“What were you doing there?” Lydea asked curiously, wondering if the grave and willowy Mag, with her hair like straw spun into gold, had a lover. She was used to the vague, wide-eyed expression Mag assumed when she was questioned. But sometimes she let slip details when she answered, that Lydea pieced together later.
“I was visiting a friend,” Mag said. “She’s teaching me something of her trade. I’m an apprentice, you might say.”
“What does she do?”
“Oh, this and that. She’s a sort of historian. And something of a healer. You might say. People go to her for help.”
“A physician.”
“After a fashion.”
“Where does she live?”
But Mag grew very vague at that, nearly inarticulate. “Along the water,” she intimated, which Lydea took to mean overlooking the sea. Mag added earnestly, by way of changing the subject, “I think the best way to teach well is to be always learning something. Don’t you agree?”
Who could not? Lydea thought, descending to the west door of the palace to her waiting carriage. Mag was as riddled with secrets as the palace. She found herself remembering, as the carriage drove past the crop of blind, withered sunflowers beside the gate, some old tale that she might have told Kyel once or twice when Royce was alive and she had been in love or in fear, it seemed, at every waking moment. What was it? A city in shadow… Something about a fan…
She forgot about that, too, as she watched the familiar streets flow past and the tavern signs above her change like playing cards, until time dealt her the Rose and Thorn and she saw, through the open door, her father’s smiling face.
PATRICIA A. McKILLIP
is a winner of the World Fantasy Award, a Nebula Award nominee, and the author of many fantasy novels. She lives in Oregon.
Ombria In Shadow Page 24
