The Obsidian Mountain Trilogy Read online

  No shops. No merchants. No one to buy things from—it was either make it yourself, or do without. Unless you could find someone who would trade with you for what you wanted. Would anyone traffic with an Outlaw?—Two Outlaws?

  The boots were flat-soled, with several thicknesses of leather pierced and sewn to heavy deerskin uppers. A long wide tongue of leather came almost to his knee, and the long outsides of the boot wrapped over that. Flat buttons, made of disks of polished antler, were sewn up the sides of the outer flap; at first Kellen had thought they were for decoration, but Idalia showed him how to take a long narrow piece of heavy buckskin and wrap it around the boot, using the horn buttons to keep it from slipping. At the top, she tied it and tucked the trailing ends under neatly.

  “Now you do the other one,” she said, getting to her feet.

  As his sister busied herself by the fire, Kellen struggled with the other boot. He couldn’t seem to keep the sides in place as he wrapped the garter around it; though the leather was thick, it was soft enough not to stand by itself. It was evident, however, that Idalia intended to let him work it out for himself, and after several frustrating tries, Kellen finally managed to secure his second boot.

  As he straightened up again, Idalia set breakfast on the table in front of him—hot stew and tea. There was a flat loaf and stone crocks of butter and honey already on the table.

  “Go ahead—I ate hours ago.” Idalia sat down opposite him, carrying her own mug.

  It was good food, and Kellen was hungry, but it wasn’t what he was used to seeing at breakfast, and somehow that just seemed to underscore what a big change there’d been in his life. He wasn’t ill-mannered enough to complain, but Idalia seemed to have no trouble sensing his thoughts.

  “It’s a big change from life in Armethalieh, isn’t it, Kellen?” she asked—kindly, but shrewdly.

  He nodded, spooning up stew to save himself from having to articulate a reply. He was alive, and that was a great gift—so great, that it hardly seemed polite to grumble about the terms.

  The food was good—if unfamiliar—and the more he ate, the more he realized just how long it was since he’d had a decent meal. He reached for the bread, breaking the loaf open and loading a piece with butter and honey. The honey was thick and dark, unlike the pale golden stuff he was familiar with.

  “Wild-gathered,” Idalia explained. “I’ll show you how, when the proper season for it comes. The butter comes from goats, not cows—I trade for that. It’s not a bad life, Kellen. Just different from what you’re used to.”

  “And you live out here all alone?” Kellen asked, swallowing a large mouthful of bread and honey.

  “Hardly,” Idalia said. “But you’ll have plenty of time to meet the neighbors, so to speak. First we need to knock some of that City polish off you. And there’s a lot more you need to know about the Wild Magic before the next time you have to cast a spell.”

  Well, he had no doubt of that. In fact, the more he saw of Wild Magic, the less he felt he knew about it.

  “Finished?” she asked. He nodded. “Good. Come on outside. There’s a few things I want to show you right now, while you’re still fresh and alert.”

  Kellen got to his feet, his hands still sticky with honey, and followed Idalia out of the cabin. At the door she picked up a large wicker basket, its contents hidden beneath a length of mottled woolen fabric, and pointed to a wooden bucket where he could wash his hands.

  “No indoor plumbing here.” She sighed. “Of all of the City luxuries, all the things I actually learned to get along without quite nicely, I do miss that, and a lot more in winter, let me tell you. Well. The necessary pit is over there—see that cairn of white stones? That’s so you can find it in the dark, if you need to. I’ll be over there, by the chopping stump.” Her eyes twinkled. “That will give you a little privacy, anyway.”

  Kellen blushed, then followed her pointing finger and took care of what needed to be taken care of, though the accommodations were hardly what he was accustomed to. And he couldn’t even begin to imagine what it would be like in the dead of winter …

  When Kellen arrived at the stump, Idalia was kneeling beside it, the wicker basket at her side. She motioned for him to sit.

  “First lesson: keystones. You know what a keystone is?”

