Points of Departure

by Patricia C. Wrede

  Givanni looked at him carefully. He had been known to tattle. But he had invoked the honorable madness. “What kind of new god?”

  Gillo in turn looked carefully at Givanni, who tried not to squirm. Certainly the tattling was not all on one side. Givanni thought of invoking honorable madness as well. But if they talked of abandoning Acrilat, in all its contradictory and arbitrary glory, they had no right to such an invocation. He said, “As we are brothers and allies, what we utter stays in the breath we share.”

  Gillo looked exactly as he had when he dared Gillo to jump into the swimming hole in the middle of the month of Buds, thinking that Gillo would refuse, and Gillo had done it. Quoting from one of their father’s favorite plays was very like jumping into that cold dark water. Now Givanni must jump as well.

  And he did. “One that can make sense,” he said.

  “Are there any?”

  “We could look.”

  “If we have to go.”

  “If we have to go.”

  “Even if we stay—” said Gillo.

  “Brothers and allies.”

  “Yes. Brothers and allies.”

  No one said a word to them, but the next time they went to the cellar to look at the mirror, it was gone. They decided that they would find it again, but not just yet.

  • • •

  In the front room of a small, newly occupied house on the Street of Trees, an old woman, brown and wrinkled as a dried plum, faced a much younger man across a table, while a white cat observed from a windowsill and a black one from underneath a floor loom. Apart from age-related differences, the woman and man resembled one another strongly; they had the same dark eyes and determined jaw, and the stray streaks of dark brown in the old woman’s salt-and-pepper bun were a match for the man’s close-cropped hair.

  “I’m going back,” the man said.

  The old woman’s eyes narrowed. “To the Farlands?”

  “To Acrivain, yes.” Although the man’s stance was respectful, there was an air of determination about him, as if he was prepared to resist considerable argument.

  “They’re not fond of outsiders, I hear.”

  The man smiled reminiscently. “Some of them are.”

  “Ah. There’s a girl involved, then.”

  The old woman hadn’t spoken it as a question, but the man answered it as if she had. “Yes, grandmother.”

  “I expect your mother wants me to talk you out of it.”

  “I expect she does. Will you try?”

  His grandmother snorted. “There’s no use talking to a young person who’s made up his mind, especially when he fancies himself in love.”

  The young man did not seem reassured. “Will you stop me?”

  The old woman studied him for a long time, then sighed. “I should. S’rians don’t belong in the cold, pale countries. And I don’t approve of that god of theirs.”

  “You don’t approve of any gods but Rikiki.”

  “You wouldn’t either, if you had to deal with them the way I do.” She paused. “Will you take some advice, at least?”

  “From you, grandmother? Always.”

  “Family is important. Especially when you are far away from it. Put down roots in your new land, but never forget where you came from. You and yours will be welcome in Liavek for as long as I am Ka’Riatha here. Longer, if I have any say in it.”

  “I will remember. And I’ll see that my children remember, too.”

  • • •

  A formal tea set sat untouched on a table between two women, one small, dark, and ancient, the other tall, pale, and middle-aged. The tea set resembled the latter more than the former, being of a style about thirty years out of date and lavishly covered in oak leaves like decorative pastry, with an acorn atop the lid of the tall pot and handles on both cups and pot like curled leaves, all difficult to grasp. The younger woman was less difficult to grasp but just as prickly.

  “Your daughter has more sense than you do,” the elder woman said sharply. “Not that that’s saying much.”

  “Marigand has always been sensible of propriety,” replied the other stiffly.

  “I meant Jehane. She at least had the wit to come to me. Better late than never, and never’s what it would have been if you’d had your way.”

  “Deleon’s disappearance is a family matter. Jehane should have done as she was bid, and held her tongue.”

  The older woman’s eyes narrowed. “I am family, I’ll thank you to remember. Much as you’d like to deny it, by your own rules I should have been informed at once. I expect you’ll give Jehane a thundering scold anyway, for doing just as you taught her.”

