The wizard in the woods, p.1
The Wizard in the Woods, page 1
part #2 of Lords of Arcadia Series
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THE CARE AND FEEDING OF GRIFFINS
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Also by R. LEE SMITH:
Heat
The Lords of Arcadia Series:
The Care and Feeding of Griffins
The Wizard in the Woods
COMING SOON!
The Lords of Arcadia Series:
The Roads of Taryn MacTavish
The Army of Mab
Olivia
Lords of Arcadia
Book Two:
THE WIZARD IN THE WOODS
By R. Lee Smith
This book is dedicated to the Redmond Library.
The real one.
Copyright © 2006 by Robin Smith
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including, but not limited to, photocopying or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the author.
Purplhouse@yahoo.com
Grateful acknowledgement is made for permission to reprint excerpts from the following copyrighted material:
“You Are My Sunshine” by Jimmie Davis. Copyright 1940 by Peer International Corporation. Copyright renewed. Used by permission.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, places, locales and events are either a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, places or events are purely coincidental.
A BRIEF WORD ABOUT WIZARDS…
Wizards are monsters.
This is not to say that they are evil, for there are many things in and out of human understanding that are monstrous but still noble of heart. A monster is merely a thing which stands outside the ordered laws of nature.
There is a sense of righteousness about those who study nature, because the world in its natural state is, if not perfect, at least precise. It obeys rules. It follows directions. It is a science of principles and laws that everyone can recognize and everyone understand. Magic is an offense to those principles and therefore wizards are monsters.
There are no worlds in all the vastness of the universe in which there is no science and so there are no worlds in which wizards are not monstrous. But there are many worlds, like Avalon, wherein wizards have conquered and consumed all other races so that the word ‘monster’
is never said aloud. There are many worlds, like Earth, wherein wizards have become the gentle stuff of let’s-believe. And there are worlds, like Arcadia, wherein those who use magic are largely benign beings who follow as close a natural flow as their monstrous powers allow. Yet even in that world, there were at times some who truly owned the name of wizard, who demanded it, and who were neither natural nor benign.
Our story concerns one such wizard, the son of Mab, born on Avalon, where even at a ridiculously young age and by a ridiculously monstrous society, he was seen as unnatural. He traveled, as soon as he learned the way of it, and passed through many worlds, Earth among them, in which he left his burning mark, before he came at last to Arcadia. There he dug himself in and where his eye fell in desire, nothing escaped him.
And now there was indeed a creature that he desired, a magical beast with an equally desirable guardian who, by Fate, had settled herself and her ward just beyond the borders of the wizard’s reaching shadow.
Worse yet, although she lived in Earth-born ignorance of what a wizard’s power could be, she was not without protection. There was another, a mystic of Arcadia, who shielded her from the wizard’s clutching hand.
The son of Mab could have easily blasted this lesser wizard to ash, for his power was unequaled in this world, but that would mean leaving the safety of his lairing place. He could have waited—the other was old and at peace with his mortality—but he lacked the quality of
patience. And now, at the blackened hearth of his den, the wizard turned his powers back to nature and employed those simple sciences, those righteous laws to which his very existence stood in offense.
He made a poison. It took no magic, but would prove just as deadly as any sorcery that came of his mother’s blood. He summoned his cat, gloved her hand, and filled her bestial mind with the inescapable thunder of his own. When he was certain that she would know no thought but his command, he sent her from him to find and kill the one thing that stood between him and the prize he coveted. Once he had that prize, he would have no use for the cat any longer, and as he watched her go, he wondered if it were worth the effort to harvest skin or blood from the perfect body that he had shaped for his own pleasure, or whether he’d simply crush out its life and let it rot where it lay.
Which only went to demonstrate further that all wizards are monsters, but some are more monstrous than others.
1. Morathi Crosses
It was another postcard-beautiful autumn day in Arcadia, or maybe it was winter now, it was getting hard to tell. The leaves had turned, died, and fallen away, making the largely alien trees even harder to recognize. The tall grass that had given her so much life-sustaining, if tasteless, grain now lay in rounded heaps all around her, soggy and brown. There were no more wild grapes to be found in the copses that dotted the plains, no more bushy-tailed hoppers with finger-sized trunks bouncing around, no more fish swimming in and out of her basket-traps in the river. Life did not surround her the way it had when Taryn MacTavish had first come to this world with her new-hatched griffin, but it was still here to be seen if one knew where to look. Its spirit was always with her.
Its spirit. She had to laugh at herself, going all new-age hippie the way she so often did these days. Morathi, the shaman elder of the nearby clan of horsemen, had been coming out to see his “two-legged daughter” every day for weeks now. It was inevitable that his otherworldly way of putting things should rub off on her a little.
