Seventh Son: The Tales of Alvin Maker, Volume I (28 page)

The others present murmured their agreement.

“I’m sorry,” said Danny. “I really am. It’s not as if I planned it. I only did what came to mind, to try to get them to work on what they were assigned. I didn’t know that it would hurt them.”

“Look at his shoulder,” said Auntie Tweng. “Look at that bruise. It’s like a truck ran over him.”

“He was trying to get away!” said Zog defensively.

“He was in agony,” said Tweng. “How dare you punish the boy before the rest of us were called?”

“I didn’t punish him!” Zog roared. “I brought him!”

“You know your strength, and you’re responsible for what you do with it,” said Tweng. “You and Grandpa Gyish did this to him? It’s at least as bad as anything he did to those two girls—why, I wouldn’t be surprised if his clavicle was broken along with a few thousand capillaries.”

Since neither Zog nor Gish was even slightly educated in the drowther sciences, they had no idea what they were being accused of having done, but they were clearly angry and abashed at having the tables turn like this.

“And while you’re torturing this child,” said Tweng, “and refusing to let him speak, has anyone thought that only he knows where he hung that tee-shirt with a brace of stupid disobedient fairies inside?”

Danny could have kissed her then and there, if he’d thought that Auntie Tweng would stand for it. Within a few moments, uncles Poot and Mook had Danny on his feet and helped him keep his balance—he was faint with pain—as he led them back to the tree.

It was farther than Danny had remembered, or perhaps pain magnified the distance, since every step jostled him and made it hurt worse. But finally they were there, with all the aunts and uncles—and now a fair entourage of cousins, too—staring up into the tree.

“I don’t see it,” said Zog. “He’s lying.”

“He said he put it high in the tree,” said Auntie Tweng. “Of course you can’t see it. The leaves are in the way.”

“I can’t climb that thing,” said Uncle Mook.

“Can you get the tree itself to bring them down?” Aunt Lummy asked Uncle Poot.

“Is it on a living branch?” Poot asked Danny. “Green with leaves?”

“Yes,” said Danny.

“Then we should try another way,” said Poot, his voice now gentle, “before we ask this scarlet oak for such a sacrifice.”

“Then Zog,” said Auntie Teng. “Send up a bird to untie the shirt and bring them down.”

Zog whirled on her, but then seemed to swallow the first terrible thing he had meant to say. Instead he spoke softly. “You know my heartbound died in the war. Such birds as I can speak to now have no such skill as the untying of a knotted shirt. I can make them attack and kill, but not untie a knot.”

“Then someone has to climb the tree,” said Uncle Poot.

“Make a clant first,” said Auntie Tweng, “and see how high it is, and how dangerous the climb might be.”

Uncle Poot was one of the foremost clanters of the Family, and he must have been showing off a little, for he sat down at the base of the tree and formed his outself into a clant using the leaves and twigs of the living oak. The smaller branches merely bent toward each other to form the leaves into the vague shape of a man. It progressed up the tree by joining higher leaves into the shape and letting lower ones fall away behind it. Soon it came back down, little more than a rapid quivering of the leaves and branches, yet always shaped like a man, and Uncle Poot opened his eyes again.

“How could you climb so high?” he asked Danny. “How could such slender branches bear your weight?”

“I don’t know,” said Danny. “I climbed up them and they didn’t break and I didn’t fall.”

“I can’t send another child up there,” said Uncle Poot. “As we were so recently reminded, we have no healer capable of dealing with grave injuries.”

“Then let me go,” said Danny.

“With that shoulder?” asked Aunt Lummy. “I don’t think so!”

“I can do it,” said Danny. “It’s only pain. I can still move my arm.”

So he climbed the tree for the second time today, slowly this time, testing the strength in his left arm and shoulder every time before relying on them to hold him.

When he was far enough up the tree that he could see none of the people below him, he came to a place where he couldn’t find any kind of handhold at all. The next higher branch was simply out of reach. Yet he had come this way. This high in the tree there were no alternate routes.

