Points of Departure

by Patricia C. Wrede

He sat down at his own table and removed Brinte’s cap, her hair, and her jewels. The door to the Lane of Olives creaked open. Deleon thought ola Silba must have thought up something especially cutting to say, and come back to let them hear it, since he had already, in a burst of uncharacteristic generosity, promised them a favorable review. He looked up. One by one, every member of his family except Jehane and Nerissa filed into the room. They stood in a clump, looking at him. Calla’s mother and Penamil, as if by magic, melted out through the other door, the one that led back into the theater. Deleon devoutly hoped that they had gone to fetch Thrae. Malion, Lynno, and Sinati were still mingling gleefully with the audience. Calla and Aelim stood on either side of Deleon, like three rocks, thought Deleon, daring a flood to rush over them.

  The old woman with Naril, whom Deleon had utterly forgotten, took three quick steps into the center of the room, her cane tapping on the tiles, and said, “How considerate of you, Mistress Benedicti, to save me the trouble of seeking you out.”

  Deleon saw that his mother and his sisters knew her, while his father and brothers and brother-at-law were bewildered.

  “Granny Carry,” said his mother. “If you knew where he was, why didn’t you tell us?” She used the mild and reasonable tone that meant somebody was in for it. You’re not twelve, thought Deleon to himself, you’re twenty-one, and you’ve been earning your living as a player for nine years. There was something else about that tone, though. He couldn’t think what; perhaps she would use it again and he would be able to remember.

  The old woman his mother called Granny Carry took her time about answering his mother. When she did speak, she did so very softly, like somebody putting down one more glass lion on a crowded shelf of fragile ornaments. “Why should I punish him,” she said, “for being the only one of all your children with the wit to run away from you?”

  “You overstep your bounds,” said Deleon’s mother, in a truly terrible voice.

  And Deleon knew both the tone and the words. Rikiki’s three stripes, he had used them himself as Brinte. As if the sun had come from behind a cloud, the entire landscape of his mind lit up, and he understood his own play. Jehane and Nerissa had understood it before he did; Jehane, who had a right to be furious, had been mildly rebuking and Nerissa, who had a right to accuse him of callous desertion, had not been rebuking at all. He had killed, not his family, but their power over him. He wondered if the eight of them here knew it

  They certainly knew that tone. Livia blanched and Isobel hid behind Givanni, just as they always did when it came time to find out who had stolen the strawberries or broken cook’s largest bowl. It occurred to Deleon that the rest of them might have had an alliance of a more normal kind, might have been more like real brothers and sisters. Not that it seemed to have done any of them much good, unless you thought that Larin Casalena was good for Marigand.

  “I?” said Granny Carry, in a much stronger voice; Deleon, his imagination loosened by the play, could almost hear in her voice the glass breaking as she tipped the whole shelf of ornaments to the floor. “I overstepped my bounds? Oh, no; this is my city and my charge. It’s you who have overstepped yours; and not even by intention, but by stupidity. You may be stupid in Acrivain if you like, but I won’t have it here. Do you understand me?”

  It was quite clear they didn’t; neither did Deleon. They were all staring like stuck sheep. His mother was so angry she couldn’t speak; but that wouldn’t last long. His father was amused, his brothers irritated, and his sisters terrified, except for Marigand, who was almost as angry as her mother. It hurt his stomach to see how little, in ten years, they had changed. They moved in their respective orbits like the painted wooden figures in Penamil’s Zhir clock.

  It was Larin Casalena who actually spoke. “You’d better explain yourself, madam,” he said

  “Bosh!” said the old woman, in a much more vigorous voice that carried a great deal less venom. “I live here; I don’t need to explain anything.”

  “We live here also,” said Deleon’s mother, with extreme smoothness.

  The old woman had wanted that reply. “You do not,” she said. “Not in any way that matters. You don’t live anywhere. You occupy a miserable space of the imagination halfway between Acrivain and Liavek. You can’t live in Acrivain; you saw to that by staging an idiot revolution at an impossible time. And you won’t live in Liavek. You make your children miserable by raising them to live in a culture they’ll never see; you stuff them full of tales of food and flowers and weather they’ll never know; you spit on Liavek as if it were a beggar in your path.”

