Ombria In Shadow

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  “You have a very peculiar expression on your face,” he commented drowsily.

  “I was just thinking.”

  “About what?”

  “About how we know what’s real. How we wake out of a timeless place and recognize time. How you know me here, now, even when nothing or anyone else in this place is familiar. I might have been wandering through your dream, but you knew immediately which of me will bring you paper.”

  He was silent for so long, still clasping her wrist, that she thought he must have fallen asleep without knowing it. He said finally, “Say that again.”

  “I can’t,” she answered helplessly. “It was just a thought. I gave it to you.”

  “Something about dreams coming to life—”

  “That’s not what I said.”

  “That’s what I heard.” His fingers loosened; he smiled up at her, his eyes as translucent as rain. “No wonder my uncle loved you.”

  She made very little of that; an effect of fever, she decided. Just as feverishly, he clung to the idea of paper: she must find it now, so that he could see if the magic were still in the charcoal, or if it had vanished with the deadly poison. She left him lost in a meandering discourse about death and art, and went to find the housekeeper.

  Not all the artists in the house had been dead and hung on the walls. She and the housekeeper found a cache of fine, heavy paper among a pile of unfinished canvases in an attic room. The paper had been nibbled through the years by worms and mice, but Ducon did not seem to mind. Lydea made him eat before she gave it to him. Then she sat quietly beside him, outwardly emanating patience, but inwardly chewing her nails and wondering if they would find anything at all familiar in the world above their heads when the sorceress finally let them go.

  Ducon drew for hours. Random sketches slid off the bed, made a paper island around Lydea’s feet. They seemed, upside down and otherwise askew, everything he remembered about the streets and taverns of Ombria. Winding cobblestones, ships’ masts, shops, carriages, barefoot urchins, merchants, roaming animals, ale-drinkers in the midst of ardent arguments, covered the floor at first. They became slowly layered, as time passed or did not pass within the sorceress’s house, with sketches of the palace, rich rooms, exquisitely plucked and painted faces, even, Lydea saw with wonder, the occasional plain, half-averted face and sturdy hands of someone carrying a coal scuttle or a tray. He saw everything, Lydea thought, more than she had ever noticed, though so far nothing more than human. The stick of charcoal, which should have been worn down to a splinter by the time it began its journey through the palace, never changed its shape.

  He drew her, while she drowsed for a few moments. The face he showed her was from memory: she almost did not recognize it. Some lovely, foolish young woman looked back at her, a crown of pearls around her elaborate hair, her smile careful, stiff. One graceful hand was raised to touch a jewel hanging at her throat. The nails were bitten to the quick.

  She drew a quick, startled breath, half laughing, half wanting to cry. “Was I so transparent?”

  He nodded indifferently, already beginning another drawing. His hands and face were smudged dark; he was beginning to resemble one of his drawings. He seemed obsessed, spellbound; the magic charcoal would not let him stop. “That’s the expression I always saw. My uncle would have seen something very different. But you never showed me that face.”

  “It seems so long ago,” she murmured, letting the drawing fall to carpet the floor with the others.

  “It seems long ago because you have come so far since then.”

  “From palace to tavern to the sorceress’s house… You should rest,” she begged, suddenly fretting again, imagining disasters in the upper world: her father furious and in despair, Kyel enthralled by the Black Pearl, recognizing no one. “Please. Stop.”

  He did not seem to hear her. His drawings changed again. This time they depicted rich, empty, crumbling rooms; not even ghosts flitted through them. The sorceress’s mansion, she guessed at first. But the chamber he lay in was all he knew of it, and those long, silent hallways and ancient rooms, she herself had never seen. He seemed to work backward through time. Walls and ceilings showed their underpinnings; paints chipped; torn wallpapers revealed other patterns, which yielded to gashes of lathe and plaster. Where, she wondered, uneasy and fascinated, had he seen all that, where had he been?

  He had stopped before she realized it. He sat quietly, gazing at his final drawing, while she waited for it to flutter to the floor, another page turned in a story he was telling. When it did not fall, she leaned over his shoulder to look at it.

