Bradley, Marion Zimmer - SSC 03 (22 page)

 
          
It
was not long in coming. A pair of deferential servants led Lythande along
paneled corridors and into a great salon, where a handsome, richly dressed lady
awaited the musician. She extended a slender, perfumed hand.

 
          
"Any
friend and colleague of Tashgan is my friend as well, minstrel; I bid you a
hundred thousand welcomes. Come here." She patted the side of her elegant
seat as if
—
Lythande thought
—
she was inviting one of the little lapdogs in the salon to
jump up into her lap. Lythande went closer and bowed, but an Adept of the Blue
Star knelt to no mortal.

 
          
"Lady,
my lute and I are here to serve you."

 
          
"I
am so fond of music," she murmured gushingly, and patted Lythande's hand.
"Play for me, my dear."

 
          
With
a mental shrug, Lythande decided that rumor had not exaggerated Tashgan's
accomplishments. Lythande unslung the lute and sang a number of simple ballads,
judging accurately the level of the lady's taste. She listened with a faintly
bored smile, tapping her fingers restlessly and not even, Lythande noticed, in
time to the music. Well, it was shelter for the night.

 
          
"Tashgan,
dear fellow, always gave me lessons on the lute and on the clavier," the
lady murmured. "I understand that you have come to
—
take over his lessons? How kind of the dear man; I am so
bored here, and so alone, I spend all my time with my music. But now the palace
servants will be escorting us to dinner, and my husband, the Count, is so
jealous. Please do play for dinner in the Great Hall? And you
will
stay
for a few days, will you not, to give me
—
private
lessons?"

 
          
Lythande
said, of course, that such talents as the gods had given were all entirely at
the lady's service.

           
At dinner in the great hall, the
Count, a huge, bluff, and not unkindly man whom Lythande liked at once, called
in all his servants, nobles, housefolk, and even allowed the waiters and cooks
to come in from the kitchens that they might hear the minstrel's music.
Lythande was glad to play a succession of ballads and songs, to give the news
of Tashgan's succession to the High-lordship of Tschardain, and to tell
whatever news had been making the rounds of the fair at Old Gandrin.

 
          
The
pretty Countess listened to music and news with the same bored expression.
But when the party was about to break up for the night, she
murmured to Lythande, "Tomorrow the Count will hunt.
Perhaps then
we could meet for my
—
lessons?" Lythande
noted that the Countess's hands were literally trembling with eagerness.

 
          
/
should have known,
Lythande thought.
With Tashgan's reputation as a
womanizer, with all that he said about Ellifanwy's love charms. Now what am I
to do?
Lythande stared morosely at the enchanted lute, cursing Tashgan and
the curiosity which had impelled the exchange of instruments.

 
          
To attempt an unbinding-spell, even if it destroyed the lute?
Lythande was not quite ready for that yet. It was a beautiful lute. And no
matter how lascivious the Countess, however eager for illicit adventure, there
would be, there always were, servants and witnesses.

 
          
Who
ever thought 1 would think of a fat chamberlain and a couple of inept
ladies-in-waiting as chaperones?

 
         
All
the next morning, and all the three mornings after that, Lythande, under the
eyes of the servants, deferentially placed and replaced the Countess's fingers
on the strings of her lute, the keyboard of her clavier, murmuring of new
songs, of chords and harmonies, of fingering and practice. By the end of the
third morning the Countess was huffy and sniffing, and had ceased trying to
touch Lythande's hand surreptitiously on the keyboard.

 
          
"On
the morrow, Lady, I must depart," Lythande said. That morning the curious
pufl of the enchanted lute had begun to make itself felt, and the magician knew
it would grow stronger with every hour.

 
          
"Courtesy
bids us welcome the guest who comes and speed the guest who departs," said
the Countess, and for a final time she sought Lythande's slender fingers.

 
          
"Perhaps
next year
—
when we know one another better,
dear boy," she murmured.

 
          
"It
shall be my pleasure to know my lady better," Lythande lied, bowing. A
random thought crossed the magician's mind.

 
          
"Are
you
—
Beauty?
If so,
Tashgan bade me give you his love."

 
          
The
Countess simpered. "Well, he called me his lovely spirit of music,"
she said coyly, "but who knows, he might have called me
Beauty
when
he spoke of me to someone else.
The dear, dear boy.
Is
it true he will not be coming back?"

 
          
"I
fear not, madam. His duties are many in his own country now."

 
          
The
Countess sighed.

 
          
"What
a loss to music! I tell you, Lythande, he was a minstrel of minstrels; I shall
never know his like again," she said, and posed sentimentally with her
hand over her heart.

 
          
"Very
likely not," said Lythande, bowing to take leave.

 
          
Lythande
moved northward, drawn by curiosity and by the spell of the wandering hite. It
was a new experience for the Pilgrim Adept, to travel without knowing where
each day would lead, and the magician savored it with curiosity unbounded.
Lythande had attempted a few simple unbinding-spells, so far without success;
all the simpler spells had proved insufficient, and unlike Tashgan, Lythande
did not make the mistake of underestimating Ellifanwy's spells, when the
wizardess had been operating within the sphere of her own competence.

