“No.” He paused in the middle of the roofless room, looking around him at the fallen beams, the burned body of a man crumpled in a corner, the broken dishes and cups. The new-risen sun of morning heated his shoulders through the silk of his robe, warmed the air even under the roof beams’ broken shadows. “No. Too many of those people in the streets too clearly killed one another.”
The guards at least all seemed to be giving the corpses, modern or ancient, wide berth.
Could sickness cling to gold? For that long? Over a thousand years? Oryn cursed himself for not knowing. If some guardsman found, among all this ash, one or another of those big crude-looking gold Zali pendants set with obsidian, or one of those smoky balls of green-and-silver glass, would he leave it alone?
Or would he bring it into the Yellow City to sell?
“So what do you think happened?” Summerchild wrapped the end of one of her scarves around the handle of a mirror and picked it up from the ashes on the floor. She turned it over. Both sides were blackened with fire. It had been broken, Oryn saw, by being struck on the corner of the wall bench beside the door. Glass sparkled, half buried in the ash.
“I can’t imagine. Everything we’re seeing should be clues, but they don’t seem to add up to anything.” He held out his hand to pick up a shard, and Summerchild touched his arm stayingly.
“I put spells upon myself, on my flesh and my clothing, against infection,” she said. “If something must be touched, I’ll do it.”
“I do need to be in good shape for my jubilee, don’t I?” Oryn dusted his hands, though he had handled nothing. “If that mirror was burned on both sides—and under the glass bed, too, I see—that means it was broken after the house was first burned, doesn’t it? Or at least picked up and moved.
“By the teyn? You say their tracks are everywhere, Jethan, dear boy.” He turned toward the tall guardsman. “Have you seen any tracks that look like they shouldn’t be here? New boots, or better boots than the villagers would wear? Even horse or camel prints superimposed upon the ash from the second fire?”
“I’ve been looking, my lord king,” replied the young man rather stiffly, as if even long familiarity with the king hadn’t inured him to being called dear boy. “And I have seen nothing but the marks of the teyn.”
“It should mean something,” said Oryn worriedly.
For a moment they stood, looking at each other, the tall king and his slender concubine in the hot latticework shade of the house’s broken rafters. Hazel eyes looked down into blue, sharing speculation and fear.
Outside the city gates, Shaldis joined the jostling line of asses, camels, farmers bearing yokes, bringing eggplants, tomatoes, onions, sweet bunches of purple-black figs to the city’s markets. Sheep and goats bleated, chickens flapped against their wicker crates. Shaldis left off her cloak of inconspicuousness and smiled at passersby as she edged among them, wondering whether Summerchild would be back today, and what she herself might find in the Citadel library. She should probably contact Pomegranate.
Then pain hit her.
Pain, and the frantic summons, instantly cut off.
The sense that her magic was bleeding.
Shaldis gasped, staggered into the corner of the gate. Terrible cold, as if her very life were draining away, and the magic bonds of the Circle of Sisterhood twisted and strained.
For an instant she thought she heard music, unknown yet half recognized, veering through her brain.
Then an avalanche of darkness. A fading scream.
Shaldis thought, Summerchild.
Her vision cleared; she was still clinging to the side of the Fishmarket Gate. A friendly-faced man had run to support her, yokes of spinach baskets still on his shoulders. “Are you all right, miss?”
By his face she must be white as a sheet. She managed to whisper, “I’m fine.”
And shaking off his helpful grip, she started to run.
“All the glass is broken,” pointed out Summerchild. “Goblets and what looks like a bowl as well. I wonder if there’s anything in the Citadel records about the teyn fearing it. I know people say they’re not to be trusted with it, out of clumsiness, but there are at least a dozen of the palace teyn who carry glass vessels back and forth to the storerooms daily without problem. I’ll be curious,” she went on as she set the mirror down, “to see what we find in those tombs.”
