Small Magics (59 page)

“There’s farms,” said George. “We can get something from them.”

They let their horses pick their way back down the hill and through the woods until they found the road, then skirted wide around the town. They found a farm and bought themselves enough cheese and bread and sausages to get them through the night and breakfast the next morning. Finding the stone circle, however, was far more difficult.

There was no direct road to the circle, and the paths they thought headed the right way meandered along with no particular direction. Several times they were startled along the way by sudden noises, and once by movement on the side of the road. In all cases the culprits were sheep, leading to much chagrin among the party.

It was near dark when they found a little path that was going in the right direction. There was no sign it had been used recently, and certainly not by a large party of riders.

“Maybe they aren’t on their way, yet,” Eileen suggested.

“Maybe they took a different road,” said George, ducking a branch. “A straight one.”

“I don’t think there is a straight one,” said Thomas, ducking the same branch.

“I hope there isn’t,” said Eileen. “I’d hate to find him already there, doing whatever he has planned.”

Me, too
, thought Thomas, wondering how he would stop the man if the bishop was already calling power.

“There!” said George.

The stone was taller than George and Benjamin would have been, stacked on each other, wider than Eileen was tall and twice as thick through as George was wide across the shoulders. What stone they could see was deep grey. The rest was crusted with moss and lichen, or hidden under the surrounding plant life. It split the path in two, sending it off in either direction. Thomas dismounted and, handing his reins to George, stepped close to examine it.

“See anything?” asked the smith.

“A big rock.” Thomas leaned closer. He could almost make out writing, or perhaps some kind of drawing on the stone itself, but time had worn the pattern down to near invisibility. He ran his hand over it, feeling the cuts in the stone, long since smoothed by wind and rain.

“Then I guess I can do magic, too,” said George, “because I’m seeing the same thing.”

Thomas ignored George and stepped around the stone. The actual circle was some fifty feet beyond, surrounded by wood. There was no sign of anyone. Thomas felt a moment’s relief. “This way. Lead the horses.”

Eileen and George dismounted and followed Thomas to the edge of the circle. There was a clear area near one side of the circle, too small to be called a clearing, but large enough to make camp. They tied the horses, and Thomas led them between the big stones and into the circle itself.

The trees and undergrowth had taken over the entire area, making footing treacherous. The stones were the same as the first they had encountered, and spaced equidistant from each other. The evening light cast long, deep shadows from the trees and the rocks themselves, covering everything they touched with a thin layer of darkness.

Thomas paced the circumference of the circle as best he could, tripping on roots and old deadfalls. There was no sign of anything magical that he could see, just the huge, ancient rocks, and the forest that had grown up around them. He walked between two of the stones to where he estimated the middle of the circle was. Thomas found a wide disk of stone there, set deep into the earth and covered with plants and debris. Thomas squatted down and ran his fingers over it. There was a hole in the middle of the stone, which looked to go all the way through to the earth beneath. He squinted at it until his eyes hurt, then at the rest of the circle. He couldn’t see anything magical about any of it.

“Find anything?” asked Eileen.

Thomas rubbed his eyes and looked up. George and Eileen were sitting on a fallen log, waiting for him. He picked himself up and dusted the dirt and leaves from his body. “Only a rock with a hole in the middle of it.”

“Probably where whoever built this place drained the blood from their victims,” put in George.

“Ha-ha,” Eileen said, hitting him. “Thank you for making it that much more creepy out here.”

“I think it’s just used to mark the center of the circle,” offered Thomas.

Eileen stood up from the fallen log. “It’s starting to get really dark. Are we going to camp here?”

“I don’t know.” Thomas made his way carefully to his friends. “There’s nothing magical here.”

“And no sign of the bishop,” said George.

“Aye, well, there is that, isn’t there.” Thomas took another look around the circle. “I thought certainly this would be the place. This is where the book said to go.”

“To increase your powers,” Eileen said. “Maybe that’s not what he wants.”

“Or he has a different book.” Thomas shrugged. “I don’t know. Let’s get a camp set up and a fire started.”

