SWORD AND SORCERESS XVI, page 27
"And how do you feel about Power?" Sarras asked.
"It was sort of fun while I had it," Melisande said. "Stephen had been promising to fix the leak in the kitchen sink for two months, but he didn't do a thing about it until this morning, when I made the drops that were leaking into the sink start singing."
"Do you think that was a legitimate use of Power?" Sarras asked.
"It was pretty frivolous," Melisande admitted, "more of a prank than anything else. I admit I was trying to force Stephen to use his Power, to get him ready for his Ordeal, but he could have gone on ignoring the leak— the singing was harmless and not very loud. I didn't want to disturb our neighbors."
"And if Stephen hadn't fixed the problem?"
"I would have waited until he went off to his workroom and fixed it myself."
"Or had Laurel do it?"
"It was my spell; it was my responsibility. That's why I started with something small, most of which already existed."
"Good enough. I can see why Stephen once used the word salt when telling us about you. You have a stability he lacks, and without it he would probably spoil like month-old beef." Sarras rose, went to the altar, and opened the Shield Box. She removed a cup from it and handed it to Melisande. "Hold this."
Melisande took it warily. It was a cylinder of hammered silver with a pattern of grapes and vines incised into it, about four inches tall and two inches in diameter. It felt pleasantly warm in her hands, like sunlight shining on them.
"What do you feel when you hold that?" Sarras asked.
"Love." Melisande said the first word that came into her head. "And light—it's as if all the light in the Universe flows through this cup."
Sarras nodded silently and lifted the cup from Melisande’s hands, but Melisande could still feel its warmth.
"Alyssa?" Alyssa put out her hands eagerly, and Sarras gently set the cup into them. Alyssa held it reverently, obviously basking in its energy. After a few moments she rose and returned it to the Shield Box.
"Thank you, Lady," she said.
"You are welcome," Sarras replied. She handed Alyssa the key from her belt. "You can take the Blade back now, and would you see if Laurel has returned yet, please."
Alyssa nodded and left the room, closing the door behind her.
"Do you know what that was, Melisande?" Sarras asked.
"A kiddush cup," Melisande began, "used by the Jews for wine at festivals . . . but that particular cup," she looked up at the ordinary-looking woman in front of her and realized what she was seeing. "You're a Guardian,
too, aren't you?" Sarras nodded, and Melisande finished, "and that's the Grail."
"And you've been sitting unnoticed in Stephen's shadow all this time." Sarras shook her head. "Didn't any of his professors ever meet you?"
Melisande shook her head. "Married student housing doesn't give much room to entertain, and I never went to the receptions. Too many people in a room at once make me nervous; it gets so noisy."
"Student wife activities?"
"I used to go to them, when we first came here," Melisande said, "but I haven't been in years. They're all in their late teens and early twenties, and I'm twenty-five. We just don't have much to say to each other anymore."
Sarras smiled. "Well, I think we'll be able to give you something more constructive to do from now on." There was a tap at the door. "Come in."
Laurel entered alone. "Lord Logas has the link stones, Lady," she reported. "And the rest was Stephen, making a present for Melisande. He's going to give it to her at dinner tonight. It's a sculpture, a bust of her."
"That would explain quite a bit," Sarras said. "Did he happen to mention how long he's been working on this project?"
"Three weeks."
"Three weeks that was supposed to be study time," sighed Melisande.
"And three weeks' worth of magical energy," added Laurel. "Just wait until you see it."
"I think I'd like that," Sarras said.
"You are welcome to join us for dinner, Lady," Melisande said, "if you don't mind eating off a plate balanced on your lap."
"That sounds like fun," Sarras said. "Thank you, Melisande; I would be delighted to join you for dinner."
She turned to Laurel. "Stand there." She pointed to a spot on the floor, and Laurel positioned herself there. "Melisande, you stand here," she said, pushing Melisande
gently into position. "I'm going to put a shield on you myself, and I'm going to link it to Laurel's. And, Laurel, if anything tries to get across this shield, I want to hear about it immediately." Laurel nodded. Sarras walked around the two of them in a figure-eight pattern, chanting what Melisande was surprised to recognize as a very strong shield spell indeed. "That should do it," Sarras said. "I think it's safe for you to leave this room now, Melisande."
"That's a good thing," Melisande said. "I have to go make dinner."
"What about the Spouse's Ordeal?" Laurel asked.
"We'll talk about it tonight," Sarras replied.
Melisande spent the afternoon cleaning and cooking, but she found that by dinnertime she was looking forward to the meal, instead of feeling frazzled and exhausted. She even found time for a quick shower and a change of clothing.
Stephen came in twenty minutes before dinnertime, carrying a package, which he set carefully on the floor beside the sofa. Melisande greeted him with a kiss on the cheek and, wiping small flecks of marble from her lips, suggested that he shower before dinner.
"Laurel has seen me look worse," he assured her.
"I don't doubt it, but Lady Sarras is joining us."
"Lady Sarras! Laurel's dragging my advisors into this already?" Stephen gasped. "It's only been a day!"
"Just go shower, all right?"
