Sword and Sorceress XXVII (20 page)

“Fought?” Cluny tried to shake the
residual stuffiness from her head. “I’ve felt nothing all night till right now!”

Fear and disdain mixed over Mistress
Elaro’s face. “A familiar and a mere sophomore student could never hope to
sense the subtle energies we true magi wield!”

Cluny stared her straight in the eye. “Subtle??
Are you kidding?? Every time you transport anywhere, it feels like someone
kicking me in the head! That unlocking spell and death magic were just as
blatant, too!”

The magistrix’s eyes flared. “How dare
you??”

A clanging started then, distant and
audible, Crocker and his parents startling violently. “The stables!” Lady
Crocker rushed for the glass doors overlooking the back patio. “Johan would
only ring the alarm in case of fire or—”

Something rattled above them; Cluny
looked up, the chandeliers quivering, a rumble in the air. “Stampede,” Lady
Crocker finished, her face going ashen. Shapes flowed out of the moonlit trees,
streamed over the low patio wall, and Cluny spun out the largest shield spell
she could think of as the dozens of horses crashed into the room, the glass
doors shattering. Whinnies, screams, and shrieks bounced everywhere, the stink
of mud and fear and sweat plastering Cluny’s whiskers.

But all she could see was Wanax, the big
black horse stepping in behind those who’d led the charge, a tiny slip of white
gold draped over his back, blood dripping from the several holes in Hesper’s
flanks.

“My Lady!” Shtasith cried, leaping into
the air.

“Froth and foam!” came another voice,
the wall sliding open to reveal Lionel and the princess dressed in hiking
clothes.

“No!” Mistress Elaro screeched, and
feeling the ragged pulse of her transport spell, Cluny prayed everyone would be
looking elsewhere before blasting her strongest disruption magic right into the
sorceress’s chest.

#

“Thank you,” Hesper murmured, lowering
her head back onto the pillow. “Next time you mix this potion, however,
sophomore, a little more honeysuckle.” She winced. “Certain forms of magic need
more sweetening than others...”

Crocker nodded, set the bowl on the
nightstand beside Cluny, and she made a mental note.

Princess Alison shifted in her chair. “We
can continue this later if you’d like, Lady Hesper.”

“Thank you, Your Highness, but there’s
little more to tell. After cornering me at the party and apologizing for her
earlier outburst, Beatrice asked me to meet her at the stables at 2 AM so we
could discuss my petition. I arrived, and she stabbed me with an iron spike
hastily ensorcelled with death magic.”

Shtasith hissed from Crocker’s
shoulders, and Cluny wished she could manage the sound as well. “All because
you wanted to become dean of Healing Arts at Huxley??” she asked instead.

Hesper fixed her gaze on Cluny. “The
thought of someone she considered an animal running a school at her alma mater
must’ve pushed Beatrice over some sort of edge.”

Lionel slapped the wall he was leaning
against. “I never liked how she treated poor Lorn, but, well, I suppose I
thought
all
magi spoke to their familiars that way.”

“Not all,” Hesper said, her gaze still
on Cluny’s, and Cluny felt her ears heat up.

The princess leaped to her feet. “But
Bea
must’ve
known Lionel and I were just out taking the lovely night
air!”

“My guess?” Cluny couldn’t keep the
anger out of her voice. “She’ll keep saying that she didn’t know, that she was
fighting Hesper in honest fear for Your Highness’s life. But it was her spell
that unlocked the stable doors, and the only reason to do that would be so the
horses could trample Lady Hesper and cover up the stab wounds.”

“Alas.” Shtasith puffed black smoke. “Such
plans needn’t be clever to be effective.”

“Yeah.” Crocker sounded angry, too. “And
when it’s the word of Her Highness’s personal sorceress against a dead and
crazy familiar, who’s gonna look too close?”

A knock at the door, and the guard
captain leaned in. “Lord and Lady Crocker, Your Highness.”

They swept through, the distress on Lady
Crocker’s face entirely genuine. “Oh, Lady Hesper! I can’t
begin
to tell
you how terrible I feel that this should happen to you here! If there’s
anything my veterinarians can do—”

Shtasith hissed, but Hesper panted a
laugh. “Thank you, Lady Crocker, but we unicorns boast so often of our healing
prowess, I’d like to find out if it’s true or not. Still, once I’m up and
about, I’d be honored if I could visit your stables and thank Wanax and my
other cousins for their help.”

Princess Alison shook her head. “Rest
assured, Lady Hesper, than Beatrice will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of
the law. And while I will support your proposal, there
is
a position for
a sorceress that’s just opened up on my staff....”

