Night Shine

by Tessa Gratton

  Surprise flashed through the sorceress’s eyes, more in her green than in the bone white. Then she pressed her lips together in an amused, flat line. “My demon called me child and impetuous creature and finally, sweetheart.”

  Nothing laughed a little. Impetuous creature made the sorceress seem youthful and wild. But then, the great demon of the Fifth Mountain had been much older than the sorceress. The thought was disconcerting and wonderful. She asked, “What else should I see in your library, Sorceress?”

  “What else do you wish to see? Wander, look. When you have a question, ask.”

  “You have only two and a half more days with me,” Nothing said. “Are you certain you wouldn’t rather be more direct?”

  “This is how magic works: you find it yourself.” With that, the sorceress stepped into the quartz mouth and vanished.

  Nothing gaped. She huffed in frustration. Then she marched to the nearest shelf—magical studies—and chose a slender volume with tiny glass droplets glued to the spine. She opened it to an elaborate illustration of what appeared to be dancing mushrooms and dawn sprites wearing garlands of flowers. She paged through more paintings of magical plants and creatures. It seemed to be a book of brief stories that mostly was an excuse for beautiful art. Nothing chose another book and then another, standing against the shelf to read bits and pieces she could understand about flower spirits and the behavior of clouds. In the next aisle she read the first chapter of an autobiography of a sorcerer of the Second Living Mountain, long dead—it began with a recounting of the process by which the sorcerer bonded with its great spirit, and Nothing was stunned by how boring it sounded. She carefully did not open a book with an embossed mouth on the cover, filled with razor teeth, and after that moved to the display tables.

  There was a jar with preserved eyeballs, and that seemed right for a dead mountain’s library. Beside it was a jeweled box holding tiny chipped color flakes that Nothing realized had to be scales from butterfly wings. She found bones, scrolls of leather tied with leather thongs, petrified wood with beautiful red-gold-green rings, crystals growing in the shape of flowers, and more bones, tipped in gold and silver. None of it drew her, though she thought about the butterfly wings and how they’d been harvested, how they’d been pulled into such tiny scales.

  Finally, she picked up a comb made of yellowing antler, with tiny characters carved into the tines. She marched to the hearth and, without hesitation, stepped inside.

  Nothing found herself instantly standing in a five-sided chamber with glinting crystal walls that slanted up and together into a central point. There was no crystal mouth on this side. No doors at all.

  The sorceress crouched against the smooth crystal floor, carving a huge diagram into the crystal with a shining crystal wand.

  “You made it,” the sorceress said without looking up, her voice strained. “Do avoid stepping on my lines.”

  Nothing instinctively hopped away, looking down, but there was no line beneath her feet: the nearest began several paces from her bare toes. “What is it?”

  “A spell for long sight.” The sorceress crab walked on the balls of her feet and one hand, the other trailing the wand with her, slicing through the smoky crystal like it was cheese. Nothing stared at the controlled grace, the slow, precise steps the sorceress took, and her concentration that seemed to vibrate through the air.

  When the sorceress reached the edge of her diagram, she blew a low note through pursed lips and linked the line she’d been cutting with another. Nothing felt a tingle, and then it was gone. The air was still.

  The sorceress leaned back on her heels, resting her elbows on her knees in perfect balance. She looked up. Sweat gleamed on her forehead and cheeks. Her hair was bound back, clubbed high, and she’d made her black-and-pink gown into a black-and-pink sleeveless tunic and trousers that hugged tight to her body. She was barefoot too.

  To Nothing, the sorceress seemed suddenly so mundane, despite being surrounded by crystal walls and a lightly flickering magical diagram. A field worker, weary after a long day harvesting wheat. Just a young woman who could maybe be Nothing’s friend.

  The sorceress wiped her forehead against the back of her wrist, pushing tendrils of hair off her face.

  “It looks like hard work,” Nothing murmured.

  “It is,” the sorceress said. She rose to her feet and leaned gracefully on one hip. “Is that Sary’s Comb of Growth?”

  Nothing stared in confusion.

