Jack said, “When did you come back?”
“End of September. Hal and I went on a walking tour from Morrowlea to Fillering Pool with another friend, then I kept travelling along through to Ghilousette before I received word that Mr. Buchance—my stepfather, that is—had passed away. I came as quickly as I could, but missed the Midsomer assizes.”
“You only have four more days to get through before the Winterturn ones start,” Hal said encouragingly.
“Daunting thought.”
There were an awful lot of servants at Dart Hall. Ellen or Elinor came in with a tray of fresh coffee and sweet biscuits, as if it had been ages since the start breakfast, then stayed to mend the fire. The Darts did not precisely ignore her—Sir Hamish murmured thanks and Mr. Dart winked at her as she passed—but they did disregard her human curiosity.
I waited till she shut the door behind her. No one else spoke; the sounds were the crackle of the new wood on the fire, Mr. Dart’s soft puffing, clinks of porcelain on plate. I had a headache and a sore throat and a deep feeling of malaise and ... and my father was alive, and my mother was dead, and one sent me mysterious letters and the other simply was mysterious.
“Point one,” I said finally. “The Assizes do start next week. As a named party I must be present so the will can be read.”
My father looked at me with a veiled curiosity. I wanted to tell him—I wasn’t even sure what. My feelings for Mr. Buchance were muddled and I was too tired to figure out how to sort through their contradictions, all of which seemed highlighted by my father’s appearance. It seemed a betrayal of my father to say how I had eventually come deeply to respect Mr. Buchance ... it was a betrayal of Mr. Buchance to pretend I had not ... it was a betrayal of myself to lie ...
Mr. Dart blew a smoke ring. “So no gaol or gaol-breaking or other criminal activity between now and then. Should be simple enough.”
I raised a tired smile. “Point two: as my uncle pointed out, it is very nearly seven years since my—since Jack was reported dead. The second time. Isn’t—Surely seven years is significant under the law?”
Everyone looked at each other.
Sir Hamish cursed.
Chapter Thirteen: The Embroidery Circle
Hal and I took Sela home to Mrs. Buchance. She refused to leave my side; I had had to accompany her to the privy before breakfast was over, to my embarrassment if not hers.
Well, that was the easy explanation, anyway. I was not yet ready to look any deeper at the waves of emotion that were sloshing away below the surface of my thoughts.
Ariadne nev Lingarel had had what almost amounted to an obsession with the ocean in her poem. I had thought this reasonable enough for someone imprisoned for life on a cliff-top prison. As I sat through that interminable breakfast, the awkward leave-taking, the settling of an excited Sela in the Darts’ carriage, fragments of the poem spun through my mind.
There were a lot of winter gales and bitter north winds in that poem—as was, to be honest, reputed to be the case in Orio City. The occasional descriptions of sunlight on waves (or whales or ice floes or schools of herring visible from the barred windows) broke through the relentless structures and strictures like—
O Lady, I thought. They broke through all those endless ways of describing the ocean as ‘grey’ like the flashes of joy that could be felt even within the doors and walls of that most famous of all Alinorel prisons, the one no prisoner had ever escaped from.
“What’s wrong, Jemis?” Sela asked urgently. She squirmed in my lap until she could touch my face.
It was only then I knew I was crying. Soundless, my chest and throat and jaws aching, the sun coming in the carriage window blurred brilliantly.
I bent my head over Sela’s soft wispy hair, which smelled a little of violets from the soap we’d used that morning, and mumbled reassurances that I was all right, really I was.
... On the wave-road
the whale-road
The white crests crescent and collapse
Cast between leaf and leaf
And the eye of heaven
When the shadows of our dreams
stand between us
and knowledge ...
There had been a total eclipse of the sun the year that Ariadne had committed her crime; so said the commentators.
HAL DID NOT SAY ANYTHING at all to me, all that way to town. He spoke to Sela, telling her the names of trees and asking her about what she liked and disliked. By this I learned that Sela loved motion much the way I did, and regarded Lauren’s more placid interests as unfathomable. She also noticed far more than I had expected. I felt quite sure that she would be able to identify her captor again—and probably be ready to bite him again, too, if she could.
