Sisters of the Raven

by Barbara Hambly

  “Darutha’s blessing on you,” she whispered, and shivered with the chill that she could not overcome.

  The rain ceased an hour after first light. The clouds dispersed hastily, as if, an unwanted duty grudgingly accomplished, they had better things to do with the afternoon. It was customary for parties to be given during or after the first rain—in bad years, as last year and the one before had been, after every rain. By the time heavenly morsels and tea had been laid out in the Jasmine Gardens the sun was hot in an unbroken sky and the last of the puddles had steamed away.

  A few of the guests commented on Oryn’s absence, knowing how much the king adored festivities of any kind. “There was trouble out at the Dry Hill mines,” Barún responded gravely, and fetched cups of mint tea for his guests with his own hands, dropping two. His wife, Blue Butterfly Woman, like a fair-haired doll in her seat of honor, rolled her eyes. When Lord Jamornid appeared with Ahure preening himself in his wake, the Summer Concubine made a point of thanking Ahure—who only looked down his nose at her—for the blessing of the rain, as if he’d been as personally responsible as he thought he was. Even more than Ahure, she implied with her glance above the pink gauze of her veils, was His Lordship to be thanked for his supreme wisdom in including the man in his court. It was a wonder Lord Jamornid didn’t strut in a circle displaying like a cock pigeon. When Lord Sarn entered, with Hathmar and Sarn’s brother Benno, the college rector, on his heels, she repeated the entire performance the moment she was sure Jamornid was out of earshot.

  Which wasn’t difficult, the Summer Concubine reflected as she moved from group to group of the guests with heavenly morsels, tea and sorbet. Jamornid was seldom aware of much beyond what he imagined people were saying about his nobility, his generosity and his general excellence. “. . . first heard of Ahure, no one else had at all,” she overheard him saying to the rangeland sheikh Kan an Aket, who had undoubtedly heard the story before, “except just those few villages in the mountains west of the Great Lake. But I rode fifteen days just to see him, and when I saw him, I knew I had to bring him back here. An incredible man, incredible.”

  And Ahure, standing just far enough away to pretend not to hear, drew himself up a little taller, and gazed down his nose at the White Cat Concubine, who was offering him a piece of baba cake, and shook his head in scorn. “Offer not such poisons to me,” he intoned. “I must preserve myself, that I may serve my lord again.”

  The White Cat Concubine, Barún’s favorite this week, backed away, as well she might: Like most Blood Mages, Ahure never bandaged or treated the wounds by which he generated and focused his power. Last night’s supreme efforts to Summon the rain had left his shaved scalp laced from brows to occipital bump with parallel slashes in which the blood had clotted thickly. Dried blood caked the pins he’d driven through his lower lip and nostrils, and made tracks from the cuts between his brows. He has to retain some powers, thought the Summer Concubine. Else those wounds would have gone septic years ago. His only concession to party manners was that he’d bandaged his left hand, the wrappings newly bloodstained over the stumps of his last two fingers. The right hand, mutilated similarly long ago, was as dirty as a kennel keeper’s. Flies buzzed around the bandage but didn’t alight.

  The Summer Concubine fetched a cup of coffee and a fragile porcelain plate of opalescent moonjellies from the open supper room at the end of the garden and made her way to Hathmar, who sat quietly under the bare vine lattices of the pergola. “I trust you’re all right?”

  “Thank you, child. I’ll be well.” Behind the ground rock crystal of his spectacles his blue eyes had a sunken look, as if from long illness.

  At the gate Barún was heartily greeting Mohrvine with exclamations of “Well, it looks like it’s all turned out for the best after all,” and slapping the mage Aktis on the shoulder with hearty familiarity. Aktis winced, and reached immediately for a blown-glass cup of wine that the Topaz Concubine held out to him on a tray. Sweat rolled down either side of his huge hooked nose, and the Summer Concubine saw that when he took up the cup his small hands shook.

  She thought, Ijnis. And shivered.

  Long before her introduction to the world of power—as a girl, training in the House of Dancing Water—her teachers had told her about ijnis. The essence brewed from that unprepossessing, flannelly weed would magnify and strengthen a mage’s powers temporarily, but it was said to be dangerously addictive, and the effects would gradually drive a wizard mad.