She spread her hands out and rested them, and her forehead, lightly against the blackened adobe of the wall. Closed her eyes, sinking once more into her listening trance. Probing, seeking within the mud-brick of the walls the echoes of whatever had been in this room. Reaching inward to touch it with her mind. Oryn knelt near the bricks of the hearth, keeping his hands well clear of the colored shards of the bowl but studying them where they lay.
There were certain magics, Soth had told him, that could only be held in glass, but glass had to be specially ensorcelled to be used for purposes of magic. Did that still hold, now that magic had changed? But in any case, all the glass in the village couldn’t have been—
Summerchild screamed. Oryn swung around, sprang to his feet in horror to see her body arch back, her hands still pressed to the wall, her blue eyes staring for a blank second at the hot morning sky. Then she screamed again, as if flesh and mind were being sliced apart in one excruciating second, and crumpled backward into Oryn’s arms.
TWENTY-FOUR
Shaldis was halfway to her grandfather’s house when she knew someone was trying to speak with her. Pebble, Moth, Pomegranate . . . Shaldis was inclined to simply ignore the urging in her mind until she could reach the privacy of her room, sink into a trance, and look for Summerchild herself, but the thought that one of the others might have already done so made her stop and perch on the low plinth beside the Grand Bazaar’s brass-studded doors and fish in her satchel for her crystal.
She had barely drawn two breaths and let her mind relax when Pebble’s homely, frightened face appeared in the central facet.
“What is it, what’s happened?”
In the background Shaldis could glimpse the vine leaves that shaded the inner court of the house of Pebble’s father.
“I don’t know. I was walking in the street, I haven’t had time to put myself in trance. It’s Summerchild, isn’t it?”
“I think so,” replied Pebble. “I—I feel that she’s the one in danger or the one who’s been hurt. It was just a horrible flash that came and went, as if it were dying away in a long corridor. Now I feel as if she’s drawing on my power, my magic, but it’s very weak. It comes and it goes. I tried to speak to her through the water bowl at once but nothing happened.” Tears streaked her face. In addition to hero-worshiping Summerchild—as Cattail had so scornfully remarked—she loved the concubine dearly. “But I’m not that good with it. More than half the time, nothing happens. But you felt it, too?”
You felt it? As if the pain wasn’t like being hit over the head with an ax. Shaldis almost laughed. But she said only, “I felt it.”
“Do you think she’s all right?”
Shaldis was hard put not to snap How the hell should I know? But Pebble’s terrified eyes stopped her. “I’m going to see what I can learn by going into a trance at home,” she said, keeping her voice steady with an effort. “But if I don’t find anything quickly I’ll go to the palace. You meet me there. If you talk with Moth, tell her to meet us both there.” She could already feel the urgency rising and pushing at her mind again.
“And don’t tell anyone what’s happened. For one thing, we don’t know if the harm came to just Summerchild, or to the king and his party as well—”
“Oh, dear gods, I didn’t ever think of that! Do you think—?”
“I don’t think anything,” said Shaldis. “And the last thing we need right now is rumors flying all over the town. Don’t tell anyone anything. Just meet me at the palace.”
“All right.” Her image faded—Shaldis marveled that she’d let go that quickly rather than hang on asking for reass
urance—and was immediately replaced by that of Moth. It was the first time Shaldis had seen the young concubine with her long brown hair hanging completely undressed and with no makeup.
“Where you been!?”
Buying candy and having my nails painted, where do you think?
Stop it. She’s just scared. People lash out when they’re scared.
“Talking to Pebble. Were you able to learn anything? To feel her mind in trance?”
“No, but it’s Summerchild, isn’t it?”
“I think so, and Pebble thinks so. . . . Neither of us could tell what happened.”
“It was magic,” said Moth. “I felt . . . awful. Like a spear in my heart. Then it faded away, fast. You don’t think Red Silk got her, do you? Her and Foxfire? I hear they left Mohrvine’s villa Golden Sky the night before last, sneaked out with a huge train of baggage, nobody knows where.”
