by Melanie Rawn
Jored got to his feet just as Josselin, still on one knee gathering strewn letters, handed him an envelope. Jored’s face froze. Recovering swiftly, he sorted through the dozen or so envelopes in his own hands and gave one to Joss as the latter stood upright. An almost identical chill passed over the superbly beautiful face.
Cailet’s brows arched in startled reaction. Neither Jored nor Josselin ever received mail. And now both had letters in hand—letters that went instantly into pockets when they read and, to Cailet’s eye, recognized the handwriting on the envelopes.
How very singular, she thought to herself. Both young men were so dark-skinned that neither blush nor sudden pallor could ever give them away. But the furtive concealment of their letters, the manner in which two pairs of gray eyes avoided each other and everyone else, the haste with which they parted, and the grim faces they wore. . . .
Geridon’s Balls! exclaimed Gorsha. You’re not on about that again!
Cailet ignored him, caught by the sudden horrible notion that she’d been wrong all the time, and it wasn’t one or the other who’d been sent here by Glenin—it was both.
Joss took his lunch out of the refectory, presumably back to the privacy of his room to read his mail. Jored, behaving as if he hadn’t received a letter at all, sat beside Taigan at a corner table, beneath the fresco of St. Elinar Longsight with her owl on her wrist.
Cailet had lost her appetite. She returned to her quarters. The atmosphere within was nearly as thick as in the refectory; Aidan had built up the hearthfire into a substantial blaze. Cailet opened wide a window in her bedroom and sat down in front of it, staring at the snow.
Granon Bekke found her there an hour later. Hesitating to disturb her, but alarmed both by her empty-eyed expression and her convulsive shivering, he strode through, slammed the window shut, and draped the black fur cloak over her.
“Captal, if you insist on catching your death of cold, please do it someplace where I’m not responsible for you.”
She glanced up. “What? Oh—is it cold in here? I didn’t notice.”
With an exasperated sigh, he leaned a hip against the windowsill and continued, “There’s a message for you from Telomir Renne.”
Cailet roused herself with an effort and held out a hand. “What does he want?”
Rather than give her an envelope as she’d expected, he brought a fist-sized glass ball from his longvest pocket. The Mage Globe within it was stained an anxious violet.
Cailet stared at it for a few moments, then mentally shook herself and Worked the spell that would free the message. Within the crystal sphere and the Globe it contained there appeared ten words:
Glenin coming to Ryka with Domburs at Midsummer. Please advise.
There was a brief flare of silver magic before the Mage Globe resumed its clarity within the glass.
“Trouble?” asked the Master of the Captal’s Warders, his shoulders already stiffening as if for battle.
Cailet nodded slowly, rolling the empty crystal between her palms. “But not just yet, Gransha. Not just yet.” She was sure of it. The shadows weren’t yet dark enough.
But that night she curled into the furred cloak in a chair before the fire, ignoring the half-read novel, moving only to pile on another log to keep the light burning brightly, brightly until dawn.
13
FOR eight weeks, a great deal was said but absolutely nothing happened.
Sarra sent Cailet another letter through the Minstrelsy, revealing her plan to go to Ryka Court for Glenin’s appearance at Vellerin Dombur’s side. Cailet sent Telomir Renne a message through his Mage Globe, advising him that at this time she had no advice to give him. The broadsheets doubled in size as distinguished guest columnists generously—and verbosely—shared their different and sometimes diametrically opposed opinions about What It All Meant. At Mage Hall, speculation was equally rife—as Cailet assumed it must be all over Lenfell.
Only Glenin was not heard from. And neither Jored nor Josselin ever said a word about the contents of their letters.
