Points of Departure

by Patricia C. Wrede

  “So you were her apprentice?” Granny said to the girl, ignoring the sobbing woman crouched within the circle of wary cats. “What is your name?”

  “Ingorin,” the girl said. “What have you done to her?”

  “What was required,” Granny said. “You will stay in Liavek for a month, so I can see what training you have and what you need. After that, we’ll arrange for you to visit once or twice a year so that you can fill in the gaps without leaving your clans with no one to turn to. And I hope you’ve learned fewer bad habits than that one. The rest of you can head back to the Waste,” she glared at the other nomads, then nodded toward Marithana, “as soon as she says young Tsoranyl is well enough to travel.”

  “But—” One of the nomads glanced uncertainly toward Ellishar.

  “She is exiled,” Granny told him. “From your clans and from Liavek. Her birth luck is gone for good, and the gods won’t listen to her at all. Beyond that, I’ve no further interest in her.”

  “Where will she go?” Ingorin asked.

  “Where she likes,” Granny replied. “Tichen, or one of the Farlands. I wouldn’t recommend Ka Zhir.” She looked back at Ellishar, and her expression hardened. “Go,” she said. “Now.”

  Ellishar stumbled to her feet and took a step toward Granny. The cats hissed in unison, and the former Ka’Riatha stopped short. The cats pressed themselves against the floor, then began creeping forward, as if they were closing in on a mouse. Ellishar backed toward the door; the cats allowed it. A moment later, she was outside and gone.

  Ingorin bowed her head briefly to the cats, then turned to the other nomads. “Though it was not according to our custom, you have seen the transfer of power,” she said in a formal tone.

  The nomads exchanged glances. “We have seen it.”

  “I am your Ka’Riatha now.”

  “You are Ka’Riatha,” the others responded in unison. Then one added rather sourly, “And now it’s for you to deal with the drought and the famine, if you can.”

  “By the time I’ve finished with her, she’ll be able to,” Granny said firmly.

  “But how long will that take? Our families are starving now.”

  “You must have planned for that,” Marithana’s voice came from Tsoranyl’s bedside. The physician came forward. “The token you sought increased fertility, you said, but that would not change the time it took your crops to grow or your herds to bear. What had you intended to do in the meantime?”

  “We have some coin,” Ingorin said. “It won’t buy enough to see the clans fed for long, though, and if Welenen is slow in answering—”

  “Earn more, then,” Granny said.

  “How?” demanded the sour-sounding nomad.

  “Offer to guide some of the trading caravans through the Waste,” Marithana replied. “You should be able to earn enough that way to get through until the end of the drought.”

  Ingorin shook her head. “Do you think we had not thought of so simple a solution? The caravaneers who stop in Trader’s Town fear we would lead them to a trap.”

  “There are S’Rian merchants in Liavek who’ll hire you,” Granny put in. “Danesh Ribera, for one; he’ll jump at a chance of getting his goods safely through the Waste, and I’m sure he can suggest others.”

  “Ask Snake, too,” Marithana added. “She owns the Tiger’s Eye, and she’s already known as one of the best caravaneers in the business. She may not be S’Rian, but if she thinks you can help her get her goods to Liavek faster, she’ll listen.”

  “Ah, yes.” Granny nodded. She’d sold some of her weavings to the Tiger’s Eye; she should have thought of Snake herself. “She’s a promising possibility. Just don’t let her talk you into an exclusive agreement.”

  The few remaining loose ends were easy enough to tie off. Tsoranyl would have to spend the remainder of the night at Granny’s, but that would be only a minor inconvenience. Ingorin would spend the next few days with the rest of the nomads, preparing them for their return to the Waste. In a day or two, once Tsoranyl was well enough to travel, the others would head home and Ingorin would come back to Granny for her first month of training. With luck, they’d have more food and a few contracts with the caravans for the new Ka’Riatha to take with her when she finally left Liavek.