Stephen was out of the shower in five minutes, which gave Laurel just time to use it when she dashed in ten minutes before dinnertime.
"Cutting it close, aren't you?" Melisande remarked. "What did you do, stop by to see Edward?"
Laurel blushed as she ran for the bathroom, while Melisande found a clean robe in Laurel's pack and passed it in when the water stopped running.
By the time Lady Sarras arrived, everyone was clean, properly dressed, and ready for dinner. After general
talk over what Lady Sarras proclaimed to be an excellent meal, she said, "I've heard so much about your present for Melisande, Stephen, that I really feel I must see it."
Stephen looked profoundly embarrassed, but he picked up the box and handed it to Melisande. With some difficulty—is this thing actually made of marble?— Melisande lifted it out of the box. Laurel's description hadn't done it justice, not that Laurel had tried very hard to describe it. It was recognizably Melisande, but not the self she saw when she looked in the mirror. The face had a calm serenity Melisande had never thought of herself as possessing, and the smile looked almost angelic.
"It's beautiful, Stephen," she said, not knowing that the smile she gave him was the same as the one on the bust, "but I think it's much more beautiful than I really am."
"No," Stephen said positively. "It's a perfect likeness. It's exactly the way I see you." He gave a small, rueful smile. "When you're not feeling trapped, that is."
She caught her breath, and then she looked squarely at him, her disbelief suddenly tinged with suspicion. "You mean . . . you really know? You're not simply saying that because you think I might want to hear it?"
"If he didn't know before, he does now," Sarras interjected. The better artists become far more observant of their subjects in the process. That's one reason we look for them." She ran a practiced hand over the bust, keeping an inch away from physical contact with it. "This is indeed you, and it is indeed how he sees you. And now you will probably appear this way so often that others will see it, too. Do you have any idea, Stephen, what you've done here?"
"A special project for my sculpture class and a present for my wife."
"Does the phrase 'Law of Similarity' ring any bells?" Laurel asked pointedly.
"You make it sound like I'm making voodoo dolls," Stephen said. "Don't be such a brat."
"I'm afraid she's making a valid observation," Sarras said. "There is a great deal of magical energy in this." She smiled at him. "Obviously, you are ready for your Senior Ordeal."
Stephen opened his mouth to protest, but she continued before he got the chance. "Your Ordeal will begin at Terce one week from today, simultaneously with your wife's Spouse's Ordeal. Lord Logas and Lady Alyssa will judge yours; Laurel and I will judge Melisande's."
"But I can't be ready by then!" Stephen protested. "And you can't force Melisande to do it."
"Melisande has already started the process," Sarras informed him. "Alyssa and I examined her this afternoon, and we were quite impressed by how much she's learned from you. I expect both of you to do very well next week." She stood up. "Melisande, thank you for a lovely evening. Laurel, have her review Junior level and work on Senior; she got halfway through Junior today. Stephen, I'll see you for tutorial at Nones tomorrow; we should do a bit of review before your Ordeal—and I think," she said, looking again admiringly at the statue, "you'll find its direction interesting. Good night, all." She was out the door before any of them could stop staring.
Stephen and Laurel turned to Melisande. "Halfway through Junior Ordeal?" they said in unison.
"What did you do?" Stephen asked.
"Mostly we just talked about all of your books that I read," Melisande said. "And she had me hold a cup and tell her what I felt."
Laurel's eyes were wide. "She let you hold the—the cup?"
Melisande nodded. "Haven't either of you ever—?"
Laurel shook her head. "I don't rate that high in Sensitivity."
"What are you talking about?" Stephen asked.
"If Sarras wants you to know," Laurel informed him, "she'll tell you." She looked at Melisande. "I think I
have just enough energy left to do the dishes. Why don't you two just go to bed?"
"Thanks, Laurel," Melisande said. "We'll do that."
She was in bed in ten minutes, four of which had been spent clearing a place for the bust on her dresser so she could lie in bed and look at it.
Stephen joined her a few minutes later. "It really is beautiful, Stephen," she said, rolling over to give him a hug. "Thank you very much."
"You're not mad about 'the waste of study time'?"
"That wasn't a waste of study time."
"You're thinking about what Sarras said about magical energy," he said, "but she's wrong. It wasn't magical energy. It was love."
"I know." Melisande turned out the light and smiled into the darkness, remembering a room of stone and a cup of silver. "But what makes you think that magical energy and love are different things?"
WEAVING SPELLS
Lawrence Watt-Evans
Lawrence Watt-Evans is the author of more than two dozen books and over a hundred short stories: science fiction, fantasy, horror, humor, etc. He won a Hugo for his story "Why I Left Harry's Ail-Night Hamburgers."
He was president of the Horror Writers of America from 1994 to 1996; has done comic books for Marvel, Dark Horse, and TeknoComix; and "meddled in various other things better left alone."
He's been happily married for more than twenty years— which in these days is close enough to fantasy for all too many people—and has two children and a cat.
His most recent novel is Touched By The Gods. This is his first appearance in Sword and Sorceress, although his work has previously appeared in Marion Zimmer Bradley's FANTASY Magazine.
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 to-
morrow!" 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 greatgrandfather'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.