In any event, Cailet did catch a cold from her hours in front of an open window, and had to spend a week in bed at Elomar Adennos’s glaring insistence. The first three days she was so miserable she didn’t much care what, if anything, was going on. The next three days she spent fretting herself into a relapse. By the ninth day she was on the mend again, sniffling but no longer coughing. Elo then allowed various Mages to visit and make their reports—mainly because no one had much to report. Midweek of Spring Moon Cailet declared herself ready to get out of bed and resume her duties. In his eloquently succinct way, the Master Healer disagreed. Cailet demanded to be let out of jail for St. Alilen’s Day. Elomar replied that celebrations at Heathering had been canceled; half the populace was down with fevers and sore throats, and a big gathering was the surest way to spread the illness to the other half.
By the time Cailet did enter the world again, she found spring had arrived with a flourish, as if to apologize for the hardships of winter. Josselin’s roses were already blooming along the wall in a tumult of breathtaking color, the meadows were thick with wildflowers, and samples of all the blossoms began to appear in vast bouquets in Cailet’s rooms. The pakkas returned from the north rather earlier than usual, already fat on sweet grass. The orchards were sprouting new leaves, and as Lovers Moon turned to Green Bells and then First Flowers, buds burst open with the promise of a massive harvest. The Mage in charge of the home farm warned the cook to start teaching more Prentices how to put up fruit for preserves.
As St. Maidil’s Day approached, Cailet was forced to begin considering what would happen at Ryka Court this Midsummer Moon. With her Birthingday gift to Sarra at First Flowers—a slender book of pressed roses from the wall, matched to applicable verses from Rose Rhymes, the life’s work of Mage Ilisa Neffe’s grandmother—she included a letter suggesting they could simply ignore Glenin. Their sister would not have made her visit to Ryka Court so public so far in advance if she hadn’t wanted them to plot and fret themselves into total confusion and nervous exhaustion. That this recommendation elicited a blistering reply was no surprise. But a few days later another letter came, in which Sarra showed unexpected sensitivity by asking if Cailet was really that frightened.
She was.
She could not afford to be.
She spent long hours over the next few weeks debating various plans with Gorsha, interrupted by Aidan or Marra bringing meals they insisted she eat.
Having been denied the music and revelry of St. Alilen’s, Heathering planned to make up for it at St. Maidil’s. Flirtations begun at First Flowers had had nearly three weeks to prosper in the profligate glory of this year’s Tillinshir spring, and several betrothals had already been announced. Only the sourest skeptics muttered that while St. Maidil was the patron of new lovers, she wasn’t called The Betrayer for nothing.
On the afternoon, as St. Lirance’s rang out Twelfth, the majority of Mage Hall residents were walking the north road to Heathering. Everyone carried money in their pockets and a wrapped bundle of clothes for later on; the former was for purchasing masks, the latter to complete their disguises for the dancing. Cailet fell in with a farmer and her husband, chatting about crops and livestock and wonderfully ordinary things while six of their seven daughters scampered around and the baby clung to her father’s neck, wide-eyed at all the people. The First Daughter gave the usual challenge: name all the sisters in order. Cailet responded (as always) by getting them all wrong, which (as always) sent the girls into gales of giggles.
“It’s Tomia first, then Selia, and I’m Shonna—”
“—then Sollina, Savasha, Sattina, and Tiana!” finished the First Daughter.
Cailet moaned and clutched at her hair. “I’ll never get it right! And don’t you dare have any more daughters, Shonya, just to confuse me further,” she warned their mother, who didn’t look old enough to have borne one baby, let alo
ne seven.
Jayan, proud father of the flock, grinned. “If we did, we’d have to call her ‘Hey You’—we’ve flat run out of names!”
By then they’d reached the outskirts of Heathering, and the girls ran off to greet their friends. Cailet wished Shonya and Jayan a pleasant holiday, and wandered down the booth-lined street to outfit herself with a mask for the evening’s dance. In Cantratown and Pinderon and other large cities they called it a Masked Ball, but here the old name was used: Maidil’s Feign. And to pretend to be someone she was not—an impossibility unless she covered herself head to foot as well as wore a mask—Cailet required a disguise.
