Ash and Silver

by Carol Berg

  • • •

  How could I waste six hours on such a useless exercise? Every moment of my first hour on the seaward wall that night, I seethed, tempted to climb back down and tell the fortress watch commander—or the Marshal himself—I was unfit for duty. But that would be a lie.

  Appetite had deserted me during the celebration of Cormorant’s investiture. Sir Conall of the Equites Cineré he was now and would ever be. But the day with Morgan—the food she’d given me, the sleep she’d guarded, the very air I’d breathed—had refreshed and renewed me beyond measure, so that even the bay crossing and the invocation of my bent had not drained me. I had no excuse but frustration.

  Inek had reasons for me to be on this wall. I’d hold faith in that if naught else. I wanted to have faith in the Archivist, too. At the end of the feast, it was announced that the Second Archivist had found Commander Inek in the armory, severely injured from an enchantment’s backlash. Who would dare contradict the story? I’d wager the Second Archivist himself sincerely believed it.

  Yet the Archivist had so much as said he knew of the trap spell and that it was alterations had devoured Inek’s mind. Who would destroy my relict and leave a poisonous enchantment for anyone who tried to learn about my past?

  Damon, surely. He had sent me to Evanide. He had a use for me beyond a folio of portraits that frightened the senior pureblood families. And Damon was a linguist, who had been trained in Order magic. Who better to create a dialect of symbols to alter a spell? But why?

  In the second hour of the watch, fog blanketed the fortress so thickly I could not see my feet. The only proof the fortress yet existed were the tide horns and the bell that struck the hours. Please gods no brother had been caught out on the sea this night.

  Though necessarily focused on balance and calm, I could not banish thought entire, not with so much learned and experienced in the past month. Yet I could not afford the distraction of wrestling with puzzles, thus thoughts and questions flowed as they would.

  My past might be gone, but my bents yet lived. What a marvel that a despicable prince’s scouring had freed them. Yet drawing Inek’s portrait had not returned me to the five-fingered land. What if Safia never allowed me through again? The Duchy of Xancheiros had been home to thousands. Was it possible they were yet trapped there? And Morgan was beyond my help if I could not satisfy her father.

  Bastien said I’d had him bury evidence of my grandsire’s investigation of Xancheira . . . a spindle . . . needlework of some kind. Evidence of the massacre, perhaps, or some hint of the city’s fate. And surely if there was a route to Sanctuary in this world, it would lie wherever that city had once stood. I needed to get that spindle.

  My grip was near bending the lance. My fingers had gone numb. I wriggled them inside the mail mitons to ensure I didn’t drop it.

  This Bastien knew more of my past than I ever would. Did Damon know of our unusual relationship—not just master and pureblood, but partners? Friends? What if the curator decided to eliminate anyone who knew me? Somewhere I had a sister. I needed to warn them both, keep them safe, Bastien and—

  Why hadn’t I asked Bastien my sister’s name or where I might have thought safe enough to send her when the Registry proclaimed me a murdering madman?

  The answer sailed past like flotsam on the flood. Because she wasn’t real to me. The horror I felt at my family’s murder I would have felt at any other family’s massacre. Yes, the sight of the fire had hit me very hard that day, but I’d felt no personal loss even after Bastien’s telling. The outrage was the deed itself and that it had been committed by people like me. I’d never imagined so much of feeling and attachment was lost with the specific memories.

  No matter what else I did, I would make that young girl real again. Get to know her in this life. Make sure she was safe and well cared for and not alone. She was likely safer at distance from me and Damon. A spark of a girl, Bastien had called her. You loved her dearly . . . your only kin left in the world . . . sent her away . . .

  Under layers of padding and mail, my sweat chilled. What had the silver-marked Dané said? Thou didst send thy heart with them. . . .

  A cry of anguish rose in me. Was it possible I had sent my only living family—my young sister who trusted me—through a magical portal with a ragtag band of Cicerons to a mythical place called Sanctuary, where she was trapped until I could get her out? Where those who waited to greet her might or might not be mad?

