The Makers of Light

by Lynna Merrill

  "No, this is not what I meant!" She was fighting tears now. It all sounded different from his mouth. He was so cold now, so distant. "I did not mean to accuse you about the pigs, either. I know that it was a mistake, I know that you would not mean to do something like this."

  "You know that? Then you know wrongly." His voice was very, very soft. "I meant all of it, and I am taking the responsibility. I won't hide it from you—and what you do with the knowledge is your own choice. We are going now; Star and Beauty are cold. You are cold as well, so you should go inside that carriage. But I won't make you."

  The carriage jerked; the horses started on their way. Rianor was staring at the road now, not looking at her at all. She shivered. The wind was colder and harsher without his arms around her, and she bit back silly tears. Master, what had she just done? How could she have said what she just had to him? She did want him, so much.

  She opened her mouth and closed it again. She should not talk. She could not think clearly, and anything else she said on that matter would be a mistake, for she had indeed meant her previous words and still did. As for Rianor, he seemed to be putting effort into not doing anything at all. She did not know what he would have done if he were not, but she suddenly knew that this inaction was the hardest thing for him.

  "I should not go inside, my lord." She felt she owed him an explanation, now that he was not making her do anything. "I would have offered to drive so that you could go inside yourself, but I don't think this is a good idea, either. We have had too much of being 'inside.' " Besides, I want to be here with you. "Just look around. Look at the world."

  She looked at the world—she needed to focus her attention away from him—and that only helped her better notice the holes in the road, the darkness of the buildings, the gloom that poured from where light and human diligence had been at work before.

  All was ... fading. With Magic dying, the very world of humans was slipping away. She knew it now. She knew it in her heart, and it seemed the heart was what mattered, for she had already known it all in her mind. She had known about the dysfunctional Factories, the new coupon system for food and material goods, the hunger and growing unrest—but it had all been so distant, almost unreal to the lady at her refuge at the top of the hill in Qynnsent.

  Rianor watched the world around them, too, and she knew him well enough to read on his face that he saw what she saw; that he, too, noticed what both of them had not noticed before. Just how easy was it to not look at the world and not know, even for them who prided themselves on the constant quest for knowledge?

  She looked at him again. "Those who seek knowledge are apt to seek it only in certain places—and thus they ignore knowledge that comes from elsewhere, unsought. This is their greatest failure."

  A part of her wanted to keep the thought to herself, now with the new tension between them. She did not. She was scared, suddenly; she was almost terrified of the idea that she could not talk to him any more, that she might have lost the friend, the partner of her mind, the only one who truly understood her. He looked at her, and she saw something in his eyes, but it was there for so brief a time that she could not discern what it was, only that it came from behind the steel.

  "I do not know about the greatest failure, Linde. There are too many failures, and they do not necessarily form a hierarchy. But a failure it is."

  They said nothing else, riding on, Blake snug between the two of them, Star and Beauty's tails swinging like blurred pendants in the falling snow. The horses' hooves sank deeply, the snow having already accumulated halfway to their knees. The carriage moved slowly now, and new snow swept over the tracks it left, obliterating them almost immediately. Caps of snow had piled on the dark buildings, too, and in the moonlit semi-darkness these houses looked like shapeless lumps, houses no more. Some of these buildings might belong to Noble Houses, others to affluent commoners; no one who had property on this road was poor. Now even these people did not have enough fire any more—and signs of human life seemed so easily erased by nature's white force.

  It was beautiful.

  "Science works." Minutes later Linden almost jumped, startled at Rianor's voice, her thoughts jerking away from where they had drifted to a world of white coldness. A world where in winter fire slept, never burning in pipes behind thick stone walls; where humans were no more, and firewells gaped cold and empty. A world like what the real world could become. She shivered.

  "Science works," her lord was saying, his voice stiff, as if he were only talking in order to return her gesture of talking to him earlier. "It is Magic that doesn't."

  This was obvious, at least after all that had happened in the last days, but they hadn't found the time to share the thought with each other. Funny that they would do so now, when it was so hard to talk at all.

