Modern Magick

The Wonders of Vale: 19

Have you ever been played by a lyre? I'll wager not. I don't especially recommend it; at least, not by this specimen. If it must be so, try for a mild-mannered, grandmotherly type; the sort that will have you baking Victoria sponge cakes and puttering about in the garden.

Not the sort that will pump you full of all the magick it has been blithely soaking up until your nose bleeds. Not the sort that will use you and discard you like a sodding handkerchief.

When I took up that lyre, it was as though either I or it (or both) ceased to exist; instead of the-moonsilver-lyre or Vesper-Cordelia, there was simply a force. And while taking up the lyre had enhanced my mother's and Emellana's ability to track past magicks, or imbued one or the other of my parents with the ancient magick of faerie monarchy, in my case the effect was, um, different.

Forgive me if I sound deranged, for I doubtless was at that moment. In my case, the effect was to turn me into a magickal source all in my own self. I was, if you like, the human equivalent of a griffin or a unicorn.

I'd have laughed if I hadn't been so busy leaking blood.

The lyre all but fused to my fingers, so that I could hardly have let go of it if I'd wanted to. And for a few agonising seconds, I desperately did, for it hurt. The lyre-through-me drank up every drop of magick in the vicinity (did I properly emphasise that this is a lot?), and then poured it forth again in a veritable ocean — only stronger, and... changed.

I learned how it feels, when lightning arcs over a griffin's hide. I learned what it means. It is a discharge of magick, because there is too much of it to hold.

That hurts, too.

Vale lay spread before me, but I no longer saw it with my half-blind human eyes. I saw it as a pattern of magick; a map, if you like, of ancient power. I saw its centre: Mount Vale, and its colony of griffins. I saw pockets of intense magick dotted here and there; the unicorn farms, I judged, and the travel points, and other things I could not name. I saw its ebbs and flows, its strengths and its weaknesses.

Terrifying came the knowledge: I could have stretched out a hand and rearranged it like a chess board, if I had so chosen.

I didn't so choose. All I wanted was Adeline. I found her: a mote of bright magick, purer than her peers, and in some odd way familiar. Around her crackled a web of magick: a net to hold her in, and all those like her.

I plucked her free of it, and then unwound the net. It came free easily enough, though every strand of it burned and blistered and I shuddered with the pain of it. Grimly, I ripped it into tatters and let it stream away, watching with distant satisfaction as the ribbons of magick dissolved back into the flow around Mount Vale.

Motes of bright magick scattered around me as the mythical beasts of Vale fled the town, free.

'So that's good, then,' I said sleepily, looking wide-eyed up at the sky, for my shaking legs had long since found it impossible to hold me. The firmament was a spiral of magick, too, a shimmering, pulsing, coiling, glorious mass; even the clouds were laced through with it, pregnant with possibility.

I wondered, somewhere in my befuddled brain, whether our Britain looked at all the same.

I thought not.

'Ves,' someone said, but whoever it was must have been very far away. The wind took any words that followed, and I barely felt the hands that shook my shoulders.

I felt the teeth, though, that fastened onto my left wrist.

'Ouch,' I said, frowning, and looked vaguely about. Something bright and lovely was near me, contours of magick that were familiar and dear, for all their strangeness. I reached out my other hand to touch it, and felt warmth. 'Addie?'