Wild Magic (12 page)

‘You can’t treat me so!’ Katla shouted furiously after his retreating figure. ‘Not with my father paying—’

She regretted this as soon as she’d uttered it. Not just because it sounded peevish and spoiled, but because it was stupidly indiscreet and now everyone had stopped their chatter to listen. Tam Fox turned back slowly. His eyes were steely. ‘Your father, my dear,’ he said softly, ‘is a fool and a madman, and penniless to boot. I do this for my own reasons, and you had best remember that and knot up your loose tongue.’

Urse turned his ruined face to Katla. It was hard to read an expression, she thought, that was half-missing. Some accident with an axe, she’d heard from one of the women; a run-in with a white bear, said one of the men. But had she been pressed, she’d have said he was smiling, and not pleasantly. ‘Hand out, girlie.’

Turning cartwheels came naturally to Katla. She’d been tumbling her way around the islands since taking her earliest steps; but with the leather binding on her fingers it required a lot more concentration, and Tam Fox’s punishment took on a rather more subtle significance. Urse had tied the thong with a series of bowlines and hitches so that the whole arrangement remained tight and unmovable even under the strain of her whole body. She became aware of the pressure of the ground beneath her palm in a way she would never previously have noted had she been springing freely in her usual way, could feel the buzz of energy released in an ever-replicating, increasingly focused arc between her body and the stone of the floor. By the end of the rehearsal, she was exhausted, but glowing with pleasure from the intense satisfaction of her body’s coordination and control. It was a simple routine, to be truthful: all she had to do was to cartwheel across the floor, then, in a series of handsprings and leaps, threaten the actor playing the god, and fall over when he hit her with a gigantic straw-stuffed anchor, as they played out the tale of Sur and his encounter with the Serpent whose desire it was to swallow the world; then Bella, another of the tumblers, would come running out of the shadows with her striped costume and mad whiskers and play the Fire Cat; at which point ‘Sur’ would whistle up the Snowland Wolf, who would toss the Fire Cat into the audience, before turning to do battle with the Dragon of Wen. It was childish stuff, but apparently the King’s favourite tale; and at least she had no lines to deliver.

She accepted gratefully the flask of spiced water Bella handed her, swigged from it greedily and then started trying to untie the thong. It was a finicky business, with one hand. She had just started to loose the first knot when she suddenly realised there was more to the arrangement than functionality: Urse had tied a message into the binding. She angled her hand away from the other mummers and stared at it in disbelief.

Meet
– a goat-hitch twisted back on itself.

End
– a single granny knot.

Practice
– an elaborate knot, the name of which eluded her.

I have
– two simple hitches, crossed.

Plan
– a bowline and half of an eight.

3 Tree
– three twists and an oak-hitch.

Gate
– a double bowline to finish the binding.

She looked around. The way she had come in had been oblique: through the postern and a snaking path between the outbuildings. No gate that warranted the name there. Still fingering the knots, she got to her feet and began to wander away from the group. She passed a group of men in long cloaks, then a gaggle of women bearing baskets of bread heading up the hill towards the castle’s kitchens. No one paid her any attention. She skirted a pond on which ducks and geese clacked and honked, climbed the hill beyond it and found herself looking down on a line of oak trees leading to a tall wooden gate.

Grinning, she ran down the avenue, stopping at the third oak from the gate. There was no one there.
Sur’s nuts
, she cursed silently. She circled the tree. Nothing. He must have despaired of her intelligence and given up the tryst. She could hardly blame him. Annoyed with herself, she walked slowly back up the line of oaks.

‘Hoooo—’

It was odd to hear an owl in daylight. She looked back. High up in the boughs of the third oak from the gate there indeed was Tam Fox, now making himself visible to her, his long legs dangling.

He cocked his head at her. ‘Get up here, and make sure no one sees you.’

Katla looked around. There was no one in sight. The oak was broad, and the first branches were out of reach. She wasn’t used to tree climbing: in the Westman Isles the only trees that could survive the hard winters and horizontal north-west winds that came howling straight off the ice floes were low-growing birches and goat-willow and a few oaks and ashes that never reached their full potential. But she hadn’t been climbing rock her whole life for nothing. At waist-height there was a small depression in the bole of the trunk, and above it a protuberance where a branch had lived and died and fallen away. Standing up on the tallest of the spreading roots, she inserted a toe into the depression, grasped the protuberance with her right hand and nimbly levered herself upright. Now she could reach the lowest branch; and after that it was easy. A moment later she was seated astride a huge gnarled branch facing the mummers’ chief.

