“Kiska.”
The voice was not Master Lukasha’s and only one other living man called her that. Heart plummeting, Kassia turned to face her king. She smiled. “Mishka,” she called him. “I didn’t expect you to rise so early just to see us off.”
His teeth gleamed white in the dark frame of beard. “To see you off.” He took her hands in his, his face sobering. “There is something unresolved between us. You know it. You are shai. You must have felt something of my . . . dilemma.”
She nodded, not daring to look at him. He put a hand beneath her chin and lifted her face to his ambush. Her eyes were captive.
“I have wanted to ask you a question these past days. I know it is not a fair request, but I have wanted to ask anyway. Your Master has pledged me not to be hasty in this. He has counseled me to patience, to open-mindedness. He thinks perhaps among the women left here at court—” His smile returned briefly. “—the ones you didn’t scare away—I will find one to whom I may give my love as well as my station and title. I have little hope of that, but I have agreed to judge them with an open mind if not an open heart. At the very least, I think it might be to their advantage if you’re not around for me to compare them to.”
“The way you did the other day?” she asked baldly. “I never could bring myself to ask you why you insisted I participate in that. I terrified them. As you must have intended.”
He had the good graces to look a little shame-faced. “Yes, well. I suppose I hoped they’d realize that they couldn’t compete with you, or that they’d be insulted that I so obviously favored a woman who had borne a son to a village potter, or barring that, that they’d flee screaming back to their homelands in abject fear.” He met her severe look with a shrug. “I can’t have a coward as a wife, Kassia. How would it look for the Queen of Polia to be cowering behind her throne instead of sitting upon it?”
The image surprised a chuckle out of Kassia and Michal cocked his head to one side, trying to read her.
“Does it bother you at all to hear me speak of taking another woman as my wife? Does it trouble you to imagine me joined in a loveless bond with a stranger? If I could marry you, Kassia, I would, but . . .”
Kassia swallowed the lump in her throat; muddy emotions warred in her breast. Frustration won. If I could cast on him a spell of forgetfulness, making him unable to recall even my name, I would do it.
She herded her words into careful order. “My lord, you are the King of Polia. You must marry and you must produce heirs if your kingdom is to endure. My sole duty is to aid and protect you in any way I can. I have no right to be troubled by your taking a wife.”
“What if I were to suggest that the best way for you to protect me is to stay by my side day and night—to offer me your wise counsel, your powerful arts . . . your love?”
She looked up into his eyes and read unspoken desires there. “I thought you had promised my Master not to ask that of me.”
“I only pose a hypothetical question.”
“That I be your personal adviser?”
“My personal adviser, my constant companion, my confidante, my friend . . .” His hands slid up her arms, brushed lightly over her shoulders, framed her face.
In the instant that Kassia knew he would kiss her, she sensed they were being observed. Lukasha. Surely he would prevent this. But Zelimir’s lips met hers with no outcry from the watching Mateu. The kiss was gentle, yet quivering with an undercurrent of passion. Stunned, she neither responded nor attempted to repulse him.
In a moment, he lifted his head and she thought he would release her. Instead, he reclaimed her mouth and drew her into a fiercer embrace. She could feel his body tremble against hers, could sense the powerful emotions that fueled his passion and knew, suddenly, that his trembling was not born of simple desire, nor even love. There was another element here—something dark and hidden.
But the impression was only momentary. Whatever barriers of propriety Michal Zelimir had erected buckled, flooding his kiss with passion. Alarmed, Kassia put her hands against his chest and pressed, readying a ward she hoped she wouldn’t have to use.
“Mishka!” Lukasha’s voice was sharp with disapproval.
Zelimir released his captive and stepped away from her, blinking into the lighted stable doorway. Lukasha stood there with Zakarij, a restraining hand on the younger man’s arm. His expression was opaque, while Zakarij’s, for an unguarded moment, betrayed something dark and violent. Lukasha turned his face to him without taking his eyes from the king. “Zakarij, take Kassia to the horses. I must speak with Michal alone for a moment.”
Zakarij did as bidden. Crossing to the silent Kassia, he took her firmly by the arm and escorted her back through the stables to their waiting horses.
“What happened?” he whispered when they were beyond the stable master’s hearing.
Kassia moved to her mount and tried to cloak herself in its shadow. “I don’t know. One moment he was telling me how Master Lukasha had counseled him to patience, the next he was . . .” She buried her face in the horse’s mane.
“I saw.” Zakarij’s voice was harsh. “Did he ask you to stay?”
Kassia managed a wry chuckle. “Hypothetically.”
“Hypothetically?”
“He asked me what I would do if he asked me to stay.”
“And you said?”
“He didn’t give me an opportunity to answer.”
“Then you haven’t promised him anything.”
She sighed. “No. But Zakarij, what if he’s right? What if Master Lukasha is right? What if I could protect him from Benedict and others like him merely by being at his side? Is it my duty to treat my King’s wish as a command—to acquiesce?”
“Is that what you want to do—acquiesce?”
