Through the Darkness

Even though Vanai didn’t want to wait any more, she did. And then, at last, there wasn’t anything left to wait for. She got the honey and the vinegar. She got lengths of each color yarn. And she got You Too Can Be a Mage. After studying the spell it gave as carefully as if she were a first-rank theoretical sorcerer essaying some conjuration that had never been tried before, she nodded. “I’m ready.”

“Good,” Ealstan said. “You don’t mind if I watch?”

“Of course not,” she said. “Just don’t jog my elbow.”

Ealstan didn’t say a word. He pulled up a chair and waited to see what would happen next. Vanai began to chant. She felt strange incanting in Forthwegian rather than classical Kaunian, though the tongue in which a spell was cast had nothing to do with how effective it was. A lot of history had proved that.

As she chanted, she dipped the yellow yarn first into the vinegar, then into the honey. She laid it on top of the length of dark brown yarn. She frowned a little while she was doing that. The phrasing for the spell there seemed particularly murky, as if the translator, whoever he was, had had trouble following the Kaunian original. She hurried on. A last word of command and the spell was done.

“You don’t look any different,” Ealstan remarked.

He’d stayed quiet all the time Vanai was working. She’d almost forgotten he was there. Now, sweat streaming down her face from the effort she’d just put forth, she looked up--and froze in horrified dismay. No wonder she didn’t look any different. The spell hadn’t worked on her; it had worked on Ealstan. He made a very handsome Kaunian, but that wasn’t what she’d had in mind.

“What’s the matter?” he asked. He couldn’t see the effects on himself, any more than Vanai would have been able to on herself.

With a curse, she flung You Too Can Be a Mage across the room. The translator hadn‘t known what he was doing--and he’d landed her and Ealstan in a dreadful fix. How was Ealstan supposed to go out if he looked like a blond? Her heart in her shoes, Vanai told him what had happened.

“Well, that’s not so good,” he said, easier-going than she could have been. “Try it again--the exact same spell, I mean--except this time put brown on yellow. With a little luck, that’ll get us back where we started.”

She envied him his calm. Forthwegians were supposed to have terrible tempers, to fly off the handle at any excuse or none. Here, though, she was furious while Ealstan took things in stride. And he’d come up with what sounded like a good idea. She went over and picked up You Too Can Be a Mage. The cover was bent. She wished she could bend the author, too.

Ealstan, still looking like a Kaunian, came over and gave her a kiss. It almost felt as if she were being unfaithful to the real him. But part of her also wished he could stay a Kaunian ... except when he had to go outside. “You too can be a mage,” he said, “provided you have more going for you than this fool book.”

“I’ll try the spell again,” Vanai said. “Then I’ll throw the book away.”

“Keep it,” Ealstan said. “Read it. Enjoy it. Just don’t use it.”

Grimly, Vanai set about the spell once more, with the reversal Ealstan had suggested. She wanted to correct the Forthwegian text where she knew it had gone awry, but she didn’t. And when she called out the word of command, Ealstan went back to looking like himself.

“Did it work?” he asked--he couldn’t tell.

“Aye.” Vanai heard the relief in her own voice. “You won’t have to go through what I go through for looking like this.”

“I like the way you look,” Ealstan said. “And I wouldn’t mind looking like a Kaunian, except that I can do a better job of keeping you safe if I don’t.”

That was no doubt true. Vanai hated it, but couldn’t argue it. She slammed the cover of You Too Can Be a Mage shut. She never intended to open it again.

Splashing through muck toward yet more trees ahead, Sergeant Istvan said, “I never thought the stars looked down on such a forest.” The big Gyongyosian plucked on his curly, tawny beard; as far as he could tell, the forest in which he was fighting went on forever.

Corporal Kun said, “Sooner or later, it has to stop. When it does, there’s the rest of Unkerlant ahead.” Kun’s beard grew in lank clumps; he was lean and would have been clever-looking even without spectacles. He’d been a mage’s apprentice before going into the Gyongyosian army, and seldom let anyone forget it.

“I know,” Istvan answered morosely. “I wonder if any of us’ll be left alive to see it.” He had no great desire to see the rest of Unkerlant. As far as he was concerned, the Unkerlanters were welcome to their kingdom. He wanted nothing to do with it. The mountains that were the borderland between Gyongyos and Unkerlant had been bad. This endless forest, in its own way, was worse. He wouldn’t have bet that whatever lay beyond it made for much of an improvement. But he did want to live to find out.