The Magician of Hoad (26 page)

The King and the new ambassador discussed trade and treaties of friendship. As they negotiated, Heriot listened to the arguments and propositions, voices advancing and retreating, and felt his occupant receiving everything that was being said, while reading things that were not being said from the minds of the men who talked back and forth so carefully. At a sign from the King, he rose and moved forward to provide a closing entertainment, something he was often required to do… something he generally enjoyed, and something that half concealed the true reason for his presence at the King’s side.

Heriot laid a sliced apple on the floor at the Dannorad
ambassador’s feet, then closed his eyes. The ambassador stared down at the apple, smiling a polite smile that had a little puzzled contempt concealed within.

The pips split. Delicate shoots came out, sipping eagerly on the power Heriot was feeding into the air. Heriot opened his eyes, stared down at the pips and their odd tendrils, then moved forward two steps to pick up a tall glass from the metal table at the ambassador’s elbow, stepped backward again, and cautiously trickled wine over the glowing plants, which suddenly leaped up as if he had commanded them. The shoots turned into green wood, growing and dividing. The trees that now stretched up toward the arches were not quite apple trees, though the blossoms bursting out at the tips of their branches were very like apple blossoms. Leaves brushed against the roof as twigs, still dividing, spread out like arms among the arches, and suddenly the arches themselves were transformed, covered with mottled bark while the stone faces in the corners of the room and in the curves of the arches came alive, blinking and smiling. The ambassador’s own smile vanished, for he was unable to hide his astonishment, nor, a moment later, his apprehension, as the strange trees that were not quite trees closed in around him. Branches that were partly arms embraced the King and the Princes, who suddenly became spirits of the wood, gazing up and out rather as the stone faces on the arches above were gazing down. Blossoms fell and apples formed. The King sat still, smiling in his curious, unpracticed way at the ambassador, but Betony Hoad reached up to pick one of the apples and bit into it, directing his smile not at the ambassador but at Heriot,
somehow challenging the Magician’s power.
Do more. Transform me! Make me marvelous!
Heriot shifted his glasses farther up his nose, sighing a little while the trees shrank into themselves, sinking down into the floor, or sideways into the stone walls. The faces in the arches froze again, becoming nothing more than carved decorations. The act of magical entertainment was over, and the new ambassador relaxed, exclaimed, and applauded, unable to disguise the fact that his hands were shaking slightly. He glanced briefly at Heriot with an uneasy respect, mixed with something like animosity, before turning to the King.

“King of Wonders,” he said, bowing politely before he and his companions withdrew, knowing they would be discussed, and making for the rooms where they could begin a discussion of their own, part of which would be about the power of the King of Hoad, who could sit so easily with such strange capacities at his elbow.

Back in the reception room the King sighed and slowly turned toward Heriot. “Well, Magician?” he asked. “What is your impression of our new Dannorad ambassador? And those attending him?”

Heriot replied, “He and his companions spoke honestly.…” He hesitated.

“But… ?” asked the King, seizing on this hesitation.

“There are things he hasn’t been told. And he knows he hasn’t been told. All I could do was to pick at their ignorance. They feel there are shifts in his own King’s policies, and here in this room, where everyone knows that secrets can be read, he was glad he and his friends hadn’t been told.”

“I see,” said the King. “Lord Glass, we may have to look further. Concealment in the Dannorad and trouble in the Islands. It is time my son took more responsibility.”

There was a silence. People looked at Betony Hoad, who sat, turned away from his father, eating an apple that could not exist.

“I am not sure the Lord Prince Betony Hoad would be happy at the prospect of more responsibility,” said Lord Glass. “Well, would you, my dear?” And he, too, looked at Betony Hoad.

“I daren’t even guess at my own response, Lord Glass,” Betony Hoad replied. “I enjoy being a mystery, even to myself.”

He sounded calm, even amused, but Heriot could read a busy tumult alive in Betony Hoad. And even more intrusive was Dysart’s mood of confused anger, which had nothing to do with the Dannorad men or Heriot’s magical event, for three days earlier the Master of Hagen had called Linnet home. The different confusions of the two Princes came and went through him like tides drawn this way and that by some invisible, inner moon.