Oh, good. Just what we need. A wizard war. The rains don’t come, the lakes dry out, and what’s the best thing we can think to do? Fight among ourselves.
Shaldis took a deep breath. “I don’t know what happened. Can you—?”
“Or what if Cattail’s selling her services to somebody like Lord Sarn? And she put a hex on Summerchild, to make sure the king dies, so that stupid brother of his can take over and that new concubine he’s got will lead him around by his—”
“We don’t know what happened,” Shaldis nearly shouted, and resisted the temptation to add that the idea of Cattail being able to defeat Summerchild in a battle of magic was ludicrous. She already knew that such an observation would only open the door to endless—and pointless—discussion and speculation. “I’ve asked Pebble to meet me at the palace. Would you meet us there, too? I was out in the street this morning when it happened, but I’m going to go home and see if I can learn anything by going into a trance.”
“I did that and didn’t get nothing. Do you think maybe—?”
“Then I probably won’t get anything, either,” said Shaldis. “But I’m going to try. Then I’ll head straight for the palace as well. Please don’t speak to anyone of what happened, or of what it could mean. The last thing we need is all kinds of rumors flying around.”
“No, absolutely!” Moth made a peasant sign of averting evil. “Besides, I never spread no rumors nor gossip.”
“I know you don’t,” Shaldis assured her, hearing as she did so her mother’s stricture that her tongue would turn coal black at that magnitude of lie. “I’m relying on you, Moth. But I must go.” And with that she closed her hand around the crystal and looked away. Breathless, dreamlike thoughts swirled through her mind.
Look in the crystal. Please look in the crystal.
After a moment she looked.
Foxfire, her face running with tears.
Am I NEVER going to get home and have a chance to see what’s happened for myself?
“What happened?” Foxfire was in some dark place, a storeroom or a cupboard, Shaldis thought.
“You tell me.”
“Is it Summerchild?”
“We think so. Nobody knows. She and the king rode out early yesterday morning to investigate the report of a plague in some village. Where are you?”
“I . . .” The girl swallowed, trying to collect herself. She was the youngest of the Raven sisters, though her training in the most expensive Blossom House in the city had given her the deportment of a much older lady. That deportment was gone now and she was a child again, a child alone and scared.
“I’m not supposed to say,” she whispered at last. “But I dreamed a dream, a terrible dream. My grandmother would never let me join with you by the Sigil of Sisterhood, but Summerchild and I did work together, when I was learning healing. And I know it was her I heard cry out. It was her I felt, that awful wave of coldness.” She swallowed, wiped her eyes. Her hair, like Moth’s, was unbraided for sleep, and she wore a striped linen bed robe pulled hastily around her slim shoulders. “It woke me up, and it didn’t fade, like dreams do, but got stronger.”
“Did you try to reach her in trance?”
“I . . .” Foxfire glanced around her, as if hearing the sound of approaching feet. “I couldn’t. I can’t. I have to go.”
The image faded.
Shaldis thrust the crystal into her satchel, and strode as fast as she could across the vegetable market toward the house on Sleeping Worms Street.
“And what do you think you’re doing, girl?”
Foxfire stopped at the sound of her grandmother’s voice, turned with the most profoundly innocent expression she could muster. “I was just listening to the birds on the terrace.”
“You’re a liar, girl, there hasn’t been a bird within a hundred miles of this place since the Akarians were kings.” Red Silk’s cold eye passed over Foxfire like the edge of a knife, taking in the unbound hair, the too-baggy bed robe, the bare feet on the cracked red floor tiles, the half-open door of the wardrobe room a few yards down the gallery. “Give me what you have in your hand.”
Foxfire held out the mirror. Her grandmother’s lined, beautiful face was unreadable and absolutely terrifying.
Red Silk passed her hand over the little circle of silver-backed glass, reading the magic that had passed through it as if it had been a lingering heat. Her turquoise eyes seemed to pale as they grew cold.
She said, “So.” Foxfire didn’t think she’d seen her so angry since she’d caught one of the maids plucking feathers from one of her pet finches.
