1 The Outstretched Shadow.3 (66 page)

 And more troubling than that, rivers that should have run fast and deep into Elven lands, full with melted snow from the High Peaks, were dry as well.

 Perhaps ending the drought would be a simple matter, requiring nothing more than a simple—though powerful—spell. The whole of Sentarshadeen would eagerly share the price, Idalia knew. She only hoped it would be that easy.

 Best to find out for sure, then, instead of worrying about it.

 She rose and dressed, some imp of perversity causing her to reject the sturdy silks and woolens her hosts had provided in favor of her own buck' skins. Let her be seen for what she was: human, and mortal, and Wildmage. Later she would wear the silks as a matter of courtesy, of thanking her hosts tacitly for providing them, but first impressions were important, especially here, and she meant them to think of her as she intended to be.

 And Jermayan…

 No. She would not think about Jermayan, ever again. And if the man had a scrap of good manners left to him, he'd arrange matters so their paths never crossed. It was for the best. The man was an Elven Knight. He was used to making hard choices. He'd just have to live with hers.

 An unbidden thought intruded. I only hope that I can…

 She shook it off, moved quietly across the main room, to look in on Kellen. He was sound asleep, tangled up in the blankets as though he'd lost a fight with them. She felt a fond smile cross her lips. Kellen slept like a hibernating bear; there was very little chance she'd wake him, no matter how much noise she made.

 She quickly brewed her morning tea. She had no appetite herself, but she set out a plate of breakfast pastries for Kellen to find when he awoke. There'd been many visitors last night while Kellen had been out exploring, and at the moment, the larder was full enough to withstand even the onslaughts of a growing teenager's appetite.

 Kellen… Idalia remembered her first experience in Elven lands and sighed. Last night, when Kellen had come back from the Palace, his eyes had been so full of stars it was the Gods' own mercy he'd made it home at all, and walked through the door instead of into it! The Elves were so beautiful, so kind, their protracted lives so seemingly perfect… it was easy to fall into the trap of thinking they were always right as well.

 And they certainly think so, after all. It's easier to shift an overburdened mule than to get one of the Elvenborn to change his mind! "Stubborn as an Elf" now there was a new maxim for the City fathers to din into younglings' heads! And it took you forever to notice, because, when one of the Elvenkind disagreed with you, all they ever did was smile and change the subject, and it could take a person forever to figure out that there'd been an argument… and you'd lost.

 She would never lose her admiration for them, her respect for their wisdom and knowledge, and her affection for them—but jermayan had served her one good turn. She was no longer blind to their faults, either as individuals or as a race.

 But all this cloud-gathering wasn't getting her anywhere, and the sun was almost up. Idalia finished her tea, washed out the cup, and left the tea-things out where Kellen would find them. Then she picked up her walking-staff, filled her pockets with charged keystones, and left their lodging.

 She took a quicker route than Kellen had followed the night before, up past the House of Leaf and Star and into the orchard beyond. Even at this early hour, Elves were already hard at work carrying water to the fragile trees. She greeted several of them by name, but did not stop to do more than exchange the briefest of greetings. The sooner she had her answers, the sooner her real work could begin. And with their usual sensitivity to her, they understood that she had an urgent task, and did not delay her beyond the simplest of courtesies.

 A few more minutes' walk brought her to her goal: one of the ever-flowing springs that supplied the water for all of Sentarshadeen, located in the meadow beyond the Queen's Orchard. Without rain, these were the only sources of water for the city. There were five of them, as she remembered: Alcemil, Caldulin, Elassar, Helanarya, Songmairie. This should be Songmairie. Helanarya and Elassar were under Sentarshadeen itself, their waters sent by wind-driven pumps, to course through the miles of pipes whose results had so delighted Kellen last night.

 A wide path of smooth stone led up to Songmairie—laid down, Idalia guessed, when it had become necessary to bring water carts to the spring several times a day—and the verge of the spring itself was edged with a decorative pattern of stones and tiles. Grass—lush here, so close to the water source—grew up between them.

