Alca didn’t look happy when Lanius and Grus summoned her. “You want me to try to learn whether the Banished One is behind this winter weather?” she said. “I wish you’d give me something else to do. I think I’ve said this before”—she eyed Grus in a way Lanius couldn’t quite fathom—“but mortals who measure themselves against the Banished One’s magic often end up wishing they hadn’t.”
Lanius said, “If he dares to use his magic and we don’t dare use ours, how can we hope to stand against him?”
The witch let out a long sigh. “Your Majesty, that is the question that has led many mortals to use magic when they felt they had to. It is also the question that has led many of them to be sorry they did.”
“Will you try, or won’t you?” Grus asked. “I won’t order it of you, but I wish you would—for Avornis’ sake.” Lanius would have ordered her. He wondered why Grus, usually so hard, declined to do so.
Alca sighed again, a sound more wintry than the freezing wind that moaned around the palace. “For Avornis’ sake,” she repeated in a gray voice. “Yes, that is a key to undo a witch’s locks, isn’t it?” Grus stirred, but didn’t answer. At last, with another sigh, Alca nodded. “I will see what I can do.”
“Thank you,” Grus said soberly.
“Yes, thank you,” Lanius said. “You may not know how important this is.”
The witch looked at him—looked through him. “Your Majesty, you may not know how dangerous this is.” She didn’t raise her voice. She didn’t even sound angry. Lanius’ cheeks and ears heated, even so. He hadn’t been dismissed like that since he was a very little boy. Turning to Grus, Alca asked, “May I be as indirect as I possibly can, Your Majesty? The less of myself I show, the better my chances of living to work some other wizardry one day.”
“As you think best, of course,” Grus answered. “I don’t want your blood on my hands—you know that.”
“Do I?” Alca said, still in those gray tones. But then she nodded once more. “Yes, I suppose that’s true. If you wanted it, you’ve had plenty of excuses to take it.”
Lanius looked from one of them to the other. They knew what they were talking about, and he didn’t. They knew, and spoke obliquely so he wouldn’t. He asked Alca, “How soon will you be able to cast your spell?”
“A few days,” she said. “I have a lot of studying to do before I try it. And even after I cast it, how much good will knowing do you? If the Banished One if making the weather worse, how do you propose to stop him? I know of no spells to let a mortal wizard change the weather.”
“Knowing is always better than not knowing,” Lanius said.
Alca raised an eyebrow. “Always, Your Majesty?”
“Yes, of course.” Lanius believed it with every fiber of his being. He was, of course, still very young.
Grus said, “I think King Lanius is right here. We may not be able to stop the Banished One, but taking his measure, finding out how much he hates us at the moment, is worth doing.”
“Maybe.” The witch didn’t sound convinced. But she dropped them both curtsies—first to Grus, then to Lanius, who resented taking second place to his father-in-law. “You are the kings. I will give you what you think you want.” Lanius didn’t like the sound of mat. Before he could make up his mind to say so, Alca walked out of the chamber, her back very stiff. But she paused in the doorway. “Will either of you want to watch the spell as I cast it?”
“I will.” Lanius’ magpie curiosity made him speak up at once.
“It may be dangerous. Anything that has to do with the Banished One is dangerous,” she said. He shrugged. He wouldn’t back away while she and Grus listened.
“I’ll come, too,” Grus said. “Lanius isn’t the only one who wants to know what’s going on.”
“The more fools both of you,” Alca said, and went her way before either one of them could answer her.
More than a week went by before she let the two kings know she was ready. That was longer than she’d said the spell would take to prepare. Lanius almost sent her a message, asking her about the delay. In the end, he didn’t. As she’d said, even if they learned the Banished One lay behind the hard winter, what could they do to him? Nothing. That being so, where was the rush?
When Lanius walked into the cramped little room where she’d try her magic, he was surprised to see a large bowl full of snow sitting on top of a battered, stained, and scarred wooden table. But then he exclaimed, “Oh! The law of contagion!”
“What’s that?” Grus asked, and sneezed. As he wiped his nose, he said, “I hope it doesn’t have anything to do with this cold I’ve caught.” He sneezed again.
“No, Your Majesty,” Alca told him, and turned to Lanius, to whom she said, “Yes, Your Majesty, the law of contagion. If our blizzards spring from the Banished One, they were once in contact with him, so to speak. That’s what I intend to try to find out. Of course, what the Banished One intends may be something very different. We’ll see.”
She held a chunk of rock crystal in a sunbeam that fell on the table but not on the bowl of snow. Lanius exclaimed in amazement, for a rainbow suddenly appeared on the wall nearby. “Pretty,” Grus remarked. If he too was amazed, he hid it very well.
“How did you do that?” Lanius asked.
“It is a property of the crystal,” Alca answered, which told him nothing. She twisted the crystal this way and that, till the rainbow fell across the bowl of snow.
Steam immediately began to rise from the snow, though the room was not nearly warm enough to make any such thing happen. Alca started chanting. The words were in an ancient dialect of Avornan, one even more archaic than that which clerics used in their prayers and hymns. Lanius understood bits and pieces of it, but no more.
“What’s she saying?” Grus whispered to him; to the older king, the archaic Avornan made no sense at all.
And as soon as Lanius shifted his attention to try to explain, he found it stopped making any sense at all for him, too. “I don’t know, not exactly,” he whispered back, and let it go at that. “We’ll find out when we see what the spell does.” Grus nodded; that seemed to satisfy him well enough.
Despite what Lanius had told Grus, he did have some general idea of what Alca’s spell was doing—she was trying to detect any sorcerous link between this snow on the one hand and the Banished One on the other, and trying to do it in such a sneaky, roundabout way that the exile from the heavens wouldn’t notice. Whether that would work—whether, in fact, there was any link to detect… That was what the witch was trying to find out.
The first chant ended. Alca shrugged. “Nothing obvious,” she reported, sounding not a little relieved that she hadn’t found anything. “There’s one other spell I might try, though, if you like.” She looked from Lanius to Grus.
Grus looked at Lanius, as though to say, This was your idea in the first place. You figure out what you want her to do. Lanius said, “We’ve come this far. If we can find out, we ought to try all the arrows in our quiver.”
“As you wish, Your Majesty,” Alca said. “Give me a moment.” She closed her eyes and took a couple of deep breaths, steadying herself, Concentrating, before she resumed. Then, as though to be sure, she carried the bowl of snow from the chamber. Looking out the window, Lanius saw her dump what was left in it, move away a few feet, and scoop up a fresh bowlful.
When she came back, she set down the bowl and picked up the chunk of rock crystal. Again, a rainbow sprang into being on the wall. The witch began to chant once more. This spell was also in old-fashioned Avornan—if anything, more so than the first. It had a stronger, harsher rhythm; Lanius could imagine soldiers marching into battle to a chant like this.