Circle of the Moon

by Barbara Hambly

  A slow grin widened Red Silk’s withered lips. “You’re learning, girl.” She leaned back to the mirror.

  To use the mirror took concentration, and when Foxfire felt the strange little stab of sensation in her right elbow that told her someone had crossed the Sigil of Ward at the gate of the tiled pavilion’s courtyard, Red Silk did not look up. Foxfire didn’t know whether her grandmother was aware of the ward sign’s activation or not. Since the mirror had shown Lord Mohrvine’s cavalcade still some distance from Golden Sky—just passing the villa’s date palmeries on the road to the Yellow City—Foxfire guessed this intruder was Opal, with the coffee she had sent for. Mindful of her grandmother’s instruction she reclined a little on the divan and turned her face toward the door with an attitude of hauteur, just in case it wasn’t.

  But it was Opal, and as soon as the maidservant came into sight in the open doorway Foxfire scrambled to her feet and went to help her with the coffee tray. “Don’t!” Opal turned her shoulder to prevent Foxfire from taking the heavy cloisonné vessels from her hands. Her velvety brown eyes danced in the ghastly landscape of scars. “Your grandmother says I’m to serve you whether you want me to or not.”

  “Yes, but we’re not serving me, we’re serving Grandmother.”

  Opal set the tray with its tall-spouted pot on the low table; Foxfire held the small clean cup in both hands, kneeling, while Opal poured the smoking coal-black brew. Then both carried the cup, with its tiny attendant tray of sugar lumps, cinnamon sticks, and rose water, to the dressing table where Red Silk sat before her mirror, a withered, white-haired, brown-skinned woman in silk striped green and gold.

  Red Silk did not turn her head. Over her shoulder, Foxfire could see, by concentrating, what her grandmother saw: the Golden Court, the great semipublic outer court of the House of the Marvelous Tower. In the heat of the summer forenoon it was usually somnolent, even the vendors of oranges and tea retreating into the shade of the colonnades that ringed it. Now it more resembled the markets of the Circus District, men crowding around the porter’s lodge at the gate or into the surrounding workshops of the royal weavers or goldsmiths, gesturing in frenzied dumb show, demanding . . . what? Two of the palace guards emerged from the porter’s lodge and were swarmed, like drops of honey dripped into an anthill.

  “And we can’t get a closer look into the palace itself, curse it,” Red Silk muttered. Opal shot Foxfire a glance of worried inquiry—she herself was unable to see a thing but the reflections of the two women’s faces in the glass, young and old. Within the mirror Foxfire saw the scene change to the Square of Ean, the still-larger open space between the palace and the city’s greatest temple, and the activity was much the same: men running, catching one another, wild with excitement.

  No bloodshed. No soldiers. No smoke.

  The ward sign jabbed at her elbow again, and this time Red Silk turned from her mirror, straightened her narrow shoulders, and gestured to Foxfire to seat herself on the divan. Without being told, Opal returned to the coffee, poured out another cup for Foxfire, and handed it to her, kneeling, with the respect that less than a year ago would only have been accorded a man. Her beauty may have been destroyed, but the short, curvaceous girl still retained the gracious manners and perfect skills of the most carefully trained Blossom Lady.

  Opal was still kneeling when the crunch of boots on the gravel courtyard path announced Mohrvine’s approach; and the next second his graceful form blotted the doorway. She sank at once into the deepest of salaams.

  “You shouldn’t race your horses in heat like this,” Red Silk greeted him calmly, and sipped her coffee. “It isn’t as if the city’s under attack.”

  Mohrvine did an infinitesimal double take on the threshold, instantly concealed. Six months ago he had learned that both his mother and his daughter held the power of magic in their hands; he was not quite used to it yet. Foxfire rose and performed a very appropriate salaam called Lilies in the Rain—suitable for a daughter to execute for a noble father—with a languor that would have done her preceptors proud.

  “Fetch my papa coffee, would you, darling?” she requested of Opal as she sank back onto the divan. “Would you care for pastries, Papa? The moonjellies are particularly delicious today.”