  “In your hand,” the sorceress insisted.

  “Oh.” Nothing looked at the comb she held, having forgotten it entirely. “I have no idea.”

  “Does it have runes down the tines?”

  “I suppose that is what these are.” Nothing pressed the tip of one tine to her palm until it hurt but did not cut. She dragged it across the lines on her palm, leaving a hot trail of pain and a white line against the soft flesh. The line swiftly filled pink. As long as the line hummed, tingling and hot, she focused on it.

  “If you tuck it into your hair, your hair will grow swiftly.”

  “I don’t know how.” Nothing wasn’t truly paying attention, staring instead at her palm and the slowly departing line.

  “I do,” said the sorceress, directly behind Nothing.

  Nothing gasped, shocked the sorceress had moved so silently and fast.

  The sorceress lifted an eyebrow, lips cocked in a half-smile, and held out her hand for the comb.

  “I… I don’t need my hair to grow.”

  “Very well,” the sorceress said with a shrug. She sauntered away. “Do you like the pears I’ve been bringing you for breakfast?”

  Taken aback by the change in topic, Nothing simply said, “Yes.”

  “Good.”

  Then the sorceress lifted her arms and stretched, eyes closed. She bent her body from side to side, then folded in half to skim her fingers to the crystal floor at her toes. For a moment Nothing thought she’d hop onto her hands and balance like an acrobat, but instead the sorceress stood again and said, “I’m going to finish my diagram.”

  “Can I help?”

  “Hmm. Watch first; then I’ll find something.”

  Nothing knelt, hands flat on her knees, and did as she was told.

  The sorceress took her wand from within her tight tunic and moved carefully across the diagram, stepping largely, turning on her toes. Not an acrobat, a dancer.

  Nothing wanted to move that way. To be noticed for grace and control, not ignored for tucking into shadows and hugging the edges of a room.

  Suddenly the sorceress crouched, brow furrowed, and touched her wand to the floor. It flared and began to slice the crystal floor again, in a curve. Gradually, the sorceress spiraled the line into itself, latched it with a triangle, and moved to a new space where she began a long line to divide the entire diagram into five sections.

  As the diagram grew, so did the anticipation vibrating through the air. Nothing was glad for the thin blue tunic and plain trousers Kirin had chosen for her, as they left her arms bare and her feet and did little to muffle her body from the tension of the magic. The tingle was a little bit like gathering storm clouds before it rained, before the lightning struck. It was like the hollow old snag tree, waiting for them off the road, and like the moment after you said someone’s name but before they turned to look.

  “Here,” the sorceress said, glancing up at Nothing. Her white eye was a bright smoky yellow-gray, like the smoky quartz surrounding them.

  Nothing picked her way quickly, avoiding the lines of magic, to the sorceress’s side. The sorceress’s body hummed with energy, and she held out the wand.

  “Take it. Hold it however you are most comfortable,” she instructed, keeping her voice a very even tone.

  Doing so, Nothing held it like a paintbrush, in loose fingers. She did not practice writing or calligraphy but had watched Kirin do it many rainy afternoons. She crouched where the sorceress directed her and tried to calm her breathing.

  “I
am going to guide your hand. When you are ready, you must will the wand to glow.”

  Nothing nodded, but the instant the sorceress placed her hand over Nothing’s, that same cold darkness encroached upon her sight and body. She shivered.

  Instead of releasing her, the sorceress pressed more firmly. “Hold it back or embrace it, or you cannot help.”

  “Which?” Nothing whispered.

  “You choose,” the sorceress said angrily, as if she’d said it a hundred times before.

  The anger helped, and Nothing ignored the dark curlicues along her vision until they were gone. Then it was only the softness of the sorceress’s fingers hovering against her knuckles, her hand at rest against Nothing’s wrist. The sorceress’s black-lacquered nails seemed to swallow light.

  No other part of them touched, but Nothing felt completely in the sorceress’s control.

  “Now,” the sorceress murmured. “Link this line with that, from exactly here to exactly here.” She pointed with her other hand.