  Balance! Focus! Eyes forward into the murk. Curl your toes and feel your feet . . . your ankles . . . knees. . . . The wall is solid beneath your boots only as long as you feel it.

  The remaining hours on the wall crawled by. Damon had set something huge in motion. Something involving the Order, the Registry, and a Sitting of the Three Hundred. I had to learn what he planned, as well as what part he expected me to play in it. But my life’s work, inside or outside the Order, would be to ensure that he could not do to my sister, my friend the coroner, or anyone else, the horror he had done to Inek.

  • • •

  Damon, muffled in a wine-colored pelisse, warmed his hands at the Hearth of Memory as I hurried into the Seeing Chamber. No one else was present.

  “I worried I’d be late,” I said. Sixth hour had rung as I threw on a dry shirt, splashed the salt from my eyes, and forced aside every concern but Damon the Spider. “Perhaps the Knight Archivist is delayed by the fog, as I was.” Or perhaps he was busy working to save Inek’s life.

  Damon didn’t bother to turn around. Clearly he didn’t realize how close I was to throttling him. “The Knight Archivist will not be present. I shall administer the eyeglim and potions myself.”

  “And work the Archivist’s magic?”

  He pivoted and examined me sharply, as if he thought I might not be the Greenshank he expected. “Are the skills of a Registry curator so far beneath those of an Order pedant that you fear to engage in this session?”

  “I’d no intent to offend, curator. And I’m certainly willing to observe whatever you wish to show me. It’s only that the enchantments required are quite specialized to the Order. I must confess, I cannot grasp your position here or your interest in my training or opinions. Sometimes it seems as if your purpose and that of the Order must be the same, but recently . . . I’m no longer sure of that.”

  The unmasked half of his face expressed only detached observation. But the quirking mouth and gleaming eye beneath the purple silk evidenced enjoyment of feint and counter. I hated that.

  “Be assured, Greenshank, the Knight Marshal and I are of a single mind. My position and purpose have not been your concern to this point. But the time of secrecy is rapidly coming to a close. Now tell me: After last night’s celebration and your ridiculous tour of the seaward wall, are you quite capable of engaging your mind? You will experience a series of complex scenes from a single perspective, and you must link their threads to make a story—as a historian does.”

  “Quite capable, domé. The seaward watch teaches a man his limits. It’s taken me a while to understand that. The time can also provide a certain clarity of thought. It is my duty to learn what every aspect of my training can teach.”

  With Inek’s fall, Damon and the Marshal had cracked open the door of their plotting. Now Damon seemed to have dropped all pretense. So push him. Give him what he seems to relish.

  “Why am I the only one privileged to observe this seeing? Is it some particular flaw in me that draws the Registry’s concern?”

  “The Order has you well practiced in dealing with uncertainty. You will be told what’s needed when the time is right.”

  “What makes you believe that I will listen to your needs at any time?”

  Even such insolence did not ruffle him. “Because I know you better than you know yourself.” He poured the amber potion and passed me the cup. “Experience what I have to show you. Then we shall discuss your future.”<
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  As ever, I used magic and all my senses to examine the amber potion and the eyeglim. Occasionally, the standard formulas and enchantments were purposely altered to sting our eyes or empty our bowels—lessons not easily forgotten.

  Both potions were as they should be. I would have to trust Damon’s skills to do the rest. Curiosity trumped caution.

  The amber potion quickly had me dizzy. Settled on the wooden bench, I allowed Damon to administer the eyeglim. And I did not fight when the blurred hearth fire flashed a brilliant yellow and I fell into another man’s skin. . . .

  I hurried down the iron stair, nauseated as always at its tight twisting as much as at its destination—the dank pit where our cruelty festered and our hope was nurtured in darkness and filth like a tender mushroom. Why my colleagues picked the middle of the night for their games was unfathomable. It was just as black down here at midday as at midnight. Did they think the hour would hide their corruption?

  I knew better. Light was coming to reveal their sins. Our sins. No deeds of worth allow the doer to remain unsullied.

