Ombria In Shadow

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  She was silent a moment, while the colors pulsed and shimmered around her. Her dark eyes seemed enormous. “What do you see?” she asked him. He knew that voice: it had hunted down his breath, the rhythms of his blood, to kill him. But here he was, safely in bed in her house; for no apparent reason she had changed her mind.

  “You,” he answered simply.

  The wild power faded, hid itself. He was left with only her disguise, fascinating enough with its proud bones, its dark, untamed fall of hair, its ever-changing expressions. But it only made him wonder: if he drew that face with the charcoal she had made, would her hidden face emerge instead?

  She asked abruptly, “Do you know my waxling? Mag?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “You wouldn’t have to think about it if you did. She goes places, does things for me. She likes secrets. Lydea said she was spying on you.”

  “Me.”

  “Is that possible? Are there places she could have gone within the palace, where she could watch you without you noticing?”

  He started to nod, thought better of it. “The palace is riddled with secrets,” he said. His voice sounded frail, reedy as an old man’s. “Some are Domina Pearl’s secrets. Others are left from the past. Others—I don’t know what they belong to. Who.”

  She breathed something sharply that made the bones in his head vibrate like a bell. He flinched. She touched him; he saw the boring worm of pain, bright, throbbing, cling to her fingers. She shook it away absently.

  “Sorry,” she said. He stared at her, amazed. She whirled, paced a step or two, her lovely eyes narrowed, so dark they refused to reflect a spark of light. “I’ve lost her. I warned her and warned her to stay away from Domina Pearl.”

  His head pounded again, just at the thought of her. “Kyel,” he whispered suddenly, and tried to sit up. The pain swung a well-aimed hammer between his eyes; he dropped. Through the haze, he saw Lydea lean over him, felt her cool hand. He heard himself say with dreamlike clarity, “Give me back the charcoal and I will find your Mag.”

  He heard, within the silence, the unspoken questions leaping into the sorceress’s mind. Then she spoke and he heard nothing at all.

  He drifted into the world after a long time, following a scent. Rosemary, he thought drowsily. Or orange. Opening his eyes, he found himself alone. Lydea had gone elsewhere, maybe into another dream. But the food on the tray beside the bed was real enough: roast chicken sprinkled with rosemary and stuffed with slices of orange and lime, bread still hot from the oven, a bowl of figs and purple grapes. He sat up cautiously. The pain in his head had gone; he felt scoured, hollow, and hungry for the first time in days.

  The door opened as he broke into the steaming loaf. He paused to watch what still seemed an impossibility: Lydea, closing a door, crossing a room, as though she thought she were still alive. He saw the relief on her face at the sight of him wielding a butter knife over the tray on his knees. She sat down on the bed, and poured a little wine into their cups. She looked hungry, too, he thought; her lovely face, which he had rarely seen except in formal circumstances, seemed hollow and worn. He buttered bread for her; she carved, and passed him a plate. They ate silently for a few minutes with their fingers, too impatient for the fine, heavy silver lying on the tray.

  He tired quickly, leaned back, wiping his hands on linen and watching her eat. He said softly, “I never thought I would see you again after Domina Pearl escorted you out of the palace that night.”

  “Mag helped me cross the city. She saved my life.”

  “Mag.”

  Her mouth crooked. “The sorceress’s waxling. That’s what Faey calls her.”

  He nodded, enlightened. “The lost waxling who was spying on me. Why would she spy?”

  A complex expression, both wry and troubled, crossed Lydea’s face. She touched her lips delicately with her napkin, as Royce had taught her, and took a sip of wine. Her voice, when she spoke, was very low. “To see if you were worth saving.”

  “From—” He stopped himself before she shook her head. His eyes widened; he felt a crazed urge to laugh. Then he glimpsed the twin-headed danger that threatened Mag in her odd pursuit: the sorceress betrayed, on the one hand, and the Black Pearl on the other. He said slowly, trying to understand, “She must have thought I wasn’t. She’s not the only one to come to that conclusion.”

  “She’s missing,” Lydea reminded him somberly. “Perhaps dead. Maybe because she thought you were.”

