Wild Magic by Jude Fisher

Author:Jude Fisher [Fisher, Jude]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Fantasy, Fiction, General, Magic, Epic, Fantasy fiction, Fantasy - Epic, Fiction - Fantasy, Fantasy - Series, Occult
ISBN: 9780756401894
Publisher: DAW
Published: 2004-07-04T23:00:00+00:00

"Henik?"

Now the extraordinary eyes came full open and Festrin One Eye stepped back, unnerved.

"What? What are you saying?" The Lady Auda pushed herself between the two of them, and pallor accentuated the normal angularity of her features. "What bizarre language is it you were speaking?" She confronted the seither suspiciously. "It sounded? foreign. Certainly not Eyran, or no dialect of our tongue I ever heard."

Festrin turned her one eye on the King's mother and took some satisfaction in the way the old woman quailed away from her penetrating gaze. "That, my lady, is the most ancient tongue in this world. It existed a thousand years before either Eyra or Istria came into being; before humankind found its way over the Dragon's Backbone and trailed out of the emptiness of the Bone Quarter like a colony of ants; eons before the Eternal City was founded, or the earth was cultivated; while dragons patrolled the mountain fastnesses and great herds of undomesticated yeka roamed the plains. It has no name: it needed none, for when it first was spoken, there was no other language on Elda."

Auda's eyes narrowed. She did not believe a word of it, but to press the point risked being drawn into madness. "And who is she? do you know her?" She stared down her long nose at her son's wife, then up at the seither.

"I? no," said Festrin, avoiding the old queen's avid attention. She knelt beside the Rose of the World and made to touch her, then drew back as if afraid to do so. "We have never met. But, my lady? ' and she addressed this

last

to

the

woman

on

the

ground,

"? I

think

my

great-great-great-grandfather may have known you."

"Six generations back?" Auda scoffed. "The girl can be no more than two and twenty, and even your father has been dead these forty years and more. Are you completely out of your wits?"

Festrin blinked her one eye. "Even were it a single generation since this lady was known, I have not heard this language spoken in these isles since my father died: I had not thought any were left who knew it."

"Sudrinni, alla ieldri segthir," the Rosa Eldi said suddenly. Something in her demeanor had changed in the course of these few minutes: a light seemed to shine out of her, a new confidence, or something yet more crucial.

"Alia?"

"I Istrianni"

The seither looked stunned. "I have not traveled as widely as I should have done. I have been very stupid. Had I only known? "

The king's mother looked from one to the other as if they were both insane. "I haven't got time for this nonsense in the middle of the night," she raged. She glared at the seither. "Quite what I can have been thinking of to summon your help, I cannot imagine. And as for you? " she curled her lip at her son's wife, "? you need not think you have deceived me with this charade of bearing an heir for my boy. Anyone with half an eye can see you're not pregnant.

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