Perfection was perfection, Foxfire Girl reflected as she slipped on her white chemise, her underdress of spotless white linen and over it a pleated gown of breath-fine, dark blue silk. Of course there were women who used their training simply as a tool to earn money for money’s sake. But there were whores in any profession, including that of wife. The ladies of the Blossom Houses, whether wives or concubines or courtesans, were trained to be perfect. Perfect in pillow matters, perfect in cooking, perfect in fashion, perfect in deportment.
Most perfect of all were the Pearl Women, the ones they wrote songs about. The ones men killed themselves for, gave up everything for, lived for and died for.
And a Pearl Woman was what Foxfire Girl had determined in her heart to be.
Given her own family, it wasn’t impossible for Iorradus to ask for her hand. I’d be a Pearl Woman for Iorradus. Foxfire Girl turned the matter over in her mind as she followed the others down the steps again, along the garden pathway toward the cypress-shaded pavilion where the poetry master waited for them. Cloud Girl had said after the last supper they both had waited on that Iorradus had asked who Foxfire Girl was. Every night since she’d heard this, Foxfire Girl had pictured the scene in her mind when she lay in bed at night: the young guardsman lingering in the doorway of the supper room as Honeysuckle Lady bade a (too loud) laughing good-bye to his friends. His handsome face was wistful, longing. Cloud Girl was clearing away the last of the coffee things from the table. He’d go to her, touch her shoulder—she’d been wearing her gray robe with the yellow birds on it that night, Foxfire Girl remembered, and the yellow underdress. And he, she recalled, wore the gold and crimson of the king’s guard, the bullion that embroidered his breast not brighter than the mane of his fiery hair. The scene was as clear to her mind as an episode in a play. Who was the girl in black? he’d asked. Or maybe, That tall girl in black, with the green eyes . . . what is her name?
Foxfire Girl, Cloud Girl would have said.
And as she turned away with her laden tray, Iorradus would have sighed a little, and whispered the name to himself. Foxfire Girl . . . Treasuring it like a flower against his heart. (He should have held a flower—maybe picked up one dropped from my hair, Foxfire Girl thought. Only of course Pearl Women didn’t lose pieces of their coiffures at dinner. She wasn’t sure about where he could have gotten the flower.)
“Foxfire Girl.” Honeysuckle Lady emerged from the rather dusty bamboo thickets of the garden court. The yellow and white of her gown perfectly suited her delicate complexion and amber-hued hair, and if her makeup was applied rather thickly under her pansy-blue eyes, it would take another woman to detect it. Men, Foxfire Girl had already learned, never noticed a thing.
As always, even when she was in bed, Honeysuckle Lady wore an assortment of protective amulets, silver and jade and glass. Every girl in the Blossom Houses had a protective talisman or two. Foxfire Girl had three. It was entirely too easy for a rival to find someone—usually an Earth Wizard who unlike the Sun Mages didn’t live in an organized college and hence wasn’t as scrupulous about who he worked for—to put words of illness or ill luck on a girl. Even a badly timed pimple on the night of an important supper could be disaster.
“Would you be a darling and go to the Ointment Market for me?” crooned Honeysuckle Lady, standing in front of her while the other girls disappeared through the garden gate. “I’ve already settled the poetry master to let you. That old whore Gecko Woman is out of sheep cream in the kitchen. I need the good-quality kind, not that curdly stuff they have for the maids here. I just found out, and I have a supper at dusk.” She pressed a silver piece into Foxfire Girl’s hand.
Foxfire Girl manufactured a bright smile, thinking, You ratty old slut—you’re doing this to make me late because I’m prettier than you. “Of course. Just let me go get my veils.” And find one of the juniors to bribe. Thank the gods I didn’t spend all my candy money this month.
“You darling!” Honeysuckle Lady put a hand lightly on either shoulder, pecked two cold little kisses on her cheeks. “I’ll wait here for you and walk you to the gate. You’re the only one I can trust—you have such excellent taste.”
