Wild Magic Read online

  The two K’mir shook their heads as they led the way into the baths. “What happened to the group and the outlaws?” Daine asked as they undressed.

  “The Rider group lost two. The outlaws didn’t make it, but Thayet and the Riders saved the village girls they’d kidnapped.” Buri plunged into the heated pool, and the girl trainees yelped as a wave almost swamped them. Onua and Daine entered more decorously. Buri surfaced and gasped, “Thayet always said it was worth losing the dress.”

  “And the king wasn’t mad?” Daine wanted to know.

  Onua replied, “He just told her next time, try to change clothes.”

  It wasn’t until supper was almost over and the mage had come to the mess hall door that Daine remembered he’d gone off to experiment with Cloud. “Ready for lessons?” he asked, sitting next to her.

  “How was it this afternoon?” she asked.

  “We determined that your range, with Cloud at least, is a mile and a half. It may be more or less than that with animals who haven’t been exposed to you for a prolonged period of time.”

  “You make her sound like a disease,” Evin commented with a laugh. “Are we going to need healers or something?”

  Numair smiled. “No. But Daine, have you found that animals you spend a lot of time with are, well, smarter than others? Smarter in a human sense?”

  She played with her spoon. A friend of Ma’s had said as much, when she had nursed one of his falcons. Some of the local herdsmen had liked her to train their dogs for that reason. “Is it bad?”

  “No, how could it be? It doesn’t make your animals less able to survive in the wild; quite the opposite.” Numair took her food tray and stood. “Come on. We’re going for a walk.” He took her tray to the servants who cleaned up.

  Daine rose with a sigh, tired muscles creaking. Miri winked. “If you don’t want lessons, I’ll take them,” the girl offered. “He’s cute!”

  Daine followed her teacher, shaking her head. Numair was well enough, as men went, but he wasn’t the king.

  The mage steered her out of the barracks and through the horse meadow gate. In silence they crossed the wide swath of green, letting their eyes get accustomed to the night. They had to stop every few feet while Daine greeted the grazing ponies and horses. Each time she patted them and excused herself, saying she would visit with them another time.

  The horses stayed back as the man and the girl went into the forest along a trail. There was just enough light to follow it without stumbling into trees. Here, away from the torches of the palace, the dark-clad mage turned into a large shadow, a slightly ominous one.

  The trail opened onto a grassy clearing. The animals who normally would have been drinking from the large pond in its center had fled on hearing them, but Daine could feel their eyes. Overhead a bat squeaked.

  “Have a seat.” Numair motioned to a rock near the pond. She obeyed a little nervously. He came up behind her to rest his hands on her shoulders. “I’m going to use my Gift, but through you. You must understand that. If I did this with the king or Alanna, they wouldn’t see what you will.”

  “If you say so.” The hair on the back of her neck was standing up, and she was quivering. It wasn’t fear, exactly, because she wasn’t afraid of him. On the other hand, the dark was filled with strange currents that flowed into and out of the presence at her back.

  He put his fingers on her temples. “Now, do just as we do when we’re meditating,” the soft voice over her head commanded. “Slow, deep breath—inhale.” He inhaled with her. “Hold it. Let it go, carefully. Again, in . . . and . . . out . . .” Eyes closed, she breathed at his command.

  Her mind filled with vines of sparkling light wrapped in darkness—or was it the other way around? When the space behind her eyes was full, the magic spilled out of her. She felt it ripple through the clearing, soaking grass and trees. It dripped into the pond, following the water into the ground.

  “Open your eyes.” His whisper seemed to come from inside her head.

  She obeyed. The clearing, so dark before, was veined with shimmering fibers. All that was green by day grew from emerald threads now. Awed, she reached down and plucked a blade of grass. The needle of green fire that formed its spine flared, and went dark.

  She gasped, remorseful. “I didn’t mean to—”

  “Hush,” Numair said quietly. “Look at the earth.”