 
          
Ellifanwy
might not have been able to cope with a were-dragon. But for binding-spells and
enchantments, she had had no peer. Every night Lythande attempted a new
unbinding-spell, at the conclusion of which the lute remained enchanted and
Lythande was racking a brain which had lived three ordinary lifetimes for yet
more unbinding spells.

 
          
Summer
lay on the land north of Old Gandrin, and every night Lythande was welcomed to
inn or castle, manor or Great House, where news and songs were welcomed with
eagerness. Now and again a wistful matron or pretty housewife, innkeeper's
daughter or merchant's consort, would linger at Lythande's side, with a
lovesick word or two about Tashgan; Lythande's apparent absorption in the
music, the cool sexless voice and the elegantly correct manner, left them
sighing, but not offended. Once, indeed, in an isolated farmstead where
Lythande had sung ancient rowdy ballads, when the farmer snored the farmer's
wife crept to the straw pallet and murmured, but Lythande pretended to be
asleep and the farm wife crept away without a touch.

 
          
But when she had crawled back to the farmer's side, Lythande lay
awake, troubled.
Damn Tashgan and his womanizing. He might have spread joy
among neglected wives and lonely ladies from Tschardain to Northwander, for so
many years that even his successor was welcomed and cosseted and seduced; and
for a time it had been amusing. But Lythande was experienced enough to know
that this playing with fire could not continue.

 
          
And
it was playing with fire, indeed. Lythande knew something of fire, and fire
elementals
—
the Pilgrim Adept was
familiar with fire, even the fire of were-dragons. But no were-dragon alive
could rival the rage of a scorned woman, and sooner or later one of them would
turn nasty. The Countess had simply believed Lythande was shy, and put her
hopes in another year. (By then, Lythande thought, surely one of the spells
would prove adequate to take off the enchantment.) It had been a close call
with the farmer's wife; suppose she had tried rumbling about the mage-robe when
Lythande slept?

 
          
That
would have been disaster.

 
          
For,
like all adepts of the Blue Star, Lythande cherished a secret which might
never be known; and on it all the magician's power depended. And Lythande's
secret was doubly dangerous; Lythande was a woman, the only woman ever to bear
the Blue Star.

 
          
In
disguise, she had penetrated the secret
Temple
and the Place Which Is Not,
and not till she already bore the blue star between her brows had she been
exposed and discovered.

 
          
Too
late, then, for death, for she was sacrosanct till the final battle of Law and
Chaos at the end of
the .
world
.
Too late to be sent forth from them.
But not too late for the curse.

 
          
Be
then what you have chosen to seem,
so had run the doom.
Until the end of
the world, on that day when you are proclaimed a woman before any man but
myself . . .
thus had spoken the ancient Master of the Star . . .
on
that day you are stripped of power and on that day you may be slain.

 
          
Traveling
northward at the lute's call, Lythande sat on the side of a hill, the lute
stripped of its wrappings and
laid
before her. If for
a time this had been, amusing, it was so no longer. Besides, if she was not
free of the spell by Yule, she would be guesting in Tashgan's own castle
—
and that she had no wish to do.

 
          
Now
it was time for strong remedies. At first it had been mildly amusing to work
her way through the simpler spells, beginning with, "Be ye unbound and opened,
let no magic remain save what I myself place there," which was the sort of
spell a farmer's wife might speak over her churn if she fancied some
neighboring herb-wife or witch had soured her milk, and working her way up
through degrees of complexity to the ancient charm beginning, "Asmigo,
Asmago ..." which can be spoken only in the dark of the moon in the
presence of three gray mice.

 
          
None
of them had worked. It was evident that, knowing of Ellifanwy's incompetence
with her last were-dragon, and her success with love-charms (to Lythande, the
last refuge of incompetent sorcery) Lythande had seriously underestimated
Ellifanwy's spell.

 
          
And
so it was time to bypass all the simpler lore of spells to bind and unbind, and
proceed to the strongest unbinding-spell she knew. Unbinding-spells were not
Lythande's specialty
—
she seldom had cause to use
them. But once she had inadvertently taken upon herself a sword spell-bonded to
the shrine of Larith, and had never managed to unbind it, but had been forced
to make a journey of many days to return the sword whence it had come; after
which, Lythande had made a special study of a few strong spells of that kind,
lest her curiosity, or desire for unusual experiences, lead her again into
such trouble. She had held this one in reserve; she had never known it to fail.

 
          
First
she removed from her waist the twin daggers she bore. They had been
spell-bonded to her in the
Temple
of the Blue Star, so that
they might never be stolen or carelessly touched by the profane; the right-hand
dagger for the dangers of a lonely road in dangerous country, whether wild
beast or lawless men; the left-hand dagger for menaces less material, ghost or
ghast, werewolf or ghoul. She did not wish to undo that spell by accident. She
carried them out of range, or what she hoped would be out of range, set her
pack with them, then returned to the lute and began the circlings and
preliminary invocations of her spell. At last she reached the powerful phrases
which could not be spoken save at the exact moment of high noon or
midnight
, ending with: