Princess of the Sword

  But now?

  Mhorghain, love, come and sit with me.

  Morgan turned around, all the way around herself in surprise until she stood facing the fire. And there, wrapped in a faint glow of elven glamour, with her arms open and beckoning, sat her mother.

  Morgan caught her breath at the sight. She’d seen her in dreams and in a portrait that hung in her grandfather’s palace, but now there she sat, as if she truly lived and breathed.

  Morgan would have moved, but she couldn’t. All she could do was look at her mother and feel herself be wrapped in a sensation she hadn’t expected. She was too startled to have the wit to identify it, but it wasn’t unpleasant. On the contrary, it was a feeling that sank into her heart and eased the fear there. Sarait of Tòrr Dòrainn was beautiful, serene, and wore such an expression of love that Morgan found her own eyes beginning to burn. If she could have even a part of what her mother radiated so effortlessly, she might have the courage to press on.

  She took a step forward, rubbing her eyes to ease them, only to realize with a start that her mother was gone.

  Now, in her place in front of the fire, sat two men who pored over spells and spoke in quiet tones. Miach lifted his head and looked for her suddenly. He smiled, a smile full of love that was very reminiscent of her mother’s, then turned back to his business.

  Morgan stepped backward and leaned against chilled stone, trying to regain her balance. She fully expected to be assaulted by a feeling of bereavement, but instead, what she had seen in her mother’s smile washed over her again. It wasn’t at all diminished by the sight of her brother and her love searching desperately for a way to save their lives and their land.

  She stood there in the shadows and wondered, absently, if her mother had actually done what she’d just seen and heard, if she’d drawn her into her arms, held her close, kept her safe.

  She let out a shuddering breath. Perhaps it didn’t matter if it was dream or memory. Perhaps it was enough to know there were others, seen and unseen, who loved her and believed she could do things that seemed impossibly difficult.

  And perhaps she didn’t need her mother’s power or her father’s skill. Perhaps Miach had it aright. All she needed was her own courage and the right spell.

  She took that thought and held on to it as she started to pace again. This time, the familiarity of the chamber didn’t trouble her as much. She made the circuit a handful of times more, then came to a stop near the fire. Miach rose, fetched a chair, and set it next to his. He sat down with her and ran his hand over her braid.

  “How are you?”

  “Better now.”

  He smiled, then took her hand and held it in both his own as he turned back to the spells laid in front of him. Morgan leaned forward and looked, but not for long. The spell of opening she’d written for Soilléir was laying there atop the rest.

  Keir looked up. “You remembered all this?”

  “Aye,” she said, “but I’m not sure if the order is right.”

  “I think this is almost exactly what he used,” Keir said, sitting back. “You have a good memory, sister. Much better than father’s was. I don’t know that he could have written this again without aid.”

  “Are you telling me your father wrote things down on his arm and pulled his sleeve up as needed?” Miach asked with a smile.

  “Nothing so clever, I assure you,” Keir said with a sigh. “He was, though, wont to jot things down in various places to jog his memory. The notes Rùnach found in the margins of books at Buidseachd are a good example of it.”

  “But I’ve heard he never wrote things down in their entirety,” Miach said slowly. “Except for the book that no longer exists.”

  “That is true,” Keir agreed. “He wouldn’t have wanted any other mage to have copied what he’d done. But ’tis also true that his spells were generally so complicated that he couldn’t remember them perfectly. Hence the jotting down of notes in margins.”

  Morgan was surprised by that, though she was certainly not one to judge. She couldn’t remember her father casting any sort of spell, but perhaps her mother had protected her from it. She watched Miach think about something for a moment, then frown.

  “So, if he were to make a substantial piece of magic, would he have taken notes with him?” Miach asked. “Or would he have gone to the spot ahead of the moment and left something there?”

  “If it was a single spell he stood to cast, he wouldn’t have needed anything,” Keir said. “More than one spell and he might have taken something with him, but he would have incinerated it the moment the spell was begun. Of course, that doesn’t cover the things he would have left behind.”

  Miach lifted an eyebrow. “And what would those have been?”

  “Some visible mark that he’d been there,” Keir said with a shrug. “His name, a word, a piece of the spell. A very small piece, mind you. Just enough to let the world know he had been there with his fearsome self and his wonderful magic. Why do you ask?”

  “I was just curious.”

  “I imagine, lad, that curiosity lands you in spots of trouble now and again.”

  “Ah, but that trouble always yields interesting things.”

  Keir laughed. “I imagine it does.”

  Morgan sat back and listened to them veer off into topics that had nothing at all to do with the spells in front of them but a great deal to do with the different sorts of trouble they’d gotten themselves into over the course of their lives. She listened for a bit and smiled at the tales, grateful for the distraction from more serious things.

  She realized at some point during that discussion that the peace she’d felt before was still surrounding her, as if it had been a quiet spell of elven glamour cast by someone who loved her. The contrast between that and the spells of evil that sat on the table was startling, but she found that she could tolerate it more easily now. She looked at Miach as he laughed at something her brother said and wondered if he had that same sort of tranquility somewhere deep inside him, a peace that not even the horrors of Lothar’s dungeon could touch.

