Wild Magic (36 page)

It was not just to maintain the illusion that she wished herself with child; nor yet to please her lord’s heart, though she yearned to do so more desperately with each day that went by, for there could be no doubt in her mind, or whatever passed for her own heart, that she loved him utterly; but also out of a growing fear for her own safety in the northern kingdom. The announcement of the pregnancy would provide her with some protection; but she had sworn her husband to secrecy until, as she put it to him, ‘she could be sure’; but it would be hard to postpone the declaration for much longer without incurring his suspicion. She had good reason to be concerned. Now that Ravn had unbound himself somewhat from her enspellment, she found herself rather more free to wander the halls and mazelike corridors of the great castle, and had thus overheard many a conversation never designed for her ears. It was true that her hearing was preternatural, and her footfall soft; but she seemed to come upon new conspiracies and whisperings every time she ventured from her chambers.

The manoeuvrings of Erol Bardson came of little surprise, even to one so poorly versed in the complexities of court intrigue; she had heard Ravn’s lords many a time warn him of his cousin’s plottings and urge their King to send the man away on some pretext or another before he could rally enough supporters to make his bid for the throne. What had surprised her had been just how many other nobles and commoners whispered against the King when they thought themselves safely out of earshot. Ravn was not popular, even in the hub of his own capital, even within the thick walls of Halbo Keep. And it was her they blamed most: that much was abundantly clear. ‘The sorceress’, they called her; and ‘the white seither’: this latter was a term she had not heard before and it puzzled her. Like so much else, she stored it away for future reference and listened on. Some of the women were vicious in their comments. ‘A heathen witch, that’s what she is,’ one bony creature in an ill-fitting yellow dress had declared to her companion, a vast woman all hips and bosom and nothing to differentiate the shape between. ‘Trapped him between her legs and squeezed all the life out of him. I remember when he ran up and down these passages of a night, slipping into one bedchamber after another and swiving everything in sight!’

Her companion had nodded her agreement vigorously, though even to the Rosa Eldi’s untrained eye, it seemed highly unlikely the Stallion of the North had ever been so starved of his oats that he would have snuffed at these poor nosebags.

‘Of course,’ the dandelion-robed one continued, ‘if she doesn’t bear him a son within the first year of their marriage, he will surely have to cast her off and take a more fertile woman to his bed.’

‘If the Lady Auda has anything to do with it, she’ll not even last that long,’ the vast woman had concurred cheerfully. She lowered her voice so that the Rose of the World had to calm her breathing to hear the rest of her remarks. ‘I heard our esteemed ex-queen has sent for a seither.’

‘Indeed?’ The thin woman was intrigued. ‘A seither to treat a seither? That’s a thing I never heard of.’

A shiver ran through the Rosa Eldi’s frame that had nothing to do with the winter’s chill. It was the second time she had heard the word, and the context boded ill.

‘Treat? To help the Queen conceive? No, you fool!’ The fat woman chuckled in disbelief. ‘To seek herbal intervention. To do away with her in such a way as it will appear she’s expired from natural causes, before the King’s seed takes root, which Auda would hate to see: she could hardly dare to lay a finger on her then. “That nomad whore”, that’s how the Lady Auda refers to her, you know. Abhors her, and all her like.’

‘Whores?’

‘No, nomads, Sera: nomads and all their witching ways.’

‘But why? I’ve never seen a nomad in my life till this one turned up; and as far as I know, Auda’s never left the Isles.’ The skinny one sounded perplexed. ‘Besides, if she has such a loathing for magic, why call on the skills of a seither?’

‘Good northern magic is quite different to the vile practices of those Footloose folk,’ her companion declared matter-of-factly. ‘It’s well known that seithers merely draw on the natural energies of the world; while the nomads . . . Well, they draw no line, even at the use of blood and men’s seed in their spells. It’s said old King Ashar fell in love with one when he went a-raiding in Istria. From what I’d heard, he never sought his wife’s bed again once he’d returned, all aflame with desire for his witch-lover a thousand miles away.’

‘No!’

‘Yes! And that’s why the Lady Auda hates nomads,’ the big woman concluded triumphantly. ‘She can’t bear to see her own son follow his father’s heart.’

‘Heart? Cock, more like!’

‘Sera!’

