The Floating Islands

by Rachel Neumeier

  Araenè fell into step beside the round-faced boy, her arms full of awkward stacks of papers and the wicker box of feathers. “Um … I was trying to get back to the street.… I thought the door was just here.…”

  “Was it?” The boy gave her a surprised glance. “The outside doors aren’t usually anywhere near here. Look out there—” He indicated one of the dusty windows.

  Araenè squinted obediently out through the glass. They were at least four stories up, and the curving wall she could make out was white. The height and the color and the curve all told her they were in a First City tower. She stepped back, blinking. “But—” she began, and stopped. Then she said, almost a wail, “But how am I supposed to get home?”

  “Oh,” said the boy, surprised. “Are you trying to leave? I thought you were a new student.”

  “Master Tnegun—I—he said—but I can’t stay,” Araenè explained incoherently. “He said I’d have to come back, but I can’t, I really can’t, he doesn’t understand—” Her voice rose too high, and she stopped.

  But the boy seemed not to have noticed anything amiss. He whistled through his teeth. “Master Tnegun!” He peered at her with a serious air. “If Tnegun says you’ll have to come back, then probably you’ll have to, you know. He would know! I expect you have a lot of magery waiting to come out. You have to let it come, or it’ll die, and what good would that do anybody? But if you’ve got family things in the way … The masters don’t always make enough allowance for that. They’ve been mages too long to remember what it’s like, at first. Look, help me get all this to Master Kopapei in the south tower, and I’ll get a door to take you home. All right?”

  “Yes,” Araenè said, a little numbly. “Um … my name’s Arei.…”

  The boy nodded, pretending not to notice Araenè’s failure to give her father’s name. Or maybe he wasn’t pretending, because he answered, “I’m Kanii—I’m a fifth year,” and he didn’t give his father’s name, either.

  “Fifth year?”

  “I started young,” Kanii said matter-of-factly. “I’m Master Kopapei’s student, you know. All his students come in early. Look, here are the stairs, cooperating for once. That’s the Quei feathers, I expect. Up three flights, here we go. Usually there aren’t any fledgling basilisks or anything on these stairs; that’s why I came out of my way to take them. Here we are—” He guided Araenè into a large, cool chamber whose single window looked out over endless waves. A salt breeze came in through the window, along with the shouts of sailors on a bright-sailed fishing boat: they were now far underground.

  “But we went up,” Araenè objected, peering out that window. “And now we’re down? I thought we were going to the—the south tower?”

  “The school’s odd that way,” Kanii agreed, barely glancing out the window. “Through here, watch your step.” He held the door for Araenè, awkwardly because of the scrolls bundled in his arms. There was a step up, and they were standing in a spacious tower room. The room was round, with a high ceiling painted with birds and stars. There were three doors in the room, three tables, three chairs, and nine windows. Every window showed clouds streaming past in a stiff breeze.

  Araenè realized that Kanii was watching her with amused appreciation and closed her mouth.

  “It takes practice to learn your way about,” he said, and unloaded his armload of scrolls on a nearby table, gesturing for Araenè to do the same.

  “Kanii!” roared a voice from an adjoining room. “You’re late!”

  Araenè jumped, but Kanii, completely unruffled, only shouted back, “Yes, sir! Entirely my fault, sir!” He added to Araenè, rolling his eyes, “I don’t think I’ve ever been on time for anything in three years.”

  Master Kopapei appeared in the doorway, bringing with him into the room a warm scent of cardamom and, more faintly, cloves. He was an alarmingly large man with shoulders like a laborer and a belly like a chef who loved his own cooking. He was bald as an egg, but he had bristly eyebrows over shrewd dark eyes. He wore clothing of plain dark blue, rather wrinkled. His shirt was slightly too big even for him and had a small rip on the cuff, and his broad leather belt was shiny and thin with age. His rumpled, cheerful air made Araenè guess that he might originally have come from the Third City.

  “You’re always nearly on time for meals,” Master Kopapei told Kanii, but without heat. Though he spoke to Kanii, he was gazing at Araenè. She flushed nervously, afraid of what he might see. But Master Kopapei, like Master Tnegun, seemed as oblivious to Araenè’s deception as everyone always had been. He only continued mildly, “A new student, Kanii? Where are your manners? Introduce this young person to me properly.”