  “My heart splits open with joy at that news.” Mohrvine unslung the silk-fine white wool cloak from his shoulders, hung it on a carved peg beside the door. “Don’t trouble yourself with it, child,” he added, when Opal would have collected it as she departed with the coffee tray. Then he glanced back at his mother and his daughter, raised one sardonic black brow. “You know, then?”

  “That skinny little witch of the king’s keeps the palace itself under a cloak of shadow.” Red Silk folded her hands. “But I know it would take more than moonjellies to bring you back here at full gallop. What has our nephew done?”

  “It’s not what he’s done.” Mohrvine settled himself on the divan next to Foxfire, facing his mother on her cushion of silk. “It’s what he’ll be required to do at the dark of the moon. That imbecile Akarian’s called for a jubilee.”

  It was, Foxfire observed, her grandmother’s turn to be taken aback. The turquoise eyes widened in shock, then narrowed again as the implications sank in. “And Oryn didn’t have his head struck off on the spot? That’s enough to make me wonder if the man’s Greatsword’s son or a by-blow.”

  Amused, Mohrvine shook his head. “Believe me, madam, I’ve checked. Repeatedly. And he doubtless would have had my head struck off, had I suggested such a thing. But that old fool was perfectly sincere—he always is—and everyone in the council could tell it. Word of it was being shouted in the Golden Court before Oryn could get his breath. The High Priest of Ean was sending formal notice to the Keepers of the Sealed Temples as I was riding out of the city. At the dark of the moon, Oryn will face the ordeals of consecration once again.”

  “Without old Hathmar’s magic to pull him through.” Red Silk’s long, skinny fingers traced the gold rim of her cup. Her pale gaze fixed upon space, as if some invisible mirror hung in the air before her, showing her what no others could see.

  Foxfire tried to recall what she’d heard of the ordeals that kings had to pass through upon taking the throne. One of the six Sealed Temples stood near the House of Six Willows in the Flowermarket District, where she’d been trained in all the arts of pleasing men. She’d passed by it any number of times as she ran errands for the ladies whose exquisite entertainments—and other activities—had largely supported the house. Once she’d asked Gecko, the house’s old factotum, what that low and windowless black stone fane was, and why no worshipers were ever seen passing through its bronze doors. What god was revered there?

  It is the house of Shibathnes the Serpent King, Gecko had replied, and had pulled her dark veils more closely around her face. With the other hand she’d drawn Foxfire to the far side of the small and rather shabby square.

  Foxfire had never heard the name before, which surprised her. In the Blossom House, and in her father’s house before that, she’d heard tales of the dozens of minor deities, village spirits, and nomad divinities worshiped in addition to the great gods like Ean and Oan Echis and Darutha.

  He is one of the old gods who watches over the king, Gecko had said, and would say no more. Foxfire had later traced its low black wall behind the district’s taverns and eating houses and had been surprised at the size of the place, but she’d only twice seen a single priest, coming and going from there to the market with food. No one, as far as Foxfire had ever heard, worshiped the Veiled Gods. No cult attached to them, no temples to them existed outside the city. Opal, whose family was from old peasant stock, said simply, My granny told me never to speak their names, and Gecko had changed the subject and pretended ignorance when Foxfire’d asked.

  Now Red Silk said, “Some of the ordeals are easily fixed—at least your father didn’t seem to lose much sleep over them.” She shrugged. As a nomad, she’d never performed more than lip service to the gods o
f farmers. “Nor did your brother, when it was his turn to go through that little comedy. And believe me, a comedy is all it is, to convince the people that Ean and his holy sons have taken the trouble to personally approve one man over another to tell them all what to do. As if they were not all men alike.”

  “It may be a comedy to you, Mother,” replied Mohrvine grimly, “but to those of us who’re going to have to go through it, the jest loses a little of its savor. I don’t believe any more than you do that BoSaa of the Cows and Rohar of the Flowers and all the rest of that gaggle, whose priests have convinced the general populace to give them food and lodging gratis, will step down to shoo the crocodiles away from me when I go wading in the lagoon in the Temple of the Twins. All I’m saying is that somebody had better.”