The coachman—Mr. Brenning, I recalled after a blank moment—let us out in the square before the Ragnor Arms. Before I could do more than begin to thank him he’d set the horses off at a pace a little too fast for town. I looked around but saw nothing that seemed likely to have alarmed him, unless it was Dominus Gleason looking smug and smarmy outside the post office.
That was reason enough, I reflected.
Fortunately the magister was not facing our direction. I turned sharply away. Hal strode briskly off towards Mrs. Buchance’s, still without comment; I found I was beginning to find his silent compassion irritating.
Not enough to start speaking, however.
Sela gripped my hand tightly. Her face was again anxious, but not out of fear of her reception, for she pulled me ahead once we came in sight of her house. I could not walk much faster without running, and tugged her into a slightly more decorous pace so as not to arrive red-faced and breathless.
She danced impatiently as I rang the bell and then opened the door without waiting for a response. Mrs. Buchance had made it clear I was to consider the house ... well, if not home, then at least a friend’s.
As soon as the door was wide enough, she cried out, “Mum! Mum! Mum!” and raced down the hall towards the parlour, where a gentle clatter of voices could be heard. “Mum! Mum! Mum! Jemis rescued me from he bad man! And then I met his papa and he’s a pirate!”
Dead silence greeted me as I halted in the doorway to the parlour. Half a dozen women looked between Sela, enfolded in Mrs. Buchance’s arms, and me.
Mrs. Inglesides, Mrs. Kulfield, Mrs. Henny the Post, Mrs. Buchance, and Mrs. Etaris. All of them were ... friends ... or friendly, at least, in memory of my mother.
I don’t know what they saw in my face, but Mrs. Kulfield—my mother’s good friend, our neighbour when my father came home the first time—Mrs. Kulfield said, “Oh, Jemis, you poor boy.”
I nearly started to cry again. Hal’s hand came heavy and comforting on my shoulder. I’d forgotten he was behind me and started, and that broke my paralysis.
“He’s not a pirate,” I said, and why that was the first thing to come out I probably would never know.
“He has an eyepatch, and he said he was on a pirate ship.”
Hal gripped me more tightly. I locked my eyes on Mrs. Etaris’ steady gaze. She did not look surprised, or if she was it had already faded before the relentless curiosity and relentless interest in ramifications I abruptly knew were two of her defining characteristics.
Her eyes narrowed. Without looking away she inclined her head.
All of a sudden I could hear my pulse thundering in my ears. My chest was tight, my breath shuddering as if I’d been sprinting at the end of a long race. I let my gaze leave hers then, slide away around the room at the puzzled and sympathetic and curious faces. I cleared my throat several times.
“On his way to seek redress from the Lady, my—my—my father was caught in the Arguty Forest by brigands, sold into slavery which included a stint on a pirate galley, from which he was rescued by a ship of the Lady this summer.”
The bald facts rattled them. I felt Hal’s hand again, radiating warmth and possibly magic. After a month of lessons I was starting to feel a faint tingle in the presence of
magic. Today the overwhelming emotional circumstances and the quickly-developing cold made it almost impossible to tell. I breathed shallowly, trying not to cough, to cry, and looked around the room again. This time I saw the coffee cups and sweet biscuits, the embroidery frames and the strange hooked knitting Mrs. Etaris sometimes did in the store. My throat felt very tight.
“Someone betrayed my father and pretended he had died by his own hand.”
Mrs. Kulfield was a large, comfortable woman. Acid shock did not sit well on her face. I felt as if my heart were trying to strangle my throat.
“I do not know a great deal about your ... I know you are interested in more than simply embroidery ... I cannot ask you ...”
I did not beg.
I did not know whether I wanted them to act or not to act.
I knew I did not want them to gossip about this through the town.
