Rick Cook - Wizard’s Bane

Moira reddened. "I suppose you think this is easy for me! To have you trailing after me like a puppy dog, or a bull and me a cow in season? To have to stay here when there are people elsewhere who need me? To have to tiptoe around avoiding you for both our sakes? Do you think I enjoy any of it?" she shouted, her freckles vivid against her flushed skin, her bosom heaving and her green eyes flashing like emeralds in candlelight. Wiz could only stare, but Moira didn’t notice.

"Sparrow, believe me when I tell you I want nothing so much as to be rid of you and gone from this place." She turned on her heel and slammed out the door.

" Damn that old wizard anyway!" Wiz said viciously in his teeth. Then he went off to the woodpile to turn logs into kindling.

Moira didn’t exactly apologize and neither did Wiz. But the outburst seemed to clear the air slightly and for a while things at Heart’s Ease were a little less strained.

Other than that, life went on as before. Wiz chopped wood and moped about, Moira stayed out of his way, Shiara was as beautiful and gracious as ever and Ugo grumbled.

In addition to cutting firewood and sighing after Moira, Wiz did try to learn more about his new world and his new home.

"Ugo, why is Heart’s Ease so special?" Wiz asked one morning when the little wood goblin came out to the wood pile to collect his work.

"Because the Lady live here," said Ugo in a tone that indicated only an idiot would ask such a question.

Wiz put the axe down and wiped his brow. "I mean besides that. Moira said there was something about the way it was built."

"No magic," Ugo told him. "Every stone raised by hand. Every board and beam felled by axe and shaped by adze. All joined with pegs and nails. No magic anywhere in the building."

"Why not?"

"The Lady does not like magic," the goblin servant said, gathering in an armload of wood. "It hurts her now." With that he turned away to his duties.

Pumping Ugo for information was never very satisfactory, Wiz thought as he washed and changed for dinner. But then damn little around here is.

Wiz pulled a clean shirt out of his chest and paused in front of the mirror before putting it on. The days at the woodpile had put muscle on his frame and the sun had darkened his normally pasty torso. He still wasn’t going to win any bodybuilding contests, but he had to admit he looked a lot better than he normally did.

"Pretty good for someone who’s totally useless," he told himself.

"Are you sure?" the mirror asked soundlessly.

Wiz jumped and gasped. Then he stared. The mirror was angled so it did not catch the full brightness of the sun. It’s surface was dark and cloudy as always.

"Are you sure you’re so useless?" the mirror repeated. The words formed in Wiz’s mind.

"Well, yeah I’m sure," Wiz said aloud.

"You shouldn’t be," the mirror said. "You were brought from a long way at the cost of a man’s life. There are a lot of people who are looking very hard for you. I’d say that makes you pretty important."

Great! Wiz thought. Now I’m getting a pep talk from a Goddamn mirror.

"You need it from someone, bub. You’ve been sulking like a twelve-year-old ever since you got to Heart’s Ease. You need to pull out of it."

"What’s the use? I don’t fit in here and I never will."

"With that attitude you’re damn straight you never will," the mirror told him. "This isn’t the first time you’ve been a fish out of water. You’re the guy who spent two years doing software maintenance in a COBOL shop and managed to fit in pretty well."

"Well yeah, but that was different."

"Not that different. Wiz, old son, you’ve never exactly been a fount of social graces, but you’ve always gotten by. And you have never, never , given up before."

"So I should beat my head against a stone wall?"

"How do you know it’s a stone wall? Face it, you haven’t tried all that hard. There’s got to be something here for you. All you have to do is find it."

"I’m not so sure."

"Patrius was. He must have had a reason to bring you here."

"Moira says Patrius made a mistake."

"Moira may be beautiful, but she’s not always right."

"Well…"

"Moira is a consideration, though. If you were someone here, it might change her attitude."

"If you’re going to offer to play me a game, I refuse," Wiz told the mirror.

"No offer," the mirror told him. "Only the observation."

"Okay, but what could make me special here?"

The mirror was silent.

"Well?" Wiz demanded.

"I don’t know the answer to that."

"Great. Then why the hell bring it up?"

"Because you have two choices," the mirror bored on inexorably. "You can believe you will never amount to anything here, never fit in, and dissolve in your own bile. Or you can believe you have a place here and try to find it. Which do you prefer?"

"All right. But how? What do I have to do?"

"You’ll think of something," the mirror told him.

"You’ll think of something," Wiz mimicked. "Thanks a lot!"

"Sparrow?" Wiz turned and there was Shiara standing in the open door.

"Who are you talking to?" she asked. Wiz flushed and opened his mouth to deny it. Then he changed his mind. After all, magic worked here.

"I was talking to the mirror, Lady."

Shiara frowned. "The mirror?"

"Well, it talked to me first," he said defensively.

Frowning, the mistress of Hart’s Ease swept into the room, her long black gown swishing on the uneven floor. "This mirror?" she asked, putting out a hand to brush her fingertips across its silvery surface.

"Yes, Lady. That mirror."

Shiara smiled and shook her head.

"I’m sorry, Lady, I know you don’t allow magic in the castle, but . . ."

"Sparrow, I think you have been brooding overmuch," Shiara told him gently.

"Lady?"

"There is no magic here. This is an ordinary mirror."

"No magic?" Wiz repeated dumbly.

"No magic at all. Just a mirror."

Wiz felt himself turning crimson to his hair roots. "But it talked to me! I heard it."

"It talked to you or you talked to you?" she asked gently. "Sometimes it is easier to hear things about ourselves if they appear to come from outside us."

Wiz looked back at the mirror, but the mirror remained mute.

Late one afternoon Wiz happened to pass Moira in the great hall.

"Moira," he asked, as she went by with a nod, "what happened to Shiara?"

The hedge witch stopped. "Eh?"

"She was a wizardess, wasn’t she? But Ugo told me magic hurts her."

"It does. To be in the presence of even tiny magics causes her pain. That is why she lives here in the quietest of the Quiet Zones in a keep built without the least magic."

"How?"

"What happened?"

"By carpenters, masons and other workers who built without magic. Isn’t that the way you build things in your world?"

"No, I mean how did it happen to her?"

Moira hesitated. "She lost her sight, her magic and her love all in one day. It is a famous tale, but of course you would never have heard it." She sighed. "Shiara the Silver they called her. With her warrior lover, Cormac the Gold, she ranged the World recovering dangerous magical objects that they might be held safely in the Council’s vaults.

"Not only was she of the Mighty, but she was a picklock of unusual skill. No matter what wards and traps protected a thing, she could penetrate them. No matter how fierce the guards set over a thing, Cormac could defeat them. With him to guard her back, she removed magic from the grasp of the League itself."

"What happened?"

"We went to the well once too often," Shiara said drily from the doorway.

They both whirled and blushed. "Your pardon, Lady," Moira stammered. "I did not know…"