:COME here,: a gentle voice whispered into the minds of the students studying in their dorms and the library. :Come here,: it requested, so reasonably, so faintly that mages and students felt only a sudden slight tug, an impulse to go to the lake. :Come here,: it crooned into the souls of mages and hedge-wizards scattered throughout Mage-Ariss.
Several University mages looked up from their work, frowned as their concentration was interrupted by a sensation as slight as the whine of a stingfly heard from another room—and then, when the passing strangeness that caught their attention did not recur, turned back to their work. A few students went so far as to look out their windows toward the darkening sheet of water over which the sun set.
The pretty girl who ran the Aelere District herbal supply shop on Five Round Way put down her mortar and pestle and herbs when she heard the call. The fertility decoction she was making for the wealthy young wife of the district banker would wait. She looked at her bondmate, and with a puzzled expression, kissed him. "I'm going out for a little while," she said. "If the baby wakes up, I have some nut-milk already prepared. That will keep him happy until I get back."
Her mate looked at her, surprised. "Where are you going?"
Her expression became troubled, and she averted her eyes. "I don't have something I need," she told him. She knew it was an evasion, but still, it felt like the truth when she said it.
He nodded, not liking the look in her eyes, but not knowing what to say to keep her from going.
Out on the Sookanje periphery, in the little blue cottage beside the Woolcloth Makkenhaus, the neighborhood's new hedge-wizard wrapped her divining cards in the middle of a reading and told her client, "I'm sorry, but something has just happened in the spirit realm that requires my attention. Will you be able to come back—" she looked on her filesheet and made a notation, "about sixth bell tomorrow?"
The client nodded, bewildered. "Well, I suppose so. But couldn't you just tell me now about the man in my future—" She discovered herself talking to an empty room. The pretty young card reader was gone. "Well, I never—" the older woman muttered. Then she shrugged. The ways of the magical folk were frequently beyond explanation. Quietly, she left, locking the door behind her.
A child three weeks away from her adult initiation heard the call, quit floating objects around her room (a newly acquired talent she had not yet announced to her parents, since they were hoping she would take an apprenticeship in the weaver's makkenhaus, and since they had often spoken badly of the city's mages), and slipped out of her bedroom window. She ran through the city streets in her nightrobe.
A delicate ebony-skinned house-bruja, out tending her plants in the darkness, put down her watercan and followed the rich unspoken promises of the voice without a word to the family and friends who sat laughing and chatting in her house.
And walking from the wingmount stables to an appointment with a friend in the senior students' dorm, one apprentice heard the call, and felt it more clearly than any of the rest of her classmates. To her, it was a soft tickle at the back of her neck, a sudden rush of excitement, the promise of something—well, wonderful—waiting just over there. :Come here,: she felt—and having lacked much of anything wonderful in her life for a very long time, she complied. To the voice that beckoned to her soul, Amelenda Tringdotte responded by turning off of the path and drifting across the quad toward the woods surrounding the Kie Lake with a boneless, liquid gait. Her student robe flowed around her ankles, her hair lifted and danced around her face. She looked very young and very beautiful—but only Flynn, the cat with hands, was out on that part of the grounds to notice, and because Flynn was deeply involved in paying court to a round-eyed, jet-black queen, he paid her little attention. No one else noticed her at all her.
So when Ame entered the woods, she did so unremarked.
"Well, this is the room."
Yaji elbowed past Faia and shoved one of fifty identical doors on the long, narrow stone hall open and stomped in. Faia followed behind her in time to see Yaji flick her fingers in the air to set lamps all around the room blazing with cool white light. When she looked startled, the other girl smirked.
"Ghostlights," Yaji said. She didn't need to add dimskull to her curt remark. Her tone implied it.
It had been an exhausting day, and Faia felt drained. Medwind Song had grabbed her following midden for a whirlwind tour of the campus, a flurry of introductions, a mountain of paperwork, and then dropped her off in the tender care of her new roommate.
The new roommate was visibly unhappy with the news. The girls in the other room of the bath house had been right. Faia sensed impending trouble.
Medwind had not been willing to listen to any arguments when she went about confirming the rooming assignment for the two young women. Yaji had attempted to bargain a trade, Faia for any other student—an action that left Faia feeling very much like a wormy sheep at market—and when Yaji discovered Medwind was unshakable, accepted her fate with sour humor. And Faia had found herself toted along in the other student's wake as if she were carrion three days dead.
What she had hoped for more than anything was just to be able to drop into bed to sleep without any conversation.
That, obviously, was not to be.
Her new room bore heavy marks of its other occupant. All the walls were covered with papers, parchments, diagrams, and fancy scripts in brightly colored inks; the desks and the "spare" bed were equally inundated by beakers and athames, books, ledgers, odd jewelry, scrying balls and mirrors, candles, chalk, ink and jars of exotic ingredients. Projects in all stages of completion (except, Faia noted, for completion itself) littered the floor, the chairs, and the tops of every article in the room that didn't move. The doors of both of the room's wardrobes were open, displaying overflows of Yaji's brilliantly colored finery. A bell lute lay on Yaji's unmade bed.
