Anthology - The Search For Magic

“You, too, old friend,” Emeth replied quietly. “And we will meet again.”

Her sapphire eyes luminous in the fragile light, the smallest of smiles tugging at the corners of her mouth, Annalisse agreed that they would.

Hearing her say so, seeing her smile, Jai suspected what he had not before: the Lady Librarian was part of the resistance.

“Mother,” he whispered, his voice a little tinged with surprise.

“Hush,” Marise murmured, and that one soft word was all the confirmation Jail needed.

The small shady path at the head of a winding forest trail was known best to the folk of Mianost who liked to slip away from parents or spouses to keep a lover’s tryst. There, in the late afternoon, Jai and his parents met a tall, lithe woman with flashing eyes so palely blue as to look like diamonds. She wore her golden hair in a thick braid. Her clothing was of gray and green and butternut, so that, seeing her move, one had the impression of sun-dapple and shade and fern. Jai’s heart rose to see her, for she was lovely like a wild thing, quick and canny and dangerous.

She stepped toward Emeth, and though he was surprised by her sudden appearance, he greeted her courteously. Jai noticed that she did not offer her name, and his father did not offer theirs.

“Greetings, traveler,” she said to Emeth.

“Warrior, I greet you,” Emeth replied.

Warrior!

“Father…”Jai said, suddenly uneasy.

Emeth hushed him with a gesture. To the newcomer, he said, “I hadn’t expected to see you so soon.”

“Nor I you. There’s no going on to Mianost, Emeth. A Dark Knight has been seen farther up the trail.”

Jai’s heart lurched. Like his parents, he darted frightened glances into the forest shadows.

“It’s all right,” said the woman. She put a calming hand on the neck of Emeth’s horse, which had begun dancing uneasily, scenting his rider’s fear. “I don’t know if he’s looking for you, Emeth, but we can’t take the chance he is, or even that he’s alone.”

Emeth nodded, as though he understood something his wife and son did not. Marise voiced the very question in Jai’s mind. “How will we get past the Knight?”

The lady warrior hooked her finger through a golden chain hung round her neck. From her blouse she lifted something bright green. Jai had the swift impression of a talisman of flashing emerald, the stone shaped like a leaf half furled. She dropped the talisman so that it hung outside her blouse, the stone sitting at the V of her rough gray shirt, the place where her breasts rose.

“Magic,” she said. “If we’re lucky.”

“Father?” Jai said again, but he didn’t give voice to his doubts. The newcomer looked up at him, right into his eyes. She raised a brow and smiled, and Jai found himself not looking into her eyes but at the emerald nestled on the woman’s breasts.

The wind changed, shifting so that it was at the woman’s back. Jai caught her scent and could think of nothing else. His mind filled with images of the forest, of oaks and elms and trees less tame than those in the orchards of Qualinost. Clinging to her hair and skin and clothing was the perfume that comes from beyond the bridges of Qualinost, from outside the city and deep in the forest where the glens are shrouded in shadow and the streams run nameless into rivers long secret.

“Let me assist you,” she said to Jai, holding the gray horse still and reaching a hand to him.

Words of protest rose in Jai’s heart at the thought of this tall, lovely woman handing him down from the horse as if he were a child. He said nothing, however, for he found himself foot to ground before he remembered moving. Indeed, his parents stood each on one side of him, his mother’s face a little paler than it had been, his father’s settling into lines of peace. Jai’s heart kicked hard against his ribs. He gasped for breath. Once, twice, and then the woman put a hand on his shoulder.

“Easy,” she whispered. “It’s like a dream.” She came very close, and his eye fell on the emerald again. She laughed, a low, soft chuckle. “Just like a dream.”

And it was, the kind of dream where people did not move but suddenly found themselves in other places with no understanding of how they got there.

Jai drew breath to speak, but she warned him to silence. With that warning he realized she hadn’t really spoken to him at all, not with lips and tongue. She spoke into his mind.

The magic is unstable, she said , keep still and trust. Concentrate on being still.

Trust! That trembled in him just as his heart did, and he wondered if that quaking heart would be enough to cause the magic to collapse or worse, to change into something the woman couldn’t control. Again, she laughed. Her voice sounded like jays in the trees, raucous and challenging. Suddenly, it had nothing to do with jays at all, but became the voice of a storm. Wind and rain and driven leaves whirled along the ground.

Jai cried out-or tried to. He had no breath, no words, and no sight. The last sense to fail was his hearing, and the last thing he heard was his mother’s voice, frail and thin in the storm-wind of magic, crying, “Jai! Emeth! Hold on to-!”

“Hey,” said a voice, low and very deep.

Jai groaned, and then he shut his mouth. He simply lay still, in pain. He must have fallen hard. His chest hurt as if all the air had been blasted out of his lungs and only recently returned. His head hurt. Worse, pain screamed through his knee. The joint felt as if it were on fire. The ruined muscles that once supported him twitched feebly.

“Hey.” A finger poked him, once and then again. “Hey! Can you hear me?”

Jai opened his eyes to see a dwarf crouching near, a glowing lantern on the ground beside his knee.

A dwarf. How?

The lantern light flickered and moved, but not like a candle’s flame. It pulsed. The dwarf leaned closer, his bearded face so near Jai could see the blue flecks in the irises of his dark eyes. “I said can you hear me?”

Jai closed his eyes again. “I’m not deaf.”

The dwarf grunted. “That’s good.” He kept silent for a heart’s beat, then, “Your ears work. How about the rest of you?

Jai’s belly clenched, but he refused to groan as he moved his leg. Pain lanced through the knee, shooting up his leg to his hip, yet in that pain he found a measure of comfort. Even all these years later, he remembered what broken bones felt like, he remembered how ripped muscle screamed and burned. His breath eased through clenched teeth. He had broken or torn nothing.

He opened his eyes again. “I’m all right.”

“If you say so.” The dwarf shrugged, sitting back on his heels, deeper into the shadows beyond the lantern light. In his muscular left hand he gripped the haft of a throwing axe. “I’m Stanach Hammerfell. You’re Jai Windwild, I take it.”

Jai frowned. “How did you know…?”

Relaxing his grip on the axe, Stanach nodded toward Jai’s knee. “I’ve been told to keep an eye out for you- a lame elf named Jai.”

For a long silent moment, the dwarf looked at the ruin of Jai’s knee, the poorly knitted bones, the swelling of new bruises. He gave Jai a sidelong glance as to say, Well, that’d be you, wouldn’t it?

But aloud, he only said, “You might like to know your mam and your da are all right.”

“My what?”

Stanach looked at him as if he’d had a few wits jogged loose by the fall. “Your mother and father,” he said with exaggerated care. A sly smile tugged at his lips. “You were concentrating on something when the lady did her magic, eh? That pretty emerald in its pretty nest. Not concentrating on keeping still and trusting, which is what you were supposed to do. Damn magic. I hate it when they have to use it. It’s always me got to go searching miles of tunnel for the ones who fall out of it too soon or too late.”