Wren Journeymage (10 page)

One more transfer spell. She knew exactly where everything was in the galley.

Easy,
you
know
this
one
.
Focus
.
A
calm
and
clear
mind
—

She could picture the big corked jug of ground red pepper on its shelf, clear as a Destination. She transferred it up, and then, with a quick mutter and a wave of her hand, let the wind blow it in the pirates’ faces. A cacophony of coughs, chokes, curses, and wails of dismay rose.

“Boom ‘em off!” the captain bawled, running down the length of her vessel. “Set sail!”

Wren looked up at the pirates’ mainsail and rigging. Her little fires burned nicely. She muttered the wind spell again, putting the last of her effort into it, and a gust of wind caught at her flames, scattering them up into the topsails and top-gallants, as horrified pirates watched in dismay.

“Magic,” someone said.

“They’ve got a mage!” a pirate yelled.

Everyone on both ships looked around. Though her head swam dizzily from reaction, Wren also looked, though turning her head that made her head ache worse.

The firelight on both ships revealed the pirates packing on sail as fast as they could in order to get away. Wren stumbled the few steps to the hatch, and eased herself down, as clumsy as her very first day.

Not to the crew cabin, she thought hazily. Even though it was still night, and her sleep shift, she did not want anyone talking to her.

Down, down, until she reached the hold. She felt her way back to the illegal cargo, and lay down on one of trunks with its extra layers of canvas.

And then despair smacked over her spirit like an old, moldy wet blanket. How close they came to total defeat while she stood there making stupid mistakes! Three spells. Three stupid, elementary spells in the time Mistress Leila, or Tyron, would have done a dozen—twenty—all correct the first time. Tyron would not have produced squawking chickens as his first effort in an emergency.

Journeymage . . .

Who
am
I
trying
to
fool
?

A calm and clear mind.

She could almost heard Mistress Leila’s precise, unemotional voice.
All
right
,
so
you
made
a
lot
of
mistakes
.
What
did
you
learn
,
besides
the
reminder
that
you
need
to
get
back
into
practicing
every
day
?

I need to . . . Wren’s exhausted mind drifted into a jumble of images and what-ifs. Her eyes closed gratefully for what seemed like just a few breaths, but flew open when she heard thumping and then a distant wail.

She sat up. Her mouth was dry, her body sticky with sweat. She must have slept, though it didn’t feel like very long. Something was going on topside. Probably nothing good, and here she was with—

She ran her hand over the canvas shrouding one of the silk trunks. An idea made her forget the noises above. During her second year as a magic student, she and her classmates had learned how to make these seals, as many magic students went on to work for guilds and scribes. It was boring, exacting sort of magic, but necessary. Wren frowned, wishing she could pull out her book and review the lesson.

Step by step
, Mistress Leila had said from the first lesson. The most difficult spells were accomplished the same way as the simple ones, step by step. You just had more steps for this sort of work, but if you knew your Basics, and thought about how each must lead to the next, you could usually remember the right way.

She dug under the layers of canvas, feeling about until her fingers encountered the false seal. With the edge of one nail she pried just a bit of the waxen seal away from the wood. Working it with her fingers to make it pliable, she started whispering the spells: the identification spell, the encapsulation of words, then planting the spell into the wax . . . After that, the spell that would release the word-spell . . .The transfer spell. All easy because she was working with such a tiny corner of the seal. Isolate, encapsulate, press the wax down—and seal it all together into an enchantment—

“Nafat!” she whispered, and felt that inward flash, like sunlight on water, that indicated the enchantment had held.

The fake seal was now real—but the magic when the seal broke would send the trunks right back to their makers. And wouldn’t the
Sandskeet
’s captain be surprised!

Wren worked her way to the back of the pile and uncovered another trunk. This time the process was much faster. She did a third, just to test her speed, but at the end felt that warning buzz again, the lightheaded tiredness that meant too much magic done.

She sank down with her back to the trunk, then stiffened when she heard more stamping, and a high wail that sounded a lot like someone young.

