The Summer Concubine nodded again, familiar with the residue of magic that she felt when she touched some of Soth’s books, or stood in that chamber of the old palace that had in centuries past seen the Rite of Obliteration performed upon a heretic king. She experienced it as a coldness or, in the books, as a gentle warmth under her fingertips. Turquoise Woman said she heard such residues in the form of sound, like faraway singing or cries. Pebble Girl described them as prickling, either stinging of nettles or the itching of a mild rash.
“I thought, it’s one thing if it’s just boys being stupid.” Raeshaldis hesitated, seeing the Summer Concubine open her mouth to object, and then, when the favorite did not in fact speak, went on, “but it’s another if it’s a man, and a mage—probably a master—who should know better. I mean, if it’s someone who should have something better to do. That’s . . . that’s more than stupid and loutish.” She caught her gesturing hands together self-consciously.
“I didn’t know if it was dangerous or just—just sick in the head. And I didn’t know who else to tell. But I thought somebody ought to know.”
I didn’t know who else to tell. The girl had appeared, in boy’s clothing, on the steps of the college one day the summer before last, asking to be admitted, refusing to tell her father’s name. He had cast her out, she said. Told her that he would have no such shameless doings in his house. Later she’d told Hathmar her father’s name—Habnit, a silk merchant in Sleeping Worms Street, and son of one of the merchant proctors who sat in judgment in the Grand Bazaar—and the Archmage had written him, but had received no reply. It occurred to the Summer Concubine to wonder who Raeshaldis talked to in the college, if anyone.
Or did she simply stay in her cell and read?
“Who do you think it was?” she asked, knowing how often instinct and feeling can work if surprised.
In this case she was disappointed of her goal, first by Raeshaldis’s hesitation—the girl was clearly one who had learned never to speak an unconsidered word—and, a moment later, by Lotus wailing, “My lady . . .” and a man’s harsh cry of “You thieving bitch!”
EIGHT
After eighteen months of grinding apprehension in the Citadel and the storm-black horror in last night’s darkness, Shaldis’s reaction was instant and automatic.
Even as the two men framed in the garden gateway thrust Lotus aside, the teapot she bore crashing to the worn paving bricks, Shaldis’s hand moved. And when the men turned toward the bench where she sat with the Summer Concubine, she saw their faces change. Bafflement replaced fury as they stared at the bench, clearly unable to see anything but sun flecks dappling the marble. Then they both looked around at the pergola that stretched above its shallow, tiled pool.
“Where the hell is she?” The older man wheeled on Lotus, who was kneeling in horror by the wreckage of the teapot, which had been Durshen Dynasty celadon ware and almost priceless.
“They told us she was here, curse her!” shouted the younger. His red, square face was a slightly thicker duplicate of the other man’s: same beard, same pug nose, same mousy brown hair. Same expression of harsh determination not to be made a fool of, though it was clear, thought Shaldis, that the son accomplished his goals by anger, and the father by craft. I would have known it! Stinking rich with nothing better to do than lie to a poor man . . . .”
“If he’s that poor, he stole that bell he’s wearing,” muttered Shaldis. The man’s anger turned her hot inside, reminding her too clearly of her grandfather’s shouting rage. “And those boots.”
“They aren’t armed.” The Summer Concubine tilted her head consideringly as three guardsmen clattered through the garden’s iron-studded gates. And as Shaldis released her hold on the cloak, a little embarrassed that her first reaction had been concealment, the Summer Concubine squeezed her hand and added, “But that was very good! Gentlemen . . .”
The men turned back, with double takes that would in other circumstances have been comical at the sight of the beautiful woman in pink standing only a yard or two from them where no woman had been before. Behind her the long, narrow garden lay around pergola and pond like a gracefully proportioned room, the walls screened with a light hedge of bamboo and barren of concealment: It wouldn’t have sheltered a kit fox. “I beg your pardon.” The Summer Concubine salaamed deeply and signed the guards back. “I haven’t yet had the pleasure of your acquaintance.”
