“He was, and Pelan, in spite of his avowal to Darus last night that he would comply with the minimum degree of welcome toward that boorish Hrethan, I heard Raifas offer to take her out again, and to Ardam, yet. . . .”
The voices had been fading. At that point Ingras’s voice became a murmur in which individual words could not be distinguished. I could have turned the corner to follow and eavesdrop more, except why? I’d learned enough to think about!
Once again I ran for my suite, but this time it was not a retreat. It had been something of a relief to hear Pelan’s and Ingras’s real voices instead of that unnervingly smooth, expressionless courtly intonation that they considered so civilized. But Ingras’s opinion of me was so different from her behavior that I lost any interest in asking her for guidance.
So far, the only ones who hadn’t seemed to lie to me (I reserved judgment about Dhes-Andis, whatever he claimed) were the servants.
When I got there I had my questions ordered in my mind. Kal and Tay, young man and older woman, came out of the alcove.
“What does egg-civilized mean?” I asked when the bowing rigmarole was over.
Tay flicked a glance at Kal, who returned her look with a minute nod: though she was the elder he was staff leader.
Tay said, “It is both an idiom and a specific, Imperial Princess. The specific meaning is to give a newly hatched or born creature a fais upon birth, to begin civilization at once.”
“Civilization means like training a horse?”
They glanced at one another, then Tay bowed. “I believe so, Imperial Princess, though we do not have horses on this island. But we know what they are. Other animals and birds are civilized in much the same way.”
“And so the idiom?”
“It is a term for the diligent parent or guardian,” Tay said. “Whose vigilant correction guides the child to learn in gentle increments. This the child is permitted to go into company at a young age.”
“Correction, you say? With a fais?” I asked in horror.
She studied me with a mirrored horror, and then (if I skip all the bowing and the careful third person formality owed to my non-existent serenity) said, “We all were raised with fais. Before anyone is given responsibility we understand the consequences of influence.”
“What does that mean?”
“I served in the nursery in my young years,” Tay said. “One learns the art of proper correction by practicing on oneself.” She demonstrated by smacking two fingers smartly inside her wrist, then touching her fais.
Fascinated, I saw a tiny flash of green on the inside of her wrist.
“So it doesn’t hurt any more than that?” I asked in total disbelief.
By now they were all there, and every single one of them bowed and assured me that no, the correction was no more than that.
“When do you start doing it?”
“Why, as soon as a child begins to walk,” said she, and indicated the stove. “We all know it is warm in winter, but we also know that to touch it would be to burn our hands. How did we learn? A tiny slap away from the stove on curious fingers is a far better deterrent than permitting the child to burn tender flesh, is it not?”
“The guardian must be responsible for both himself and the child,” Kal said. “We are all educated in civilized behavior from the time we first crawl. And if a child has been born among the Chosen, education in responsibility equally begins early.”
That caused a fresh cascade of questions, but an imperial minion arrived with a summons to you know where.
At once they bustled around me, switching out my rumpled, still-damp outfit for a fresh formal one embroidered over with tiny lilies and rosebuds.
Then off I went, hurrying to the timing of my thudding heart, my throat echoing with remembered pain.
I nearly stumbled over one of the white cats, same color as the marble floor, and risked a moment to bend down to apologize as I dared not reach mentally. I held out a finger. The cat’s tail went straight up, except for an interrogative hook at the end as it advanced daintily, sniffed then permitted me to scratch its head. It began to wind around my ankle. Two more pats while the minion waited and I straightened up, feeling the urgency in that quiet stare. If correction was so gentle, why that anxious gaze?
No, there was definitely something missing there, I thought as the door minions tended those big double doors so that I did not have to defile my fingers.
TWENTY
I braced for another harrowing session, but Dhes-Andis said only, “The perch tenders reported your gesture with magic, apparently to the benefit of the great gryphs.”
“It still makes me dizzy,” I said, “but I can do it.”
“I think practice to a better purpose than burning straw might be useful,” he replied, taking me by surprise. “You probably know that the stoves here use Fire Sticks, made the same way the world over: young mages sit outside in spring and summer, repeating the spell to draw and store sun warmth in the Sticks. It is regrettably tedious work, something that most mages have to endure for their first year or two of study. I suggest you go through the palace and renew the magic on the Fire Sticks.”
“If I do, will not the mages be put out of work?” I asked.
“On the contrary, they would be grateful beyond measure. The spell is simple. There is no need to perform it endlessly except that it must be done. So it is given to beginners to discipline them. But discipline can be learnt as well in other ways. The skill to call and control handle fire is rarer. If you can draw and store your fire in the form of warmth in those Sticks, mage students will be free to turn their efforts to other uses.”
Such as making whatever it was you threatened to ignite back in Thann? I thought.
I didn’t ask it, though I despised myself for my cowardice. And the answer was obvious anyway. If he wanted that spell done it would get done, whether or not Fire Sticks got made.
He added with his smile that looked so benign, “And I will remind you that effort is always rewarded. Go experiment. See what you can achieve.”
I didn’t even try to hide my relief. There was no reason to refuse—no one would be hurt or harmed.
