Short story written in March 2015 for Phil Overby's Diversity Challenge.
5000 words
My twelve-month solitude was broken by a flash of fire on the sea. Not at dawn but at midnight, when the waves rose and fell like a dark breathing beast and the sky was speckled with starlight. The glow of strong magic flared in the distance and, deep in my dreaming trance, I thought I recognized it. As clear as an old friend’s voice.
When I had pulled myself up and stared out at the black horizon, that familiar fire remained. It could not be...
In the morning, I stood on the sands, barefoot in my green handspun robe and old trousers, and watched the skiff approach. It cut through the waves in a plume of sea spray, driven by a reckless arcane wind. I could hear the taut sun-bleached sail creaking from across the beach—then it went limp as the spell snapped and the skiff heeled up in the sand. The figure aboard staggered, then jumped out.
She burned so brightly that for the first time in months I withdrew my inner senses entirely. A mortal mage should not seethe like the air over hot coals, but she did. It was a relief to look at her with only my eyes, and...something more than a relief. She wore a long dark swallow-tailed coat and a battered three-cornered hat, and as she turned unsteadily around to survey the beach, I saw an undyed shirt beneath the coat, loose and unlaced. She saw me, then, standing with my arms folded, and I heard her mutter "Shit."
"Hello!" she shouted in the next moment, waving her hat and trudging across the sands. Her fine black hair fluttered in the breeze. "Don't mean to trespass on your island, good sir, I'd just like to take a look at the volcano." She was panting for breath by the time she got to me, her teeth showing in a grimace.
"Iseult Blackwater," I said aloud. I half expected my voice to come out in an old man's rasp, so little had I used it, but it was clear, and deep in a way that I hoped was not feigning.
It was worth three hundred days of isolation to see the look of incredulity that spread across her face, exaggerated and eloquent in the way that her looks always were. I was surprised that I recognized her face so clearly, after the intervening years, but there it was—proud, angular features, tiger's-eye-brown skin, eyebrows like slashes of ink, full lips with a crooked twist to them. There were faint lines beginning around her mouth, and a starburst scar on her right cheek.
"Am I hallucinating?" she asked, conversationally.
My brows lifted. "I can assure you that I am standing here, but aside from that, how am I to know?"
For my first conversation on the island, it was an odd one. My heart was pounding, but I kept still and rooted.
Iseult shook her head, smiling despite herself, and then suddenly blinked and stared at me. Her eyes were wine-dark and rimmed with black lashes—and the bruises of someone who did not sleep well.
"You... You remind me of someone. Do you know Mirembe Andou?"
I bit my lip to keep from grinning—what should it matter if she remembers you?—and replied slowly, "I know that name. It happens to be mine."
She gaped at me. I saw the pinch of sadness and regret in her face before she burst into amazement, and that did not surprise me, after the time we went through at the Academy, but the keenness of it did surprise me. My own resentment was dulled by now, and I had left far later than she had.
"Mirri! Gods below, why didn't you say it was you, you bastard!" Iseult shouted, and hit me in the arm with her hat. She stepped back and scrutinized me. I braced for the first pricking question, but all she said was, "Damn, the southern sun suits you. What the hell are you doing on this island?"
"Training. Learning. Centering myself in earth and aether." That was slightly facetious—it was a phrase one of the Magisters had used too many times—but it was also true. "I like being alone," I added.
Iseult's wry dimple appeared, deepened by the thinness of her cheeks. "You always have, but you don’t need to sail to an isle at the end of the world to be alone, Mirri."
"Well, I… I don't go by Mirri anymore." The words escaped my lips and I immediately swallowed, as if I could force them back into my chest.
Her head came up. "What do you go by, then?"
"Just Mirembe. Mir would do."
Her pause was considering, not taken aback, but I hurried to break the silence nonetheless.
"Why have you come out here, Iseult?"
Her gaze flickered out to the rolling blue-green sea. “Needed a break, same as you. The trade runs me ragged. That, and I’ve heard that volcanoes are the purest source of raw thaumaturgic energy.”
I regarded her for a moment, and felt my face begin to crack into a smile. “We cannot both be here because of that lesson of Magistrix Sondra’s on the Isles of Fire.”
Iseult grinned back at me. “But it looked so fantastic in the illustrations! And the thought of white sands and hot sun…”
“While we were in the middle of that sleeting winter,” I agreed, then paused. “This search for raw energy has nothing to do with the fact that you are shining like a lighthouse, does it?” I asked quietly.