Someone like Danal, in fact.

Wren fumbled her way forward, barking her shins, sides, and forearms against more corners then it seemed possible the entire world could contain, much less one small cargo area. She climbed up to the next deck. In the light of a single swaying lamp, a great many crew-members stood on the ladder, faces lit by slivers of golden lamplight, all straining upward. Listening. Their shadows rippled back and forth against the bulkheads.

“She is
not
!” Danal’s voice carried down into the hot, stuffy deck. “We
hate
mages!”

Uh oh. Wren ducked back down, and held onto the ladder as she envisioned her hammock. There it hung on the crew deck. She kept its image firmly in mind and then leaned sideways, one leg outstretched. Whatever posture you transferred in you appeared in, and she didn’t want to transfer into a hammock standing upright.

Hold the image—and transfer! Thump. Right onto the hammock, but half in and half out. She felt herself swinging dangerously. She flattened herself hastily, and when the hammock stopped its swing, she peeped over the edge. Another crowd of crew members pressed up against the ladder, listening.

Danal’s voice was louder now. “She isn’t! I tell you. No one in our family—no one in our
village
knows any mage. If we did, would we be
here
? No! We’d be livin’ like princes—” The voice abruptly stopped, and was followed by an enraged, “Ow! It’s the truth!”

“That’s right,” someone muttered. “Beat it out of the brat. We all oughta be livin’ like princes.”

Wren had heard enough. No one suspected her. It was Patka! Why her?

The pepper. Wren grimaced. Once again, she hadn’t thought ahead to the results of her actions. The cook probably found the jug empty, and everyone must have smelled the pepper on the air when Wren used it against the pirates. Patka was the Cook’s mate. Wren was only the stupid helper who couldn’t speak Dock Talk. They thought Patka was a secret mage.

Wren sighed. Now what?

Think ahead. With a calm, clear mind.

Wren checked her tunic. The magic book lay securely there. She hefted her pack onto her hammock, which made a kind of rough Destination, just in case. Then she flipped out and joined the crowd at the ladder. “Let me by.”

The sailors laughed, and one waved Wren back.

Wren’s heart began to race. “If you don’t, I’ll turn you all into tree stumps.”

One or two sailors reacted as if she’d stuck pins into them, but the rest scoffed, or pretended to be afraid. She whispered, snapped her fingers—and a cold bit of mage-light appeared.

They jumped away as if a snake had bit them. She pushed past, leaving the mage-light to burn there in midair, and climbed up the ladder. Whispering broke out behind her.

“The cook’s helper?”

“I thought she was smart as a rock!”

“Maybe a wizard in disguise?”

She ignored them and walked down the companionway, where she heard the captain clearly. “Well, then, boy, we’ll just have to hang her from the main yard by her heels, and see if she suddenly finds magic and will do the simple things I asked for. If she don’t, well, guess we were wrong, eh?”

Wren paused. Think! Clear mind—

Two spells. Get them ready, yes. That’s right. Two good spells, ready to use.

She shut her eyes and concentrated, whispering steadily, and entered the cabin, interrupting the cruel laughter and taunts of the mates. In the middle of the crowded cabin, Patka sat on a stool with her hands tied behind her, a dirty rag binding her mouth, and a knife held at her neck by the first mate. He was a big, strong, grizzled man who strongly resembled the captain.

Two others held Danal, one at each arm. His face was red, and tears of helpless rage dripped down his face.

“Let him go,” Wren said.

Attention snapped her way.

The first mate snorted. “It’s the land-clod.”

The captain said, “You make up some story to cover your pal here?” She jerked a thumb toward Patka.

Wren said, “I’m the mage. You have two heartbeats to free Patka. Or you’re all . . .” She sorted desperately for a good word in Dock Talk, then grinned. “Barnacles.”