I began in my suite, where I could make mistakes and not be distracted by watchers other than the people I knew already had to watch me.
It took me a couple of days of frustrating experiments in tiny bursts, for I did not want to risk cracking the porcelain of the stove if I lost control of the withering stream of fire, or reducing the enameled Fire Sticks to ash. This spell’s dangers I’d learned the summer before, and had nearly destroyed myself and half of Fara Bay in the doing.
I retreated a couple of times to the music room, which I found comforting in a frightening situation that kept me restless and tossing at night no matter how tired I was.
By the second day I found myself falling asleep if I sat and closed my eyes. It was in the state between waking and sleep after one of these inadvertent snoozes that I found myself sensing magic beyond the continual “hum” of the fais.
That meant I could evaluate the Fire Sticks’s stored magic, perceiving how many of the repeated spells gathering sun warmth still remained. It was like counting a stack of sheets of paper. I didn’t have to frame those cumbersome repeated spells into one hypothetical sheet of paper at a time. I shaped my fire magic by curling my thumb and forefinger in a tiny circle no bigger than a pin-hole and drawing it through by force of mind. Using the pin-hole as a way of controlling the magic, I sent a steady but thin stream of fire magic into the Fire Sticks until they pulsed green in the mental plane: enough.
They glowed full of magic, safely releasing the warmth through the framing spell, which I had managed not to destroy. They would probably last at least a year, maybe more, before needing more magic.
My breath still shuddered in my chest. That spell always cost. But I was sitting cross-legged on the ground, so I pressed my hands to the floor on either side of me, and kept my eyes shut until the swimming sensation pa
ssed.
Then I moved to the little stove in the bath. The magic in those Fire Sticks was far more diminished. Whoosh! Sit. Recover.
Then to the stove in the bedroom, and in the two sitting rooms that I never used, one formal and one extremely formal.
When I was done, I said to Kal, “Do you have a stove in whatever space you have beyond that alcove?”
He bowed very low, then said, “The Imperial Princess honors us with her question, but there is no need to bestir herself. Our needs are seen to by the royal steward.”
I said, “But someone still has to do the work to bespell your Fire Sticks, do they not? Why not me when I can do it faster? The emperor asked me to practice,” I added, and sure enough, mention of Dhes-Andis got them hopping.
Well. Not hopping. Djurans don’t hop. But they permitted me beyond the limit of their little alcove, which was built to be unobtrusive.
I was relieved to discover a spacious six-sided room beyond: spacious, plaster instead of marble, lit by glowglobes. It also had a small dome overhead to permit what sunlight there was. Plain doors opened off all six sides into small bedchambers.
An equally plain stove had been built in the center of the room. An old woman sat by it, embroidering intertwined vines full of blossoms onto a length of silk.
I sat cross-legged on the floor, concentrated, and renewed their stove.
When I’d recovered, I said, “Do you have stoves in your rooms?”
Kal—with a lot of embarrassed circumlocution—gave me to understand that the rooms were very small as they spent no time in them beyond sleeping, at which time they opened them to the main room to catch the heat flow.
They all stood around with their hands together, watching me. I became aware that I had crossed some kind of invisible boundary, and there were no rules for the situation. Rather than make them uncomfortable, I scrambled to my feet and retreated to the grand suite of fancy rooms suitable for one imperial princess.
I had done what I’d been asked and no one was hurt. It was even helpful. And I’d enjoyed myself.
Without further examining my motivations, as a four day blizzard pounded the palace walls and windows I moved from chamber to chamber to renew the Fire Sticks. If a door opened to me, and not all of them did, I went inside.
At no time did the fais stop me, so I learned something of the life of the palace. Those upper floors, spread between the highest three towers, made up the imperial residence—which had been an inner wing in Erev-li-Erval, with its own gardens. No garden here, except those carefully tended and trained trees in some rooms. I didn’t think about how they dealt with the roots when there were floors beneath, but it would be important later.
At first I moved with trepidation, dreading a stumble into Dhes-Andis’s lair. Horrid thought! But I avoided going near the golden doors with rampant dragons carved amid stylized flames. Those had to be his personal suite.
That brought the question: why didn’t he go around once a year and renew the Fire Sticks himself? Those many layers testified to laborious spellcasting of the sort beginners did. He could save them days of labor, but I wasn’t going to ask. I was happy enough to avoid him, though his presence began to shape itself around me in odd ways. Like that room with all the weapons. Late one morning I passed it and heard the murmur of his voice inside—and here were two of his guards on duty, and a faint trace of his scent in the air.
It was not at all an unpleasant scent, rather the opposite, complex yet subtle. In fact, anywhere else I would have liked it, but my nerves recognized it before I did, flashing an echo of burn and I sped away as if I’d been caught stealing.
So he went there to use those weapons. But I already knew that Sveran-Djur civilization was capable of astoundingly, flagrantly non-peaceful behavior.
At the other end of the floor several cats decided to follow me, so quiet at first I didn’t notice. I crouched down, scratching and petting heads, under chins, over backs. The cats rubbed cheeks against my hand and humped backs into my fingers, as all cats do, except they were so silent, like ghost cats.