I wrestled with the knowledge that it was folly not to exact a promise, but I did not want to demand, based on—what? My rank? A month ago I had had none and worse than nothing for a reputation, and Mrs. Buchance had taken me in without question and Mrs. Etaris given me a job without hesitation.
Mrs. Kulfield had believed me when I told her I had not missed my stepfather’s funeral on purpose.
Mrs. Inglesides was Mrs. Buchance’s sister-in-law, and always smiled kindly on me when I passed her in the street or the bookstore or her husband’s bakery.
Mrs. Henny the Post, the oldest of the group, sat there knitting in a cloud of soft wool, blue eyes twinkling like the epitome of a warm-hearted grandmother. My own grandmother was acrid and eccentric; and Mrs. Henny, my father had once warned me, was the best player of Poacher he’d ever met.
My father was one of the seven masters, I thought, watching Mrs. Henny’s wooden needles flicker in the air. What did that make her?
Her twinkling blue eyes watching mine gave nothing away at all.
“Thank you for telling us,” Mrs. Etaris said. “You may rest assured in our discretion.”
And I recalled her, that first day in her bookstore, making a wide gesture at the shelves of poetry and philosophy and cooking and history and saying that if there was anything she knew how to do, it was how to have an adventure.
What a gift it was to know I could rest in their discretion.
I bowed.
Chapter Fourteen: Fairy Blood
“This is stupid,” I said, not for the first time.
“It’s an adventure, Mr. Greenwing,” Mr. Dart replied, laughter threading his voice. I could only look at him in scattered, petulant (I could admit it to myself) glares. He was properly dressed, from hat to boots every inch a young gentleman. I was wearing—
“Sheets.”
“They’re robes, Mr. Greenwing.”
“They’re sheets.”
“You look very distinguished.”
“Yes, like a madman.”
“Or the Wild Saint,” Mr. Dart agreed with placid good humour.
“Pshaw,” I said, tugging down the sheets. Hal came back into the room with a wreath made of twisted holly and ivy. I eyed this with revulsion.
“Pshaw?” he said, grinning at me. “This is all for you, Jemis, you know.”
“Will you please explain what we’re doing?” My voice came out alarmingly plaintive.
“Discovering what magic you have, of course; I said that.”
His silent forbearance as we walked (slowly) back to Dart Hall had finally broken through my reticence. I had braced myself to talk about my father, almost to tell Hal about the dreams that had finally stopped, only to come crowding round in life.
It had taken so long to convince myself that my father was dead, truly dead, and buried under the White Cross as a suicide and a traitor and a disgrace.
But I had not been able to begin with that discussion, had instead begun with my mother’s letter, with her comments about my uncle and those about her family’s magical lineage.
I had argued unsuccessfully that I should stay in town, as I would need to be back for work the next day. Hal had stared at me with too much comprehension before stating firmly that as it was still only Saturday, no, I didn’t, and that as we did have an afternoon more or less free ahead of us we could do one of the spells he’d just thought of.
And so we were standing in the middle of the bare room Mr. Dart had found for us, which he (it appeared) had been using to practice exercises to compensate for his stone arm and which once upon a time had been the workroom of some distant Dart ancestor who had been a wizard.
And somewhere in the house was my father.
“Someone sent me that letter,” I said abruptly.
Mr. Dart nodded. “I’ve been wondering that, too.”
“I forgot to ask Mrs. Henny. She was at Mrs. Buchance’s when we brought Sela home.”
“Later,” Hal said. “I promise I’ll remind you. Mr. Dart, will you pass me that pitcher, please?”
Hal arranged items on a wooden tray he’d brought in. A branch of red rowan-berries, a coil of blackberries with the fruit green and red and purple, several feathers—white, grey, blue, bronze, peacock. A rounded white stone and a rough reddish one. A glass bowl he filled with water from the pitcher. An unlit beeswax candle. And finally, a tiny silver spoon.
Mr. Dart tilted his head, staring mesmerized at the tray. “They’re ... humming ...”
“Hush. This ritual isn’t for you. Jemis, will you take off your ring, please?”