  It was a door in a wall that seemed to be weeping rain. But where the door should have been there was nothing, darkness, charcoal. Except… She looked closer, and saw the lines emerge from the blackness: the suggestion of a face, a vague nimbus of pale hair.

  The charcoal slid out of Ducon’s fingers. He leaned back, his eyes heavy, still watching the drawing as though in the next moment the shadowy figure might show its face clearly, step into the light.

  “There,” he whispered; he had finally reached the place where the mysterious tale the charcoal told ended or began. “There.”

  His eyes closed. Lydea caught the drawing as it fell.

  SEVENTEEN

  Blood and Roses

  Mag spent a day or two on the streets of Ombria searching for Ducon, listening for rumors, for a single, random memory of him in anybody’s head. No one had seen him but everyone knew him, therefore he must be around somewhere: Had she looked in the Whistling Swan? The Panting Hart? The King of Flounders? She had crossed the sprawling, erratic web of cobbled roads between docks and palace so often that her feet finally stopped midstride on their way to yet another improbability. The sky was growing grey. A wind from the sea, sharp and blustery, was driving threadbare urchins to their lairs, and whirling scraps of refuse into vague, ragged forms that walked the gutters a moment and then collapsed. A briny edge of wind caught her eyes. She blinked away sudden tears and thought wearily: Either Camas Erl has found him or he is dead.

  She slipped down the nearest entrance to the underworld and trudged through the dark toward the distant, serene lamps along the river that illumined her path home.

  She did not immediately recognize the woman who opened the door to the sorceress’s mansion. A new housekeeper, she guessed; the old one must have drifted completely out of life. This one was dressed from throat to heel and wrist in black taffeta. She looked slightly demented. Her black hair hung loose; her delicate oval face was powdered dead-white; her red-rimmed eyes glittered feverishly. She stared at Mag; Mag stared back. Then a tiny frog leaped into Mag’s throat and she put her hand over her mouth.

  “Where have you been?” The sorceress’s voice seemed to come from everywhere at once: out of the river, out of stones, out of the muddy banks and far, cavernous depths. “I sent you out for eels! From the fish market, not from the next kingdom! And why are you wearing that—that pavilion?”

  “I’m sorry,” Mag whispered behind her hand. She could not see where truth would get her, but it seemed even more dangerous to lie to those furious, reddened eyes. Faey could not have been weeping. She was too old to have any tears left. She was too old to remember what they were for. “I went—I went to look for Ducon Greve.”

  The black eyes did not flicker. “Why?”

  “I didn’t want him to die.”

  Faey was silent, her arms folded, gazing at her waxling. There was a curious expression on her face. Mag, expecting swords and lightning bolts to leap from the sorceress’s mouth, was stunned when Faey finally spoke. “No. Neither did I, when I found him. I just sent him home.”

  Mag’s voice barely got past the frog. “He was here?”

  “He fell through from the street. Lydea took care of him, since you were nowhere to be found.”

  “She was here?”

  “You are echoing yourself. You were on the streets above all this time?”

  Mag shook her h
ead, both hands over her mouth now. “Not all the time. Not exactly.”

  “So.” Cold blue eels of fire swam for an instant through the sorceress’s eyes. “She did find you.”

  “Not—”

  “Exactly.”

  “May I come in?” Mag pleaded. “I am so tired.”

  “You deceived me.”

  “You deceived me,” her waxling said recklessly. “You told me I am wax, and that you made me. You taught me how to lie. I’m not wax, you did not make me, I’ve known it ever since I swallowed that heart. But you never wanted me to know. So what else could I do but lie?”

  “I don’t think,” the sorceress said slowly, “that I am the only one you deceived.”

  Mag started to answer, stopped. She bowed her head, feeling exhaustion drain through her, weighing on her bones, dragging at her until she didn’t know if she had the strength left to lift a foot across the sorceress’s threshold. “It seems,” she heard herself say, “that I tried to deceive us both. For a long time I didn’t want to be human.”

  “What changed your mind?”