“Thank you, Your Highness.” A glint came
into Hesper’s eye. “But might I suggest a sophomore of our mutual acquaintance?
If you’re still looking in three years, that is.”

Lady Crocker gave a gasp and turned to
her husband. “Oh, Lawrence! How wonderful! Both our sons in the royal court!”

“Mom?” Crocker’s magic went hot around
her. “I’m not—”

Another hiss from Shtasith, but Crocker
finished with: “Not sure that’s the sort of thing I’d be interested in.”

“What?” Lady Crocker’s face became more
pinched. “Don’t be ridiculous, Terrence! Of course you’ll—!”

“No.” He pointed a shaking finger at
her. “When I didn’t have any talents at all, you didn’t care about me. And now
that I
do
have some talents, I’m finding I don’t care about you.”

“Terrence!” Lord Crocker barked. “I’ll
not have you—!”

“Don’t care, Dad.” Crocker reached a
hand up to Shtasith, the other to Cluny; nearly cheering, she jumped in,
scurried to her pocket. “I didn’t much like the way our family worked, so,
well, I got another family. And while I’ll always love you guys for, y’know,
whatever reason, I’d rather be with people who like the real me, not some me
they think I should be.” He bowed to the princess. “Now, if you’ll excuse me,
Your Highness, I’d like to show my friends around the grounds.”

Princess Alison nodded, and for all the
shaking Cluny could feel as Crocker stepped out the door, he made it most of the
way down the hall before his knees buckled and she had to levitate him onto a
window seat overlooking the sun-drenched woods. “Did I—?” He sucked in a
breath. “Did I really just do that?”

Cluny reached up to pat his chin. “You
did.”

A grin curled Shtasith’s snout. “And
splendidly as well.”

“Huh.” Eyes closed, Crocker leaned
against the wall.

“So!” Cluny couldn’t help it; she
bounced against his chest, said in her squeakiest voice, “When’s the tour
start??”

Crocker laughed. “How ‘bout as soon as I
can feel my legs again?”

Netcasters

by
Layla Lawlor

I like to get
stories from new writers—not that it’s easy to find new writers these days.
(The good thing about self-publishing is that anyone can do it. And the bad
thing about self-publishing is that anyone can do it, regardless of their
ability to write, use proper spelling and grammar, proofread, or format their
book properly.) When this story arrived in the slush pile, I started reading
it. And I kept reading it, all the way to the end. I don’t know if Layla ever
heard Marion’s instructions to “grab the reader by the throat on the first page
and don’t let go until the end,” but she certainly followed them. I didn’t even
notice how long this story is until I did the word count.

Layla
Lawlor is a freelance artist, illustrator and writer. She lives with her
husband, dogs and assorted farm animals on 11 rural acres near Fairbanks,
Alaska, where winters dip to 50 below zero and summers yield 24 hours of
daylight. During the short (but bright!) summer she enjoys gardening and
hiking, and in the winter she makes things. This is her first professional
fiction sale.

****

Zair was rocking by the fire, mending a
fishing net, when the still night outside her window erupted in a ruckus.
People shouting, dogs barking, goats bellowing—a regular set-to.

She laid down her shuttle and pegboard,
the rough mass of the seine slithering from her lap to the floor. Clearly
someone with sense should sort things out. Besides, truth be told, she was
curious. Zair picked up her walking stick and stumped outside to see what the
fuss was about.

A waxing crescent moon rode low over the
marsh, throwing down a glittering trail from tidepool to tidepool and out into
the wide dark ocean. The village’s hill cast a black shadow across the whispering
sedge. By the slender shell of moon, Zair tapped her way around back of her
house, past the middens and privies to the goat pen, where half the village had
gathered.

“What are you fools doing?” Zair
demanded, pushing her way through the crowd. More people trickled out of their
houses, drawn by the noise. Someone said “Pirates!” in a hushed whisper, and
Zair rolled her eyes. Oh, there were always tales of raiders up the coast, and
there had been that one time with the smugglers in the marsh... But pirates
weren’t known for sneaking into goat pens.

“We caught a thief, Auntie!”

She might have known
:
her nephews
Rig and Orrel, along with a few of their equally thickheaded friends. Someone
held up a lamp, and Zair could see that the boys were sitting on somebody, a
stranger to judge by the long coat of colorful patches that was spread in the
mud around them. No one in the village had a coat like that.

“Let him up,” Zair said.

