Wild Magic (39 page)

The woman removed her hand slowly. When she lifted her eyes to Selen’s face once more, the Istrian woman was shocked to see that where before they had been the cool green of precious jade, now they were dark and shimmering. No tears fell, but somehow that very absence spoke a greater emotion than mere sorrow.

‘I must have your child.’

Selen’s heart thudded once, heavily. What could she mean? Into the long silence that followed this statement, and her own failure to respond, there came a rustle of fabric and then the tall figure moved into her view. As it turned towards her, the hood fell away from its head. Selen gasped. It was indeed a woman who towered over her, not an ordinary woman, but one so tall she had to crane her neck to make contact with her appalling single eye. A chill crept over her, for the gaze of that eye was unbearably intent. And then her heart began to hammer at twice its normal rate; her knees gave way and she began to fall.

Lightning-fast, the pale woman came out of her chair. The tall woman swept forward to throw an arm around her waist. Between them, they caught Selen and transferred her to the Queen’s vacant chair.

‘Do not be afraid,’ the single-eyed woman said. ‘We wish no harm to you or to your child. Quite the opposite. We have a very special bargain to make with you, one from which you both will prosper.’

And then, with the Queen of the Northern Isles, oddly titled the Rose of the World, seated at her feet like a common slave, Selen Issian listened to all the seither had to say of the bargain they might make.

It was almost dawn before Erno Hamson regained anything approaching his proper wits and managed to stagger into a nearby hostelry, croak out his need for a bed to the surly boy left in charge of the now-quiet bar, and crash into more natural oblivion on a flea-infested straw pallet in the back room. He had no memory of how he had come to be lying face down on the cold cobbles of Halbo Dock with the snow settling on his cloak and the foul water of a muddy puddle soaking into his one and only pair of boots; no memory of where the other crew members of the
Ice Bear
might be; no recollection at all of a girl once called Selen Issian.

But as he slept he saw a face – laughing eyes, hair flying in the ocean winds, hair which at first seemed black, but in some lights might be red – and he hugged himself tight and felt comforted.

Just before dawn, a tall, hooded figure emerged from the Queen’s chamber and, armed with information gleaned from the careful scrying she had just carried out, took herself off to the Enemy’s Leg – a tavern of dubious reputation down near the docks. There, as she had foreseen, the crew of the vessel on which the pregnant southern woman who called herself Leta Gullwing had arrived, were arrayed in all their drunken glory: snoring like old mutts in a pile on the floor amongst discarded tankards and flagons and boots and sea-bags.

She moved amongst each of them, touching one briefly on a shoulder, another on the head. She tarried for a few seconds with her hand on the cheek of a large woman with rings in her ears and a storm of ferociously braided yellow hair who lay with her head pillowed on the stomach of a small round man blowing air noisily in and out of his mouth, and her face softened for a moment. Could she heal the pain she saw within that outwardly tough and fearsome skull? Should she? She lifted her hand with some reluctance. The pain was what made this woman the fighter she was; it was not her place to change this warrior’s character. As a seither, her bond with the world was to do no harm; unless it were forced upon her.

Nor could she effect total loss of memory of the pregnant woman: she could but haze and confuse. Some would recall they had travelled here with another; but be unable, for some time at least, to remember whether that person had been male or female, let alone a woman from the Southern Empire who bore a growing child.

In the nights that followed, she would work her way through the occupants of Halbo Keep, intimating to each man and woman as they lay wrapped in sleep that the Queen was looking remarkably well in her pregnancy, her skin glowing and her body softly swelling these past couple of months – longer than that she dared not suggest, since the royal ravens had but recently made their separate flights carrying the portentous news that the King’s wife was with child. Illusion would have to suffice where the appearance of gravity was concerned; and she would need to train her mistress in the channelling of her own powers over her husband’s perception of her as they lay together naked in the royal bed. It would not be so hard: it was clear even to one to whom sexual obsession was the most alien of sensations that Ravn Asharson saw his wife through many veils of fantasy and self-deception. And men who wished for something as hard as he wished for this child were yet more susceptible to the easy suggestion of such magics: it would not be so difficult.

