Points of Departure

by Patricia C. Wrede

  It was Remembrance Night, and so I remembered the dead. I was very angry with them. They had left me; they had made a mystery of it; and for what? To get me out of my parents’ house? It could not be that simple. It had, grotesque amidst all the marks of genuine loss and tragedy, the flavor of a practical joke, a play for two before an unwitting audience. I thought of Calla. “I don’t look forward to remembering the dead tonight.” Yes, indeed, I had discovered something. Doing anything about it would have to wait ’til morning.

  I did not go home, to my parents’ house or to the brick house on the Street of Flowers. I sat in my wooden chair in Verdialos’s room, trying to think of my grandmother, who had taught me Old Acrivannish and the proper making of wedding-cake with lard and honey and rye flour. Songs and talk and laughter and shrieks ebbed and swelled in the streets outside; the sharp glancing light of lanterns bounced across the room. After a long time I heard an irritated mewing in the street, and went down to let my cat in.

  Bazaar Day

  The Desert Mouse had a new coat of white paint over its much-peeled stucco; it looked like the cakes Jehane used to make, on which she thought a liberal application of frosting sufficed to correct all structural defects. The wooden carving of the theater’s entry porch, formerly painted lumpily in bright yellow, had been scraped and picked out carefully in six colors. They had been alternating between Andri Terriot’s rejects from the Levar’s Company and Deleon’s so-called Acrivannish plays, and it must have been working beautifully. Liavekans have very odd taste.

  I went in quietly. They were rehearsing something; it sounded more like Deleon than like Andri Terriot. There was more talk than action and the verse was sparer than Terriot’s. Deleon appeared to be simultaneously playing the part of an old woman and instructing his fellow-players Calla and Lynno how to say their lines. Thrae, who owned the theater, stood off to one side looking sardonic; but when she said, “Let’s stop and consider, please,” all three of them ceased yelling and went over to her.

  Calla saw me and nudged Deleon. He looked at Thrae, who nodded, and swung himself off the platform. “Nissy? I thought I was supposed to meet you on Restoration Day? Did Aelim misremember?”

  “Aelim never misremembers,” I said. “I wanted to ask you something. Do you use a lot of pig’s blood?”

  Deleon hardly blinked. “We used to,” he said. “But Naril’s gotten so clever we haven’t much use for it these days. Why?”

  “Where did you get it, when you needed it?”

  “From a butcher, dear sister,” said Deleon, kindly enough; he was in somewhat of a flowery frame of mind, from repeating his own poetry all day. “We used Roani Sirro on Canal Street, usually. It wasn’t all pig’s blood,” he added, looking at me rather anxiously. “He would give us chicken’s or goat’s or whatever he’d had a call for that day. Does that matter?”

  “How much would it take to look as if two people had bled to death?”

  “Nerissa, what are you plotting?”

  “Nothing. How much?”

  “Holy preservation, Nissy, I don’t know. Thrae? Where’s Malion?”

  “Cleaning out his desk,” called Thrae. “He’s feeling about as friendly as a sick tiger; I’d leave it until tomorrow.”

  “It’s all right,” I said to Deleon. “Just let me talk to Calla.” She was, I thought, listening to us instead of to Lynno; but that might have been mere curiosity.

  Deleon looked at me. “Something’s happened.”

  “It certainly has. And when I’ve done with Calla she can tell you all about it.”

  “Calla’s worse than Mistress Oleander, when the fit’s on her,” said Deleon. He pulled my hair, said, “Give my best to your cat,” and called to Calla that she should talk to me in the players’ room while he and Lynno discussed Lynno’s lines.

  I followed Calla into the back of the theater. She was wearing red and still looked sick. She looked straight at me and said, “I couldn’t tell you, Nerissa,” in the way one would say, I can’t reach this shelf, I can’t throw that ball so far, iron sinks in water. I looked at her hard, and believed it. Verdialos and Etriae were not wizards, but they could be a most potent combination.

  “Why did they tell you at all?”

  “For the pig’s blood.”

  “Did they say they would kill themselves?”

