Sisters of the Raven

by Barbara Hambly

  “But you wouldn’t put fear spells on the walls of the compounds to keep them in at night?”

  She said nothing for a time.

  A guard’s horse snuffled, made uneasy by the scent of the jackals in the hills. Though the tombs of the Durshen kings clustered farther back up the dry wadis of the Dead Hills, nobles and merchants centuries dead had paid to have their own resting places carved out—or erected in granite and basalt—in these lower sandhills, the ragged foothills of those fanged heights. The old fears that clung around the realms of the dead seemed to breathe up out of the ground. Oryn skirted the bulk of this middle-class suburb of the royal necropolis, turned his big gelding Sunchaser’s nose toward the open desert to the south.

  At length she said, “I don’t know if I could. My spells . . . don’t seem to work that way. Sometimes a spell will work perfectly well and three hours later the exact words, the exact placement of power, will yield nothing. Every one of the women says the same, except Cattail Woman, of course, who won’t admit that there’s anything her spells can’t do. Even Raeshaldis, who’s had formal training. Soth doesn’t understand it any more than we do. I would hesitate to put any reliance on any spell I might use to . . . to dominate the teyn or any other creature, simply because it might not hold.”

  Curious, Oryn asked her, “What if you knew it would hold? Would you place such spells then?”

  Her silence was her answer, opening before him disturbing vistas of choice and responsibility and possibilities that he didn’t want to think about: What if Sarn, or Mohrvine, or Jamornid allied themselves with a Raven who could, and would, keep the teyn enslaved? He hadn’t the slightest idea what he’d do in such a case.

  He was the king. It was his job to decide.

  It was his job to save his people, even the ones he didn’t like. Even the ones who hadn’t any table manners and thought it was a good idea to drape their rooms in cloth-of-gold.

  Even at the cost of the love that was the heartbeat of his blood.

  Dear gods, don’t let it come to that.

  “Why couldn’t I have just continued to be a disgrace to my family and the dynasty?” he asked aloud with a sigh. “I was quite happy as a disgrace. I even had a name picked out for myself, to be remembered by posterity: the Peacock King—which I suppose is better than being known as Oryn the Fat. I gave good parties; I treated my concubines well and kept the gardens up to date. I didn’t do harm to anyone. If I’d been my father’s younger son I’d have frittered away hundreds of thousands of gold pieces and not have had to be followed everywhere by guards to keep me from being murdered by irate clan lords or rebelling teyn. Would you have loved me less?”

  In the dark cloud of her veils she was only a moving shadow. But the smile in her voice thanked him for not pressing the issue; for saying, We shall deal with that when we have to and not before. Lord Akarian was not the only one, Oryn reflected, to trust in the gods. “I would have drunk pearls dissolved in vinegar at your side, O Peacock King,” she said. “And so we will one day, when this is done.”

  “I shall hold you to that promise, my dear Summer Child.”

  If the Yellow City doesn’t rise in outright revolt. If Lord Sarn doesn’t have me murdered over the next rise in taxes, or Lord Akarian doesn’t convince himself that the Iron-Girdled Nebekht— Why iron-girdled? It sounds horribly uncomfortable, not to speak of unfashionable—really wants him to be king and not me . . .

  If the rains come.

  The guards formed a rough square around the circular dip in the ground where, three hundred years ago, a mage named Goan Bluecheek had met regularly with the djinn the records called Bright-Fire Lady. The Summer Concubine drew out the five sigils and linked them with loops and strings of runes, with chalked patterns of magic, with lines of iron and ocher and silver dust. The smell of incense mingled with that of desert dust, and the whisper of her spells misted away into the desert stillness. The candles burned, small ensorcelled stars in endless night, and while Oryn sat quiet in his own protective circle she sang the names of the djinni, some of which appeared over and over in the lore of the mages and some of which marked only a single appearance: Thuu the Eyeless, Naruansich, Great Ba, Meliangobet, Smoke of Burning . . . .

  Someone, anyone, come.

  Someone, anyone, tell us what is happening. Tell us what we can do, must do, to live.

