There was a long, long pause. Then Olga pushed her hair back and held out both hands. What looked like a simple clod of the reddish earth detached itself from the surface of the pit and hopped like a toad, straight through the surface of the bubble and into Olga’s hands. She held it up to her face, smiling, as if she were holding a kitten. “I can make the link,” she told Blade. “No need to worry. The air ones are coming now.”
There was a pattering and a pinging from all over the outside of the bubble and a frothy rushing-feeling from underneath where they all sat. Little bright bits like snowflakes came swirling in under the umbrella, and from the sides and bottom of the pit, and attached themselves to the outer surface of the sphere like iron filings clinging to a magnet. In seconds there was a thick layer of them all around, whitish and shining. They all felt they were inside a snowdrift. The light was dim and pinkish blue. But it was noticeably easier to breathe.
“Thank you,” Ruskin said devoutly. “Tell them thank you, Olga.” His face suddenly streamed with sweat, and sweat dripped in the plaits of his beard. They all looked at him and looked away quickly, realizing that being without air was a dwarf’s most hideous nightmare. Ruskin had been living in that nightmare until this moment.
As frozen air elementals continued to patter onto the outside of the sphere, and the earth clod sat between Olga’s hands exuding smug excitement, Blade turned to Claudia. “What exactly does your jinx do?”
Claudia spread her thin olive palms out expressively. “This! It messes everything up. Twists it. Everything, particularly magic. It’s at its very worst when I travel, but it’s terribly ingenious, too, so that I can’t guard against it. Something different happens every time. I’ve had snowstorms in summer and landslides and flash floods and things struck by lightning. People go to the wrong place to meet me, or we miss the supply cart, or the road subsides and we have to go around it. Or the horses go lame or trees fall across the track or, or … I’ll tell you, coming to the University, I lost our map—I think ants ate it!—and we went miles out of our way to the east, until the road just ended in a cliff. So we turned back. The legionaries said they’d try to get me back to Condita—they’d gone all grim and sarcastic, the way people do after a taste of my jinx—but instead we blundered into a wet forest full of alligators and went north avoiding that. And then it rained and rained, and when the rain stopped, we saw the University city on the horizon. So we went there. Luckily Titus had made us set off in plenty of time. He always does these days. And I did get there in the end, because that’s the way it works.”
“Let’s get this straight,” said Blade. “You weren’t using magic to travel with, were you?”
“Of course not,” said Claudia. “The legionaries would have hated it.”
“Perhaps she should have been,” Kit suggested. “It sounds like a powerful translocation talent that’s got bent out of shape somehow.”
“It does,” Blade agreed thoughtfully. “And when she does put magic consciously with traveling, it brings us to another planet. It’s strong all right.”
“But other magic things go wrong, too,” Claudia pointed out.
“Well, they would,” Blade explained. “Everyone has one or maybe two major abilities. Olga’s is talking to things I can’t even see, for instance. And if the major talent gets deformed somehow, all the rest goes wrong, too.”
Olga, with her face pink in the strange shadowy light, looked at Lukin and murmured, “That explains my monsters.”
Blade sat with his knees up, chin in hands, elbows on bony knees, staring thoughtfully at Claudia. She looked miserably away from him. “Sorry,” Blade said. “You’ve realized, have you? It’s your feelings that are deforming your magic.”
“I refuse,” Claudia said, with her head bent. “I refuse utterly to believe that Wermacht was right!”
“I don’t know what Wermacht said,” said Blade. “But it’s an awful pity. You feel to me as if you ought to be as strong as Querida really. Let me think—I’ve been to Condita lots of times, but I only ever met you there once. You must have been away a lot.”
Claudia nodded. “I expect I was away in the Marshes with my mother. She insisted I spent half my time with her.”
“And which did you like best, the Empire or the Marshes?” Blade asked her.
Claudia began to speak. “I—” she said, and then put both hands to her face and stopped. “I always tried to kid myself,” she began again, “that I liked both of them equally. But now that it seems important to admit it, I know I hated both of them equally. I mean, I’m fond of Mother, or I would be if she ever stopped grumbling, and I adore Titus, but when I’m in the Marshes, everyone and everything make it plain to me that I’m Empire born and don’t fit, and when I’m in the Empire, it’s worse, because they think of me as dirty Marshwoman—scum, marsh slime, all that. Are you trying to make me admit that my jinx is because I’m a half-breed?’ There were tears in her eyes, big and shiny and greenish in the peculiar snowdrift light.
Blade shook his head emphatically. “No, no, no. Mixes usually make stronger magic. Look at Kit and Elda: They’re lion, eagle, human, and cat. No, what I’m getting at is that you’ve spent most of your life shuttling between two places you hated, and you probably have a fiercely strong translocation talent, anyway, so of course it went wrong. It was your way of kicking and screaming as they dragged you back and forth.”
The tears in Claudia’s eyes spilled out and rolled down her narrow cheeks. “Of course that’s what it is! I should have seen. But—what do I do about it?”
“Forget your childhood. It’s over,” said Blade. “You can be a wizard now and go anywhere and do anything you want.”
Claudia stared at him, still with her hands to her tear-marked cheeks. A slow smile of relief began to spread on what could be seen of her face. “Oh!” she said, and took a deep breath of the chilly, heady new air. As she did so, Blade gave Kit a slight nod. Kit’s mighty talons reached out and tweaked.
“Got it,” he said, whisking something invisible away through the snowy side of the sphere. “One jinx gone. One to go.”
“I know all about mine,” Lukin said defensively. “Mine happens because I don’t want to be a king. When I think about ruling, I just want to dig myself a deep pit and stay in it. So it’s quite obvious and natural that whenever I do magic, I make a hole in something. There’s nothing anyone can do about that.”
Felim had listened appreciatively as Blade coaxed Claudia’s jinx out of her. Now he leaned forward and joined in. “Why do you not want to be a king?” he asked. “This continues to puzzle me, for I know that in my case I would far rather be a wizard, but I know that you have another kind of mind that spreads wider than a wish to sit and study spells.”
Lukin blinked a bit. He thought. “You have to be so strict if you’re a king,” he said at last, rather fretfully. “Everything has to be just so, because you have to set an example, and there’s no money—and by the time I’d get to be king, there’ll be even less money—and we can’t ever seem to heat the castle, and nothing ever really goes right because the tours laid the kingdom to waste, and—”
“Hang on,” said Blade. “You’re talking about the way things are, in Luteria, and the way your father behaves, not about being a king. Just because your father’s the gloomiest man I know, it doesn’t follow that you have to be.”
“Or mismanage money the way he does,” added Kit.
Ruskin wh
o, as a dwarf and a future citizen of Luteria, had been attending to this keenly, looked deeply shocked. “Mismanages money?”