  It was inevitable the fools had fixed their minds on the portraits. Were I one of my single-minded peers, I would have burnt the damnable things the moment I saw them and buried the artist right then. But Pluvius-the-not-so-much-a-fool-as-he-pretended swore that all of pureblood society would notice the paintings’ disappearance. Over the months of their creation, he’d made a great fuss about Remeni’s brilliance and how we would hang the portraits whenever the new king took his throne, celebrating the Remeni—and thus the Registry—connection to the Crown. Exactly the kind of attention we could not afford. And then there was the matter of the massacre so close in time, making Lucian’s fate more noticeable. We’d had to wait. I’d approved of Pons’s solution to keep Lucian out of sight. Unfortunately, it just hadn’t worked.

  “Damon!” Pons waited at the bottom of the stair, torchlight turning her thick skin yellow. My protégé was a singularly unattractive woman. “Do you know what these idiots think to do here?”

  “Hide their crimes,” I said, “as you did, my friend.”

  Pons’s maturity had produced a formidable intellect, and she had performed admirably as our newest curator, as I knew she would. Her connection to Remeni and his cowardly grandsire had been invaluable; her fitness for the duties of her future unquestionable. Never had I known any person at once so diabolically ruthless and so morally conflicted as Elaia Pons-Laterus. I planned a grand future for her. And she was perfect.

  My heart hammered so violently, it yanked me out of the magic for a moment. I drew a great breath, willed my body to slow down, and dived back into Damon’s memory. Into Lucian de Remeni’s past. My past.

  The remaining four of our six—Gramphier the Blood-handed, Pluvius the Idiot, Scrutari the Holy Hypocrite, and Albin the Devil’s Insufferable Cock—waited in the cell they’d set up as an artist’s studio. The blindingly white plaster that masked the iron walls had taken a month to install. The worktable bowed with the weight of inkhorns, pens, and artist’s paraphernalia, the fodder for their schemes. The chair where they’d bound sleeping ordinaries in hopes of seeing Remeni vanish as he drew them had been pushed to the side. Did they not listen to Pons’s tales of the man’s stubborn righteousness and extraordinary discipline?

  Through session after session, slobbering from the potions and magics they used to force him to speak after months insisting he mustn’t, Remeni claimed that his magic could draw out a man’s soul. He refused to draw anyone who was alive. We could kill him or not, he’d said, but the gods would never forgive him such a crime.

  His confusion and weakness had been subterfuge. None of the others recognized it. And none of them had the grit to haul in a corpse for him to draw—which gave him the victory, albeit a small one, as my magic ensured he would not remember it. After six increasingly brutal attempts, Albin and Scrutari, at the least, had come to believe the vanishing was a lie. Their illogic never ceased to astonish me.

  Let them believe it. The tides of history would sweep them aside.

  A clattering in the passage announced his coming. My colleagues, shy of being seen by the jailers, veiled themselves.

  The knaves hauled Remeni in naked and chained, his hands silkbound, his eyes blindfolded. No matter how often I’d told them it made no difference, they always insisted he be bound “lest he remember being without.” The imbeciles could not comprehend magic that could so precisely expunge a man’s experience. They shoved him to the floor.

  “Unbind him,” I said. “How can he possibly do what’s needed while trussed like a goose?”

  Remeni, head bowed and eyes squeezed shut, twitched as nervously as a twistmind craving his nivat. As the jailers removed his bonds, he buried his eyes in the crook of his elbow. It was hard on him coming into the brightness from the pitch-dark cell.

  Unfortunately, that darkness, too, was necessary. Lucian de Remeni-Masson was a stubborn, disciplined man. Breaking him was never going to be easy, and these games in the cellar hadn’t helped in the least. I didn’t have forever to grind him down and rebuild.

  Crouching beside him, I laid a hand on his cold flesh. He jumped, and I sent a bit of soothing magic into him. Not too much. We needed him lucid. “I heard you’ve been dreadfully sick, Lucian. Is that so?”

  Lucian wouldn’t speak without magical coercion. He knew the rules of his confinement, and discipline comprised his very bones.

