The hills weren’t so green now that most of the fields had been trampled into mud or harvested to feed the Usurper’s fighters. The enemy encampment lay several hundred paces away. Between it and the city wall were several straight ridges that had not been there before.
Extending her senses, she was relieved to find no Stain. Though the civil war had been brutal and unforgiving, neither the king nor the Usurper had risked the Angels’ wrath by ordering the use of magic. Everyone had speculated on whether one or the other side would stoop that low at some point, but she doubted they would. Only priests had the freedom to grow proficient at magic, and she doubted the king or Usurper would find any willing to use it for warfare.
Another horn blast came from somewhere beyond the wall, but this was a different sound than before. The noise outside the tower lessened for a moment, then the tone of it changed. A call went up, which was repeated over and over, close to the tower and also in the distance. Soldiers rushed up and down the stairs, forcing Rielle and Betzi to return to the corners again.
“They’re retreating,” someone bellowed atop the tower. Rielle recognised Kolz’s voice. Betzi’s worried expression vanished.
“Is it a trick?” a fainter voice called from somewhere in the street below.
“Might be. Did any survive the breach?”
“I’ll check.”
Returning to the window, Betzi and Rielle watched the Usurper’s forces withdraw, the soldiers disappearing over the ridges before marching into sight again beyond them. One of the peaked structures of the enemy encampment abruptly collapsed, then another.
“Are they packing up?” Rielle wondered.
“Who is that, walking up the road?” Betzi asked.
Rielle squinted, searching for the people Betzi had seen. “Where?”
“Three men, one with a gold-coloured coat, two in strange clothing. Foreigners, maybe.”
“Your eyes are much better than mine,” Rielle said. “Perhaps if they come near…” Her breath caught in her throat as she saw the trio.
“The one wearing gold might be the Usurper,” she heard Betzi say. “The others…”
Rielle opened her mouth, but could not find the air to speak.
“… they look a little like priests,” Betzi continued. “Didn’t you say they wear dark blue in the north? Rel?”
Rielle’s lungs began to protest. As her throat unclenched, air rushed in.
“What’s wrong, Rel?”
Rielle shook her head, but she could not take her eyes from the trio approaching the city. Hope and fear tumbled over one another in her heart. If this is… if they are…
“… escort these two women from the battlements to their home,” a voice said at the entrance of the stairway above.
“But, Captain—” Betzi began.
“Go home, Bet,” Kolz said. “Lock the door. I will send news to you, when we know what the situation is.”
A hand grasped Rielle’s arm and pulled her away from the window. A memory she kept well bound to the past broke free and she felt an echo of terror and a vision of a desperate man, his hand brandishing a knife. She closed her eyes, gathered the memory up and locked it away again. When she opened them again it was Betzi’s face she saw.
“Come on, Rel.” Betzi linked her arm in Rielle’s and guided her down the stairs. The tower now reminded Rielle of another. A mountain prison. A young priest leering. A scarred priest. An Angel, more beautiful than any mortal could hope to be…
Bright sunlight made her wince and brought her back to the present. Betzi stopped. The young archer stood a step away, a scowl on his face as he saw Rielle properly for the first time. Taking a deep breath, Rielle pushed away the memories, and the urge to run back to the tower window and confirm that she was mistaken.
Because she had to be, surely.
“Are you all right, Rel?” Betzi asked.
“Yes.”
Betzi turned to the archer. “Lead on,” she said brightly, and they set forth into the subdued streets of Doum.
CHAPTER 2
Standing in front of the loom, Rielle stared at the partially completed tapestry and let her memories overlay the design.
The bobbins still hanging from the surface were coated with dust. She hadn’t worked on it in over a year. It had been her practice piece, on which to try out and refine the techniques she had been taught. By now she ought to have finished it and freed up the loom, but the old wooden structure was too warped to be used for a valuable tapestry anyway, and the one student Grasch had taken on since Rielle had finished her training hadn’t even finished her first year of learning how to spin and dye yarn.
The weaving contained the awkwardness and mistakes of a novice, but that was not why she had abandoned it. The workshop had been in great demand until the siege, keeping all the weavers busy, but that was not why she hadn’t set aside a few hours to complete it. Betzi and some of the other girls had urged Rielle to sit at the loom countless times, but they could not persuade her to work on it.
The trouble was, filling in that last section meant taking a great risk. The karton–the drawing that hung behind a tapestry as a guide–and the painted design showed vague shapes in the unfinished area, because she did not dare add the detail that would reveal the subject. Many times she had wondered why she had chosen the subject at all, especially when she had promised never to speak of it to anyone. Yet her hands had drawn the karton almost as if someone else had controlled them.
Perhaps someone had. The possibility that an Angel had guided her was the only reason she hadn’t cut the unfinished piece down and burned it.
“A weaver’s first tapestry often says more about them than they expect,” Grasch had said, when the other weavers began to speculate on her reason for ceasing work.
“Or about someone else,” Betzi had added. “Whoever this man is. An ex-lover perhaps?”
“He is a priest,” Tertz had pointed out.
