Fray

by Rowenna Miller

  “Crown Prince of Contradiction,” I said with a mock bow.

  “Not a title I ever wanted.” He lifted his head, watching a bird soaring high overhead. It dipped its broad wings and hovered lower, lower, and then dove into the waves, emerging with a fish already half-swallowed. “An albatross,” he mused. We watched it bob on the surface, its long wings tucked delicately alongside its body as it finished its meal.

  “It’s huge,” I said, the statement absurdly obvious. I didn’t know what else to say—our lives were shifting with almost unbearable speed. I could be parted from Theodor and, in my greatest fears, never see him again. The chain around my wrist, promising marriage, promising future, might be nothing more than dead, cold gold. So there was a large bird preening just off the starboard bow; it was the only thing I could find words for.

  “One of the largest wingspans in the known world. They must have a rookery on one of these islands—summer is their mating season.”

  “How did you come to know so much about albatrosses?” I asked.

  “One of the more useless things my tutors insisted I learn was ornithology.”

  “And botany was so very useful?”

  “If I need to, I could identify edible plants from all the major regions of Galitha and most of Kvyset, thank you very much.” He laughed. “But I did like the bit about the albatrosses. They mate for life, and one of our books had illustrations of the dance they do when the pairs reunite. You see, they spend most of their time at sea, separated. They return to the same island every year and raise their young, then leave one another again, for months, and don’t set foot on the ground again until they reach their island and greet one another with their dance.”

  “They… dance?”

  “It’s called a dance, at any rate. The book said they bob their heads and twine their necks and pat their feet—it sounds ridiculous, I know, but the idea of those two birds finding one another, across all that distance, and remembering their dance? I liked that idea.” He covered his hand with mine. Our matching chains clinked gently. “I like it now.”

  “I don’t think I can learn a dance.” I smiled softly.

  “I think we already have,” Theodor replied. “I think we’ve started to learn to live alongside one another. We know one another, what makes us happy. What grieves us. What shaped us, what we hope for tomorrow. What makes each other smile, what makes you angry.”

  “What makes me angry!” I laughed.

  He pulled an arm around me. “What makes the other laugh, when she needs it. When to stop laughing and simply be still.” I held his arm close around my waist. The quiet bustle of seafaring work surrounding us faded, and there was, for a few brief moments, only us. “All the minute intricacies that make a life together.

  “It’s very possible we will have to separate at some point,” he added abruptly. “I have to believe that if albatrosses can find each other and fall into their dance after months at sea, apart, we will, too. We might hit the wrong rhythms at first, or step off beat. But we’ll remember.” With a spray of water and rush of wings, the albatross lifted off from the waves, soaring quickly out of sight.

  “Was any of that true? About the albatross?” I asked.

  “Every word,” Theodor said, pulling me into a swift kiss.

  I closed my eyes, relishing this moment, perhaps the last one for a long time. The outbreak of war erased the need to shoehorn myself into acceptance with the nobility, and the uncertainty of our futures blotted out any reticence about marriage I stubbornly held to. I had fashioned myself by what I had made—a shop, a career, closetfuls of beautiful creations—and had likely lost it all. I was still Sophie, still a seamstress, still a charm caster, even without a sign over a door in Galitha City.

  I didn’t have to give anything up to accept a future with Theodor. He sought me, stayed with me, danced with me for who I was. As he held me, past and future melted away and for a moment we simply were, together, in the present.

  54

  WE HAD SEVERAL DAYS AT SEA BEFORE WE WOULD REACH THE Galatine coast near Hazelwhite, and we put them to good use. Theodor and Kristos spent long hours in discussion with Sianh, determining military strategy and, implicitly, solidifying their roles as leaders of an army.

  “I’ve begun work on some… shall we say, ‘inspiring’ pamphlets to encourage participation in our cause from the people,” Kristos said. “Not to boast, but the Pen of the Midwinter Revolt never had any trouble pulling support.” I gave him an encouraging smile, but the question nagged me—what was I going to do of use? Theodor, Kristos, and Niko made a veritable trio of leadership, though I very much anticipated they would fight like cats. Sianh would train an army. I was marching to war with no direction.