***

“It doesn’t make sense,” Dysart cried to Heriot, after the ceremony of reception was over, after the ambassador had gone. “Just as I’ve turned into the second son, just as I’ve become the heir to the heir, Hagen backs off. It’s crazy.”

“Something’s happening,” Heriot said, “but I can’t tell you what it is. It has the feeling of a great gamble. A dangerous one,” he added.

“Betony?” Dysart said with resignation in his voice.

“No, it’s
about
Betony, but it doesn’t come from him. It’s coming from your father,” Heriot replied. “He’s working his way toward something dangerous. It’s to do with the Islands, but I think he’s really hoping to force something out of Betony Hoad… to make him become something he doesn’t want to be.”

“Something dangerous from my father?” Dysart cried. “My father’s the most careful man alive. And he would tell me,” he declared, but didn’t sound entirely sure of this.

Heriot continued. “And before he left, I could feel a shift in the Master of Hagen. But I don’t know what’s shifting in him. I can always tell about
you
if I try, because you come halfway to meet me. You’re like a partner in a dance of friendship. But Cayley—well, when I’ve tried reading him it’s like coming up against a wall. Not a word, not a memory, not the color of a feeling. Just blankness! Something happened to him once that drove him so deep into himself that he’s all protection these days. Mind you, I do know that back in the Third Ring, we recognized each other— well, recognized something in each other—though how we could possibly have recognized anything when we’d never met before I just don’t know.”

He hesitated, realizing that Dysart was not interested in the enigma that was Cayley. Dysart remained silent. Heriot began again.

“Anyhow, as I’ve told you before, some of these men who now come to the King have something of the same blankness. Not in the way Cayley has, but I can’t read them the way I read the men of last year and the year before. I think it means the counties, the Islands, the Dannorad of
course, are trying to send men who might have some inner protection against the Magician of Hoad. I’ll tell you what, though. Your brother…” He fell silent.

“What about my brother?” Dysart asked sharply.

“Yes, what about his brother?” asked a new voice. Neither of them needed to turn to know who had come walking silently up behind them. He was brilliant in his purple and gold, and yet the very magnificence of his clothes seemed to be a secret jibe directed at the world.

“I was about to say that in the back of his mind your father is angry because you won’t go to bed with your wife,” Heriot said, defending himself by way of an immediate attack.

“I’ve made no secret of the fact that I will not have children,” Betony Hoad replied. “I may be cruel, but I’m not totally without mercy.”

“Oh, Betony!” exclaimed Dysart impatiently. “So you want to be wonderful. All right! Being a father and being King will make you wonderful.”

“Ah, but not wonderful enough!” Betony replied. He looked at Heriot with something approaching the animosity he had revealed earlier—a glance of less than a second, but one that Heriot read easily.

“Good night, Princes,” he said, going downstairs and then down more stairs, making for the kitchen door, the closest door to the orchard.

“Good night, Magician,” said the maids, yawning as they washed the last dishes of the day. Flaring torches lit the first courtyard at the back of the castle, but Heriot knew the linked courtyards so well by now he could have
walked them in the dark. He knew every ridge—every slight subsidence, knew the places where the stones caught the light of the torches bracketed into the castle wall and the places where they dipped into darkness. As he moved into the orchard at last, with all the relief of someone coming home at the end of a long day, he wondered if Cayley was likely to be there, and then rather hoped he wasn’t, for he had to sit beside the King early next morning. He needed to sleep. There would be no time to talk or joke together, telling stories that seemed like pins holding the day back for a minute or two before it moved on and dissolved forever.

As he came up to the door of his shed, feeling relief at the thought of darkness and rest, darkness betrayed him. The orchard night seethed with a sudden movement, and a blow fell on his shoulder with such force that his arm froze to its very fingertips. Not just one man, three at least. An arm was drawn back—an arm with a sword. He saw the blade gleaming. In another second…

Protect me,
he cried back into his head, where he could feel the occupant moving. But protection was already there, coming not from the occupant, but from a fourth figure that suddenly wheeled out of the shed. Heriot couldn’t tell what was happening. A ringing clash and the urgent blade was deflected. Movements so quick it was as if a puppet master was flicking his fingers and making his puppets dance. Someone screamed. A second blade slashed down at him, there was a clatter of steel and the blow slid sideways, striking the wall. He was aware of another, immediate blow somewhere to his left—not directed at him this time. One of his attackers screamed and fell. Shivering movement
all around him, as someone slashed at his defender, then something or someone thumped down onto the ground beside him. The sound of limbs thrashing came out of the night, and then a spasming in the orchard grass that had brushed so peacefully against him only moments before.

