His Majesty's Elephant (15 page)

She felt as if she had moved a mountain.

“Don't stop,” Kerrec said in her ear. “Don't think. Put it on.”

Habit would have made her argue. Sense made her obey. The golden thing settled on her breast as if it had always been there—and in truth it had been, only she had not known it.

Her hands fell away from the talisman. She closed her eyes and simply thought about breathing.

When she opened them, the world had changed.

It was the same world she had always known, green of grass and trees, brown of earth, blue of sky. And yet the green was brighter, the brown deeper, the blue clearer than she had ever imagined they could be.

She gasped with the wonder of them; and gasped again as her eyes turned to the Elephant. He was pure white, shining like snow on Candlemas Day. And Kerrec—ragged dusty-haired Kerrec—was full of light.

“There now,” he said. “You're the magic's master. Don't let it rule you.”

“But—” she started to say. Then forgot, because she had looked down, and she was like a lamp at dusk.

For a moment she did not realize what she had not seen. She could feel the talisman, its chain about her neck, its weight on her breast, but there was nothing to see with eyes of body or mind. It had become a part of her.

Her eyes closed again. She did not know if she could stand to see like this, not every waking moment. She leaned, and carefully, slowly, opened her eyes.

Everything was dull; blessedly, beautifully so. This was the world she remembered. The Elephant was grey blotched with sickly white, Kerrec was his untidy self, she was Rowan in a muddy gown, sitting by the swans' pond in her father's palace in Aachen.

But inside she was all different.

“I still don't know what I know,” she said.

“You'll know it when you need it,” Kerrec told her. “You're lucky. You've got the gift of knowing. I had to learn everything step by step, with mistakes that could have killed me.”

“That won't happen to me?”

“You're still as human as you always were. You can still make mistakes. But you don't need to learn how.”

“I don't have to learn to make mistakes? I can't tell you how that comforts me.” She shrugged him off before he could answer. The sun dazzled her, shining straight in her eyes. She started. “How did it get so late? It was barely noon when I came here.”

“Magic's time is tricky,” Kerrec said.

Rowan tensed. “But if it takes so long to get through a few moments, what will happen when we meet the sorcerer? He'll be gone and my father will be dead before I can get my wits together.”

“I said it was tricky,” said Kerrec. “Not that it was slow. Or not always. It takes as long as it needs to take. You may find it moving very fast, when we come to the battle.”

“And it is going to be a battle,” Rowan said. She was starting to shake. “I've never fought. Men fight. Women stay home and wait, and tend the wounded.”

“This isn't that kind of fighting,” Kerrec said. “You said yourself that magic isn't male or female, it just is. So is war of magic. Or are you going to run away again, and leave everything to fend for itself?”

He was trying to shock her into courage. She would not have known that, an hour or two ago. It made her no less angry now, but she was quicker to recover. “You know there's no escape for me. Not since I took up my magic. The sorcerer will know, if he doesn't already. And if I don't go to face him, he'll come after me. He can't let me live and wield magic this close to his sorceries.”

“He can if he's diverted.”

“By you?”

Kerrec did not answer.

“He'll gut you and hang you up to dry,” Rowan said.

“Not if I'm with Abul Abbas.”

Abul Abbas rumbled. Maybe it was his stomach demanding its dinner. Maybe he was saying something of Kerrec's foolishness.

“It has to be all three,” Rowan said. “Threes have power, you told me. Now I understand what you meant. We three are different sides of magic. You have sight. I have knowing. Abul Abbas has—” She paused as the rest of it came to her. “Abul Abbas has wisdom and strength. And he knows the Talisman. He's part of it somehow.”

“They used the magic in him to seal it, when it was made,” Kerrec said slowly, listening to the Elephant, turning thoughts into words where Rowan could hear. “The two of them are the same gift. The Talisman was to protect your father. Abul Abbas was to protect the Talisman. And he failed. We got in his way when he would have stopped the spell; it rebounded on him. We were idiots!”

“We didn't know,” said Rowan.

