A Taste of Magic Read online

  “Your fault, Eri.”

  My fault. Yes, I believed her in this, too.

  I tried to center myself. I could not change what had happened to the Village Nar … but I could make something right by fulfilling my bloadoath and making Lord Purvis share the fate of Lady Ewaren and the others.

  I shivered and searched for a way to make myself feel whole, though I knew that was impossible now. What was possible was getting Alysen into the hands of the Nanoo.

  I so wanted to be rid of this girl and her hurtful words!

  “Alysen, we cannot, either of us, wander at will from the other … like you did in the woods of the tangling vines. You have to stay with me if you want to stay safe. You’ve proven to me that Nanoo Gafna found you a willing and able student. Doubtless you have many talents you’ve not displayed, spells you’ve not shown me. But…”

  She smiled, and I saw no pleasant line of lip in it.

  I so wanted to hand her over to the Nanoo this very instant.

  “Talents and other spells. Perhaps, Eri.” Alysen leaned back against one of the stone pillars. “Very well. I’ll not run off again.” She had a hand against the red-stained stone on each side of her body. “Favor me this much, Moonson. Favor me and stand you so also against the pillar behind you.”

  I hesitated, trying to read her expression. “I am no Moonson. I try to live by the principles Bastien taught me. I embrace honor and do my best to live righteously. But I am no Moonson.”

  My tongue tip tasted the air. I caught no hint of evil or deception from her, just anger and loss. I wondered if I was a lackwit for doing what she asked.

  “You say you are not a Moonson because only men born into wealthy homes can enter the knightly order?”

  I didn’t answer her.

  There came a flow of wind down from the rock face. It was a chill breeze that felt welcoming after the fire Alysen had conjured. It wrapped pleasantly around me and brought a sense of autumn to this place of Fire Stones. The rich spiral notes that made up a bride song of a varle sounded. And just for a moment—a very quick moment—I saw color enwrapping Alysen. It was a swirling circle of color, purple and green, then shifting to pale blue and shimmering orange. As I watched, it turned sun-yellow, then gray. A moment more and it had changed to the maroon of her skirt. Her clothes softened as I watched, like they were old and most of the dye had been sucked out of them. The colors seeped into the rock behind her, causing the stone to flare with an unnatural beauty.

  It was a ward of some sort, nothing I could have performed. Alysen was far deeper into the wyse and its ways than I. The ward enclosed me now, taking the color from my clothes, but not whirling about me as the colors had her. I slipped down the rock and settled cross-legged at its foot, my hands resting on my knees. A part of me said I should not permit this. Putting a ward on someone without their consent oversteps propriety. But another part was curious, and that part believed I could rise and walk away at any moment.

  Perhaps I’d become so beaten down by everything that had happened that I was too tired to argue with her.

  Lord Purvis and his men had gone to the Village Nar for me. Did they still look? Had I become the quarry just like the curl-horns had been mine?

  An unusual restlessness settled in my heart. I could not go back to the Village Nar, not just because of the men who pursued me, but also because that part of my life was over. In my mind I saw the bloodied corpse of Lady Ewaren and smelled the death of the villagers. I tasted grief and hate, both of those emotions now coming from me.

  By the Green Ones! The feelings of grief welled and churned and worked to weaken me. I stretched a hand up to touch the tear-shaped moss agate stones of my necklace, then dropped the hand back to my knees, my eyes welling with tears.

  Through the haze of colors I saw Alysen settling at the foot of her own pillar.

  “The Emperor is dead.” Alysen’s words were stiff. She’d repeated that phrase so many times to me. Her eyes were fixed on the trail behind, the one we’d followed to come to this place of Fire Stones.

  “My father is dead, too, Alysen. So you say.”

  If she heard me or saw me, I couldn’t tell. Perhaps this unknown ward she’d cast had drained her … she’d used so much wyse-power on this rock plateau that she likely had no energy left. I continued, slowly, giving weight to every word I spoke.