What was more difficult was that the Lady Auda – well aware of the nature of the visitor she had called forth – had barred her door so effectively that Festrin could not enter her chamber while she slept; not even a seither’s spells could break through good oak and iron, or the tangle of repellent herbs the old woman had in her panic strewn across the threshold. Well: let her rant and rail and declare the Queen a charlatan: no one would listen to an embittered crone who so obviously loathed her son’s choice of wife, an ex-queen unceremoniously dethroned by a pale nomad whore.

And as to the matter of the child? What good could come of an enforced coupling, the seed extruded in such terrible circumstances by such an evil man? Yet, it was not the child’s fault. It might yet grow straight and true, brought into the world in the northern court, which while rough and unsophisticated, and filled with a disparate company of folk, was not the worst place in the world; even a world which seemed poised on the brink of war.

None but she need know the truth of it: that the child thus apparently engendered could never be the product of the marriage of the Eyran king and his nomad bride; not just because of the true nature of its parentage, but because nothing tangible could ever come of the union between any man and the woman who currently presented herself as the northern queen. For it was not a union of equals, in any sense at all: for as cats and dogs, rats and whales; yeka and dragons could not interbreed, neither could any man get a child upon a creature so rare, exotic and remote as the Rosa Eldi.

She wondered when the Rose of the World would recover her true self, regain her memories, bitter though they must surely be, and come back fully into the world.

And she shivered to think what would happen when she did.

Night lay soft around the Eternal City. The generous stone of Jetra’s thick walls absorbed light and warmth and held them fast, cradling its occupants against the chill of the darkness, muffling all sound, gentling breathing, lulling the senses. It seemed to swallow the shuffle of his footsteps as he slipped through the silent corridors, feeling like a fugitive. Turning yet another corner in the labyrinth of passageways, he felt disoriented, misplaced, as if he might at any moment step through a doorway and find himself in another era entirely; which might be a blessing, given his current circumstances. Even time seemed held in abeyance in Jetra: it was perhaps, Virelai thought, another reason for the city’s ancient title; that and its endurance, against all the odds, surviving the tides of war that had washed endlessly back and forth across this vast plain.

He took a set of worn stone stairs that wound down towards flickering darkness and suddenly found himself at a thick wooden door girded with ironwork. Through its vast, empty keyhole, he could sense the outside world at night beckoning him. The door opened with barely a creak. There were no guards posted at it, for the call to war had taken every military man who could march or ride north to the muster outside Cera, or fanning outwards to the separate provinces, there to recruit and train others in the skills that would doubtless be required in the days to come. Which largely, Virelai considered sourly, would consist of being able to swim the Northern Ocean, given the rather crucial lack of seaworthy ships available to an invasion force set upon storming Eyra. It was not that Istria’s leaders were entirely unaware of this setback, but rather that they appeared to have moved a stage beyond the lack already, reassured as they were by the Lord of Forent’s assertion that a fleet would be constructed in no time. So the warlords who would advise the vanguard on their strategy cheerfully gave themselves up to the formation of elaborate plans for the siege of Halbo rather than addressing the problem of how they might actually reach Ravn’s capital city, from which they were separated by several hundred miles of turbulent ocean.