  “A straight line or a curve, or…?”

  The sorceress sighed in irritation.

  Nothing gritted her teeth. She pushed the tip of the crystal wand against the floor at exactly the correct point and dragged it unthinking to the other line. The wand flared, the floor groaned, but the line sliced into place.

  There was a pop inside Nothing’s ears, and all the tension and waiting energy faded.

  “Good,” the sorceress said, soft against Nothing’s cheek. Then she added in more of a drawl, “Though it’s a deeper line than necessary.”

  The sorceress stood, and Nothing shivered, blinking at afterimages of cold, dark spirals and curling tentacles. She stood too, facing the sorceress, and thrust out the wand. “Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome,” the sorceress said mildly.

  “What will we do with this long-sight spell?”

  “Oh, it isn’t finished. Only the diagram.” The sorceress walked to the empty wall. “Are you coming?” She glanced over her shoulder at Nothing, then vanished through the solid rock.

  As quickly as she could without stepping upon any of the diagram lines, Nothing dashed after.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  AS SHE WALKED THROUGH the portal after the sorceress, Nothing wondered if she went because she wanted to or because she always followed.

  The room she stepped into might’ve been part of a house. Rich wooden paneling hid the mountain walls, inlaid with carved teak and lattice as if they were windows beyond which one might view the sea. Rugs covered the floor, deep blue and purple with spots of red florals, and the ceiling was banded with thick beams and whitewash. Wooden furniture clustered intimately around a desk and a hearth burning what looked and felt like real fire. Book piles leaned precariously into one another, and pillows were tossed about on both floor and plush sofa. Beside the hearth a real door opened into another room.

  Lamps filled the rooms with bright, warm light.

  “Sorceress?” Nothing called.

  “Through here,” the reply came, distant from the other room.

  Nothing went into it. An entire wall was mirrors, some human height, some round and small, with floor pillows and bolsters near them, as well as low tables filled with paint pots and powder. There was also a bed on a swaying trestle, and a wide, open wardrobe spilling silks and satins and shining cloth Nothing had no names for.

  The sorceress wasn’t even in her bedroom.

  Nothing paused, feeling like she didn’t belong. She heard running water beyond yet another door and peered through at bright tiles, but she refused to walk into a bathing room. Biting her lip, Nothing returned to the sitting room and plopped onto one of the sofas.

  What was the point of this? she thought. Was it supposed to be friendliness or seduction or admission to the sorceress’s privacy to prove her willingness to reveal secrets?

  Maybe the sorceress simply had wanted to bathe away her sweat and work.

  Nothing closed her eyes and listened for the heartbeat of the mountain.

  She didn’t hear it.

  “Thirsty?”

  Nothing snapped her head around to the sorceress, who leaned her shoulder against the bedroom doorway. Her damp hair fell heavily around her face, making her magical eyes seem huge, her cheeks rounder and prettier. A silky green robe was clenched around her waist with a white and pink cherry-blossom sash, but the collar was an open arrow down between her breasts, revealing the entirety of the bronze-pink scar over her heart. Nothing’s own heart clenched at the sight of it.

  She wanted to—she wanted—

  The sorceress walked barefoot across her plush rugs to a sideboard and lifted a decanter of bright-pink liquid. She poured two small bowls of it and brought them to Nothing, offering one.

  “Tea or liquor?” Nothing asked, cupping the bowl with all her fingers.

  “A little bit of both.” The sorceress sipped at her bowl.

  Nothing stared through the pink drink at the shimmering images painted on the inside of the bowl: little gold and blue fish, tiny as grains of wheat. She sipped. The drink was bittersweet and complicated, with a tiny burn. She understood how it might be a little bit of both.

  The sorceress draped herself upon a low sofa, delicately crossing her ankles. “Tell me what you like to do, Nothing.”

  “Do?”

  “In your old life, at the palace.”

  “Why?”

  “You said you are not my demon, and so I would like to know who you are.”

  “I’m not anybody.”

  “Nothing,” the sorceress murmured.