The generous curve of her mouth tightened. “It might,” she admitted, and was silent for so long that I thought she would say nothing else, until— “You’re impressive yourself, even when you’re all pulled into your shell.”
The sun was suddenly unreasonably warm. I cleared my throat. “We’ve a lot to talk about. Let’s go into the shade,” I suggested. “I have food and drink in my home, a little ways into the jungle.”
“Your home, eh? I’d like to see it.” Iseult turned around to look at the boat and, with a lift of her hands and a surge of power that made me wince, shoved the craft higher up onto the sand. The timbers creaked and the mast tilted askew when she let it go.
“Ah, almost forgot,” she muttered, and pulled a purse from her belt. She emptied it into her hand; a single silver coronet flashed in the sun. She flipped it up between her fingers and tossed it in a long, high arc into the sea. At my questioning look, she explained. “Buccaneer custom, thanking the sea spirits.”
“Is that your trade, then? Buccaneering?”
“A while back. I’ve mostly been a mage-mercenary.”
I looked her over again. It was true that there was threadbare gilt embroidery to her coat and a bedraggled ostrich plume in her hat, and her shirt was raw silk instead of linen, but— “If you’re a mage-mercenary, where’s the rest of your coin?” I asked, surprised enough to be blunt.
“Poured it out before I left port,” she said cryptically, then clapped her hat back on her head. “Let’s go.”
The jungle closed in around us, green and murmuring with bird- and beetle-song. I led her down the palm-frond path, where the sand was silvery and cool from the shade, towards the black prow of the volcano. I had never thought the path long, save for that first week when every tree and rock had looked the same, but Iseult seemed to find it taxing, and said little. I was glad of the silence in which to collect my strewn thoughts, and felt guilty for that gladness.
We reached my erstwhile home, shaped from the vast trunk of a banyan tree. I had put sea-blue glass in the windows last month, and hung a crystal mage lamp in a twistvine net by the door. The wild garden and the basalt bulk of the alchemical brewhouse were just visible behind the tree.
I turned to tell Iseult that we were there, and the words died in my throat. She was leaning against the trunk of a tree, her face ashen grey.
"I think I need some water," she muttered, and pushed off from the tree. I reached out to steady her, fortunately, because she pitched forward in a dead faint.
Where her skin touched mine, it was scorching hot.
I carried her into the house, slamming the door open with my shoulder. Her weight was light in my arms, and not because of my new muscle. I kicked books from the hammock, sparing only a moment of regret, and laid her in it. She was still limp, radiating dry heat. A sliver of white showed between her eyelids. I grabbed the nearest bowl and scrap of cloth and summoned water from the hollow roots that served as my copper-piping to the spring. Cool water on her brow did not wake her. I closed my eyes, and opened my senses.
Her aura of fire roared around me—I battled it for my own space, my own breath. I could not see what was wrong with her body beneath that bright turmoil, but I did not need to. This was no natural fever, any more than that was the natural state of her magic. I made myself as still as stone, an anchor in the fury. I reached out into the flames, and discovered that I could touch it with my own power, like a cast spell. This magic was spilling from her, taxing her body even as she lay there, and she seemed to have no control over it. But if I could bleed some of it away, it might ease the strain...
It was slow going, working with the seethe of it, but survival had taught me patience and painstaking care. Little by little I spun the power away like carded wool, drawing it up and releasing it safely in the air far above the banyan tree. Hopefully no seabirds chose to fly above us, or...well, they would make a good dinner. At last, her aura simmered closer to the boundaries of her skin, and I could see past its light to the energies of her body. The fissures of exhaustion were everywhere I looked. Her heart labored, though there was no flaw in it. I gave her soothing energy from the stillest place in my soul that I could find, but that was no cure. This was not an afternoon’s work.
I woke with a headache and a sore back; Iseult snored, cheek-down on the hammock. I poured spring water and chopped fruit by hand, and scooped the pot of spiced chickpeas I had left cooking over the coals onto spinach leaves, and still she slept. Finally, restless and stiff, I walked back out to the beach to gather her things. That proved to be no more than a sailor’s bag in the bottom of the boat. Itching for answers, I suppressed my scruples and opened it. A canteen, an unopened packet of hardtack, a compass in a cracked case, and a gilded blackpowder pistol with a pouch of cartridges. At the bottom, two flasks, one half-full of gin, the other full of a very strong-smelling brandy. I slowly buckled up the bag again. Were you looking for reassurance?
