A Sudden Wild Magic

It was a trying half hour. Why don’t I like this woman? the High Head kept thinking. She stuck long legs in high boots out across the floor of his office with a confidence that would have reminded him of Leathe had it not also seemed so masculine. If he had let her, she would have got up and strode about. He judged it prudent to keep her seated, but her aggression still came out — Leathe-like — in strident little phrases tacked on to the end of everything she said.

“Tossing the caber is immensely satisfying to a woman — but female satisfaction will be outside your experience, I imagine,” she remarked; and later, “female athleticism is largely a matter of mind and emotions, you know. Muscle tone isn’t hugely important to us. But I don’t expect an all-male community to grasp this sort of fact.”

He knew she was lying, over these Highland Games of hers and almost everything else, but there was in her aura a background of sincerity almost as strident as the rest of her, which he was at a loss to account for. Somewhere, at some level, Roz cared deeply about what she was saying. It kept reminding him she was alien, with alien notions of truth. There was magecraft in her aura too, though not much of it, and that little as alien as the rest of her. That did not surprise him, since she reminded him of Leathe anyway; but, annoyingly, that and her sincerity kept her mind warded from him. He looked her in her frank and self- confident face and thought of cracking her open with raw power. That would destroy her mind, and one did not do that to a guest under the protection of the Goddess. A pity.

The last ten minutes of the interview was rendered even more trying by an uproar in the next room, where Marcus was becoming steadily more unhappy. The High Head shielded, and warded, and blocked, by every method he knew, and the child seemed to slide his noise past everything put in its way. Irritably the High Head realized that he had better see this infant next or it would disrupt every interview until he did.

“There was a time in my life when I contemplated being gay,” Roz announced through the din. “Do you know the term? It means homosexual.”

The High Head had had enough. “I’m not interested in the history of your life. Go to hellband, Lady Collasso,” he said cordially. “Kindly go away. I will see the small child next.”

He made the last two sentences performative, rather forcefully. The mages in the outer office responded. Roz, without quite knowing how, found herself walking forth from his office into the outer room, with the curtain wall folding and dilating about her to let her out and to let Zillah and Marcus pass her on their way in. She directed a look at Zillah to Play dumb! and wished there had been more time to brief the woman. The others, waiting in the outer office on high stools, evidently felt equally anxious.

This was not lost on the High Head. The veiling of that entry was designed to give him sight of such things. But he was mostly taken up with exasperation. “When I said I would see the child, I meant the child on its own — er — Lady Green.”

“I think I’d better stay with him,” Zillah answered diffidently. “He’s a bit difficult when he’s upset like this.” In her arms, Marcus turned wide, accusing eyes on the High Head and was shaken with a huge gasp of a sob.

It was, the High Head recognized, primitive magic he was up against, the bonding between a mother and a small child. It was something he had only read about up to now, and he was astonished at its strength. Zillah, for all her apologetic manner, was immovable. It had nothing to do with her own magic gifts. He had Edward’s report to show him these were strong indeed. According to Edward, this woman had actually adapted young Gordano’s birthright for her own use and held Edward pinned to her desire. These were not gifts you meddled with lightly. He sighed and gave in.

“Little boy, what is your name?”

Marcus looked up under his mother’s chin, a stormy blue glare, and gave another body-shaking sob. “Barker.”

Odd name. “And where do you live?” asked the High Head.

“Idanda how,” said Marcus. “Dilly bool.” He turned his face away.

“And how did you travel here?” persisted the High Head, with a strong sense of getting nowhere.

“Bud,” said Marcus, with his face pressed into Zillah’s shoulder. “Jidey bud. Didden lie bub. Go bub. Doe lie did how. Wan hoe, wan hoe, wan hoe, Dillah! Wan gorblay, wan bregia, wan barberday, wan doad!” By this time he was bawling desolately again. “Dillah, I need DOAD!”

“There, there, honey,” Zillah said, rocking him.

There was a sort of helpless concern to her rocking the boy, and a meekness before fate — the High Head had read this described — but he nevertheless discerned that her meekness was a blind. The wretched woman knew he could not make head or tail of the infant. She was trying not to laugh.

“What is wrong with him?” he said, giving in again. “Why is he crying?”