Hidden Warrior (34 page)

“And kiss them, eh?”

Tobin nodded.

“That’s a new one!” Korin said with a too-loud laugh.

His father burst out laughing. “Well, it’s hard to fault you for that, nephew. But you girls should have better sense. Shame on you! Get back to your mothers’ houses where you belong, and don’t think they won’t hear of this!”

Una looked back at Tobin as she turned to go. The doubt in her eyes hurt him worse than anything the king could have said or done.

“As for the rest of you—” Erius paused, and Tobin’s belly tightened again. “You can spend the night at the altar of Sakor, meditating on your foolishness. Go on! Stay there until the other Companions come in the morning.”

T
hat night, Tobin meditated instead on the king and all he’d let himself forget once again. Despite the lapses he’d already witnessed, he’d let himself be taken in by Erius’ fatherly manner and generosity.

Brother’s appearance today had broken the spell once and for all, and his heart with it. It was proof that for at least a moment, the king had meant to hurt him, just as Orun had.

But it was not that, or the punishment, that started him softly weeping in the darkest hour of the night. As he knelt there, shattered, exhausted, dozing even as he wavered on aching knees, the breeze shifted and the strange-smelling smoke from Illior’s altar enveloped him, and he remembered—remembered how his mother had dragged him to that window, trying to pull him out with her as she fell to her death. He remembered how the river had looked, black between the snow-covered banks. There’d been ice along the edges and he’d wondered if it would break when he landed on it. His mother was going to make him fall. He
had
been falling, but someone had yanked him back at the very last moment and dragged him away from the window, away from the sound of his mother’s dying scream.

It had been Brother. But why hadn’t he saved their mother, too? Had he instead pushed her out?

Sobs rose in his throat. It took every ounce of will to hold them in. Just when he thought he was going to give way and shame himself again, Ki’s hand found his and squeezed it. The grief and fear receded slowly, like the waves of the ebb tide. He didn’t disgrace himself, and greeted the morning sun dazed but strangely peaceful. Brother had saved him that day, and again with Orun. And would have today, perhaps, if the king had lost control of himself after all.

He needs you, and you need him
, Lhel had said. Brother must know it, too.

R
eturning to the palace with the others later that morning, he learned from Baldus that Una had disappeared in the night without a trace.

T
hat first winter with Kaulin and Wythnir passed quietly. Mail arrived regularly from Tobin and Ki, and from Iya, who now divided her time between her travels and more frequent visits to the city. A few oblique remarks made it clear that she had found allies in Ero, wizards who would be of more use staying where they were than joining him.

The boys wrote of court life, and in Tobin’s Arkoniel discovered a dark thread of worry and discontent. Korin was carousing more, the king was changeable in his moods, and the older boys were treating Tobin and the other younger ones like children.

In contrast, Ki reported happily on parties and various girls who were showing interest in them. Arkoniel guessed that Tobin was less pleased with the latter; he said nothing about girls at all, except to report that one whom he’d been friends with had disappeared under mysterious circumstances. He was vague on the details, but Arkoniel was left with the unsettling impression that Tobin thought her murdered.

As winter closed in once more, Arkoniel divided his own attentions between his new guests and the workroom. Kaulin was not much interested in Arkoniel’s “indoor magic,” as he called it, preferring to wander in the forest in all weathers. Once he’d settled in, he’d proven something of a grumbler, and Arkoniel was content to leave the fellow to himself.

Arkoniel was somewhat perplexed by Kaulin’s neglect of Wythrin. He wasn’t really unkind to the child, but frequently
went off without him, leaving him in Nari’s care like an ordinary child in need of a nurse.

Arkoniel remarked on this one morning as Nari bustled about his workroom with her dust rag.

“That’s all right,” she said. “I’m glad to have a child under this roof again. And Maker knows, the poor little thing can do with some coddling. He’s hardly out of clouts, wizard-born or not, and hasn’t got a soul to care about him.”

Arkoniel caught something sharp in her tone. Setting his half-finished journal aside on the writing table, he turned in his chair and laced his fingers around one up-drawn knee. “Kaulin does neglect him a bit, I suppose. The child seemed well enough when they arrived here, though.”

