Fearsome Magics

by Jonathan Strahan

  “Why?” Lettice said.

  “To see ’im dead for bringin’ that slavegirl ’ome,” muttered one.

  “She’s eyes on the throne,” her neighbour told her confidently, barely able to be heard over the hubbub of voices and the clatter and slam of plates and cutlery. “And she has a lib’ry full of books of Nazurian warlockery. Eh-em, I mean, fireside stories of course, not a word of truth, but she have faith in ’em. And she’s got a spyin’ glass. My sister is ’er second maid and she’s seen it. A ball the size of a man’s ’ed. She’s from Keltrad that Lady Bonfort. They’re primitive down that way. Until last autumn and the Glory they burned the Writ and any who spoke of it, though she’s taken to it lately at chapel in town.”

  “Do you think there is a dragon in the mountains then?”

  Lettice looked around at the woman, opened and shut her mouth a couple of times. “I can’t say I ever really considered it,” she replied.

  “Them Red wizards was brickin’ it yesternight so I think there must be—though they go stirrin’ it up and we’ll burn for sure,” another woman put in, emphasising her point with a chicken bone that caught Lettice’s attention. She felt a sensation that she had learned to dread —a conviction that what she was about to understand was absolutely true; that she was about to know a fragment of the future. It didn’t matter what she did next, the vision would form.

  She looked at their dishes. Among the heaps of plates, the spilled wine, the broken bread, the tumbles of tough sinew spat out and the vegetables scorned for meat in the midst of plenty there was but one bone. Only one to return, said the voice in her mind which spoke unbidden and whose words she disliked to hear. It had told her many things over the years, had never faltered. It had warned her about the Cascars years ago and she had listened, and fled.

  “I am sure there is nothing there at all but a lot of rocks and empty caves,” Lettice said firmly and got up. “Please excuse me, I am not used to so much rich food and I fear I must lie down.”

  Her companions looked dismayed at her, because she had given very little in exchange for their talk. “Better be somethin’ up there or we’ll all suffer come the return.”

  She went to her room, shadowed by a guard, and composed herself for a sleepless night. Hex a dragon indeed. This is what life came to when people without a shred of magical sensibility took it on themselves to interfere with things. She could no more have hexed a dragon than she could leap to the sun. As long as her life depended on their believing it, however, she found that she was prepared to pretend she could. Given that she was also happy to spit in a Lord’s eye this intrigued her, for it felt like two opposing forces propelling her in the same direction, one to preserve her life and another to spend it. Either way, there was no avoiding the journey.

  In her room she took Annett out from her basket and slept with the warm, fat baby cuddled in her arms; an unexpected stay of execution. In the morning she put her back in the basket. Where they were going there was no place for living children.

  Her reservations about the journey proved well founded. The roads were hard and unforgiving and the weather still cool enough in the valleys to make it taxing. By the time they had crossed into the borderlands of the Nazurim and began to ascend, ever fearful of spies and assassins, it was properly cold and the winter clothing had been brought out. Lettice walked or, when she was tired, rode on one of the covered wagons.

  The foothills were bare and unceasingly desolate after the meandering valleys of Wast. Their heather, bog and rocks was unbothered by farmers and most other things too, save the odd hare or hawk. A few dells held dark knots of trees and the kind of Lesser Spirits that held such gloomy places precious and dwelt in their shelter so they were not blown to bits by the wind.

  That night the wagon and the horses abandoned the path and turned for home. Chatter and high spirits were replaced with silence and concentration. Sore feet stepped onwards, the porters carrying the luggage now and breathing heavily as they crawled steadily up the lower slopes of Nazur, the Skybolt. The peak was a jagged strip of white against the cobalt blue.

  Lettice trod carefully, placing her feet between stones and lightly on rock. Scatterings of dust and tiny pebbles were all that covered it instead of earth. Black ice coated the sunless sides of boulders, shiny as scales. In the click of pebble on rock, the twist of stunted thorn trees, bent all in a single wave by wind, in the overreaching vast vault of the sky an overwhelming, exacting power lay massed. The black birds the Red sorcerers had spoken of floated out their lives on its high currents. They were not really birds.

