Wild Magic Page 3

  But as she laid a hand on the first hold of the cold granite a fine trembling had started up in her fingers, followed by a hot buzz which had suffused her whole arm, then her shoulders, neck and head, and at last her entire body, as if the rock were speaking to her in a language her blood alone could understand, a language like thunder; and that had been the most confusing thing of all.

  For Katla, climbing was her ultimate escape – away from the chores of the steading and her mother’s doomed attempts to make her more ladylike – out into the most inaccessible places on the island where no one could follow her, even if they knew where she was. To be able to look down onto the backs of flying gulls, to share a sun-drenched ledge with fulmars and jackdaws, to watch the folk of Rockfall from way up high, and them not even aware of their audience, was a special pleasure to her: at once a discipline of controlled movement and the ultimate expression of the wildest part of herself. Whenever her life became frustrating or alarming she would climb. The necessities of the activity brought a great simplicity to life, she found: move carefully, hold tight; do not fall. When she climbed she was forced to make these her only concerns, so that all other anxieties receded into insignificance; but to be assailed by this tangible flow of earth-magic, with all the complexities and consequences it brought into her life turned simple escape into a perplexing discussion of the nature of the world.

  The sea, she thought now, looking out over that wide blue expanse. The sea’s the answer. I may feel the magic running out of the reefs and skerries; but surely over the deepest ocean it will leave me be? I’ll put my case to Da, make him take me on his expedition . . .

  Aran’s lungs and legs were complaining long before he crested the final ridge, even though the landward path was far more kindly than his daughter’s route to the top. It had been a long time since the Master of Rockfall had even walked to the summit of the Hound’s Tooth; indeed, it was with some chagrin that he realised that ‘some time’ meant in truth almost twenty years – before the island had become his domain, after his father’s death in the war with Istria. In all that time it had been a succession of lads he’d sent up here on look-out duty: immediately after the war, looking for enemy ships, which could be hard to spot: since native Istrian vessels were not designed for ocean crossings, the Southern Empire used captured Eyran ships against the north; then, when the uneasy truce had been established, looking for independent raiders intent on pillage, and more lately, with rather less urgency, looking for merchant ships and those bearing men and news from the King’s court at Halbo. In his father’s day, the look-outs commanded respect in the island community, but since the perils of war had ebbed away the task had fallen to green lads – second, third and fourth sons of Rockfall retainers with no land of their own to work and few other prospects. Young Vigli and Jarn Forson were the current pair of look-outs, and Sur knew how feckless those two could be: with war looming again, he should set about the matter of finding reliable replacements . . .

  ‘Hello, Da.’

  Katla waved her hand at him. Her right hand, the one that had been maimed. The bandages with which Bera had thought to conceal the sudden improvement from the superstitious eyes of the world had gone, he noticed. But of course, no one had yet had the chance to tell Katla to keep them on.

  With some trepidation – for Aran did not share his daughter’s nonchalance around precipitous cliffs – he sat down on the rocky outcrop, rather further from the edge than Katla, and took the proffered hand in his own. In his meaty grasp it was tiny, almost fragile. He turned it over, palm up, then palm down, and gazed at it in amazement. He had pulled her out of the pyre the Istrians had made for her at the Allfair, for her sacrilege (as they saw it) of climbing their sacred Rock, and for the part they claimed she had played in the abduction of Lord Tycho Issian’s daughter Selen, before she could be swallowed by it, but her right hand had been burned raw and red, her fingers fused into a clublike mass. He had thought she would never forge another sword, never decorate another dagger, never climb another cliff; but now here was she was with a full complement of pristine fingers and a separate thumb once more, sitting cheerfully on top of her favourite route. Aran had never been much of a believer in magic, but what he had experienced of late had given him considerable pause for thought.

  ‘So,’ Katla grinned at him, the sun adding mischievous sparks to her tawny eyes, ‘now that I’m whole again, can I go with Fent and Halli to Halbo to capture the King’s new shipmaker?’