  She suspected so.

  The conversation soon turned to things less magical, settling finally on famous battles in the past. Keir, despite his having been trapped in Ceangail for years, was apparently a serious student of the history of the Nine Kingdoms. She suspected that he knew many of the players he mentioned, just as Miach did. She listened for a bit, then looked at the spell in front of her, wishing quite desperately that it would simply up and reveal its secrets.

  The longer she stared at it, the more the words began to move on the page. She pulled Mehar’s knife out of her boot and fingered the hilt, just to keep herself where she was and not lost in some horrible forest of Olc where what sun that shone down was cold and flat. It was a pity that there was no way to fight magic with a blade. It would have made it so much more tolerable.

  She watched her hand as it reached for the quill and ink that was sitting on the edge of the table. She slowly turned the top sheaf over, then sat down on the floor and began to rearrange the words she could still see swimming in front of her eyes in a less magical pattern.

  She tried first to put them in precise, disciplined columns, but they didn’t seem to care for that. She arranged them then in rows that marched across the page with precision and order. That made the words slightly less disgusting, but no less eager to be managed.

  She considered all the battle plans she had studied during her time at Gobhann, plans for sieges successfully mounted and wars successfully won. Her preferred route was to simply slip over the wall in disguise and threaten the lord with death until he opened the front gate to her fellows, at which point she would slip back into the background lest the lord recognize her and be wary of her the next time. She’d done it more than once, with great success. It wasn’t, however, a very showy, grandiose way to go about it. If she were going to lay siege to a keep and make certain everyone for miles knew she’d done it, she would have gone about it far di
fferently.

  She thought back to a book she’d read in Weger’s gathering hall more than once, a tome written by Gleac of Gairn, the general who had stopped the Eastern Ravages hundreds of years ago. She’d liked his writings partly because he’d had a very wry sense of humor and partly because he’d been a brilliant tactician.

  She thought back to a particular chapter in that same book where Gleac had presented a score of battle plans suited to the ego of the commander in charge. She’d found it to be ridiculous at the time, but over her years as a mercenary, she’d begun to see the truth—and the humor—of it. Not that she’d allowed her ego to become involved in what she was about, but she’d seen scores of other lads do so.

  She now chose one of the more flamboyant plans of assault that came to her and began to arrange the words of her father’s spell in the order that Gleac would have moved his men. She flipped the sheaf over a time or two to study the words of the spell to make sure she wasn’t missing anything. When she was finished, she blew on the ink to dry it, then set the sheaf on the ground.

  And her writing, words that had come from her hand, began to glow with a red light that had nothing to do with the fire in front of her.

  She leapt to her feet, overturning her chair as a result, and stared down at the sheaf on the floor in horror. She heard other chairs scrape as they were pushed back, then felt Miach’s hand on her arm. She looked at him, then at Keir. Both of them were staring down at what she’d done with openmouthed astonishment.

  “What,” Keir asked in a garbled tone, “have you done?”

  “I don’t know,” she said, wrapping her arms around herself and pricking herself with the quill. She threw it down on the floor next to her arranged spell, then hugged herself again. “I don’t know.”

  Miach stared at the spell for a moment or two, stroking his chin thoughtfully. Then he looked at Keir.

  “Fetch a bottle of wine, my lord.”

  “But—”

  “A bottle,” Miach said, shooting Keir a look. “Unopened.”

  Keir looked positively green, but he nodded just the same and walked away. Morgan watched him go, then shivered.

  “What have I done?”

  He turned her to him and put his arms around her, pulling her close. “I’ll tell you when I’m certain of it. First, tell me how you knew to arrange those words that way.”

  “I didn’t know anything,” she said, fighting the urge to shiver. “I was just trying to distract myself. Magic bothers me, as you know.”

  His laugh was nothing but the slightest of huffs. “An understatement, but I’ll let it stand. Go on.”

  “Do you remember Gleac of Gairn?” she asked.

  “Aye. He was the captain of Nicholas of Diarmailt’s armies at one time.”

  She felt as if someone had just kicked her in the stomach. It took her a moment or two before she could catch her breath. “Is that so?”

  “I thought you’d find that interesting,” he said, sounding as if he smiled. “He was a brilliant soldier, General Gleac. Still is, I daresay. But I’m pulling you away from what you wanted to say. What about him?”

  “I was considering his schemes for mounting sieges. I thought that it might ease my mind to take a spell from a pompous mage and try to wrestle it into a pattern created by a very showy soldier.” She paused. “It was just for sport.”

  “Interesting sport.”

  She pulled back far enough to look at him. “The words are glowing, Miach.”

  “So they are, love.” He tucked a lock of hair behind her ear. “Some spells do that, given the right circumstances. Their perfect order. A powerful mage. A powerful mage writing a spell down in its perfect order.”

  She took a deep breath. It had to have been simple coincidence. She was not a powerful mage and that spell had been arranged thus simply as an amusement.

  “I was just curious, you know.”

  “Dangerous,” he said with a smile.

  “You’ve corrupted me.”

