The Skeleth (17 page)

Tom ran his hand along the carven rim. He tried to do justice to the sword he wore, tried to be martial and stern, but failed and wept, his hands across his face. All he could think of was what he was going to tell Katherine about her papa.

Rahilda found him there, knelt in darkness in the grass. “I bless the day you came to us.” She grabbed him around his
skinny shoulders and kissed his forehead. “You are always one of ours, now, forever one of our own. Don't you forget it.”

“I won't.” Tom picked up the box and turned for the hall. When he had lain awake at night, back home in Elverain, he had dreamed of one day being something other than a slave, but he had never dreamed of being a leader, or a hero. He had not dreamed, not even once, of how burdened he would feel once he was free.

“My lord?” He ascended the wooden steps. Two torches sat in sconces within, one close and one far. “My lord, it's me.”

“I am here, Tom.” Tristan sat alone by the cold hearth.

Tom set the sculpted box on the floor by Tristan's feet. He took a torch from the wall and used it to wake the fire. The flickering light cast the tapestries on the walls in warm reverence, two rows of men standing brave and battle-sure.

“Do you like them?” The lines of a smile crinkled around Tristan's eyes. “I always did.”

Tom set the torch back in its sconce. “I wish they were alive, my lord. I wish they were here.” The man in the nearest tapestry wore his hair in long braids beneath a simple pot helm. The weaver had set him ferocious, forever charging forth with hatchet and sword in hand. Beside him stood a pair of blond boys, each carrying a longbow taller than himself. The men in the tapestries looked as though they could do anything, fight anything, conquer all before them. The Ten Men of Elverain, Tristan's old friends and companions, looked down upon Tom from either wall, and he felt like a fool for wearing a sword at his waist.

Tristan broke into Tom's thoughts as though he could hear
them. “Finely made as these are, Tom, they fail to tell the whole of the tale.”

“I don't understand,” said Tom. “Weren't they brave?”

“Brave indeed, brave beyond measure,” said Tristan. “Resourceful, openhearted, live of wit—yet still there is a deception here, the fond myth that shrouds the honorable tomb. You see these men with all accomplished, their lives at an end and their glory secured. The past is a safe country, for there all the chances have already been taken, the hard things already done.”

Tom turned the other way. Across from the twin boys stood a man who seemed to burst the edges of his tapestry. He bestrode the whole of its width, legs akimbo, holding an enormous mattock butt down to the earth.

“Which are you looking at?” said Tristan. “Owain? Thoderic?”

“It looks just like someone from my village,” said Tom. “Katherine's cousin, Martin Upfield.”

“Then that would be his father, Hubert Upfield,” said Tristan. “I have never known a man as worthy of the name
hero
.”

“What does it matter, my lord?” Tom wanted more than anything to hold on to his victory, but it felt like trying to remember a dream. “The Nethergrim is alive, but the men who once fought it are gone. Hubert might have been a hero, but his son is just a farmer.”

“Hubert was a farmer, too, just a four-acre cottar working his little plot of land around your village,” said Tristan. “He hated the whole idea of war—he was the most peaceful man I
have ever known. He learned the arts of battle from need, not from desire. He fought only because he had reason to fight.”

Tom stepped along to the last tapestry on the right side of the wall. The man depicted there was beardless and young, with dark hair that fringed his brow. He clasped the fingers of one hand over the hilt of the sword that hung at his belt, while his other hand held the reins of a horse that peeked in from the edge of the tapestry. The face was a masterwork of the weaver's art, the line of the graceful jaw meeting the chin in a faint cleft, the nose shaded in with expert craft between two large and handsome eyes. Tom found letters stitched at the bottom. He could not read them—he did not need to read them. He knew from the face that the name beneath it read J
OHN.

Tristan held out his scarred and callused hands to the fire. “The tales of my old companions leave out much, perhaps too much. There is no hint woven here of the doubts we felt, the fears, the arguments over what to do. We felt helpless, Tom, many times—and, yes, sometimes we despaired. In any task worth memory there are moments when it seems too hard to accomplish.”

Tom looked across to the tapestry opposite John Marshal's. He had seen the man woven within it before—a middle-sized man with a strong jaw and thick, short hair, faced directly out, one hand tracing a sign of strange power and the other ringed in flame. He did not need to read that name, either, for he knew that it said V
ITHRIC.

The chair by the hearth squeaked back. “And now, hero,
for so I name you, I summon your aid to rid our world of the Skeleth.” Tristan got to his feet. “There will be no rest for you, Tom, no days of ease and triumph, no time to feel the relief you give to others.”

Tom bowed his head. He turned to Tristan, and in doing so bumped the scabbard of his sword against the wall. “But I don't know how to do it. I don't know how I can possibly do what you ask of me.”

