Диана Джонс - A Sudden Wild Magic

With silent gestures, Marceny sent people to their places. One gesture, and a group of girls was sent to the far end of the table; another, and Zillah was halted among other women at the near end. Zillah was forced to stand and watch Philo go with the first group, separated from her by the length of the table with its gleaming knives. The light from the sky had almost gone by now. Marceny’s red velvet gown glowed bloodily in the flames as she beckoned Herrel, carrying Marcus, up beside her.

A practical color, Zillah thought bitterly. Very practical. But then black witches are, I’ve heard. We all know the Goddess has her dark side. That singing—

— is not the Goddess

It was as if someone spoke. Even more clearly than she had known the nature of Arth, she knew this. Whatever the power Marceny was using, whatever it was that sang, it was something other than any aspect of the Lady. It was very foul. It fed on Herrel, through Marceny, and on other things too. It was very strong. Well, at least I know what we’re up against, Zillah thought. That sounded better than it was. The truth was, she did not know what this thing was. The hopelessness she had thought she felt without Mark was nothing to what she felt now. She was down at the raw end of a chasm where hope simply was not.

The singing stopped. An abiding silence settled.

“Give me the child now,” Marceny said to Herrel. Her voice seemed a small, shrill thing in contrast to the singing.

As Herrel’s arms moved, Zillah said, “Do that, Herrel, and you’re dead meat!”

“He is anyway, dear. Both of you are,” Lady Marceny pointed out. She put out her hands and took Marcus under the armpits. Marcus himself, frightened by the strangeness and remembering he disliked Marceny, clung to Herrel with arms and legs. Herrel simply stood there. Two young women went to help Marceny. Zillah had a glimpse of Philo, staring helplessly.

“Herrel, for God’s sake, stand up to her!” Zillah screamed. She threw every protective strength she had around Marcus.

“Come along to your granny, dear,” Lady Marceny told Marcus. “Let’s have no more nonsense.”

Marcus was removed from Herrel and dumped screaming on the table. He was truly terrified now. Zillah’s protections were broken. It was as if half her being was wrenched from her. She had at that moment some notion how Herrel must have felt when Mark was taken from him. The two girls were undressing Marcus. Marceny, with a firelit knife raised in both hands, was reciting an invocation to the Goddess. The Goddess! That’s rich! Zillah thought. She could not move. The heavy power pinned her at one end of the table. But Herrel was a free agent. Zillah knew he was, even before he turned and looked at her with his eyes screaming and his mouth smiling. Asking me to help! Zillah more or less screamed to herself. You’re asking me to stop Marcus being made like you! You could stop it, Herrel, in an instant, if you wanted to. You’re so strong that that being infesting your mother feeds and feeds and you still carry on!

Herrel, of course, could not want to. He could not want anything that had been taken from him to make Mark.

Zillah was in the act of kicking Herrel aside mentally as useless, when she saw that this wronged him. Herrel had done one small thing. He had done it for Marcus. On the table, Marcus was screaming and threshing and surrounded by a small, triangular space of his own. It seemed to be the ghost of the Eeyore-hut. Marcus was mentally crouching in it, disseminating the one protection small children have — fear. Fear beat in waves over the two women trying to undress him and slowed their movements. Even the knife in Marceny’s hands showed a slight tremor. And his screams were horrible.

What’s this supposed to do? Zillah thought angrily. Yet she knew. Herrel had made the circuit of that illusory room, and made it just real enough for Marcus to use. It was all he thought himself able to do. The slight breathing space this gave, Zillah was supposed to use to confront Marceny.

And I can’t! she thought. Doesn’t he know I couldn’t even face my own mother? I just had to leave. I couldn’t even look Marceny in the eyes, and he expects me to—

Ah then, she thought. I must fetch Mark here. There was no time to consider it impossible. They had Marcus undressed now. “Philo, help me!” she called out above the drone of Marceny’s invocation, and threw her mind toward Earth and Mark.

Tod came out on the terrace to see Marcus naked and Marceny in the act of blessing the knife. His birthright, at the sight, ramped within him like an enraged beast. Maybe it was anger, maybe it was the strange negative presence of the man Paul behind him, but he felt it, for the first time for years, spring out of his control. It seemed to be going wild. He was terrified. And he could be no use like this. Then he heard the voice of his old tutor, saying, “Even now it will sometimes take over, and you’ll find it knows what it’s doing.” Well, I just hope he was right, Tod thought, and let it go.

He found himself calling out in a great voice, far deeper than his own. “Stop this! This dirties the name of the Goddess. I forbid it!”

At the other end of the lawn, a flying pale shape crashed through the trees and burst among the watching people. Tod, to his astonishment, saw Josh, whom he had confidently thought to be safely on his way to Frinjen, gallop among the pans of fire and slow gradually as the heavy ponding of power caught him. Josh came to a halt between two fires, facing Tod, pawing the turf angrily. “Leave that child alone, woman!” he panted. “I tell you—”

A timeless stillness was suddenly present.

Oh, thank Heaven! Zillah thought. Space. The space Herrel had tried to give her through Marcus. Marceny and the women around her were still moving, but in the slowest of slow motion, and if Marceny was still chanting, her voice was too slowed and lengthened to hear. Zillah knew what had happened. Tod and Josh had accidentally — if such a thing could ever be accidental — taken up the positions of a ritual of their own. They stood to east and west. Philo was to the south, and Zillah herself to the north. There was someone strange with Tod, who had the effect of dimming the other women with Marceny, so that the heavy power was forced to draw in around the table to protect itself. What Zillah had here now was the space peculiar to magic — which might last a second or many hours — and in which she could work.

And how do I? she wondered. Power. They all had power. Tod’s was trained, but it seemed to be running wild in anger at the moment. Josh and Philo had certainly been taught, but the tuition in Arth, it had always seemed to her, had been beside the point for both of them. Whatever they had was almost untrained. As for herself, anything she had was as feral 3.s 3. wild animal.

Well, then we call it wild, she said, and called.

Wild it was. It lifted her in an exultant sheeting gust so long and so far that she lost all sense of time, or of her own body. She was all mind for a nano-second that seemed to last a thousand years. Understanding filled her. This was why she had always ducked out, refused training in witchcraft, run from Amanda’s kind of education. The restraints of knowledge harmed this wild power. In order to use it, Zillah could not know what it was. It would only answer a being as untrammeled as itself. It was wildness. Zillah hung in its exultant aurora borealis, exulting herself, because she had always known this about wild magic really. The instant, and the knowledge, extended infinitely. Her forgotten body sheeted across time with her, or shrank to the smallest instant, most strangely. Sometimes she had been a giant for hours, and then a small blob for a century. The knack, she discovered, was not to let it distract you. After a millennia-long instant, she was in a house she only remembered seeing once before, where a wild sending stalked around the borders of its safety, rattling windows, howling in the chimney, and snapping trees. There was a jungle of huge potted palms. She thought she had found the wrong place, until she heard her sister’s voice.