When I got back, I set the bag by the door and looked over to find Iseult awake, and draining the cup of water I had left. I fetched her another one, and a pile of fruit, and leaf-wrapped chickpeas. She said nothing, so I bit my tongue, until—
“If you try to feed me anything more, I will puke,” she said reproachfully.
I looked her squarely in the eye. “Tell me what’s happened to you.”
“Give me a minute,” she replied, rubbing her face. She had always been thin, but now I could see the sinews in her neck, and her cheekbones cast shadows. When she looked up again, she looked past me, at the clutter of the house: hangings of bright cloth and feathers decorating the knotted wood walls, shelves filled with glass pots and bottles, the dangling strings of the magical loom I had set up in the corner, the case of books and reed scrolls behind the faint shimmer of charms against damage.
"Did you make all of this?" she wondered, reaching up to touch an inlaid box in the nook behind the hammock.
I ducked my head. "All but the books. The island has everything I need—water, sand, wood, fiber."
"And your bloody great talent for artifice," she added, smiling. "So there was nothing here before you came?"
"There was an old hut in the clearing," I reflected. "And some poor soul's bones. I gave them a proper burial, and decided to build from this tree."
Iseult stared up at the woven timbers of the attic floor and gave a low whistle. "You could make a fortune as an artificer, Mirri. Sorry—Mir, not Mirri?"
There was that question, at last. At least it was gentle. I exhaled, trying to keep my voice steady. "Yes. It—It's been a long time coming. The past two years, I've been using herbs and infused magic to make myself—as you see me now."
"How long coming?" I couldn't look her in the eye, but there was nothing but soft curiosity in her voice.
"Since I was a child, in ways I didn't realize."
"Oh, Mir, why didn't you tell me?" I glanced up, and the warm sympathy in her crooked smile sent me reeling inwardly. "If it was important to you, I wouldn't have teased you. Well..." She looked doubtful. "I was such an ass's child," she sighed.
"It was my great and awful secret, at that age. I was too afraid to tell anyone." Most of all you, but not just for fear of teasing.
"I can't blame you, at the Academy. Two years ago," she mused. "You could have been sitting for your mastery exams."
"I was preparing to."
"Oh."
“Yes, I stayed that long.” I licked my lips, thinking about how to tell this. "They could accept a woman earning her Magus, with only another year of provisional study. They could not accept a tall dark woman who thought she was a man, and acted like it. I left before they threw me out of the gates." Or made sure I never walked out of them. I pushed away the memory of kneeling naked in an inn room, the edge of a knife at my throat.
Iseult muttered something vindictive in Couén. I knew her temper, and I could imagine what she would say to the whole story. But I didn’t want to blight the air.
"After that, I went to Port Tzel and bought every text on magic I could find. Writings from Namea and Inwende, Hanaren scrolls, books from Satyameva and Trinar—anything they didn't teach at the Academy. Then I came here. I asked permission from the headman of the Seoli people in the main isles," I added, not wanting her to think me a trespasser. "He was happy to grant it. Unlike me, the Seoli have enough sense not to build on the slopes of a living volcano."
Iseult grinned, settling back in the hammock. Her color looked much better.
"In another year or so, I mean to go back and make Magus as a foreign mage. Thaumaturgy, artifice, alchemy, everything." I had no doubt that I could pass those exams—under a fair judge. I sighed. "Or maybe I'll skip that, and just take a ship to Inwende or Madria."
"These days fewer people care about the Magus mark," Iseult agreed. "I don't have mine, of course, and I never wanted for coin." She stretched out, looking up at the sun-bright window. After a lethargic pause, she said, "For what it's worth, Mirembe, you've grown up to be very handsome."
I was glad that my dark skin masked the heat that flooded over my face. "I seem to remember that you think every man and woman you meet is handsome," I said, in a tone I hoped was repressive, and began to gather up the cups and plate.
"I always mean it truly. But you are something else. All this change from the kid I knew, just through time and the help of some herbs."
"And some flesh artifice," I told her, scrubbing the plate intently. Not enough, yet.
She winced. "Ow."
I shrugged, the weight of my pulled-back dreadlocks swinging. "It wasn't bad. I can ease pain, too."
