The Blood Mirror

She glanced at the conn over on his other boat. “Sometimes nothing. Sometimes the caster is made an idiot. Sometimes she simply dies, too. It depends how intricated the caster is.”

“Intricated?”

“Polychromes can more fully take on their host’s body. The different colors connect… differently.”

“Let me guess,” Kip said, stomach sinking. “Superviolet to understand the thoughts, blue to see and remember, green to feel and to sense how the body should move, yellow to hear and hold the balance of man and animal, orange to smell and process what an animal smells, red to taste and feel the emotions, and sub-red for the passions and the other animal senses a man doesn’t share.”

Sibéal looked at Kip as if he were a rock trout who had just beached himself and started lecturing her on eudaemonic theology. “How…?”

“Lucky guess,” Kip said. The cards. It was the same as the cards. So will-casting was, deep down, connected to the same magical reality that chromaturgy was. It was simply understood differently.

All magic worked by certain laws, but no one knew them all.

But Sibéal wasn’t ready to let go of it. “I would have expected someone who had read up on will-casting to say blue for sight, green for touch, and so forth, probably forgetting sub-red and superviolet. But the secondary connections are not widely known. And you’ve shown no other knowledge of will-casting. Have you been pretending ignorance of all this? Trying to trap me in a lie?”

“No. And we don’t have time to quibble now,” Kip said. “What happens if the man is killed while he’s controlling the animal?”

“No, how did you know about the colors’ connections?” Sibéal insisted.

Kip said nothing, and they stood eye to eye. Or more accurately, eye to belly, but the pygmy didn’t let the height differential affect her in the least. She was flushing, skin turning bluer by the moment.

“Lord Guile… sometimes just understands things about magic,” Tisis said, trying to spread oil on the waters. “He’s kind of irritating that way.”

Sibéal went silent, and her grinning mouth threw Kip. He was still learning to look around the corners of her eyes and to ignore the mouth. “Conn Ruadhán Arthur’s twin, Rónán, was killed while he was fully intricated in his bear, not two months past. Ruadhán had to go kill the bear himself. The animal that held the last living remnants of Rónán’s soul. It tore Ruadhán’s heart out to kill it. But kill it he did.”

“And what happens if you don’t kill the animal?” Kip asked.

“Kip!” Tisis scolded.

“I have to know,” he said.

“It goes mad. Tries to return to its people—its human people. But the magic fades, and it reverts to animal, and the man-soul dies at last. But all too often, it gets violent, for it’s been changed, been violated. They kill people. We have many stories of attempts to save the soul-trapped, Lord Guile. None of them end happily.”

“The Briseid?” Tisis asked. “Tamar and Heraklos?”

“Indeed. Though perhaps told quite differently than you remember. The Chromeria has ways of crushing knowledge, but some truth always leaks out.”

“Not… The Seven Lives of Maeve Hart?” Tisis asked.

“That, too,” Sibéal admitted uneasily.

“No wonder the Chromeria forbids it,” Tisis said.

“What’s that?” Kip asked. He’d only heard of the last one. “Briefly.”

Tisis said, “A woman flings her soul into a hart and flees when soldiers storm her home and burn it to the ground, killing her body. Her husband Black Aed hunts the men to their homes one at a time, and murders their wives, and puts his Maeve’s soul in their bodies. But it never works, because every woman already has her own soul, so he slowly loses her, her soul slipping away, until he comes to the queen herself who had ordered the burning. And with her body, the magic works or seems to work, for she is soulless. But one night he has a foul dream, and on seeing his enemy’s face leering over him, shaking him, he strangles her. And upon seeing what he’s done, he kills himself, throwing his spirit into the stones of the old castle. He haunts it to this day.”

“Lovely,” Kip said. “I can’t wait to hear more uplifting tales from your homeland.”

“The story is actually… somewhat darker even than that,” Sibéal said. “But that’s beside the point.”

“I agree,” Kip said, not willing to answer more questions, which she seemed poised to ask. He wasn’t telling her about the cards. “So it seems like, to put it in your dichotomies, we’re talking about two different things: will-casting and… what?”

“Soul-casting.” Sibéal looked up the river. “Do we really have time for this?”

“I’m afraid we don’t have time not to do this,” Kip said.

“Have you not read the Philosopher? Before you understand anything, you must understand physics—what is in the corporeal world. Upon that you build your understanding of the metaphysics, what is beyond the simple corporeal: emotions and thoughts and so forth. From those two, you derive your ethics, how one is to act properly in accord with the facts, above that, politics, how bodies of individuals are to act toward each other, and then rhetoric and the arts, the poetics. We and the Chromeria disagree about our metaphysics, and it affects everything above it.

“If, as they believe, you tear off a piece of your soul when you will-cast, you’re doing fundamental harm to yourself every time you do this magic. It would be akin to magic powered by murdering someone—it wouldn’t matter if you did good with the magic, because at base, the action empowering that good is itself evil. Thus, the good we do they discount, whilst every ill effect that comes from our magic they say obviously springs from the corrupted nature of the whole. We can’t win, because we argue politics—the regulation of magics—when our dispute is about metaphysics.”

“This is… very complicated,” Tisis said.

“Not really,” Sibéal said. “We say the will is the breath of the soul. Like your body needs breath and will die without it, your soul needs will. But we can inspire an animal—literally, ‘in-breathe’—to do something. Of course we need to recover afterward, like you need to inhale every time you exhale. Like you breathe hard after running. You need recovery time. And yes, if you go too long without breathing, you die. Or if you deprive another person of their breath, it’s killing. This is murder if it’s a person, but the animals we inspire can also be killed thus if it’s done wantonly or clumsily or for too long, and we regard that as a serious offense, too. Will-casting with the higher souled is a profound partnership. And the animals we partner can tell if it is done with violent or disrespectful intent. And the will-caster feels their terror, too, if the partnering is done poorly or meanly. We know and love our hosts to a degree that one who has never will-cast cannot fathom.