“It's going to be hard,” Kerrec said. “Much harder than it would have been at first.”

“Then the sooner we do it,” said Rowan, “the sooner it's done.”

He should have known better than to be surprised. “Now?”

“What better time will there be?”

That called for an hour's worth of answers, or none. Kerrec opened his mouth, but shut it again. Rowan nodded briskly. “Good,” she said. “Now. Shall we begin?”

Beginning was easy enough to say, but harder to do. Before they could engage in battle, they had to find the enemy. And Michael Phokias was nowhere to be found.

The envoys from Byzantium had rooms in the palace. Some of them were there, asleep. Others were in the town doing whatever men did in the early evening; most of it had to do with wine and women, and some with song. None of them was Michael Phokias.

Rowan knew a long moment's horror. What if he had gone away? What if he had taken the blackened and corrupted Talisman and gone back to his master in Byzantium, and left his spell to work itself unattended?

But that did not feel like Michael Phokias. He would want to see the end of it, and his master, if he was sensible, would want clear proof that the spell had succeeded.

No, Michael Phokias had not left Aachen. He was hidden, that was all, and she had to find him.

First Rowan did something that she should have thought to do long since. She sought her eldest sister, and found her in the company of their aunt. That, taken all in all, was not surprising. And it made matters simpler.

“Bertha,” said Rowan as soon as she politely could, “would you watch over Gisela for me?”

Rowan had tried not to let that come out of nowhere, but to Bertha no doubt it did, since they had been discussing the chance of rain before morning. Bertha looked mildly startled, but she was calm by nature, and she was used to Rowan's shifts and changes. “Why?” she asked. “What do you think she'll do? Shouldn't it be Hrotrud I watch?”

“Hrotrud doesn't need watching,” Rowan said, trying not to snap. “She hasn't been acting like a mooncalf in a stupor.”

“Gisela is never the most vivacious of women,” said Bertha. But her brows had drawn together. “And yet... she is acting strangely, isn't she? Do you think she's ill, Theoderada?”

“I think she's bewitched,” Rowan said, and never mind what Bertha thought.

The abbess nodded, agreeing, but not saying anything aloud.

Bertha's frown deepened, maybe at that evidence of the abbess' complicity, maybe only at what Rowan had said. “Rowan, do you think you're seeing things quite as they are?”

“I don't know,” said Rowan with as much patience as she could muster. “All I know is that she needs a guard. Can't you do that, Bertha? I don't know of anybody who would be better at it.”

Abbess Gisela spoke at last before Bertha could begin, neatly forestalling her. “We'll keep the vigil,” she said.

Bertha opened her mouth, probably to object, but closed it again and sighed. She was not won over, not nearly, but she would do as the abbess bade her.

Rowan hugged them both hard enough to squeeze the breath from them, and left before she could be tempted to linger till morning.

oOo

With Gisela as well protected as she could be, Rowan went in search of Kerrec. That was easier than she might have expected. When she thought of him, she knew exactly where to go.

More magic. More oddness. And yet it was like coming home, to find him near the outer gate of the menagerie. His rough-haired shadow was blessedly familiar in a world that kept trying to go strange, his voice as close to friendly as it ever was, calling her by name. “Kerrec,” she answered him.

“Names have power,” he said. “That's another lesson for you.” Then he lowered his voice. “I think I've found him.”

Everything in Rowan sprang alert. She found herself whispering, as if the sorcerer could not have heard them from a mile off, naming themselves without concealment. “Where is he? And where is Abul Abbas?”

Kerrec answered the second question first. “He's waiting. He'll be with us when we need him.”

“But—” said Rowan.

“We have to start alone; make the enemy think there's no more to us than there was before. When Abul Abbas is ready, he'll come.”

Rowan shook her head. That was wrong, she knew it. How could the Elephant not know it, too?

But Kerrec had her by the arm, dragging her till she had to walk of her own accord or fall flat. Time was short, too short for arguments. And if they failed because they were two instead of three—

She had to trust Abul Abbas.