The boys, looking disappointed, let the
accused thief rise to his—no, her knees. She wiped mud off her sharp cheekbone
and smiled brightly at Zair: an angular, long-legged scarecrow of a woman, with
a mess of short dark hair that looked like it had been hacked off with a dull
knife.

 “Hello, honored mother. I’m sure we can
work out this tiny misunderstanding like civilized people.”

“What did she steal?” Zair asked,
looking around at her neighbors and relatives.

People started pulling items from
pockets and cloaks. Spoons and other silver tableware. Jewelry. Small coin
pouches of worked leather. Bits and bobs, the little precious things that poor
people owned.

The thief’s smile dimmed. “As I said, I
can explain. My uncle—”

“Cheri found her in the chicken shed.”
Black-haired Solya pointed at her smallest daughter, who blushed and stuck her
fingers in her mouth.

“I was sleeping there,” the thief said. “As
I explained—”

“...with her pockets full of our stolen
things.”

The thief opened her mouth again. Zair
interrupted. “Where did you come from?” The nearest town, Trenza, was a
half-day’s travel with a goatcart. A lone traveler, especially one with such
long legs, could have walked much faster.

The thief offered a shy, deprecating
smile, which Zair distrusted instantly. “I took shelter in your village from my
cruel uncle’s hired brigands, until the moon set and I could leave under the
cover of darkness.”

“And our silver?” Solya demanded,
shaking a bag that jingled.

“I am so sorry,” the thief said. Her
eyes dropped contritely to her hands, the long, graceful fingers clasped on her
knee. “My uncle has cut off all my means of support. I would have paid you back
once I regained access to my fortune.”

Zair could see sympathetic credulity
building on the wide-eyed faces of her nephews, who’d never been away from the
village longer than it took to go to market. “Goat crap,” she said loudly. “Anybody
turns up in a chicken coop with half the village’s silver is no princess. I say
we tie her ‘til morning and then decide her punishment when we’ve slept.”

Tired from a long day at the nets, no
one argued. The thief offered a wide, warm smile and held out her hands, the
bony wrists together. “Please, honored mother, I will accept whatever
punishment you deem fit.”

“Or maybe you plan to slip the ropes as
soon as we turn our backs,” Zair said. The thief gave her a look of wounded
innocence. “Well, I can assure you that no one ever escapes from
my
knots.”

“Of course, honored mother, I am sure
they don’t,” the thief agreed meekly.

Everyone in the village knew Zair was
best with knots, so she took a twist of cord from her pocket and looped it
around the thief’s wrists. The thief gave the loosely bound rope a look of
surprise. Plainly she’d had no idea it would be this easy.

“Where shall we put her?” Solya asked.

“Oh, out back of your privy would prob’ly
do, if you don’t mind the noise.” A night by the privy in the cold marsh air
would do their guest some good.

The thief came quietly, making no effort
to escape, although the fact that she was surrounded by two dozen annoyed and
well-muscled fishermen probably had a lot to do with that. Orrel took a big
knife off her, a wide-bladed thing in a battered leather sheath. “We’ll give
this back when you leave,” he said.

“Of course,” the thief agreed, and her
eyes followed it as it vanished under his cloak.

The privy looked too rickety to make a
decent jail, so Zair took another stout bit of twine and bound the thief’s
hands to the stump where Solya tied up her goats for milking. There was enough
rope that the thief could stand up, stretch, and lean against the side of the
privy if she wanted to.

“Good night,” Zair said, dusting her
hands on her trousers. “See you in the morning.”

“Of course, honored mother.”

As they walked away, Zair’s nephew Rig
said, “How long d’you think it’ll take her to try to escape?”

There was a thump and a loud curse from
behind them. “Not long,” Zair said.

#

In the morning, after the young and the
strong had departed to fish for linget in the shallow channels of the estuary,
Zair gathered the rest of the village—old women, small children, and Deke
One-Leg—and went to see the prisoner. As expected, the thief was right where
they’d left her, although her wrists were raw, her fingernails broken, and the
dirt had been scraped back from the stump to a depth of two feet. Her eyes were
wild, her short hair sticking up in spikes.

“What did you
do
?”

“Tied you to the privy,” Zair said.

“No, no, it’s more than that.” The thief
held up her bound hands and shook them. “You didn’t even draw it tight. I could
escape from more complicated bonds when I was six years old. And yet it won’t
come off!”

“Course not,” Zair said. “When I tie
knots, they stay tied. We couldn’t make a living if our nets were always coming
undone, could we?”