Underneath the mess, it was a large, agreeable room. Pale wood paneling over one of the stone walls added warmth, and the desks and beds and wardrobes of the same pale wood were well made, and fancier than any Faia had ever used. The single window was glazed with tiny diamonds of pale rose glass, and was flung open to reveal, in the last shadowed stretches of daylight, a wooded park and the leading edge of the lake that lay across the grounds. There were two pentacles painted side by side on the floor, properly oriented with their leading apexes aimed north. Yes, she decided, it was a very nice room.
Still, Faia had never seen such an abundance of junk in her life. Tactlessly, she admitted as much.
"Do you never clean in here?"
"This is organized the way I want it. I like to have my work spread out and undisturbed."
Faia nodded. "Well, I like to sleep lying down, and unless you move this stuff, I will not be able to." She looked closer at the equipment that littered her bed. "Some of these things of yours are a waste."
Yaji glared at Faia. "Oh, really? You know so much about magic, do you?"
"I know what works. A bowl of water serves as well as one of those pretty crystal globes for scrying, and you can change the water's ingredients to suit your purpose. There is nothing wrong with dried herbs if you cannot get fresh—but this time of year, fresh can be had, and cheaper, too. And what in the Lady's Name do you intend to do with a jar full of butterfly wings?"
"It's a spell I'm developing myself. For beauty."
Faia snorted. "You misuse the Lady's creatures for your own vanity, and you will find the price high indeed."
Faia started shoveling Yaji's things without ceremony into a heap in the middle of the floor.
"Wait a minute!" Yaji yelled. "I didn't tell you you could move my things!"
"No, you did not. And I did not ask." Faia continued excavating through the mess in search of the bed.
"But that's all mine!" Yaji wailed.
"You are welcome to help move it."
Faia was not in the mood for any more of Yaji and was not, she thought, going to be able to tolerate any more of anything this day. She found the covers on the bed, pulled them back, then stripped to the skin.
"What are you doing?" Yaji asked.
"Going to bed."
"It's almost time for nonce, and afterward, evening studies. You can't go to sleep now. And you can't intend to leave all my belongings on the floor."
Faia crawled between the covers and pulled them over her. "Good night, Yaji."
"Look, you, I have an entire set of lessons I have to do tonight," Yaji mewled, "and I'm in no temper to work them while crawling over and around some slumbering giant."
"Pity. Then work them elsewhere."
Faia closed her eyes and feigned sleep. Yaji's voice nattered on, but the words drifted by without ever connecting. And soon, Faia wasn't feigning at all.
Nightmares crawled through Daane University that night—crept from student to student, slithered from instructor to assistant, until they touched, briefly, every single soul. They were weak and tentative nightmares, new-hatched dragonlets hesitantly breathing flames for the first time. But like new-hatched dragonlets, they held the promise of becoming much bigger.
The first tentative ray of sunlight fell through the rose-tinted window directly on Faia's face. She woke, pushing away the last clinging shreds of an unrecallable bad dream, and thought the sunlight and the breaking day pleasant—until her eye caught her new roommate, dressed in an obnoxiously frilly pink cloud of a nightgown, sprawled on the other bed.
Yecch. Here I am, then, and there she is, and things could only get worse from this point.
Faia rose and pulled her tunic over her head. She crept to the window.
Outside, it was beautiful. The endless rains were gone, and the sky had cleared, and promised sunshine. The lake that began on the other side of the campus greensward beckoned invitingly. In the still morning air, its surface reflected the silhouettes of the ancient, gnarled trees that dipped to its edge, and the horsetail whites of cirrus clouds high overhead. Boulders, worn smooth and round by near-eternities of passing time, stretched along the shore like a line of lizards crawling out of the shadows to sun themselves. Little blue hovies skimmed and dipped and circled in the pink dawn, chasing insects.
I'm sure I'm not supposed to wander around here without telling someone what I'm doing—but I don't care. Let the rest of the world find me if it can, Faia thought. I'm going to go see that lake.
The deed was as simple as the idea. Faia tugged on the rest of her clothes and her boots, shoved her rede-flute into her pocket, and sneaked out the door.
At the water's edge, she pulled off boots and socks and dropped them on the first boulder she passed, and stepped barefoot into the lake. She laughed as slippery, chilly clay mud oozed between her toes.
Faia reveled in the crisp bite of the morning air and the startling heat of the just-risen sun on her cheeks. It was glorious to wander, free of watching eyes and whispers and stupid curiosity and stupider bigotry. She squelched along the muddy lake edge until she was out of sight of the dorm and the tower. The tiny splashes of her steps stirred up clouds of clear-winged dew-flies; each misstep on the moss-covered rocks that alternated with the mud underfoot sent minnows and crayfish careening in front of her, disturbed by her passage.
Ahead, one huge flat rock cut far into the water; she had seen the point of it from the dorm window, but had not imagined how much more of it there was. To Faia, the rock looked like it had once intended to make itself into a bridge, before it had wearied of the task and quit partway. She clambered up on it, wary of snakes, and crawled along its length. From that vantage point, she could see that the lake was longer than it appeared from shore. It curved back on itself, and extended northeast into a wilderness of huge trees and tangled thickets—in the midst of giant metropolitan Ariss, that dark and secluded piece of forest sent a chill shiver down Faia's spine. For an instant, she felt terribly isolated, and imagined herself the prey of some great, deadly beast.