Anger flared, solid and recognizable. “No. Of course not. I want to be at Lorant. I want to be a Mateu, not a King’s concubine.” Kassia realized that her hands had begun to tremble. Before she could do much more than note it, the trembling was spreading throughout her body. “I wish I’d never come to Tabor,” she whispered through clenched teeth. “I wish the king had never seen me.”
Unable to hide her quaking, she turned to mount her horse. Zakarij was beside her in a breath. She thought he meant to help her mount, but instead he put his arms around her and drew her against him, embracing her. He said nothing; there was nothing for him to say, but she felt his empathy. Kassia knew that if the king pressed her, hers alone would be the decision to go to him or stay in Dalibor.
She did not hasten to leave the circle of Zakarij’s arms. She stayed and let him work whatever spell it was he used to calm her trembling and soothe her fears.
Chapter Thirteen — Where Two Worlds Meet
Who would cross the boundaries imposed by time and place, and break the barriers of earth and sky should stand where two worlds meet, face the rising place of Sun or Moon—whichever rules the hour this spell is struck—and invoke the supreme Spirit. Follow this with a call to the angels (spirits) of earth, air, fire and water, giving precedence to air and earth, for these must be cloven if the spell is to succeed.
One must hold these things in the strictest balance, and with concentration unbroken, exert the will toward establishment of a window, a doorway, a corridor between this place and that.
The secret of this spell is this: That it has not one, but four catalysts, and that these catalysts square each other, and that they are all of openings, and that these openings contain the catalysts, which are living symbols. Let him who has ears hear—these four catalysts may represent the kingdom of Day or of Night or of Twilight, and these four may allow the user to see or to be or to control. These are the faces of increasing levels of power, of which there are three. I beg God’s forgiveness that we have not always stayed in the light. May He have mercy on us.
Kassia’s eyes drifted past Marija’s translation of Pater Honorius’ tidy Latin scrawl to the symbols below it. They were divided into four quarters by a set of
neat, crossed lines, at the ends of which were tiny symbols indicating the points of the compass and the primary substances: gold, silver, copper and cobalt. Within the four quarters the symbols were grouped in two rows.
The arrangement seemed wrong, considering that Honorius had written of three classes of catalysts. Either he or Marija had evidently left the third set out. Well, that mystery she would solve in time. She had Honorius’ notes and she had Marija’s journal. One might have provided a key to the other, except that for some reason Kassia couldn’t fathom, Marija had scratched out several of her Polian translations, and had replaced them with Latin notations. There were numbers embedded in the text, too, that seemed to reference pages that held the unknown script.
Kassia gathered up the folio, her book and papers and moved to a chair before the hearth where a fire had been set against the cool of the evening. Her eyes stumbled over the unfamiliar letters and words. Zakarij could translate this; he might even have knowledge of the strange, cryptic text Marija had used. But no—Kassia wasn’t ready to share this. Not yet. She would find the Traveling spell herself, without help. She applied herself to the task of using Marija’s initial translations to dredge meaning out of the Latin passages. Only marginally successful, she abandoned that task after a while and began a painstaking scan of each journal page, hoping to find something she had missed in her initial leaps ahead.
An hour later, she thought she had found something. Buried amid chatter about the more mundane aspects of college life, Marija noted that ‘following the monk’s directions’ she had ‘visited Tabor’. The word “visited” was underlined twice. Tabor was a place Marija had never been. But Kassia had been there, and recognized the other woman’s “vision” of the odeon just down the boulevard from the front gates of what was now Zelimir’s palace.
Adrenaline surged. Surely Marija had taken meticulous notes on how the spell was to be cast, what were its catalysts, and in what order the spirits were to be invoked. But there were no notes in the journal—at least none that Kassia recognized as such. Puzzled, she continued her meticulous perusal of the fat little book, trying to find some clue. What she found was something Marija’s inconstant diary-keeping had hidden from her before. The gaps in the dates of entries were only partly the result of that inconstancy—entire pages had been sliced neatly out of the book, very close to the binding. Here, a page ended in mid-sentence. There, it picked up again in a completely different vein. If Marija had written about Pater Honorius’ spell in these pages, it had been carefully excised.
Stunned, Kassia sat for some moments trying to collect her thoughts, trying to imagine how the pages had come to be missing. She had found Marija’s journal right where the other woman had left it; no one else seemed to have any idea of its existence. In the end she came to the only conclusion that seemed logical. Marija herself must have removed those entries. But why?
I saw, as if through a window, Marija wrote, this marvelous street with buildings that grew straight up into the sky. One facade was painted with all the colors of the dawn. What a wonder that was! I’m still shaking from the experience. Tomorrow, I will—
The entry ended abruptly. Marija’s ‘tomorrow’ had vanished.
Kassia closed the book and tilted it so that she could inspect the top of the binding. Now she could clearly see where pages had been removed. There was more than one such spot—in addition to the one she had just found there were several others later in the volume. She poked a fingernail into the tiny gap and opened the book to find herself among entries from a number of years later. Most were in Latin. She thought again of bringing Zakarij into her confidence and again abandoned the idea. This was her test, her task, laid upon her by Master Lukasha. By the Holy Seasons, she would complete it.
