by J. V. Jones
Last week Emith had begun teaching her how to rule and mark pages before starting work on a pattern. It was while he was demonstrating how Deveric went about constructing complex designs from basic geometric shapes—showing her how trumpet spirals were drawn from simple circles, how most knotwork was based on a continuous row of XXXs, and how all key patterns were built upon a diagonal lattice—that Tessa began to perceive something hidden between the lines.
Emith had pulled out an old parchment that Deveric had ruled and pricked years earlier yet never gotten around to filling in with ink and paint. Looking at it, Tessa immediately saw the patterns he had intended to construct. She had no way of knowing what forms those patterns would take—whether they would be elongated birds, vines, ribbons, animals, or just plain threads—but she could make out the overall design. She saw the way the lines would dip, curve, and cross each other. She knew the lay of the page.
It was as if a secret code had been revealed to her eyes alone. She cried out to Emith, “Can’t you see it?” and although he nodded and said, “Yes, miss,” she knew he didn’t see it the same. The design didn’t jump out of the vellum at him, demanding to be finished there and then.
Before Emith could stop her, Tessa took up a horsehair brush and began painting over the leadpoint markings. She quickly inked in the major lines, moving from curve to curve, knowing instinctively when to turn and raise the brush. In her mind she no longer saw Deveric’s rough outline, but the finished design, complete with shadings, colors, borders, and background.
Emith uhm’d and ahh’d and didn’t seem at all pleased that Tessa had taken it into her head to paint over his master’s work, yet after a while of pacing, hand wringing, and anxious murmurs, he grew quiet and came to stand at the back of Tessa’s chair, peering over her shoulder to watch the design unfold.
Tessa was aware of him, but as the brush whisked across the page, trailing a line of acid and lampblack ink in its wake, the world around her began to matter less and less. She became caught up in the angles of the pattern. Lines were no longer just lines, they were secret passageways leading to other places. The page itself was no longer stretched and beaten lamb’s hide, it was a landscape to be navigated, shaped, and explored.
Deveric might have laid down the blueprint, but all of a sudden Tessa realized she was in control. The brush did her bidding, no one else’s, and as her gaze darted ahead to the next pinprick on the vellum, she decided to strike out on her own. Deveric’s intentions were perfectly clear—too clear—and she felt a mad, intense itching to create something new.
Palm gliding two knuckles above the tabletop, fingers gripping the hog-bone handle of the brush, Tessa veered the line away from Deveric’s pinprick, sending it reeling toward the virgin whiteness in the middle of the page.
Over her shoulder, she heard Emith catch his breath.
Under her hand, the pattern stopped being Deveric’s and became Tessa McCamfrey’s instead.
The brush turned and spiraled, broadening into the deep cleft of a curve, then thinning into a whipstroke on the turnout. Tessa no longer saw the pattern in terms of points to be met and rulings to be guided by. She saw a complex grid, many-faceted like a fly’s eye, with jutting, eclipsing angles and a mesh of potential lines. She could move anywhere on the page, manipulate the design in any possible way, and as long as she kept to the grid laid down a decade earlier by a dead man, a pattern would emerge from the ink.
Tessa felt herself entering the design. She felt her mind crowded with fragments of lines, brushing against her thoughts like insects’ antennae, bristling against her skin like hair just cut.
A faint noise sounded. Ringing.
Tessa panicked. She had let herself concentrate too deeply, opened up the door and let her tinnitus come in. She should have known better. Angry with herself, she pulled back, dragging the brush tip away from the parchment and her mind away from the design.
She closed her eyes. And as she did so, she caught a glimpse of something hidden beyond the screen of meshing lines. A land of dark curves, like rolling hills seen by night. A spark of something glinted in the valley between the slopes: a pool of black oil.
“Miss, are you all right?” Emith touched her shoulder, gently, as was his way.
Tessa nodded, suddenly feeling uncomfortable inside her body. Looking down, she saw where she had let her brush go idle for too long, causing the ink to run into a puddle on the page. Seeing its dark, shiny surface, she shrugged. The vision of the pool wasn’t a vision after all.