“Such is the path of the hero,” said Tristan.

Tom returned to the hearth. He picked up the box and took Tristan's hand to lead him from the hall. “It's not the path I expected to walk.”

Tristan smiled. “That is what John used to say.”

E
dmund did not know how best to sit on ground he could not feel. “I don't like it here.”

“Neither do I.” Ellí hunched with him beneath the Sign of Obscurity, the hem of her long dress draped so that it spilled across his shoes. “But it's the only way for us to safely meet. I am still being watched.” The glittering dust she had thrown into the air drifted slowly down, seeming to crown her with a halo of stars.

Edmund kept his gaze fixed on Ellí's face, dizzied by the churn of light and shade, ecstasy and terror, death and life around him. “Who is it that is watching you?”

Ellí's blue eye glittered cold and bright. “Edmund, there is something I must tell you. Your friend Katherine attacked me in the castle, while I was in the middle of a spell.”

Edmund sat back, then forward again, since the trunk of the walnut tree he had been leaning against no longer seemed to be there. “Katherine attacked you?”

“I don't quite remember how it happened,” said Ellí. “I was deep under the Sign of Communion, and then, all of a sudden, your friend Katherine was knocking me about the room.”

Edmund felt a shiver. “I don't understand.” He blinked up at the pale and lonely sun. The daytime sky around it looked like a place for warmth to rise and die, empty without limit, and for one sickening instant he thought that up was down, and that if he did not seize onto Elli's hand he would fall into it, up and away, falling forever and forever into the blue.

Ellí took Edmund's reaching hand as though she understood exactly why he had flailed out for her. “Edmund, you might as well learn this now.” Her sweet, soft voice seemed to come from everywhere. “Ordinary folk don't really understand people like you and me, and because they don't understand, they suspect the worst of us.”

Edmund shook his head. “But, it's Katherine. She saved my life, under the mountain of the Nethergrim. She's my”—the next word stuck in his throat—“friend. My good friend.”

“Wizards don't get to keep their friends from the world outside.” Ellí gestured outward from the grove where she and Edmund sat, across the open green of Moorvale to the place where Edmund's neighbors stood all in a clump. “Most of us come to find early on that only others of our own kind can truly understand us. It's not simply what we can do, it's what we know. People like us, Edmund, have thought things that people like Katherine will never think. We know things she could never understand.”

Edmund turned to look at the folk on the green, but through the smearing effect of the spell they all looked the same to
him. Indeed, the longer he looked, the less they looked like people at all.

“Everything you learn changes who you are,” said Ellí. “Everything you learn makes some things that you once held to be true seem untrue, and things that once seemed solid feel like the whispers of a fading dream.”

Edmund hesitated, unwilling to say what he thought. “That frightens me.”

Ellí turned a smile upon Edmund that seemed to have nothing in it save for loneliness and loss. “The saddest stories I have ever heard are those of wizards who tried to stay married to some merchant, or noble lady, or the like. It never ends well.”

Edmund reeled, his senses spinning from the warping visions of the spell all around him. “But I know Katherine. We've been friends for years. She would never attack someone for no good reason.”

“I'm sure she simply misunderstood what she saw.” Ellí's smiled turned wry. “Still, I wish she wasn't quite so violent. Does she always think with her fists like that?”

Edmund felt a looming presence behind him and shifted out of the way just in time. He looked up to see his brother, Geoffrey, walking nearby with his bow and quiver of arrows, calling his name, looking all around for him but unable to see that he was right beside him.

“This is our sorrow, Edmund, this is our burden.” Ellí shifted closer to Edmund to give Geoffrey a clear path to pass on by. “To help them, we must become unlike them. To save them, we must become something that they will not trust. Every time I cast this spell, I see that truth more clearly. That is
its cost, by the way. This spell shows me how different I am from other people.”

A sick, strange feeling ran through Edmund. He saw his little brother and knew who he was, knew the face he had been looking at for as long as he could remember, but at the same time he saw a stranger, just a snub-nosed, freckled kid wandering at the edge of the woods. Geoffrey called his name again, then passed by toward the green, and he felt for a moment as though he could watch him walk on out of sight and not care one bit if he ever saw him again.

“I am sorry.” Ellí drew her long hair behind her ears. “Not everyone with the talent for magic keeps on the path. There are many reasons to leave it. Are you and Katherine . . . very good friends?”

Edmund sighed. “Not as good as I wanted us to be.” He turned to Ellí. “Do you get lonely?”

“Sometimes.” Ellí picked up Edmund's wax tablet, on which he had recorded what he had found in the tomb under Wishing Hill. “But what we do is worth doing, don't you think?”

Edmund felt as though the sun were growing warmer again. “We're fighting to keep the world safe from harm.” He looked to Ellí. “Even if people don't understand or like us, it's still right to help them.”