  They did not talk further, for at that moment one of the horses slipped, and the carriage shook, almost rotating in the snow. Blake barked in alarm, and then barked again, with enthusiasm, and the horse straightened and neighed. The Qynnsent buildings had suddenly risen ahead of them.

  So enthusiastic were the animals to get home. Linden wished that she were, too, but right now those white-capped roofs and snow-buried windowsills did not feel like home.

  Linden

  Evening and night 29 of the First Quarter, Year of the Master 706

  Linden locked herself in her suite immediately after they got back and allowed herself to cry, but the tears would not come. She simply sat on the sofa and stared at the banner above the door, this time not caring to do either Magic or Science—not caring to do anything at all. She opened the door to no one: neither to Felice who came to bring a tray of food, nor to Clare who stood with her voice trembling behind the door for a long time, begging Linden to talk to her.

  Linden did talk to her, eventually. She did not put it beyond Clare to try to break the door down or go seek a key, involving Nan in the whole situation. Linden did not want Nan, or anyone, right now.

  "Please, Clare, go away," Linden said at some point, and heard the girl's voice turn into sobs just as she stopped knocking furiously.

  "I will go if you want me to, Lind." Sob. "You just had to"—sob—"say so! But you were so silent, and I was so afraid! I did not know whether you were conscious, or even whether you were alive!"

  Linden flung the door open. She had forgotten, in the half-hour since she and Rianor had come back, that she had been very sick for days and that Clare had been by her bed most of the time. She wrapped her arms around Clare and let her cry on her shoulder.

  "See? I am alive. You are, too; we all are." Clare still wore her bruises from the night of the fire outage, but she had not needed to be in bed for days herself. Or, had she not? For the first time Linden noticed a certain wildness in the girl's eyes that had not been there days ago. Linden cursed herself. The great lady would manipulate servants that everything was fine—while meanwhile she would not notice that the servant closest to her, her friend, was unwell! Linden stroked Clare's hair. It was smooth and chestnut, and suddenly it reminded her of Eileen's.

  "I am sorry, Clare. I am so sorry. I should have opened the door to you. Yet, I was occupied by other thoughts, and for a moment there I seemed to forget everything else." Why was she telling her maid about forgetting? Perhaps because Clare listened.

  "Lind, you know, I ..." Clare looked towards her, her eyes wet, a frown on her forehead. "I am so happy. I ... I cannot bear the thought that something may happen to you. But it sounds strange, what you said. I ... I actually forgot that you could be unwell and I forgot the fire outage! I came here because I was worried for you, and I was worried mostly because the fire outage had happened and all that. But for a moment there, while I was knocking on your door, I did not know why I was doing so. I only wanted to enter. It is so strange. Somewhat frightening, too."

  Linden patted her shoulder. "Do not worry too much. For some reason, sometimes our minds can only handle one thing at a time. You decided to come to me, and you had your re
asons that were important—but, indeed, at the moment of knocking, the reasons were not important any longer. Their importance had done its job by bringing you here to knock."

  And that was important to Linden, right now.

  "It all works, Clare."

  Worked sequentially, the principle of a human so close to the principle of a mechanism. "Besides, the fire is back, the House looks like a House again, I am mending, and we prefer to not remember the bad things. All is fine now." And I hope that it will be fine, but I am not going to lie to you and give you unjustified hopes. Interesting, she had done it to the other servants. But Clare was not them.

  "Is it fine now?" Clare met her eyes, which, being a maid, she did rarely. "How about tomorrow, then?"

  Linden said nothing.

  "No tomorrows, then." Clare sighed, looking away, then slowly walked towards the western window, the Wind Moon peeking through the curtains, casting a yellow glow on her face. "And no yesterdays."

  "Even yesterdays?" Linden closed the door and stepped beside her, watching the neverending snow outside, pretending to not see the water gathering in the corners of Clare's eyes.

  "Yesterdays especially, or so Oldma—my grandmother—used to say, every time she told the story ..."