  He was silent, musing over the faceless waxling bound to Faey, who kept an eye on his life without his knowledge. He glanced down streets in his memory, into taverns, and came up blank, without a likely face, not even one he might have drawn on impulse. “What does she look like?”

  “She’s young, midway between Kyel and me. Between knowing too little and knowing too much, you might say. She wears pins like skewers in her hair, which is the color of gold and looks like a pile of straw. She’s tall, wiry, and not afraid of anything, not even of what she should fear.”

  He shook his head, trying to conjure her up and failing. Lydea stripped a cluster of grapes and held a handful out to him. “Eat,” she advised, “if you want to get out of here.”

  His hand slid over her hand, closed. He said, “Thank you for finding me, and taking care of me. In this most improbable place.”

  She smiled a little, turning their hands over so that the grapes fell into his palm. “I didn’t realize how invisible I felt since I left the palace,” she said slowly. “As if I had died there. And then you recognized me, and brought that Lydea back to life.”

  He swallowed a grape to please her, and dropped the rest on his plate. “I understand what I’m doing here. But how and why did you find your way here, wherever here is?”

  She told him. Kyel, she said, and again, Kyel, reminding him, filling him again with a weary impatience at his helplessness. Then he began to hear what she was telling him.

  “You’d do that?” he interrupted incredulously. “You’d put yourself under Domina Pearl’s nose to watch over Kyel?”

  “It was hard enough losing Royce,” she answered painfully. “I didn’t understand at first how much I would miss Kyel. I can’t do anything more for Royce; he’s safe where he is. But I have nightmares about what the Black Pearl might do to Kyel.”

  “Whatever you dreamed, she will do.” He pushed his hands against his eyes, trying to think. “I know of places to hide within the palace… She rarely lets him out of her sight by day… Except—” His hands slid down; he gazed at Lydea without seeing her. “He will begin to study soon; his tutor will have him for several hours a day. Perhaps, then…” She came clear under his eyes: the long red and bronze sweep of her hair, her smoky eyes, the fine, elegant bones of her face. He shook his head restively. “No. It’s too dangerous.”

  “What?”

  “Cutting your hair would be easy. But you would have to change the expression in your eyes.”

  It changed as he spoke, became fierce with longing, hope. “I’ll do that,” she promised. “I’ll do anything. What—”

  “If you could disguise yourself, pretend to assist Camas somehow—He might take the risk, for Kyel’s sake.”

  “Camas?”

  “Camas Erl. Perhaps you never met him. He was my tutor.”

  “Perhaps I never paid attention to him,” she said steadily, “if he was only a tutor. After all, I was the prince’s mistress.” The bitterness in her voice surprised him. She stood, hefting the ornate tray off his knees, and added, “It’s strange that the more clearly you can see yourself, the clearer other things become.”

  “Do they?” he asked. “I wouldn’t know. The only time I glimpsed myself was in a dream.”

  He saw the dream again, the face that was his and not his, and felt again the shock of recognition and his thoughtless longing, that had not made the world around him any clearer as he followed the stranger through the streets of Ombria, but had changed it at every step until, when he had
finally fallen out of it, the world had become completely unfamiliar.

  “Sleep,” Lydea said gently, settling a pillow under his head. “Neither of us can leave until you’re well.”

  He saw the sorceress just before his eyes closed. She stood at the foot of the bed, holding something small in her hand. Around her the bewitching tides of her powers eddied and gathered and ebbed into distances.

  “I found your charcoal,” she said. “The toad has taken the poison out of it.” In the fragmented time of dreams or sorcery, she was beside him suddenly, laying the charcoal next to his hand. “Now you must find Mag.”

  It was still there when he woke.

