Chapter 4

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“Not funny,” the adviser said. “This is her first time. I would appreciate a breath of peace before you suck the Acting NeachDare d’Shadowed Rooster into the whirlwind of your workings.”

“And who might you be, mouthy one?” asked the snarler.

“Skald Sunny a’Tara, personal representative of Danu Elizabeth the 25th Matriarch of the Families,” was the reply.

“Oh.”

“I’d ask for your name,” the Skald continued pointedly, “but I’m a little busy right now.”

“We rarely need names in the WorldView,” said a calm, confident voice. “I am NeachDare Gwenlyedyr d’Lioness Rampant. We welcome Skald Sunny a’Tara and the Acting NeachDare d’Shadowed Rooster. Unfortunately, the needs of the Nation come even before the needs of a scared young cousin; you have another thirty breaths before her power is siphoned.”

“Thank you.”

“You’re a Skald?” the foundling wizard asked quietly.

“Sit down and shut up, Honored.”

“Are we sitting? Or standing? I can’t feel my legs.”

“We’ll discuss that once you, or more accurately your power, is connected to the WorldView.”

The foundling wizard looked around her. Everything was gray and misty, like early mornings by the lake. But she couldn’t feel the expected dampness on her skin. She couldn’t feel anything. She couldn’t see anything either, though she had the impression of other cousins in the… room, space, area, breath… she was in. Well, she knew there were at least three Gifted besides her. One with a nasty snarly attitude, rough and grumbly. One with a calm and efficient, impersonal attitude. And one Skald, whose voice was warm and lilting, like sunshine on a stream.

“Happily, your power knows everything,” the Skald continued in a manner both quick and soothing. “It has done this many times. Unfortunately, the siphoning is probably going to hurt this first time because I don’t know how to prepare you. The Wizards need your power and they need it now.”

“They can have it,” the young wizard whispered. The words grew loud and louder until they became visible in the mist. The foundling cringed against her newest best friend.

“Not all of it and not forever,” said the Skald a’Tara, ringingly. Her words shimmered and faded.

“Not yet, anyway.” Those words, spoken by an unknown misty voice, flared orange and disappeared.

Then hands were grabbing, and the young wizard was pulled into fifty pieces.

It felt wonderful. No longer did the weight of years bow down her adolescent body. No more the constant subconscious murmur of generations of wizards critiquing her every unwilling move. She could think for herself, by herself. She could step back and view the events of the past year; and make note of whom to apologize to (the Skald) and whom to reprimand more harshly (near everyone else).

She did not regret turning the Familiar into a statue, nor any of the other spells she had inflicted upon it. If she had dropped a tome upon its interfering head, she wouldn’t have felt the slightest guilt.

The mist thinned and faded, leaving the foundling with the impression she was in a large empty room. And that there was a hand upon her shoulder. She turned and saw the Skald, happily still very much the same cousin who’d been her advisor for the past year.

“You’re doing very well,” the Skald said. “Now, you need to establish a connection with the WorldView.”

The foundling reached out to the dissipating mist and grasped nothing. “What am I supposed to connect with?”

“You are a wizard. A wizard shapes her power to her will. So it is with the WorldView. You connect with the place, for want of a better word, by exerting your will over it. See it as a room, one large enough to hold many cousins. Perhaps see yourself in a chair or at a table. Give yourself some walls and a floor.”

“Me? What about you?”

The Skald grinned. “Skalds create their worlds automatically, like breathing. I’m already quite comfortable, thank you.”

As the young wizard concentrated, shapes came into focus. Women and men (many more than three) stood or sat in a loose half circle a few feet away from the Skald and her charge. The wizards were each dressed in loose robes with ornate pictures on them. Most faced a large space, like they were waiting for something to appear. A few glanced at the foundling before returning their attention to… whatever.

The Skald continued her instruction. “You have a wall on your left and on your right and a wall at your back.” The young wizard nodded absently. “In front of you, in front of everyone, you should see a large scrying fountain. A huge scrying fountain. A fountain so big, all you can see is the wall of water falling down.”

This was the easiest thing to create in the whole room. It made sense; a large waterfall was an excellent source for a room full of mist, dry as it was.

As the young wizard stared, each drop of water that fell became a picture. All over the endless wall of the WorldView, pictures grew and shrank as they joined and separated and moved down the wall of water.

“Welcome to the WorldView,” said the Skald. “Now let’s move onto the next step, directing malice. As blessings come on Midwinter’s Day, so does malice come on All Fools’. Your job, as a wizard of the Families, is to direct that malice away from truly harmful acts. In order to do that, you first have to see what is going on. All over the land. The easiest way for me to describe the process is defocusing. Stare at the middle of the waterfall and let the edges blur.”

