Morgain's Revenge - Laura Anne Gilman [40]
A well-trained horse would not become skittish in battle and throw his rider. A healthy fisherman would not allow his family to starve, come the winter storms.
And work well-done is the mark of a craftsman—or woman—worth the hire.
This did not sit well with the accepted view of Morgain, the view Morgain herself provoked and maintained, of the vengeful and dangerous sorceress. Of the evil woman, set on taking down her brother’s rightful claim to the title of High King.
It puzzled Ailis. So she did what she did with all things that puzzled her. She put it away in a corner of her mind, and went on with what was in front of her.
“What is this?” she asked, pointing to a series of linked crystals on the table, glimmering blue and gold and black deep within the links.
“Those are not for touching. Or looking too deeply in,” Morgain said brusquely, reaching up to cover them with a dark cloth, shielding them from Ailis’s gaze. “Not everything in this room is so gentle as the bone-warmers.”
Ailis knew she should have felt rebuked. Instead, she turned to another object, this one a polished bone the size and shape of a pigeon’s wing, set in a block of onyx. “And this?”
Morgain looked, then smiled. “That, my dear, is for a woman whose man strays.”
“It brings him back home?”
“In a manner of speaking, yes.” Morgain’s smile twitched, but she refused to elaborate further.
All right, perhaps that might be something evil. Or not. Ailis wasn’t sure—and she wasn’t sure she wanted to know.
“Here, try this.” Morgain lifted a flat piece of wood off the table and handed it to Ailis. The girl took it hesitantly, almost expecting it to transform into something dangerous, or at least surprising. But it remained a piece of wood.
“Tell me about it,” Morgain demanded.
Ailis looked at Morgain, then back at the wood.
“It’s wood.” She ran one finger along the length of the piece. “A soft wood, not hard. Birch?” Morgain didn’t respond, instead turning to a box of tiny metal figures which she began to sort, almost as though they were threads for embroidery.
The thought made Ailis nostalgic for an instant, for the boring sameness of the queen’s solar. Then she looked down at the wood in her hands, and was absorbed again in the task set to her.
“It has been planed, smoothed. So it’s not meant for whittling. Birch isn’t used for building, nor tools. My cousin…” Ailis stopped. She hadn’t thought of her cousin in years. He was dead now, in the same battle that took her parents, and his parents as well. He would have been a man now, had he lived. “My cousin used to make boats out of birch bark.” Ailis stroked the wood some more, lost in her memories.
Birch is the wood of memory. The wood of remembrance.
The voice didn’t sound like Merlin’s. It didn’t sound like Morgain’s, either. Deeper, more rounded, more feminine than either, and yet powerful at the same time, and it came not from outside Ailis’s mind, but somewhere deeper inside. It was the same voice that had warned her away from looking at the figure behind her in the dining hall.
“It’s meant to…hold things? A box, or a chest…no.” Visions came to her then, of the shelves in Merlin’s study, the upper reaches of Morgain’s library. “Spellbooks. It’s used to bind spellbooks.”
“To bind, yes, and it’s often used as the pages themselves,” Morgain said. “For things that are best carved, not written with anything as flimsy as ink.”
Ailis looked at the blank wood and tried to visualize what sort of spells might be best carved rather than penned. She could almost see the heated prong etching runes into the pale wood, red and char marking the smooth surface in a mockery of the magical characters Merlin had drawn with fire on ice when he gave them the riddle to find the talisman to break Morgain’s sleep-spell.
“You mean a dangerous spell. One that hurts people,” Ailis said.
“Spells are just words, witch-child. They don’t do anything, of themselves. A spell to drive the strength from a man’s body is only a word removed from