The thief scowled at her. “I didn’t want
to tell you this last night, because I had no wish to frighten you, but I work
for a man who takes a third part of my earnings. If I don’t deliver my take to
him each night, he beats me—and if anyone stops me, he beats
them
. He
will already be searching for me, so I suggest you let me go before he finds your
village.”

Deke One-Leg laughed, and Zair raised an
eyebrow. “Really? I thought you were running from your cruel uncle.”

“They are one and the same.”

“You’re not just a liar, but a very bad
one,” Zair said. “In any case, strong hands are always useful during fishing
season. We’ll feed you and you’ll work for us ‘til the dark of the moon. Then
you can go free.”

The thief’s mouth dropped open. “But it’s
waxing! That’s twenty days, at least!”

“Then you shouldn’t have thieved from
people who can tie good knots.” Zair folded her arms. “Or we could take a
fish-cart into Trenza and dump you on the magistrate’s doorstep. The penalty
for theft in Trenza, I recall, is the loss of a hand.”

The thief’s jaw worked. After a time,
she said, “You’ll feed me, you said?”

“Surely. And you can sleep in the
goatshed, long as you’re well-behaved.”

“Oh,” the thief said, “the
goatshed
.
How kind.”

“It’s better than the privy,” Zair
pointed out.

“True.” The thief held out her hands. “Very
well, you have my word. I’ll work for you until the moon is dark, and I won’t
try to run off.”

“Kind of you to give your word.” Zair
slit the thief’s bonds with her fish-scaling knife, and after the thief had
flexed her wrists and stretched, Zair reached out an open hand, palm up. The
thief stared at it.

“Now what?”

“Give me your wrist.” When the thief
did, reluctantly, Zair bound one-half of the cut cord around it. Then, under
the thief’s suspicious eyes, she tied the other half to the top rail of the
goat pen, a less complicated version of the knot that kept the goats in.

“What did you do?”

Zair drew a circle in the air. “You can
go to the spring, the back gardens, and the goat pen. No farther.”

The thief held up her arm, where the
bracelet of coarse twine swung below the bony lump of her wrist. “This will
stop me?” Her voice dripped sarcasm.

Some people had to learn the hard way. “Yes,”
Zair said, and shooed away the onlookers. “I’ll bring up breakfast. I’m sure
you’re hungry.”

She didn’t expect it would take long for
the thief to try an escape. And so it was. Zair and the other old people
stopped to watch as the thief broke into a swift, graceful run towards the
coast road to Trenza, her long patched coat billowing behind her. Then she hit
the limit of the invisible tether Zair had set on her, and flipped end-over-end
in a swirl of coattails and flailing limbs.

Leaning on her walking stick, Zair
strolled up as the thief scrambled to her feet, cursing loudly and brushing
dirt off her trousers. Zair glimpsed a brilliant green stone on a thong around her
neck before the thief stuffed it quickly down her shirt.

“Now you know how far you can go,” Zair
said.

The thief glared through a fringe of
badly cut bangs. “You did that on purpose.” She tugged futilely at the knotted
bracelet.

“Of course. Care for some goat cheese
with your breakfast?”

#

In the next few days, with the linget
running fast and everyone from fifteen to fifty out on the nets, no one missed
an opportunity to put the thief to work. Whether it was painting tar on
boat-bottoms, repairing holes in a thatched roof, feeding the goats or digging
weeds out of someone’s garden patch, something always needed doing with never
enough hands to do it. The thief couldn’t work on the nets or repair the
protective knots that hung from every fencepost and door lintel, but there was
no shortage of drudgework to keep her busy.

Zair adjusted the tether when necessary,
but kept it short enough that the thief could not reach the houses. No sense
giving her ideas. They’d already caught her trying to steal eggs twice, and
once attempting to hide a mattock under her coat, for all the good it would do
her.

Stumping out back to dump slops, Zair
found the thief in an unhappy heap next to the midden, staring glumly at a
ratty pack of cards that she’d produced from somewhere about her person. “Ah,
good,” Zair said. “The goat pen wants raking.”

The thief glared. “Look at my
hands
.”
She spread the long nimble fingers to display blisters and inground dirt. “My
hands are my livelihood. They’ll never be the same.”

“You stole from us,” Zair said evenly. “We
are poor people, but I guess you never thought of that when you took our
silver. You think this is hard? We do it every day.”

“Oh, what a subtle lesson,” the thief
sneered, tucking the cards away.

“It’s no lesson; I doubt you’d learn
anyway.” Zair shrugged and turned back to her house. “But I’m sure you’d rather
blisters on your hands to having one cut off.”