  A pale bronze mist lay on the piles of dead matter under the trees. When she let the blade of grass fall, its spine turned the same dim bronze as it touched the ground. “It returns to the Goddess,” she whispered.

  The stone beneath her and the other rocks she could see were veined with dark silver. An owl on a nearby branch gleamed with a tracery of copper fire. A vole grubbed beneath a bush near the spring, a point of copper light.

  Daine looked at her hands. They were laced through with strands of reddish light, almost as if her veins had the power to glow. Intertwined with the red were strands of copper fire. She looked at the owl, at the vole, and at her hands—all the same shade of copper.

  Half twisting, she managed to see part of Numair. He too was laced with red fire. In addition a white, pearly glow flickered over his skin like a veil. She recognized the light Tahoi had shown her once.

  “Sit straight,” the mage ordered her quietly. “I have to remain in contact with you to keep the spell going.”

  She obeyed. “I wish I could see this by myself.”

  “You can learn. The vision is in your mind, like the power to heal. Just remember what your magic feels like, and practice reaching for it.”

  “Reaching for it how?”

  Something between them shifted, and she knew she looked into herself. At her center, deep inside, welled a spring of copper fire.

  She called, and a slender thread rose from it to her. She caught it, opened her eyes, and threw it out to the owl.

  “You don’t need the hand motion,” Numair said. “In magic, the thought is the deed.”

  “If you want it bad enough,” she added. “That’s what Ma said.”

  “She was right.”

  The owl glided down through the air. She held out her arm, and it perched, looking her over with solemn eyes. He was a barn owl a little more than a foot tall, with the white ghost-face of his kind and a powerful grip.

  You called to me, night-sister?

  His voice was cold and precise. It was also clearer than the voice of any animal she’d ever spoken to, except Cloud’s.

  “Only to greet you, silent one,” she replied with respect.

  “You don’t need to say it aloud,” Numair commented.

  Daine shook her head. “Can we do this a little bit at a time?” she asked, not looking away from the owl. “Please?”

  She felt him smile. “Whatever you say.”

  The owl ruffled his feathers in disapproval. It is not for the nestling to decide the proper time for lessons, he said, and flew off.

  “I heard that,” Numair remarked. “He’s right. And it’s time to stop.” The ending of the spell felt to Daine as if she were a waterskin and the water was trickling out. She opened her eyes.

  “How do you feel?” he asked.

  She didn’t reply. She felt a tickling in her mind—a feeling similar to the one caused by Stormwings, only faint and far more pleasant—and looked around for its source. It came from the pond. A tiny figure not much bigger than the owl, glittering with scales, was levering itself out of the water.

  Numair saw what she was looking at. He spoke a word Daine couldn’t understand, and the clearing filled with bright light. The little female creature in the pond whistled shrilly and vanished into the water again.

  “Her hair was blue.” Daine said it calmly. She had used up her excitement for the day. “She was all over scales and her hair was blue.”

  “Undine,” Numair whispered. His dark face glowed with awe. “I think we just saw an undine—a water sprite.” He walked over to the pond and knelt beside it. “I’m sorry, l
ittle one. Won’t you come up again?”

  “Maybe if you doused the light,” Daine recommended. She sat back down on her rock. Her knees felt a little weak.

  “Oh—of course.” He said something, and the clearing was dark once more.

  They waited until Daine was half-asleep, but the undine did not return. Finally Numair gave up his vigil and roused the girl. “I’ll have to tell the king,” he said as she stretched. “Or maybe not. She won’t harm anyone. They’re said to be incredibly shy of humans.”

  “I noticed,” she said dryly.

  He produced a globe of light so they could see the trail: they both were tired and needed the help. “To see a water sprite,” he murmured, steering her down the path. “We live in marvelous times, my little magelet.”

  “What’s a magelet?” she asked, and yawned.

  “Nothing, really. Well, ‘little mage.’ Isn’t that what you are?”

