Ash and Silver

by Carol Berg

  “. . . and how persuasive is the righteous anger of a portrait artist easily seduced to murder?” I said.

  Fix nodded slowly, eyes never leaving me. “Aye. There’s that. So I just feel . . .”

  “. . . there must be more.” We spoke the inevitable conclusion in unison.

  If Damon didn’t want something more from me, I would be a martyred memory, not nurtured in the bosom of the Order with my memories of the past dust.

  “I’ve got to keep going, Fix,” I said. “I’ve got to learn what is Damon’s idea of Registry purity and the rebirth of Navronne. Does he plan to make a puppet of whichever prince wins the day? And if not one of Eodward’s sons, then who does he intend to sit Caedmon’s throne? Does the Marshal bring the Order to enforce their will? The second band on the bracelet suggests it.”

  Fix threw his bent spoon into the empty pie dish. “Boldest would be to sit his own king. Wait for one of the three to eliminate the other two and then trump the winner with his own man. But I’ve no idea who.”

  We had to leave the question there, as Fix had duties to attend. “I’ll look in on your hungry friend from time to time through the night. Are you for the seaward wall? That could be a good time to consider magic that can knit the world back into one piece or set free a people trapped in trees. Gods’ bones, I’ll need to give those things some heartfelt contemplation myself!”

  “Our seaward flank will go unguarded this night and several more,” I said, dragging myself from the floor beside Fix’s brazier. “Inek’s pointed teaching tells me I am unfit to buckle my boot at present. And falling off the wall will do no one any good. But there is a matter of boats. . . .”

  “Boats, as in more than one? I told you old Dorye—”

  “I believe I can bring the Cicerons from Xancheira to anywhere in the fortress, if I focus my magic right. Two hundred people or so.”

  Fix closed the door he’d half opened and rested his back on it. “And when are you planning to perform this feat?”

  “It needs to be soon. Tonight I sleep. Tomorrow night I’ll take old Dorye to the estuary. By now Morgan should have Bastien waiting for me, assuming he was willing to come away, rather than waiting around to be murdered. I’m hoping the two of them will agree to get the Cicerons back to Palinur or wherever they want to go. As soon as we’ve a plan, I’ll return to Xancheira through the crypt door and retrieve them. Hopefully I can bring more than one at a time.”

  “There’s no place for your sister here. The Order doesn’t believe you should even know she exists. Are you sure—?”

  “I won’t allow her to stay in Xancheira and starve. She’s made friends with the Cicerons. . . .” I couldn’t believe I was even considering sending my sister off with a troop of thieves and vagabonds, no matter their place in history. But where would a gently raised pureblood maiden of fifteen be safe? Evidently a place of legend I’d never seen, beyond a mystical boundary I myself couldn’t cross, had seemed the best choice two years ago.

  Fix folded his arms across his chest. “You won’t need boats alone, but rowers; never heard of a Ciceron who knew an oar from a chicken leg. And you’ll need a distraction, as we wouldn’t want the Order, for the Mother’s sake, to see two hundred people hauled out from their own confusticated docks!” As his voice rose, I’d swear the air rippled. “But certainly, paratus, Fix the boatmaster can provide whatever you need. Just give him a day’s warning to create a bit of distracting spellwork and eight or ten rowers who can make a rough crossing twice in a night and whose minds can be safely mucked out at the end.”

  “I can do that. And this is your warning.”

  He jerked his body away from the door and reached for the latch again, then paused and looked over his shoulder, the moment’s manic agitation profoundly stilled. “I felt what your magic wrought as you opened that door in the crypt, and again this morning when you returned. This Morgan and her kin, who seem devoted to preserving the natural order of things, are right to be concerned about you. Use such power wisely, Greenshank. I don’t like thinking of a power-mad Damon having your kind of magic at his beck as he sets out to transform this kingdom. You cannot allow him to control it. I can’t allow it, either. I won’t.”