A week had passed since then. A week where, depending on her state of mind, Tessa either excused the sensation of entering the pattern as mere foolishness or tried to recapture the feeling in her head.
Sometimes the ringing sound came back to her. For the first few days she froze when she heard it, yet only last night it had woven its way into her dreams and in the half-light, half-consciousness of sleep, the ringing no longer seemed like a threat. It wasn’t the same as noise caused by her tinnitus. It began in a different place.
“That’s enough, my dear,” Mother Emith said, pulling Tessa back to the present, back to the task she was doing with no thought whatsoever. “The wax should be hot enough by now.”
Tessa wrapped her hand in a cloth and lifted the pot containing the beeswax from the bath. “I’m sorry if I left it too long,” she said, not knowing how long her mind had drifted away or what her hands had been up to in the meantime. “I was just . . . daydreaming.”
Mother Emith nodded. “No harm done, my dear. Daydreaming never hurt anyone.”
Funny, but Tessa almost knew what Mother Emith was going to say before she said it. The old lady was always so good to her. Always.
Tipping the pot on an angle, Tessa poured the hot, liquid wax into the hollow tablet, filling it to the edge. Almost as soon as the wax hit the wood it began to cool, growing duller and more opaque by the second. That done, she set the pot to one side and placed the tablet on the table, ready to show Emith when he returned. The wax was a fine dark blue color now, and she couldn’t resist scoring her fingernail along the cooling surface. Mother Emith was right: the mark showed up perfectly.
Tessa crossed to the fire and poured Mother Emith a cup of celery tea to help the circulation in her bad legs. “Why are you and Emith being so kind to me?” she said, handing over the cup. “You’ve looked after me for all these weeks, yet you didn’t have to. No one made you.”
Mother Emith put the cup on the small stand she always kept close to her chair. Knitting, darning, dried herbs ready to be packed in oil or vinegar, and fish ready to be scaled: all her works in progress rested atop the three-legged stool.
Mother Emith took so much time settling the cup down, then settling herself back in her chair, that Tessa didn’t think she was going to answer the question. Perhaps she had been too forward? Or rude? It was hard to judge these things. Her only points of reference were Ravis, Emith, and his mother. In the short time she had spent with Ravis, Tessa had got the distinct impression he would say and do whatever he liked and not care a jot what anyone thought of him. Emith and his mother were different, though; more considerate.
“How does Emith look to you these days, my dear?” Mother Emith said, startling Tessa by finally speaking up.
“Fine,” she answered automatically. “Very well.”
“Yes. He is, isn’t he? And you know why?”
Tessa shook her head.
“Because of you, my dear.” Mother Emith beamed at Tessa. She was looking very wise, enthroned upon her chair with all her instruments of power surrounding her. “Emith worked for Deveric for twenty-two years, you know. Twenty-two years of hard work, long hours, and unquestioning devotion. For Emith to lose his master so suddenly was a terrible blow—terrible. Yet having you here has helped ease his pain. By teaching you all he knows, he feels as if he’s carrying on his master’s work. It gives him a purpose, gives him chance to pass on the skills he loves, and stops him from brooding over Deveric.”<
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“So that’s why you keep him as busy as possible all day?” Tessa said, beginning to see things in a whole new light. “To stop him from brooding?”
Mother Emith neither confirmed nor denied Tessa’s assertion, merely smiled and said, “It’s so very hard for me to get around.”
Tessa smiled with the old lady. What she said made such sense that Tessa wondered why she hadn’t figured it out on her own. Sometimes the most obvious things passed her right by.
“In many ways Emith is like his father, you see,” continued Mother Emith, her thin voice falling into the cadence of a much repeated phrase. “Both Maribane men at heart. And if there’s one thing Maribane men like more than the feel of rain beating against their faces in a storm, it’s feeling sorry for themselves in the dark. Such a damp, drizzly island. Made for brooding, it is. Why, if my dear old husband hadn’t married me when he did, he would have brooded himself right into the grave.”
As she spoke, Mother Emith rocked back and forth in her chair, and for some reason Tessa found herself doing the same on her little stool by the fire. Rocking was obviously contagious. “Has Emith ever been to Maribane?” Now that she and Mother Emith shared a secret, Tessa was hoping to coax her into talking a little more about her son.