“He wasn’t starved, I’ll grant you, but you’ve seen how Kaulin is with the child. He hardly has a kind word for him, when he can be bothered to speak to him at all. But what can you expect, eh? Kaulin only took the boy on to repay a debt.”

“How do you know that?”

“Why, Wythnir told me,” Nari said, and Arkoniel caught her smug little smile as she went to work on the windows. “And I got a bit more out of Kaulin the other day. The poor little thing had been treated very badly by his first master, a drunkard or worse, from what I gathered. I suppose even Kaulin was an improvement, but he doesn’t seem to care for the child. It’s no wonder Wythnir looks like a little ghost all the time.” She flicked dust off a candlestand. “I don’t mind having him underfoot, of course. He’s not a bit of trouble. Still, he is wizard-born, and the way he’s taken to you, perhaps you could show a bit more interest in him?”

“Taken to me? He hasn’t even spoken to me since he got here!”

She shook her head. “You mean you haven’t noticed how he follows you about and lurks outside the workroom?”

“No, I haven’t. In fact, I didn’t think he liked me.”
Arkoniel’s early experiences with Tobin had left him rather shy of quiet children. “Anytime I speak to him he sticks a finger in his mouth and stares at his feet.”

Nari snapped her dust rag at him and chuckled. “Oh, you just take some getting used to. You’ve gone a bit crusty and strange since the boys left.”

“I haven’t!”

“Oh yes, you have. Cook and I don’t pay you any mind, but this is a little boy and I guess I know more about them than you do. Give him a smile! Show him a trick or two and I’ll bet you a sester coin he warms right up.”

T
o Arkoniel’s surprise, Nari won that wager. Though the child remained quiet and shy, he did brighten noticeably when Arkoniel took the time to show him a trick or ask for his help with some little chore. He was still thin, but Cook’s good food had put color into his wan cheeks and brought a bit of luster to his ragged brown hair. Conversation remained difficult; Wythnir seldom spoke except to mumble a reply to a direct question.

In the workroom, however, he watched every move Arkoniel made with alert, solemn eyes. One day, for reasons known only to himself, he shyly offered to show Arkoniel how to make a luck charm out of a bunch of dried thyme and horsehair. It was not the sort of thing most eight-year-olds, even wizard-born, knew how to do. His weaving was a little clumsy, but the spell held firm. Arkoniel’s honest praise earned him the first smile he’d seen from the boy.

After this small success Wythnir truly began to blossom. It seemed only natural to teach him, and it only took a few lessons to discover that Kaulin had done a better job with the boy than Arkoniel had guessed. Wythnir had been with the man less than a year, but already knew most of the basic cantrips and fire charms, as well as a surprising amount about the properties of plants. Arkoniel began to suspect that it was not boredom or disappointment that
made Kaulin neglect the boy, but resentment of the boy’s obvious potential.

The discovery of Wythnir’s quickness made Arkoniel more cautious in what he let the boy see of his own studies. What he’d learned of Lhel’s witchery was still forbidden knowledge among the free wizards. They worked together each morning, but the afternoons were reserved for Arkoniel’s solitary labors.

S
ince Ranai’s spirit gifting, Arkoniel had discovered that certain types of spells—summonings and transmutations in particular—came more easily than they had before. He saw spell patterns more clearly in his mind and found he could hold the wizard eye for nearly an hour without fatigue. Perhaps it was thanks to her, as much as to Lhel, that he finally achieved his first success with what he’d come to think of as his “doorway spell.”

He’d given up on it a dozen times or more since he’d first conceived of it, but sooner or later he’d find himself with the old salt box in front of him, trying to force a bean or stone to materialize inside it.

Wythnir was sweeping the workroom one rainy morning in late Klesin while Arkoniel was making another attempt, and wandered over to see what he was grumbling about.

“What are you trying to do?” Even now he spoke in the hushed tones of a temple novice. Arkoniel often wondered what a few days with Ki would do to change that.

Arkoniel held up the recalcitrant bean. “I want this to go inside this box, but without opening the lid.”