  His sobriety shot steel needles up my spine. “I understand, sir knight.”

  “And you’d best figure out what your friendly Danae do to mad ones of their own kind and to those humans who’ve befriended them. Two hundred ragtag Cicerons are one thing. But what happens when twenty thousand sorcerers, savaged by the Registry, are set free? Are these new wars in the making? Will your involvement bring them to my fortress? I won’t allow that either.”

  His warnings jangled every nerve, but I refused to let fear take hold. “We can’t turn our backs on them, Fix. We have to find a way to make it right.”

  A grin flashed through his mask. “Thought you’d say that. But do let me know what I must prepare for. If Damon thinks to use the Order to bring down the Registry and win Navronne’s crown, and you think to bring in a legion of starvelings and mad Danae, I’m thinking I might have a very busy year.”

  His humor should have been reassuring . . . but Fix was a very serious man. I watched him stride down the quay, brushed by spotty lamplight . . . and felt the swift pulse of power that transformed the tall, brisk, sinewy knight into a round-shouldered, slow-moving elder. Had I not been waiting for it, the keen blade of enchantment would have been lost in the myriad threads that entangled Fortress Evanide.

  “Dost thou count that extraordinary person as friend?”

  The voice from the depths of the cottage spun me around so sharply I near broke my skull on the low lintel. “I thought you were sleeping, Lord Siever.”

  “Perhaps his potent spells cannot redeem this cadaverous frame any more than Kyr’s new-bled meat does. Though, truly, I’ve not felt so well in months.” Siever hefted his lank body to sitting. “This man Fix . . . danger drips from his tongue alongside jest as bee stings companion honey.”

  His wry observation raised a chuckle, but my answer came sober. “Fix is not my friend. His duties preclude friends, I think. He’s let me know him, which implies a trust I believe extremely rare. Never would I presume on it. In return, I believe him eminently trustworthy. He’ll not betray either of us.”

  “To this man Damon—who seems set to upend the world my people yearn to rejoin? Or to thy Danae friends?” Perhaps the fate of his people weighed especially heavy on Siever at that moment—or perhaps it was the cost of illness or Fix’s spellwork—but his warmth had shifted into cool and weary resignation. “Thou didst not mention having friends among the long-lived.”

  “I didn’t think—” Why hadn’t I told them of Morgan and her kin? “I’d no intent to deceive. But it’s a difficult situation, and I’ve no idea how to resolve it. Indeed, I could use some good counsel. . . .”

  So I sat back down and told him of the blue Danae and their concerns about my magic and their silver-marked kin, of Morgan and the youthful liaison I could not remember, and of the terrible risk she’d taken to help me. “. . . so she agreed to bring this coroner back here. And I hope she can tell me what’s necessary to set your people free of their prisoning.”

  Siever spoke carefully, as if paring away words he might otherwise have said. “I would accompany thee to meet this gentle lady. ’Tis inevitable that she have questions, and across a boiling sea is a very long way to shout an answer.”

  “I’d welcome you—and so would she.”

  The lamplight carved creases into his high forehead. “I doubt that. Truly ’twould be best not to speak truth of my origins, even to one who has so captured thy regard. Once the long-lived understand that the terms of thy oath are in play, thy choices will be limited.”

  His clarity shook me. I had sworn to take Tuari to the silver Danae as soon as I learned how. And Morgan’s fate rested solely on my adherence to those terms
. I was already in violation.

  But Morgan had accepted my excuse that I had to understand what I learned before telling her father. “I trust Morgan, if not her kin. But I’ll leave you to decide what she should know of you.”

  “But—” Again, he bit off words. “Well, we shall see.”

  Of course his dreadful experience would color his feelings about Danae. “Will you be strong enough to venture the sea tomorrow night?”

  “A bit of sleep, another meal or two—this cider is extraordinary—and I shall likely be able to row.”

