“Well, that’s all easy enough,” Tharais said.
“Yes, but if it was that easy, then people wouldn’t make mistakes that cause scandals,” Geral said. “For example, the newly betrothed or married can’t ribbon with another for a year. It’s considered indelicate. But if it’s a marriage purely for treaty, they might be ribboned with a lover or ribboned meaning they’re looking for one. Sometimes it depends on what time of day they wear ribbons. Or not.”
Macael laughed. “Symbolic ribbons! That sounds just like Colend.”
Geral laughed. Tharais laughed. Ivandred shook his head, still grinning.
Everyone noticed he didn’t say no.
After supper, when Tharais caught Macael alone, she said, “Thank you. If you can keep him away from home for the rest of the summer, well… you know.”
Macael placed his hand over his heart, his generous mouth curving in a grin. “Yes, O Queen. Any further commands?”
She gave him a mock stern look. “Indeed. Since my brother refuses to use his unless the world is ending, you are to use that golden scrollcase of yours, and if anything at all happens with this princess, you are to write to me every single night.”
Macael laughed. “I promise. But you know, I did wonder about his never using his scrollcase. He’s learned some spells—he could even make one—so it can’t be a matter of not trusting magic.”
Macael’s laughter vanished at Tharais’s grim expression. So grim, her resemblance to Ivandred was unsettling.
She said softly, “He has it in case the world ends. The world, to him, being home.”
NINE
OF WATER AND MAGIC
T
he summer that everything changed, we traveled to Sartor in the company of the compassionate Lady Darva, her younger sister Lissais, and several others. We Colendi have a word for the grief of a broken romance, which is a play on “river” and “tears.” Until that year I thought the “river” meant only the quantity of tears (which would be true) but I came to understand that it also meant the ceaseless flow of grief-stricken words. In private, Lasva talked about Kaidas, endlessly, examining every turn of his head, the exact meaning of every smile, his tone as well as his speech.
In public, Lasva spoke social nothings from Alsais all the way south to the aromatic pine forest of Barhoth, always endeavoring to smooth the ribbons of conversation that Ananda tangled. Ananda was still angry that Kaidas had actually married Carola. Young Gaszin was too experienced to exhibit any sign of emotion for the entertainment of court, but those who knew him best remarked on the sharpness of his sarcasm.
Then things changed, and the blame is mine.
One rainy day, as Lasva repeated every motion and word of a conversation that I had already discussed exhaustively with her, I thought, So much for the reality of human passion, as I clenched my teeth hard on a yawn, my eyes watering. I would swear that I showed no sign of how stifled I felt that humid day, but Lasva must have seen, or sensed it. She tipped her head in that considering way, murmured that she was tired and, thereafter, all we got from her was the same superficial politeness she gave the world.
For one day, it was a relief, but then Marnda and I hovered in worry, striving to find little ways to please Lasva, to win a genuine smile, to ease the unexpressed suffering from her gaze. Guilt kept me awake nights.
When we reached the lakeside town Pirun, she began practicing the Altan fan form alone in her room, sometimes to music played by hired musicians, other times accompanied only by the sound of rain, or the river beneath the windows.
The day after our arrival was Restday, so everyone was free. I set out for a long walk, grieved that I had failed Lasva when she needed me most. I stepped down from an arched bridge, examining a window that overlooked that bridge. It was so beautiful a scene but the shutters were closed, carved with ancient acanthus-leaf patterns blurred by wind, weather, and time. Why would the inhabitants not look out?
It’s like Lasva, I thought, and made a vow to bring her outside the prison of her grief.
I returned, and it became my turn to talk endlessly—about the gardens growing aromatic blossoms both familiar and strange, about what kind of life people might have when most of the town was comprised of inns that catered to the yearly pilgrimage to the Sartor festival.
Lasva listened but gone was the delight of past years, the questions and debate. When I offered information she thanked me, but the subject died after her gratitude. I had become another social obligation. I don’t think she was punishing me. I don’t think she was aware. She had fallen into so deep a reverie, emerging occasionally to read and reread a book of poems that she had copied out herself; they belonged to the old seasonal mode, but they were really poems about sorrow.
From Pirun we transferred by magic to Lirendi House in Ilderven, which was owned by Colend’s royal family. As soon as I recovered from the wrench of magic transfer, I ran to fetch and sort through all the waiting correspondence. In the front vestibule—a plain room tiled in blue and white that served as a weather buffer—was a large shallow bowl carved from pink marble into which city runners and personal pages put letters. In Sartor they do not fold notes into shapes. They merely crease them into thirds and close them with a blob of wax, stamped with a signet or carved seal.
Among the many notes to Lasva there was one for me, from Greveas, who had been watching for sign of our arrival.
Emras: there’s a new fad this year. They’re carrying decorated albums around, filled with sketching papers, on which they are to draw one another while listening to the music. You’ll want to have one ready—come as soon as you can.
Early the next morning, I hunched into my cloak as I hurried through the nearly empty streets.
