Auralia's Colors

by Jeffrey Overstreet

  In the Ring, the dancing flames of the torches stole her concentration. She could feel their heat, smell the sweat and the damp wool garments of the crowd that surrounded her. She traced the edges of the cold tiles with her bare, bruised feet.

  When she closed her eyes, she dizzied in the gravity of sleep. How many days had she forced herself to stay awake?

  Ever since her ordeal in the wild, she had braided, unbraided, spooled, and spun, worried that if she rested for a moment she might never wake again. The toil of weaving the last loose lines together had commanded all her strength and attention. She could not be sure if she had fastened them out of impatience, desperate to finish the work, or out of glad obedience to their subtle provocations. At times, the cloth in her hands had been heavy with tears.

  From the moment the blind Bel Amican woman cried out and clutched at the colors, Auralia’s day world and her dream life had become inseparable, no matter how she fought to unscramble them. It certainly seemed illusory when she staggered from the Cragavar trees to the gates of Abascar and ordered the guard to call for the summoner. For a few moments there, she felt herself drifting, pulling at strands that held her together, hovering like a kite above the scene, watching herself ask for something she felt no will to request. In that suspended state, she had glimpsed an audience around her, spectral and translucent figures, shy, curious, and close. The Northchildren.

  “You do not know where you come from?” Aug-anstern was asking, his eyes red as cherries in a face of doughy flesh.

  This was now. This was here. This was inside Abascar’s walls. That was not a river of blood flowing beneath his feet toward her. “A crimson carpet,” she whispered. “Crimson.”

  “You must know, you ridiculous girl. The Gatherers only care for orphans from within House Abascar. So tell me, are you a trespasser? A thief? Where is your true home?”

  She replied, unsure if her voice was sounding. But the examiner’s fingers flexed and grasped at the air, sharp black nails trying to catch and crush her words. What had she answered? Why did they laugh? Why were the people in the green headdresses clear and cruel in her vision, while everything else seemed pale?

  “Never mind that for now. Something else offends me worse than your mumbling and your filthy brown cloak. You have seen summer and winter come and go sixteen times, and you have nothing in your hands. You bring no pledge of service to us. Did no one explain the ritual to you?” He gestured to those Gatherers pardoned in the Rites.

  Her eyes found Krawg, who stood behind a ribbon that bounded the space reserved for the redeemed. He sat with his hood pulled over his head so she could see only the clouds of his breath on the cold breeze. His knob-knuckled hand gripped his picker-staff as if he might snap it in two.

  “Stammer Cole carried a rake to us. Fudden Slopp brought a carving knife and a stone hammer. Krawg’s too ill to be of much use, but as he has labored for years, he’ll enjoy the safety of Abascar’s walls for the remainder of his days. Each of these has earned an opportunity to make themselves useful to the house. But you…Your hands are empty.”

  Auralia opened her left hand, which held a strand of thread, the remainder of the string she had spun from the feather of that magnificent bird. The strand was such a deep, deep red…darker than blood, brighter than ruby.

  This was the filament that fulfilled her quest, the key to the riddle of her work. She thought of the ale boy standing somewhere in the mass behind her, of how he loved to spark bursts of color for her delight. It was enough to give her a fleeting smile. She would give him one last surprise. She closed her hand over the strand, sure she felt the flame that burnt within it.

  “We’ll cast you back to the reach of beastmen until you learn something of use!” one of the magistrates bellowed. “What have you to say for yourself? Have you been sent to try the patience of King Cal-marcus ker Har-baron?”

  A woman’s voice, a whisper, reached her ear from the crowd. She knew the voice immediately—Ellocea, a Gatherer who had been pardoned two years ago. A Gatherer known for her ever-present crutch, but even more for her way with a paintbrush. “Be careful, Auralia,” she was saying. “Do what they tell you to do.”

  Aug-anstern laughed and addressed the people. “Someone outside the walls has sent this wretched girl to entertain us, or perhaps to disrupt our honorable ceremony. She says she wishes to speak with the king, that she has come with something to show him.”

