The Windrose Chronicles 3 - Dog Wizard (13 page)

“Well,” Antryg replied mildly, “I know what it cost me.” But he reached down with great gentleness to straighten the shabby old plaid shawl the Archmage had about her shoulders.

Rosamund struck his hand aside. Antryg sat back, startled at the contained fury of the blow—her ladyship met his eyes for a moment, then looked away. “I'm sorry,” she said in a stifled tone. “I shouldn't have done that. But she ... ” She paused, looking down at the old lady dozing in the sun. “She has been ill a great deal of late.” Her voice turned quiet, tender, and a little sad. “She is very old, over a hundred. She shouldn't have to be dealing with this. If she were anyone but the Archmage—if she were anywhere but this Citadel—she would have died at the turning of the granny-winter, when I brought her here from Angelshand.”

“When you decided to come after me.”

The long, dark lashes lifted, unveiling emerald eyes that challenged him to debate what she had done. “It was not the only reason for our experiments, and I think you know it,” she said. “In a way, we hoped to circumvent this situation by gaining knowledge of the Void ourselves.” She reached down to draw up Aunt Min's shawl herself, and as she did so, she spoke without heat, or violence, or rage in her rose-petal voice. “She overtaxes her body, thinking it can bear the strain of her magic as it could when she was forty. She will not believe that battling your mind for dominance, or struggling with the wild magic of the Void, will do her harm. Believe me, Antryg,” she added quietly, “if this does kill her, I swear to you that when she dies, and the Master-Spells pass to me, I will hold you responsible.”

Antryg was silent, wrapping his aching hands in the trailing ends of his shawl. Though there was a certain division of opinion in the High Council as to whether the Lady Rosamund or Daurannon the Handsome would inherit the Master-Spells, Antryg himself had no doubt that they would pass to the woman now seated beside him. His mind and body still ached from the geas—he felt as if his flesh should bear the marks of it: slashes, bruises, burns. But the force that had left his mind a shredded ruin had been actuated, he realized, by no malice. Aunt Min had only done what she conceived needed to be done for the good of all concerned.

And Min, he had been aware even as the darkness had sliced and lacerated him to let the others in, had been trying quite sincerely to hurt him as little as possible.

Under ordinary circumstances he knew his own powers to be greater than Lady Rosamund's and guessed—though he was not entirely sure—them to be greater than Aunt Min's would have been, had she not been what she was. But the Master-Spells that descended from Archmage to Archmage were not precisely a matter of strength. Few wizards truly knew what they were a matter of.

In any case, he knew that if he were still under the Council's geas—or for that matter anywhere within the Citadel—when Aunt Min died, he probably wouldn't like what would happen next.

“You love her a great deal,” he said gently, and she looked up at him with a chilling bitterness in her sea-colored glance.

“I would love her,” Rosamund said, “even were she not as good to me, as kind, as caring as ... I would say 'as a mother' but in my case that would be a jest in exceptionally poor taste.” She glanced aside, her face averted from him now and still as marble. “Perhaps I should say, as caring as the mother I dreamed about when I was doing stitchery with my fingers shaking from hunger because I'd been clumsy with my silks or talked impertinently to the music master and had been sent to bed without supper the night before. The mother I dreamed about when I was being trained to sit straight in my corsets for hours on end doing nothing, because the daughters of earls must learn to be idle gracefully; listening to my mother and her friends gossiping in the drawing room. Though I don't know why I call them 'friends.' They would betray one another's most intimate confidences the moment they thought they could amuse a superior by them.”

Her chin lifted, her red lips set as if they were vermilion porcelain rather than flesh. The absinthe-tinted eyes stared out past him—past the tiny sandstone court spread out below them, visible beyond the roofs of the North Cloister and its hall, past the dark sweep of the forest, black and pewter and broken by rusty patches of bog, that stretched out before them to the milky ice of the horizon. In them Antryg could see the reflection of a young girl, stately and beautiful as a child queen, and cold within with a grief like frozen tears and mercury.

“I hated it,” she whispered. “I used to sneak away and meet her by the kitchen door—she sold herbs to our cook. Even then she was very old, just a tiny old lady like a little black sparrow, always fumbling with her knitting. Later I would steal my maid's dress and climb out the window to meet her at night, to learn. One of the first spells she ever taught me was a sleep-spell, because the maid shared the room with me—a lady is never alone, never. And she ... ”

She looked down at the old lady dozing in the sun with her knitting lax under knotted little hands.