  So she crept, hoping to go unnoticed as if that hope had any chance when she walked within the thing she sought to avoid. The emptiness demanded she pour herself out. The weariness that had kept her in Far Ashes yearned towards it.

  At the evening camp they were so few there was only one fire for all. The men’s faces were deadly serious and the fatted-bullock looks that they had sported in the lowlands were now grizzled edges and deep lines. Forced to observe them at close quarters she was not surprised to see that many of them were not real people; empty incomprehension lay behind the blacks of their eyes as they huddled and ate. A lot of them filled Wast now, more year on year. She sat alone at the midst of them, wrapped in her cloaks, looking at the ground or her soup cup but eventually Bonfort called on her to speak.

  “Were the Red sorcerers right? Is there a dragon here? Is it like those from the tale of the Dragon Kings?”

  Here it was then, the focus that she had longed not to hear, the one he had kept to himself. “You speak of the Journeys of the Dragon Hero,” she said, not asking a question. “It is a sorcerer’s story, much misunderstood.”

  In the tale two brothers went up into the mountains in despair after the sack of their kingdom. They spent thirty days alone in the wild, surviving, starving as their bodies shrank and their spirits were eaten by the hungry ghosts of the high plateaux. Eventually they were so empty that when they came upon the bones of a dragon hidden in a cave they ground them up and ate the dust before lying down to die. The dragon spirit filled them and they returned, powerful beyond measure, to wreak their revenge. They were not men, but they ruled for centuries, tyrants and unassailable, until sorcerer warriors slew them—those the Red Circle presumed their forebears. Lettice had never paid much attention to this story, since there was a terror at its core which disturbed her so greatly she sought never to lure its attention. Now as Lord Bonfort spoke she felt a circle close to a knot within her.

  “But is it true?”

  Lettice looked up, furious. “All I did was put an imp in the jam!”

  They all stared at her. She shook her head angrily. “Did you come here for that, then? To eat dragon bone?”

  Soon the mountain would bare the graves in her heart and then—she did not know what then and started in reaching for the basket as a kick on her ankle gave sudden pain.

  “Mind your tongue, witch.”

  Lettice had had time on the path to ponder the worth of the human lives around her; those she left behind in Wast, the greater masses she had heard of, those left long ago in the earth and herself. For all her efforts she had not resisted the mountain. Stripped of the world they had left she could no longer hide in its solidity from the knowledge of how it had been built. From these heights overlooking all of Wast the village beneath the lake that had fascinated her as a child with its plaintive ghosts shone like a tiny mirror, white as the cloud, bright as the sun.

  She looked at the guard’s boot that had delivered the kick and the things she had seen came creeping out of memory to stand around her; the murdered girls and the slaughtered boys, the butchered men and the blood of women taken to be used until they died and left without burial or mention again, the Writ a slab of rock across her friends that crushed them into dust.

  She had always known the dragon was here.

  “Aye they are right,” she said, reaching down to rub her ankle.

  The men shivere
d, but Bonfort ignored them. “I have seen no signs of a living dragon. Is it alive?”

  “Yes,” she said, drinking her soup.

  “Where?”

  Lettice turned her head and looked up to the brilliant white summit, one of many, that rose far above them. A little below it black rock broke the perfect blanket and steadily showed its harsh edges in a scatter of ridges. “There is a cavern up there. That is where it is.”

  Uneasy bickering and dispute. They were not sure whether to believe her.

  “If we go up and there is nothing you will pay dearly.” Bonfort clenched his gloved fist and his jaw muscle flickered.

  As if it was her fault. She sat up and lifted her head, looked directly at Bonfort. “You can no more take its power than you can build a butterfly. That is the only advice I have for you. Your Red mages would go no farther. In that, at least, they show wisdom.” She gestured at the tattered cloth and the red coil of thread holding it fast to a stone that marked the small lee in which they rested. “Even I long to be out of this place. There is nothing good here. Go home.”