“A fire?” George repeated. “Do you think that’s wise? What if he comes?”

“I doubt he will. This place is hard enough to get to during the day. If he was going to do something here, he would have shown up by now.”

“Besides,” Eileen pointed at the stones and the long, dark shadows they cast across the forest floor. “I want a fire.”

Thomas had little more to say, and kept silent as they set up camp for the night. George dug a deep pit to hide the fire from any watching eyes, while Thomas and Eileen found deadwood to feed it. When it was finished, Thomas sat, searching through the stolen witch hunt books as the last light of day began to fade. As it became too dark to read, he closed them with a thud and sat back with a sigh.

“Anything?” asked Eileen.

“Nothing,” said Thomas. “I found the bits on sharing power, but they all assume the witches are working together. There’s nothing about stealing magic from anyone else, and nothing about stone circles, either, except in the spell book.” Thomas picked up the little book again, and paged through it until he found the spell. It glowed, blue and bright to his eyes, though he knew no one else could see it. “I don’t understand it, though. If the circle itself isn’t magical, why do you need to be here? Why won’t the spell work in your kitchen, or the stables?”

“Maybe the spell attracts the magic to the circle,” suggested George as he tore at some bread. “The way a cheese on a hook attracts fish.”

Thomas snorted at the image. “I don’t think it’s quite the same thing, but you’re probably close.”

“Maybe the spell draws the magic in,” Eileen suggested. “Like a lodestone. And maybe being in the circle is what makes the magic grow stronger.”

“I don’t know.” Thomas stared down at the book, then looked back at the circle.

Eileen straightened up suddenly. “You want to try it.”

Thomas took a big breath before replying. “Aye.”

Chapter 29

George stopped in mid-bite. “Are you crazy? You don’t know what might happen if you do that.”

“ ‘Spell to increase one’s power,’ ” said Thomas, quoting the title. “It increases your power.”

“How?” demanded George. “What happens to your power? How does it increase?”

“It doesn’t say,” said Thomas. “It just gives the instructions.”

“And you want to try it anyway?”

“Aye. I need all the power I can get to face down the bishop.”

“If it
works
,” warned George. “What if it causes you to turn to ash instead?”

“It won’t do that,” said Eileen.

George raised his eyebrows at his sister. “And how are you so sure?”

“Well, the person who wrote it down probably did it.”

“So?”

“So if he did it, how could he have turned to ash?”

George’s eyebrows came down, and his eyes narrowed. He struggled with it for a moment, then doubtfully suggested, “Maybe he wrote it down first?”

Eileen smiled at her brother. “And why would he do that if he didn’t know it worked?”

George sighed. “You’ve been spending too much time with him. You’re starting to sound the same.”

“What are you going to do?” Eileen asked Thomas.

Thomas looked at the book in his hands. “I don’t know.”

“Well, you’d better make up your mind fast.” She pointed to the horizon, where the last of the light was fading. “Didn’t the spell say you had to start the circle after sundown and finish before moonrise?”

“Aye.”

“Well, then?”

Eileen and George both waited. Thomas tried to think about the reasons not to do it, but curiosity, as always, got the better of him. Thomas picked himself up, “I’ll need a light.”

Eileen stood up. “George can make a fire in the middle of the circle.”

“You’re daft,” said George.

“Aye,” agreed Thomas. “Will you help?”

George sighed, and put down his food. “Aye.”

Thomas went through the spell again, reading the words by their own glow as the sunlight faded. “All right, I’ll need the fire and something to draw with. I have to make two circles, one inside the other, and write a bunch of symbols inside them. I also need your walking stick, George.”

“My stick?”

“Aye, I need to make a compass.”

George, puzzled, handed over the stick, and turned his attention to charring the ends of a dozen small twigs. Thomas stepped into the stone circle, the thin light of the flames and the last fading daylight making the ground hard to see and making safe footing even harder to find. He stumbled his way forward until he found the stone disk in the centre. He ran his hand over it until he found the hole in the middle, then jammed George’s stick into it. “I need some string.”

“Here,” Eileen began unlacing her bodice, “use this.”