  Had she said that? Auralia thrust out her chin and faced her questioner, striving to muster some confidence.

  Aug-anstern was enjoying all this attention as he pranced back and forth at the top of the stairs. “We know we have the respect of fair House Bel Amica. We know that House Jenta favors us, and we have never been troubled by spies from the south. So if she’s a spy, she’s been sent by a fool. And there is only one man who would dare to taunt his lordship in such a fashion. Perhaps…”

  The advisor’s jaw snapped shut as if he were a puppet responding to the will of his controller, and another voice—a roar—filled the courtyard.

  The song stopped midverse, and the sky became a deeper grey. Auralia sent a pleading glance toward the musicians. But when the next question came in a different voice, resonant with menace, she looked up into the dissimilar eyes of King Cal-marcus—one green, one gold. There was something familiar about his face, as if she had seen him when he was a young man looking down upon her from a similar distance. Had she ever seen him ride a vawn? Surely not. She had not lived enough years to see him young. Another name came to her. Cal-raven.

  “Have you been sent?” The king’s question was pointed, full of accusation and anger. “Who sent you?”

  Her eyelids fluttered, beaded with new raindrops. Even as she looked out at the world, she could see it reflected upside down and distorted. The storm was breaking. The gulls yelped and wrote invisible exclamations in the air, while the vultures above them maintained their slow, patient circles. The king waited. Gossip ceased. The world went still.

  She watched the birds’ hypnotic spirals, felt the wind brush back her hair, and then closed her eyes as a chance ray of sunlight broke through and warmed her face. It was as though the weather lifted her arms slowly above her head to embrace the light, to praise the storm, and in doing so she shrugged the heavy earth-brown cape from her shoulders. It was time to be free of its burden. And it fell away with ease.

  Her dark cover dropped like a curtain, and the sunlight caught the second cloak that she had concealed—the cloak in which every strand had known her hands; every knot had been crafted once, twice, and again until right; every line of color had been teased, touched, and tightened until it found a perfect tension that would enhance the weave entire.

  Auralia reached up, cold in the wind, and pinched the end of the loose red thread between her finger and her thumb, letting the strand rise and trace the wind. Then she nimbly tucked it through a loop at the collar point and wound it thrice around a bold black button of mountain lodestone.

  The color of that last thread, like a drop of blood in water, dissipated and spread, transforming the extravagant whole.

  The grey of the day might have been night in view of the brightness that flared up from the Ring of Decision. All the power of springtime had arrived in an instant.

  The air, ablaze, filled with color the way wine fills a glass. Ripples of shimmering hues spread in expanding circles across the faces of the storm clouds.

  The birds laughed, exultant.

  Trapped by the thunderstruck crowd, the ale boy could not see Auralia. He stared upward instead, watching the light as it painted the sky.

  Around him, children on their parents’ shoulders silently pointed toward the Ring of Decision.

  The adults remained as still as the towering wooden statue of the king, which was splashed with strange colors from the fountain of light far below.

  Beside him, Scharr ben Fray reached into his hood to unfix the stone disguise, uncovering his face and a fall of tears wh
ile the mask fell to the grass. “All the colors of the Expanse and more,” he whispered in reverence. “Colors…colors we’ve never seen.” As if trying to find answers, the stonemaster turned to the north wall. “What does she know that we don’t?”

  The colors the ale boy saw in the sky—he remembered them. He had seen them before, softly flickering behind a curtain in Auralia’s caves.

  More birds were gathering—streamertails, greenfeet, blustercalls, blue-breasts, and the furious vultures. They rose and fell over the platform in waves, intent, trying to snatch the colors from the air.

  There were so many things the ale boy wanted to be. To be strong, so he could push his way through the people pressed together before him. To be tall. To have authority. To be king. To be next to Auralia. To be elsewhere. To be free of this horde, of this role, free of his superiors.