Then the feelings were gone, and she laughed at herself. The "wilderness" could cover no more than a few hundred square estas. Her sudden flight of fancy had to be nothing more than her sensing the incongruity of an untended stand of trees in the midst of a city manicured to within a fingers' breadth of hysteria.
She relaxed and enjoyed the solitude. There was no one visible. Not on the lake, not in the woods—nowhere. The noises of the city were still audible, but Faia found she could block them out. She concentrated on the tiny susurration of water against the rock, and the chirp of birds, and the lazy drone of insects.
Sunlight warmed the boulder and slanted across her exposed face. She rolled over to lay on her back, and pulled out the rede-flute. Closing her eyes against the glare, she put the flute to her lips and tried a few notes. They carried softly across the water, and picked up echoes from backwaters of the lake.
She played the "Shepherd's Lullaby"—slow, measured, soothing—and then worked variations on it, liking the harmonies of the echoes the water reflected back to her.
The ball of pain she had carried around inside of herself since Bright shifted, and slightly loosened its grip. She sat up, realizing that she felt good. She wished she could make the feeling last. She centered herself, and brought up the circle of earth-energy, and let it move from the rock through her and back into the rock. She changed her music, into the intricate instrumental for "Lady Send the Sunshine." She sang the words in her mind as she played.
On the Wheel of
Life I ride,
Circle round from
Birth to death.
Choose my spoke and
Live my life,
Glad for times of sunshine.
Lady shears and
Lady cards;
Lady spins and
Lady dyes.
Lady weaves our
Lives to cloth and
Lady sends the sunshine.
For the moment
I rejoice,
Whatever the
Moment brings.
Cry for sorrow,
Laugh for joy for—
Sometimes I have sunshine.
Lady shears and
Lady cards;
Lady spins and
Lady dyes.
Lady weaves our
Lives to cloth and
Lady sends the sunshine.
I have known the
Pain of birth;
I will know the
Pain of death.
Days between are
Mine to cherish—
Storm and snow and sunshine.
Lady shears and
Lady cards;
Lady spins and
Lady dyes.
Lady weaves our
Lives to cloth and
Lady sends the sunshine.
When she concluded the music, she sat motionless, eyes closed, letting the energy she'd built flow through her.
I am where I need to be, she told herself. And I can be miserable here, or contented—but I cannot go back to Bright, and I have nowhere else. So I might as well be happy.
And indeed, she felt happy. Or, if not exactly happy, then free at last of the dark burden of Bright's annihilation.
The sound of bells drifted across the water—deep, rich peals that signaled this first major event of the campus day. As those bells rang, others from across the city began to clamor, too.
As Medwind Song had explained to her the day before, this was the signal of rising time. In the dorm, the rest of the students would be opening their eyes, dragging out of their beds, and readying themselves for antis, and then for morning classes. Faia sighed. The bells meant that in a few more minutes, she would have to leave her tranquil hideaway. She would have to go back and face yesterday's mocking students and yesterday's displeased instructors and the unknown and terrifying ordeals of classes.
So it is, so it must be. When the next bells rang, she would go back. Until then, she had no intention of leaving her protected circle.
She played the rede-flute, eyes closed, until the peculiar sensation of being watched drove her music to a faltering halt. Skin prickling, she opened her eyes—and froze. The music had drawn an audience that rested, almost submerged, in the lake, and stared at her with winsome brown eyes.
Otters?
They appeared to be. Blunt-snouted and whisker-faced, they floated in the shadow of an overhanging willow. She counted seven of them.
They were scattered along the bank, up against huge, gnarled roots and low-hanging branches. She measured them against the monstrous, ancient willow, and rubbed her eyes with confusion. They must be enormous! But they cannot be as big as they appear. I have misjudged the size of the tree—otherwise the beasts would be as long as a tall man.
Deceptive, those distances—and that had to mean that the lake was smaller than it seemed, too. A miniature dark forest—the illusion of untamed wilderness—and I will bet that means that this lake is just like the rest of the campus and the city. Artistically planned to just the right, safe scale, manicured and trained to be a play forest. She felt somehow betrayed. Ariss had seemed friendlier when she thought that there were a few places uncontrolled by people.
There were still the otters, however. She had loved the antics of the little beasts since she was a tiny child. She watched them watching her. Then, recalling games she had played with the highland otters around Bright, she whistled a few notes, then played a brief trill with the rede-flute. The trill imitated as closely as she could the rolling speech of the creatures. Immediately, one of the otters chirped back, its deep contralto warble an odd mockery of the normal soprano call. The beast swam out of the shadow in her direction, while the other six hung back, watching.
She was forced to upwardly revise the scale of the tree and the lake. The "otter" swimming towards her was exactly as huge as her first seemingly impossible estimates had made it. Mother of us all! How can that be? she wondered.
She longed to stay and lure the creature closer—but the bells began to ring for antis, and she had missed nondes the night before. She was starved.
Maybe they will still be here after classes. I shall come back and look for them then.
With real regret, she grounded her shields and turned her back on the swimming otter to hurry toward the Greathall.
Even before the first bells rang, Medwind Song was up and preparing for the day. She stared at her reflection in the mirror and pulled a gold-and-bone ornament from a rack that rested on her dressing table. She fitted the pin through the hole in her left nostril and surveyed the result.
