Sisters of the Raven

by Barbara Hambly

  And what about the other women? The Summer Concubine sat back on her heels before her low dressing table, pressing her fingers to her aching head. What about the women whom she hadn’t found yet? Who had not yet admitted to themselves that the mice that stayed away from their storerooms, or the cats or birds or teyn who’d recovered their health, weren’t accidents? Weren’t chance coincidences?

  They were out there. She knew there were others.

  The thought of them made her feel suddenly afraid . . . .

  “Lady?”

  The voice spoke in her head and she snapped her attention to the mirror. Passed her hand over it, carefully forming the spells in her mind.

  It was Corn-Tassel Woman.

  “Great gods, what . . . ?”

  “It’s all right.” The big, fair woman shook her head, gestured reassuringly, as if her bruised cheek and swollen, red-rimmed eyes were of no more importance than an untimely pimple. “It’s just my man. Are you all right? I felt your calling . . . .”

  “I’m well.” The Summer Concubine forced down her rage, her frustration; this wasn’t the first time Corn-Tassel Woman had borne evidence of her husband’s surly angers. “Did anything happen last night? Any ill, any danger that you know about? I felt. . . I don’t know. Something.”

  And she saw, for just an instant, a look of worry or guilt in her friend’s eyes.

  Then the glassblower’s wife shook her head, and said, “Nothing, bar that I was awake, and working just a little bit of a spell for my neighbor; there was no harm in it, and it was all for the good. But Enak got word of it somehow, and has got one of his rages going.”

  She turned her head sharply, as at a sound—a shout from the door of the kitchen, perhaps, or the crash of a thrown log.

  The image faded.

  Around her, the Summer Pavilion felt suddenly cold and filled with darkness. The Summer Concubine slewed around on her knees, her heart in her throat.

  But there was nothing. Not even shadow or dimness, for the midmorning sun lay bright on the terrace garden, casting lace-work shadows from the vines onto the lapis mosaic of the floor.

  Yet for one moment the room had seemed to breathe with a presence other than her own.

  There was nothing in the shadow of the bronze bed with its golden vines; nothing where the screens stood near the wide windows; nothing hidden in the rows of gold-rimmed niches where lamps awaited the touch of flame. The wall cupboards with their inlays of shell and gold were closed, and none was big enough to hide so much as a child, let alone . . .

  What?

  She could not even say what it was she feared. What she thought, for one instant, had been in the room with her.

  Dreams, she thought. Dreams and nightmares.

  Still she went out onto the terrace, carefully drawing her veils close to protect the porcelain perfection of her complexion, and remained outside until the chimes on the Marvelous Tower let her know that Rainsong Girl was finished with her lessons, and she could go and play with her child.

  With the sun’s sinking, Oryn rode back along the beaten roadway that ran between the dry fields and the wide brown stretches of crocodile-fringed lakeshore. From far off he heard the groan of the Citadel’s horns and shivered. On either side of the Yellow City the sown fields lay brown and waiting, the turned tops of the soil crumbly-pale between the rows where last year’s seed wheat slumbered. Between the wheat fields, teyn labored at clearing the last debris of the winter cotton crop, watched by mounted overseers. As Oryn and his two bodyguards rode past, one of the shaggy little hominids raised a long arm and waved.

  Like the smile of the gardener’s teyn, the gesture made Oryn wonder—not for the first time—what they thought about, those long days in the fields. Set any band of the children of humankind to a tedious task, hauling a canal barge or grinding wheat or churning butter, and someone is bound to start a song. Oryn was fascinated by these simple tunes, the heartfelt words, old tales of love and work and heartbreak.

  Teyn didn’t sing. As a child he’d asked one of the teyn who worked in his father’s stables about this and had gotten only a blank look from those pale blue, slit-pupiled eyes. He wasn’t even sure his question had been understood.

  What did they think of any of this? he wondered, and slowed his horse beside the high mud-brick wall of one of Lord Sarn’s teyn villages.

