Sisters of the Raven

by Barbara Hambly

  But the stocky clan lord clearly wanted a further conference, and Oryn, who ten years ago would unhesitatingly have extricated himself from the conversation with a choice epigram, had come to learn that power had its price not in the dire and bloody deeds of ballads, but in terms of the sheer tedium of dealing with people one would prefer to avoid. And power was what he would need, not—alas—to scale the rarefied heights of ultimate dissipation, but simply to pilot the realm through a desperate and frightening time.

  So he caught Soth’s eye and transferred the Archmage’s hand from his own arm to that of the court mage: “Would you be so kind as to see that Lord Hathmar has a couple of guards to walk with him back to the Citadel? Thank you.” He smiled and turned back to Sarn. “He only bade her good day, you know, and quite politely. If I had him murdered in his bed what on earth would I tell the rest of the house?”

  “Nothing,” snapped Sarn, the red in his face concentrating in unsightly blotches on the bones of his cheeks. “Don’t pretend you don’t know what I’m talking about.” Sarn had been Greatsword’s rival and drinking companion, a hardheaded warrior who, like Greatsword, detested the court with its preoccupations with orderly procedure. “Your uncle may have had a hand in your father’s death and he’d have a hand in yours if he thought he could get support from the other houses in killing Taras Greatsword’s son.”

  The blue eyes narrowed in a fierce glare, and the breeze from the lake ruffled his short-cropped pale hair. The House of the Marvelous Tower was the only dwelling in the Yellow City that actually overlooked the Lake of the Sun, for the greater part of the city was set back, where it would not impinge on expensive agricultural land. But like the lake waters, the wells within the palace precinct were low. The gardens that were one of the wonders of the realm had a parched look under the wintry sun, yellowed and a little dusty, like a floured biscuit.

  “He’s courting not only the rangeland sheikhs; he’s been inviting your own landchiefs to little conferences in Blossom Houses around the city. And not just in this city—in all the cities of your realm. His sons have been courting Garon up near the Lake of Reeds, and Brodag and Gremm . . . . Every word he says is to turn them against you. It’ll work, too, if you increase the taxes to pay for this aqueduct of yours.”

  He pronounced it correctly, that time. Oryn folded his hands over the elaborate knots of his sash, seeing in the man’s eyes the contempt that underlay the wariness but seeing, mostly, calculation. When Oryn had been only an overdressed dilettante prince they’d each had the luxury despising the other. But Oryn understood now that Sarn had brains, even if he didn’t bathe particularly often and kept an inferior valet and a worse cook. And Sarn understood . . . what?

  “Thank you for your warning, my lord.”

  “Will you take it?”

  “I’ll certainly consider it.”

  The clan lord’s thin mouth turned down at one corner. “You’ll need allies,” he said, “if Mohrvine consolidates the nomad sheikhs. My sister’s come of age to be married—my full-blood sister, youngest of my father’s daughters. She’s a beautiful girl. Better bred than many you’ll find these days.”

  He didn’t glance toward the pavilion. Nor did Oryn, though he knew that no shadow stirred within. The woman behind the screen had been strictly trained in proper decorum and would no more have shown herself at a council than she’d have danced naked in the market.

  “Her children will be kinsfolk of House Sarn. Your brother can tell you how the ladies of our house are raised.”

  “He can indeed.” Oryn smiled again, warmly. “Barún speaks nothing but praise for your niece Blue Butterfly Woman.” Of course, his brother spoke nothing but praise for anything he encountered in life except unshaven chins on the palace guards. But that, Oryn reflected, was scarcely the worst fault a man could have.

  “Come to dinner once the rains begin.” Lord Sarn manufactured an enormous smile and draped an avuncular arm around Oryn’s shoulders. “It goes without saying, of course, that my sister has been raised to know her place and would never dream of trespassing on the privileges of the Summer Concubine. But as a musician”—his voice sank into a conspiratorial man-to-man whisper—“you know there are different songs for different moods.”

  “I do indeed.” Oryn clasped Lord Sarn’s hand politely in parting. “And I shall certainly look forward to dinner. I shall also,” he added aloud, once Lord Sarn had made his way the entire length of the Green Court to the bodyguard and the other clan lords waiting for him in the shadow of the Marvelous Tower’s gaudy arches, “certainly think twice before I let you step into the role of wise old brother-in-law.”

