by Kate Elliott
The light at the end of the stairs beckoned. We surged out and down the wide corridor in a chattering mass of young women soon joined by a chattering mass of young men. The actual children, the pupils under sixteen, were herded away to the school building in the back of the academy, but we college pupils spilled into the high entrance hall to await the summons to luncheon.
The academy had been erected only two decades before with funds raised from well-to-do families who resided in the prosperous city of Adurnam and its neighboring countryside, all ruled over by the Prince of Tarrant and his clan. Those families came from many different backgrounds, and some had fought bitter wars or engaged in blood feuds in the past. The prince had clearly instructed the architect to placate everyone and offend no one. Therefore, the inner stone facade of the entrance hall had been carved with a series of reliefs depicting plants: princely white yams, hardy kale, broom millet, poor-man’s chestnut, jolly barley, honest spelt, humble oats, winter rye, broad beans, northern peas, sweet pears and apples, stolid turnip, quick radish, and even the newcomers brought over the ocean—maize and potatoes. Something for everyone to eat!
“Luncheon smells so good,” whispered Bee, licking her lips.
Yam pudding. My favorite! The assembly bell rang.
She pulled me around the outside of the milling crowd, whose fashionable clothing brightened the hall with so many bold colors, including intense stripes of red that matched my mounting irritation at being dragged along like baggage.
“Bee!”
“We have to get my sketchbook back. Look! There goes the old basilisk. Blessed Tanit save me. She’s giving it to the headmaster! Cat, do you have any idea—”
“I have an idea that I’m very hungry. Unlike you, I missed my morning porridge.”
“He’s seen us!”
Maestra Madrahat saw us, too, and she beckoned like an angry Astarte, goddess of war, summoning malingering troops to battle. Bee hauled. I lagged. Why ever could I not keep my mouth shut?
The headmaster was a tall, elderly black man of Kushite ancestry who had a scholarly background in the newly deciphered hieroglyphics of ancient Kemet, which the Romans felt obliged to call Egypt. The headmaster was the one person who the various monied factions in the principality of Tarrant had all agreed would, like the plants, offend no one because of his impeccably distinguished and noble Kushite lineage. Even though the great wars between Rome and Qart Hadast—called Carthage by the cursed Romans—had been fought two thousand years ago, what Kena’ani mother would actually want a son of Rome teaching her precious daughters? Our ancient feud was far from being the only dispute or duel raging in the private salons and mercantile districts of Adurnam with its many lineages, clans, ethnicities, tribes, bankers, merchants, artisans, plebeians, and lords living all smashed together in the city’s stately avenues, crowded alleys, busy law courts, and the narrow parks where hotheaded young men fought duels.
Adurnam, city of eternal quarreling!
The great port city was built along the banks of the Solent River, downstream from the vast marshy estuary we in Adurnam called the Sieve. As many rivers and tributaries and streams flowed into the Sieve as peoples, lineages, languages, gods, rhythms, and cuisines flowed into the city. So it was no wonder that the academy had chosen for its headmaster a man who could claim relation to the Kushite dynasty, whose scions had been peacefully ruling venerable but decaying Kemet—Egypt—for the last two thousand five hundred years. Even the Roman Empire had lasted only a thousand.
“Now is not a convenient time, maestra,” murmured the headmaster in a low voice I could hear, although I certainly was not meant to. “Does this matter really warrant my attention?”
“If you’ll just speak to them, maester.”
He looked toward me, as if to say with his gaze that he knew how well I could hear although we were still a thrown book away and they were speaking softly.
Bee leaned her whole body into tugging me, and we crossed the gap out of breath and staggered to a halt before him. Bee pulled off her indoor slippers, and this impulsive gesture of respect—removing shoes before an elder—made him smile. We kept our gazes humbly lowered.
“The Barahal cousins may attend me,” he said as he tucked Bee’s schoolbook under an arm. He offered a courtesy to the maestra and, leaning heavily on his cane, made his way across the hall.
Bee tugged her slippers back on and cast such a look at me. “Are you going to help me or hinder me?” she murmured.