She closed the journal. If . . . if what she had accidentally stumbled upon in Zelimir’s audience hall was the same Window spell Marija had first used, then it must correlate to Pater Honorius’ first level of power. But clearly, if she wanted to progress to a higher level, she would have to drag the knowledge out of the monk’s equations herself. Very well. If that’s what it took . . .
She rose from the hearth, packed up book and papers, and retreated to her studio. She spent half the night there pondering Honorius’ cryptic notes, and somewhere around midnight came to the realization that she was taking the wrong approach. Whatever equations the monk had used to see across distances, she had already replicated accidentally, merely by the use of a fundamental Squared spell. The two things were related. Using the fundamental elements themselves, she had effected something unstable, capricious. The key was most certainly in the catalysts—not elements, but something those elements could be expected to contain.
She meditated on that as the horizon lightened, and compiled a list of things contained in air, water, fire and earth. One of Marija’s translated symbols was definitely a fish, another might be taken as a snake or worm. Piscis, Kassia wrote, and Serpens or Nymph.
The remaining hours of the night she spent trying these things as catalysts with little or no success. The very best she was able to do was to emulate her accidental opening of a spirit window, this time into her Master’s empty library.
Frustrated and exhausted, she went back to the pictograms to stare at the symbols until her eyes blurred. Sleep came upon her stealthily, forcing her to lose her grasp on her frustration. Just before her eyes closed and her head sunk to the table top, she felt a sudden surge of clarity take her. She fought sleep, but its momentum had already claimed her. She dreamed.
oOo
The air was a stole of balmy silk and smelled gently wet. A whisper of sound, a breath of breeze floated past her ears, touched her face. Beyond the golden shore on which she stood, lay water like liquid gems, so clear she could count the grains of sand beneath the crystalline waves. A fish swam toward her out of the deep. It swam right to her feet and looked up at her with eyes clear and black, then swam away again.
Piscis, the fish.
Comprehension washed in on the gentle lake-tide; Kassia knelt and took up a handful of sand. Cool powder of golden silk slipped between her fingers, revealing a graceful, serpentine shape beneath its dwindling grains. A tiny burrowing snake curled in the palm of her hand, its tail in its mouth. Now, she turned questing eyes to the sky. Far, far away the Sun burned in a field of deep azure and across its face flew a bird.
And what of fire? She turned and looked around. The fire burned on the beach behind her, sending gleaming salamanders into the suddenly dark sky. She moved closer to the fire and could see, within it, little lizards of ivory white that burned but didn’t seem to be consumed. She reached out and grasped the final symbol.
oOo
Kassia woke, jerking upright on a rush of adrenaline and victory. Fish, snake, salamander, and bird. She gave Honorius’ pages a fierce grin. She had but to determine which names to use for those symbolic animals and the order in which to speak them and she would have access to the spell.
There were yet some hours of darkness left and she availed herself of them, falling into bed with her clothes on. She got only a few hours of sleep, for Beyla was an early riser and woke her for breakfast. After the meal, Kassia, eager to probe the spell further, bid Beyla spend the hours before his own classes with Shagtai, but he begged to be allowed to stay with her and watch as she attempted the spell.
“It was wonderful,” he enthused, “when you came to visit me and Shagtai that time. You were all covered with light and flickering like a candle.”
“Well, before I can do anything like that again, I’ve some studying to do. That won’t be very wonderful, I’m afraid.”
“But I want to help,” he begged, and so she explained to him that she sought the names of four catalysts for a special Squared spell.
Brow furrowed, Beyla asked, “What’s a cat-a-list?”
“It’s a spirit that makes the spell work, that gives it the push that tells it which direction to take.”
“You mean li
ke when you tug on a kite string?”
“Just like that. What I must do is find the names of the four spirits that are a catalyst for this spell.”
“But can’t a spirit have more than one name?”
“Most have at least two—a celestial name and an earthly one. One given by Mat, the other by Itugen.”
“Celes-ti-al,” Beyla repeated. “That means from heaven “
Kassia nodded.
“How will you know which one is right?”
“I hope I’ll just feel it.”
Beyla pulled himself upright and folded his hands before him, looking most studious. “What can I do, mama?”
“Do you think you can read well enough to find me some names in this compendium?”
He nodded, eager for the chance to show off and she handed him the large, metal bound book.
“I need the names for fish, salamander, snake and bird.”
He blinked at her. “I know some of those. Except for salamander. I don’t know a name for that. Shagtai uses the others to make his kites.”
Kassia ogled. “Shagtai uses spirits in building his kites?”
“Sure. That’s all right, isn’t it? His father and grandfather were shamans, so I suppose that makes him one too. I asked him why he wasn’t a Mateu, and he told me that an old soldier-shaman doesn’t make a very good Mateu.” He paused, his dark eyes getting a far-away look in them. “You know what I think? I think it’s because the Mateu didn’t save his family. And they should have.”
Kassia put a hand to his cheek. “Lukasha told me about Shagtai’s family. The Tamalids sent armed men to Lorant. They killed many people. Perhaps there was nothing he could do.”
The Spirit Gate Page 24