"Yes, I noticed that. Thank you." She sat up slowly, rubbing her breastbone with one hand. Her inky hair slid over one shoulder. "Alright," she said, finally. "I'll tell you what's gone wrong with me."
I'd hoped my honesty would coax something from her, but I suddenly felt apprehensive. I set the cups down and sat on my workbench stool.
She took a deep breath. "You remember Magister Altaire?"
I sat up straighter, frowning. "I...never liked him much."
"Wish I hadn't. In our last novice year, he drew me into his circle of study. He flattered me, played to my pride and my hunger. I wanted to be better than everyone, even you, Mir—uncontested." She gave a mirthless laugh. "His words were sweet, but there was something rotting underneath. You see, what he wanted was a mage strong enough to bear spirit possession, but foolhardy enough to overlook the risks. It’s hard to find such a mage, unless they’re young.”
“Gods,” I murmured. Spirit bonding was outlawed in most lands, for good reason. Perhaps one in three even survived it. But...I had seen mages with a benign spirit bond before, and they were not so blinding as she was now.
“I went into that tower willingly. He was wrong, and the ritual circle failed. I was left bare to the aether, and what came to me was not a lesser spirit but a Greater One.”
I stared at her. All I could think to say was, “Why were you not consumed?”
“I don’t know.” Her hands gripped the hammock, pale-knuckled. “It possessed me, and then spat me back out, but I couldn’t escape its burning touch. I went mad, for a while, and that was when I disappeared. Ended up with a gang of highwaymen. I got my mind and my magic back in time, but… It pours power into me, until I leak.” Her dark eyes lifted to mine. “You saw what it’s doing to me, I think. It depends on what healer I ask, but I know I won’t make it to forty.”
I swallowed powerless anger; it tasted like ash. When I could trust my voice, I said, “I’m sorry.”
Iseult gave a short shake of her head, chewing on her lip. “Do you have anything to drink?” she wondered, in a sudden hopeful tone. “Or smoke?”
I blinked, still shaken. “I have coconut wine I was storing up. I’m sure there is something you can smoke in the jungle, but I haven’t made a study of it,” I added dryly.
“All this time on your hands,” she lamented, “And you haven’t done anything useful with it."
5000 words
EARTHFIRE, SOULFIRE
My twelve-month solitude was broken by a flash of fire on the sea. Not at dawn but at midnight, when the waves rose and fell like a dark breathing beast and the sky was speckled with starlight. The glow of strong magic flared in the distance and, deep in my dreaming trance, I thought I recognized it. As clear as an old friend’s voice.
When I had pulled myself up and stared out at the black horizon, that familiar fire remained. It could not be...
In the morning, I stood on the sands, barefoot in my green handspun robe and old trousers, and watched the skiff approach. It cut through the waves in a plume of sea spray, driven by a reckless arcane wind. I could hear the taut sun-bleached sail creaking from across the beach—then it went limp as the spell snapped and the skiff heeled up in the sand. The figure aboard staggered, then jumped out.
She burned so brightly that for the first time in months I withdrew my inner senses entirely. A mortal mage should not seethe like the air over hot coals, but she did. It was a relief to look at her with only my eyes, and...something more than a relief. She wore a long dark swallow-tailed coat and a battered three-cornered hat, and as she turned unsteadily around to survey the beach, I saw an undyed shirt beneath the coat, loose and unlaced. She saw me, then, standing with my arms folded, and I heard her mutter "Shit."
"Hello!" she shouted in the next moment, waving her hat and trudging across the sands. Her fine black hair fluttered in the breeze. "Don't mean to trespass on your island, good sir, I'd just like to take a look at the volcano." She was panting for breath by the time she got to me, her teeth showing in a grimace.
"Iseult Blackwater," I said aloud. I half expected my voice to come out in an old man's rasp, so little had I used it, but it was clear, and deep in a way that I hoped was not feigning.
It was worth three hundred days of isolation to see the look of incredulity that spread across her face, exaggerated and eloquent in the way that her looks always were. I was surprised that I recognized her face so clearly, after the intervening years, but there it was—proud, angular features, tiger's-eye-brown skin, eyebrows like slashes of ink, full lips with a crooked twist to them. There were faint lines beginning around her mouth, and a starburst scar on her right cheek.
"Am I hallucinating?" she asked, conversationally.
My brows lifted. "I can assure you that I am standing here, but aside from that, how am I to know?"
