The Magician of Hoad (20 page)

“That’s all?” Heriot exclaimed incredulously. “You think safe and happy is easy?” His voice suddenly tipped toward fury. “When I saw Izachel, I remembered! I remembered too much.”

Linnet closed her eyes, in case her courage would somehow leak out and run down her cheeks like tears.

“And it wasn’t ordinary memory. It was recognizing a voice I hadn’t ever really heard before. Listen!”

She heard his breath now as he panted a little in the shadows.

“Do you know what my first memory is? My very first? It was feeling someone pushing a hook through my head, ear to ear, and I grew up with that hook being pushed into me, sometimes several times a day… all the way from here
to here.” He slapped first one side of his head and then the other. “And when I hung from that hook, I’d bleed… bleed at my nose and out of the corners of my eyes, even though the hook wasn’t what you’d call real. But it did something real to me, didn’t it? I spent hours of my childhood sleeping off the pain.”

In spite of everything, Linnet was affected by the horror of his story. She waited, and at last he spoke again, sounding rather more resigned. “I thought it was just something that had gone wrong with me. Some people are born to have fits, and that’s just nature. But when I saw Izachel I recognized the hook. He’d felt me out there in the country, being what I was, and he’d tried to feed on me, using the power he hooked away from me as his own. That was his particular talent. And the King of Hoad, and Lord Glass, too, without knowing it, had been pushing him into my head, day and night, night and day, until I somehow learned the trick of holding them off. Which I did. At least my rag did… the bit that had been ripped out of me by Izachel. That torn-away bit hid in me for years. Mind you, it came out when it was ready, and it’s still there, off to one side, flapping away. Sometimes we get together, but only as—like—like twins. I should be one single thing, but I’m not. I’m two forces in the one body.”

“Dysart didn’t have anything to do with that hook,” Linnet declared, sure of what she was saying.

“I know. He’s got a kind heart,” Heriot said. “Come to that, I think I must have put a hook of my own into him. I promised him a kingdom, didn’t I? Not that I actually remember promising anything.” He sighed, screwing up his
face and half turning away from her, shifting the hay as if he might burrow into it. When he spoke again it was as if he were explaining something to himself. “The part of me they really want is that restless part that twists the world. None of them want me to move on to… to become what I’m truly supposed to become. And I’m a stranger to that part of myself. I know it’s there… but I don’t know what
it
knows, even if it’s still me… even if it’s me that’s doing the knowing. There are two people inside my head… the farmer and that other one, both signaling to each other, waving from hill to hill, and then having to guess what the signals mean.

“When I saw Izachel the other night, the magic man and the farmer ran together, and I became a single man—the completed one I should be—just for a little. Then Dysart grabbed my arm and gave me back his promise, and”—Heriot gave his familiar shrug—“I must have tumbled in two again.”

Linnet wasn’t interested in Heriot’s puzzling.

“Stop thinking about yourself all the time,” she cried impatiently. “I’m here about Dysart.”

“I want to stop thinking about myself,” Heriot declared, frowning and staring into the dark air. “But you can’t, when Kings and Princes are watching you, ordering you to do what they tell you to do, offering a sort of glory, asking for kingdoms and hooking you out of yourself. You have to wonder what you really are. Why did Lord Glass come looking for me? Why was I stolen away from my family where I was happy and driven into Diamond? I have a family—a brother, a sister, a mother, cousins. I’ve got a great-greataunt. I had to leave them all behind me.”

“I don’t know anything about that,” said Linnet impatiently.

“But if it had all happened to you, you’d start thinking about yourself, right?” said Heriot quietly.

Linnet sighed with weariness and exasperation. They stared at each other across the candle flame. Somehow Heriot had grown easier. He pushed the hay well back from the candle, then, smiling, he slid his pack of cards from his pocket and began shuffling them idly, watching the stiff images eclipse one another on the face of the pack. Suddenly he seemed at home in this cage, almost contented as he leaned easily against the rigid back wall.

“So what was it you wanted, exactly?” he asked her. “You want to say something about Dysart. What is it?”

Something new had come into the glance he directed at her. His smile was unexpectedly familiar. Confronted with that knowing smile, she suddenly found it difficult to talk about Dysart.

