Wild Magic (2 page)

At the Gathering, King Ravn is bored – bored with shrouded southern women whose beauty he cannot assess, bored with the machinations of the northern lords, all manoeuvring for their advancement – until he too is captured by the power of the Rosa Eldi. Forsaking all others, he claims her as his bride.

The Gathering is already in turmoil as the Allfair Guards burst in with a captive: Katla Aransen – mistaken for a man with her hair cut all rough and short – is accused of murdering Selen Issian’s slavegirl and stabbing Tanto Vingo. Even when the error of her gender is resolved, there remains the matter of her climbing the Rock. The northerners claim it to be Sur’s Castle, but the Istrians insist it is sacred ground to the Goddess. There are calls for a burning: the traditional Istrian punishment for sacrilege. The Moonfell Plain is neutral ground; but Lord Rui Finco, a southern lord bearing more than passing resemblance to the northern king, quietly points out that the Rock was ceded to Istria in an agreement made by Ravn’s father, the Shadow Wolf himself, Ashar Stenson. Katla will be burned, according to Istrian law.

Fights break out across the fairground. The nomads, who have seen omens of bloodshed and a return of their own persecution, flee the plain. Amidst the chaos, the northern king is abducted, revealing a plot by a number of Istrian lords to gain control of the northern fleet and thus the ocean ways, which will render them great power and wealth. But the plot is foiled and Ravn Asharson flees with his bride, leaving Katla Aransen to burn and his countrymen in fierce and furious conflict with the Istrians.

Tied to a pyre, flames all around her, it seems nothing can save Katla. But young Saro Vingo, following a mystical encounter with the Rosa Eldi, wades into the fire to set her free, the moodstone he carries killing all in his path. Katla’s kin take her to safety; but even when the crisis has passed, cries for war fill the air.

Meanwhile, Erno Hamson has done as Katla told him – rowed away with Selen Issian: his heart is broken, and she is now a refugee who can never return to her home. Tanto Vingo, his wound poisoned, is saved only by drastic surgery. Tycho Issian, obsessed by the loss of the woman who has enslaved his soul, devotes all his efforts to fanning the flames of war: under the pretence of rescuing his daughter from her barbarian abductors and liberating all the women of Eyra from the sacrilegious lives their menfolk have forced them to lead, he calls for the south to carry fire and sword to the Northern Isles until they have laid it waste (and he can claim the Rosa Eldi for himself). He has the sorcerer, Virelai, and his magical cat to aid his cause; as well as Lord Rui Finco and his conspirators, for whom war with Eyra would suit many of their purposes.

Katla Aransen, carried unconscious from the Moonfell Plain, recovers slowly at home in Rockfall; disfigured and damaged by the fire, her precious right hand fused into a clublike lump of scar tissue. She fears she will never climb another cliff, never forge another blade. Disconsolate, she wanders the island, trying to avoid doing household tasks. At Winterfest the mummers, under the charismatic leadership of Tam Fox, arrive; and with them comes a
seither
, one of the mysterious ancient folk who have but a single eye, which sees more than mortals’ two. The
seither
sees in Katla an adept, a channeller of earth-magic. To Katla, despite her great skill with rock and metal, this comes as a shock. The healer lays hands upon her and together they begin to work on Katla’s burned arm; but this act is tragically misinterpreted by Katla’s twin brother Fent, who attacks the
seither
, running her through with the Red Sword, Katla’s finest blade. Appalled, Katla attempts to turn her newfound abilities to the aid of the
seither
, but strength fails her and she feels herself ebbing away into the darkness, a darkness in which a distant and infinitely powerful voice calls to her . . .

Prologue

The Rose of the World hovered over her sleeping husband and the ends of her pale hair grazed his cheek. Wrapped in the strangest of dreams after his night’s exertions, King Ravn Asharson – known, confidingly, by the women of Eyra and, enviously, by the men, as ‘the Stallion of the North’ – stirred briefly as those silky fibres brushed him, his eyelashes fluttering like the lift of a crow’s wings.

