Hidden Warrior

by Lynn Flewelling

  It had been Brother. But why hadn’t he saved their mother, too? Had he instead pushed her out?

  Sobs rose in his throat. It took every ounce of will to hold them in. Just when he thought he was going to give way and shame himself again, Ki’s hand found his and squeezed it. The grief and fear receded slowly, like the waves of the ebb tide. He didn’t disgrace himself, and greeted the morning sun dazed but strangely peaceful. Brother had saved him that day, and again with Orun. And would have today, perhaps, if the king had lost control of himself after all.

  He needs you, and you need him, Lhel had said. Brother must know it, too.

  Returning to the palace with the others later that morning, he learned from Baldus that Una had disappeared in the night without a trace.

  PART II

  Had we known where this vision would take us when we started, I don’t know that we’d have had the courage to follow it. The Oracle was kind, in her way …

  —Document fragment, discovered in the

  east tower of the Orëska House

  Chapter 27

  That first winter with Kaulin and Wythnir passed quietly. Mail arrived regularly from Tobin and Ki, and from Iya, who now divided her time between her travels and more frequent visits to the city. A few oblique remarks made it clear that she had found allies in Ero, wizards who would be of more use staying where they were than joining him.

  The boys wrote of court life, and in Tobin’s Arkoniel discovered a dark thread of worry and discontent. Korin was carousing more, the king was changeable in his moods, and the older boys were treating Tobin and the other younger ones like children.

  In contrast, Ki reported happily on parties and various girls who were showing interest in them. Arkoniel guessed that Tobin was less pleased with the latter; he said nothing about girls at all, except to report that one whom he’d been friends with had disappeared under mysterious circumstances. He was vague on the details, but Arkoniel was left with the unsettling impression that Tobin thought her murdered.

  As winter closed in once more, Arkoniel divided his own attentions between his new guests and the workroom. Kaulin was not much interested in Arkoniel’s “indoor magic,” as he called it, preferring to wander in the forest in all weathers. Once he’d settled in, he’d proven something of a grumbler, and Arkoniel was content to leave the fellow to himself.

  Arkoniel was somewhat perplexed by Kaulin’s neglect of Wythrin. He wasn’t really unkind to the child, but frequently went off without him, leaving him in Nari’s care like an ordinary child in need of a nurse.

  Arkoniel remarked on this one morning as Nari bustled about his workroom with her dust rag.

  “That’s all right,” she said. “I’m glad to have a child under this roof again. And Maker knows, the poor little thing can do with some coddling. He’s hardly out of clouts, wizard-born or not, and hasn’t got a soul to care about him.”

  Arkoniel caught something sharp in her tone. Setting his half-finished journal aside on the writing table, he turned in his chair and laced his fingers around one up-drawn knee. “Kaulin does neglect him a bit, I suppose. The child seemed well enough when they arrived here, though.”

  “He wasn’t starved, I’ll grant you, but you’ve seen how Kaulin is with the child. He hardly has a kind word for him, when he can be bothered to speak to him at all. But what can you expect, eh? Kaulin only took the boy on to repay a debt.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Why, Wythnir told me,” Nari said, and Arkoniel caught her smug little smile as she went to work on the windows. “And I got a bit more out of Kaulin the other day. The poor little thing had been treated very badly by his first master, a drunkard or worse, from what I gathered. I suppose even Kaulin was an improvement, but he doesn’t seem to care for the child. It’s no wonder Wythnir looks like a little ghost all the time.” She flicked dust off a candlestand. “I don’t mind having him underfoot, of course. He’s not a bit of trouble. Still, he is wizard-born, and the way he’s taken to you, perhaps you could show a bit more interest in him?”

  “Taken to me? He hasn’t even spoken to me since he got here!”

  She shook her head. “You mean you haven’t noticed how he follows you about and lurks outside the workroom?”

  “No, I haven’t. In fact, I didn’t think he liked me.” Arkoniel’s early experiences with Tobin had left him rather shy of quiet children. “Anytime I speak to him he sticks a finger in his mouth and stares at his feet.”