Seething at being thus trapped into the errand, Foxfire Girl shouted for Gecko Woman on her way through the kitchen yard, then flounced up the steps to the attic again. Having remained to set out their clothing for the supper, Opal Girl was still dressing for class. She was short where her friend was tall, warm brunette to Foxfire Girl’s dramatic pallor and darkness, at age fourteen curvaceous already. Foxfire Girl snatched up the veils without which no decent woman appeared in public, her fingers tangling in the lacquered whorls of her hair.
“I won’t have time for a real bath,” she snapped, barely able to breathe with anger. “So make sure they don’t empty out the tubs by the kitchen until I get back.”
Opal Girl nodded. She was half afraid of her roommate, partly because, as the daughter of a great house, Foxfire Girl had grown up with an arrogance that would not take no for an answer. “I’ll have everything laid out ready for you,” Opal Girl promised. “I’ll try to stay here to help you get ready.”
“Thank you, baby.” Foxfire Girl bit back the torrent of oaths and recriminations on her lips, stepped over to the other girl and kissed her lightly, then pinned the face veil in place with just the proper coquettish gather of folds at the side. “But don’t make yourself late.” Her tone implied, Not too very late, anyway. “I’ll be as quick as I can.”
But, as Honeysuckle Lady had undoubtedly been aware, by the time Foxfire Girl and Gecko Woman reached the Ointment Market near the Baths of Killibek where the fancy milk sellers had their pitches, most of them had closed up for the day.
There wasn’t a question of buying any old thing, either. Honeysuckle Lady brought in too much money for Chrysanthemum Lady to ignore a complaint from her about a fledgling. By the time Foxfire Girl found something remotely acceptable and got back to the House of Six Willows it was dark, and the horns that had groaned so tediously through the day from the Citadel—Can’t they just get on with it? she’d wondered impatiently—had ceased.
They’d already emptied the tubs.
Her room, when she reached it, was pitch black, but as she opened the door the fusty reek of cat urine stung her nostrils. Oh, no, she thought, aghast, furious. Oh, no . . .
She fumbled with striker and steel, lit the candle by the door.
Oh, yes. Opal Girl, true to her promise, had left her best white dress and black-and-white flowered outer robe spread out on the bed. And one of the half-dozen cats that spent their days hunting mice in the kitchens (in spite of what Chrysanthemum Lady spent each year on mice wards—What was wrong with wizards these days, anyway?) and loafing around the garden had desecrated not just one garment, but both.
Damn her. From the window Foxfire Girl looked out across the tiny garden court, past the pavilion that held the dancing floor and the classrooms, across to the warm lights of the supper room. Bright figures moved in the verandas, shadows flickered on the stiff bleached papyrus shades of the windows. If Iorradus and his guardsmen cronies weren’t there already they would be soon, far too soon for her to get herself washed and perfumed—and her hair fixed; it was still dressed for poetry class, not for serving at a supper—in time to participate.
I’ll kill her, she thought, with the cold, perfect, towering fury of fourteen. I don’t know how yet . . . .
And unbidden, a thought flickered across her mind. A dream, maybe, or something that was almost a dream.
Her eyes narrowed and she thought, Well, maybe I do know.
Or anyway, I’ll certainly try.
With a single slashing gesture she hurled the ruined garments on the floor and carried her candle to the painted chest where her other robes were, to see what else she might wear.
The Citadel’s horns had ceased and luminous darkness had settled on the face of the desert when Oryn scratched at the door of the wisteria-covered pavilion behind the library.
Lamps burned among the trees of the Green Court, visible beyond a screen of mostly bare foliage. One of Oryn’s cats—Candy or Black Princess, barely a silhouette in the darkness—stalked crickets, its eyes flame-soaked mirrors. The silence that was so sweet a component of the House of the Marvelous Tower—set as it was between the city and the lake, with open fields on two sides and water on the third—lay like a blessing over the pebbled paths.
The tall windows of the library still showed lamps burning, and Oryn wondered if Soth had forgotten the time. Time was not something that wizards commonly forgot. It was almost unheard of, for Soth.
At least for the Soth Oryn had known as a youth.
He scratched the door again. When no reply came from within, he pushed on the carved panel gently and called the wizard’s name. “Are you there?”
