EIGHT

Bourne sat alone in the wood, trying to lift the Floating School.

The students had been sent outside the school for no particular reason that he could see. To learn something, Felan had indicated, though exactly what seemed nebulous.

“You will find your way back when the wood has revealed its nature to you,” he told them. “In revealing its nature, it will also reveal yours. You will not see the school once you have left it. The wood will become the world; it will become your vision; you will not see your way beyond it. If you need help or become frightened, I will find you.”

They had all looked back at the school once the outer gate had closed behind them. Green wood was all they saw: the tangled weave of ivy and ancient, twisted branch, shrub and brush and flowering bramble growing around and into and through one another, moist and sweet, and so still that the briny wind churning the grasses on the plain might well have been in some distant country.

“Will the wood feed us?” one of the dozen students wondered wistfully. No one laughed. They had all been at the school too long to expect anything predictable or comfortable.

For a few moments they stood aimlessly, talking and waiting for something to happen. Gradually, in boredom or curiosity, or for less obvious motives, they began wandering away in no particular direction, just wanting, Bourne thought, to begin the exercise so that it would come to an end.

He began walking, determined to find his way out of the wood. It might be futile, he thought, but at least it was a purpose, a goal. The wood, after all, was small; he could have ridden around it in an hour. Later, he sat sweating on an old stump, watching a dank little pool overgrown with water lilies for a frog, a fly a minnow, anything to disturb the utter stillness around him. He felt he had walked all morning. It might be any hour of the day. The damp, shadowy mistiness of a wood not yet found by sunlight remained unchanged; he might have just left the Floating School.

Thinking of it, for he was beginning to be hungry, he remembered the task they were given a week ago: to lift the Floating School above the trees while sitting within it. It seemed beyond impossible. “You will,” Felan had promised them. “It is simple. A child could do it with one finger.” They had strained their brains to the utmost; none of the students could lift so much as a brick.

Maybe, Bourne thought, it would be easier to do it outside.

It was something to do, at any rate. He settled himself cross-legged on the stump, let the silence of the wood seep into him, like an old toad drowsing in the moss, until his thoughts were formless and pellucid as air. After a time, he let the image of the school drift into them, a floating island of walls and towers, a dream, an airy construct of space and light, weighing nothing, no more than a memory, no more than an imaginary world. It hung there, suspended in his mind above the trees, immense and serene, the old stones butter-colored in the sunlight, as solid and as insubstantial as cloud, there and not —

“Bourne!” his uncle exclaimed. He jumped like a frog, then wondered with horror if he had truly heard what he thought: the sound of something unimaginably massive shaking the earth as it dropped.

But the wood, except for his uncle, was still soundless. No birds scattered, crying, out of the trees; he heard no human shouts.

I dreamed it, he thought confusedly. His bones felt surprisingly stiff as he straightened, sliding off the damp stump.

“Uncle Ermin,” he said, feeling less than his usual composure. “What are you doing here?”

“I rode over from the palace to see what you are learning,” his uncle said. “They told me you were out here.” He dismounted, leaving his horse to snort suspiciously at the bracken. “What were you doing sitting on a stump and doing nothing?”

Ermin of Seale was a big man, like Bourne’s father had been, his yellow hair graying, his eyes restless and piercing, a predator trying to run down his prey before time ran him down. There were many like him, Bourne knew, in the palace above the sea. But no one else had thought to place a nephew in the Floating School to make a warrior mage of himself to aid his uncle’s ambitions.

“We were sent out here to perform a task,” Bourne explained. “I’ve been waiting for mine to come along.”

“What kind of task?”

Bourne shrugged. “Something the wood dreams up. I don’t suppose you have anything to eat.”

“I’ve just sat through another endless meal,” his uncle said pitilessly. “This one to honor a delegation from Almorania. They all wear beads in their hair and smell like sheep. They only want to be left alone; no help to us there. Show me what you’ve learned lately.”

Bourne turned away from the Lord of Seale, shifting his thoughts with an effort out of the tranquil nothingness in which they had been drifting. He had to kindle fire from cloud, from the quiet wood around him, from his own toad-stupor. When it came finally, the sudden, vivid red-gold flash did little more than leave a blackened scar across a hoary tree trunk. But his uncle was impressed.

“I saw that,” he said, “in your eyes before it came out. That’ll be useful. Can you take down a wall with it?”

“It should be possible,” Bourne said. He felt suddenly weary, something damp and smoldering, without true heat or warmth, just a lot of smoke pretending to be fire. The effects of twiddling his thumbs in the wood for hours on end, he thought. He added, with an effort, “I learned something even more interesting, though I can’t show it to you now. I traveled from the Floating School to the library in a single step, the other evening.”