“You’ve had the pleasure of my wife’s!” bellowed the younger man, regaining his tongue after a moment’s shocked silence. “You and those Ravens of yours!”
The raven was the only animal, Shaldis remembered from her childhood fables, whose female was attributed with magical powers. In the tales her grandmother used to tell—after her grandfather’s little harem had closed its doors for the night and the women were alone—all ravens had magic, cocks and hens both. The word, “raven,” was one of a handful of nouns that took the nearly obsolete intermediate article and case, unlike all other animals: bull and cow, horse and mare, tomcat and queen, teyn and jenny. Ravens were ravens were ravens—and ravens had magic. All of them.
“You have no right to be sheltering her.” The older man motioned his son quiet. “You may be the king’s woman, but even the king won’t stand for it, for a woman to shelter a runaway wife.” Even less than his son did he dress like a poor man. His coat was red and the shirts under it finely woven cotton—Shaldis recognized the costly lawn as the type most expensive in her grandfather’s shop. His boots were new and latched with rosettes of silver. They were glassblowers, she gathered. The older man had to own a factory to afford clothes like that.
“Not to speak of losing a woman who had the best touch with a furnace in the whole of the street!” the younger man ranted. “I trained her for years, and yes, I’ll even admit she had a better eye than I for the color of the fireback, to know when to mix in the frit! It’s robbing a man to encourage a woman like her to think she can do magic, which is a crock—you understand me? A crock from under the board in the outhouse. and no one can tell me different! My woman, do magic? Corn-Tassel Woman? Shit, I say! First-grade, corn-fed, fish-liver-lubricated—”
“Shut up, Enak.” The father turned his sharp dark eyes back to the Summer Concubine. “Pardon my son, lady. And pardon me for saying so, but shame on the woman that encourages a wife to leave her man. Nothing but pain can come of it, besides taking the bread from out of a man’s mouth, not to speak of cheating his sons out of the care they need.”
“Corn-Tassel Woman was an ideal wife—ideal!—until you got to her!” yelled Enak, disregarding his father’s stricture as surely as his father and the Summer Concubine disregarded him. In the courtyard gateway the guardsmen lingered, arms folded in their crimson mail, faces inscrutable. Shaldis wondered if they agreed with Enak and his father.
“A woman like yourself, that hasn’t a family nor responsibilities, I’m sure you do think you have power or something. But to call my son’s wife away from her rightful work and fill her up with notions—”
“Your son’s wife has left him, then, sir?”
“You think we’d have come all the way out here looking for her if she hadn’t?” The elder glassblower glared at her as if confronted with willful stupidity. “I know she used to sneak away mornings and come here. She wasn’t as clever as she thought she was being. And I know it was you she’d come to, and talk this magic codswallop that all these women are claiming.”
“Corn-Tassel Woman comes here at my request, yes, sir.” The Summer Concubine folded her small hands before the golden knots of her belt. Her voice remained low and sweet, as if these men were her husband’s honored guests. Raeshaldis, in her position, would personally have spit in Enak’s face and told the guards to put the pair of them in the street and be damned to the woman whose abilities they put beneath her usefulness at tending a furnace. Her grandfather . . .
“She’s a woman of great ability, especially in healing,” the Summer Concubine went on. “And a good friend.
She’s been invaluable to me in trying to find answers to what is happening to magic.”
“Exactly fucking nothing is happening to magic!” shouted Enak. Raeshaldis wondered if Corn-Tassel Woman had been studying it with the intention of turning her husband into something small and squashable. “Except that people are getting themselves into a fucking panic over fucking nothing, and I’m fucking sick of hearing about it every fucking time I fucking turn around.”
“That’s as may be, lady.” The father was watching her warily, as if wondering how much of the family business his daughter-in-law may have told this soft-voiced woman veiled in pink gauze. “Now, it’s one thing for her to sneak away for an hour in the mornings. All women do it, to slang the neighbors behind their backs with each other in the baths—”
Like men don’t spend half the evening “catching up on news” in the cafés, thought Shaldis.