By the time she had the bodice unlaced and the strings out, Thomas had scraped the leaves and moss and dirt away from the surface of the stone disk, and had put the book down in the middle. George had a dozen twigs charred and another, large branch in full flame. He led Eileen into the circle, both moving carefully amidst the undergrowth. Eileen gave Thomas the laces. He measured the distance he needed as best he could, tied one end of the laces loosely around the stick and made a loop in the other.

George handed him the charred twigs. “Use these. I’ll get the fire going.”

Thomas pulled the lacings tight to what he hoped was the correct length for the outer circle. He made a loop at the end of it, then put in the first of the twigs and began to draw. The going was slow and painstaking, and he used up six twigs by the time the first circle was drawn.

George had the new fire going a few feet away from the stone disk. Eileen was searching through the underbrush for more twigs to char. Thomas adjusted the length of the lacings and drew the inner circle. Once it was done, he pulled George’s stick free from the hole, tossed Eileen her laces and George his stick, then took off his sword-belt and handed it to Eileen as well. Thomas looked up into the night sky.

“What are you doing?” asked George.

“Finding north,” said Thomas. He turned in a slow circle clockwise from where the sun had set until he spotted the pinpoint of light that was the northern star. “I knew that astronomy class would come in handy.”

He marked the point on the inner circle and picked up the spell book. The inscriptions that needed to run between the circles were intricate and formed symbols Thomas hadn’t seen before. Drawing them was slow going, and the little twigs seemed to break as fast as Eileen and George could make them. Thomas glanced skyward, worried he wasn’t going to finish on time. The moon hadn’t risen yet, though, and he turned back to the symbols. He kept working, painstakingly reproducing the diagrams, symbols and numbers from the little book. At the end of an hour, his fingers were numb and his knees ached from kneeling on the stone, but he was finished. He straightened, feeling his back complain.

“That,” said George, “is impressive.”

“Academy training.” Thomas stood and rubbed feeling back into his legs. “In your second year, they make you copy old manuscripts that are falling apart to keep them from being lost. You aren’t allowed to make mistakes.”

“Well, you didn’t make any here,” said Eileen. “Now what?”

“At moonrise, I have to sit and meditate into the north for an hour. Then east, then south, then west.”

“How are you going to know when an hour has passed?” asked George.

Thomas gestured at the sky. “The position of the moon and guesswork. Unless you have a better idea.”

George thought about it. “Nope.”

“Should we stay in the circle?” asked Eileen. “Or will that wreck it?”

“I don’t know. Best to stay outside, I guess.”

“All right.” She leaned in and kissed him, careful not to touch the circles on the ground. “We’ll be at the other fire. Call us if you need anything.”

“I will.” Thomas sat himself down in the center of the circle, watching his friends climb over the fallen branches and underbrush. The light of his little fire didn’t carry far, and George and Eileen faded to dark silhouettes in a few steps, and then vanished entirely into the darkness between the fires. It wasn’t until they were next to their campfire that Thomas could see them again. The light from the pit fire was barely enough to allow Thomas to make out their faces. He waved at them, then turned to the north, and worked on getting as comfortable as possible. Sitting cross-legged seemed to be his best bet, though he wished he had a cushion. Still, he did the best he could, and read the instructions one last time:

Sit quietly, back straight. Breathe deeply in the nose and out the mouth. Focus your mind on the magic and stare directly ahead. Once you have achieved the vision, change your focus to drawing the magic inside yourself.

What
achieving the vision
was, Thomas had no idea, but the moon was starting to rise. He took a quick, last look at his friends, then, sitting cross-legged and keeping his back straight, began to breathe. In through his nose, out through his mouth. His thoughts danced in different directions, from breakfast that morning to Eileen to worries about the bishop to wondering how his mother was doing. He closed his eyes and tried to focus. Again and again he turned his mind from other paths, back to the images of magic that had come to him the last few months. He remembered the white glow from Ailbe’s hands as she healed Eileen’s cut. He remembered the change in the bishop’s voice as he commanded John Flarety and the stunning, tiny beauty of the ball of light that both he and Timothy had summoned.