Taryn glanced skyward, guessing at the time by the sun’s place behind the clouds. Nearly noon. Morathi should be here any second now. She was glad, grateful as always for whatever company she had. If 1
there was one thing she missed about Earth, one thing she now knew she’d taken for granted, it was all the people. Not just family or friends, but neighbors, passers-by, waitresses and store clerks, people driving cars and riding bikes and strolling on the sidewalk, giggling teens and screaming kids and old men who wore their pants too high, and pretty much everyone. Everyone.
Taryn was alone so often.
Right on cue, Romany’s song came like a second dawn, pale and blushing at first, but swiftly and easily strengthening into melodies (impossibly many melodies) of golden sound. Taryn, doing her best to whittle out a pole from a long branch, immediately stopped what she was doing and turned around, grinning from ear to ear. Aisling, napping in a cold patch of autumn sun nearby, uncurled and uttered an angry squawk at the interruption, then a delighted chirp as recognition took hold of him.
Before Taryn had even managed to put aside her would-be pole and her precious steel axe, the baby griffin was bounding away and into the tall grass that surrounded her camp. Taryn rose to follow with considerably less urgency. The gypsy’s song was still well off; although Romany could step out practically in Taryn’s lap if she wanted to, she had taken to ending her Road some distance away, so that she could walk a while in the Valley to which she had finally been given some welcome.
Taryn didn’t know what terrible thing had happened to put this rift between Romany’s people and the lords of the Valley of Hoof and Horn. She’d asked Tonka, who, as chieftain of the Farasai, was responsible for keeping his people’s histories, but Tonka had only changed the subject. She’d then asked Antilles, the current lord of the Valley, and he had muttered something mean-sounding in another language and then gruffly reminded her that ‘your damned Romany’ was welcome before stomping off. She’d finally asked Morathi, who, as his tribe’s storyteller, probably stood the best chance of knowing the reason, and as the eldest and most respected Farasai, also was likeliest to ignore the disapproval of others and actually tell her what it was. But Morathi had merely shrugged his thin shoulders. “War happened,” he’d said.
“And wars build towers a thousand times more enduring than their foundations.” Perhaps someday she’d get up the nerve to ask Romany herself, but until then, Morathi’s answer was certainly good enough.
And it would be a long time before Taryn would dare to attempt anything that might damage her relationship with Romany. It had such a tenebrous feel these days. Oh, Romany didn’t avoid Taryn’s eyes and 2
there was nothing in her attitude to suggest that she even remembered that day when she had tried…well, what she’d tried, but her sly smile had a sorrowful twist to it that was difficult to ignore. It hurt to feel that distance between them.<
Not that they’d ever had a sister’s close relationship, but Romany had been the one to bring Taryn here to Arcadia, the one who had secured this lifeline of communication between her and her family back on Earth, and that gave the gypsy a special place among all the others whom Taryn considered her friends. She wanted to have a closeness, especially a human and feminine closeness (she was intensely aware that, however Romany may look, she could not truly be human, but the appearance was there, and what the eyes saw, the heart craved), someone to sit and giggle with and maybe even talk about boys, like she’d done with her little sister, Rhiannon. There was nothing about Romany that had ever indicated an urge to giggle and boy-talk, but still, there was only one other human face that Taryn had ever seen in Arcadia, and it belonged to the magus.
As always, the faintest thought of him took an immediate and wistful root in Taryn’s mind. She stared away into the west, although the woods in which the magus lived in his cozy cabin with his evil cat was well out of eyesight. She didn’t even look around to watch Romany enter her rough little camp, or to see all the little dragons spinning and singing and diving around the gypsy’s hair. Things had a way of becoming so much less important when the magus was on her mind.
“Hail, thee.”
The sound of Romany’s voice broke the dreamy hold the western woods had on her, and Taryn turned around at last to greet her friend.
Romany’s colorful clothes were soaked with rain, although the skies were clear (the Arcadian skies, anyway), but she seemed neither to notice nor care. She went directly to Taryn’s firepit and bent to inspect the contents of the cauldron (plain hot water, boiled earlier for Taryn’s morning tea), then rose to smile her sly and sad smile at Taryn.
“Will you stay?” Taryn asked, as she always asked.
“Nay,” she was answered, as she was always answered. Romany reached into her sleeve and produced the mail she’d carried all the way from Earth. Now Taryn was supposed to take it, and then Romany would turn around and walk away in a glittering cloud of dragons while Aisling leapt and too-ra-looed her goodbye.
3
Taryn said, “Please.” She said it softly, in the tone one might use to coax a deer to eat from her hand.
Romany’s smile faded. Her outstretched hand seemed to tremble once. And her eyes, as black as the bottom of the sea, turned briefly to pools of flame. “Nay,” she said again, and she said it softly too.