  But in that moment he remained small and thus unable to see. He remained weak. He was an errand boy, lost in a multitude, sent and expected. He teetered on tiptoe until his feet hurt. He strained for the voices of the king and the girl. But from his position on the trodden courtyard grass he could not see any piece of the event.

  What he saw instead was the wet, windblown curtain opposite the king’s statue, falling against all that it concealed—a statue of the lost queen. Her outline pressed through the cloth, a ghost raised by outrage, eyes empty and wide, mouth open in a protest, an ultimatum, a cry, her hands raised in a frozen gesture declaring this event an abomination.

  Children broke the silence. They charged, climbed over each other, ran pell-mell between the legs of grownups, and pushed their way to the front, toward Auralia.

  The ale boy prepared to move as well. But the mage caught him and lifted him. He stood on the old man’s shoulders.

  He gazed across the field of hoods, hats, and helmets—all of which revealed shifting, living colors—to the row of humble Gatherers, the clearing below the birds, and there, in the Ring of Decision, a bonfire of light.

  For a moment, he feared they had set a torch to Auralia’s garment.

  But then, he saw that the fire was her garment—a cloak as elaborate as a tapestry, as magnificent as wings.

  The ale boy understood now; she had indeed been weighed down but not with grief. This had been the vision compelling her from the day that first thread gleamed in her hands.

  The magistrates leaned back as if scorched. The Bel Amican ambassadors covered their faces.

  King Cal-marcus clutched his goblet in one hand, while he reached with the other to try and break a fall. He brought the cup to his lips and swallowed all it contained, a feat that (the ale boy was certain) would have knocked flat any other man in the house.

  If a crowd looks upon the sea, they all see a different mass of water, for it casts color and light in all directions. In the same way, everyone saw Auralia’s colors, but each saw a different flourish. Auralia’s work played all the notes an orchestra can know. And more even than that. Such vision could only have come from someone who had been Elsewhere, seen Something Other, and focused all her energy into preserving the experience in a frame.

  For all present in the courtyard, what was real and possible had been transformed. The eyes of their eyes were, for a moment, open to a world larger and more beautiful than they could have imagined, to the luminous presence of every man and woman, boy and girl.

  Clouds moved again across the sun, and the glow of Auralia’s colors softened, like a flame drawn down into a pulsing coal.

  Auralia absently loosened the binding thread and pulled it free of the cloak, closing it up in her hand.

  As she did, the lights diminished, and she stood before the king still radiant with the colors of what she had made. She heard the whispers.

  “Who does she fancy she is?”

  “Such colors…”

  “The dungeon. Bound for the dungeon.”

  “Just a child.”

  “Now them Bel Amicans will have something to say when they go home.”

  “There’s no queen rich enough to have somethin’ like that.”

  The children surrounding Auralia reached forward to timidly poke and prod at the colors, hoping the hues might rub off on their hands. Auralia endured their gentle nudges and tried to remember Aug-anstern’s questions. Moments later the guards stepped in, driving back her admirers with the butts of their spears to clear the Ring.

  The king perched at the top of the stairs, his robes hanging around him like the wings of a predator bird. For a moment, many believed he would fall. The torment in his face suggested that he was unsure if he had suffered a terrible symptom of the drink or if the world had been truly transfigured for a few breathtaking moments.

  Auralia thought of the scarecrows, of the yellow-squash king whose head she had broken, of the smoke that escaped in a sigh.

  “Who told you to come and taunt the king of Abascar?” barked Aug-anstern, twitching at the back of the platform.

  “We already know the answer,” said King Cal-marcus, finding his voice at last. The wooden stairs creaked beneath his boots as he descended toward his offender. “But I want to hear you say it, little girl.”

  “Scharr ben Fray,” whispered the Housefolk behind her. “He’s talking about the exiled mage.”

  “Tell me, Gatherer girl, who hides like a coward and sends a child to taunt me? Confess your master’s name.” Cal-marcus’s voice rose to a commanding volume, even as it wavered under the influence of his turbulent drink. “Did he bewitch you the way he tried to cast spells on my son?”