  In those days one saw it seldom. But sometimes she’d be serving in the house’s supper room and would see among the patrons a man in the brown or gray robes of an Earth Wizard whose desperate eyes would now and again flare wide at the sight of things others could not see. Whose hands would shake, or who pressed his fingers quickly to his own lips to smother sounds over which he had no control.

  In the past ten years, she’d seen these symptoms more and more frequently among wizards whose strength had once been uncontested in the Realm of the Seven Lakes.

  “I hear there was commotion here last night, lady.”

  The Summer Concubine rose from Hathmar’s side and dipped a deep salaam to Lord Mohrvine. His simple dark robes were a variation of Greatsword’s ostentatious militarism—No nonsense about me—though not many years ago he’d had the director of his silk-weaving rooms whipped by his private guards for producing a color that was no longer in fashion. Now he could barely be got to admit that there was such a thing as fashion, at least where anyone could hear him.

  “Nothing compared to the later celebration for the first rain.” She smiled and took in Aktis with her glance. “For which I understand you are partly to thank.”

  “I commanded Aktis to perform the Calling, as I understand others”—Mohrvine’s pale green gaze flicked contemptuously to Ahure, who was lecturing a rather heavy-eyed Soth—”took it upon themselves to do as well. Whether that’s the same as being ‘responsible,’ I don’t know.” His eyebrow lifted. “I understand my nephew actually roused himself to go out with the guards. It must have been a catastrophe indeed.”

  “A message arrived for my lord.” The Summer Concubine touched two fingers to her lips, indicating that her lord’s secrets were of course her secrets as well. She wondered who among those present in the kitchen court last night were in Mohrvine’s pay.

  In the rainy predawn darkness she had kindled the lamps in the pavilion again, had once more dipped water from the garden pool into her alabaster bowl and had sought sight of the escaping teyn. A messenger had been dispatched at once, with as detailed a description as she could manage of the countryside she had seen. She prayed it would give Bax some idea of which direction to take in the absence of tracks.

  Then she’d eaten ravenously of the baba cake and dates she’d found on the wicker tray and sent a message to Geb ordering invitations sent out. Though her nightmare’s nameless dread had whispered at her from the shadows, she’d known she couldn’t afford not to sleep. And her sleep had been peaceful; whatever shadow watched and listened for her seemed to have dissipated into the rain.

  She had barely waked in time to scry again, send another messenger to Oryn, wash, dress in pink gauze and garnets, make up her face to cover her weariness and present herself at the Jasmine Garden to watch Barún welcome Oryn’s guests.

  It was part of the training of a Pearl Woman not to consume so much as a morsel at any festivity she attended. She was like the flowers on the table, which she had also arranged: there to entertain, not to be entertained. The Summer Concubine would gladly have murdered any of the maids for the contents of her tray and cast a spell of sudden death on every person in the garden in order to be alone for a nap.

  “Well, I trust he knows what he’s doing,” sighed Mohrvine in a voice that implied he didn’t hold out much hope. “I suppose Bax has a large enough force to protect him from sudden attack? I understand nomad bands have invaded the Sarn and Jothek rangelands up on the White Lake and the Lake of Gazelles, and there’s been t
rouble over nomad herds on croplands south of the Lake of the Moon. Or didn’t that occur to him? Apparently not—nor to send for me? Or the other lords?”

  “That I don’t know, my lord.” She gave him her luminous smile, certain that he knew exactly the size of the force Bax had taken. “Speaking entirely for myself, I’m only glad that you remained here in charge of the garrison forces, if there has been such a problem.”

  He tilted his head and considered her, only half a head shorter than he, and she kept her eyes modestly lowered. She had not yet picked up the wizard’s trick of listening to all things and still carrying on a conversation, but she did hear, like the blinking reflection of fragmented glass, Barún say, “Maybe all that talk of an aqua-whatever was a storm in a fishpond, eh?” Lord Sarn stood between him and Blue Butterfly Woman, an avuncular arm around them both.

