by Carol Berg
As I wiped sweat and dirt from our saddles, Dante touched his staff to a blackened ash ring and murmured, “Incendio, confinium a circumna.” Sparks snapped and flew from the heel of the white stick—and inside my skin. The mage tossed in twigs and bits of dry moss he’d gathered from the trampled ground, and in moments flames had sprouted. The bright enchantment devoured me, a surge of cold fire from feet to head that shivered my bones. The questions I’d prepared for him along the way, the arguments, the appeals to his agreement and our effective partnership, all fled before my longing.
“Creator’s Hand, what makes the difference?” I said. No urgency gripped me more than this most fundamental one. “Your enchantments live and breathe. Beside them, every other I’ve known seems but an image of an image.”
Instead of answering, Dante walked. A quarter of an hour . . . half an hour . . . he strode the perimeter of the clearing: thick trees, tangled underbrush, the river, broad and swift-flowing, aglint with the beams of the sinking moon. I could not see his face. He had cleanly and purposefully chosen reticence about the past night’s encounter, but this silence seemed a struggle.
When he returned to the fire, he crouched and planted his staff between his knees, gripping it so tightly that his knuckles gleamed pale. Poised on edge, I sensed revelation but a decision away.
“Magic must rise unhindered from one’s own depths,” he said at last. “Only then can it encompass and magnify the entwined keirna of its objects. As I told you, your mind is riddled with barriers solid as mortared walls. And you maintain this stubborn belief in elements, particles, and formulas, as do all those taught at Seravain. Here . . .”
Near spitting with impatience, now he’d sloughed off indecision, he jumped to his feet and beckoned me after him. He halted at the path that had brought us into the clearing. “Learn this path,” he said, brightening the glow of his staff, scooping a handful of the black dirt and cramming it into my hand. “Squeeze this. Smell it. Examine its color and composition. Dark and rich here by the river. Mixed with old dung, bark, the rot of fallen leaves and decaying trunks, and all that’s washed in from the river in flood.”
He scuffed his boots in the rutted track. “See how worn the path is, this wide trough. Consider its uses—tired travelers, maybe fearful ones, scavengers, wheels, horses, mules. This camp is decently protected by the water and the tangled trees, but we ought to build a ward that will warn us if any approach by the path. Where do you begin?”
“Wards require impermeability—base metal. . . .” Rote memory spat out the answer.
“Use your mind, Portier! Think not of divine elements, but of what’s here before you.” Dante crouched down and tapped a pale knot protruding from the dark soil of the path. “The path is laced with roots. Hornbeam clearly, from the color, and the branches hanging over your head. So, examine the tree roots with your fingers. Then look up, recalling everything you know of hornbeam—modest in height, its wood pale as birch but hard as iron, seeds winged like insects. Feel these leaves, crimped like women’s hair.”
He swept his arm back the way we’d come. “Someone’s coppiced most of the hornbeam in this wood, as the shoots make good poles. But the wood has been ill tended, left to grow for a long time—perhaps the Blood Wars wiped out those who minded it. My staff is hornbeam. The wood is strong, almost impossible to work. It binds magic well. Now wait. . . .”
He crashed off into the tangled underbrush. I studied the path and the dirt in my hand, not at all sure what I was doing. Questions and mysteries and sleeplessness nagged at me, yet magic lay at the heart of our mystery. I had to understand it. And Dante was the only mentor I wanted.
The mage emerged from the thicket and thrust a slender limb into my hand. “Here. Use this to scribe your enclosure about the snarl of roots and the dirt from your hand. Encircle them in your mind, as well.”
“Ow!” The hornbeam shoot was approximately the length of my arm, the diameter of a finger, and smooth, straight, and pale, save for one blackened end—still hot, where he’d burned through to cut it.
As commanded, I dumped my handful of dirt atop the exposed roots and used the shoot to draw an elliptical pattern around the pile. Before closing the oval, I hesitated. “Perhaps it’s not wide enough. If I need to block the entire path, or if there are more parti—more objects to contain.”
