The Mirror of Fate Read Online Free Page A

tissues, coaxing them back to strength, back to wholeness. Layer by layer, I worked higher in the wound, slowly drawing nearer to the surface.
    Several minutes later, I lifted my hands. The ballymag’s black skin shone smooth and unbroken. Feeling drained, I leaned back against the stream bank, resting my head against a gorse root. Blue sky shone through the yellow blossoms above my head.
    At last I sat up. Lightly, I tapped the ballymag’s flank. “Well,” I sighed, “you’re in luck. I’ve decided not to boil you after all.”
    The creature’s eyes, already wide, swelled some more. But he said nothing.
    “It’s true, poor fellow. I never was going to harm you, but that was the only way I could get you to stay still.”
    “You’re just toyannoying with me,” he groaned, squirming in my lap. “Laugholously playfooling me.”
    Hallia looked at me warmly. “He doesn’t believe you now. But he will, in time.”
    “Nowoe chancehappen of that!” The ballymag suddenly uncoiled several of his tails, wrapped them around a rock protruding from the bank, and wrenched himself free from my grip. He landed with a splash in the shallows at my feet. Spinning his six arms, he swam downstream at terrific speed. In a flash, he had rounded the bend and disappeared.
    Hallia stroked her slender chin. “It’s safe to say you healed him, young hawk.”
    I glanced over at my shadow, crouching beside me on the mud, whose pose seemed hopelessly insolent. “Glad I can get something right.”
    She ducked under a branch and moved to my side, as gracefully as an unfurling flower. “Healing, I think, is different from other magic.”
    “How so?”
    Pensively, she rolled a twig between her fingers, then tossed it into the flowing water. “I’m not sure, exactly. But more of healing magic seems to come from within—from your heart, perhaps, or someplace even deeper.”
    “And other kinds of magic?”
    “From, well, outside of ourselves.” She waved at the azure sky. “From out there somewhere. Those powers reach us, and sometimes flow through us, but don’t really belong to us. Using them is more like using a tool—like a hammer or a saw.”
    I pulled a mud-encrusted stick out of my hair. “I understand, but what about the magic we use to change ourselves into deer? Doesn’t that come from within?”
    “No, not really.” Pondering her hand, she squeezed it into the shape of a hoof. “At the beginning, when I will myself to change, I can feel my inner magic—but only as a spark, a sort of invitation, that connects me with the greater magic out there. That’s the magic that brings change in all its forms: night into day, fawn into doe, seed into flower. The magic that promises . . .” She paused to stroke a curling shaft of fern sprouting beside her on the bank. “That every meadow, buried in snow all winter long, will spring into life once again.”
    I nodded, listening to the splatter and spray of the stream. A snake, thin and green, emerged from a tangle of reeds by my feet and slipped into the water. “Sometimes I feel those outer powers—cosmic powers—so strongly they seem to be using me, wielding me like their own little tool. Or writing me like a story—a story whose ending I can’t do anything to change.”
    Hallia leaned closer, rubbing her shoulder against mine. “It’s all this talk, isn’t it? Oh yes, young hawk, I’ve heard it, even from some of my clan who ought to know better. All about your future, your destiny, to be a wizard.”
    “And not just any wizard,” I added, “but the greatest one of all times! Even greater than my grandfather, Tuatha, they say—and he was the wisest and most powerful mage ever to live. It’s . . . well, a lot of weight to carry around. So much that sometimes it’s all I can feel. As if my own choices, my own decisions, aren’t really mine after all.”
    “Oh, but they are! They surely are. That’s what makes you . . . you. That’s why I wanted to tell you .