  “You,” she whispered, “with that toad and that charcoal making Ducon Greve’s death. I don’t want to be like you, either.”

  Faey was silent, her powdered face as white as porcelain and as expressive. She moved finally, opening the door for Mag to enter. Her fingertips, falling lightly on Mag’s shoulder, stopped her as the door closed behind her. A crack appeared here and there across the porcelain. “I’m older than you can imagine,” the sorceress said. “And I think I have forgotten a few things I knew when I was young. I realized that when I remembered how to weep.”

  Mag stared at her, feeling the frog again in her throat, swelling and about to speak. “You cried for me?”

  “I wouldn’t have wept over wax.”

  She moved; Mag followed after a moment, too amazed to speak. Now that she seemed irrevocably human, human questions began to swarm in her, things she had, in her amorphous state, overlooked for years. Who am I? she wondered silently, and as intensely, she asked the sorceress’s back: Who are you? Nothing seemed certain any longer; she felt that if she stopped to think about it, she might forget even how to walk.

  Maybe I should have stayed wax, she thought confusedly. I wasn’t frightened then.

  “I don’t know who you are,” Faey said, answering her unspoken questions. “Someone left you on my doorstep.” She turned, as Mag stopped again in wonder. “Literally. You woke me with your crying.”

  “Here?”

  “On the steps outside.”

  “So someone knew to come here. Was I sold? Did you pay for me?”

  Again the sorceress heard what was unspoken. “Many women knew their way to me; they bought spells for love, and revenge, and for doing away with unborn children. You were not the result of a spell that didn’t work, but of one that did. Love can make a child, but not keep it fed or unharmed in the streets. You know that. You were brought to me and left deliberately, not for money but in hope. Of what, I’m not sure. That I would find a home for you, I suppose, or keep you myself. Which I did. I thought you might be useful. I never thought—” Faey gestured wordlessly, scattering possibilities in the air between them. “I thought you would always be my waxling. That with me to think for you, you would always be safe. I didn’t realize until now that despite all these years as my waxling, you had learned to meddle with my heart.”

  Mag swallowed. Still her voice came out edged and scratchy when she spoke. “How can you assume that I was—that I was left here because I was wanted? I was abandoned on your doorstep—”

  “You were given to me,” Faey said. Somehow, without moving, she seemed closer, her shadows, cast by various candles on the walls around them, all stretched across the floor toward Mag. “You know what happens to unwanted newborns. You’ve come across them. They aren’t dressed and warmly wrapped in wool and silk; they don’t wear mysterious lockets around their necks containing three drops of dried blood and a flower petal.”

  Mag took a step toward her. “A locket?” Her voice shook. “She left me a locket?”

  “On a chain around your neck. It’s a wonder you didn’t inhale it; you were bellowing enough. I never saw so many windows lit up in those old houses along the river.”

  Mag took another step. Her entire body was trembling now; her hands rose, clasped. “Please. May I see it?”

  “You can have it,” Faey said, “when I remember what I did with it.” She waited while Mag bridged the distance between them, step by uncertain step. “Remember,” she said softly as Mag reached her, “I am not human. I raised you as if you weren’t, because myself and ghosts and Ombria’s past are all I know. You’ll have to find your own way into the human world. If that is what you want.”

  “I don’t know what I want,” Mag said helplessly. “Except that this is the only home I know. Don’t force me to leave just yet.”

  “I can’t promise that you will want to stay. You know what I am.”

  Mag’s mouth crooked. “And you know what I am. I don’t know if I would have a place in the human world. I don’t behave like anyone human.” Ducon’s face drifted into her thoughts then, unexpectedly. He might be eccentric, she reminded herself, but his place among humans, while on the edge, was still within the border.

  “You’ll find your way in it,” Faey said. “You found your way out of here.” She touched Mag again, lightly, tentatively. “Go and wash. And find something less hideous to wear. You can tell me where you’ve been while we have supper.”