  Aran dropped her hand as if it had burned him. It was impossible that anyone else had crept up the Hound’s Tooth to overhear them; but even so, he could not help but glance around anxiously.

  ‘What? How could you know?’

  Never an accomplished liar – partly through laziness, for it was simpler to tell the truth – Katla opted for the easy explanation: ‘I overheard you and the lads plotting in the barn after the feast. To bring Morten Danson back here, whether he will or no, and all the timber and tools and men too, so that he can make an ice-breaking ship for your expedition north, through the floes.’

  Aran’s eyes hooded themselves briefly, as if he cloaked his thoughts from her. When he looked up again his face was dark with some hidden passion. ‘You cannot tell anyone. You know that, don’t you? The future of our family is at stake here.’

  ‘So you’ll let me go with them?’

  ‘It’s strong men that are needed, not girls,’ he said roughly.

  Katla’s nostrils flared. ‘I can fight as well as my brothers: I can wrestle better than Halli and wield a sword better than Fent—’

  ‘You are not going. Your mother needs you here.’

  ‘My mother! All I do is get under her feet and remind her what a hard job it’s going to be to marry me off—’

  Aran gripped her so hard that she almost yelped. ‘When I make this expedition you will be running Rockfall with Bera: you’d better start learning the way of things now.’

  ‘But Da!’ Treacherously, Katla’s eyes had filled with sudden, scorching tears. If she could not sail to Halbo, she’d been consoling herself that at least she’d be sailing with the expedition force, to find the legendary island of Sanctuary and the treasure that was hidden there. She blinked furiously. ‘You need to take me with you – who else can shin up the mastpole when the lines get tangled? Who else can feel the draw of the land when there’s none to be seen?’

  ‘I’ve nearly lost you twice, girl: I’d not forgive myself if I lost you again.’

  Katla wrenched herself free of his grasp so violently that Aran fell backwards, his head striking an outcrop of granite splotched with rosettes of gold lichen. She leapt to her feet, her shadow falling across him for a moment, then she took off down the cliff path without looking back.

  With a groan, Aran levered himself upright, an expression of pain tightening the lines on his handsome face, though it could not be said whether this expression were brought about by the knock he had taken from the granite or from some other, more interior, sensation.

  Overhead, a black-backed gull slipped sideways on a current of warm air, its shadow long in the low sun.

  ‘She said I must look well to you, Katla,’ the Master of Rockfall said softly, watching his daughter running wildly down the cliff, oblivious to the gorse and brambles which choked the path. ‘Or she would be back for you.’ He knew he would never tell her of the exchange he had had with the seither, not just because Katla would toss her head like a wayward pony and have her way out of sheer, cross-grained will, but out of some obscure shame in him that there might be other influences on their lives that he could not control, that some other force might already be pulling on the lines of his fate, and those of his family, too.

  Even downhill and at the breakneck speed that drove her it took Katla more than twenty minutes to reach the harbour. The first person she encountered there was Min Codface, Tam Fox’s right-hand woman, whose specialism within the mummers’ troupe was the throwing of knives with such accuracy that Ta
m liked to joke she could trim your beard and your nails and then kill you dead before you knew it. Min was a big woman, but even she was staggering under the weight of a huge wicker chest, around which she could see nothing at all: two more steps and she’d be in the sea. Katla caught hold of the chest and turned Min sideways with a foot’s length to spare.

  ‘Close one!’ grinned the knife-thrower, revealing the huge gap in her teeth that had caused some obscene merriment between Fent and Tam, before Min had threatened to punch their lights out, and even Fent had recognised someone potentially more violent than himself and had mumbled what amounted, almost, to an apology. ‘Thanks, chubb.’

  Min had developed a habit of referring to everyone as some type of fish or another. ‘He’s a right strange mullet,’ she’d said of one unfortunate lad who’d lost his balance on top of the human tower they’d been practising before the feast or, referring to one of the village girls, ‘Pretty as a speckled trout’; and ‘Your brother Halli seems like quite a fair carp,’ which was apparently a compliment. Katla had wondered whether Min had chosen her own name, or whether its imposition had coloured her view of the world.

