right, then. I’m going to let her out now.” Odo probed at the cage with delicate, fingerlike tentacles until an opening appeared.
I stepped through it, taking care not to move too hastily, lest I alarm anyone. “Thank you.”
Odo’s giant eye surveyed me with satisfaction. “Now we can make plans.”
“Yes.” As a few of the hidden creatures peered out at me, dozens of questions crowded my mind. “But before we start, I think you’d better tell me more about how my stone works here. It used to be cracked, before I came here. Why isn’t it now?”
“Whenever you Chantresses come to our world, your magic grows stronger,” Odo said. “It has always been like that. Some say it is our blood thickening and renewing in you. And since the stones are part of your magic, they grow more powerful too. It has been so long since Chantresses came here that we were surprised that there were any left with power. The wall weakened all of us, including you.”
“If I took off my stone, would I hear Wild Magic?”
“Yes, but not as you know it,” Odo said, waving several arms to emphasize the point. “Do not be hasty. Our Wild Magic is far richer and stronger than anything you can hear on Earth—so powerful that even when your stone is on, you can’t help but hear the thrum of it. Sometimes you even can discern the outlines of a tune, if the singer is close enough. You can heard something of the song your mother is singing, can’t you? And a deep humming in the ether, like an undertow beneath everything?”
I nodded.
“That is only a faint echo of the Wild Magic you would hear if your stone were not protecting you,” Odo told me. “Your Chantress songs are merely the tiniest part of it. The ether here allows every bit of Wild Magic to reach us, while your own world blocks most of it. That is part of what undid your mother when she took off her stone. It was as if she had lived all her life in the murky depths of the sea, only to find herself suddenly on the surface, in the full glare of the blinding sun. And in that moment, Pressina attacked and took possession of her.”
“I see.” I swallowed hard. “And if I took off my stone, I would be blinded too?”
“You would. After the first shock, you might find that you could start to work with the Wild Magic here. You have our blood, so it ought to be possible. But in practice, you would be unlikely to get the opportunity. And even if you did, as a novice you would be very vulnerable. If I were you, I would not take the risk; I would keep the stone on. My best advice is to ambush Pressina and attack her with the stone while you are still wearing it.”
I shuddered. That would mean getting very close indeed to that horrible eel-haired head and the gelatinous mass beneath and around it. But I didn’t want to end up like my mother either, becoming nothing more than Pressina’s voice.
“I wish I had attacked her when I first saw her,” I said. “Or that my mother had.”
“You didn’t know. And I doubt your mother did either. In any case, she never had a chance,” Odo said sadly. “She was so weak when she arrived, almost drained of power. Pressina took her prisoner right away. Your mother was desperate to get back to you, but Pressina told her she would never see you again unless she sang the wall down. Viviane refused to do that, so Pressina kept her locked away for years.”
“Did you try to help her?”
Odo looked down at my feet, as if abashed. “Not for a very long time, I’m sorry to say. We were afraid of that stone, you see. But the longer your mother held out against Pressina, the more some of us began to wonder if we might be able to make an alliance with her. So we started to try to devise a plan to put ourselves in touch with her, which was itself a great challenge. For years we struggled to find our way to her. And then Melisande came, and everything became much more urgent.”
“Did Pressina take possession of her?”
“Not in the way she took your mother, no. She needed two things from Melisande, and both required that Melisande stay alive and intact. One was her ability to impersonate other