A couple of Bereth Ferian’s mage students walked with her. One of the younger girls said, “Do you transfer all the way to Sartor from Roth Drael? Isn’t it brutal?”
“I do it in stages,” Hibern responded, walking quicker. “Spend an hour in my home kingdom. Then on to Sartor.” At the corner of the hall, she turned away from the archive, knowing that most of the students would be heading that way to get started on their new assignment.
The younger girl cast a quick look back at her seniors, then stayed with Hibern. She matched pace and asked, her voice low, “What’s she like? The queen, I mean.”
Hibern didn’t want to say that she didn’t really know. Even though she called the Queen of Sartor ‘Atan,’ the most personal conversation they’d had so far was at that first interview. Since then, their weekly meetings these past eight months had been strictly about magic.
But Hibern’s earliest lessons had been to keep her own counsel, and though this red-haired mage student with all the freckles seemed friendly, Hibern didn’t know any of the Bereth Ferian mage students well enough to predict how they would hear her words. So she said, “She works very hard. She’s earnest, and quick. She knows more about the history of magic than anyone I’ve ever met.”
“That would be Tsauderei’s doing,” the student said confidently. “We all hear about how he and Mage-King Evend used to argue about how to teach magic, how Tsauderei felt that history ought to come before basics, not after.” She tossed her curls. “As for the queen, she sounds boring.”
Hibern didn’t find Atan boring. Well, maybe the mask was boring. But the day of her interview, Hibern had glimpsed somebody behind that mask.
The girl went on, “Though she could be a dragon come back and Sigini would have volunteered to tutor her, just for the prestige.” The redhead laughed and ran off with a flick of a hand, her silvery-blue mage robe rippling.
It was not actually Hibern’s time to go south, but the other students didn’t know that. Hibern transferred back to Roth Drael, and shivered at the sudden shock of damp chill. Magic warded the heavy sleety rain slanting down, but not the cold of the late summer storm.
She ran down the short hall, by now so accustomed to the place she no longer noticed the startling jagged lines of the broken walls, some fixed with regular stone centuries ago, others protected by layers of warding spells. She’d learned on her first interview with Erai-Yanya that Roth Drael was one of the few untouched ruins left from the Fall of Ancient Sartor four thousand years ago. Mages had vowed to leave the ruin as a memorial, but an ancestor of Erai-Yanya’s had withdrawn from the world to study ancient magic in it, and heeding the vow, managed to make a cozy home of the ruin, using magic to ward weather. Bright woven rugs, comfortably shabby rigged bookcases, and low, cushioned chairs made for ease of reading, with plenty of small tables that could double as desks.
Erai-Yanya sat in one of these old chairs, a lapboard stretched across the padded arms, her bare toes propped on a fender near a leaping fire in the fireplace. Two old-looking scrolls lay half-furled on the lapboard, with an empty mug, an inkwell, and a stack of paper on which the mage was busy writing.
She looked up. “How did it go?”
“Well enough.” Overhead, the roar of rain ceased abruptly. Hibern lowered her voice. “We got assigned some reading about magical displacement spells and banks and treaties. The same reading you gave me last year.”
“Did you tell them that?”
“I kept it to myself.”
Erai-Yanya smiled. “Good. Anything else?”
“Yes. At the end of the lecture, someone asked something about wards. I confess I was only paying partial attention, as I’d already done that reading. But the tutor said something about Sartor, then she pointed at me and told them that I was the new queen’s study partner, and perhaps I could better answer their question. They all stared at me.”
“And?” Erai-Yanya asked.
“It went pretty much as you predicted. Even who.”
“Sigini,” Erai-Yanya said unerringly. “Did she, or anyone, ask what you study with Atan?”
“No. But that’ll probably come,” Hibern said.
“And what will you say?”
Hibern suppressed a sigh. “This is an old lesson. I’ll be as brief as possible. Tell them as little as I can. Without claiming great secrecy.”