And the two of them had collapsed into mirth and begun a different sort of conversation entirely.

The Rosa Eldi had never known anxiety; but she was beginning to learn its potency now. Added to this, she had been visited by strange thoughts of late – it was hard to think of them as dreams, since she did not truly sleep. Images came to her in flashes, more and more frequently since the haunting vision of the rock-choked cavern. She had no idea what to make of them, for they tallied with nothing she had experienced in this world since leaving Sanctuary. She saw a city of gold, its turrets gleaming in the sunlight. She saw gigantic trees towering into a summer sky. She saw cliffs so white they seemed carved from ice: but they were warm and vibrant, pocked with coloured flowers and with trailing ivies, nothing like the ice-cliffs of the Master’s sorcerous island. More than once, she saw the image of a woman in a red dress, her long, pale hair all decked with blossoms, mirrored in the clear surface of a lake. The woman’s head was thrown back and she was laughing, so the Rose of the World could not clearly see her face; but something about her was terribly familiar, made her pulse race. Beside her, a step behind, stood a tall man dressed all in blue, his long flaxen hair blowing in the breeze. His hand was on her waist, the gesture both proprietorial and affectionate. At his feet sat a huge beast, black-furred and sleek. It stretched and yawned and she saw the deep, dark-red interior of its mouth, its sharp fangs, its long tongue. Something about this vision kept returning to her in slightly different forms through the days and nights; but never could she make out the man’s visage, or fully recognise the female figure, though some part of her knew it was herself she saw there, knew it as well as if she looked into a mirror now. Had she truly once been so happy? The woman in her flash of memory had appeared powerful, ecstatic, free. She could not equate such a figure with the woman she was now; had no idea of the identity of the man who was with her. That he might be her husband, in another time, another life, seemed like some cruel trick.

Cruellest of all, however, had been the unmistakable swell of her belly. In this other time, this other place, with this other husband, she had conceived a child.

And if that were the case, why could she not now?

She sighed and pressed her hand against the defiantly flat muscles of her abdomen. ‘Grow,’ she whispered fiercely. ‘Grow.’

But what good was such an instruction if there was no seed planted within? It had been almost two weeks since Ravn had made love to her, and that one time he had withdrawn before ejaculating: some old wives’ tale about a man’s seed deforming the growing babe in the womb. And when she had stared at him in disbelief and dismay he had merely stroked her face and reassured her that once the child was born they would take even greater pleasure from one another than they had ever before, since no one would be able to begrudge them such, with one healthy heir already the consequence of their enjoyment.

She was called back to herself by something stirring beneath her hand, the hand which rested amid the herbs in the clay planter against which she leant. She blinked and looked down. A sturdy green shoot had forced its way between her first and second fingers, its continuing upward progress bizarrely visible. She drew back, at once afraid and fascinated. And still the shoot grew; unfurled its green head, put forth a pair of tiny leaves on its stem, then a second pair. A moment later the new herb had produced nascent shoots and tiny buds; and then – in the middle of a bitter Eyran winter, surrounded by plants which lay blackened and frost-withered – it burst into a dozen pale pink flowers.

The Rose of the World stared at this miracle, then at her hand. She bent to touch the plant, and the aromatic scent of its flowers engulfed her. No illusion, then. Her fingers tingled. She touched them experimentally to a patch of creeping thyme, its twiggy runners bare and leafless. ‘Grow,’ she whispered again.

And it did.

The Rosa Eldi gazed at the herb, wide-eyed. Then, as a thought occurred to her, she smiled. If she could bring such magic out of herself for the sake of a tiny plant, should she not be able to channel the same power, and more, inwards? She returned to her chambers, her cheeks flushed by something more than the nip in the air, and finding her husband just returned from the hunt and in the midst of changing his mud-spattered clothes, she dropped her furs and her robes to her knees and embraced him in such a manner that no amount of self-control could possibly withstand.

King Ravn Asharson, Lord of the Northern Isles, announced his wife’s pregnancy that very evening; sent ravens and runners out across the mainland and to every Eyran island with the joyous news that his queen, the Rose of the World, had conceived him an heir. A great feast of celebration was planned. Across the realm, many would breathe great sighs of relief. But there were others yet who wished the royal pair ill, whose plans would be thwarted by these tidings. The King’s mother took to her chambers under the pretence of an ague and awaited the visitor she had summoned ever more impatiently.

