The Mage of Trelian (9 page)

“Yes, beautiful,” she said out loud, closing the last of the distance between them and sitting down at his feet. He sank down around her, repositioning himself fluidly to support her back and curl into the smallest circle he could manage, which wasn’t all that small. “And enormous. When did you get so big? I remember when you were barely bigger than Lyrimon.”

That made him send back a strange blend of embarrassment and contempt for his former tiny size, which made her laugh again.

“All right,” she said. “I’ll try to keep in mind how gigantic and strong and fierce you are now.” And he was all those things, of course. But also capable of astounding gentleness when he chose. And filled with love for her, which always made her feel safe and protected and just . . . really, really good.

Even now, when everything else was so very much
not
good.

“Oh, Jakl,” she said, her smile fading. “I wish none of this were happening.”

He nudged his head even closer, putting the tip of his snout in her lap. She laid her head down against him and closed her eyes, letting herself be comforted as much as she could. It would all get sorted out somehow. It had to. They’d end the war and get Calen back and stop Mage Krelig from doing all the evil, terrible things he was planning to do, and everything could go back to normal. Whatever that meant. She was having a hard time remembering.

She stayed there for the rest of the afternoon and into early evening. The sun was just starting to disappear into the horizon when Jakl raised his head abruptly at the same moment Meg felt his alarm through the link.

“What is it? Is someone —?”

He uncurled himself and leaped to his feet just as she heard the shouts and screams begin. But it wasn’t until the sky grew bright with flaming arrows that she understood.

They were under attack.

T
HE SHOCK WAS SO GREAT THAT
Calen nearly fainted. Or maybe he did faint. The world had seemed to go away for a few seconds — his vision went gray and then white, and then he was sitting on the balcony floor, staring at the bird, who had jumped down from the railing to stand in front of him.

His first thought when his wits returned was that he must have truly gone crazy at last.

But he didn’t feel crazy. He felt . . . he felt . . .

Oh, gods. Thank the gods. Meg hadn’t given up on him. She was trying to find him.

She was still his friend.

The bird hopped impatiently before him. “Calen,” it said again.
Meg
said. Through the bird. How was she doing that?

She couldn’t be doing that. Not on her own. Which meant that Serek hadn’t given up on him, either.

His relief was so enormous that he had to fight an insane urge to grab the bird and kiss its ugly, feathery head. And then he had to bite his fist to keep from laughing. At himself, at the bird, at everything. Oh, gods.

All right. Good. Really good. This was really, really good. But what did it mean, exactly? What did he do now?

Good question. He didn’t see a note attached to the bird’s leg in the way that birds sometimes carried messages. Maybe they had been afraid of the bird delivering its message to the wrong person. This bird had zeroed in on Calen as soon as it had become aware of him. It must have been spelled to speak to him and him alone.

He leaned forward and asked quietly, “Meg? Can you hear me?”

The bird just looked at him. He supposed that was too much to hope — that the bird could somehow let them communicate directly, in the moment.

“Can you say anything else, bird?”

“Calen!” it said, still using Meg’s voice. “Calen, Calen, Calen!”

Okay. Probably not, then. So the purpose of the bird must have been . . . to find him. To find him and let him know that they were looking for him.

And to give him a way to send a message back.

He thought about how something like that might be accomplished. Unfortunately he could only see the colors of active spells as they were being cast; there was no hint that he could see now of what Serek might have done to make the bird able to find him or able to carry Meg’s voice. He had to assume that the bird must be able to find its way back home again; maybe Anders had used one of his sequence spells to send the bird to find Calen and then, once it found him, head back to Trelian. So all he had to do was figure out how to give it a message to carry back.

A paper message was too risky. Even if he’d had any paper. If by some chance Mage Krelig saw this bird on its way home, it had to appear to be just a regular crow with nothing special about it at all. Hopefully the mage wouldn’t be able to tell that it had any kind of magic attached to it. He hadn’t noticed it on the way here, anyway. At least — at least as far as Calen knew. He looked anxiously over his shoulder toward the door that led to the hallway.

No. He couldn’t worry about that. He had to seize this moment. He had to trust that Mage Krelig was distracted with the other mages or whatever had been making him so angry this morning or any of his usual crazy things. Or that Serek and Anders had done something to make the bird pass unnoticed. Or at least less noticeably.

Stop worrying,
and start thinking.
The voice in his head sounded a little like Meg. It made him smile again.

All right. Thinking.

White energy for communication, obviously, but what else? Should he try to make the bird sound like him? How had they
done
that? He shook his head. First things first. He had to make it say something other than his name. If it returned and just kept saying the same thing they had trained or spelled it to say when it left, they would never know it had found him.

He tried nonmagical means, just to see. But he couldn’t get the bird to just repeat something he said. It only cawed at him, or said his name in Meg’s voice, over and over.

After a few more minutes of thinking, he tried his original information-gathering spell again, the one he’d tried sending at the bird in the first place. Maybe there was something he could find out that way.

Luckily the bird seemed perfectly content to stand there while he tried all these things. “Good bird,” Calen said, because it was true. He wished he had some bread left to give it. He wished he had a whole feast of all of its favorite foods to give it, in fact. If this bird really helped him get home, he was going to make sure it was kept in . . . well, whatever crows liked best, for the rest of its life.