Ilderven’s buildings are commonly five and even six stories, unlike Alsais’s, which are never more than three. Ilderven is mostly bare stone—shades of gray, warm sand, honey-brown, even a reddish rock that contrasts beautifully against the dark green pine forest on the mountain slope north of the city. The closer you get to the palace, the more marble you find.
I’d turned two corners and was heading toward the double spire above Twelve Towers, when I heard my name above the splash of my feet.
“Emras!”
I stopped at the running approach of a tall fellow wearing outlandish clothes. His round cheeks glowed with effort. Round little nose. Button chin—
“Olnar?” I gazed up in disbelief at my brother, who’d left the scribes for the magic school when I was six. I’d seen him only intermittently since, and he’d grown at least a hand since I saw him last.
“You shrank, Em,” Olnar said, grinning.
“What are you doing here?” I exclaimed.
“I’ve leave. Mother thought you might be here. I was heading for Lirendi House when I saw you bolt out like a horse from a barn, and I’ve been running after.” Olnar looked strange to me with that short tunic of shale blue coming to mid-thigh, worn over loose dun trousers tucked into low blue-weave boots. “It’s winter up north. Haven’t had a chance to change.”
Up north—he meant on the other side of the world.
“Where are you running off to?” he asked.
“Guild. There’s a new fashion—”
“What?” he exclaimed. “Sartor doesn’t have fashions. They repair and redo and replant, but it looks like it did a thousand years ago.”
The surprise encounter had shocked my wits into a tangle. I glanced around wildly, for I could not speak of my foremost problem—the desire to distract Lasva from her private grief—and my gaze caught the stylized knotwork in the corbel above us, a motif echoed in the collar around a gargoyle across the street. “Isn’t this city amazing? I wonder how old yon bird-creature is. And if it represents something real.”
“You’d be surprised what lives in the north, especially the wilds of Helandrias,” Olnar said grimly, eyeing me. “So what’s this fashion that seems to have you running from shadows?”
“Sketching albu
ms. They’re sketching one another this year, while they listen to the music.”
“Why don’t you just send a page to the bookmakers for a bound book, and come to breakfast with me?”
I frowned at him. “Is this a hint that you find my work frivolous?”
“Ah-yedi, sister! Enlighten me.” He tapped his fingers together in peace mode.
“Olnar, she’s a princess. What album she’ll carry reflects on me. I need to see the paper, the covers, and the ribbon marker, and I’ll want to make certain the binding is good.” It was reasonable, it was true, and it also concealed my worry about Lasva.
Olnar rocked back on his heels, squinting up at the crouching owl creatures staring down with hooded stone eyes. Mist beaded on his eyelashes. “Ah-ye,” he said. “So it has to be the best. And even if everyone else throws theirs away as soon as they get home, she’s a princess—maybe even heir—so hers becomes an artifact.”
“She’s not the heir anymore.”
“I’m behind in southern news. Ah-yedi! I will come along with you, and we can catch up.”
He fell in step beside me as I told him briefly about Princess Alian’s birth.
At the end, he peered down into my face, furrowing his nondescript eyebrows so like mine. “You’re hiding something. If you talk about something else, your tone is normal. As soon as our conversation touches the princess, you go flat. Em, I hope your heart is not given.”
“Heart-given!” I hiccoughed on a surprised laugh. “My heart is ungiven, and so is hers,” I said. “It’s just that… things are difficult right now.”
“With her losing a crown? I can imagine.”
My tongue shaped the words to deny that, then I hesitated again. Why not let him believe it? The world probably did.
So I sought another subject and found one. “Now the problem becomes all the suitors everyone expects. But I can leave that to the queen. And the Grand Seneschal, who will have to find room for them. Olnar, why magic? When I asked you before, all you’d tell me was that I’d find out later. Cousin Tiflis and I both found that very condescending.”
Olnar grinned. “It’s an odd thing. I know your age, but in my mind you are still six.”
We dodged around a party of workers carrying bits of scenery—looked like a false castle—across the square. Then I said, “Can you tell me now?”
“It was a girl,” Olnar admitted. “I’d passed my Fifteen late, so I was near sixteen by the time the practice rotations put me at the palace relay desk.”
“Oh, that was so tedious,” I said, remembering that month of monitoring the ensorcelled tile to which magically transferred messages were relayed. We had to note in a log book when messages were received, and who they were for, then file them in the slotted shelves against the wall.
“There was a mage student on pickup rotation. Never mind her name. Our passion faded within a month, which is to be expected at sixteen. But in that month I found every excuse I could to delay her, and so I asked questions about magic. The more I heard, the more I got interested in it. We stayed friends, and so, when I was hauled in for my career discussion that next winter, and I asked about transferring to scribe mage, she was the one who showed me around. I’m a full mage now,” he said, taking me by surprise. “Happened just this spring. I’ve a head for spells, it turns out. But we don’t write about what we do in letters. So I tell Mother and Father what I can, and you know how discreet they are.”
We’d reached the boulevard lined with venerable linden trees, one over from Quill Street. “So tell me how magic works. I know that spells do different things—you have to gabble Old Sartoran codes and make comic gestures.”
Olnar frowned. “Emras! You know mages don’t talk about it. They must have told you that a hundred times in scribe school.”
