Fireshaper's Doom by Tom Deitz Page B

one of them was sapient.
    Locked in a stall of pure white marble in the sprawl of the High King’s palace, Fionna had not slept for the three days that had passed in Tir-Nan-Og (nor the nine that had lapsed in the Lands of Men) since Morwyn had trapped her in horse shape.
    The first day she had been too angry either to think or to take any action. The second she had spent in consideration of her circumstances. On the third day she was ready.
    Taken by themselves, the fourfold shaping spells she had drawn upon herself would have been no problem to escape. She had touched them before and knew their form and structure.
    But Morwyn’s binding had complicated her plans considerably, for it had insinuated itself through the layered sorceries and locked them tight around her. It had taken her a long time to find the gaps, but the enchantments Caitlin had contrived, and to which Lugh and Nuada and the Morrigu had each applied their Power, had been set to hold another body and to drown another memory. Thus they did not fit her quite precisely.
    It therefore took Fionna the better part of a day to twist her thought through the innermost entrapment. It was subtle work and painful, so she worked carefully, removing the substance of the bindings a thread at a time, as one might unravel fabric and yet preserve the pattern. The first shape-spell she broke this way; the second followed quickly. The third was far more trouble, for the weaving there was tighter, yet it she breached as well, straining her Power through like water through fine linen. The fourth was easiest of all, for by then almost nothing remained of horse-thought to distract her.
    By dawn Morwyn’s spell alone retained its substance, like a hard layer of lacquer casing the fragile filaments of the other four. That one had been made for her and fitted her much better, yet it too had a weakness. In her final desperation, Fionna had sent a Shaping arrowing toward Ailill, and though Morwyn had broken off that contact, the way of its passage had left a frayed spot in her sorcery. It was a tiny thing, that thinning, yet Fionna found it, and poured her Power through.
    Part of her was free now, though not corporeal. A moment later there was more. She split her Power then, and applied it to her bindings both from outside and within. There was resistance at first, but then a weakening that became more obvious as she put forth greater effort.
    Suddenly Morwyn’s spell collapsed, and with it the other four pooled away to nothing, like melted ice. One moment Fionna was a black horse; a moment later a fair-skinned, black-haired woman.
    She smiled her exultation.
    “Morwyn, your head is mine!” she whispered. “As soon as I find my brother.”
    Fionna studied the entrance of her prison. Statues of rampant stallions carved from jet-black marble flanked the opening; the double doors of the gates were a grillwork of cast brass, their junctures bridged by four hand-sized knotwork medallions wrought of gold-wound iron—human work that, and very dangerous. Those locks did not daunt her, though, for she had learned something of their workings in that part of Froech’s mind she had seen when she bespelled him, and she had passed long hours since then surveying them more closely. It would be a simple matter of Power applied to the golden wire alone: just so —and the first lock tumbled open—and so, and so, and so…
    The four magic locks were even simpler, for their pattern too she had stolen from Froech and carefully remembered. So, and so, and so, and so…
    But what form, she wondered, when she had finished, would make her escape most certain? Not the perilous human nakedness that now enwrapped her, though clothing it would be no problem. No, it must be another shape, possessed both of subtlety and cunning, for Fionna knew that she had spent too long in a skin of other-seeming to change again so quickly and expect to retain control. No, whatever shape she chose must be able to sustain