  “If we do,” said Deleon’s father, to everybody’s obvious amazement, “what’s that to you?”

  “Your wife has S’Rian blood. I am responsible for those of the Old Blood. And among you, you let in Acrilat,” said the old woman.

  Deleon burst out laughing. S’Rian blood! What a lovely irony. The old woman looked at him, and he stopped laughing. Beside him, Aelim said softly, “Granny Carry.” Deleon looked at him. Tenarel Ka’Riatha. A S’Rian name that Aelim thought was a title.

  “I am honored to let in Acrilat,” said Deleon’s father.

  “I am not honored to have him!” said the Ka’Riatha. “He’s a lunatic; not only that, he’s a self-centered lunatic of the worst description, with less native wit on his best day than Irhan has on a bad one. I won’t have him about; he’s dangerous. Now listen to me. I’ll give you a year. If at the end of that time any of you is cherishing any thought or action that Acrilat would find useful, I’ll put you on the next ship out of here, and I won’t trouble myself about which direction it’s sailing or who’s aboard. Do you understand me?”

  They said nothing; the old woman smiled a chilling grim smile and added, “And if you don’t think I can do it, try me. It would please me no end to rid Liavek of its ungrateful guests. You’ve got a powerful stink on you after twenty years.”

  She had not looked at Deleon except when he laughed; but he was a member of the family she was reviling. “Do you have any suggestions?” he said. “To remove the stink, I mean.”

  “You,” she snapped, “make up your mind; and don’t write any more plays about Acrilat. As for the rest of you: Livia! Your sister tells me you’re engaged.”

  Livia nodded dumbly. Deleon, who was accustomed to thinking of her as a whining tyrant twice his weight who was constantly complaining of him to their older brothers, stared at her. What a round, quaking little mouse she was. She didn’t have as much backbone as Nerissa, whom he had always regarded as a supreme, if justified, coward. How old was she? Twenty-four? Twenty-two? He supposed that living the last ten years in his parents’ house, in a society where children could burst out on their own at fifteen, might have been wearing. And who was he to revile her for cowardice? He was the one who had run away; she and all the rest of them had stuck it out.

  “To whom?” said Granny.

  Livia gulped. Deleon’s mother said, “She is betrothed to one Ebulli jhi Rovoq, the youngest son of a Hrothvekan family with seven children. He has his own fishing boat; she met him as a friend of Givanni’s. They are to be married next year, possibly in the month of Reaping.”

  She had hated saying that. A fisherman, by all that was holy; a youngest son. But she said it in a tone of nicely modulated pleasure, implying that young people would do these foolish things, and parents must allow them to, if they were not actually bent on disaster. Deleon grinned to think of what Livia must have been up to that they had consented to this match. And yet, if they were in no hurry, it couldn’t be all that desperate a case.

  “The month of Meadows is better for weddings,” said Granny.

  “In Liavek, perhaps,” said his mother, in automatic dismissal, and then shut her mouth hard. She always knew when not to make matters worse for herself.

  The Ka’Riatha looked as if she were about to break another shelf of glass animals, and Livia said, quite loudly, “I want to be married in Wine.”

  “Meadows,”
said the old woman, very sharply. “Or Buds.”

  Livia gave her a betrayed look, and Deleon’s mother said, “If you want Wine, my dear, Wine it shall be.”

  Calla made an abrupt movement; Deleon glanced at her. She was quivering with suppressed laughter.

  “Isobel,” said the old woman. “Did you marry Hanil Casalena?”

  “No, madam,” said Isobel, warily.

  “Why not?”

  “He’s a toad,” said Isobel, with her customary directness. “A wooden toad. He won’t do anything. He reads poetry and weeps about Acrivain, day and night. And he won’t argue.” She looked sideways at her eldest sister and that sister’s husband. “I’m sorry, Larin, but you know it’s true.”

  Deleon’s eyes stung. She was not talking about Hanil Casalena; she was talking about their father.

  “Isobel?” said Livia. “Ebulli has a great many brothers.”