This morning she only vaguely resembled the Daane University instructor she'd so obviously been the day before. Gone was the bright red instructor's uniform, exchanged for a brilliantly colored and precisely patterned Huong-tribe staarne. The tribal costume wrapped at wrists and waist and flowed in sweeping folds to mid-thigh. Under it, blue-dyed leather Huong breeches met curl-toed, quilted boots. Gone was her plain, straight hair style, replaced by myriad braids woven into a midnight-black crest that ran from the top of her head to the nape of her neck. Her deep blue eyes were lined by black esca, in the Huong-sacred cat-pattern of the senior magician. And now the curving insignia of the Huong-revered sslis dangled from her left nostril.
It was this last item that especially drove the Mottemage crazy. The gold-and-bone nose ornament was the sort of barbaric flourish Rakell tried to suppress in her university. The Mottemage said she was striving for unity among her students and professors; Medwind Song thought she was actually trying to achieve homogeneity. Medwind didn't approve of homogeneity.
The instructor listened to the first bells ring across the city and grinned at herself in the mirror. She decided to sit next to Rakell during antis to see if she could give the administrator a bad case of indigestion. If she could, it would be sweet revenge for Rakell's insistence that she wear the idiotic red school suit during her search for Faia.
She padded down the spiraling tower steps three at a time, hoping to get to the Greathall before the call to antis rang—there might, after all, be an extra sweetroll for her if she was early—passing other, correctly garbed instructors, who apparently had the same plan in mind. They saw her battle dress and gave her knowing smiles as she sailed by.
"Rakell annoy you again, Med?" one called, and laughed.
"Just a little," Medwind admitted. "If she annoyed me a lot, Thea, I could do much better than this."
"Skyclad at High Nonce?"
The barbarian instructor snorted at the idea. "Nothing of the sort. I'd just teach Flynn to mis-play the violitto. I've heard that cat sing—he's tone-deaf as hell."
"Remind me never to make you angry at me! Still, giving Flynn hands wasn't her best idea, either," the other woman agreed. "If that lunatic cat starts playing bad music, it will be her own fault."
The stairwell filled with chuckles.
Medwind continued her headlong bounding down the steps.
Without warning, a wave of blinding pain caught her between the eyes and sent her staggering against the wall. She missed her footing and fell heavily down several steps before hitting the landing. She was conscious of the frightened, inarticulate cries of her colleagues. From all around her, groans and sobs echoed against the cold stone. Red light pounded through her tightly shut eyes, and the scent of blood and fear assailed her nostrils. She was aware of an alien elation—of sheer delight at the misery she sensed. Medwind's breath came fast and sharp, and her fingernails dug into her palms as she willed the torture to stop.
The horror surrounded her and suspended her inside its timeless, eternal self—It has always been this way, and will always be, she thought—and abruptly, the horror and its attendant thought were gone.
Silence roared in on heavy feet to fill Medwind's overloaded consciousness. She opened her eyes, and saw nothing but brilliant, awful white. Scent vanished, and sensation with it. Medwind felt she'd been transmuted into bodiless light, as if she were on the point of vanishing.
Then the absence of sensation disappeared too, and she was aware of the throb of a twisted ankle and the taste of blood from her bitten lip, and of aches from arms and knees and back that had careened against stone. She was back in the stairwell with the rest of the instructors, who were beginning to shake themselves and move around. She met their eyes, and saw only stunned disbelief, and terror, and Üxwbewilderment.
Litthea Terasdotte, a city-born, civilized instructor—well-dressed, petite, black-eyed, and blonde—bit her lip and glanced at Medwind. "What happened?"
Medwind sat on the step and rubbed at her throbbing ankle. "Don't have any idea, Thea. Nothing like that where I come from—not ever."
Thea nodded. "Nor here. That was bad."
"Bad—intentionally crazy. Evil."
"Evil. Yes, definitely evil. But it's gone now."
Medwind felt a thrill along her nerves, and in the pit of her stomach something lurched. From the back of her mind, she felt echoes of the thing as it laughed. She shivered involuntarily, and shook her head. "Not gone. Just waiting, I think."
Faia sat in the Greathall, listening to spoons clicking on bowls and teeth, and the shuffle of leather soles on stone, and the occasional rustle of a cloth-covered rump shifting uncomfortably on a hard wooden trestle. All around her, eyes fixed on plates, fingers stirred food listlessly, voices were mute.
Suddenly, there was a clatter from the front of the hall, and heads lifted dully. Faia turned to look too, and saw a barbarian in exotic attire beating on an empty wooden mug with a spoon. It was not until the barbarian began to speak that she recognized the woman as Medwind Song, the tall, red-garbed instructor who had brought her to the university, then stuck her with Yaji.
Song shifted from one foot to the other, then cleared her throat.
"I know you felt the disturbance this morning before antis—I understand that all of you are upset."
Disturbance? Faia wondered. What sort of disturbance?
"I just wanted you to know that the Mottemage herself is tracking down the source of the Sending. She feels that the mindscream was a random impulse, and was not directed at us—that it was, most likely, an accidental projection from some young woman who suddenly opened up to her getlingself, and was overwhelmed and frightened by the experience. None of us feel that you have anything to worry about—and we think we will be able to find the person responsible and bring her under control so that this won't happen again. Until then, please try not to let this incident disrupt your studies."
