Magic Steps (2 page)

The duke raised a hand, and all of his group halted. The fat man came forward until he stood just ten feet away and bowed low, his palms pressed together before his face. His guards also bowed, though not so low that they lost sight of the duke’s protectors.

“Good morning, Rokat,” the duke said. His velvety voice had gone very cold.

“May the gods be praised, your grace!” said the fat man, straightening. “It is a grand thing, to see you among your people once more.” Now that he was closer, Sandry could tell that he wore a jeweled pin in the neat green folds of his turban and that his clothes were made of the finest silk that money could buy.

His plump hands glit tered with rings, all gold and most sporting a gem. After living with a smith for four years, she could also tell the bodyguards’ weapons were very good and bore signs of earnest use.

“It was unnecessary for you to leave your countinghouse to give me these felicitations,” the duke replied.

“But I had to express my joy,” replied the man—Rokat, the duke had called him—as he bowed again. “Seeing you is reassurance that the peace and law of your realm will continue to be kept. Seeing you, those of us who shelter in this safe harbor know we need fear no withdrawal of protection.”

“Is there any reason I would consider such a withdrawal?” inquired the duke, leaning on his saddle horn.

“Never, your grace,” said the fat man. “Never. I hope to see you again soon.

Congratulations on your restored health!”

He waddled back to Rokat House. One of his guards sprang forward to open the door; the other two closed in swiftly behind him, guarding his back. Only when the quartet had gone inside Rokat House did Sandry feel a relaxing among the soldiers around her.

“Let us continue,” Duke Vedris announced. The guards who had flanked her and her uncle fell back into their normal formation, and they resumed their ride.

“Who was that?” Sandry wanted to know.

“Rokat,” the sergeant growled behind them, and spat.

“Jamar Rokat,” Vedris said, nodding to a maid who was opening a set of shutters nearby. “Head of Rokat House here in Summersea. They hold the monopoly on the myrrh trade and import other items. They behave within my borders, but elsewhere they are little better than pirates. They know I will have none of the killing and thievery they use as common coin, and they dare not lose permission to enter our harbor.”

“Is this Jamar as bad as the rest of his family?” Sandry wanted to know. There had been something about the fat man’s brown eyes, a nervousness, that made her curious.

The duke rubbed his shaved head. “When Jamar Rokat was but twenty years old and living in Janaal, he was courting a young girl of great beauty and fortune.

Somehow the word got out that the girls father was considering another man, one who had offered more gold in the marriage settlement. Jamar entered his rival’s house and with a silk cord strangled the man, his father, and his grandfather.

He desired to make the point that competing with any Rokat was a fatal exercise.”

Sandry shuddered.

The duke leaned over to pat her knee. “Fortunately, my dear, you need have nothing to do with any of Rokat’s tribe. For that, I am thankful.”

Pasco leaned forward as Osa rowed his boat around the low wharf that served the fishing village. Ahead of them stretched a broad length of beach on which a few boats had been careened for scraping and repairs. Lanterns glinted from the fishing boats as their owners prepared to sail. More people had gathered on the strand. Under a lantern dangling from a pole, a man sat cross-legged, testing the drum in his lap. A woman stood behind him, playing scales on a wooden flute.

“Your dad got musicians?” Pasco asked, goosebumps crawling over his back and arms. “For me?” He’ll blame me when it doesn’t work, Pasco thought, panicked.

He’ll say I promised I could dance a catch for him, and want me to pay these people!

“It’s only my uncle and my cousin,” Osa told him pa tiently. “Calm down. You jump worse than a landed cod.”

Pasco made a face at his friend. The closer they got to the beach, the more he wished he’d said no when Osa first spoke: of doing this.

You wanted to be paid for dancing, Pasco thought woefully, his breakfast a lead weight in his belly. Paid like a real dancer, like’ the ones who dance at festivals and for the duke, instead of just dancing at parties with your cousins and, friends. .And now it’ll go bad, because you. didn’t’ have: the backbone to refuse!

His mother had said it time after time, “You. never think of consequences, Pasco. You just think about right now. One of these days the consequences will take you, blind side: in an alley, and you’ll, wonder how things got so bad. He pressed his; face to his knees shivering.

Soon enough he felt the scrape of bottom under their keel. Strong hands grabbed the sides of the boat and dragged it up onto the beach.