  SIXTEEN

  Here and There

  Lydea, roaming through the mansion in search of the sorceress while Ducon slept, felt that she moved backward in time, wandering haphazardly through layers of history that changed at random and were never consecutive. A certain garment worn by one of the taciturn ghosts evoked an entire epoch of Ombrian past; a change in the style of a chair leg signalled a death or a coronation in the House of Greve. The fashions and supercilious faces in paintings reminded her of other ghosts in other paintings who had watched her nervous passage through the halls of the palace. Family, Royce had called them with easy familiarity. The earliest of them were painted on wood, and wore their weight in furs and pearls. Here on Faey’s walls hung art that seemed earlier still, and verged upon artless. Strange landscapes and animals, the suggestion of a city’s streets, an even vaguer, blurred face glimpsed in a glittering fog, were depicted on what looked like the round tops of wine barrels, or on stretched hide. Older than anything Royce had shown her, they seemed. Older than the House of Greve, though that could scarcely be possible. Ombria and the House of Greve had been born together, twin children, bloody and ignorant, who had made the world around them as they grew.

  So Royce had told her. His memory shadowed her as she searched. The age and richness within the sorceress’s mansion, the changing glimpses from room to room of older times, the antique velvet Lydea wore, made her feel ghostlike, as if she were haunting her own memories of life within the palace. She listened futilely for Royce’s confident, good-humored voice explaining this and that to her: an odd, obsolete weapon, the curdled expression on an ancestor’s face. Strange, she thought, how such assurance, such perception, could not foresee its own abrupt end. She took comfort in the thought that he must have believed he would live unchanged forever.

  A face hanging at one end of a long ballroom stopped her. Surely Faey had worn those blue eyes, that pale, disdainfully arched brow. She still did, it seemed. The pursed lips opened suddenly, and the sorceress’s husky, impetuous voice came improbably out of them.

  “I’m in here,” the lady in the painting said shortly.

  “Where?” Lydea asked, after a hiccup of surprise.

  “Go through three doors without turning.”

  The moving lips melted back into paint. Lydea, thinking it best not to think too much in that upside-down place, grasped the two door latches in front of her, pulled the ballroom doors wide, and walked across the hall to open what looked like a cloakroom.

  The sorceress, surrounded by brass hooks knobbed with porcelain, was sitting on a small gilt chair. A single cloak hung behind her: wine silk, lined with snow hare. Faey, also in wine silk, her unruly dark hair coiled neatly around white rosebuds, looked as if she had shut herself up in a closet as punishment for having misplaced her waxling.

  She fixed a dark, humorless eye on Lydea and said, “I told you I do not wish to be disturbed. You’re disturbing me. What is it?”

  “I’ll help you,” Lydea said steadily, “if you’ll help me. And I can pay you.”

  The sorceress regarded her dourly, but with slightly more interest. “With what?”

  “With all I have left. I have shoes with sapphire heels—”

  “So do I. And ruby. And emerald.”

  “And I have—” Lydea’s voice faltered, strengthened. “I have this ring.”

  She pulled it from under her gown: the opal inset between pearls that Royce had given her. Faey leaned forward to study it. “Pretty,” she said absently. Her eyes had narrowed. “You should hang it on something besides that dirty ribbon.”

  “I tore it out of my cap.”

  “Why do I see my waxling within the opal?”

  Lydea blinked. “Because she rescued it for me?” she suggested. The black, abysmal gaze moved to her again.

  “You will help me. How?”

  “You can change your face at will. Give me another face so that I can return to the palace and watch over Kyel. If you do that, I can search for Mag there, too, with no one being the wiser.”

  “What makes you think that the Black Pearl won’t see beneath any mask you wear?”

  “It’s she who pays you for your magic. How could she see through any mask you would make?”

  The dark brows, angled upward like crows’ wings, flew higher. Faey seemed to slump for a moment into herself; her neck disappeared; her backbone began to meld with her knees. Then, as Lydea’s eyes widened in fascinated horror, the sorceress shook her body back into its beautiful proportions.

  She said grimly, “I’m not sure anymore what that woman can or cannot do. I thought she was some ghost of the House of Greve, who refused to die and kept herself upright with a lacquer of beetles’ wings and amber. But I haven’t paid enough attention to her. I don’t know how powerful she has become in the past century. Looking back, I see now that I have always done her bidding.” She contemplated the Black Pearl in silence a moment, then added, “I sent Mag out for eels for supper. That’s the last I saw of her. She may be nowhere near the palace. She might have run away, been abducted by pirates, fallen in love—”

  “Would you know if she were dead?”