  They charted the paths of Mag and Ducon Greve together over turtle soup. Over fish, Mag listened, astonished, as Lydea found her way into the sorceress’s house. Over roast beef, cold and heavily peppered, Camas Erl first appeared in the Black Pearl’s library. Faey set her fork down then; her eyes never left Mag’s face. They looked oddly muddy, Mag thought, as though they had picked up something of Camas Erl’s yellow during the telling. A salad roused the sorceress.

  “This tutor—he does the Black Pearl’s bidding?”

  “I think,” Mag said, “he does what he wants. He let me go. If he had told her I was there, I’d be there still. Or as likely dead. He has his eye on something; I don’t know what.”

  “And yet Ducon Greve trusts him.”

  Mag felt a prickling down the back of her neck, as though one of Domina Pearl’s ensorcelled guards were staring at her. “Did he tell you that?”

  “He suggested that Lydea become Camas Erl’s assistant, pretend to help him tutor Kyel, so that she could be with the boy. I gave her an aura that might deceive the Black Pearl if she doesn’t look too closely, and sent Lydea to the palace with Ducon. She gave me this in payment.”

  Faey spread her jewelled fingers; Mag recognized the dead prince’s ring. There was a peculiarity within the opal. She looked more closely at it and started.

  “That’s my face.”

  “Indeed.”

  “How did I get in there?”

  “You must have made an impression.”

  Mag studied herself, marveling. Faey had given Lydea a spell in return for her waxling’s face; her waxling, considering that, felt the unfamiliarity of suddenly becoming human diminish a little. “Would you have come to find me,” she asked uncertainly, “if Camas Erl hadn’t freed me?”

  The sorceress’s eyes changed again, hard as diamond, black as coal. “I don’t remember how to be subtle in the world above,” she said obliquely. “I would have come to get you if the Black Pearl had you, but I might have destroyed too much. There is a mystery in the House of Greve. Domina Pearl sees it; Ducon Greve is part of it; I think this Camas Erl, who wears one face for the Black Pearl and another for Ducon Greve, glimpses it also. He seems a foolhardy man, juggling bare blades with his bare hands—”

  “What mystery?”

  The sorceress shrugged an ivory shoulder. “If I knew, it wouldn’t be a mystery.”

  Mag took a breath, held it, then said precipitously, “Camas Erl want
s to meet you. That’s why he let me go.”

  Coffee and chocolate interrupted the sorceress’s immediate comment. She lifted her cup daintily as the door closed, then returned it to the saucer with a clatter, sloshing coffee. “Why?” she asked drily. “Who does he want me to kill?”

  “He seems more interested in people already dead.”

  “Does he?”

  “He wants to know where you came from.”

  “Does he.” She lifted the dripping cup, stared into it a moment, puzzledly, as though she were trying to remember herself. Then she took a sip. “I would like to know where he came from. He sounds reckless and dangerous, and I didn’t spare Ducon’s life just to have him betrayed by the tutor.”

  “He said that he and Domina Pearl want Ducon alive—”

  “But for how long, I wonder? And what of Lydea and the child? Will Camas tell Domina Pearl about Lydea?”

  “Perhaps,” Mag suggested, “you can bargain with him for his silence. He likes past. You have one. You have enough down here to keep him busy for years.”

  Faey considered that for a moment, dipping a chocolate into her coffee. “Why,” she wondered, “did I never let you think before?” She smiled a guileless smile at the invisible tutor before the melting chocolate disappeared between her fine white teeth. Mag felt a pinprick of sympathy for Camas Erl.

  Later, she watched from the doorway as Faey surveyed the chaos of her bedchamber. “Now, where…” she murmured, stepping through a tide of mismatched shoes, around mountains of garments, scarves, cloaks, moth-eaten drapes, small tables cluttered with sea shells, a set of wooden teeth, a crab carapace, endless strands of amber, pearls, gold wrapped around tortoiseshell combs and perfume bottles. “Where would I have…” It seemed impossible. But after looking in several bowls and boxes, a few satin slippers, and under the bed, Faey moved with sudden inspiration to the marble mantelpiece. There she picked up a red glass vase and upended it. A thin gold chain slid into her palm, pulling a little locket of ivory and gold behind it.