Dust and Light

by Carol Berg

Bastien found me seated on the floor beside the prometheum font. Sometime in the past hour, I had staggered out of the preparation room and down the stair. After washing my hands, I had slid to the floor and forced down a cupful of water and the cheese Maia had sent with me that morning. My head rested on my knees.

  “May it p-profit you,” I said, teeth rattling with my shivers. “And if you have more work for me, it will have to wait.”

  “A bit testy today, are we, pureblood? Have I worked you too hard? Constance said you had ants up your backbone when you first came in. So, what is it?”

  Parchment rustled above my head.

  Oh, aye . . . the contract. I needed to be out of here. Merciful gods, my true life seemed a thousand quellae distant.

  Many times I’d done six or more portraits at a sitting, but never had I emerged so drained. And never had I experienced pain as I worked. So strange . . . with each drawing the discomfort had grown worse than the last. By the time I finished the sixth, my jaw radiated torment throughout my skull, and my right leg felt as if it had been ground in a mill wheel. Which made no sense at all, save that an axe had cleaved the soldier’s jaw clean through his cheek, and that his right leg was yet bandaged in rusty linen.

  I’d never heard of any such manifestation of an artistic bent. But with all those horrid wounds waiting in the yard . . . Truth be told, my shivering was not solely from magical depletion.

  “Did you have something to say to me?” Bastien’s enthusiasm had vanished. Surely his humors were as variable as the colors of sunlight.

  The future . . . Juli . . . our family’s place in the world . . . I needed to direct my attention to what was immediately important. Even the chimera of the Danae must wait. “I must speak with you about the c-contract.”

  “The contract is settled,” he snapped.

  A glance upward registered the stack of new portraits in his hand and a somewhat startling change in appearance. The coroner’s sand-colored hair had been oiled and tamed with a green brow band, his exuberant tangle of a beard trimmed close around his mouth, and the rest of his jaw shaved. A spruce green velvet tunic, trimmed with black embroidery and buttoned from just under his chin all the way to his knees, was bursting at its threadbare seams. The garment, no doubt quite fashionable when my grandsire was a boy, displayed Bastien’s chest as wide as his book press.

  But it was one of the portraits that seemed to have frozen his satisfaction as solid as Valdo de Seti’s heart. And my scrutiny only soured his face the more.

  “It’s just”—now I’d come to it, I wasn’t sure how to couch my inquiry—“a curiosity. I understood the year’s stipend was left open in your initial bid. I wished to know . . . the negotiation. You must be extraordinarily p-persuasive.”

  I bundled my cloak tighter, despising my stammering weakness.

  Bastien snorted. “Here’s how it went, my fine gentleman, so’s you’ll not bother whining at me again.” He squatted beside me, a cloying perfume clogging my nostrils. “You’d best figure out what you did to stir that woman’s bile. She asked what you were worth to me. I told her a price, starting with half what I thought I could muster. She wrote it down and had me sign. There weren’t a cat’s whisker of negotiation. You could have stole my teeth.”

  No negotiation? Was it exhaustion or sheerest disbelief set the world spinning? Everything—the foundation of the pureblood compact with the Crown, with the gods, with ourselves, our independence paid for with obedience and strict discipline that forbade us friends and choices, even the choice to marry, love, or have children—all of it rested on the sacred nature of our contracts. Otherwise, what were we?

  The coroner continued his crowing. “Best deal I ever made. Already sent a purse to take up your contract for a second year. She’s offered three for the price. And from what she tells me, you’ve naught to say about it. Four years. I’ll have my due.”

  If Bastien spoke true, Pons had sold me like a slave for a year, now stretched to four, when at last I would be old enough to negotiate for myself. Yet my elevation to Head of Family at thirty required Registry consent as well. Surely Pons was not so powerful as to override that? Surely . . .

  Bastien stood up again, his glare scalding my head. “Now, what’s wrong with you? It’s not so frosty as all that in here, and you’ve a cloak a man would sell one of his brats for. By Iero’s holy balls, if you’ve brought a fever to Caton, I’ll bury you with these fellows.”

  Dizzy and nauseated, I squeezed my eyes shut. Surely Pons had already buried me.

