She unbuttoned and stepped out of her skirt-I was intrigued, but underneath she wore men’s leggings-and braided up her hair. Then she rubbed a little dirt into her palms and, her head back, considered the steep surface. It was pocked with cracks and fissures; even a few flowers grew in tiny pockets of soil. Then she began to climb.
“Remember those words of the Hidden Language,” I said quickly. “If you start to fall, you might be able to slow your descent with the flying spell.”
Theodora finished shifting her weight from a lower to a higher toehold and paused. “Maybe I shouldn’t let you teach me to fly after all,” she said. “This wouldn’t be as challenging if I knew I was always perfectly safe.”
She went back to climbing, moving slowly but steadily, finding crevices in the rock which I would never have found, trusting herself to them when I would have been paralyzed. Although she did not have the long toes and fingers of the workmen on the cathedral, she moved with the same apparent disregard for height.
At first I watched her from the ground, then I flew up to a ledge and watched as she went by. She broke into a light sweat as she climbed, making her tunic stick to her back. She seemed to have an exquisite sense of balance and an absolute confidence that her body would obey her mind.
At the end of a half hour, Theodora had almost reached a deep crevice in the rock face. But the last few feet of cliff jutted outwards. She worked her hand into a narrow crack, made a fist so that the hand would not slip out again, and braced her weight against it as she scrambled for purchase with her toes. For a moment she became motionless, then her knees started to tremble and she began quietly swearing.
I reached with magic to catch her, but then she flung the other hand up, grabbed the lip of the crevice above her, kicked her way upward, and folded herself into it. I let out my breath all at once. “I’m going to rest here!” she called cheerfully. “I think there’s enough room for you, too.”
I flew up to join her. “Are you all right?”
“Of course. I apologize for the cursing. There’s always a moment, usually just before you reach the top, when you think that this time you’ll never make it and you have to yell at your body to keep it moving at all.”
There was just room in the crevice for a second person. Although not nearly as supple as she, I managed to fit most of myself in. Our faces were very close together and our shoulders collided. I was surrounded by the scent of her, a combination of sweat, lavender, and clean hair.
“I’m extremely impressed,” I told her honestly. “Did your mother teach you climbing as well as magic?”
“It was my father, actually,” she said. “He died in a fall when I was only ten, but he’d already taught me everything he knew.”
“Oh, I’m sorry,” I said inadequately.
“It’s a long time ago now. Besides, I don’t think of him as being dead. I think about what he used to say to me, how he used to encourage me when he first took me out to practice on little ten-foot boulders. Sometimes when I’m climbing I can still almost hear him.”
I thought to myself that theirs must have been a very unusual family. But I was distracted by the realization that her lips were less than an inch from mine. It seemed perfectly natural to start kissing them. Even though I could not embrace her, as my arms were needed to hold me in the crevice, I kept on for some time. Theodora seemed to be enjoying this as much as I was.
I had almost decided I could spare one arm to put around her when the corner of my eye caught a glimpse of empty air. If I wasn’t careful, both of us would be down at the bottom of the cliff.
Very delicately, I pulled my head back. Her eyes smiled into mine. “Is this what you’re imagining the princess and the royal wizard doing?” she asked.
I wasn’t at all sure she believed my theory about Sengrim-I wasn’t sure I believed it myself. But being reminded of him calmed me down enough that I noticed how cramped I had become jammed into the crevice. “I’m going to slip out now,” I told her. “Were you planning to climb any higher?”
“This is high enough for today,” she said. “It always takes longer to go down than up. We’ll have to come back here again.”
I rolled out into the air and hovered, watching as she extended first one long leg and then the other. She found toeholds and started easing herself down.
As she descended I hovered to one side, trying to stay far enough away that I would not distract her and yet close enough that I could catch her with magic if she slipped. She would probably object if she knew what I was doing, but her father had fallen to his death.
Somehow and quite mistakenly I had assumed going down would be easier than ascending. Instead of looking above her for the next tiny ledge or crevice, Theodora had to feel below her with a toe. When she was twenty feet from the ground I went down and stood below her, thinking that if she did fall I could cushion the impact with my body. Suddenly I heard voices.
Coming around the corner were three men. They had the massive upper arms and chest muscles of men who spend their days swinging hammers against solid stone. “Hey, look!” said one of them. “It’s a girl on the cliff!”
The other two laughed. “Let’s get her down!” They ignored me, an ineffectual looking white-haired man. They brushed past and looked up the cliff as though about to start climbing.
A pebble rolled past my head as I heard Theodora shifting. I looked toward her and froze. She was gone.
The men were equally startled. “Hey, where’s the girl?” The leader looked at me for the first time. “What did you do with her, old man? Are you a magician or something?”
“I am the Royal Wizard of Yurt,” I said loudly, doing my best to give him a piercing look. Inside my head I was yelling, “Theodora! Where are you?”
“A wizard, huh? Did you make the girl disappear? What did you do that for?”
“To keep your unwanted attentions from her, of course,” I said and extended a hand. With a small bang and a burst of pink smoke, the grass caught fire at his feet.
“Very good, pupil!” said Theodora’s voice inside my mind. I stole a quick glimpse up the rock face. The sun was at an oblique angle, and the crevices and odd bits of plant growing out of the limestone made a jumble of shadows, but there was a larger shadow where I had last seen Theodora.
The men stepped back, temporarily startled. The leader regained his composure first. “You want to fight, is that it?” he cried and charged.
I would never have been able to hold him off if he had reached me, but fortunately I did not have to. I lifted him six feet off the ground and held him suspended. “All right,” I said to the other two. “Would either of you like to take your turn?”
The man in the air kicked and bellowed, but magic held him firmly. I shifted my attention to the second man and started lifting him slowly. I did not have to lift him far. He tried to jerk away and cried out with fear as all but the tips of his toes left the ground. I let him go, and he dropped heavily. He caught his balance, spun around and began to run. The third man was already gone.
“Keep this in mind as a useful warning,” I said to my remaining audience. “Never try to attack a wizard.” But I went up into the air myself, above the reach of his powerful arms, before letting him down. He gave one snarl in my direction and followed his friends.
“Theodora!” I called, trying to find her shadow. But the shadow was moving. In a few minutes it had reached the bottom of the cliff and Theodora reappeared, taking one hand out of her pocket.
I put my arms around her. “Thank God. Are you all right? How did you make yourself invisible?”
“How did you lift him off the ground?” She was smiling with delight. “Is that a variation of the flying spell?”