Beard and eyebrows jerked forward. “Of course I’m hurt! It’s no thanks to the cowardly imbeciles in this household that I wasn’t killed!” All the smoking bile he would have hurled at her for not prostrating herself in the deepest of the twenty salaams proper to women—and a granddaughter of the house to its patriarch at that!—spewed into the glare he directed at his son. “So this is the brat that’s grown so crafty, is it, Habnit? Just like any other female, telling me what I already know! She’s a fool, and the daughter of one!”
“Have you had anyone look at your wounds, sir?” Shaldis felt sick at the way her father cringed from the words, marveled that her own voice sounded so cool and steady.
The old man rounded on her. “Fat lot of good it would do! There isn’t a wizard in the town who could charm a wart off my backside anymore! And if you think I’ll let some midwife smear it with rotted leaves and lizard dung you’re out, girl! I’ve good-healing flesh. Ask any man in my company of the militia, when I was a boy.”
“Father, you must—” began Habnit, and the old man snarled at him like a dog.
“If I did all you said I must, I’d be a poor man, and a dead one, too! As for this brainless whelp of yours—”
“What happened, sir?”
His hand flinched toward the rod that lay across his desk—the fourfold split bamboo with which he lashed the teyn and which he didn’t scruple to use on his sons and grandchildren as well. But he drew it back. Shaldis had thin, straight white scars on her arms and legs from girlhood beatings. It was one of the things that had made her mother plead with Chirak: too many scars could easily sink a prospective marriage, marking a girl as defiant. Parents and matchmakers looked for them.
How did I ever live this way? Day out and day in?
Chirak’s lip drew back from his teeth again. “I was attacked in my chamber, is what happened— Didn’t you listen to what your father said? I woke hearing a noise—it was pitch-black, even the night-light had gone out, though there’s no magic to that: that imbecile Flower never puts enough oil in the lamp.”
Maybe that has something to do with your withholding food from all the maidservants—who were all named Flower, the custom in most wealthy houses—for wasting oil.
“I felt hands seize me and I pulled aside as a knife slashed into me. I shouted—I’ve had a couple of the camel drivers sleeping in the gallery outside my room, since those damned protective wards I paid a fortune for have quit working, and the wizard who laid them on the house seems to have skipped town.”
He snatched up his bamboo rod and slapped angrily at the wood of his desk. “I pulled away and the slime-got bastard followed me, as if he could see in the dark. When your father and your uncle burst open the door there was no one in the chamber and the door and window shutters were bolted from inside. They ransacked the room and found no one. The drivers were still waking up in the gallery, both of them. Drunken louts and fools, but the door was bolted. It’s a pretty pass the world’s come to when you can’t get a wizard who’ll put a spell of ward on an honest man’s house, but there’s still plenty of them around who’ll hire themselves out as assassins! Only a wizard could have got into the room or out of it without being seen.”
“Do you keep gold or valuables in your chamber these days, sir? Or anything a robber would have been seeking?”
“Just like a woman, trying to find other explanations for what’s staring her in the face! Have you ever known me to keep such a thing in my room, girl? What would I be doing that for, when I have a perfectly good strong room?” He lashed sideways toward the strong room with his rod, then flicked Habnit a stinging slice on the arm. “What god did I offend, to deserve you bringing a stupid female into my house to plague me with inanities? Someone tried to murder me, girl!” He slewed back furiously to Shaldis. His voice shrilled, “Not rob me, not rape me, not kiss me in the dark! How much clearer do I need to make it? Someone put a spell on the guards to send ’em to sleep; someone who could get out of a bolted chamber and rebolt the doors and windows behind him! D’you need it spelled out for you?”
“Yes, I do, sir,” replied Shaldis evenly. “I’m sorry if the questions I ask seem trivial to you, but small details help me put together a picture of what happened and who I should be looking for.”
“You should be looking for a wizard!” the old man screamed at her, and the rod whistled close to her face. “That’s why your imbecile of a father wanted to bring you here! A wizard who hates me! Now can you or can’t you find him?”
