Dust and Light

by Carol Berg

  But Juli’s mind had skipped onward. “It’s good Pluvius offered to help, though I’ve ever thought him a fool. This Bastien likes you, doesn’t he? Whatever would we do if he reclaimed the stipend? The servitor brought it, you know. Perhaps we should hide it.”

  The stipend! Mighty Deunor, I’d forgotten. “Where is it? And he left a copy of the contract, yes?”

  “He left a scroll with the purse. They’re in the counting room.”

  As if Karish angels lifted me with their spread wings, I was on my feet. “Stay here. I’ll fetch them!”

  Renewed, I raced down the stair. With even a modest stipend I could hire a bodyguard for my daily walk to the necropolis. Get new boots made that would not leave my feet like clubs of ice on such a day. Recall Juli’s tutors. Set aside a marriage portion for her. Summon my old swordmaster; gods knew such skills seemed more and more necessary of late, even for purebloods. And I’d heard of a new kind of brush from the ice lands north of Hansk—made from the fur of a black weasel, wonderfully fine and resilient. They were horribly expensive, as they had to be smuggled through the rugged island routes held by Navronne’s perennial foes. I coveted such tools to complete my grandfather’s portrait. If the fee was slightly more than modest, we could begin to think about rebuilding the house at Pontia.

  I darted across the ground-floor reception room and through the small door at the back. This had once been a wealthy vintner’s house. The reception room had held his casks and samples, ready to be brought out to the inner courtyard on fine Ardran days that never seemed to come anymore. In the small room at the back he had counted his gold. And now it held ours.

  The fat gray purse sat on a black enamel table, the rolled contract beside it. If the former was sufficient, the latter didn’t matter.

  The bag was nicely heavy. I closed my eyes, blessed our family’s patron, Deunor, and poured out my father’s ruby ring and the chinking load . . . of silver.

  “No! No! No! Bastien, you scurrilous, vile, wretched cheat!” In no way this side of Kemen Sky Lord’s halls could a fistful of lunae be an entire year’s stipend. A purse this size should have been packed with gold. I leapt to my feet, ready to head straight back for the necropolis. Had Leander not even looked? Surely he had taken the Registry’s tithe. . . .

  My heart near seized. Or was this Pons’s hand?

  “Aperite!” Spitting out the Aurellian word for open, I shattered the spelled wax seal and spread the parchment scroll open. The ornate script flowed beautifully. Perfectly. Outlining my perfect and permanent ruin.

  . . . for the consideration of One Hundred and Sixty Lunae.

  Lunae, not solae. Silver, not gold. Every prospective master looked at previous contracts. And no master in Navronne could look at this contract and believe I could be anything but an undisciplined and untalented idiot.

  Juli and I had no treasury to tide us over a thin contract. A hundred and sixty solae would have been slim enough. But a solé was worth four hundred coppers, a luné forty. This house alone cost us eighty lunae a year, our servants forty more. That left forty silver pieces for food, clothes, coal, and everything else. For a year.

  Not only did this contract preclude rebuilding our home or reinstating the life we knew, not only did it fail to provide the secure foundation that allowed purebloods to concentrate on their duties, but we would not even be able to live as we had. There must be some mistake.

  I sank back to the floor, eyes fixed to the document. To the amount. To the signatures: my own, Pons’s, Albin’s, Bastien’s. I knew pens and ink, lines and curves. There was no irregularity.

  At last Pons had given me the future she believed I deserved. But why would she ruin my sister, who had not mortgaged her future for a moment’s pleasurable companionship? How could she so dishonor the memory of my family?

  “So can your master beat you or can he only make you stink?” Juli appeared in the doorway, wrapped in her own quilt. “I hope you’ll not be so stingy with the coal, now we’ve good coin.”

  I ground the heels of my hand into my eyes, trying to crush the hammering ache in my head. “Perhaps we need a smaller place to heat. . . .”

  * * *

  “Domé Lucian, it’s the hour you specified.” I didn’t break the hand shaking my shoulder. Some god should reward my restraint. “I’m sorry, domé. Here’s your wool shirt. And Maia’s sent up a tisane, fresh brewed and quite hot if you down it right now.”

