Wild Magic (3 page)

And so, she moved further down the bed until her face was level with her husband’s chest. Then she laid her head down upon him and listened to the steady draw of his breath, to the powerful slow beat of his heart – like a tide, like a tide – and wondered whether she would ever learn what it was to be human in this world of Elda.

One

Intrigues

Aran Aranson, Master of Rockfall, stood in the doorway of his smithy with the moon leering over his shoulder like the eye of some vengeful giant, and watched with disbelief as the dead woman came to her feet.

In front of him, his second son Fent was on his knees, gazing up at the apparition he had killed only moments earlier, while his only daughter, Katla Aransen, lay as still as stone on the cold floor with blood all over her face and hands. The dead woman took a step towards him and the moonlight shone from her single eye so that she looked like an afterwalker, recently returned from the quiet of the burial howe to haunt those who had done it wrong in life, to straddle the rooftree of the houses till the timbers broke, to hag-ride the livestock till they ran mad; to terrorise all and sundry until the whole settlement was cursed and abandoned.

His hand tightened on the pommel of the dagger he wore at his waist-belt.
Severing the head, that’s the only thing that works with ghasts
, old Gramma Garsen had told them, her face lit ghoulishly by the embers of the firepit, as he sat with all the other little boys of the steading, held rapt and terrified breathless by her words,
You have to cut off the head and bury it as far from the body as you can
. But would such simple advice work on a seither, one of the legendary magic-channellers of the Northern Isles? Aran drew the dagger and held it out before him, knowing it an inadequate weapon for the task at hand. Katla’s Red Sword, the prize weapon she had forged last year, with a carnelian set into the hilt, lay out of his reach; but if he could disable the seither with the dagger, then spring past her to retrieve it—

‘Put away that pin, Aran Aranson.’

The seither’s voice was deep and resonant: too powerful for a woman heart-pierced only moments earlier. He found his hand faltering, as if there were more power in her words than just their meaning.

‘Would you bring down the same curse on yourself as I placed on your murderous son?’

May all your ventures meet with disaster.

Aran had never thought himself as a particularly superstitious man but now he felt an icy dread upon him as if the dead woman had reached out and placed a chilly finger on his heart.

‘I do not understand what has happened here,’ he managed at last.

The seither, Festrin One-Eye, smiled grimly. There was blood on her teeth and gums, blood which looked black in that garish light.
They do not bleed as we do
, Gramma Garsen had said;
they swell to twice their normal size and their veins fill with black fluid, one drop of which would sear a hillside for eternity.

‘Do you really think me
aptagangur
, Aran Aranson?’ Festrin said with remarkable sweetness, and began to unlace the ties of her tunic.

Aran’s eyes dropped unwillingly from the seither’s face to where her clever fingers pulled apart the bows and knots. Beneath her hands the torn and bloodstained fabric parted easily; but although he had seen the Red Sword rammed home to the hilt by a panicked Fent there was no sign of any hurt there – no ragged hole, gouting the blood that had spurted over Katla as she tended to the dying woman; not even the closed purple of a stab-wound newly healed. Nothing but smooth white skin, and the swell of her breasts. Aran felt his mouth drop open like any fool’s.

Fent spun to regard his father, his face waxy with shock. ‘I killed her,’ he whispered. ‘I saw her die.’

Festrin stepped around the boy as if he were of no more consequence than a stray dog, keeping her eyes all the while on the Master of Rockfall. ‘Your daughter is a rare creature, Aran Aranson. She tried to give her life for mine, but do not fear – she is still alive. She will recover herself. Mark well what I say. Do not waste her. Do not bargain her away like a prize ewe; nor wrap her in silks and mothballs. Earth-magic flows through her, and something else as well—’ She leaned towards him and poked him hard in the shoulder with one long, lean finger. ‘Look well to your daughter, Master of Rockfall; because if you do not, I shall return for her and you will wish I had never set foot on this island.’

And having delivered this pronouncement, she was past him, her form silhouetted for a moment, tall and straight as a monolith, in the frame of the smithy door; and then she was gone.

