2
Morda had stopped smiling when his sister did, on the other side of the door: he only smiled now to please her. His face as he moved outside was grim, and the oppressive heat did little to lighten it. The thought that another mage, should he be appropriately skilled, could have cooled himself with a weatherworking charm made him even grimmer.
By the time he had moved into the wood, where the shade gave some relief, his bronze hair was pasted flat to his skull with sweat, and the few threads of beard he had managed to grow contained droplets of the same substance. His tunic was soaked through, and he could see the wet spots under his armpits when he looked downwards.
Well. Walking had been a stupid idea, anyway.
He threw himself down beneath a tree. There were humbleberry brambles around the foot of it and he stripped them of their fruit idly, unbothered by the occasional thorn. The berries were purple, juicy, sun-hot and sweet. His mouth felt sticky after eating a few of them, and his hands felt sticky too.
He ate a few more berries, squeezing each one to find the ripest and juiciest of the lot. It made him a feel a little better to know there was a berry bramble the other boys hadn't found, the domestics hadn't plundered to make their dry excuses for tarts. If nothing else, he could strip a berry bramble others had missed.
As he ate, he took in the view. He had climbed, it seemed, to the top of a small hill--the Changing coven was visible in a slight valley below, white towers shining quaintly amongst the trees and vines. From this distance the Changers around it, in their varying shades of red robes, looked like berries themselves.
Berries, Morda reflected moodily, could be plucked. Squashed. These weren't berries.
He watched the scattering of bright red robes on the lawn, the periodic flash of a globe in the air appearing and disappearing. They were playing the old Changing game of Wills, where students battled over a large water globe--half concentrating on keeping it as water, half struggling to turn it into ice, disappearing it and calling it and hiding it about their persons throughout as a way of distracting the other team.
Such games, all the texts Morda had read said, were good for developing fighting reflexes in young apprentices. They would need them, as they grew older--there was an upstart clan of Weatherworkers not fifteen miles to the east in the Tonkin kingdom, and there were always the strange powers of the Clockwork Mage to the south. Today's young Changers had to be fast, using magic just as reflexively as they ever used strength. And pitting your skills against one another let you know exactly how strong each of your companions was, where their weaknesses lay. It was a good game, he supposed, for a world of unsteady peace.
Morda did not usually play in these games. The few times he had shuffled out with the other apprentices, he had been chosen last for teams.
But he knew how the other children played, just from watching them in class. Better in some ways than they knew themselves. He knew Alexei clammed up right before casting, Destrina doubted her own abilities. He knew of the badly healed thumb break that made Elsee's handwork subpar, the slight lisp that dampened Nortel's otherwise flawless chanting. He knew Wentworth's chants were slightly flat. He knew Forsien, from the way her hands flinched slightly away from the proper motions, feared she might accidentally hurt someone.
He watched them play, with this in mind, keeping one distant player apart from another by hair color and weight of step. He was surprised by very little, very little.
"Next," he murmured to himself, around a mouthful of berries, "Elsee will lose concentration, and the globe will turn to ice."
In moments, he heard the groan of Elsee's teammates.
"Now," he said, "Alexei will steal the globe, but Wentworth's rude self will steal it right back."
He watched the globe wink out of existence on the field below, reappear under a robed figure's arm.
"Destrina gets ahold of herself and freezes it," Morda said, smiling a little. Destrina, whose mouse-meek face hid a great share of ability, was one of the few players on the field below he could stand.
The cheers were fairly loud, even on top of the hill.
"Dear gods," a hoarse voice said companionably from beside him. "Do you have the Sight, boy?"
Morda, who hadn't been expecting company this far out from the coven, jumped a good half a foot into the air and choked on a berry.
The man pounded him on the back until he could breathe again. "Easy does it," he said. "So. Do you have the Sight?"
"No!" Few Changers had Sight-gifts, and those who did had only the barest whispers of it. "I just know them. I know how they work."
"Hm," his new companion said. "Out of the two, that might be the rarer thing."
Morda turned to look at him and saw, for the first time in gods knew how many years, a person not arrayed in some form of red robe, or the sturdy orange tunic of a domestic.