  Min dumped the chest unceremoniously on the seawall and wiped her brow. Behind her, a cavalcade of mummers was winding down the steep hill from the steading, their arms full of costumes and props and provisions for the voyage ahead.

  ‘You’re sailing today?’ Katla asked, appalled at how time had overtaken her.

  The knife-thrower nodded quickly. ‘Aye, we’ll catch the late tide, Tam says. He couldn’t be arsed to make an early start, lazy great halibut. Got us all running around while he sweet-talks your ma out of her best yellowbread.’

  At the very mention of this delicacy, Katla’s stomach rumbled loudly. Her mother’s yellowbread was known across all the islands, though she baked it rarely now that the cost of the flowers that gave up their stamens to the spice that gave it its distinctive taste and colour had become so expensive. The crocuses grew only in the foothills of the Golden Mountains on the southern continent, and this was one reason Gramma Rolfsen cited as clear evidence that the Eyrans had been driven out of their rightful homeland: for how otherwise would yellowbread have become a staple of the Northern Isles when all the southerners did with the flowers was to crush them for dyeing or use them in their rituals?

  Katla gave the knife-thrower a distracted smile, then started up the hill towards the hall. Breakfast first, she thought; then some serious plans to be made. She passed the tumblers, dressed not in their bright motley but in ordinary brown homespun, with casks of water and stallion’s-blood wine balanced precariously on their heads, then some more of Tam’s women stumbling down the path with a freshly dead cow which seemed to be refusing to cooperate with them. It would, Katla thought, watching them wrestle awkwardly with the stiff-legged carcass, have been far simpler to joint and carve the creature up at the hall and haul down a portion apiece, or to have butchered it down on the strand, close to the ship. The mummers were not always the most practical of folk, for all their skill and tricks. Towards the end of the procession she saw her twin brother Fent carrying a long, finely made box of polished oak. Katla’s eyes narrowed suspiciously.

  ‘What’ve you got there, fox-boy?’ she said, stepping in front of him so that he was forced to halt. She knew the casket well enough: Uncle Margan had made it as a gift to her father by his brother-by-law, for keeping his sword in, ‘now that we are no longer at war and you will be providing for my sister by becoming a great landsman’. Bera liked to tell the story of how Aran’s face had fallen, thinking Margan had brought him a new sword, and how long it had taken for him to recover his manners sufficiently to thank him for the box alone.

  Fent looked surprised at first to see his twin up and about; then he turned shifty. He had not shaved in several days, Katla noticed with some surprise, for her brother was vain of his looks and never let a beard grow to cover them up. Now, however, a fine orange fluff had coated his chin and upper lip like some sort of exotic mould. ‘It’s for Tam,’ he mumbled, and tried to press past her.

  Katla stood her ground. ‘There’s only one sword in Rockfall good enough to find Tam’s favour,’ she said grimly, ‘and that’s my carnelian, which I have my own plans for.’ She nipped forward and neatly tipped the lid of the casket. Inside, on a bed of white linen, lay the Red Sword. Katla swore. ‘Who said you might take the finest blade I ever forged and give it away to a mummer?’

  Fent coloured, but his chin came up pugnaciously. He snapped the lid shut, barely missing her hastily withdrawn fingers. ‘Father said Tam Fox should have it as part payment for the voyage. It’s tainted now, anyway.’

  It was said that the blood of a seither would make the blade that had drawn it chancy and untrue, liable to turn on its owner.

  ‘Even so, no one asked me.’

  ‘You were dead to the world.’

  ‘You’re damn lucky you aren’t,’ Katla fumed, her grey eyes sparking dangerously.

  They stood eye to eye in this way, as like as a pair of birth-hounds, neither prepared to back down, until Halli, appearing suddenly with a couple of wheels of muslin-wrapped cheese in his arms, intervened.

  ‘It’s good to see that you’re well enough to argue with Fent, but let him take the sword, sister,’ he said quietly. He gave Fent a cold look that made his younger sibling quail in a new and unusual manner.

