Mystic and Rider

by Sharon Shinn

  “Ah,” she said, and then stepped back and glanced around at the rest of the small hall, as if looking for confirmation.

  “What?” Kirra demanded. “What is it?”

  Senneth was nodding, and she looked strangely pleased. “I think what we’ve stumbled on is an old, old temple dedicated to the Bright Mother,” she said.

  “The Bright Mother?” Cammon repeated.

  “The sun goddess,” Senneth explained. “No one talks about her—or the other gods—very much these days, but a long time ago, she was worshiped much more fervently than the Pale Mother is today. Well, perhaps that’s not entirely true. In Brassenthwaite and Tilt and Kianlever, you can still find some of the Bright Mother’s shrines. I’m not sure if the religion ever caught on this far south.” She touched the wall again, still looking happy. “Though apparently there were a few believers, even in the southern Houses.”

  “There’s a temple not far from my father’s house,” Kirra said. “I’ve been there a few times because—” She made a face. “Because my father, of course, believes everyone should have every experience available to him. But it’s in much better shape than this.”

  “Yes—well, as I said, the religion fell out of a favor a long time ago,” Senneth said. “Now, those who worship at all worship the Pale Mother, the moon goddess. They’ve forgotten all the other gods entirely.”

  “You haven’t,” Justin said. He had drifted over casually, as if pretending he wasn’t really interested. “You swear by the Bright Mother all the time.”

  She gave him a quick smile. “I do. My grandmother was from Kianlever. She loved the sun goddess and taught me to honor her.” She tugged her circular gold pendant out from under the collar of her shirt. “See that? The filigree all around the disk? It’s a sun charm. The Bright Mother protects me wherever I go.”

  “Well, she’s certainly found a way to protect us all tonight,” Tayse said practically. He didn’t have much more patience with gods than he did with mystics. “We need to eat before we all drop from exhaustion.”

  They melted snow over Senneth’s bewitched fire and made hot tea, which they sipped while they cooked their dinner. Something about the difficult travel or the unexpected refuge or the very presence of the snow itself had given them all a strange shift of mood; the entire meal had a festival air. The women laughed—Kirra flirted—taciturn Donnal made jokes—even Justin was smiling. Tayse himself felt curiously relaxed and amused, ever so slightly intoxicated with the sense of camaraderie. So he had felt sometimes after a hard campaign with trusted Riders. But only one of his companions tonight was a Rider, and the rest he did not trust.

  He stayed mostly silent as, one by one, the others began telling stories around the fey and joyous fire.

  “My dad was a wanderer,” Donnal said. Tayse had missed the question, but he assumed someone had asked one. “He didn’t own a thing in the world except two shirts and two pairs of trousers. He spent one summer working for my uncle—tenant farmer on the Danalustrous lands, a man who was never going to own more than a few changes of clothing himself. When he left, my mother was pregnant. I was her third child. None of the men in her life stayed longer than a few months.”

  He paused to sip at his tea. Donnal didn’t talk much, but it was clear, when he felt like it, he could transform himself into a storyteller.

  “I can’t remember a time when I couldn’t change shapes,” Donnal continued. “I must have done it in the cradle—imagine that, the first time you’ve come in to check on the sleeping baby, and you find a cat or a rabbit or a bird in the crib. By the time I was old enough to know what a strange skill it was, the rest of my family had grown quite comfortable with my ability. My uncle even used to send me out sometimes as a mole to check the water levels under the soil—or as a hawk to see if it was safe to go poaching off Danalustrous land.”

  He smiled at Kirra, who shook her head and smiled back. “But I didn’t think about it much,” he said. “What it meant or what I might do with such a skill. It just was. It was part of my life. Till the day the young woman came riding up to my uncle’s house and demanded I be sent outside so she could see me.