  “And you, lady?” asked Mohrvine. “When all these several Earth Wizards and Blood Mages were putting forth their power last night—setting shoulders to the wheel that the Sun Mages were not able to themselves turn—what of you? Did you put forth your power too?”

  As if he were not informed of it, she thought, every time Hathmar or Soth tries to teach me a spell that fails. As if he were not the author of a hundred little broadsides and market songs about the fat king’s woman-who-does-magic weaving her spells for the king in bed.

  Mohrvine asking prying questions about Oryn was one thing. That was just policy, part of the chess game of being the old king’s brother—one reason why almost half of the previous dynasty of Akarian kings had started their reigns with systematic fratricide. Asking about her abilities was another.

  “Like everyone in the city,” she replied, smiling and glancing again in the direction of Aktis, who was seated shivering on a bench, “I did what it is in me to do.”

  No council being called, the lords dispersed at noon. Mohrvine caught up with Lord Akarian and his two sons on the way out, draping an arm around the old man’s stooped back and gesturing at the sky. The Summer Concubine heard Iron-Girdled Nebekht’s holy name. The other concubines disappeared immediately, the White Cat Concubine on Barún’s arm, leaving the servant women to clear off the tables and devour the remaining sugared pork, moonjellies and fried redbean balls the moment they were out of sight. The Summer Concubine gathered a plateful and retired to the end of the garden, too exhausted for the moment even to consider walking back to the Summer Pavilion.

  She’d have to scry again, she thought. And try once more to reach Turquoise Woman and Cattail Woman, though she wasn’t sure what she could tell them—that she’d had bad dreams? She wondered if there was time to bathe, to sink her mind and body into the slow luxury of the successive chambers of steam, to give herself over to the renewing hands of the palace bath women. To rest on the cushions in the heated room afterward, wrapped in linen finer than silk, sipping tea while a servant combed her hair.

  Or was it going to have to be another quick scrub in the pavilion’s downstairs back room?

  In the water bowl that morning she’d seen the teyn band moving. The slumped forms scurried warily along the stone floor of a deep canyon, far in the badlands now, shoving and pinching the three children they’d kidnapped whenever they stumbled or slowed. They were definitely village teyn, with shaved heads and arms.

  Yet they moved as if they knew where they were going. And, she’d noticed—it was difficult to tell, seeing those shapes so tiny in the water bowl—they kept to the stony talus at the base of the canyon walls, where no tracks would show up in the loose sand near the dry wash in the center.

  They’re miners, she thought, and rubbed her tired eyes. They can’t have been more than fifty feet outside of their village in their lives.

  Why children?

  “Lady?”

  It was Lotus, one of the maids. Traditionally the palace maidservants were all called Flower (“Great gods, girl,” Taras Greatsword had moaned, “you know how many of ’em there are?”), but with her elevation to the status of favorite, the Summer Concubine had asked each woman to choose her own name. Most had simply chosen the names of flowers: Lotus, Jasmine, Clematis. (One kitchen maid was now named Moonjelly after her favorite sweet.)

  Behind her stood that other girl who had chosen her own name, who had chosen a man’s name.

  Raeshaldis the Sun Mage.

  The Summer Concubine got to her feet, held out her hands to the awkward, shy-looking adolescent. “My dear, I hardly recognized you! Please sit down. Lotus, would you please bring something for our friend. What would you like, lady?”

  “Tea,” said the girl, as if she weren’t sure about that or anything else. “Maybe a little bread.” She looked tired and ill, and no wonder, thought the Summer Concubine, studying the long, rectangular face, the too-large nose and deep-set brown eyes. The mages had worked, fasting, for seven days, to Summon that morning’s rain. While Barún had gone from guest to guest with his hearty greetings of the rain god’s bounty, the Summer Concubine had watched Hathmar’s face and had seen in it the weariness of a man who understands that his job has not only not finished, but has barely begun.

  The rain had been nothing. It had barely dampened the parched soil. After seven days’ labor, that was a frightening thing to understand.

  “What can I do for you, dear?” asked the Summer Concubine when Lotus had brought the bread and tea. “Do you have everything you need at the college?”