  “Alysen, if my father was murdered, then poison was the weapon. Perhaps the murderer had a talent—there are as many black-hearted users of the wyse as there are white-. And there are enchantments beyond the wyse, not as powerful, but certainly useful. My father could have been struck dumb, unable to call out a warning. There are poisons that take your voice.”

  When I was very, very young, my father had begun schooling me in poisons and how to taste for them merely by setting my tongue near the substance. Then he was gone to the Emperor and Empress, and my mother had schooled me in other things—cooking and sewing, tasks I was ill-suited for. I again studied poison with Bastien. But these were of the woods—vines and ivy, snake venom—things one encountered in nature, not found laced into food by enemies.

  “He was poisoned, wasn’t he, Alysen?”

  She didn’t answer for the longest time, still looking toward where we’d come. I opened my mouth to repeat the question, and she held up a hand.

  “I saw him die, Eri. Do you know why I looked in on him with my scry magic? Oh, I visited a lot of places through a muddy puddle, but most often the capital city. Everything there is so beautiful. The ladies in clothes made of silk and lace, hair in spiraling curls and a red tint to their cheeks. Fine food on tables in fancy inns. Places I’d dreamed of being and can never go because I am of the House of Geer.”

  “Why did you look in on my father, Alysen?”

  “Because you had one. Because I heard you mention him at dinner one night. Because I didn’t have an earthly father and was curious what he might be doing in the fine, fancy city to the south. A handsome man, your father. I wish I hadn’t seen him die.” A pause: “Poison, maybe. I did not see him eat or drink, I’d not been looking in on him long. I saw men in his doorway, the man now I know as Lord Purvis, one of them. I saw him stumble and clutch his chest. And I saw him die.”

  I didn’t stop the tears. I let them spill over my cheeks and into my mouth. So salty and sad, they tasted. I let my breath come ragged like I was a babe who’d fallen and scraped her knee.

  Alysen looked puzzled. “You spent years away from him, Eri. Why grieve for a man who was your father only in name?”

  “Because he was my father.” No sisters, cousins, at least that I knew of. And my brother was long gone, away in some army. Did my brother know of our father’s death? Was my brother safe because there was no magic about him?

  “My father.” I knew my father loved me in his way, I saw it in his eyes when I visited him at his sickbed. Oh, why hadn’t I stayed longer on that trip? What pressing thing awaited in the Village Nar that I had to return? Why had I thrown away the letter he’d written?

  “There is no heir to the throne.” Alysen deftly changed the subject. “The Empress has no child, and she is at the far edge of an age that would let her have a child. A distant relative will be named to succeed her, I’d guess, in the event something untoward happened to her. Perhaps the border nobles will start courting her, hoping to wed her and father the next Emperor while she still might be fertile.” Alysen was looking at me now, though her eyes seemed distant. “What do you think will happen, Eri?”

  I shrugged and studied Alysen. A child, her head danced with adult concerns. She was too mature for her age, and yet too immature to suit me. “Alysen, I’ve never cared for royalty and their trappings.”

  “Like the Nanoo.”

  “Like Bastien.”

  “I don’t think the Empress will consider courtship. Not now. The Emperor out of the way, I think she’ll go after the Southern Border Lords and work to expand her country rather than her family—though I could be wrong
. She has no heir. The Emperor always opposed a war, and so did the Dawn Priests. But the Southern Border Lords might look to their boundaries now.”

  “A war? Already the land is scarred … by something. Game animals are getting scarce. The land doesn’t need a war.” Again I pictured the dead Village Nar. “There doesn’t need to be more killing.”

  The starlight softened, and I looked up. A thin layer of clouds drifted across, blotting out the larger constellations. In the silence that filled the minutes between Alysen and me, more clouds appeared, these thicker and darker, dropping down to nearly touch the stone rise and blotting out the sight of the stars altogether.

  15

  I tasted the air, closing my eyes and calling on my wyse-sense to tell me what the wind knew. Brimstone came at me first, followed again by the stench of burned flesh, Grazti’s. I smelled the gentleness of the fell pony and the pleasure of Crust at having rolled in grass and drunk deeply of cool water. The cob was purely happy, not having any idea how close he’d been to danger if the grass had caught fire, and not understanding what had happened with Dazon or with Grazti. Horses are such simple animals. I found myself drinking in the cob’s joy—I so desperately needed something to lift me from this melancholy.