“The library?” His uncle took a step toward him, astounded. “You don’t mean the royal library?”

“Yes. I was here in one breath, there the next, in the refectory where the librarians were eating supper.”

His uncle thought for a breath, color mottling his face. “Can you make yourself invisible and do that?” he demanded sharply.

“I thought you’d see where it might lead,” Bourne said evenly. “Not yet. I haven’t been taught to make myself invisible, and I can’t control the traveling. It—” He paused; his uncle watched him narrowly. “It still depends.”

“On what?”

“On what I travel toward. It depends on what —on how much I want to get there.”

“And what book did you want that much in the palace library?” the Lord of Seale asked shrewdly.

“It wasn’t exactly a book.”

“I imagined that it wasn’t exactly a book.” His uncle sighed. “You’re doing well with this. But be careful. Don’t get yourself into trouble with anyone I’ll have to fight or pay to get you out of.”

Bourne shook his head. “It’s no one like that. She’s an orphan. A transcriptor.”

“An orphan.” The Lord of Seale touched his eyes. “Well, at least she inspired you to make use of your talents. Just guard your words around her.”

“Why? Do we have anything to keep secret?”

His uncle glanced around them, as though wondering if the trees were listening. Probably, Bourne guessed, but they seemed to guard their words quite well.

“Not here,” the Lord of Seale said abruptly, “not in a wood full of mages. It’ll wait. Just keep working. Be ready when I need you.”

He mounted. Bourne watched him ride away, but not far. The trees and brush closed around him quickly; even his horse’s steps faded soon in the underbrush. Bourne sat down to wait again. Some time passed, only a moment or two, perhaps, but who knew in that timeless place? Then he felt his entire body prickle eerily. He raised his head, the breath flashing out of him, to stare at the place where the shifting branches had hidden his uncle as he rode away from Bourne.

His uncle, Bourne remembered clearly, had already returned home to Seale. He had taken his heir with him, and left his other sons and nephews to celebrate the event and make what they could of the political winds pounding across the plain. “I’ve seen the young queen,” he had said grimly to Bourne, visiting the school before he left. “And I’ve seen the gathering of wolves around her. I’ll leave them here to howl at one another, while their own Crowns lie unguarded. I have work to do in Seale. And you have yours here. Do well for me, Bourne. We’ll use all you can learn.”

“It was only a dream,” he whispered. “Only a dream. The wood revealed my own thoughts to me. That’s all. But I knew them already.”

Then he felt his heart floating again, sunlit and serene, impossibly heavy, impossibly light; he felt the earth itself balanced on his outstretched finger.

The wood will reveal your nature, he heard Felan say, and his skin prickled again, this time with wonder.

Which? he asked it. Which?

He rose again, turned aimlessly this way and that, hoping to see the walls of the school and finding only trees everywhere, interminable walls of green. He stood uncertainly, restless and disturbed for some reason, and suddenly tired of looking at himself. He heard a few twigs snap and tensed. Then one of the other students emerged on the far side of the tiny pool, and he sighed with relief at the company.

She looked only vaguely familiar. One of the newer, younger students who had entered the school at the beginning of spring, he guessed. He hardly knew them. She was flushed; her long hair, a lank white-gold, had snagged a leaf or two, a bit of moss. She nearly walked into the pond before he spoke.

“Watch your step,” he advised. She stopped dead, staring at him as though he were one of the wood’s portents. “I’m Bourne,” he added quickly. “Another student.” She was still looking at him in a kind of bewildered horror; he wondered if he had grown horns or if his face had turned green from proximity to all the trees. “There’s a pool,” he explained gently, “in front of you. It looks very shallow, and I think it’s uninhabited by monsters, but you will get your feet wet if you take another step.”

She glanced down finally. “Oh,” she said, and stepped backward carefully, as though she were practicing a dance step. When she looked at him again, her face seemed calmer. “Thank you.” Her voice was soft, very shy; she might bolt like a deer, he guessed, if he sneezed. She was oddly dressed for a student, wearing an oversized homespun cloak over what looked like pink silk worse for the mud, and a pair of black riding boots. She studied him silently, for a disconcertingly long moment, before she spoke again. “The wood,” she said hesitantly. “It’s odd today. Not like the last time I was here.”

“It is very odd,” he agreed fervently, and watched her begin a path around the pond. All her steps were cautious, precise; there might have been monsters sleeping all around her she was trying not to waken.