  “No,” said Calla. “They didn’t say what they wanted it for. But what else could it be? I knew.”

  She knew, I thought, but she might have been wrong all the same. I remembered a few pranks in the past, with pigs’ bladders—there it was, pigs again—filled with water and dropped down the stairs; or the day somebody had baked slips of paper with rude messages written on them into all the honeycakes. Nobody had ever been held to account for these antics, but I remembered also how Etriae would turn the Deck of Hours upside down and run riot through it, and what Verdialos thought was funny. They might not have planned to be dead; but they were. I still thought of Gorodain, who had known them for years and was very astute, however mad he might be.

  I said to Calla, “I told Deleon you’d tell him what happened. If you’d rather not —”

  “No, I ought to; Malion will go out in disgust soon and buy the Cat Street Crier.” She sighed. “Deleon will be solicitous; he can’t help it.”

  “I know; that’s why I’m leaving before you tell him. Say I’ll see him day after tomorrow, just as we planned.” Calla smiled; I added, “Ought I to tell you to break your leg now?”

  “No,” said Calla, with a remarkable combination of rue and cool irony. “I think a broken heart is sufficient to ensure a good performance.” She gave me a good long time in which not to answer, and then said, “Will you come to see us?”

  “I’ll try.”

  “Bring your sisters,” said Calla. “They laugh so charmingly.”

  I patted her on the shoulder and went away.

  It was impossible to walk anywhere and not buy something. If you refused to buy, eventually they would grin and give it to you. I was given a leather harness suitable for holding six or seven knives, a small copper pot, and a tangle of marbles and wire that I suspected was a failed shiribi puzzle, but was asserted by its giver to be an ingenious device for getting the sand out of spinach in one washing. I gave in finally and bought a linen bag of catmint for Floradazul and a linen hat, without catmint, to keep the sun off my head. It was hot for year’s end. I almost bought Etriae a fan of peacock feathers; the merchant in question, thinking I disliked it after trying it out, pressed upon me instead a clip for the hair, also of peacock feathers attached to a band of copper. Perhaps Calla would like it.

  I needed somewhere quiet to think. The House of Responsible Life, between the lost children, the allegedly lost children who wouldn’t go home, its two lost Serenities, and the necessity of celebrating their death with a party even larger than had been planned for Festival, was in an uproar. My parents’ house would be quiet if they had gone to Marigand as they intended, but not if they had stayed home to scold me. I would not go to the house on the Street of Flowers until I found out in precisely what manner I had come to own it. To have, I thought suddenly furious, the responsibility of it. A fine example they had set, if they had meant this. A fine example whenever they died; I was supposed to have a cat and nothing else, not an entire brick house full of nooks and crannies and linens and oddments and drains that needed attending to and windowseats for kittens. And five peony trees, I thought gloomily, that were no doubt languishing in the attic this moment.

  I went back to the House of Responsible Life, locked the door of Verdialos’s room, and began rummaging in his desk. It was not in very good order, and besides containing several unpaid bills and several more that had been paid twice, was graced with a number of peach pits and a mummified mouse. Floradazul had no doubt put it there to begin with, but that it should have been so long undiscovered must still be laid at Verdialos’s door.

  I found his notes concerning Calla, and nobly forebore to
read them. I could not find the ones about me; and he had not taken on anybody else for so long that those writings would all be gathering dust in the archives. I shuffled through the account-books again, and found finally a tall black one ruled for figuring that contained six pages of ancient household records, and Verdialos’s own journal.

  I closed it over my finger and sat frowning at the polished floor. Some time after that, a young man with his hair in three braids knocked on the door and delivered an indignant Floradazul with the remark that she had eaten all the cream off the largest fruit sculpture and then been artistically sick in a series of ingenious locations. That was all right, finding them all was giving the children something to do, but did I know where Etriae had kept the stomach potion, because several of the children had gotten sick too in sympathy; and the willow-bark; and the collection of odd mugs and glasses, because there were a great many people here; and where had she hidden the cask of beer she had taken away from him and two of his friends last week? I told him where Etriae kept the medicines and the glassware, and disavowed knowledge of the beer. Then I looked at Floradazul, but she had curled up and gone peacefully to sleep in a corner.

