A Sudden Wild Magic

Zillah swallowed. She was rather good at concealing her frequent unseemly need to laugh, and she was fairly sure this High Horns had not noticed. “He’s hungry,” she explained. “He was frightened in the capsule, and this place is strange, and he doesn’t like the food we were given.” She added, in her usual placatory way, “I’m afraid.”

The High Head saw a way to break this partnership without a clash of mageworks. “In that case we must find him something to eat. If I get someone in from Kitchen, would the child consent to go there while I ask you a few questions?” It was not the way around he wanted things, but the other way was hopeless.

“I think — well, he might,” Zillah conceded.

“Good.” The High Head gestured, crisply and precisely. Marcus took his head out of Zillah’s shoulder and gazed with tear-filled but interested eyes at the sigil of Housekeeping forming in the air, then dissolving to that of Kitchen, but he hid his face convulsively again when the sigil gave way to the flesh-and-blood figure of Brother Milo, with a list of stores in his hand.

The High Head explained. Brother Milo nodded and seemed rather relieved that this was all the High Head wanted of him. He held out his free hand to Marcus. “Coming with me, sonny? Come with Brother Milo and we’ll find something to eat.”

It was not as simple as that. The High Head contained his exasperation while Marcus hid his face again and Zillah placed him on the floor and then knelt down to explain that the kind man would find Marcus some toast, and that Mum would stay here for just a bit, and Marcus would be happy with the kind man. Then there was further delay while Marcus turned and examined Brother Milo, with his thinning hair and wiry body, and while he made up his mind that maybe he rather liked the way Brother Milo’s face hung in nervous folds like brackets around his mouth. Finally, with some condescension, Marcus held out his hand for Brother Milo to take and trustingly vanished with him.

Zillah gave a little sigh. It was not relief. She hoped High Horns did not realize how much she had spun all this out. She was dreading this interview. No one had told her what she was supposed to say.

Luckily, the High Head was too inexperienced in the ways of children — as far as he knew, Marcus was the only child ever to visit Arth — to do more than conclude that Zillah was an overprotective mother. She was bound to be, he thought irritably. Love beamed from her aura. Here he realized, with something of a jolt, that Zillah was the one whom the Goddess had been most concerned to protect in that madly plunging capsule. He looked at her in this light, wonderingly but warily. She was, he had to admit, very comely — not in the highly wrought cosmetic fashion of the Ladies he was used to, but in a direct, untreated way which, again he had to admit it, spoke directly to the austerities of his soul and no doubt pleased the Goddess too. But she was also tiresomely humble and probably very devious. He told her curtly to sit down.

“Tell me the reason for your journey in that capsule.”

“It — it was on the way to the Highland Games,” said Zillah. This at least she knew to say.

“But you were not taking part in those games yourself,” guessed the High Head.

“That’s right.” Zillah found she had agreed before she was aware. Panic. She sat twisting her hands between the knees of her jeans and wondered what the hell to say she had been doing. Inspiration flushed through her — thank the Lord! “But it was a charter flight, you know, and Marcus and I got the two spare tickets at the last moment because I — er — had to get away.”

The High Head watched the power rise around her to answer his suspicions and was not surprised that the Goddess had singled this one out. This woman was important. He began to suspect that whatever business the occupants of the rogue capsule had been on, it concerned Zillah and her child somehow. Maybe they were her bodyguard. Yes, that might fit. Roz would lie to protect her. Well, that was no concern of his, so long as it did not threaten Arth. But he needed to be sure.

“Had to get away?” he asked, using the time-honored technique of simply throwing the remark back.

“Oh — yes,” Zillah invented. “The courts had given me custody of Marcus, but his father wants him. He was threatening to kidnap Marcus, so I had to get away quickly to somewhere where he wouldn’t find us.”

“Where is that somewhere?” the High Head inevitably asked.

Zillah wished she could remember whether Roz had named a place. “Lyonesse,” she said desperately. “Near where they hold the Highland Games.” And, striving for local color, she added, “Logres is near there too, just down the road from Camelot. Marcus’s father wouldn’t dream I’d gone there. Camelot’s politically unsound.”

“And Marcus’s father is who?” came the next question.

Oh my God! Zillah thought. “Someone very important — whose name I’m not at liberty to reveal.” Which, she thought, was not so far from the truth.