  Theodor drummed his fingers on the table, a marching beat of his own. “Even with manpower, we need supplies. We need cannon and shot and powder and—damn it, we even need wool and linen for uniforms. We don’t have many noble coffers at our disposal, and the Royalists can outspend us ten to one.”

  “We have the majority of the country on our side, in terms of people, but the nobles have the money,” I agreed.

  “You won’t get Kvyset on your side, not fully.” Alba folded her hands neatly, prim as a pin. “Some houses will offer support, either financial or sending a troop of hired horse.” A pert smile snuck through. “My house will certainly do so. It did once before. But overall—yes, the Royalists have West Serafe backing them, and you have no one.”

  “What of the Allied States?” Kristos asked.

  Theodor shook his head and Alba laughed, adding, “They won’t take a side. They don’t have to. They’re so secure in their neutrality, so assured that neither side would cut trade ties, that they will ride this out and befriend the winner.”

  “What about Fen?” I knew before I finished speaking that it was a stupid question—Fen was practically powerless, a neutered island nation.

  Theodor began to argue, but Alba stopped him. “It’s worth considering. Fen—and Pellia, for that matter—have little to lose and much to gain in an alliance with a new Galatine government. Not unlike Kvyset, but perhaps even more—a friend in a high place, perhaps, where there was no friend before.”

  “If they help us now, they can be assured of favoritism later,” Kristos mused. “Are we in a position to offer anything concrete? Trade monopolies or assistance or lifting tariffs?”

  Theodor nodded slowly. “Yes, we could do any of those things. But I’m loath to overcommit ourselves for—what? Bolts of wool and blankets?”

  “We will need blankets, most likely. Unless you want soldiers to freeze this winter.” Alba shrugged.

  “Besides,” Kristos said, “you’ve forgotten Fen’s other resource.”

  “Rocks?” Theodor said.

  “Coal. They’re even now more fully industrialized than Galitha, and even in the short time I was there I saw the beginnings of a boom. Each factory and foundry owner racing to outpace his competition.” He narrowed his eyes, as though squinting at a page of very small writing he couldn’t quite make out. “If it’s cannon and shot we need, muskets and bayonets, then we need Fen. We don’t have many noble coffers, but we have some. Fen’s foundries are hungry for investment, to grow. They would take our business; our money is just as good as anyone else’s. And they could outfit a fleet by winter.”

  Theodor considered this. “We need cannon, and shot, and muskets—Galatine Divine, we need a damned navy. If an alliance with Fen can give us that, it’s well worth pursuing.” He glanced at me, ready to say something else, but stopped.

  “And Pellia?” Alba asked, tickled by my brother’s suggestion. “What is Pellia hiding?”

  “Pellia produces salted redfin and fish oil.” Kristos looked right at me. “And charm casters.”

  Theodor’s eyes on me became almost too much to bear. “Iron and wool,” he said, “and charm casting.”

  “Theodor,” I said, voice low.

  He pressed on despite the warning
in my voice. “Remember the night of the Midwinter Revolt? You gave the soldiers charms then. What if we could give our army charmed uniforms?”

  “Yes, but—” I shook my head. “I just wanted to keep them from being hurt. I wanted to keep everyone from being hurt.” It hadn’t felt like a military strategy at the time, like I was throwing my abilities on one side of a conflict. I saw clearly now that it was. I had, in a sense, militarized my own gift. “But I couldn’t possibly outfit an entire army with charms.”

  “We both know there are other ways to embed your charms. Perhaps it could be done on a larger scale,” he said, meaning implicit and unspoken, his own part in our experiments still secret.

  “No,” I whispered. “Theodor, no. If I could—and I don’t know that I could—what would that mean?” I imagined it, iron forged with luck, wool loomed with health. My ability turned commodity on a mass scale. The industrialization of the art of my grandmothers—it was a perversion, wasn’t it?

  “It could mean the turning point for an army that, at this point, will be outgunned and outmanned.”

