1 The Outstretched Shadow.3 (35 page)

 "I don't remember much after that. And I'm not sure it could have all happened the way I remember, because all the bites and everything are gone," Kellen finished, confused again.

 "Oh, they were there, right enough," Idalia said. "Bites—gouges— lacerations—bruises—scratches—broken bones—you looked like you'd been through—well, an Outlaw Hunt. Lucky you were near to my cabin here, when you crossed the border; I'm the only one out here who could have put you two back together again." She tilted her head a little and looked thoughtful. "The unicorn probably had something to do with that; it's no secret where I live, and he must have known that after that last border increase, you two would have to face the Outlaw Hunt, and afterward you'd need help, and I was the logical person to offer that help."

 "I don't understand," Kellen replied, shaking his head. "I mean, I understand that we'd need to find someone and quickly, but I don't understand why it particularly had to be you—"

 She raised an eyebrow. "I'm well known as a Wildmage and a Healer out here; it would make the best sense for Shalkan to head straight for me—especially once you were actually injured."

 Kellen stared. Idalia… a Wildmage? A female Wildmage? But women couldn't do magick!

 Or could they?

 Was that just another of the Mages' lies?

 What if it was?

 Idalia didn't seem to notice his shocked expression, any more than she'd shown any particular surprise or amazement at hearing about his involvement with the Wild Magic, although he supposed she'd had plenty of time to get used to that idea already, since he'd come in riding Shalkan, something only a Wildmage would be likely to be doing. He regarded his newfound sister with increased respect.

 His sister was a Mage… a Wildmage!

 "How did you think all your injuries disappeared so fast? I healed you—yes, with genuine, women-can't-possibly-do-it magic," Idalia said. "Wild Magic."

 Kellen gaped blankly at her, still trying to get used to the idea of meeting a Wildmage. Another Wildmage.

 "Of course," Idalia went on, "it was only Wild Magic, so I suppose that doesn't count for the Council's purposes…" she added mockingly.

 "And now I suppose you have a right to hear my side of the story," Idalia continued, "but to tell it properly I'll have to go back a good deal further than you did."

 She brooded for a moment, and Kellen took the opportunity to drink as much of his tea as he could before his hand began to shake.

 "I suppose it begins with our mother, Alance. Father didn't need to tamper with your memories to make you forget her. She left when you were still a baby, and from what little I remember of those days, he never let her see much of you at all. I suppose after he saw how I turned out, he was afraid her Mountain blood would contaminate you." She sighed. "Sometimes I wonder what the two of them ever saw in each other, but I suppose everyone wonders that about their parents. Still."

 She shook her head. "I would like to believe that at least at some point they loved one another, but for all I know, it was a political alliance for him."

 "But you were old enough to know her—" Kellen ventured cautiously. "He always said my mother was dead…"

 Idalia grimaced, dismissing Kellen's half-voiced question. "Here's what I do know for sure. Alance was the daughter of a Trader from the Mountains. The Mountain Traders used to come right down into the City, but after Alance left the City again they stopped and started trading only through Nerendale village. I'm not sure why, or if her leaving had anything to do with that. I'm also not really sure why Father didn't try to make me forget her, either—maybe he thought it wasn't worth bothering with, me being a mere female. And then again, perhaps he was right about the 'bad blood' in both of us coming to us through her: if Mother really was a Wildmage, perhaps she was able to cast a spell to make him simply forget about it. Anyway, no matter how it came about, I remember her, and what she told me about how they met.

 "Before Father was Arch-Mage, Alance came into the City with a trading caravan of the Mountain-folk. He was already on the Council then, though not yet Arch-Mage, overseeing the licensing of new goods for the markets. She said she fell in love with him, and when her caravan left, she stayed. I was born, and then, ten years later, you were bom."

 Kellen was putting together the chronology in his mind. "Was she happy? I mean, I can't see F—Lycaelon with a wife."