 She looked out over the meadow, but there were no unicorns to be seen at this hour, though she knew that quite a large herd lived in Sentarshadeen, since Elves and unicorns often lived together. Centuries ago, during the Endarkened War, Elven Knights had ridden unicorns into battle against the Endarkened hordes and their allies. All memory of that war had carefully been edited out of texts in the City, and it was so long ago that Idalia doubted that any of the Elvenkind now alive remembered it personally. But the memories of the Elves were very long, and their recorded memories of Demonkind longer still, and it was never safe to forget the Shadow.

 She knelt and drank from the spring. The water was icy and pure. But not enough—even if Sentarshadeen held ten times its population, and all of them labored day and night—to water enough acreage to save them from disaster. All it would take would be one good grass-fire, one lightning strike…

 One out-of-control salamander, a high wind, or just another year of no rain. And no reason for it. It was raining in Merryvale, and that's east of here, toward the sea. Why shouldn't it rain here?

 Still kneeling, she emptied her pockets of keystones. She dipped each in the spring—water called to water—and then arranged them around her in a rough circle.

 She cupped her hands again, filling them with the spring, and scattered the water around her, moistening the keystones a second time. Earth-magic and the spells of Finding and Calling required the caster's blood and the fruits of the earth as tokens of intent, but weather magic was the magic of air and water, and did not use those symbols as a bridge between the power of the Wildmage and that of the Gods.

 She touched her wet hands lightly to her lips, blowing over them gently, and let the power well up in her, concentrating on her need and her desire.

 Rain.

 Kneeling in the earth, feeling its thirst, Idalia smelled water, tasted water, willed water to be. It was time for rain—the harvest was in, the land was ready to rest, to sleep. Time for rain, to bring the autumn leaves down from the trees and ready the earth for winter and snow. She could feel it—in the air, just over the peaks, in the distance—and called it to her with the intensity of a woman calling for her lover. Come to me, Beloved, and give me rest.

 Nothing.

 After a long fruitless struggle, Idalia opened her eyes with a sigh. Not so much as a shift in the wind. The keystones were drained, and the sky was still an empty arid blue.

 More than any other, weather magic required patience and care. A storm couldn't be whistled up for the asking—not out of a cloudless sky, at least, and certainly not without paying a greater price than Idalia cared to. To change the weather was more a matter of a series of gentle nudges over time, more like herding sheep than lighting a fire.

 But if her spell was going to have any effect at all, she should have felt something. And she'd felt nothing at all. It wouldn't matter how much power she used, or how many folk she shared the price among, she knew: the result would be the same.

 The wind would not shift. The rains would not come.

 Idalia's shoulders slumped.

 This is no natural drought.

 She'd suspected as much, after hearing Kellen's story the night before—Ashaniel would not have been so disturbed by a natural change in the weather. The Elves had seen so many droughts in the course of a lifetime that a natural drought would simply be met with a sigh, a hope that the Gods of Leaf and Star would set things in balance soon, and some careful conservation until the drought was over. They were sensitive to the health of their land as humans (other than Wildmages) were not; they would have known if this drought was like the others that had come and gone in the past.

 They had—as she had—felt the subtle wrongness. They had known that no natural dry spell would give rise to that feeling of imbalance.

 And that meant that someone was causing this.

 High Mages? It wasn't impossible. Would Lycaelon attack the Elves indirectly this way, perhaps to drive them farther away from the City and the lands it claimed? It would be a clever way to do it, since he could, if challenged, easily deny any such thing, even to the Elves. High Magick, stolen as it was from all of the citizens of Armethalieh, and learned according to strict formulas, did not have a signature in the way that Wild Magic did, identifying who the Mage was that set it in motion.

