Ley Lines

by Lisa Lowell

  “How are we going to do this?” Gailin gasped, feeling true fear, not needing to play a role, for her emotion was genuine and the thought of being alone, tramping across the wilderness with this man who would and could kill her with a thought came from a real place. Then she managed to remember she promised to leave Vamilion directions and she fetched her book out of the pile of her belongings to carefully pull out a few precious pages and begin writing on them. “We've got nothing and nowhere to go?” she added to get Drake talking and to give her more time to write.

  “Gailin, stop panicking,” he ordered, and she felt the heavy fist of a compulsion descend on her. She stopped breathing for a moment and stared back up at him, unable to move. “Now, do you have something to carry these things in?” he asked tonelessly.

  Carefully she looked him in the eye and said the truth. “No, I have nothing. What did you just do to me?”

  This bald question, recognizing he had used name magic on her, finally got him to react a bit. “I asked you to stop panicking and you had to. I've ….it's a bit of magic I have. Like you. You've got a gift and so do I. We'll make a team of it. We'll be fine. Now, do you have any ideas how to carry all of this?”

  Released from his magic-induced calm, Gailin managed to keep it for herself. She finished her notes, walked over to him beside the bed, plopped the book in the pile and scooped all her belongings into a tidy package in the blanket. When she didn't deny the magic, nor comment on it, he smiled subtly and turned toward the larder to gather food for their journey. He made a similar bundle of the blankets he had used since moving in with her and within minutes they were prepared to leave. She stood with her bundle at her feet, looking around the place and felt no fear. Was that from Drake's induced calm or was she really at ease with leaving her grandmother behind in Vamilion's hands and facing her first true adventure as a Wise One, in constant danger of being killed by her traveling companion? She couldn't tell.

  Drake must have interpreted her daydreaming as something else and came to her, pulling her out of her reverie when he put his hand under her chin, making her look up at his deeply set eyes. “Don't worry, Gailin, I'll be with you and you'll be with me.”

  There was no compulsion in his words, but she steeled herself for it so when he unexpectedly leaned down and kissed her, she didn't react. While it shocked her, she didn't flinch. His lips felt cold and firm, hardly there for her, and she had to swallow her revulsion like bile. Kissing a wall? No, kissing a snake? She could just imagine that forked tongue and almost gagged suddenly. All her steadiness in carefully slicing a body into ribbons had not prepared her for the icy understanding that a monster was manipulating her and she still had no way out of it.

  “Lean into him girl,” a strange voice growled into her head. “Let him think he stands a chance. You'll be able to get behind his shields with that eventually.”

  Gailin obeyed the voice, though she didn't know who it was. Certainly Vamilion's gentle rumble would be recognized and welcomed, so this must be Owailion. She closed her eyes and leaned into the kiss, smiling against the cold embrace. Anything to escape Drake's mind hold over her. She could pretend. It wasn't a lie if she meant to kill him eventually. Instead she thought of how it would be to kiss another human and imagined it was Vamilion there holding her head against his, twining his fingers among the woven strands of her loose braid.

  Thankfully Drake, emotionless as he was, didn't recognize her hesitation as more than surprise and seemed gratified that she had not rejected his awkward attempt at affection. Instead he broke off the kiss, hefted the bigger of the two packs and picked up his cloak. “Let's go.”

  Gailin hesitated, wanting to say goodbye to her grandmother. She feared in the pit of her stomach she would never again see the woman who had raised her and the thought brought tears to her eyes. She dare not let Drake see them and obedient to her mental command, they only burned and did not run down her cheek. A healer often must set aside her own emotions to help others with theirs. Instead, Gailin reached down and lugged her own pack after Drake, not even looking back, as if compelled.

  “Where are we headed?” she managed to ask and then regretted ever making it his option. Before he could answer, she made her own wishes known. “Not into the mountains. They're so cold and I won't be able to grow anything there.”

