Sky Rider Read online

  Frightful was game. As soon as Dara loosed her, she took a single wobbly step on her overlarge feet, spread her wings, and grabbed the air. She took off like an arrow, and in moments was a speck in the clouds.

  Dara relaxed and let her mind mix with the falcon’s, as she took wing. Frightful was feeling exhilarated, the young wizard discovered, surprised and pleased at the strength and surface area her new wings provided her. She was determined to make use of them. Frightful now climbed higher with every powerful beat of her wings than she had with two beats, before. When she crossed the path of a flock of starlings, once a tasty snack for the bird, Frightful all but ignored them. They were too small; puny birds that weren’t worth her attention. Even the ducks who frequented the mill pond seemed almost dainty.

  Dara was astonished herself – not at the speed and size of Frightful’s flight, but at the gleeful way her bird regarded her unexpected transformation. She was thinking about all the other birds she could terrorize, all the cats she could harass, all the previously-challenging mammals on the ground who would now be horrified by her size and strength.

  My bird is a bully! Dara realized, with a snort. It was an unpleasant thought, but then animals didn’t have the same standards and contexts as humans, she knew. Expecting them to behave like humans was foolish. But Dara had a sneaking suspicion that Frightful was, to avian society, what the mean girls in Barrowbell were to human society.

  Frightful wheeled a few circles around the incredibly beautiful white spire that sat upon the crest of the largest hill in the valley, Matten’s Helm. It was an Alka Alon design, a slender tower sitting atop an elegant base that made up the embassy hall for the nearly-immortal non-humans. It had always been a major landmark for Frightful, but from her transformed perspective it, too, seemed smaller and daintier, now.

  Dara permitted her bird no more than three circuits of the spire before recalling her back to the much more mundane looking top of Sevendor Castle. She came toward them even faster than she had, originally. But this time she did not try to land on her wooden perch, she landed squarely on the crenel closest to them.

  Ithalia immediately started singing her scrying spell, while Dara did her own inspection of her bird. Despite her larger size, she seemed perfectly healthy for the experience.

  “I think I have enough information,” Ithalia concluded, when her short song was done. “I’ll turn her back, now. I don’t want her to linger in a transformed body until I have my grandmother review our results,” she said, nodding. “But based on what I’ve seen, I think we can proceed to the next stage. A little augmentation of the energy transfer in her metabolism, some fiddling with her bone density and some work on muscular efficiency and blood flow, and I think we’ve got it. How did Frightful fare?”

  “She’s awfully proud of herself,” Dara snickered, as she watched Frightful preen her feathers. “She has no idea why or how it happened, but she wants to go attack every creature in the vale, now.”

  “It’s good that she hasn’t lost her belligerent nature,” Ithalia smiled. “Now let me transform her back. If she was hungry before, she’s ravenous now, with her stomach three times its normal size.”

  “How much larger do you think you’ll take her?” Dara asked, after Ithalia sang a far-simpler tune than the first, returning her to her normal size.

  “Oh, another two orders of magnitude, I think,” Ithalia decided, after some thought. “A lot will depend on my grandmother’s calculations. She thinks we’ll settle around a thirty-eight foot total wingspan, on average. But she thinks she could go as high as a sixty-foot wingspan, without running into too many problems.”

  “What kinds of problems?” Dara asked, frowning, as she returned Frightful to her perch with another morsel.

  “There are limits to even our magic,” Ithalia explained. “Transgenic enchantments are rarely tried on mortals – of any species. They’re just too fragile, ordinarily. The transformation itself puts stress on the organism. And if the transformation is too profound, it can cause problems of adjustment that can be . . . tragic.

  “In this case, it’s merely a matter of scale,” she continued, managing to instruct without sounding like she was lecturing. Between Master Minalan, Lady Pentandra, and her two senior apprentices, Tyndal and Rondal, she got plenty of those. Ithalia was merely . . . explaining, she reasoned. “While that is a simple component to the enchantment, it brings its own problems.