  “Exactly,” Nothing said, and drank all the rest of her drink.

  “But what do you do?”

  “I listen. I—I eat and drink and go where I wish through the walls of the palace. I spend time with Kirin and sometimes my friend Whisper. I trade gossip for what I need, but only if Kirin is not nearby. When he is with me I can have anything I want.”

  “What sorts of things have you wanted?”

  “You know the answer!” Nothing forced herself not to throw the little bowl.

  “You wanted what the prince wanted. You wanted to be quiet and unseen, to be his companion without ambition. Never to leave, but only to push or pull what you could to make him happy.”

  Nothing’s voice shook when she said, “I already accept he mastered me, that some part of me was a demon and vulnerable to it. Why are you making me say it again? He was my friend, my prince. Why should it have seemed odd to want to make him happy!”

  “Because it infuriates me,” the sorceress said coldly. “I would like to put his eyeballs on a platter for it.”

  “No,” Nothing snapped.

  “As you wish.”

  “I was friends with the great demon of the palace,” Nothing said, trying to offer the sorceress something.

  “Were you?” She looked at her bowl, slowly swirling liquor within it, instead of looking at Nothing.

  “I scratched its itches and told it jokes, and sometimes it purred for me and promised to miss me when I left. That is friendship, with a demon.”

  The sorceress blinked rapidly and her lips parted, but she paused and those lips spread in a real smile. “Would you like me to scratch your itches, Nothing, to win your friendship?”

  Nothing felt heat in her cheeks, throbbing from the burning flower over her heart. She certainly needed more liquor for this conversation. “Ah, I…”

  The sorceress laughed lightly. “I did not get to tease you so, when you were a demon.”

  “Maybe you shouldn’t tease me now, either!” Nothing insisted, trying to scowl. But her answering smile shone through. She dipped her chin, still glancing up at the sorceress.

  The delighted expression on the sorceress’s lovely copper face faded slowly, in a gentle way like the setting sun. Not closed off, nor cold. But she did not speak.

  Nothing wanted to know why. She did want to know this sorceress; she wanted to see the impetuous creature.

  A g
asp caught in her throat. She wanted. Nothing grinned: it was the first thing she’d realized she wanted for no reason that could possibly have to do with Kirin.

  The sorceress narrowed her eyes. “What is that smile?”

  Nothing laughed. Now the sorceress wanted the same thing from her. It felt good. It felt… powerful. Nothing shook her head slowly. “I should go.” Before she lost this feeling. She should go while it reigned in her heart.

  Nothing liked how the sorceress seemed to stop breathing for a moment, then drew herself to her feet and pointed imperiously at the wall.

  “There is the exit,” the sorceress said as a door appeared, carved with flowers painted red and pink. Nothing’s door.

  “I’ll see you at dinner,” Nothing said, dashing for her bedroom. She stopped before opening the door and turned to add, “I’m looking forward to it.”

  Then she laughed again, quite happily.

  Only a slight shock began to appear on the sorceress’s face before Nothing grasped the many-petaled flower knob and left.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  NOTHING WENT STRAIGHT INTO her room, turned, closed the door and opened it again. This time it opened into the corridor outside. She headed for the altar room, wondering if Sky and Kirin remained there. It had been hours since she left. But where had they to go, unless the dragon guided them?

  The two young men sat together on the floor, backs against the altar that had been Sky’s bed. Around them scattered the remains of quite a meal, platters and bowls of crumbs and streaking sauces, and a bottle of wine leaned against Kirin’s thigh, trapped between them.

  When she barged in, Sky smiled, but Kirin frowned.

  “Where did you go?” he demanded, drawing one leg toward him to rest his arm against his knee.

  The displeasure in his voice and posture soured her stomach. Nothing stopped and planted her feet wide, fists on her hips to resist him. “I can go where I like,” she said.

  “But should you? You abandoned us.”

  “Kirin,” Sky said with obvious censure.

  Kirin closed his mouth in a tight line. Even on the floor he looked imperial. Arrogant. A unique flower to be envied in his red jacket and perfect hair.