Slowly, he reached toward it with another tendril of questing white energy. He got back a sense of . . . speed, he thought. Speed and sky and flight. Well, all right. He could have guessed that part. He reached a little deeper, trying to direct the magic to find out what was different about this bird. What had happened to it? What had Serek and Anders . . . ?
Come on,
he thought pleadingly, then suddenly remembered his candles and heard Mage Krelig’s voice, telling him that a mage didn’t plead with the magic to do his will. He demanded it.

Tell me!
Calen commanded his spell, sending it forward more forcefully. He was no longer trying to tease out little hints of information; he was insisting that the magic show him what was there to be discovered. He didn’t want to hurt or alarm the bird, and he didn’t want to push too hard . . . but he discovered that he didn’t have to. The shift in his intention was enough. Almost at once he felt his attention drawn to the bird’s head. Or — not its head, exactly, but the space around it. Very faintly, he could see . . . what was that? A tiny ball of energy, seeming to float just above the tiny feathers that rimmed the bird’s bright eyes.

He sat back, amazed. That must — that must be the spell that Serek and Anders had cast. But — but he couldn’t see colors after the initial casting. He could only see magic when it was first happening.

Well, not anymore, apparently,
said the Meg-like voice in his head.
Be amazed later. Right now, use it to cast your spell and send the bird back home!

Right. He nodded to himself, not even caring anymore about what that said about his sanity. Then he tried to examine the ball of energy more closely. There was a mix of colors — white, of course, as well as purple, blue, green, black. . . . He studied them, trying to sort out how Serek and Anders might have used them, and why. He’d never done anything like this before. He’d identified the colors in magic countless times, and could often reason things out afterward, if the spells and colors were straightforward enough. He could cast counterspells very quickly based on the colors he saw in another spell, but that was more instinct than reason. This was the first time he’d been able to spend more than a few seconds looking at the colors of a spell. He couldn’t quite see how they were all connected to one another, but he could see the relative amounts of each type of magic energy used, and given what he knew about what the crow had been able to do . . .

It took some trial and error, and many, many whispered words of thanks to the gods for the crow’s continued patience and cooperation, and also to Serek and Anders and to the bird itself and any bird-gods that might exist and be listening as well, just on general principles, but eventually Calen thought that he had it. He could see enough of what the mages had done to figure out his own version, something that would give the bird speed and strength and purpose and would let him give it a message to carry back. Not quite the same spell that Serek and Anders had used, but close enough. And maybe . . . maybe even better.

He picked up the bird gently in both hands, and began.

Later, when it was time to go down for dinner, Calen stood for a long moment in his doorway, trying to pull himself together.

He was still reeling from the relief of knowing that his friends — his
famil
y — wanted him back and were trying to help him,
and
from the astounding realization that it was possible, at least some of the time, for him to see the colors of spells that had already been cast. And on top of that, he was now feeling so hopeful and impatient and excited for the crow to make its way back home.

But what he was feeling right that moment more than anything else was terror that Krelig would be able to tell.

He had been terrified of Krelig from the start, certainly, even if he had to try to hide it to avoid the mage’s anger whenever Calen actually showed his fear. And he’d been determined to find a way home from the start as well. But now that the crow had come, now that he’d heard Meg’s voice and sent a reply and it seemed that escape might truly, actually be possible . . . now the idea of Krelig finding out and stopping him was absolutely unbearable. It hadn’t been nearly as bad when it had all just been vague dreams of how he would somehow, someday get away. Now it was actually beginning — he had taken the first steps toward getting back where he belonged. Which meant that now there was a real plan, a real
chance,
for Krelig to discover and destroy.

Calen swallowed and tried to slow down his breathing and his frantically beating heart. He had to act normally. He had to go down there and get his food and not draw attention to himself and not seem in any way any different from the person he had been when he left the mage’s presence earlier that day. Sometimes the man was too crazy and distracted or just too uninterested to notice anything going around him. But sometimes he wasn’t. Sometimes he was very perceptive indeed.

Well, being late to get his food was not going to help him stay inconspicuous. He forced himself to take a step into the hallway. After that it was easier to take another. And another. And then he was walking, and then he was at the end of the hall, and then the stairway. And eventually he was all the way down in the dining hall.

His covered plate was waiting in its usual location. But there were five other plates beside it.

For a second, he couldn’t make any sense of it. And then he remembered. The other mages! He’d completely forgotten about them.

They weren’t there yet. He wondered if Krelig had bothered to tell them how meals worked around here. Probably not. Almost certainly not. Well, Calen wasn’t going to go fetch them. They could figure it out, just as he had. He took his plate and carried it to one of the long tables, sitting in the corner with his back to the room in a way that he hoped would discourage any of the others, should they eventually show up, from thinking he wanted company.

He ate without noticing the food, his mind continuing to dart against his will to thoughts of the crow.
Stop it,
he told himself firmly.
Stop thinking about it!
But that was far easier said than done.

He was just about to stand up and carry his plate to the counter when he heard someone enter the dining hall behind him. He turned to see which of the mages it was, and his heart sank. It was Mage Krelig.

He never came to dinner when Calen was there. Never. Why tonight, of all nights?

Maybe because he senses that something is wrong,
the voice in his head said. It didn’t sound like Meg anymore.

He can’t. He can’t know anything.

Krelig didn’t seem angry, but of course, that meant nothing. Calen waited to see if maybe Krelig had gone to fetch the other mages after all and was just leading them in, but no one else entered behind him. He walked straight over to where Calen was sitting and sat across from him. He continued to sit there, silently, just looking at Calen.