  I took my finger out of the journal, sighing. Etriae had meant to give them that beer on Festival Night; but if they wanted it on Beggar’s Night instead to help celebrate her death, who was I to thwart them? I went out and downstairs, found the braided boy, told him where the beer was, and returned to Verdialos’s room. I supposed it was mine now.

  If I did not read the journal, how would I discover what I wanted to know? It was not reasonable to go a hundred miles to Crab Isle to see if Gorodain was still there. It occurred to me that Captain Jemuel would be likely to know such things as whether exiled criminals had escaped and whether anyone had seen them. She might know also how reasonable it would be to think Gorodain might want to kill Verdialos and Etriae. I did not much want to talk to her; probably, in any case, it being Bazaar Day, she would not be working. But I could not read that journal without at least making some other attempt to find out what I wanted to know.

  I left Floradazul sleeping and found a footcab. There were if anything more of them about than usual; I supposed the job gave one a good chance to observe the festivities without losing a day’s earnings. The owner of this one, a perfectly cheerful young woman, tried to sing that most melancholy of songs, “Dry Well,” but kept forgetting verses and starting over. She didn’t mind, but I paid her feeling that even if throwing the dice yet again would lead me alive out of hell, I didn’t want to hear about it.

  I went up the steps Floradazul had climbed, and opened the door she had slipped through. The room where she had found Stone and Rusty was empty. I had to wander a little before I found Jemuel’s room. I saw nobody else, but she was there behind her desk, making patterns on its paper-strewn surface with an appalling number of empty mugs. It looked as if she had collected them with an eye to washing them and then forgotten about it; but surely Guard captains didn’t have to wash their own crockery.

  I clapped my hands gently, and she looked up. Her hair needed combing and her eyes sleep. She did not look in the least surprised to see me.

  I was surprised, if gratified, to see her. “Are a great many terrible things happening?” I said foolishly.

  “I wouldn’t say a great many,” said Jemuel. “Cheeky’s blew up on Divination Day; I can hardly wait to see how many crazies that sets off in the next four years. And your two Green priests went on Procession Day. Aside from that, less than the usual mayhem and more than the usual weirdness.” When I said nothing to that, she added, “Are you enjoying your house?”

  “I’d rather have Verdialos and Etriae,” I said. Jemuel merely looked at me; I added, “I wondered about Gorodain.”

  “I wondered about him, too,” said Jemuel. “He’s on Crab Isle.”

  “Couldn’t he have come off it?”

  “Not easily,” said Jemuel. “But I sent Lieutenant Jassil down there yesterday. They were giving away rides on the train to Saltigos.” Her mouth twitched; I wondered what Rusty had had to say about the train. Jemuel said with finality, “Gorodain’s on Crab Isle.” She leaned back in her chair and stretched.

  “Couldn’t he have left and gone back?”

  “Even assuming he would want to,” said Jemuel, “no. Lieutenant Jassil spoke to him. He ought to be dead.”

  That was what my father and Isobel had thought also; but as an answer to the question I had asked it did not seem satisfactory. “Do you think I killed them?” I said.

  She sat forward again and moved a few of the mugs back and forth on the desk. “I wish I’d never asked Dialo for that paper,” she said. “Without that, we’d assume this was the way they’d chosen, and roll our eyes, and forget it.”

  “But someone would have killed them before they were ready.”

  “Do you know how many—” said Jemuel, and let her breath out, and shook her head at her desktop.

  I said, “And with the paper, what will you assume?”

  “Is that the kind of joke he’d play?”

  I thought of saying yes, but Verdialos would not have liked it. “Not exactly,” I said. “Too subtle. Now the pig’s blood, that is the kind of joke he’d play.”

  That was the wrong thing to say, and though in fact her expression altered very little, I knew it. Explaining Floradazul to that weary and experienced face was more than I could manage. “Calla told me,” I said.

  “That’s more than she did for me,” said Jemuel.