I sighed, knowing I had no choice. Like obedient handmaidens in the old tales, we followed him out through the marble portico into the chill of the inner court, a central garden covered by a glass roof. The courtyard was surrounded on three sides by a two-storied stone building that housed classrooms, workshops, and tutors’ offices. No sun shone through the glass today; flakes of snow powdered the sloped roof. The noise of the hall behind us receded as a waiting servant opened the door to the library wing, and we entered a somewhat less chilly marble corridor. The headmaster took the wide stairs toward the upper floor, slow progress because of his infirmity. Bee’s gaze was fixed on the schoolbook under his arm in the manner of a stoat waiting for the prime instant to steal an egg.
His office was behind the first set of doors in the upper corridor. The servant, who had paced us up the steps, moved around to open these doors so the headmaster could enter without altering his steady advance. The office was spacious, with one wall of windows facing the rose court, a door into an adjoining chamber, and the rest of the wall space lined with bookcases. Mirrors hung on the back of each door, creating corridors of reflecting vision that revealed most of the chamber before and behind me.
The chamber was neither oppressively tidy nor unpleasantly messy but rather graced a middle ground between cluttered and neat. A chalkboard had been pushed in front of one bank of bookcases, facing four chairs. The large fireplace had been refitted with a circulating stove whose warmth radiated through the room. His desk had not a scrap of paper on its polished surface while the big table set beneath the windows formed a topographical masterpiece of stacked books, open books, two globes set on pedestals, and several half-unrolled maps with corners weighted down by scarabs carved out of green basalt. A longcase clock faced the table, its glass door revealing the steady motion of pendulum and weights within. Glass-doored bookcases held carefully labeled papyrus scrolls in cubbyholes classified according to chronology and subject matter.
On a pedestal in one corner was fixed the severed head of the famous poet and legal scholar Bran Cof. A scan of the chamber, as I saw it reflected within the mirrors, showed me a glimmer of magic like a cowl around the poet’s sleeping head but no other sign of magic’s presence. I caught the headmaster watching me in the mirror, though. Could he see chains of magic in mirrors, as I could? It was said that mirrors reflect the binding threads of power that run between this world and the unseen spirit world, but the truth of that statement is a secret hoarded by the sorcerers who have the power to manipulate such chains of power, people like cold mages, fire mages, druas, master poets, and the bards and djeliw. I was not one of them. I could not manipulate or handle the chains of magic except on a purely personal level: I could use them to conceal myself, to hear better, and to see in the dark. And, of course, I could see them in mirrors.
There was only one thing I remembered my mother saying to me, long, long ago, when I was five years old: Don’t tell anyone what you can do or see, Cat. Tell no one. Not ever.
I had obeyed her. I had never told anyone, except Bee, because Bee knew everything about me just as I knew everything about her.
The headmaster smiled gently at me in the mirror’s normal reflection. I looked away, because it was proper that I look away, being the student and he the elder.
“The cousins Hassi Barahal,” he observed in his dry voice, “certainly know of my admiration for the Hassi Barahal brothers.”
Naturally we knew of it, since his admiration paid our tuition.
“Your father,
Beatrice, has done the academy board certain favors on whose basis your tuition is excused by the board of directors.”
“Favors” being a more palatable word for less palatable activities.
“Obviously your father’s journals, Catherine, to which your uncle has provided us full access, have proved invaluable in the academy’s quest for a deeper understanding of natural history. Daniel Hassi Barahal understood that scholars seek to unravel, explain, and explicate from scientific principles the workings of the natural world out of purely disinterested motives. That includes the mysteries of mage-craft and its ties to a spirit world said to lie athwart our own. He was something of a scholar himself, if not precisely educated in the academy. Given the mage Houses’ notorious and hostile secrecy, which they can back up with actual retribution, such attempts to uncover the worlds’ workings seem bound to fail.” He paused to glance at the mirrors.
I said nothing. Neither did Bee.