  Kanii bowed, not very gracefully. “Master Kopapei, allow me to make known to you Arei, a new student of Master Tnegun’s.”

  “I’m not!” Araenè said sharply, afraid to let this pass because it sounded oddly like something that might be true. “I am not going to be a mage! I’m going to be—” She collected herself and stopped, finishing lamely, “Anyway, I’m not going to be a mage.”

  “No?” Master Kopapei gazed at her, blinking vaguely. “You have some other plan for your life? But you know, young Arei, we do need mages rather badly. And chance or life or the Gods do have a way of interfering with even the firmest-set plans. If magery is rising in you, you might consider permitting it to rise. Hmm?”

  Araenè stared at him. She did not know what to say. Another plan? The only life available to a girl of decent family was marriage and children. She knew she couldn’t be a chef, not really—she couldn’t live her whole life disguised as a boy, could she? And she knew she didn’t want to marry anyone. But how could she possibly be a mage? She said quickly, trying not to think too hard about whether she might actually want to be a mage, “I need to go home. Kanii promised he’d show me the way out.”

  “Did he?” Master Kopapei tilted his head to the side, regarding Araenè with good-humored indulgence. “Well, then, certainly he must. Kanii, you had better make certain young Arei finds a door that will take him properly home. That will make you later still for your lessons with me, but no doubt you will be happy to work after supper to make up for it.”

  “Certainly,” Kanii agreed, not in the least perturbed. “That means you won’t want me this afternoon, of course, sir. I thought I’d show Arei around the school before he goes—if you have time,” he added to Araenè.

  It was still early. Araenè nodded, cautiously, to be polite. But then she realized she really was interested, and nodded again with more enthusiasm. “As long as I’m home by seventh bell,” she said; then, because Kanii was always late, prudently amended this to half past sixth.

  “Of course,” Kanii assured her.

  “Be sure of it, if you undertake this trust,” Master Kopapei commanded him sternly. “It’s important to keep promises. Arei … family complications have a way of working out. You need to decide whose life you’re living: yours? And if not, then whose?”

  Araenè looked up at the mage. She found she liked him a great deal—rare for her. She wanted to ask him why Master Tnegun might want her for his apprentice—her particularly. But she didn’t quite dare. She asked Kanii, though, once they were out of the tower room and clattering down flights and flights of stairs.

  “And why all the stairs now, when we didn’t come this way at all on the way up?” she wanted to know, exasperated.

  “Would you want to climb that many stairs?” Kanii asked reasonably. “Down, it’s not so bad. I can’t guess why you caught Master Tnegun’s eye, except you must have a lot of potential. He’s tremendously skilled, and a good teacher. You’re lucky to have him for your master.”

  “I don’t!” Araenè said. But this came out rather shrill and uncertain.

  “Well, Arei, family things do work themselves out when they have to, you know: Master Kopapei was right about that. I mean, we get this all the time. We’ve got a new boy, Cesei, lots younger than you; his father’s a high court minister. He was just so
set on his son following him in the ministry, you know? But the boy’ll be a mage now, no question.” Kanii lowered his tone, gave Araenè a significant glance. “It is Master Kopapei who has him now, but they say it was Cassameirin himself who found him.”

  “Cassameirin?” It didn’t quite seem an Island name.…

  “Master Cassameirin. He’s older than anybody, almost; they say he was a master even before the sky dragons cut the Islands free from the earth. I don’t know about that, but he wrote half the books in the school libraries. If it’s true he found Cesei, I expect the brat’ll prove brilliant.” Belying his words, Kanii’s tone was one of casual approval. He added, “No doubt Cesei will turn out to be one of those scholar-mages who wander down now and again from their high tower and absentmindedly explain some theoretical principle that’s been baffling everybody for a thousand years.”

  Araenè paused on a landing to catch her breath and consider this easy flow of alarming information. She found herself wondering what it might actually be like to be a mage. But that didn’t even matter, of course it didn’t, couldn’t. Not for a girl. She said fiercely, “Some family things are harder to work out.”

  “But they do, all the same,” Kanii said without heat.

