A Forthcoming Wizard

by Jody Lynn Nye

“You had every opportunity to depart. Now it would jeopardize our plans.” She made a sharp gesture with her good hand, and two knights spurred in to flank Serafina. More surrounded the other members of Tildi’s party. Each of the scholars carried a bloom of blue power in the hand not holding his or her reins. Tildi regarded it with horror. The rune upon it was not unlike her spell of green demon-fire. It promised pain and destruction. “It is only for a few days more. Then you are free to go. All but her.” She threw her ruined hand toward Tildi, who felt the gesture like a slap in the face. “She will stay at our pleasure.”

  “You cannot confine us.” Serafina stiffened her back. “Our duty is to return the book to its original resting place.”

  “I care nothing for your duty. Our mandate is centuries older than yours.”

  “You will regret this, Abbess.”

  “I doubt it,” Sharhava snapped. “Let me clarify the position. You won’t be allowed to have the book from this day on. After we reach the Scriptorium, I care not where you go. You may tell your precious council it will not see the book again. It belongs of right to the Knights of the Word.”

  Serafina didn’t reply, but her eyes flared with anger and indignation. Tildi could tell that she was containing her temper with difficulty. The abbess, unconcerned, turned back and signaled to the knights to go about their business.

  “And me?” Magpie asked, his voice suddenly cold and still. “Do you include me in your threat?”

  Sharhava swiveled her head to regard him. “You are of the blood royal. It would be a dire breach of the concord of kings to harm you. Bear in mind, won’t you, that I hold the power of life and death over all my knights. All of them?”

  Magpie was shocked. He saw the feeling echoed on the faces of some of the senior knights, especially Loisan.

  “Even you wouldn’t stoop to such means,” Magpie said. “You are not thinking clearly if you believe that justice will not follow you. Inbecca is in no danger from you.”

  “So you believe!”

  “Abbess!” Loisan said, horrified. “You are not yourself!”

  “Pah,” Magpie said, hardly believing what he had heard. A contrary impulse made him dare to defy her just to see what would happen. He pointed toward where Tessera was tethered. “I’ll start riding now. Either you strike me down now, or you strike Inbecca. One of us will survive, that I promise you. Then what will your sister the queen say to you?”

  Even Sharhava seemed to realize she had gone too far. Her fair face grew red, and she began to shake. “How can you say I would ever harm my own niece? You would hurt her if you departed. It would be your doing. Yours!”

  Brouse came to put a hand on her shoulder. She threw it off. They exchanged looks, and the wild expression melted from her face.

  “Then, I stay,” Magpie said.

  “Indeed you will,” Sharhava said. She clapped her hands together, wounded and whole, and closed her eyes briefly. Her lips moved silently, mouthing unfamiliar words. A spark of red formed between her palms. She spread out her hands, and the spark grew to a sphere. Magpie felt the air crackle. A shock of force struck him in the chest like a gust of wind and passed through him as though he were no more substantial than cloth. The redness kept spreading and thinning out until the land and sky around them bore a faint reddish tint. He frowned, wondering if he was imagining it. Sharhava looked around her with satisfaction. “Do not go beyond the pickets without an escort.”

  “What have you done?” Serafina asked, horrified.

  “Enforcing my order,” Sharhava said. “You understand now, don’t you? The force that was centered upon you is now centered on me. I control the borders of safety. You will obey my orders now.”

  “You misuse the power,” Serafina said. “How can you . . . do you understand what you have done?”

  “I dare,” Sharhava replied simply. “If you had the conviction of your beliefs, you would have protected what you had. It is mine now, and I do what I must. You will all remain.”

  Magpie stared from one to the other. “What has she done?”

  “Come, go, stay, come, go, stay,” Lakanta chided her. “You can’t make up your mind, can you? Well, wild horses couldn’t drag me from Tildi’s side, no matter what dire plans you have. I wouldn’t want to be anywhere else at all.”

  “Nor I,” Rin said.