  Kellen sat, feeling the warmth of the stump even through two layers of leather. “No,” he said. Despite the fact that everything around him was different, this bore an odd family resemblance to his lessons with Undermage Anigrel. He’d hated them. He’d never imagined that he’d miss them. But he did; not that he’d want to go back to them … but it was something he was used to, and it didn’t seem right, the middle of the morning, not facing Anigrel.

  Idalia smiled. “The funny thing is, you wore a keystone, or a kind of one, all your life, until the day you were Banished, and so did I. At its simplest, a keystone is a device for harvesting and storing power. The Talismans the citizens of Armethalieh wear are designed to harvest and store the tiny amount of power the average non-Mage possesses—when you take your Talisman to the Temple of the Eternal Light each New Moon and trade it in for a new one, the Mages harvest the stored power and use it for their magick.”

  “Anigrel told me that,” Kellen muttered. I didn’t like it then, and I still don’t. “They’re a damned cheat!”

  “Yes,” she agreed heartily. “They are. But like all the things that the City Mages use to harm people, at root they’re just a tool, and tools can be used for good or ill.”

  He thought about that statement; he decided she was probably right. Even taking someone’s memories could be used for good, if the memory was of something so terrible that it would drive them mad. But you would have to be so careful about that, because pretty soon, if you didn’t hold yourself to the strictest of standards, you’d be meddling with people’s minds in other ways … “for their own good” … which was what the Mages were using as a rationale for everything they were doing now.

  “Since you know what the Talismans really are, you’re halfway there,” Idalia said cheerfully. “Our keystones are a little different, though. For one thing, we don’t steal the power from the unknowing like a swarm of leeches.”

  She reached into the basket and took something out. She took Kellen’s hand and drew it toward her, palm up, uncurling the fingers so she could place the object in his hand.

  “This is a keystone,” Idalia said.

  Kellen looked down at it. It looked nothing like the elaborate golden Talisman he’d used to wear around his neck; in fact, it didn’t look magical at all. It was a small white quartz river stone, perfectly ordinary. He held it up to the sun, looking for runes and carvings, and found nothing. Only the surface was frosted; through gaps in that, he could see down into the clear inside of the stone. He looked at Idalia inquiringly.

  “A rock?” he asked dubiously.

  “We can use almost anything, but crystals and gemstones are easiest to work with,” she told him. “Keystones—even if the Mage Council does use a version of them—are not in themselves a bad thing. We can use them, too. High Magick and Wild Magic both require payment, even if they don’t call it ‘payment’ in High Magick. The power to change things has to come from somewhere. In High Magick, it comes from the citizens of the City as well as from the Mages themselves—which wouldn’t be so bad, if the citizens were told about it and given some choice in the matter.” She shook her head.

  “You probably already know that part of managing the costs of a spell of the Wild Magic can be done by banking personal energy against a future request. The way to do that is by storing your personal energy in a keystone—or several keystones, as each one will only hold so much energy—and then emptying them at need. Of course, using a keystone costs more in banked energy than if you cast a spell in the regular way—probably because stored energy isn’t ‘coming from the heart,’ but sometimes, especially for small things, it’s just more practical to use a keystone in order to avoid Magedebt.�
�� She smiled. “After all, you don’t want to have to go out rescuing a nest of fledgling birds, as it were, every time you want to use a little Finding Spell! So I’m going to show you how to make a keystone.”

  “Now?” Kellen said, recoiling. After what it had taken to get here, he wasn’t sure he ever wanted to have anything to do with magic—High, Wild, or any other kind—ever again.

  “Relax,” Idalia said, looking amused at his skittishness. “It won’t hurt. And it isn’t a spell, so there’s no question of paying a price for the work. Just relax. This won’t hurt. If there was ever anything harmless in magic, this is it—why, once you’ve made the stone, I won’t be able to use the power in it. You, and only you, will be able to access it.”

