He was barely aware of the solitaire any more, thinking through the pieces, feeling his way as he might feel the texture and taste of the mustus, the first crush of the fruit, when it told him what sort of Harvest he had. “Spells do not travel well over water, we know this. But we never thought how they might travel though water.” He tried to imagine such a thing. Even having felt it, knowing how his incantation went awry, it was difficult.
The boy, Po, had been right, even as he was wrong. Salt water had changed everything.
“You’re saying magic has influenced their breeding?” Harini had joined them, drawn by their voices, and now broke in with a voice filled not with shock but comprehension. “The way a dog is bred to be a herder, or sheep for better wool….”
“Magic bred serpents who are drawn to magic,” he said. “It’s only a theory, not –”
“No. It makes sense. I don’t know how, but it makes sense, and if it makes sense then it must be so.”
“There are many things that are so in this world that make no sense,” Kseniya said dryly.
“That is why they ignored my ship, why I could not bring them close enough to study. Because we use so little magic. There’s too much use of it, and we don’t think about what it’s doing…”
Bradhai ignored her attack on magic and licked his lips, unable to summon even the faintest reassurance of saliva to a suddenly dry mouth. “It explains why they attacked us, when I tried the most recent incantation. They could not help themselves; it was too powerful.”
“Is it also the reason they are larger? And so different-looking?”
“Maybe. I don’t know.” There were differences among the vines, the aeathervine fruit larger and lighter than growvine, and the others different still. The mustus they created, when crushed, smelled differently, the vine, even the vin ordinaire, tasted differently. Might magics, driven into flesh, also create differences?
The thought stirred memory with him, uneasy. If magic changed flesh… what then did that make him? All the slaves who lived and slept, breathed and drank of the vines, Vinearts who spent their lives working the juice, taking the magic within them, forming and structuring it, using the ability to draw on the magic within themselves….
What were they?
“It will only get worse, won’t it?” Kseniya, her voice quiet, but her body tense, as though waiting for a fight she knew she could not win.
“I don’t know.” He didn’t want to know. He wanted to go back to his vines, to do the things Sin Washer had created him and set him to do. This was none of his concern…
But it was magic. And magic, by Sin Washer’s command, was his sole purpose and concern. “Did you see this, Zatim?” he asked the long-dead god. “Did you plan this? Or is it simply a spill you never thought to clear?”
“Vineart?”
They looked to him for an answer, as though he knew what to do.
“Rot it to the root,” he said, bitterly. He wanted none of this, not the knowledge, nor the women staring at him, one curious, one worried, and the safety of the oceans resting solely on him – for who could he tell? The idea that magic –undirected, unintended – could wreak such changes…
“No one can know,” he said. “I will find a way to fix this, but we can never speak of it.”
“But…”
“He’s right, Harini. You choose not to use magic, but the world needs it, needs to trust it. If they knew…”
“But…” The girl looked at them both, her eyes a little wild, as though they’d just told her to cut off a hand. Then her body deflated, the fight leaving her. “I’ll know,” she said. “I’ll know, and I’ll write it down, and even if I can’t tell anyone. The record will be there.”
That seemed important to her, so Bradhai nodded. Writing it down in her notes seemed harmless enough.
“What are you going to do?” Kseniya still watched him, still waited.
“Undo what was done,” he said.
Thankfully, she didn’t ask how.
o0o
He had no access to the casks and sacks he had brought aboard the ladysong, now lost to the deep sea, along with the rest of his tools. But he had saved enough – he hoped.
And what he did not have, he would improvise.
The ship had a small amount of coldfire spellwine; even Harini’s objections were not enough to induce sailors to use open flame on the open sea. He claimed that, and the growspell the Captain took from one of his crew, who had hoped to grow himself into something the ladies might like better. The spellwine was not his work – some lesser Vineart, Bradhai could tell by the feel, without even tasting it – but it would do. Firewine and growwine and his aetherwine: He would have liked a dose of healspell, just in case, but he might as well wish for Sin Washer to come down and lend a hand, as the captain refused to hand over what little the young swimmer carried.
Bradhai supposed he couldn’t blame the man.
He gathered all his supplies together in the cabin they had given him – he alone seemed to rate his own space, while the other refugees were clustered together – and stared at it, willing the vin magica to tell him what to do.
Before, he had worked with what he knew. An incantation was a delicate, careful thing, precise and formal, to bind the wilder magics to obedience, but there were forms to follow, structures to use. This…
He was not directing the magic to do something for him, this time. He would be asking it to change something.
Nothing he knew told him how to do this. Nothing he had ever learned, led to this. You could not draw back the day, you could not unwind time. Growspells pushed forward, healspells could mend, but could not undo damage already done.
Bradhai stared at the wines, then turned to stare across the length of the ship, simply observing the scene the way he might his vineyard, waiting for an answer. Men worked as though it were an ordinary day, as though they were not all on edge, waiting for the first twitch, the first break in the water’s surface. Men hauled rope and toted bales, polished gear and mended nets, making sure that there were no rips where the larger, valuable fish might escape.
