Od Magic

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  “And what will that prove?”

  “That I can whistle up a street warden to escort you back to the school. He won’t be discreet about it. He’ll hand you to Wye herself. Take your pick.”

  Her mouth opened, closed again, pinched tight. She breathed something he couldn’t hear. He guessed at it anyway.

  “Tyramin? You came to see him, too?”

  She peered up at him; he saw an eye then, catching a fleck of moonlight. “Is that why you’re here?”

  “Curiosity,” he answered easily, not specifying whose.

  She nodded. “Yes.” She shifted slightly closer. “We could find him together, you and I. I’m not sure where I’m going, and they say these ancient streets are a maze.”

  “They are,” Arneth agreed. “I’m not sure where to go, either. But I am absolutely certain that I’m not going anywhere in the Twilight Quarter in the company of a student of magic. I’d lose my position.”

  “Your position,” she scoffed. “All right, then. I’ll take the robe off.”

  “You do that, and I’ll summon all the street wardens in the quarter to take you back.”

  She was silent; after a moment he heard her sigh. “Are you really,” she asked dourly, “a quarter warden?”

  “Yes. Are you really a princess?”

  She stepped toward the gate without answering. He guided his horse beside her, breathing more easily once they passed through the archway, left the Twilight Quarter behind them. She walked mutely, her head lowered. The streets were quieter here, without the comfort of crowds or light except for the occasional smoking streetlamp. After a while, she raised her head; he heard her voice again.

  “Whoever you are, I’m grateful for the escort.”

  “You can ride,” he offered.

  “No, thank you. I trust you only as long as both my feet are on the ground and yours are not.”

  “Suit yourself.”

  “After all, quarter wardens don’t ride the streets like common street wardens when they work.”

  “I like street work. I meet the people of Kelior. They do far more unpredictable things than a piece of paper on a desk does.”

  He couldn’t tell if she believed him; she only asked, “What’s your name?”

  “Arneth Pyt.”

  She said nothing to that, but her brisk steps missed half a beat. She cleared her throat. Arneth waited, but she had nothing to add to that, either. The great towers of school and palace were looming over them, high windows lit at random, making star-patterns of fire against the stars.

  “I’ll wait to see you safely in.”

  “Thank you,” she said a trifle sourly.

  “If I see you in the Twilight Quarter again, I’ll escort you straight to Wye myself.”

  “You won’t see me,” she promised, crossing the street to the immense wrought-iron gates that led toward the main doors of the school. Arneth, on the other side, sat watching. At the gates she turned, seeming uncertain, to look back at him.

  The streets and grounds were still; he saw no one, but he kept his voice low as he called, “Can you get in without trouble?”

  She opened a small gate inset in the larger. “It’s unlocked until midnight,” she told him. “I’ll be all right now.”

  She closed the gate, and the great moon shadows of trees swallowed her up. He rode to the corner of the iron fence, watched from there. She didn’t come out again, but however it was she entered the school, it wasn’t by the main doors; he never saw them open.

  FOUR

  Princess Sulys slipped through the trees down a side path around the school, unbuttoning the worthless robe as she walked. She hooked it over her shoulder with one finger, her straight brows drawn. Beneath it she wore a silk chemise and underskirt, both black mourning garments and not for public view. They wouldn’t have caused comment in the Twilight Quarter; in that unpredictable place, the only garments that caught attention seemed to be the complete lack of them, and exactly what she had worn. She had been given the student’s robe years earlier as a token of honor when she had paid her first royal visit to the school. She should have remembered the implacable rule about students venturing into that quarter, but she hadn’t, and who would have guessed anyway that the High Warden’s son would have spotted her before she had gotten farther than the Twilight Gate?

  He would have recognized her if she had showed him her face. But she hadn’t learned his name until they were nearly at the school. And he would have told someone, most certainly his father, how he had found the king’s only daughter wandering alone in the dangerous, bewitching Twilight Quarter and rescued her. Lord Pyt, creature of ambition that he was, would have made certain that the tale reached her father’s ear. Her father would have streamed fire from his nostrils and bellowed like a huckster; her brother would have imitated an icicle, dripping words like cold water; her aunt Fanerl would have suggested six eminently suitable young men for her to marry on the spot, all of them completely unbearable.