“So? Not all countries require priests to be celibate.”
Rielle smiled as she remembered the conversation. That was when Betzi hated me. And I her. The girl had been the favourite in the tapestry workshop, though Grasch claimed to have none. Rielle had been desperate to prove her worth to the master weaver, having been rejected by the town’s master painter after a trial of her skills full of mockery and derision.
Her hands had been shaking so much when Grasch tested her artistic ability, she had barely been able to paint at all, and the weavers had exchanged looks, speaking words she couldn’t understand but which communicated their doubts plainly. Even though they had given her food and a place to sleep, she thought she had failed because the master weaver put her to the most basic and menial tasks. It took some months before she understood enough of their language to discover that spinning yarn and learning to dye it was the first stage of her training, and that cooking, cleaning and serving the weavers were chores given to all new apprentices.
No single incident had turned the dislike between her and Betzi to friendship, just small moments in which they had gained each other’s respect. Though very different in personality, Rielle liked to think that their souls were similar. They both had been hardened by their life before joining the workshop. Each respected the other’s need to keep that past secret.
A noise behind Rielle made her jump.
“Is it the right time, then?” The voice was whispery with age.
Rielle squinted in the direction it had come from. She had brought the loom over to the only window whose shutters hadn’t been nailed closed to deter intruders. With eyes used to the brighter light, it took her a while to see the old man sitting in a dark corner of the workshop.
“Master Weaver,” she said, “I thought you would be upstairs. If I am disturbing you—”
“Not at all,” he said, “I am enjoying the sound of weaving again. I will be disappointed if you stop.”
Looking down, she considered the bobbins she’d been lining up on the trays.
“I guess I must do it, then.” Oddly, her voice sounded more certain than she felt.
“Indeed.” He sighed. “I feel the world turning.”
A shiver ran down her spine. She heard the truth in the saying, in the acknowledgement of great change in the world, but did not want to contemplate it. Yet it filled her with urgency. Weaving was slow work. She did not know how much time she had.
Taking a stool over to the loom, she sat down, blew dust off the threads and bobbins and contemplated their colours. The hues were still vivid. A local berry made a dye almost as vibrant as the bluegem pigment used in the spirituals of her homeland. She had tried to make paint out of it, but the result was dull and disappointing. What made a good dye did not always make good paint, and vice versa.
The blacks were achieved with a mix of dung and the local mud. Reds were extracted with vegetable skins and rusty metal, yellows with a meadow flower, all easily acquired, which meant there was plenty of thread coloured in the skin tones she needed. Since Schpetans were almost as pale as her subject this worked in her favour.
She picked up a bobbin and began to catch every other warp thread with the point, pulling the whole thing through where she judged the hue must change, then weaving back again. A few taps pushed the new yarn snugly against the old. Small sections at a time, she filled in the gap between collar and jaw, following the angle in her memory rather than the karton. Extra stitches here and there mixed with the next shade, creating the illusion of shadow.
Now that she had begun, her hands quickly found their rhythm. As the face began to emerge she worked with increasing speed. Her choice had been made, and now she only wanted to make sure she completed the tapestry before… maybe just before the other weavers discovered what she was doing. So she chose her colours carefully. Mistakes would cost her more time.
As she worked she opened the doors to the past and braced herself.
But the pain she once believed would always be too vivid to bear remained dull. Only sadness and a little guilt remained. Would her love for Izare have faded as fast even if they had remained together? Surely her regret at breaking her lover’s heart and ruining her family’s ambition should last longer than five years? It took centuries for the best-made tapestries to fade; in comparison, the time she’d been in exile was nothing.
Yet the cause of all the heartbreak, her use of magic, had been forgiven by nothing less than an Angel. Surely, then, she should forgive herself too? And she had done far worse than that. She had killed a priest with magic.
At that memory she shuddered. Sa-Gest had been a vile, manipulative man who had blackmailed other women into his bed. But he hadn’t succeeded with her, and all men deserved a chance to defend themselves before judgement. Yet she felt more horror at the thought she had killed someone and at how easy it had been, than that she had killed him.
He was there one moment and gone the next. She’d pushed him off the precipitous road and over the cliff–and stripped magic from a great swathe of the valley to do it.
If she had seen his body, she was sure that the memory of it would haunt her now. Instead it was an image of a man with impossibly pale skin–the hue she was weaving now–that visited her dreams, waking and sleeping.
“You are forgiven, Rielle Lazuli. And I offer you this: if you vow never to use magic again, unless to defend yourself, I will give you a second life. You cannot return to your home. You must not contact those you left. You must travel to a distant land where you will be a foreigner and a stranger.”
His lips had been… what colour had they been? She faltered, her hands still as she considered. If the shade hadn’t been remarkable then it must have blended well with the rest of him. So his lips were probably pinker than his skin, but not so dark as to look painted.
