Mind of the Magic (Arhel Book 3) Page 3

  At that moment a large grey tabby cat bounded onto the open windowsill, clutching something that gleamed dully of gold in one stubby, furry fist. He looked from Faia to Witte, clutched his booty tighter, and darted for the open door behind Faia, running three-legged so he would not drop his prize.

  “Hrogner!” Faia yelled, and slammed the door in the cat’s face. Both man and cat jumped.

  “Close the shutters,” Faia yelled as she dove for the cat.

  Witte managed to pull them to before Hrogner escaped. Faia cornered him under the bed and dragged him out, protesting.

  “Give,” she snarled.

  He growled.

  She pried the golden thing from his fingers while he yowled and glared at her, then held it up to show Witte—a gaudy gold ring, set with stones. “Belongs to one of the neighbors, of course—though I’ll have a time figuring out which one.” She dropped the cat to the floor and grumbled, “He steals things.”

  “He has hands,” Witte murmured.

  Faia opened the shutters and shooed the cat back outside. “Yes. He does. The Mottemage at the university I attended thought it would be useful if her cat could open doors for himself, so she gave him hands.” Faia watched Hrogner sulk through the tall grass, and turned back to her guest. “It was an incredibly stupid thing to do. The characteristic bred true—and the little monsters have all the bad characteristics of normal cats, and a few nasty quirks all their own. They strike quicklights they find lying around, and catch things on fire. They pick simple locks, and take things apart… but they never put them back together, of course…” She shook her head. “And they steal. Hrogner is a brilliant thief. My neighbors loathe him.”

  “And you named him Hrogner.” The little man chuckled, and his eyes twinkled.

  “Hrogner is the saje god of mischief. I thought the name appropriate.”

  “No doubt it is. But have you never considered that if you run about calling that name aloud, more than the cat might answer?” He winked at her.

  Faia snorted. “No worry about that. Hrogner never comes when called. He’s a cat, after all.”

  “Nevertheless, you need equal measures of kindness and paranoia, dear girl. Otherwise, there’s no telling what might show up at your house someday.”

  Chapter 3

  PREPARING nondes that evening, Faia found herself even more excited than she had been about getting away from Omwimmee Trade for a while. She ran over a list of all the gifts she would have to buy—it was extensive.

  She pounded her fists into the bread dough and thought, while she listened with only the smallest part of her attention to Witte entertaining Kirtha in the garden. They both laughed merrily at intervals. She couldn’t make out the words they said, for both of them talked at full speed and at the same time.

  Faia smiled. Witte was such a nice man—he’d told some wonderful stories about Nokar in the years before she knew him. She had never known that Nokar had once climbed into the tower room of his university’s chief administrator and replaced all of his grand robes with the simple robes of a first-year student, yet when she heard the story, she had no trouble imagining it. Nokar had been very much the sort of person who would delight in such a prank. The new stories brought him back to her, and made her miss him afresh.

  Kirtha’s giggles drifted in from the garden. She was ordering Witte around again—giving orders was one of the things Kirtha did best. She considered the little man a cross between her patient and her slave; for his part, he’d been her willing and good-humored servant.

  It was pleasant having Witte as healthy, happy company—and Faia realized, listening to him talking and laughing with Kirtha out in the garden, how she longed for the sound of a man’s voice in the house. Witte’s presence was comforting after her solitary years in Omwimmee Trade.

  Rejected suitors notwithstanding, I’ve been alone too long. I need to find someone I can care about.

  She slid the bread in the oven and began cleaning the fish, enjoying the simple physical pleasures of cooking and preparing a meal without magic. Lost in her own thoughts, she didn’t realize the garden had grown quiet until Kirtha’s screams shattered the silence—screams of pure terror.

  Faia charged out of the kitchen, her heart in her throat to find Kirtha crouched behind the b’dabba, the Hoos plains hut that Medwind Song had left behind when she moved away, while in front of her, Witte fended off a tiny grey swallow that belched spurts of fire at him. The little man beat the air with his arms, but the bird refused to break off its attack. Already Witte’s hair and eyebrows were singed.