  Mistress Benedicti’s eyes flickered. “We’ve been managing it in our own way.”

  “You’ve done nothing,” Granny said flatly. “For eight years.”

  “We looked for him.”

  “A lot of Farlanders who’ve made it their business to know nothing whatever of the place they’d lived in for ten years? And who, by the look of things, haven’t learned any more of it in the eight years since?” Granny shook her head. “As well ask a flatfish to hunt up a desert shrew.”

  “I suppose you think you could do better!”

  “I’ve no intention of trying. Your son is of age—”

  “Not by our customs!”

  “He is by mine, which means he’s old enough to know his own mind.” Granny looked suddenly thoughtful. “Of course, he’s a Benedicti, so he probably doesn’t.”

  Mistress Benedicti’s pale face flushed an unbecoming red. “You insult me in my own home?”

  “It’s a privilege of aged family members,” Granny said. “I’ve held my peace these twenty years”—Mistress Benedicti’s eyes narrowed skeptically—“but my patience is wearing thin. Now, explain to me exactly what the rest of your family is up to, assuming you know any more about that than you do of Deleon’s affairs.”

  • • •

  All but one of the cats—a young gray tabby who had not yet learned to stay well away when Granny Carry worked magic—had abandoned the tidy house on the Street of Trees for the time being. Granny herself was bent over a mirror, drawing runes in thick purple ink.

  At last she raised her head and muttered a few words. The ink flared, smudging the lines she’d spent so long inscribing. “Well, well,” she said to herself. “So Acrilat’s involved after all.”

  The gray cat stretched cautiously toward the bowl of ink. After one sniff, it squinched up its eyes and pulled back.

  “Just so,” Granny told it. “We’re not having It in Liavek. Fortunately, It has only just begun paying attention. Family is the web that brought It here—drat those Benedictis!—and family will send It back. A few nudges should set things nicely in motion.” She set the mirror face down on the table and covered it with a neatly hemmed square of linen. “I’d best talk to Healer Govan, for a start.”

  The young tabby made a wide circle around the ink bowl and eyed the linen speculatively.

  “Leave that alone,” Granny instructed the cat as she left the room. “I’m not finished with it yet.”

  The cat hesitated briefly, then jumped down from the table and began to wash its tail.

  • • •

  Isobel had her Lessons of Mindfulness three times a week in the lesser temple of Acrilat on the edge of town. She did not much care for the lessons, but ordinarily she liked her best friend Lily, who also attended. She worried at all the talk of leaving Acrivain and going to Liavek. And then just as it was decided, as it usually was in the spring, that there would be no moving this year, Lily had annoyed her. Lily had her own child-mirror, and said that her sisters also had one, and her cousins, and the children of the baker’s family and the dyer’s family each had them.

  They would let you talk to Acrilat, and you could show Acrilat your problems and It would give you advice. You did not have to make excuses to leave the house and talk to a priest. You did not have to worry that the priest would not see your difficulties in the s
ame light as you did. You did not have to worry whether the priest ought to be a priest, which was a thing Isobel would never have thought of had she not overheard Marigand and Givanni talking about it on the shed roof after she was in bed. But if you had a mad god and mad priests, you did need to think of these things. Isobel could see that. And now she could not talk the matter over with Lily, because Lily had been given her child-mirror and did not need the priests any longer.

  Isobel considered asking her father about this, but decided that it was more something that her mother would be responsible for. Her mother, when applied to, looked momentarily as if she were going to scold, and Isobel got ready to duck. Their mother had never actually hit any of them, but when she looked angry, you felt there was no reason that she might not decide to do so. But then her mother explained quite calmly that their family, being special, had one mirror for all the children, including any new ones that might be born; and that as a very special expression of their fineness, their parents were in the mirror as well. But this meant it must be looked after carefully, and could not be played with.

