Rosemary Kirstein - Steerswoman 04 (30 page)

The time came. Rowan turned, pulled Will by the arms, hard,
saying without sound: Run!

They tried. They were slow. Willam was too heavily burdened,
his strength too spent.

They made it to the end of their ghost-dragon’s space, but
they staggered, and stumbled, and Willam was down on one knee. And the hole
moved back into the herd, leaving them behind.

And there it was—the one dragon that before had cut off
their escape, now standing between them and the herd, not ten feet away, facing
left.

They were in full view of its glittering eye.

Dragons saw motion. For the space of three heartbeats, Rowan
and Willam remained, frozen.

But the steerswoman saw from the movements within the herd,
and knew from memory, that when this dragon was gone, others would be there,
more of them: many bright, jeweled eyes to catch the humans’ last break for freedom.

Rowan said, between her teeth: “Run.” And she ran, herself—left,
away from Willam.

The dragon saw her, head twisting to follow the motion, then
turned its snout toward her.

She dodged, right. A wash of heat and light beat to her
left. When the flame stopped, Rowan placed herself in the hot air of its
passage, and ran up that corridor, straight ahead, straight toward the
creature’s blind spot.

Her sword was in her hand. She reached the dragon as it turned
its head, and she swung with all her force directly at the glittering eye.

The eye shattered, cascading red shards, spitting sparks
from within. The dragon writhed, backed, flamed again with no aim, twisted its
neck.

She ducked under the head, struck at the second eye, missed.
The creature saw her, tried to turn, to flame, but the blade caught on the edge
of the eye.

Rowan held tight, and the dragon’s own strength pried the entire
garnet dome free of its face. Blinded, it froze, then collapsed, senseless.

But the pattern still moved, and now other eyes were
watching. Rowan straddled the fallen dragon, holding its place in the pattern
for the single moment she needed, raised her sword, dropped its point behind
her head, used both hands, and flung it: up, high, arcing out over the herd.

Bright metal flashed twice in the low sunlight, spinning,
then descending. Heads lifted and turned; from a dozen sources, flame
fountained up—

Willam had her by the arms, stopping her flight. “You’re
clear, you’re clear!” She did not recall having run. She looked at him, stunned
and speechless.

They were outside the perimeter.

Willam was pale, and shuddering, his shirt drenched, his
eyes wide; Rowan thought that she must look the same herself. He smelled of
sweat, and oil, and mud; she thought she smelled of dragon-fire.

They stood, shaking and gasping. Then Willam said suddenly,
in a wild voice, “What were you
doing?”

And because it was a question, the steerswoman discovered that
she could answer immediately. “Distracting them.” Willam made several attempts
to speak, and failed. Eventually he found his voice. “It worked.”

Rowan made a noise that perhaps ought to have been a laugh
of relief, but it could not escape from the back of her throat. It sounded to
her like something a very small dog would say. She dropped to a seat on the
ground. Willam knelt down beside her.

The sun was low, and the air was cold. Very slowly, Rowan’s
heart calmed, and her breathing eased. “Where’s our victim?”

Willam had his eyes closed. Without opening them, he tilted
his head. “Over there.”

About twenty feet around the perimeter, just past the line
in the earth marking the safe distance: a sprawled shape, bright green and
silver. Lying senseless and blindfolded, it looked, at the moment, rather pitiful.

Rowan nodded, dumbly. Her left leg was lying in a puddle,
water seeping in over the high edge of her boot. She felt dull, weak, empty.
She struggled to recover thought. “We should move it, before the sun goes
down.”

Willam’s head dropped, and his shoulders slumped. His hands
lay limp on the ground beside his knees, palms up. “Yes,” he said, eyes still
closed, “but I don’t think I can carry it anymore.”

They both carried the dragon, slung between them, leg-tied
and suspended from a dead branch, looking to Rowan like the prize from a hunt
in some heroic ballad. And it was, as Willam had predicted, heavier than it
looked.

They went north away from the city, and inland away from the
river, so that it would encounter no humans once it was set free.