  Nari snapped her dust rag at him and chuckled. “Oh, you just take some getting used to. You’ve gone a bit crusty and strange since the boys left.”

  “I haven’t!”

  “Oh yes, you have. Cook and I don’t pay you any mind, but this is a little boy and I guess I know more about them than you do. Give him a smile! Show him a trick or two and I’ll bet you a sester coin he warms right up.”

  To Arkoniel’s surprise, Nari won that wager. Though the child remained quiet and shy, he did brighten noticeably when Arkoniel took the time to show him a trick or ask for his help with some little chore. He was still thin, but Cook’s good food had put color into his wan cheeks and brought a bit of luster to his ragged brown hair. Conversation remained difficult; Wythnir seldom spoke except to mumble a reply to a direct question.

  In the workroom, however, he watched every move Arkoniel made with alert, solemn eyes. One day, for reasons known only to himself, he shyly offered to show Arkoniel how to make a luck charm out of a bunch of dried thyme and horsehair. It was not the sort of thing most eight-year-olds, even wizard-born, knew how to do. His weaving was a little clumsy, but the spell held firm. Arkoniel’s honest praise earned him the first smile he’d seen from the boy.

  After this small success Wythnir truly began to blossom. It seemed only natural to teach him, and it only took a few lessons to discover that Kaulin had done a better job with the boy than Arkoniel had guessed. Wythnir had been with the man less than a year, but already knew most of the basic cantrips and fire charms, as well as a surprising amount about the properties of plants. Arkoniel began to suspect that it was not boredom or disappointment that made Kaulin neglect the boy, but resentment of the boy’s obvious potential.

  The discovery of Wythnir’s quickness made Arkoniel more cautious in what he let the boy see of his own studies. What he’d learned of Lhel’s witchery was still forbidden knowledge among the free wizards. They worked together each morning, but the afternoons were reserved for Arkoniel’s solitary labors.

  Since Ranai’s spirit gifting, Arkoniel had discovered that certain types of spells—summonings and transmutations in particular—came more easily than they had before. He saw spell patterns more clearly in his mind and found he could hold the wizard eye for nearly an hour without fatigue. Perhaps it was thanks to her, as much as to Lhel, that he finally achieved his first success with what he’d come to think of as his “doorway spell.”

  He’d given up on it a dozen times or more since he’d first conceived of it, but sooner or later he’d find himself with the old salt box in front of him, trying to force a bean or stone to materialize inside it.

  Wythnir was sweeping the workroom one rainy morning in late Klesin while Arkoniel was making another attempt, and wandered over to see what he was grumbling about.

  “What are you trying to do?” Even now he spoke in the hushed tones of a temple novice. Arkoniel often wondered what a few days with Ki would do to change that.

  Arkoniel held up the recalcitrant bean. “I want this to go inside this box, but without opening the lid.”

  Wythnir pondered this a moment. “Why don’t you make a hole in the box?”

  “Well, that would defeat the whole purpose, you see. I mean, I might as well just open the—” Arkoniel broke off, staring at the boy, then the box. “Thank you, Wythnir. Would you leave me for a while?”

  * * *

  Arkoniel spent the rest of the afternoon and the night cross-legged on the floor, deep in meditation. As dawn bro
ke, he opened his eyes again and laughed. The pattern of magic had come to him at last, so simple and clear in its workings that he couldn’t imagine how it had eluded him for so long. No wonder it had taken a child to point it out to him.

  Going back to the table, he picked up a bean and his crystal wand. Humming the tones of power that had come to him in the night, he wove lines of light on the air with the tip of his wand: whirlwind, doorway, traveler, rest. He hardly dared believe it, but the pattern held and the familiar cold prickling of energy ran down from his brow to his hands. The pattern brightened, then collapsed into a small blot of darkness. Shiny and solid-looking as polished jet, it hung in the air in front of him. Reaching out with his mind, he found that it was spinning. He was so surprised that he lost concentration and it disappeared with a sound like a cork coming out of a wine jug.