“There’s no need for you to put yourself into a cage,” she said crossly.

“There’s every need,” said Heriot. “I’m a good monster. Aren’t I?” he added, leaning forward a little. His eyes, looking at her across the cards, widened briefly and alarmingly.

“Nobody thinks you’re a monster,” Linnet declared.

“Everyone does, deep down,” said Heriot, “and so do you.”

“You can walk out of this cage at any time you want to,” she said. “It’s just a game to you.” All the same, she thought
that Heriot might quickly become crazy enough to insist his game was a reality, and spend the rest of his life in a cage with an open door.

She passed her hand to and fro across the candle flame, making a series of little eclipses. “They say the Hero told a strange story this morning,” she said at last. “He told the council he once tried to kill you.”

“Oh, that,” said Heriot, rubbing his ribs. “Ages back. One good thing about my life, it’s never been boring.” He looked at her directly. “Did he say why? Everyone thinks I know everything, but I don’t. I’ve always wanted to know. Carlyon was as sweet as pie to me one moment back then, hiding me from Lord Glass and Cloud. And then, suddenly, he pulled a knife on me.”

“He says he was thinking treason,” Linnet explained. “He says you read his thoughts.”

Heriot sighed. “He was unhappy,” he said at last. “Dark with misery. Is it treachery to be unhappy in Hoad? Then they should hang
me
. You too.”

“He said it was treason,” Linnet repeated. “He said he acted on impulse.”

“Some impulse… ,” Heriot muttered, looking back at his cards. “Yes, he tried to kill me, but I saved myself. Then, later, I ran off, trying to hide, and after a few adventures here and there, I wound up in Diamond.”

“Why didn’t you tell them?” Linnet asked. “The King might have been on your side.”

Heriot laughed unexpectedly and held his cards out at arm’s length.

“Let Dysart go!” Linnet said, both commanding and begging at the same time.

“What do you mean, let him go? I haven’t got him.”

“He’s lying on his bed in the Tower of the Crow,” she cried. “He can’t see or hear. He can’t move.”

Heriot looked at her incredulously. “You think I’ve put him under a spell?”

“Haven’t you?” she asked.

“No.” The familiar and somehow disturbing expression was creeping across his face again. “He touched me, back when I wasn’t safe, but—” Heriot hesitated. “Well, if he’s lying there,” he said at last, “perhaps it’s because deep down he doesn’t want to wake.”

“Can’t you do something for him?” she persisted. “Bring his true life back to him?”

“Yes, if I knew where he kept his true life,” Heriot said scornfully. “But he doesn’t know himself, does he? His true life shifts around in him.”

He looked down at his cards, then up again, very slowly this time, up at Linnet once more, staring at her with an expression she could only describe as mischievous.

“Look at me!” he commanded. Light oozed out of him like sweat, and she saw his face clearly for the first time, looking out of its tangled hair, colorless and wild in this light, eyes like pits. He held a card toward her.

“Now look here!” he commanded. “Look hard!”

Linnet frowned at the picture.

“Dies heart!” said Heriot, his voice distant, and from just beyond the card, he looked to Linnet like a smiling demon. “Dice Heart! Dysart!”

Suddenly Linnet found she was kneeling, peering into the card almost as if it were a fortune-teller’s mirror. Time had been stolen from her life. She could feel the discontinuity, knew something had happened, but had no idea what it might have been. She had been given an instruction. It was there in her head, her feelings and intentions aligning themselves around it, but she had no idea what it was.

“What have you done?” she cried, shivering.

Heriot replied with a question. “What does it feel like?”

“A break,” said Linnet, forcing herself to speak with all the detachment she could muster. She wasn’t going to gratify him by showing fear. “As if I’d gone out of existence for two minutes and then flashed back on again, the same but different.”

“That’s what I feel like from time to time,” Heriot said, sounding surprised and suddenly companionable. “The same but different.” Then he leaned forward, his dark eyes openly alight with the mischief she had glimpsed earlier, and touched her lightly but somehow powerfully on her right cheek. “On your way!” he said, still smiling.

Linnet mistrusted that smile. “What did you do?” she asked, rising, vaguely aware of a slow warmth spreading through her, a curious spasm of excitement in the pit of her stomach. Why was she getting to her feet and moving to the door? Nothing had been accomplished. Dysart was not saved.