“Been there?” Mother Emith sounded surprised. “Why, he lived there for six years.”
Tessa felt the hairs on her arm prickle. “Did he visit the Anointed Isle?”
Mother Emith nodded. “That’s where he learnt his trade. Of course he was only a young boy when he sailed there—not even old enough to scrape a razor across his cheek—but he was quite determined to go. Nothing would stop him, and his father all but tugged the ship out of the harbor for him. Never was a man more eager to see his son visit the land he once called home.”
“What did Emith do once he learned how to scribe?”
“Oh, he never learnt how to scribe, my dear.” Mother Emith’s voice was a gentle reproof. “He learnt how to be an assistant, not a scribe.”
Annoyed with herself for making a mistake just as she was getting Mother Emith to open up, Tessa stopped rocking. “Did Emith work for any Anointed scribes?”
“Why, yes, my dear, I believe he did.” Mother Emith picked up her cup of celery tea and blew off some imaginary steam. “What was his name now . . .”
Tessa stood. She was afraid of revealing how interested she was in what was being said. Looking around for something to do, she caught sight of the iron poker by the fire.
“Avaccus. That’s it.” Mother Emith nodded to herself. “Brother Avaccus.”
The poker felt good and heavy in Tessa’s hand as she began poking at a beech log near the bottom of the fire. “Did Brother Avaccus do the same kind of work as Deveric?”
“Why, I think so, my dear. But then it’s all pretty much the same to me.” Mother Emith drained her cup. Tessa noticed how well tended her fingernails were. They looked as strong and bright as a young girl’s. “Terrible shame what happened to him in the end, though. Terrible shame. Emith had to leave Maribane straight after. The holy fathers insisted on it, seeing as he had been working for Brother Avaccus at the time it happened.”
Tessa tended the beech log as if it were an only child. When she spoke her voice was as casual as she could make it. “What happened?”
Mother Emith didn’t reply. After a minute or so her chin fell to her chest and her eyelids batted a few times, then closed.
Realizing that Mother Emith was launching into one of her rests, Tessa made a sudden jab with the poker, sending logs tumbling forward in a flurry of smoke, sparks, and steam.
Mother Emith sat bolt upright in her chair. “What? What?” she cried, head jerking left and right.
Stepping away from the fire, Tessa hid the poker behind her back. She felt bad about shocking the old woman. “Oh, it’s nothing. Just a log rolling onto the hearth. Here,” she said, moving forward and taking Mother Emith’s cup from the stand. “Let me fetch you some more tea while you tell me what happened to Brother Avaccus.”
The old woman regarded Tessa suspiciously for a moment, looked at the fire, then out of the window to check on the time of day. Finally she said, “Brother Avaccus, you say?”
Tessa poured tea in her cup. “Yes. Remember how you were telling me how Emith had to leave Maribane because the holy fathers sent him away?” To keep the old woman busy, she thrust the brimming cup into her hands.
“Aah. Yes, yes.” Mother Emith struggled to get a proper hold on the cup. “Well, it had something to do with demons. The abbot said Brother Avaccus was drawing them, you see. Drawing craven, ungodly things to stir up the devil and his kind. Of course Emith was the one assisting him at the time the illuminations were found, so naturally he was sent away.”
Craven, ungodly things. Tessa ran her hand across her chin, thinking. If Avaccus had been working on designs similar to Deveric’s, that would explain why Emith had avoided knowing the purpose behind his master’s work: because he knew it was considered ungodly.
Suddenly feeling hot, Tessa moved away from the fire. “What happened to Brother Avaccus?” As she spoke she glanced up at the window. It was almost dark now, and Emith would be back soon.
Mother Emith made a soft, clucking sound in her throat. “They severed the tendon on his right thumb. Stopped him from ever taking up a pen again.”
Tessa looked down at her own hands. Her own thumbs. “Did he leave the Anointed Isle with Emith?”