  But discipline, unthinking habit, forced breath in and out of my chest. This Bastien was an ordinary, a clever, despicable, volatile pickthief, who used the law and families’ grief to line his purse. Yet he was merely the beneficiary of my downfall, not the cause. Rebellion would certainly make matters worse.

  “I’m quite well,” I said. “Show me the girl child. I can redo her portrait before I leave for the day.”

  “Then come along.” Bastien led me through the vaulted colonnade where I had first encountered him, behind the prometheum. “We’ve put her in the Hallow Ground.”

  Moving made it less tempting to plow my hand into a marble wall. It gave me time to summon self-control, to remind myself that the life I knew, that I believed in, was worthy. Pons was the betrayer. Not this greedy man.

  Halfway down the colonnade, the coroner unlatched a low iron gate. As so many things in Necropolis Caton, the place beyond the gate was wholly unexpected.

  The snow lay deep, shielded on all sides as it was by high walls, imbuing the enclosure with a deep and peaceful quiet. It recalled the pureblood necropolis in Pontia, though instead of grand marble monuments bearing storied family names, the crowded headstones that peeked from the snow were modest, adorned with carved images of birds or gods or nothing at all—the Hallow Ground, not the Hollow Ground as Constance named it.

  Our boots crunched on a well-trod path. In the corner farthest from the gate, they had piled snow and ice as high as my head, packed and shaped it, and cut a door through the side. Sheltered from the sun as it was, such a frozen barrow could last well into our weak summer.

  “We’ve a few special cases we keep here,” said Bastien. “’Tis a luxury of a rotten winter. When you deem your fine self in the mood to work, tell Constance, and she’ll have someone pull the girl out. No tricks, or you’ll regret the day you ever heard the name Bastien de Caton.”

  The pleasure of telling him the current extent of my regret was not worth the dregs of my pride. Perhaps a little while alone in such a peaceful surround and I could regain some sort of balance. “Give me half an hour.”

  But Bastien didn’t leave. Instead, he folded his velvet-sleeved arms and stared grimly at the mound, as if his vision might penetrate its walls and the mystery inside. To escape his company I’d have to plod around him through thigh-deep snow. So I waited, seething, surprised when he spoke up again.

  “On my visits in the Council District this morning, I let slip a few mentions of the king-to-be and his heirs.” His bellicose basso had yielded to a quieter tone. None but I and the sleeping dead could have heard him. “Perryn’s acknowledged five children of his wife, three boys, two girls, all aged under seven years. None’s counted his by-blow, of which, gossip says, there are many. That seems likely, with a wife producing five live brats in eight years.”

  His silence extended a goodly while, his thick fingers tapping their opposite elbows. I cared naught for the royal family or its breeding habits, and tried to focus inward and rebuild my power. Breathing deep, I forced mind and body to let go of the day’s annoyance. Closed my eyes. Closed my ears.

  But Bastien mumbled on. “Prince Bayard has two strapping boys of ten and twelve. No girls. And he’s spent the most of his days since age fifteen on his warships, chasing Hansker raiders, keeping Navronne’s coastal cities safe and his wife lone. None knows of Osriel the Bastard’s couplings any more than they know whether he’s yet a human person or has truly forfeited his bal
ls to Magrog in return for sorcery. But he’s no marriage nor heirs recorded and, as far as anyone knows, hasn’t left Evanore’s mountains since he was a boy. I doubt this girl is his. For certain none but a child in the direct line could wear the tri-part lily. Thus she’s likely Perryn’s.”

  “You believe what my drawing showed!” My every sense flared alert. He’d been so certain of my scheming. I wasn’t even sure that I believed the dead girl had royal blood.

  “Didn’t say that. I deem you a pompous pureblood twit who believes he’s been ill-used because he’s got to smell shite. I believe you’d do just about anything short of cutting off your hands to weasel out of this contract. But none’s ever said Bastien de Caton fails to take advantage of what it might profit him to know, and it’s not every day I earn favors from those who can tell me of princes and their get. And now these”—he shifted his gaze to the stack of portraits in his hand—“are shown without their woundings.”

  Was that all? I had purposely used the undamaged parts of the men’s faces to rebuild the dreadful gaps, just as I could fill in a full head of hair for a woman who had lost hers or make a man’s rheumy eye clear.