  “That mighty-thewed arm about your shoulder didn’t strengthen and comfort you in your distress?” Silk rustled on tiles. The Summer Concubine emerged from the pavilion, wrapping a spider-work woolen shawl about her thin shoulders in the morning’s chill. “You didn’t leap at once at the opportunity to hear how his good old friend, your father, would have ordered the House Jothek and the realm it ruled?” Her eyes twinkled like aquamarines. “Too many books and baths for you, my lad.” In the pavilion behind her, Gray King picked his way along the council table, gravely dipping his paw into the coffee cups and licking the sweet droplets from his toes.

  “I felt too faint with joy at the prospect to leap at anything. What are you doing?” For she’d stepped back from him and walked in a little circle, hands behind her back. She halted, and gravely struck the marble pathway twice with one small, pearl-decked foot.

  “It’s the square root of four.” She widened her enormous eyes at him. “Can I have a carrot now?”

  “My dear . . .” He caught her up, lifting her effortlessly from her feet—people underestimated how strong he was—and kissed her too-wide mouth. “I shall give you orchards of apricots and boatloads of crimson lilies, warm from the lovemaking of the sun.”

  The Summer Concubine had a mouth too big, a chin too pointed, and the flat, thin figure of a girl; her enormous blue-topaz eyes had, in moments of repose, a kind of delighted crystalline silliness that women of her age and position were supposed to have long outgrown. When she was eighteen, Taras Greatsword had paid a hundred thousand gold pieces for her to Peach Woman, the mother of the most prestigious Blossom House in all the Realm of the Seven Lakes—actually to the rabbity nonentity who was Peach Woman’s nominal husband, but everyone knew how such matters were worked.

  Two years later she had encountered Oryn—whose affectations and aphorisms had amused her from a distance—playing his harp in the gardens, and had realized that the dandified court clown was in fact a watchfully intelligent young man who steadfastly refused to let his father turn him into something he was not.

  They had loved at sight.

  “Why in the name of all the gods,” said Oryn now, “would anyone believe a man would mask his powers behind a woman? Much less that several men would set up a cabal of women pretending to work magic? It’s ludicrous.”

  “They believed it.” The Summer Concubine took his hand, and handfast like children they walked along the path between the winter-clipped rosebushes, toward the eight-faced glittering pylon of mosaic, statuary, gold and glasswork that gave the palace its name. A gardener picking the tiniest weeds from between the bushes inclined his head to them—the palace gardeners had from the start respected Taras’s heir for his formidable knowledge of botany and horticulture. In the trees around them, gold and crimson ornamental finches sang in their lacquered cages, enviously observed by the kitten Black Princess. One of the palace teyn, lugging water in buckets from the central pool, bowed but gave a shy smile at the sight of the king, odd to see on the jutting, doglike face.

  “Did you see their eyes?” the Summer Concubine went on. “The landchiefs and the sheikhs? They wanted to believe.”

  “In the name of all that’s holy, why?”

  “Why don’t kings dare marry the well-bred and gracious sisters of clan lords?”

  Oryn’s stride checked mom
entarily: He met the woman’s eyes, seeing in them the memory of angry battles with his father over marriage alliances that had never come about, the delicate jugglings of status, power and fear. It had been generations since a high king had taken a formal wife—Blue Butterfly Woman was the first wife of a king’s heir in centuries, and if Oryn died sonless Lord Sarn would hold unbelievable power in the land. Taras Greatsword himself had inveighed righteously against the realm being ruled by the sons of concubines from who knew what background, but in the end he, too, had been unable to bring himself to surrender even that much power to any one of his clan lords.

  And had he raised a mere concubine to the position of wife, he would have lost them all.

  “Every man assumes that a woman will be another man’s tool.”

  “Hmn.” Oryn folded his arms, rather like an enormous, exotic blossom himself in his robes of peacock green, his turquoise-striped pantaloons. “I’ll bet you gold pieces to your second-best hair ribbons that this girl of House Sarn will be, anyway. Considering Lord Sarn’s been lord of his house for twenty years, this sister of his probably ‘came of age to be married’ quite some time ago.”