  “Well, that caused quite a commotion, as you might imagine. My mother and I were inside, peering out the dirty windows, wondering if I was about to be taken into custody or burned for a mystic. Not that such things happened on Danalustrous land, mind you, but my father wasn’t the only traveler who had happened upon my uncle’s farm. We knew stories of the way the rest of the world was run. It was not always an acceptable thing to have magical powers.

  “My uncle stood out front, arguing with the woman—who was clearly an aristocrat, with her fine clothes and her haughty way of speaking. My mother and brothers and cousins and I cowered inside, trying to decide if I should change to a mouse right then and disappear out the back and never return to my uncle’s farm. But we finally decided that such a cowardly action might bring even more harm to my family, if harm was to come. So I stood up bravely and tugged my shirt down and went out the front door to stand at my uncle’s side.”

  Donnal paused to take another swallow. Tayse was irritated to find himself interested in the story, all because of the man’s easy voice and calculated pauses. “I was surprised to find, when I was actually face-to-face with our noble caller, that she was only a year or two older than I was—but still just as haughty as she’d seemed from inside. ‘I’m the one who can change himself to animals, ’ I said to her. ‘Take me, then, and let my family be.’

  “Well, she slid off her horse and put her hands on her hips, and she said, ‘How do I know you’re telling me the truth? Change yourself into something. Let’s see you turn yourself into a dog.’ I had been pretty afraid when she first rode up, but that made me mad, so to scare her I turned into a wolf. Big one, too, with a black face and evil eyes. She jumped back, and the guards with her raised their crossbows. I probably came as close to being killed at that moment as I ever have in my life. Well, until I joined this lot,” he added, and a soft laugh went around the circle of listeners.

  “But nobody shot me, and the lady came a step nearer—and then, to my utter astonishment, she melted. She just—there was no other word. She melted into a wolf shape herself. I had been a shiftling all my life, you understand, but I had never seen anyone else transform, and it was almost enough to send me howling across the valley. But I was too afraid to move, and when she shifted back to human state, I shifted right along beside her. And then I just stared at her.

  “She looked entirely pleased with herself. ‘Very well, you can come study with me,’ she said. ‘My father has already engaged a tutor to hone my abilities, but he thought it would be helpful if there were other students who might challenge me to try harder. So far, we haven’t been able to locate anyone else with any magical ability, but then I heard some villagers talking about you.’ We lived about ten miles from a small market town, and, as you might guess, everyone within fifty miles of us had heard my story by this time. I just hadn’t thought they’d be repeating it to noble folk.

  “She turned around and got on her horse. And then she turned to look at me like I was the stupidest man in Danalustrous. She said, ‘Well? I told you you had to come with us.’ And I got all mad again, and I said, ‘Lady, I wouldn’t come with you to study magic if you were the daughter of the village mayor himself.’ And she said, ‘I’m the daughter of Malcolm Danalustrous, and I think you’ll do whatever I say.’ And from that day on,” Donnal added in a rueful voice, as the others began to laugh, “that’s pretty much been the way of it. She gives the orders, and I do what she says.”

  “And did you really study magic with her?” Cammon asked.

  “Off and on, for the next ten years,” Donnal said. “It wasn’t very formal, you understand. Just if some mystic or another happened to be traveling through, and Lord Malcolm heard of it, he would accost the poor soul and promise him all sorts of rewards if he’d come teach his wayward daughter and her scruffy friend.
Or, who knows, maybe he promised all sorts of dire punishments if the fellow refused.”

  Cammon glanced at Senneth. “Were you one of their tutors?”

  She nodded, her white-blond hair vivid in the soft firelight. “One of the early ones. I don’t know that they learned much from me, since I don’t have the temperament for teaching. And I was there selling other skills at the time.”

  Justin looked up at that. “Oh? What would those be?”

  She grinned. “That’s when I thought I could make my way as a freelance blade. I was hired as part of the lord’s civil guard. I wasn’t bad at it—and I must say, I learned a lot under his watch commander—but I eventually realized the life was too confining. I was not much better at following orders than I was at teaching students.”