The magic kept flowing. She grew apples in the frosty garden; then buried them for the worms. She healed one of the castle dogs when it was gored by a wild pig and the wound turned septic. None knew she had done this, for the dog had been left in the stables to survive or expire; there was much rejoicing from the houndsman the next morning when he found his favourite bitch up and about, if limping heavily: it had not seemed wise, the Rosa Eldi thought, to make the healing seem too miraculous. Ice bound the earth so hard that the castle’s well ran dry. Unseen, the Rose of the World laid her hands on the rock floor of the well chamber and sent her thoughts down into the land. Ranging out through the rock-veins, she at last located a small stream which ran down from the mountains above the city, then veered away through the forests to pour itself dramatically in a great waterfall into a mossy chasm above the sea. Making a subsidiary branch of this stream, she guided it deep beneath the frostbound earth, through the ancient volcanic rocks on which Halbo stood; and then, unnaturally, upwards so that it carved a strange new course into the well.

This last exhausted her; but it also exhilarated her. She felt the thrill of a deep connection with the world which bore her name, had the sense that something at its heart had heard her call and answered it. And surely, surely if she could move rock and water, manipulate the core of the world to her will, she could bring life into herself?

But for all her efforts, the Queen felt not one tiny change in her own body. Her belly remained as empty and as flat as ever it had; and now she began to learn the true sharpness of despair.

And the voice that had called to her as she had laid her hands on the rock and called forth the water, and now quested after her – joyful, sharp with unanticipated hope and desperate yearning – went unheard.

Some days later a small vessel drew into the harbour of the capital at dead of night, its sail filled with a non-existent wind. It came sweetly into the lee of the seawall, bumped gently against the stonework as its occupant disembarked onto the weed-covered jetty, and then drifted out into the night again as if it had a mind of its own. Which, perhaps, it did.

A tall, thin moon-cast shadow preceded the sailor who had thus arrived as he – or she – made their way through the sleeping streets. More than one cat stopped its midnight prowling in mid-stride and stared, one paw raised, tail a-quiver, the silver light reflecting from its eyes, as the figure passed; and then slunk quickly into a safe dark place, and did not stir till morning. The castle hounds, usually more than a nuisance with their incessant bayings and howlings at the moon, fell uncharacteristically silent as the eastern lych gate creaked open and then closed; though as the shadow passed by one or two of the older bitches lifted their heads, sniffed the air, and gave the merest whimper of recognition.

The guards on duty at the entrance to the castle saw nothing out of the ordinary that night, though an observer might have noted how their conversation ceased for the space of a few seconds and their eyes flickered closed; only for the argument as to the merits of the beer to be found in the Stag’s Head as compared with that served in the Enemy’s Leg to ensue again in the middle of a sentence as if there had been neither pause nor lacuna.

The Rosa Eldi, however, felt an itching inside her skull; a little vibration through her bones; an unwonted shimmer of heat. She sat bolt upright in the bed she shared with the King of Eyra and, like a cat, her green eyes went wide and reflective. Like a cat, she trembled: if she had had whiskers, she would have twitched them, felt the movement of air currents through the castle walls; but as a woman, she listened and looked and every pore of her body opened itself wide to sense whatever was out there – and now
in here
, in Ravn’s castle. The palms of her hands began to grow hot; the base of her spine tingled: she could
feel
the approach of magic, like a change in atmospheric pressure, like the coming of a storm.

Slowly, she rose up out of the bed, pulled on the gown she had learned was seemly to wear if she went abroad, and slipped out into the corridor. There was no guard outside the royal chamber: Ravn preferred to avoid such formalities in his home, though Stormway and Shepsey would no doubt soon win their argument over this omission now that the Queen was with child. So no one saw the Rose of the World as she passed soundlessly through the passages of Halbo Keep, her bare feet white and fragile against the massive granite flags. The sound of voices – conspiratorially low – came floating to her through the night’s thin air: one was sharp with spite, the other as mellow as a sun-ripened fruit. The itching in her head and hands grew stronger: heat pulsed through her extremities, conducted by the length of her spine. Something she remembered, something she
knew
. . .