This man--for he was older than Morda by some years, and to Morda at least seemed full-grown--was stringy and lean, and dressed all in black, and needed at least one bath, probably two to scrub the worst of the grime off. The hair that hadn't been molded into horrible waxen dreadlocks by day-to-day filth was bound back in small almost-dreadlocked braids, strung with beads of glass and wood.
His hands were the most intricately muscled hands Morda had ever seen. Knuckles like granite chips, fingers thick as sausages. The man's palms were plump with muscle, like twin pot pies rising in the ovens. They were the hands of someone who spent serious time practicing magic.
And this wasn't the strangest thing about him, either. Morda's eyes drifted upwards to the lean brown face under its mop of hair, and the small triangular tattoos that covered brow and cheekbone.
"You're Clanless," Morda whispered. "Oh, gods. I'm not supposed to talk to you."
"No?" the man said, inspecting the mountain ridges that served him as knuckles. "Funny. I bet if you think hard, you can't remember anyone--anyone who counts for anything--ever telling you that."
Morda thought. The man was right--aside from the boys whispering on their side of the lunchroom, he could remember no one telling him he couldn't speak to the Clanless. It just wasn't done. The very thought of it made Morda nervous.
The Clanless weren't shunned by those who fit neatly into one of magic's many categories, and who had been accepted by one of the little covens dotting the countryside. Not exactly. Brekan Mageborn, the long-ago father of all mages, had after all declared that no mage could be outright shunned by his brothers.
But the Clanless were a special case. People of odd gifts, not easily explained as Changing, Healing, Sight, Necromancy, or Weatherwork, they traveled from coven to coven, learning what they could where they could. The covens fed them--reluctantly--and let them sit in on the more basic classes. To do any less would be an affront to the tenets of magecraft, and mages were, if nothing else, all about tenets.
The Clanless engendered suspicion at best, outright hostility at worst, whatever the tenets might have been. But the fact remained--some of the most powerful mages in the land had begun Clanless. The Clockwork Mage to the south had begun Clanless, and hadn't claimed a clan even when the Changers had offered him a master's robe.
It was a story Morda, who had debated a Clanless existence for himself many times, was quite familiar with.
"Hello," Morda said at last, awkwardly. "I'm Morda."
The man grinned. "Good on you, mate. I'm Grier." He proffered a blocky hand. Morda shook it, half expecting to be crushed to pulp, but the man's touch was gentle, in spite of the steel underneath it.
"So," he said, plopping down under the tree beside Morda. "What's got you all the way out here? You're a Changer boy--I recognize that sturdy white tunic. Your folk don't usually wander so far afield."
"Your folk don't usually stick so close."
"Silly. I don't have a folk." Grier winked at him. "I'm guessing you're a bit of a loner too, then?"
Morda shrugged, the weight of his long day settling on him once more. "I guess," he muttered.
Grier laughed delightedly. "Proud, I see," he said, clapping his hands together. "My goodness, I bet they love the hell out of you. You've got to be their star student, hmm? Otherwise, what's a sheep like you doing so far from the fold? They herd the stupid ones like sheep, you know. Push them, meld them, make them. Or are you too stupid to see it yet? I hope not. I rather like you already."
"I'm not stupid," Morda said hotly. Though it had, in fact, never occurred to him before--and how hadn't it? The outcast was quite right. All the training, practicing, even the prescribed nonsense syllables every apprentice had to chant. It was like they were being molded. Children were run through the press, and only neat uniform Changers came out. Fat old men and women with hairy ears and unsightly moles.
He liked the idea. It was bold, new. It fit in quite well with how he felt.
Grier hadn't taken his eyes off him, even to reach for the berries on the bramble. He plucked a few ripe ones without even looking down and popped them into his mouth.
"Not stupid," he observed. "But not a star student."
Morda didn't know what it was about the man that made him spill his guts, but there was something almost compulsive about it. Before he knew what he was doing the sun was a low sliver in the sky and all the berries were gone from the bush.
Grier only watched him, a half-smile hovering about his lips. He hadn't interrupted once.