The Rosa Eldi smiled. It was an expression she had been practising each day in the privacy of these chambers, with the aid of one of her husband’s many gifts to her – a mirror of polished silver, glass and mercury, bought from traders from the Galian Isles: a miraculous thing in itself; but all the more so to the Rose of the World, who had never seen her own face, except as a reflection in the eyes of enraptured men.

They told her she was beautiful and rare, the most perfect of women: but she had no means to judge if they meant what they said: she had spent all of the life that she could recall cloistered away in Sanctuary, that remote icy stronghold, whose only inhabitants had been a black cat, Bëte, the mage, Rahe; and Virelai, the Master’s apprentice. Rahe had told her she was beautiful over and again: but since he had also given her to believe that he had created her in an image most pleasing to his own eyes, it seemed a subjective judgement.

Then, when Virelai had stolen her away and they had travelled out into the world she had had the opportunity to assess for herself the concepts of beauty and perfection; but in the beginning the assault on her starved senses had been so overwhelming that she had found everything – from the commonest dungfly to the mightiest tree – beautiful and perfect as and of itself. And yet, at the same time, everything she saw had seemed oddly familiar to her, as if the images that had populated her dreams had suddenly slipped from her head to swarm around her in all their myriad forms and colours.

But people were the most disconcerting. She had no idea of how to react to them; and so usually she said nothing and just drank in their images to recall later in the darkness of the wagon in which she, the cat and the apprentice lived while they travelled; but what struck her repeatedly was how women recoiled from her, smiling with their mouths, but rarely with their eyes, as if they mistook her silent gaze for insolence, or a threat. Men, on the other hand, appeared to fall in love with her in an instant and become so helplessly enraptured that they wanted to have congress with her there and then, no matter how inappropriate the time, place or circumstances. The women did not like that, either. It seemed that in the making of her, the Master had invested her with sufficient magic to seduce every man on Elda (though that had clearly not been his intention, which was surely to keep her to himself alone) and from what she now understood about such matters, it seemed that Virelai had understood her power early in their journey and had made himself a considerable sum of money from these men and their use of her as they travelled across the world.

She felt her smile fade at these memories: felt it by the release of the muscles in her face. Turning, she reached over and retrieved the mirror from its place on the tapestried settle beside the bed, and tilted the pretty artefact until the first rays of the dawn’s light were caught between its sheeny plate and her pale, pale skin. The silver gave back to her an oval face as white as milk, except where her husband’s beard had during the night rasped her chin and cheek and brought a faint pink flush to the surface, and a pair of green eyes, more sea-green than leaf-green. Ravn called them ‘mermaid’s eyes’ and laughingly insisted on checking her feet each morning for signs of her secret nightly excursions: for fronds of seaweed, he said; for seahorses, flippers or scales! She had no idea what he meant by this, and had solemnly told him so, which surprised him much, for surely everyone knew the tales of the selkies of the Northern Isles, who borrowed human form to seduce unwary sailors and fishermen, and then slipped into their fishy skins at night and returned to their ocean homeland, leaving their lovers mazed and heartbroken? She smiled again into the mirror and watched her lips curve up into a pale pink bow, saw how her cheeks rounded and the skin around her eyes creased. She relaxed the expression and stared mercilessly at her changed image in the reflective surface. In this strong morning light she was able to spy out the vaguest of lines running from the sides of her nose to the corners of her mouth, fanning outward from her eyes. She had not thought she knew how to smile, or make any other such expression; but these faint marks told another story.

The Master had always treated her as a thing rather than any sort of person, a solace and pastime for his pleasure alone in the chilly, empty world of Sanctuary, and until this time she had never questioned her place in that world: but now a new thought came to her.

In some lost past, she must have smiled and frowned and pursed her lips enough times to have etched these small lines into her skin.

In some lost past, therefore, she must have had another life.

