Midwinter 02: The Office of Shadow

by Matthew Sturges

  "You want me to work for him?" said Silverdun, incredulous.

  "You need him," said Everess.

  "More than you can possibly know," said Paet.

  Silverdun scowled. "Are you always this ... ominous?"

  Paet tapped his cane on the ground. "You'll be hearing from me shortly," he said.

  Silverdun and Everess watched him leave. Silverdun blinked, and that same odd trick of the eye occurred, foreground into background, and Paet was gone.

  "Interesting fellow, isn't he?" said Everess, once he'd vanished.

  "I can't say I'm in love."

  Everess chuckled. "Give him time. Paet's a good man. His experience has made him what he is. All for the love of Seelie. The Seelie Heart; isn't that what Mauritane called it?"

  "Mauritane excels at convincing others to fling themselves at death in the service of abstractions." Silverdun sighed. "You're not helping your cause."

  "This is good work," said Everess. "We need you. And let's be frank. You need us."

  A remark leapt to Silverdun's lips, but he suppressed it. Perhaps if he stopped arguing the point, Everess would shut up about it.

  "Tell me this, Everess," said Silverdun, quiet. "Was I chosen for this because of my strengths or because of my ability to get intelligence from the Arcadians?"

  "I never do anything for only one reason," said Everess. "Either way, it's time for you to stop pissing around and get to work."

  Silverdun wanted to disagree, but couldn't.

  "You're mad," said the goat, hopping up and down. "I am indeed," the bear replied."But there is strength in madness."

  from The Goat and the Bear,'' Seelie fable

  he Copperine House sat on an estate nearly a day's ride outside the City Emerald, set back from the Mechesyl Road, just beyond a small ridge dotted with spruce and fir trees. This was the beginning of the Western Valley, where the high mountaintops held snow year-round, and the evergreens were the only trees that grew. Here, though, the conifers mixed in with deciduous life, speckling the landscape with points of darkness in a world of color.

  The house was relatively new, less than three hundred years old. It had been donated by the sixtieth Lady Copperine after the unfortunate incident that claimed both her son's life and the lives of the twelve others in the cafe with him when he'd lost control of his Gift of Elements and turned them all into sand, including himself. The incident was hushed up by the Royal Guard, a fire set, and the heir apparent to the Copperine title was mourned appropriately. Devastated, his mother donated the family estate to the Crown, with the explicit instructions that it be used to prevent other such tragedies. Once her affairs were settled, Lady Copperine drank poison and joined her son in death.

  The house itself was large and rambling, having been added on to and spellturned rather haphazardly in its day. The unfortunate lady's great uncle had been something of an amateur turner and had made a number of ques tionable choices regarding the estate's architectural layout. Now the house was three times as large as it had been when built, though there were rooms in it that had been lost forever. The residents of Copperine House had it that an unlucky niece had been inside one of the lost rooms when it was badly turned, and haunted the building into the present day.

  Sela's favorite place was the tiered terrace that overlooked the small valley behind the house. There was nothing artificial in this view. Only trees, sky, earth, and small animals that could sometimes be cajoled into eating corn from Sela's hand. If she were able, Sela would have waited for a rainy day, then stepped down each stone tier, walked barefoot through the grass as the rain plastered her hair against her face, and disappeared into the forest, never to be seen again.

  This was a fantasy, of course. Beyond the terrace was a fence of pure Motion that would stop her in her tracks, and unpleasantly so, were she to take more than a few steps into the lawn. That the small animals could come and go through it while she could not was some small comfort to Sela. The part of her that was them, at least, was free. This was something she knew intellectually, but could not bring herself to feel. Not in this place. Not with the Accursed Object wrapped around her arm.

  The Accursed Object was a band of cold iron, three inches thick, that encircled her upper arm, resting snugly against her skin. It was coated with the barest plating of silver to keep it from burning, but its presence disrupted her re enough that she could barely think, let alone employ her unique skills.

  Some others in Copperine House attempted to escape from time to time. Horeg the Magnificent, a mestine of some great former renown, once chewed off his own arm at the shoulder, but the attendants discovered him bleeding to death halfway to the road and dragged him back in. All the way he shouted to them that he had a performance at the Principal Theater that could not be missed. Once it was all over, the attendants had whispered in Sela's hearing that the Principal had been closed for over six hundred years, and Horeg the Magnificent wasn't that magnificent. He was only forty-five.

  Panner-La, a military commander, had been able to dig a tunnel forty feet long beneath the house before he was caught. He'd managed the feat by whittling away at his own Accursed Object just enough to use Elements to turn the earth to air, an inch or two a day, over the course of twenty years.

  Many attempts at escape had been made, but Sela didn't know of any that had succeeded.