  “You’d turn up your nose at a woman because of her age?”

  “My darling, any man who would do so has never encountered Spotted Serpent Woman of the House of Ten Lilies, who has to be sixty-five if she’s a day, or was when I had the privilege of being galloped nearly to death by the lady in my dissolute youth. It’s an experience I wouldn’t care to undergo again—at least I don’t think I would—and considering the number of love spells the clan lords throw in gratis when their women marry men of power, I think I’ll find some good reason to avoid dinner at House Sarn. It shouldn’t be difficult. The man’s cook is apparently under the impression that it’s polite to boil asparagus to mush in order to spare the teeth of his lordship’s guests.”

  “Just because Lord Sarn means to rule you through his sister doesn’t mean Mohrvine isn’t a danger.” They slowed their steps as they approached the red-lacquered gate beneath the tower. Two young guardsmen waited there with the king’s horse, which was tall and caparisoned in turquoise and green. The guardsmen were likewise caparisoned and tall: Oryn greeted them by name. Oryn’s valet, Geb, materialized out of the shadows to trade the king’s flowing iridescent robe for a shorter riding jacket in the same extravagant hues. “An aqueduct is a farmer’s bounty,” the Summer Concubine went on softly. “The herds of the sheikhs live by wells.”

  “How deep does he plan on digging them?” Oryn worked his large, soft hands into embroidered gloves. “The well we dug last year out beyond Mud Lake is close to two hundred feet deep, and it’s nearly dry. We’ve had three of those deep wells collapse, with dozens of workers killed, and not a drop to show for them. Is he right?” He looked down into her eyes; she was like a child beside his tall bulk. Her eyes, within the frame of the pale green veils she’d drawn down as they neared the public area of the Golden Court, were grave and perplexed. “Is this something that comes in cycles, like winter and spring? Long cycles? Too long for generations to remember?”

  “It would have been written somewhere,” she said. “In the records of tribute if nowhere else. As for the magic”—she shook her head—”there isn’t even a word for this . . . this fading. Just as there is no word for a woman-who-does-magic. How very awkward it will be,” she added, and though her mouth was veiled he saw her eyes smile, “if more and more women do come to power, and everyone has to mumble around like that because there is no female form for the word ‘mage.’ ”

  “In that event I trust”—Oryn kissed her hands in parting, and the taller guardsman, a big glowering youth named Jethan, looked shocked—“that you and your ladies will come up with one better than any poet could devise.”

  There were servants who would have escorted her back to the pavilion whose name she bore, but the Summer Concubine wreathed herself instead in the lightest of white cloaks—the spells of not being noticed—and walked back through the palace gardens alone. Her daughter Rainsong Girl would be at her lessons—at eight years old the little girl was making astonishing progress not only in the simple Scribble of women but also in the complex and nuanced High Script of literature, law and men. The Summer Concubine paused on the yellow marble brink of one of the Green Court’s long reflecting pools and, kneeling, brushed her hands over the water.

  Briefly, like a reflection between sun flashes, she saw Rainsong Girl kneeling before her low table copying out runes under her tutor’s watchful eye.

  She is well, the Summer Concubine told herself, and let the image fade. She is well.

  Last night was . . .

  Was what?

  She rose from the edge of the pool, walked on, barely a shadow passing over the dusty grass.

  A dream? If she’d dreamed she couldn’t recall it—only the waking, the terrible sense of panic, of horror, that had sent her, first to her mirror to call her daughter’s peacefully sleeping image, then to the nursery itself, padding along the icy tiles of the arcades wrapped in Oryn’s fantastic peacock-feather cloak that he’d left lying across the foot of her bed.

  And of course Rainsong Girl had been asleep exactly as the Summer Concubine had seen her in her scrying mirror minutes before. Dark braids like silk ropes on the pillow. Hazel eyes like raw amber flecked with gold—Oryn’s eyes—closed in dreams. The child’s nurse, Rabbit Woman, had been awake and alert, puzzled and worried over the fear that she so clearly saw in the Summer Concubine’s eyes.

  And the fear had grown as the Summer Concubine had walked slowly back through the candle-pierced predawn darkness to her bed.