  I squeezed my eyes tighter, in hopes the ever-mild Giaco would vanish. He repeated his gentle prodding and gave me his hand as I emerged from the cocoon of quilts and abject stupor—or a sea of mud, as it felt. The wool shirt was a pitiful substitute for the quilts. But the tisane infused a bit of life. Blessed Maia.

  The outrage of the previous night came flooding back. How in the name of all gods was I to tell our servants I could no longer pay them?

  Sometime after midnight, Juli had laid a charm on me to make me sleep. Livid at the hints of deprivation to come, she had made me beg her for it, as well as insisting I forbid Soflet to barricade the doors to keep her in the house as if she were “a madwoman or a leper.” I’d done as she asked. I’d have done anything for sleep.

  And now I had to face the wretched day.

  Did Pluvius know the disgraceful terms of this contract? I’d certainly need his help. For the Registry to overturn a signed contract was rare in the most compelling of circumstances. We would have to plead Pons’s bias, my awkward family situation, my grandfather’s memory, Juli’s needs, even if it brought a Registry minder into our house. But I would see it done. Yet it couldn’t happen immediately. I would not disobey my master’s command to attend him before dawn, violating the contract even as I demanded to have it voided.

  “The tisane and the shirt are most welcome, Giaco. My boots?”

  “They’re as dry as I could get them, domé. I’ve had them next the fire all night.” With his quiet competence, he had me shaved, dressed, fed—I was no such fool as I had been the previous day to let nerves hinder reason—masked, and out the door before I could blink. I would miss him—all of them—and not just for the comforts and care they provided. They had come from our house at Pontia. My parents had trained them. Their memories and good service were our inheritance. I’d need to contact acquaintances, find them good positions, while I found us a new place to live.

  The inner turmoil was a blessing in a way. No phantom archers or windswept voices plagued my nerves as I traipsed through the waking city. I had no difficulty ignoring the cold seeping through my boots, the filth and debris piling up on boulevards that had once been pleasant, or the pent violence in the crowd gathering in the pocardon. No one bothered me. The contract did indeed include a clause permitting defensive magic. I’d need to learn some this winter; no sword training was in my future.

  When I reached the broken brick arch and the descent to the hirudo, I did not hesitate. If the laughing thief knew my name, he likely knew about my bent, as well. Perhaps he thought a portraitist an easy mark. Even with my limited skills, I’d show him elsewise.

  Though the night had not yet begun to fade, the hirudo was already stirring. Torches and cook fires pushed back the shadows. A woman fried dough balls over a dirty fire pit. An emaciated dog nosed through a pile of indeterminate filth beside a collapsed shed. An ebony-eyed Ciceron with a mottled beard and thick mustache played a wild farandole on a syrinx. At any moment I expected a chain of drunken men and women to dance through the forest of hanging laundry in frenzied answer to his piping.

  Watchers were everywhere. A bony young Ciceron with hooped earrings. A graying, hard-faced woman in leather jaque and breeches, idly twirling a well-used sling. Two ragged men dicing in the light of a barrel fire, one observing the tumbling dice, one watching the lane.

  Some halfway along the ravine path, I halted. Pointing my finger, I pivoted just fast enough to billow my cloak, waiting until every watcher’s eyes were on me—even those I couldn’t see.

  Whe
n the syrinx fell silent, I raised a pen in one hand and a small knife with a broken hilt in the other. With a spark of will—drawing full upon my seething anger—I released magic into the two implements and the shaped inflation spell waiting on each. Then I tossed them onto the frozen muck. In a hiss and flash of light, they grew until each was a forearm’s length. None could mistake their shape.

  “I am an artist,” I said, pointing to the pen. “This is my chosen weapon.”

  The knife shriveled, while the pen flew upward and sketched a silver tree that shone bright against the lingering night above my head.