“I was a fledgling hawk in a gilt cage, with nothing but a linnet's seeds and fruit to eat. She fed me on my true food through the bars of my prison until I was strong enough to wrest open its doors.”

The green gaze flicked back to him, present again and angry, as much at what she had just told him as at anything to do with Aunt Min. “You didn't need to fight her as you did.”

Something gray and swift flashed along the wall to their right; turning, Antryg saw that it was the cat Fysshe, followed closely by Paddywinkle and Issay's big red tabby Rufus. At the same moment a sudden, snarling shriek came from the courtyard below. Looking over the edge of the wall, he could see Imp, Lady Rosamund's huge black tom, bristling in furious challenge at Spooky Bob, the tailless charcoal tabby whose usual haunt was the kitchens. Haifa dozen of the other Citadel cats—Otaro's geriatric calico Lady Dyna, Bentick's Silver, four more of Issay's, and several belonging to various Juniors-were prowling uneasily around the edges of the skirmish, hissing at one another and occasionally scurrying away, but never going more than a few feet. Spooky Bob, no hero, turned what tail he had and bolted but came up short as if at a barrier; turning back, he yowled furiously with an air of trapped desperation.

“What on earth ... ?” Lady Rosamund had risen to her feet, was looking down into the court, her brow a darkening storm of anger. More cats were arriving all the time. A couple of novices in their meal-colored robes had emerged from under the arcade of the North Cloister, and a gust of nervous laughter rose on the bright air.

“If it's one of the Juniors causing this I'll flay him!” Rosamund turned on her heel and strode off for the perilous little stair that led to the Cloister, and so to the court, like a gust of dark wind.

Antryg remained where he was, pulling the sloppy rainbow of his shawl more closely around his shoulders and watching the ragged mill of feline bafflement in the court below. Automatically, his eye traced the line from the stained marble turret of the Rotunda, just visible beyond the roof of the North Hall, out to a small chapel in the foot of one of the drum towers on the other side of the courtyard with its skirmishing knot of cats. Though the silver-gray trunks of the pines hid it, he knew precisely where an arrow-straight alignment of standing-stones lay in the forest, stumpy and eroded as broken teeth and stretching for miles out of the forest and on into infinity over the steppe.

“Eh, the poor things.” Fingers like the claws of a chicken closed around his own.

Antryg glanced down at the top of that white-crowned skull, at the level of his knee, feathers of wind fraying its wisps of hair. “The Citadel's stood for nearly a thousand years,” he remarked quietly. “Quite apart from spells the Juniors concoct for fun, there's a lot of very old magic locked in its stones, and not all of it was made by those who eschewed meddling in human affairs.”

“And they brought grief down upon us all,” creaked the old woman's voice. “And will again. Nyellin did spells with cats.” She named an Archmage dead six hundred years, a woman rumored to have been addicted to taking cat-form herself. “And Feldchibbe used to call up demons out of the echoes made when he'd strike a silver ball. Did Rosie bring my posset? A honey posset ... my old bones ache ... ”

“I'll fetch it.” Down in the court the novices had scattered like terrified sparrows. Lady Rosamund was standing amid the cats, dispersing the spells that had summoned and kept them, releasing the nervous and frightened animals back to their accustomed ways. A gust of wind swirled the black skirts of her robe, made a velvet cloud of her witch black hair. The anger that enveloped her at whoever would do such a thing to defenseless animals was nearly as palpable and certainly as dark—a shadow guarding lightning.

Antryg shivered.

“Did you sleep well?” Aunt Min shifted her position a little, tugged his hand as he would have risen to go rattling off down the steps to the kitchens.

“Not very.”

She made a little noise with what few teeth she had left, as if he'd been a novice who'd botched a simple illusion, and stretched out her hand. After a moment he slipped from sitting on the wall to kneeling before her, as he had in the Council chamber, so that her crippled fingers could brush back the graying curls from his temples.

“Old sorrow and old pain,” she clucked. “Like the spells that fill this place, clinging to the teles-balls, clinging to the Vaults, clinging to every stone and kitchen pot. Why do the mageborn always grow up in pain? Why can they never let it go?”