  By the Lady! Faia thought. She had never seen such a bird.

  Then Hrogner launched himself out of the garden tree to chase the swallow, sporting a brand-new pair of very functional wings.

  The swallow saw its attacker, made a tight loop in the air, and took off over the roof. Then it curved back and caught the pursuing cat full in the face with a tiny, bright blue stream of flame. The cat yowled and veered away; the swallow darted after him, singed his tail, and simultaneously caught the thatching of the roof on fire.

  Faia suffered only an instant’s hesitation. Then she pulled the energy of sun and earth around her and created a raincloud above the little tongues of flame that licked along the thatch. She no longer needed to search for ley lines—in the last few months, they had come to overlie everything in Omwimmee Trade. She merely willed water out of the air and there it was. Rain poured onto the roof and put the fire out, leaving the thatch smoking and hissing.

  She stopped the swallow in midflight, magically looked inside of it, and discovered the changes that had allowed the bird to breathe fire; they were clumsy, childish changes that would have proven quickly fatal to the tiny creature. Faia returned the swallow to its normal state, and with a peremptory mental suggestion, sent it on its way before the cat realized the bird was once again harmless.

  Then she turned her attention to the cat. “Hrogner,” she said, “come here.”

  Hrogner, no longer pursued by the vicious swallow, had landed on the roof, where he sat licking his singed fur. He wore the air of one who has taken an unfair and totally unwarranted blow from life.

  “Hrogner!” Faia called again. “Come here. Here, kitty, kitty. Come here, cat!”

  Witte came to stand beside her and said, “You brought me back to health and drew rain from the sky; you are not unskilled at magic. Why do you not make the cat come?”

  Faia said, “You haven’t had much experience with cats, have you? No one can make them do anything. They are immune to magic.” She turned to Kirtha and said, “Bring me a handful of chud jerky from the pantry. I want to get Hrogner off the roof.”

  Kirtha, wide-eyed, nodded and ran into the house.

  Witte stared at the cat, puzzled. “Immune to magic? Then how do you explain the creature’s hands… or its wings?”

  “I did not say that well.” Faia turned to Witte. “Cats are not immune to all magic—they only ignore the magic that doesn’t interest them or, in their self-interested little minds, offer some benefit for them. The only reason my little monster still has hands is because I can do nothing to change them back to paws.”

  Kirtha returned, carrying a handful of very smelly dried brown flakes. “Here, Mama. For Hrogner-cat.”

  Faia took them and held her hand up. “Here, kitty, kitty. Come here. Come get the tasty fish.”

  Hrogner gave his burned fur another lick, then flew down and landed, clumsily and with claws out, on Faia’s arm.

  “Ow!” she yelped. She grabbed up a handful of fur at the scruff of his neck and dragged the hissing, snarling Hrogner into the house.

  Inside, she stopped and frowned. She turned back. “Come with me, Kirtha.” She eyed Witte, who noted her expression and followed, too. “I want to know what happened.”

  Faia studied the cat once everyone was inside. The changes in him were altogether more subtle and clever than the changes in the bird had been. The wings looked clumsy enough, and th
e feathers were the sort of silly detail she would expect from a five-year-old, but there was an underlying soundness of structure and form that implied knowledge of flighted creatures—a knowledge Faia did not think Kirtha had. She narrowed her eyes in concentration and magically probed deeper. The musculature was very finely done, while the boning and changes made in the cat’s spine to accommodate the addition of wings were as elegant as anything Faia had ever seen from the Mottemage during her time at Daane University.

  She arched an eyebrow at Witte. He grinned sheepishly.

  Hrogner, having acquired wings, was not willing to part with them.

  “You cannot keep them,” she muttered at the cat, who gave her a disdainful look. “The neighbors would execute both of us.” She couldn’t force him to give them up, however, and she knew Hrogner knew it.