“—just so long as she was back to make dinner and get the furnaces ready for the evening’s work, I could deal with that. Women are like that. And whatever she may have told you about what happened yesterday, well, she flounced away in such a huff she didn’t let Enak finish what he was saying. Hasty, she is. She may not have shown that side of herself to you, but you haven’t seen her at home. What I’m saying is, we want her back.”
“I’m sure I understand your feelings . . . Barbonak, I believe she told me your name was?” The Summer Concubine tilted her head a little, a characteristic gesture Shaldis would come to know well, and looked up at the burly man squared off against her. “If Corn-Tassel Woman fled your house last night, sir, she did not come here. Should she do so, I would of course ask her reasons for her departure before informing you of her whereabouts—and I would assuredly speak to the king concerning what she has told me over the past two years of your efforts not only to have her improve the quality of your glass with her ‘touch,’ as you put it, but to have her put words of ill on the furnaces of other glassblowers in Frit Street—”
“Now that’s a complete lie!”
“She always lies!” stormed Enak, who didn’t seem to have a lesser vocal range. “I never yet met a bitch who could tell a straight story!”
Not with you standing there ready to hit her for what she says, you pig-faced bastard.
“—which is, as you know,” continued the Summer Concubine, in tones trained to carry over the noisiest supper party, “in direct contravention of all laws governing wizardry and is punishable by death. And what women do, sir,” she added, “is wizardry—even if it be performed by a woman.”
“That bitch never told—”
“Enak, I said shut up.” Barbonak’s voice was quiet now. “Lady,” he cajoled, “I understand how you’d find my son’s wife believable. She does have a reasonable way with her. Many and many’s the time I’ve seen her tell the most amazing whoppers with the straightest face.”
“I’ve heard my share of ‘whoppers’ in my time, sir,” replied the Summer Concubine. “Told by the greatest nobles in the land, who are, believe me, far better talesmiths than Corn-Tassel Woman—or yourself, I might add. I promise you that you shall indeed be sent for if she comes here. Good day, sir.”
And she sank another profound salaam, which would have left no one in doubt that the interview was ended even had the guardsmen not stepped forward—they had to be chosen for their size, thought Shaldis—and escorted the glassblowers, father and son, from the Jasmine Garden.
The Summer Concubine paused to make sure that Lotus hadn’t been hurt by Enak’s angry jostling, and to reassure her that the palace storerooms contained hundreds more Durshen teapots, before taking another half-full pot from the sideboards in the pavilion’s open supper room—now nearly cleared of leftovers and dishes—and leading Raeshaldis with it down the length of the pergola to the cushioned marble bench at the back of the bare vine’s lacework shade. She poured tea for them both, making a graceful show of it almost without thinking, as if after so long she couldn’t do it any other way. Small yellow butterflies played about the favorite’s brilliant hair.
“Damn him,” she whispered, “damn him!” Even in her anger she moved gracefully, removing her veils and laying them aside so that they made a pleasing pattern of folds over the edge of the bench. Her hands did not shake with anger, nor did her expression contort, but Raeshaldis felt it come off her in waves, like the desert’s summer heat.
“They fought yesterday—I don’t know about what. When I spoke with her through the mirror she was bruised. Maybe it was only that.”
A servant woman brought her a shawl, pink camel hair embroidered with pearls. “What was?” asked Shaldis.
“My feeling. The . . . the dread I felt. Three years ago I started seeking out those women the rumors were speaking of, women who had healing hands, or a ‘touch’ at keeping mice away from the family granary. This hasn’t been easy.”
“With husbands like Enak, I can understand that.” And with fathers, and grandfathers, like her own.
“Some of them didn’t want my . . . my interference, they called it. Some I simply never heard of again. Others became my friends. Corn-Tassel Woman and I made a sigil between us, a Sigil of Sisterhood, that our minds would touch as if we were twins. All yesterday I felt danger, uneasiness; last night I dreamed that she came to some dreadful grief.”