  Raeshaldis’s lips folded quickly in under her teeth and the Summer Concubine thought, Damn them.

  They’re hazing her.

  She could see it in the way the girl’s eyes flinched aside, in the wave of color that flared under those thin, sunburned cheeks.

  Anger budded, swelled to an exploding sun under her breastbone. Anger that Pearl Women were never supposed to feel, let alone show on their well-schooled, smiling faces.

  The male students were hazing her.

  She had feared it when Hathmar first had come to her with news that a young girl had applied to the college. The talk among the men—Hathmar and Soth and Oryn—had been all about women’s magic, grave consideration about whether proximity with the magic that seemed to be blossoming in certain women would disrupt the long-standing aura of power in the Citadel. Would a woman have the strength and discipline to master spells? Would Raeshaldis herself in fact draw her power from the sun, or perhaps she was more fitted to be trained by an Earth Wizard or a Blood Mage, supposing Aktis or Ahure or one of the leading Pyromancers could be talked into taking a female pupil.

  Only afterward she had said to Oryn, Will the men at the college accept her?

  And Oryn had seemed not quite to understand what she meant.

  Everybody gets hazed, he’d said. He’d been sent for two years to the garrison far to the north, beyond Mud Lake, to “teach him to be a warrior,” as his father had said—and to get him away from the concubine who, his father had suspected, had begun to trouble his dreams. That’s just a thing that boys do. One gets through it.

  That was all he’d say of that time; the Summer Concubine gathered the experience had been fairly brutal. And he’d added, She may very well be the hope of the future. Of course they’ll accept her.

  Eventually, yes, the favorite had thought. Once their own loss has been mourned—the loss that now isn’t even recognized, let alone accepted. And in the meantime it is a different thing when a girl is being hazed by men.

  Particularly men who feel themselves losing the thing that is now being given to her. The thing that has made them special, whose presence in their flesh has shaped their lives.

  All this she saw in the way Raeshaldis’s fingers shook when she set down the fragile celery-green bowl of tea.

  The Summer Concubine was silent, waiting, her eyes on the girl’s still face.

  Raeshaldis took a breath, let it out and looked back at her as if they’d been talking for some minutes. “I didn’t want to say anything the first time it happened,” she said. “The boys . . . they just egg ea
ch other on. They’re just being louts, you know? And I could really hurt them.” She had big hands, and long knobbly fingers, and she used them when she talked. Her voice was low and a little husky; like a boy’s, gruff and matter-of-fact.

  “I mean, I know spells now that would do damage, and they—the boys—wouldn’t have the magic to protect themselves. Because most of the boys—the novices, I mean—a lot of them don’t have any magic at all. At least . . . sometimes I’ll be walking along the south wall at night, or in the empty rooms in the vaults, and I’ll see candlelight. That means somebody’s reading who can’t see in the dark and can’t summon light to read by. I’ve gone back and found burnt tow, which means they had to light the candle, even, by flint and steel. No wonder they’re mad.”

  “That’s no excuse for ganging up on you,” the Summer Concubine said. “Or damaging your things.”

  By the way Raeshaldis stiffened and glanced away again she knew that both these forms of torment had taken place. She’d once been the youngest girl at the House of Dancing Water, as every fledgling was. She knew all about that.

  “But what happened last night was different.” Raeshaldis took a deep breath, steeling herself to share something she didn’t even want to think about. “It’s why I decided to come to you. Last night . . . it has to be someone with some power.”

  The Summer Concubine was silent for a few moments, remembering her choice, to say nothing to Oryn and Hathmar, to let this most promising girl of all enter the training of a mage-born boy, something that was mostly out of the question for her small circle of women-who-do-magic.

  Wondering if she’d done rightly.

  “What happened last night?”

  “Someone tried to break into my room.” Raeshaldis picked at the bread on her plate, tore it into pieces and left them, pale brown hillocks on the pale green porcelain. “I think it was the same person who tried to grab me in the passageway outside my room the night before. When I finally went around to look outside the door and the window, it was nearly light and the rain had already started. If he left any tracks they were gone. But the . . . the taste of the spells he’d used to try to get the window open was still in the wood. You know what I mean!”