camp, a plump little woman in a dress scintillant with opals and featherwork come running out to embrace Tally and the sleeping child, and lead them toward the largest of the lighted pavilions. And he saw how Tally turned to look out into the darkness, and it seemed to him for a moment that their eyes met.
FIVE
FOR A LONG TIME AFTER JALDIS SLEPT RHION SAT AWAKE BY
the fire, staring into its silken heart and listening to the silence of the deserted inn.
And thinking.
You reach the point where you can’t live a lie anymore
, he had said. And,
I tried so damn hard to be good
.
He had never spoken to a nonwizard about wizardry like that. On the whole, those who were not mageborn—those not born with the strange sleeping fire in their veins, their hearts, the marrow of their bones—found it impossible to comprehend why those who were would subject themselves to such stringent teaching and disciplines in order to achieve a state of virtual outlawry, the state of
beldin nar—
literally, to be dead souls, whose deaths were no more a matter for vengeance than the desecration of a dog’s carcass.
Yet he had said it to her, knowing she would understand.
And saying it, he had remembered afresh how much it had hurt to wonder and pretend and fake being something everyone thought he should be; to live in the subconscious hope that it wasn’t true or that, if it was true, he could keep people from guessing.
On the whole, to those nonmageborn acquaintances who evinced a genuine interest in the subject—and there had been some among their patrons and clients from the court at Nerriok—he had explained his initiation into wizardry in terms of teaching, education, and eagerness to learn. To them he had recounted how he’d cooked and cleaned and run errands, fetching and carrying up and down all those long rickety stairways of the tall, narrow house in Nerriok, even in the days when they could afford a servant; made a good story of all the tedium of ritually cleansing crucibles and implements in the attic workshop, censing and sweeping the sanctum where the meditation was done, and washing the vessels before and after. That they would understand, at least in part. But never all.
All those first years he’d been reading, absorbing almost without knowing it, all the infinite, tiny gradations of lore necessary to wizardry, gradually becoming aware, through conversation with Jaldis, with Shavus, and with other mages of the Order who stayed with them of the interweavings of all things in the physical world, the metaphysical, and the strange shadowland of ghosts and faes and grims that lay between them—learning how all things were balanced and how no alteration of the fabric of the world could be made without somehow affecting the rest of the universe, sometimes in rather unexpected fashions.
After the spells of imbuing Jaldis’ crystal spectacle-lenses had nearly cost him his own eyesight, Rhion had taken the concept of precautions and Limitations very seriously indeed. He had not worked a spell for a long while after that, and had been careful to make the Circles of Power and Protection absolutely correct, to study carefully the Words of Ward and Guard. Simply the study of these had taken him nearly three years of painstaking memorization, during which time he had also studied all those things that his father had never bothered to have him taught: the structure and nature of plants, and how to tell them from one another by sight and touch and smell; the names of every plant, every bird, every beast and fae and spirit and insect and stone, and how they differed from one another; and how each was its own creation, with its own secret name.
Such things were not necessary to accounting—things not only beyond a banker’s ken, but beyond even one’s imaginings.
And somewhere in those first few years he had learned the thing that he’d never been able to explain to even the most sympathetic of
FIVE
FOR A LONG TIME AFTER JALDIS SLEPT RHION SAT AWAKE BY
the fire, staring into its silken heart and listening to the silence of the deserted inn.
And thinking.
You reach the point where you can’t live a lie anymore
, he had said. And,
I tried so damn hard to be good
.
He had never spoken to a nonwizard about wizardry like that. On the whole, those who were not mageborn—those not born with the strange sleeping fire in their veins, their hearts, the marrow of their bones—found it impossible to comprehend why those who were would subject themselves to such stringent teaching and disciplines in order to achieve a state of virtual outlawry, the state of
beldin nar—
literally, to be dead souls, whose deaths were no more a matter for vengeance than the desecration of a dog’s carcass.
Yet he had said it to her, knowing she would understand.
And saying it, he had remembered afresh how much it had hurt to wonder and pretend and fake being something everyone thought he should be; to live in the subconscious hope that it wasn’t true or that, if it was true, he could keep people from guessing.
On the whole, to those nonmageborn acquaintances who evinced a genuine interest in the subject—and there had been some among their patrons and clients from the court at Nerriok—he had explained his initiation into wizardry in terms of teaching, education, and eagerness to learn. To them he had recounted how he’d cooked and cleaned and run errands, fetching and carrying up and down all those long rickety stairways of the tall, narrow house in Nerriok, even in the days when they could afford a servant; made a good story of all the tedium of ritually cleansing crucibles and implements in the attic workshop, censing and sweeping the sanctum where the meditation was done, and washing the vessels before and after. That they would understand, at least in part. But never all.
All those first years he’d been reading, absorbing almost without knowing it, all the infinite, tiny gradations of lore necessary to wizardry, gradually becoming aware, through conversation with Jaldis, with Shavus, and with other mages of the Order who stayed with them of the interweavings of all things in the physical world, the metaphysical, and the strange shadowland of ghosts and faes and grims that lay between them—learning how all things were balanced and how no alteration of the fabric of the world could be made without somehow affecting the rest of the universe, sometimes in rather unexpected fashions.
After the spells of imbuing Jaldis’ crystal spectacle-lenses had nearly cost him his own eyesight, Rhion had taken the concept of precautions and Limitations very seriously indeed. He had not worked a spell for a long while after that, and had been careful to make the Circles of Power and Protection absolutely correct, to study carefully the Words of Ward and Guard. Simply the study of these had taken him nearly three years of painstaking memorization, during which time he had also studied all those things that his father had never bothered to have him taught: the structure and nature of plants, and how to tell them from one another by sight and touch and smell; the names of every plant, every bird, every beast and fae and spirit and insect and stone, and how they differed from one another; and how each was its own creation, with its own secret name.
Such things were not necessary to accounting—things not only beyond a banker’s ken, but beyond even one’s imaginings.
And somewhere in those first few years he had learned the thing that he’d never been able to explain to even the most sympathetic of
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