Willam made several attempts to speak, and failed. Eventually he found his voice. “It worked.”
Rowan made a noise that perhaps ought to have been a laugh of relief, but it could not escape from the back of her throat. It sounded to her like something a very small dog would say. She dropped to a seat on the ground. Willam knelt down beside her.
The sun was low, and the air was cold. Very slowly, Rowan’s heart calmed, and her breathing eased. “Where’s our victim?”
Willam had his eyes closed. Without opening them, he tilted his head. “Over there.”
About twenty feet around the perimeter, just past the line in the earth marking the safe distance: a sprawled shape, bright green and silver. Lying senseless and blindfolded, it looked, at the moment, rather pitiful.
Rowan nodded, dumbly. Her left leg was lying in a puddle, water seeping in over the high edge of her boot. She felt dull, weak, empty. She struggled to recover thought. “We should move it, before the sun goes down.”
Willam’s head dropped, and his shoulders slumped. His hands lay limp on the ground beside his knees, palms up. “Yes,” he said, eyes still closed, “but I don’t think I can carry it anymore.”
15
They both carried the dragon, slung between them, leg-tied and suspended from a dead branch, looking to Rowan like the prize from a hunt in some heroic ballad. And it was, as Willam had predicted, heavier than it looked.
They went north away from the city, and inland away from the river, so that it would encounter no humans once it was set free.
The jammer-spell that Willam had kept was now tucked into Rowan’s shoulder satchel; while being transported, the dragon would remain deaf to the commands of the controller spell in Jannik’s house.
They found a place by a little stream with steep banks, where wooded hills rose above, now deepening with evening shadow, and smelling sweetly of pine; rather a pleasant spot, Rowan thought.
As they set their burden down, and Willam began to untie its legs from the pole, something occurred to Rowan. “When you take off the blindfold, it will expect the pattern. Nothing will fit. It will attack.” Willam paused; this had not been anticipated.
They solved the problem by digging a small hole in the rising ground, and arranging the dragon with its head in the hole, its face pressed up against the earth. Rowan could not help but feel sorry for it.
When Willam carefully slipped the cloth free, the dragon remained inert. He and the steerswoman backed away, then climbed.
Up into the woods, high, and deep, until the stream and the sprawled green shape on the bank were just visible below through the pine trunks. Willam and Rowan crouched down behind one particularly large tree, and peered out from either side.
Rowan passed the jammer-spell to Willam. He opened it, glanced once at Rowan, drew a breath, then prodded inside the box with his index finger.
Far below, the green jerked, then writhed, struggled. The dragon found its feet, and lifted its head, shaking dirt from its eyes.
It cocked its head; glanced here, there, and about; scratched its nose with a forefoot. Then it began scrambling along the edge of the steep bank. “The controlling spell has it,” Willam said, quietly. “It’s sending it back to the dragon fields—” Then he stopped short, with a quick intake of breath.
The dragon had halted suddenly, and now stood completely still. Then it wove its head, slowly, side to side. Willam breathed: “And there’s Jannik.”
A tall broken stump was nearby; the dragon noticed it, and climbed up its ragged top, then arranged itself carefully among the splinters and sat up, front legs tucked against its chest. It paused, made a precise quarter turn to its right, paused again, and repeated, and repeated, until it had turned in a slow, complete circle.
No animal would do that. The wizard was now personally commanding its movements; and, the steerswoman realized, surveying the dragon’s surroundings himself, gazing through the creature’s own jeweled eyes.
Rowan and Willam remained very still.
The dragon’s forelegs dropped. Then, with sudden animal nimbleness, it leapt from the stump, clambered down the steep bank toward the water. A moment later it could be seen splashing through the brook. When it reached a large, flat rock, it climbed and sat, tail curled, eying the surface with one raised forefoot poised, exactly as if patiently hunting fish.
Willam and Rowan exchanged a long look. Then, crouching low, they backed off and made their way up the hill, through the woods, and away.
They made camp by the roadside, at a site that had been used for that purpose before. A ring of stones already outlined the best location for the fire, and some kindly person had left a number of branches drying nearby.
Willam made the fire quickly with the help of a small bit of metallic powder that hissed into white flame when he spit on it. Then he collapsed full length on the ground, with a groan containing just enough theatrics to tell Rowan that he was not in serious trouble. “I can’t believe we did that.”
“I can’t believe we even attempted it.”
“That was the most horrible experience I’ve ever had in my life,” Willam declared, with feeling. When Rowan did not immediately voice the same opinion, he raised his head and eyed her. “Not in yours?”
The steerswoman had several candidates to choose from. “Well . . .” She pulled the saddlebags from among the tack they had removed from the horses. “It was different from anything else. I’ve never before had an experience that was so, so logical and so mindless, at the same time.”
“Logical and mindless.” Willam lay his head down again. “That’s magic.”
They dined, he on fish pastry and a baked potato, she on roast boar and squash, which they heated on stones by the fire.
She wrote in her logbook. When Willam passed by after arranging his bedroll, he caught a glance of one page. He leaned forward and indicated. “That word is misspelled.” Under his correction, shoot became chute.