“It seems full of things,” she continued. “Last time it seemed empty.”

“What kinds of things?” he asked, settling back against the stump, curious about someone else’s visions.

“Except for the giant,” she amended.

“You saw a giant?”

“Last time. This time, I saw birds.”

“I haven’t seen so much as a mosquito. Not even over this pond, which should have spawned vast numbers of flying things.”

“They spoke.”

“They—?”

“The birds.” She had rounded the pool within a few feet of him; she stopped again. He could see her eyes now, a pale blue beneath her very pale brows. “I could understand them. Don’t you think that’s strange?”

“Oh, very,” he agreed. “What did they say?”

“There was one in particular — a fiery red, every feather, and black, black eyes. It told me to beware what I might meet in the wood. That’s why— ”

“That’s why,” he finished, enlightened, you seemed so frightened of me.”

“For a moment,” she admitted. “I was expecting something that breathed fire, or had teeth as long as my arms. But it was you.”

“All I saw was my uncle,” Bourne mused. “Who looked so much as ever that I forgot he had gone back to the Second Crown a week ago. What else did you see?” he asked the odd young woman, who seemed more woodland animal than human. A useful quality in a mage, he thought. Some of us have a harder time forgetting our humanity.

“Things,” she said vaguely, remembering them. She took an unconscious step toward him. “A tree spoke to me. It looked like a very old man, twisted and slow, with mossy hair down to its ankles and eyes like dead leaves. It did not say much, just my name. I think that’s very strange, that a tree I have never met would know my name. And there were the stags with the fire in their antlers. They did not speak. The warrior followed them.”

“The warrior.”

“Fully armed, on a white war horse. The warrior wore a great sword with a crosspiece inlaid with uncut jewels; it looked too long and heavy for anyone human to wield. The warrior was very tall and broad-shouldered. I could not see the face or hands; the visor was down and of course the hands were covered with mail gauntlets. Anyone could have that gold hair, flowing from underneath the helm.”

“Anyone,” Bourne echoed, puzzled. “Did he speak?”

“No. The warrior only pointed, and all I saw was a huge thicket of brambles. Perhaps it was meant to be seen by someone else.”

“I’m not sure that’s the way the wood works,” Bourne said slowly, “though we are all out in the wood together today. You’ve seen a great deal for a beginning student.”

She blinked at him; he wondered what word had silenced her. She told him. “Student.”

“You are a student, aren’t you?”

“At the mages’ school?”

He was silent then, wondering. A peculiar expression flitted over her face, as though she had bitten into something unfamiliar. “Is that what you are?”

“Yes,” he said. “A student at the Floating School. Our task today was to stay in the wood and let it speak to us.”

She gave a little, breathless laugh. “That’s what I thought you were,” she told him. “Something of the wood speaking to me.”

“Then who are you?” he asked, amazed. She backed a step, her face closing. The wrong question, he saw.

“I must go,” she said.

Or maybe she really was something magical in the wood that he had failed to recognize. “Go where?” he asked recklessly.

“Back. Before they miss me.”

“Are you staying on the plain?”

She hesitated, then gave a little nod. “Yes.”

“But you saw so much—the wood spoke to you. You must have a gift for magic; you shouldn’t ignore it.”

“Is that what it is?” she asked. “I’m never certain. It seems unimportant to anyone.” She took another step backward, lingered, studying him, shy again, but this time unafraid. “How will we really know,” she asked him, “if either of us is real?”

He opened his mouth to protest, then closed it and smiled ruefully. “Then let us agree to be one another’s vision,” he said gravely. “Perhaps we will meet again in the wood, if that is the only place where we exist to one another.”

“Yes.”

“Anyway, thank you.”

“For what?” she asked.

“For coming to talk to me. I was getting lonely.”

She smiled, a surprised, genuine smile, before she turned. She doesn’t smile often, he guessed, watching for a long time, it seemed, before the wood hid her away.

“How strange,” he breathed, thinking of her rough wool and fine silk, the contradictions of wildness and power in her uncertain face. Why do I know that face? he wondered, baffled. He straightened, took a step or two away from the stump, then noticed how dark it was getting, even in that perpetual twilight.

I’ve been out here all day, he realized with surprise, and saw her face again, her hair impeccably braided and bejeweled, her head held very high, very stiffly, so not to dislodge the crown that had been placed on it.

He felt his skin constrict again. “No,” he told her finally, hoarsely. “You could not possibly have been real.”

When he could see past memory, he found the massive walls of the school a pace or two away across the pool, the outer gate beginning to open as though he had just knocked.