  Her mother would have laughed.

  But the king’s consort had been born in a different country with, in Galin’s view, a poor understanding of the complex link between power and magic. Sulys knew his speech by heart. The wizard Od had not started her school under a tree; she had stood under the roof of the King of Numis and asked permission to bring magic into Kelior. She had made her school, her knowledge, her power subject to the king. Both rulers and wizards craved power; to avoid contention and chaos one had to be bound by the other. Magic unbound was suspect, dangerous. Therefore, it was not permitted anywhere in Numis. The wizards of Numis, like its nobles, were subject to the laws of the land. All power in Numis, of magic, of law, of arms, ultimately belonged to the king.

  Students were forbidden in the Twilight Quarter not because anyone seriously believed it harbored uncontrollable and suspect forms of magic unknown to the wizards of Kelior, but because rumors of such things floated constantly out of it, like seeds from a milkweed pod. An inexperienced student could get as confused as its streets by mistaking tricks for truth. It had happened several times during the school’s history, most gravely during Flamin’s rule, when a traveling magician and trouble monger nearly incited a students’ rebellion against the king. Since then, the rule had been imposed rigorously: students of magic caught in the Twilight Quarter were expelled without appeal. Sulys was not a student and had every right to go where she wanted. But wanting to go alone and disguised into the Twilight Quarter suggested a dangerous lack of sense, as well as a puzzling desire to infuriate her father. To say nothing of the lack of decorum.

  Why Arneth Pyt had not dragged her straight to Wye, she had no idea. Perhaps he showed mercy on her because she had gotten no farther than the gate. Being caught so easily, he must have felt, had made its point. She had been fortunate in that. But because their paths had crossed so inconveniently, she would have to pick another night, find another disguise, and pretend to be here and not able to be there to everyone all over again.

  She had debated, as she went through the students’ gate, about waiting until the quarter warden rode away and, then, sneaking back down to the Twilight Quarter. But she had no other disguise, and anyway, he showed every sign of sitting there on his horse all night, waiting for her to do just that.

  She went from school grounds to royal gardens through a tiny gate nearly lost behind a cataract of vines. In the gardens white peacocks rustled their trailing plumes as she passed. She had left a sedate gown hanging on a hook inside a potting shed. She slipped it on in the dark and emerged for an innocent stroll among the rose trees. She picked one or two flowers, wandered into the palace. Because she had made it clear to everyone that she would be spending a tranquil evening with her great-grandmother, she decided to go up to the chambers high above the world and do just that.

  Lady Dittany had last left her chambers a year before to bury her granddaughter. Since then she had seen no reason to leave. Indeed, she could see very little at all now with her fading eyes.
The circumference of her visible world was measured by the distance that her teacup might travel around her. She spent her days in her bed or in a chair beside the fire. Sulys found her dressed in blue satin and yellowing lace, absently petting the mangy ball of fur on her lap as she chatted with her maid. They had grown old together, she and her lapdog and her faithful Beris; now they busied themselves with trying to find the most comfortable places possible in the luxurious rooms.

  Dittany smiled as Sulys opened the door, though Sulys wondered how she could so quickly recognize the blur that came into the room.

  “Sulys! My dear.” She held up her frail hands; Sulys bent to kiss her.

  “How do you know it’s me, Grandmother?”

  “I feel your mind like a fresh breeze. Sit down.”

  “I brought you—”

  “Roses. You’ve been outside; I can smell it.” She smelled the roses, then handed them to her ancient maid, who had risen to give Sulys a wobbly curtsy. “Beris and I have been reminiscing.”

  “I’ll put these in water, my lady,” Beris said, and withdrew to leave them in privacy. Sulys sat down. For a moment the ghost of her mother joined them, slight, golden-haired, and smiling on the hearth. She had taken nothing, not even the king, not even death, very seriously. Her dark-haired, dour daughter, with her weedy limbs and certain troublesome gifts felt that except for their blue eyes she had grown up to be completely unlike her mother.