  “I am also pureblood, as you see. The law of Navronne declares I pass unhindered wherever I choose.” As I spoke, I moved around a broken cask left to rot alongside the path, my footsteps marking a circle in the snow. “Some who dwell here may not be aware of the king’s law, and I dislike having to prove my right again and again.”

  The tree collapsed in a shower of sparks. With a quick second infusion of magic, I triggered a voiding spell, the only serious enchantment I knew outside my bent. The earth inside my circle collapsed inward; the cask toppled and crashed to the bottom of the hole.

  Gasps sounded here and there, quickly muted.

  “Whichever of you is Demetreo the Ciceron, hear this. It is your responsibility to see that the arché, the grave sign I carelessly lost here when passing last night, is left where I’m now standing before I pass here again.”

  No one in such a place would have challenged a pureblood without the headman’s permission.

  With that, I unraveled the inflation illusion and the void spell in one move. The pen and the gouge in the earth vanished. Tossing pen and knife alongside the splintered cask, I continued on my way, ears pricked for any movement at my back. The only person I passed was a crone in a bone necklace, stroking a dog’s back. Her black eyes followed me onward.

  As I passed through Caedmon’s Wall and the slot gate, I traded one anxiety for another.

  Frosted mist hung over the world like a curtain of grace to hide its ugliness. It also left me the familiar sense of a presence just beyond the range of seeing.

  Trying to ignore it, I hiked across the burial ground to the nameless grave where the snow had buried my eating knife. The taint of death seemed multiplied a hundredfold on this morn. Perhaps because I had touched the field or simply because I now knew what kind of place it was.

  “Forgive my faithless promise,” I said, pressing a hand to the mound. “I’ll return your marker tomorrow.”

  As I trudged onward toward the gates, a bright blue gleam flashed at the corner of my eye, as if the sun had sent a stray beam ahead of its rising and found a bit of lapis on a woman’s wrist or a sapphire ring on a man’s finger. The second time it happened, certain that I felt a person hidden in the mist, I called out, “Halloo. Who’s there?”

  No one answered, of course. Giaco had likely sprinkled my clothes chest with herbs, accounting for the hint of rosemary intruding on the stink of death.

  Another hundred paces and I halted. Blinked. Squinted. Two tall, slender shapes strolled down the cart road away from the necropolis. Human shapes. They carried some strange lamp that illuminated the intricate designs of their garb in hues of cerulean, lapis, and sapphire. Or perhaps a merchant had formulated some kind of luminous ink that could be transferred to his fabric . . . or directly to . . .

  I blinked again, this time holding my eyelids closed for long enough to ensure I controlled my own seeing. But it was not simple weariness or living dream.

  Truly the work at Caton must have drained me past reason. My mother’s family had portrayed mythic beings—gryphons, dragons, angels—in artworks for generations, but my historian kin had never found evidence of them. Only a madman or a fae-struck child would believe two Danae walked naked on the Caton plateau on a winter’s morn, their bare skin etched with exquisite line drawings that shimmered with indescribable enchantment.

  A gust of wind-driven snow obscured the sight, and when it had passed they had vanished.

  My long-held breath released. I needed to get on, yet my feet would not move. I stared into that pocket of night until my eyeballs near froze. But by the time the temple bells pealed, I was no more enlightened and shivering uncontrollably.

  Feeling entirely foolish, I hurried my steps through the last hummocks. The sixth bell chimed as I rushed breathless through the open gates to find the courtyard awash in torchlight and corpses.

  CHAPTER 7

  In a dawn grayness brightened by a ring of torches, Constance and Garibald had marshaled their troop of laborers to deal with the savaged remnants of the royal brothers’ war. Broken bodies lay everywhere, lifted from five half-emptied wagons.

  I had studied the history of war. My grandsire had taught me to examine a battlefield, to hear the clamor and feel the horror of brutal death, to taste blood on the air, to see images of ruin, and use these things to make sense of the past. But never had I seen the actual carnage laid out before me. And these were only a few, the wounded who had died along the way home.