 But much as she'd like to place all the evils of the world at Lycaelon's doorstep, until the City had claimed and pacified both the Western Hills and the High Reaches, they had little motive for starting a war with the Elven lands—and war it would be, the moment the Elves discovered who was behind the drought. And Lycaelon could not have set a spell of this magnitude alone. He would have needed the backing of the rest of the Council.

 No. Idalia abandoned the idea reluctantly. Though the City might yet be discovered to be behind this, the Elves had other enemies. Enemies older than the City, and more powerful…

 Wearily, Idalia gathered up her empty keystones and got to her feet. Figuring out who was responsible for this would take a lot more work than she'd already put in. She'd have to rest first, and then make her plans— and weave her spells—very, very carefully.

 If her suspicions were true, she could not afford even the slightest of mistakes in her hunting.

 KELLEN slept deeply and well on his first night in Sentarshadeen, his dreams untroubled. When he awoke at last, it was to the gentle tickle of whiskers on his face, as the grey cat that seemed to have adopted them investigated him curiously.

 A glance out the window told him he had slept far later than he could remember sleeping in—well, it would have to go back to before he began formal schooling. In the Wildwood, the day and its tasks started with the dawn, and back in the City, Kellen had always been in a hurry to be out of the house by Second Morning Bells at the latest in order to avoid Lycaelon.

 But here there was nothing pressing that had to be done, and no one to avoid.

 He lay there for a few minutes, examining the feeling and not certain how to label it, while he gave the grey cat the thorough head scratch she demanded. He was sure there were things to be doing here in Sentarshadeen, but at the moment he didn't have to do any of them. It felt peculiar.

 The cat seemed to find some fault with his attentions, for she suddenly gave a violent sneeze directly into his face and bounded off through the window Kellen had left open the night before. "Now, there's gratitude!" Kellen said, half annoyed, half amused. "You ought to belong to Lycaelon."

 Yawning, Kellen got up and went in search of Idalia and breakfast.

 He found breakfast—a plate of cold pastries, and tea-things laid out for him on the table beside the hearth-stove—but no Idalia. Her room was empty, the bed neatly made. Obviously she had gone out several hours before, leaving him to sleep.

 He filled the kettle and put it on to heat, and while he was waiting for it to boil, he washed and dressed, being careful to use as little water as possible and marveling once again at the comfort and efficiency of the Elven plumbing. No shivering outdoors as he had in the Wildwood or waiting around for servants to bring water as he had back in the City. Everything was just there, exactly when and where you wanted it.

 Clean and dressed—after a little hesitation, he'd chosen one of the new Elven outfits that had been left for him—he ate, savoring the unfamiliar Elven spices, while deciding what to do with his day. The view from the balcony was just as amazing this morning as it had been last night; now he noticed something else, the sound of Sentarshadeen.

 In Armethalieh, he'd grown up listening to the harmonizing of the bells that marked the rhythms of the City's days and seasons; in the Wild-wood, he'd become accustomed to the way that random birdcalls, water sounds, and the song of the winds in the leaves created a background "song," of sorts.

 Here in Sentarshadeen, the magic of the bells of Armethalieh had somehow been grafted onto the sounds of the Wildwood. The song of the forest, added to the wind chimes, the wind bells, and wind harps in the gardens, created a music unlike anything he had ever heard. Beautiful, peaceful—he wondered what it would be like if there wasn't a drought. Surely there would be the voices of a thousand fountains, waterfalls, and the great voice of the river as well, adding yet another note to the consort.

 Then, as he finished his breakfast, a breeze brought him the scent of Sentarshadeen—or at least, the scent in drought time—and it was as subtle as the song. As in the Wildwood, Kellen could smell the aroma of warm grass and green leaves, but with a hint of sweet herbs and foreign spices added, a suggestion of something in flower. The scent was refreshing, but again, he wondered what it would be like if there wasn't a drought, and lusher flowers were in bloom, roses and phlox, and the water lilies of the ponds.