  It was with her now, as if the daylight were stained. As she entered the shadowy lower floor of the Summer Pavilion, the chilly dimness there seemed, for a moment, alien to her, as if there were someone there besides herself. Though of course that was ridiculous, she thought, standing in the doorway of the little salon and looking around carefully. The indigo silk hangings that all winter mitigated the piercing desert cold had been taken down from the blue-and-white-tiled walls. The screens of pierced sandalwood, and of lacquered lattice as finely worked as lace, stood back from the door into the dining chamber; no one could have been concealed behind them.

  And in any case, who could—or would—be hiding in her pavilion?

  It was absurd.

  Yet so strong was her feeling of dread that she checked in the jewel-tiled dining chamber, and in the enclosed garden beyond it, and even the small and exquisite baths tucked into the garden’s foliage, before she climbed the spiral stair.

  There was no reason to feel fear. The dream had been only a fright, a noise in the night.

  If dream there had been at all.

  The Summer Concubine sat at her dressing table, drew her mirror to her again.

  Soth Silverlord had taught her that a mage could not scry another mage—could not summon the image of one who had magic born into the flesh—and this seemed to hold true for women-who-did-magic as well as for wizards. Certain spells wouldn’t work on mages, either, depending mostly on the strength of the mage who was casting the spell. Addressing a brief prayer to the god of wizards, the Summer Concubine passed her hand across the silvered glass and conjured the broad, fair face of her friend Corn-Tassel Woman, called to mind the Sigil of Sisterhood that they had made between them, to touch one another’s magic.

  Nothing. Did that mean something terrible had happened to Corn-Tassel Woman, or only that her friend’s obnoxious husband or still more obnoxious father-in-law were keeping her from some reflective surface in which she could reply?

  Her mind went into the sigil, and she brushed the mirror again. This time she called to mind the round face of Pebble Girl, who had come to her nearly eight months ago—I hear you been asking about them that can work spells, lady . . . .

  Almost at once she saw her, the angle of her image in the mirror telling the Summer Concubine that Pebble Girl was bending over a basin in her father’s kitc
hen, an expression of astonished delight in her dark eyes. “Oh, madam!” the girl whispered. “Oh, madam, it’s really true! You really can speak to me like you said, through water . . . . Oh, madam . . . . Oh, what can I do for you? How can I serve you? Oh, madam!”

  The image faded as abruptly as it had come into focus. The Summer Concubine guessed that Pebble Girl’s excitement had broken what concentration she had. She’d have to send her a message, reassuring her that everything was all right, or the girl would drop everything to hasten to the House of the Marvelous Tower, possibly getting herself into trouble with her father thereby. Since she’d first begun inquiring, nearly three years ago, for other women in whom the powers of magic had begun to grow, the Summer Concubine had encountered the most problems from the families: fathers, husbands, fathers-in-law. Some of the women she’d sent word to couldn’t come to her—their husbands would not let them leave the house. Some had sneaked to her, like thieves in the night—and afterward, she learned, had been beaten.

  Cattail Woman, a big-voiced and harsh-featured laundress from the Fishmarket District, had been suspicious, answering her summons sullenly and asking at once whether she meant to interfere in her affairs. Cattail Woman didn’t respond to the Summer Concubine’s carefully conjured mental summons on this occasion. That might mean she was busy gossiping—or laying out a spell to do some favor for one of her cronies—or it might mean she simply wasn’t hearing. The Summer Concubine tried to scry her house, but again got nothing. Soth said that it was far more difficult to call the image of a place where you had never been than it was to see a place you had visited.

  Maybe it was only that.

  Maybe she was being foolish, placing too much weight on the dread she felt.

  She couldn’t conjure the image of Turquoise Woman’s little room in the Slaughterhouse District, either. Turquoise Woman was supposed to have come to her yesterday, to share in Soth’s lesson, but the shy, self-effacing young woman often wasn’t able to walk in from that outer district beyond the Eastern Gate. The Summer Concubine worried about her with an uneasy guilt. It had only been after Turquoise Woman had begun to study magic with the Summer Concubine that she had left her husband, had taken up residence in the rough and dangerous slums outside the city walls.