  I trembled, though whether with anger or bitter guilt, I couldn’t tell. I had always held fast to my ethics. I had broken them only once, to craft the curse in the queen’s shawl, and that still haunted me. This felt like abandonment of the core ethics of casting, even if no one had ever warned me against this particular use. Still, Theodor was right. We needed far more luck than I could dole out piecemeal.

  “I won’t press you,” Theodor said, disappointment thick and gray in his voice.

  “I will,” Kristos said.

  “Damn it, Balstrade.” Theodor whirled.

  “No, Kristos, you don’t get to argue with me about this,” I said. “Not you. Of all people.”

  “I know. I—”

  “If you know then you won’t say anything to me. Not now, not ever. Not about this.”

  Kristos bit his lip. I knew that face, knew it better than even he did, perhaps—the burning impatience he felt when he wanted, very badly, to say something. He made it a dozen times a day when we were children, wisely restraining himself from talking back to our mother.

  “I can never make up for what I did,” Kristos finally said. “I coerced you. I promise I will never do so again.”

  I nodded, once. Terse acceptance of that earnest and yet impossibly inadequate apology.

  “I will say this.” He held up a hand to my protest. “This is your choice. My life, Theodor’s life, the lives of thousands may hang on it. Your life may eventually hang on it. The fate of nations may hang on it. But it is your choice. Yours alone. No one will force your choice. No one.”

  I fell into a morose silence. None of them would force me, but the war already had. My rules were, perhaps, good ones, guiding principles for ordinary times, but I had outpaced them. If I could do something, I was bound to try. Besides, I argued to myself, feeling the weakness of the ethics even as I considered it, someone would eventually discover what I had discovered. Someone else would find that charms could be pulled from the ether and embedded without a clay tablet or a needle and thread. Someone would put it to use for their country or their army.

  The ethics were weak, but the pragmatism was inarguable. “All right. I’ll try.”

  55

  ALBA PRODUCED A SMALL LEATHER NOTEBOOK AND A GRAPHITE stick. She made a few hasty marks, concentration tightening the furrow between her eyes. “There. I’ve calculated the percentage of my house’s coffers that we can put, immediately, toward infrastructure in Fen. I daresay we’ll have little difficulty finding at least one foundry, perhaps two, able to turn these funds into cannons within months, and woolen and linen mills who will make contracts with us when they see what we’re able to invest.”

  “Months.” I shook my head. “It seems a long time.”

  “But it’s worth it to establish our own supply line.” Alba watched me carefully. “And you believe we can imbue those supplies with additional… fortification?”

  “That’s a puzzle I’m still working out,” I hedged. “I certainly can’t sew all the garments myself. I couldn’t even sew cockades for a quarter of their hats. I’m not sure that there’s any other method I could use.” I met Theodor’s eyes—the one method I did have was his violin, and we both knew that he couldn’t come with me, fiddling at a factory to charm the fibers of the flax and wool they wove. “Worst case, I can… I don’t know. Sew a few buttons on as many coats as I can… or make pieces for elite forces.” This felt pitifully inadequate, but everyone was kind enough not to say so.

  “I’ll write to Annette and Viola,” Theodor said. “I’m sure they’ll be willing to put some money toward supplies. So don’t finalize those calculations quite yet,” he said to Alba.

  “I won’t.” She looked at me again. “It seems to me that investing in wool and linen is only worthwhile if they can be charmed. So that, shall we say, puzzle must be solved rather quickly.”

  I nodded soberly and began to pace the deck. The sea reflected the sun in its rich, ever-varying blue. Watching the gentle swell and dip of the waves calmed my racing thoughts, so I stared into the depths and took a few breaths.

  I stopped. Did I need the violin to cast directly? Surely, I had learned by now that the casting methodology was only the way a practitioner reached to the light and drew it out. The method was either literal and crude, like the folk practice of carving tablets, or utilized someone’s talents, like my sewing or Theodor’s violin playing.

  But what if I could draw it from the ether itself, without the aid of a sewing needle or music?