  Isobel flung her hair back from her face with a gesture that reminded Deleon of Sinati, and said distinctly, “I don’t want to be married. I don’t see how any of you could possibly wish to be married. It’s nothing but misery. Nissy may be vulgar with her notions about raising cats, but at least she knows the virtues of solitude.” Deleon blinked hard, feeling Aelim’s eyes on him. Isobel knew; maybe she had always known. He had thought her proud and secure in the center of their parents’ esteem, the perfect Acrivannish maiden, except for a slight, deplorable tendency to be spiteful. She had a heart like granite and a mind like the map of a coal mine; and yet she knew, and had not been happy either.

  “Isobel,” said Marigand, in her soft voice, “must you always make a speech?”

  Rikiki or Acrilat, Deleon was not sure which, laid hold of him. “Why shouldn’t she?” he said. “The Levar’s Company needs understudies.”

  Isobel looked shocked, not as if she thought this was an evil idea, but as if she wondered how Deleon had come upon it. She must be a superb player, and know it, to have behaved as she had all this time. Maybe nine years with somebody like Thrae would make Isobel no worse than Sinati.

  “And when you have become a player, Issa,” said their mother, in a perfectly steady voice, “will you write such a play as your brother’s?”

  Deleon, who would have stared into the bore of a cannon, or the mouth of Acrilat’s temple itself, before he looked at her, looked at her. She was completely serene, if a little white and strained about the mouth. What do you expect, thought Deleon. People don’t change their natures in an instant. But she had noticed; she had understood.

  Isobel stepped out from the clump of family so she could look their other in the face, and said, not loudly at all, “Shall I need to?”

  There was a perfect and hideous silence, as those two composed, pale, unyielding faces gazed at one another. Deleon would have run out of the room if he could have moved at all. His mother looked like a bad drawing of Isobel. It was entirely possible that, like Brinte, she had not enjoyed the last twenty years any more than the rest of them had.

  The Ka’Riatha broke the silence. “You had better not write such a play as that,” she said brusquely. “It’s full of extremely potent summonings of Acrilat, and a great deal of sentimental poetry, too. I trust you can do better.”

  Deleon’s desire to weep dried up abruptly in a scorching blast of injured pride, and was replaced almost at once by an insane desire to laugh. Calla was having trouble, too. Aelim was unmoving.

  The Ka’Riatha dealt briskly with Deleon’s brothers, his remaining sister, and her hapless husband, most of whom were living more or less independent lives, or at least doing something un-Acrivannish. Deleon, who had briefly felt entertained, found unease overtaking him. He began to be rather sorry for his family; and if Granny thought she had silenced his mother, she was less clever than she might be. He also found that he very much did not want to hear what she had to say to his father. It had occurred to him that he might, after this was over, wish to speak to his parents again; and if he had heard whatever dreadful things Granny was likely to say to them, the meeting would be even more difficult. He caught Granny’s eye.

  “Go along with you,” she said. “And mind what I said.”

  Deleon took Aelim by the hand, which he had never done even when he was a very lost twelve and Aelim had been assigned to look after him. He tried to collect Calla with his glance, but she had perched herself on Sinati’s table. She looked as if she were watching a very good play, with an eye to playing the lead herself. The soft yellow of the jasmine in her black hair caught the yellow of her eyes. Deleon had a certain premonition that Granny would have something to say to her; and he wanted to hear that even less than he wanted to hear the rest of it.

  He said in the general direction of his family, “I’ll see you later; just ask for Thrae’s study.”

  He and Aelim shut the door carefully, and discovered Sinati and Lynno in the hallway, mouths agape.

  “Where’s Thrae?” said Aelim.

  “Getting Andri Terriot drunk,” said Lynno. “I think she’s pleased, Del, but she won’t say a word without you and Aelim. Malion looks like a very cross parrot; she won’t even tell him he did well. Come on.”

  “What’s happening to Naril?” said Sinati.

  “Nothing untoward,” said Deleon. “Come and get drunk with Andri Terriot.”

  They walked down the clean-swept hall with its patchy pink-painted plaster, into Thrae’s cool study, with the Tichenese carpet and the green glass jar of Worrynot and the vase of Ombayan tiger-flowers, to be praised for their playing.