“Her,” said Shaldis.
“WHAT?”
“Her, sir. Every wizard has lost the ability to work magic. If magic was used, then your attacker was a woman.”
“That’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve heard in my life! It’s the kind of puling bathhouse rumor women pick up and believe rather than look at the facts! Because there’s been a raft of charlatans in this city and not a decent teacher in that precious Citadel of yours—and well they deserved to be run out! Let them work for a living for a change!—you and every other fool in the marketplaces just up and decides that all men have lost their power! Stuff! I want to hear no more of it.”
He jerked to his feet, not quite as tall as her father but wiry, with a leashed and dangerous power. He slapped the desk with his rod, and Shaldis fought not to jump.
“If that’s the best you can do, girl, you can go back to your precious Citadel, and good riddance to you! I told you how it would be, boy,” he added, his green-flecked glare raking his son. “Women haven’t the brains to see what’s under their noses! Now get her out of here before I get truly angry!”
SEVEN
I should probably have a look at his chamber before he comes out of his study,” said Shaldis.
Interrupted in the midst of his nervous apologies, Habnit regarded his daughter with surprise. She returned the look with a calm perfected in eighteen months of continuous hazing by the male students of the Citadel. She felt now as she had during those ugly days: knees trembling, stomach hurting, jaw aching from gritting her teeth. In those days each of the masters had been secretly confronting his own loss of power—they had been of no help to a girl who obviously still had it.
In what she hoped was a rational voice she went on, “And I’ll need to see every woman in the household.”
Her father goggled, then stammered, “Of—of course,” and led her through the gloomy passageway that connected the rear garden to the busy kitchen court. “Let’s just go up to my room so I can get a—a tablet and stylus for you.”
Shaldis had a tablet and stylus in the leather satchel slung around her shoulder, but she followed her father up the stairs anyway. She knew what he really wanted was the wine he always kept in his room.
She supposed, if one had to live in her grandfather’s house, it helped to start drinking an hour after sunup. At least it clearly helped her father. She’d seldom in her girlhood seen him staggeringly drunk, but never entirely sober.
The pain of that girlhood awareness returned, but it was an old pain, like the shadow of a cloud she knew would pass.
They took the wooden stairs that ascended from the kitchen court to the upstairs gallery. This arcaded wooden walkway ran around all four sides of that busy heart of the household. From it, they cut back through the maids’ dormitory to the gallery that similarly surrounded her grandfather’s garden. It would have been more direct to climb the stairs from the garden itself—there were two flights of them, one on the north side leading directly to her grandfather’s rooms and one on the south to the smaller chambers of her father and uncle—but in that case her grandfather would have seen them from his study.
Neither Shaldis nor her father felt any need to comment on this roundabout route. But after two years away from the household, Shaldis was interested to see how naturally she fell back into the unspoken set of local rules about not disturbing Grandfather. Fear of the old man seemed to breathe from every mud brick and painted pillar of the house, like tainted wa
ter that everyone drinks because there is no other.
At the top of the kitchen court stairs she halted and looked down into the big rectangle below. The pregnant jenny Five Cakes was now sweeping the soft, pitted bricks of its pavement: Shaldis had always found the slow, deliberate movements of the teyn, and their habitual silence, curiously comforting, though she’d heard they could move with terrible speed when roused. Shaldis’s mother emerged from the kitchen, unveiled since this area of the house was harem but with her hair bundled under a striped scarf, followed by Fish-Hook, the biggest of their boar teyn, carrying a huge iron cauldron in his arms.
Of course they’d be dyeing cloth the day I come back to investigate in the household, thought Shaldis. The place would stink of boiling urine for weeks.
Her mother, always stout, had put on weight, she saw, under her billowing yellow dress, but her voice as she gave Fish-Hook his simple instructions was as lilting and sweet as ever. The girl who skipped behind her Shaldis took for a very young maid—her grandfather believed in buying children for slaves because they were cheaper—until she heard her mother call the girl Foursie.