  Her great-grandmother said softly, as soon as she heard Beris shut a door behind her, “You didn’t see him.”

  Sulys sat down on the plump, tapestry-covered stool beside Dittany’s chair. Their heads, one dark, disheveled, the other capped with ivory braids and blue satin, inclined toward one another; they kept their voices hushed. “No. I stupidly went disguised as a student, thinking no one would notice me. I hardly took three steps beyond the gate before I was caught by a quarter warden.”

  “No.” Her great-grandmother pushed a lace-enclosed palm against her mouth. “Were you recognized?”

  “No. I pulled the hood close around my face and said I was a princess. Of course he didn’t believe me.”

  “Who?”

  “Arneth Pyt.”

  “Murat Pyt’s son? How disagreeable.”

  “He escorted me back to the school, but he didn’t take me to Wye. I suppose he had more important things on his mind. Like seeing Tyramin himself. I asked him to take me with him, but he refused to risk being seen with a student.” She sighed, then added briskly, “Another night. Soon. I’ll borrow some of Enys’s clothes. Though it isn’t easy trying to remember what lies I’ve told to whom so that nobody will come looking for me.”

  “They came looking tonight,” Dittany told her. “Your ladies.”

  “Did they? What for?”

  “They didn’t say. I instructed Beris to say we were not to be disturbed. Beris does well at that; she pretends to be deaf until they go away.”

  Sulys smiled, wondering who had wanted her so urgently and why. Her father and Enys and Fanerl never bothered to climb the tower to visit the ancient Dittany; they seemed content to let Sulys see to her. Most of the time they seemed content to ignore Sulys as well, as long as she did nothing troublesome and remembered to show herself when expected. It made hiding the small mischiefs she and Dittany concocted much easier.

  Little witcheries. Magic that didn’t count; spells too small to be noticed by the wizards next door. So Sulys thought of those things that Dittany had been teaching her since she was small. How to summon a passing crow and give it a message, or ask it to keep an eye on something for you. How to see, in crystal or water, where someone was in the palace. How to bind a secret possession into stitchwork, so that it became invisible within the threads. How to find the odd missing ring; how to see in a candle flame what tomorrow might bring.

  Sometimes they worked; sometimes they didn’t. And they were all harmless, these things that Dittany had learned in the land where she was born. There, they were common as dreams, though not everyone had what Dittany called “the gift.” Sulys’s mother couldn’t do such things; Dittany herself had half forgotten them until one day a very young Sulys had stared into a candle flame and seen great, white, plumed birds in it. They arrived the next day: white peacocks for the king’s menagerie, a birthday gift from his father-in-law.

  There were rumors that Tyramin had been born in her mother’s country, that he, too, knew such small, secret magics. Sulys, who still missed her mother terribly, wondered if the traveling magician might have glimpsed her as he performed at her father’s court. If, being of the same country, he might know how to laugh like she had, how to charm the heart.

  It was a tenuous hope, but she was restless anyway, tired of her own grieving, and Dittany did not try to stop her.

  “He’ll be in Kelior for some time,” Dittany predicted. “Magicians of such fame require a lot of baggage and travel slowly.” She stroked the sleeping dog, her eyes growing filmy with memory. “I remember watching all those great wagons, all brightly painted and streaming ribbons, drawn by white oxen into my father’s courtyard.”

  “Tyramin?”

  “Long ago, on my sixteenth birthday. He picked roses out of my hair and told my fortune.”

  Sulys patted the fragile hand petting the dog. “Someone like him, maybe,” she said gently. “Your Tyramin wouldn’t still be alive and traveling now.”

  Dittany was silent; the cloudy eyes seemed to be trying to see through their mist. “You must be right. Someone like him. A traveling magician with his wonderful, endless bag of tricks: flowers, birds, fire, all kept in his hat or down his boot. He had a daughter, this magician, a lovely girl with ivory hair and sapphire eyes. He would turn her into fire, and then into a flock of doves…”

  “What was your fortune?”