  Drake looked back at her as he stood on the stoop considering their different options. He wouldn't want to go into the mountains either, she was reasonably sure. Drake knew that Vamilion was behind this abrupt play on the chess board they had been at for more than two decades. It left two directions open; northwest onto the plains or southeast, into the forest. Without asking further, Gailin brushed past him and began marching toward the sun, walking away from the river and out onto the grasses. Thankfully Drake didn't object. Perhaps he didn't care; just as long as they left before he had to confront the mountain man, whom he presumed was behind the power that had passed through the village and the haunting reappearance of a dead farmer.

  Invisible and just beyond the verge of the forest, Vamilion watched them go. He tried desperately to tell himself that Gailin would be safer moving off. She was clever. Look how she had encouraged Drake to head out in the direction they planned to drive him. Her magic remained hidden and without hesitation she had left her grandmother and played the part demanded of her. She would be fine.

  Wise Ones could only lie to themselves.

  With a sigh Vamilion turned to the duty he had just inherited. The grandmother was now his to tend and he had little time to consider what he would do with this. He knew where his yearnings pulled him, but as was often the case, he doubted the purity of his own motives in taking Grandma to his home. But Vamilion wanted to go home and perhaps that was selfish. Paget would help there, certainly. It would give her something to do and it would be safer for the grandmother. He must remember to ask Gailin the next time he could, what was the poor old lady's name. Meanwhile he contemplated his options. He wanted to send the grandmother to his palace where Paget could wait on her. There she could be comfortable and cared for while Vamilion would be able to move more freely and would not be hindered and pinned down. Yes, he would send her there.

  Resolved, he went into Gailin's cabin and found the pages the Queen had left for him, along with the old woman who was now his solemn responsibility. As he read the pages he surveyed the simple world Gailin had gleaned for herself. With a little inspection he found the herbs and supplements the healer had preserved and began to assemble them on the table in preparations to leave with them. He conjured a bag and then went to the chest for clothing for the old woman. He was almost done with his inspection when he heard a quavering voice from the bed nearest the fire.

  “Gailin?” the old woman called weakly.

  Vamilion knelt at the side of the bed and reached for the withered hand. “No, mistress. She is not here now. She has asked me to watch over you. You may call me Vamilion.”

  The old woman finally managed to open her eyes and focus on him. For his part, Vamilion felt the stab of the lady's green eyes and realized his mistakes in ever volunteering here. These were Gailin's eyes in sixty or seventy years. Despite the silvered hair, this would be Gailin's if she had never touched the Heart Stone and she would have aged just as beautifully as this frail woman. It wasn't a compulsion, but Vamilion acknowledged that the magic would drive him. He wanted so badly to go out onto the plains and see that woman just having looked at the soft and frail face of her grandmother.

  Then the lady's hand gripped his fiercely, as if all her life resided in her gnarled hands. “No, your name is not that,” she declared. “Why are you here?”

  Vamilion could ask himself the same question. Why am I here? To watch over yet another woman dying, powerless and at the whims of time? Or was this practice for future deaths? Was every woman he ever knew doomed to die as he looked on? Strangely, he realized and for the first time in his life he was glad that both his children were boys. He thought of them;
fine young men now with children of their own settling on the Lara River. They had left home as soon as they could under the uncomfortable realization that their father was an ageless magician and would never be able to live as other men. They would not forgive him for taking on the magic.

  In a way Vamilion wouldn't forgive himself either, though he probably would make the same decision again, given the same dire circumstances. Twenty-five years earlier, he and his little family had been traveling along the coastline, kept out of the Land by the Seal. Then, for no discernible reason, the Seal had fallen. Their curiosity led the family to investigate and they began up the beach when magical explosions had frightened him and his family into hiding behind the doubtful shelter of their wagon. Owailion had come bolting across the beach to rescue them, offering him magic even as the explosions shattered their belongings. At the time, Vamilion would have done anything to avoid dying. Now he held the consequence. Responsibility for all the Land.