‘Very ladylike,’ he observed, grinning to see how her kirtle had ridden up to her waist.

Katla, who never had much thought for such proprieties, firmly tugged the fabric down. ‘It cannot be a very crucial plan if you have time to waste on staring up my tunic.’

‘How could I consider that wasted time?’ His teeth were white amid his beard. And when Katla’s eyes sparked at him, he said swiftly, ‘I have a role for you tonight I believe you’ll enjoy.’

Katla lay on the floor, gasping. Flint Erson was standing over her, triumphant in his tattered robes of sea-grey and storm-grey and his huge black beard of dyed sheepswool. His vast, straw-stuffed anchor came down again.

‘Damn it,’ she hissed, dodging the direct blow. ‘Not so hard!’

But the crowd were roaring with laughter, whistling and stamping their feet, clearly enjoying the show. Though not nearly so much as Flint Erson seemed to be. Then there were oohs and ahs, and here was Bella as the Fire Cat, sewn into a supple costume of painted horseskin in such a way as to best show off all her lush assets. Flames licked their way from the soles of her feet to the crown of her head, played suggestively over her thighs and chest. The Fire Cat dropped to her hands and knees and began to purr. She twisted herself around the god’s legs in ways no mere woman should be able to. Bella was double-jointed.

Katla smiled. With the crowd suitably distracted, she slithered quickly out of view and took off the Serpent’s head, stitched neatly from cured salmon skins. It had held up remarkably well to the tumbling, she thought, turning it this way and that; but it smelled awful. Her first task was done; but it was not yet time to carry out her next piece of play-acting. For the first time this evening, she was able to relax sufficiently to gaze around the Great Hall, taking in the monumental architecture of its carved pillars, stretching fifty feet or more to meet the great fans of wooden beams that spanned the high roof, the fabulously-coloured tapestries adorning the thick stone walls depicting scenes from myth and history – King Fent and the Trolls of the Black Mountains; The Battle of the Sharking Straits; Sur standing waist-deep in the Northern Sea, skimming his stones into the ocean to make the islands of Eyra. Then she turned her attention to the assembled guests. It was like the Gathering all over again, she thought: the Eyran nobility all turned out in their gaudiest, least tasteful costumes, all vying with one another to be noticed by the King. Ravn Asharson – who had let the Istrians take her to be burned without lifting a finger or his voice to prevent it – had eyes for no one apart from the woman he had now taken officially as his wife, and therefore Queen of the North. He sat with his handsome head turned from the entertainment (so much for all that rehearsal, Katla thought crossly) speaking softly with his companion, his hand in her lap, her long white fingers fluttering along the underside of his wrist in the sort of sensual, hypnotic rhythm of one stroking a favourite cat. Behind the pair sat an austere-looking woman dressed all in black with the hawkish nose and bearing of Eyran royalty. She was not watching the entertainment, either: rather, she had her eyes fixed with undisguised loathing on the new Queen of Eyra. The Lady Auda, Katla realised: the King’s mother, widow of the Night Wolf, the Shadow Lord himself, Ashar Stenson, now displaced as the first lady of the realm by the nomad woman who sat before her, her only son bound tightly under her spell.
No wonder she looks so sour
, Katla thought,
to be forced to give way to a Footloose woman with no name and no heritage, and to lose not only your status, but your son as well
.

Her eyes strayed back to the nomad woman again. It was the first time Katla had had the chance to examine the Rosa Eldi at her leisure: being manhandled by a troop of Allfair guards on her way to the stake had hardly been conducive to giving the nomad woman her undivided attention. She was, thought Katla, used to the robust females of Eyra, an odd-looking creature, being so thin and pale and delicate that she might have been raised in a snow-cave without sun or sustenance all her life: but there was something more to her than met the eye. Others had called the Rosa Eldi ‘blonde’ and ‘fair’ and ‘fragile’, but Katla had seen the pelts of the white-bears from the coldest regions of the Northern Isles and been intrigued by the hairs on them that on closer inspection when held up to the light revealed themselves not to be the pale, yellowish-white colour you might expect from seeing the beasts at a distance (always the safest way to view them, for despite the deceptive way they ambled along, they were renowned for their speed and ferocity, as Urse could probably attest to), but as translucent as an icicle trapping frozen fire. And that was how this woman appeared to Katla: pale and cold and beautiful, with her finely drawn features and her willowy limbs, yet filled with some dangerous, invisible energy that at any moment might break its deceptively fragile bonds, flare out into the hall and kill everyone there in an instant.