  In her father’s best Morianie play, there was a mirror that would show the possessor of it his best friend and his best enemy. Isobel asked her father, when he read her the passage about the mirror, if it worked for girls too, and he said that it worked for anyone who possessed the mirror. She asked him what possessed meant, and he gave her a very long speech. She garnered from it, mostly by thinking about it in the middle of the night for the next week, that if you bought or were lent the mirror, it would work for you; but just picking up somebody else’s would not, and stealing the mirror was in what her father called a murky neighborhood. If you stole it, you might have to propitiate it. When she went to tell him goodnight at the end of her thinking week, she asked him what propitiate meant; but he grew impatient and sent her away.

  Gillo knew what “propitiate” meant, but wanted to know where she had heard it and why she wanted to know.

  “I always want to know,” said Isobel.

  Gillo laughed. “You know that’s not true. You don’t want to know about rocks, or weather, or baking.”

  Isobel decided to tell him. He never hit, you could say that for him; it was tattling that you had to think about, but he was much less prone to that than either Givanni or Marigand, unless he was tattling on Givanni. But that was private between them, and Isobel had learned to give the appearance of not wanting to know about it, even though she did.

  She told him about the child-mirror, and about the mirror in the Morianie play. She expected him to laugh at her. He just looked thoughtful.

  “Do you think a child-mirror would be like the mirror in the play?”

  “It might, because Papa says the Morianie plays are one of the templates for the worship of Acrilat.”

  “Let’s go and find it,” said Gillo.

  This had to wait until their mother was out and their father with her, to visit the temple and then the market before the twelve play-reading revolutionaries arrived that evening.

  There were perhaps fifteen secret places in the house. They began in the cellar, where the drink much stronger than beer and the accounts of the revolution were kept, and moved through the four stories of their tall, narrow house; past the books about a time before Acrilat came to Acrivain, the tightly-stoppered purple bottles with a poison mark upon them, smelling sharp and sweet at once from the spells on their wax seals; past the store of small velvet-covered blank books that concealed identical books that had been written in by their grandparents and by people they had never heard of; past the wooden box filled with ancient gold coins and the ceramic box filled with only somewhat newer silver ones; and finally to the attic.

  There was not much in the attic. Isobel’s best friend’s family had an attic crammed with objects, but the Benedicti attic was almost entirely empty. It had some chairs that Givanni and Gillo were supposed to learn how to mend; a discarded altar to Acrilat that she had heard her parents arguing about keeping for some dire but unmentioned occasion, or giving to the temple to purify and use; everyone’s winter clothes and boots; and three leather trunks, each under a window. They were covered with cushions, and until this search Isobel had not thought to try to open them.

  “Have you never opened those?” she asked her brother.

  “Givanni and I tried when we were very small. We weren’t strong enough, and Mama was angry when she found us trying.”

  “Was she not always angry, when you were small?”

  Gillo appeared to need some consideration before he answered. “She wasn’t always angry at us,” he said. “She was angry at the court, and at Papa.”

  Isobel took the cushion from the nearest trunk, released its catches with some difficulty, and yanked the top open. A mirror flashed in the dusty, sunlit air of the attic, flashed and sparkled.

  “It’s broken,” said Isobel, trying not to sound as frightened as she felt.

  “It has to be,” said Gillo, “to put us all in. See. Count the pieces.”

  Isobel did. Papa, Mama, Marigand, Givanni, Gillo, Isobel, and Jehane, the baby. Just the right number. One piece was much larger than the others; that might be for more children, or it might be Mama and Papa’s, since they were bigger.

  “How did the mirror work, in the Morianie play?” said Gillo.

  “You said, ‘Show me my friend and I shall be thine; show me my enemy and I shall be thine twice over.’”

  “I don’t like that,” said Gillo.