Foursie! Fourth Daughter—her younger sister’s real name—had been a little girl when she’d left.
And she’d be twelve now. And that fairylike child running out of the kitchen with a gourd of water for the three teyn and two old women slaves grinding corn under the other side of the kitchen gallery: That child had to be Fifth Daughter, Twinkle, whom everyone in the household called Our Little Twinkle Star.
“Daughter?”
Shaldis looked back at her father, waiting in the doorway of the shadowed dormitory of the maids.
“I’m sorry.” She followed him through the dim room, long and narrow with the girls’ wicker chests crowded against the single wall that didn’t have a divan, the bedding stowed out of sight in its few wall cupboards for the day. “Was that Twinkle I saw downstairs? She’s going to be beautiful!”
“She is, isn’t she?” Habnit smiled with a gentleness that told Shaldis that while she’d been watching her mother in the court her father had nipped on through and gotten his cup of wine from his own room, then come back. A second glance showed her that, yes, he had the half-finished cup in his hand, and there was no more talk of getting a tablet and stylus from his room. “Maybe too beautiful—Strath Gamert tells me his son doesn’t want to marry Foursie, and wants Twinkle instead. . . .”
Shaldis was shocked. “Twinkle’s only . . .” She counted on her fingers. “Twinkle’s only eight! You mean Forpen Gamert? Who was supposed to marry me?”
Her father stopped in the doorway that led to the gallery above the garden, his face filled with infinite weariness and infinite shame. “We need Strath Gamert’s partnership,” he explained—as he’d explained, with that same expression, two years ago when it was Shaldis who had been signed over as bride to the harness maker’s foul-tempered son. “Threesie and Twosie were already spoken for—Lily Concubine and Green Parakeet Woman, I should call them.” He gave the two sisters their names in the old style, the names their husbands (or more probably their husbands’ fathers) had picked for them, with the proper suffixes—Woman and Concubine—that were now falling into general disuse.
“Forpen Gamert doesn’t like Foursie, and because the original contract was breached . . .” There was a trace of accusation in his eyes as he regarded the daughter who’d fled the house and her marriage contract and caused him all this inconvenience. “. . . Strath says he should be able to choose. We’re still negotiating.”
Which meant Grandfather was still negotiating. And if you say a single word in reply to any of this, Shaldis told herself, following her father out onto the next gallery, you’ll be dragged back into the affairs of this family, for another sixteen years of rage and helplessness, to absolutely no purpose.
But she still felt sick anger at her father and grandfather for little Twinkle’s sake.
One more thing, she thought, to see if I can maneuver.
As she passed through the arched doorway of the maids’ dormitory she reached out and brushed the wood with her hand, and felt it.
The tiniest whisper of magic, as if the fibers of the wood had been slightly warmed.
“But if you say only women can work magic,” fretted her father as they turned along the latticed gallery that led to her grandfather’s rooms, “surely you can’t mean it’s a woman in this household?”
“It’s either a woman of the household or a woman who’s not in the household,” said Shaldis. “If it’s a woman who’s not in the household, it has to be a woman whom Grandfather has hurt, insulted, or endangered; a woman whose family—if she has one—Grandfather has hurt, insulted, or endangered; or a woman who is in the pay of, or being blackmailed by, someone Grandfather has hurt, insulted, or endangered . . . which is a fairly long list of candidates.”
“But you’re sure it’s a woman?” Habnit gestured with his wine cup. By the smell it was sherab—distilled wine, nearly as strong as opium. Two years ago, thought Shaldis sadly, he hadn’t started in on the sherab until after dinner. “Father says—”
“Grandfather doesn’t know what he’s talking about.” Shaldis halted on the gallery outside her grandfather’s bedchamber door. “Men do not have magic. The same way, ten years ago and for all of time before that, women did not have magic. They just didn’t. And now men just don’t.” Healing no longer flows from their hands, a voice had cried in her dream. “The problem is that everything—laws, family, who we’re taught to obey and respect—hasn’t changed.”