“The size of the enclosure does not matter,” said Dante. “Stretch it as you work if need be.”
I took his word that this would eventually make sense.
“Now fashion a simple crossing ward: You’re to be wakened when a warm body passes the barrier. Build the spell pattern in your mind. Your hand can serve as the warmth needed. Surely you know your own hand better than anything in the world, just as you know best what warning can wake you from sleep. So, lay your hand atop the roots and dirt within your enclosure. When the pattern is prepared, seek the power that exists in it already, joining it with what lives in you.”
Spell pattern—not so easy as it sounded. As I had learned magic, particles enclosed by a physical boundary—rope or string or circumoccule—provided both the physical and mental structure for spellwork. Formulas prescribed the placement, as well as the balance, of particles—the metal used for spark must sit beside the fabric used for wood and air in the fire spell, for example. I had been taught to hold that exact physical arrangement in my mind as I infused it with will and magic. I’d never been required to create a pattern in my head, a structure of understanding, of random ideas like crossing or of properties like warmth, provided by physical objects that could be stretched, arranged, molded solely by force of will and inner vision.
But I recalled the runelike structures Dante had shown me, and I worked at creating something similar. Carefully, precisely, as if nurturing the last flame that might keep me living in a tempest, I considered warmth, crossing, strength, barriers, waking . . . and I imagined each of them as an abstraction of shape and color. My creation looked something like a gate. And then I reached for what magic might live in hornbeam and soil and the night and the warmth of my own hand, as well as that born in my blood. . . .
As a blizzard wind, enchantment rushed upon me, billowing, thrumming, slamming, sweeping through my heart and soul and mind in a sere glory . . . and vanished two heartbeats after.
Gutted, bereft, I crouched in the dirt in the dark of a woodland after moonset. My skin could not sense the night damp, much less any enchantment. The river’s burbling slop sounded a thousand miles distant. Dante had gone off again, taking his staff and its quiet glow.
Gods, fool. What were you thinking? That nature would relent because you’ve had a difficult few days? That Dante would lend you the keys to Heaven’s gates? He’s off laughing at you.
I tromped back to the fire, rolled up in my cloak, and closed my eyes in search of sleep. Dante did not return. Sleep was a long time coming. . . .
WHEN THE TRUMPET FANFARE SOUNDED inside my skull, I leapt out of the tangle of sleep as if bit by a viper. Dante leaned on his glowing staff, standing in the path just on the near side of the lumpy hornbeam roots. “Decently done, student. Naught to raise you into the Camarilla, but decently done.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
7 CINQ 18 DAYS UNTIL THE ANNIVERSARY
Magic! Half-giddy, disbelieving, I made Dante step back and cross the ward thrice over. I insisted he leave his staff behind and do it three times more. When I shamelessly implored him yet again to swear he had not himself sounded the warning trump in my head, he glowered and waved his stick to move me out of his path. “Enough. I would like an hour of sleep before the sun rises. We’ve three days on the road ahead.”
As I squatted in the path and gazed fondly on the gnarled hornbeam roots, he wrapped himself entirely in his cloak. Sitting with his back to the tree nearest the fire, he appeared naught but a shapeless appendage of night. When I gave in and returned to my own resting place, his muffled breathing had already taken on the shallow regularity of sleep.
Though sorely tempted, I did not attempt to create another spell. Depleted as I was, I would surely fail. It seemed more important to relive every moment of the ward’s creation, etching each word of Dante’s instruction upon my bones. My soul ached at the implications of his teaching. Every spell of a kind could be different—every ward, every bending of light, every cleansing spell, every weather charm—differing not only in quality, but in its very creation. Blind . . . holy Creator, it was as if sorcerers had lived with senses chained these many years, and no twisting of logic or drawing down of history could explain to me why that was so.