  Kings and emperors had always sent their ducs and barons home from war to heal or be buried. Common battle dead were buried where they fell. Most of the wounded were left behind, as well, to heal if they could or die at the enemy’s hand. But King Caedmon had believed that every man should have a chance to die on his home ground. Thus he had brought every one of his wounded home, despite the risks of pursuit and thin-spread lines. As ever, many—most—had died along the way, but his soldiers adored him for it. As in most things, all Navron kings had followed Caedmon’s example when it served them. Prince Perryn must have won a decisive victory in the north or be a truly courageous man in the mold of his great-great-grandsire.

  Uncertainty paralyzed me. If anything was to be done about the contract—my future, my sister’s future—it needed to be addressed right away. And I longed to contemplate what I’d just glimpsed outside the walls. Danae—myth become real? Who else could they be? And yet a man could not encounter such a display as lay in this courtyard and turn away to private grievance or even his soul’s wonder.

  Constance waved a hand and hurried over, dodging laborers with litters and shooing the coffin maker’s girl away like a pesky fly.

  “Coroner’s off to the Council District, arranging with lardships about their kin-dead. Da rathers Bastien do it.” She brushed away dull strings of hair that had escaped her skimpy braids and eyed me with a gleam of avarice. “But he’s left tha orders. See those six rowed nearest the steps off rightmost? Mysteries worth solving, he says of ’em. Ye must have a drawn of each by midmorn. And he’s set an inside for the doing.”

  Her grin spread ear to ear. “Coroner said ye must do as Da or I bid.”

  Indeed he had, and, for now, I was bound to his word. Yet neither the onerous contract nor personal discipline nor any threatened consequence induced my obedience. In that busy courtyard were overwhelming pain and sorrow made visible. A few sketches were simple enough.

  I would redo the girl child’s portrait today, as well, as much for my own peace of mind as Bastien’s. I didn’t plan to return here another day.

  “When the coroner returns, tell him I must speak with him.”

  Constance dipped her knee and pranced away.

  Once I retrieved two sticks of plummet and a stack of parchment scraps from Bastien’s book press, and a dusty folio of a size and stiffness to use for a lap desk, I headed for the victims Constance had indicated. They were laid out like pens in a writing case, their death pain writ as clear as their blue-gray flesh or their filthy garments.

  Why were these six singled out? Out of scores of new arrivals, surely half could not be named, and it wasn’t as if any of the deaths were suspicious. The battle woundings were dreadful—no simple stabs or slashes, but brutal hacking and mutilation, most around the head and face, far beyond what would bring down an enemy.

  A stroll down the row spoke the distasteful answer to my curiosity. None of the six had
weapons remaining, but one wore a sword belt of excellent quality, another a single fine boot I would have been happy to own. An intricately embroidered silk shirt was tucked under layers of another man’s shredded leathers. Two bore a crest or insignia on their garb—a sure sign of a family or lord who might claim them—though the badges were damaged beyond easy recognition. One had pinned a wealthy woman’s lacework kerchief inside his shirt. Each displayed evidence that someone would pay well to learn who he was.

  Swallowing disgust, I waved at two of the laborers and told them to carry the man with the boot to whatever chamber the coroner had set aside for me to work. An inside room, I guessed. Constance’s contorted verbiage recalled Bastien’s stricture and the idiotic accusation that had prompted it. Solid bodies—even those of sorcerers—did not flicker.

  They led me to an upper chamber at the rear of the promethium. A clean room, thank all gods. Waiting in quiet dignity were a stone bier, a washing trough, and a beautifully carved laver protruding from the wall. A shelf held a variety of jars and oil flasks. A preparation room, then. For nobility, I guessed, from the privacy and the quality. Perhaps for purebloods.

  The best furnishings were the two windows, one north, one east. Opening the shutters left the room frigid; neither glass nor even horn or oiled parchment served as panes. But the extra light was well worth the cold.

  Settled on the stool next the bier, I pushed aside every concern save the gift I had been born to share. I touched the soldier’s cold face, and opened myself to magic. . . .

  * * *

  “Damn and blast! Well done! You see them without their wounds. Never imagined that.”