Or was it the other way around?
CHAPTER 4
No Refund, No Return
Matt stared at the unfamiliar landscape around him, stumbled, then caught his balance and managed to right himself. Still agog, he decided he could see why magicians said their spells aloud. It definitely gave better results!
Then it hit him—well or poorly, the spell had worked! Even without reciting it aloud—the gag was still in his mouth. It had worked!
Why?
No time to figure it out now; he filed it away for analysis when there would be a moment of leisure—i.e., one not filled with trying to stay alive—and got down to the serious business of getting that gag out of his mouth.
His hands were chained behind his back, and his mouth was filled with dry cloth. Free his hands, and he could untie the gag—or free his mouth, and he could make up a spell to get rid of the chains. Which to do first?
Make sure there were no enemies about to pounce on him—that did kind of take first priority. "Enemies" included mountain lions, wolves, and other mountain dwellers that might consider him to be just the right snack. He turned around slowly and saw that he was alone on a hillside. He relaxed a little—then realized that he hadn't had any trouble turning. His ankle had been manacled to the wall, but apparently the manacle hadn't come with him.
That made sense—the end of it being attached to the wall, it counted as part of the castle he had been trying to get away from. Therefore, it had stayed behind—but his wrist chains, being attached only to him, had come along.
Well, he was grateful for every little bit of progress. Free feet were better than nothing. Then a light bulb turned on inside his head, showing him a scene of himself as a child playing the old game of trying to step through the circle of his own arms, with his hands clasped together. As he remembered, he'd managed it—but he'd been considerably more agile at ten than he was at twenty-seven.
Or was he? His first few weeks in Merovence had put him back into very good shape, and he hadn't lost much of his muscle tone in the last three years—Alisande had kept him very busy going from place to place in the kingdom, trouble-shooting and wiping out leftover pockets of sorcery. Most of it, he had to admit, had been necessary, at least for the first two years. The third year, though, had been full of make-work errands. The memory galled him, especially since he was pretty sure what had instigated them—Alisande's need to be away from him.
The thought scored his heart, so he thrust it aside and got down to experimenting. Carefully, trying not to lose his balance, he bent his knees, getting his wrists as low as he could and stretching the chain as far as it would go. Then, slowly, he lifted his left foot and tried to push it over the links.
His toe caught.
For a second, he teetered, madly trying to keep his balance, then fell crashing to the ground. He lay still for a second, trying to contain the burst of anger—it wouldn't do any good to let it out at the moment, anyway.
Why not just make up a spell? If he could get out of a prison, he could get out of a chain.
Two reasons. The first was that the transportation spell had worked well enough, but not perfectly. In fact, Matt's spells frequently tended not to have quite the effects he had planned, anyway, and the imperfections that came from reciting the verse silently might have very painful results. The second was that magic had a way of attracting the attention of other magic-workers, and Matt would just as soon have his hands and mouth free before having to try to deal with any wizardly tracers Alisande might manage to have her second-class magicians try on him.
Or any hostile locals, for that matter...
On the other hand, now that he was on the ground, he had no balance to lose. The idea made sense—so much so that he thought he should have tried lying down in the first place. Well, now that he had, voluntarily or not, he could try stepping through the chain with a bit more leisure. He pulled his left foot up, jamming his knee against his chest, and very carefully moved his toes past the chain. Then he straightened the leg—with a feeling of victory. Now, if he could just do it with his right...He rolled over onto his left side and slowly, carefully, raised his knee and pulled his right foot through. Then he sat up, smiling around his gag as he looked down at his hands, there in front of him. He felt an immense sense of accomplishment.
He stretched the chain tight again and lifted it over and down behind his head. His fingers pulled at the knot in the cloth. It wasn't easy—the guard had tied it to stay, as tightly as he could. A fingernail snapped, but Matt had needed to trim it, anyway—and, finally, the gag was off! He pulled the wad of cloth out of his mouth, spitting out lint, then working his mouth to bring saliva, moistening his tongue and lips. Finally, he opened his mouth again, to sigh with relief—and to recite a quick verse that made his manacles spring open and fall to the ground. Then, at last, he could stand up again, and really look about him.
Matt took a breath of cool air as he gazed at the high slope before him. Then he stilled—that air had been cool, hadn't it? Funny—it was high summer, in Merovence.
Therefore, he wasn't in Merovence.
The thought sent prickles along his scalp. The first spell—the one that hadn't worked—had been the same one he'd used when he'd spelled Alisande out of prison, three years before, and he'd still expected to wind up next to a little brook, under a canopy of musk roses, eglantine, and woodbine. This place, though, looked to be at a much higher altitude, and the evergreens certainly didn't resemble the deciduous bower he'd had in mind.
Well, you couldn't expect a spell that had only been thought to be as effective as one that had been recited aloud, could you?
Or had somebody wanted him someplace else?
He went back to looking at the scenery, trying to ignore the hollowness in his stomach, and decided that the landscape was definitely uneven—not in quality, as pine forests and alpine meadows are always beautiful, but in terrain. He was hard put to find a horizontal line anywhere, and the ground rose up toward the edge of the sky like the back of a giant stegosaurus, shadowing half the little valley in which he stood.
Behind his back stood the sun.
He hauled his stomach back up from the gulf it was trying to sink into and reflected that it could be much later in the day—he could have traveled really far. But somehow, he doubted that he'd moved more than a few degrees in longitude—one time zone, at the most. He'd arrived at Alisande's castle right after dawn, and would have escaped no later than mid-morning. That meant the sun had still been in the east—so if it was on the far side of those peaks, he was on the western side of the mountains.
In Ibile. The kingdom of black magic.
He put the qualms behind him—he was the one who had said he was going to invade Ibile and capture its throne. In fact, he'd sworn it—and he couldn't blame the Powers That Be if they had taken him at his word. He should have been more careful with his language—in his anger, he'd fallen back into lifelong habits and used expressions that were a trifle more emphatic than they should have been. By the rules of this nutty universe, that meant he was bound to do what he'd said. Totally unfair, he decided, but not all that unjust. It was a great way to break a man of swearing, but it seemed a trifle extreme.
He put the issue aside and forced himself to smile, enjoying the simple pleasures of the moment, drinking in the wild beauty of the place, and he allowed himself to feel a bit of guilt over having left Alisande so suddenly. But only a little—he had to admit it had begun to pall on him, having a girlfriend who could handily order his head chopped off if she wanted to. The notion was decidedly intimidating, even though he knew Alisande would never do such a thing.