“That’s three to me,” said Cayley’s voice. “Big ones too. I told you it was important to be quick on your feet.”

A groaning rose from the grass under the trees.

“Why?” Heriot exclaimed furiously. “Why did they attack me?”

“You tell me,” said Cayley. “You’re the Magician.” There was something unexpectedly distracted in his voice.

“Are you hurt?” Heriot asked with sudden anxiety, staring through the shadows at his companion. His expression changed abruptly as Cayley, just as abruptly, stepped back into even deeper darkness.

Heriot did something he almost never did outside of the King’s throne room unless forced. He became a Magician for his own purposes, drawing light from the air around him, for, though it was night, there was always light to be found in darkness—starlight, the glow of lamps and torches seeping down from the tall towers of Guard-on-the-Rock or from the Ring beyond the castle, all reflecting faintly on orchard leaves and boughs. Three men lay between him and his doorway, one still alive and trying to drag himself into the shadows that disappeared as stolen light spread around them.

“Help me,” mumbled the man on the ground, thinking, maybe, that his friends were still alive. But Heriot was staring incredulously at Cayley, who, caught by the
suddenly intrusive light, was hastily gathering his slashed jacket around himself. But as he did so, a piece of the jacket peeled away and fell to the ground. A thin worm of blood snaked across pale skin and softly rounded curves. Cayley looked up and met Heriot’s eyes.

“You’re lucky to be alive,” Heriot said at last. Inside he was filled with a huge confusion, as if the world was remaking itself around him.

“It was close,” Cayley replied. “But it wasn’t luck. Like I said, I’m quick.”

There was a short silence.

“All these years… ,” Heriot began.

“You’ve never caught on, though, have you?” Cayley said, that damaged voice defiant but also filled with a curious, shaken triumph. “Not to what I really am. What I’ve always been. A girl.”

“I’ll talk to you later,” Heriot said after another silent moment. “Right now we’d better get the guard. And a doctor for the hurt one. No doubt he was only doing what he’s been told to do by someone a lot farther up in the world.”

“Or been paid to do,” said Cayley, struggling with her ruined jacket. “You! You’re too kind. It’ll be the death of you.”

They stared at each other across the groaning man.

“Are you… are you hurt?” Heriot asked. “I… I could see enough, but I couldn’t see everything.”

“See it now, then,” said Cayley, and flung the slashed jacket wide. “I took on one, bending away from the others. Then one of them came in again, slashed twice, cut my jacket, but mostly missed me. It’s only a scratch. Because
I’ve learned to be quick, and I’ll keep on learning. No one will ever get me. Not so it counts.”

They stared at each other for a moment more.

“You might have told me,” Heriot said at last, in a low voice. “You didn’t need to be scared of me.”

“Scared of you?” Cayley laughed bitterly. “Everyone has secrets from the rest of the world. You’ve got your secrets and I’ve got mine. And this isn’t my only one either.”

Heriot crossed over and pulled the slashed jacket across her small breasts.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” he asked for the second time.

“Help me,” groaned the man at their feet.

“You’re the Magician. Why didn’t you guess?” she asked, half-mockingly. “You never did, not even that first evening here, when I was sick but wrapping that towel round and round myself. Mind you, I was a lot flatter back then.”

“People out there have had funny things to say about our friendship,” Heriot said at last, “and at times I’ve wondered too. Perhaps I knew, without knowing I knew.”

“I’ve been good at being a man,” Cayley said. “Back when I first came to the city with my mother, we soon caught on it was a dangerous place all over, but more dangerous for a girl than for a boy. So my mother got me boys’ clothes, and I’ve been a boy ever since. And I don’t plan to change, not until… well, I just don’t plan to change. My voice didn’t deepen up like a man’s, but then, having had my throat cut about makes me speak with a mixed voice anyway. At the time it seemed bad luck having someone try to kill me back a bit, but really it was good fortune disguised.”