  “Any skillful portraitist can do the same. Magic simply makes it easier to get it accurate.”

  “So, you truly don’t know . . .”

  Control yourself, Lucian. “Know what?”

  “This one.” He held out the face on top. “I know this man.”

  A narrow face with prominent cheekbones and a wide, straight nose—the one whose dreadful jaw wound yet throbbed in my skull. Instead of hair glued to his skull with blood, I’d given him a thick, waving mane to match the beard on his intact cheek, a logical extension of what I saw. And over his bloody hauberk, I’d sketched a clean, well-cut surcoat instead of the filthy remnants of his own.

  “You chose him from the deadcarts, not I,” I said. “He wore decent mail and an expensive swordbelt.”

  “But it’s not from the yard I know him. And I never met him in the flesh. But whole like this, he’s the very image of the chief magistrate of Wroling, and of proper age to be old Maslin’s son. And that”—he pointed to a badge on the man’s surcoat, an intricate device of a wolf devouring a falcon—“is the badge of the Edane of Wroling. Perhaps you knew that already. Or did you hear some gatzi-fed slander and think you’d put it there for a jest?”

  He bit off his last phrases as he might snap the neck of a stray chicken. Though I had no idea what slander he might mean, that was surely the source of his current annoyance, not my skills or lack of them. That relieved me. Complaints about my skills would only complicate matters.

  The portrait glared at me as if daring me to solve its mystery. This soldier was not one of the two wearing torn badges. This man had worn no device. Which meant . . . what? Why had I interpreted his prosperity with a particular badge . . . as if I knew him?

  Bastien’s fingers tapped, his impatience feeding my own.

  “Nothing in that courtyard would put me in mind of a jest, Master Bastien, even if I knew what you were talking about. And by the time I did this portrait—”

  No. If I told him about the pain, he’d just think me whining again. And I certainly couldn’t explain it. So I held to plain truth. “I’ve never been to Wroling nor met its lord or its magistrate nor heard any stories of them. I’ve no knowledge of Ardran noblemen’s badges. You’re certain of its design?”

  “Aye. And I’m as certain of his parentage as I can be without showing him to his da. Seems uncanny two men would be birthed so like and not be kin. If I didn’t trust your art so far as a decent likeness, I’d have had you up before your Registry witch already.”

  My shivers had waned, thanks to the food and drink and passing time, but my temper was as threadbare as Bastien’s velvet. “Hear me, Coroner, for the first and last time. I will not, not ever, deliberately falsify a drawing. My magic, my art, is the only thing—”

  Again, no. I would not admit him to my privacy. But I had to convince him.

  My fingers raked my hair. “I cannot explain the badge or the portrait’s likeness to someone you know. I cannot explain the girl child’s lily. But I swear upon my dead sire’s name and upon my dead mother’s heart, they arose from no artifice, only from magic . . . or instinct . . . or some blending—”

  My breath caught. Was it possible that reaching for the life behind death’s mask had roused some fading ember of my second bent? My grandsire had discovered many marvels with his magic—new meanings for glyphs and symbols, legends that he could confirm only later, ideas that meshed with other discoveries to reveal a story unexpected. And he had often warned that pursuing our shared bent was fraught with the agonies of war, but, stars of night, I’d never imagined that meant physical pain. Yet it made much more sense that I could inherit a dead man’s pain by way of a bent for history than from drawing his portrait. And on the night just past when touching the frozen graveyard, I had glimpsed . . . threads . . . threads of vision that mimed the investigations of history.

  My face heated under Bastien’s glare. “I gather that’s a strong oath for a pureblood,” he said. “I’ll take it for now.”

  Compared to the storm rising inside me, his words pattered like raindrops. In the days when I practiced both bents, I’d felt the streams of magic entirely distinct—history deriving from the mind and art from the soul, or so I had explained it to my family. Never had I been able to merge them for any task, no matter how useful. When I was twenty and a fool, such a skill would have elated me. The blending would be a marvel, an unprecedented extension of the divine gift. But now? All I could see was the most cursed, wretched consequence.