  The moon edged the eastern sky in silver, above the dead goblin hills. Then showed itself, gibbous and gold. The Weeping Ladies walked down the sky in pursuit of the gypsy star. A cat watched them from the top of a half-crumbled tomb, casual indifference in its yellow eyes. Southward, endless infinities away, Oryn saw again the wavering mist of greenish light, but it disappeared as soon as he was sure it was real.

  What is that?

  Where are you?

  Why don’t you come?

  Nothing else stirred.

  Candles and incense burned away to nothing, as they had three nights ago on the turtleback rock where Oryn had seen the djinni as a child. Stumbling with weariness, the Summer Concubine collected her wide-flung magics, or disarmed them as Soth had taught her so that they could not float abroad and do harm. She gathered the vessels of water and fire, now equally cold, and eradicated every line of power from the earth. She said nothing as they rejoined the chilled and weary guards and rode back across the flat, harsh plain the two miles to camp, where Soth slumbered in his brandied sleep. Geb had honeyed figs, bread and tea ready for them, and though the Summer Concubine ate, it was clear to Oryn that she had no awareness of what she was eating.

  An hour or so before dawn she cried herself to sleep in his arms.

  A girl? said the voice of a gray-robed adept, passing down the tiled corridor that ran behind the Citadel lodge. Please tell me you’re joking.

  Gods help us, I think Hathmar’s serious.

  Gods help us indeed.

  Shaldis had forgotten that overheard scrap of conversation. It came back to her now, with the heat that had been thick as yellow cheese in the lodge, and the scrape of her brother’s shirt against the cut on her arm that she’d earned going over the wall of her grandfather’s house the day before. There was another girl in the lodge, as there had been on that day, a pretty girl a few years older than herself, as far as she could judge.

  The girl—Xolnax the water boss’s daughter—was veiled, but she held herself as the pretty girls did. The girls who knew they’d be wanted and sought after no matter what they did.

  Why am I back here? Shaldis wondered, her stomach clenching in panic. Please, please, don’t let the past eighteen months have been all a dream!

  Fear flashed through her, fear that she’d wake up and find herself in her grandfather’s house again after all. In her grandfather’s house, listening to them talking about whether to marry her to Forpen Gamert, the harness maker’s son, or to one of the merchant proctors who could give the family better placement in the market stalls.

  Fear that she had dreamed it all: the Citadel, and magic, and learning.

  Xolnax’s daughter glanced at her over the green gauze of her veil. Golden eyes, like mountain wine. Just seeing her made Raeshaldis feel sticky and awkward and out of place, in her brother’s clothing with her hair braided up under a cap. They’d both been sitting for hours, since Hathmar had spoken to them and left. The veiled girl showed no signs of impatience, only now and then stretched out one hand and conjured little illusions in her palm: once a pile of jewels, another time colored fire that danced. Shaldis had wondered then—and still wondered—if she thought they were being observed and wished to show possible watchers just what she could do.

  Hathmar had only asked them each to kindle fire without touching the wood, and to make a pebble move.

  They’ll take her, thought Shaldis in panic. They’ll take her and not me.

  The thought turned her sick.

  Don’t send me back, she thought. Don’t make me go back to Grandfather’s house, to marry Forpen— whose silent, pliant fa
ther was her grandfather’s best friend and whose mother was a bossy horror dreaded by every woman in the district. Let me stay here and sweep the courtyards, just so I can read in the library, so I don’t have to go home.

  Footfalls outside the door. The golden-eyed girl got to her feet, readying a salaam of deepest respect while Shaldis scrambled awkwardly from her cushion as well. It would be Hathmar and Benno Sarn, Shaldis knew—and Benno Sarn was angry at her because she’d talked back to him the day before yesterday outside her room. But that happened later than this, she thought foggily, maybe he won’t remember.

  But it was a very tall, grim-faced young man with brilliant blue eyes under a heavy bar of brow, a young man whom Shaldis knew she ought to recognize, clothed in a laborer’s baggy yellow trousers and coarse tunic, his black hair gathered back and lacquered into a severe soldierly knot. “Are you all right?” he asked.

  Shaldis opened her eyes. Harsh light from the single window gouged her brain. Someone was murdering children somewhere close by. She hoped the murderer would finish quickly; the noise of their screaming was agony to her aching head. The air stank to heaven of blood, dung and garbage, so there was no question about where she was. “Don’t send me home.”