Antryg thought about Lady Rosamund Kentacre, practicing the gentle arts of ladylike deportment and gossip; about his own nightmares; about the golden fifteen-year-old dancing girl they still sang songs about, nearly a century later, in the streets of Angelshand, never knowing what had become of her.

“Perhaps because it can never let them go?”

But at her touch he felt the bleeding grip of last night's horrors ease.

“A flower sleeps in the earth,” she said, “and dreams of color and sun. But when it blooms, the earth leaves no stain upon it. Maybe you only need to sleep a little longer in the City of Dreams.”

She shook her head again and sighed. “Those things in the Vaults.” She spoke as if the horror Nandiharrow had killed with lightning had been no more than a mouse that had slipped through the spells woven about the Citadel to keep it free of such vermin. “Sad little things, and no more to be blamed than the poor pussies. You really have to do something about it.”

And putting her head down, she fell promptly back to sleep.

“And what will you do,” Seldes Katne asked, out of sheer force of habit straightening the edges of the piles of books Antryg was sorting, “if Aunt Min does die?”

“Run like hell, I suppose.” He glanced at the spine of a crumbling grimoire in the hard slice of butter-colored afternoon sunlight, set it in the largest heap. “Turn this one over to Nandiharrow's team—it has some mention of early wizardry in it, but I don't know how much bearing it would have on the current powers at large in the Vaults. The problem is that though she couldn't track me by scrying-crystal—geas or not, I am still mageborn—Rosamund knows I wouldn't go far as long as Joanna is a prisoner here.”

The librarian glanced quickly at him across the heaped library table and started to speak, then stopped herself and changed what she was going to say to “You think the Master-Spells will fall to Lady Rosamund, then, and not Daurannon? I know Aunt Min favors the Lady.”

It was a few moments before Antryg replied. To look at Salteris' books—to help Seldes Katne sort the former Archmage's water-stained miscellany of demonaries, catalogs, thaumaturgical cookbooks, and experimental notes from sorcerers long forgotten for anything containing reference to ancient magics in the Vaults—brought a yearning ache to his heart, a memory that was both hurt and joy. It had been less than a year altogether since he'd realized that Salteris was no longer alive in any real sense of the word, and less than six months since he had strangled the thing that was left of him.

He had taught himself to speak casually of the old man, when speak of him he must, only by thinking of him as someone who was still alive somewhere, someone he would one day see again—scarcely different from all those years imprisoned in the Silent Tower.

“It isn't a matter of favor, precisely,” he said at last. “Nor is it invariably the strongest to whom they pass. Or perhaps it is, by some definition of strength other than the one we use. And of course, once the Master-Spells do pass to the new Archmage, the question of strength becomes largely academic.”

“But it's always someone on the Council,” Seldes Katne pointed out doubtfully.

“Well, I think that works backwards,” Antryg said, flipping open a sheaf of notes—yellow and brittle as last year's fallen leaves—in Salteris' elegant hand and identifying the spells they glossed. “They usually fall to someone within a certain range of strength, and Council membership merely assures that those with that strength will continue the policies of the former Archmage. And they do seem to fall to whoever is most appropriate, though the Archmage doesn't will them to a successor. It's more accurate to say that to the Archmage, at least, the successor is obvious. And speaking of me skulking 'round the woods whilst Joanna is locked up in a tower here ... ”

“Quite.” Seldes Katne carefully shifted a crumbling old tome on ophidiomancy to the sideboard behind her, to be sent down to the Juniors in the scriptorium for copying. “As you asked, I checked all the attics above here, and the subcellars below my quarters, though I really don't think anyone could be holding a prisoner there any more than they could hold someone in the Conservatory. They're just too close to my quarters for anyone to come or go unheard.”

She turned back to him, wiping the dust from her hands and studying the stacks of books still on the table.

Every inch of wall space not pierced by windows in the great library chamber was already covered in an uneven crazy quilt of cabinets built on top of cabinets and shelves of all lengths of sizes, from the floor to the lower side of the gallery that circled the room at the height of twelve feet, and then again, above the gallery, up nearly to the curve of the ceiling. At some time in the distant past the three turrets that opened off the gallery had been used for study rooms, where novices could engage in their endless task of memorizing lists, laws, and songs—the work of every novice's first five years. Now they, too, were jammed with books, and the novices studied in their own—or one another's—chambers.