“I can’t,” I said, and went on before he could fire his next arrow, “but I may be able to teach you to see it if you’re willing to try.”
“Why wouldn’t we be?” Cyriack said, and I knew that pose of careless bravado, knew it from the inside.
“Not ‘willing to let my words go in one ear and out the other while you nod politely,’ ” I said. “Willing to try.”
That stung him, as I’d known it would, and he agreed on the instant. Corbie was frowning at the bog body; she said, “Sure. It’s spooky as shit, though.”
“Yes,” I said, and reminded myself to go gently with them. I was suddenly—and rather absurdly, all things considered—glad that I’d chosen to bring Ynge’s Influence of the Moon into exile with me. I’d read it so many times between Mélusine and Esmer that I had the relevant passages essentially memorized. And I knew they would work, if Cyriack and Corbie would let them; they’d worked for me.
I looked around; there was a chair in the corner, and I pointed Mildmay at it. “This may take a while. You might as well sit down.”
He gave me the look under his eyebrows he always gave me when I worried about his health, but he sat. Insofar as I could read him, he seemed interested, but not at all alarmed. “All right,” I said to Corbie and Cyriack. “Remember you promised to give this an honest effort.”
They nodded, Corbie cooperatively, Cyriack scowling with impatience. I said, “I want you to think about the moon. You can close your eyes if it helps, but you don’t have to. Think about the moon at the half.”
Cyriack opened his mouth to object, caught my eye, and subsided. Corbie had her eyes squinched shut in a look of desperate concentration; I needed to remember to start teaching her basic mental imagery. But cooperation was cooperation; the fine details were a matter for later. “The moon is at the half,” I said. “In the night sky, it’s half a circle, but you know that in reality, there’s a full circle, half-light and half-dark. Yes?”
“Yes,” Cyriack said, and Corbie nodded. Cyriack had his eyes closed now.
“Good,” I said. “You have a circle, half-light and half-dark. You can see both halves in your mind.” Next was the tricky bit; I was careful not to let my voice alter. “Now I want you to imagine this moon, the moon at the half, in a white sky. Where before the dark half was invisible, now the light half is invisible. You have the dark half of the moon hanging in a white sky. Are you still with me?”
Corbie’s face had smoothed out; Cyriack was frowning slightly. But they both nodded.
“Good. Now reverse it again: the moon against a black sky. But remember the full circle is always there.” I took them through the switch a couple more times, and then said, “Now hold that image of the moon, the full circle, half-light, half-dark, in your head, and open your mind to your magic. Let your magic fill the moon, half-light, half-dark. The moon is your magic, half-light, half-dark. You see both sides at once.” I waited a moment, watching their faces, and said, “Now open your eyes and look at this bog body.”
Corbie staggered backwards exactly as I had. Cyriack held his ground, but his face went a dreadful color, and his voice cracked when he said, “What is that?”
“That,” I said, “is noirance. Congratulations.”
“But . . . I . . . but it wasn’t . . .” He turned to Mildmay. “Do you see it?”
“Annemer,” Mildmay said, perfectly calmly.
Cyriack turned, like a bear at bay. “Corbie?” Corbie was still staring at the bog body. Cyriack looked wildly at me. “What did you do to us?”
I smiled at him. “I taught you a new metaphor.”
“But this . . . this isn’t . . .”
“I’ve been telling you for weeks that aether isn’t real, any more than noirance is. They’re just different ways of looking at something we aren’t built to understand.”
Corbie announced, “I need a drink.”
“Right,” said Cyriack. He all but bolted from the room. I didn’t entirely expect him to return, but he did, only five minutes later, carrying a bottle and four glasses. He splashed whiskey in the glasses and handed them around. Corbie knocked hers back like a woman taking medicine, and Cyriack poured her more without being asked.
I sipped my whiskey and waited. The next move was clearly theirs.
And they were clearly very uncomfortable with making it. Neither Cyriack nor Corbie would meet my eyes, and I watched the way they both kept glancing at the bog body and then quickly away. Mildmay folded his hands over the head of his cane and observed everything with attentive disinterest. I would have to remember to ask him later whether he’d classed the bog body as a threat or an advantage.