  “Why am I here? I'm here to tend to you, mistress. I am going to take you to my home and watch over everything you need. Your granddaughter asked me to do this for her.”

  Something in his words must have contented the old woman, for her grip eased on his hand and she closed her eyes. “You're a good man,” she declared before she abruptly fell back asleep.

  With a sigh Vamilion rose back to his feet and then resolved, he stretched out his magical mind. He leaned toward the west, toward his home on the north side of the Vamilion Mountains. He felt the steady stones of the lower ridges and the tension there waiting for him to stir them awake. His presence brushed over the miners working in the deep roots, just discovering iron and tin in the veins there. Then he reached the tallest ridges and used its height as a lodestone for his magic. Then he slid his power down the slope, drawn in by something other than stone, but flesh and blood. Traveling this way was always easier when he reached for a mind. He reached for Paget.

  He found her in the gardens of the grand palace called Vamilion, digging in the kitchen garden for something for her cooking. She had always been interested in the living things, not the cold and hard stones to which he felt akin. They had little in common now. She had followed him to the Land because at the time she had been a mother with two boisterous boys to raise and a husband who was away too often. He had been a trader, traveling the coastal routes between Demion and Marewn, and Paget had willingly packed up to follow him. But when the Seal on the Land had broken and new country demanded he defend it, Paget had little choice as her husband left her to become a Wise One. Now she was leaving him behind instead and nothing either could do would stop that change.

  Vamilion couldn't consider the past when his present and future demanded his attention. He hated traveling like this but it couldn't be helped. With one portion of his mind he hefted the bed, occupant, conjured bag and all, and with the other he latched onto his wife's mind, with the mountain's peak as his fulcrum and he threw himself and the burden around through space. He and the bed landed right beside Paget, squashing the bean plants as she straightened up painfully from her harvesting. Vamilion immediately felt sick and curled over, vomiting into the garden row, trembling and holding onto the bedstead to keep from passing out.

  At least Paget had grown accustomed to his strange arrivals. She dusted off her hands and reached for him, forcing him to sit and rest while the world spun around him, leaving him incapacitated for quite a while. She knew better than to demand an explanation for the bed and old lady that now occupied her summer garden. When Vamilion stopped retching, Paget wordlessly left and went inside the glossy wood door in the side of the grand palace and in moments returned with Goren, Vamilion's doorkeeper.

  Goren, a steady, almost silent man also knew magic often deposited strange circumstances so he didn't question a bed in the garden. Instead he brought water for Vamilion while Paget pulled the lighter of the blankets up over the bolsters to shade the old woman from the sun until Vamilion was well enough to manage to get the bed inside the building that loomed over them.

  Recovering must have taken quite a while, for the sun was lowering into his eyes by the time Vamilion's head stopped spinning and he managed to clamber up to sit on the foot of the bed. Paget and Goren stood in the beans waiting for an explanation and he had little to give them.

  “I'm responsible for her until she dies,” he managed. “I don't even know her name. I'll put her in the room on the ground floor.”

  Helpfully they stood him up and then he looked at the bed. Grandma seemed undisturbed by her thousand mile journey. He lowered the thin blanket to be sure she was still asleep. Then, with a practiced flick of his hand, she disappeared into the great palace, into one of its dozens of empty rooms. “Sorry about the beans,” he commented, looking at the squashed vegetables and then over at Paget and Goren, who stood there watching him, mystified. “She is the grandmother of someone I found who is helping me deal with the hunter. I am supposed to guard Grandma until it is done or she dies naturally. This is how I was told to care for her.”

  He held the pages out to Goren who took them and began perusing them. Meanwhile Vamilion held out his arms toward Paget and she came to him, let him wrap his arms around her and give her a kiss, though her stiff smile warned him that he had more explaining to do. She knew he would not stay long and that she would want to talk before magic demanded that he leave her again.