  I had always begun with sewing, starting with the needle and thread until the light appeared around my action. I struggled to even put myself in the right frame of mind—of being, really—to see past the visible and into the place where the charms and curses came from. Without my needle in hand, it felt impossible. I threw myself back in memory, to first drawing the light as a child under my mother’s tutelage. Had it been easy, hard? Had she guided me? The first lessons blurred in memory, wrapped up with the scent of simmering spinach and the feel of our dusty packed-dirt floor beneath my bare toes.

  I couldn’t remember, and the invocation of the light was so tied with the action of sewing. I fished out my housewife from my pocket and began to sew, trying to locate within myself the moment where I sensed the light, the moment I could grasp it and draw it into my work. It was like staring into a bright candle flame—the closer I looked, the less I could see. The intrusion of thought over rote practice drove the light away and swiftly built a headache out of the tension in my temples.

  I returned to my cabin. I tried mimicking sewing, then stopping the motions; I tried imagining music; I tried closing my eyes and slipping into a half daydream. Nothing worked, except pretending to sew, which only worked as long as I kept up the motions, and even then the trail of light was thin and recalcitrant, trying to follow the motions of an imaginary needle rather than my wishes for it.

  I threw myself on the bed and stared at the pale wood of the cabin’s ceiling, the water reflections playing on the slats above me. Not so unlike the charm light. The thirati, Corvin had said they were called. As real as matter and space, as real as heat and cold.

  Real. Of course—I was trying to pull the magic from the air in order to see it. I had to reverse my tactic. My gift wasn’t solely for manipulating the thirati—it was for seeing it to begin with. If I could see it, perhaps I could work with it. But how to sense something beyond my sight, feel something hidden behind the screen that cuts the invisible world off from the visible? It was like asking to see love, or grief, or joy, I thought with a pang of defeat.

  Except it was, in fact, very much like seeing an emotion. I felt a certain kind of contentment while I cast charms, and a dark heaviness when I cast curses; I had always assumed this was an effect of the casting. But what if it was tied to its source, what if I was “seeing” the magic with my intuition? I tried to find that emotion in myself, that feeling o
f unshakable comfort, of patient joy that accompanied strong charm casting. It was elusive, like trying to force a smile from a stubborn child, but the stirrings of it blossomed in my chest, warmed my limbs, tingled in my fingers as I pressed my thoughts toward the greenhouse with Theodor mere weeks earlier, or splitting a sticky nut roll with my mother, long ago. I traced the chain on my wrist and freed the unbound imaginings of future happiness.

  Finally, I saw as well as felt the magic—a thin golden stream of light, distinct from the sunlight and the reflection of the water. I pulled the strand of gold from the air, twining it into a thin circle. It hung suspended in the air before me, a perfect golden ring. What to do with it now? I wondered, toying with it, moving it between my fingers, letting it bounce between my hands. I laid it on the bedspread and imagined it a part of the fibers, embedding it into the fabric. A little golden ring, now as much a part of the woven wool as if I had embroidered it with needle and thread.

  I played at it for another hour or more, feeling lighter, feeling more joyful as I worked. I pulled light and twisted it, spread it, manipulated it like fibers and like clay, let it dance and swell and pulse in its own state, held but unchanged by me. I could work the light into cloth easily, into wood with some difficulty, even, awkwardly, etched into glass. I laughed, imagining the owner of this ship never knowing about the invaluable, invisible decorations in one of his cabins. I was still clumsy, and slow, but confidence welled in me—I could do this. I could charm cloth on the looms or shot in the molds.

  Reticently, I allowed the light to fade away, slipping back into the ether. I swallowed—I had to know if I could, if it was possible, so I sought and finally found the heavy feeling of curse casting, buried deep yet too willing to rise to the surface. I drew the glittering black from the ether like a thick stroke of ink from a pen, wrapping it into a delicate spiral. I could manipulate it, move it, hold it just as the charm thread, though when I brought it too close to the golden ring in the coverlet it seemed to pull away, repelled by the presence of its opposite. I didn’t want to embed it here, but letting it sink back into the air didn’t prove anything to me about whether I could manipulate it as I could the charms. Eventually, I hovered it over the bowl of water with the floating lilies, and submerged the ring. Imagining it dissolving, I pressed it into the water.