  “As you please,” Sharhava said, as though the outburst had never occurred. “The matter is settled now. Loisan, send out the scouts. We will have our meal, then move as soon as the way ahead is clear. In case the townsfolk do pick up Mey’s trail, I wish to be away from here. We will travel for a couple of hours after dark. This is a good road.”

  The lieutenant seemed happy to go elsewhere. He bowed.

  “Yes, Abbess.”

  Her senior officers gathered around her and escorted her away up the road, away from Magpie and the others. Inbecca stood bolt upright among her fellow knights, a stricken look on her face. Magpie started toward her, to stand by her side, but Inbecca’s eyes flashed blue-green fire up at him, and he halted. He knew better than to approach her with that look on her face. She had been hurt to the depths of her being by Sharhava’s callousness. One by one, the people in whom she had put her trust had betrayed her. Magpie felt guilty. He went back to the other side of the encampment, but kept her in view in case she needed him. He thought it was unlikely.

  Serafina walked frantically up and back, her two guards keeping pace with her, half a body length away on either side. The senior, a stern woman with a broken nose, looked impatiently at Magpie, but made room for him beside the wizardess, obviously considering him of little concern.

  “What has Sharhava done?” Magpie asked in a low voice, falling into step with Serafina.

  “It’s monstrous,” she said, coming to an abrupt halt. “She’s . . . I never guessed the Scholardom would be prepared to use the Great Book’s power so readily. You are aware of the wards Tildi and I cast about us, to prevent anyone from finding us by magical seeking?”

  “I am.”

  “She . . .” Serafina was nearly sputtering, “she tied a spell of her own to the wards—a fire spell. It will scorch anyone to the bones who passes it. Birds and animals will have the sense they were made with to avoid touching it, but humans, dwarves, and smallfolk won’t! I cannot remove it without destroying the warding, leaving us vulnerable to thraiks and other menaces. Oh, I should have insisted we go long before this!” She wrung her long hands together.

  “You couldn’t,” Magpie murmured, not without sympathy or disagreement. He caught the flailing hands and held them against his chest, forcing her to look up at him. “You were tired, in shock. You weren’t ready.”

  “Now I am,” she said with an angry glance in the abbess’s direction. “And I cannot. The warding is under my control, but the burning sphere is under hers. To dispel them both would stretch my abilities to the limit. My mother would have known what to do. I don’t. I am not a second Edynn.”

  “No one expects that of you,” Magpie said soothingly.

  “Let us eat, then,” Lakanta said. “As long as we’re not going anywhere at the moment, it makes no sense to try and puzzle this out on an empty stomach. Not that I think we’ll get either satisfaction or nourishment out of anything the Scholardom provides for us.”

  Tildi’s heart sank with the sun. She huddled on her rug with the book beside her. The limits of her world at that moment were marked out by six handfuls of blue fire. No one would be looking for them now. They believed she and the book had been destroyed by Nemeth. That could not be true, could it? Master Olen would know. Wouldn’t he? He would see them in one of his crystals, or with the aid of one of his scrying spells.

  Yet the party was shielded against being seen by a magic search. Had the spell thwarted Olen’s ability to find them? Now they were openly prisoners, held behind that hot wall. “I dare,” Sharhava had said. Tildi could have echoed Olen’s lesson, that all wizardry involves risks. In the abbess’s mind the p
rice of failure outweighed the potential death of innocent beings. Serafina said no animal would cross the invisible line. Tildi missed the sound of the birds’ evening song. Those cheery notes had helped to raise her spirits during the hard miles they had ridden over the last many days. What few trills she could hear were as distant as thoughts of home.

  She toyed with her plate of scorched bread and undercooked meat. Thoughts of the poor beast-men kept coming back to her, as they had every night since it had happened. She had never seen such a terrible thing done deliberately in all her life. They must get away from Sharhava and her evil plans, but could she dare to count the cost in the lives of her kinsmen?

  In spite of the increased guard around them, her companions were muttering together about how to defy Sharhava’s will. Rin especially was angry about the forced confinement.

  “I would have stayed in any case, but it was my choice. My brother will visit vengeance upon them.”

