“That’s the old university,” said Jute. “No one goes there. It’s full of magic and death and all sorts of ghosts.”
“True to a point,” said the old man, smiling. “However, the place is so steeped in magic that the wihht would have immense trouble finding your scent there. Besides, the Guild would never set foot in the ruins, so we’re killing two birds with one stone. We don’t need them and the wihht both hunting you. You should be safe within the walls. Reasonably safe. Oh, you needn’t look like a frightened sheep, Jute. Most of the stories you’ve heard about the university ruins aren’t true, and the ones that are true—well, you step carefully once inside those walls and you’re safe enough.”
Here, Severan paused, as if unsure as to how he should proceed. “I’m a scholar of sorts. Some years ago, several of my colleagues and I were granted permission by the regent of Hearne, Nimman Botrell, to conduct a search of the university grounds. It’s been unoccupied and locked up since the end of the Midsummer War, more than three hundred years ago.”
“Yes,” said the boy, remembering stories told late at night by the older boys. “And for good reason!”
“Oh, piffle. Worn-out reasons from long ago. Perhaps in the years following the war—the first hundred or two hundred years—there was wisdom in that. I’ll be the first to admit that, er, not just anyone should wander about the university. There are some interesting wards within the grounds that have survived the years intact. Some of the most deadly wards ever spelled. But don’t worry, boy,” he said hastily, for Jute’s eyes were widening. “My colleagues and I are well suited for what we do. If we weren’t, the regent would have never given us permission. Besides, he’s gambling he’ll have his cut out of whatever we find—a greedier man I’ve yet to meet.”
“If I take one step out into the square,” said Jute, “the Silentman will know instantly. Half the barrow vendors are in the Guild’s pay. Pickpockets and cutpurses everywhere. Worse still, we, the Juggler’s children, always considered the square as our play field. They know my face. I’m sure to be seen!”
“Wait here,” said Severan.
The old man hurried off across the square and disappeared among the vendors and the crowds eddying about the carts and stalls. The boy hunkered down behind some garbage and stared out at the square. The thought of his old playmates worried him. Would they turn him in for a copper coin and a kind word from the Juggler? He wasn’t sure, and the uncertainty was worse than the hunger in his belly. Lena wouldn’t squeal on him, but she was only one among dozens. The twins. They probably wouldn’t say anything either.
Mioja Square was the proving ground of the Juggler’s children. It was where the children honed their skills at picking pockets in hopes of graduating to the richer pickings of the Highneck Rise district. His first lift had been a wallet filched from a fat man inspecting bolts of silk at a draper’s stall. But he had been too eager, and the man had whirled around. Jute had sprinted away, the wallet clutched to his chest. The fat man could not keep up for long and stopped, gasping and hurling curses after the boy. Jute had collapsed in a fit of nervous giggles, once safe, and the Juggler had been pleased later. Three gold pieces as shiny bright as butter.
The Juggler.
Shadows.
It felt like a hundred years ago.
The Juggler. The Knife. The man’s face swam into his mind and he saw his lips move, forming the words: Remember, boy. Don’t open the box, whatever happens. If you do, I’ll cut your throat open so wide the wind’ll whistle through it. He shivered, remembering too well the man’s hand drifting down, the needle prick on his shoulder, and the night sky receding away as he fell down the chimney. Something tight and hot congealed within his chest, a point of almost physical obstruction that made him swallow convulsively. And for the first time in his life, Jute hated.
A breeze rustled down the alley and blew across his face, waking him from his reverie. Footsteps sounded and he looked up to see Severan.
“Here,” said the old man, handing him a folded up cloak. “Put this on. Pull the hood down over your face.”