For my first conversation on the island, it was an odd one. My heart was pounding, but I kept still and rooted.
Iseult shook her head, smiling despite herself, and then suddenly blinked and stared at me. Her eyes were wine-dark and rimmed with black lashes—and the bruises of someone who did not sleep well.
"You... You remind me of someone. Do you know Mirembe Andou?"
I bit my lip to keep from grinning—what should it matter if she remembers you?—and replied slowly, "I know that name. It happens to be mine."
She gaped at me. I saw the pinch of sadness and regret in her face before she burst into amazement, and that did not surprise me, after the time we went through at the Academy, but the keenness of it did surprise me. My own resentment was dulled by now, and I had left far later than she had.
"Mirri! Gods below, why didn't you say it was you, you bastard!" Iseult shouted, and hit me in the arm with her hat. She stepped back and scrutinized me. I braced for the first pricking question, but all she said was, "Damn, the southern sun suits you. What the hell are you doing on this island?"
"Training. Learning. Centering myself in earth and aether." That was slightly facetious—it was a phrase one of the Magisters had used too many times—but it was also true. "I like being alone," I added.
Iseult's wry dimple appeared, deepened by the thinness of her cheeks. "You always have, but you don’t need to sail to an isle at the end of the world to be alone, Mirri."
"Well, I… I don't go by Mirri anymore." The words escaped my lips and I immediately swallowed, as if I could force them back into my chest.
Her head came up. "What do you go by, then?"
"Just Mirembe. Mir would do."
Her pause was considering, not taken aback, but I hurried to break the silence nonetheless.
"Why have you come out here, Iseult?"
Her gaze flickered out to the rolling blue-green sea. “Needed a break, same as you. The trade runs me ragged. That, and I’ve heard that volcanoes are the purest source of raw thaumaturgic energy.”
I regarded her for a moment, and felt my face begin to crack into a smile. “We cannot both be here because of that lesson of Magistrix Sondra’s on the Isles of Fire.”
Iseult grinned back at me. “But it looked so fantastic in the illustrations! And the thought of white sands and hot sun…”
“While we were in the middle of that sleeting winter,” I agreed, then paused. “This search for raw energy has nothing to do with the fact that you are shining like a lighthouse, does it?” I asked quietly.
The generous curve of her mouth tightened. “It might,” she admitted, and was silent for so long that I thought she would say nothing else, until— “You’re impressive yourself, even when you’re all pulled into your shell.”
The sun was suddenly unreasonably warm. I cleared my throat. “We’ve a lot to talk about. Let’s go into the shade,” I suggested. “I have food and drink in my home, a little ways into the jungle.”
“Your home, eh? I’d like to see it.” Iseult turned around to look at the boat and, with a lift of her hands and a surge of power that made me wince, shoved the craft higher up onto the sand. The timbers creaked and the mast tilted askew when she let it go.
“Ah, almost forgot,” she muttered, and pulled a purse from her belt. She emptied it into her hand; a single silver coronet flashed in the sun. She flipped it up between her fingers and tossed it in a long, high arc into the sea. At my questioning look, she explained. “Buccaneer custom, thanking the sea spirits.”
“Is that your trade, then? Buccaneering?”
“A while back. I’ve mostly been a mage-mercenary.”
I looked her over again. It was true that there was threadbare gilt embroidery to her coat and a bedraggled ostrich plume in her hat, and her shirt was raw silk instead of linen, but— “If you’re a mage-mercenary, where’s the rest of your coin?” I asked, surprised enough to be blunt.
“Poured it out before I left port,” she said cryptically, then clapped her hat back on her head. “Let’s go.”
—
The jungle closed in around us, green and murmuring with bird- and beetle-song. I led her down the palm-frond path, where the sand was silvery and cool from the shade, towards the black prow of the volcano. I had never thought the path long, save for that first week when every tree and rock had looked the same, but Iseult seemed to find it taxing, and said little. I was glad of the silence in which to collect my strewn thoughts, and felt guilty for that gladness.
We reached my erstwhile home, shaped from the vast trunk of a banyan tree. I had put sea-blue glass in the windows last month, and hung a crystal mage lamp in a twistvine net by the door. The wild garden and the basalt bulk of the alchemical brewhouse were just visible behind the tree.
I turned to tell Iseult that we were there, and the words died in my throat. She was leaning against the trunk of a tree, her face ashen grey.
