Lynn Flewelling - The Bone Doll's Twin

More laughter, and a bellow from Tharin. It appeared Ki had taught Tobin of snowballs and their uses. Work on the snow fort halted as the battle raged. Arkoniel was tempted to go down and join them, but the warmth and quiet of his workroom won out.

The first step in creating magic, as Iya had taught him, was to envision the desired result. Casting a known spell began that way; if you wanted to make a fire, you envisioned a flame, then let form follow intent with focus.

Creating a new spell was simply a matter of finding out the steps in between to make that intent a reality.

At first, with the adjustment to his new role and home, and the excitement of setting up his own rooms occupying his mind, he’d toyed with alchemy and other known sciences, perfecting the skills he already possessed. However, with a routine established and winter settling in, he found himself thinking about his encounter with Lhel.

The startling power of her sexuality found its way into his dreams more and more often; he could feel her heat against him and smell her musky, feral scent.

He awoke each time with his heart pounding in panic, drenched in sweat. In the light of day he was able to discount all this as the raging of his young and unruly body. The thought of touching her as he did in those dreams made him sick with anxiety.

What drew him back to those memories today was not the carnality of their encounter, but what he thought he’d seen her do that day in the forest, and a dream.

The projection of one’s image was a known magic; not easily mastered, but not uncommon, either. Iya could do it and Arkoniel himself had had a few minor successes, but by Orëska magic the resulting image was limited to the wizard’s form alone, usually very clear and unnatural, like a specter seen in daylight. That day by the road, however, he’d seen Lhel as if through an oval window; the light that had struck her was daylight, and he’d been able to see the marsh around her before he’d had any idea that one existed in the area. His own mind could not have filled in such detail; Lhel had shown him where she was as clearly as if she had taken him there through a hole in the air.

A hole in the air.

The image had come to him just as he was waking up that morning. Up until now, he’d been relying on disappearance spells, trying to bend them into a combination of form and movement. Nothing had come even close to working.

But this morning he had a new idea, an inspiration left in the wake of a dream. In it, he’d again seen Lhel floating in that green-tinged light that did not match the sunlight where he stood. She was naked, beckoning him, as if she wanted him to step through the shining oval and join her without the trouble of walking up the hill. In this dream he perceived some sort of hole or tunnel connecting them by a tube of shifting green light. In the dream he’d known he was about to grasp the secret he needed, but the image of the naked witch intruded again and he woke with a full bladder and an aching groin.

As he sat here pondering all this, another long-forgotten and seemingly unrelated memory came to him. He and Iya had once explored echoing tunnels at the base of an ancient peak in the northern territories. The tunnels reminded him of enormous mole burrows, but the walls were glassy smooth and showed no sign of digging. Iya claimed that the mountain had created them itself somehow, and showed him chunks of obsidian that contained tiny holes, miniatures of the tunnels themselves, but these were as fine as ant holes in fine earth.

His member stirred again as he settled on a stool by his worktable and attempted to summon the details of the dream more clearly. He willed his body to behave and concentrated on the image: a hole in the air-no, a tunnel! Easy to visualize, but how to create such a thing when he didn’t even understand how the mountain had achieved it? Never in all their travels had Iya or he discovered any spell that resembled such a thing as he envisioned. Here, in his newfound solitude, he worked alone at devising some mechanism of mind that could encompass his vision.

As he had so often over the past few weeks, Arkoniel reached into a nearby bowl and took out a dried bean. It was half the size of his thumbnail and dark red with a smattering of white speckles, the sort his father’s cook had called red hens. He rubbed it between thumb and forefinger, committing its weight and smoothness to memory.

Holding the image of the bean firmly in his mind, he placed it on the oak table in front of him, next to a lidded salt box Cook had grudgingly relinquished. Concentrating, he pushed the bean back and forth with his fingers a few times, then took his hand away and raised the bean with his mind until it hovered a foot off the table. Then he brought the full force of his concentration to bear on it, imagining the tunnel he’d dreamed of, willing the bean to find such a route into the closed box.

The bean certainly moved, but only in the usual prosaic manner. Flying against the box as if hurled from a sling, it struck the lid so hard it split in half. The pieces ricocheted in opposite directions and he heard them skitter away across the bare stone floor, no doubt to join their predecessors already scattered around the room.

“Bilairy’s balls!” he muttered, resting his face in his hands. Over the past few weeks he’d used enough beans to make a pot of soup, and always with the same discouraging results.

He spent another hour trying to get his mind around the construct of an opening in the air, but ended up with nothing more than a thumping headache.

Leaving off, he turned to surer magics for the rest of the afternoon. Shaking out a newly made firechip from a covered crucible, he placed it on a plate and murmured, “Burn.” The reddish brown chip flickered at his command to release a small tongue of pale yellow fire that would burn until he told it to stop.

He set a crucible full of rainwater to boil over it on an iron tripod, then went to his herb cabinet for the various simples he needed to concoct a sleeping draught for Mynir.

The initial mixture stank fiercely, but Arkoniel didn’t mind. A feeling of satisfaction crept over him as he sat watching the first bubbles rise. He’d gathered the makings himself in the forest and meadow, and woven the spells from memory. Such melding of magic and material things calmed his nerves; it was pleasing to have a finished, useful product at the end of the incantations. The firechip was his work, as well. Remnants of the latest brick he’d fashioned still lay on a plank nearby, next to the stone hammer he’d used to smash it into usable pieces. This batch would keep the house supplied until spring.

The smell of the steeping herbs brought him back to memories of Lhel, this time as she’d been during their journey to Ero. She’d used every pause and rest break to seek out useful things in the earth or among the dry autumn leaves. His face burned again as he recalled how he’d dismissed her then, not realizing the power she possessed.

More recent memories of musky, tattooed skin and whispered promises crept up on him, making the wizard’s heart skip a giddy beat.

Had she known his secret hope? Had she shown him a glimpse of that trick on purpose to snare him? During the long journey to Ero he’d caught her touching his mind so many times; how often had she stolen in unheeded?

He slid off the stool and went back to the window. Late afternoon shadows stretched themselves like long blue cats below the house and a three-quarter moon was rising. Tharin and the boys were gone. Their fort stood like a tiny outpost, surrounded by a welter of trampled footprints. Below it, a single track line of footprints crossed the smooth white flank of the hillside, leading down to the bend in the river.