  • • •

  I slept that night like the Sky Lord’s hounds, who chase the Bull and Stag across the winter sky and sleep away the summer. After an early visit to the chart room and a hard run across the mudflats, Dunlin, Heron, and I sat our session with the Archivist. We had already studied the premises of memory magic—language, symbols, patterns, and the structure of human recollections—as well as the physical and ethical considerations underlying memory implantation and removal. To implant a new memory with a fullness of experience, understanding, and emotion was so complex and bore so many ethical burdens that it was taught only to vested knights who had substantial need for it. Memory preservation was quite delicate. Thus we began with the study of simple destruction.

  We began by constructing the simplest kind of memory pattern—a word and its definition, a food and a preference, an action and result—and learning to wrap it in magic, so we could strip it from a person’s mind.

  The more one knew of the person, the more specific the memory you could construct—and the more complete the removal. The spells on our memory-wipe tokens used for strangers were extremely specific—this man’s face, that particular location, this exact circumstance—else we risked intruding on memories we had no right to touch. Removing the memory of a knight’s mission was dependent on the thoroughness and exactitude of his report.

  Removing the past of a tyro was work that had been developed over decades, a sprawling net spell that touched those parts of every person’s experience—family, teachers, lovers, residences. . . . It was brutal because of its extent, yet necessarily incomplete, so that the memories could be returned. Fragments always remained—perhaps like the greeting Envisia seru when one met a being of legend, and certainly those roots of familiarity, like the scent of ink, my hand’s recognition of my signature, the understanding of my own artworks, the familiarity of Bastien’s necropolis.

  “Attend, Greenshank!” The Archivist’s knuckle rapped on the table. And I bent to the work, exchanging memory patterns with Dunlin to examine and correct.

  Creating memory patterns was art. Words, objects, faces, facts—these were lines, curves, dimensions: thick or narrow, sturdy or delicate, certainty or suggestion. Sensation and emotion were colors, blended and shaded, given depth or left vague. The memory itself was a composition, and if the artist was able to bring his bent to its creation, it would take on the aspect of truth. It was no delusion or excessive pride to believe I would be good at it, in the same way it was no false modesty to know I would never be a renowned swordsman. Delusion and false modesty did not last long at Evanide.

  At midday, the Archivist dismissed us, grumbling that it would be the new year before we could dare try our workings on a person’s mind. Disappointing. By the new year the world would be changed for good or ill. The fate of the Xancheirans would be determined. The Sitting of the Three Hundred would have done its work. Navronne’s king would be one of Eodward’s vile sons or perhaps, instead, a person of Attis de Lares-Damon’s choice.

  Was a man of such overarching confidence as Damon capable of stepping aside? And where was his belief in justice when he learned of my family’s murder? I would bring him to account for that. But before I could know how to do it, I had to learn his plan.

  Dunlin, Heron, and I spent a hard afternoon working with another cadre and the swordmaster on improving faults exposed at Val Cleve. When my back started leaking blood again, the swordmaster sent me to the infirmary for new stitches. An hour later I was fighting again, with knife and fists and magic, as if incinerating hay bales and slamming my brothers to the floor might drain the tumult inside.

  The three of us were dull at supper. “What are we preparing for?” said Dunlin. “Magrog’s coming?”

  “Whatever comes,” I snapped, my wounded back protesting the long row across the bay still to come before sleep. “We’re not children.”

  The eighth-hour bells saved me from the urge to explain more. “We’ll run again tomorrow. Heron, find the earliest hour we can slog through the ebb. Leave a message on Inek’s tablet.”

  I ignored their eyerolls as I hurried to catch up with a knight just leaving the Hall. Exactly the person I needed to see.

  “Knight Conall,” I said, pressing my fist to my breast. “Might I have a word?”

  “Greenshank! For certain!” The man I’d known as Cormorant inclined his head properly—and then grinned hugely. “That was a most excellent job of navigation on our return from Val Cleve. Inek could not have asked for better. Though he would have, eh?”