She looked away, discomfited by this bizarre thought, and as she did so her eye was snagged by another fall of blonde hair: truly gold this time, rather than the green of an unripe wheatfield, as it had been the last time Katla had properly seen her friend: for there, seated a few places down from the King, between a scrawny young man in a purple tunic and a greybeard in an overstuffed doublet, was Jenna Finnsen. And next but two from Jenna was the shipmaker, Morten Danson.

Perfect
, thought Katla.
Two birds with one shot
.

There came a great burst of raucous applause. Katla turned to see that in the middle of the players’ circle, Sur had just polished off the Dragon of Wen with a great flourish of his oversized sword, and Tam Fox had taken the floor. He clapped his hands and called for quiet.

‘And now,’ he declared. ‘It is time for a miracle of mutability, a magical, mirth-making mystery of tantalising trickery, a phenomenal phantasmagoria, a triumph of transformation, a veritable spectacle of shape-shifting!’

The crowd applauded. They enjoyed the troupe-chief’s wordy introductions. Four of the players carried on a striped tent made of flexible poles and densely woven cloth and set it down behind Tam Fox, shuffling around to situate it exactly where it was required. It stood maybe a head taller than Tam himself, and a tall man’s length in diameter, looking remarkably sturdy for all its lightweight components.

‘I need two volunteers,’ Tam Fox proclaimed. ‘A gentleman, and one of the fairer sex. They will enter the magical booth and – well, what they get up to together in there is their own affair of course—’ This encouraged a number of crude comments and whistling. ‘All I can promise is that what you are about to perceive is the rare and ancient art of shape-shifting!

‘Any volunteers?’

Only one person – Silva Lighthand, seated between the shipmaker and the old, fat man next to Jenna Finnsen, and primed to play her part – answered his call.

Tam Fox smiled. ‘Is there no gentleman brave enough to take my challenge?’

This was Katla’s cue. With the Serpent’s head jammed hastily down over her face, she came cartwheeling out of the shadows, a lithe figure all in sheeny silver, all the way to the royal bench, where she stopped, panting slightly, before Ravn Asharson and his new wife. There she executed a flamboyant bow, then turned enquiringly to Tam, as she had been told.

‘Shall my lord take the challenge?’ Tam Fox cried out.

The crowd fell hushed and shocked at his effrontery, but almost immediately Katla was on the move again, with a grin and a back-flip which brought her directly in front of Morten Danson. The shipmaker stared at her, aghast, as she leapt up onto the table and took him by the arm. Then, hauling him to his feet, she ignored Silva’s outstretched hand and moved beyond her.

‘What are you doing?’ Silva hissed; but ‘Shhh,’ Katla replied and reached across for the daughter of the Fairwater clan.

Jenna opened her mouth to protest; but the Serpent dipped its head and – she was quite sure of this – winked at her out of the eye-slit that had been cut between the salmon-skins. In the moment of hesitation that followed, Katla grabbed her friend and pushed her and the shipmaker out onto the floor.

‘Why,’ Tam declared with a slightly bemused frown, ‘it seems the Serpent has found two brave souls to take with him on his journey into the underworld.’

The crowd cheered wildly.

It was too late to escape. Morten Danson decided to try to make the best of the situation and began to grin and to wave with his free hand, but the hand that Katla held imprisoned was damp with sweat.
He isn’t enjoying this at all
, she thought gleefully.
And how much less is he going to enjoy what comes next
. . .

Tam Fox gave the pair a loud lecture on their proper behaviour when they were together in the tent (since the presence of the Serpent could lead only to greater temptation). He made to look under Jenna’s skirts to ensure she was wearing stout undergarments, which caused her to slap his hands away and to blush furiously. The crowd cheerfully roared its encouragement to the shipmaker, who looked equally embarrassed by the proceedings. Then Katla led them inside the canvas, gripping their hands with all her might. In the seconds before chaos ensued, she heard the musicians strike up, and the sound of dancing feet encircling the tent; then the floor gave way beneath them and they were falling.