She’d had a servant pull the maid’s fingernails out, and had set her to washing floors.
Her hand flicked out like the striking head of a snake and she caught Foxfire’s hair close to the scalp, pulled her forward with a brutal grip.
“I see you’re going to have to trust Opal from now on about how your hair looks, and if your eye paint is on straight.” Her voice was as level as a marble floor, and as chilly. “We’re rationing water as it is: I’ll just give orders that you’re not to have a cup or a basin left in your possession—you’ll have to ask, to drink or to wash or to clean your teeth. I thought I could trust you.”
Foxfire made herself whisper—made herself not cry out as Red Silk’s grip tightened excruciatingly on the handful of hair—“You can, Grandmother.”
“You’ll have to show me that on another occasion. To whom were you talking?”
Through gritted teeth Foxfire replied, “Shaldis, Grandmother.”
“And you said?”
“Only that I was lonely. That I’d had a bad dream which frightened me.”
“And you didn’t come to me?” As she spoke Red Silk pulled Foxfire down toward the floor, Foxfire struggling not to scream with pain, tears pouring down her face.
“I went into your room and you were gone.” A lie, but Red Silk was dressed and booted and had come from the direction of the main house, not from her room.
The horrible grip pulled her steadily down until Foxfire was kneeling on the tile, then down further, so that she bent over, her face nearly touching the floor with Red Silk crouched over her. Foxfire began to sob with pain. “And Opal was where?”
“Sometimes Opal doesn’t understand. Sometimes there are things only someone like me, someone with magic, can understand. Please don’t hurt Opal, Grandmother, don’t have her beaten.”
The grip on her hair released. Foxfire collapsed to the floor, crying in earnest now, burningly aware of the folds of her grandmother’s black linen robe lying over her hand.
“Have her beaten until her understanding improves?” Red Silk’s voice crackled with amused irony, and that cold, strong hand touched Foxfire’s head. “You’re the one whose understanding needs improvement, girl. But until your father is king—until my son passes safely through the hands of the gods—the stakes are too high to leave our hopes supported by a pillar that has so much as creaked once. Do you understand?”
Foxfire nodded wretchedly.
“Sit up, girl, I’m done with you. You shall have ample opportunity to d
emonstrate to me how sorry you are, and how trustworthy. For my part, I am sorry that you’re lonely. I did what I could to obviate that. But women born under the shadow of the Raven to some extent will always be alone.”
And women born under the shadow of the Raven, thought Foxfire, with a sense of falling into a gulf of infinite despair, will always be sought after by those who want to control them for their own ends.
Even Father.
The knowledge yawned in her, a black wound. Mortal.
She made herself say, “Yes, Grandmother.”
“What we do here is too important to risk discovery,” said Red Silk. “And that concubine of the king’s can charm the birds off the trees, let alone charm information out of someone who’s lonely. Habnit’s Daughter is no more than her handmaiden—and why shouldn’t she be? She owes her the bread on her plate, these days. You cannot trust them, either of them.”
“No, Grandmother.” Her lips only formed the words; no sound came out.
“Next time you’re lonely, come to me. You haven’t broken your fast, have you? We’re starting the first of the test spells with the cobras in an hour. You have just time to get yourself washed.”
“Yes, Grandmother.”
Foxfire raised her eyes as her grandmother strode away up the gallery, following that small black figure as it passed through the muzzy shadows of the columns that surrounded the bare central courtyard, the clear shadowed morning light. Seeing in her mind those scarred white hands, strong as an eagle’s talons and scented faintly with attar of roses, dripping with goat’s blood in the Temple of Nebekht. Hearing that cracked ancient voice screaming the trapped djinn’s name.
She felt a kind of dizzy shock at the wound of knowledge. The only reason Father hasn’t married me off already is that he wants to keep my power at his own beck and call. It is all I am to him.
Is it all I am to him?
She didn’t know, and didn’t know how to go about finding out.
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