Finally, Corbie couldn’t stand it any longer and said, “But if there’s all this . . . this noirance, where is it coming from?”
“An excellent question,” I said, “to which I don’t have an answer. Shall we look?”
Corbie looked at me as if I’d suggested biting the heads off babies for fun.
“She’s still dead,” I said. “Her noirance can’t hurt you unless you let it.”
“Wait a moment,” said Cyriack. “How do you ‘let’ magic do anything?”
“Don’t think of it as a force of nature,” I said. “It’s not like your elements, fire and water and so on. It’s a human force, shaped by human will and human desire. And it holds impressions frighteningly well.”
“I don’t understand,” Corbie started, and Mildmay said, “He means ghosts.”
“Well, not ghosts exactly,” I said. “Those don’t necessarily have anything to do with magic. But necromancy isn’t merely bringing the dead back to life, and the dead aren’t the only nonliving things that can hold, and twist, magic.”
Cyriack and Corbie were staring at me now with even greater alarm, and I brought myself sternly back to order. “But my point is, unless you are very very stupid and invite it in or otherwise open yourself to it”—as I had done, more than once, but there was no need to tell them I was speaking from personal experience—“it cannot harm you. Most of magic is in your intent, after all.”
Not to them, of course, poor lambs. They thought it was all quantifiable, that it had some objective existence apart from their own perceptions. But perhaps they were learning better.
“So,” Cyriack said. “You think we should . . . examine the body?”
“It’s what you do, ain’t it?” Mildmay said.
“Yes, but I didn’t . . .” Know, he did not say.
“Oh for pity’s sake,” said Corbie, shaking herself like a dog coming out of the water. “If it hasn’t hurt you before, it won’t hurt you now. Come on.”
She stepped boldly up to the table and there foundered—not so much, I thought, on lack of courage as on lack of experience. She glanced sideways at Cyriack and said, almost shyly, “I don’t want to mess up your research.”
“Oh,” Cyriack said. “Oh. Right. Yes. No, she should be perfectly stable, if Adept Chellick’s spell has worked correctly. Which, of course, it may not have.” Concern for his specimen got him up beside Corbie, and he said, in a more normal tone of voice, “I haven’t really had much of a chance to look at her. I’d better, um . . . Is it all right if I take notes?”
“Why are you asking me?” I said. “It’s not my bog body.”
He said, “Right, right. Back in a minute,” and darted away. Corbie continued to stand, both hands pressed palms down on the table, as if she was trying to prevent it from flying away. I looked over at Mildmay, who gave me a flat, green, indecipherable look back and then pushed himself to his feet and came over to the table, where he looked at the body critically.
After a moment, he said, “She don’t look very old.”
I looked at her face, at her small clutching hands. “You’re right. She doesn’t.”
“And look,” he said, bringing his cane up and using it, very very gently, to press her chin up from its position tucked against her chest. “She was strangled.”
“How—” Co
rbie began explosively, and then she saw what Mildmay had seen: brown against brown, there was a rope around her neck, much too tight against her skin to be anything but the instrument of her death.
Cyriack came back then, and Mildmay said, without looking up, “How many of these bog people died of being strangled?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“C’mere,” Mildmay said, and Cyriack came and looked.
“Oh,” he said, “but that’s symbolic. The old word for ‘bog’ means ‘strangling water.’ ”
“That ain’t a symbolic knot,” Mildmay said, nudging again with his cane, this time moving aside the flat braided strands of the woman’s hair. Then he said, “Oh, shit, that ain’t rope, neither.”
“Her own hair?” I said after a long moment.
“Still attached to her head,” Corbie said. She looked rather sick.
Cyriack reached forward, touching the woman’s throat very lightly. From the point of contact with his fingertips, the dark brown dissolved from skin and hair, showing her as tawny as any living Corambin, and the rope around her neck indubitably her own hair. And with the contrast of color returned, it was possible to see the broken hairs where her murderer had knotted her death viciously against her skin.