There was one bad moment when they crossed the square. Right next to Vilanuo’s barrow—he sold fried bread—Jute looked up from within the shadow of his cowl to meet Lena’s glance. Lena, of all people. She was turning away from the barrow, gnawing on a slab of greasy bread dripping honey. Her eyes flicked up, blue against the ravaged, ward-scarred skin. An uncertain frown drifted across her face, followed by blank eyes and dismissal. But Jute had already turned away, steeling himself from breaking into a run. Sweat trickled down his back. Lena was his closest friend among all of the Juggler’s children. Had been, said part of his mind. Trust no one.
He hurried to catch up with Severan stalking through the crowd. Some beggars sat lazing in the sun on the steps of the old university. They scattered like a flock of ragged starlings as Severan and the boy came toward them, shambling to the outer edges of the steps and down to the square.
“Your precious ruins are safe, scholar,” jeered one old man as they passed. “We’ve been hard at guard.”
“Aye,” said Severan. “I warrant your smell’s enough to do the job.”
This elicited a chorus of cackles from the other beggars, and they drifted back to their spots in the sunlight pooled on the steps. The front doors were massive, ironbound affairs, with chains wound through the double handles. They were secured by a rusty lock. As Jute stepped closer, he felt his skin prickle and go cold.
“This is warded,” he said. “Heavily warded.” He could feel the curious stares of the beggars behind them.
“Yes, yes,” said the old man, not paying attention to him. “Ah, there it is.”
Jute blinked in astonishment. Where there had only been a stone wall before, a small, dark opening yawned.
“Hurry,” said Severan. “It’ll only stay open for a moment. We can’t have one of these old fellows sneaking in after us. One of them did that several months ago. Never saw him slip inside. Didn’t find him until later. What was left of him. He didn’t survive much more than an hour.”
Jute snorted. “I can be a lot quieter than a beggar.”
“I’m sure you can,” said Severan. “But an alarming number of the ward spells here aren’t attuned to noise. The university isn’t a safe place.”
“I thought you said it was safe,” said Jute, but they were already through and there was only stone behind them where the opening once had been.
“Safe?” echoed the old man. “Did I say that? Well, yes, of course it’s safe. In a relative sort of way, perhaps. Safer than the streets of Hearne! The wihht won’t find you in here. Er, at least, that’s my hope.”
It was dark inside after the morning sunlight, and at first Jute was aware only of an echoing space before and above him. As his eyes grew accustomed to the darkness, he saw stone pavement stretching out in front of him for a great distance. Rubble lay scattered across it. Pillars rose up in rows running along either side of the floor. Some of them were shattered and broken off at different heights. Shafts of scarlet, gold, and azure light slanted down through clerestory windows of stained glass. It was a place of shadows, despite the light falling through the stained glass.
“Come,” said the old man. “Food and a bed for you, and then later we’ll talk of what must be done. For now, however, walk behind me and don’t speak unless I speak to you. There are certain wards within this place that are disturbed by the sound of human voices.”
The boy wondered why Severan had bothered to say human voices instead of just voices. At the end of the row of pillars, there was a series of doors. These led into a maze of corridors and stairways so full of twists and turns that Jute was soon hopelessly bewildered as to their direction. Dust lay over everything and stirred in their wake.
From time to time, the old man stopped and mumbled a sentence or two. He spoke so quietly, however, that Jute could never make out what he was saying. But he knew the old man was disarming wards, for he always
stopped in places where the air quivered with expectancy, and whenever the old man finished, the quivering sensation was stilled. The expectancy was everywhere—that listening quality every ward has, regardless of its function. The air rustled with it. Jute prided himself on never having yet encountered a ward he could not lull into complacency through his own silence. Here, however, the coiled, listening expectancy of the ward spells was different than anything he had ever known. The back of his neck prickled. He imagined eyes watching from every dark doorway and from behind every pile of rubble they passed. Once, he whirled, sure he had heard footsteps, but there was nothing except the empty corridor behind them.