The jammer-spell that Willam had kept was now tucked into
Rowan’s shoulder satchel; while being transported, the dragon would remain deaf
to the commands of the controller spell in Jannik’s house.

They found a place by a little stream with steep banks,
where wooded hills rose above, now deepening with evening shadow, and smelling
sweetly of pine; rather a pleasant spot, Rowan thought.

As they set their burden down, and Willam began to untie its
legs from the pole, something occurred to Rowan. “When you take off the
blindfold, it will expect the pattern. Nothing will fit. It will attack.”
Willam paused; this had not been anticipated.

They solved the problem by digging a small hole in the
rising ground, and arranging the dragon with its head in the hole, its face
pressed up against the earth. Rowan could not help but feel sorry for it.

244
THE
LANGUAGE OF POWER

When Willam carefully slipped the cloth free, the dragon remained
inert. He and the steerswoman backed away, then climbed.

Up into the woods, high, and deep, until the stream and the
sprawled green shape on the bank were just visible below through the pine
trunks. Willam and Rowan crouched down behind one particularly large tree, and
peered out from either side.

Rowan passed the jammer-spell to Willam. He opened it,
glanced once at Rowan, drew a breath, then prodded inside the box with his
index finger.

Far below, the green jerked, then writhed, struggled. The dragon
found its feet, and lifted its head, shaking dirt from its eyes.

It cocked its head; glanced here, there, and about;
scratched its nose with a forefoot. Then it began scrambling along the edge of
the steep bank. “The controlling spell has it,” Willam said, quietly. “It’s
sending it back to the dragon fields—” Then he stopped short, with a quick
intake of breath.

The dragon had halted suddenly, and now stood completely
still. Then it wove its head, slowly, side to side. Willam breathed: “And
there’s Jannik.”

A tall broken stump was nearby; the dragon noticed it, and
climbed up its ragged top, then arranged itself carefully among the splinters
and sat up, front legs tucked against its chest. It paused, made a precise
quarter turn to its right, paused again, and repeated, and repeated, until it
had turned in a slow, complete circle.

No animal would do that. The wizard was now personally
commanding its movements; and, the steerswoman realized, surveying the dragon’s
surroundings himself, gazing through the creature’s own jeweled eyes.

Rowan and Willam remained very still.

The dragon’s forelegs dropped. Then, with sudden animal
nimbleness, it leapt from the stump, clambered down the steep bank toward the
water. A moment later it could be seen splashing through the brook. When it
reached a large, flat rock, it climbed and sat, tail curled, eyeing the surface
with one raised forefoot poised, exactly as if patiently hunting fish.

Willam and Rowan exchanged a long look. Then, crouching low,
they backed off and made their way up the hill, through the woods, and away.

They made camp by the roadside, at a site that had been used
for that purpose before. A ring of stones already outlined the best location
for the fire, and some kindly person had left a number of branches drying
nearby.

Willam made the fire quickly with the help of a small bit of
metallic powder that hissed into white flame when he spit on it. Then he
collapsed full length on the ground, with a groan containing just enough
theatrics to tell Rowan that he was not in serious trouble. “I can’t believe we
did that.”

“I can’t believe we even attempted it.”

“That was the most horrible experience I’ve ever had in my
life,” Willam declared, with feeling. When Rowan did not immediately voice the
same opinion, he raised his head and eyed her. “Not in yours?”

The steerswoman had several candidates to choose from. “Well
…” She pulled the saddlebags from among the tack they had removed from the
horses. “It was different from anything else. I’ve never before had an
experience that was so, so logical and so mindless, at the same time.”

“Logical and mindless.” Willam lay his head down again.
“That’s magic.”

They dined, he on fish pastry and a baked potato, she on
roast boar and squash, which they heated on stones by the fire.

She wrote in her logbook. When Willam passed by after arranging
his bedroll, he caught a glance of one page. He leaned forward and indicated.
“That word is misspelled.” Under his correction,
shoot
became
chute.

Willam sat by the fire, quiet, watching the flames. Despite
his weariness, perhaps, like her, he felt that sleep would be long coming.

