Magic Steps

Alzena slapped his face. “If you are not silent, I will cut out your tongue,”

she whispered.

He stared at her with eyes that were set in deep black circles, with no trace of white remaining. “How’re you different from the pirates?” he wanted to know.

“They hit roe when they felt grumpy, too.”

Nurhar crouched beside him. “She didn’t mean it,” he told the rnage. “She’s just frustrated. We’re all frustrated.”

The rnage hid his face in his hands. “There is some thing about this place,” he whispered through his fingers. “All these spells. Centuries of them. Centuries

Take me out of here. Closer to Durshan Rokat’s house, perhaps I can do something. Yes.” He looked at them, black eyes glistening. “Yes, get me closer.

The air here is bad for me—too many spells. Once in the city I can work better.”

“You’d better find a way to handle all the spells here,” Nurhar said, his voice ice. “Once we’ve got the old man, we’re coming back” He picked up the mages carry-frame and slung it on his back. “You’ll get us into that inner keep if I have to use your head as a battering ram.”

Pasco was following the musicians out when he rebelled. This wasn’t right, He wanted to see his net work. They were treating him like a child, when they might have no chance to get these rats without him. He was going to stay, that was all there was to it.

But how? In a moment those mages would come out of the net room. They would disappear within spells to make them look like part of the house or the garden, or the street outside, He’d heard them talk about that If they saw him, they would make him go.

Suddenly he remembered something from the day before. Yazmín had been teaching allurement dances. One had a movement that caught his imagination the dancer held an arm straight out with the hand at right angles to the arm. The dancer then pulled, the other hand over her face with the fore and middle fingers parted in a sideways arrow. While one hand traveled across the eyes, the dancer looked sidelong at the outstretched hand. Yazmín had called it a “flirt.” Pasco thought it also looked like something that—with a bit of magic behind it—might achieve the opposite result. It could make people look away from the person who made it. Their eyes might slide off the mage; they might never see him.

Standing in the hall, he closed his eyes and took his seven-count breaths, holding them and letting them go as he’d been taught. The feeling he was beginning to know was his magic, a kind of fizzy tingle, filled him al most instantly. He gracefully lifted his left arm, holding it out palm up and outward, as he let his power roll down it. Now he raised his right hand, forming the arrow with forefinger and middle finger. He drew it across his eyes as he looked sidelong at his left hand. While he did these things, he cast some of that fizzy sense out through his left arm, and poured more through his right hand, making it flow away from him.

The woman they called Moonstream emerged from the dining room, talking to redheaded Skyfire. “I hope this works,” she said. “Otherwise we may have to do something drastic.”

Skyfire bark-laughed. “Any ideas on what this drastic thing will be?”

Moonstream shook her head. “Not a one,” she said ruefully. They walked right by Pasco. “How often are we called on to deal with a mage like this, anyway?”

They didn’t see me! I did it! Pasco thought gleefully, struggling to hang on to his power. I worked a magic all by myself!

Now for a place to hide. The corner of the kitchen between the hearth and the cupboards seemed best. No one would stand guard in that part of the house at all, in case the rats came in that way, and Pasco could hear every thing that went on in the dining room from there. Just now Dedicate Lark was telling Lady Sandry, “I’ll be downstairs with the guards. Call if you need help.”

“Of course,” Lady Sandry assured her. “Pasco did a good job, didn’t he?”

Pasco beamed.

“The boy has talent,” Lark said. “Don’t forget to conceal yourself, my darling.

You don’t want them to see you until they’ve stepped into the net.”

“I’ll be fine,” Lady Sandry assured her.

Dedicate Lark walked in from the dining room. For a moment she hesitated, frowning. Pasco felt the tiniest, most delicate shift under him, as if someone were tugging a rug from under his feet. Hurriedly he called up his power again, and drew his hand over his eyes once more. Look away, look away, he thought.

At last Dedicate Lark shrugged, and went to the cellar door. She stopped, checked around one last time, then went downstairs.

CHAPTER 14

Azena, Nurhar, and the mage caught up with Durshan Rokat just past the Arsenal gates, in a snarl of people and horses caused by an overturned wagon on Spicer Street. Once they would have been amused by the Guards’ frustration over the delay and their fear that the Dihanurs might try to kill the old man there.

Alzena thought they could have spared themselves that worry. Seeing all those people in the halls to the inner keep had made her jumpy. There were too many chances here to collide with someone and be caught. Instead they watched the old man and his protectors dully, waiting until the tangle cleared.

When it did, they kept well back from Rokat, but followed him all the way home.

They went a scant block away when he entered the gateyard of his house, leaving the Duke’s Guards to position themselves on the street side of his property wall. None of them looked happy, they heard one woman tell her lieutenant, “May as well draw a target on his head, the old fool.”