  It had taken my grandsire months of persuasion to delay my Declaration of Bent when I turned sixteen and to secure the Registry’s approval for me to continue exploring both gifts. And even his tolerance had collapsed at my first hint of undisciplined behavior. Now I was so clearly in trouble; if I were to plead my case to the Registry, try to bring Pons to account for her betrayal, any hint of a dual bent would undercut everything I said. History said that those with two strong bents inevitably went mad. Great Deunor preserve, they might try to excise it again! The memory of that pain made the echoes of wounding no more than the brush of a gnat’s wing.

  Bastien thrust the page into my hand. “Copy this, and I’ll send it to Magistrate Maslin in Wroling. We’ll see what he says. Then, perhaps, we’ll both know something new.”

  * * *

  The coroner rejoined me in the preparation room, where I was standing beside the window, wiping my hands with a damp kerchief. The aches in my thigh and jaw were fading, for which I was profoundly thankful. It had taken me less than an hour to reproduce the soldier’s portrait, as if the throbbing in my own jaw had kept the lines and curves of the soldier’s face ready in my fingertips.

  “I suppose you’re quit for the day,” snapped Bastien.

  I could not summon the strength to challenge his insolence. “The light’s going. I do better—”

  “Yes, yes. You can redo the girl’s portrait tomorrow. And I’ve a number of new subjects for you to work on.”

  No point in broaching the subject of the contract. My flimsy hope of getting the cursed agreement voided lay in some Registry curator—Pluvius, I supposed—who could see what Pons’s betrayal meant to pureblood honor. And that was beginning to seem a very flimsy hope indeed.

  I stuffed my kerchief in my waist pocket. “Master Bastien . . .”

  He halted on his way out the door. “What?”

  I’d thought to mention my need for new lodgings, but the wretched words wouldn’t shape themselves. He was an ordinary. He owned me. “At the same hour tomorrow?”

  “Every day the same. And wear more of your furs if you’re so thin blooded as to get the shakes. Wouldn’t want a Registry inspector to think I’m mistreating you.”

  Wordless, numb, I touched fingertips to forehead.

  CHAPTER 8

  Profound night awaited me outside t
he walls. Half-hopeful, half-terrified, I peered into the sable winter of the burial ground. No blue threads teased my eyes. The wind gusts whispered no words. Living myth . . . Surely the morning’s vision had been but imagining.

  Pride had vetoed such a violation of custom as bringing my own lantern from home; purebloods did not march about the city dangling lanterns or waving torches like linkboys. My fury over the contract had fueled my stubbornness. Laughable, now, that I had thought the penurious stipend the worst part of it. I had vowed to reserve enough magic to see me safely home. The long day’s work might well have undone that vow; without question identity portraits of the dead consumed more of my capacity than anniversary portraits at the Registry. But at the least I’d had sense enough to wear silver bracelets about my upper sleeves—ideal for supporting a spelled light.

  As on the previous night, I shaped my desire and filled it with magic. Then I crimped the thin silver band around my left wrist and triggered the spell.

  The ivory light guided me across the burial ground to the gap in the wall. Praying that my demonstration of the morning had sufficed to keep the Ciceron rogues at bay, I descended into the hirudo.

  A bone-clawing chill had settled in the ravine. A number of folk huddled about small smoky cook fires. They’d bundled themselves head to toe in so many layers of rags and sacking, hats and shawls, one could scarce tell men from women from children.

  Nattering, arguments, the clatter of dice, and drunken laughter died as I passed. No one looked at me. No one approached.

  Feet and spirit longed to race through the lane, to distance myself as quickly as possible from Necropolis Caton and this, its wretched appendage. But running from a predator only set the beast’s juices flowing, so I kept my pace measured, eyes forward, ears alert, and fingers ready to snatch the dagger from my boot. The clearest answer to my morning’s work would lie ahead, before the path turned upward toward the city.

  The arché was waiting for me, as I had commanded, though it remained secure in the grasp of a short, sinewy Ciceron. Red ribbons wove his black hair into five plaits, and the false gold of his dangling earrings glinted in the wavering torchlight. His gray-mottled black beard and heavy mustache identified him as the syrinx-player of the morning. His confident stance named him the headman of Hirudo Palinur.