  The cold iron bands kept most of them in check, but there were some whose Gifts were so strong that they could not be fully stifled. There was Brinoni, the daughter of a courtier in Titania's court, whose Premonitory Gift was so powerful that she lived her entire life in the future, several hours ahead of reality. Her body jerked and dragged as she attempted to move in time with her future actions. Her speech was so much nonsense, always responding to words as yet unsaid, and thus disrupting her own visions. Brinoni lived in a future that no one else would ever experience, the future that would have been had she not been there to see it.

  Some of the patients' Gifts were so extreme and so dangerous that there was nothing for them but to keep them sedated at all times. Prin had once been a Master of the Gates, but had been caught between worlds and lost his mind. Left fully conscious, Prin was capable of transporting the entire house and a good portion of the countryside to another world entirely, or to one of the dark places, or of spellturning the house into itself. Sela thought his case was unbearably sad, and would have put Prin out of his misery if she'd been able to work out a way to do it without being caught. Because even with the band around her arm, Sela could feel Prin's anguish despite the drugs they gave him. His misery ran so deeply that she'd almost managed to form a thread toward him. But not quite. There hadn't been any threads in quite some time.

  In Sela's case, the band was highly effective. Her talent required concentration, and the Accursed Object kept her just off-kilter enough to render her essentially powerless. Of all the patients at the Copperine House, Sela was the only one who was not mad. Nor was she a danger to herself. What kept Sela at Copperine was the simple fact that nobody knew what else to do with her.

  Sela understood that she could not be allowed free. Or at least, she understood that her keepers believed that to be the case. Sela knew-or remembered knowing, as her mind was one of the many things that the band hampered-that, if free, she could find a way to be of no danger to anyone. But given her history, it would be difficult to convince anyone of that.

  Thinking of her history led her to thoughts of Milla. The thoughts of Milla, on those occasions when they came, overtook her and she broke down. Today was no exception. While the rain pattered down just past the terrace awning, Sela experienced Milla's pain all over again, still fresh no matter how many Accursed Objects they wrapped around her limbs or how much bottled forgetfulness they forced down her throat. Milla was real, and Milla was dead and it was Sela's fault. It was truth; a hideous truth. One that could never be undone.

  Oh, Milla.

  An attendant, seeing Sela weeping on the terrace, rushed to offer
a handkerchief, a cool drink, a cucumber sandwich. Anything to calm and please. The conceit was that the patients at Copperine were, in fact, guests at a proper country estate, and the staff all behaved as though this were the case. Many of the patients chose to believe it, and those who didn't, like Sela, saw no reason to spoil the fantasy. It was nice being treated like a lady, even if the lady couldn't leave her estate. It was far better than what she'd grown up with.

  The manor house is very large, bigger than anything Sela has ever seen. Bigger than anything she's ever dreamed of.

  Mother told her that she was a very lucky girl, that she must do everything that Lord Tanen and his servants told her. She was Lord Tanen's ward now. Sela didn't know what that meant. Mother had said that she would come to visit Sela soon, but later Sela heard Mother and Father whispering in bed, and Father said, "Why did you lie to her? We'll never see her again." And Mother only cried and said, "What can I do?"

  A beautiful room in the manor house has been prepared for her. It's so beautiful and fancy that at first she forgets all about Mother and Father, and the farm, and her friends in the village. At night, though, she cries and misses her family.

  Lord Tanen calls the three old women "crones." He says that she is to do everything they tell her, and that if she does not, he will come back and punish her.

  "Where will you be?" asks Sela.

  "I will be in the city," he says. "But I will come to visit from time to time."

  Lord Tanen is old, and his skin looks like Father's old saddle. His breath smells sour. She does not like him, so she is glad he is leaving.

  "Don't you want to know why I've brought you here?" he asks her.

  Sela hasn't thought about it. She doesn't know what a ward is, but she is a good girl and does as she's told.

  "Why?" she asks, because he wants her to.

  "Because I have searched far and wide for a special girl like you," he says. "Did you know that you were special?"

  "No."

  "Do you want to know what makes you special?"

  "Okay."

  "There might be something inside you called a Gift. Do you know what Gifts are?"

  "Magic," says Sela. Everyone knows that. "There are twelve Gifts. But children don't have Gifts and, and farmers don't have them, either."

  "That is mostly true," says Lord Tanen. "Children do not express their Gifts; they only manifest during puberty. But there are ways of knowing in advance. And while it is true that the lower classes show a far lower rate of manifestation, it is not unheard-of."

  Sela doesn't understand what Tanen is saying, and is getting bored. She looks around her bedroom for something to play with.

  "May I have a doll?" she asks.

  "You won't have time for dolls," he says.

  Sela was sitting quietly in the tearoom when Lord Everess stepped through the door, still shaking the rain from his hair. He was the sort who seemed jolly but, upon closer inspection, was anything but. Even with the Accursed Object damping her down, Sela could see it.