 Idalia gave him a measuring look. "I suppose they must have been happy at first, but once you were born, he changed toward her—I was only a child, but I do know he became very strange around that time. He separated us from her, did everything he could to keep me away from her, and put both of us in the care of a nurse I didn't much like. The nurse was very strict, always lecturing me about how I needed to be a proper lady if I was going to grow up to marry well."

 Idalia laughed, but there was little humor in the sound. "Now, up until that point, I had always assumed I would become a Mage like Father. When the nurse came, I was swiftly disabused of that notion. And when I demanded to know why not, I was informed that it was the destiny of a Mageborn girl to marry a Mage—since only the finest Mageborn son would do for Lycaelon's daughter—and produce lots of sons to grow up and become Mages. You can imagine how much I enjoyed hearing that!"

 Kellen winced. "I'm sorry," he said awkwardly.

 She shrugged. "It doesn't matter now. Anyway, Mother came to me in secret one night when you were about a year old—there was a tremendous party for your Naming Day, and of course I wasn't let to attend. I'd thrown a furious tantrum over it and been sent to bed without supper, locked in my room so I couldn't sneak out and cause trouble. I cried myself sick, of course, and then in came Mother, dressed in the strangest clothes I'd ever seen, with a pack on her back just like a street merchant.

 "She told me she was going away—"

 "She ran away?" Kellen gasped.

 Idalia nodded.'t"Not dead, no matter what you were told. She ran away. She told me she was going away, and that I would never, ever see her again. She told me that she loved me, and you, and it was not because of anything that either of us had done, but that she must go, because she had come to realize that Lycaelon loved his magick and his reputation more than anything else in the world, including her. She said I must be brave and careful, and that no matter what happened, I must never, ever speak of her again to anyone, even to you, because that was the only way you and I could be safe."

 Perhaps because Kellen hadn't known his mother, he found it easy to sympathize with her plight. Perhaps because he knew now just how vindictive Lycaelon could be, he understood. But he saw the masked pain in Idalia's eyes, and heard the hurt in her voice. It had been different for her…

 "I begged her to take me with her, but she said that Father would never let me go, because I was his daughter, and that this was the only way. Then she kissed me and left. I tried to follow her, but she'd locked the door again. There was nothing I could do but cry myself back to sleep."

 "I'm sorry," Kellen said again, wishing he could make some of that pain go away.

 But Idalia shrugged, and a kind of veil dropped over her expression. "In the morning, as soon as I could get away from the nurse, I sneaked into Mother's rooms, but they'd all been tidied away, and every trace of her was gone, as if no one had ever lived in those rooms at all. I waited sennights for someone to even mention that she was gone, but no one ever did. Ever.

 "I was so frightened by their silence that I did exactly as Mother said, and never said a single word about her, so perhaps that was why Father didn't think he needed to bother with erasing her from my mind. Or perhaps there was a spell after all. Or perhaps a little of both—you already know how mysteriously the Wild Magic works."

 "Oh, yes," Kellen agreed bitterly. "And things are always, 'out of sight, out of mind' for Lycaelon. As long as there's no reason for him to act, he's far more concerned with all that business of being important than with anything in his household."

 "I'm not surprised," Idalia replied. "Well, after that, I devoted myself to making life hell for a succession of governesses and to protecting and taking care of you; Father devoted his to becoming Arch-Mage; and you grew up into an adorable little boy. And the one thing I wanted most in the entire world was to become a Mage myself. .

 "Of course it was unthinkable. I'd been told that, loudly and repeatedly. Nevertheless, it was the one thing I wanted most in the entire world."

 Kellen eyed her with speculation. "Why is it that I just know you wouldn't take 'no' for an answer?"