  His guards drew rein as well, young men chosen by Barún for looks and height as well as skill. Why surround oneself with ugly guards? The fair one, bronze and blue eyed, looked about with his hand on his sword, assuming that the only reason anyone would stop near a teyn compound was if there was trouble. Iorradus, his name was, Oryn recalled. A relative of House Akarian. Jethan, dark and dour and built like one of those standing stones one saw far out in the deep desert, merely looked disapproving. He’d ridden with his king before.

  Most farming or mining villages had a walled teyn compound nearby, particularly where there was a crop requiring heavy labor, like cane or cotton, or where long chains of hoists were needed to bring up water from the lake. Ocher and white and black, the runes of fear and obedience were traced along the wall top and around the village’s single gateway. Oryn remembered riding out with his now deceased uncle Polmec to watch Soth and Lord Sarn’s then court mage, the Earth Wizard Urnate Urla, renew them, as they were renewed every few years. They were fresh-marked now. He wondered who Sarn had found to do it after he’d turned Urnate Urla out.

  And what would happen if those spells were to fade?

  For centuries innumerable generations of those short-lived, silent little creatures had been controlled by the magic of humankind. Attacking bands had been driven off from the fields along the lakes. Spells had been laid on the leaders of the tame villages, to make them fear their human overseers, to make them remain in the boundaries of the villages at night. To fill them with content at a good day’s work well done, and at a small ration of corn at night. Having no magic themselves, the teyn in their turn relied on their human owners for healing, and seemed grateful as far as anyone could tell.

  Those whom spells could not cow, spells could defeat—and destroy.

  From his horse in the shade of the drooping date palms along the dried lake brim, Oryn watched the slumped little forms. They worked neatly, loading stalks and dead leaves onto sledges to be hauled to the kindling sheds and pulping mills of Lord Sarn’s domain. Did they sense that those spells were growing weaker every day?

  Did their wilding brethren, roving the mountains on the western shores of the lakes, the dust-colored rock hills and wastelands to the east?

  Teyn minders were just finishing up the stewing of the corn-meal porridge that the village lived on as the king and his guards rode under the gate arch. The men hurried out of the round central pavilion, but Oryn gestured with his fan. “My dear sir, I’m just having a look about,” he called out to the senior of the two. “I shall think much the worse of you if you lay your rightful work aside to fawn upon the powerful.” The teyn minders laughed, and told him to give them a shout if he did need anything—he was aware of Jethan’s deeper frown.

  He feared that the boy found him unconscionably frivolous.

  Apparently it was perfectly legitimate for kings to go about in disguise—for they did in all the best tales—and have humble folk tell them home truths because they weren’t aware of their kingliness. But if a monarch were there in his curly-toed shoes and peacock-embroidered riding jacket, a certain amount of fawning was in order just on general principle.

  Shaking his head, Oryn reined his horse slowly around the perimeter of the village, as close to the wall as he could, to feel the terror spells imbued in the bricks. Flies swarmed—teyn villages were uniformly filthy—and Oryn swished vainly at them with his fan. As a child, he recalled, he’d been made almost sick by the sense of cliff-brink fright that began a foot or so from the wall. He didn’t think he was any farther away now than he had been then. Old Sunchaser didn’t seem to be having any problems,
but then for all his prancing and tail flashing, Sunchaser was really a very calm horse. Cats had avoided the walls, too, and would always walk in and out of the teyn villages by the gates—always, Oryn had observed, in the exact middle of the arch.

  A big tabby basked between the sharpened stakes on the top of the wall now, catching the last brazen glimmers of evening light. Oryn wondered how long it would take the teyn to notice.

  Or had they noticed already?

  But all seemed quiet. A young female—jennies they were called—swollen with child, waddled from one of the round huts to the cooking pavilion: bent-legged, long-armed, silvery arm and head hair neatly shaved. Oryn called down, “Good evening, Mother,” and she looked up at the tall, stout, gorgeous man on his tall, gold-maned steed, bared her tusks and patted her belly proudly.