  Nothing she tried would get him to let her remove them, either—until he passed a mirror and saw his own reflection. He hissed and arched his back, and the clumsy feathered wings splayed out, gangling and awkward-looking.

  Hrogner seemed terrified of his appearance—he who usually loved to admire himself.

  Faia used his reaction to her advantage; she laughed at him. All cats hated to be laughed at, and vain Hrogner was no exception. He glared at her, stalked away, and snagged a wing on a chair dowel when he tried to walk under it.

  Then and only then did the cat permit his wings to be removed. Dewinged, he skulked down the breezeway. Not until Faia heard a crash from the kitchen did she remember the fish she’d been cleaning on the tray.

  “Nondes!” she yelled, and ran after the cat into the kitchen. But it was too late. The tray and two of the sea-brouk were on the floor; the third Hrogner had apparently dragged off to eat in peace.

  Faia turned on her daughter and Witte. “So much for a nice meal,” she said. She crossed her arms over her chest and studied both of them. “I want to know what happened.”

  Kirtha looked at their guest, her eyes accusing. Witte said nothing.

  “Witte told me a story,” Kirtha said at last.

  Faia tilted her head and looked at him, eyebrows raised.

  “I merely recounted the old Forst fable about why cats climb,” Witte said quickly. “You know the one, perhaps?”

  “No.” Faia settled into a chair and crossed her arms over her chest. “Why don’t you tell it to me.”

  “Well—” Witte cleared his throat “Well. When Fetupad created cats—”

  “Fetupad?”

  Witte hopped up into a chair across from her. He sat, his feet dangling more than a handsbreadth above the floor, looking at that instant very like a guilty child. “In Forst Province, the people worship Fetupad as the god of beasts. In any case, when she made cats, she created them with wings. For a time, all was well. But cats, with their great pride, flew to the sky home of Fetupad—the Forsters believe all their gods live in the clouds, you see—and moved right in. They bothered Fetupad’s sacred hounds, and ate Fetupad’s sacred birds, and they sang and carried on all night on Fetupad’s sacred roof.”

  “Her roof is sacred?” Faia asked.

  “All things which touch the gods are sacred,” Witte said stiffly.

  “Of course.”

  “So, in a fit of anger, she ripped off the cats’ wings and threw the beasts to the earth. Cats, of course, are so well made that they were not harmed by their fall from the sky. They landed on their feet. But they could no longer ascend to the sacred presence of Fetupad. They were not humbled by their fall, however. Oh, no. They told each other, ‘We will make our own sky homes, and we will still catch the flying things, and we will still sing on the roofs of houses when the Tide Mother shines without the sun.’ And so they have continued until this very day. And that is why cats climb.”

  Faia nodded. “A very pretty story.”

  “I wanted the cats to have wings, Mama. I thought ol’ Fetupad was mean to them.”

  “I see. So my daughter declares herself a god and gives our cat wings. This doesn’t surprise me. What does surprise me is that you helped her.”

  Witte blushed. “She was so excited about the idea, and I must admit I thought it would be charming.”

  “You thought it would be charming to give Hrogner wings? Hrogner the Thief? Hrogner the Firebug? Hrogner the idiot cat with hands?” Faia shook her head in disbelief.

  “I like your cat. I find him a delightful animal, and a creature after my own heart.”

  Faia arched an eyebrow. “I don’t want to think what that says about you.” She shook her head. “Which gets us as far as the cat’s wings. What about the swallow?”

  “The cat, as soon as it had wings, flew into the air and caught a bird in front of the child.”

  Kirtha’s eyes grew bright with tears, and one rolled slowly down her cheek. “Hrogner caught the bird an’ ate it, Mama. Bad ol’ cat!”

  “So you made the next bird you saw breathe fire.”

  Kirtha pointed an accusing finger at Witte. “He said, if birds could blow fire on cats, cats wouldn’t bother them. He said!”

  “Did he?” Faia turned to Witte.

