Just as Isidore had said, Magda, too, could see both sincerity and competence in Merritt’s eyes.
Yet unlike Isidore, Magda could also see the gift.
In Merritt’s eyes, the gift was different from anything she had seen in her life. It was a look that was at once breathtaking and dangerous, but at the same time softened with an undertone of warmth. Under his intent gaze, she had to remind herself to let her breath out.
On second consideration, she decided he did indeed look to her very much like a wizard.
“What news have you of Isidore?”
His voice matched the look of him perfectly. It almost felt as if her whole being vibrated in harmony with the deep, clear tone of it. Magda swallowed and forced herself to speak.
“Before I can say anything else, I must ask you to swear an oath.”
His brow drew down. “An oath?”
“That’s right. I need you to first swear an oath of loyalty to Lord Rahl, which will protect your mind from dream walkers. Only in that way can I know that we are talking in confidence.”
He did the oddest thing, then.
He smiled.
It was an easy, warm smile that betrayed a shade of private amusement.
“A bold, if not highly strange request from such a lovely stranger at my door. We haven’t even been properly introduced.”
Magda pushed the cowl back off her head. “I am Magda Searus.”
The smile vanished in a heartbeat. “Magda Searus?” His face turned red. “Wife of First Wizard Baraccus? That Magda Searus?”
“Yes.”
The frown revisited his expression. “I was there, among all the people at the ceremony the day your husband’s remains were purified in the funeral pyre. I saw you there that day, in the distance. You had long hair.”
“Well, with Baraccus dead, the council wanted it cut off. They were quite insistent about letting the world know that without Baraccus I am a nobody. Elder Cadell, personally, saw to cutting it.”
He dipped his head respectfully. “I’m sorry about the loss of your husband, Lady Searus. Baraccus was a truly great man.”
“Thank you.”
He stared into her eyes a long moment, head still bowed, then remembered himself and straightened. “Please,” he said as his face reddened again, “wait there a moment, will you?”
He abruptly shut the door.
Magda realized, then, what else was different about him from most men. The entire time he had been in the doorway, he had looked into her eyes, his gaze wandering no farther than to her hair. The gazes of most men invariably wandered elsewhere. Merritt hadn’t done that, even though the black dress she was wearing under her light cloak did tend to reveal her shape to advantage.
Magda heard him stumble over something inside that then rolled across the floorboards. There was a thud as something heavy hit the floor. Then, it sounded like a chair fell over. A few more things clattered when they fell. It went silent inside the house for a time.
Magda glanced up and down the street to see if anyone else was hearing all the noise or paying attention to the visitor at his door. She saw a woman across the narrow street and up a ways come out and shake a rug. She folded it over and arm and went back in without noticing Magda in the shadows of the porch. Through small gaps in a screening lilac bush, Magda could see a few people in the distance talking, but they were too far away to be able to see her standing behind the greenery.
The door finally opened wide. Merritt was still tucking in a dark shirt. The long, wavy locks of his light brown hair had been hastily brushed back, revealing that his face had been hurriedly wiped clean.
“Sorry to make you stand out there, Lady Searus.” His face flushed again. “I’m afraid that I was out back working on a few things and—” He paused, apparently afraid that he was beginning to ramble. He made himself start over as he lifted a hand out in invitation. “Please, won’t you come in?”
As Magda stepped through the doorway, she could see an overturned chair and a small statue lying on its side. The place was small, with the strangest things stacked everywhere. Strange metal objects, not unlike the things she had seen Baraccus make, sat all around the room, making it difficult to tell what she had heard fall to the floor and what had already been there.
As odd as everything was, there was a strange kind of order to it all. Books stood in tall columns in places at the side of the room. A wicker couch also held books, but they were lying open and piled one atop another, as if to keep a place marked. A variety of small tables held mounds of scrolls between candles, bottles, boxes, and bones.
A small, tightly rolled scroll sticking out of a shelf had a variety of small clay figures collected all around the end of it. As far as she could tell, they were all floating around the end of the scroll with nothing holding them up. It was an inexplicable and disorienting sight.
There were also profoundly beautiful statues standing in random places around the room, not as if they had been placed to be admired, but simply, it appeared, put wherever there had been an empty spot at the time. There was a soldier about to unsheathe a sword carved from a gray stone, there were several smaller statues of men in robes carved from pale butternut wood, and, carved from pure white marble, there were several statues of the most graceful women Magda had ever seen.
Draped over the table beyond the overturned chair was a large square of red velvet. The tabletop was the only place in the entire room that wasn’t cluttered. A single gleaming sword sat in the middle on a raised portion of the red velvet.
Magda noticed an ornate gold and silver scabbard attached to a baldric lying on the floor. The scabbard was so striking that it could only belong with the sword.
Merritt righted the chair, then hung the baldric and its scabbard over the back before he hurriedly removed books from the wicker couch. “Sorry for the mess. I don’t ordinarily live in such clutter. It’s just that this place isn’t as roomy as my place at the Keep. Please, Lady Searus, won’t you have a seat?” He looked around. “Tea. I should make tea.”
“No, none for me, thank you,” she said as she made her way to the wicker couch.
He looked relieved. Magda wondered why he no longer lived at the Keep, but didn’t ask; she had more important matters to get to first. She waited until he turned around to her again.
“I need to talk with you, Wizard Merritt.”
“So talk.” He gestured to the couch. “What about Isidore?”
Magda wasn’t ready to sit. “What about the oath?”
He put both hands in his back pocket as his posture relaxed a little. He grinned boyishly. “You mean the devotion to the Lord Rahl? Master Rahl guide us. Master Rahl teach us. Master Rahl protect us. That oath?”
“Yes. You’re familiar with its purpose, then?”
He was smiling as if it was a private joke. Magda didn’t think it was funny. She could feel her own face heating to red.
“Actually, you see, Alric is an acquaintance of mine.”
“You know, then, that he’s a good man, and that he means the devotion to protect us from dream walkers?”
He still had a hint of a crooked smile as he kept her locked in his gaze. “Yes. Their side creates a weapon, we have to work to counter it. That’s why I helped him in creating the power contained within its bond.”
Magda blinked in surprise. “Are you saying that you helped him create the magic that protects people from the dream walkers? That power? You helped him with that?”
Merritt nodded. “To a certain small extent. I don’t know exactly how he crafted magic that could do such a thing, but I do know that he’s as smart as he is determined. He was stuck at a point that was keeping the bond from taking hold and igniting in others, at their end. It worked for him, but he wanted it to work to protect other people as well, and it wouldn’t go to root in them, I guess you could say. He knew that I happen to be familiar with unusual calculations for spell couplings, so he asked for my help.”
Magda
tilted her head toward him. “You helped Alric Rahl create the magic of the bond.”
He nodded again, looking quite earnest. “I provided the authentication routines for the verification web, from inside of it, in order to complete the validation process. That was what initiated the unification of the spell components he was trying to combine so that the bond would activate in the proper sequence.
“Once it ignited, locking down the series reductions, I was the first one to speak the devotion. When I did, I did it from inside the completed web. I wanted to test it first to ensure that it wouldn’t inadvertently harm people when they gave the devotion to invoke the bond.”
Magda couldn’t help staring openly at him. She touched her fingers to her forehead, trying to take it all in. “You mean that you were the one who made it work?”