Feelings that she could put no name to welled up in her. She dropped the mirror to her lap, barely registering its cold touch on her naked skin. Beside her, her husband stirred briefly, eyelids flickering, then he stilled and slipped back into deep sleep. She reached out and brushed a frond of his black hair away from his brow, and felt herself calmed by the sheer simplicity of the act.
Such a man of many parts
, she thought, taking in the conjunction of the weatherbeaten skin of his face and neck with the vulnerable whiteness of his chest and belly; at the dark hands and forearms flung wide upon the linen sheet which contrasted with legs so pale they were like limbs belonging to another man. Only the curling black hair that grew everywhere upon him knit the whole together, blurred the seams, confused the edges.

Leaning towards him, she laid the mirror now on its side before his sleeping face and watched as his breath bloomed on the cold metal. The bloom faded and died, then was restored with each new passage of warm air. Then she wiped the mirror on the sheet and breathed on it herself.

Nothing.

The metal remained pristine, unblemished.

‘For all your reputation, there is no heat in you,’ she remembered the Master saying to her. Then, under the binding of his magic, it had been as much as she could do to concentrate on the sound his words made; it was only now, away from his influence, that she began to see what he might have meant by this, yet no matter how many times she tried the test, the result was still the same and she still had no better understanding of who she was or where she had come from. It was a mystery that was coming to obsess her, to drive her mind ceaselessly through every hour of the day and night.

All she knew was that she had owned no knowledge, no identity or volition while she lived with the Master. It was as if his sorcery had smothered them as a wet cloak might smother flames before a fire could catch hold. All she had known in her years in Sanctuary was how to arouse Rahe’s ardour and slake his lusts: other than this, she had drifted as in a dream. It was only after she had left the island that she had felt any sense of herself return. But even after several months of travelling amongst the fantastic people and places of Elda, she had still been quiescent, content to drift in Virelai’s wake; content to do what he asked of her with the men he brought to the wagon. Content, that is, until he had tried to sell her to a southern lord – a man whose touch had made her skin creep, made her shudder with a revulsion she could neither name nor comprehend except to know with a deep, primal instinct that he was full of death and she wanted no part of him.

The fact that she was here, now, in the royal chambers of Halbo Castle was all her own doing, and she felt some satisfaction in that. When she had escaped Virelai on the night of the Gathering, she had not known her own intention. To remove herself from the grasp of the deathly southern lord meant putting an ocean between them; and a ship bound for the north required the protection of an Eyran captain; but when she laid eyes upon Ravn Asharson the future came into clear focus. Assessing him at a glance as a powerful man, a man who could defend her against all comers, she knew at once that his soul cried out for the exotic; and so she had stepped into his orbit and drawn his eyes to her.

In her short experience of the world beyond Sanctuary she had learned that women used whatever wiles they possessed to attract men to them, and that the conquest of a king would be regarded by most as a triumph, not an undertaking to be entered into lightly or by a woman of no breeding or heritage. But for the Rosa Eldi, this was no game of statesmanship, no play for status: it was a gambit made simply for survival, and so she had exerted the full force of her seductive magic upon him; he was utterly, inextricably bewitched.

What she had not bargained for were the odd sensations he drew forth from her. These sensations, which she learned to term ‘feelings’, started with a vague tenderness toward a man so vulnerable her mere glance could bring him to his knees; then had grown into something altogether more demanding of their connection in the weeks of the voyage back to the northern capital and his careful introduction of her into the great castle he called his home. Now it had become something she could only think of as a slow fire burning deep inside her, so that instead of abandoning him as soon as the ship docked in Eyra as she had planned, she now experienced an almost physical pain every time he left her side.

This pain was made all the worse by the fact that she knew she had wrought a powerful enchantment upon Ravn: she could not be sure that, without it, he would feel anything for her at all. And since she had thrown this veil of bewitchment over him, it was impossible to know his true character. It was like viewing an island through fogs: she sensed, beneath the miasma of the magic, something adamantine in him, something uncompromising and elemental; something that might challenge and thrill her into a greater understanding of love, of life, of the world and her place in it. But he moved and talked as if in a daze when he was with her; and when he was away, she knew nothing of him.

It would, she pondered, leaning closer to trace the chiselled line of his mouth with the tip of her finger, be curious to withdraw the glamour and see just who this man she had chosen to ally herself to might truly be. But she did not yet dare to do it.