  I rose, scraping my cloak against the pillar behind me. Alysen sat still, eyes closed and lost in thought. I stretched and rolled my shoulders, forced out thoughts of the Village Nar and my dead father, and tasted deeper of Crust’s rapture.

  My heart finally lighter, I tasted for other things. I picked up the stone that stretched away under my feet and rose in pillars all around me. It was different stone from the cliff face that reached high and touched the low-hanging clouds. The stone spoke of ancient fires and liquid rock, when in ages past this land had been volcanic and when a mountain—the cliff all that remained of it—often had painted the ground with molten lava. The pillars were shaped by magic, by witches from an old time, I guessed. And whatever significance the pillars had to their rituals or wards was long lost.

  I tasted a river deep beneath the ground, thick and slow, and rising with the land and spilling out a crevice in the cliff and satisfying Crust and the fell. I sensed that it had not always flowed below the earth, but that some great upheaval had changed the land. I had not sought these bits of knowledge, but sometimes when I tasted the air it gave me all manner of impressions.

  Longer I tasted and found more water, heavy in the air and heavier in the clouds above. My tongue told me rain was coming soon, and that it would not be a gentle one. I felt the energy in the sky, and it told me a storm was stoking. Harsh weather was more certain a thing than speculations concerning the Empress and the Border Lords to the far, far south.

  We needed shelter. There was no roof or creviced wall here; the pillars stood apart and did not promise cover—not against a storm, in any event. I continued to study the clouds, hearing a distant rumble that signaled it was already raining to the west.

  The darkness hid much of what lay farther north. I was sure we were far enough north—though it hadn’t been of our own volition—to be safe from Lord Purvis and his men. I needed Alysen away from me. Then I wouldn’t worry about being safe. I would worry only about fulfilling my bloodoath.

  I swung around the pillar and strode toward the horses. Crust had been rolling again, but he stood as I approached, nostrils quivering and ears pricked forward. I knew that he was sensing the coming storm, too—animals could sense such things without the need of magic. I stopped at the collection of saddles and packs, and I whistled for Crust.

  The cob kept staring at the clouds, nostrils wide. I whistled again, and she looked to me, answering my call with a long whinny and running toward me, thudding hooves hitting hard against the ground. She trotted a little to my right and then picked her way in a circle to reach me. I put the saddle on her, cinched it, and added two packs to the back of it. Then I whistled for the fell pony, Spring Mist. She came immediately, and I saddled her and put Alysen’s packs on her back.

  I looked back to the stone pillars and cliff face. All around the dark was deepening and the shadows were inky black. Lightning flickered overhead. Again and again, thin and light, looking delicate, though heralding something that would be fierce.

  “Alysen, we need to leave! We must find shelter.”

  She still sat against the pillar, too far away for me to see if she had her eyes closed.

  “Alysen! Listen to me!”

  She raised her arms above her head, gripping the pillar and inching up it. Then she looked to me and pointed at the cliff face, where the slender waterfall came down.

  “You want shelter, Eri? There’s a cave in there. I would’ve thought your wyse-sense would have shown it to you.”

  I edged my tongue out beyond my teeth and found the wyse magic again, this time focusing only on the cliff and finding the cave Alysen had mentioned. I cursed myself for not searching further, when I found the underground river. Inside the cave that stretched behind the narrow waterfall, I felt a dampness … but it wasn’t wet. The river flowed through the stone, above the roof of the cave. It would accommodate the horses, too.

  I took their reins and led them now.

  I didn’t wait for Alysen. I went straight to the waterfall, stopping only when I needed to coax Spring Mist and Crust through the water … and that took some doing. It was blackest black inside, the water that cascaded over the opening a ribbon of silver-gray. Alysen joined us just as thunder rocked the ground.

  I heard the snap of lightning, then thunder again.