  She felt rather than saw the hand raised to belt her. “The ramblings of a mad old woman. You cannot allow it!” But a glance from Bonfort had it taken down.

  “The river ferryman at Cold Sidens swore that you kept his boat afloat though it had a hole in it a hand wide from rapids. The villagers at Tornscrap say you lifted a tree more than two ton off a house just to save a dog with no more than a word. You raise the dead.” He made a gesture and she started as the guard beside her seized her basket. With a jerk he tore off the cover and scattered everything it held onto the stony dirt. The few personal items and the white cloth doll tumbled out and the booted foot kicked through them: a spindle, a distaff, some wool, a leather reticule of sewing needles and threads, a golden ring.

  “Women’s nothings. What kind of a witch are you?”

  Bonfort did not correct the guard this time. Lettice reached down for the doll. The booted foot kicked it away. It bounced heavily and landed at Bonfort’s feet. He picked it up and brushed it off, apparently without thinking, then studied it briefly—featureless head, simple arms, simple legs, no hands or feet.

  “If you continue up the mountain none of you will return,” Lettice said.

  “She curses us!” one of the men spat, standing and moving towards her. Bonfort held his hand up and the man stopped. He toyed with the doll, Lettice watching his every move. “What is the dragon that lives here?”

  “Death,” she said, though this was true of all dragons. “Do you still want its treasure?” She reached out to reclaim the ring, but the same boot trod down on it and she had to snatch her hand away.

  “Many rich men have sought it over the years,” Bonfort said, his lips looking thin and bitten as he contemplated the least success. “Their bones and their fine weapons are still on the hills for the taking. And the skulls of their sorcerers.”

  “Did you not think it strange that the Nazuri allowed you here without argument?” Lettice tried her final, desperate tactic. “They won’t walk on its ground.”

  “Your business is to hex the creature to prevent peril,” Bonfort told her shortly. “See you manage it or your skull will be sooner collecting more rain than you would prefer. We ascend to the cave at first light.” He got up and tossed the doll onto the fire.

  The guard bent and took the gold ring. The other items were left where they lay. Lettice did not pick them up. She watched the doll burn and thought, I could never have left you on my own. Lettice had put Annett, her daughter, beyond the world a long time ago, to spare her the ravages of black water fever, and now she was entirely beyond return’s gate. She gave nothing away in her expression about this, nor moved, until all but the guard had gone to sleep. Finally he slept too, thinking he watched the same night stars pass slowly over the black tooth of the mountain and Lettice climbed the frozen road up and over the boulders and the crags to the cavern.

  The night was clear and bitter. After hours of effort she fell a final time of many in the darkness and did not get up again. The sun found her and she opened her eye to its bright light as the rim of it crested the horizon below. Voices came from close at hand, men, and those of the Greater Powers that circled them, hungry and unseen.

  Lettice stretched out her hand and the Greater Powers scattered. She got up from her cold bed and the mountain shifted a little, enough to loosen stones that had teetered on the brink of falling for over a year, held by ice and the winter lately. They gave with a sudden gush of smaller rocks and then boulders were tumbling and bouncing down the slopes, breaking on each other as the fall became an avalanche of stone moving like water in a single wave, roaring. The men were swept away and she watched them go, tiny toys thrown about jauntily until they lay buried under the foot of the crag and the last stones trickled down over them and came to rest.

  She went down there to the edge of the fall line. The night’s camp was there, a few yards beyond the last pebble. She picked up the golden ring from where it lay on the bare stone, pocket-fallen. There were embers in the fire, and soup, still warm. She took out the clothes from the packs and dressed herself in Lord Bonfort’s silver, red and black with the fancy borders. Her old clothing she tossed on the fire, careless of whether it burned or not. In the reflection of melted snow she looked at her own face and saw it become his face. She straightened and surveyed her terrain, from Nazuria, where they rightly feared the mountain and the creatures thereon, to Wast, whence a woman called Lettice Beaverley had come to be shriven.