  Granny doubted she’d be sorry to see the last of them all. She had enough to do in the city without taking on the clans as well. Still, she would have to keep in touch once they returned to the Waste. Most of the night’s trouble might have been avoided if the Ka’Riatha of the Waste and the Ka’Riatha in Liavek had only known of each other.

  As the door closed behind the departing nomads, Granny frowned. Perhaps it was time she thought about training her replacement. After all, it might take her a decade or two to find someone suitable. Well, there was no need for hurry. She was good for another century or two yet.

  “I’ll be leaving as well,” Marithana said, breaking into Granny’s reverie, “as soon as I’ve made my patient comfortable for the night. I’ve given Tsoranyl another draught; he won’t wake before morning.”

  “You’d do better to stay here,” Granny said, noting her drawn face. “That is, unless you object to cats.”

  “The cats are no problem. But sleeping under the same roof with a patient is something I prefer to avoid unless constant attendance is necessary.”

  “Hmmph. Well, at least you’ve the sense to know your limits.”

  “I’ll be back in the morning to check on him,” Marithana said.

  Granny nodded. As she closed the door behind the healer, her eye fell on her loom and the almost-completed tapestry. Granny chuckled. She’d finish the weaving in the morning, and give it to Marithana as a memento. She could afford it, and she was sure the healer would appreciate the gesture. Still chuckling, she turned to shoo the cats away from Marithana’s patient.

  Two Houses in Saltigos

  By Pamela Dean

  Deleon liked best the plays about the cold places. This was either a reasonable or an unaccountable preference, as you were pleased to look at it. The first of his family born in Liavek, he ought therefore to be, if not fond of, at least accustomed to its sunny climate, where fire was the enemy and winter brought only rain, and folk shivered and complained in the month that to call Frost was an exaggerated courtesy. On the other hand, he had been conceived in Acrivain in a sharp and uncertain spring, when the flowers that one’s mother said were supposed to break through the snow and bloom atop it, had, in fact, done just that. This had made his sister Jehane, who was six then, very happy; and so she had remembered it and told him. And in the little brownish book he carried sewn in the pocket of his smock, his mother said just the same; his father seldom noticed such things.

  Deleon, with the ease of long practice, turned his thoughts from the little brownish book and bent them fiercely upon the problems of the Desert Mouse. The foremost of these was, in all probability, its threatening and ridiculous name. But there was nothing he could do about that. Malion, who had been there longest, and Thrae, who owned the theater, liked its name. Calla, because it amused her, liked it too. Lynno said it sounded like a place thieves might come to after dark to sell dubious and not very useful merchandise; Sinati said it might do for a tavern or even a small pot-boil establishment; Aelim’s first remark to a wondering Deleon, five years ago, had been that it would do very well for anything other than a theater. But the theater had it, and would continue to have it.

  Somewhere in its back passages, somebody started to sing. Deleon immediately shed all thought and resigned himself to a kind of tingling and apprehensive joy. It was Calla, and he was most unfortunately in love with her. She could carry a tune, but her sense of rhythm was uncertain and it was obvious that nobody had ever trained her. She was singing one of the Acrivannish ballads he had translated, but she was taking it too fast. Malion and Thrae had wanted to send her down the road to old Gellirt, who had instructed the other members of the company in the rudiments of proper singing. She had
refused to go, maintaining, first, that if she could sing she would be continually made to play simpering fools; and second, that many of the characters, fools or otherwise, who were made to sing in plays were most unlikely, in fact, to be able to sing at all, and would be better represented by someone who was a little shaky at it herself.

  The intellectual repercussions of this position had died down three or four days after her arrival, but the emotional ones were still sorting themselves out three months later, and would probably linger for years.

  Lynno had gotten drunk for the first time in his life because Sinati agreed with Calla. Sinati, whose agreement had been based neither on the merits of the arguments nor on any liking for Calla, had ceased a five years’ habit of dithering. She had decided to align herself neither with Lynno nor with Aelim, but instead went to live with a young bookseller who had just invested his luck and meant to become a hero.

