The Floodgate - Elaine Cunningham [99]
Even so, after several days on the road, Tzigone was beginning to wonder if both she and Matteo had been mistaken about the wizard.
She poked at her morning campfire, coaxing the blaze higher. A small iron pot sat among the coals. The scent of herbs and mushrooms and root vegetables rose with the steam. The hired swords gathered around a larger fire a few paces away, using their knives and their teeth to tear strips of meat from the bones of roasted conies, mountain rabbits that were nearly as big as hounds.
The rich, savory smell made Tzigone's stomach lurch. For some reason, she had not been able to eat meat of any kind during this trip. Calling creatures required a strange sort of affinity with them. Tzigone suspected that this would pass, but for the time being she stayed with herbs and greens.
"Can you keep strong on such food?"
Tzigone glanced up into Dhamari's gently concerned face. She stirred the pot and lifted a steaming ladle. "Want some? It's not bad."
"Perhaps later. I have another spell for you." He diffidently handed her a rolled scroll.
Tzigone flattened it out on her lap and studied it. It was a complicated spell, without doubt the most difficult she had ever seen. The incantation required elven intonations that would task her powers of mimicry. There was also an odd tablature that looked a bit like written music, indicating that the spell was to be sung. The melody, however, ranged down into the lowest depths of Tzigone's voice and soared into regions she had never attempted to explore. At first study, the markings that choreographed the hand gestures appeared to be less orderly than the footprints left by the last staggering sprint of a beheaded chicken. At least half the runes were totally unfamiliar to her. She suspected that they were taken from a magical tradition very different from that of Halruaa. As she studied, though, the spell's basic meaning emerged from the tangled mess.
Tzigone stared at the spell scroll in disbelief. Dhamari had just given her a spell to summon and banish the Unseelie folk!
She lifted an astonished gaze to his expectant face. "If you wanted me dead, you could have poisoned me before we left the city and saved us all some wear on our boot leather."
He blinked and then frowned. "I don't understand."
"The hell you don't! I'm just an apprentice. This spell would challenge a graybeard wizard."
"You have exceptional talent-"
"And astonishing beauty," she interrupted, mimicking his tone. "But for argument's sake, let's say I can cast this. What then? Wasn't the owlbear enough excitement for you? For them?" she concluded furiously, waving with one hand toward the surviving members of their guard.
Dhamari lifted a placating hand. "I do not intend for you to summon the dark fairies," he protested mildly. "That is not the point at all. It would not only be foolish but redundant. They are here already. Have you not heard them?"
She hesitated, then nodded. The strange, compelling song, distant and faint, had haunted the edges of night for three days.
"These hills are strange and fey," the wizard went on. 'The veils between the worlds are thin in Halruaa-few places in all the world provide more portals into distant places. The Unseelie folk are around us. Knowing that I have brought you into a dangerous area, it would ease my mind tremendously if you could cast the spell of banishment."
"Why is that necessary? Can't you do it?"
He sent her one of his small, wistful smiles. "I do not have Keturah's talent and defer to the wizard whose voice held the laraken."
Tzigone didn't like flattery, but neither could she deny the practicality of Dhamari's words. So she let him tutor her in the preliminary spell, one that would enable her to read the runes. He gave her a ring of translation so she would pronounce the strange elven words properly.
As she murmured the words over and over, the morning breeze seemed to grow colder. Her arms prickled with gooseflesh, and the warm cloak Dhamari had draped around her shoulders didn't help. Tzigone let him build up the campfire, but she