Erai-Yanya dipped her head in a nod. “I beg your forgiveness for being repetitive, but when it comes to Atan, everyone wants to know everything. And one can never quite be sure what people are hearing in the most innocuous-seeming answers.”
“What if I tell them that we studied wards? Won’t that be innocuous enough?”
“For anyone else, maybe. But someone hears that, and passes it on, and it gets passed farther—because Sartor is always interesting—and before you know it, some diplomat appears before the Sartoran Star Chamber, and demands a treaty to prevent the magic war that rumor has it the queen is about to begin because she’s expanding her border wards. Then someone at Twelve Towers, or the Sartoran mage guild, gets busy and traces the rumors back to you.”
Hibern sat back. “Muck! I didn’t think of that.”
“Do,” Erai-Yanya said earnestly. “You gained enormous prestige in being picked as Atan’s study partner. But prestige . . . well, you don’t need that lecture.”
“Yes, we Marlovens have the opposite of prestige,” Hibern said. “Old news!”
Erai-Yanya smiled, but she did not deny it. Hibern said, “The sun is out. I’m going to take a walk before I have to transfer again.”
Erai-Yanya shook her head. “Better not. I noticed a migration earlier.”
“Oh.” A migration usually meant the Fens, animals of Helandrias, who had been cursed with speech, because of some well-meaning but misguided mage long ago. The animals were very definite about speech being a curse; the mages had discovered that the animals called humans the Snakes with Two Faces.
Hibern grimaced as she hung up her shawl. The Fens might or might not attack her. Better not to tempt them. “This two-faced snake will work, then.”
* * *
Hibern discovered she still had a turn of the glass before she was due in Marloven Hess.
She walked to her own room, with the old tapestry covering the massive crack in the single wall, and a strong weather-ward making a window of the missing part of the roof. This room had probably been a conservatory once, with its broad windows on three sides, through which Hibern could watch the forest life. She’d decided to live in this room during the summer. During winter she retreated to a smaller, cozy room.
She sat down at her desk, virtuously pulled out her notes from the year before on the incredibly boring subject of banks and displacement wards, then sat back, thinking about what the redhead had said about the Queen of Sartor and Sigini the Fhlerian.
She could be a dragon come back . . . The expression had all the cadence of a popular saying. Dragons occasionally appeared in colloquialisms in the world, though no one had seen one for thousands of years. It was said that the Chwahir language was full of dragon references, but that was a secondhand report. Hibern knew no one who spoke it.
When it was time to go, she packed up her books and transferred to Marloven Hess.
Senrid’s study was empty. Not only empty, but it looked like a windstorm had been loosed, for books lay haphazardly on the table, and papers had been scattered all over the floor, their edges curling. More books kept them flat, which dispelled her first impression, that someone had ransacked Senrid’s study. He was always so tidy. Something had clearly happened, probably bad.
The door opened. A runner stuck his head in and eyed Hibern. “Blue robe. Are you the mage student?” he asked. On Hibern’s open-handed gesture of assent, he continued, “I was to tell you that Senrid-Harvaldar and Commander Keriam were called away.”
Hibern sighe
d with disgust. Why hadn’t Senrid written her a note and saved her a wrenching transfer for nothing? She knew he had a golden notecase. That had been one of their first projects together. He’d even insisted it actually be gold, though that metal hadn’t been used exclusively since centuries ago, back when only the wealthy and powerful could afford to have mages make them. Senrid had been skeptical about the fact that anyone could send a note or a small object if it fit inside the case, as long as the ‘sigil,’ the notecase’s Destination, was known to the sender.
He’d asked for gold simply because it would stand out, as he had no other gold objects. But he still thought like their ancestors, who never trusted magical communications. If he had some emergency, he would go straight to his army of runners, who would carry messages without revealing them to anyone else.
She walked out of Senrid’s study and paused on the landing, staring sightlessly at the curving lines of a running horse frescoed on the wall, a raptor wing-spread above its flying mane.