  He squinted over his arm, trying to blink away the tears flooding his eyes so he could get a good look at me. The flash of hope that followed was always the most painful part to witness. He couldn’t remember how often we had done this.

  Today, though, he just stared dully, buried his eyes again, and nodded. Good . . . we were getting close to the end of this business.

  “I’m truly sorry for that. We’ve tried to keep you clean and healthy. If I find your minders have been careless or have maliciously dosed you to make you ill, they’ll be soundly thrashed.”

  I glared and dismissed the brutes.

  “We’ve a different task for you today. A bit of painting. Some of my colleagues are uncomfortable about their portraits. Small alterations can ease their concerns. No souls involved. No betrayal of your bent. No magic at all, save that mundane sort which lives in any fine portrait artist’s hands. And just think, you’ll learn your masters’ intimate secrets!”

  His breath visibly slowed. He was considering it. I wondered if he could manage the work. His hands trembled like terrified rabbits.

  “I swear on my hope of a nobler world, Lucian, that once this task is done to our satisfaction, we’ll have no choice but to consider your madness much improved and perhaps relent in the strictness of your confinement. Come, stand up. . . .”

  His body had not deteriorated as much as five months’ imprisonment would lead one to expect. I made sure he was fed adequately and kept free of vermin. Silence and darkness would make him stronger. Physical inaction would leave him all the more ready for the Order’s molding. A mad starveling would do the world no good at all.

  Still blinking, he let me lead him to the stepstool and the great easel where the man-high painting stood waiting under its sheet. As I unshrouded Pluvius’s portrait, the Master of Registry Archives unveiled himself. I wasn’t sure Remeni even noticed the man. He stared at the painting.

  “Do you have all the materials you need to make a few small changes to this work?” I said. “Lucian! Tell me.”

  The prisoner jerked his eyes from the canvas, glanced at Pluvius and then at the worktable. His hand, steadier, poked through the materials—dishes of ground pigments, flasks of oils, resins, and sharp-smelling chemicals, rags, brushes, scraping knives and tweezers of all sizes. His fellow portraitist Gilles had made the selection. Poor Gilles, to be sacrificed as so many others had been . . . and would be.

  Lucian dipped his head and held out a hand
, palm up, as if to ask what he was supposed to do.

  “Tell him what you want repaired, Pluvius. . . .”

  It was a very long time until I slipped back into my own body, imagining I could yet smell the paint and ethers I’d used to alter four paintings of my own making. But I did not open my eyes or move or give an indication to whoever might be watching that I was yet returned. How could I ever comprehend what I had just witnessed?

  Only Morgan’s testimony and Bastien’s convinced me that the half-mad prisoner was me. How unnerving, how extremely odd, to observe oneself in such a state. Odder yet to believe to my depths that the scene was true, and to have absolutely no recollection of it. Over four sessions in that white room, my art had hidden truth to mask a multitude of sins. I felt dirty. To alter the truth of one’s divine bent was a corruption of the soul.

  Curator Pluvius, who had been my contract master at the Registry, had told me to erase a symbol of Xancheira’s white tree that hinted at forbidden Registry secrets in his possession, and to replace a missing hand, an unwelcome reference to a second bent, excised when he was a child. The genial old man had also called me son and lad and talked of persuading the other curators that he should have custody of me until my madness was deemed cured. His kind talk might have had some meaning had I not been naked, mute, and half mad, doing his bidding in a prison cell.

  I had originally depicted Curator Scrutari-Consil, a small, ugly man, at his desk writing. The official seals of the king of Navronne and the two highest clergymen in the kingdom, already pressed into red wax, lay beside the document. The seals were not attached, however, and none of the three men were present—the makings of a royal forgery. Damon had goaded Scrutari to confirm that the document was a false will that named Perryn of Ardra as Eodward’s heir. At the behest of his contract master and Prince Perryn himself, Scrutari had executed a forgery that would give a cheating coward the throne of the mightiest kingdom in the world at a time of its gravest crisis. I had obliterated the evidence.