Plenty of people had already bought their choice of masks, and carried paper-wrapped packages. She saw Mikel playfully shoo off three of the local girls from a booth as he tried to keep his selection a secret, and down the street other Prentices and Mages picked through the offerings for exactly the right persona amid much merriment and teasing.
Cailet’s favorite vendor, the one she always bought from, was the local blacksmith who also had a fine hand for more delicate work: she made all the collar-pins for Mage Hall—Sparrows, Candles, Herb Sprigs, Mage Globes, and Swords. Her smithy featured two painted signs: Caitiri the Fiery-eyed for her forge and Maurget Quickfingers for her sideline in jewelry. But she was the perfect picture of the Saint her mother had named her for: Brisha Strong-arm, patron of their craft. Brishan greeted Cailet with a smile and some choice bucolic gossip, then brought out the special masks saved for special customers. She showed Cailet a cunning creation of scrolled iron-shavings imitating a lion’s mane; a silly and brilliantly made clown face with a garish two-foot nose; a mirror-mask of polished tin pounded paper-thin and lined with goosedown for comfort; mossy green velvet stitched with tiny brass bells shaped like flowers; bird-masks feathered with everything from gray doves to bronze ban-tie roosters to gorgeous iridescent fantails.
“Here’s one you might like,” said Brishan, reaching under her table to produce a plain foil mask decorated at the brow with a single painted flameflower. “For our own St. Caitiri.”
“But everyone would know it was me behind it!” Cailet smiled. “What about one of the birds? They’re beautiful.”
“A new line, proposed and constructed by my grandson,” the smith reported proudly. “The hawk is popular this year, so you wouldn’t be the only person wearing one.”
She was about to agree—as a tribute to Sarra’s adopted Liwellan Hawk sigil—but then her eye was caught by another mask. “That one,” she said definitely. She took a quick glance around to make sure no one was looking (silly of her, but the spirit of the day had infected her), and accepted the invitation to try it on in privacy. Slipping behind a short curtain, she eased it over her head and turned to judge the effect in a small mirror. It was more of a headdress in the old-fashioned style of twenty years ago than a mask, made of wire covered in smooth plumes that fit snugly from brow to nape. With her black eyes ringed by snowy feathers, her fair hair hidden, and her face concealed nearly to the chin, she felt reasonably confident that it would take even those who knew her well at least a minute to grasp her identity.
You realize, of course, the irony: the mask one chooses is ultimately revealing.
What? I don’t understand. She looked at herself in the mirror as if by looking at her own dark eyes she could see Gorsha’s green ones.
Don’t you want to know why you chose the owl?
Not really—but you’re going to tell me anyway, aren’t you?
It’s St. Elinar’s sigil—and you’d love to have a little of her Longsightedness about what’s going to happen. Moreover, the owl hunts at night, she’s not afraid of the dark—
Stop it! Don’t spoil today for me please—
—and it cries out a single question: WHO.
Shut up! she ordered viciously, glaring at her own masked face in the mirror. I’m not listening to any more of your rubbish, do you hear me? Let me be, you horrid old man! Leave me the hell alone!
She composed her expression, carefully removed the mask, and pushed the curtain aside. “This one, absolutely,” she said, more to Gorsha than to her friend.
“Excellent choice.” As Brishan wrapped it in paper and string, she said, “Any news of that young man?”
“Which young man?” Cailet asked before she thought.
“The one who beat me five Delilah’s Days out of six at the smithing,” Brishan grumbled with a wry sidelong glance from eyes nearly as black as Cailet’s own.
“Oh, him. No, not a word.”
“Pity. He was a bit young for me, but I’d gladly’ve married him if only for the right to forbid him to compete!”
Cailet laughed. “Don’t try to fool me, Brishan—you’d’ve married him and then cheered him on!”
“Well, at least he didn’t leave until I got his secret for shoeing a Clydie in no time at all.” She gave Cailet the wrapped mask. “Here you are. And I’d better see this out on the dancing circle tonight, my grand Lady Mage Captal!”