Willam sat by the fire, quiet, watching the flames. Despite his weariness, perhaps, like her, he felt that sleep would be long coming.
Logical and mindless, the steerswoman wrote. But so many things in the world were both logical and mindless. The swing of the stars above, for all their beauty, had no intent behind them.
High up, in the crystal dark, the Western Guidestar hung, glowing bright, seeming eternal. In the opposite side of the sky: the Eastern Guidestar. Watching, recording, waiting for commands from their masters—“Are they alive?”
Willam glanced at her, then followed the direction of her gaze. “The Guidestars? I don’t know.” He remained, face tilted to the sky. “I used to ask that—not about the Guidestars, but about other things.” His voice was quiet, puzzled. “The things that move, and act. The things that watch, and choose, and decide. The things that speak to us . . .” A pocket of moisture in one burning log hissed, squealed, then snapped. “And whenever I asked that question, Corvus would always say: ‘The short answer is no.’ And then he’d give me the long answer. And, Rowan” and he looked at her, shook his head, “it always seemed to me that the long answer really meant yes. So . . . I don’t know.” He picked up a stick of kindling, used it to prod at the heart of the flames. “I do know that they’re not considered to be alive, and they’re not treated as if they were. We create them and destroy them without a second thought . . .” A breeze from the river rose, making the fire flutter as if struggling against it, instinctively. “If they are alive, I suppose that’s wrong. But what I really think—” He set down the stick, held out both his hands, first together, then slowly widening the gap. “—I think that the division is not as clear as we think it is. Between what’s alive, and what’s not. I think,” and he watched as his own right hand marked off steps toward his left, “that there are . . . degrees, between. More, alive, less alive . . . I don’t think that there’s any one point where we can say, ‘Here’s where it begins . .’” He considered his hands silently, then dropped them to his knees
. “I suppose that’s true of a lot of things. We mark off some point in the middle, and say, ‘There’s the division,’ when, really, there are a dozen steps between, or a hundred, or a thousand . . .”
He grew silent. The fire sputtered, sent up sparks that died before they reached the sky, fell as ash, and rose again, riding the heated air. Rowan watched the light move on Willam’s face as he gazed into the flames.
She said: “Willam . . . will you teach me magic?”
He looked up at her. “Yes,” he said, and he seemed gently surprised, not by the question, but by the idea that she might think there could be any answer other than yes. Then he hesitated, and said, “But. . .”
“I know. You couldn’t learn it all in six years; I suppose it’ll take even longer for me to learn just what you know.”
He gave her a wry look. “Actually, I doubt that. But—” He paused. “Rowan, if things go wrong tomorrow night, but we do still manage to escape with our lives, I’ll probably have to run. And probably you and Bel should, too. In the opposite direction. It would be safer, for all of us. So I just don’t know how much time we’ll have together.”
She had, for the moment, nearly forgotten their mission for the following night. And for all the hope that it offered her, she found that she now resented it. “Then . . . for as long as we are together.”
He nodded, pleased. “All right.” And then he laughed. “But I don’t know where to begin!”
“Since we have so little time,” Rowan said, “give me the heart of it.” The phrase took him by surprise. “Is there one idea,” she went on, “one principle, that stands at the center? Can you think of one sentence that is true of every aspect of magic? Is there even such a thing: one truth that underlies it all?”
She thought that he had never considered this before; it seemed that he was thinking, not to recover one key phrase that had been told to him, but to discern, among all the things he knew, the connections; and then to follow them inward, to the heart, the center.
It took some time. The copper gaze shifted, uncertain, as he sifted, perhaps, through everything that he had learned. At one point, he idly picked up the stick again, apparently merely for something to do with his hands, then sat gazing at it, brows knit, as if it contained the answer. Apparently it did not. Frustrated, he tossed it into the fire.
Then he stopped short; he looked at the fire, looked at his hand—and he had it. He turned to the steerswoman. “Everything is power.”
She was frankly disappointed. “And, I suppose, power is everything.” It seemed a typical wizardly idea, but she had frankly hoped for something less political.
“No.” He leaned forward, intent. “Not the way you think. I mean really. Everything . . . is power.”
This made no sense. “I think,” she said cautiously, “that you’re using that word in a way I don’t know. Some things have power—”
“Everything has power; and everything also is power.”
She rubbed her forehead. “I think that even six years won’t do it. We’re only at the first sentence, and already I’m lost.”
He sat back, struggled with his thoughts. He tried again. “Power,” he said, “is what everything is made of. You, me; the fire; rocks and trees; the world, the sun, the stars.”
“But, I am made of matter . . . so . . . Matter is made of power?”
He shrugged, helplessly, almost apologetic. “Yes.”
Take it as a working hypothesis, the steerswoman instructed herself. “Very well. Go on.”
“All magic,” he said, “is movements of power, or transformations of power. In fact,” he admitted, seeming a bit surprised at the thought, “everything that happens at all is movement or transformation of power. And magic is what happens when you have a very close control over the movement or transformation of power, and can use it to do something complicated and difficult, something that wouldn’t happen naturally, all by itself.”