Eventually even the satiety of a lifetime’s yearning must yield to exhaustion, and I fell into vivid dreaming—of a bloody battlefield where my arm strained to breaking as my luminous staff held off a ravening multitude, of rescuing a besieged caravan in high mountains, of conjuring a floodwall for a city threatened with annihilation, of being chained to a bleak and barren rock through season upon agonized season as penance for some brave deed long past remembrance. Every dream story I had glimpsed throughout my youth came full-blown upon me in that waning night. Surely I smiled in my sleep. If my hand could conjure enchantment, then even the wildest fantasies of heroic service might take on true life.
I WOKE TO THE SOUND of rain . . . or the river . . . or . . . I propped myself on my elbows. Bleared eyes noted Dante standing in the path, relieving himself on my treasured hornbeam roots. No trumpet sounded in my head. No magical residue settled on my spirit.
“The sun’s been up an hour,” he said, when he was done. “Could I saddle a beast one-handed, I’d have headed for Vernase without you.” Cold as a marble tomb, he stepped over me and kicked dirt over his fire that had burned through the night without feeding.
Lurching to my feet, I chose to douse my head in the river before thinking too deeply. It served. Not only did the cool water cleanse me of road dust, sleep grit, and Dante’s sour greeting, but of naive hopes and childish dreams.
Gaetana was dead. Dante had spent six-and-thirty hours in the Bastionne Camarilla and had chosen to tell me exactly nothing more than that, diverting my attention with the one thing he knew would erase all other concerns. He had played me like a dulcian.
As I saddled the horses, the mage sat on a log, eating a dried fig. The Mondragoni book lay beside him. “Did you work the ward?” I rasped, swollen anger and humiliation lodged in throat and chest. “Or did it ever exist at all?”
He accepted the reins and climbed into the saddle, as out of comfort with the horse as a fish in a barnyard. Yet his arrogance remained unyielding. “Did you not sense the spell binding, then? Pity. Even if a slattern despises her bastard, she cannot fail to recognize it as her own.”
His vehement ugliness stunned me speechless.
Naturally, I examined the roots. Though I brought every inner sense to bear, no bound enchantment existed on the path or anywhere in the camp. Slight residue of spent magic hung about the defiled hornbeam roots, like morning fog in a hollow, but even if I’d had the skill to disentangle it, it was masked quite effectively by the physical residue Dante had left there.
And naturally, I spent a painstaking half hour attempting to reproduce the pattern I’d created in the night. Nature did not so much as sputter in contempt.
When I caught up to Dante, I passed right on by without a word. I could not bear to look at him. Serving a pitiful vengeance, I raised the pace too high for his inexperienced horsemanship. Stiff as starched sheets, he bounced and jostled, jerking on the reins so that he repeatedly had to coax his confused mount to keep moving at all. By nightfall the mage would think he’d been beaten with Merle’s truncheon. Perhaps by then I could put grief and humiliation aside and put him to the question yet again.
The road took us through the grand estates of southern Louvel. Budding vineyards teemed with laborers hauling away weeds and winter’s trimmings, or dredging ground limestone and dung into the soil. Farther south, a few tenant farms and freeholds appeared, squeezed between the endless ranks of vines. Here and there a laborer shouted as we passed. I could not hear what they called, and Dante did not say, but the rude gestures were easily interpreted, as well as their pointed reference to Dante’s collar. Dante paid them no mind.
The Camarilla’s diligence in eliminating false practitioners had left bitter resentments in the countryside. Villagers deprived of their wise women and potion makers could not afford trained mages or adepts. Yet the penalties for purveying false spellwork could be anything from lashes to branding to ruinous fines. The penalties for practicing magework without a collar or adept’s work without Camarilla supervision were far more severe.
As the morning waned, rage leaked away, swallowed by profound misgiving. The inquisitors would have questioned what Dante knew of Gaetana, of transference, perhaps of necromancy or other kinds of unholy magic. They might have pushed to know of his training or his methods. If he had spoken his beliefs about magic, they would never have let him go. If he had exposed his role in our investigation, the prefects would have complained so vociferously that the king was violating their authority as laid down in the Concord, everyone in Merona would have heard the uproar. Neither had transpired.