Gideon died by strangling. I was glad, now, that I had not been allowed to see the body.
“But she doesn’t look . . .” Corbie didn’t finish that sentence, either. We looked at the woman’s twisted, crumpled face.
“She don’t look like much of anything,” Mildmay said. “And I s’pose we wouldn’t, neither, after being in a bog all this time.”
“Well, no.” Cyriack opened the notebook he’d brought with him and began taking notes in a very small, very precise hand. “To answer your question, not all the bodies have ropes around their necks, of their own hair or otherwise. I’d assumed they’d all drowned, because why strangle someone if you’re going to throw them in a bog anyway?”
“Well, it makes it easier to do the throwing,” I said and got horrified looks from Corbie and Cyriack. Mildmay just bumped me very gently with his shoulder and changed the subject.
“So, this whole strangling with her hair thing, could it be where the noirance is coming from?”
“Not in and of itself,” I said, “although it certainly helps to explain why it has persisted all these centuries. Clearly, like the necromancers in Mélusine, they knew the thaumaturgical effects of violent death.”
“The thaumaturgical effects of violent death?” Cyriack was staring at me.
“None of them is pleasant,” I said.
“Never mind that,” Mildmay said, and jabbed toward the table with an impatient finger. “What about her?”
I looked at the noirance wound about the corpse like ribbons. “They must have anchored it somehow . . . I never would have thought of using architectural thaumaturgy on a person.”
Mildmay gave me an odd look. “Ain’t that what your tattoos are?”
It took me a moment even to understand what he meant, and then I looked down at my hands, feeling as if I’d never seen them before. He was right. The blue eyes tattooed on my palms (Miss Leverick says sailors think blue eyes are good luck, Mildmay had said last night), tattooed and then pressed to another Cabaline’s palms in the final step of the oath-taking. Tattooed and sworn and unfading, and why had it never occurred to me that architectural thaumaturgy was exactly what they were?
“Yes, well,” I said, hastily grabbing after my wits. “That’s neither here nor there. Cyriack, did the ancient Corambins practice tattooing?”
“Not that I’ve ever heard,” Cyriack said. He looked doubtfully at the bog body. “I suppose we can look.”
If she had had clothes, they had not survived with her, except for sandal laces still wrapped around her calves. Cyriack did his small magic on her arms, her thighs; when he touched her left shoulder blade, something that I had taken merely for an effect of her centuries in the bog resolved itself into a series of circles scored into her skin.
Not merely circles. I looked closer, holding my breath against the stench. “A labyrinth,” I said. “They marked her with a labyrinth. Mildmay, weren’t you telling me that there are labyrinths all over Corambis?”
“That’s what the lady said,” he agreed.
“Know of any labyrinths associated with your bogs?” I asked Cyriack.
He’d gone back to writing notes. “I, um. I’d have to ask Adept Gower, and he’d probably have to ask his friend who’s collecting stories for him.”
“You mean like all the people who said if you got something evil, you give it to the bog?” Mildmay said.
Cyriack twitched and smudged his notes. I wished I’d been here for that earlier conversation.
“That’s certainly what it looks like happened with this poor woman,” I said. “They put all their darkness on her.”
“And gave her to the bog,” Corbie said.
“Yes. And gave her to the bog.”
“Sacrifice,” Cyriack blurted and then looked as startled as if the bog body herself had spoken.
“Yes?” I prompted.
“When Mr. Brightmore was here”—and there was a story I wanted, but I would ask Kay rather than Cyriack—“he said that the magic these people practiced was probably based on sacrifice, as the Usara’s magic still is.”
“The Sacrifice of the Caster,” Corbie said, almost inaudibly.
“It’s a very potent force,” I said, as neutrally as I could. “And I told you, the thaumaturgical effects of violent death, while not pleasant, are profound. When they did this, they meant it to stick.”
The conversation failed, and we watched silently as Mildmay picked up the sheet from where Cyriack had left it and draped it over the dead woman.