  He shrugged. “I was trying to make the child laugh. She was so upset when the cat killed the little bird I had no idea—”

  “On the contrary,” Faia interrupted. “You did have ideas—and you shared them with a five-year-old.” She sighed. “That was the problem.”

  She began to think having Witte as a continuing houseguest might not be the unadulterated bliss she’d hoped. Perhaps she ought to push herself in order to take him to the First Folk ruins soon. It was a pity there was no way she could just do it in the morning, but if she went all the way to the First Folk ruins, but wasn’t prepared to stay, she would never hear the end of it from any of her friends. She definitely needed to get under way soon, though. Meanwhile, she needed to have a talk with Witte—before he had any more amusing ideas.

  He was a charming man. But he was, she began to suspect, well-meaning trouble; the sort of person who stirred things up by not thinking—then stood back with his eyes wide and his hands clean, bemusedly watching the subsequent disaster.

  Even well-meaning trouble was more trouble than she wanted.

  Chapter 4

  FAIA slept poorly, and what little sleep she got was full of dreams of cats with wings and a little man dressed all in red who danced from place to place in front of her, while calamity followed.

  She woke to darkness. She tossed for a while, trying to find a comfortable position, but discovered she was wide awake—and soon she wearied of waiting for sleep to return. She rose and walked through the house. Neither Kirtha nor Witte were up, but outside, morning noises had begun. Cattle clop-clopped through the cobblestone streets, heading back from the pastures where they had grazed. Antis-bells rang in the center of town, and the criers from the local temples began their ululations. The fish cart rattled by, the fishman singing, “Feeeeesh, fresh feeeeesh!” All of Omwimmee Trade acted as if morning had already begun.

  She stepped into the street and looked east, toward the far hills. The first rays of dawn should have pinked the horizon, but the sky remained black and the stars glittered coldly.

  Instead of the sun, Faia saw the giant sphere of the Tide Mother dressed out in black with a gold corona around her.

  It was then, when she saw the vast bulk of the Tide Mother dark and fire-edged, that Faia realized the sun would not rise again for fourteen days. The Month of Ghosts was upon her, and Faia, too busy with her sick visitor to notice the preparations the townsfolk made for the holy days, had done nothing to ready herself for its coming.

  She ran back inside, to her workroom. It had once been a sitting room, but she’d changed it after Medwind and Nokar were gone. It was now full of candles and herbs and oils, bundles of flowers drying upside down, unspun wool, skeins of yarn dyed and undyed, a spindle, a lap-loom, and an ancient and terribly heavy worktable. She gathered up the white candles and set them against the north wall beneath the shuttered win
dow; north was the direction of the realms of the dead.

  Then she went and woke her daughter. “Kirthchie, it is time to help the ghosts of our loved ones find their way to the Wheel.”

  Kirtha woke slowly, rubbing sleepy eyes. “Yes, Mama.” She trotted down the hall and knelt at her mother’s side in front of the makeshift altar.

  “Light candles for the Lady and her Lord,” Faia instructed. That was the part of every ceremony Kirtha got to do. Faia hoped it would give the little girl respect for the magefires she commanded. Kirtha closed her eyes, and flames appeared on the wicks of the two deep-green candles.

  To the hill-folk, the simple darkness of night was the Lord’s time, when he walked through the hills, calling the spirits of the dead to commune with him. And the special darkness of the Month of Ghosts was the time when, after he had learned what the dead had done with their lives and what they still needed to learn, he took them back to the Wheel so they could begin again.

  From the time Kirtha could first walk, Faia had taught her the hallowed songs, including the songs of the dead, and explained to her the importance of remembering those who had gone on. But Kirtha was still so young. Faia wondered how much of this Month of Ghosts the child would remember—this one, where all of Faia’s family and most of her world were moving between the planes.

  “Do you remember the words of the Ghost Song?” she asked her daughter.

  Kirtha nodded. Solemnly, mother and daughter knelt on the floor in front of the two glowing green candles and the forest of plain white tapers, and sang.