Free Delusion by Laura L. Sullivan Page B

hung for a sheep as a lamb, they said when I was a boy. It is clear that she won’t leave without further assurance of your safety, Prentice Stanislaus. We may not kill her, we cannot contain her with magic, and I’m sure we can only toss her back over the ha-ha so many times before she decides to make herself a true nuisance. You say she is safe, prentice? Well, you may hold the future of the College of Drycraeft in your hands. If you think she can be trusted to hold her tongue, why don’t you tell her about us.”
    Stan nodded. “And about her, sir?”
    The Headmaster’s silver caterpillar eyebrows twitched upward. “No. We know nothing about her, lad. We only suspect, and that is no better than the wagging tongues of old gossips. Go someplace you can be alone. The solar, perhaps. If we are very fortunate, she’ll tell the world and end up locked in an asylum for the rest of her life and will trouble us no more.”
    Phil snaked out an arm and recaptured her sword. “Somewhere outside the manor, if you please.”
    The Headmaster chuckled. “Of course, of course. You are no prisoner—anymore.”
    “Neither is Stan,” she retorted.
    He did not answer her directly, only studied her for a long moment before saying, “Don’t leave the grounds too quickly. There is still a matter I must discuss with you.”
    The doors clicked behind her, unlocking and swinging ajar. Holding Stan tightly, she backed out, telling herself that no matter what Stan might say, she was taking him back to Weasel Rue with her, even if she had to drag him all the way.
    Stan led her through the woods, past vines growing as fast as twining snakes that reached for her arms. Unseen in the shrubbery, something large moved, making a sound between a purr and a growl. When the landscape opened near the lake’s mossy bank, she glimpsed a flash of prancing white. A horse, she assured herself, wide-eyed. For there was no way she could have seen a horn.
    “What is this place?” she breathed. If Rousseau had painted a madhouse, it would look like this. But Stan seemed to have no fear, so she clung to him and kept her terror secret when a golden bear lumbered across their path, ignoring them as it reared up to eat pink lychee nuts.
    They sat together under the Japanese maples, on a high bank overlooking the lake. For a long moment Stan gazed over the water, watching the reflection of passing clouds until the surface was shattered by the stout, olive-colored body of a hunting pike. When at last he spoke, he didn’t answer her directly.
    “My mother never danced for me, but she told me of the nights when the campfires were so bright they blinded the moon, when fiddlers played songs that would lure gods from the heavens and ghosts from below, when the caravans looked like palaces. On those nights, she told me, she would dance, and it was beyond the power of any eye to look away from her. They took her when she was heavy with me, away from her family, away from her lovers, and locked her away in a place they called a university, in Dresden. It was a prison. There she bore me, and there we stayed for five years.”
    His voice was far away, and he spoke as if he had seen those womb-times with his own eyes.
    “I don’t understand. Who took your mother? Why?”
    “We are Romany, Gypsies. She was a sorceress, renowned among her people. We were in Poland when they found her. They had taken members of our clan before, over the generations. It runs in our line, you see. They came from nowhere, and in an instant we were behind beautiful, cold stone walls. I know I can’t remember—how could I?—yet I know there was a time when all the warmth and light fell out of the world. I was born a month later in the Universität Zauberhaft.”
    “But
why
did they take you?” Phil asked, knowing she was missing something crucial.
    “Magic,” he said. “Haven’t you been listening?”
    She had been, but in her mind there was only one kind of magic, and these people