He had no idea how he was to fight this sorcerer; just refusing to reveal his own name had been almost more than he could manage. ‘The pain had been growing to the point that I feared that I might die from it,’ he thought, rubbing his chest beneath his cloak. ‘Would I have died had Jack not awakened me? What am I to do to prevent it from happening again; can I never sleep safely again?’
Somehow it was all tied up with the magic of the Old Wizard. He regretted now having picked up the headpiece from the wizard’s staff out of the destruction of his cottage. In fairness, it had probably already saved their lives more than once—he, Jack and Marian would have ridden close under the old watchtower, had he not seen it there the night before, and that gorn in the woods would certainly have killed Marian, and probably the rest of them as well, had he in the body of the owl not intervened—but was his sanity and possibly his life to be the price?
The meeting with that sorcerer had not been the doing of the Old Wizard’s magic, though it must somehow have been related. If disposing of the headpiece would make him safe, return his life to him, he would do it in an instant, but he feared that it would not. The sorcerer had told him as much when he claimed to know his “essence” and be his “master”, his piercing black eyes gleaming through that veil of acrid green smoke, and Owen believed it to be true. His only other choice was to somehow learn to use the curse that had been laid upon him. The sorcerer seemed to think that he was someone’s student. If he was to survive, a student was what he must become, but how he was to do so was still a mystery. The Old Wizard was dead. Who could teach what he so desperately needed to know?
Though filled with uncertainty, liberally laced with fear, a calmness stemming from his resolution to accept and to learn flowed over him. With the moon gone, he could see little. He was barely able to make out the shape of the castle in the starlight. Standing watch no longer seemed to serve much purpose. Exhausted with the little sleep he had gotten since leaving South Corner, Owen moved back into the trees where he had left his horse. He removed the brass headpiece from his pocket and stuffed it deep in his saddlebag. Still wrapped in his cloak and blanket, he burrowed into the leaves under the trees, and went to sleep.
The morning light through the trees woke Owen gently. He had not dreamed, that he could remember, and he felt rested for the first time in days. He scanned his surroundings from his place on the forest floor, and all looked to be at peace. Rising slowly and quietly, Owen looked intently around. The forest, or at least all that he could see of it, was empty.
Owen checked his horse first. He moved its tether to another spot that still had a little remaining greenery, and gave it a handful of grain. Satisfied, he reclaimed the brass headpiece, a couple of hard biscuits, and his water bottle, and crept quietly and carefully back to the thicket he had been using to watch the castle. Thin spires of smoke were rising slowly into the still morning air from several locations in the old fortress. Other than that, he could see no signs of life. The frost on the fields around the castle had not yet burned off completely under the rising sun, and he checked it for any signs of disturbance. None were evident.
Taking a deep breath, and recalling his determination of the previous night to learn to control his own destiny, Owen examined the brass figure closely in the morning light. It was cleverly worked in the likeness of the head of a raptor, with the notched upper beak of a falcon or eagle. The protruding ridge of its brow gave it a fierce appearance, and added to the intensity of the stare of its deep-set eyes. The rubies that represented those eyes captured the light and glowed and sparkled with it. Their concentrated gaze seemed to follow him as he turned the piece in his hands. Owen could not understand how the gems had been placed. Their size would not have allowed them to be easily fit through the more narrow space under the heavy brows.
Somehow, he was sure, this object was the key. Nothing else could explain what had been happening to him. If he was to gain control of the powers that were manipulating him, it could only be done through this brass remnant of the Old Wizard’s staff.
Settling himself comfortably, sitting cross-legged deep in the bushes overlooking the castle, Owen took one more careful look around through the dense leafless branches, then returned his concentration to the brass figure. He knew nothing of magic or its workings, but he thought that if he concentrated and opened himself to the power of the object in his hands, perhaps he might feel some contact with that mysterious force. If he could feel it, perhaps he could seize it. If he could seize it, perhaps he could direct it. If he could direct it, perhaps he could… Well, he didn’t know what he could do, but anything would be better than the helpless state that he found himself in now.
Taking a deep breath and letting it out, Owen relaxed as completely as he could. He focused his gaze on the ruby eyes of the wizard’s artifact. The eyes seemed to hold his gaze, and to pull him in. There was a depth there, deeper than the size of the stones could allow, and growing, growing deeper and broader. There was a pulse of light, and Owen felt himself falling into that ruby depth. A wave of vertigo overcame him, and in a panic he tore himself away from the eagle’s gaze.
His heart was pounding, and his breath game in gasps. Fearing that he may have cried out inadvertently, or jerked in a violent motion that might have caught the eye of a watcher on the castle walls, Owen slowly and carefully raised his head to search for any reaction. His heart still pounded in his chest, and he almost held his breath to keep from adding to the sound of his drumming heartbeat, lest someone hear from across the valley. But the fortress was silent; unchanged from before.
For long moments he searched and stared, but there was no sign of activity. With a conscious effort, Owen began to regain his calm. ‘This is foolish,’ he thought, berating himself. ‘The whole purpose of the exercise was to somehow gain a feel for the magic. Then when I just start to experience something, I panic.’