  When I bent my head to acknowledge it, he nudged me as he’d have done a month ago. “We are yet brothers, Greenshank. I’ve a notion you’ll join me vested sooner than you think. Tell me”—he drew me out one of the kitchen doors into the unlighted niche where emptied bins and crates awaited sorting—“what happened to Inek? I’d never believe him caught in a backlash, even if I didn’t know about that odd business on my vigil night.”

  The Archivist had commanded me to secrecy, but I no longer trusted the Archivist. Someone needed to know the truth. Conall was Inek’s man. “You cannot speak of this to anyone, not the Marshal, not the Archivist, not anyone.”

  I gave him a chance to stop me. But a jerk of his chin said continue.

  “With Inek’s knowledge and consent, I was—and still am—embroiled in a dangerous play for power that shadows the Order. I’m working to learn its objectives and its reach. Inek went to the archives that night to secure my relict, which was . . . guarded . . . by a virulent spell trap.”

  “Mother’s heart! I knew it was something like, but you were the only one I dared ask. And he’s—”

  “In stasis for now, but at terrible risk. The Archivist seems to have high regard for him and says he’s trying to work out a counter, but I don’t know the whole story and don’t trust him entirely. I try to visit when I can. The more who do so . . . perhaps, the safer he’ll be.”

  “I’ll get in there,” he said. “It’s been a rough month.”

  “Indeed, I wanted to ask how your tyros were shaping. I know a few, at least, are near squiring. Would you trust any of them with a double crossing to the estuary in a single night? I’ve talked to the boatmaster about an exercise I want to try for Dunlin, Heron, and me. The three of us would navigate. If you’ve one who could tail me, it would just be hard rowing for the rest. Rough conditions.”

  “Five of my eight would thrive on it, and one of those is going to make Marshal before I get my first mission out. I’d like to stretch him. A sixth is a possible. The other two would die for sure in the second return. Something different would be good for the five.”

  I hated drawing Conall into my scheming. I’d tell him the entire story if I had time. I believed he’d answer my need willing. But this could not get back to the Marshal or Damon, and until I had better evidence of their duplicity, I had to keep things simple.

  “Good. I’m thinking tomorrow night or the next, but I’ll let you know by midday so they can snatch some rest in the afternoon. And the boatmaster says it’s an exercise works best with surprise—an evacuation drill—so if you’ll keep it close . . .”

  “I understand.” His face livened with the generous humor that would make men die for him. “They won’t realize it, but I’ll hold back a bit the next couple of days. They’re still a bit sagged. Inek would have
been proud of them at Val Cleve, too.”

  “Tell him of it, Conall. I like to believe he hears what we say.”

  • • •

  The night’s venture had me inexplicably edgy. My snap at Dunlin shamed me. Whatever the reason, my agitation was helped not at all when I arrived at Fix’s cottage to find Siever half in, half out of a thick cloak while doubled over with a violent cough.

  “Thy not-friend has provided an elixir,” he said, when he could croak a reply to my concern, “but it were a fool would drag me out to sea this night.”

  “And a worse fool who would allow himself to be dragged,” I said, helping him back to the cot and throwing the cloak over him. “It may be only fever or the cough, but your color seems better.”

  “Some of all, I ween,” he said. “My belly flourishes, for which I thank thee. And there’s this . . .”

  He held out his open palm and there rose from it a ball of rose-colored light and a sweet effusion of magic that brushed my spirit with joy. Though it vanished almost as soon as it was born, its glistening reflection lingered in the caverns of Siever’s eyes.

  “Lightwork,” he whispered, hoarse.

  “Ah, Siever. I am so glad.”

  “I could smell divine Idrium’s mead and ysomar that night at the citadel’s well and found the prospect of immortal feasting detestable; I’d sworn not to die before my lord and lady walked free. And now, perhaps, if the Mother wills it so, and thou art wise”—his words lingered on the air a very long time—“perhaps we can do something about that.”