When she was still a girl, the daughter of the Lord of Re Albi had the power to see power in others, and the skill to twine her own fine charms around the mage's boy when she came upon him gathering white hallows in the meadow.
She had no great plan in doing so, only that she felt his power calling out to her, and wanted, perhaps, to make it in some way hers; and wanted him to come back to her, again, and always. But her mother knew what she had done, and told her to go, and take this chance to practice the wiles and entrapments that would be her greatest weapon in the years to come.
And then he opened a door, the mage's boy who flushed even darker red when she smiled at him and when she stung his pride, who could call a wild hawk to his arm but had no mastery of himself; and his master forced it closed. And the Lord's daughter locked herself in her chamber, chilled and screaming in her bones, feeling the tearing in the bindings she had woven through him. And when that had passed, and all the doors were shut again, she combed her hair until it shone like the sea at night, and put on her best gown of fine white Gontish fleecefell, and marched into her mother's sitting room, feeling very cross.
"You used me," she said wrathfully. "You tricked me. I could have made him mine forever, but you put your own spells on him through me, didn't you? And you didn't have the patience for the subtlety you taught me, and now the Mage is watching, and neither of us shall have him."
"I did it," her mother said, through heavy-lidded eyes, her words feathered from her childhood on Osskill, "I did it because you needed to be taught a lesson about reaching beyond your place. And because I could."
The girl frowned at her. "I knew where I was: I could have kept him."
"And what would you have done with him, once you had him? Made him call a fawn, to lay its head in your lap, and sing pretty songs to you, until the Mage came for you both? No, we proved our power against him, and we have our hooks in the boy still; the old Mage is too wise to see all the tangles in my weave; we shall have them again, when it is *needful.*"
"Neither of you shall do anything of the sort," said the Lord of Re Albi, stepping from the shadows behind her mother's couch. He was old even then, as hard and stern and unyielding as the cliffs and high fells which had bred him, and his daughter could not imagine a time, in thirty years or sixty, when he would not still be here, ruling his household as ever. "I have been kind in allowing you to teach her your little witch's chants and cantrips," he said, not looking at her but at his wife, "but that you would seek to use them against a man is abomination."
He was not a man, only a boy, the girl would have protested, and a very stupid one too; except that her mother had set a binding of silence on her, and she could only follow, and bow her head to her lord in acquiescence.
That evening he and his pet sorceror (he had little sorcery of his own, and so resented it in others, and went through sorcerers from Roke more quickly than Sister Moss tired of a man in her bed) wove another charm of binding about her, the sort of simple spell of obedience and complaisance that any village witch could cast. The Mage's boy had probably known it since he was a mere babe tending goats; and she, who came to sorcery through her mother and her father's mother and the old blood of the North, who had learned words of power in Oskillian and the dragons' tongue as soon as she had learned to speak, she could have broken the binding as easily as any man-spun thread, except that she might not. Because he was her father, and she belonged to him. And he smiled down at her, as soon as the binding had settled, kneeling before him dutiful and meek, and said, "I think it is past time you were wed."
And soon after, on the day of the first frost, her father took from her her child's name, and she stood before him, stripped naked of every dignity, and waded into the icy water of the stream. The mage of Re Albi (now minus one prentice) having refused to come, it was her father's sorceror who stepped forward to meet her on the other side. He was thin, and drawn and twisted like a tallow candle kept too close to the hearth, and she had always hated the way he smirked at her, the way he brushed against her as she poured in the Lord's hall, the way he looked at her now, her hair like a fall of dark water, her body flushed and peaked from the cold. He put his clammy hands on her shoulders and then let them slip lower, his eyes stripping her nakeder than before, and told her a new name. And she went to stand silently beside her father, a child no longer.
That night, in the dark place, the deep place, her mother washed the men's name off again, and gave back to her her true name, the name that had been given her at birth, and sang it softly to her, in the dragons' tongue, and her father's tongue, and her mother's tongue : Arezay, Silver, Serret.
Then she was a woman, and then she was off on the long, miserable voyage to Osskil, and her husband, and the treasuries of the Court of the Terrenon.