She now had an entire hour to explore Eidervaen, the capital of Sartor and the oldest city in the world. She hadn’t been permitted to wander alone during the rift-fighting days, but surely nobody was stopping her now.
She walked back to Senrid’s personal Destination, transferred to Sartor, and after recovering, asked the chamber attendant, “Which way is outside?”
A formal gesture toward the opposite archway sent her down a hall with a shiny tiled floor into a vault-ceilinged intersection made of gray, peach, and silver marble.
She tipped her head back to study the tall windows high up on the wall, the strong afternoon light shafting in, lighting up slow-moving dust motes. As she slowed, she became aware of a quick, light sound, followed by the hasty whisper of slippers on marble.
She suppressed the urge to turn and look. There was no danger here. She picked another tile-floored, marble hall, hoping it would lead to the famous dragon door that she’d read about in her studies.
The pitter-patter neared. Hibern whirled, to find herself looking down in amazement at the strangest-looking child she’d ever seen. This girl would have been ordinary enough—brown of skin and hair—save for the wide, slightly protruding eyes with the droopy lower lid that marked her as some relation to the Landis family, and for the fact that she was dressed in some kind of ragged garment that was way too large for her.
“Are you a mage?” the child asked. She couldn’t have been more than five.
Hibern said, “I’m a mage student,” as she lifted her gaze to the servant, correct in livery, who halted a pace behind the child. This servant, a young woman, clasped her hands tightly, saying in a low, firm voice, “Come, joel, this is not appropriate.”
“I am only asking,” the child stated, owl-eyed.
‘Joel,’ Hibern had learned, was a familial honorific, which could also be used for small children. Hibern said, “I am a student of magic, joel.” Nobody reacted, so she was not incorrect.
“Teach me a spell to become invisible?”
“Do you know your basics?” Hibern responded.
The child scowled, and the servant stepped up to her. “Come, joel, do you not see? It is necessary to learn your letters.”
The child whirled away in a flutter of tatters and uncombed brown hair. “I won’t do letters,” she stated, then ran off without another word.
The servant sent Hibern a look that the latter took as regret and worry, then scurried after her charge.
That was odd. Not just the way the child was dressed, but how much she looked like Atan. And yet Atan had said her family was dead. But then the word ‘family’ could differ in meaning—to some it meant only parents, guardians, and siblings, and to others it could encompass an entire clan.
Hibern forgot the child when she reached a door, carved around with leaves and flowers but no dragons. She opened it and slipped outside, pulling her coat close about her. So far, no one had stopped her. No wards or alarms, though the Marloven was loose.
The sun was out, so it was comparatively balmy for a winter’s day, sunlight shining weakly on a series of broad, shallow steps, worn by countless feet over the equally countless years. She looked down at the pale gray stone, then up, overwhelmed by the profligacy of grace in color, shape, and style: tower, archway, statue seduced the eye, demanding adulation. And the decorative motifs, as if to compete against the monuments of kings! Here was the famous stylized wheat pattern, there a Venn knot in reverse. Above, the sun with the sword rays, and facing it from that tower, the sun with the waving rays . . .
She had an hour. She forced her attention downward to the street, where people came and went, walking and riding in carriages, carts, and pony traps, and driving long wagons full of goods. Where to begin?
“Need transportation?”
The clatter of small hooves neared, and Hibern whirled around to discover a small pony trap pulling up, only the animals were a pair of silky-haired goats. As she stared in amazement, the nearer goat gave her a stern look, and uttered a soft “Mah-a-a-ah.”
The boy driving the trap was no older than Hibern, a round fellow with rusty red hair tied back. He wore a thick yellow tunic with a green shoulder-cape and green cuffs, a yellow and gold wheel patch sewn on the shoulder. “Where to? Or are you just lost?” the boy asked, making the polite bow for third circle. “I can give directions. Things are slow today.”