  However, Isobel had said it. The mirror lit up with a vehement blue glow like the lamps in the temple of Acrilat. This was familiar enough, but in their sunny attic it seemed like some otherworldly invasion, like the one in the second-best Morianie play. For a long moment, while Isobel tried to decide whether slamming the trunk shut would help or not, the pieces of the mirror showed single objects: the fourth-best Morianie play, open to its third act; a geode broken in half, sparkling with amethyst; a five-petalled orange flower with deeply-cut leaves; a bunch of grapes; a small sailboat; a puppet with long yellow hair and a lute; and a baby’s blanket embroidered with lilies-of-the-valley.

  Jehane had just such a blanket.

  “Never mind,” said Isobel, as if she were talking to the dog. “Good mirror, go back to sleep.”

  The mirror slowly turned blue altogether. Isobel looked at her brother; his face was a terrible color, the one they told you in school meant that a person couldn’t breathe properly and needed aid. He looked blank, and then suddenly alarmed. Isobel turned back to the mirror, which showed a pair of blue eyes in a pale face; it could have been anybody in Acrivain, but the eyes seemed to have more in them than the reflections of what they saw. Isobel backed away a little.

  “I am your friend,” said a voice from out of the mirror. It was dreadfully mellifluous. “All others are your enemies.”

  “That isn’t true,” said Gillo, in a shaking voice that frightened Isobel more than the mirror, “and so we are not yours after all.”

  “You did not ask that I tell you true,” said the voice, “and yet I have done so. You are mine. You were mine already, but now you have consented.”

  “I don’t consent,” said Gillo. “I don’t!”

  “I know when you go about the market,” said the voice. “I know when you go to the sea. I know when you go to the mountains.”

  This sounded harmless to Isobel, but when she looked at Gillo his face was terrible. He squeezed his eyes shut and said in a whisper, “I consent. Issy, come away.”

  He went very fast across the attic and down the ladder. Isobel stared at the mirror. Suddenly she saw why her mother might be angry so much. It made you less afraid.

  “I hate you!” she said.

  “You are looking into a mirror,” said the beautiful voice. “Whom do you truly hate?”

  Isobel slammed the trunk shut and kicked it, hard.

  Gillo did not speak to her, other than to ask for the salt or the sumac, for months afterwards.


  • • •

  Nerissa’s expression said plainly that she had not been expecting to encounter Granny Carry so early in the morning, and especially not on the street outside the Benedicti home. Nevertheless, she greeted Granny politely, if warily.

  “And good morning to you, too,” Granny replied. She bent to let the black cat sniff her fingers. “Good morning, Floradazul.”

  “I wasn’t expecting to see you,” Nerissa said.

  “I came to return something of yours.” Granny reached into a pocket and pulled out a small book, bound in green velvet.

  Nerissa’s eyes widened and she snatched up the book. “Where did—Jehane! I will kill her,” she burst out.

  “I can’t blame you for the sentiment, but I shouldn’t follow through, if I were you,” Granny said with infuriating calm. “She is the most sensible of your sisters, though that’s not saying much. Also, the guards are not kind to murderers, and you’re doing well enough for yourself that it would be a shame to spoil it.”

  “Did you—” The girl stopped short and bit her lip.

  “Of course I didn’t read it,” the old woman snapped. “I’m not a Benedicti.”

  “I know. I’m sorry. Thank you for returning my diary.”

  “You’re welcome,” Granny said, mollified. “Though I’d keep a lock on it, if I were you, until your sisters learn better.”

  Nerissa scowled. “After camels become sweet-tempered, if then.”

  “Not if I have anything to say about it,” Granny said.

  • • •

  When Jehane was five, and it had been decided that they were not to go to Liavek, her brothers and sisters showed her the mirror in the attic. Gillo explained that when she began to go out for her Mindfulness lessons, other children might talk of child-mirrors. They might even ask to see hers, though this practice was strongly discouraged by the priests of Acrilat. But Jehane did not have her own mirror like most children, because their family had one mirror among them, so that their unity with Acrilat would be whole-hearted.