“Yet we scholars are a stubborn crew. It is these circumstances—the information provided by your fathers, each in his own way—that have led me to turn a blind eye to certain reports of your behavior that are not what we would prefer to see in our female students. Allowing girls into the academy at all is controversial, so those young females who study here must conduct themselves at all times with prudence—”
A bell tinkled.
My stomach growled softly in response, but it was not the luncheon bell but a lighter handbell rung from the adjoining room. For an instant, that aged and solemn face looked startled, then concerned. As swiftly as a curtain is swept closed, he concealed his feelings beneath a meaningless polite smile.
“Wait here, maestressas.”
Still clutching Bee’s schoolbook beneath an arm, he limped to the door and, as the servant opened it, vanished into the adjoining room. We caught a glimpse of close-packed shelves of books before the servant closed the door behind both of them. Bee and I stood alone in the headmaster’s office, except, of course, for the sleeping head of Bran Cof. A rumble of voices drifted from a far chamber, but I wasn’t close enough to the inner door to pull apart the words.
“Do you think he just forgot he had it? Now what will happen?” Bee said in a low, fierce voice.
“He’ll page through and see the seven hundred small and large portraits of Maester Amadou’s pretty eyes and perfect jaw and braided hair. And before him, Maester Lewis with his red-gold hair and elevated brow and narrow chin. You’ve filled up reams of paper and ten or twelve schoolbooks with sketches of the best-looking young men in the academy.”
For once she did not spit fire. “I don’t care if people laugh at me for that. I’ve never cared what other people thought.”
True enough. “Then what matters so much to you?”
Her gusty sigh shuddered in the room, and for an instant I caught an echoing shudder of movement, eyes drifting as in dreams, beneath the closed eyelids of the poet’s head. I tensed, a shiver of cold crawling down my back, and stepped closer to Bee to clasp her hand.
What if he opened his eyes?
“I don’t know how to explain it,” she murmured, squeezing my hand. She hadn’t been looking at the head. Maybe I had imagined what I had seen. Bran Cof’s enchanted head had last been known to speak over one hundred years ago, on some arcane legal matter.
“Bee, we promised to always tell each other everything. What worries you so much about what’s in your sketchbook?”
The door into the adjoining room opened. We both jumped like children caught by the cook with honey cake stolen hot from the pan. As the headmaster’s assistant walked into the room, we offered a hasty courtesy to cover our embarrassment. His cheeks pinked—easy to see because he was albino—as he offered a more elaborate courtesy in return.
“Maestressas, I did not know you were here.” We called him the headmaster’s dog, not kindly. He hailed from a distant eastern empire beyond the Pale, and indeed one could discern his Avar heritage in his broad cheekbones and the epicanthic fold at his eyes. Rumor whispered that as a child, he had been rescued by the headmaster from death under the spears of the Wild Hunt that rode on Hallows Night. If true, the story explained his utter devotion to the old scholar.
We folded our hands politely before us and smiled at him.
For a moment, he looked ready to faint, for I am sure we appeared like two vultures biding our time until the dying cease their inconvenient thrashing. Then he glanced at Bee, his face curdling to such an unseemly shade of red that I conceived the horrible notion that the poor young man believed himself in love with her. Naturally such an infatuation was utterly forbidden between any of the teachers or their assistants and one of the academy’s prudent and virtuous female pupils, even if she was going to turn twenty and reach the age of majority in just under two months. Even if she had a mean left hook. Even if she had shown the least interest in him, which she had not.
“I beg your pardon,” Bee said so sweetly the words stung. “The headmaster instructed us to wait for him here. Will he return shortly?”
Her smile was too much for him. He croaked out a garbled word and bolted back the way he had come, wrenching the door closed behind him.
“Bee! Was that necessary?”
She stared at the door as if her gaze alone could splinter it into a thousand shards. “You know how I have always had such vivid dreams. I’ve started drawing them out to help remember them by.”
“How can you draw a dream?”
Her color was high, and her hands were clenched. “I had to try to make some sense of them because the details haunt me! I don’t even know why, and it doesn’t matter, but I can’t bear to have people looking—I can’t explain it. I didn’t even show them to you!” Tears welled in her lovely eyes. I knew when Bee was bluffing, and this wasn’t it.