Virelai knew what would be coming next: he had witnessed his two masters discussing it when they had thought him otherwise engaged. They had forgotten about the seeing-stone, of course; and there was no reason for them to suspect that little by little he had mastered the art of reading a man’s moving lips. Initially, panic had overwhelmed him. What did he, Virelai, escaped mage’s apprentice and one-time hawker of fake maps, know about the construction of ships? Absolutely nothing: it was a northern art, not something he had learned at his master’s knee; and while he had no idea where in Elda Rahe hailed from, it was most certainly not from the Northern Isles where the art of shipmaking had its home. The tiny sloop in which he had escaped Sanctuary had leaked and wallowed its way across the ocean: he had held it together with much magic and an abundance of sheer good luck; and none of the grimoires he had liberated from the Master’s library even mentioned the word ‘ship’, let alone gave the least clue as to how one might be spirited into being. The shipwright to whom the task should rightly have fallen was dead; his successor mysteriously vanished, and there was no template to work from, either, ever since the blasted sell-swords had stolen the one good Eyran vessel Rui Finco had bought for the purpose at such great expense. Virelai had seen this ship in the stone one night, as he saw so many things, sailing ever farther northwards, manned by a motley crew of mercenaries, deserters and no-hopers. And the girl. The pretty dark one with the radiant eyes and growing curves. Tycho Issian’s lost daughter; found once more, but by him alone, for that was also something he’d kept to himself.

But it was not his fear at the likely consequences of failure at the immense task that awaited him which drove him out into the night; but something altogether more pressing and personal.

He was being forced, quite literally, to save his own skin.

As the light from the torch he carried played across the splayed fingers of the hand that pushed open the postern gate, he saw again with barely-contained panic the way the skin there was greying and shedding, sloughing away like sunburn or a snake’s seasonal casting. Except that beneath the dead stuff was not vibrant new skin but yet more of the old; and that dull and flaky and crumbling to the touch. He had tried every spell he knew, and several he didn’t – workings he had sought in the grimoires he had stolen from the Master, and in all the old parchments and scrolls he had secretly perused in Jetra’s great library: to no avail. Even when the cat was being cooperative (which was increasingly seldom: now that it sensed his waning strength it seemed bent on shifting the balance of power between them into its own favour) nothing seemed to stem the decay – if decay it was. What frightened him was not merely the horror of this physical dissolution that threatened to undo him, but that it might herald the leading edge of Rahe’s curse and that the screaming demons the Master had promised would attend him would surely descend at any moment.

Only one person he knew could make the sort of scrying that might detect their presence; only one might conceivably be able to treat his sloughing skin; and only one would do it for him out of friendship; for he had no money: Tycho had made sure of that – it was yet another means of binding Virelai all the more tightly to his service.

Alisha.

It had been a shock to see her in the stone again; and this time she had not seen him, occupied as she was with Falo and some cut the lad had sustained on their journey. When he realised that the rose-red walls he could see rising in the background to the scene he viewed were those of Jetra’s great keep, his heart had lifted for the first time in months. And so it was that as night wrapped itself securely around the Eternal City he stole furtively into the stables, saddled one of the loathed animals within and urged it out, spurred on by the knowledge that he had barely four hours in which to find Alisha, reveal his distressed and distressing condition to her and return as swiftly and as secretly as he had come.

The nomad camp he had seen in the crystal lay some miles beyond the bounds of Jetra’s walls and was well camouflaged against casual scrutiny by a stand of osiers and goat-willows by a curve in the river.

There was no fire burning: nothing at all to mark their position, but he found the curve in the river he had seen with an almost preternatural sense of these things. And without falling off his mount once, a fact in which he took some small pride. A few hundred yards away from the group of quietly cropping yeka and the dark wagons, he tethered the horse to an alder and made his way into the encampment on foot. The caravan with which he had travelled to the Allfair was sadly diminished. Where before there had been twenty and more wagons, now there were but four. The nomads must have divided for their own safety, he supposed, having viewed so many scenes of terrible persecution in the crystal. There seemed to be no safe haven any longer for the Footloose in this world. And by the very action of seeking out this group, he placed them in danger. But he had no choice.

The wagon in which he and the scryer had spent many a lazy afternoon was not among those gathered here; but he recognised the smallclothes set to dry on the line attached at one end to the branch of a goat-willow and at the other to the handle of the door of a more traditional-looking wagon with an elaborate stars-and-moon design painted on the door. He was sure this was the vehicle once occupied by Fezack Starsinger; but the smallclothes – edged in Galian lace and structured to promise sumptuous flesh beneath – were most certainly not those of that ancient, wizened woman . . .