He knew that he had to try again, but the fear of falling into that ruby blaze, of losing himself in the intent gaze of those glittering red eyes perhaps never to find himself again was warring with the fear of the consequences of ignorance, the fear of once again being summoned powerless before the unnamed sorcerer.
Owen pulled a biscuit from his pocket and nibbled on it, occasionally washing it down with pulls from his water bottle. The sun rose slowly up from the east. The frost was beginning to melt in patches where the sun shone most directly, while persisting in the shade of small hollows. After a long delay, during which time Owen tried to steel himself to face what he greatly feared to do, but at the same time was convinced that he must do, he finally resolved to make another attempt to touch the magic. This time, however, he would not just throw himself into those intent ruby eyes. This time he was determined to maintain his own center.
Instead of surrendering himself to the bronze figure, Owen took a deep breath, focused his gaze in the distance, and opened himself to the calm concentration that he used with the bow and the staff. He had first really felt it years before when battling with quarterstaffs with Aaron under the watchful gaze of the Old Wizard, and he had used it many times since when precision with the bow, the staff or the sling was most important. It came to him most easily when he held the staff the Old Wizard had made for him, but he found with practice he could reach it at almost any time he chose.
As he opened himself to the calm, he became aware of the earth and stone that supported his weight. He discerned the individual twigs and limbs of the brush on the ground beneath him. He felt the air smoothly entering and leaving his lungs on its slow complex journey from left to right through the branches of the thicket that was his hiding place. He sensed the components of that thicket around him, and the open space above his head. He was all part of it, and it was all part of him.
Firmly established in the calm, Owen brought his disinterested gaze once again down to the bronze headpiece he held in his hands. The red stones that were its eyes pulled him as before, but this time he did not enter; he merely ob
served. As before, there was a depth to those stones that could not be explained by their physical dimensions. As before, the space in that depth seemed to deepen and broaden. And, as before, there was a flare of ruby light that seemed to rise up and envelop him. He felt a brief tremor on the edges of his concentration, as though something—fear perhaps—was trying to enter, but his concentration did not waiver. Owen merely observed.
Gradually Owen sensed a change. First at the edges of sight, then slowly filling into his field of view, he became aware of a glow in the branches and twigs around him. The glow seemed to spread to include everything that he saw. It was faint and indistinct; a pale red or orange in color, and it grew with his awareness. Slowly it resolved, and Owen could see that it was not a general glow, but rather fine threads of pale light or energy that seemed to define the objects and spaces around him.
A great nexus of thousands upon thousands of threads, brilliant in their concentration, rose from the earth beneath him, passed through his body and compressed into the headpiece of the Old Wizard’s staff before fanning out to the spaces and objects around it. They seemed to pulse, and to flow in both directions, dazzling in their radiance. Owen raised his right hand and gazed at the wonder of light that enlivened it. The filaments were alive in his hand, and responded to each movement, each flexure of muscle, with a spreading and a bunching that seemed to presage and to complete each action.
He followed the threads of light up through his wrist, across the spread of his hand and out along his fingers. At the tips of his fingers, they launched themselves diffusing into the air, seeming to join his hand, as with the glowing threads of a spider’s web, to the air and to all of the objects near him. He followed their course up into the sky, and became aware of a depth of filaments, vast in their scope and more widely spaced, that undulated and flowed through the air all around.
The wonder and amazement of this sight finally overcame the calm, and like a candle snuffed by a drop of rain, the vision vanished.
Stunned with his new awareness, Owen sat with his mouth open, a huge grin on his face. He had had no idea. It was too fantastic. The wonder of the light and the energy that flowed all around and through him was beyond anything that he could have even suspected. Was it the essence of magic that he had seen? The essence of life? The essence of existence? From within the calm, it had somehow seemed so natural, so fundamental to the objects that he had examined, that he could not believe that it had been added as a result of his mental state, or created by the presence of the artifact that he held.
Tentatively, Owen reached out to touch a brown and leafless twig of the bush that grew in front of him. He almost expected to feel a heat, or a shock such as the ones he could generate when combing a lamb’s pelt when the air was very dry. In truth, he somewhat feared to feel these things. A deep and inarticulate part of his mind did not want the world to suddenly change so radically from what he had known all his life. It did not want the ordinary and familiar to instantly become strange and unknown. It feared a world in which all of the rules of daily existence had changed.
His fingers slowly closed together. With relief, Owen let go a breath that he had not realized he had been holding. The twig was just a twig. It did seem that his fingers had grown more sensitive, though. He was able, he thought, to feel much more of the texture of the small branch—the rough irregular pattern of the thin bark—and to also more clearly feel its connection to the bush as a whole as well as the bush to the ground. But that could easily be imagination, he thought. He did not believe that he had ever before reached out to touch something as mundane as a winter dormant branch with the focus and intensity with which he touched this one now.