  “By the Light!” Composing himself, he sketched the pattern again. When it was fixed in the air, he tested it more carefully and found it malleable as clay on a potter’s wheel. All it took was a thought to make it expand to the size of a keg head, or shrink to a hummingbird’s eye.

  It was not a stable spell, but he found he could weave it with ease, and experimented with a succession of them. He could change the position with a thought, moving it around the room and tilting the axis from vertical to horizontal.

  Finally, tingling with anticipation, he visualized the salt box without actually looking at it and dropped a bean into the little vortex. The bean disappeared like a stone into a tiny pond and did not fall out the other side. The hole collapsed on itself with the usual dull pop.

  Arkoniel stared at the empty air where it had been, then threw back his head and let out an elated whoop that carried his joy all the way to Lhel’s camp.

  Wythnir, who had evidently gone no farther than the floor outside the door, burst in. “Master Arkoniel, what’s wrong? Are you hurt?”

  Arkoniel swung the startled child up into the air and danced him around the room. “You’re a luck bringer, my boy, do you know that? Illior bless you, you put the key in my hand!”

  Wythnir’s baffled smile made Arkoniel laugh again.

  Over the next few weeks Arkoniel armed himself with a handful of beans and put his new magic to various tests. He successfully sent beans into the box from across the workroom, then from the corridor, and finally, thrillingly, through the closed workroom door.

  He also inadvertently made a crucial discovery. If he was careless or hurried, if he didn’t visualize the destination carefully and concentrate on his purpose, the unlucky bean simply vanished. He tested this repeatedly and was unable to recover any of the lost ones, or discover where they’d gone.

  Doubtless trapped in whatever middle space they occupy between the spell pattern and their final destination, he noted in his journal that night. It was nearly midnight but he was too excited to worry about ghosts. Wythnir had long since been packed off to bed, but Arkoniel kept the lamps burning, unwilling to stop when things were progressing so well. He was more tired than he wanted to admit, however.

  He decided to try sending something heavier into the box. A lead fishing weight Ki or Tobin had left behind was just the thing. In his excitement, however, he carelessly brushed the black disk with his hand and felt a distinct tug as the hole closed. For a moment he could only stare stupidly at the spurting stump that was all that was left of his little finger. It was gone, cut clean as a sword stroke just below the second knuckle. It began to throb painfully, but still he stood there, watching the blood flow in disbelief.

  The pain soon brought him to his senses. Wrapping the finger in a fold of his tunic, he raced to the table and opened the salt box. There was the lead, intact as expected, but the inside of the box was a spattered mess. The flesh of his finger had been torn from the bones and mangled to bloody gobbets. The bones were undamaged, however, and the nail had survived intact; it lay like a delicate seashell beside the weight.

  Only then did the enormity of what he’d done hit him. Collapsing on the stool, he rested his forehead on his left hand. He knew he should call for help before he fainted and bled all over the floor, but it was a moment before he could make himself move.

  Lhel warned me never to touch the window spells, he thought, as a wave of nausea rolled over him. No wonder she’d been so hesitant to trust him with this sort of magic.

  Because the wound was so clean, it took a bit of doing to get the bleeding stopped. Cook stitched up the end of his finger, smeared it with honey, and tied it up in a bit of clean linen.

  He cleaned the box out himself and said nothing of the incident to Kaulin or Wythrin, but he was more careful than ever to keep others away as he cast the spell.

  Rather than dampen his zeal, however, the accident spurred him on. He spent the next few days experimenting with different objects: a slip of parchment, an apple, a cloak pin, and a dead mouse from the kitchen traps. Only the metal pin survived. The parchment was shredded to bits, but not burned. The apple and the mouse carcass arrived in very much the same state as his severed finger; the flesh and delicate bones were mangled, but the mouse’s skull survived intact.

  Having determined that only very solid objects could be safely transported, he then experimented with weight and found that a carved stone book end took no more effort to send across the room than the beans had. Satisfied, he went back to beans and began distance trials.