  Unlike the Talismans …

  “What you need to do is feel your way into the stone. Pour yourself into it, the way water pours into a cup, and when you pull back, just leave a little of yourself behind.” She gave his hand an encouraging pat. “I’ll show you now.”

  Kneeling before him, she clasped her strong callused hands over his, folding his reluctant fingers around the stone. “Relax,” Idalia repeated firmly. “This stone has been used before. It knows the way.”

  For a long moment nothing happened. Kellen felt awkward and a little silly; all he was aware of was his surroundings—the sunshine, the fresh air, the birdcalls, and the unfamiliar trees. Despite his previous experiences with the Wild Magic, a part of him insisted that this wasn’t magic. Magic was incense and incantations done in the hours of darkness, long elaborate memorized rituals and hours of painstaking preparation. It couldn’t be this simple, this natural.

  Then the stone seemed to grow warm in his hands, as if the blood that flowed through his veins were flowing through the stone as well. He felt a faint distant tugging—and then, as if some instinctive part of him had gotten the idea—he pushed …

  —And then Idalia’s hands were on his shoulders, steadying him as he slid sideways, suddenly dizzy and weak. He leaned against her, blinking dazedly, feeling as if he’d just run for miles.

  “Too much too soon, little brother!” Idalia said, laughing and ruffling his hair. “You don’t do anything by halves, do you?” She plucked the keystone from his fingers and dropped it back into the basket.

  “I guess not,” Kellen said weakly. He took a deep breath and sat up again, pushing the dizziness away with an effort of will. “So that’s how you charge a keystone?” he asked, trying hard to sound as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

  “Usually it’s not so dramatic,” Idalia answered dryly. “Usually, the Wildmage doesn’t try fully charging a stone when he’s still recovering from a mauling. But yes, that’s how it’s done. They won’t replace the personal price the Wildmage has to pay for the larger spells, of course. But they’re a help.”

  “Idalia.” Kellen hesitated, then plunged on. He had so many questions, and even if he wasn’t completely sure he could trust her answers, there was no one else he could ask. “Why is that? Why does the price … change? Why is it so, well, peculiar? I did two different Finding Spells, and both times, the price was … well, it was nothing like anything I ever studied in the High Magick. And I didn’t exactly get what I asked for, either.”

  “I think it’s all a matter of balances,” Idalia answered slowly, as if she had to think hard before she spoke. “I’m not sure. I’ve worked most of this out from The Book of Stars, which—as you’ve probably discovered—is the most difficult to understand of the three Books. I believe that what our own power does is enable us to make our requests of—some Great Power. I can’t explain it any better than that.”

  “The Eternal Light?” Kellen asked stumblingly. The Eternal Light was the only Great Power he’d ever heard of.

  “Nothing that bloodless and impersonal,” Idalia said dismissively. “The High Mages like to make everything abstract and completely removed from the real world, but I don’t think the Powers that made us are anything like their Eternal Light. The Elves have their own explanations and names for it all, and they’re nothing like the Eternal Light. Better, I think.” She brooded for a moment. “Let’s just call them ‘the Gods,’ and leave it at that. And I think the Gods need people here in the world to make minor adjustments now and again to keep things running properly; the Elves say that They don’t meddle in the affairs of mortals lightly, and that when they choose to, They need mortal hands to do those things—but that They will neither command nor compel, only make an exchange. That’s why we end up doing what we do to pay for our spells.

  “As for why we get what we need rather than what we specifically ask for … I’d say it’s a little more like a gift than a business transaction, even though we do have to pay for it. They’re looking out for us. Helping us—I don’t know—become better. Or at least giving us the tools to become better, if we want to be.”

  She paused for a long time, looking thoughtful. “I also think—though, mind, I don’t know for sure—that when we use keystone energy to pay for spells, that energy is used by the Gods to some other purpose of Theirs elsewhere. So They need what humans send Them, but it isn’t being directly returned to our world in any way we can see. Not like when you cast ‘from the heart,’ and pay in this world with a task the Gods set.”