“No.” The soft, husky voice came out of the darkness. Oryn knew the pavilion well enough to cross its outer vestibule to the inner chamber, where a little light leaked through the windows from the library across the court. He also knew well enough to move carefully, shuffling his feet so as not to trip over the stacks of books the wizard habitually and continually shifted from tables to divans to floor. He encountered two or three of these anyway, and once a low table undoubtedly rendered invisible by some spell. Two enormous pyramidal book racks loomed like mountains in the dark, the bullion thread-work and polished gems of the book covers glimmering like the phosphor that lay on the surface of the Lake of the Moon. “No, my boy, would that I could tell you that I were here,” Soth went on, in a voice of great deliberation, as if the enunciation of each separate syllable were a matter of honor. “But the fact is I’m not. I have no idea who’s here in my stead.”
Soth’s desk was beside the southern windows, and by the sound of his voice he was sitting at it. Oryn heard the alcohol in the slurred inflection and smelled sherab, the twice-distilled brandy of grapes, in the chilly, stuffy dark. Exasperation flashed through him—0f all the times to pick to drown your self in the bottle!—replaced, a moment later, by pity, and shame at his own anger. He picked his careful way to the desk and said, “Perhaps you’ll like him. I do.”
“Kind of you.”
Oryn’s eyes were adjusting to the darkness. He picked out, by the dim ghost of the distant library lamps, the painted latticework doors of cupboards around the walls, open under the bulge of scrolls, codices, notes, tablets; the pale handbreadth of Soth’s narrow, unshaven face. The wizard poured himself another cup of brandy—he was taking it in teacups, big as half oranges, rather than in the smaller vessels made for liquor—and unsteadily rose to fetch another for his guest.
There was a slithering clatter as Soth knocked over a pile of books; Oryn caught his arm. All he’d need, he thought, was to tip over a lamp and soak everything in oil.
“Thank you, dear boy.” The wizard shook him off gently and fetched the cup with the dogged persistence of a drunkard. The unraveled braid of his hair made a tangled silky cloak to his hips. “But he’s a paltry fellow, you know. Useless. Ask Lord Mohrvine. He’ll tell you.”
Oryn gritted his teeth. He’d been afraid his uncle’s silky deference had hurt his former tutor worse than criticism would have.
“Your lovely lady will be of more use to you in your evening’s quest.”
Oryn accepted the cup held out to him but only pretended to drink. One thing he couldn’t afford tonight was even the slightest possibility of misstep or misjudgment, and he recognized the vintage: laid down by his grandfather, twice distilled and aged thirty years. He wasn’t sure that the smell alone wouldn’t make him stagger as he left. “I’m sorry you won’t be able to join us,” he said, quite sincerely. “The last time I spoke to the djinni was twelve years ago, and even my memories of their summoning aren’t what a trained wizard’s would be. The Summer Concubine has performed it before, and watched you, of course, the time before last. But though you said she performed the rite perfectly last time, there is always something a man of experience sees and knows that doesn’t get said. And she’s never even seen the Beautiful Ones. Of the three of us, you’re the only one who has actually summoned the djinni.”
“She did the summoning perfectly last time.” Soth groped his way back to the desk. The figured silk cushions of the divan sighed like a generation of disappointed parents as he sagged into them.
“They did not appear.”
“My child, they’re not servants.” Soth blinked up at him, squinting to see in the nonexistent light. Or perhaps, thought Oryn sadly, merely struggling to focus his eyes. It had been years since Soth had read, as wizards do, in the dark. “They didn’t answer my summoning a year ago, not that I was able even to summon so much as a dog by that time. But even when I had power, more frequently than not the djinni chose to ignore the call. They are unaccountable, my Peacock Prince. Creatures of magic, living in magical realms. They have no need of us nor of anything we can offer them. Particularly not now. We can only petition like hungry bankrupts at their invisible gates.”
No, thought Oryn. He drew the great collar of his sable-fur cloak about him and left the dark pavilion behind the library, making his way by circuitous paths to the kitchen gate where the Summer Concubine waited for him with the horses. There was a time when we could say, We can only do so much, and if the djinni did not answer the call of whatever wizard tried to summon them, it was irritating but not fatal.
Now it could very well be fatal.