  Once inside his palace, Vamilion ate a hearty meal to recover his strength and then went to be sure Grandmother was comfortable. He spoon fed her the strange concoction Goren had prepared per Gailin's instructions. Then, after the old woman had fallen asleep again, he couldn't put it off any longer. He had to talk to Paget and explain what was happening in his life. He dreaded this conversation, knowing for twenty-five years after a fashion, it would come. He found his wife down in his work room dusting. She always cleaned when she was upset or stressed, and while his workshop always needed it, she would dust just to keep herself busy at this point.

  “You've been cleaning,” he commented dryly as he stood in the doorway, studying her single-minded work as her once white rag grew grey with the stone dust that coated every surface of his carving room. His present piece, a still shapeless lump of gray and blue veined marble, loomed in the corner, unacknowledged. “I'm sorry I couldn't come home sooner. Sometimes the compulsion is too hard to resist.”

  “I understand that,” she replied without looking up from the sixth candle stick she had dusted. “You had to go.”

  Wordlessly he reached for her to still her determined dusting and held her hands in his until she stopped manically cleaning, though she still wouldn't look at him. In her mind he could hear how she didn't want to see his young face, sunburned and rugged. For his own part he noted how the tendons and veins in her hands showed more prominently than he remembered from just a month earlier. As a sculptor, he had been fascinated with hands and their qualities, but seeing hers changed so dramatically disturbed him. He also noted how the silver in her dark hair had grown more pronounced. He had probably given her every one of those grays with worry for him and he felt them like a stab in the heart.

  “Paget, I need to tell you. Will you please sit?”

  She turned toward him finally and glared, her snapping brown eyes again reminding him of the respect and love he had for this woman who had stayed with him throughout the tiresome demands of magic. She was perturbed, but it was nothing against him and she threw her rag down on the nearby table and sat down on a stool, unwillingly allowing him to explain what she probably already suspected.

  “You knew it was a strong compulsion. I….I….I had to rescue her. But I didn't look at her. The compulsion was only to rescue. The spell to love her hasn't set in yet. I haven't even looked at her or heard her voice. The hunter followed me to her and is controlling her so she's in great danger. I'm communicating with her through writing so I won't be so… driven to be with her.”

  “Oh Gil,” Paget interrupted him with a tone mixed with res
ignation and disgust, using the nickname she had used ever since they had met thirty-five years earlier in their native land. “You cannot go on this way. You've found her. She's in danger. Why are you doing this to yourself? To me? To her? You've got to go to her and the compulsion be damned.”

  “I made an oath to you,” he reminded her. “I won't break that promise and…” He paused for he grew distracted as his clothing shifted into those of the King, regal and an annoying reminder of the magic that now dictated his life. Paget had seen it before and felt no alarm at the abrupt change.

  “And you're a king, obviously. The kings of Demion have many wives,” Paget pointed out, recalling for him their former life and homeland. “You're a King so magic is insisting that you can have more than one wife. She is meant to be yours. It's inevitable. Let me stay here contentedly and you go follow her to do magical things. It won't be a conflict any more. The boys aren't here to resent you and I….”

  “Don't say it,” he stopped her. “I need you and you need me.”

  Paget rolled her eyes to hide her pain. “You've given me everything I need. I'm old enough now the only thing I want is a warm bed and my comforts. Cleaning up after a dusty mountain man is more than enough work to keep me busy. You don't need to be here to shovel the snow any more. I've got Goren to do that. I'll take care of the grandma. You go do your magic work and let me do mine here.”

  Vamilion sighed. He hated the bitterness in her tone that belied her frank acceptance that really she had little comfort from his presence. “I don't want two wives, Paget,” he replied gently. “Just because Demonia's kings feel this is fine, it's not right in my mind.”

  “Even when I cannot give you what a wife is supposed to give her young, vital husband?” she answered back. “That's not right either.”