Elaine grinned. "Good."
Jonathan looked at the younger man's eager face. Had he ever been that young? No, he decided, he had not. There was an answering gleam* in Thordin's eyes. Looking forward to the next battle. Perhaps Thordin had been that young; perhaps he still was.
Jonathan stared at the two warriors. Perhaps those who lived by steel, like those who lived by magic, suffered the same delusion, that their abilities could solve every problem. Come to think of it, once upon a time, there had been a certain mage-finder that thought his abilities were proof against all evil. That had not been so long ago. Before Calum's illness-a few months.
He wanted to touch Thordin and Elaine, to shake them until the eager light died from their eyes. Didn't they realize that steel was not always enough? Magic was not enough. Intelligence was not always enough. There were some horrors for which nothing was enough.
They had fought the walking dead before and conquered. But a plague of the dead? Half a village brought to unholy life? Would they finally meet something they could not overcome? For the first time, a tiny worm of doubt began to gnaw at Jonathan Ambrose, mage-finder. Doubt. . and fear.
SIX
The man's body lay on its back, hands at its side. He had been average: medium height, brown hair, an unremarkable face, neither handsome nor ugly. Perhaps, alive, there had been some humor that animated that face, a divine spark that brought beauty to ordinariness. Elaine had seen enough dead to know that was often the case. It was hard to recognize a friend, a loved one, in the face of the dead, even the newly dead.
The shed was a mere lean-to, one wall missing, open to the winter night. Snow skittered across the body, sounding dry as sand as it gathered in the wrinkles of the deadman's clothes. The back of the shed was filled to the ceiling with wood. The snow dusted the cut wood.
Tereza stood over the body. The lantern at her feet cast a golden swath on the dead face. The icy wind gusted inside the lantern with a whoosh that sent flickering shadows trembling in the shed. The amber light seemed almost as uncertain as the shadows themselves, like colored darkness.
Elaine huddled inside her hooded cloak. There had been much yelling about her braving the cold so soon after nearly dying, but in the end, they had listened to Gersalius. He said she would be fine. It was magic, and on that, like it or not, Gersalius was the expert.
The wizard moved up beside them, kneeling by the body. His thick cloak spread like a dark pool on the hard ground. One pale hand appeared from his cloak to trace the man's cold face. His fingers were very long, graceful; musician's hands, poet's hands. They traced the bones of the cheek, the chin, the forehead, the bridge of the nose, the fleshy lips. Without looking up, he said, "What do you see, Elaine?"
"I see a deadman," she said.
"Look with more than your eyes."
Elaine shivered, drawing her cloak tighter. "I don't know what you mean."
He looked up. His eyes were thrown into shadow, like blind holes. His face was strange, somber, no longer friendly or even approachable. Kneeling there in the fire-kissed dark, fingers touching the corpse's up-turned face, he was suddenly a sorcerer, with all that one word implied.
"Come, Elaine, we have had this discussion before. You are a budding wizard, a witch, if you prefer. Tell me what you see."
His voice filled the shed, beating against the darkness. It was not a shout, and yet it was, as if his voice shouted on other ears besides her 'normal' ones.
"We haven't got all night, wizard," Tereza said. She stamped her feet against the cold. "Question her later, in the warmth."
Gersalius did not even look at her; his black-hole eyes never wavered from Elaine's face. "She must learn."
"I asked if you could discover why the great tree had come to life. You asked to see the corpse. I brought you. Now you go all mysterious on me. Why is it that wizards can never do anything like normal people?"
He turned to her at last, a slow move of his head. As his eyes moved out of shadow, they gleamed with a greenish light, the color of nothing in the shed.
His eyes weren't really glowing, were they? Elaine did not want to know if they were.
"You wanted me to discover something about the spell that killed this man. I am trying to do just that," the mage explained patiently.
"I asked you about the spell that animated the tree. We know what killed the man," insisted Tereza.
"Do you? Do you really?"
"The tree tore him in half, old man."
"That is how he died, yes, but not what killed him."
"It is too cold for riddles."
"And too cold for interruptions, gypsy."
Elaine's eyes flicked to Tereza. No one used that tone with her, not and lived a long and happy life.
Tereza drew a long breath that steamed in the air. Her eyes looked away from the kneeling wizard. "You are right. My apologies."
Elaine couldn't have been more astonished if Tereza had sprouted a second head. The woman never apologized, not for anything.
"Is that a spell?" She blurted it out before she had time to think. If it were a spell, saying so was not a good idea. Or perhaps it was. Gersalius shouldn't be bewitching them with his eyes. Surely Jonathan would disapprove of that.
Tereza smiled. "It is not a spell. The mage is trying to teach you sorcery, and I am questioning his methods. If I were teaching you swordplay, I would not want to be second-guessed." She made a small bowing motion with her arms. "Pray, continue, wizard. I will merely stand here freezing while you play school marm."
"Graciousness becomes you, Mistress Ambrose." His voice held a familiar lilt of humor. It was the voice that had been so comforting in the kitchen. Then he turned back to her, and as his eyes crossed into shadow, they gleamed. They seemed to merely reflect the glow of the lantern, but Elaine knew better. His eyes shone with sparks of blue and emerald, the color of no honest flame.
When his eyes were safely shadowed, and that disturbing light quenched from her sight, he spoke. "Now, Elaine, tell me what you see."
She released a long breath that wavered and fogged near her face. It was so cold. Her body trembled in the warm shell of her cloak. Why was she suddenly so cold?
"Elaine, your magic seeks to control you. You must control it."
"I don't know how."
"You must learn, or perish. There is no other choice."
"Why am I so cold?"
"Because it's the bloody middle of winter," Tereza said.
Gersalius held up a hand. "No interruptions." Neither he nor Elaine looked to see what the woman thought of such an abrupt order.
"Your magic takes shape from two things, outside forces, like the fire or light of your visions, and your own body. It is trying to feed on the warmth of your flesh. Don't let it."
"I don't understand." The cold was growing worse. It was not the winter air. The cold was coming from inside her. She could feel it like an icy wind through her belly.
"Can you find the source of the cold?"
She nodded. "Yes."
"Explore it, Elaine. Tell me what it feels like."
She tried. She reached for the cold with something like a hand, with something that traced the cold wind back, back, deep inside her, farther and deeper than her frail body was wide. There, at what felt like the cold, dark center of her being, was something like a cave. She had no words for what it was, but she was human and needed words. So it became a cave, and with the word, the thought: It was a cave. A cavern of ice that had been built one crystalline layer atop another until it was like a great mirrored room. Each facet of ice glinted with reflected light. But there was no light. AH was darkness.