Hibern was intensely interested in talking to someone born a century before. “How much to ride around, and maybe get information on what I’m seeing? I have an hour.”
The boy’s business-smile widened to a grin. “I can get you around the Way in under an hour, if we don’t stop, for a sixer. Ask any questions you like. You get your money back if you stump me.”
The Way. Hibern knew that had to be the Grand Chandos Way, the street built on the foundations of what had once been the walls of the most ancient part of the city. And ‘sixer,’ she knew, was idiom for the six-sided brass coin, twelve of which made up one silver. Not to be confused with the six-sided silver coin, half of a gold-piece, that was called a ‘six.’ Erai-Yanya had counseled her to always carry a few coins in her pocket when transferring, and here she was, needing them for the first time.
Feeling worldly, she said, “I’d like that,” and hopped into the trap.
A whistle, and the goats trotted neatly off, their prettily shod hooves clicking on the street paved in chevron brick pattern. “Do you get a lot of custom from the palace?” Hibern asked, to hear his accent again. It was different from Atan’s, which was more like Hibern’s own.
“Almost none. Those who come to the palace usually have palace business, and go away again either by their own wheelers or by magic. The good trade’s at the guild Destinations.” He flapped a hand behind them. “The senior wheelers get the best spots. But I like getting foreigners, because they’re fun to talk to. As long as I can understand ’em.”
As he spoke, he drove them under the enormous windowed archway that connected to a white stone tower. Hibern looked up at that smooth, glistening stone, like ice and yet not. Here was the same strange not-quite-stone of Erai-Yanya’s ruin at Roth Drael. Some of the most awe-inspiring, and frightening, stories about Sartoran history involved this tower.
“Mages’ Finger, that is, the Tower of Knowledge,” her guide said. “Been here as long as the city. Some say longer. Only mages go in. And the royal family. Behind it is first district’s labyrinth.”
“Is that just for the royal family, too?”
“Oh, no, they have their own on the other side of the palace. Many families have their own. Each district has a public one, maintained by citizens.”
The west wing of the palace hid the tower from view. They were making a wide sweep to run alongside the northern branch of the Ilder River. On the other side of the river ranked in elegant rows the famous Parleas Terrace, the aristocratic houses. The boy called off a
list of statues and towers, about half of them names she recognized from history.
At the end, he said, “Any questions?”
“I know that kings and queens put up monuments to their rule, here, in Colend, and in many other kingdoms.”
“They start thinking about it right when they’re crowned. So the stories go,” her guide said cheerily. “Some don’t last long enough to put one up, and some dithered until it was too late. If there wasn’t one put up to honor them, they just become another name in the list.”
“So I take it rulers don’t remove former monarchs’ efforts?”
“Not in Sartor.” He sounded surprised that anyone would do such a thing.
“So is this because the Landis line is unbroken here? Or because Sartor hasn’t been conquered, outside of a hundred years ago?”
“Oh, there have always been Landises, but I don’t know what you’d call unbroken,” the guide said. “No, they don’t knock down anyone else’s monument, but build in front? Around?” He laughed. “I wish you had longer than an hour. I could show you some peculiar ones.” He glanced back at her. “They don’t build monuments where you come from?”
“No.” Royal legacies of any kind in Marloven Hess didn’t often survive changes of kings, save the shields and swords on walls, commemorating battles.
He clicked to the goats, who veered expertly between a dashing high-sprung two-seater carriage, pulled by a pair of gray horses, and a slow covered wagon behind a team of oxen. “Things’ll be slow today up in the palace for you scribes.”
“Slow?” Hibern repeated, not correcting his misapprehension. Erai-Yanya had deliberately given her a robe of a sky blue, different than either the dark blue of the Sartoran mage guild or the silver blue of Bereth Ferian’s mage school. Scribes also wore various shades of blue. Scribes and mages had been tied together as long as there was recorded history. And in those histories it was clear that people didn’t always like mages.
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