No one saw the seither leave. No boat was missing from its moorings the next day, nor was any horse gone from the stables. All Tam Fox, the leader of the group of mummers with whom Festrin One-Eye had come to Rockfall, could offer by way of explanation was to tap the side of his nose and declare: ‘Best not to enquire how seithers travel the world.’

Katla spent two days in the bed to which Aran carried her, sleeping as deeply as a sick child, waking briefly, then sleeping again. But on the third day when he came to sit by her he found the bedclothes thrown off onto the floor in a heap and her boots missing from their place beside the door.

Aran walked the enclosures and checked the outhouses, but to no avail. At last he took the path down to the harbour where, reduced to simple methods by the club-hand she had earned from the burning, she would sometimes sit and dangle a crabline from the seawall, but the only folk down there were the fishermen taking their boats out on the early tide.

He went out to the end of the mole anyway and turned back to stare inland. The steading at Rockfall was no grand affair like some of the other great halls of Eyra’s clan chiefs, but it was a fine and sturdy longhouse constructed from timbers shipped out from the mainland in the time of Aran’s great-grandfather, from stone dug out of the surrounding hillsides, and roofed in the traditional fashion with peat and turf. Even on this fine summer morning a curl of smoke rose from the central fire that maintained all day and night throughout the year.
My home
, Aran thought with pride, taking in the bustle of activity in the enclosures, the shimmering field of barley, the white specks of sheep up on the mountain pastures. When he had taken over responsibility for Rockfall after the last war, the hall had been in a state of disrepair, the crop-fields fallow, the outhouses tumbled down. Aran Stenson had paid little mind to his land, preferring a life on the sea, ‘trading’ as he liked to call it, though others might consider it simple piracy. The Istrians, for example. Aran Aranson smiled. He had done his duty by his family; he had made Rockfall a steading to be proud of. It had taken years of hard and selfless work; he had rebuilt much of the hall with his own hands, in the days when they could barely afford to feed themselves, let alone their retainers. He and Bera had raised a family, and lost five children to stillbirth and disease along the way. He had won support from his neighbours and from lords and clan chiefs across Eyra for his steady voice and fair dealings in a hundred lawsuits, and his strong arm in enforcing them. He had made himself a man to be reckoned with by walking the line of sense and responsibility all these long years; and now he considered he had earned the right to follow his own dreams and enjoy the adventures he had missed out on as a young man, and had been promising himself ever since. That promise had propelled him through the difficulties of his marriage and the dullness of the farming. It had kept him steady all these years, and now he would have his reward.

He patted the pouch he wore about his neck. In it there nestled a scrap of parchment, an ancient map he had come by from a nomad trader at the Allfair. That map would bring riches his forebears could never have imagined. His pursuit of the treasure it guaranteed was hardly, therefore, a selfish thing: it would provide for his family far better than his staying on Rockfall and managing the farm, or by mining and trading the rare sardonyx out of the heart of the island, which was both costly and time-consuming. No, in one fell swoop, with some luck, some audacity and the right vessel, he would make their fortunes. Bera could live like the rich woman she had always dreamed she would be. His sons could buy a veritable fleet of longships, sail the Ravenway, or, in Fent’s case, go raiding the Istrian coast, before they settled for some good land and a wife to plough. And as for Katla, wherever she might be . . .

He scanned the landscape absent-mindedly for his daughter, his thoughts already drifting out onto the high seas, to the north, with their drifting floes and towering bergs and secret islands wreathed in mist . . .

Drawn back to the ocean by the seductive images in his head, he watched the last of the fishing boats sail out of the bay, passing the dramatic spike of the Hound’s Tooth, the rocky headland which provided the island with its look-out position to all points south and west. On its very apex, a detached rock stood out, balanced precariously on its seaward lip. He narrowed his eyes, and as he did so, the sun crested the mountains of the island’s interior and cast their light across the cliffs so that he was suddenly able to make out – instead of a rock – a tiny figure, its red hair haloed by the sun.

Katla!