  “Simply making Frightful bigger isn’t going to necessarily mean that her form is going to be viable. She might become too big to fly, for instance. If her muscles are not strong enough to beat her wings fast enough, or if she gets tired too easily because of the magnitude of the task, then our spell is flawed. That’s why I’m getting my grandmother to look it over. She specializes in this sort of thing.” That brought another thought to the sorceress’ mind, Dara saw.

  “And Dara? If you could be . . . discreet about this project, for now, that wouldn’t be a bad thing.”

  “Why?” Dara asked, curious.

  “Just trust me, for now,” Ithalia assured. “I don’t want it generally known that we’re conducting clandestine experiments. Not before they’re done. Especially if my grandmother is involved, in any way. It’s difficult to explain, but some Alka Alon would not like that. Just . . . trust me.”

  “Who would I tell?” Dara asked, with another snort. “But if you want it kept secret, I can keep it. And . . . if your grandmother could make her smarter, while you’re at it, that wouldn’t be a bad thing,” Dara suggested, humorously.

  “I’ll see what I can do,” Ithalia agreed, to Dara’s surprise.

  “You can do that?”

  “It all depends upon how the spell is sung,” shrugged the beautiful Emissary. “And what you mean by ‘smarter’. I’ll mention it to my grandmother. She might know a way.”

  “I mean, she’s already smart,” Dara corrected herself. “For a bird, anyway. Compared to a dove or a chicken or a sparrow, she’s bloody brilliant. But she’s also stubbornly dim, when it comes to some things. Like thinking her reflection wants to be friends,” she suggested. “Or when she’s certain that the castle’s cats are conspiring against her.”

  Ithalia looked surprised. “She thinks that?”

  “In her defense, they are a shifty lot,” Dara pointed out. There were probably six or seven cats who wandered around Sevendor Castle on rodent-control duty. They were perfectly normal, friendly cats, but Frightful did not like them one bit, and never passed up an opportunity to fly at them when she was able. The cats, for their part, liked to sit and stare balefully at the bird, two or even three at a time, which made her even more nervous. Dara tried to reason with them, through magic, but they ignored her. “If they thought they could get away with it, they might try to worry Frightful. When she was large defeating her hated foe was one of the things she was looking forward to.”

  “Even paranoid birds can have real enemies,” giggled Ithalia.

  Dara thought again about the rage the falcon harbored for the cats. It wasn’t exactly murderous, but it was close.

  “Yeah, on second thought, make her smarter, if you can . . . but not too much smarter,” Dara suggested, her eyes narrowing as she watched Frightful preen. “I’m not certain we could really trust her.”

  Chapter Two

  The Chewed Stick

  Dara didn’t return to her room until she was certain Frightful was comfortable in the little mews that Master Minalan had built for her on the third floor of the castle, not too far from Dara’s own quarters.

  She’d been given most of one tower room – the one closest to the Westwood – when she first came to live at the castle, last year. Compared to the little chamber she’d lived in at Westwood Hall, her quarters were spacious and roomy. But then she needed the additional room for all of her hawking gear, not to mention the growing pile of magical supplies, books and scrolls she was accumulating.

  Instead of having her falconry gear and her magical gea
r neatly separated and organized, her room was a mad mixture of both, in perpetual disarray, combined with a healthy amount of her dirty clothing. Master Minalan ignored the problem. The women of the castle frequently took her to task over the unkempt nature of her room, and Lady Estret, the wife of the castellan, Sire Cei, had taken it upon herself to encourage Dara to adopt more ladylike standards, now that she was actually an official lady.

  But neither title nor position could change Dara’s fundamentally messy nature. It wasn’t that she delighted in chaos. She admired organization when she saw it. She appreciated the necessity of order when it came to magic, falconry, or the other areas in which she was educated.