  At the edge of the cliff she slipped the gold ring onto her finger and turned her face towards the south. Above her the black birds spiralled on the rising currents and she opened her dark, leathery wings and made her descent into Wast in the low country, Cascar as it was known then, though it would not be known that way for long.

  WHERE OUR EDGES LIE

  NINA KIRIKI HOFFMAN

  IN MY EARLIEST memories, I can’t tell where I begin and my twin sister ends. We stare into each other’s eyes through the bars of our separate cribs, and I fall into her mind and she into mine, and we swim together on a tide of our thoughts. We share hunger and contentment and wonder, the look of sunlight as it moves across the ceiling in the morning, the taste of apple juice, so sweet and bright, the one foot that feels cold because a sock came off, and we don’t know whose foot it is. Ours.

  To the frustration of our parents, who wanted gifted children, we didn’t speak until we were three. We didn’t need to tell anyone anything outside ourselves.

  I forget who broke silence first. When we spoke, we said full sentences.

  I felt interchangeable. Damia and I answered to each other’s names, did each other’s chores, laughed or didn’t laugh at the same jokes. We were one in a world full of others. We were both intensely curious about how other people experienced life, but only so we could share our thoughts about them, and why our way was better.

  When we were ten, Dad had us put in separate fifth-grade classrooms, over Mom’s protests. He insisted we choose different clothing, too—even took us shopping at Penney’s so we could pick our own clothes for the first time in our lives.

  It made me nervous when Damia and I went into a dressing room and tried on two different things. I felt as though we were in separate slices of time. She got itchy, too. We wanted the same clothes. Dad despaired, but bought us three matching outfits and said we had to wear them on different days.

  That September, when I went to a classroom without my sister for the first time, I felt lost. I couldn’t pay attention to the teacher because I missed my twin so much. Her absence made me stupid.

  A month later, though, I had a sneaky feeling of happiness. Everyone in class called me Cosima or Cozy. Sometimes it was, “Cozy, you idiot!” That hurt without the instant comfort my sister could supply, but I learned to live with these small wounds.

  My classmates never called me “Damia.”

  Damia still cried every night after we t
urned out the lights. I did, too, if it seemed like she wasn’t going to stop. I buried my secret happiness deep down inside, where my sister would never sense it.

  I SAT ON the wall by the school’s front steps, hugging my green backpack and staring at sparkles in the sidewalk. Damia’s teacher wanted to talk to her about a science project, so she was late. Most everybody else had walked or biked or bussed off already. I wished Damia would come out so we could fall into step with each other again. A school day was too long a time apart, even broken in half by time together at lunch.

  Someone paused in front of me. The first thing I saw about the woman was her pointy-toed cowboy boots. They were black, with red leather flames up the sides.

  I glanced up, past her crinkled turquoise skirt and the white shirt embroidered at the yoke with flowers. Her hair was blue-green. Her eyes were pale green, like the bottom of a Coke bottle. Her mouth had the short upper lip and the pillowy lower lip I saw whenever I looked at Damia or a mirror, and her angled cheekbones looked like ours, too. The tips of her ears poked up through her hair, like fox ears. I wondered if she were a cosplayer.

  “Cosima,” she said. Her voice was low and thrilling.

  “Do I know you?”

  She sat beside me in a flurry of blue skirts and took my hand. Hers was cool and dry and almost reptilian. She smelled like jasmine and honeysuckle and dust. “I’m your real mother,” she whispered.

  An arrow of ice shot up my spine.

  “Are Damia and I adopted?” I whispered back. I had never suspected it for a second. Our little brother Lars looked a lot like us, a lot like Mom, same high cheekbones and gray-green eyes and streaky brown hair. I remembered when Mom was pregnant with him (she was so cranky with morning sickness!), and when we first got to see him, two days after he was born, in a basket in Mom and Dad’s room.