Getlingself... , Faia thought, getlingself... What by-the-Lady could that be?
The instructor returned to her seat, and the students resumed eating. The silence had been broken, though, and gradually, they began to talk in whispers. The noise level in the Greathall rose.
Yaji, sitting opposite Faia and determinedly ignoring her, turned to the girl sitting to her left and said, "I don't believe what Song said for an instant. Do you?"
The other girl tried to pretend Yaji was not speaking to her, Faia noticed. Then she changed her mind and shrugged. "I guess I might. I remember when I turned twelve and my getlingself woke up one day. I was sick, and wanted water so badly—and I wanted it so hard the water came to me. It scared the life half out of me."
Getlingself... Lady's Gifts, Faia decided. Why couldn't they just say Lady's Gifts?
"Of course it did," Yaji agreed. "My question is, did it scare the life half out of everyone else in the city at the same time?"
"Well..."
"No," Yaji interrupted. "It didn't, of course. So that story they're giving us to keep us quiet and happy is just that. A story."
Faia could not suppress her curiosity any longer. "What are you talking about? What happened this morning?"
Yaji's eyes riveted on hers, and other girls along the table turned and stared.
"What do you mean, what happened?! Didn't you feel that awful mindscream this morning? That torture?" Yaji's voice was shrill enough that other students down the table and from several other tables turned to see what was going on.
"No," Faia admitted. "I did not feel anything. What was it?"
"Nobody knows, Faia," Yaji said, the tone of her voice replacing Faia with stupid in her answer.
Faia winced. "When did it happen?"
"It happened after the get-up bell, right before the call to antis. I can't believe you're supposed to be so talented, and you still missed it."
"Well, I am sorry, but I did not feel anything."
Down the table, Faia heard the whispers.
"Wasn't she supposed to be such a mighty hill-mage?"
"I guess what I heard she did to that village was just a fluke after all, if she couldn't feel that."
The students snickered and cast superior glances over her head at each other.
Faia felt the heat of embarrassment in her face and on the back of her neck, and knew that she had blushed for everyone to see. Gods, but I hate this place, she thought. She bit the inside of her lip to keep from crying.
She choked down the cold grains and slippery white paste from her bowl, wishing she could simply disappear. The other students eventually tired of staring at her and shifted to other topics of conversation.
Faia tried to ignore the chatter, but found she could not.
"Did Amelenda decide to sleep this morning instead of eating?" one student asked her seatmate.
The other sounded confused. "I don't have any idea. She's your roommate. Why are you asking me?"
"Didn't she spend the night with you?"
"Of course not. Why would you think she did?"
The first girl wrinkled her forehead in worried concentration. "She didn't come to our room last night, and I knew you two were doing a project for Communications—I just assumed—"
"Ame was supposed to come over last night to work on it, but she never showed up, and I thought that she decided to work on her Divinations—" There was a pause. "She promised she would be over one bell past nondes. She was very emphatic about it, because I wasn't there the last time she came over to work on the project. I just thought when she didn't show up that she was getting even."
The absent Amelenda's roommate sighed. "What an awful idea. Amelenda wouldn't do something like that. She's too serious about her work. What do you suppose she's doing?"
"She's pretty discreet. I know she's been studying the Mottemage's wingmounts. Maybe she has some private project she's working on to win her a place on staff when she graduates."
The girls gave each other worried looks and changed the subject.
Friends, Faia thought. I wish I had one. She pictured Aldar, and for a moment, regretted leaving him in Willowlake.
He is better off away from me, though. He has family.... She shoved that line of thought away before the tears that welled up in her eyes had a chance to run down her cheeks and cause her further embarrassment.
She bit her lip in sudden irritation. Why do you not just sit and feel sorry for yourself, Faia? I am certain there is no one in the world who has ever hurt before, no one who had ever been lonely—
Her tears dried up, but her appetite was still gone. She pushed the cold, lumpy mess of food away from her and sat staring at the joints in the ceiling stonework until the bells began their clamor announcing first class.
Mottemage and barbarian instructor strode across the green toward the classrooms.
"Did they believe it?" Medwind Song glanced over at her superior.
"Of course not. Would you have? On the other hand, they'll at least think that we have some idea of what happened—that, perhaps, we even have matters under control. That fact alone will buy us time and will prevent a panic."
"Was it our missing student?"
"Unknown. It was someone with magical aptitude—otherwise the mindscream would not have carried with anything like that force. But Enlee? Who could say."
Medwind looked at the Mottemage, eyes dark with worry. "Or Amelenda. She was missing at breakfast this morning, and her roommate doesn't know where she is."
Rakell's face went white. "No," she whispered. Amelenda was one of her favorites, and her prote[aage[aa, and the student most likely to carry on with the work the Mottemage had done with wingmounts.
Medwind said softly, "It may be nothing. It may be Amelenda has a young man... or got an emergency call from family—there are a hundred explanations."
"And one of them is horrible."
"Don't think the worst." Song rubbed her temples and sighed softly. "Meanwhile, what should we be doing?" she asked.
"Gods, Medwind—I wish I had an idea. Any idea."
Medwind closed her eyes and inhaled deeply. "Whatever it was that had her scares me. I've never felt such evil. Such concentrated, purposeful, strong evil."
"Nor have I." The Mottemage glanced at her friend with worried eyes. "Except in my nightmares."
