Mercedes Lackey - Anthology by Flights of Fantasy Page A

heard Wren's voice, which was high and sweet.
"She wished me to spare you. And I'm so pleased that she dared to speak up
that I've decided I shall.
                 Come
in," she gestured him forward.
                 "Do
... do you mean it?" he asked, looking very young in his relief.
                 "Yes,"
she said, bustling about. "Sit there." She indicated a chair set
within a complicated design. "Step through the break I've left in the
pattern."
                 He
looked nervously at the chair and then back at her where she mixed something in
a cup. The hawk, hooded, sat on it's perch inside an
identical design.
                 "You're
going to let me go?" he asked.
                 “No, of course not." Adelia glanced over her shoulder
at him. "I told you to sit down."
                 Nairn
simply stood and stared at her. He swallowed visibly, looking stunned.
                 "Sit!"
she told him in a voice of command.
                 Nairn
took a deep breath and then reluctantly, fighting the compulsion of the relsk
stone around his neck, moved to the chair.
                 "I
don't understand," he whispered, his voice thick with tears.
                 "You
have been well fed, you have enjoyed Wren." She grinned at his shock.
                 "Don't
look so surprised. I know everything that happens in my house or on my land. It
accorded with my wishes, and so I've allowed it." She moved toward him,
cup in hand.
                 "You
said that you would spare me." His eyes were pleading.
                 "And
I will." Adelia held out the cup. "There is no reason for you to be
awake while the transformation takes place. Apparently that was the worst of it
for Wren, and so I shall spare you that." She smiled. "Drink."
                 "I
do not want to be transformed!" Nairn shouted. "I merely wish to go
home," he said softly.
                 The
sorceress closed her eyes and took a very deep breath.
                 "By
the same token," she said crisply, after a moment's pause to hold onto her
temper, "there is no need for you to be asleep either. You can sit here
screaming your head off, totally aware the whole time of what is happening to you,
or you can sleep through it." She held the cup out to him.
                 "It's
entirely up to you."
                 "Can
I say nothing that will change your mind?" he pleaded.
                 "This
is your last chance," Adelia said through clenched teeth.
                 Looking
her straight in the eye, he took the cup. Then he flung back his head and drank
it all in three great swallows.
                 "Excellent,"
Adelia said with a nod, taking back the cup.
                 She
knelt and completed the open space in the pattern around his chair. Then
placing the cup outside her circle, she completed all the spaces left undrawn,
picked up her wand, and began to work the spell she'd labored over so long.
                 Adelia
called upon forces and elements and gods so old they barely knew themselves
that they existed. Her long hair belled out around her head with the discharge
of power, and the words she spoke made no sound though she shouted them. She
gestured with her wand and the words that she wrote on the air hung there,
palpable, but invisible, yet squirming with a life of their own.
                 Nairn's
head dropped to his breast, his breathing the slow, regular rhythm of deep
sleep; even as the goshawk screamed and bated, beating its wings frantically as
it sought to escape whatever thing crawled insidiously beneath its feathers. At
the appointed moment Adelia spoke a word, and the air boomed like a
thunderclap. The man and the bird began to stream toward each other in thin
ribbons, meeting and mixing over a complex pattern in the center of the