“I should hope not!” exclaimed Habnit, truly distressed at the idea. “But a woman in this household.”
“I admit that any woman in her right mind who’s conscious enough of her own magic to slip door bolts and elude the camel drivers would use her power to escape the house rather than stick around and try to murder Grandfather.” Shaldis passed her hands over the door’s wrought-iron handle, over the wood just above it, where the latch inside was.
Magic there, strong and sweet now, like a little song. It didn’t feel like the spells of the Raven sisters Shaldis knew best, the ones to whose power and souls she had united her own with the Sigil of Sisterhood: Summerchild, Moth, Pebble, and Pomegranate.
Nor did it feel like the magic of Foxfire, Lord Mohrvine’s fourteen-year-old daughter, though Shaldis wasn’t as sure of that. When the Sisters of the Raven had united their power with the rite of the sigil, Mohrvine had forbidden his daughter to join them, lest they be aware of it should she work some great spell clandestinely. Mohrvine’s mother, the formidable nomad princess Red Silk, had likewise held aloof from the rite of the sigil, as had the seventh Crafty woman of Shaldis’s acquaintance, a greedy busybody named Cattail who’d formerly been a laundress.
Magic, Shaldis had long ago learned, did not automatically convey either benevolence or wisdom, any more than blue eyes or a sweet voice did. It simply was.
With the magic of these last two, Shaldis had had little acquaintance, but the taste—the vibration—of power she sensed in the wood of the door didn’t feel familiar. What Cattail’s spells—or Foxfire’s or Red Silk’s—would feel like if they were sourcing their power differently she wasn’t sure. From the earth, for instance, or fire, rather than from the sun. Nor could she tell what difference it might make if they worked magic while drunk or drugged or under any number of other conditions. She simply didn’t know.
She followed her father into the room.
Chirak Shaldeth had all four upper chambers along that side of the court, connected by inner doors as well as doors onto the gallery to form a single suite. In the crowded conditions of a city house it was a shocking amount of space, like his claim to the whole of the inner garden. Her brief mental query about why he’d had the camel drivers sleep out in the gallery rather than in one of the rooms of the suite evaporated the moment it formed. Her grandfather despised the men who worked for him as he despised his family, and kept them away with the same mix
ture of random physical abuse and arbitrary rules.
Of course he’d keep three rooms empty because they adjoined his own. That was how—and who—he was.
He didn’t even use them as Shaldis would have, for a library or a laboratory or to fill with pretty or curious things. She raised the latch on the inner door that led from the bedchamber into the next room along, and saw that second chamber was simply empty: cupboard doors shut, floor swept of the city’s eternal dust, divan cushions clean and untouched.
The latch was on the bedroom side. The assassin wouldn’t have needed magic to dart through and escape the camel drivers, but she would have needed a mage’s ability to see in the dark.
Magic had definitely been used in the bedchamber.
It wasn’t as localized as the whisper in the wood of the door where the latch had been raised from the other side, but Shaldis felt it everywhere. It clung like perfume to the cedar pillars of the bed, whispered from the folds of the mosquito netting that more and more people were buying now that magic wards against those pests no longer kept them from the windows: every house in the city was beginning to smell of the various smudges people were experimenting with, to drive them away.
None of the Raven sisters had yet been able to place a mosquito ward that worked for more than a few hours.
Yet in her dream the voice had whispered, We command the fire and the serpents and the stinging insects.
WE who?
The woman whose power breathed like the faintest of distant sounds in the air of the dim bedchamber?
Like the sound of . . . what? That rhythmic roar.
Shaldis touched the carved doors of the wall cupboards, the chest beside the bed. All of them locked tight, as were the latches on the window shutters: tight as her grandfather’s heart. The magic here felt strange, very unlike the spells of opening that lingered on the door. . . . He had spoken of a knife cutting at him out of the dark—had they kept any slashed bedclothes?—but she wondered if the alien power she sensed like the whiff of smoke around the bed was some kind of death spell.
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