Spellfall (18 page)

~~*~~

It was Friday evening before Lady Thaypari took Natalie to the Heart for her interview. She knew a lot more about the soultree by then.

As she’d hoped, Lady Thaypari had proved easy to talk to and it was all so fascinating she’d lost track of the time while they fed their magehounds, explored the fantastic leafy chambers, and met some of the lucky Treemages who lived in Oq’s branches and helped care for the tree. They’d breakfasted on an airy, sun-dappled balcony with a view over the entire Earthaven canopy, and though they had left Merlin waiting below in Lady Thaypari’s private chambers (he’d flatly refused to have anything to do with feeding magehounds) Natalie didn’t say anything because she wanted to keep the Spell Lady to herself for as long as possible. She did feel a little selfish but at the same time she couldn’t help feeling glad the boy wasn’t around to ruin her enjoyment of the meal. Soulfruit tasted as good as it looked and, after checking with Lady Thaypari that it was indeed safe to eat, she ate so much of it she became drowsy. After breakfast, Thaypari told her to lie down and rest if she wanted and, although she didn’t mean to, Natalie had dozed off right there on the balcony with the Earthaven breeze playing through her hair. She woke sometime during the afternoon feeling guilty but Lady Thaypari assured her Merlin was resting too and promised she’d be able to see her friend as soon as her interview in the Heart was over.

With complete trust, Natalie followed the Spell Lady through the spiralling passages, deeper and deeper into the tree, with K’tanaqui and K’aypari padding at their heels. As they neared the Heart, however, a heavy green silence folded around them and she began to feel nervous again.

“What’s it like?” she whispered, afraid to raise her voice.

Thaypari smiled and spoke equally softly. “It’s different for everyone. Don’t worry, Oq will be pleased to see you.”

“See?” Natalie breathed. “How can a tree
see
? Has she got eyes, then?”

“Just a manner of speaking,” Thaypari said with another smile. “You’ll be connected directly and might get images in your head like the ones K’tanaqui showed you. Oq will get the same from you. Think of them as human telephone lines, only much better because they don’t just carry sound. Hush now, we’re here.”

She stopped at the entrance to a small chamber filled with emerald light. Natalie peered inside and caught her breath. The walls and floor glowed with layer upon layer of luminous moss. Sweetly scented vines hung in loops from the ceiling. Tiny coloured stars glimmered among their leaves, and a faint music lingered in the air. A stool waited in the centre, half hidden by all the greenery. “Is that where I sit?” she asked.

“That’s right. Oq can hear us anywhere, of course, even through her smallest root, and she speaks to us with her public voice in the Council chamber. But this is the only place we can communicate on a personal level. In the Heart you’ll hear her private voice and she’ll hear yours.” She gave Natalie the strangest look, started to say something else then changed her mind. “You can go in now.”

Natalie shivered, suddenly apprehensive. Thaypari gave her a gentle push. “Go on. Oq won’t hurt you, I promise.”

She had to duck through the entrance and keep her head low as she made her trembling way to the stool. Once she was seated, however, her nerves vanished. Warmth and sweetness welcomed her, and her tense muscles relaxed. K’tanaqui thrust his muzzle anxiously through the opening.
Pup be carrreful. Pup in place of grrreat powerrr.

Natalie didn’t need to be told. An ancient heartbeat throbbed beneath the stool. The tendrils that caressed her hair made her skin tingle. One of them pushed gently under her fringe and attached itself to her temple with a sticky kiss.

She clutched at the stool.

“Don’t be afraid, Natalie!” Lady Thaypari called. “Remember I’m out here all the time, and so is K’tanaqui.”

She forced herself to sit still as Oq made the remaining connections. There was a peculiar tickle inside her skull. Then words streamed across her head, cool as the wind, very different from K’tanaqui’s gruff voice.

WELCOME, DAUGHTER OF ATANAQUI. SOMEONE WANTS TO SPEAK TO YOU.