One of the mates holding Danal dropped his arm and lunged at her, but she’d prepared for that. She pointed at him, finishing the illusion spell she’d set up, and as fake green fire whooshed out of her finger, she muttered the heat spell. It only lasted the space of a breath—heat was very hard to sustain—but the quick sense of burn and the bright, poison green illusion of fire were enough to send the captain and mates backing away in haste, leaving Danal to drop to the deck, and Patka sitting alone on her stool, her eyes wide with incredulity.

“I got rid of those pirates. Then went to take a nap,” Wren said, knowing that she had to sound really, really strong, or they would rush her again. “What’s all this noise?”

The captain said, slow and wary, “If you’re a mage, why’d you let yourself get boomed?”

Why indeed? Wren could tell the truth, but she sensed that she only had a little time before they would act. Above all she wanted Patka to understand what magery really was.

So she said, “None of your nosing. Got my own
cruise
.” Cruise being the closest she could come to
affairs
. “Needed to learn to hand, reef, steer. Learned it.” She pointed at Patka. “If you thought she got you safe from pirates, why treat her bad?”

“Didn’t kill her outright, did I?” the captain retorted, her face sullen, but her eyes afraid. A vein beat in her temple.

Wren said, “Can you get a new sail by wishing it?”

They stared, looking confused, until the first mate said, “Of course not. But
you
can.”

“No,” Wren said. “Magic makes things same way as hands do. Gather the flax, work it, spin it. One thread, two threads, three. Weave it. It’s the same work. Just a different way.”

They all showed various expressions of disbelief.

“Magic is like . . . like food. You eat food, you can work. If you work and don’t eat, you get weak and can’t work. If you eat too much and don’t work, you get sick. Magic has . . .” She turned to Danal. “How do you say balance in Dock Talk?”

He whispered it, his expression so unhappy, so betrayed, she felt her insides wring.

“Balance,” she repeated the new word. “Use too much magic, and the entire world gets sick. Good mages don’t have silk. No palaces. No gold. They make bridges. They make spells to keep the streets clean.” She was going to add something about guild seals, but remembered her surprise down in the hold, and hastily said, “Water cleaning spells. Protections. Things making life for everyone better. Not just kings. Unless you are a bad sorcerer. Like Sveran Djur. And they aren’t as safe as they think. They make the world sick, and the Mage Council will come after them.”

The captain and first mate stirred impatiently, and Wren realized they were getting over their fear. She knew if they acted, it would not be to her benefit.

So she finished the second spell she’d prepared, a partial stone spell, just enough to keep them all in place. She made mysterious signs while whispering the last two words, and felt the heavy pull of magic within her that meant the spells held. But the cost was a return of that lightheaded buzzing.

The captain and the mates stilled, their eyes looking wide and scared. The knife clattered to the deck.

Wren knew the spell would not last long, so she had to be quick. She could rest later.

Because the spell was only partial they were able to talk, though with difficulty. “Why. Do. That.” The captain spoke as though under water, slurry and slow.

“Because I know what was coming next,” Wren said, picking up the knife. “From the threats you made to Danal, you were going to force Patka to do bad spells, weren’t you? You’d like to do that to me.”

The captain’s eyes flickered and her mouth opened as if to deny, then shut. Once again Wren felt that inward prickle of alarm, just like the night they got boomed, and she remembered that whisper in the alleyway, “That’s the one.”

Wren stared at the captain, sensing that there was some other plan here, but she decided not to waste time and effort trying to find it out. The captain would just lie. Better to get away, then any nasty plans wouldn’t matter.

Meanwhile, Patka finally got the gag loose. “Not you,” she cried.

Wren sighed. “It’s true. Come on. Outside.”

Danal had picked himself up from the deck. He and Patka followed Wren outside into bleak morning light under a gray-streaked sky. Faces peered from the rim of the main hatchway, and once again Wren sent out her fake green fire. The faces dropped hastily away, and she ran forward and kicked the hatch cover over, then sat on it.

Other than the lookout up on the mainmast and the young crew man at the wheel, everyone had gone below to nose out what was going on in the cabin. Only one sail had been set, just enough to keep the ship from wallowing. The mate of the watch had been one of the ones holding Danal.