  “Now, I find myself surprised,” Justin said with heavy irony. Senneth merely laughed.

  Cammon had turned his attention to Kirra. “What about you?” he said. “What did your father do when he discovered you were mystic?”

  Kirra grimaced. “Well, first you have to understand my father. He is—he believes he is—the shepherd of Danalustrous, the living representative of all the generations of Danalustrous heirs who have gone before. That all the weight of all those centuries of Danalustrous pride sits squarely on his shoulders—and that Danalustrous itself is the most powerful, important, and precious place in this world. To somehow belong to Danalustrous is to be made holy almost—to earn the right to be protected to the death. I was mystic, but I was Danalustrous. Therefore, I was to be cherished—no matter how strange or dangerous I might turn out to be.”

  She brooded a moment. “My father has had three wives,” she went on. “The first two were far from happy. He is a powerful, determined, and difficult man. His first wife died after ten years of marriage, and everyone said it was because she could not think what else to do to get his attention. Even that didn’t do it—he remarried again within six months. His first wife had come from Tilt, an eldest daughter of a respected House. He decided his second wife should be someone with lower expectations, so he chose a woman who—while perfectly respectable—”

  “Thirteenth House,” Cammon said. He liked to use the phrase, Tayse had noticed; it seemed to tickle him.

  Kirra smiled. “Exactly. She came from a lesser estate on the Danalustrous property, and she had not been trained in all the proprieties a true noblewoman would have understood by instinct. In fact, she was dead wild, according to everyone who knew her. Never quite appreciated the honor my father had done her. Never seemed to really enjoy the gorgeous house, the rich property, the handsome husband. I think she got bored. Two years after I was born, she left.”

  There was a slight pause. “Left?” Cammon said. “And didn’t come back?”

  “And didn’t come back,” Kirra repeated. “I have no idea if she’s even still alive.”

  Senneth looked at her. “I didn’t know that part,” she said. “Your father always spoke of her as if she was dead.”

  Kirra laughed. “Well, he had her declared so, in order to marry a third time. Fortunately, his third wife turned out to be exactly what he needed—clever, self-sufficient, accomplished, and devoted to Danalustrous. She’s my sister Casserah’s mother, and she’s been a very good stepmother to me.” Kirra smiled. “She was not thrilled when I turned out to have mystical powers, you understand, but she didn’t faint or shriek or demand that my father throw me out of the house. She did watch Casserah with some apprehension for a few years, because she was afraid that the taint may have come from my father, but Casserah has always been quite determinedly normal.”

  “How did they first show up?” Cammon asked. “Your mystical abilities.”

  “I was about ten. My stepmother was trying to teach me how to curtsey. She would say, ‘Pretend you are curtseying to the queen,’ and so I would imagine what the queen looked like—and then I would turn into the queen, or a ten-year-old’s perception of the queen. You can imagine how disconcerting it was for her the first time it happened. But as I say, she handled it all quite coolly. And my father—well, it never occurred to him to turn against me. Which is why he sought tutors to train me. And he insisted I take my place as a rightful daughter of the Twelve Houses. He forced the Tilts and the Storians and the Gisseltesses and everyone else to accept me for what I was. I never suffered a single social stigma because of my magic. And, you know, there are many other children of the aristocracy who cannot say the same.”

  “Yes, we have all heard some of those stories,” Senneth said somewhat curtly, though Tayse had not, and he wondered if the others in the room had. “How does your sister tolerate your magic? I have always found her a little hard to read.”

  Kirra laughed, seeming truly amused. “Casserah is—completely unaffected by anything that does not pertain absolutely, directly to her. As long as I don’t turn her into a spider, or burn down the house while she’s sleeping in it, Casserah doesn’t really mind who or what I am. We are quite close, actually, though it is a hard relationship to explain.”