I sighed. “I do not want the secrets of spells, I only want to know how it works. But if you cannot tell me even that…” I made the formal Peace.
And my brother blushed. “Well, there’s no harm in generalities,” he said, and I tried not to see condescension in that. “Shall I come with you, since I’ve the time? I miss fine paper and inks, I have to admit.”
“I would be delighted in your company. Please, go on, if you will.”
“So. Generalities only! Think of magic potential as a giant lake. Got that image?”
“Yes.”
“And magic is the water.”
That seems obvious, I thought, but I only repeated, “Yes.”
“You’re standing at the edge of the lake. You’re thirsty, but you haven’t a cup, or a thimble, or even hands. You have no lips. How do you drink?”
“I guess I don’t.”
“Our ancestors—so we are told—used to be able to think magic into action. But we need the lips to sip, and the cup, and the hands to hold the cup. That’s what spells are: the lips, hands, and cup. The water is still water—its nature doesn’t change—but we need all these things to get and use it.”
We’d reached the corner of Quill Street, with Twelve Towers Archive on one side, the Scribe Guild on the other, and the royally appointed paper and book makers on either side.
“We used to hear warnings about Norsunder, the land of death beyond time, and their use of dark magic. ‘Dark’ meaning that its uses are evil, sending magic out of the world. But it made little sense. How can you send anything out of the world?”
“Think of steam—ah-ye, that’s not right, for steam beads up into water again. Think of the water boiling dry, and forget the steam. Think of the danger of the fire that is doing the boiling.”
“So boiling a pan dry is evil?”
Olnar rubbed his hands together as he squinted up at the statues of ancient writers. “It’s not evil itself, but most of those who use that kind of magic—no safeguards and spending it profligately—use it for evil purposes. And use it faster than nature can replenish it.”
“So light magic doesn’t spend it faster than it can be replaced?”
“Correct—which is where the word ‘light’ comes in, from the sun that returns each day. Light magic is used in small amounts. Bound to the thing being made or protected. Slowly it leaches back into the lake over time. It isn’t burned up, as in a house consumed by conflagration. That’s why all our things need to be respelled over and over.”
“So you go around renewing bridge spells, and road protections, and binding spells on walls and roofs?”
“I have done so,” he said slowly. “All this last year. But I’m training for wards.”
“I hear about wards. At borders. But not what they do.”
“They are invisible walls to keep out specific types of spells.” He made the flat hand gesture once used to negate spywell enchantments. “They can be as wide as a kingdom or as small as a single person. Kingdom-wide wards are built by a team of mages, working together. Those are the most powerful ones. Except the wards that put things beyond space, which is what banks use.”
I had never thought about banks, for I would never have a fortune to be kept for me. Banks in Alsais are run by a branch of the heralds, their storage all being shifted to magical space.
“And so Norsunder is not just a story to frighten children. It really exists—beyond time and place,” I said, hunching my shoulders when I saw how his mouth tightened.
“Oh, it exists,” he said in a low voice. “And the lords of it really are thousands of years old. And they really do smite you with a thought. But they seldom come into the world we know. We’re taught that the resumption of the pull of time and the weight of existence in the material world exact a cost even on them.”
We’d stopped in the street outside of the Guild. “Oh, I want to hear more. But I do not wish to miss Greveas.”
“Greveas,” he repeated.
“She gets up early—ah-ye! You know her?”
He shrugged. “We met. Look, your selection will require thought and attention. How about we try to meet again when you really are free, before I leave? We can catch
up on family news without having to worry about duty.”
Of course I agreed. I gazed after him, wondering if Greveas had been a girl in his life. That was the only explanation I could think of for his sudden change of mind.
TEN
OF FIRE AND WATER
I
n her private diary, Countess Darva of Oleff wrote later that summer: You must remember, my darling grandchildren, or grandchildren of my grandchildren—whoever reads this—I cannot know what fashion will decree in heralding the movements of courtiers by the time you are born, but in my day we all had handsome panels that attached to the sides of our coaches, and when we wanted our movements publicly known, the panel was taken off and hung on a hook outside the castle, or palace, or suitable posting inn, proclaiming our presence. On our river and canal barges, the panels hung from the taffrail: the most important in the middle, and the others moving outward by rank and degree.
So you see the picture, my dears? We are at a posting house along the Margren River at Arva, at the very southwest corner of Colend. This is a large affair built of pale, patterned brick and decorative stone, located above Great River Fork, and there along the low roof are all our panels, including that of Princess Lasthavais, and behind the inn are gathered the prettiest coaches we can afford, for it’s here that we will leave the river and start eastward toward home.
Then rides up, in the sort of military formation you only heard about in very old songs, a group of young men, most with braided hair the color of sunflowers, wearing these plain coats of servant gray that were not cut like anything our servants wear: made tight to their arms and chests, high at the neck, but the skirts long and full, down to the tops of their high blackweave boots. And, oh my dear you would never believe the horses! Riding at the front, all dressed in black except for the golden buckle on his belt, is their leader, who stops his horse and raises his hand.