  He knows, Katla thought, remembering with sudden clarity the conversation she had overheard after the feast. He knows that Fent is a murderer, that he killed Finn Larson in hot blood at the Allfair. And how much, she wondered, did he know of the episode with the seither, Festrin One-Eye? As if in answer to this, she watched his gaze fall to her miraculously mended right hand, saw how his brows drew together into a single straight line just as their father’s did when he was confounded. Taking advantage of this moment of inattention, Fent shouldered past them both with the box and trotted smartly down the path, his red head bobbing with suppressed energy.

  ‘Let him go,’ Halli said, placing a restraining hand on Katla’s shoulder. ‘The sword is cursed and so is he. Why do you think he hasn’t shaved these last few days?’

  Katla shrugged. ‘Laziness?’

  Halli gave out a brief, harsh shout of laughter. ‘After the seither told him all his ventures would meet with disaster, he hasn’t dared take a knife to his face for fear it will slip and cut his throat!’

  Katla grimaced, feeling almost sorry for her twin.

  ‘And you—’ He stared down again at her arm, lost for words.

  Feeling uncomfortable, Katla tugged her sleeve down over her hand. ‘Oh, that,’ she said inadequately. ‘It’s better.’

  ‘Rather too quickly for nature.’

  One of their farmhands came into view carrying a roll of sailcloth and, catching the end of their conversation, gave Katla a curious glance. Halli took her by the arm and drew her out of the way until the man was out of earshot.

  ‘Was it the seither did this to you, made it whole?’

  Katla warded him off and started walking up the path again. She didn’t want to think about this now. ‘I don’t know.’ Past Feya’s Cross, where the path forked, she took the way up towards the mountain pastures. ‘I don’t care, either,’ she added, firmly. ‘All I know is that it’s whole again and that’s all that matters to me.’ She flexed her fingers, revelling once more in the healthy sensation of separate fingers and strong muscles.

  ‘It may be all that matters to you, but there are those who’ll talk of witchcraft if you don’t keep it hidden. They’ll shun you for it, and the rest of our clan, too.’ He frowned. ‘And with Da set on this mad plan, we’re likely to be outcast soon enough as it is.’

  ‘Not if the stories about Sanctuary are true. Not if he brings back the gold.’ Katla’s eyes shone at the thought.

  ‘It’s all nonsense.’

  ‘Da doesn’t think so.’

  ‘Da’s head’s been turned inside out by that nomad mapseller
and his fairytale maps.’

  ‘If Da hears you say that he’ll pound your head. Anyway, who’s to say the map’s not real – it’s most accurately drawn.’

  ‘Aye, well there’s something odd going on,’ Halli glowered. ‘For his is not the only map I’ve seen.’

  Now it was Katla’s turn to frown. ‘Showing the oceanway to Sanctuary?’

  ‘Keep your voice down. Aye. I caught a glimpse of a map that Hopli Garson was showing to Fenil Soronson at the Allfair.’

  Katla considered this in silence for a moment. ‘Then they’ll be planning an expedition too?’

  Halli nodded. ‘No doubt. Fenil is just as mad as Da for tales of treasure and lost islands and the like.’

  ‘But we must get there first!’ she cried, her face lit with fervour. ‘Can we not just take the Fulmar’s Gift and set out straight away? It’ll be months if we have to wait for a new ship to be built, and that’s even if Morten Danson agrees to it, which he’s hardly likely to do, even if you abduct him – especially if you abduct him!’

  ‘Even Fenil is not such a fool. The sea freezes as far south as Whale Holm from Spirits’ Day to gone Firstsun: and beyond that they say the ice goes on to the top of the world. He’ll need an ice-breaker just as we do.’

  ‘But he’ll already have gone to Morten Danson . . .’

  ‘Tam says the shipyard’s taken in six months’ production of iron ore from the Eastern Isles.’

  ‘That’s more than’s needed for a single ice-breaker. If he binds that much iron to his ship the only course it’ll be taking is straight down to the Great Howe!’