Chapter 17

Edmund did not know how best to sit on ground he could not feel. “I don’t like it here.”

“Neither do I.” Ellí hunched with him beneath the Sign of Obscurity, the hem of her long dress draped so that it spilled across his shoes. “But it’s the only way for us to safely meet. I am still being watched.” The glittering dust she had thrown into the air drifted slowly down, seeming to crown her with a halo of stars.

Edmund kept his gaze fixed on Ellí’s face, dizzied by the churn of light and shade, ecstasy and terror, death and life around him. “Who is it that is watching you?”

Ellí’s blue eye glittered cold and bright. “Edmund, there is something I must tell you. Your friend Katherine attacked me in the castle, while I was in the middle of a spell.”

Edmund sat back, then forward again, since the trunk of the walnut tree he had been leaning against no longer seemed to be there. “Katherine attacked you?”

“I don’t quite remember how it happened,” said Ellí. “I was deep under the Sign of Communion, and then, all of a sudden, your friend Katherine was knocking me about the room.”

Edmund felt a shiver. “I don’t understand.” He blinked up at the pale and lonely sun. The daytime sky around it looked like a place for warmth to rise and die, empty without limit, and for one sickening instant he thought that up was down, and that if he did not seize onto Elli’s hand he would fall into it, up and away, falling forever and forever into the blue.

Ellí took Edmund’s reaching hand as though she understood exactly why he had flailed out for her. “Edmund, you might as well learn this now.” Her sweet, soft voice seemed to come from everywhere. “Ordinary folk don’t really understand people like you and me, and because they don’t understand, they suspect the worst of us.”

Edmund shook his head. “But, it’s Katherine. She saved my life, under the mountain of the Nethergrim. She’s my”—the next word stuck in his throat—“friend. My good friend.”

“Wizards don’t get to keep their friends from the world outside.” Ellí gestured outward from the grove where she and Edmund sat, across the open green of Moorvale to the place where Edmund’s neighbors stood all in a clump. “Most of us come to find early on that only others of our own kind can truly understand us. It’s not simply what we can do, it’s what we know. People like us, Edmund, have thought things that people like Katherine will never think. We know things she could never understand.”

Edmund turned to look at the folk on the green, but through the smearing effect of the spell they all looked the same to him. Indeed, the longer he looked, the less they looked like people at all.

“Everything you learn changes who you are,” said Ellí. “Everything you learn makes some things that you once held to be true seem untrue, and things that once seemed solid feel like the whispers of a fading dream.”

Edmund hesitated, unwilling to say what he thought. “That frightens me.”

Ellí turned a smile upon Edmund that seemed to have nothing in it save for loneliness and loss. “The saddest stories I have ever heard are those of wizards who tried to stay married to some merchant, or noble lady, or the like. It never ends well.”

Edmund reeled, his senses spinning from the warping visions of the spell all around him. “But I know Katherine. We’ve been friends for years. She would never attack someone for no good reason.”

“I’m sure she simply misunderstood what she saw.” Ellí’s smiled turned wry. “Still, I wish she wasn’t quite so violent. Does she always think with her fists like that?”

Edmund felt a looming presence behind him and shifted out of the way just in time. He looked up to see his brother, Geoffrey, walking nearby with his bow and quiver of arrows, calling his name, looking all around for him but unable to see that he was right beside him.

“This is our sorrow, Edmund, this is our burden.” Ellí shifted closer to Edmund to give Geoffrey a clear path to pass on by. “To help them, we must become unlike them. To save them, we must become something that they will not trust. Every time I cast this spell, I see that truth more clearly. That is its cost, by the way. This spell shows me how different I am from other people.”

A sick, strange feeling ran through Edmund. He saw his little brother and knew who he was, knew the face he had been looking at for as long as he could remember, but at the same time he saw a stranger, just a snub-nosed, freckled kid wandering at the edge of the woods. Geoffrey called his name again, then passed by toward the green, and he felt for a moment as though he could watch him walk on out of sight and not care one bit if he ever saw him again.

“I am sorry.” Ellí drew her long hair behind her ears. “Not everyone with the talent for magic keeps on the path. There are many reasons to leave it. Are you and Katherine . . . very good friends?”

Edmund sighed. “Not as good as I wanted us to be.” He turned to Ellí. “Do you get lonely?”

“Sometimes.” Ellí picked up Edmund’s wax tablet, on which he had recorded what he had found in the tomb under Wishing Hill. “But what we do is worth doing, don’t you think?”

Edmund felt as though the sun were growing warmer again. “We’re fighting to keep the world safe from harm.” He looked to Ellí. “Even if people don’t understand or like us, it’s still right to help them.”