  Not mine, Araenè wanted to say, but she couldn’t think of a way to say this without explaining why not. She turned her back on Kanii instead so he wouldn’t see the angry tears that threatened.

  In a corner of the landing, something glittered and seemed to rise up. She leaped back, caught herself, and stared. A large gold and ebony serpent was curled on a bench, head raised and hood spread. Eyes of gold and jet glittered in its slender head. But it wasn’t moving after all. “Gods preserve us—that’s just a carving, isn’t it? Is it?”

  “Yes—so far as I know!” answered Kanii. “But be careful! You can’t ever trust things like that to stay what they seem to be. What do you want to see? The aviary? The balcony garden? The common workshop? Oh! I know—the hall of spheres and mirrors!”

  “The kitchens?” Araenè suggested diffidently.

  Kanii grinned. “Wonderful idea! Splendid idea! A boy with a proper sense of priorities! Down all the way, then—let’s take a shortcut—” He led the way off the stairway landing and into a room entirely filled, or so it seemed to Araenè, with ornaments of spun glass and crystal. Some hung from the ceiling on fine transparent cords, with others cluttered in haphazard disorder on knee-high tables. “Careful,” Kanii advised, ducking underneath a flock of tiny, delicate birds in jewel-colored glass. The birds swayed on their cords, producing a fragile chiming. Araenè held her breath, but nothing shattered.

  “But what are these all for?” she asked.

  “No idea,” Kanii admitted cheerfully. “Tichorei swears you can predict the weather by watching the birds, but I don’t know; I expect you could fool yourself, don’t you think, changeable as the weather is? But they’re pretty, aren’t they?”

  Araenè nodded, edged carefully by the swaying ornaments, and turned to gaze back into the whole amazing room for a moment before following Kanii through the door he was holding open for her.

  The hall he led her into proved to be disappointingly ordinary.

  “I know,” Kanii said, laughing at her expression. “But don’t give up hope! Any of these doors”—he gestured broadly at the dozen or so doors in sight down the wide hallway—“might suddenly open, and we’ll find before us an animal never seen before outside the illuminations of an ancient manuscript, or a harp of bone strung with the voices of the forgotten dead, or a Quei sitting on a nest of ruby eggs. But this door”—and he strode ahead of her and flung one wide with a flourish—“will probably bring us to the kitchens.”

  The completely nonmagical fragrance of baking bread and syrup and braised lamb with spices rolled out into the hallway. Araenè took a deep breath and smiled, feeling knots of tension undo themselves in her neck and back.

  There were two chefs, with three boys to help them. The older and fatter of the chefs scowled good-naturedly at Kanii, but smiled at Araenè and handed over bowls of rice with sweetened coconut milk and slices of mango.

  “A new student, ha?” he said to Kanii. “That’s your excuse today, is it, young sir? A good one, yes; we must seem welcoming! Mind, don’t touch those pastries! Those are for supper.”

  “What difference would it make if I had mine early?” Kanii wondered wistfully.

  Araenè tasted the coconut rice and suggested, “It needs a little more salt to bring out the sweetness, don’t you think? What kind of rice is this? It doesn’t seem like ordinary rice.”

  The chef’s eyebrows rose high. He snatched up a longhandled tasting spoon and tried the rice himself. “Perspicacious, young sir!” he exclaimed, reaching for a little box of flaky salt. “You are knowledgeable? You possess an educated palate, hmm? This is Yngulin sticky rice, which must be steamed, for it is too heavy if it is boiled. Master Tnegun prefers this rice above all others. We make it for him. Tonight we will serve it with the lamb dish also, though ordinarily the lamb would be served with a lighter rice.” He handed Araenè a tasting spoon of her own and gestured permission for her to try the lamb.

  It was meltingly tender, in a creamy sauce fragrant with coriander and cardamom, black pepper and cumin. “You used ground hazelnuts to thicken the sauce? Not walnuts?” she asked.

  The chef beamed at her. “This school needs more mages with so discriminating a palate!” he told her.

  Araenè didn’t try to explain that she wasn’t going to be a mage. She said, “I always wanted to be a chef. May I see that rice? Oh, what an interesting shape and color! How long does one steam it? Does it pick up the flavors if you steam it over stock instead of water?”