"Funny you should mention—" The barbarian shook her head and looked away.
"Nightmares?"
Medwind shook her head, but said nothing. Rakell knew her prote[aage[aa well enough to understand that to the Huong Hoos, nightmares meant more than they did to the civilized people of Ariss. She also knew Medwind wouldn't be willing to talk about it. She didn't pry. "You'll have to go on with classes today, you know, Med. Nothing can change. We daren't let the students suspect how bad this is, or how close to home."
Medwind nodded grimly. "Something out there slaughtered one of my most promising students, if not two. You knew Enlee was missing?"
The Mottemage nodded affirmatively.
Medwind's voice grew bitter. "And I'm going to sit in a drafty class discussing Fundamentals of Plant Mutation to flighty First-Circles." She jammed her clenched fists into the pockets of the barbarian tunic. "I'll do what I can," she finally muttered.
"What else is there?" the Mottemage asked.
"You can't read, you can't write, you don't know the standard spell signs, you don't know any of the basic wards or entry-level procedures—and you have access to power that leveled a village. What in the seventy abominable saje-hells am I supposed to do with you?"
"I do not know." Faia stared miserably at her feet.
"It was a rhetorical question." Medwind sighed. "I know where I'm going to place you. There's going to be a riot when I do it, and you can expect to have most of your classmates furious with you, but you'll be going into the advanced classes."
"Why will that cause problems?"
"Because, dear, you can't read. You can't write. You don't know the basics. You just happen to be a conduit for energies that could run bronzeshod over your classmates. They're struggling to gain power. You are trying to find a way to control more power than they'll ever have. Don't expect them to like you for it."
Faia stared at the instructor with frustration. "I did not ask for this."
"No. But you got it. Stop whining and be an adult, Faia. A lot of us ended up with our lives going in directions we hadn't intended."
Medwind studied a sheaf of papers. "Since you're joining us halfway through the school year, I'm going to do something I usually don't. I'm going to assign you to take all your classes with one person, which will save you from having to learn the schedules and instructors, and will give you someone to study with whose schedule exactly matches yours. I'll put you with Yaji."
"No!" Faia blurted. "She cannot stand me!"
"Nor are you terribly fond of her. I already noticed. However, she's good—perhaps one of the few of your peers who has the potential to keep up with you. She isn't living up to her potential, but your presence may be the goad she needs. And she can easily familiarize you with the basics."
There was a light tap on the door, and Yaji came into the cluttered office. Her eyes fixed with unconcealed loathing on Faia. "I'm sorry," she said to Song. "I'll come back later, when you aren't so busy."
"I wanted you here now," the instructor said. Faia noted the cool control in her voice, the "I'll have no nonsense" tone.
Not a woman to cross, Faia thought. And not a woman to annoy.
Yaji, however, seemed impervious to the ice in Song's voice. "I'd rather wait until you finished with her before we talked about whatever it was that you wanted to see me for."
Medwind Song's eyes narrowed, and her face grew a wickedly sweet smile. "Just by sheerest coincidence, what I wanted to talk to you about is Faia. Not only is she your roommate, but now she's going to be your class-partner as well. You'll show her what you know of the basics of our system of magic—and in return she'll show you the things she knows. And the two of you will be in every class together so that you can keep up with each other. I think you'll find this arrangement very stimulating—don't you, Yaji?"
There was a long silence.
Song's smile vanished. "Well?"
Not even Yaji could miss the threat in the instructor's voice that time. "Yes, Frelle Medwind," she muttered.
Yaji stared over at Faia, and Faia had the urge to back away from the raging fury in those eyes. I would as well throw myself in the lake right now with a stone around my neck. That is where I am no doubt going to find myself anyway, and I shall save Yaji the trouble of mussing one of her outfits dragging me there after she has killed me.
It is going to be hell to sleep in that room tonight.
Fifth class. Fifth cold, stone-walled, slit-windowed room. Fifth long-winded instructor expounding nonsense words like "Keplef theorem" and "wall of impulse" and "cellular resistance" with the air of a god imparting the secret of fire to freezing primitives. Fifth hour of blank-faced students muttering "Yes, Frelle This," and "No, Frelle That." And this time was the worst. This time it was that pompous little helke bitch Frelle Jann.
Faia squirmed in her seat and resisted the urge to yawn. To her left, Yaji made little scratch-marks on pale green sheets she called drypress. To her right, the high slit window displayed a tantalizing glimpse of hot late-spring sunshine and allowed passage to the faintest suggestion of perfumed almost-summer breezes. Faia's eyes fixed on the slit. She could almost feel herself outside, playing her rede-flute and watching new lambs harassing their mothers and chasing each other over the hillside. She could feel the heavy wool of her erda pillowed beneath her head, and hear the whisper of meadow grass under her back as she shifted her position; she could smell clover and wildflowers and mountain air. She relaxed into the dream. It was comforting, familiar, and somehow very real. If she concentrated, she could even bring to mind the ripple of a stream. Carried to her on the breeze, she could hear the soft murmur of laughter from a long way off....
Laughter?...
She started, and returned her attention to the class. Every face was turned to her, and every eye watched her with malicious amusement, and a touch of calculating anticipation. And they laughed.