 She smiled thinly, but continued without a comment. "Of course it was as unthinkable when I was in my teens as it had been when I was a child. I'd heard all the arguments—women were too emotional, too frivolous, not smart enough, but they all boiled down to one: there'd never been a female Mage in Armethalieh before, and so of course there could never be one now. So I sneaked into the Records Room of the Council Hall to search through their archives, since unlike the Library at the Mage College, which I knew I'd never be able to get into, the Council Hall isn't surrounded with wards to keep any mere mortal from setting foot in it. All I had to do was make sure I went on a day when the place was full of foreign Traders. That was easy enough; some of them always get lost, and if they were triggering wards all over the place there'd be no peace for the high-and-mighty overlords of the City!

 "Besides, it was the records of the Council itself I was after. I figured if I could find a record of a female Mage in the Council Histories, that would be enough precedent for my own training, and if I could find no record that any woman had ever been apprenticed and failed, I could always argue that if there had never been any female Mage-candidates, how could the Council possibly know that women didn't make good Mages and couldn't control their emotions?

 "That was when my Books came to me. I found them there on the shelves, crammed in among a bunch of bound copies of minutes from some ancient meeting."

 "Your Books?" Kellen gaped at her. "There? In the Council Records Room? What did you think they were?"

 She gave him a sidelong look. "I knew exactly what I had of course— I'd read all the way through Father's library by the age of twelve and I knew the Ars Perfidorum practically by heart. I knew they were supposedly Anathema, but I didn't care. If the Council and Father were so wrong about females, why should they be right about this? And unlike High Magick, I wouldn't need tutors, or textbooks, or special equipment, or years of practice before I could become a Wildmage. I started practicing Wild-magery before I even finished reading The Book of Stars."

 "You did?" Kellen felt his estimation of his sister rising again. Brave and fearless Idalia!

 Idalia finished her tea, and put the empty cup down on the table. "Yes. Stupid of me, I know. Of course the Council caught me, and pretty quickly, too. I was lucky not to be executed out of hand, but the Council does love its pretense of fairness and mercy. Just as you did, I found myself tried and Banished, standing outside the City walls, waiting for sunrise and the release of the Hunt. Since I was a female, and not terribly important to them or to Father, I wasn't given the option to recant, either, just a half-chime trial, a couple of bells in the cell, and out the gate like the trash I was."

 Kellen winced, imagining the scene very clearly. Idalia didn't see it; she was looking down at her empty cup.

 After a moment, she went on. "Unlike you, I'd done a little more digging in the Council archives before I'd found my Books. I knew exactly what was going to be coming after me when the Outlaw Hunt was released, and I had no intention of being anywhere that the Hounds could go. So I did a more specific spell. I asked for the power of flight, so that no matter what happened, the Hounds couldn't possibly reach me.

 "Of course, since I'd made such a specific request of the Powers, things didn't work out quite the way I expected them to."

 He saw a tiny change in her at that moment, a subtle relaxation. Well, the painful part of the narrative was probably past, now.

 "It never does, you know. You'll find that out soon enough if you haven't already. I found myself transformed into a Silver Eagle, and the price of the spell was that I must remain in that form until I could find a mate and raise a brood of chicks before I could transform back again. What made that difficult—other than having to wait for mating season— was having to find a Silver Eagle mate. Silver Eagles live in Elven lands, and even there, they are very, very rare. It took me three years to accomplish the task. But—oh!—being able to fly… "

 Idalia stared off into space, her expression dreamy as she remembered. Then her eyes focused on Kellen's face again, and she smiled teasingly, reaching out to pat his hand.

 "I rather enjoyed it. Once I got used to it, of course. Eggs are certainly a better way of having children than the way we do it. At any rate, once my price was paid, I was free to change back whenever I wished, so I went to the Elves, made my situation known, and changed back to myself— which is a lot better than ending up stark naked on a cliff in the middle of nowhere, don't you think?"

 "Better than I did," Kellen said glumly, staring into the dregs of his now-cold tea. He'd almost gotten himself and Shalkan killed. All Idalia'd had to do was spend three years flying around Elven lands as an eagle, probably having all kinds of interesting adventures.