Ellí's smile lost its tinge of sorrow. “When I think about it like that, I feel less lonely.”

“So do I,” said Edmund. “And at least folk like you and me can understand each other.”

“As no one else could.” Ellí set the tablet in her lap. She read
what was written there, and brightened. “Edmund, this is wonderful! This is it—the spell that stopped the Skeleth all those centuries ago. You've set it all down here as clear as day.”

Edmund felt a glow spreading out from within.

“The Sign of Perception, yes, yes, of course.” Ellí traced her finger on the tablet. “The Pillar of Inversion, the Sign of Closing . . . yes. Edmund, it's perfect.”

“Something about it still bothers me, though.” Edmund dug the brooch from his sack. “I found this on the dead queen in the tomb. See those words around the rim?”

Ellí read the words inscribed upon the brooch. “I am the weapon that wounds the wielder. I am the defense that is no defense at all. I am triumph in surrender. I am that which, by being given, is gained.”

She flipped the brooch over and read the back. “For my beloved sister.” She stared at it awhile, then shook her head. “No, that's nonsense, just some
Ahidhan
claptrap.” She put it back in Edmund's hands.

Edmund felt across the brooch with his finger. “If it didn't matter, then why was it there?”

“Edmund, you have come far with magic on your own, but now you should learn something of its nature,” said Ellí. “What we call magic is divided into three paths,
Dhrakal
,
Eredh
, and
Ahidhan
.”

Edmund raised his eyebrows. “There are different kinds of magic?”

“Three kinds,” said Ellí. “Three paths of magic, each one founded by one of three sister queens—but you must
understand, Edmund, that the three paths are not equal. As my teacher used to say: one path is true, one is false, and the third path is useless.”

Edmund leaned closer. Such was his excitement at his first proper lesson, that even the dizzying visions of Ellí's spell fell away beneath his notice.

“The first path is the one we walk,” said Ellí. “That path is called
Dhrakal
in the old Dhanic tongue, and it is the one that not only allows its students to see into the true nature of the world, but gives them the power to alter its rules to suit their desires. That is what ordinary folk mean when they say we cast a spell. We can do it because we understand the laws that govern the world, the first and most important being the Law of Balance.”

“Everything has a cost.” Edmund leapt ahead of Ellí's words, trying to show that he knew at least a little. “You can have what you want, but you must always pay for it.”

Ellí nodded. “Yes, very good. You have already met the founder of
Dhrakal
, in a manner of speaking. In fact, you are the first person to see her in centuries.”

Edmund felt a thrill. “The queen under the tower!”

“The tower you found was called the Tower of the Queen of the Wheels, and as you might guess, the Wheels are the five Wheels of magic—Substance, Essence, Thought, Change and Form.” The dust had descended far enough that it now glittered all about Ellí's shoulders. “So it is written, that queen preserved the truest and most powerful of the ancient arts, and when a wizard today casts a spell, he follows down the road she made.”

“Then what about the other two?” said Edmund. “The
Paelandabok
talks about three kings and three queens.”

“The other two founded the other paths, the false one and the useless one,” said Ellí. “The false one is called
Eredh
. They are seers, stargazers and makers of pacts, those who say they can pronounce the doom of fate. That was the queen who made the great mistake, the queen who brought the Skeleth into the world to serve her husband, King Childeric, in his war. If that's not proof that their way is false and dangerous, I don't know what is.”

Edmund looked down at the brooch in his lap. “You said this had to do with
Ahidhan
, the third path.”

“The useless one,” said Ellí. “We true wizards understand that everything is in balance, that light needs darkness, that order and chaos are two sides of a single coin. The followers of the third path, the witches of
Ahidhan
, believe that there are things for which there is no cost, changes you can make without paying for them.”

“What sort of things?”

Ellí shrugged. “I don't know, since I've never met one. My teacher says that all they do is go around pouring smelly potions down the throats of sick people, and nursing sheep, and things like that. She says that they're deluded and their magic is useless, and that the sick people were either going to get well or die on their own.”

Edmund read the riddle once again.
I am that which, by being given, is gained.
A meaning teased his mind, then danced away uncaught.

“Come, then.” Ellí nudged him. “When you asked me to
teach you, I doubt you only wanted lessons on history and theory.”

Edmund looked up at Ellí. “What do you mean?”

“I mean that I would like to teach you a real spell.” Ellí set down the tablet between them, turning it facedown. “That's what you want, isn't it?”

Edmund clasped his hands and had to resist rubbing them together. “Yes!”

“Good. I'm going to teach you how to do what I did to you out on the moors,” said Ellí. “I'm going to show you how we wizards defend ourselves against people who raise weapons against us.”