  “Forget about those windbags,” Lakanta said cheerfully. “We’ll leave when we’re good and ready to. It’s been convenient having them around, but I don’t like their way of doing business, and I’m not about to let them take my livelihood for granted. Keep your eyes ready, and whoosh!” She mimed a bird taking off to the skies.

  “No, we can’t,” Tildi said. She glanced over her shoulder at the abbess, who had her head bent in prayer over her meal. “Don’t make her angry, please.”

  “Why and wherefore?” Rin asked. “She’s just a human.”

  “Hush!” Serafina hissed, leaning over to them. She shot a significant glance at their guards. “Do not make them take more dire action.”

  “And just what can they do to me they haven’t done?” Lakanta asked. “Not that I don’t prize your company, or that I don’t believe in our task. I do not like my comings and goings constricted, either. Why would I have left the caverns of my people to the open road if I wanted someone to stop me moving about as I choose? Let’s go now, Tildi,” she said encouragingly.

  “I . . . uh . . . it’s growing dark.”

  “What of that? I have lived in caverns most of my life, and you can make all the light you choose. Let’s defy these people and let them choke upon our dust.”

  Tildi could hardly say a word one way or another to that. They were so badly outnumbered that except by using the power of the book itself, they stood no chance of getting away. Lakanta continued to try to get her involved in the conversation. Two things prevented that: the number of guards who surrounded her like an enormous picket fence, and her own fears. She could think of no good alternative.

  “Please,” Serafina said, and for the imperious young woman it sounded like begging. “We will speak later, I promise.” Her eyes were full of meaning. Tildi’s hopes rose. Serafina did take the threat to heart. She would find a way to take them south, without jeopardizing the people of the Quarters. They would find an opportunity to speak privately.

  “Oh, all right,” Lakanta said, throwing up her hands. “Morag, what have you got for me? Can I have a morsel of stew that’s merely overdone, instead of over-overdone?”

  Tildi was so distracted that she wasn’t even seeing runes correctly. It looked to her that one of the women halfway up the camp was wearing hers backward. That was impossible. Runes always looked right way around no matter what angle one was seeing them.

  The Scholardom finished their meager dinner, which for once smelled almost as bad as Morag’s cooking, then Sharhava summoned the group to her. All but the guards near Tildi formed a tight knot at the abbess’s feet. Tildi could guess as to its subject: the gossip in Rainbownham about the survivors of the terrible cataclysm that included a prince and a princess. She had wished desperately that some of those curious-minded townsfolk would have found their way to where she sat before they set out again, but they could not now come within the bounds of the wards. Now she hoped that the knights had hidden their tracks well.

  “Bring me the Third Book of Guidance,” Sharhava said. One of the young men went running back to the packs stacked near the tethered horses and removed a foot-long scroll wrapped in crimson brocade.

  The knights bowed their heads as Sharhava wound through the book to find the page she wanted. She pointed to a page and began to read aloud. Tildi strained to hear the words. She was curious about their rituals. The knights refused to discuss the structure of their order with her, as a member of a race named anathema. In spite of the open insult, she could not help but be interested in what they were doing. Olen would have told her it was natural to want to investigate cultures she had never seen before. The book helped her. The voices within it repeated what Sharhava was saying.

  “Toklevi camroh sati enlevi . . .”

  To Tildi’s annoyance, the chant was in the ancient tongue. Most of the words were unfamiliar to her. She recognized a phrase here and there. It must have been the retelling of a story of how the Scholardom came to be founded, since the words she knew spoke of relaxation and freedom from fear. Knowledge would bring them a measure of comfort.

  She was not comfortable. She felt as though she was at a party where everyone was snubbing her. The six knights around her cloth kept her friends at a distance. They didn’t speak with her, and every so often one would get up and exchange places with one of the knights attending the reading. The constant movement was just another discomfort she must endure, until Serafina or one of the others could figure out how to free her from this place.