  As they left the clearing, Daine saw movement out of the corner of her eye. Another tiny person, a green female, watched them go from the branch of a tall oak. She decided not to mention tree sprites to Numair just now. She wasn’t sure that she liked being called “magelet.”

  The next day passed in the same manner—driving the trainees morning and afternoon—with one difference. As if her time in the undine’s clearing had opened a door in her mind, Daine saw glimpses of copper fire in every furred and feathered creature to come near her. It was very distracting until she got used to it. Most alarming were the flashes at the corner of her eye, the ones that made her turn to look.

  “Why do you keep twitching?” the brunette Selda wanted to know. “You look like you have a palsy.”

  Daine glared at Selda but held her tongue. The older girl was like some people back home, never happy unless she had something to complain about. Still, the comment was enough to make her guard herself so she wouldn’t jump at the hint of copper light. She came to like seeing it. Her only regret was that copper was the only magical glitter she saw—no blue or green threads, no bronze mists and pearly shimmers.

  She had a fresh shock that day: when she saw Onua with the ponies, the same copper color threaded the K’mir’s head and hands.

  “Why so surprised?” Numair asked that night, when Daine told him. They were on their way to the horse meadow once more. “She’s—what’s the K’miri term?—horse-hearted. Did you think Thayet would commission just anyone to obtain mounts? The Riders depend on horses more than any other military company. Onua ensures they have the best.”

  “Does she know?” Daine asked.

  “Of course.” He boosted himself up to sit on the top rail of the fence. “She doesn’t have it enough that she needed training in it, like you. There are a few people here with it: a man and his grandson in the palace mews, two sisters at the kennels, some of the hostlers. Stefan, the chief hostler, has a lot of it. He breeds great-horses—the extra-large mounts many knights need to ride in combat. I trained him.”

  Shaking her head, Daine sat on the rail beside him, looking at the animals grazing in the meadow. “And I only heard of all this two days ago.”

  He tweaked her nose. “Being all of thirteen, of course you should be omniscient,” he teased. “Now, magelet—to work.” He pointed to a pony grazing by itself nearly three hundred yards away. “Call to it.”

  She opened her mouth, and he clapped his hand over it. “ Without sound.”

  She glared at him. “Then how’m I supposed to call her?” she asked, his palm tickling her moving lips.

  “With your mind. One thing I’ve noticed is that you tend to be confused about how you speak to and hear animals. We’re going to break you of the habit of assigning concrete manifestation to magical phenomena.”

  “What?”

  “Believing you actually hear or speak with your body when all of it is done with your mind. Call that pony.”

  “‘That pony’ is a mare. Why can’t I just talk to her?”

  He sighed. “A time may come when being heard will get you killed. Also, your mind needs discipline. If your thinking is more direct, what you can do with your thoughts will happen more directly. Learn to focus your mind: focus creates strength. Meditation helps you reach the same end.

  “We’re doing spring cleaning up here.” He tapped her forehead with a long finger. “Once you put everything into its proper place—once you organize your mind—you’ll be able to find what you want quickly. Now call her, please.”

  Daine clenched her teeth and thought, as loudly as she could, Come here, please! The mare continued to graze peacefully.

  “Think of the magic,” Numair said calmly. “Try again.”

  An hour or so later they gave it up and went inside. Daine’s head ached fiercely, and the pony had not come closer by so much as a step.

  “We’ll keep practicing,” Numair said calmly.

  “Lucky me,” she muttered, following him into her room. A large book lay on her writing table. “What’s this?” She opened it to a colored page and gasped in awe: it was a precise drawing of the bones of a wild pig.

  “It’s a book on mammalian anatomy,” he said, sitting down on her bed.

  “A book on what?”

  He sighed. “I keep forgetting you’re not a scholar—sorry. Anatomy is what’s inside a body: muscles, veins, organs, and so on. ‘Mammalian’ refers to mammals. You know what they are; you just don’t know the fancy term. Warm-blooded animals with hair-covered bodies that suckle their young are mammals.”

