Someone brushed past her, bundled up against the cold, and hurried across the plaza. That reminded her that it wasn’t just the guard she needed to avoid; it was anyone in this hostile town. Fortunately, the gloomy cold and damp seemed to be keeping almost everyone inside.
With the ingredients in her hand she watched the guard; he didn’t seem to have noticed her presence at all. He was staring dully straight ahead, at the next street over from the corner where she stood.
All the same, she decided she had stood in one place long enough; it might be suspicious, and besides, the cold wasn’t as bad when she was moving. She began strolling along, looking in the shop windows, as if she were simply bored.
She was actually watching the reflections in the windows more than looking at the goods displayed, but she hoped no one would notice.
She had been wandering aimlessly back and forth, staying always in sight of the gate and its guard, for what seemed like hours, when at last the guard shifted uneasily, turned, and trotted out of sight down an alley, one hand tugging at his kilt.
Irillon dashed across the square, her hands already busy with the spell’s preparatory gestures. She mumbled the incantation quickly as she ran.
She came to a stop with her nose to the castle wall, beside the gate and below the pike, still chanting. She dipped the raindrop up with the cock’s toe, performed the necessary ritual gestures, transferred the drop to the empty vial, then closed the vial and tapped it with her athame.
At that tap she felt suddenly light; she tucked everything but her knife away and spoke the final word, and rose from the muddy ground.
A moment later she stopped herself, hanging unsupported thirty feet in the air, just a foot or two from poor Therindallo’s ruined face. He looked much worse close up, but she refused to let herself think about that as she grabbed a hank of his hair and began sawing it free.
Seconds later, with her knife sheathed and the hair safely stuffed into yet another vial, she spoke the word that would trigger her descent.
Only then did she remember to look down.
The guard was back at his post, but now he had his sword drawn and was staring up at her.
There was nothing she could do, though; she was sinking slowly downward, like a pebble in oil, and there was no way to restore the spell before she touched ground.
Desperately, she drew her knife again and tried to think what she could do.
She was a girl of fourteen, not large for her age, armed with a belt-knife; he was a burly guardsman with a sword. She couldn’t fight him fairly.
She was a wizard’s apprentice, and knew just seven spells. She couldn’t use Tracel’s Levitation again in time to be any help; the Dismal Itch would just annoy him; and Fendel’s Elementary Protection wouldn’t stop cold iron, such as a sword. The Spell of Prismatic Pyrotechnics or the Sanguinary Deception or the Spell of the Spinning Coin wouldn’t do any good here at all.
That left Felshen’s First Hypnotic as her only chance; if she could daze the guard with it she might be able to escape before he recovered. She reached for her pouch...
But not in time; the guardsman stepped forward and grabbed her ankle before she could get the flap open. She yelped, startled, and tried to wrench free, but could not escape, and as the Levitation continued to fade she tumbled backward until she was lying on her back in the snow, one leg raised, the guardsman gripping the ankle tightly with one hand, and pointing his sword at her chest with the other.
“I think you need to speak to the Captain,” the guard said, not unkindly.
Irillon, flustered but not so distraught as to forget her Islander accent, didn’t reply at all.
A few moments later she was inside the castle, being escorted into a small, wonderfully warm room; guardsmen gripped both her arms, and her knife had been carefully taken away. A fire burned cheerily on the hearth at one end of the room, while armor and weapons adorned the other walls. Much of the floorspace was taken up by a heavy wooden table, its surface strewn with rolls of paper; on the far side of that table sat another guardsman, but this one was older and more elegantly attired, with rings on his fingers and a golden band about his right arm.
He looked up. “What’s this?” he asked.
The right-hand guard explained, “She was stealing hair from the piked head over the gate. She flew up there and back.”
The seated guardsman leaned back in his chair. “Flew?”
“Yes, sir,” the guard replied.
“Just the hair? Not the whole head?”
“Just hair.”
“Then she’s not a relative trying to give it a proper pyre.”
The guard shrugged.
The seated man looked Irillon in the eye. “I’m Captain Alderamon,” he said. “Who are you?”
Irillon swallowed and said nothing.
Alderamon waited a moment, giving her time to change her mind, then sighed.
“You’re a thief,” he said. “Thieves we punish. If you flew, though, you might be a magician, and magicians we treat more respectfully. Now, thieves might be mute, I suppose, or deaf, but a wizard or a theurgist or a demonologist can’t be, because then he couldn’t recite incantations. I don’t know for certain about witches or warlocks, or all the other sorts of magician, but I never met one who couldn’t speak. Let me ask again — who are you?”
She looked at him, at his unyielding face, and realized that if she remained silent she would be treated as a common thief. While that would probably mean flogging or imprisonment rather than beheading, it still wasn’t anything she cared to experience. Islander accent or not, she had to speak.
“I’m Irillon of... Irillon the Apprentice,” she said, trying to imitate the captain’s accent.
“Apprentice what? Who’s your master?”
“Apprentice to Ethtallion the Mage. I’m a wizard.”
“I thought so. Only a wizard would have any immediate use for a dead man’s hair.” He leaned forward, elbows on the table. “Well, Irillon, we don’t want any trouble with the Wizards’ Guild, but you were caught stealing. Can you prove you’re a wizard’s apprentice?”
“Yes,” Irillon said. “If you give me back my knife I can show you a spell. And there’s a spell on me that will tell my master if I’m harmed...”
“The Spell of the Spinning Coin, I suppose?” Alderamon interrupted.
“Yes,” Irillon admitted, startled that a non-wizard had ever heard of it. She had certainly never heard of it before her apprenticeship.
“So if your heart stops, the coin will stop spinning. I’ve had it explained to me before. We certainly don’t want that. Now, what spell can you demonstrate? Something harmless, please!”
“Ah... the Spell of Prismatic Pyrotechnics?”
Alderamon nodded, and a moment later Irillon had the spell ready. She blew on the silver whistle, and a shower of sparks in a hundred different hues sprang up from the little silver tray, exploding in tiny bursts of color.
“Very pretty,” Alderamon acknowledged. “It would seem you are indeed a wizard’s apprentice. Now, in that case, why were you stealing that hair, rather than buying it?”
Irillon blinked in surprise.
“Buying it?” she said.
“Of course.”
“Ethtallion... my master just said to fetch the ingredients...”
“And he didn’t mention that we sell them?” Alderamon sighed. “Well, we do. I told you, we don’t want any trouble with the Wizards’ Guild. That means we don’t try to withhold ingredients wizards need for their spells — but that doesn’t mean we’ll just give them away! You don’t give away your spells, do you?”