Taking Flight

“And there isn’t any counter-spell, at least not that anyone’s ever found. Which is why there wasn’t any Third Augmentation — because Javan tried out the spell, and loaded a dozen spells into his head, or maybe a dozen anyway, and from then on he could use them all as easily as snapping his fingers, but he could never get them out, and he couldn’t do any other magic, ever, and no other wizardry would even work on him, he was so charged full of magic, and since he hadn’t used any youth spells or immortality spells or anything in his experiment, that was the end of him — he lived about another thirty years, I guess, and he could do those ten or twelve spells all he wanted, but he wasn’t any use for anything else.” She grimaced. “Anyway, he’d written the whole thing down, so anyone who wanted — I mean, any wizard who could work high-order magic, because it’s not an easy spell — anyway, anyone who wanted to could see how the spell was done, but nobody ever tried it again.” She took a deep breath.

“Except me,” she said.

Chapter Twenty-One

Irith had paused in her story, but Kelder and Asha just waited, and after a moment she began where she had left off.

“It was... well, I’d heard the story from Kalirin, about how the great Javan went and ruined himself, and I was worried about the war, and I didn’t want to be a wizard, and I was really sick and tired of being an apprentice — I mean, for three years I had worked the skin right off my fingers, doing all this weird stuff,” Irith said. “And it seemed like a good idea, to go ahead and do the spell, and then I’d know some magic, but I couldn’t go into combat because I wouldn’t know the right kind of magic, and I’d never be able to do research — I wouldn’t be able to do any other magic, ever. So I started picking out the spells, and practicing up. The book said that Javan’s Second Augmentation was a seventh-order spell, but it looked a lot easier than that, and I was doing fourth-order spells without much trouble, and I figured that if it didn’t work I wasn’t any worse off. I mean, usually, when a spell doesn’t work right, nothing happens at all. Sometimes it goes wrong, and all kinds of horrible things can happen when that happens, but usually it doesn’t, you see?”

Kelder nodded.

“So I started picking out the spells I wanted, and collecting all the ingredients for everything. I can still remember what I needed for the Augmentation — maybe one reason I liked the idea was that there wasn’t anything really yucky in it. I needed three left toes from a black rooster, and a plume from a peacock’s tail, and seven round white stones, six of them exactly the same weight and the seventh three times as much, and a block of this special incense that had been prepared in the morning mist of an open field, and then I needed my wizard’s dagger.” Irith smiled dreamily, leaning on one elbow. “You know, I haven’t thought about this stuff in ages! All that stuff, to work magic!”

“You don’t have a wizard’s dagger now, do you?” Asha asked.

“Of course not,” Irith said, sitting up again. “I had to break it as part of the spell. I cut my knee doing it, too.”

“Go on,” Kelder said.

“Well, it took a couple of months to get ready,” Irith said, “and then an entire sixnight to work all the spells together. They didn’t all work — I’d picked some that were too hard for me. And some that sort of worked didn’t work right, like the invisibility spell. It was supposed to be Ennerl’s Total Invisibility, but it doesn’t act the way Kalirin’s book said it would; it’s a fifth-order spell, and I didn’t really know how to do stuff above fourth-order, but I figured I could give it a try.” She shrugged. “It’s better than nothing.”

“So what other spells did you try?” Asha asked.

“Oh, I picked all the best ones I could find,” Irith said, “but not stuff that the army would want. And I didn’t make Javan’s silly mistake; the very first one I did was a spell of eternal youth, and if that hadn’t worked I wouldn’t even have done the rest, I don’t think. I’m not really sure, because the magic messed up my memory a little bit — but anyway, the spell worked, so I was fifteen then, and I’ll always be fifteen — I can’t get any older unless something breaks the spell, and there isn’t anything that can break the spell!” She smiled brightly.

“What else?” Kelder asked.

“Well, there’s a Spell of Sustenance that they used to use on soldiers so they didn’t have to feed them — see this?” She lifted her head and displayed her throat, pulling away the velvet ribbon, and for the first time Kelder realized that the bloodstone she wore there was not on a choker, but set directly into her flesh. “As long as that stone is there, I don’t need to eat or drink or even breathe — but I usually do anyway, because it’s fun, and besides, if I go without too long it feels really weird and I don’t think it’s good for me. And I don’t get tired if I use it, I mean, not the usual way, but it... I don’t like to use it too much.” That explained how she could dance along the road for hours, Kelder realized — and also why she didn’t always, why she had gotten tired when carrying Asha on horseback.

(Could she use her other magic when not in human shape? She hadn’t said.)

“And I can change shape, of course,” Irith continued. “I have seven shapes. That’s Haldane’s Instantaneous Transformation, and it was the hardest part — I had to make bracelets from the skin of each animal, and soak them in my own blood stirred with butterfly wings.”

Kelder remembered the bands around her ankle, and once again, a mystery evaporated.

“Seven shapes?” Asha asked. “What are they?.”

Irith hesitated. “Oh, I guess it won’t hurt to tell you,” she said finally. “I can be a horse, or a bird, or a fish, or a cat, or me, or me with wings, or a horse with wings. And before you ask, I can’t carry much when I fly, even as a horse — I couldn’t have just flown us all to Shan. Flying with anything more than my own weight is hard.”

“How did you get skin from a flying horse?” Kelder asked. He had never heard of flying horses, and certainly had never seen any.

“Well, I didn’t, really,” Irith admitted. “I used strips of ordinary horsehide braided together, with dove feathers woven in. And for just growing wings, I used dove feathers wound in my own hair.”

Kelder nodded. “Anything else?” he asked. “Shape-changing, invisibility, eternal youth, the Spell of Sustenance — that’s four, and you said there were a dozen.”

“I said you could maybe do twelve,” she corrected him. “I only tried ten, and half of them didn’t work.” She shrugged. “I was only an apprentice, after all.”

“Half — so is there one more?”

Irith bit her lip, and Kelder thought she blushed slightly; he couldn’t be sure in the dimness of the tavern.

“There is, isn’t there?” he said. “At least one more.”

“Just... just one, I think,” she admitted. “And I wish it didn’t work, and I’d gotten one of the protective spells instead, or the one that would let me walk on air, or the one to light fires. I still can’t believe I messed that one up — the fire-lighting spell. I mean, it’s about the simplest spell there is, one of the first things every wizard’s apprentice learns. I think I must have left it until last, and I guess by then I was really tired...”

“Irith,” Kelder said, cutting her off, “what’s the other spell?” He was not going to let his wife keep any important secrets from him, and while Irith wasn’t his wife yet and didn’t know she would ever be, he knew.

“...I mean,” she said, “here I was doing seventh-order wizardry, and I couldn’t get Thrindle’s Combustion!..”

“Irith.”

“Or maybe,” she went on desperately, “I never even tried it after all — maybe I forgot, or decided it would