I grasped her hands. “When he comes back in, you cause a distraction, anything to get him to put the book down and shift his attention elsewhere. I’ll sneak it into my schoolbag.”
Nodding, she let go my hands and wiped her cheeks. The longcase clock’s pendulum ticked. Ticked. Ticked. Ticked. Bee stared at the poet’s head as if daring Bran Cof to open his eyes. I couldn’t bear looking in case he did, so I let my gaze wander to the chalkboard. It had been recently erased, but I could still read traces of figures and words as a geologist can read down through layers of sediment and rock. The Hibernian Ice Sheet Expedition: Lost, no bodies or wreckage recovered. The Alps Ice Cap Expedition: Turned back by ice storms. The First Baltic Ice Sea Expedition: Remnants rescued after a year missing. The Second Baltic Ice Sea Expedition: Lost, no bodies or wreckage recovered.
“I wonder who that lesson was for,” said Bee. “It’s strange to look at that and remember that both your father and your mother were members of the First Baltic Ice Sea Expedition. That they were the ‘remnants rescued after a year missing.’ Them and, what, ten others?”
“Three others. Only five survived out of the twenty-eight who set out. I think I’ve read my father’s account of the opening months of that expedition a hundred times. ‘No man has ever crossed the tempestuous Baltic Ice Sea or set foot on the towering and inhospitable Skandic Ice Shelf.’ No woman, either, for that matter. Fifty-four journals he wrote and numbered. That’s the only time he mentions my mother.”
She made a face. “Probably because the next two volumes are missing.”
“Yes,” I said peevishly, “the very ones covering the rest of the expedition, when any idiot who can do math—”
“That would be you.”
“—can draw the conclusion that I was conceived in the latter months of that very expedition.”
“It is curious,” she agreed. “You would think a man falling in love would write paeans about the fine eyes of his beloved. But perhaps it was later, in the midst of the crisis on the ice, that they—”
A tremor in the floor alerted me. I lifted a hand to warn her. I heard, as she did not yet, the halting step-tap of the headmaster approaching the door. We comp
osed our faces and pretended to be looking out the windows at the bare branches of autumn trees in the rose court. The door opened. The servant entered first, holding the door for the headmaster, who limped in with a preoccupied frown on his face. He seemed surprised to see us.
“Are you still here?” he asked. “Forgive me. I meant to dismiss you. Did I speak to you about the wisdom of not antagonizing the mage Houses, maestressas? Even in so small a way as imprudent speech?”
Bee’s eyes had gone wide as china plates, and her chin trembled. The headmaster was no longer carrying her sketchbook.
“You did, maester,” I responded promptly, seeing Bee was in no condition to speak. “I’ll guard my tongue. It was ill-considered of me. I beg pardon.”
“Ah, well, then. Best you go down to luncheon.” A smile flitted and vanished on his seamed face. “I believe there is yam pudding. My favorite!”
The servant had crossed the chamber already and opened the outer door for the headmaster. We had to follow him down the path offered.
5
But that did not mean that, once out in the corridor, I could not feign a broken ribbon on my slipper, pretend to lose my footing, and therefore be obliged to kneel and fuss to make things right. Bee, leaping at once into the gaps between my beat, begged the headmaster to go on ahead and we would catch up as soon as the torn ribbon had been jury-rigged.
He and his servant went on, leaving us behind just as we’d hoped.
“We have to get back in and find it.” Bee used the tone of voice that, like a stake, always impaled me to the wall.
“Both the headmaster’s office and the formal library are specifically off-limits to unchaperoned pupils. We already know that the headmaster’s dog is roaming loose among the books.” I rose. With my height, I towered over her. “Can you imagine what will happen if we’re caught in either place?”
“I’ll go alone.” She pressed her left hand to her bosom but fixed her right around the door’s handle and misquoted the famous words of the great general Hanniba’al: “ ‘I will either find a way, or make one.’ ”