"So she's decided to rejoin us. How nice," Frelle Jann commented. "Perhaps we should each thank her for gracing us with her presence." There was more laughter, which trickled off to nearly nothing. There were a few snickers, but even these died down as the class waited to see what the frelle would do.
"Come up to the front of the class, Faia, and, since you feel you know this material so well that you don't need to pay attention, I'll let you demonstrate some of it for us."
The faces of her classmates glowed with unholy joy.
Wolves, Faia thought, who have spotted the sick sheep, and are waiting for an easy shot at the kill.
They had enjoyed her lack of education at every opportunity. All day she heard "You mean you can't read?" and "How can I teach you if you can't write?" and "What do you mean, you haven't heard of Loink's Basic Formula for Circle Cleansing? You can't do a first-level pentacle without it," and "What do you mean, what's a first-level pentacle ?"
She had ignored the whispered jokes told just loud enough that she could hear them, about farm girls too stupid to move out of the way of running horses, too foolish to know not to buy kellinks from Ranmeers— She hadn't said a word. She'd pretended not to hear.
Walking to the front of the class, though, she could not pretend anymore that she was not hurt. She was. So what if I am not one of them? So what if I do not have their education or their money or their fancy clothes and fancy manners. I'm somebody. I can do things, too.
She was overcome by the urge to show them. She wanted to prove that she was as good as any of them, so that they could never laugh behind her back again.
Frelle Jann stared coldly up at the tall farm girl when she reached the front of the classroom. She leaned forward and whispered upward, for just Faia to hear, "I'd like for you to remember this in future, Faia. We have these classes to teach talented mage students the elements of magic. Not to provide ignoramuses with a chance to cloudgaze out the windows. If you haven't any more attention than that, you can go work in a kitchen cleaning pots. You'll never be a mage." She raised her voice so that the rest of the class could hear. "Take this apple, Faia, and repair it so that it is edible again. We've been discussing the formulas in class—since you seem to know so much about them, you shouldn't have any trouble."
Faia held in her hands the withered, dried remains of an apple. It was a sorry, wormy red windfall apple, one of last autumn's. She had, in her young life, seen more windfall apples than anyone had any business seeing. Fix it? she thought. Fix it? Surely she's joking.
Faia repressed a smile of unholy glee. They thought fixing an apple was some sort of wonderful demonstration of magic? That was what all these hot-air formulas and equations and long-winded talks were about? No one had said anything before about apples.
She turned to face the class, and held the apple in her outstretched hand. She centered, pulling energy from the earth below her and from the air above, and visualizing the apple as one of her favorite huge tangy green Highland Susskinds. She could taste it, feel it, hear the crunch when she bit into it, smell the pure autumn smell of it—she could see it sitting pale yellow-green and glossy in her hand. She looked at it from all angles, and when she had it fixed in her mind, she closed her eyes and let the energy she'd drawn into herself feed carefully into the withered brown fruit.
When she heard gasps, she opened her eyes.
A perfect Highland Susskind rested in the palm of her hand.
Her dear instructor's jaw rested on the floor.
So the stupid hick from the highlands can do a few tricks they cannot, in spite of their fancy schooling. That ought to show them. Faia grinned viciously, took a bite of the apple with a cheeky toss of her head, and remarked loudly to no one in particular, "Been doing that since I was six."
:I felt that! Did you feel it too?:
:Yes, Sahedre. I feel the song of the magic, too.:
Sahedre was elated. :Yes-s-s-s! Gods, yes! A body with the power I crave resides here. I glimpse her only at odd moments, but here she hides. Sooner or later, I shall trail this magic back to its maker, and then I shall have her.:
:If she has the power, Sahedre, the second protested, perhaps she will resist you.:
:Aye, she might. I shall see that she does not want to. First, though, I must find her.:
Yaji walked beside Faia after nondes. They were heading back to the dorm, and Yaji was uncharacteristically quiet. She had been, Faia noted, ever since Frelle Jann's class. Faia saw no purpose in spoiling a good thing.
Yaji took a deep breath, started to say something, then stopped. Her fair brow furrowed, and she glanced at Faia from under her lashes.
What is this? She looks like she is just dying to ask me some question, Faia decided, and it galls her lily-soft hide to even think of it. The hill-girl pretended that she had noticed nothing unusual in her roommate's manner. No sense in making things easier for the detestable Yaji.
Yaji, however, was determined. "How did you do that?" she finally asked.
Faia pretended ignorance. "Do what?"
"With the apple. That's advanced work. I mean, I've been doing magic for years, and I've never been able to rejuvenate an apple."
Faia's response was a mild rebuke. "I have been doing magic for years also, Yaji Jennedote. Has it occurred to you that maybe I am better at it than you are?"
Yaji snorted. "Not a chance. How could you be? You don't know anything."
Faia laughed, an explosive belly laugh that brought a flush of deep red to Yaji's cheeks. "Perhaps I do not know anything. But I can do things. That is better, I think."
"I'm sorry I asked."
"You only asked so that you could laugh at me, or tell me that I did not do my magic correctly."
There was a long pause. Then Yaji answered with a gentle rebuke of her own. "I only asked because I have never had any luck with that particular assignment, and I was hoping you could help me."
Faia walked along in silence, feeling suddenly small and petty. "Oh," she said. She walked further, staring at her feet, at the campus, everywhere but at Yaji. Finally she added, "I am sorry."