“I haven’t been sneezing anywhere near so much—”
“You’re nowhere near normal, either,” Mr. Dart replied.
“I have a cold.”
“That, to be sure, explains all.”
The laughter was still in his voice. His face, when I glanced suspiciously at him, was bright, eager, intent, unshadowed, focused on the tray.
I caught my breath. I could not remember, literally could not recall, when I had last seen him look like that. There was always a faint reserve, even when he was focused on a history book and dreaming—well, it behoved me to believe him when he said he dreamed of his brother’s house and the land he would one day inherit.
“You don’t want to be dependent on that ring, surely?” Hal asked.
I was spinning the ring with my thumb, as had become my habit when I felt anxious.
I did feel anxious. I did not understand Hal’s insistence that I learn magic, now; I did not understand my own reluctance to do so, when I found it so delightful; and I really did not understand why I had to keep explaining how wonderful it was not to sneeze all the time.
I thought of my father when I’d started that morning at breakfast, and as if on cue, sneezed several times in succession.
Without saying anything I took off the ring, laid it next to the tray, and stood a few steps back from the table so I could be racked by many tiny sneezes all by myself.
Hal cast me a severe glance, but he knew they were involuntary. “We are here,” he said, in a more formal tone of voice, “at this time of transition between the autumn and the winter, in the spur weeks between seasons, when the moon turns in her phases and the sun in his. We bring a life in transition, a soul in transition, a young man between the second and the third age of his life, between undaura and wizard, between the past and the future. In this cusp of the moment as the world turns, let the symbols of his power call him that he may come into his own power unfettered by fear. I, Halioren Isidorus Leaveringham of Fillering Pool, descendant by blood through many generations of the Sun and the Moon through the line of Linara, do ask the magic this in the name of the Lady of the Green and White, the Emperor of Astandalas, and the Prince of the White Forest whose name is blessed.”
I did not know who the Prince of the White Forest was; I had not realized that Hal was a descendant by however many generations of the third of the Imperial lineages; and I was only vaguely aware that undaura meant something like ‘one who is untrained’.
I felt the magic move.
It began as a tin
gle that grew to a strange beautiful humming, very like the song of the bees of the Woods Noirell when I woke them from their curse. Was that, I wonder, what Mr. Dart heard when he heard the voices of the inanimate?
It was, perhaps, inevitable that the humming came from the candle, symbol of my mother’s inheritance and also my father’s. He had always sought to ‘hold the Sun’, as it was called, holding the Sun Banner firm on the edge of an embattled cliff in Orkaty, holding the Border firm at the Gate of Morning on the other side of Loe.
The bees were my mother’s. She had always said that was our family’s inheritance: honey, stings, light.
“Take the one that speaks to you,” Hal instructed softly.
I stepped forward. The candle was calling me to take it and call forth its inner fires into light. Out of the corner of my eye I saw the dark mass that was Mr. Dart step forward beside me. I half-turned my head so that I could still see the candle and also see his face. It was still eager, intent, unshadowed. My heart leapt with gladness to see him so and something I thought just perhaps was pure magic coruscated golden-white-and-green in the air around us.
The scent of honey rose up strong as the Tillarny limes of the Woods, who waited like brides for the bees of Melmúsion to visit them.
I touched the candle and Mr. Dart touched his object, and the magic exulted.
I WOKE TO LONG SLANTING sunlight and the unusual sensation of my hand being held.
I lay still for a while. I was in my room at the Darts’, with its green and gold striped walls and the comfortable bed and the view over the stable courtyard.
The room wavered, as if it was not really there, but only an image on fabric, and the fabric was billowing. I watched it calmly, unworried about this.
From somewhere the thought floated into my awareness that usually I would be very alarmed and upset to see the fabric of reality rippling.
Yes, I thought, usually I would be, but that didn’t mean I was, just now. The ripples were pretty, my mind and my body were both very calm, very relaxed, and the person holding my hand had a deep rumbly soothing voice.
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