Wythnir pondered this a moment. “Why don’t you make a hole in the box?”

“Well, that would defeat the whole purpose, you see. I mean, I might as well just open the—” Arkoniel broke off, staring at the boy, then the box. “Thank you, Wythnir. Would you leave me for a while?”

*     *     *

A
rkoniel spent the rest of the afternoon and the night cross-legged on the floor, deep in meditation. As dawn broke, he opened his eyes again and laughed. The pattern of magic had come to him at last, so simple and clear in its workings that he couldn’t imagine how it had eluded him for so long. No wonder it had taken a child to point it out to him.

Going back to the table, he picked up a bean and his crystal wand. Humming the tones of power that had come to him in the night, he wove lines of light on the air with the tip of his wand:
whirlwind, doorway, traveler, rest
. He hardly dared believe it, but the pattern held and the familiar cold prickling of energy ran down from his brow to his hands. The pattern brightened, then collapsed into a small blot of darkness. Shiny and solid-looking as polished jet, it hung in the air in front of him. Reaching out with his mind, he found that it was spinning. He was so surprised that he lost concentration and it disappeared with a sound like a cork coming out of a wine jug.

“By the Light!” Composing himself, he sketched the pattern again. When it was fixed in the air, he tested it more carefully and found it malleable as clay on a potter’s wheel. All it took was a thought to make it expand to the size of a keg head, or shrink to a hummingbird’s eye.

It was not a stable spell, but he found he could weave it with ease, and experimented with a succession of them. He could change the position with a thought, moving it around the room and tilting the axis from vertical to horizontal.

Finally, tingling with anticipation, he visualized the salt box without actually looking at it and dropped a bean into the little vortex. The bean disappeared like a stone into a tiny pond and did not fall out the other side. The hole collapsed on itself with the usual dull pop.

Arkoniel stared at the empty air where it had been, then threw back his head and let out an elated whoop that carried his joy all the way to Lhel’s camp.

Wythnir, who had evidently gone no farther than the floor outside the door, burst in. “Master Arkoniel, what’s wrong? Are you hurt?”

Arkoniel swung the startled child up into the air and danced him around the room. “You’re a luck bringer, my boy, do you know that? Illior bless you, you put the key in my hand!”

Wythnir’s baffled smile made Arkoniel laugh again.

O
ver the next few weeks Arkoniel armed himself with a handful of beans and put his new magic to various tests. He successfully sent beans into the box from across the workroom, then from the corridor, and finally, thrillingly, through the closed workroom door.

He also inadvertently made a crucial discovery. If he was careless or hurried, if he didn’t visualize the destination carefully and concentrate on his purpose, the unlucky bean simply vanished. He tested this repeatedly and was unable to recover any of the lost ones, or discover where they’d gone.

Doubtless trapped in whatever middle space they occupy between the spell pattern and their final destination
, he noted in his journal that night. It was nearly midnight but he was too excited to worry about ghosts. Wythnir had long since been packed off to bed, but Arkoniel kept the lamps burning, unwilling to stop when things were progressing so well. He was more tired than he wanted to admit, however.

He decided to try sending something heavier into the box. A lead fishing weight Ki or Tobin had left behind was just the thing. In his excitement, however, he carelessly brushed the black disk with his hand and felt a distinct tug as the hole closed. For a moment he could only stare stupidly at the spurting stump that was all that was left of his little finger. It was gone, cut clean as a sword stroke just below the second knuckle. It began to throb painfully, but still he stood there, watching the blood flow in disbelief.

The pain soon brought him to his senses. Wrapping the finger in a fold of his tunic, he raced to the table and opened the salt box. There was the lead, intact as expected, but the inside of the box was a spattered mess. The flesh of his finger had been torn from the bones and mangled to bloody gobbets. The bones were undamaged, however, and the nail had survived intact; it lay like a delicate seashell beside the weight.

Only then did the enormity of what he’d done hit him. Collapsing on the stool, he rested his forehead on his left hand. He knew he should call for help before he fainted and bled all over the floor, but it was a moment before he could make himself move.