  “Don’t be silly,” said Jethan.

  (Of course it’s Jethan.)

  “I’ve been waiting for you since yesterday,” he said, as if he suspected she’d spent the intervening time lolling at the baths eating candy. “What happened to you?”

  “Long story.” She drew a couple of deep breaths. Her lungs felt stronger than they had last night. She had a dim recollection of stumbling through the alleys of the Slaughterhouse last night—none whatever of how she’d gotten through the East Gate. The confusion was gone from her mind, but she felt bone tired and drained of strength. “Somebody poisoned me.”

  A miscalculated dose? she wondered. A sufficiently speedy application of oil, cayenne and a finger down her throat? Her mouth tasted as if she’d supped on badly prepared and extremely spicy garbage.

  Or did someone want her incapacitated in some alley somewhere, but not dead?

  She opened her eyes again, noted by the light, which came in through the room’s open door from Greasy Yard, that it was midmorning. The horns sounded over the city. If she listened as a wizard listens, she could hear Hathmar’s voice lifted in the sun’s brave song.

  “I need a place to hide for a time, at least until I get some idea of who did it, and why.”

  “You can’t stay here.” He sounded as horrified as if Raeshaldis had proposed matrimony.

  “I have to get word to the Summer Concubine. Don’t you have any furniture here?”

  “What’s furniture got to do with anything?” asked Jethan.

  Shaldis closed her eyes again, to take a momentary rest before answering him, and didn’t wake again until the middle of the afternoon.

  Hands folded on the white knots of her student belt, glancing now and then to the left and right to observe the budding wisteria in the House of Six Willows’ tiny garden as she walked, Foxfire Girl was conscious of appearing supremely unhurried. Every girl in the class had been aware of it when Chrysanthemum Lady herself had appeared in the dance pavilion, watching the girls at an hour when she was usually arguing with the grocer. When she’d laid a hand on Foxfire Girl’s sleeve as the girls were coming off the floor, all the others had crowded around the door, just out of her sight, to listen.

  “Someone is here to see you.”

  She felt their eyes: Opal Girl and Wren Girl and Blue Flower Girl and the others. Felt too the stabbing glare of the Honeysuckle Lady as she passed her by the baths, and smiled inside. Of course the girls were not supposed to have visitors and of course they sometimes did—men who glimpsed them in the supper rooms, who asked discreetly, Who is that girl? The tall one in the black?

  That morning old Gecko Woman had slipped a note under the bowl of barley she’d given her at breakfast: Know that Iorradus dreamed all night of you.

  And I of you, she thought, exhilarated, ablaze Not only that he’d dreamed of her, but that he’d been willing to pay the exorbitant price Gecko Woman usually charged men to sneak notes to the girls. And I of you.

  Today’s horoscope promised “a blossoming of the roses of desire.” She’d sent Gecko Woman to the Flowermarket early and wore in her black hair the two scandalously expensive red hothouse roses the old woman had bought at her command.

  They’d all known of that, too. At least half of them bought Starbright Woman’s horoscopes—they were by far the most accurate—and everyone in the fledglings’ attics read the daily predictions for everyone else. She’d heard—felt—the whispers go around, had seen Opal Girl’s widened eyes. Opal Girl had been with her when she’d sat up two nights ago, after the supper party when that cow Honeysuckle Woman had kept her from giving her special, ensorcelled tea to Iorradus. But she’d been clever. She’d watched the bowls as they were cleared away, had taken the fragments of the food he’d left, the tea dregs from his cup. Had stayed up half the night weaving spells of her own devising with the sun glyphs of his name.

  Know that Iorradus dreamed all night of you.

  There was a little pavilion off one of the gate lodges where the women of the House of Willows could speak to admirers who came in the day to visit. As she crossed the moss-stained stepping-stones and approached the delicate paper screens, Foxfire Girl heard Chrysanthemum Lady’s voice. “Here she comes, my lord.” The screen slid open.

  The man on the divan was Foxfire Girl’s father.

  “Papa!” All pretense of being a Pearl Woman, a damsel of the House of Blossoms, a worthy pupil of the arts of civilized joy, dissolved, and Foxfire Girl caught up her parakeet-colored gauze skirts and threw herself into her father’s arms.

