‘Oh, sure,’ Steven joked, ‘they’re always better with salt, but that stuff is so bad for you.’
‘You know what I mean.’
‘I hope I am.’ He pulled on his jacket and quietly zipped it up. ‘The difficult part will be unravelling the tendrils of Nerak’s spell. I haven’t done that before and I don’t really know how it works.’
‘Can’t you just create a stronger spell to cancel the existing one?’
‘I wish it were that easy, but I’m afraid I’d destroy the table or kill myself – all of us – in the process. From what little I understand about magic, the most powerful spells actually change what is real. They alter reality, and then allow time and space and Twinmoons to go on as if nothing had happened. The magic is still there, churning away, but the world keeps going on as if nothing’s different. Reality isn’t suspended momentarily – although there are spells that do that too. Instead, what is real is shifted, and then permitted to fill its own niche in who we are and where we are and what we’re doing.’ He broke a small stick and handed Kellin half. When she raised her eyebrows, he made a stirring motion with one finger.
‘Oh, right.’ She stirred the bubbling mixture, and said, ‘I won’t pretend I have any idea what you’re talking about. How will you know what to do when you get down there?’
Steven said, ‘I’ve been lucky so far.’
‘Lucky?’
‘The magic has shown me what to do.’ He mulled over this another moment, then added, ‘Actually, it has shown me what not to do, what’s not important. Figuring out what is important has been my job. So, yes, I’ve been lucky.’
‘And skilled,’ Gilmour rolled over and rubbed his hands above the flames. ‘Don’t let him fool you, Kellin. He’s been very deft at figuring out what needs to be done.’
‘I don’t know about this one, though,’ Steven said.
‘Because you’re distracted by the water and the cold and the possibility of drowning,’ Gilmour said.
‘Well,’ Steven chuckled, ‘it’s hard to get past those, my friend.’
‘Nonsense.’ The teacher in Gilmour took over. ‘Don’t think about it as an underwater moraine in an icy river.’
‘That’s easy for you to say.’ Steven smiled over at Kellin. ‘You’re not the one going down there, Gilmour.’
‘You must think of it as a pile of rocks on the shore, someplace warm and dry. Deal with the cold and the air first; then forget them. You said yourself: the most powerful spells change what’s real. Change the water temperature; change your lungs and then get busy working on the moraine. You need to unravel the spell inside the rocks and the riverbed; that’s what we’re doing here. The rest of it is extraneous detail.’ Gilmour handed Kellin his goblet and she filled it. ‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘Think of it like the doorway to Prince Malagon’s cabin on the Prince Marek. Remember that spell?’
‘What I remember is that I couldn’t unravel a damned thing, so I blasted it to matchsticks with the hickory staff.’
Gilmour looked disappointed. ‘Right. So you did.’
Kellin said, ‘I still don’t understand what you mean by unravelling the magic. I thought you said once reality was changed, it was changed for ever.’
Gilmour said, ‘Yes, it does change. But as Steven also said, the magic is still there, still churning away – like a diverted stream, it’s a layer of refocused energy in our existential plane. As long as a wily sorcerer can get at it, he – or she – can change it again, change it back, even paint the goddamned thing yellow if he wants to.’
‘Yellow?’ Kellin said.
‘Insider joke,’ Steven said.
Gilmour went on, ‘So all Steven has to do is find that place where Nerak’s magic comes together, where all the scattered threads have been woven into something new. In this case it’s something dangerous. It’s probably somewhere near the base of the thing, especially if he cast a spell on the rocks and the riverbed simultaneously. Then, the rest of it becomes-’
‘Geometry,’ Steven finished his friend’s thought, ‘the mathematics of untying knots, imploding old buildings or folding paper into complex shapes. It’s all just one turn, one brick, one fold at a time.’
‘Exactly.’ Gilmour handed back his goblet for a refill. ‘So, Kellin, there you have it. That’s all our young friend here has to do today.’
Steven smirked. ‘Again, that’s easy for you to say. You’re not going down there.’
Gilmour frowned. ‘Of course I am. Don’t be silly; I wouldn’t miss this for anything.’
‘But the cold, and the water, and the rest of it,’ Steven said, ‘are you really up for all that, all those extraneous details?’
‘I don’t think so,’ Gilmour admitted, ‘but I’m certain that you are.’
It was one o’clock by Howard’s watch, some time after dawn in Eldarn, when Steven sat on the fallen pine to remove his boots and socks once again. The river rolled inexorably through Meyers’ Vale.
‘Ready?’ he said to Gilmour.
Gilmour had already stripped to the waist and was standing barefoot in the dusting of snow that had fallen overnight. He looked unfazed, as comfortable as if he were on a tropical beach. ‘I suppose I am,’ he said, turning his arms in great spiralling loops like an Olympic swimmer warming up. Gilmour’s body was an emaciated, bandylegged leather sack, ribs pressing out against the paper-thin skin of his chest. The fisherman Caddoc Weston, whose body Gilmour now wore, had spent many Twinmoons hauling nets on the Ravenian Sea, and that time had toughened the old man’s flesh into something near-impenetrable, otherwise Steven was sure that Gilmour would have frozen, cracked and collapsed into a pile of jagged pieces right there beside the river.
‘Don’t warm me up right away,’ Gilmour said. ‘I want to see if I can still handle a Winter Festival swim.’
Garec laughed. ‘And if you can’t?’
‘I guess you’ll have to gaff me and sell me at the fish market in Orindale.’
‘With all that meat on you?’ Garec said. ‘A half-bucket of eddy fish and a slimy eel are worth enough copper Mareks to buy a round of beers. For you we’d be lucky to get enough for a loaf of day-old bread.’
‘Trust me, I’ve got it where it counts, Garec,’ Gilmour crowed, puffing out his narrow chest.
Brand and Kellin laughed at that.
Garec, lightening the mood in the cold grey of another sunless winter morning, looked around and asked, ‘Where? In a box under your bed? Because from where we’re standing, it doesn’t look like that old fisherman left you with much – or is that just a wrinkle that won’t iron out?’
‘And what would I do with more than a handful, Garec?’
Preparing for an equally hearty dose of ribbing himself, Steven pulled off his jacket and started concentrating on a spell to warm air and water. ‘So, size is an issue here, too, huh? Christ. A guy falls through a magic portal into a mystical world, and it still comes down to the size of the packet under the godforsaken Christmas tree.’
Garec roared with laughter, nearly slipping on an icy rock and tumbling into the shallows. Brand and Kellin joined in as Gilmour struck several ridiculous poses, his leggings sagging over his bony backside.
Steven focused his will; his skin tautened into gooseflesh, and he felt the familiar sensation of something charged moving through his body. The air began to thicken; the pines, the Blackstones and the snowy riverbank all blurred into a distant, waxy backdrop.
Gilmour stopped his posturing and moved to stand beside him. ‘Is it working?’ he asked softly.
As Steven nodded, the others quieted as well and Gilmour asked, ‘How close do you need me?’
‘Until I get it right, stay here beside me, please.’
‘Get it right?’ Gilmour put a hand on Steven’s shoulder. ‘My boy, if I don’t get in that water soon, the heat out here is going to leave me senseless.’
‘You can feel it?’ Steven wished he had thought to bring along the hickory staff. Somehow having it in his hands gave him confidence; it helped him to feel that magic was tangible. His battle with Nerak had taught him he didn’t need it, but for the first time since defeating the fallen sorcerer, Steven missed the wooden staff.