Cailet made a face at her, laughed, and departed. Despite Taig’s long ago and Collan’s more recent tutelage, dancing was not one of her accomplishments. She’d gotten over stepping on her partner’s feet, or leading in the wrong direction, but anything more complex than a waltz utterly defeated her. So it was that when everyone—herself included—had changed in private to their party clothes, and gathered in the yard of St. Lirance’s to dance, Cailet merely watched.
The early evening rituals of food and drink and sociability had concluded. All the familiar faces of Heathering, the surrounding smallholds, and Mage Hall were masked. By torchlight (and a few strategically placed Mage Globes) the real business of St. Maidil’s Day commenced: the coaxing of flirtation into love, love into ardor, and ardor into the nearest secluded location.
Cailet watched, and smiled, and sipped wine, and didn’t pay much attention to the order of the dances. Her mistake. There was a time-honored progression to the sequence—reel to jig to promenade to square to two-step—with just enough pause in between for the women to select new partners if they were so inclined. The selection of tunes was up to the musicians (local folk, every bit as good as the professional bands other communities hired), but the succession of dances never varied. So Cailet should not have been surprised when, at a gesture from their conductor, every musician suddenly yelled out, “Contrariwise!”
Gleeful whoops greeted this permission for the men to ask the women to dance. Every male above the age of fourteen—and a few bold boys even younger—went scrambling toward their chosen ladies. Impertinent behind Maidil’s Day masks, which protected them from open discovery even if everyone in Heathering knew exactly whose face was concealed, the men began to swagger into the dancing circle escorting their laughing partners.
Cailet swore under her breath and looked for an escape. On any other night, few of the men here would have the presumption to ask her to dance. But the masks that licensed some occasionally outrageous behavior also sanctioned them to ignore the real identities of even the most important and unapproachable women. And so she found herself being bowed to by a tall, black-clad young man wearing the mask of a black-and-amber hawk.
She knew who it was, of course. There was no mistaking Josselin Mikleine’s height and build, even if his face was completely covered and he wore gloves to hide the telltale darkness of his skin. She looked narrowly at him from behind her own feathers and saw moonstone-gray eyes twinkle merrily in response. She couldn’t refuse; that wasn’t allowed any more than acknowledgment of identities was allowed. She accepted his gloved hand with a nod.
Joining the other dancers, waiting while the musicians tuned up, all at once she wasn’t so certain that it was indeed Josselin who had asked her to dance. There was another tall young man in black nearby, wearing an almost identical hawk mask—ah, but the girl he’d chosen sealed his identity. Taigan, despite a gold-painted sunburst mask nearly
as concealing as Cailet’s owl headdress, was easily recognizable by her long-waisted, lissome figure and the wayward tendrils of golden hair curling down her slender neck. Cailet assumed that Jored’s mask was a deliberate tribute to the Liwellan Hawk sigil; she glanced briefly up at Joss, wondering if he had intended the same.
Cailet never had to think about the Ward that disguised her maimed breast anymore—but she found herself nervously reinforcing it as Josselin drew her into his arms and they began to dance. Naturally, it was a waltz.
The journey long, the perils many,
The road a thousand thirsty miles,
Still my steps shall never falter
My faith and purpose never alter
For you are by my side
It was one of Collan’s favorite songs to sing languishingly at Sarra, teasing her—yet she never complained, only blushed and laughed the special low, soft laugh given to her husband alone. Cailet wondered if Josselin was making fun of her.
You, and only you, dear love,
You, with whom I am myself
You, my courage and my solace
You, whatever might befall us,
You are by my side
Josselin was holding her much too tightly. She couldn’t upbraid him for it—she couldn’t even show that she’d noticed. The night of St. Maidil’s was for piquant pretense, and never could she indicate that she knew who clasped her so closely. Her position demanded that she behave as if she hadn’t even been here. So Joss was free to embrace her as tightly as he pleased, and to slide his hand down her back to her waist, and whirl her around and around to the dizzying strains of the waltz—