  “Child, I’m very sure this isn’t how your preceptors have instructed you.” Her father’s narrow face was wreathed in joy. He hugged her close; she felt his strong arms under the gray-and-black-striped linen of his simple jacket.

  “Stand straight, child,” added Chrysanthemum Lady in her cool, melodious voice. “Let your father see that your manners at his special supper the other night weren’t mere show for company.”

  “When I came into the supper room and saw you there, it was everything I could do not to smile at you,” said Foxfire Girl breathlessly, straightening up and holding her head high. She’d dislodged two of her long jade hairpins in the embrace but knew that to readjust her coiffure in a man’s presence was worse than having it disordered. A Pearl Woman’s perfection lies, in part, in her sureness of it no matter what her hair looks like. She met her father’s eyes—bright, cool, glimmering jade, like her own and her grandmother’s—and smiled.

  “My Lord Mohrvine.” Chrysanthemum Lady swayed down in a deep salaam. “The calligraphy master teaches the girls at the third hour. Shall I give warning in time for that?”

  “Do.” Foxfire Girl’s father nodded genially, and the woman slipped shut the screen behind her, closing them into the sunlit room with the clatter of the noise from the street. “There is a time to smile at those we love,” he added, turning his eyes back to his daughter, “and a time to keep our minds on business. I’m glad you’re learning the difference, child.”

  “Well, since you placed me here and talked to Chrysanthemum Lady about me, I knew you had to understand.” Foxfire Girl looked around her, saw that a plate of dates and goat cheese had already been brought, and a teapot of silver and glass. “May I pour you out tea, Father? I see Chrysanthemum Lady has already cheated me out of serving you.”

  “And here’s the girl who wouldn’t put her own hairpins in a dish! You may pour me out a little more tea. That cup is for you.” It stood already poured out, on the side of the table nearest her; larger and deeper than the minute glass vessels that were all a Blossom Lady could consume in public, and musky smelling. Mint tea was drunk in the evenings, green tea in the day. This was smoke-cured tea, of the kind generally consumed first thing in the
morning, when her father preferred coffee. “Chrysanthemum Lady tells me you do well in your studies here, and I saw the other night that she spoke the truth.”

  “I have marvelous teachers.” She salaamed a little as she said it, to cover up the glow of unmaidenly delight at the praise.

  “Did you have a chance, in the course of your excellent service the other night, to observe anything of the men you served? They observed you.”

  She felt the color surge to her face and knew that the light dusting of rice powder didn’t hide it. A Pearl Woman would have praised the damsels whose dancing was supposed to be the main attraction of the evening, the lady whose graceful conversation had kept the room aglow. But she could think only of Iorradus touching her hand.

  She whispered, “I know.”

  “Do you now?”

  She peeped at him under her lashes; he was smiling.

  “So what do you think of House Akarian?”

  Her cheeks warmed still further. She wanted to say. That they have the most beautiful man in the world as one of their own, but knew she couldn’t: “That if Lord Akarian truly accepts the principles of Iron-Girdled Nebekht, they’d probably better have a skilled cook.”

  He flung back his head with that flashing silent smile that for him was a shout of laughter; she’d never seen him do so with anyone else. “They’re binding that lunatic Lohar to them; winning his loyalty, and with it that of all his followers. The old man’s already in the inner circle of the temple. I’ve heard he’s grooming the younger son to be initiated as a priest.”

  “Are the followers of Nebekht really that powerful, for Akarian to do that?” Mischievously, she added, “Perhaps you’d better call back Sormaddin from up north and have him cut his hair like that.” She named her least favorite brother, and her father gave her a reprovingly lifted eyebrow and no reply.

  “I wouldn’t have said so,” he said instead, and sipped his tea. “But Akarian isn’t thinking like a clan lord about them. I believe he really thinks what Lohar says Nebekht wants is true: that mankind should follow his word, regardless of their other responsibilities. And last night, I’m told, there was trouble in the Slaughterhouse, so bad that the city proctors called the watch out: a hundred people or more gathering to stone the house of some clerk Lohar had it in for, enough to fill three streets. I didn’t know Lohar could call so many, so quickly.”