  “That I would travel far and marry well, and have a long and interesting life.”

  “Magic,” Sulys murmured dryly, and Dittany chuckled again.

  “Of course I knew that already; what young woman doesn’t see that as her fortune? And it all came true. I married the youngest son of the ruling family, and had your grandmother, who went off to marry in another country herself. When your great-grandfather died, a couple of years after your mother married Galin, she invited me to travel all the way to this country to live here with her. So.” She patted the dog again, looking a little bewildered suddenly, as though wondering where her fortune had gone. “You see, he was right.”

  Sulys put her arms around Dittany, held her gently a moment. “It was a good fortune,” she agreed.

  “Well, look at me. I could be living on the streets in a—a wine barrel. I don’t have my daughter or my granddaughter anymore,” she added bravely. “But I have you.”

  “Yes. You have me.” She loosed her great-grandmother. “Now what shall we do?” She looked around; her eyes were caught by melted wax rolling down a candle like a fiery tear. “Wax,” she said softly, her attention tumbling down along with another tear. “Hot and cold, solid and liquid…a changeable thing. What spell can we make with that?”

  “Nothing tonight.” Dittany sighed. “Not with people wanting you. We might bumble into some wizard’s magic coming up to search for you, and that would be trouble indeed. You should probably go down before they think you’ve gone off on your own and visiting me was just your excuse.”

  “I suppose you’re right,” Sulys said reluctantly.

  “And maybe you shouldn’t really wander the streets of Kelior by yourself, even dressed as your brother. Is there someone you could take with you next time?”

  “I’ll try to think of someone,” Sulys promised, to make her great-grandmother feel better. She kissed Dittany, called Beris back, and left them with their white heads together, settling again for the evening’s exchange of memories.

  She got as far as the stairway. She would go down in a moment, show herself to the world again. But here it was peaceful, and no one made unpleasant demands. So she sat down on a step
and thought who might accompany her to the Twilight Quarter. Not a wizard; they were all as shortsighted as her father. Not Enys, her brother, who had grown into a humorless, pompous prig since their mother had died. The quarter warden, she thought, hopeful for a moment. She would tell him the truth; he would guard her well, and he seemed to like the peculiar quarter. Then her hope slumped. No. He would surely tell his father, and Murat Pyt would be eager to tell her father that Princess Sulys was chasing rumors of magic in the Twilight Quarter…

  A boot intruded into her thoughts. It had stopped a couple of steps below her, black and very polished, just inside the periphery of her vision. She glowered at it; it refused to move. She gave a silent, mental sigh and raised her eyes.

  “I thought I recognized that boot.”

  It was, as she expected, Galin’s son and heir, her older brother Enys, with his first mustache creeping like a caterpillar across his upper lip. He had their mother’s blue eyes, too, but his were more like chilly water than her warm sky-blue. Other than that, he looked presentable, with his father’s vigorous figure and their mother’s golden hair, which Sulys considered wasted on someone who had an entire kingdom to dangle in front of his suitors.

  “What,” he demanded peevishly, “are you doing sitting in the middle of the stairs?”

  “Thinking,” she answered coldly. “Sorry. Am I in your way? Surely you’re not going up to pay a visit to your great-grandmother?”

  “Surely not,” he agreed. “At the moment I’m looking for you.”

  She gazed at him, baffled. “You? I mean, why you? You could have sent some—” She caught her breath then and rose, impelled by a confusing gust of memory. “Is anything wrong?”

  “No,” he said with annoying coolness. “Our father has chosen a husband for you. We thought you’d like to know.”

  Sulys sat down again, hard, on the marble step. The vague whoosh of sound that came out of her could have been interpreted as a question; so Enys heard it.

  “You will be happy to know that you won’t even have to leave Kelior. Our father has chosen among several suitable offers, including one or two from rulers of countries east and south of Numis. But, considering the extraordinary power at the king’s command in Od’s school, he decided that he did not have to marry you to another land for the sake of peace.”