“What happened? Why did the First Wizard do that?”
“The man was sent on behalf of another to ask a question of the First Wizard. The First Wizard gave his answer.”
Abby clutched her sack to herself for dear life as she gaped at the blood on the floor. “Might that be the answer to my question, if I ask it?”
“I don’t know the question you would ask.” For the first time, the sorceress’s expression softened just a bit. “Would you like me to see you out? You could see another wizard or, perhaps, after you’ve given more thought to your petition, return another day, if you still wish it.”
Abby fought back tears of desperation. There was no choice. She shook her head. “I must see him.”
The sorceress let out a deep breath. “Very well.” She put a hand
under Abby’s arm as if to keep her on her feet. “The First Wizard will see you now.”
Abby hugged the contents of her sack as she was led into the chamber where waited the First Wizard. Torches in iron sconces were not yet burning. The late-afternoon light from the glassed roof windows was still strong enough to illuminate the room. It smelled of pitch, lamp oil, roasted meat, wet stone, and stale sweat.
Inside, confusion and commotion reigned. There were people everywhere, and they all seemed to be talking at once. Stout tables set about the room in no discernible pattern were covered with books, scrolls, maps, chalk, unlit oil lamps, burning candles, partially eaten meals, sealing wax, pens, and a clutter of every sort of odd object, from balls of knotted string to half-spilled sacks of sand. People stood about the tables, engaged in conversations or arguments, as others tapped passages in books, pored over scrolls, or moved little painted weights about on maps. Others rolled slices of roasted meat plucked from platters and nibbled as they watched or offered opinions between swallows.
The sorceress, still holding Abby under her arm, leaned closer as they proceeded. “You will have the First Wizard’s divided attention. There will be other people talking to him at the same time. Don’t be distracted. He will be listening to you as he also listens to or talks to others. Just ignore the others who are speaking and ask what you have come to ask. He will hear you.”
Abby was dumbfounded. “While he’s talking to other people?”
“Yes.” Abby felt the hand squeeze her arm ever so slightly. “Try to be calm, and not to judge by what has come before you.”
The killing. That was what she meant. That a man had come to speak to the First Wizard, and he had been killed for it. She was simply supposed to put that from her thoughts? When she glanced down, she saw that she was walking through a trail of blood. She didn’t see the headless body anywhere.
Her bracelet tingled and she looked down at it. The hand under her arm halted her. When Abby looked up, she saw a confusing knot of people before her. Some rushed in from the sides as others rushed away. Some flailed their arms as they spoke with great conviction. So many were talking that Abby could scarcely understand a word of it. At the same time, others were leaning in, nearly whispering. She felt as if she were confronting a human beehive.
Abby’s attention was snagged by a form in white to the side. The instant she saw the long fall of hair and the violet eyes looking right at her, Abby went rigid. A small cry escaped her throat as she fell to her knees and bowed over until her back protested. She trembled and shuddered, fearing the worst.
In the instant before she dropped to her knees, she had seen that the elegant, satiny white dress was cut square at the neck, the same as the black dresses had been. The long flag of hair was unmistakable. Abby had never seen the woman before, but without doubt knew who she was. There could be no mistaking this woman. Only one of them wore the white dress.
It was the Mother Confessor herself.
She heard muttering above her, but feared to listen, lest it was death being summoned.
“Rise, my child,” came a clear voice.
Abby recognized it as the formal response of the Mother Confessor to one of her people. It took a moment for Abby to realize that it represented no threat, but simple acknowledgment. She stared at a smear of blood on the floor as she debated what to do next. Her mother had never instructed her as to how to conduct herself should she ever meet the Mother Confessor. As far as she knew, no one from Coney Crossing had ever seen the Mother Confessor, much less met her. Then again, none of them had ever seen a wizard, either.
Overhead, the sorceress whispered a growl. “Rise.”
Abby scrambled to her feet, but kept her eyes to the floor, even though the smear of blood was making her sick. She could smell it, like a fresh butchering of one of their animals. From the long trail, it looked as if the body had been dragged away to one of the doors in the back of the room.
The sorceress spoke calmly into the chaos. “Wizard Zorander, this is Abigail, born of Helsa. She wishes a word with you. Abigail, this is First Wizard Zeddicus Zu’l Zorander.”
Abby dared to cautiously lift her gaze. Hazel eyes gazed back.
To each side before her were knots of people: big, forbidding officers—some of them looked as if they might be generals; several old men in robes, some simple and some ornate; several middle-aged men, some in robes and some in livery; three women—sorceresses all; a variety of other men and women; and the Mother Confessor.
The man at the center of the turmoil, the man with the hazel eyes, was not what Abby had been expecting. She had expected some grizzled, gruff old man. This man was young—perhaps as young as she. Lean but sinewy, he wore the simplest of robes, hardly better made than Abby’s burlap sack—the mark of his high office.
Abby had not anticipated this sort of man in such an office as that of First Wizard. She remembered what her mother had told her—not to trust what your eyes told you where wizards were concerned.
All about, people spoke to him, argued at him, a few even shouted, but the wizard was silent as he looked into her eyes. His face was pleasing enough to look upon, gentle in appearance, even though his wavy brown hair looked ungovernable, but his eyes … Abby had never seen the likes of those eyes. They seemed to see all, to know all, to understand all. At the same time they were bloodshot and wearylooking, as if sleep eluded him. They had, too, the slightest glaze of distress. Even so, he was calm at the center of the storm. For that moment that his attention was on her, it was as if no one else were in the room.
The lock of hair Abby had seen around the noble’s finger was now held wrapped around the First Wizard’s finger. He brushed it to his lips before lowering his arm.
