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FIVE
WILD MAGIC
Seated at the table was the bearded man Daine had seen that morning. “I just got here,” he said in a deep, gentle voice. “I took the liberty of ordering refreshments from the cooks, by the way.”
Close up, he was a sight to wring any female heart. His close—cropped hair and beard were blue black, his eyes sapphire blue, his teeth white against the blackness of his beard. Daine gulped. She felt ten feet tall and clumsy. Her face was probably breaking out in pimples as she looked at him.
He got to his feet and smiled down at her. “You must be Daine. You may not remember me from before—you were busy.”
Looking up into those eyes, the girl felt her heart melt like butter in the sun. “No, sir, I remember. You threw blue lightning.”
He held a chair out for her. “Sit down, please.” She obeyed and was glad when he sat again. Having him behind her was wonderful but terrifying. What if she had forgotten to scrub the back of her neck?
A cook entered with a tray loaded with cakes, fruit, and a pitcher of juice. Placing it on the table, he bowed to the man. “Your Majesty.”
“Exactly what we need,” the stranger told him. “My thanks.” The cook bowed again and made his escape.
Daine gaped at her host. “You’re the king!” she cried. Belatedly remembering she ought to bow, or kneel, or something, she jumped to her feet.
Jonathan—King Jonathan—grinned. “It’s all right. Please sit. Otherwise good manners say I have to get up again, and I’m tired.”
She sat, trembling. This is a very strange country, she told herself, not for the first time. Back home, you couldn’t pay a noble to speak to a commoner!
The king selected a cake and bit into it. “Wonderful,” he said with his mouth full. “The Riders eat better than I do.”
“It just seems as if we do. We don’t have six footmen asking if you’re sure you don’t want a taster,” Onua teased. She poured juice for all of them.
King Jonathan snorted. “Don’t remind me.” He looked at Daine. “Seers can tell, sometimes, if the immortals will attack a place. You, however, are the first I know of to sense them nearby. Are there seers or fortune-tellers in your family?” He smiled at her, just at her.
She’d tell him anything for another smile. “Ma was a hedgewitch, Your Honor. She had the Gift for birthing, healing. Protection spells—not as good as Onua’s. She was best with plants. She never could see any future things, though.”
“Did she have the Gift from her family?” he asked.
She nodded, fiddling with the lacing of her shirt. “All the girls in her family was healers but me.” She swallowed a throat-lump, remembering how disappointed Ma had been that Daine couldn’t follow in her steps.
“What of your father?” His voice was kind, but the question hurt. The king saw it in her face and said gently, “I’m sorry, but I must know. If your father was a peddler or a vagabond, perhaps he sired other children with your ability. We can use more people like you.”
“Why? Sir—Your Majesty, that is?”
“Winged horses were seen in Saraine this winter.” The grimness in his eyes caught and held her. “Griffins nest in the cliffs of the Copper Isles. There are spidrens throughout the hill country this spring.”
Winged horses? Griffins? “Where do they come from, do you know?”
“The Divine Realms—the home of the gods. Four hundred years ago, powerful mages locked the immortals into them. Only the greatest gods have been able to leave—until now.”
An arm crossed Daine’s vision to pick up a cake. Numair took an empty seat, and the king went on. “Our neighbors—Galla, Scanra, Tusaine—report unicorns, giant birds, even winged people as small as wrens. We are plagued by monsters, ogres, and trolls.” He drummed his fingers on the table. “It’s interesting that a weak mage like Sinthya could send rare creatures like Stormwings after you. Where did he get such power? As far as we know, he had only one secret worth protecting: he was dealing with Carthak.”
“Carthak’s another country?” Daine asked, blushing for her ignorance.
“Across the Inland Sea,” Numair said. “They’re desperate. Their crops failed two years in a row—not enough rain, and tornadoes that ripped up the fields. There were food riots in the capital last winter. The emperor needs good farmland, and we’re the closest target.”
“Carthak has the university, its school for mages, and its library—the same library used by the mages who sealed the Divine Realms.” The king looked at Numair. “I think the Carthaki mages found those spells.”
Numair was rolling a cake into a ball. “And spells to compel immortals to obey humans. How else could Sinthya get Stormwings to chase me?”
“We have nothing like those spells,” Jonathan told Daine. “Sinthya’s papers vanished. We’re searching our own libraries, but it might take months. In the meantime, the warnings foretellers give us aren’t enough. If we could send those with your ability to sense immortals to our villages and towns, we could better protect our people. If we can find your father—”
It had come back to that. She shook her head, humiliated.
“Daine?” It was Onua, who had given her trust and work that she loved. She owed this woman, at least, an answer.
She looked down. “I don’t know who he is. It’s in my name. Sarrasri—Sarra’s daughter. Only bastards are named for their mothers.” She spat out the hated word, but its taste stayed on her tongue.
“Why don’t you know?”
She didn’t look up to see who had asked. “Ma never told me. She never told anybody. She kept saying ‘someday, someday.’”
“Do you know anything?” Onua rested a hand on Daine’s shoulder.
She fought to get herself under control. “It was Beltane. They light fires, and couples jump over the embers when they burn down.” So they’ll have babies in the coming year, she thought, but she wasn’t going to say that.
“We do the same thing,” the king remarked.
Daine looked at him, startled. “You never jumped over no embers,” she accused before she knew what she was saying.
The others laughed. She ducked he
r head to hide her blush.
“The ruler takes part in all great feasts, to show respect for the gods,” Jonathan told her gravely. His eyes danced. “Thayet and I do it every year.”
“I didn’t mean—I wasn’t trying to be—disrespectful—”
He patted her knee. “I didn’t think you were. Go on.”
“Ma wasn’t sweet on anybody, so she went walking in the wood alone. She met someone. I used to think it was a man that was already married, but when I asked last year, she said no. And I don’t look like anyone from Snowsdale. Most of ’em are blond and blue eyed, being’s we’re so near Scanra and all.”
The king sat back with a sigh. “Well, it was an idea,” he said to no one in particular.
“I’ll help if I can,” she said, knowing that she had disappointed them. “I just don’t know what I could do. And the warnings aren’t that, exactly. I know something wrong’s coming, but I knew that much about the rabid bear.”
“A rabid bear?” the king asked in horror and awe. “Mithros—that’s not something I’d ever want to see!”
Daine smiled. “I didn’t want to see him, either, sir. I just got to.”
“Did you get the identical sensation from the bear as you got with the Stormwings or the spidrens?” asked Numair.
“Oh, no. It was different. Bad, but in a brown kind of way.”
“In a what?” Onua asked.
“Well, animals—I think of ’em in colors, sometimes.” She tapped her head. “To me, bears feel brown, only this one had red and black lights. Very sick, he was. I get the monsters as colors too, but they’re gold with black and green lights in them. I never felt any real creature as gold.”
“I told you she has magic,” the mage told the king triumphantly.
“No!” she retorted, jumping to her feet. “Didn’t Ma test me and test me? Don’t you think I’d’ve grabbed at magic, if I had it, just to please Ma?”