  She stood just inside the opening, cloak wrapped around her, so still she could have passed for a statue. I saw her outline only because she stood next to the ribbon of water. Thrusting the nickering of the horses to the back of my mind, I stretched out my arm and tentatively touched her shoulder.

  She shivered, still staring at the ribbon of water. She shivered again when lightning snapped and thunder boomed.

  The brash child—daughter of a god, she claimed—trembled in fright. Her hands fell limply to her sides, and she spoke in the strange singsong voice she had earlier.

  “I am Alysen, true daughter of Lady Magen of the House of Geer and one of the Green Ones. I have not given myself to the Nine Circles of the world, and yet I have true sight and straight thought. Without giving any man Liege Oath, no city or country, I am strong in the wyse.”

  Moisture gathered in her eyes and spilled over to make runnels down her scratched and dusty cheeks. She raised a hand to smear the tears and dust together.

  “I am no power-worker.” I spoke a little louder than I’d intended. I wanted to give weight to my words and to be heard above the waterfall and the rain that had started pattering against the rocky plateau outside. “I am Yulen t’Kyros, and we do not stand in Kyros, for that was taken by floods in another season. Nor are we anywhere near the House of Geer or the Village Nar or the Nanoo’s fen. We are near-lost, Alysen. And it is well more than all right for you to act like a child. You are but a child, Alysen.”

  I didn’t have to look in her face to know her eyes were glazed with fear. “Not near-lost, Eri, completely lost. Grazti ordered us this way and that way.”

  “Ever north, though.”

  She nodded.

  “So near-lost, but if we travel south, until we find something familiar…”

  “We’ll eventually find the Nanoo.” Her voice was raised at the end, as if in a question. “I didn’t know that Grazti was a loathsome thing. If only I’d thought to taste for evil … or if you’d thought to do so.”

  “Enemies are often hidden things, Alysen.” I dropped my hand from her shoulder and let my fingers dance across the rock behind me. It was moist from the waterfall, and soothing.

  “Not to you, Moonson. Your enemies are Lord Purvis and his men. They—”

  “I tell you again, Alysen, I am not a Moonson. Bastien was a Moonson, and I was trained by him. But—”

  “He called you Moonson, though perhaps not to your fa
ce. I heard him tell Lady Ewaren you were as much a Moonson as the knights in the great city to the south.”

  “But I am not noble-born.”

  “No.”

  “And only noble-born men are knights.”

  “And only knights can be Moonsons.”

  “Yes, Alysen.”

  “I understand, Moonson.”

  I let out a deep breath. “Then understand this, Alysen. Since I have enemies, I will find allies.” Though I would call on no ally to help me fulfill my bloodoath.

  “The Nanoo are your allies.”

  “And we will find them, Alysen, since we are—”

  “—not completely lost,” she finished for me.

  I felt her smile through the darkness.

  The storm intensified, the rain drumming hard and the thunder playing havoc. If the sky had a mood this night, it was anger. Roused and fighting mad. Thunder roared and rumbled its arguments to the ground. Water poured down steadily, harshly rat-a-tat-tatting against the stone, so harshly it sounded like hail. Everything so loud, we couldn’t sleep until the night stretched toward morning.

  We slept soundly then, in those early hours, even Spring Mist and Crust. The rain continued, softer now, restful and sonorous and rhythmic. For the first time in the past few days I’d found something to be thankful for—nature’s lullaby and bones so tired that they didn’t protest the cave floor for a bed.

  The rain ended when the first rays of the morning sent the ribbon of waterfall to shimmering bright silver. I passed through it, slowly, unbuckling my weapon belt, loosening the lacing of the hide jerkin, and slipped it off. The coarse linen of my shirt followed, then I pulled off my boots. I let the waterfall rush over me, taking off the dust and the worst of the memories of the previous days. But it couldn’t wash away all the heartaches.

  Soon, I stood naked between the stone pillars, my clothes spread out on the rocky plateau to dry. The air was a little cool, but I didn’t mind it. I looked to the north, where a faint double rainbow arced across a cloudless sky.