The foundling wizard did not find this difficult either, as she had been moving through most of the last year fuzzy on the edges.

“Now, to make this easier,” the Skald continued, “I’m going to give you a little chant.  This is only a tool to help you get started, and you’ll eventually figure your own way of working with the View. But for now, when you start losing focus, or unfocus, repeat this:‘I can see what I need to see.’”

“I can see what I need to see,” the foundling wizard repeated.

“Good. Keep chanting, under your breath, and listen to the sound of my voice. Don’t worry if you feel like you’re half-asleep. That’s preferable. As you look upon the fountain, an incident will need your attention and its scene will become solid. You can see what you need to see.”

“I can see what I need to see.”

What the young wizard could see was a large, opulent room. The Heralds of the Nation were gathered in this room, talking relentlessly at a crowd of Skalds. She could see every freckle on every face. As the foundling wizard marveled, a swarm of black specks almost obliterated the scene. The foundling jerked back, swatting at the air in front of her, but the specks were not in the WorldView, they were in the room of Heralds and Skalds. The Heralds started singing, poorly; the singing became caterwauling. The Skalds’ grimaces of annoyance became contortions of pain.

The foundling’s hands curled. A golden wave washed through the scene and the shrieks returned to very bad harmony.

Even as the foundling breathed in to ask a question, the Skald advisor whispered in her ear. “You can see what you need to see.”

The opulent room drifted away, and another picture took its spot in the center. It was a cozy family picture; a woman teaching her heirs how to make breakfast on one side of a wall, while her spouse sat on the other side, at a large polished oak desk. The household books were spread out in front of him. He had a grin on his face as he added two pounds of manna to the supply list.

The black flecks trickled down and the two pounds became four pounds. Golden power washed through and left behind even more black flecks. The father gleefully crossed off the request for three yards of pink cotton, and wrote down three yards of harsh puce wool.

The Skald spoke softly. “Annoying and malicious, both scenes, but neither group ends up dead.”

“I thought All Fools’ was just a topsy-turvy day. All in good fun. Role reversals and practical jokes. Do the Families know there’s the potential for injustice?” Even the foundling knew puce wool did not make a pretty dress.

“Say rather random misfortune. All Fools’ has little to do with justice.”

The young wizard shook her head vehemently. “Do the Families know?”

The Skald raised her eyebrow. “It is the tradition. Anything can happen.”

“That’s MidWinter. ‘Anything can happen, any dream can come true.’”

“It is both,” the Skald said firmly. “It is the balance. The corollary being, at MidWinter you get to ask for the dream you wish to manifest. On All Fools’, you have no control over the mischief and malice.” The Skald gently turned the young wizard back to the screen. “Keep your focus, Acting NeachDare. You can see what you need to see.”

The founding wizard rolled her eyes, but dutifully repeated, “I can see what I need to see.”

“Danu Elizabeth, 16th matriarch of the Families, encouraged role reversals, in the ninety-fifth year of her reign, to create more chances for mischief instead of the more painful options. This has worked very well, because malice doesn’t care if it’s your pride or your bones that ache. Malice doesn’t actually care about anything, except that it balances the blessings bestowed on MidWinter’s Day.”

The young wizard hummed, watching as a boy scrambled after nuts thrown by giggling squirrels. “But doesn’t the very act of us controlling the malice negate the balance?”

“The wizards do not control the malice,” said the Skald, very piously. The young wizard blinked and glanced sideways. “Nope, you can see what you need to see. Not me.”

“Not thee,” the young wizard muttered.

“I knew there was a sense of humor in there somewhere. Look at the fountain! There were many attempts to control the malice, with and without the aid of the Unmentioned, Destiny, and various otherworldly entities. We were luckless. The best we could do was guide the malice, dam it up, perhaps channel it, to dilute the effects.”

“What if it’s not used?”

“They tried storing it once, instead of dispersing it. In the last five breaths of All Fools’ 1310, the sum total of the malice dumped itself on Atlantis.”

“The big bang is real?”

The Skald snorted. “I will thank you to not use that stupid nick name in my presence. Atlantis disappeared entirely; a whole clan was decimated. Look at the fountain. You see what you need to see.”

“I see what I need to see.” The young wizard studiously watched the butcher, the baker, and the soap maker indulge in some typical male prank. When they were saved from a fate worse than slow roasting only by virtue of an unseen surge of power, the three men merely laughed harder. “What I don’t see is how I’m doing any good.”