  “Mother,” she agreed in the thick bass mumbling characteristic of the teyn. When she passed another hut—the huts lasted anywhere from twenty to fifty years, and were rebuilt on the same foundations until some villages stood on mounds a dozen feet high—an old boar teyn crawled from the low, round door. He was crippled with arthritis and bleached to the roots with age. Oryn saw him take the jenny’s hands, exchange a kiss with her on the lips. Neither spoke. Teyn did not, among themselves.

  The first gangs were coming in from the fields, settling around the troughs as the minders scooped meal into the hollowed wood. They were all silent, though they’d sometimes nudge or kiss. The children—pips—ran squeaking around with high, shrill calls like birds or piglets, but didn’t seem to want or need to speak any more than did the adults.

  Queer. Very odd.

  Oryn had studied for years in Soth’s library, had sent repeatedly to the other cities, and even to the rocky little towns of the faraway coast, for any volumes concerning the teyn, and had never learned more of them than he knew.

  “My lord?” Young Jethan’s voice was deferential, but he sat his horse as if someone had put a poker up his back. His right hand never got more than a finger’s width from his sword hilt, though it was quite clear they were in no danger of attack. The lovely Iorradus simply looked bored, glancing at the sky as if he had other plans in town the moment he was off duty and surreptitiously fixing the hang of his cloak. “It is growing dark. If you’d like us to find torches or lanterns . . .”

  “No.” Oryn glanced back over his shoulder at those silent, shifting, pale forms around the troughs. “No, we’d best be going.” It was nearly time for supper, and young Iorradus wasn’t the only one who had other plans for the evening. If he were going to accomplish tonight what he hoped to accomplish, Oryn knew he’d need a few hours’ rest. In many ways dissipation was an entirely preferable way to spend one’s life; he couldn’t imagine why he’d given it up. In his palmier days he’d barely be awake at this hour of the afternoon—well, awake, maybe, but just finishing in one of his three private bathhouses. And it had been weeks since he’d spent time with his music, or sorting through his collections of rare gems, rare books, rare instruments of music.

  Perhaps, instead of sleeping, he could spend an hour examining the rubies that had been brought in from the mines in the Mountains of the Eanit west of the Lake of Reeds—dark jewels the hue of bulls’ blood with strange pink stars sunk in their depths.

  Or maybe just having tea with the Summer Concubine and their daughter.

  As he bent his head to ride under the gate again he saw a rat skitter along the top of the ward-written village wall.

  A bad sign, he thought.

  A very bad sign.

  FIVE

  Do you think he’s really in love with Honeysuckle Lady?”

  “What if he buys her contract? Makes her his own?”

  “It’s the fifth time he’s asked for her, and you know what Chrysanthemum Lady charges for the supper room!”

  “Well, Iorradus is rich . . . .”

  It isn’t true, thought Foxfire Girl coldly, silent among her giggling fellow fledglings as they walked back through the tiny garden of the House of Six Willows to the stair that led up to their attic rooms. Their chatter washed over her like the breezes that rippled their thin pastel dancing frocks.

  “He isn’t, either—he’s only a guardsman.”

  “He’s a cousin of Lord Akarian. He could even marry Honeysuckle Lady!”

  “I think it’s romantic!”

  I think you’re an idiot, Foxfire Girl fought not to say. It’s only a blind, Iorradus coming to see Honeysuckle Lady. It’s me he’s in love with.

  And the thought of the young guardsman’s long golden hair, his broad shoulders like brown silk and the dazzling sapphire of his eyes, sent a shiver through her limbs and a lance of amber warmth into her heart.

  Once through the little gate at the far end of the garden, which was smaller and narrower than the big dining hall in the home of Foxfire Girl’s father, the fledglings broke into a run. They dashed along the cramped passageway to the kitchen yard where old Gecko Woman would have water and sponges and towels laid out on the long worktable under the ramada of pine poles that shaded the back of the kitchen. They had to be out of their dancing dresses and into the plain, exquisitely tasteful everyday costumes for their poetry lesson, every bow tied and not a hair out of place, in a little less than an hour, something Foxfire Girl would bet a month’s candy money Honeysuckle Lady couldn’t do if her life depended on it.