Nets. Bradhai’s gaze narrowed, and he looked at the sailors as though he had never seen such a thing.
“A net to bring what you want….and let the things you don’t want slip through.”
o0o
Two days later, the crew was on edge, too long in one place, anchor down despite the wind rising with the sun, urging them elsewhere. Bradhai waited, alone, at the forecas’l. He had ordered all but the helmsman away, sending the other crew down-below, and the Captain had enforced the order. Only he, the Captain, and a handful of men armed with bows and squid-poison quarrels, remained. None of them knew what might happen, but all expected the worst.
He was not ready, would never be ready, but there was no reason to delay further. Bradhai placed the two vials on the platform in front of him, and broke the wax seal on the first one, letting the contents touch his tongue. For a moment he relished the fullness of the vin magica, letting it remind him of who he was, and what he did. And then he used the earlier spellwine to call the serpents to him.
This time, he did not have the heart to enjoy the magic as it arched from him into the water. He waited anxiously until the water’s surface broke, and a blunt-ended muzzle surfaced, whiskers first. Bradhai clenched the railing, but could not otherwise move as more of the long, thick neck emerged, and the great head – the length of a wagon – rose to eye-level, and turned to look at him. Somehow he knew it was the same serpent that had approached them before: the leader. He could have reached out and touched the nearest whiskers, thick as cable and stinking of salt and dead fish, if he had a mind to.
He most emphatically did not.
“Kill it!” the captain, behind him a safe distance, if such a thing existed, was shouting madly. “Someone kill it!”
If it were that easy, they wouldn’t have needed him.
What he was about to do was madness. Sin Washer had n
ot issued a Command against it, because no sane man would try. But what other choice did he have? Bradhai had been too long from his vines, and if madness was the only way to return, then he would take that risk.
“The deep sea will protect us,” he said, as much a prayer as a certainty, and uncorked the vial of the new, untested spellwine.
So few drops, to do so much. He placed them on his tongue, and felt the deep, sweet fruit rise almost immediately. Thick and full, all the flavors fighting each other for dominance. It was not a blend but a jumble, an argument.
The decantation was as simple as the incantation had been complicated.
“From flesh, rise. From blood, pour. From whence you came, return. Go.”
The spell swirled around him, hesitant, and then exploded so violently that he was pushed back as though someone had hit him square in the chest, nearly knocking him down. The air around him shimmered, the same deep clear red he had seen just prior to the attack, and he caught his breath, bracing for another blow.
The great whiskered head turned to him, leaning in, the great mouth opening as though to engulf him, and Bradhai was almost knocked down again by the smell that filled the air – less of fish than expected, and more of something sweeter, no less salty but clean and healthy; the smell of blood and bone and living things.
The smell of sea-magic, unknown and unmistakable, a new thing, created out of so much being sent out, gathered and blended in the depths…..
And then it was gone.
o0o
When Bradhai came back to himself, all he could hear was roaring. Slowly, he realized that it was cheering, ringing down from every corner of the ship. He opened his eyes to find himself still at the railing. His fingers were clenched so tightly that he had shattered the vial, and the last drops of the spellwine mixed with blood from the cuts on his hand.
“It worked!” The solitaire nearly knocked into him, then embraced him in her excitement. Numb, Bradhai barely noticed. The sea in front of him was empty, the small waves undisturbed.
“Worked.”
“The greater beast, it pulled away and went below, and then they all…disappeared. Like magic.” She laughed, the high giddy noise of relief.
Bradhai nodded, but he felt uneasy, off-balance.
“All gone.” Harini was at his other side, but she was not laughing. Her gaze searched the waters, looking for even the slightest flicker of life, some whisker or tail.
A slight flurry at the side of the railing drew her attention, but it was only a school of spinners, leaping and diving as they swam past in search of fish.
“Gone.” He seemed to only be able to echo what others said to him, the inner silence overwhelming anything else. Yes, they were gone. His spell had worked… too well.
He understood now, too late. A vine’s fruit had skin and flesh, juice embedded, needing to be crushed and pressed. Once you removed the mustus, the flesh and skin were nothing, fit only for compost.
‘What have you done,” Harini whispered. “Vineart, what have you done?”
He had taken the magic back, drawn this sea-magic out of the serpents… and they were gone.
He raised one hand to his chest, pressing his fist against his chest, feeling his heart thump, tight and sore.
What he had done here… another might do to him. Remove the magic… and the Vinearts were gone.
“Never speak of it, Harini,” he said, a harsh reminder. “None of us must ever speak of it.”
She turned to him, but there was no protest in her eyes, only horror.
“They’re gone. You did this.”
“Never speak of it.”
He did not threaten, he did not raise his voice, but her gaze fell, and her lip trembled, and he knew she never would.
Neither of them would ever forget, or forgive.
o0o
And if, decades later, either of them woke in the stillness of the night, in their own beds far distances from the ocean and the memory of faint, sweet singing….
They never spoke of it.
Also by Laura Anne Gilman
The Vineart War Trilogy
Flesh and Fire
Weight of Stone
The Shattered Vine
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