  Like promising a year of chastity to a unicorn, Kellen thought. Try as he might, he couldn’t imagine how that was going to be of any use to anyone, including him.

  “It makes my head hurt.” And he’d thought the High Magick was mind-numbingly esoteric!

  Idalia smiled. “Tell you the truth, it makes mine hurt too, sometimes. I haven’t met very many Wildmages who really understand it. But that’s enough theory and practice for one day. I’ll tell you something you never heard in Armethalieh: magic can be fun. That’s another reason to store power in keystones; so you can use it to have a little fun.”

  “Huh,” Kellen said disbelievingly. It hadn’t been fun so far. Exciting, yes, but looking back, there had not been a lot of what he’d call fun.

  “Seriously. I’ll prove it,” Idalia assured him.

  She got to her feet in one smooth motion and reached down into the basket once more. She lifted out the folds of fabric—as she swirled them through the air, Kellen could see it was actually an ankle-length hooded cloak of thin grey wool—and draped it around herself.

  And vanished.

  “Hey!”

  Kellen jumped to his feet in alarm, staggering just a little in the hasty movement. Idalia was gone.

  “Like it?”

  She reappeared behind him, the cloak draped over one arm. Kellen stared at her, knowing he was gaping at her like a country fool in a wondertale but unable to keep from doing it. This was magic—magic of the sort that only existed in books and scrolls and Festival-day plays!

  “It’s a tarnkappa—a cloak of invisibility. I made it a while back when I was still thrilled by being able to create things with the Wild Magic whenever I wanted to, with no one around to care whether I did or not. When I’m wearing it, no one can see me—or hear me, or smell me. Oh, it has its practical uses. I use it to take game in the dead of winter, when quarry is scarce and easily spooked. It’s about the only magical contrivance I have at the moment,” Idalia said, her eyes dancing with glee at his reaction.

  “Why?” Kellen asked bluntly. “I mean, if you can make more things like that, why don’t you? Make indoor plumbing, if you miss it?”

  Idalia shrugged. “The thrill wears off, once you get used to the idea that you can work Wild Magic openly, whenever you like,” she said simply. “I have everything I need now, and luxuries—well, they don’t seem as much of a priority. But that’s enough about magic for one day,” she said briskly, folding the tarnkappa back into the basket. “Wait here, and I’ll bring you something to do.” She grinned now. “If you’re going to eat my food, brother mine, you’re going to have to help me put it on the table.”

  She walked off toward the cabin, carrying the basket.
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  Kellen watched her go, frowning faintly. After a few moments he sat back down on the stump again, thinking hard. Idalia, he was coming to realize, was very good at changing the subject when it started to get into matters she didn’t want to discuss.

  And Kellen—as he was also starting to realize—was very good at thinking about forbidden subjects.

  Take the Elves, for example. They’d gotten off that subject mighty quickly when Idalia had been telling him her history! But something about everything she’d told him about how she’d ended up here just didn’t make sense. Why was Idalia living out here in the middle of nowhere—in a cabin that didn’t even have indoor plumbing—when she could be living with the Elves in their Elven city? Everybody knew that the Elven cities were places of fabulous luxury and decadence, where Elven enchantresses practiced their forbidden wiles on any human men unfortunate enough to fall into their perfumed clutches. And, Kellen supposed fair-mindedly, Elven men did the same for human women, if they could catch them.

  So why wasn’t Idalia still living there? It obviously wasn’t because the Elves had a problem with Wildmages. She’d gone to them for help when she turned back into human form, so they were evidently familiar with the Wild Magic and its effects. She must have lived with them at least for a little while afterward. Why hadn’t she stayed with them?

  Kellen knew a little about Elves from his studies in the City—though, just as with unicorns, when he came to think about it straight on, he didn’t know much. And most of that was from wondertales.

  Fiction. Probably not a reliable source.

  Not that anything he’d learned in Armethalieh—he was coming to suspect—was very reliable.

  So what had he learned from his lessons?