"I think I need some water," she muttered, and pushed off from the tree. I reached out to steady her, fortunately, because she pitched forward in a dead faint.
Where her skin touched mine, it was scorching hot.
—
I carried her into the house, slamming the door open with my shoulder. Her weight was light in my arms, and not because of my new muscle. I kicked books from the hammock, sparing only a moment of regret, and laid her in it. She was still limp, radiating dry heat. A sliver of white showed between her eyelids. I grabbed the nearest bowl and scrap of cloth and summoned water from the hollow roots that served as my copper-piping to the spring. Cool water on her brow did not wake her. I closed my eyes, and opened my senses.
Her aura of fire roared around me—I battled it for my own space, my own breath. I could not see what was wrong with her body beneath that bright turmoil, but I did not need to. This was no natural fever, any more than that was the natural state of her magic. I made myself as still as stone, an anchor in the fury. I reached out into the flames, and discovered that I could touch it with my own power, like a cast spell. This magic was spilling from her, taxing her body even as she lay there, and she seemed to have no control over it. But if I could bleed some of it away, it might ease the strain...
It was slow going, working with the seethe of it, but survival had taught me patience and painstaking care. Little by little I spun the power away like carded wool, drawing it up and releasing it safely in the air far above the banyan tree. Hopefully no seabirds chose to fly above us, or...well, they would make a good dinner. At last, her aura simmered closer to the boundaries of her skin, and I could see past its light to the energies of her body. The fissures of exhaustion were everywhere I looked. Her heart labored, though there was no flaw in it. I gave her soothing energy from the stillest place in my soul that I could find, but that was no cure. This was not an afternoon’s work.
I woke with a headache and a sore back; Iseult snored, cheek-down on the hammock. I poured spring water and chopped fruit by hand, and scooped the pot of spiced chickpeas I had left cooking over the coals onto spinach leaves, and still she slept. Finally, restless and stiff, I walked back out to the beach to gather her things. That proved to be no more than a sailor’s bag in the bottom of the boat. Itching for answers, I suppressed my scruples and opened it. A canteen, an unopened packet of hardtack, a compass in a cracked case, and a gilded blackpowder pistol with a pouch of cartridges. At the bottom, two flasks, one half-full of gin, the other full of a very strong-smelling brandy. I slowly buckled up the bag again. Were you looking for reassurance?
When I got back, I set the bag by the door and looked over to find Iseult awake, and draining the cup of water I had left. I fetched her another one, and a pile of fruit, and leaf-wrapped chickpeas. She said nothing, so I bit my tongue, until—
“If you try to feed me anything more, I will puke,” she said reproachfully.
I looked her squarely in the eye. “Tell me what’s happened to you.”
“Give me a minute,” she replied, rubbing her face. She had always been thin, but now I could see the sinews in her neck, and her cheekbones cast shadows. When she looked up again, she looked past me, at the clutter of the house: hangings of bright cloth and feathers decorating the knotted wood walls, shelves filled with glass pots and bottles, the dangling strings of the magical loom I had set up in the corner, the case of books and reed scrolls behind the faint shimmer of charms against damage.
"Did you make all of this?" she wondered, reaching up to touch an inlaid box in the nook behind the hammock.
I ducked my head. "All but the books. The island has everything I need—water, sand, wood, fiber."
"And your bloody great talent for artifice," she added, smiling. "So there was nothing here before you came?"
"There was an old hut in the clearing," I reflected. "And some poor soul's bones. I gave them a proper burial, and decided to build from this tree."
Iseult stared up at the woven timbers of the attic floor and gave a low whistle. "You could make a fortune as an artificer, Mirri. Sorry—Mir, not Mirri?"
There was that question, at last. At least it was gentle. I exhaled, trying to keep my voice steady. "Yes. It—It's been a long time coming. The past two years, I've been using herbs and infused magic to make myself—as you see me now."
"How long coming?" I couldn't look her in the eye, but there was nothing but soft curiosity in her voice.
"Since I was a child, in ways I didn't realize."
"Oh, Mir, why didn't you tell me?" I glanced up, and the warm sympathy in her crooked smile sent me reeling inwardly. "If it was important to you, I wouldn't have teased you. Well..." She looked doubtful. "I was such an ass's child," she sighed.
"It was my great and awful secret, at that age. I was too afraid to tell anyone." Most of all you, but not just for fear of teasing.
