by Sean Wallace
Erhensa has threaded copper wire through the fur. She has quick, nimble fingers; Ysoreen finds herself entranced by their speed. She pushes away from that and jots into a little book. Surrogate daughter. “Who made the golem?”
“Have you ever wished for something fiercely, desperately, only to discover that the world does not contain it?”
“No.”
“You must’ve led a perfect life. A loving family, a good wife.”
“I’ve no more need for a wife than I do a second head – less, since a second head could guard my back.”
Erhensa laughs. “So many ardor-notes must’ve crumpled under your heel. But Areemu, yes. There was a girl. A princess or the daughter of a puissant magistrate. She was beautiful, it is written. Eyes like the glaze of honey on scarab wings. A little like yours.”
She’s less than wind. But there’s no stopping the rush of blood, no hiding the surge of heat. Like her mothers and sisters, Ysoreen is one of the best to have graduated from the Academy of Command. One of the best, save her unruly moods. She tries too hard, they told her; as long as she fights herself, as long as she pours effort into suppressing rather than understanding, she will be like this. “My eyes are no such thing. What would a princess want with a golem? She couldn’t possibly lack for slaves.”
“She wanted a lover.”
“Then she must’ve been brutishly ugly.” A relief; the thought of being compared to a hideous girl sits better on Ysoreen than the opposite.
“Hardly. Areemu could not lie, and she said the girl was so lovely she might stop the stars in their tracks. She had suitors uncountable. A duchess who wooed her with a gift of elephants and birds of paradise. An arctic queen who sent a chariot pulled by white tigers and an ice house that never melted. A witch who enchanted an entire aviary for her, so the birds would always sing and never die. To each the princess said no, and no again. She’d been told all her short life that she was perfect, and she would take nothing less than perfect for her consort.”
The volume Ysoreen read was a golemist’s manual: for mulae and procedure rather than history. It doesn’t mention from whence came the commission, whether there was a princess or whether she was coveted. Erhensa’s tale may well be apocryphal. She records, all the same.
“Her mother sent for conjurers instead of suitors. The best thaumaturgists in the land and several lands surrounding. From east and west they came, from north and south they journeyed, to prove themselves supreme among their kind and make for her a paramour. One who would not betray, one who would be gallant to her always, one who would never weep come what may. What woman of mortal matter could do so much?”
Wish fulfillment, Ysoreen adds. It’s a common motive to buy a golem; perhaps the most common. Surrogate parent. Surrogate child. And lovers, always lovers. Left unchecked half the nation of Scre would have been golems.
Erhensa shifts the fox away from her lap. Even her magic is alien. She has not murmured an incantation, dropped a pinch of powder or struck crystals together, but somehow she’s liberated a triangle of fur from the rest. A perfect isosceles, as though measured with ruler and ink. “The true challenge was volition. She did not want a mute toy which would come when called, say yes when asked, kiss her when pressed. The princess wanted to be loved back truly.”
“Not likely,” Ysoreen says. “Golems don’t have emotions. They can pretend, if it’s inscribed into their cores. Nothing more.”
“I’m glad you know so much about golems. It is enlightening. They must give you a peerless education that you may know such subjects better than practitioners.”
“I have made golems my study.”
“Is that so? Ah, it seems I’ve run out of feathers. Will you bring me some? I’m a stranger to the way of winged things, the difficulties of ensnaring and capturing. An owl will do, Hall-Warden. Something gray, with a coat like velvet.”
You see the world differently as a bird, so much closer to the sky. Thought is like the center of a yolk, sloshing within a brittle shell. Bones so light, sinews so lean.
I reach from the inside and make this one a girl.
The confoundment is partial; her shoulders flare into wings rather than arms, and her stare remains amber, dark-seeing and immense. Feathers give her modesty, shrouding her skull in place of human tresses.
She flits from branch to branch. Hardly any skin on her; hardly any hip or breast. Ysoreen sees through the guise, as she must. Does she pause, does she hesitate? For the length of a blink.
The fox was fast, but it was a slash of red on sunlit snow. The girl-owl is gray nearing black and the moon is a half-lidded eye. The Hall-Warden must keep her gaze trained skyward; keep her feet firm on the wet mulch.
The owl grins down and laughs into her wings.