I was moving faster, Danny thought. I was almost running up the tree. I must have leapt upward and reached it without realizing it.

Yet he knew this was not true. Such a leap as this he would have noticed and remembered—if for no other reason than to brag that he had done it.

He had climbed the tree in the same kind of single-minded trance that came over him when he ran. He didn’t remember picking his way or watching his footsteps when he ran his fastest, and likewise he had no memory of gripping this branch or that one when he had made his first climb, though he remembered every handhold and every reach on this second time up the tree.

He closed his eyes. How could he possibly go back down and tell them that what he had climbed before, he could not climb a second time? What could they possibly think, except that he refused to go? What if someone else got to this same place, and saw the tee-shirt hanging far out of reach? What would they think? Only that Danny didn’t want to free the girls from their imprisonment. Then Uncle Poot would ask the tree to sacrifice and break the living branch, and Danny’s punishment would be severe indeed. Who would think him anything but a drekka then?

Yet he knew there was a way up, and not just because of the logic that the tee-shirt was knotted around a branch, so Danny must have been there; he knew there was a way because he could sense it, where it began and where it led, even though there were no handholds that his eyes could see.

So he closed his eyes and reached upward, sliding his hand along the rough trunk. Ah, if only you could speak to me, Scarlet Oak, if only we were friends. If only you could bend your branch to me.

And as that yearning mixed with his despair, he twisted and flung his body upward. What did it matter if he missed the branch and fell? His days were numbered anyway, if he did not bring those girls back down.

His hand gripped a branch. He opened his eyes.

It was not the next branch up, the one that he had reached for in vain a moment before. It was the very branch the tee-shirt hung on.

How did I get from there to here?

But even as he asked himself the question, he answered it. I could not have done it with hands and feet. Nor is there any magic that lets a twelve-year-old boy leap upward three times his own height.

No, there was such a magic, only Danny had never seen it. The whole world had not seen it since 632 A.D. He had to close his eyes and breathe deeply as he took it in.

I must have made a gate. A little one, a gate that takes me only there to here. I must have made it when I climbed the first time, and when I leapt again just now I passed through it.

He had read about gates like this in books. They were the gates that were within the reach of Pathbrothers, or even lockfriends sometimes, back in the days when gatemagery was still practiced in the world. And now that he was thinking of it this way, Danny could see just where the gate began and ended. It was nothing visible, not even a quivering in the air or a rearrangement of the leaves, like Uncle Poot’s temporary clant had been. He simply knew that it was there, knew where it began and ended, felt it almost as if it were a part of him.

Danny had made a gate. How many others had he made, not knowing it? It must be gates like this that had allowed him to get past the watching trees at the perimeter. How long had he been making them? How many were there?

As soon as the question formed in his mind, the answer came. He could sense the placement of every gate that he had ever made. There were scarcely two dozen of them, but from his reading he knew that this was really quite a lot. Even a Pathbrother could only make a dozen gates of any size, because each gate required that a portion of the gatemage’s outself remain behind with it. A trained, experienced gatemage could close the gates that he had made himself, erase them and gather his outself fragments back into the whole. But Danny had no idea how such a thing was done. And there was no one to teach him.

I’ve made two dozen gates without knowing that I was doing it, without feeling it at all. Yet I’ve been finding the ones that lead outside the compound, because I could sense without realizing it exactly where they were and where they led and how to use them.

Now every one of them is lying about inside the compound, waiting for someone to stumble into it and find himself abruptly in another place. It only had to happen once, and the discoverer would know there was a gatemage in the world again, and one with strength enough to make a gate rather than merely find and open up a gate that someone else had made.

Danny exulted at the knowledge that he was not a drekka at all, but instead a rather powerful mage of the rarest kind. But eating away at the thrill of triumph was the fact that to be a gatemage in the North family was worse than being drekka.