  I could not tell what she thought; her air towards me shifted according to what I said. She did not look at me at any time as I would look at someone who had killed two people for offering nothing but kindness. But she had probably seen a great deal worse than that. “If I killed them,” I said, “how did I do it?”

  “Well, that’s the question, isn’t it,” she said.

  I went back to the House of Responsible Life and read Verdialos’s journal. He had very bad handwriting. Once I had found the dates I wanted, I had no desire to read the rest of it. The problem of Gorodain had occupied his mind almost to the exclusion of anything else; but in the passages I scanned finding the right ones there were a number of things I did not want to know, or wanted very much to know only if Verdialos or Etriae had seen fit to tell me. I had never thought for a moment that Verdialos doubted what he was doing; but here were the tracks of that doubt. It appeared that after a number of years of loving Etriae devotedly and regarding everyone else with the tolerant indifference of a well-fed cat, he had suddenly found himself growing fond of people again. I was one of them. He had loved me; truly he had. I was almost immediately ashamed to be so pleased about this: it had held him back and caused him much distress. But I was pleased just the same.

  This account ended in the middle of a sentence; I finally found its other half written upside down in a book otherwise occupied by gardening notes. Five years ago the tomato worms had been very bad; the lost children had rebelled at being made to pick them off the tomatoes.

  Floradazul woke up halfway through my reading, and required to be taken down to the party and made much of. They were lifting their glasses to Verdialos and Etriae as I came in. Somebody handed me a cup, and somebody else gave Floradazul a dainty confection of fish and cucumber. She bolted the fish, ejected the cucumber neatly, and pushed her head into her benefactor’s ankle. I drank the entire glass. It was Saltigan wine. I sneezed three times, and felt obscurely comforted.

  My reading had seemed very promising when I left it, but when I returned it petered out into a series of murky philosophical speculations and rapidly jotted notes that were agitated and evocative, but not informative. If he had been writing a poem for Remembrance Night, it might have made more sense. All I could gather was that, although Gorodain had indeed killed all those people, something else had happened also. Gorodain was a magician; the deaths of the six wizards were the culmination of some project stretching back thirty years at least, a project fueled
by his adherence to the old Green Church. He had not crept about Liavek at night with a ball of green lightning in his fist or a bottle of green poison in his pocket, as some of the stories said. He had sat in his high room in this very house and done subtle things with sorcery; and just like Verdialos and Etriae, the wizards he killed were dead without a mark on them—and without any pig’s blood, either. But if he had killed from a distance by magic, and his luck had been taken from him, then he could not have done what was done to Verdialos and Etriae.

  I turned to the most recent pages. “I have sent Calla for the pig’s blood,” I read. “It will do her good to be in something she cannot meddle with.” Although that was just what I would have said of Calla myself, it made me angry to read it. At the bottom of the page was written clearly “Quard—toyshop near Wizard’s Row.”

  I read it all again, several times; eventually I fell asleep on the floor in a position very uncomfortable to wake up in. I woke up not because I was uncomfortable but because somebody was banging on the door. It was the braided boy, very red about the eyes, with Floradazul; and the Serenity Ressali with a series of apologetic questions. Etriae had kept the records of children recently lost, and they had several downstairs who might need to be identified, asked questions, and probably returned to their parents.

  Festival Day

  The Serenity Ressali, a thin old woman with skin the color of a much-handled half-copper and short white hair like the burst pod of a milkweed plant, appeared to have had a great deal less sleep than I. This didn’t impair her concentration, but it made her testy. I could only be grateful that Etriae’s methods of working were considerably tidier than Verdialos’s. I found Ressali what she wanted, explained the system so that she would not have to ask me again, and went down to the kitchen for some breakfast. The kitchen looked as if the entire Green order had drunk itself halfway into the next world right there; the only person present, cooking barley porridge with bacon in it amidst a crowd of dirty pans, was the cook. He was red-eyed, too, but entirely pleasant. I discovered that he expected to sleep until evening, and most of the House with him. I thought this sounded an excellent plan, if I had had a bed to sleep in.