Yaji shrugged. "I suppose you had every right to think what you thought."
"Yes."
"Look—I'm sorry, too. I admit that I didn't want to room with you. Don't take it so personally. I didn't want to room with anyone—"
"I heard about that."
"You did?"
"Mmm-hmm. Two girls in the bath house yesterday referred to you as 'Her Bitchy and Immaculate Highness.' They thought it very funny that you should be stuck with me."
Yaji was suddenly incensed. "You think that's funny—what they said?!"
"Not really. The things they said about me were equally unkind and also untrue—and they had never even seen me. I hoped they were wrong about you, too."
Yaji walked slowly up the steps to the dorm, her fingers trailing on the stone rail. "They were," she said slowly. "They didn't know it, I guess, but they were wrong about me. I took a lot of grief from everyone when I came here. My mother was expelled from Daane—expelled because she was pregnant with me. The story got around, and a lot of my fellow classmates decided that the fact my mother was a local hedge-wizard instead of a great university mage made me a failure, too. I was a lot better at magic than everyone else, though, so when my roommates mistreated me, I got even. I did really awful things to them. Pretty soon, no one would room with me. I liked it that way."
"I see."
"It's hell being an outsider—not having any friends."
Faia raised one eyebrow and looked sidelong at Yaji. "No!" she said. "I cannot imagine."
"That was a stupid thing to say, wasn't it?"
"Yes."
Yaji, a few steps ahead of Faia, stopped dead at her own doorway and stared at her new roommate. "Gods! You just say whatever you think. That's an awful habit." She touched three spots on the door, and muttered a short string of syllables, and the door opened. Yaji stepped across the threshhold, snapped her fingers, and the ghostlights flickered on. She stared at her roommate in the cool white light. "Why are you really here, Faia?"
Faia paced across the room, avoiding Yaji's mess, and sat down stiffly on her own bed. "I am here because my village was destroyed by Plague, and because I grew angry and created a firestorm that melted the very stones into a puddle on the ground. The fine people here did not think I should have done that, so they sought me out and brought me here to make sure I did not do it again."
"Not really." Yaji's expression indicated that she expected Faia to admit to the joke any second.
Faia stretched out on her bed and stared up at the ceiling. "Really."
Yaji stared at her as if she were trying to see straight into Faia's brain. Then she shrugged, and began pulling books off her shelf. "Whatever you say, Faia. Anyway, we have homework to do. Since you can't read the books, I might as well help you with it."
Faia imitated Yaji's shrug. "Whatever you say, Yaji."
Several frelles stretched out in their private lounge, reading by soft white ghostlight. Four sat at the little wooden table in the far corner, submerged in a tight and vicious game of Three-and-One, played for stakes. Their voices rose at irregular intervals, crosscurrent to the readers, and they received dark stares and dropped their volume again until the passions of the game overrode their caution. Two Idargga players clicked their stones across the board, wordless as statues and nearly as motionless. In the near, offhand corner, one group chatted over tea and hardrolls.
All of that Jann saw as soon as she entered the lounge. None of the frelles in the room that evening ranked her, either. She smiled slowly. Good, she thought. Then I can have peace and quiet and put my day behind me.
The tea-and-rolls group looked her over, and Tella and Delis grinned and waved. "Bring a book, or come to talk?" Tella called.
"Either." Jann went over to join them. She took a cup and poured herself tea, then curled into one of the stuffed, round-backed chairs. "I just want to ground out—today wasn't one of the good ones."
Delis and two of the very new instructors—both of whom had been Jann's students before being taken on staff—laughed heartily. Delis said, "Yah—the story about your day is already making the rounds. I hear you and the child hill-wizard crossed staffs again, and she rubbed your face in the dirt."
Jann's back stiffened. "Hardly. I asked her to rejuvenate an apple, and she did. It was a classroom assignment."
Delis giggled. "Oh, certainly." The blonde girl grabbed another hardroll and looked around at the other frelles. "From what I heard, Jann here told that brawny heathen that she would never be a mage and took her up to the front of the class to humiliate her. Handed her a rotted red fodder apple and told her to fix it. So the girl takes the apple and stares at it like she's never seen an apple before—like so," Delis held out her hand and widened her eyes in mimickry, "and then she draws in enough power to run every ghostlight in the city. Then, does she rejuv the apple? No! She transforms it. Red fodder apple becomes gorgeous yellow pedigreed eating apple—and in front of everyone, she takes a bite of the damned apple—
"—No, she didn't!—"
"—That's crazy!—"
"—Yes, she did. And then tosses off some impudent remark about doing that when she was a little child."
The group surrounding Jann laughed. "Students are such an agony to the fundament," one remarked.
Tella chuckled. "I wouldn't have thought the girl capable of much of anything, no matter what the rumors said she did up in the hills. She doesn't look bright enough to find her own shoes in the morning."
Delis agreed. "Evidently she's a bit smarter than she looks—"
Jann blocked out their cheerful remarks. She heard only the laughter of her colleagues, and not the empathy. The laughter grated deep into her soul, and cut her pride to ribbons. Faia has embarrassed me—humiliated me, Jann thought. Twice now, she has made me into the butt of jokes that are bantered back and forth among the other students and my colleagues. I will extract payment for this. She owes me.