Katla Aransen sat on the top of the Hound’s Tooth, her face thrust out towards the sea, her feet dangling over three hundred feet of clear space to the water breaking over the rocks below. She had risen at dawn filled with an energy she could put no name to and had fled the house before any of her family were awake. In these last few days, she had seen and heard so much that it had all become a great jumble in her head: Festrin’s talk of earth-magic, her father’s plans to steal the King’s shipmaker for his mad expedition into the frozen north; the voice in her head that had rumbled like thunder when she had channelled whatever force it was that had brought the seither back from the brink of death . . .

The implications of this last act in particular were so mystifying that she could not bear to talk to another soul until she had made some sense of it for herself. And so she had run down to the water’s edge and climbed to the top of the cliff by her favourite route.

Climbing always cleared her head of troubles, especially a dizzying ascent like the dauntingly sheer seaward face of the Hound’s Tooth, which required every bit of her concentration. Being unable to climb all these months because of her injuries, and believing that she never would again, on account of the awkwardness of the clubbed hand, had been the worst punishment of all.

She held the afflicted arm up in the air now, twisted it this way and that. Still she could not believe the marvel of it. Where before there had been a great welted mass of red-and-white scar tissue, now she had four fingers and a thumb again, albeit pale and thin in comparison with her other tanned and muscular hand. It was hard to believe she was healed; harder still to comprehend that she had brought about that healing herself. It was perplexing and strange, and she half-expected at any moment to look down and find the old monstrosity there again. So she tried not to think about it at all, in case doing so might tempt the Fates and remind them of her unworthiness as a recipient of this miracle.

But as she laid a hand on the first hold of the cold granite a fine trembling had started up in her fingers, followed by a hot buzz which had suffused her whole arm, then her shoulders, neck and head, and at last her entire body, as if the rock were speaking to her in a language her blood alone could understand, a language like thunder; and that had been the most confusing thing of all.

For Katla, climbing was her ultimate escape – away from the chores of the steading and her mother’s doomed attempts to make her more ladylike – out into the most inaccessible places on the island where no one could follow her, even if they knew where she was. To be able to look down onto the backs of flying gulls, to share a sun-drenched ledge with fulmars and jackdaws, to watch the folk of Rockfall from way up high, and them not even aware of their audience, was a special pleasure to her: at once a discipline of controlled movement and the ultimate expression of the wildest part of herself. Whenever her life became frustrating or alarming she would climb. The necessities of the activity brought a great simplicity to life, she found: move carefully, hold tight; do not fall. When she climbed she was forced to make these her only concerns, so that all other anxieties receded into insignificance; but to be assailed by this tangible flow of earth-magic, with all the complexities and consequences it brought into her life turned simple escape into a perplexing discussion of the nature of the world.

The sea
, she thought now, looking out over that wide blue expanse.
The sea’s the answer. I may feel the magic running out of the reefs and skerries; but surely over the deepest ocean it will leave me be? I’ll put my case to Da, make him take me on his expedition
. . .

Aran’s lungs and legs were complaining long before he crested the final ridge, even though the landward path was far more kindly than his daughter’s route to the top. It had been a long time since the Master of Rockfall had even walked to the summit of the Hound’s Tooth; indeed, it was with some chagrin that he realised that ‘some time’ meant in truth almost twenty years – before the island had become his domain, after his father’s death in the war with Istria. In all that time it had been a succession of lads he’d sent up here on look-out duty: immediately after the war, looking for enemy ships, which could be hard to spot: since native Istrian vessels were not designed for ocean crossings, the Southern Empire used captured Eyran ships against the north; then, when the uneasy truce had been established, looking for independent raiders intent on pillage, and more lately, with rather less urgency, looking for merchant ships and those bearing men and news from the King’s court at Halbo. In his father’s day, the look-outs commanded respect in the island community, but since the perils of war had ebbed away the task had fallen to green lads – second, third and fourth sons of Rockfall retainers with no land of their own to work and few other prospects. Young Vigli and Jarn Forson were the current pair of look-outs, and Sur knew how feckless those two could be: with war looming again, he should set about the matter of finding reliable replacements . . .