Natalie slowly unclenched her fingers. “Who?” she whispered.

In answer, stars drifted out of the leaves and formed themselves into a green-eyed woman whose long, silver-gold hair shone like the moon. She wore a robe of green shadows, and her bare feet floated a fraction above the ground. Natalie stared, a thousand different emotions chasing through her. No, they couldn’t do this to her.

The woman held out her starry arms and smiled. “Hello Natty,” she said. “I’m glad K’tanaqui found you at last.”

Natalie’s heart lurched. “Mother?” Her voice would hardly work. “But you’re— you’re—” Her eyes brimmed with tears. The woman looked older than in her photograph and she wasn’t wearing her dark glasses, but only one person had ever called her Natty.

She slid off the stool. But before she could launch herself into those glittering arms a vine coiled about her waist, holding her fast. She struggled wildly, tears spilling out. “Let me go, you stupid tree!” she sobbed. “That’s my mother! Let me
go
!” But this time Oq didn’t obey her, not even when she thumped the vine, gasping with the pain in her heart.

“Natty,” the sparkling figure said softly. “Natty, calm down and listen. Oq restrains you for your own good. It would be highly dangerous for you to touch me in this state. My body is dead. But when a Spell Lord or Lady dies, their spirit returns to the tree they serve, which is how I can appear to you now. Shh, daughter, sit down. We have to talk about some important things and there isn’t much time.”

Natalie sank on to the stool, her head spinning. “But how—”

“I’ll explain in a minute. First, I have to know, are you happy with your stepmother?”

“I...” She closed her eyes, opened them again. “Julie’s nice.”

“Good. We don’t have much power outside Earthaven these days but sometimes it’s possible to influence things just a little bit. Were you surprised when your father joined the dating agency?”

Natalie blinked. “
You
made him do that? You made Julie marry him?”

Her mother smiled. “No, I couldn’t do that. But sometimes I can still reach your father when the Boundary’s open – through dreams and things. Let’s say I influenced the odds slightly in her favour. So tell me, how is he?”

“He’s fine.”

Her expression must have given her away. Or maybe Oq was reading her thoughts and relaying them to her mother? The sparkling figure dimmed slightly. “He loved me very much,” she said softly. “It won’t have been easy for him. But before I was a wife and mother, I was a Spell Lord, and that’s not something you can just give up. He knew that, just as he knew that one day I’d return to Earthaven. It came sooner than either of us expected, that’s all.”

She drifted closer. “Don’t cry, Natty. I know this must all seem very strange and new to you. I’ve so much to tell you and I want to hear all your news, but it’ll have to wait until this crisis is over. Right now, you must dry your eyes and be brave. There’s going to be a Caster invasion this year, isn’t there?”

“So the Council say.”

Lady Atanaqui sighed. “I knew it would come to this eventually. Human science has advanced faster than any of us expected.” She took a deep breath. “Listen, Natty, this is serious. For the past decade, the Caster who calls himself Hawk has been working on a weapon capable of killing a soultree. If he’s planning an invasion, that means he’s succeeded or thinks he has. He mustn’t be allowed to bring that weapon into Earthaven tomorrow night. If he does, Oq could die.”

Natalie sat very still. “You mean the Raven, don’t you? K’tanaqui showed me a picture of a black bird but he didn’t understand what it meant and neither did the Council. One of the Lords thought it might be a new weapon but the Council said Earthaven’s anti-technology spell would stop it from working inside the Boundary. They said we’d be safe if we stayed in the tree.”

Her mother shook her head sadly. “They’re wrong. You have to understand, Natty. The Council have lived so long inside Oq, they think in tree terms now. A century is like the blink of an eye to them. They want to believe nothing has changed. They still think they can live apart here in Earthaven, recycling a few spells now and again to keep the Casters happy. It was only when I left to live with your father that I realized how frustrated the Casters had become. I heard whispers about a weapon that would bring doom to Earthaven, so K’tanaqui and I did some investigating of our own. We discovered Hawk was working on a way to get a weapon past the anti-technology spells but before I could warn the Council, Hawk’s spellclave pushed me in the river.” The stars around her shivered. “As a spirit, I’ve certain limitations. I’ve done my best to warn the Council through their magehounds via K’tanaqui, but I can’t communicate with them directly as I’m communicating with you now. It’s not the Council’s fault they’ve failed to heed my warnings. They’ve no idea how rapidly human science has advanced in the past few years.”