She was reduced to repeating his most incomprehensible statements. “Everything that happens is movement or, or transformation of. . . power?”
He was more certain now. “That’s right.” He considered. “The sun,” he said, “sends power down to the world. And a flower on the ground will, will gather up part of that power and use it to—well, to do whatever it is that flowers do to keep themselves going. I don’t know a thing about flowers, except that. And you, and I, we take in food, because we need the power that’s in the food to keep ourselves going—”
I thought it was the food that I needed; but she did not say this aloud. “Go on.”
“And that’s a movement of power, from the food to you.”
“But,” she said, “a rock doesn’t take in anything, it doesn’t need power . . .”
“Except to exist. It’s made of power. And”—something came to him—“you can give it more.” He searched the ground around him, found a stone. “If you take a stone, and lift it,” he did so, “and, say, put it on top of a boulder and leave it there,” he indicated it with his other hand, “you’ve given it some of your power, and the power is stored there. And if, say, it then fell off—”
Rowan immediately recognized an example from her earliest training: a demonstration, with attendant calculations, of potential and kinetic—
“Energy,” she said.
He blinked. “Yes. But, not in the usual sense, like liveliness, or get-up-and-go—”
“You mean,” she said, and stressed the word, “energy.”
He sat up straight, suddenly glad. “Yes!”
And they looked at each other, each immensely relieved. They shared, apparently, at least one technical term.
“The energy of the wind,” Rowan said, “is transferred to the sails—”
“And the ship goes forward.”
“And you tie a donkey to the turning bar of a mill—”
“And the donkey moves, and its energy is moved into the millstone—”
“—so it goes around—”
“—and you place your grain between the stones, and the energy, the power, crushes your grain.”
“The energy from the stone, from the donkey, from . . . the food the donkey ate.”
“Hay. A plant. Which took its energy from the sun. Most power comes from the sun, in the end.”
“But,” she said, and paused to consider all that had been said, “Will, none of these things is magic.”
He took a breath to speak; but she spoke for him. “The division is not as clear as we think it is. There are steps between.”
“A dozen,” he affirmed, “a thousand. But it’s just a question of degree.”
A continuum. A line that one could walk, step by step, from the familiar to the more and more arcane. And at the end: magic.
Not impossible, not mystical, but natural and logical, as mindlessly logical as the swing of the stars, as the fall of a stone.
She had asked for principle; he had given it. She said: “Now something specific, to demonstrate. Something magical, in detail.”
“I don’t know how to begin, really . . .”
Her own context would be much the same as Willam’s had been; and he would know best how to teach in the way that he had himself been taught. “Let’s start with your blasting-charms.”
The stone was still in his hand; he laughed, tossed it into the campfire, and a spray of sparks flew upward from the pulsing orange heart of the wood. Willam watched with pleasure. “Lady,” he said, his copper eyes reflecting rising glints, “they’re fire. They’re just fire.”
They began, then, with fire—according to Willam, one of the purest examples that existed of the transformation and movement of energy.
They spoke of substances, and the way in which fire acted upon them; and the differences between the substances, and their inner nature.They touched briefly upon where to locate certain of these substances, and under what conditions they might be found; Rowan was familiar with some of these facts.
Optimal substances were iden
tified. Specific quantities were named, and proportions, and the actions needed to combine them. And here, the matter seemed to the steerswoman as straightforward as a recipe.
Then speed appeared. Speed was the key. Heat caused expansion—and some things burned very fast indeed.
When the amounts of substances used were no longer specified, proportions naturally transformed themselves into ratios . . .
Speed spawned derivatives: acceleration, and force. Force was large.
Substances became symbols.
Actions became abstract operations.
Symbol, operation, symbol, result. . .
And the result, in the end, was wild, raw power.
At a pause, when Willam built up the fire again, Rowan attempted to quickly copy into her logbook the scrawled writing in the dirt that she and Willam had generated. And it was only in the act of writing them down that she noticed: she was copying a series of mathematical equations. She realized then that for some time, she and Willam had been speaking almost entirely in formulas.
She looked about. Willam was breaking small branches across one knee, tenting the kindling and logs. The fire would burn quickly, but brightly. They needed the illumination.
Down at the riverbank, reeds rustled in a light wind; stars shone on the river, not mirrored, but transformed into quick flickers by the motion of the water. The loom of trees behind Rowan, the sound of the horses breathing and shifting in the dark: all were sharp, clear, fresh.
Rowan felt she had been on a journey: a distance long, but quick, and quicker as the countryside grew ever more familiar. She and Willam had been hurrying at the last, not from urgency, but from the sheer joy of the speed.
The new kindling caught, new flames leapt. Willam watched the campfire for a moment, almost fondly.
Then he settled beside the steerswoman again, and they went on.
16
They slept as late as they dared, breakfasted as quickly as they could, and made the best speed possible back to Donner.
The Language of Power Page 23