  Nari and the others gave him some odd looks as he dashed around the keep. Stationed by the box, it was Wythnir’s task to yell down the stairs as soon as the little travelers appeared.

  No matter how far Arkoniel got from the box, no matter how many doors or walls lay between, he only had to imagine a hole in the side of the box itself, concentrate carefully, and the bean would find its way home.

  He next tried sending beans to other destinations. The first one made its way successfully from the workroom to the offering shelf of the house shrine. From there, he sent it on to Cook’s flour barrel—a messy success in that case—then began sending it outside.

  Kaulin remained unimpressed. “Don’t see much use in it,” he sniffed, watching Arkoniel retrieve a bean from the bole of a willow beside the river.

  Arkoniel ignored him, already making a mental list of places in other towns he could picture clearly enough to focus the magic on.

  “It is a drawback, of course, not being able to send parchment letters,” he muttered aloud. “Still, there must be some way around that.”

  “You could write them on bits of wood,” Wythnir offered.

  “I suppose I could,” mused Arkoniel. “That’s a very good idea, Wythnir.”

  Kaulin gave them a disdainful look and wandered off about his own business.

  Chapter 28

  Even in the mountains, that spring and early summer were hotter than the last. Tradesmen raised their prices, complaining of dead livestock and fields blasted with drought and blight. On the mountainsides the birch turned yellow in high summer. Even Lhel seemed to feel it, and Arkoniel had never once heard her complain of heat or cold.

  “The curse on this land is spreading,” she warned, scratching symbols into the dirt around her camp.

  “Tobin is still so young—”

  “Yes, too young. Skala must suffer a little longer.”

  The heat finally broke in late Gorathin with a spate of violent thunderstorms.

  Arkoniel had taken to sleeping through the hottest part of the day. The first clap of thunder shook the keep like an avalanche, startling him bolt upright on his damp bed. His first thought as he lurched up was that he must have slept the day away, for the room was nearly dark. Outside, clouds the color of a new bruise were scudding low over the trees. Just then another blinding blue-white flash split the sky and another rending crash shook the house. A puff of damp wind stirred against Arkoniel’s cheek, then the rain came, falling in thick, silvery curtains that instantly cut off all view. Fat drops spattered across his sill so hard he felt the spray from three feet away. He went to the
window, glad of any respite, but even the rain was warm.

  Lightning lanced down in angry tridents, each flash leaving a deafening report in its wake. The storm was so loud he didn’t notice that Wythnir had come into his room until he felt the child’s hand on his arm.

  The boy was terrified. “Will it hit the house?” he asked, voice quavering as he tried to make himself heard.

  Arkoniel put an arm around him. “Don’t worry. This old place has been here a long time.”

  As if to contradict him, a bolt struck a dead oak at the edge of the meadow, splitting it from crown to root and setting it ablaze.

  “Sakor’s fire!” Arkoniel exclaimed, running for the workroom. “Where are those firepots you cleaned the other day?”

  “On the shelf close by the door. But—you’re not going out?”

  “Just for a bit.” There was no time to explain. Arkoniel knew of at least half a dozen elixirs that could only be brewed with this sort of fire, if he could get to it before the rain put it out.

  The pots stood ready on the shelf, pierced brass lids gleaming. Wythnir had been diligent, as always. Their round iron bellies were filled with dry cedar bark and greasy wool. He snatched the largest and ran down the stairs. Kaulin called after him as they passed in the hall, but Arkoniel didn’t stop.

  The rain pelted his hair flat and plastered his kilt to his thighs as he sprinted barefoot over the bridge and plowed on through the coarse, waist-deep sea of dead timothy and thistle, hugging the pot close to his chest to keep the tinder dry.

  Reaching the oak, he was glad to see that he was in time. Flames still hissed and crackled in the fissures of the blasted trunk and he was able to knock a few brands into the pot with his knife before the last of them fizzled out. It was enough; the tinder caught and he had his fire. He was just clamping the lid in place when Kaulin and the boy came panting up to join him. Still frightened, Wythnir cowered as lightning struck again down by the river.