She shook her head. Under rouge and rice powder transparently applied, Raeshaldis could see the marks of stress and fear—could see, too, that this beautiful woman was older than she’d at first thought, in her mid-thirties, though her body was slight as a child’s.
“Now you tell me there was other evil abroad last night.”
Silence fell on the garden again. In the deserted supper room, a big gray cat leaped up onto the sideboard and drank daintily from the remaining teacups, dipping with one soft, enormous paw.
“I don’t know what it was,” repeated Raeshaldis. It felt strange to talk about magic to another woman. To talk about magic at all, rather than simply to learn and absorb lectures and instructions, spells and lists. Endless lists of the names of things: all the different grasses, each type of pebble, birds, stars, djinni, formations of cloud. The true names that summoned them as Hathmar and the others sang for the rain.
She took a deep breath. “They don’t talk about it, you know,” she said. “At the college. Mostly they pretend it’s not happening at all. But it is. There was a boy named Seb Dolek, Urnate Urla’s apprentice originally, though he left him and came to the Citadel about a year before I arrived. All the masters praised him, the way everyone in the neighborhood always had: He was good-looking, and his family was rich, and he memorized all the spells and lists and was always first doing the exercises. But he couldn’t make the spells work.”
She rubbed her hands together on her thigh, as if she were cold, though the garden was pleasant. She remembered Seb Dolek in Rachnis the Shadowmaster’s courtyard, struggling to perform the simplest of cantrips. Sweat had streamed down the young man’s face as he’d stared at the steel sphere he was trying to make move. Perhaps another time, Rachnis had said at last, and Seb Dolek had screamed, No! I’ll do it!
Then he’d looked up at Shaldis, blue eyes almost inhuman with hate. And he had whispered, Get her out of here . . . .
“It isn’t just that magic is part of everything we do, healing and eating and keeping ourselves safe. All the mages in the college—all the mages everywhere, I suppose—have been raised and bred and lived their lives with the knowledge that they do this. It isn’t merely a part of their lives, it’s the whole of their lives, everything they are, like their manhood. I don’t think anyone ever even asked themselves before this why it is that only men were born with these powers. Or why only a few men, out of all men born. And they built everything on it, not only for themselves, but for all the rest of us as well. We have only the most rudimentary ideas of what herbs will heal if they aren’t imbued with spells.”
The Summer Concubine nodded. “It’s like the rains,” she said. “
You know, seven hundred years ago, in the time of the Durshen kings, the rains came of their own accord every spring, and for thousands of years before that.”
“I know,” said Shaldis, dipping a fragment of bread into the oil on her plate. “It’s in the histories.”
“So when they ceased coming, no one asked about why, or how to get water elsewhere. The mages just started calling them, and they came. It never occurred to them—or to us—that it would be any different. It’s all become so much a part of everyone’s life—the fact that magic was something men could do or might do . . . . Why are you laughing?” Her smile was bright and warm.
Shaldis chuckled. “I’m just remembering when the Nettle-flower Concubine—she was my grandfather’s sole extravagance, and Grandmother always had a special tone of voice for when she spoke to her or of her—anyway, she was expecting a child. We brought in old Urnate Urla to lay his hands on her belly, the way people usually do, to see if the child would be a boy or a girl. This was seven years ago, when there was that long drought, and sales at the shop were so bad Grandfather was just torn—he wanted another son, but even more he wanted not to have to pay a healer to come in for the birth, so he was really hoping it would be a girl so we’d all just take care of it ourselves. I’m just remembering the look on his face.”
Her grin faded as other memories of that red-faced old man came back to her: his rage when he’d learned her father was teaching her the elaborate characters of High Script as well as Scribble, the syllabary women used for shopping lists and horoscope almanacs and the romantic novels circulated among themselves. Remembered her father begging her not to practice her little spells. I know it’s fun, Old One, but word’s going to get around.
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