In the end she falls too, an arrow’s fletching in her belly, for Ysoreen does not permit herself failure. The Hall-Warden stands over the girl who is slowly reverting to an owl. Her knuckles drag over her face, and this time her knife is not so swift.
She makes small noises in her throat as she dismembers and flays. The knife-point plunges into the owl-girl’s eyes, and my sight burns out in a flash of steel and moonlight.
Ysoreen jolts into a morning so white it blinds her and for a moment she pants into the glare, blinking down tears.
The smell of blood clings. There is no help for it; she fills the brass tub and strips. The lidded jug is warm and the water steams, an enchanted courtesy. When she sinks into the bath the scent of foreign flora rise. Citrus. Her mind drifts and snags on the thought of Erhensa’s fingers. Long, elegant, tapered like candles.
She pulls herself up short and out of the bath. The sorcerer turned an owl into a woman to do – what? Annoy and disturb. Quickly she dresses, slotting and strapping on the armor. When the manservant comes only the stains on the floor where water has dripped mark Ysoreen’s indulgence.
Erhensa is busy with the charm, sewing feathers into the lattice of copper wire and fur. Her needle flashes, disappearing and reappearing. “It’ll be a fine thing. Not so often do I make these with such attention, with such fresh ingredients.”
“Using magic against an Ormodoni officer is misconduct that merits execution.”
“Putting on slightly unusual clothes is enough to have me put in chains, Hall-Warden Zarre, so must we go over such tedious minutiae? No harm was done and none was meant.”
Anyone else Ysoreen would have cut short and confronted with the exact penalties for their offense. She’d have disabled them and brought them to the Institute, there to be stripped of their properties and status, there to be fettered and their magic ripped out. The crime warrants that and more.
Instead she kneels in the grass, where each blade comes up to her shoulder and casts a stripe on her cheeks. Why allow Erhensa to believe that the owl moved her. It was only a bird.
“Permit me to continue where I left off,” says Erhensa. “Areemu was the labor of two sisters, a goldsmith and a carpenter who dabbled in alchemy. They wouldn’t have recognized a formal axiom if it sank teeth into their ankles. A convocation of scholars, and they were bested by a pair of tradeswomen.” Erhensa’s mouth curves, wicked. “Imagine the insult of it.”
Ysoreen’s lips twist as though yoked to the islander’s amusement. She straightens them at once.
“They made her out of the most delicate filigrees but also gave her a spine extracted from a rare and special ore: strong as steel but weightless, lustrous as silver but untarnishing. They enameled her skin and shielded her joints in diamonds. For might she not be the princess’s knight as well as her darling?”
Made for combat, Ysoreen writes. It matches the two sisters’ journal. Anywhere, anytime, there’s always a thaumaturgist investing in the idea of an army that knows no pain or disobedience.
“Areemu was presented before the court. The princess had been taught: you are the fairest and none may compare, you are the moon and the stars while all else are candlelight. Yet here Areemu shone, a sun.”
Erhensa sets the charm down. “You had too little sleep, didn’t you?”
Because she dreamed, all night, of a girl who was a bird. She dreamed of driving the blade into eyes too enormous, of tearing out a heart too small and holding it in her fist still beating, always beating. A clot of nausea, a tactile memory. “It is nothing. I’m the mistress of my flesh and it my slave, not the other way around.”
“Body and mind should walk in harmony, as friends or sisters.” Erhensa reaches across and strokes Ysoreen’s forearm. The touch goes through fabric; a tug at her arteries. The queasi ness recedes. “Take this as my apology.”
Ysoreen looks down at the sorcerer’s hand. Those fingers, that skin the shade of oak. She swallows, and when her breath stutters she knows that she’s stayed too long, has let Erhensa under her skin. Symptoms of immaturity, she’s always said of her peers in scorn. She is above it.
“Tomorrow I leave.” Her words do not stumble. “With the golem’s parts.”
“It was pleasant to break my solitude. You will not think of it so, but you kept an old woman company, and that’s a fine, gracious thing.”
“You are not so old as that.”
“I forget that in your country the grayness and bruises of age descend like anchors on a fraying rope. As soon as the first blush of adolescence is past, the flesh puckers and creases while the tendons wither. It’s the winter, which bleeds you of vigor. It’s the food, which lacks spice and so does not arm your livers.” The sorcerer tips her head back. “Where I’m from the grandmothers keep hold of their resilience and dignity long after their heads are white.”