  They expect King Oryn to fail, Foxfire thought, not even shocked at her father’s sacrilege—which she’d always sensed, though this was the first he’d spoken it outright before her. And they expect his brother, Barún, to take the tests, and to fail them, too.

  They expect them both to die.

  Grief twisted at her, for she was fond of her cousin the king. Her father was always telling her of the man’s foolishness, credulity, and willingness to put the whole realm to unnecessary labor over a situation that was at best temporary, but she liked that tall fat gentle man with the beautiful voice. She knew, too, that Summerchild loved him above her life. Anger tinged her grief, the same anger she’d felt at the tormented teyn, that her father seemed to have already disregarded Oryn’s death.

  And flooding in after the anger, cold panic, as logic opened the next door, and the next in her mind.

  “I know of no spells that will control either crocodiles or serpents,” Red Silk said, and tasted her coffee. She made a face, and set the cup aside. “That imbecile Soral Brûl has given me half a dozen to try, and all I’ve gotten out of it is half a dozen dead teyn. The ones to counteract poisons generally are no better, those that I’ve tried.”

  “Then I suggest, Mother, and you, Daughter”—Mohrvine pressed his palms together, his voice steady as his eyes moved from Red Silk’s impassive face to Foxfire’s frightened one—“that you arrive at some, and soon. Because if Oryn dies, and Barún, I’m going to need those spells very badly.”

  TEN

  I have to go.” Shaldis closed her hand around the white scrying crystal, looked up into her father’s worried face.

  The worry changed to alarm. “But you can’t!” Something told her that his concern was less his father’s actual danger than his own fear of what the old man would say—no matter what he’d screamed at her in his study—about Shaldis’s walking out of the house with the puzzle unsolved.

  Or maybe both. Shaldis had long ago given up trying to sort out what were genuine emotions in this household and what were simply the smoke and mirrors of denial, resentment, and fear.

  “I’ll be back,” she promised. “He is my grandfather.”

  And that, too, she thought dourly, was a lie masquerading behind truth.

  That frightful old beast downstairs was her grandfather, the patriarch of her family, and Shaldis was aware, within herself, of the unthinking reflex: you never abandoned your family. You never said no to them, never cast them off.

  But she was aware, too, that her motive in returning to them wasn’t that simple.

  With the dissolution of the Sun Mages, who for six hundred years had brought the rains to the Realm of the Seven Lakes, there remained eight women—only eight, none of whom completely understood how to make her own magic work—to summon the rains at the end of the coming winter.

  The woman who had tried to kill her grandfather would make nine.

  If they were lucky.

  She passed her hand again over the wood of the outer door in whose opening she still stood, half in shadow, half in light. While she couldn’t imagine any reason Mohrvine’s mother, Red Silk, would try to murder her grandfather, it wasn’t beyond the realm of possibility. According to Summerchild, Mohrvine had connections with most of the wealthy merchants of the city and with a number of the crooked water bosses whose thugs ruled the slums outside the city walls. And Cattail would work for anyone’s pay without asking who might be hurt in the long run.

  It could be either of them.

  Or not. The voice returned to her mind, the voice in her dream.

  Help us. Our children are dying. We the Craft women . . .

  WE the Craft women.

  More than one.

  Whoever they were and wherever. And whatever it would take to secure their alliance, to beg their help.

  Shaldis took a deep breath. Summerchild had said she was sending someone with a horse, to bring her to the palace as swiftly as possible.

  That didn’t sound good.

  Behind her friend’s face, Raeshaldis had glimpsed the carved openwork walls, the polished wooden pillars of the Cedar Pavilion, where the king held his councils. Another bad sign. Whatever had happened at the council, Summerchild hadn’t even waited to return to her own pavilion to call for help.

  “When I come back,” she said, turning to face her father, “I’m still going to want to talk to every woman in the household. Has there been anyone new since I’ve been gone?”

  “Eight Flower,” he said a little numbly. He still looked as if he couldn’t quite put together this tall, self-possessed young woman with the spindly, gawky girl who had walked out of the kitchen court that day two years ago.

