“I don’t think so,” came the faint reply. Ki began to struggle, and between the two of them they managed to heave the catamount aside. Ki emerged pale and shaking but unquestionably alive. The front of his tunic had several jagged tears and blood trickled down onto the lacings from a long scratch on his neck. Tobin dropped to his knees and stared at him, hardly able to believe what had just happened. Without a word, they turned to look at the huge she-cat lying beside them. The yellow eyes stared sightlessly into the ditch. Dark blood stained the snow under her gaping jaws.
Ki found his voice first. “Bilairy’s hairy bag!” he croaked, his voice a full octave higher than normal. “What happened?”
“I think Brother killed her!” Tobin stared in wonder at the ghost crouching now over the dead cat. “He got between me and her and stopped her charge. But then you came running in with … What were you thinking, running at her with—with a stick?”
Ki pulled out the carved horse charm he wore around his neck. “I’m your squire. It was all I could find and—” Ki stopped, staring gape-mouthed over Tobin’s shoulder.
The hair on Tobin’s neck rose. Did catamounts hunt in pairs? Or packs? He twisted around quickly, lost his balance, and fell heavily on his backside.
Lhel stood a few feet away, looking as dirty and ragged as he remembered. She didn’t seem at all surprised to find them here with a dead catamount.
“You be looking for me, keesas?”
“Well, yes. I—I hope you don’t mind. I told my friend—He’s never met a witch. And—and you said you were going to teach me things,” he finished lamely, unable to tell in the failing light if she was angry or not.
“And instead you be find by big maskar.” She nudged the dead cat with one rag-bound foot.
“Brother stopped it from catching me, then Ki came and drew it off and Brother killed—”
“I kill. Brother not make death.”
Both boys gaped up at her. “You? But—but how?” asked Tobin.
She snorted. “I witch.” She knelt and cupped Tobin’s face between her rough palms. “You be hurt, keesa?”
“No.”
“You?” She reached to touch Ki’s neck.
Ki shook his head.
“Good.” Lhel grinned, showing the gaps of missing teeth. “You Tobin’s brave good friend. You got voice, keesa?”
Ki blushed. “I don’t know what to say to a witch.”
“Say ‘hello, witch,’ maybe?”
Ki got to his knees and made her a bow as if she were a lady. “Hello, Mistress Lhel. And thank you! I’m in your debt.”
Lhel placed a hand on his head. For an instant Tobin thought he caught a fleeting look of sadness in her eyes and it sent an unpleasant chill coiling through his belly. But the look was gone when she turned and drew Tobin into a hug. He accepted the embrace stiffly; she still didn’t smell very good.
Lhel held him tight for a moment and whispered, “This a good keesa. You be good to him? Be protecting him?”
“Protecting him? From who?”
“You know, comes the time.” Lhel tapped a finger against his chest. “You hold that here, don’t be forget.”
“I won’t.”
Tobin pulled away. Brother stood close enough to touch now and he tried to, to thank him. As always, his hand found no purchase on that solid-looking form, only a patch of colder air.
“How did you know we were here?” Ki asked.
“I be seeing you many time to know what kind of good friend my Tobin be having. You be fine warriors together.” She touched her forehead. “I see it here.” She looked back at Tobin, then pointed to the keep. “You got another teacher. You like?”
“No. He does magic, but not like yours. Mostly he teaches us how to read and figure.”
“He tried to teach us dancing, too, but he’s like a big heron on ice,” Ki told her. “Will you come to the house with us, Mistress? It’s not my place to offer you hospitality, but you saved my life. It’s a cold night and-and Cook is making a galantine pie.”
She patted his shoulder. “No, they don’t be know me. Not tell, yes?”
“I won’t!” Ki promised, shooting Tobin a conspiratorial grin. The tale of a witch had been a fine secret; the witch herself was a treasure beyond all hopes.