The shape had been fuller than the thin line of the typical Schpetan mouth, closer to that of her own race. Weaving slowly, she worked until the result seemed right. Taking a few steps back, she was startled to find the mouth almost appeared to be smiling. She could not remember if he had smiled, though she felt he must have at some point. Perhaps only because he had been so forgiving and kind, and she had not grown up expecting that from an Angel dealing with the tainted–those who had stolen and used the magic that belonged to the Angels.
That was not the only expectation that had been proven wrong, that day.
“I give you permission to use magic, if your life is in danger and you have no other choice.”
Her stomach clenched as she thought of the magic she and Betzi had used to fend off the soldiers. A lifetime of caution could not be so easily escaped. She had not used magic the time, not long after her apprenticeship began, when she had been cornered and fondled by one of the palace litter bearers, only escaping when a coughing fit loosened his grip. Still at odds with Betzi, she had been surprised when the girl guessed what had happened and offered sympathy that was, for once, lacking in mockery.
“Do you have any knack for weaving the darkness?” the girl had asked. By then Rielle had learned enough of the Schpetan language to know what Betzi was asking, and that the Schpetans were inclined to overlook the occasional, small transgression. “If you do, I can teach you a trick or two to warn off men like him,” she’d offered. “Don’t wait until you’re cornered again, either. Like everything in life, it takes practice.”
Only when the siege had begun had Rielle accepted that offer. While the Angel might have given her permission to use magic, she could never prove it. He may have dealt with the priests at the Mountain Temple who had once used tainted women to breed stronger priests, but there had been years of suffering before his intervention. She did not want to find out what this nation did to punish the tainted, or rely on the Angels to rescue her, unless she had no other choice.
Betzi had taught Rielle to create a tiny flame by vibrating the air until it grew hot, and to harden and move the air in order to push something away. The girl had told her to practise the trick, reasoning that if the Angels wanted magic for themselves but permitted it for self-defence, then surely it was better to use it as efficiently as possible.
Even so, using magic had made Rielle dream of walking down the main streets of Fyre dressed in rags, filth flung at her by the crowd. It made her feel sick with fear whenever the local Schpetan priests were near.
And now the Angel was here, if the rumours that had followed their return to the workshop did truly confirm what she had seen at the wall. Had he come to punish her? She shivered as she imagined disapproval in the Angel’s ageless eyes–eyes that had been so dark she’d had difficulty making out the border between cornea and pupil. How am I to show that? Perhaps a warm and cool black together. The same for his hair, perhaps?
She paused to raise a hand to her hair. It had grown long enough to touch her shoulders by the time she’d arrived at Doum. She’d let the locals believe that Fyrian women always wore their hair short, and that she then grew it longer because she liked the local custom. Glossy and black, it fascinated Betzi, who liked to braid it.
The Angel’s hair was black, but where light touched it had reflected blue. As she finished weaving the forehead she glanced at the tray of bobbins and the shade of blue she had chosen. An improbable colour, but one she had recognised below the city wall that morning–and not just from the robes of the priests.
She frowned. It might not be him. It might be an ordinary priest wearing a close-fitting dark blue hat. Yet there had been something about the figure’s walk that made her skin prickle. Nonsense. I never saw him even stand up at the Mountain Temple. How could I recognise his walk?
Behind her, she heard Grasch sigh. Suddenly aware of the room around her, every sound she made seemed crisper and louder than usual. She missed having a buzz of voices around her as she worked. Other kinds of weaving were solitary–only one weaver could operate a fabric loom at a time. Tapestry weaving allowed as many weavers to work as could fit, side by side at the loom. Sometimes they crowded in together when deadlines approach
ed. The weavers with good voices would sing, the rest humming along.
But the workroom had grown steadily quieter as each day of the siege passed. Continuing with commissions had kept the weavers busy, but when they reached the point where a vital shade of yarn ran out and there was no more dye, they had no choice but to stop working on a tapestry. Now all the aum that provided the fleece had been killed and eaten. As talk of fuel supplies running out reached them, the weavers feared that people would come seeking the wood of the looms to burn, or that they would be forced to burn them themselves. All the more reason to finish her tapestry. They could sacrifice a poorly made loom rather than a good one.
At last the top of the figure’s head was done. She continued weaving towards the border, continuing the radiating black lines around the figure. They were black lines instead of the customary white. She suspected that this, more than her unconventional way of representing an Angel, was the most dangerous choice she had made. But she could not deny what her eyes and mind had sensed. She knew that the white lines in temple paintings were an illusion created by the black of the Stain radiating from an Angel when he drew in magic. But to suggest that an Angel created Stain when using magic might be considered blasphemous.
As the last thread was tucked into place, the last end cut and the last bobbin set down in the basket, an old weight lifted from her shoulders and a new one settled into place.
So here it is. My secret revealed. It’s just a question of how well I’ve done it. Slipping off her chair she turned away and walked over to Grasch’s chair. The old man was asleep and snoring softly, but he was a light sleeper and the sound of her footsteps roused him. She turned, lifted her eyes to the Angel staring back at her from the loom. Her heart lurched.
There he is. Maybe time has exaggerated what I remember, but the essence is there. Unearthly. Ageless. Kind.