If anyone would know what was happening—to magic, to the rains, to the world—it would be the Beautiful Ones. The wild spirits who manifested themselves in the form men called djinni. Who lived, in their strange realms of crystalline light and magic, forever.
The Summer Concubine waited for him in the court behind the kitchen, where deliveries were brought in. She had a kind of slim neatness in her dark riding dress, like a little soldier. “You’re not too tired?” he asked, helping her to the saddle, assistance she needed rather less than she needed help in feeding herself. “It may be a long night with nothing to show for it.” He himself had slept, and spent a little time with his music, playing strange laments on an ivory zittern from the deep-desert oasis of Minh. The instrument was said to perfume the listener’s dreams.
“I’ll be all right.”
She was a Pearl Woman, reflected Oryn with a mental headshake as he unbarred the gate and led his own mount through. No Pearl Woman on the face of the earth would admit that she was too tired, or unable to perform any task required of her. He closed the gate behind them, swung up onto his bay gelding, as tall and as bulky as himself. He felt a little silly as he wrapped a tribesman’s scarf around the lower part of his face; there were few men in the palace of his opulent stature and surely the guards would recognize the horse, not to mention the sables. But perhaps the guards merely required that he fulfill the forms of incognito. They certainly made no comment as he showed them the pass he’d written for himself, only opened the outer gate.
The torchlight failed behind them. The full moon’s light silvered the sterile furrows of the lakeside fields, the withe fences of market gardens as they struck out northward. As they passed dose by the small houses clustering the base of the city walls, Oryn heard the hum of day’s-end commerce: the bray of asses being unhitched and the squeak of cart wheels. In every house in the city, women got up from their looms. Men and teyn left the bucket hoists that brought lake water to the fields. Somewhere on the margins of the lake a crocodile bellowed.
A woman’s voice called to a child to fetch the turnips and be quick about it. A vendor sang about the finest-quality goose quills in the land.
The Citadel, looming high on their right, was silent and dark.
Dust stung Oryn’s nostrils, gritted under his scarf. In spite of first-quality ointment his skin felt tight and dry. Ahead and to both sides the herds of House Jothek cattle lowed with thirst around dry water tanks. A rider whistled to his horse in the dark, and somewhere a dog barked.
This has to work.
The bluffs rose like a dark cloud on their right; the blanched light outlined Joshua trees and scrubby ocotillo.
We have to learn what’s happening, and the djinni are the only ones who can tell us.
If they could be induced to tell.
Oryn had been six when first he’d seen the Beautiful Ones. He remembered the whirlwinds of gems far out in the desert, scintillant in their own light. Remembered the touch of wind that had flowed out from those brilliant beings, the scents that had filled the night. Wild, clean, delirious scents that he remembered with crystal exactness but had never encountered anywhere else, had never found words to compare them with. He’d struggled furiously against his father’s iron grip, overcome with the need to run to them, to break out of the protective circle Hathmar had drawn. To absorb and be absorbed by those wild promises of love and unbelievable joy.
Meliangobet, who was Hathmar’s friend among the spirits, had looked down at the chubby, curly-haired child standing at the very edge of the circle, had smiled. For years Oryn had tried to capture in his music the wonder of that smile. The djinn’s eyes were harder to describe, and tales differed about whether these spirits went naked or were clothed in robes of billowing silk dusted with jewels. About whether they flew themselves, or rode upon winged and nebulous things.
Only that they were beautiful, filled with magic and free.
This will be a king? the spirit had asked.
Hathmar had put his hand on Oryn’s shoulder. “If he lives.”
Oh, you will live, my lovely princeling. Meliangobet leaned down and extended a glowing hand. For a few moments only the hand was visible, emerging from a veil of light. I see the years crowning you like a garland of summer flowers.
And though Hathmar had warned him repeatedly against doing so, Oryn had stepped forward over the protective line. Both the Archmage and Greatsword lunged to pull him back; it wasn’t safe for any mortal, let alone a child, to be unprotected around the djinni. But Meliangobet, and Naruansich, and the Bright-Fire Lady and Thuu the Eyeless had all laughed and drawn Oryn into their glittering circle, touching him with long, thin, cold fingers that trailed white flame.
Sisters of the Raven Page 7