“We have to get home.” Tobin cast another worried look at the sky; it had darkened to purple-and-gold behind the black peaks. “Now that we’ve found you, can we come visit you again? You said you’d be my teacher, too.”
“Time come. Not yet.” She put two fingers in her mouth and let out a piercing whistle. The runaway horses came trotting up the road, dragging their loose reins in the snow. “You come visit times, though.”
“Where? How will we find you?”
“You seek. You find.” And with that she stepped lightly away and vanished into the gathering darkness.
“By the Flame!” Ki bounced up and down in excitement and punched Tobin on the arm. “By the Flame, she’s just as you said! A real witch. She killed that catamount without even touching it. And she told our future, did you hear? Fine warriors!” He mimed a fierce blow at some future foe, then gasped at the pain in his side. It didn’t slow him down much though. “The two of us together! Prince and squire.”
Tobin raised his hand and Ki clasped it. “Together. But we can’t tell,” Tobin reminded him, all too familiar with Ki’s tendency to blurt out whatever came into his head.
“By my honor, Prince Tobin, I shall obey. Torture wouldn’t drag it out of me. Which is what we’re in for when we get home! The sun’s down for certain now.” He looked ruefully at his torn tunic. “How are we going to explain this? If Nari finds out she’ll never let us out of the house again!”
Tobin chewed at his lower lip a moment, knowing Ki was right. Even with Arkoniel’s support, Nari still fretted and fussed over them if they were out of her sight for too long. The thought of losing a single day of their newfound freedom was intolerable. “We’ll just tell her Dragon ran away with you. That’s not even a lie.”
Chapter 29
Rhius returned to Ero before the turn of the month, leaving Arkoniel and Tharin once more in charge of the boys.
Having defined his duties as tutor to his own satisfaction and that of his young charges, Arkoniel was pleased to find himself with a great deal of time to pursue his own studies. Iya had been content to wander, collecting ideas and practicing her craft for those who needed it and could pay. Arkoniel had always wished to create and study; now it seemed Illior had granted him both the means and the opportunity to do so.
By late Kemmin the rooms on the third floor were finally refurbished and he took possession of two of them: a small, comfortable bedchamber, and a large, high-ceilinged room adjoining it. In return for his guardianship of Tobin, the duke had granted the wizard a virtually unlimited allowance to pursue his own studies when not otherwise engaged.
For the first time in his well-traveled life, Arkoniel had both ample time and the means to pursue more complex magics. Long before the final coat of plaster was applied to the upstairs walls, he set about furnishing what he already thought of as his workroom. Over the next few months crates arrived almost daily, filled with books and instruments he’d seen in his travels with Iya. From the foundries and kilns of Ylani came the mortars, limbics, and crucibles for alchemical studies and the compounding of magical objects. At Alestun he found tables, braziers, and tools enough to fill another section of the room. He sent to the mines of the northern territories for fine, clear crystals and wrote to other wizards for herbs, ores, and other rare substances not available locally. He began to wonder if he dared ask for another room. In return for such largesse, he began crafting every household simple he knew how to make.
Since he dared commit little news of Tobin to writing, he filled long letters to Iya with his progress, plans, and hopes. In her infrequent replies he read approval and encouragement.
This is what a Third Orëska might be, she wrote, choosing her w
ords carefully. Not one wizard working alone, but many, sharing their knowledge with generations of students for the benefit of all. I expect you will have something new to show me, when next we meet.
He fully intended to fulfill that expectation, and with something much more impressive than a new fire spell.
The year’s first heavy snowstorm came on the fifth night of Cinrin. The following day the world was a startling palate of black and white under a sky of dazzling blue. The boys were absolutely incapable of sitting still for lessons with such a landscape waiting for them outside the window. Shaking his head, Arkoniel released them and retired to the workshop to pursue his current passion. Soon after, he heard laughter from outside. Going to the window, he saw Tharin and the boys building a snow fortress in the meadow. The slope around them looked like a sparkling white expanse of fine salt, unbroken except for the area they’d chowdered up with their building. Where they’d walked and rolled their snow boulders, the shadows showed blue. The road and bridge had disappeared beneath the snow. Only the river remained, flowing like a thick black serpent between its mounded white banks.