  “Of course I would know,” Faey said imperiously. “She is my making.” But her eyes, uncertain, brooding, suggested otherwise. She did not look at Lydea when she asked, “Wouldn’t you know if your making—or if some human child you had taken to, Kyel for instance—had died?”

  “No.”

  The sorceress turned a stony face to her. “You don’t know that. You have never made a child.”

  “No,” Lydea sighed. “Which is why I want to be near Kyel. Will you help me?”

  The sorceress held out her hand.

  Lydea untied the ragged ribbon looped through the ring. She dropped memories into Faey’s palm, a priceless treasure of them, along with love and rue, jewel and gold. The sorceress, sliding the ring onto one long finger, saw only the face of her making within the opal.

  She studied Lydea with a practical eye. “The child,” she said with unexpected perception, “would take cold comfort in some stranger who tried to persuade him to believe that she was you. You must keep your own face.”

  Lydea agreed reluctantly. “You’re right. He probably suspects I’m dead; after all, I vanished like his father, and on the same night. If I wear a strange face, he might think I’m just something Domina Pearl made to confuse him. But how—”

  “Oh, there are things I can do,” Faey murmured, turning Lydea’s face with her jewelled forefinger, “to disguise you from other eyes. Unless you come face to face with Domina Pearl. I have no idea how well she sees, if she would recognize my magic. I’ve been sending my makings to her for years.”

  “Why?” Lydea asked recklessly. The sorceress, contemplating her past, seemed to wonder herself.

  “She needed; I made. It was business. I never thought anything of it, except that I disliked her. But I never questioned anything she wanted. She seemed inconsequential, until now. I have lived a very long time; I’ve seen minor powers come and go. I kept expecting her to go.” She paused, her eyes growing lightless, flat; Lydea guessed that she was, at least in imagination, helping the Black Pearl along her way. “I suggest that you do nothing to attract her attention. Don’t search for my waxling. Ducon can look for her. If that woman has her, I will search the
palace for her myself. And not even Mag will recognize me when I do.” Lydea nodded wordlessly. “But before I permit you to leave my house, you must make Ducon well.” She gestured dismissal, then added as Lydea turned to go, “It’s odd, don’t you think, that he wanted that deadly piece of charcoal back? Did he tell you why?”

  “Only that he loved the drawings that came out of it. I think he was delirious. Did you put something besides poison into it?”

  “Just some old paintings… He made his death into art.”

  “You nearly killed him—”

  “You do dwell on details.”

  “But something stopped you. Something in him. What was it?”

  The sorceress, contemplating a brass hook, seemed to see again some mystery, an unanswered riddle. “He sees,” she murmured, “more than he should. More than human.”

  Lydea, trying to imagine what someone more than human might see in the commonplace world, found herself standing outside the cloakroom door without realizing that she had moved.

  She found her way, or the sorceress found it for her, back to the room where Ducon lay sleeping. She studied him. Beyond the mystery of his coloring, or lack of it, he looked as human as anyone. His eyes opened; at that moment they seemed to see nothing at all. He muttered something, stirring; his hand shifted from beneath the bedclothes to grasp her wrist.

  She leaned closer. “What?”

  “Paper.” His eyes drifted closed, opened again. “I need paper.”

  “Of course you do,” she sighed. “What else?”

  “Drawing paper.”

  “Well, I didn’t think you wanted to wrap up a mutton chop.” She touched his face; it seemed warm with fever. Better than the icy chill that had seeped into him from the toad, she thought. But still not good enough to free them. She held water to his mouth. “You must get well,” she pleaded. “What will Kyel think?”

  The silvery eyes saw her clearly then: someone real, standing in time, not in a dream, with a face he recognized and thoughts that he could guess at if he had to. How strange, she reflected. How strange to be in a dream one moment and in the world the next, and to know the difference in the blink of an eye.