  Not that she’d ever be asked to, of course. It was understood that though Chrysanthemum Lady charged enormous fees to teach young girls perfection—in taste, in service, in accomplishments, in manners—it was the payment charged for exclusive suppers with the two Blossom Ladies who worked there that supported the House of the Six Willows.

  The girls stripped, laughed, speculated about Iorradus and Honeysuckle Lady as they scrubbed each other’s backs and took turns at the four small tubs of steaming water in the striped black-and-yellow shade. Blossom Ladies were distinguished, among other things, by exquisite cleanliness, which could get expensive if you were buying wood to heat wash water three times a day. A quick scrub in the kitchen porch was all the fledglings got; they would then bear cans of hot water up two flights of stairs so that Honeysuckle Lady and Poppy Lady could wash in the secluded comfort of their own rooms. At least they only washed twice, a scrub in the morning and a regular bath midafternoon, in the small but elegantly appointed bathhouse that was part of every Blossom House, before getting ready to entertain at supper. Although it was understood that a Blossom Lady would arrive at an accommodation with a patron to spend the night—not always the patron who had paid the supper-room fee—pillowing was only one of her talents. As Gecko Woman put it, “Any old whore can spread her legs.”

  To be a Blossom Lady was to amuse, to entertain. To direct the whole of her attention and soul to making her patron happy.

  That was what the girls were truly at the House of Six Willows to learn.

  Iorradus can’t really be in love with Honeysuckle Lady, thought Foxfire Girl, gathering up her discarded dancing silks and wrapping a towel around her. It was a quick bolt across the kitchen yard to the attic stairs, and the late-afternoon sun was already fading. Though spring had well and truly come, the afternoons were still sharply chill, the nights bitter. Honeysuckle lady is thirty-six at least, and such a bitch. She hid it around her patrons, of course—though her salty tongue and wicked imitations of landchiefs and actors and well-known gladiators were famous throughout the town. But the Blossom House fledglings and servants knew her hidden side too well.

  “I’ll help you with your hair, sweetheart,” offered Opal Girl, who roomed with her, as they climbed the narrow stair.

  “Thank you, baby.” Foxfire Girl spoke the words without really listening to them. Surely Iorradus would be able to see through Honeysuckle Lady to the rotten person she is inside? The last time he’d had supper at the House of Six Willows—eight nights ago, when the year’s third moon, the Moon of Rains, waxed like a segment of tangerine above the desert horizon—he�
�d listened to the Blossom Lady’s gay chatter but his eyes had sought the jade-green eyes of Foxfire Girl. She’d felt his glance follow her as she and her fellow fledglings carried mint tea and heavenly morsels, couscous and honeyed chicken, figs and coffee, to him and his guardsmen friends. She, Foxfire Girl, might be only a fledgling training in the accomplishments of womanhood to make her a graceful and entertaining wife . . .

  But she had felt the warmth of his love.

  And why not his wife?

  “We’re both on the list to help with supper,” whispered Opal Girl as she deftly brushed out and coiled her friend’s long black hair. “What do you want to wear? My horoscope says I should wear blue as long as the evening star is in my third chamber, and I look dreadful in blue.”

  “You can settle your third chamber with hair ribbons,” advised Foxfire Girl promptly. “That’s what I always do. I’ll lend you mine—my brothers sent me new ones from the City of Reeds.” She studied herself in the polished glass of the mirror on the wall, another gift from her father, which she let Opal Girl use too. “I’ll let you wear some of my cassia perfume tonight, too.”

  Opal Girl clapped her hands with delight and hugged her. Unlike Foxfire Girl, whose father had placed her in the house for her education to become a perfect consort, Opal Girl was the daughter of a carpet weaver who’d sold her to one of the prestigious brothels in the Flowermarket District when she was five to pay for her brother’s education. The mother of that house was having Opal Girl educated at the House of Six Willows because of her beauty, which would eventually bring in high-paying clientele. There were a few Blossom Houses that specialized in training the daughters of the wealthy or the noble—and had a reputation for turning out unsophisticated prudes—but none that trained solely those girls destined for careers as courtesans.