Logical and mindless,
the steerswoman wrote. But so
many things in the world were both logical and mindless. The swing of the stars
above, for all their beauty, had no intent behind them.

High up, in the crystal dark, the Western Guidestar hung, glowing
bright, seeming eternal. In the opposite side of the sky: the Eastern
Guidestar. Watching, recording, waiting for commands from their masters—“Are
they alive?”

Willam glanced at her, then followed the direction of her
gaze. “The Guidestars? I don’t know.” He remained, face tilted to the sky. “I
used to ask that—not about the Guidestars, but about other things.” His voice
was quiet, puzzled. “The things that move, and act. The things that watch, and
choose, and decide. The things that speak to us …” A pocket of moisture in
one burning log hissed, squealed, then snapped. “And whenever I asked that
question, Corvus would always say: ‘The short answer is no.’ And then he’d give
me the long answer. And, Rowan” and he looked at her, shook his head, “it always
seemed to me that the long answer really meant yes. So … I don’t know.” He
picked up a stick of kindling, used it to prod at the heart of the flames. “I
do know that they’re not
considered
to be alive, and they’re not treated
as if they were. We create them and destroy them without a second thought …”
A breeze from the river rose, making the fire flutter as if struggling against
it, instinctively. “If they are alive, I suppose that’s wrong. But what I
really think—” He set down the stick, held out both his hands, first together,
then slowly widening the gap. “—I think that the division is not as clear as we
think it is. Between what’s alive, and what’s not. I think,” and he watched as
his own right hand marked off steps toward his left, “that there are … degrees,
between. More, alive, less alive … I don’t think that there’s any one point
where we can say, ‘Here’s where it begins …’” He considered his hands
silently, then dropped them to his knees. “I suppose that’s true of a lot of
things. We mark off some point in the middle, and say, ‘There’s the division,’
when, really, there are a dozen steps between, or a hundred, or a thousand …”

He grew silent. The fire sputtered, sent up sparks that died
before they reached the sky, fell as ash, and rose again, riding the heated
air. Rowan watched the light move on Willam’s face as he gazed into the flames.

She said: “Willam … will you teach me magic?”

He looked up at her. “Yes,” he said, and he seemed gently surprised,
not by the question, but by the idea that she might think there could be any
answer other than yes. Then he hesitated, and said, “But …”

“I know. You couldn’t learn it all in six years; I suppose
it’ll take even longer for me to learn just what you know.”

He gave her a wry look. “Actually, I doubt that. But—” He
paused. “Rowan, if things go wrong tomorrow night, but we do still manage to
escape with our lives, I’ll probably have to run. And probably you and Bel
should, too. In the opposite direction. It would be safer, for all of us. So I
just don’t know how much time we’ll have together.”

She had, for the moment, nearly forgotten their mission for the
following night. And for all the hope that it offered her, she found that she
now resented it. “Then … for as long as we are together.”

He nodded, pleased. “All right.” And then he laughed. “But I
don’t know where to begin!”

“Since we have so little time,” Rowan said, “give me the
heart of it.” The phrase took him by surprise. “Is there one idea,” she went
on, “one principle, that stands at the center? Can you think of one sentence
that is true of every aspect of magic? Is there even such a thing: one truth
that underlies it all?”

She thought that he had never considered this before; it
seemed that he was thinking, not to recover one key phrase that had been told
to him, but to discern, among all the things he knew, the connections; and then
to follow them inward, to the heart, the center.

It took some time. The copper gaze shifted, uncertain, as he
sifted, perhaps, through everything that he had learned. At one point, he idly
picked up the stick again, apparently merely for something to do with his
hands, then sat gazing at it, brows knit, as if it contained the answer.
Apparently it did not. Frustrated, he tossed it into the fire.

Then he stopped short; he looked at the fire, looked at his
hand—and he had it. He turned to the steerswoman. “Everything is power.”

She was frankly disappointed. “And, I suppose, power is everything.”
It seemed a typical wizardly idea, but she had frankly hoped for something less
political.