It seemed as if they walked for hours, through shadows and archways, down long malls and past stairways twisting away in every direction. They picked their way through gaping holes in crumbled walls. They crossed a hall filled with light so bright it made his eyes ache. The roof, high above them, was shattered and open to the sky. The wind moaned through the broken ribs of stone overhead and Jute looked up, thinking of the hawk. They came to a warren of corridors relatively untouched by ruin. Severan opened the door to a room furnished with a bed, a wooden chest, and a table and chair.
“Wait here,” said the old man.
When he returned with a plate of bread and cheese and a withered summer apple, he found Jute snoring on the bed. The boy had fallen asleep on top of the blankets. It was chilly in the room, and the old man rummaged in the chest for a woolen blanket. He laid it over Jute and then left, closing the door quietly behind him.
Jute lay on his back under a night sky. He had the strange sensation that he could feel the entire earth pressing up underneath him. Mountain ranges, plains, long ribbons of river shining silver in the moonlight. Distant lands. Deserts chilled and shrouded in darkness. Forests lost in shadows of green midnight. The whole of the earth pushed up against his back, as if he were on the prow of a gigantic ship rushing through the night, propelling him through a vast darkness in which only a few stars gleamed. The wind touched his face. He heard in it the echo of a mighty tempest blowing toward him from an impossible distance away, blowing and howling among the far-off stars and spinning dusts of space.
He wanted to reach the sky, to hurl himself up into it. To unravel into the night until there was nothing left of himself. To be freed from the hold of the heavy earth. The breeze whispered to him of the older winds roaming free, far above the plodding earth. A tremor shook him as he strained upward, but he could not lift a hand from the ground. The blades of grass growing from the earth under and around him held his body fast in their gentle embrace. Stone shifted beneath him like bone scraping on bone. The earth held him close, whispering to him with the sounds of rustling leaves and the mutter of worms as they pushed their patient way through the loam.
No. It cannot have thee, said a worm.
No, agreed another.
It hath nothing to give thee, rustled a leaf. Nothing except the emptiness of sky.
Nothing.
Thou must not forsake the earth.
Thou will wither like this leaf, said a worm in satisfaction.
Aye, said a leaf. The best and truest of fates.
He will wither like thee.
Aye, agreed the leaf.
The worms murmured together in lines that moved so slowly and smoothly he thought he could feel the damp earth eaten and left in the wake of their tiny passage.
He will fade into worn hues.
Muted from last year's bold spring.
He will tatter in the wind.
Teeter on a shivering branch.
And lose his breezing balance.
He will fall to drift on down.
And so lay with the whole of earth.
Pressed against his crinkled back.
Aye, rustled the leaf.
“But the sky,” he said. “It’s so perfect and clear. I wish. . .” He could not say what he wished. The worms had nothing more to say either. The leaf, however, rustled one more time.
Aye. I have seen the sky before. Before I fell.
He cried out in longing and awoke. The dream faded from his mind, as dreams do, and he was conscious only of regret and the memory of sky.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
ANDOLAN
The town of Andolan nestled in a valley within the Mearh Dun, or the Horse Hills as they had been known hundreds of years ago, before Dolan Callas had first ridden north during the settling of the lands of Tormay. It was written that Dolan Callas fell in love with the region for three things.
First, for the hills themselves and the prairies stretching from the cliffs in the west on the sea’s edge to the Mountains of Morn in the east. Each season was more beautiful than the preceding: lush green in the spring spotted with the scarlet poppies like drops of blood, all of which burned into gold under the summer sun, followed by the rust of autumn and the stark snows of winter.
Second, he was drawn by the wild horses that claimed the hills and prairie of the Mearh Dun as their own. The love of horses runs strong in the blood of every Callas, and Dolan Callas was the first of that line.
Third, and most important, Dolan was caught by the gray-green eyes of a peasant girl whom he saw as he rode along the banks of the river Ciele in the heart of the Mearh Dun. Legend has it the girl was washing laundry at the river’s edge. Dolan reined in his horse on the other side. The girl’s black hair, bright and dark together as a raven’s wing, fell across her face as she bent over her work. She did not look up, even though she must have heard him approaching, for the Ciele is a narrow river. At the nicker of his horse, she finally glanced up. Her name was Levoreth, as so many women of the Callas family down through the years have been named. He built Andolan for her and she bore him three sons. So began the lineage of the dukes of Callas.