“Good-bye!” Heriot said, lying back and shutting his eyes. “And do call again soon.”

“What did you do to me?” she asked once more, looking back over her shoulder.

“It’s a riddle,” Heriot said. “You lot and your kingdoms!” he added, turning his back on Linnet, pulling his knees up, bending his head down, curling himself up and laughing in his own darkness. “You’ll find out! Dysart! Yes! Meanwhile I’ll get some sleep.”

His gentle laughter terrified Linnet. She scrambled away from him out of the unlocked cage and into the garden through which she had felt her way so blindly only an hour earlier. The familiar stars had curved a little across the sky, but the garden seemed to be springing up around her in lines of light, things flaring into existence as she passed them, then dying back into darkness as she left them behind. Yet this flaring was not a flaring of light. Time was illuminating the gardens. Somehow she was perceiving the world by the smoldering residues of its past.

She turned toward the Swan Tower but found herself brought to a standstill as if she’d lost her way, though she knew exactly where she was. Then, slowly, she turned to look sideways toward the Tower of the Crow. Light came from a torch burning over the doorway, and there, by a little brazier beside the door, she could see a group of men talking in low voices, glancing upward from time to time, no doubt gossiping about Betony’s wedding, Heriot and Dysart, and all that had happened around them. If there had been only one guard she might have walked up and demanded admittance, but it didn’t seem possible to show herself to a whole crowd and walk past them into the Prince’s tower.

Linnet looked up to the very top of the tower.
That’s where I should be,
she thought to herself.

The tower rose into the night, dwarfing the patch of light at its own doorway, and then, as she frowned to herself, measuring its height, ascending hyphens of dim light, one above the other, seemed to ooze toward her from its blank surface. She was reminded of notes on a page of music, recording a rising scale. It took her a moment to realize what a freak of starlight was showing her. There before her, seen more clearly than ever before, was an ancient exterior flight of steps, similar to those that wound around the Tower of the Swan, but even more worn and crumbling.

Unseen by the men at the door, Linnet crossed the Bridge of the Crow, slipped along a thin path to trees and bushes at the base of the tower, then twisted herself, as silently as possible, through leaves and twigs until, at last, she laid her hand on the wall of the tower, felt the deep chill of the blocks of stone, and there, under her palm, very faintly, the actual curve of the tower’s side. She even imagined it might be breathing.

Sliding sideways, she searched for what, in due course, she found… a first step. Finding it so easily filled her with such excitement and determination that she had no room for ordinary fear. She was terrified at her own plan, and yet it was an exalted terror… a terror that was also a necessity… a terror she could somehow enjoy.

She felt above the first step and found another one and then another, but they were unclimbable, or so she thought at first. But then her blind hand, circling up and around, discovered, almost as if it had known just what was there to
be found, a short crescent of steel set in the stone, a handhold. After only a second of hesitation, Linnet put her foot on the first step of the crumbling stair, locked the fingers of one hand around the steel bar, then felt for the one that must surely be above it. She began to climb, rising high into the airy night.

Her first steps were desperate ones.
I can’t do this,
she thought wildly, but doing it nevertheless.
I really can’t do this.
Experimentally she faced the stone, then flattened herself against it, finding herself almost spread-eagled, arms stretching desperately from handhold to handhold. Feeling sideways with her foot, she stepped again, trusting her weight to the next stone, and then to other stones, some of which accommodated only her toes and the ball of her foot, and left her heel treading air.
I can’t do this, but I’m doing it. I’m on my way
. She breathed in the dust and grit of the weathering stone… felt the very substance of Guardon-the-Rock filling her lungs as she hung in darkness. More than once she stepped on the hem of her own cluttering dress. Once a step wobbled like a loose tooth in the face of the tower, and she tilted backward.
Falling!
she thought, growing sick with fear as one of her shoes tumbled away into the night. But the air around her grew somehow hard and unrelenting; she found an impossible purchase in it, and pulled herself forward again. As she did, she felt a tenuous but determined presence collecting itself around her, and knew at last exactly what Dysart had meant when he had talked, years ago, about someone being there to catch him.