  • • •

  The month of Fruit in Acrivain was very dusty; and yet there was a great deal of rain, and anything anybody dared to plant came up in a tremendous hurry and flourished. Not one soul came panting, or crawling, or mewling, or ranting to the door of the Tower of Acrilat, begging admission to the priesthood. This was unfortunate insofar as there was a great deal of work to do with everything growing the way it was; but as an indication of the health of the general population of Acrivain, it was a good sign to the few who considered such things. In the month of Wine they ate strawberries the size of peaches, and wondered who to thank.

  Mad God

  By Patricia C. Wrede

  An uneasiness hung in the air of Liavek. It manifested itself in small ways. The merchants in the Bazaar drove harder bargains and scowled as they pocketed their coins. A gem-cutter on the Levar’s Way missed her stroke, ruining a thousand-levar jewel. The number of persons seeking advice from the Faith of the Twin Forces increased so sharply that half a dozen Red priests normally employed in the lower ranks of church bureaucracy had to be hastily reassigned. The Zhir snarled as they went about their business; but the Zhir usually snarled at Liavekans whenever they could, so no one noticed any difference. The Tichenese delivered elaborately veiled insults with exquisitely relentless politeness. No one noticed anything different about that, either.

  Among magicians, particularly those of Wizard’s Row, there was more awareness of the uncomfortable atmosphere. One or two even went so far as to attempt to identify the source of the miasma. Their efforts were noteworthy only for their uniform lack of success.

  In a neat little house on the Street of Trees, Granny Carry sat glaring at a silver bowl of clear water. It had been gathered from Liavek Bay by moonlight on the eve of last year’s summer solstice, then boiled with wormwood from Ombaya, juniper from the mountains of the Silverspine, and yarrow from the back garden. The steam had been painstakingly collected, a drop at a time, by holding a mirror over the boiling water.

  And it had shown precisely nothing. Granny snorted. Gods were all alike—they’d pester you with omens for weeks when all you wanted was peace and quiet, but ask them a few questions of your own and they shut themselves up like so many clams.

  Granny’s frown deepened. She rose and went to her loom. It was empty, waiting for the next project; she had finished the last weaving only that morning. She shooed two of the cats away and chalked a circle on the floor ar
ound the loom. Then she stood in front of it, closed her eyes, and drew on the birth luck that provided the power for every wizard’s spells. In her mind, she wove a pattern to begin the long ritual.

  Eyes still closed, she let the magic guide her hands to the rack of threads behind the loom, choosing the colors for the weft. She paused and opened her eyes to examine the selection. A pale, smooth linen flecked with red; a thin, vibrant green silk with a tendency to break; a nubbly, wildly variegated wool in a hundred shades of blue and white and a constantly changing thickness.

  Granny blinked in surprise. The choices seemed clear enough, but… “Acrilat?” she said skeptically. “I thought I’d gotten rid of It.”

  She glanced back over her shoulder. One of the cats had jumped onto the table and was sniffing experimentally at the silver bowl. “You’ll probably end up seeing double,” Granny warned it. The cat looked up, twitched its whiskers, and began lapping water out of the bowl. Granny shrugged and went back to work. She drew on her luck once more, picturing a second pattern as she began to wind the weft onto shuttles. Then would come selecting the warp, setting the threads on the loom, and, finally, the weaving that would complete the spell. The entire ritual would take several days to complete, but long rituals, done correctly, made more powerful spells. Granny was patient.

  When the warp had been cut and she could take a rest from her spell-casting, she made a pot of tea and sat down to think. Some months ago, Granny had put an end to the subtle interference of Acrilat, the mad god of Acrivain, in the affairs of Liavek. She had thought that would be the end of the matter, but apparently the mad god had more persistence than she had given It credit for. It looked as if It was going to try again.

  Normally, Granny did not particularly care which gods were or were not worshipped in Liavek. Her job was to care for the city, its rulers and inhabitants, and those few gods who had come from the ancient city of S’Rian before the Liavekans conquered it. Even with all the power and skill bequeathed her by her predecessors, the job was a big one, and it kept her busy. She would not have worried about Acrilat any more than she worried about the horde of gods who had been brought to Liavek in recent centuries, except that Acrilat had already demonstrated that it was not satisfied with mere worship. For some mad reason of Its own, Acrilat wanted to have Liavek the way It had Acrivain, and whether Its plans succeeded or not It might well ruin the city trying.