Once she was walking, Kerrec let her go. He was trusting her, maybe because he had no choice. As softly as she could, and with something of the resignation of the condemned criminal approaching the headsman's block, Rowan followed where he led.

Someone had oiled the hinges of the gate to the menagerie. That was new: it had creaked in ghastly fashion when Rowan last went through it. It served them well now, letting them enter without a sound.

oOo

The menagerie was transformed in the pallid light of the moon. Its shadows were utter black, its bright places luminous blue-white. Shapes could be anything: cages with beasts asleep inside, swans in the pool, peacocks together under the beech tree.

Not every creature slept. Rowan heard the soft growling of the leopard and the pad-pad-pad of its pacing. Others of the big cats were uneasy, and the apes chittered as they dreamed.

Eyes gleamed in the depths of the bear's cage. Beyond it in the hunting park she heard the sound of bodies moving, and the chuff of a stag startled into vigilance.

She caught at Kerrec's hand. It was cold, but no colder than her own.

The touch warmed them both a little. Linked hand to hand like children frightened of the dark, they crept toward the center of the uneasiness.

She could feel it on her skin like the touch of an icy wind, and like wind it tugged at her, striving to thrust her back. Because of the force of the unease, they had to take a winding path, around the swans' pool and back to the wall. That was not a way Rowan often took, since it was so roundabout, but on the other side of the wall was the orchard where so much of this tangle had begun.

The moon shone through the apple boughs, dappling the grass. It was a waning moon, and sickly, white and bloated like a corpse. The trees seemed as twisted as the moon; the apples on them swelled not with ripeness but with rot.

Rowan stopped and could not go on. Kerrec, who should have pulled her back into motion, was as frozen-stark as she. There was nothing to see but moon and trees and leprous grass.

She set her teeth and shook the horrible vision out of her head. Here was the orchard as it had always been, and the moon, and the night untainted by any foulness. “There's no one here,” she started to say; thinking that this was a trick, and the sorcerer was somewhere far away.

Kerrec's hand tightened on hers until she gasped with the pain. Whether it was her pain or his tautness, all at once she could see. Someone knelt under the centermost tree, doing something in the grass.

He was cutting a circle with a knife that cast no light from its blade, even when it should have caught the moon and flashed. He was careful about it, meticulous, but very quick.

Something lay in the circle. It seemed a bundle of clothing, or maybe a carpet, until Rowan understood the oddities of its shape. It was a human body.

Its hair was long and pale. It was a woman, then; old, maybe, with that white hair.

Not if white was silvery gold, and the woman was Gisela.

Rowan was letting her fears conquer her common sense. Gisela was asleep in her chamber, guarded by the strongest women Rowan knew.

But Gisela was here, covered with a cloak. She stirred slightly and murmured as one does in sleep.

She was alive, then, and probably enspelled.

The figure who made the circle straightened just before he closed it, and turned his face to the moon. Yes, it was Michael Phokias, with his curling black beard and his long pale face. His eyes were black and lightless like the blade of his dagger.

“Black magic,” Kerrec breathed. “Oh, black indeed.”

Rowan kicked him to make him hush. The sorcerer did not know that they were there—he was too arrogant to set wards, or too contemptuous of their magic—and they did not need to awaken him to his mistake. It might be all the advantage they had, without Abul Abbas.

She wondered if young warriors felt this way before a fight: half dizzy, half sick, and thoroughly terrified. So terrified that she could not move, either forward or back.

At last she shook herself. She would not die here, if she could possibly help it. Nor would she go away ensorceled.

That too, maybe, was a warrior's thought, his last desperate surge of courage before the charge.

The sorcerer bent over the woman asleep in his unfinished circle, and lifted her cloak. Under it she was as white as the moon and as bare as she was born.

He did not pause to savor the sight of her, though he took her hands and folded them on her breast. Something dark was wound in her fingers, something darker than that hidden beneath them.

Rowan's hand went to her own breast, where her magic pulsed like a heart.