More laughter, and a bellow from Tharin. It appeared Ki had taught Tobin of snowballs and their uses. Work on the snow fort halted as the battle raged. Arkoniel was tempted to go down and join them, but the warmth and quiet of his workroom won out.
The first step in creating magic, as Iya had taught him, was to envision the desired result. Casting a known spell began that way; if you wanted to make a fire, you envisioned a flame, then let form follow intent with focus.
Creating a new spell was simply a matter of finding out the steps in between to make that intent a reality.
At first, with the adjustment to his new role and home, and the excitement of setting up his own rooms occupying his mind, he’d toyed with alchemy and other known sciences, perfecting the skills he already possessed. However, with a routine established and winter settling in, he found himself thinking about his encounter with Lhel.
The startling power of her sexuality found its way into his dreams more and more often; he could feel her heat against him and smell her musky, feral scent.
He awoke each time with his heart pounding in panic, drenched in sweat. In the light of day he was able to discount all this as the raging of his young and unruly body. The thought of touching her as he did in those dreams made him sick with anxiety.
What drew him back to those memories today was not the carnality of their encounter, but what he thought he’d seen her do that day in the forest, and a dream.
The projection of one’s image was a known magic; not easily mastered, but not uncommon, either. Iya could do it and Arkoniel himself had had a few minor successes, but by Orëska magic the resulting image was limited to the wizard’s form alone, usually very clear and unnatural, like a specter seen in daylight. That day by the road, however, he’d seen Lhel as if through an oval window; the light that had struck her was daylight, and he’d been able to see the marsh around her before he’d had any idea that one existed in the area. His own mind could not have filled in such detail; Lhel had shown him where she was as clearly as if she had taken him there through a hole in the air.
A hole in the air.
The image had come to him just as he was waking up that morning. Up until now, he’d been relying on disappearance spells, trying to bend them into a combination of form and movement. Nothing had come even close to working.
But this morning he had a new idea, an inspiration left in the wake of a dream. In it, he’d again seen Lhel floating in that green-tinged light that did not match the sunlight where he stood. She was naked, beckoning him, as if she wanted him to step through the shining oval and join her without the trouble of walking up the hill. In this dream he perceived some sort of hole or tunnel connecting them by a tube of shifting green light. In the dream he’d known he was about to grasp the secret he needed, but the image of the naked witch intruded again and he woke with a full bladder and an aching groin.
As he sat here pondering all this, another long-forgotten and seemingly unrelated memory came to him. He and Iya had once explored echoing tunnels at the base of an ancient peak in the northern territories. The tunnels reminded him of enormous mole burrows, but the walls were glassy smooth and showed no sign of digging. Iya claimed that the mountain had created them itself somehow, and showed him chunks of obsidian that contained tiny holes, miniatures of the tunnels themselves, but these were as fine as ant holes in fine earth.
His member stirred again as he settled on a stool by his worktable and attempted to summon the details of the dream more clearly. He willed his body to behave and concentrated on the image: a hole in the air-no, a tunnel! Easy to visualize, but how to create such a thing when he didn’t even understand how the mountain had achieved it? Never in all their travels had Iya or he discovered any spell that resembled such a thing as he envisioned. Here, in his newfound solitude, he worked alone at devising some mechanism of mind that could encompass his vision.
As he had so often over the past few weeks, Arkoniel reached into a nearby bowl and took out a dried bean. It was half the size of his thumbnail and dark red with a smattering of white speckles, the sort his father’s cook had called red hens. He rubbed it between thumb and forefinger, committing its weight and smoothness to memory.