  "A story?"

  "It is a very old story—" Suddenly Clare stopped, her face pale, her hands dashing to her chest where they clasped each other. "I—I am sorry, my lady. I shouldn't have said this. I shouldn't have even thought about it. It is just a story—a fairytale."

  Linden did not immediately shift her eyes away from the snow. She and Eily had made snow animals often at wintertime, whispering to each other that perhaps they came alive at night when no one could see them. A fairytale. A yesterday.

  "Clare." She breathed against the window and drew a small animal with a finger. "It is a fairytale someone used to believe in, isn't it? Perhaps even a fairytale you want to believe in, yourself."

  "No! I don't want to believe in it!"

  Linden looked away from the window now and into Clare's eyes, reaching out to take Clare's trembling hand. "You do not have to tell me any stories or fairytales if you do not want to. But if you do want to—you can. If it is a fairytale, I probably know it already. If it is not, whatever it is, do not worry, I do not care how aberrant it might be. And if you want to believe in it, you can do that, too, even though we should hide it from Bers and Mentors." She sighed. "I, as your lady, am giving you permission to believe, all right? Better yet, you should give yourself permission."

  "Lind. You don't understand." Clare's hands were still clenched. "I don't want to believe in it. My lady." She lowered her eyes again, her face still pale. "There is something you don't know about me. I was born a wretch. Daughter of wretches, former peasants who came from the province of Dobria to seek their fortune but never really found it. Do you know of Dobria? It is that province lying where the Kadisha River and the Maeron River merge to form the Dobria River, between the lands of Houses Kadisha and Maeron.

  "I know where the rivers merge, but I have never been there."

  "It is a foul place." Clare shuddered. "So much water. Of course, I haven't seen the confluence itself, or even the Ber Station, for the Bers have put wired fences around it all. The Station is far enough that, even if you stood by a fence, you would not see anything. But no people go so close to the fences—at least not unless they are young, stupid, and someone dares them to." She shuddered again. "Few ever come back. But Oldma did, long ago—or so she used to say. She used to say other things, too."

  Linden waited, patiently, until Clare gathered the courage to say what the "other things" were. Linden pulled two chairs from the table and set them beside the window for them both. If Clare would usually protest that the lady would bring a chair for the maid, this time she said nothing.

  "She used to sing to me and tell me stories when I was a little child in the slum, Oldma did." Clare lowered herself to the chair, her eyes glazed. She seemingly looked at the night outside, but Linden knew that she must be seeing something else.

  "When I cried because the other children were mean and hit me and pulled the ribbon Da had given me from my hair, she would sing until I fell asleep. She would kiss me and rub my bruises with herbs she had gathered Master knew where, when my drunk Ma beat me, and she would tell me stories about poor little girls who grew up to become ladies. She even sang to me when they took Da away for his failure to pay his dues to the Lord of Maeron ..."

  "Oh, Clare." Linden took both her hands in hers. "Where is your Da now?"

  "I don't know." Clare shook her head violently. "She told me to forget. She told me—"

  She shook her head again, the knuckles on her fingers white with squeezing. "She told me that now, more than ever, I should forget lest I drown in suffering, drown like in those treacherous rivers, Dobria's bane, where people perish if they are careless. She told me it was the fate of Dobria's mothers, daughters, and wives—forget. Forget all yesterdays. We were no longer in Dobria, I almost did not remember Dobria, but still she said it. She was his Ma, too."

  "When was that, Clare?"

  "Long ago. Or, long ago for me, for I was only nine, but if she is right, time is not something to be measured. She said that me and my pain were naught but a grain of dirt in time, that time was so immense that she and I could only see now, that if we tried to look further forward or back, time would swallow us. If we looked back, especially. I tried to believe her, Lind, I tried to not drown, but I never did believe her, for I do not think a "now" is all there is to life if there is pain in the now that came from elsewhere. You need to know where elsewhere is, I thought—and I—I didn't want to forget Da!"