“I’ve missed you,” Taryn told her.
Romany bent and placed the letters on the ground. She turned around, took one step, and stopped. Her head bent. The little dragons that were her constant companions began to settle, and then all at once burst away, funneling out in a multi-colored ribbon and vanishing into the nearby copse of trees.
Steam was rising from the gypsy’s wet clothes.
“Please stay,” Taryn said. “Just for a little while.”
“Ah, my fool.” The tone was a fond one; the voice, inhuman.
“Just sit with me,” Taryn said. “We’ll have tea.”
Romany lowered herself again and took up the letters. She turned back to Taryn, and her face was the same fox-sly and smiling face that she had always worn. She moved close, took Taryn’s arm, and placed the letters into her hand. “I will not stay,” she said, “until I can look on thee and see no gold.”
Taryn drew back in bewilderment, one hand rising to touch hesitantly at her flame-red hair. Romany laughed at her, then turned around and began to walk away, her voice rising in its own impossible harmonies. The dragons came swarming back, and Romany raised one hand without looking behind her.
Taryn watched as the gypsy sang her way out into the plains to vanish. Someday, things would have to be right between them again, but Taryn wasn’t sure just how to go about it. Time, she guessed. Time was always a good place to start.
The first letter she opened was from Granna Birgit and it was still on hospital stationary. All temporary, she was assured. Every day for a week, the nurses had promised her that ‘maybe tomorrow’ would be the discharge-day. She wasn’t too unhappy about it, really. The food wasn’t bad, despite what people said. If only the good folks there weren’t so keen on sticking things into her every ten minutes, she’d be right at home. She asked after Aisling and then after Taryn’s “young chappie” (which gave Taryn something of a puzzled turn until she realized with a blush that Granna meant Antilles), acknowledged the latest batch of carefully-cropped photographs and then coyly remarked 4
(and not for the first time) that Morathi was a right handsome old dote and she wouldn’t mind taking a wander out Africa-way if it meant catching the eye of a gentleman like him, “especially those as wears no britches!”
Taryn was still blushing at the thought of her grandmother making Irish eyes at Morathi (and Morathi winking right along back at her) when she opened her second letter, but her residual smile died away as she read, The doctors think it best if your grandmother was moved to a more intensive-care facility instead of going back to Shadow Lane.
She’s being stubborn about it, but unfortunately, I think the doctors are probably right. It’s going to take her a while to recover, and in the meantime, she just needs more looking after. It might help if you were to casually mention in your next letter about the importance of laying aside one’s pride and letting someone else take care of you once in a while. If you can do it (sorry, sweetie, but it’s true), then anyone should be able to. Love you much and will write more when I’m back at home. Mom After that, any attempt to concentrate on work was a bust, and when one was swinging an axe, especially one as sharp as Tilly’s hatchet, that was simply not the time to go wool-gathering. Taryn knew that worrying about her grandmother was just about the least-constructive thing a person could possibly do, even if she was right there next to the worryee. Here in Arcadia, it was even more pointless.
Still…she had to do something.
But shelling a tent wasn’t it, clearly. Taryn left her day’s efforts in the pile of futility she had formed, and started locking down her camp.
Morathi apparently wasn’t coming today, so she’d go see the magus.
He’d been here for fifty years, he had to know a little something about how it felt to be far away from the ones you loved. She could always count on him to be sympathetic. And come to think of it, it had been a long time since she’d last seen him. She was spending too much time with her other friends. Poor, lonely magus in the woods.
She set out with Aisling at her heels and her slingshot in her hands.
It was a nice day. True, Taryn’s standards for ‘nice’ had started dropping since the weather had gotten serious about turning, but today was a truly nice one. Clear skies, even a little warmish, and although the ground was a little damp, most of the grass was dry enough that it was just her shoes and the hem of her jeans that got soaked, not the whole of her legs. Long walks in wet denim were not a fun thing.
5
But winter was getting closer and the grass was dying. If it hadn’t been, Taryn might have walked right by him without noticing.
But with the tall stems half-bent or entirely fallen, it was impossible to miss the pool of grey lying in all this dead brown. She hesitated before investigating, unsure what she was looking at or if it was a good thing to startle it, but curiosity got the better of her. She took only four steps, however, before she realized with an ugly start that she was looking at a fallen horseman.
She ran forward, an involuntary cry escaping her lips, and the horseman on the ground groaned and raised his head a few inches. He saw her. He smiled.
It was Morathi.
She couldn’t move right away. For a moment, and really, it was the strangest and most sickening feeling, the urge came on her to keep walking. Like maybe she hadn’t seen him at all. That if she just went on ahead like everything was normal, why, then everything would be normal and Morathi would be fine. The magus would open his door and bring her in and there would be hot tea and happy conversation and everything would be just fine.