Holding the image of the bean firmly in his mind, he placed it on the oak table in front of him, next to a lidded salt box Cook had grudgingly relinquished. Concentrating, he pushed the bean back and forth with his fingers a few times, then took his hand away and raised the bean with his mind until it hovered a foot off the table. Then he brought the full force of his concentration to bear on it, imagining the tunnel he’d dreamed of, willing the bean to find such a route into the closed box.
The bean certainly moved, but only in the usual prosaic manner. Flying against the box as if hurled from a sling, it struck the lid so hard it split in half. The pieces ricocheted in opposite directions and he heard them skitter away across the bare stone floor, no doubt to join their predecessors already scattered around the room.
“Bilairy’s balls!” he muttered, resting his face in his hands. Over the past few weeks he’d used enough beans to make a pot of soup, and always with the same discouraging results.
He spent another hour trying to get his mind around the construct of an opening in the air, but ended up with nothing more than a thumping headache.
Leaving off, he turned to surer magics for the rest of the afternoon. Shaking out a newly made firechip from a covered crucible, he placed it on a plate and murmured, “Burn.” The reddish brown chip flickered at his command to release a small tongue of pale yellow fire that would burn until he told it to stop.
He set a crucible full of rainwater to boil over it on an iron tripod, then went to his herb cabinet for the various simples he needed to concoct a sleeping draught for Mynir.
The initial mixture stank fiercely, but Arkoniel didn’t mind. A feeling of satisfaction crept over him as he sat watching the first bubbles rise. He’d gathered the makings himself in the forest and meadow, and woven the spells from memory. Such melding of magic and material things calmed his nerves; it was pleasing to have a finished, useful product at the end of the incantations. The firechip was his work, as well. Remnants of the latest brick he’d fashioned still lay on a plank nearby, next to the stone hammer he’d used to smash it into usable pieces. This batch would keep the house supplied until spring.
The smell of the steeping herbs brought him back to memories of Lhel, this time as she’d been during their journey to Ero. She’d used every pause and rest break to seek out useful things in the earth or among the dry autumn leaves. His face burned again as he recalled how he’d dismissed her then, not realizing the power she possessed.
More recent memories of musky, tattooed skin and whispered promises crept up on him, making the wizard’s heart skip a giddy beat.
Had she known his secret hope? Had she shown him a glimpse of that
trick on purpose to snare him? During the long journey to Ero he’d caught her touching his mind so many times; how often had she stolen in unheeded?
He slid off the stool and went back to the window. Late afternoon shadows stretched themselves like long blue cats below the house and a three-quarter moon was rising. Tharin and the boys were gone. Their fort stood like a tiny outpost, surrounded by a welter of trampled footprints. Below it, a single track line of footprints crossed the smooth white flank of the hillside, leading down to the bend in the river.
In the forest the bare trunks and branches stood stark black against the blanket of new snow like hairs on a miller’s arm. Soon the real storms would come and choke the roads and trails until spring. The keep was well stocked with provisions and fuel, but how would a barefoot little woman, even a witch, survive? How had she survived so long here already?
And where was she right now?
He stretched his arms out over his head, trying to ignore the fresh thrill of guilt-tainted longing that coursed through him at the thought.
Instead, he leaned far out the window, letting the cold air deal with the sudden flush that suffused his cheeks.
From here he could hear the clatter of cooking pots echoing from the kitchen and the muffled staccato of hooves on the road behind the keep. Arkoniel covered his eyes with one hand and sent a sighting spell up the mountain road. He was nearly as good at this spell as Iya now, and could see over a distance of several miles for short periods of time.
Looking down from a hawk’s height, he spotted Tobin and Ki galloping for home, cloaks billowing behind them. They were still some distance away and riding hard to get home before sunset. They’d come in late a few weeks earlier and moped like caged bears when Nari had kept them inside the walls for two days as punishment.
Arkoniel smiled to himself as he watched them. As always, Ki was talking and Tobin was laughing. Suddenly, however, they both reined in so abruptly that their horses reared and wheeled, throwing up white bursts of snow. A third figure entered the wizard’s field of vision and he let out a gasp of surprise.