"I don't understand it," Morda finished lamely. "I can see what I should do. I can see how it works. I can even feel the magic around me, just like they say you're supposed to. But I can't do it. And if I don't get better pretty fast, they're going to make me an archivist. I think I'd rather die. I've read every damned thing in that library I could ever want to read."
"Hmm," Grier said. "Why do you care, what they make of you?"
Morda had almost forgotten what his companion's voice sounded like. He jumped a little at the interruption.
"Because," he said. "Because I want to be something. Something great. I know I could be. I can feel it."
"And what would you do, with that power?"
"I don't know. I don't care." Morda gestured out over the coven, its mica-flecked white walls glistening in the dusklight. "I just want to use it. I want to be what I'm supposed to be."
The Clanless man tilted his head one way and then the other. Morda had the uncomfortable feeling the man was somehow looking inside him, rummaging around in his soul for some tiny but important lost detail.
"Morda, my friend." he said at last. "I haven't been entirely honest with you."
"Master Otrang tells us the Clanless rarely are," Morda said, a touch bitterly.
"He lies. The Clanless are individuals, Morda--we aren't all one thing or the other. I, however, am generally quite honest." He whet his lips, leaned forward. "If you please, allow me to be so with you."
Morda waited, strangely eager.
"It is unusual for the Clanless to come so close to a coven, when not seeking food or learning," Grier said at last. "This was the coven I was cast out from, and as such I should never have returned. But I came because I was drawn here--because of a powerful need. As far as I've been able to tell, Morda, my gift is a sort of reverse Changing--I make things fit together, exactly as they are. I make things right in the world. And when I saw you--when I felt the flame flare within me, brighter than a bonfire, as soon as I laid eyes on you--I knew why I was here. I'm here to fix you, Morda. I'm here to make you what you were born to be."
Morda found himself leaning forward as well, until he was almost touching brows with the Clanless mage. The man's breath was foul, rotten and meaty, but his eyes were luminous in the half-dark.
"You don't have a mind like other minds," he said softly. "You won't find it easy to work within the confines they've imposed on you. Your mind is sharp where others are dull, organized and efficient where others are chaotic. You have a machine-mind, my friend. A mind for gears and the twisting of metal, not for the silly singsongs and organic chicanery of the Changers."
"Is this it, then? Am I Clanless?"
"No." That strange half-smile again. "You're a Changer, through and through--the sort of Changer this world has not seen the likes of in thousands of years. Don't fear, boy. You shan't have to abandon your precious red robes quite yet--though you may do it voluntarily, in the end."
He reached out, grabbed Morda's arm with one of his overmuscled hands. Morda felt the fingertips like five points of ice.
Gods. Was it true? Could it be true?
"When you next practice the whetwork charm," Grier whispered, "do it in silence. Don't use their stupid rhymes, don't move your hands. Do you have your globes with you? Of course you do. A good little sheep always has his globes by him."
Morda was so entranced he barely noticed the insult. He brought out the globeset, laid them out with a single swipe of the velvet cloth.
In the dark, he could almost feel them. The seven weights of them, hard with magic and the natures of their different elements.
Rise, Morda told them silently. Rise, Air. Rise, Fire. Water, Glass, and Wood, rise. Stone, rise. Metal--
A thrill went through him at the touch of the metal globe. Gods! It felt like murder made solid, blood and flesh and slick-sinew, grinding and gnashing in the woodland's primal heart. It felt like muscle and tendon and cold hard bone.
"Ah," Morda breathed, watching the globes spin about him in perfect unison. He sent his thoughts out to them. They listened, ready and willing, Metal his special friend.
Morda thought about forges, streams of hot iron. The metal globe brightened, lengthened.
This. This was how it should be. This.
He ran the hot metal about him, letting it thin out in spirals. He made it splatter on the trees and bushes, left it to smoke there a while before he drew it back together.
He was standing, he realized suddenly. Standing, alone, in a now-darkened clearing. The Clanless man had disappeared.
Morda listened to the hiss of the hot metal and was, for the first time in his life, perfectly content.
"What I was born to be," he whispered. "What I was born to be."