The duke’s party clattered over the bridge crossing the Ciele and came up the road winding toward the two old towers that guarded the southern gate. Lights gleamed in the town of Andolan, for the sun was lowering in the west. The men-at-arms laughed and talked among themselves. They were glad to be back—good ale and good friends at the castle, the warmth of their homes and wives. The guards at the gate were already standing at attention, for the tall form of the duke was distinctive at a distance.
Children skipped alongside the horses and chased after pennies the duke tossed for them as the party rode through the streets. Men and women called cheerfully from porch stoops and windows and from market stalls shuttering for the night. They tugged their forelocks in respect to the three members of the Callas family. The duke and duchess were loved in Dolan, but especially in the town of Andolan. The dukes of Callas had never forgotten the peasant girl who had become the mother of their line. It was in honor of her that the castle doors were always open to the townsfolk. Equally so, it was just as normal to find the duke sitting outside the local tavern with the old men who had nothing better to do than warm their bones in the sun and swap tall tales.
Grooms ran out to hold the horses’ reins as they clattered to a halt in the castle courtyard. Two hounds lollopped up and sniffed dutifully at every horse before making for Levoreth to slobber happily all over her hands. The old steward Radean emerged from the front door and tottered down the steps. Servants peered smiling from lamp-lit windows. The Callases were home.
The days whisked by in a whirl of activity. There was much to do before setting out for Hearne and the Autumn Fair. Melanor decided none of her dresses would do and, catching Hennen at an opportune time when he was sneaking a pork pie in the larder before supper, convinced the duke to part with the necessary gold.
“I think Levoreth could use a few new things, too,” said the duchess.
“You women are going to beggar the duchy,” said her husband, edging around so that he was standing between the duchess and the remains of the pork pie sitting on the shelf.
“Nonsense,” said his wife. “We’re the only reason the land hasn’t gone to ruin, with you buying up every horse in sight and paying
a king’s ransom for whatever four-legged creature the Farrows trot through here.”
“What?” said the duke, foolishly rising to the bait. “Madame, you speak of things you know nothing of. Horses are the treasure of Dolan. That last colt—she’ll be faster than Min the Morn, or I’ll eat my best cloak—was worth every penny I paid.”
“And how much was that?”
“Er . . .”
“I don’t suppose you’ll grudge Levoreth and me a few pieces of gold.”
“A few pieces? Why, I know that just one of your dresses—”
“Hennen, you have crumbs on your chin,” she interrupted. “And we’ll need to get some shoes too. Several pairs each.”
“Oh, all right,” he said.
Levoreth would have smiled if she could have heard them, but she was walking down by the river Ciele. She did not care about new dresses and shoes. The few she had she was comfortable with, for they were faded and known, like old friends. Green and growing things fascinated her: the change of seasons, how the earth accepted the coming of the rain. And the homey parts of everyday life never ceased to tire her: the scent of bread baking, the cooing of a baby, the flicker of a hearth fire at the end of the day. And then there were horses. She was a Callas, through and through, in every best sense of the name. Every Callas loved horses.
One of the hounds had followed her from the castle and now was snuffling among the rocks by the river’s edge. Every once in a while, he would stop and raise his head to stare at her, as if to reassure himself of her presence. She sat down on a slab of rock. Light glittered on the water. The sun rode up the arch of a perfect sky. She leaned back, rested her head on her shawl, and slept.
She dreamt of a young girl standing on a savannah of grasses waving in the wind. The girl’s face was remote and still. Sadness pooled in the shadows under her gray eyes. Her hair streamed away from her in black tresses. She gazed away into the distance. The girl turned, slowly, to look at Levoreth.
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