They followed me the rest of the way on that floor, but stopped at the stairway. I had to laugh at the feline vanguard along the top stair, tails raised like banners, then I ran down.
Below this floor lay state rooms, and the floor below that comprised the guest suites where stayed the Chosen. Almost all those doors were shut, save two large spaces whose purpose I could not guess. I renewed the stoves there then ran down another set of stairs.
Here I found the largest part of the palace by a significant margin. The building was still marble, but bare of decorative carving and art, the vaulted corridors opening to a bewildering warren of connecting suites used by the administration of the empire. Three floors of it. I spent the larger part of my days there, and though I encountered what must have been hundreds of Djurans, alike in their black hair and similar robes, who bowed like sheaves of wheat in the wind whenever my eye fell on them, then faded back. No one spoke to me.
I found that unsettling, to be visibly invisible—so very much the opposite of my experience in life so far—but I stuck to my task.
An even more bewildering warren below that belonged to the servants who did all the work of maintaining that beautiful palace. Here the people wore the familiar gray linen but had different colors of hair, including a surprising number of fair-haired folk. So servants did not dye their hair black, or could not?
No one to answer that. And I didn’t dare ask lest it somehow be interpreted as uncivilized.
The blizzard ended the day before I finished my Fire Stick renewal. During that time no one disturbed me, but on the last day it became apparent that Dhes-Andis had kept a close eye on my progress because I had scarcely finished the last room and was facing the long climb up the stairs to the top again when I was summoned.
I ran all the way up, turning right instead of left.
“Well done,” Dhes-Andis said when I arrived breathless. “I wondered how far you would go to please me.”
Please him! I bent my head in a quick bow to hide my horror. I had not done that to please him. Had I?
“What did you learn?” he went on.
I braced myself inwardly, doing my best to smooth my expression. “I learned how to sense the magic remaining on the Fire Sticks, then I learned how to limit the magic like this.” I demonstrated my pin-hole with finger and thumb. “By the time I reached the lower floors, I could picture my finger and thumb here.” I tapped my forehead. “And do the spell that way.”
“Excellent. And as I promised you success is always rewarded. You have done a superlative job. What would you ask?”
Stop burning me with fais magic? But I knew he would only laugh, or chide me, and I’d get yet another lecture about civilization. “I already have more stuff in that suite than I’ve ever had in my life. I don’t need more.”
“You will learn to appreciate fine things. For now, I trust you will enjoy a broader boundary, say to the city?”
A semblance of freedom, like a leashed pet, I thought bitterly as I gave him My Imperial Serenity’s best bow.
And out I went before he could change his mind, straight to the stairs. I had to get away, though I knew that escape was relative. He could spy on me through his scry crystal any time he pleased, thanks to this horrible, choking fais. But a semblance of escape was better than nothing and I had to think. The idea that I might have been motivated to please him was so . . . so insidious! But I knew that underneath all my other excuses—it needed doing, it was good practice, people needed it—there had to be some truth.
I hated that thought so much I ran down the stairs as if escaping my own magical fire.
When I reached the lowest terrace, which opened onto that giant parade ground, I found the stones swept clean of snow. A servant approached to ask if I wished for a cart, indicating a decorated one or two person carriage on wheels, harnessed to a pair of creatures I’d never seen before, somewhat like a long-necked bird
, but with a lizard’s head, and reddish scaled skin except on its round body, which was feathered in brown. They balanced on two long, spindly legs with three long toes, and they had two tiny front arms folded in against their bodies below golden fais attached to the harness.
Their heads moved lizard-quick, one eye then the other looking my way. When I met the gaze of the foremost, I got that blurry, heady feeling, as if the ground were unsteady, and I looked away. “That’s all right, thanks,” I said. “I would enjoy the walk.”
“As the Imperial Princess desires.”
I turned my back on the low bow, and crossed the parade ground toward the broad stairway at the other end.
The urge to escape intensified my itch to be moving, after all that enforced enclosure. I stood at the top of the steps that had been carved in switchbacks down the mountain, with little curved stone benches at every turn. I leaped down the steps, five at a time, happy to be in the air again.
Oh, the urge to transform was so strong! I tried to assuage it by ever longer leaps, hair and tail flashing out to balance me, until I dared the long leap from one switchback to that below it, my feet stinging when I smacked to the stone. The sting subsided so I did it again, and again, somersaulting through the air, and finally practicing wide-armed dives, head over heels before landing.
Exhilarated in spite of my awareness that freedom was only pretense, I reached the street long before I was ready to.
Until then I had not given a thought to my appearance among the mostly dark-haired, golden or bronze-skinned Djurans. All my life I had hidden my differences, striving to blend in without notice. I was used to being invisible in any crowd. But the first people I encountered stared before quickly turning away.
It couldn’t be helped. Either I went back up to hide or ventured on and got stared at. And if so, what were they going to do?
Yes, what were they going to do? Were they going to hate me after that appalling business when their emperor made them trudge all the way up the mountain to stand in the icy air, just for me to make an appearance for about the space of three breaths?