Tales of Ethshar

Weaving Spells

Kirinna had been staring out the farmhouse window at the steady rain for several minutes, worrying about Dogal, when she got up so suddenly that her chair fell backward and crashed on the floor. Her mother jumped at the sudden sound, dropping a stitch. The older woman looked up.

“I’m going after him,” Kirinna announced.

“Oh, I don’t — ” her mother began, lowering her knitting.

“You are not,” her father announced from the doorway; he had risen at the sound of the toppling chair and come to see what had caused the commotion.

“Father, Dogal and I are supposed to be married tomorrow!” Kirinna said, turning. “He should have been back home days ago, and he isn’t! What are you going to do tomorrow, keep the whole village standing around while we wait for him?”

“If he’s not here, then the wedding will be postponed,” her father said. “You are not going to go running off in the rain looking for him — what if he comes home while you’re away, and you’re the one who misses the wedding?”

“Is it any worse that way? It’s still early. I’ll be back tonight, I promise.”

“That’s what Dogal said,” Kirinna’s mother said worriedly.

“Which is why you aren’t going anywhere, girl,” her father said, pointing a hand at Kirinna. “Now, you pick up that chair and settle down to your work.” He gestured at the bowl of peas Kirinna had been shelling before her worries got the better of her.

Kirinna stared at him for a minute, then sighed; all the fight seemed to go out of her.

“Yes, Father,” she said. She stooped and reached for the chair.

Her father watched for a moment, then turned to resume his own efforts in the back room, polishing the ornamental brass for tomorrow’s planned celebration.

Kirinna fiddled with the chair, brushed at her skirt, adjusted the bowl — and then, when she was sure both her parents had settled to their work, she ran lightly across the room to the hearth, where she reached up and snatched her great-grandfather’s sword down from its place on the mantle.

“What are you?..” her mother began, but before the sentence was finished Kirinna was out the door and running through the warm spring rain, the sheathed sword clutched in one hand, her house-slippers splashing noisily through the puddles as she dashed through the village toward the coast road.

A moment later her father was standing in the doorway, shouting after her, but she ignored him and ran on.

She didn’t need anyone’s permission, she told herself. She was a grown woman, past her eighteenth birthday and about to wed, and the man she loved needed her. It wasn’t as if she intended to run off blindly into the wilderness; she knew where Dogal had gone, knew exactly what he had planned the day he disappeared, a sixnight earlier.

A strange stone the size of a man’s head had fallen from the sky during the winter and landed in Dogal’s back pasture, melting a great circle of snow and plowing a hole in the earth beneath, and everyone knew that such stones were rare and of great value to magicians. When the spring planting was done and the wedding preparations in hand Dogal had set out three leagues down the coast, to sell the sky-stone to the famous wizard Alladia, said to be one of the richest and most powerful in all the western lands.

He had teased Kirinna about how she might spend the money once they were married, and she had laughed and given him a shove on his way.

And he hadn’t come back.

Some of the village children had teased her when Dogal didn’t return, far less kindly than had her betrothed, saying he had run off with someone else — that he hadn’t gone to Alladia at all, but to some rival’s house, rather than stay to wed crazy, short-tempered Kirinna.

Kirinna knew better than that. Dogal loved her.

Other villagers had suggested that perhaps Dogal had angered Alladia somehow, and been turned into a mouse or a frog, or simply been slain. That possibility was far too real, though she couldn’t imagine how poor sweet Dogal could have annoyed the wizard that much. She had been telling herself for two or three days now that Alladia couldn’t be so cruel.

But then there was a third suggestion — that Alladia had decided to keep handsome young Dogal for herself, and had ensorcelled him. Kirinna found that theory all too easy to believe; certainly she had wanted Dogal from the first moment she had laid eyes on him, and Alladia was said to be young for a wizard, certainly young enough to still appreciate the company of men.

If the wizard thought Kirinna was going to give her man up without a fight, though, she was very wrong indeed — and that was why Kirinna had snatched her great-grandfather’s sword. It was said that during the Great War old Kinner had once killed a Northern sorcerer with this very blade; Kirinna hoped she could do as well with it against an Ethsharitic wizard.

Of course, Kinner had been a trained soldier, with years of experience and all the magical protection General Gor’s wizards could provide, while Kirinna had never used a sword in her life — but she tried not to think of that as she marched down the road.

She had gone less than half a league when she paused to mount the scabbarded weapon properly on her belt; carrying it in her hand was tiresome and unnecessary. She settled the sheath in place and drew the sword, just to test it.

She was startled by how fine and light the blade was, how the weight of the sword was so perfectly balanced that her hand seemed to almost move of its own volition as she took a few practice swings.

She remembered to wipe it dry before sheathing it again; then she jogged onward down the road, trotting to make up the time she had spent trying the sword.

The rain stopped when she had gone a little more than a league from her parents’ home, and the skies were clearing by the time she finally came in sight of the wizard’s home.

She had left the ill-kept road for the rocky beach half a league back, scrambling across grassy dunes and wave-polished rocks. Alladia’s house was perched on a bluff overlooking the ocean; as Kirinna watched the sun broke through the clouds and painted a line of gold along the water that seemed to burst at the end into a shower of sparks that were the reflections in Alladia’s dozens of windows.

It was the biggest house Kirinna had ever seen; she wondered whether even the overlord’s Fortress in Ethshar of the Rocks could be larger. Three stories high, not counting a tower at one end that rose another two levels, and easily a hundred feet from end to end — Kirinna had never imagined anything so grand.

The main entrance was on the other side, she knew — that was one reason she had come along the beach. She had no intention of walking up to the wizard’s front door and politely asking if anyone had seen a young man named Dogal; she planned to get inside that house and see for herself. She began clambering up the bluff.

At the top she heaved herself up over the final outcropping of rock and found herself staring in a window, her face just inches from the glass.

She was looking into a wizard’s house, and she half-expected to see all manner of monstrosities, but instead she saw an ordinary room — paved in gray stone, as if the entire floor were hearth, but otherwise unremarkable. An oaken table stood against one wall, with a pair of candlesticks and a bowl of flowers arranged on it and chairs at either end; a rag rug covered perhaps half the stone floor. There were no cauldrons, no skulls, no strange creatures scurrying about.

She hesitated, considering whether to find a door or simply smash her way in, and compromised by drawing her belt-knife and digging into the leading between windowpanes. A few minutes’ work was enough to loosen one square of glass, and she pried at one edge, trying to pop it free of its mangled frame.

The sheet of glass snapped, and shards tumbled at her feet; she froze, listening and peering into the house, fearing someone had heard the noise.

Apparently no one had; the only sounds she heard were the waves breaking beneath her and the wind in the eaves.

She reached into the hole she had made, unlatched the window, and swung it open; then she climbed carefully into the house.

The room was bigger and finer and cleaner than most she had seen, but looked no more outlandish from