  Malion and Thrae, by long experience and natural serenity of character proof against all but the most cataclysmic assaults, had nevertheless been observed, for more than a tenday, to treat one another with a perfect and unnatural courtesy, as though they were one another’s distant relations come inconveniently to town.

  Deleon, hitherto immune to those forces that periodically ravaged the company, had fallen disastrously in love with Calla. And Aelim, during a particularly heated argument about the purpose of drama, had revealed, at least to the keen-eyed, what Deleon already suspected: that he himself so successfully resisted the blandishments of Sinati because he was in love with Deleon.

  If Deleon had been head of the company, he would not have hired Calla. She was a skilled player, having been engaged in the trade since she was three years old; and she was intelligent and applied her intelligence to her trade, which made her far more reliable than those who depended on a certain moodiness or lack thereof to achieve their effects. He still would not have hired her, not for this company. By her very nature, whatever exactly that was—love, he found, diminished perception, which was dismaying but hardly astonishing—she distressed and ruffled them, individually and collectively. Acrilat knew what, in all innocence, she would make to happen next.

  Her voice had been wending steadily closer, and for the first time the words she was singing too fast became discernible. To the delicate and plaintive tune that ought to have told the Acrivannish tragedy of the Second King and the Mountain Empress, Calla sang:

  A knight came down the dusty road.

  All in his horse’s mane were twined

  Seven and seventy lively toads

  And forty twinkling newts and nine.

  “May these events,” said Deleon between his teeth, “not involve thy servant.” He had never in his nineteen years set foot in a disorderly house, but it often seemed to him that all Liavek might be so characterized. Liavekans were mad; madder than Kings’ Tasters; madder than the mad god Acrilat itself; madder, he finished maliciously, with the ease of someone who long before he became a player had arranged his thoughts as speeches, than their own Levar.

  Calla, wearing a threadbare white tunic and an old pair of Sinati’s soft boots and carrying a sheaf of papers, came across the platform and sat herself down in the dust next to him. She looked quite sane.

  Deleon gazed at her and, as always, felt hungry. She reminded him irresistibly, despite his best efforts to force his thoughts into a more romantic path, of a whole collection of delightful things to eat and drink. Her hair, which she wore long, as women ought to and as many Liavekan women didn’t, was the color of strong kaf. Her eyes were the bizarre yellow of green tea that has been brewed too long. Her lips and her palms and the insides of her elbows and the backs of her knees and the heels of her feet were the color of cinnamon bark. The rest of her skin faded, in a series of subtle gradations Deleon wished he could paint, to the color of that peculiar chocolate they sold in the Two-Copper Bazaar. Deleon had stopped putting cream in his kaf since she came; he had always liked green tea; and he had bought a string of cinnamon to hang in his room, but he had been unable to stomach that chocolate. They had made it with goats’ milk, and it tasted like an unfortunate experiment in cheese over which somebody had spilled a bad grade of sweet wine. The old man who sold it to him, taxed with these deficiencies, had told him shortly that it was intended for cooking, not as confectionery. If you kept it around to look at, it grew over itself an unwholesome gray bloom and inspired unwelcome thoughts of mortality.

  Deleon was not accustomed to shunning thoughts of mortality. He liked the plays about the cold places not least because so many people died in them. People seldom died in Liavekan plays: though they often seemed to, it was generally a ruse or a mistake, or both. This made for a great deal of hilarity, but gave little scope to his particular talent.

  “Deleon!” said Calla, in precisely the tone she used to Thrae’s cat when it climbed onto the theater’s roof and refused to come down. Her voice, at least, did not remind him of food, or of anything at all; it was hers and brooked no comparisons.

  “What are you dreaming about?”

  “Kaf,” said Deleon, smiling on her with considerable satisfaction. A secret love has its rewards, and he reaped them daily. He had not so far chosen to examine in what regards an acknowledged but unrequited love might also have its pleasures. This had never happened to him before and he did not expect it to happen again. He intended to wring the most out of each of its scenes.