For the last gatemage in the world had been Loki the trickster, the monster Loki who had sealed up every Great Gate in the world so thoroughly that all traffic between Westil and Mittlegard was cut off at once. It had shattered the power of every Family in the world, for the mightiest of powers could only be sustained by frequent passages back and forth. Magic gathered in one world was magnified a hundred times by passage through a Great Gate into the other. Little gates like the ones that Danny made had no such power—they led from Earth to another spot on Earth, and meant nothing except that his body moved from there to here. But the Great Gates had been what turned the mages of Westil into gods when they came here to Mittlegard.

And when they closed, when Loki made it impossible for anyone to even find them, even the gates that had stood for three thousand years or more before his time, the gods became mere mages, and easy to find and kill if someone was determined to; they could die from the blows of drowther swords or the darts from drowther bows. They had to learn caution, to isolate themselves, to pretend that they were ordinary people. To hide, as the North family was hidden here in the Virginia hills, where people who kept to themselves were not exceptional and others mostly left them alone.

The wars had been fought at first to force the Norths to reopen the gates, for no one believed that Loki’s actions were not part of some nefarious plan. Only after the Families had decimated each other and the Norths had fled with Leiv Eiriksson to Vinland—only then, seeing how helpless the Norths had been against five centuries of onslaughts, did the other Families finally believe that Loki had acted alone, that the Norths were not holding on to some secret Westil Gate that would enable them to build up power that no other Family could withstand.

Even so, once America was conquered the Families made war on the Norths again from time to time, whenever the pain of being cut off from Westil became too much to bear, if only to punish the Norths or perhaps destroy them utterly—what else did they deserve?

But as truces and treaties were formed and broken, made anew and once again broken, they always included this clause: That if any gatemage was born into the world, into any Family but most especially the Norths, he would be killed. And not just killed, but his or her body cut up and one piece sent to each of the other Families as proof that it was done.

Otherwise, whichever Family got a gatemaker first would have a devastating advantage and could destroy the others if they were not stopped in time. All the Families feared the others would cheat, because that’s what they themselves would do.

If any of the adults had sent a clant to watch Danny and saw what he just did to reach this spot, then when he came back down they’d hack him to death on the spot, and care nothing. For if the Norths were caught with a gatemage of any degree of power left alive and making gates, the other Families would unite again and this time they would not stop till every North was dead.

I am a mage with power to do what no other living mage can do; and yet I am a dead man. If Loki had not played his monstrous, inexplicable prank and closed the gates, the discovery of my power would be a cause for celebration. I would at once become one of the leading members of the Family, and mere beastmages like Zog would defer to me, and Lem and Stem would never dare to raise their hand against me. But Loki closed the gates, and now it’s a crime for me to breathe. If I were a good boy, I’d fling myself from this tree and die, saving them the trouble of killing me.

But Danny was not that good a boy.

He owed them nothing. He was not one of them. He did not accept their power over him. He would not let them kill him if he could avoid it.

The only trouble was, he didn’t actually know how to use his power. He had made a gate, but unconsciously; he could map with his mind all the gates that he had ever made, because they were a part of him. But he had no idea what to do in order to create another. Useful as it might be right now to make a gate that would take him from this treetop to a place somewhere in Canada or Brazil, he had never made a gate that took him more than fifty yards, and never made a single one on purpose.

So he inched his way out to where he had tied the shirt, unfastened it, opened it, and released the two feeble fairy clants. At once the girls’ outselves let go of the pieces of their clants and let the twigs and leaves and nutshells tumble or flutter to the ground. Upstairs in the schoolhouse, their eyes were opening; no doubt they were wailing and clinging to each other and making noise about how terrified they’d been.

And it’s a near certainty that they’ll never wave their clanty boobs and butts at me again, thought Danny, if I were ever set to watch over them again. So my plan was a good one, except for the part where it nearly got me killed.

Danny made his way slowly down the tree, pausing here and there to try to hear what was going on below him. Then he noticed that his shoulder did not hurt at all any more. That it had not hurt since he made the leap through the gate and hung from the branch where his shirt was tied. He looked at his shoulder and saw no trace of injury—not a bruise, not a scratch.