Free Liavek 1 by Emma Bull, Will Shetterly Page A

face and shuddered, noiseless, and even the master averted his eyes from the red welling on the white skin. Kalum was not beaten. He sickened rapidly, as do all who fail at the investiture of birth luck into a vessel of magic. On the second day he died.
    •
    "But he was ready ," Reykja said, for perhaps the hundredth time. "He was ."
    The two girls huddled in a hidden cranny on the roof of the master's house, sheltered between twin squat chimneys. Below them Liavek shimmered like a bright mosaic in the brilliant afternoon sunshine. It was the month of Wind; Kalum had been buried for a month, and Reykja sat facing the distant graveyard, unseen beyond the Cat River, where he lay. Before them to the north the roofs of Old Town glittered in whorls and swirls around the green copper of the Levar's palace; from behind them came the salty smell of the sea. The city below teemed with color, with movement, with life. Ondur's white hair blew free above the roof, without ribbon or veil. She never sunburned.
    "Kalum was ready for the magic, Ondur. He was!"
    "No," Ondur said patiently.
    "By all gods, don't keep saying that! I told you—I told you the little magics he could do each year in his birth hours. More each year. Just last year, remember—no, it was a few months before you came, you didn't come until after my birthday—what was I saying? Kalum! He made that mirror reflect the cottage where we were born—I told you. He was ready."
    "No, dear heart."
    "And the ring, the vessel—it was a unity whole, it was strong enough to bear the investiture, it would have held the luck for a year until it was freed on his next birthday. He talked about investing it in something else next year, something richer, we might have been able to buy something rich next year—he was ready!"
    Ondur put her arms around Reykja.
    "It was the magic," Reykja cried passionately. "Kalum was ready for investiture, I know he was! It was the magic that betrayed him!"
    "Oh, Reykja—"
    "Don't talk to me like that!" Savagely, not knowing what she did, she pushed away Ondur, whom she had been holding fast, and turned upon her because there were no tears left and she must turn on something or feel she was going mad. "'Oh, Reykja'—little mincing protests, as if I were a baby who had lost a sugarfruit! I was his sister, his sister damn you, and you were only the latest girl he bedded—Ondur, I didn't mean that! I didn't!"
    Ondur had begun to weep. Reykja seized her friend and held on tight. She suddenly felt that the whole world was whirling around her, the terrible bright sky had fallen below her and the roofs of Liavek twirled giddily above; her soul was falling right through the hole torn in the whirling world by Kalum's death. Terrified, furious, hating herself for having hurt Ondur out of her own hurt, Reykja grabbed wildly for something to hang on to in the whirling. Something, anything...if she did not grab hold of something she would be sucked into the sky below, smashed against the roofs and alleys above—something, anything! Anything to make sense of the senseless, to invest the whirling anger, because if she did not the tears were surely going to drown her and the choking and raging anger would tear her apart bodily, limb from limb, something, anything...
    She found it.
    "But it was the magic, Ondur! Hear me—it was. That's what killed Kalum, that's what brought him and me here—I've told you the story, the magician uncle of ours who sold us into bond after my aunt died—don't you see? All this," she waved one hand over the city below, "what does it do but serve all the evils of magic? It's the magic that causes the suffering. It's the magic that is the enemy!"
    Ondur grew very still in her arms. Reykja, plunging on, did not notice. Her voice was feverish now, frenzied, the voice of someone grasping at the door out of pain.
    "The magic is the enemy, Ondur. Liavek is rotten with it. Even the Levar herself, the stories of the way her first regent