Ever had the mage been blunt and inconsiderate, but never had he been cruel in our private dealings. And never once in our partnership had he told me an untruth, until he allowed me to believe I had worked magic. Something in his hours at the Bastionne had aimed his deepest rage straight at me.
Two more days—one, if we pushed hard—would take us into Aubine. The Ruggiere demesne lay just inside its boundaries. Dante and I needed a plan to approach our investigation, which meant I had to clear the fouled air between us.
As we neared the market town of Sciarra, the traffic picked up. Forced to a walking pace, we had to thread a path between bawling pack mules laden with early vegetables, dung carts bound for the vineyards, and a youthful swineherd and his unruly charges. A roadside fruit seller spat in our wake. “Cheat! Conniver! Camarilla whore!”
Sciarra’s town gates had rusted open and were overgrown with chickweed and trailers of black bryony. I nudged my mount alongside Dante as we rode through. “We are partner agentes confide, Master,” I said, sucking in my tattered pride. “What have I done to earn your despite?”
Stone-faced, he stared straight ahead, ignoring the stares of townsmen unused to seeing a collared mage guiding his horse through a sea of pigs. His gloved hand tightened on the reins and his nostrils flared. “I warned you to keep your Camarilla friends out of my business. So you promised. I warned you I detested liars. But it seems I’ve you to thank for my visit to the Bastionne. And you persist in the lie by pestering me for information. Surely you know your mentor is a skilled and ruthless interrogator. Has he not given you the full report?”
The Camarilla letter. I’d never had a chance to tell him of it. He thought I’d set the inquisitors on him apurpose. And Kajetan . . .
“Father Creator, Dante, I never intended you to be taken. We should have been well away by the time they came for Gaetana. And I’d no idea Kajetan was in Merona. I swear—”
“No more swearing. Better we make an end to this demeaning confederacy. Sooner will please me best.”
It was as if a gate had been slammed in my face. This was no afternoon’s offense, as when I had challenged his actions on the Swan, no playacting, no testy independence that would eventually yield to shared purpose, as our every dispute had done. Though my accusations had not named him, my thoughtless, careless, desperate play had risked his freedom to practice sorcery—the one thing he held more valuable than life. Naturally, he would see it as betrayal. And forgiveness was not a word in Dante’s vocabulary.
Eyes darting hither and yon, the mage shifted in his saddle and loosed the strap on his staff. The town’s tall houses throttled the road, crowding travelers, carts, and beasts. The pigs had toppled an onion cart, and the onion seller screamed at the swineherd to keep his charges from eating what was spilled.
I felt as incapable as the hapless swineherd. Certainly no words would repair this breach. Yet, at the least, I had to know how it would affect our work. “Was Gaetana guilty?” I blurted.
“I told you, they executed—”
“But was she guilty? Did she bleed Gruchin? Do you believe it?”
“Yes.” The answer struck square as hammer to nail.
“And Ophelie?”
“Yes.”
Every instinct at my command testified that his conviction was not feigned. This eased my conscience somewhat, but not my regret. “You agreed to the terms of our partnership,” I said. “But, altogether without intention, I’ve betrayed your trust. I understand that will be difficult to mend, though I will do my best. Master, do we finish this or not?”
“Eltevire is destroyed,” he said, cold as spring frost. “Gaetana did not know how to formulate such magic, nor did she know anyone who could. None of them know. Camarilla hounds can dig out her confederates. But I will witness to any who listen that her interests did not extend beyond the magic. Once we identify this Aspirant, the instigator of this plot, the matters of our investigation will be closed, and we can each return to our own business. The sooner I’m out of that nest of aristos—”
A thump caused Dante to jerk and grunt. A second caused him to throw up a hand protectively. A third projectile bounced off his back and struck my knee. Stones.
“False! Liar! Cheat! Souleater’s tool!” Shouts and more missiles flew from a yawning upper window, peopled by shadowed faces. I covered my head, but the sudden barrage caused a squealing riot among the meandering swine that now filled the road side to side hunting onions. My mare jinked and whinnied, and it required all my skill to keep her from panic.
