Jo Clayton: Blue Magic

She drifted onto dew-soaked grass; her feet were aching with cold but she ignored that and danced slowly around the perimeter of the glade through the dappled moonlight, around and around, singing a wordless song that wavered through four notes no more, singing herself deeper into trance, around and around, gradually spiraling inward until she spread her arms and embraced the tree, circling it a last time,’ drinking in the dark dry smell of it, breasts, belly and thighs rubbing against its crumbly rough bark. When she finished the round, she folded liquidly down and curled her body between two great roots pushing-up through layers of dead and rotting leaves. With a small sigh, she closed her eyes and seemed to sleep.

As she seemed to sleep, a dark thin figure seemed to melt from the tree and crouch over her, long long gray-brown hair drifting like fog about a thin pointed face, androgynous, with an eerie beauty that would have been ugliness if the face were flesh. Long graceful fingers of brown glass seemed to brush across Kori’s face, she seemed to smile then sigh. Brown glass fingers seemed to touch the leather thong, seemed to slide quickly away quivering with distaste, seemed to draw the medal from under the shift, seemed to stroke it smiling, seemed to hold the medal in one hand and spread the other long long hand across Kori’s face.

How Harra Hazani Came To Owlyn Vale

Gibbous, waxing toward full, the Wounded Moon shone palely on a long narrow ship that sliced through the windwhipped, foamspitting water of the sea called Notoea Tha, and touched with delicate strokes the naked land north of the ship, a black-violet blotch that gradually gained definition as the northwestering course of the smuggler took her closer and closer to the riddle rock at the tip of that landfinger, rock pierced again and again and again by wind and water so that it sang day and night, slow sad terrible songs, and was only quiet one hour every other month.

On the deck by the foremast a woman slept, wrapped in blankets and self-tethered to the mast by a knot she could pull loose with a quick jerk of her hand. All that could be seen of her was the pale curve of a temple and long dark hair confined in half a dozen plaits that danced to the tug of the wind, their gold beetle clasps tunktonking against the wood, the small sounds lost in the creaks, snaps and groans of the flitting ship. A man sat beside her, his back against the mast, a naked sword across his thighs. Now and then he sucked at a wineskin, the pulls getting longer and more frequent as the night turned on its wheel. He was a big man and in the kind darkness had the athletic beauty that sculptors give to the statues of heroes; even in daylight he had the look of a hero if you didn’t look too closely for he was at that stage of ripeness that was also the first stage of decay.

The night went on with its placidities and tensions intact; the Wounded Moon crawled, up over the mast and began sliding toward the heaving black water with its tracery of foam; the groaning song of the riddle rock grew loud enough to ride over the noises of the sea, the wind and the straining ship and creep into the fuddled mind of the blond hero who stirred uneasily and reached for the empty skin. Remembering its emptiness before he completed the gesture, he settled back into the muddled not-sleep that was a world away from the vigilance he was being paid for. The woman stirred, muttered, moved uneasily, on the verge of waking.

Shadows began converging on the foremast, dark forms moving with barefoot silence and confident agility, Captain and crew acting according to their nature, a nature she’d read easily enough when she made arrangements to leave Bandrabahr on that stealthy ship, needing the stealthiest of departures to escape the too-pressing attentions of an ex-friend of her dead father, a man of power in those parts. Having no choice in transport and understanding what a swamp she was plunging into, she hired the hero as a bodyguard and he’d done the job well enough up to this moment but her luck and his were about to run out.

The hero’s throat was cut with a soft slide, the sound lost in the moan from the riddle rock now only a few shiplengths off, but since most of the crew were here, not tending the ship, she lurched in annoyance at being neglected and sent the hero’s sword clanging against the deck. Half awake already, the woman jerked the knot loose and was on her feet running, knives in both hands, slashing, dodging, darting, slipping grips, scrambling on her knees, rolling onto her feet, creating and reading confusion, playing her minor whistle magic to augment that confusion, winning the shiprail, plunging overside into the cold black water.

She swam toward the land, cursing under her breath because she was furious at having to abandon everything she wasn’t wearing. Especially furious at losing her daroud because her father had given it to her and she’d managed to keep it through a lot of foolishness and it was her means of earning her keep. She promised herself as soon as she reached the shore and could give her mind to it she’d lay such a curse on the Captain and crew, they’d moan louder and longer than that damn rock ahead of her.

Getting onshore without being battered and torn into ground meat and shattered bone proved more difficult than she expected; the smaller rocks jutting from the sea around the base of the riddle rock were home to barnacles with edges sharp enough to split a thought in half while water was sucked in and out of the washholes in the great rock, flowing in powerful surges that caught hold of her and dragged her a while, then shoved her a while, then dragged her-some more. Half drowned, bleeding from a hundred cuts, she caught a fingertip hold on a crack in a waterpolished ledge and used will and what was left of her strength to muscle herself high enough out of the water to roll onto the ledge where she lay on her side, gasping and spitting out as much of the sea inside her as she could. When she was as calm as she was going to get, she began the herka trypps that were meaningless in every way except that they helped her focus mind and energy and got her ready to use the more demanding levels of her magic. Blending modes she learned from her father with others she’d picked up here and there in her travels since he died, she began to draw heat from the air and glamour from the moonlight and twisted them into tools to seal the cuts where blood was leaking away and taking strength with it and when that was done, she pulled heat and glamour into herself and stored it, then used it to shape the curse and used her anger to power the curse and shot her curse after the ship like poison arrow, releasing it with a flare of satisfaction that turned to ash a moment later as a net of weariness settled around her and pinned her flat to the cold stone.

Cold. She wasn’t bleeding any longer, but the cold was drawing the life out of her. Get up, she told herself, get on your feet, you can’t stay here. Struggling against the weight of that bone deep fatigue, searching out holds on the face-of the riddle rock, she forced herself onto her knees and then onto her feet. For a minute or an hour, she never knew which, she stood shivering and mind-dulled, trying to get her thoughts ordered again, trying to focus her energy so she could understand where she was and what she had to do to get out of there. The riddle rock moaned about her, a thousand fog horns bellowing, the noise jarred her over and over from her fragile focus and left her swaying precariously on the point of tumbling back into the water. The tide began following the moon and backed away from her, its stinging spray no longer battered her legs. Once again she tried the herka trypps, closing her numb hands tighter in the cracks so the pain would break through the haze thickening in her head. Slowly, ah so slowly she regained her ability to focus, but the field was narrow, a pinhead wide, no more. She drew power into herself, plucking it from tide and moonlight, from the ancient roots of the rock she stood on, a hairfine trickle of strength that finally was enough and only just enough to let her see the way off the rock, then shift her clumsy aching body along that way until she was finally walking on thin soil where grasses grew gray and tough, where the brush was crooked and close to the ground. Half drowned still, blind with effort and fatigue, she walked on and on until she reached a place where there were trees and where the trees had dropped leaves that weren’t fully rotted yet, where she could dig herself a nest and cover herself over with the leaves and, at last, let herself sleep…