  He smiled. “I imagine I have. At least now we have each other to add a bit of protection whilst curiosity is satisfied.”

  She looked into his very pale eyes. “Aye, so we do.”

  “Would you do me a favor?” he asked seriously. “I vow I’ll return it.”

  She looked at him for a moment in silence, then sighed. “I know what you want. I won’t go again without telling you.”

  “I won’t either.”

  “Vow it.”

  He took her left wrist, put his fingers over the crown of Neroche engraved on the inside there, then met her eyes. “I vow it. Now, ’tis your turn.”

  She made the same vow to him, had another quick embrace for her trouble, then stepped away as Keir came back to the fire with a bottle in his hand. He handed it to Miach.

  “Well?”

  Miach took the bottle and set it on the floor. He reached down for the spell, then set it aside on the table. He considered for another moment or two, then looked at Morgan.

  “Want to try?”

  She nodded, though she had no desire at all to attempt it. But a coward, she wasn’t. “Won’t everyone here feel my magic?”

  “Not after I weave Sosar’s spell of concealment over us.”

  Morgan watched him do so, smiled at Keir’s cursing, then realized there was nothing else to use to delay the unpleasant. She looked up at Miach. “The spell has its final pattern, but how is it woven, do you suppose?”

  “If you were a soldierish sort, how would you use those words if they were your men?”

  She blew out her breath. She supposed a spell of opening was the same no matter if one wanted to open a keep or a bottle of wine. She thought about it for a moment or two, then began to use the words of the spell as she might have soldiers on the field of battle. She paused, then spoke the last word.

  The cork flew out of the bottle so hard, the bottle shattered and wine gushed everywhere.

  “Bloody hell,” Keir said, leaping out of the way.

  Morgan managed to get her boots out of the way of the flood, but she managed nothing else besides finding her chair and sitting down on it. It was Keir who mopped and Miach who retrieved broken glass and put it into a bucket for rubbish.

  Once the floor was clean, Miach drew up a chair next to hers and collapsed into it.

  “Well,” he said.

  “Well, indeed,” she said weakly.

  “Is there a stricture for that?”

  “I don’t think so, but I read the book in Weger’s library. Does that count?”

  “Cheeky wench,” he said as he reached out to tug gently on her braid. He rubbed his hand over her back for a moment or two, then took her hand. “Are you game to give something else a go?”

  “Always,” she said weakly.

  Miach fished Sarait’s letter out of the pile and handed it to her. “I wonder what would happen if you did your same bit of rearranging with this?”

  Keir leaned forward intently. “But that spell isn’t complete.”

  “Let’s see what Morgan—Mhorghain, I should say—can do with it. We might see what’s missing if we have the proper pattern for the rest.”

  Morgan felt time begin to march on very oddly. She was Morgan; she was Mhorghain. She was taking magic and trying to bend it into strictures and structures she’d found in a place where no magic was possible. She was who she had been and who she had become.

  She felt quite ill, actually.

  Miach took her hand and squeezed it. “We can rest a bit, if you like.”

  She looked at him. It took her a moment before she could see him. “Nay, I am well,” she croaked. “I’m not afraid.”

  “Of course you aren’t.”

  But he didn’t release her hand and she didn’t pull away. She took several deep, steadying breaths, then waited until Keir had pushed the table in front of her and put a clean sheaf of paper out. He set their mother’s letter to the side where she could see it, put the quill in her hand, then sat back down
and waited, silently.

  Morgan looked at the words there, then considered for quite a while. She called to mind Gleac’s most brazen strategy and considered its implementation. Men stationed themselves at the four corners of a keep, distracting as others slithered over the walls and took over those same four guard towers from the inside, and they waited whilst yet another team of more skilled mercenaries took up the same positions just inside the great hall, each group pressing inward until the lord of the hall was ringed about in his own keep by lads who were not his. The final blow came from the commander who merely walked through the front gate and into the hall without resistance, either taking the lord prisoner, or slaying him on the spot. Not quick, but exceptionally showy, leaving the lord in question no doubt as to who had been behind the attack.

  Morgan looked at the words written in her mother’s hand, then arranged them in the same way, from the edge inward, layer upon layer, gathering the spell’s power as it closed about the center spot. She wrote the last word she found in her mother’s hand as she stood in front of that imaginary lord—but there was no killing blow.

  But the final word was not there on the missive.

  She looked at Miach and Keir. “I think all we lack is the last word.”

  Keir nodded. “Mother had thought so even at the time. I think she hoped Father would close his own spell, or give away the last piece of the puzzle. For all I know he did, but I certainly didn’t hear it.” He paused. “I don’t even think he would have written it in his book, though I could be wrong. I think he had been planning to open the well for quite some time, so perhaps he did write down what he intended to use. It doesn’t matter, though, does it, since we don’t have the book.”

  Morgan watched Miach stare thoughtfully at the spell. He ran his fingers over words that, thankfully, didn’t glow, then sat back and looked at Keir.

  “Tell me again about how your father would leave his mark.”

  “As I said, it would be his name, or a bit . . .” Keir’s face was suddenly ashen. “A bit of the spell.”