  But when it came to her room, Dara resisted all attempts to keep things tidy. Almost no one ever came here, she reasoned, and she had better things to do than sort out which of her clothes were clean, somewhat dirty, ready for the laundress, or ready to be burned.

  It didn’t help matters that she had a puppy.

  Cinder was adorable, one of the Westwood hounds that her family had bred for generations to aid them in patrolling the wood and hunting. Dara’s father had given the puppy to her as a gift when she’d moved to the castle, and had given her littermate, Midnight, to Master Minalan. The two pups spent most of their time down in the Great Hall, or out in the yard of the bailey, with the other castle dogs. But when she wasn’t chasing chickens or sniffing her way through the gardens, Cinder returned to Dara’s room, where she seemed determined to track down any representation of order and eliminate it.

  So far, the teething puppy had chewed through several strips of rawhide, one of Frightful’s old lures, the left boot of a pair Dara had outgrown, her pillow, and the Principles of Elementary Thaumaturgy authored by some important scholar from the ancient Magocracy.

  Today, the gray and black hound was sitting on her bed – where she was forbidden – and gnawing playfully on a stick. Her tail started wagging as soon as she saw Dara, but she didn’t stop chewing for more than a moment.

  Dara didn’t even bother chiding Cinder about the transgression. Compared to the pillow incident, her pup was being sedate and well-behaved.

  Dara threaded her way through the piles of things on the floor to get to her table, which was just as chaotic as the floor. But that was where she kept her writing supplies. She cast a small, simple spell – known to wizards as a cantrip – to ignite the lone candle on the table. She would have cast a magelight, but that spell was exhausting, if she didn’t have her witchstone – and Master Minalan still kept her measly little stone locked up, if she wasn’t using it in her lessons. That was annoying, but her master had a poor history with apprentices who had unfettered access to irionite, and he insisted on the precaution.

  Once Dara had liberated her stool from the pile of stockings, she quickly found a quill, inkpot, and blank parchment in the mess and began to work.

  One of the few things Master Minalan insisted upon with the falcon project was that she record the process in detail for later review. It was as much a writing exercise for her as a report to him, she knew, but she didn’t mind. The falcon project was important, and she didn’t want there to be any problems later on because she forgot to note something now.

  Just last year the idea that she would be writing, much less reading fluently, would have caused Dara to scoff. Learning to read had been a torturous process for her. But to her surprise, the words and symbols that had been so excruciatingly difficult to understand when she’d began her training were now second-nature. Writing those letters and symbols in proper order and form once seemed impossible, but thanks to the constant practice Master Minalan insisted upon she could now write entire sentences as effortlessly as drawing a picture of a cat.

  To prove it to herself, she drew a picture of a cat in the margins of her report before she began.

  FALCON PROJECT DAY ONE she wrote in bold letters across the top of the page.

  Lady Ithalia arrived at the castle equipped with the first transgenic enchantment spell supplied by our allies, the Alka Alon. After establishing Frightful’s health and normal flying requirements, Lady Ithalia sang her spell. Frightful transformed into a larger version of herself and successfully flew to Lesgaethael and back in her new form without incident or injury. She quickly adapted to her new form after some initial confusion. Lady Ithalia took some mental notes (because the Alka Alon never write anything down) and then transformed Frightful safely back to her original form. Lady Ithalia says that she will take the results back to the Alka Alon and return soon with an improved version of the spell.

  It only took her an hour to write the report, and Dara took great pains to ensure that every word was spelled and formed properly. Instead of spreading sand on the parchment to dry it, as normal people did, she used another cantrip and the ink dried instantly. She was grateful for that. Writing sand was messy. The room did not need another source of debris to accumulate.

  When she was done, she threaded the top of the parchment sheet into a wooden dowel and rolled it into a scroll. It would be the first of many, she hoped. As much as she disliked writing, she looked forward to adding more to it as the project progressed.