  "You should not forget him," was all Linden could say, but Clare was not listening to her. She was "elsewhere" right now, where Linden could not follow—and Linden let her talk, let her pour out what was inside her; pour it out like water, like those rivers Clare seemed to hate so much.

  "The story, Lind ..." Clare closed her eyes, her face a moonlit paleness framed by chestnut. She looked so frail and tired right now; had she eaten at all today, had she rested? Linden should give her food—but not now. Now Clare needed other things.

  "The story is ... Have you ever wondered why Bers teach us to hate water so much? Why fire is venerated but water feared and detested, even though we need both? Water is treacherous, we know. Fire can be tamed, but water is always wild. Oldma's story gives a reason for that. It tells that there was once a lady, long ago, before the Bers came to the world—a great lady with a gentle and strong mind, who could tame water, not with force but with kindness and a gentle touch.

  "She was the Lady of Dobria, long before the first Maeron and Kadisha ladies and lords were even born, and she cared for Dobria so that the crops grew, animals multiplied, people rejoiced, and the rivers flowed peaceful, always nourishing and never hurting or destroying soil and life. She had a name, but no one remembers it; some call her Mother, others River Lady, Lady of Water, or simply Lady of Dobria. There are many stories, always whispered, always hidden from the world—sometimes even from Dobria's men—about her wisdom and kindness, about how she saved a little bird from drowning, about how she justly divided a piece of land between two neighbors. Many other stories, as well.

  "A time came, though, when the lady fell—and she fell to a man. A man who could tame fire and not water, and that not with kindness but with brutal force—a man who enchained fire and made it suffer, and so those whom this fire was made to serve suffered as well. Oldma said there were many stories about the lady's fall. Some say that he killed her, others that he took her to be his unequal wife by force, and yet others say that she submitted to him willingly because it was him she loved. But all agree in one thing—she was the ruling lady no more and he was now Dobria's master. And later, he was the Master of the world.

  "The rivers overflowed in Dobria, ruining the soil, killing the crops, chasing away the animals, leaving the humans to fight for their land and
houses. To fight with dams and ditches—and we all know that humans should not touch dams and ditches but should let the Bers control water, for dams and ditches will turn back on us when we least expect them, for nothing but Ber Magic can control water."

  We all know? Perhaps those born in Dobria did. In Mierber, people would not even think of controlling water.

  "But Oldma said that dams and ditches were treacherous and difficult to control not because they lacked Ber Magic, but because the water yearned for the gentle touch of the lady and resented the new Master's merciless rule. He burned all—humans, animals, and plants—who opposed him, and he tried to burn the rivers themselves ..."

  "Fire cannot burn water, Clare." Linden had not meant to say this and now was startled by her own voice. Whence did she know that at all?

  "I ... I don't know about that." Clare was startled, her eyes wide-open now, the flow of her thoughts interrupted.

  "They ... they say he was cruel and, even though he could not rule the rivers, he found a way to diminish their strength, which is why the Ber Station is there at the confluence. The land is fertile again nowadays. Nan has taught me that it is the most fertile land after Balkaene, but Oldma before that taught me that it is nothing compared to what it was when the Lady was there. The Master left Dobria at some point, and I don't know what happened to the lady, but he left two of his servants, the Lords of the new Houses of Kadisha and Maeron, to control the water in his stead. What he did not predict was that those two would quarrel, that for centuries their Houses would fight for Dobria's land, while for those ordinary people who made this land their home the result was always suffering and death ...

  "Forget everything that was, Oldma told me, like they had to forget about the lady and never mention her name; like they had to swear allegiance to a new House every once in a while and forget that only recently they had been made to swear allegiance to the other one. Like they had to forget the foul deeds those of both Houses committed, while each House claimed that only the other one did—forget about the lives abused and lives wasted, because, what can you do? Bow your head and live in the now, do what is expected of you, forget yesterday, and don't obsess with tomorrow, for yesterday is gone and tomorrow might bring other sorrows. What you have, the only thing you have, is today."