  “And I suppose your father and your stepmother and everyone eventually realized the tainted blood must have come from your mother, the restless one,” Senneth said.

  “Must it always come from somewhere?” Cammon asked. “Don’t people ever just—develop magic on their own?”

  Tayse looked up at that question. He couldn’t say he’d ever given it much thought till recently, but in fact, that was something he would like to know as well. Where did the magic come from? Could anyone suddenly discover in himself a mystic trait, or was it a power that had to be handed down through the generations?

  Senneth and Kirra were exchanging glances. “No one is quite sure,” Senneth said, “but it seems to follow bloodlines. That is, Donnal’s wandering father may not have been a mystic himself, but his father was, or his father. Many a scandal has unraveled in the aristocracy when a serramar of the house is suddenly discovered to have special skills. Generally, it turns out the mother confesses she has played the father false, because of course neither one of them could admit that magic ran in their veins from generations ago! But Kirra could sit here and name you a mystic born in one generation or another to every one of the Twelve Houses. I think the magic is inbred a lot more deeply than any of them like to believe.”

  “I think it was my father who was the mystic in my case,” Cammon said. “Just because my mother always seemed so devoid of any—any power at all. Any strength. Surely she would have used it at some point if she’d had it.” He smiled a little sadly. “Anyway, from what you say, it sounds like all mystics have a restless streak, and he certainly had that. And look at the four of us—we’re all wandering. Maybe it’s something in the blood.”

  “When did you first know you were mystic, Cammon?” Kirra asked.

  He laughed. “When you pulled me out of Kardon’s tavern! But I knew I was—strange—before. I could sense when something was not quite right—and I always knew when someone was lying to me. I think my father was also a sensitive. He would make these impossible deals with people—choose to trust the unlikeliest individuals you could imagine—but the crazier the scheme, the more likely it was to pay off. I think he would have been a wealthy man if he’d ever learned how to hold on to his money.”

  “How did he die?” Senneth said.

  Cammon made a little grimace. By firelight, he looked almost ageless, Tayse thought. His face was round, sweet, unmarked by experience, but his flecked dark eyes were old and knowing. It was not hard to believe he possessed a special wisdom, that he could look into any soul and read its secrets. Tayse shifted on his blankets and cast his own eyes down.

  “We were in Arberharst. We had spent almost all the money we had accumulated in order to buy passage from Sovenfeld. There was some man my father was to meet in Arberharst, someone who was going to set him up in”—Cammon shrugged—“some enterprise. I’ve always thought something must have gone wrong when they were making the deal. Maybe, this one time in
his life, his ability to judge a man’s character was wrong, and the person he was dealing with turned out to be a liar. Maybe there were others present that my father hadn’t known about beforehand, and he said out loud that he didn’t trust them. In any case, he didn’t come home that night. His body was found the next morning, not far from the harbor. They brought me over to identify him because my mother was too hysterical to leave the inn. Three weeks later we sold what we had to pay for our tickets back to Gillengaria.”

  Senneth was watching him. “That wasn’t so long ago,” she said. “Your father died in Arberharst, and then your mother died on the journey home, then you got sold into slavery, and now you’re wandering an unfamiliar world with people who are still virtually strangers. Yet you seem content and not so full of woe as I would be.”

  His smile was rather small and painful. “Perhaps I am just still numb. I have come to believe there are no safe harbors. I am just grateful when there is not a storm raging over my head at that very moment.”

  Tayse glanced up at the roof, where patches of snowy starlight filtered in through numerous holes. “There is a storm tonight, of a sort,” he said.

  “It is not this kind of weather that bothers me,” Cammon said.

  Kirra reached out and gathered him to her in an easy hug. “We’ll be your family now,” she said. “When this journey is over, if we haven’t found a place for you in Ghosenhall, I’ll take you back to Danalustrous, where you can be an advisor for my father. He would like very much to have someone standing at his right hand who could always tell him whether someone was lying or telling the truth.”