  “Let’s get some, then,” said Calla. “I want to talk to you about this play.”

  “Is it very bad?” They mostly were. Even something like The Pirates of Port Chai was beyond the capabilities of the Desert Mouse.

  “No, just the contrary. I think we could do it very well if we suppressed Aelim’s tendency to make a tragedy out of a drowned spider. But it needs Sinati.”

  “Don’t talk to me about Sinati.”

  Calla gave him a level and completely opaque look. “Is Aelim suffering?”

  “No more than he would over a drowned spider,” said Deleon, a little shortly. He had become irritated a month ago at the insistence of the company on assuming that anybody of whom Sinati had chosen to deprive her considerable charms must be heartbroken. “Why does it need Sinati?”

  “Isn’t she the only one who can do illusion?” asked Calla, with the new-student expression that amused Deleon and enraged everybody else. She knew perfectly well that Sinati was the only member of the company who had invested her luck; the only one who had enough luck to invest. Calla had obviously studied the company for days before offering herself to its employment; what her occasional pretense of ignorance gained her, she alone knew.

  “Unless,” she added, pulling hard on a good handful of Deleon’s thick, short hair and almost stopping his heart, “you would care to play a simpering fool of a girl with yellow hair?”

  “Does she die?” said Deleon just above a whisper, wondering if he were about to do just that. It would be a better way than any he had previously feigned or contrived; but it was beginning to seem to him possible that a world containing Calla might be worth living in after all. She took her hand away and he decided he could still breathe.

  “No, but she swoons a great deal,” said Calla. “You could practice falling without bruising your elbows.” And she laid a finger on the purple patch above his left one, the company’s last reminder of Mistress Oleander.

  “That,” said Deleon, feeling the blood rise in his face and cursing the pale skin that would show it to her, “would be useful.” He closed his mouth suddenly and stared at her. “Have you spoken to Thrae or Malion?”

  “No, I just finished reading the play last night.”

  “They cast the characters.”

  “Well, of course. But if nobody cares to coax Sinati away from her new magician, they must ask you to do it; there’s nobody else. You can at any rate decide if you’d like it.”

  Deleon went on staring; momentarily, the problem she posed occupied more of his attention than her mere bewitching pr
esence. “Just what would you do, my dear, if Thrae gave you a part you didn’t like?”

  “Tell her so.”

  “I’d like to be in the audience for that!” burst out Deleon. “In the outside row,” he added.

  Calla raised her straight, sleek eyebrows at him. “You’d better have that kaf,” she said. “Your wits are addled.”

  “Yes, all right,” said Deleon. “I believe they are.”

  In the event, they had tea, not kaf, which was expensive these days; and yhinroot tea, not green, which Calla said made her sneeze. Nor did the conversation go as Deleon wished it to. He explained to Calla, as carefully as he knew how, that Thrae had been trained in the very pure and extremely costly school of magical theater. Only her ineradicable penchant for picking up strays and waifs could explain how she came to be burdened with a company so woefully lacking in luck.

  Calla interrupted him, possibly incensed at the implication that she was a stray. “Why doesn’t Thrae practice magic, then?”

  “She used to,” said Deleon, who had gotten the story out of Aelim, “but she had only five hours, and the reinvestiture was harder every year. Malion was afraid she’d fail altogether the next time, so she gave it up. That story would make a play,” he said, scowling. Calla did not look sympathetic to this notion, so he went on. “Sinati says she probably wasn’t a good player anyway, and that may be true. But she’s a very fine instructor.”

  “That may be,” said Calla. “But—”

  “And,” said Deleon, “she still has her standards.” He picked up the threads of his speech, which he had been prepared for some days to deliver. Quite apart from the unwisdom of usurping Thrae’s prerogatives, he explained, it would outrage those standards to suggest to her that someone who happened by an accident of birth to have the required color of hair for a particular part should take that part over someone who could create the color by art alone.