  The book, unable to teach her to translate, still provided company. She perused the signs she did know. One symbol was very like one Olen had set her to learn that stood for a family of mint plants. It was undoubtedly related. When she laid her finger upon the sign, she found herself seeing the leaves of the plant. It looked like all of the others. But, wait, apple mint had hairy leaves, and peppermint was serrated like a carving knife. She knew this one, had rubbed the dry leaves grown in her garden into powder with her own hands. She forced her mind to concentrate, trying to decide what it was. Soft music from Magpie’s pipe coupled with Sharhava’s murmured litany added to the intellectual puzzle put her into a state of ease. In spite of herself, she began to relax.

  She caught a trill of laughter from her friends.

  Something was wrong with her companions. Sharhava’s threat seemed to have made no impression on them. They laughed and joked together as though they were out for a country ramble.

  “. . . And that’s when he tipped up the bottle and found I had drunk the last of the ale!” Lakanta concluded triumphantly, tossing the last crust of bread into the bonfire. She dusted her hands together and glanced past the crouching human at the edge of the embroidered cloth. “Tildi, that’s one of my best stories. Not a single chuckle? Smallfolk are hard audiences!”

  “I think it was a good story,” Rin said encouragingly. She sat on the coarse grass with her long, thin legs curled under her.

  Tildi looked up at her friends and tried to smile. “I am so sorry. I wasn’t listening.”

  “Don’t worry. We will be on our way soon to the south,” Lakanta said. “I pay no attention to that woman’s bluster. We have all the power between us. The sooner you realize that, Tildi, the better off you would be.”

  “That’s not true.” Tildi suffered a terrible mental picture of the smallfolk falling under the blades of the knights. The most fearsome weapon anyone had was a shotgun or crossbow for dispatching the wolves or foxes that threatened the henhouse. She could scarcely bring herself to picture their slaughter by steel or, worse, what had befallen the hairy beast-people. She felt tears starting in her eyes. “We have no power. She has it.”

  Lakanta stepped over past the nearest guard to sit beside her and tapped her knee.

  “Don’t ever think that way, Tildi. Often the biggest bluster conceals the hollowest chest.”

  Tildi looked at her in horror. Lakanta grinned.

  “Oh, it is true! You are used to bowing to authority. I’m not. We dwarves are always arguing among ourselves. That
way we know who is right, because we have discussed it in so many different ways.”

  “I have heard that you never get anything done because of all the arguing,” Rin said, pursing her long lips.

  “Oh, no!” Lakanta said. “If it is all taking too long, we go ahead and do what we think we should. In the long run, someone is right.”

  A chuckle forced its way out of Tildi. She felt better for having something to laugh at. She looked around for the others.

  Morag and Teryn had joined the Scholardom for a cup of ale and serious discussion. The knights had accepted the two guards as fellows in service to a higher cause, even if it was not their own. Magpie was among them with his pipe. Tildi enjoyed his music and his endless good humor. His gift was true. He was also unafraid to ask the questions that no one else dared voice.

  I had never heard of the earth having roots before,” Magpie said casually as he bent his head over the pipe, embellishing the design he had carved in the raw wood. He often found that taking his eyes off those with whom he was speaking made them feel they weren’t giving him information he shouldn’t have. The ploy had served him well in his role as a spy during the war between his nation and Rabantae. Fortunately, none of the knights knew of that. He had never told Inbecca, but even if he had, she was unlikely to have passed along information to her aunt, no matter how angry she was with him.

  “Do not believe the wizard,” Thyre said dismissively, glancing at where Serafina sat by herself on the edge of the firelight. “That was some kind of cave plant, probably invented by the Makers.”

  “Aye,” Pedros said. After several days he still seemed heady on the liquor of power. He seemed so young, for all he appeared to have the same number of years as Magpie himself. Magpie suspected he was a little drunk, having indulged in too much ale to make up for their meager dinner. “Another of their inventions that shouldn’t have been. We caged it up for good, didn’t we? I’m eager to confront the next abomination they made, and snuff it out or pen it up. There’s nothing we can’t do now, is there? The world’s been waiting for us, and we are ready!”