  Araenè pulled herself away from the kitchens only reluctantly, when Kanii’s sighs grew too dramatic to ignore. The chef pressed a bag of exotic fruit on her—“Apples, from far northern Tolounn,” he told her. “They are excellent in tarts with cassia and a touch of cloves, but eat these out of hand.”

  “They never let me filch more than a taste now and then,” Kanii told her when they finally left the kitchens. “Nobody ever offered me an apple.” His tone on this last was wistful, and so was the sidelong glance he gave Araenè. She laughed and handed him one of the fruits.

  “I didn’t think we’d be so long in the kitchens,” Kanii said, tossing his apple in the air and catching it with satisfaction. “I wanted to show you, oh, I don’t know, the labyrinth in the deepest part of the school, and the balcony where the black gulls nest—sometimes they hatch out basilisks, though, so you have to be careful—and it is a shame to miss the hall of spheres and mirrors—”

  Araenè found herself wanting to say, Well, next time, but didn’t. How could she let there be a next time? She could not be a mage—anyway, she didn’t want to be a mage.…

  “But it’s after fifth bell now,” Kanii was continuing. “It wouldn’t do to delay, not after Master Kopapei made such a fuss about promises and getting you home on time. Let’s see: one of the outside doors ought to be just along here.…”

  He found the door without much trouble: a heavy, abundantly carved door of oak and ebony, the sort of door a First City tower might have.

  “You open it,” Kanii told her. “It’ll most likely take you straight to your home, if that’s where you want to go. We call this one the Akhan Bhotounn—that means ‘the friendly one’ in Guaon.”

  Araenè thought Guaon was a language of ancient Tolounn, but she wasn’t sure. The words sounded more Tolounnese than anything else. When she opened the door, she found herself looking out at the sun-burnished street in front of her house, framed by its graceful flameberry trees and with its door flanked by pots of red flowers. From the angle, she seemed to be standing in the house across the street. That was, of course, impossible, but she was tempted to step out and look over her shoulder just to see.

  But she murmured, “The back would be better,” then shut the door and opened it again. This tim
e it showed her the alley behind her house.

  “See?” Kanii said. “Friendly. Though that was especially quick; maybe you have a knack. Be sure and tell it you’re grateful—thank you, Akhan Bhotounn,” he said to it himself, and patted the doorframe.

  “Yes, thanks,” Araenè said distractedly. She looked at Kanii, somehow reluctant, now that it came to it, to actually step out through the door.

  The plump boy grinned at her. “A fine afternoon, Arei. You can raid the kitchens with me anytime, but next time I’ll definitely show you the hall of spheres and mirrors, all right?”

  Araenè opened her mouth, but closed it again without saying anything. She stepped through the door, which seemed to be set directly in a wall she knew was ordinarily blank. It closed behind her with a decisive-sounding click, and then the wall was blank. Only Araenè somehow had a feeling that if she should lay her hand on that wall, the door would appear under her hand, open wide to welcome her back.

  She didn’t touch the wall but quickly turned, gave a cursory glance around, and climbed up to her window.

  Her mother was sitting at Araenè’s writing desk. Her face was braced against her hand; with her other hand she was slowly turning a polished brooch over and over. Whatever her thoughts, she was too absorbed in them to hear her daughter at the window. Araenè, frozen in place, thought her mother looked sad and tired and, oddly, lonely. She’d never thought of her mother as lonely in her life.

  And what was Mother doing home? Anger mixed with shock and worry: it wasn’t even sixth bell! Mother never came home from visiting so early. It wasn’t fair at all that she should pick this particular day to return early—unless, Three Gods be generous, she’d had news about Trei? That kind of early notice couldn’t be good, could it? She needed to go in, find out—surely Mother wasn’t going to sit in Araenè’s room all afternoon? In a minute, Araenè suspected, her fingers would cramp and she would topple backward into the alley. Absorbed or not, Mother could hardly fail to hear the resulting crash.

  From elsewhere in the house, Cimè called. Mother started, set down the brooch, and hesitated. After a moment she got to her feet, ran both her hands across her hair, checked that her dress fell gracefully straight, donned a smile as deliberately as she might don a garment, glanced in Araenè’s mirror to check that everything was in order, and swished out of the room.