“I am told you are the daughter of a sorceress.” His voice was placid water flowing through the tumult raging all about. “Are you gifted, child?”
“No, sir …”
Even as she answered, he was turning to another who had just finished speaking. “I told you, if you do, we chance losing them. Send word that I want him to cut south.”
The tall officer to whom the wizard spoke threw his hands up. “But he said they’ve reliable scouting information that the D’Harans went east on him.”
“That’s not the point,” the wizard said. “I want that pass to the south sealed. That’s where their main force went; they have gifted among them. They are the ones we must kill.”
The tall officer was saluting with a fist to his heart as the wizard turned to an old sorceress. “Yes, that’s right, three invocations before attempting the transposition. I found the reference last night.”
The old sorceress departed to be replaced by a man jabbering in a
foreign tongue as he opened a scroll and held it up for the wizard to see. The wizard squinted toward it, reading a moment before waving the man away, while giving orders in the same foreign language.
The wizard turned to Abby. “You’re a skip?”
Abby felt her face heat and her ears burn. “Yes, Wizard Zorander.”
“Nothing to be ashamed of, child,” he said while the Mother Confessor herself was whispering confidentially in his ear.
But it
was
something to be ashamed of. The gift hadn’t passed on to her from her mother—it had skipped her.
The people of Coney Crossing had depended on Abby’s mother. She helped with those who were ill or hurt. She advised people on matters of community and those of family. For some she arranged marriages. For some she meted out discipline. For some she bestowed favors available only through magic. She was a sorceress; she protected the people of Coney Crossing.
She was revered openly. By some, she was feared and loathed privately.
She was revered for the good she did for the people of Coney Crossing. By some, she had been feared and loathed because she had the gift——because she wielded magic. Others wanted nothing so much as to live their lives without any magic about.
Abby had no magic and couldn’t help with illness or injury or shapeless fears. She dearly wished she could, but she couldn’t. When Abby had asked her mother why she would abide all the thankless resentment, her mother told her that helping was its own reward and you should not expect gratitude for it. She said that if you went through life expecting gratitude for the help you provided, you might end up leading a miserable life.
When her mother was alive, Abby had been shunned in subtle ways; after her mother died, the shunning became more overt. It had been expected by the people of Coney Crossing that she would serve as her mother had served. People didn’t understand about the gift, how it often wasn’t passed on to an offspring; instead they thought Abby selfish.
The wizard was explaining something to a sorceress about the casting of a spell. When he finished, his gaze swept past Abby on its way to someone else. She needed his help, now.
“What is it you wanted to ask me, Abigail?”
Abby’s fingers tightened on the sack. “It’s about my home of Coney Crossing.” She paused while the wizard pointed in a book being held out to him. He rolled his hand at her, gesturing for her to go on as a man was explaining an intricacy to do with inverting a duplex spell. “There’s terrible trouble there,” Abby said. “D’Haran troops came through the Crossing …”
The First Wizard turned to an older man with a long white beard. By his simple robes, Abby guessed him to be a wizard, too.
“I’m telling you, Thomas, it can be done,” Wizard Zorander insisted. “I’m not saying I agree with the council, I’m just telling you what I found and their unanimous decision that it be done. I’m not claiming to understand the details of just how it works, but I’ve studied it; it can be done. As I told the council, I can activate it. I have yet to decide if I agree with them that I should.”
The man, Thomas, wiped a hand across his face. “You mean what I heard is true, then? That you really do think it’s possible? Are you out of your mind, Zorander?”
“I found it in a book in the First Wizard’s private enclave. A book from before the war with the Old World. I’ve seen it with my own eyes. I’ve cast a whole series of verification webs to test it.” He turned his attention to Abby. “Yes, that would be Anargo’s legion. Coney Crossing is in Pendisan Reach.”
“That’s right,” Abby said. “And so then this D’Haran army swept through there and—”
“Pendisan Reach refused to join with the rest of the Midlands under central command to resist the invasion from D’Hara. Standing by their sovereignty, they chose to fight the enemy in their own way. They have to live with the consequences of their actions.”
The old man was tugging on his beard. “Still, do you know if it’s real? All proven out? I mean, that book would have to be thousands of years old. It might have been conjecture. Verification webs don’t always confirm the entire structure of such a thing.”
“I know that as well as you, Thomas, but I’m telling you, it’s real,” Wizard Zorander said. His voice lowered to a whisper. “The spirits preserve us, it’s genuine.”
Abby’s heart was pounding. She wanted to tell him her story, but she couldn’t seem to get a word in. He had to help her. It was the only way.
An army officer rushed in from one of the back doors. He pushed his way into the crowd around the First Wizard.
“Wizard Zorander! I’ve just gotten word! When we unleashed the horns you sent, they worked! Urdland’s force turned tail!”
Several voices fell silent. Others didn’t.
“At least three thousand years old,” the First Wizard said to the man with the beard. He put a hand on the newly arrived officer’s shoulder and leaned close. “Tell General Brainard to hold short at the Kern River. Don’t burn the bridges, but hold them. Tell him to split his men. Leave half to keep Urdland’s force from changing their mind; hopefully they won’t be able to replace their field wizard. Have Brainard take the rest of his men north to help cut Anargo’s escape route; that’s where our concern lies, but we may still need the bridges to go after Urdland.”
One of the other officers, an older man looking possibly to be a general himself, went red in the face. “Halt at the river? When the horns have done their job, and we have them on the run? But why! We can take them down before they have a chance to regroup and join up with another force to come back at us!”