  Auralia watched the storm of birds. She thought of Dukas and how he would have purred at the sight of so many. She wondered if his dreams looked anything like this. Had she ever seen so many in the sky at one time? They did not make a sound, nor did they fight. They only circled, waiting.

  “Did your master conjure that…that reckless magic?” the king asked. Auralia could smell the hajka on his breath. “Did he send you to insult me for allowing the Proclamation of the Colors? You foolish, gullible orphan. You are a wild, reckless wretch from the wilderness. You’re a joke made at Jaralaine’s expense.”

  The king looked back at the veiled statue of his lost queen. Then he lunged and seized Auralia by the wrist, pulling her forward. She stumbled and fell on her way up the stairs to the dais. Gasps and shouts burst from the crowd.

  “Look out over the people.” The king’s voice trembled in his attempt to suppress his temper. “You’ll recognize one who doesn’t belong. Point out your master. Where is he?”

  One of the reedflutists timidly sounded the ceremony’s theme, coaxing the others halfheartedly to join him, but an order from the king silenced them.

  Braver all the time, birds swooped low above the platform.

  “Where is he?”

  Auralia’s answer would become engraved in each listener’s memory as the boldest speech ever delivered before the king. Housefolk would try to reconstruct the words, inventing many and varied distortions. The people would argue and fuss over who remembered them best. But all would agree they were glad to have been alive that day to witness such a spectacle…that is, until the events set in motion during this ceremony would come to fruition and make the people of Abascar wish they could forget.

  “You know where my master is,” Auralia said, looking down at the tangle of thread in her hands. “When you’re sleeping, he walks through your mind. But when you’re awake, you have to look to find him. Right now, he’s living in the lake. But tomorrow, who can tell? He might take to the sky or the forest. He’s always moving about, but he likes to hide just to see who’ll come seeking.” She gestured to the northern horizon.

  No one said a word, but their expressions confirmed what the Housefolk were thinking. To speak of the Keeper in the presence of the king was a flagrant violation of the law.

  “What a curious creature,” remarked a smiling Bel Amican. “If she was sent to taunt you, King of Abascar, then what an elaborate joke this is. Let us take her back to Be
l Amica.”

  The king turned on his heel, seething.

  But the Bel Amican continued. “Take no offense, King of Abascar. We seek to preserve the laws you have designed. We will take this trouble from your courtyard. Such an impressive exhibition will be welcome in our house.”

  Auralia heard the sharp crack before she felt the sting from the back of the king’s hand. Her head snapped around, and whatever the king said next was lost in the ringing of her ears. It might have been “Foolish forest girl.” Or “Reckless, worthless fool.”

  She collapsed to her knees.

  A bitter cry from across the platform, a woman’s voice, urged the king on in his anger.

  A young woman—the one promised to the prince—was pointing at Auralia’s cloak. “Take it away from her!” The young woman came forward, barely escaping her mother’s anxious grasp. Auralia noticed the impressive colors of her gown. “Colors such as those belong only to the King of Abascar. They don’t belong to…to her.”

  “Colors don’t belong to me nor to the king.” Auralia bowed her head. Small drops of blood spilled from the wound where the Bel Amican hunter had clubbed her.

  “The Proclamation,” Stricia hissed. “King Cal-marcus, don’t forget about the Proclamation.”

  “I know the laws of my house.” The king rasped, “Sit down, Stricia kai Ark-robin, and say no more.”

  Aug-anstern signaled to soldiers across the courtyard. They answered, marching toward the stairs.

  The king turned to receive them. “Take this wicked girl away for questioning. We shall pry these lies from her head.”

  “What about that, my lord?” Ark-robin gestured to Auralia’s cloak.

  “Lock it away in the Underkeep like the rest of House Abascar’s colors. There it will stay…until I announce Abascar’s Spring has come.”

  At those words, the Housefolk exchanged uneasy glances.

  Then someone from the back of the crowd responded with a spiteful “Ha!”