  “That’s most of my friends.” She said it quietly, turning page after page of drawings with fingers she had scrubbed on her shirt.

  “Exactly. If you’re to learn healing, you need to understand how animals are put together.”

  “I already know some.” Here was a bear’s skeleton; here the veins and organs of a cat. Every drawing was done with an eye to the finest detail.

  “This book will help you to organize what you know and add to your present knowledge.”

  She made a face. “Why? My friends don’t organize their minds. Everything they think about is all tumbled together, willy-nilly.”

  “For them that’s enough,” he said patiently. “As animals they remember the past only vaguely. They are unable to visualize a future, apart from the change of seasons. They have no comprehension of mortality—of their deaths. They don’t learn from books or teachers, so they have no need to structure their minds in order to find what they learn. You, however, are human and different. If you do not find a way to organize your mind, at worst you might go mad. At best, you’ll be stupid.”

  She made a face—she didn’t like the sound of either fate. With a sigh she looked at the page before her. The artist had drawn a bat, its frame spread so she saw how bones fitted together. “You’d best take this when you go. My friends come in every night. I wouldn’t want it soiled.”

  “The book is spelled against dirt and tearing. It’s yours. I want you to use it, not admire it.”

  It took a moment for her to realize what he’d said. “Mine!” she gasped. “No! It’s—it’s too valuable. The likes of me don’t keep such things!” Her fingers shook, she wanted it so much, but peasant girls didn’t own books.

  He caught her hand, his eyes earnest. “Daine, listen to me.” He pulled her down to sit beside him. “You’re a student mage. You need books like this to do your work. I am your master. It’s my duty—in this case it’s my pleasure—to give you whatever books and scrolls I believe you require to learn. Unless you don’t want to learn?”

  “Odd’s bobs, of course I do!”

  “Good. Then get your book. We’ll start at page one.”

  They ended some time later, when Onua knocked and stuck her head in. “We’re about to meditate. Come on, if you’re coming.”

  “Do we have to?” Daine asked, closing the wonderful book.

  “Spring cleaning,” he replied, getting to his feet.

  She followed him to the Rider mess. She’d been surprised to learn
that meditation was required of all trainees, not just Gifted ones. They worked at it every night before they went to bed, along with all their officers, Daine, and Numair, “whether we need it or not,” Evin commented once, in a whisper.

  That day set the pattern for the next three weeks. It took Daine six days to learn how to deliberately call the nearest pony without using words. Numair then had her summon a pony farther away but still within sight, until she could do that. Next she had to call an animal from inside the barracks or stables, where she couldn’t see it: often that was Tahoi or one of the cats that slept in her room. She worked hard. Each task took less time to master.

  Anatomy lessons she swallowed in gulps. Every spare moment she had went into studying her beloved book and memorizing its contents.

  Meditation was the hardest. She did her best, wanting to control the copper fire that was her kind of wild magic, but clearing her mind was hard. Stray thoughts popped into her head; something would itch; a muscle would cramp, and she would have to start over. Often she fell asleep. The best thing about meditating with the trainees was the knowledge that she wasn’t the only one who was easily distracted or who dozed off.

  Slowly they all grew used to their work. She saw it in the trainees before noticing it in herself, as their bodies hardened and the hard routine became habit. After two weeks she was taken off watching them on foot and put to teaching archery, something even the officers had to work to beat her at. It wasn’t until she saw that few trainees were falling asleep in meditation that she realized she no longer fell asleep, either. With practice it got easier to learn to think of nothing at all. The deep breaths emptied her thoughts and quieted her body rhythms. Her mind learned to drift. She began to feel as she had in the marsh, when she had listened for the hawk.

  Is that what it is? she thought one night, lying awake in bed. She grasped the badger’s claw. “I wish you’d come and tell me,” she whispered, earning a curious look from the pine marten who had arranged herself and her kits on the girl’s blanket-covered legs.

  If the badger heard, he did not answer the summons. “Typical,” Daine told the martens, and went to sleep.