“You aren’t, directly. Your power is. Do you feel the tug?”

“Always.”

“Let your eyes haze, let your mind rest. Follow your power and let part of your consciousness join the Wizards, of which you are rightfully one. You the Wizards are directing, deciding, working, watching for the good of the Families. You will feel what you need to feel.”

“I will feel what I need to feel,” the young wizard agreed, dreamily.

And so she drifted through the day, seeing what she needed to see, feeling her power fix what it needed to fix. She began to have opinions on how to apply the power. Some of these ideas were enacted or incorporated; mostly though, the foundling wizard was a thought behind the action.

Then the sun went down. The consumed alcohol doubled in everyone’s bloodstreams. Men lost the minimal control they had on their sex drives; women lost the power of the finer emotions. The scenes in the WorldView still came one by one, but they - and the defining breaths - came faster. The foundling wizard lost herself totally in the ebb and flow of power and malice, riding on the confidence of the other wizards, and the ease of using her power without thinking about it.

Then the events ceased. The fall of pictures condensed and melded and faded until there was a simple trickle of a waterfall in the distance. The clouds were blue around the essence of the gathered wizards, and stars appeared, twinkle, twinkle.

“It can’t be sunrise,” said an almost familiar voice.

“It’s not,” the Skald answered. “We’ve another bell to go, give or take fifteen breaths.”

“We’ve never finished with malice so early,” said another voice.

“We’re still not in balance,” the Skald said. 

“There’s enough malice out there for one major offensive or several small ones.”

How did she know that? the foundling wizard wondered silently.

“There’s a meter there at the bottom of the View,” came the answer. The young wizard concentrated below the edge of the falling water. Sure enough, there was a small grey smudge outlined by two lines of midnight blue.

“When we started,” the Skald continued, “that smudge was so black it was almost purple. All Fools’ is not over until the bar is completely white. And the NeachDare d’Lioness Rampant is correct. The malice flows right up to the last few breaths.”

The young wizard blinked thoughtfully. “What happens if…?”

“Don’t even think that thought,” said the Skald quickly. “We will finish balancing the energies tonight. And all will be well.”

A chorus of “All will be well,” sounded around them, taking form for a brief breath.

“Can’t we go look?” the young wizard asked the Skald.

“No. No one knows where the malice will go until it arrives. We have to wait for the scene to show itself.”

The youngest wizard looked around at the wispy shapes and trickling water. “So what do we do now?”

“We wait.” Skald Sunny settled herself cross-legged upon the floor. “And we don’t chit chat. We meditate and focus our thoughts on all being well.”

Meditation was something the foundling wizard had never learned -- sitting still is rarely on the list of a child’s things to do. And since that day one year ago, sitting still had not been one of the things the young wizard was taught or even encouraged to do. Happily, however, that meant breaths of peace were so rare, they seemed almost exciting to her. She floated among the clouds and almost found her twelve-year-old self.

“Something’s happening,” said Skald Sunny.

“How long has it been?” the young wizard whispered.

“There are only a few breaths left until sunrise,” said the not nasty voice.

“Look!” the competent voice demanded. “The power is all gathered, right there. Take a deep breath, Cousins.”

Instinctively, the young wizard held out her hand and clasped onto someone else’s. They concentrated on the malice, ready to snatch it away, burst it into little fireflies that would settle into the beds of the villages and give horrifying nightmares, when the malicious power went…

…puff.

“Puff?” she said.

“Puff,” a tired female voice confirmed. 

“Where did it go?”

“It’s nowhere on this world,” said a high-pitched voice.

“Track it, quickly,” Not nasty ordered.

“Follow me,” said the Skald. She seemed to walk into the fountain. Somehow, in the directionless clouds with the vague shapes, the Wizards moved after her until the clouds cleared away again and took on a familiar view.

A violet dawn draped around the forbidding tower of the Shadowed Rooster, oldest and least accessible Tower in Ainland. A light winked as a door opened and closed again. A tall woman, in cloak and hood, swung a satchel aboard a horse, leapt gracefully into the saddle, and galloped away as if trolls were after her.

“That’s my tower,” the newest wizard said in a whisper.

“That’s Te Marla sneaking out the back door,” said the Skald.

“And that’s us pushing away the unfamiliar energy surge,” said the not nasty voice as the scene disappeared like a hand had wiped it from the scrying fountain.

Then the foundling wizard was back in her workroom, the fountain was silver before her, and Acting Savant Deibra was cautiously peeking around the door.

Skald Sunny was nowhere to be seen.