Natalie thought of what Lord Pveriyan had said about the Raven, and wasn’t so sure. But she held her tongue.

“You mustn’t blame the Council, Natty,” her mother went on, picking up her thought. “Time blindness is a common condition and everyone suffers from it one way or another when they get old. Mothers, for example, like to think their children will stay small forever, then one day they turn around and discover their child has grown up.” Something glinted in her eye as she said this. It might have been a star. “Which is why you must tell the Council what I said about the anti-technology spells. Warn them the Raven might well be able to pass them. Persuade them to act before it’s too late. It would have been easier if your father had brought you to us when he was supposed to but we’ve still got time. They can send a force through the Thrallstone to stop Hawk bringing the Raven across the Boundary tomorrow night. It’s risky, and might be noticed by the authorities in your world, but this is an emergency. The Raven could be a lot more dangerous than they think.”

“I still don’t really understand,” Natalie said, her stomach doing peculiar things at the thought of her kidnappers attacking the soultree. “Why would Lord Hawk want to kill Oq?”

“You’ve heard of Spellfall?”

“The Council mentioned it, I think.”

“Right. Well, when a soultree dies she creates spells. They’re like seeds. Soulfruit doesn’t contain any because soultrees live so long and are so huge they can’t go producing seeds every year willy-nilly, or Earthaven would soon be choked with roots. But when a soultree knows she’s dying, spells fall from her branches like stars and the one that falls in exactly the right place grows into a new soultree. This takes thousands of years, during which the other spells gradually die of old age unless they’re picked up and used by one who has the ancient blood.”

“Like Casters, you mean?” Natalie said.

Her mother smiled. “Don’t they wish! But yes, when they all lived in Earthaven they could indeed pick up spells like that, which was the whole problem. In the early days, you see, there were plenty of soultrees and plenty of spells to go round. But people breed faster than soultrees and certain Spellmages started hoarding spells to use in their power games with no thought for the future. Naturally, they sought out the most powerful spells that should have been allowed to grow into soultrees; and, although the more responsible Spellmages tried to get other spells to grow by artificially mimicking the conditions of Spellfall, they never succeeded. As the centuries passed, the number of soultrees dwindled, so special Councils were set up to protect those that remained. These soultree Councils drew up a treaty called the Spellfall Solution, decreeing that all new spells should be allowed to lie where they fell. Any Spellmage who refused to keep to its terms was banished across the Boundary.”

“The Council said Hawk was banished!” Natalie said.

Lady Atanaqui nodded. “Exactly. But at first, the banished Spellmages weren’t allowed spells outside the Boundary, which turned out to be a big mistake. As the number of disgruntled Casters grew, they started to band together in spellclaves and attack the Boundary, destroying gateways and invading Earthaven during the annual Opening, stealing spells whenever they could. They created such havoc, the Councils were forced to amend the Spellfall Solution. In return for the Casters’ good behaviour, the Councils agreed to supply them with recycled spells and collect the dead ones for processing in Earthaven. This meant using human agents to collect and distribute the spells outside the Boundary, but it kept the peace... until now. If Hawk succeeds in forcing Oq to Spellfall, he’ll have his pick of spells with more power than has been seen in your world since Atlantis lay above the waves. What he’ll do with that power, I hate to think. First, he’ll probably take revenge on the Council for kicking him out Earthaven. After that, who knows?”

Natalie shifted uncomfortably on the stool. While Lady Atanaqui had been speaking of spells and soultrees, treaties and revenge, one thing had blazed in her mind brighter than all.