  No one had tried this kind of magic before – at least no one human. The Alka Alon, masters of magic on Callidore, had taught humanity how to use its newfound magical powers centuries ago by aiding them in developing what was known as the Imperial Magical System that all professional wizards in the Five Duchies used. But Dara often felt as if the enigmatic non-humans had kept all of the best magic for themselves.

  From what Master Minalan and his colleagues said (when they didn’t think Dara was listening) there was not even a theoretical basis for those types of transgenic enchantments within Imperial Magic. Nor did the Alka Alon seem willing to share it, though they were happy to use it to help the war effort. It was a point of friction in the alliance, Dara knew, but one she could do little about. Indeed, it was something even her master, the great Minalan the Spellmonger, could do little about.

  Thoughts of her master and his expectations banished Dara’s speculations. Writing the report had been gratifying, but that wasn’t the only thing she needed to write. She had lessons to study, and no amount of work on the special project would keep Master Min from drilling her on the thaumaturgical basics. Even though she’d mastered the various magical runes that were the symbolic basis for Imperial Magic, she was learning the long, tiresome process of stringing those runes together in various ways to manifest magical power differently.

  It was a tedious process. Each new rune could change the spell in dramatic ways, and each of those ways had to be understood by the mage in order to complete the spell. Nor was it as simple as writing. Each rune not only had to be inscribed in some way, it had to be understood, integrated with the others, and magically activated. Imperial Magic was full of mnemonic devices that helped you remember them precisely.

  You could do that a number of ways, she was learning. While the runes could all be simply written out to represent them, when a wizard was actually using them could use body motions, spoken words, visual depictions, or even pure thought, if they were good enough at the arcane arts. The motions made by her fingers, or the words her lips spoke, or the runes she inscribed in the air weren’t themselves magical. They were merely devices that gave her mind the organization it needed to let the flow of arcane power her Talent provided to be shaped into a useable form. The words and gestures didn’t make magic happen. Her mind did.

  This week she was learning six-rune combinations, a particularly challenging iteration of the Imperial System. But the technique was essential, she’d been told, for unlocking an entire domain of powerful spells.

  She was in the middle of practicing Thayer’s Test, a magical routine that helped her manage six runes at once, when there was an unexpected knock on her door.

  “Come in!” she said, automatically, expecting another head-shaking lecture from Lady Estret on the state of her room. Instead, when her narrow wo
oden door swung open, the tall figure of Sir Festaran of Hosly filled her doorway.

  Dara was immediately mortified. It was one thing for Lady Estret or Sister Bemia or even Baroness Alya to see her room looking like a cesspool. But Sir Festaran was an altogether different matter. She sprang to her feet, looking crazily around at the mess, and started babbling to distract the young knight mage’s attention from the disorder.

  “Sir Fes!” she said, her voice breaking, uncomfortably.

  “Lady Lenodara,” Festaran said, managing a graceful bow despite his lanky frame. “I apologize for disturbing you in your chambers, at study – I do hope you weren’t working on anything delicate?” he asked, anxiously.

  Sir Festaran, as assistant castellan to the foremost Magelord in the kingdom, had grown accustomed to the type of magical work their master did. He, himself, was technically a mage, after all – though his Talent was far inferior to Dara’s, it had awakened on the same fateful night. Sir Festaran was what wizards called a ‘sport’. While Dara was plowing through the intermediate-level spells every apprentice mage needed to know, Festaran’s feeble Talent allowed him the capacity to cast only the most basic of cantrips. Except for one thing.

  Festaran had been blessed with the ability to accurately estimate pretty much anything he thought about. She’d tested him on it, asking him to supply the number of bricks needed to build the castle, the number of blades of grass in a meadow, the number of feathers on Frightful – all sorts of things. He’d indulged her happily, but despite his amazing ability he wasn’t able to do much more than that, despite the attempts to teach him. Sire Cei, who was also a knight mage and an arcane sport, could transform magical energy into physical power on the battlefield. Festaran’s Talent was far less useful there.