Ellí’s smile lost its tinge of sorrow. “When I think about it like that, I feel less lonely.”

“So do I,” said Edmund. “And at least folk like you and me can understand each other.”

“As no one else could.” Ellí set the tablet in her lap. She read what was written there, and brightened. “Edmund, this is wonderful! This is it—the spell that stopped the Skeleth all those centuries ago. You’ve set it all down here as clear as day.”

Edmund felt a glow spreading out from within.

“The Sign of Perception, yes, yes, of course.” Ellí traced her finger on the tablet. “The Pillar of Inversion, the Sign of Closing . . . yes. Edmund, it’s perfect.”

“Something about it still bothers me, though.” Edmund dug the brooch from his sack. “I found this on the dead queen in the tomb. See those words around the rim?”

Ellí read the words inscribed upon the brooch. “I am the weapon that wounds the wielder. I am the defense that is no defense at all. I am triumph in surrender. I am that which, by being given, is gained.”

She flipped the brooch over and read the back. “For my beloved sister.” She stared at it awhile, then shook her head. “No, that’s nonsense, just some Ahidhan claptrap.” She put it back in Edmund’s hands.

Edmund felt across the brooch with his finger. “If it didn’t matter, then why was it there?”

“Edmund, you have come far with magic on your own, but now you should learn something of its nature,” said Ellí. “What we call magic is divided into three paths, Dhrakal, Eredh, and Ahidhan.”

Edmund raised his eyebrows. “There are different kinds of magic?”

“Three kinds,” said Ellí. “Three paths of magic, each one founded by one of three sister queens—but you must understand, Edmund, that the three paths are not equal. As my teacher used to say: one path is true, one is false, and the third path is useless.”

Edmund leaned closer. Such was his excitement at his first proper lesson, that even the dizzying visions of Ellí’s spell fell away beneath his notice.

“The first path is the one we walk,” said Ellí. “That path is called Dhrakal in the old Dhanic tongue, and it is the one that not only allows its students to see into the true nature of the world, but gives them the power to alter its rules to suit their desires. That is what ordinary folk mean when they say we cast a spell. We can do it because we understand the laws that govern the world, the first and most important being the Law of Balance.”

“Everything has a cost.” Edmund leapt ahead of Ellí’s words, trying to show that he knew at least a little. “You can have what you want, but you must always pay for it.”

Ellí nodded. “Yes, very good. You have already met the founder of Dhrakal, in a manner of speaking. In fact, you are the first person to see her in centuries.”

Edmund felt a thrill. “The queen under the tower!”

“The tower you found was called the Tower of the Queen of the Wheels, and as you might guess, the Wheels are the five Wheels of magic—Substance, Essence, Thought, Change and Form.” The dust had descended far enough that it now glittered all about Ellí’s shoulders. “So it is written, that queen preserved the truest and most powerful of the ancient arts, and when a wizard today casts a spell, he follows down the road she made.”

“Then what about the other two?” said Edmund. “The Paelandabok talks about three kings and three queens.”

“The other two founded the other paths, the false one and the useless one,” said Ellí. “The false one is called Eredh. They are seers, stargazers and makers of pacts, those who say they can pronounce the doom of fate. That was the queen who made the great mistake, the queen who brought the Skeleth into the world to serve her husband, King Childeric, in his war. If that’s not proof that their way is false and dangerous, I don’t know what is.”

Edmund looked down at the brooch in his lap. “You said this had to do with Ahidhan, the third path.”

“The useless one,” said Ellí. “We true wizards understand that everything is in balance, that light needs darkness, that order and chaos are two sides of a single coin. The followers of the third path, the witches of Ahidhan, believe that there are things for which there is no cost, changes you can make without paying for them.”

“What sort of things?”

Ellí shrugged. “I don’t know, since I’ve never met one. My teacher says that all they do is go around pouring smelly potions down the throats of sick people, and nursing sheep, and things like that. She says that they’re deluded and their magic is useless, and that the sick people were either going to get well or die on their own.”

Edmund read the riddle once again. I am that which, by being given, is gained. A meaning teased his mind, then danced away uncaught.

“Come, then.” Ellí nudged him. “When you asked me to teach you, I doubt you only wanted lessons on history and theory.”

Edmund looked up at Ellí. “What do you mean?”

“I mean that I would like to teach you a real spell.” Ellí set down the tablet between them, turning it facedown. “That’s what you want, isn’t it?”

Edmund clasped his hands and had to resist rubbing them together. “Yes!”

“Good. I’m going to teach you how to do what I did to you out on the moors,” said Ellí. “I’m going to show you how we wizards defend ourselves against people who raise weapons against us.”