Calmly, Owen expanded his examination of the world around him. All looked much the same as it had before. The fortress stood as before, with here and there a slight stream of pale gray smoke rising into the air—fewer now than before—and over the field on the other side of the river a large red-tailed hawk was now soaring in lazy circles while its mate sat nearby perched high on the limb of a tall pine. ‘The hawks will probably be leaving this valley soon,’ he thought in passing, ‘as the rodents that they live on withdraw to the deepest chambers of their burrows to sleep through the long winter.’
In his observations, textures and colors seemed a little more distinct than he remembered them, but as with his sensitive touch of the twig before, that was likely just his imagination.
Gradually, Owen realized that he was both quite hungry and thirsty. He had hardly broken his fast this morning, his mind occupied with the need and the dread of searching for the magic, and his body was reminding him of the continued need for such ordinary care.
Owen pulled a hard biscuit from his pouch, and removed the stopper from his water bottle. As he ate he thought again of what he had experienced. Gradually he rebuilt the calm around himself in preparation to try again to contact the magic. With familiarity, he thought, it should be easier to gain the calm needed to attain and hold to the state required to observe the light. He did not know what the light had to do with the magic, but he was certain that it was the place to begin. With the way that the threads of energy had clustered so thickly in the Old Wizard’s staff headpiece, the connection seemed obvious.
His meager meal complete, Owen once again focused his eyes on the middle distance and sought the calm. As before, but more quickly this time, he achieved the utterly calm state of the disinterested observer, and with a relaxed look into the glowing eyes of the staff head, the light slowly returned.
Once again, he could see the glowing threads of power that surrounded him, flowing through solid objects and arcing off through the spaces between. It seemed that the threads originated in the earth itself, and flowed from there up through the trees, the bushes, and even the sparse blades of grass that covered the valley. No space was completely devoid of light, but living things contained it most vibrantly. The veins of light were thickest but darkest in the earth itself, splitting and dividing repeatedly as they climbed through trunks and branches, until the finest of filaments left the trees to fill the air.
Owen gazed at the old fortress and noticed that the stone walls held relatively few cords of light, but those were thick and very well ordered. A weave of dull light formed the walls and battlements, and unlike the cords and threads that flowed through the forest trees, they appeared very solid and stable. From this distance, they did not seem to move or flow in any way.
Owen looked up to where he had seen the hawk in its pattern in the sky. There he saw a cluster of light that moved and flowed lazily through the fine filaments around it. Wonder pulsed at the edges of his calm, but this time he did not allow it to distract him.
Threads seemed to flow into the soaring bird, combining into thicker and more densely packed strings that defined its shape, and splitting and reradiating as fine filaments again as they left it. It seemed to him that it might be possible to trace a thread all the way from his own fingertip up through the air to where it joined with the hawk. Most things seemed to be connected, if one could trace the myriad of fine strings along the correct path. All paths appeared to ultimately connect through the earth itself, the seeming origin of the flow of light. Of the thousands of thick strings coursing through the brass headpiece, Owen thought that several must converge into the bird in the air.
As Owen pondered this connection, his gaze again wandered to the old castle. There was activity there now. A small party—seven people, Owen decided—was exiting the main gate and heading across the wooden bridge over the river. The way they were formed up, it appeared to be one person leading two prisoners, with two additional guards on either side.
Owen strained to make out detail without disrupting his calm center. He could feel it tremble under the effort, and eased back trying to maintain a more disinterested interest. It was difficult to tell from that distance, but from their attire, Owen thought that the prisoners must be young women.
The party crossed the bridge and foll
owed a path that would take them through the field in the general direction of the base of the stone arch over the Wizard’s Moat.
Intent crept into the calm that surrounded Owen. He knew all of the young women of the village, of course, and after his days of pursuit, he felt a personal obligation for their ultimate safety. He did not want to lose track of any of the captives now that he had tracked them to their imprisonment in Carraghlaoch.
As he watched, intent and need building within the calm, Owen noticed that the prisoners and their guards were passing on a line that would take them not far from the red-tail still soaring overhead. With this observation came again the thought that the hawk must surely be connected in some way with the brass headpiece that he held in his hands.
Gazing down at the raptor’s fierce ruby eyes, he let his need select a bundle of cords that pulsed through the artifact. He released his tight grip on his own center and cast his consciousness into the flow. The light seemed to flare around him, and he felt himself rushing forward as though he were suddenly caught up in a mountain stream during spring flood. It was all he could do to hold to his tenuous grip on the calm, and not to panic and fight the forces that swept him onward.
Suddenly his perspective changed. Owen still sat in his hiding place in the bushes gazing at the flashing eyes of the brass raptor, but overlaid with that vision was a view of a field of brown grasses slowly passing below him. The duality was disorienting an a little nauseating initially, but with the calm, his mind seemed to gradually adapt.
Employing his intent, Owen found that he could subordinate his view of the glowing artifact to his view of the field across the river. The duality did not go away entirely, but the sharp gaze of the red-tail in its hunt became strongly dominant. With his need, Owen shifted that gaze to take in the view of the procession below. He could see them clearly now, and he had been right.
The Staff of the Winds (The Wizard of South Corner Book 1) Page 15