  "Sela," said Everess with a curt bow, the benevolent recognition of a nobleman to a woman with no status whatsoever. Under normal conditions, it would have been impossible for Everess even to address her, so there was no appropriate greeting.

  "Lord Everess," said Sela, rising and curtseying automatically, as she'd been taught since her earliest childhood. Always ready to please. Always ready to obey.

  No. This was not Lord Tanen. All lords were not the same. That's what Everess had told her.

  She looked him directly in the eye. "How may I be of service to you, Lord?"

  Everess cracked a smile. He took a large pipe from the pocket of his voluminous overcoat and lit it, puffing quietly for a moment before speaking.

  "Let me ask you a question, miss. How do you like it here?"

  If Everess was expecting a polite response, he wasn't going to get one. "I despise it here," she said simply.

  Everess laughed out loud. To him, she was a puppy nipping, nothing more. "Brutally honest as ever, yes. This place hasn't drained that out of you."

  "I am what I was made to be," Sela said.

  Everess watched her, puffing on his pipe, saying nothing. Letting the silence between them grow dense.

  Finally, he spoke. "What is it that you want?" he asked.

  "Excuse me?"

  "For yourself. What is it that you want for yourself?"

  "I've never been asked the question before." Sela thought back. No, it was true. At no time in her life had anyone ever asked her what she wanted; not about anything that mattered.

  "Well, it's not a complicated question, however novel," Everess huffed. "If you despise Copperine House, as you say, then where is it that you'd prefer to go?"

  Sela glared at him. "You of all people should know that I can't answer that question."

  Everess smiled. Of course he knew. And he wanted to be sure that she was focused on what she owed him before he made whatever strange request he was about to make of her.

  She decided to answer the question anyway. "I want to be useful," she said, crossing her hands on her lap. The muslin of her skirt settled softly. "I want to be ... good. Do good."

  "Ah," said Everess. "Meaning what, exactly?"

  "I want for my life to ... mean something. I sense the hours and days and years going by, and nothing I do means anything to anyone. I might as well not even exist. Sometimes I wish that I didn't."

  Everess dragged a chair toward the love seat where she sat and planted himself in it, leaning forward. He took her cold hands in his, which were warm and meaty. She smelled tobacco and liquor on his breath.

  "Sela," he said. "What if I told you I had an opportunity for you to be useful and good? More useful than you can possibly imagine?"

  What game was Everess playing? What fancy of his was this? While Sela had been at Copperine, Everess had visited from time to time. They'd played draughts. He'd checked up on her, asked after her health, made sure she was being taken care of and treated properly. But she had never been under the illusion that he loved her or even cared for her as another Fae. She was a duty of his, and though she'd never understood the exact nature of that duty, she knew the reason for it. It was not the same reason that Lord Tanen had raised her, had invested so much in her upbringing, but it was not far different, she felt now.

  "You misunderstand me, Lord Everess," Sela said, stiffening. "I did not say I wished to be used. I said I wished to be useful."

  Again the smile. Sela could not think of anything she'd ever said to Everess that had wiped that smile off his face. Someday, she found herself thinking, she would find a way.

  "I apologize profusely, miss," said Everess, leaning back and releasing her hands. "I did not mean to imply that."

  "Then let us stop circling around it," said Sela. "What is it that you want?"

  Everess stood and began making a lap around the room, inspecting the mantelpiece, sniffing at the condition of the wallpaper. "How long have you been at Copperine, Sela?"

  More circling, then. "Ten years." She could just as easily have told him the number of days.

  "Do you know why I brought you here?" he said.

  "I have an assumption," said Sela. "At first, I simply assumed you were being kind, knowing so little of kindness as I did. After a time I came to believe that it was because you could simply think of nothing better to do with me. But now I know why."

  "And why is that?"

  "Because you believed that at some point I would become a valuable asset to you. And now that time has come."

  "Well," said Everess, drawing out the word. "All three of your assumptions are true, to a greater or lesser degree. I did and still do feel very warmly toward you, Sela. And at the time, I certainly had no idea what was to be done with you. You don't really belong here, but I could never figure out where you did belong. And as for your being an asset, Sela ..."

  He paused, perhaps thinking of the right way to say it, then gave up. "It's true, of cou
rse. One doesn't get to where I am without understanding people and how they can be maneuvered into serving one's own ends."

  "How noble," she said.

  He ignored her. "But believe me when I say, Sela, that I do care for you. More than you think. And I want you be happy."

  Was this true? Maybe he thought it was true.

  "Regardless, I've found a place for you. A place where you can use your talents. Where you can be of use to me. And where you can be truly useful. Does that interest you?"

  Sela scoffed. "What difference does it make? I have no control over where I'm sent."