“Oh no, my dear. He was one of their own, a fellow brother; they would never let him leave. Those hard Maribane holy men pride themselves on expelling demons and breaking the spirit of a man. They like nothing better than redeeming the sinned, that’s what my dear old husband used to say. Probably did all manner of things to the poor man in the name of saving his immortal soul.” As Mother Emith uttered the last words, her chin began to drift downward toward her chest. Another fit of resting was coming on.
Unwilling to shock the old woman twice in one day, Tessa let her be. She’d gotten enough to think about for the time being. Moving around the room, she began to make the usual preparations for the evening: taking butter from the larder and placing it near the fire so it would be good and soft by supper, pushing wicks into the bowls of tallow, stirring the fish stew so the bottom wouldn’t burn, and sprinkling dried hellebore roots on the windowsill to keep out moths and gnats.
Strange how quickly she had become accustomed to this new world of hers, she thought as she pulled a linen square out of a bath of oil and wrung it between her hands. Here she was, preparing the cloth to be hung over the window in the morning—oiled, so it let in as much light as possible—as if it were the most natural thing in the world. Back home she let everything collect dust.
Things were different here. Jobs needed to be done, so she did them: it was part of staying in the house. She couldn’t imagine it any other way.
Back over at the fire, Tessa grabbed hold of one of the small, thick-bottomed copper pots. She felt like trying her hand at making sauce. She wasn’t sure what sort of sauce it was going to be yet, and had serious doubts about whether or not fish stew even needed a sauce, but the idea of cooking something had suddenly caught her fancy, and sauce seemed the easiest place to start.
As she scooped a spoonful of butter from the crock, the latch on the door rattled.
Tessa froze. An image of the night on the bridge shoved the kitchen from her sights. The harras. The misformed faces. The smell.
The butter crock slipped from her hands. It thudded onto the hearth stone, cracking but not smashing.
“What? What?” cried Mother Emith.
The latch lifted. The door swung open and Emith walked in, arms filled with bundles, cheeks reddened by fresh salty air. “Greetings, all!” he called, nudging the door closed with his elbow. “I’m sorry I’m late. It took me an hour to push through the crowds in Fullers Square. I think the whole city is out on the streets tonight.” After shrugging off his parcels onto the table,
he crossed the room, kissed his mother on each cheek, and then turned to Tessa. “I’ve brought lots of things to show you,” he said. “And perhaps even a surprise for later.”
Tessa smiled automatically, but her mouth was so dry that her lips caught against her teeth. Her heart was beating fast. The memory of the harras on the bridge was slow to leave. At her foot, butter began to run out of the crock, warmed to a glistening yellow ribbon by the heat from the hearth. The fatty, animal smell sickened her. “Why are so many people on the streets?” she asked.
Emith glanced at his mother, then leaned in close to Tessa and whispered, “News has just come today that Izgard has taken Thorn.”
“Thorn?” Tessa remembered the man who bore the name: dark gold hair, gray eyes that shifted from light to dark, and a voice used to snapping orders.
“Yes. It’s a town northwest of the Vorce Mountains.” Emith made a small movement with his head, motioning Tessa to step with him, away from his mother and her chair. “People are saying Izgard’s harras have done monstrous things: slain women, children, and old men, slaughtered pigs in their pens and cows in the fields, not stopping until everything and everybody was dead.”
Tessa shivered. The butter began to sizzle, then burn, on the hearth.
Camron of Thorn ran until he could run no more. Until his lungs were bursting and sweat stung his eyes and his throat was raw and scorched. He ran until his legs buckled beneath him and he collapsed on the wet earth of Runzy, chest heaving, breath steaming, muscles cramping in his stomach, chest, and back.
The summer rain stung him. He imagined he heard it hiss as it touched his flesh. He hated the fact it was warm. In the darkness it might have been anything dripping onto his body, rolling along his cheeks, soaking through his shirt. It might have been his father’s blood.
Bringing his knees up toward his chest, Camron curled into a tight ball and tried to ease the tightness in his chest. The smell of damp earth reminded him of home. Not Bay’Zell with its two harbors, two shrines, and two faces, but real home. The small community nestling in the joint shadows of the Boral and Vorce Mountains, that anywhere else in Rhaize would have been named a village yet in the northeast was called a town.