“Come on, boy,” a voice told him. Pasco looked up into the flinty eyes of Osa’s grandmother. She wrapped a big-knuckled hand around his arm. “Take off your shoon. You got to learn this net-dance fast if you’re to do it before we sail.”

Men were working next to the flute player and drum mer, laying something on the beach a corner at a time and securing it by staking it down. It was a real net, Pasco saw, one with bigger holes than most fishing nets. Hurriedly he stepped out of his shoes. Men and women left the boats to stand along the edges of the spread net, the lantern light rippling over their faces. They looked grim and forbidding, like statues of stern old gods.

“Two months ‘thout enough fish to cover the deck,” one of them muttered. “This better work.”

Pasco’s store of courage, never large, shrank even more as he looked at their faces, I’m dead, he thought weakly. I just ain’t bothered to lay down yet.

“It’s an easy step,” Osa’s grandmother told him. “Look at my feet, boy. I don’t want to go repeating it. See, you dance each square of the net, like so.” She was nimble in spite of her years, her feet tapping lightly on the sand to shape the four corners of a square. She did a light step over—,”Next square, right in the middle,” she explained to Pasco—her feet leaving a dent in the sand that would form its center. “Up one row of the net, down the next.” Drummer and flute player were trying a lively tune that made Pasco think of leaping fish. Suddenly he was wide awake. His feet were already tracing the sand pattern of steps without waiting for his head to decide to do it.

“Told you it was easy,” the old woman said, watching his feet move, “You ready?”

He would have said he wasn’t, not yet exactly, but the drummer and the flute player began that catchy tune in earnest, and his body wanted to dance. He stepped lightly into the first square on the net closest to him and marked the corners with his toes, his legs flicking across each other. It was a jig of sorts, and he always liked jigs. He locked his hands behind his back, keeping them firmly out of his way as the drum pounded and the flute trilled.

Square by square he called the fish, and he felt them answer, their tails flicking through the squares as his feet did. Oddly, his legs and feet were so warm they seemed almost fiery, though the warmth only came as high as his waist.

It wasn’t an uncomfortable warmth—if anything, It gave him strength.

When he finished, he did it by leaping from, the last square and coming down, feet together, as light as any wisp of silk The music stopped. He bowed to Osas grand mother, because it seemed like the right thing to do.

The sound of hands clapping made all of them, Pasco and the fisherfolk, turn. A party of riders had come onto the sand while Pasco was dancing.

Who was mad enough to be riding at this hour? Pasco wondered. He squinted at them, then gulped. His grace the duke of Emelan and the prettiest lady Pasco had ever seen were applauding him.

The lady dismounted from her horse and walked over. She was just an inch shorter than Pasco’s own five feet five inches, but the way she held herself, back perfectly straight and head high, made her seem taller. She had a button of a nose, eyes of the brightest blue, and an open, friendly smile.

Blessed with four older sisters, Pasco took, note of the lady’s clothing. The girls would love to know she wore a pair of green breeches with legs so wide that, when she was afoot, she seemed to be wearing skirts. Over that she wore: a long, sleeveless tunic in pale green cloth, fastened down the front with a row of tiny buttons shaped like: suns. A full-sleeved blouse with green embroidery kept her arms from the cold. A, sheer green silk veil was fixed somehow to light brown braids wound, about the lady’s head like a, crown. She: removed, one of her tan, riding gloves and offered him. her bare hand.

Pasco took it and bowed, feeling a. little dazed.

“You dance very well,” she said with approval. “What is your name, please?”

Pasco could not reply. Osa’s grandmother said re spectfully, “He’s Pasco Acalon, my lady. A friend of my grandson’s.” She dipped a quick curtsy and nudged Pasco with her elbow.

“Wha—?” he asked, startled, and realized he still had the lady’s hand in his.

“I—I’m sorry. I didn’t—,” He dropped the small hand as if it had turned to fire.

“I thought I had seen nearly every kind of magic there is these last four years,” the lady remarked in a friendly voice, “but never magic that was danced.

Where did you learn it, Pasco?”’

Now he gaped at her, flustered. “Magic? Me, do magic?” Magic was a thing of schools and books. No proper Acalon did magic. They were harriers. They had always been harriers, or the spouses of harriers, or the parents of harriers.