  “And your brother Tulik will be married next year to Vortas Brenle’s daughter . . . You remember, the salt merchant Father trades with? She’s been in the house a number of times. But surely she wouldn’t . . . Surely no one in the household would . . .”

  “I don’t think so, either,” said Shaldis, which was not quite the truth. “But I need to see everyone just to make sure.”

  It was true that to her magic had meant escape, not retaliation. But whatever else could be said of him, Chirak Shaldeth was her grandfather. A slave woman might see the matter otherwise.

  “Your aunt Yellow Hen Woman is still with us,” Habnit added, with a half-smiling shake of his head. “Your grandfather tried to sell her last year to Namas the silversmith, but she made such a scandal—spreading the story to everyone in the market and causing such trouble to Namas—that Namas returned her. And your grandfather blamed her for being a bad example to you.”

  “You’d think he’d learn.” Shaldis smiled a little in spite of herself at the thought of her aunt, whose crooked back, buckteeth, and ax-blade nose had defeated forty years’ worth of Chirak’s attempts to marry her off. Legally, of course, he was within his rights to sell her as a slave, but men who did so to their own children without the excuse of direst poverty were held in universal contempt.

  And whereas Chirak Shaldeth didn’t give a snap of his fingers for any man’s opinion of him, he knew that contempt usually translates to a loss of business.

  For as far back as Shaldis could remember, Yellow Hen had held on to her position in her father’s house despite everything the exasperated patriarch could do, to Shaldis’s secret admiration.

  “It hasn’t made her lot any easier.”

  “I don’t think an easy lot is what she wants.”

  Shaldis had thought she’d seen her aunt from the gallery above the kitchen court, sitting in the shade with the teyn who spent the day grinding the endless amounts of flour and cornmeal required for the family’s food. It would be good to have a few words with her now, while waiting for Summerchild’s messenger. With her, with her mother, with Foursie and Twinkle and all her old friends and allies in the kitchen court.

  “Father!” bleated Habnit, even at his age aghast at being caught in her grandfather’s room.

  Shaldis whirled, stifling her contempt for her father’s guilty panic—What does he think Grandfather’s going to do, beat him?—and at the same time bracing for the storm of the old man’s wrath. But Chirak advanced into the room with his hands held out and his big yello
w teeth bared in what he clearly imagined to be an ingratiating smile. “Well, my dear, I trust your father’s shown you everything you need to see in here? I’ve ordered the girls to make up a room for you, Eldest Daughter, a nice one in the front of the house beside your mother and your aunt.”

  By aunt Shaldis knew he meant her uncle Tjagan’s wife, Apricot. Yellow Hen slept in the maids’ dormitory, where Shaldis herself and her sisters—and Tjagan’s three daughters—had all slept, listening to the more venturesome of the maids giggling when they let one or the other of the camel drivers in, in the dead of the night.

  “It’s been too long, dear girl, since we’ve had the pleasure of your presence beneath this roof.”

  It was as if the scene in his study had never taken place. Shaldis’s eyes darted past the old man to the other figure standing in the doorway behind him. It took her a moment to recognize her brother Tulik, who had been barely more than a schoolboy when she’d gone away. He’d grown in two years, and grown more like her father in appearance. In another year or two he’d fill out with their father’s broad-shouldered bulk.

  But where her father’s face wore an expression of amiable eagerness to please, Tulik’s was already settling into lines of watchful intelligence, gauging everything by the standard of how useful it was or could be. Where her father’s brown eyes were gentle under their straight, gingery brows, Tulik’s were already hard.

  “It is indeed good to see you, Eldest Sister.” Tulik came into the room and, like his grandfather, held out his hands to her. “I can’t tell you how grateful I am—we all are—that you’ve come to help us in this terrible time. Maybe—now that you’re back with us—we can persuade you to look into one or two other little problems we’ve been having. With the teyn, for instance. Now that the spells of fear on their compound gates aren’t working, we’ve had a devil of a time with escapes. They’ve gotten sulky, too. And I’ll wager you’ve learned some really fine good-luck words to put on our caravans.” He winked at her. “All in the family, of course.”