"I can't blame you, at the Academy. Two years ago," she mused. "You could have been sitting for your mastery exams."
"I was preparing to."
"Oh."
“Yes, I stayed that long.” I licked my lips, thinking about how to tell this. "They could accept a woman earning her Magus, with only another year of provisional study. They could not accept a tall dark woman who thought she was a man, and acted like it. I left before they threw me out of the gates." Or made sure I never walked out of them. I pushed away the memory of kneeling naked in an inn room, the edge of a knife at my throat.
Iseult muttered something vindictive in Couén. I knew her temper, and I could imagine what she would say to the whole story. But I didn’t want to blight the air.
"After that, I went to Port Tzel and bought every text on magic I could find. Writings from Namea and Inwende, Hanaren scrolls, books from Satyameva and Trinar—anything they didn't teach at the Academy. Then I came here. I asked permission from the headman of the Seoli people in the main isles," I added, not wanting her to think me a trespasser. "He was happy to grant it. Unlike me, the Seoli have enough sense not to build on the slopes of a living volcano."
Iseult grinned, settling back in the hammock. Her color looked much better.
"In another year or so, I mean to go back and make Magus as a foreign mage. Thaumaturgy, artifice, alchemy, everything." I had no doubt that I could pass those exams—under a fair judge. I sighed. "Or maybe I'll skip that, and just take a ship to Inwende or Madria."
"These days fewer people care about the Magus mark," Iseult agreed. "I don't have mine, of course, and I never wanted for coin." She stretched out, looking up at the sun-bright window. After a lethargic pause, she said, "For what it's worth, Mirembe, you've grown up to be very handsome."
I was glad that my dark skin masked the heat that flooded over my face. "I seem to remember that you think every man and woman you meet is handsome," I said, in a tone I hoped was repressive, and began to gather up the cups and plate.
"I always mean it truly. But you are something else. All this change from the kid I knew, just through time and the help of some herbs."
"And some flesh artifice," I told her, scrubbing the plate intently. Not enough, yet.
She winced. "Ow."
I shrugged, the weight of my pulled-back dreadlocks swinging. "It wasn't bad. I can ease pain, too."
"Yes, I noticed that. Thank you." She sat up slowly, rubbing her breastbone with one hand. Her inky hair slid over one shoulder. "Alright," she said, finally. "I'll tell you what's gone wrong with me."
I'd hoped my honesty would coax something from her, but I suddenly felt apprehensive. I set the cups down and sat on my workbench stool.
She took a deep breath. "You remember Magister Altaire?"
I sat up straighter, frowning. "I...never liked him much."
"Wish I hadn't. In our last novice year, he drew me into his circle of study. He flattered me, played to my pride and my hunger. I wanted to be better than everyone, even you, Mir—uncontested." She gave a mirthless laugh. "His words were sweet, but there was something rotting underneath. You see, what he wanted was a mage strong enough to bear spirit possession, but foolhardy enough to overlook the risks. It’s hard to find such a mage, unless they’re young.”
“Gods,” I murmured. Spirit bonding was outlawed in most lands, for good reason. Perhaps one in three even survived it. But...I had seen mages with a benign spirit bond before, and they were not so blinding as she was now.
“I went into that tower willingly. He was wrong, and the ritual circle failed. I was left bare to the aether, and what came to me was not a lesser spirit but a Greater One.”
I stared at her. All I could think to say was, “Why were you not consumed?”
“I don’t know.” Her hands gripped the hammock, pale-knuckled. “It possessed me, and then spat me back out, but I couldn’t escape its burning touch. I went mad, for a while, and that was when I disappeared. Ended up with a gang of highwaymen. I got my mind and my magic back in time, but… It pours power into me, until I leak.” Her dark eyes lifted to mine. “You saw what it’s doing to me, I think. It depends on what healer I ask, but I know I won’t make it to forty.”
I swallowed powerless anger; it tasted like ash. When I could trust my voice, I said, “I’m sorry.”
Iseult gave a short shake of her head, chewing on her lip. “Do you have anything to drink?” she wondered, in a sudden hopeful tone. “Or smoke?”
I blinked, still shaken. “I have coconut wine I was storing up. I’m sure there is something you can smoke in the jungle, but I haven’t made a study of it,” I added dryly.
“All this time on your hands,” she lamented, “And you haven’t done anything useful with it."
—
(Continued in Part Two)
(Continued in Part Two)