“Oh, no—please, you’re mistaken, my lady. I’m. no mage.”

She met his eyes squarely. “You just danced a magical working, Pasco Acalon. I am never mistaken about such things.”

“Tell her,” Pasco said pleadingly to Osas grand mother. “You know I never had any sparkle of magic, not the tiniest.”

“That he never did, my lady,” admitted the old woman. “He and my grandson have been friends all their lives. There’s nothing odd about Pasco. Just as ordinary as mud, ‘less he starts showing more of a knack for har rier work.”

“Not quite like mud, Gran,” protested the boy Osa.

To Pasco’s deep embarrassment, Osa told the lady—and by then,Duke Vedris, who had ridden over to listen—of the other times Pasco had danced for luck, and gotten what he’d danced for. Pasco stared at the sand, wishing he could just leap into one of the fishing boats now being launched.

When Osa finished, the duke leaned forward in the saddle. “Pasco Acalon—you are related to Macarin and Edoar Acalon?”

Pasco bowed to Duke Vedris. “My father and my grandfather, your grace.”

“Then your mother was Zahra Qais before her marriage, and your maternal grandfather is Abbas Qais.” The: dukes quiet voice was soothing. With a smile: he added, “‘Were: all my servants as faithful and thorough as the Qaises and the Acalons of the Provost’s Guard, I would be the most fortunate ruler on earth. My dear,” he said to the: young lady, “is it possible you are mis taken?”

“No, Uncle,” the lady replied. She: slid cool fingers under Pasco’s chin and forced him to look up, to meet her eyes. “I didn’t mean to startle you, but you do have power, If you didn’t know it, then you need a teacher.”

“My dear, before you began to rearrange his life, did you introduce yourself to this poor lad?” inquired the duke.

The lady stared up at him, startled, then started to grin. Quickly she bit on her lip until she was able to look at Pasco with a straight face. Her fingers never so much as twitched from their position under his chin. “I’m sorry. I’m used to everyone already knowing who I am. I’m Lady Sandrilene fa Toren, the duke’s great-niece.”

Pasco blinked at her for a moment, dazed. It was such a pretty name, as pretty as she was—then his mind began to work again. Sandrilene fa Toren. Any resident of Summersea over the last four years would know that name, and know it well.

She was part of a quartet of young mages who had come to live in the temple city of Winding Circle, outside Summersea. First, they had managed to survive an earthquake while trapped under ground. They had next destroyed a pirate fleet, then gone to the northern mountains to tame entire forests as they burned. They came back to the coast in time to help end the blue pox plague of 1036. Everyone told stories about them, including tales of the girl who wove bandages with the power to heal and veils that made the wearer as good as invisible. In a world in which mages were as common as architects or jewelers, Lady Sandrilene and her three friends were on their way to becoming great mages, the very best of their kind.

“Not meaning any disrespect, your ladyship,” Pasco told her earnestly, “but rnaybe the magic’s in the net. I’dve known if I was magic, ‘deed I would.” My family would never let me hear the end of it, he thought.

Her eyebrows, fine gold-brown crescents, rose. “You may not have,” she replied firmly. “I didn’t know until I was ten—just before I came here, in fact. My three friends didn’t know until they came here, either, and Tris was inspected by a magic-finder. Some talents run very deep, Pasco Acalon. I think yours is one.”

“Your grace!” A boy on a pony galloped onto the sand from the Harbor Road. He’d been riding hard: the pony was covered in sweat as they drew up next to Vedris’s horse. The messenger wore the provost’s colors. “They told me you rode this way,” he gasped. “Captain Qais on dawn watch requests your grace’s attendance at Rokat House, on Harbor Street.”

Pasco frowned, thinking, This Qais would be his uncle Isman, who was not the man to send a boy out at full gallop without very good reason. Isman was so unflap pable that if he were to see a tidal wave roaring down on him, he would blink and order his sergeants to find boats.

The duke and his great-niece traded looks. “And the nature of the emergency?”

the duke asked coolly,

Perhaps Uncle Isman isn’t the only one who’d take a tidal wave in stride, thought Pasco, envious. That duke don’t startle easy. Me, I’m like this messenger—too excitable,

“It’s Jamar Rokat, the myrrh trader from Bihan, your grace,” replied the messenger. “He’s been murdered. It’s a terrible sight, begging your grace’s pardon.”