That night, Mildmay read d’Islay to me while I paced around the main room of our apartment. I was not attending very well, and after the third time he’d had to ask me twice for a definition, he put d’Islay aside, very carefully—and one of the reasons I loved him was his gentle reverence for books. I hadn’t taught him that; as far as I knew, he’d always had it. He asked, “You wanna tell me what’s wrong?”
“No,” I said honestly, which amused him. I could hear that in his voice when he said, “You wanna tell me anyway?”
“Violent death.”
He understood; I saw it in his eyes when I glanced at him. And then he very visibly braced himself and said, “Could you bring Gideon back? If you wanted to?”
I stopped pacing, staring at him. Finally, I said, “How long have you been sitting on that idea?”
He shrugged. “I just wondered.”
Which did not answer my question, but I decided to accept his sidestep—decided I really didn’t want an answer. I began pacing again. After a while, I said, “I suppose I could. I mean, if I weren’t under the binding-by-obedience. I think I know enough of the theory, and I could always consult the Mulkist books in the University library if I needed to. But what I brought back . . . it wouldn’t be Gideon.”
He said nothing, watching me with those feral green eyes.
“It would be a memory of Gideon,” I said. “A pattern of Gideon as he was. Not . . .” I thought of Prince Magnus, trapped forever and eternally at the age of fourteen, and I sat down heavily beside Mildmay on our sway-backed couch. “It wouldn’t be Gideon, who rubs your back when your muscles ache from coughing, or Gideon, who writes snippy notes in the margins of books of thaumaturgical theory, or Gideon, who . . .” I swallowed hard.
“Say it,” Mildmay said softly.
“Gideon, who kisses me openmouthed,” I said in a rush. “Gideon, who butters biscuits for me even when he’s mad at me. Gideon, who . . . who . . .”
“Say it.”
“Who loves me,” I said, and it hurt like tearing my heart out through the ribs of my chest. “Gideon loved me and I can’t have that back, no matter what I do.” I was crying, and I didn’t know when I’d started. “I can’t have him back and I miss
him so much. I miss him so fucking much.”
“I know,” Mildmay said, and he put his arm around me, letting me hide against his shoulder, knowing, as I did, how dangerous, how fundamentally unsafe it was to confess to love. “I know.”
Chapter 14
Felix
On Venerdy, Mildmay returned to his program of reading to Kay Brightmore; on Domenica, the Institution being closed, I finally gave in to my curiosity and accompanied him.
Kay Brightmore was being kept in the old nursery, where he was incongruous against the pale yellow walls and brightly colored, if shabby, rugs. He was transparently pleased to hear Mildmay’s voice, and welcomed me as close to warmly as I imagined he got. I asked after Julian; Kay said, “He is well, although Murtagh is being very foolish. Is not as if Julian can choose whether he will be aethereal or not, so is no sense in punishing him for it. But Murtagh has forbidden him to go to the Mammothium and is talking of withdrawing him from the University.”
“That seems . . .”
“Unusually shortsighted in a man as canny as the Dragon of Desperen Field?” Kay was pacing the length of the room as easily and rapidly as any sighted person. “Yes. He seems to consider the matter a personal affront. And I fear my sister Isobel is particularly ill-suited to be either a peacemaker or a comfort. Julian has been coming to me.” His tone invited us to share the joke, and I had to admit, he seemed as alien to those roles as he said his sister was.
“And you ain’t sent him off with a flea in his ear?” Mildmay said. He crossed the line of Kay’s pacing and settled in a battered wing-back chair near the arched windows.
Kay made a noise deep in his throat, exasperation and compassion and amusement all combined. “Is not the boy’s fault. And as far as I can tell, he has no one else. His friends seem to be all magicians.”
“Cyriack,” I said. I followed Mildmay’s example and sat on one of the window seats.
“With whom Murtagh has forbidden Julian to have any further contact.” Kay sighed. “And I am a little dubious, I confess, as to Thrale’s . . .”
“Yes, exactly,” I said.
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