“Why did you leave?” Ysoreen says before she can clinch shut the strings of her curiosity.
“A callow conviction that my will was the sun around which the world must revolve. I offended a woman of prominence and supremacy. And so, as the dusk of my life approaches, I’m severed from my kin and clan, to wait for the end in a land with ice for marrow, which delights only in conquest. A land that loathes me.”
“You could’ve wedded.”
“I could have.” A deep chuckle. “I thought you said a wife was less use than a second head?”
“I meant – for myself.”
The charm inches toward completion. Topaz beads glitter in the velvet of feathers and fur. “Do you want no one to grow old with? It can be difficult to weather alone the decades when your vision dims and your reason fades.”
“Then,” Ysoreen says, “I’d have to marry a woman at least ten years my junior.”
“Or one to whom age does not mean weakness.” Erhensa lifts the triangle and exhales upon it.
Ysoreen imagines that breath against her cheek.
* * *
It is death to sway the mind of an Ormodoni. When I entered Scre, that was one of the compulsions I bowed to, and it slithered into me where it abides even now, a snake of spite and abasement. But it is not Ysoreen’s thoughts that I pluck at, nothing so coherent as picture or language. It is only a look through warped glass. Enough to see that her dream is a bucking beast of russet and soot, snarled with longing.
I wake her, and the dream falls apart like muscle tearing under a machete.
She answers the door in armor. Always she wears it; refuses to be seen without. Despite its protection she flinches at the sight of me. Have I struck too harsh with my trick; have I sundered her courage?
“I wanted to finish my account of Areemu.”
It is to her credit that she is instantly alert. “As you wish.” Perhaps reminded of courtesy a young woman owes one her mother’s age, Ysoreen takes my elbow. Her grip tenses then relaxes, firm.
To my library, where the talisman simmers in the symbols of my country, the symbols of Sumalin. Laminated petals captured at their prime: the liveliest purple, the tartest yellow, the purest white. The seeds of papayas that will never grow here. The shells of tortoises that won’t survive this cold. My shelves strain with volumes from home, paper and wood, alloys and mosaics. More than any treasure, I’ve guarded these, some brought with me on that exiles’ ship, others purchased and amassed over my banishment. I’ve become known as the madwoman who’ll trade jewels for books, so long as they are from the island of my nativity.
Ysoreen conducts me to my seat with a courtier’s gravity, the way they do in high-ceilinged Institute halls. She unfolds my shawl, draping it over my shoulders. Then she steps away, hands clasped behind her.
“Where were we? Yes. The presentation of Areemu. She did not yet live, and if her eyes were clear jewels they did not yet see. It was this unlife that made her bearable to her prospective mistress: it was still possible to think Areemu a doll, satellite rather than sun. Seizing Areemu’s shoulders, the princess ordered that she live. This manner of waking shaped Areemu; prepared the facets of her logic. She would have made a fine instructor at your Institute. No human mind is keener; no pupil a quicker study.”
Ysoreen stiffens. Her teachers ought to be proud of her, their Hall-Warden, so strict and strictly adherent to their every code. “What have you taught her?”
“Any skill or discipline she cared to learn. Astronomy, painting, horticulture.”
“What else was she like?”
“This.”
The door opens and Areemu steps through.
A glance too long or a thought too weighty will scatter her, this shimmer in the cold. But Ysoreen Zarre will not be able to tell that. Areemu seems as solid as either of us; more, for we are merely suet and fluids while she is – was – harder elements, sturdier substance.
My daughter is holding a dress I trained her to sew, and in this art she exceeded me: a marvel of sleek fabric and wave-patterns, embroidery of tails and shark pectorals to honor my ancestral land. Laughing soundlessly Areemu shakes out the gown to show me her work.
Ysoreen’s attention is held fast by my mirage daughter. I know then that I will have Areemu back. I will have my daughter back and the chambers of my house will echo no more; the chambers of my heart will brighten again.
“Your gift will be finished by noon tomorrow. I will be sorry to see you go.”
“If I—” Ysoreen has turned to me, but her thoughts are looped tight around Areemu. “If before I leave I ask you a question, will you give me a true answer?”
“You are of Ormodon.” I know what the question will be.
“Not that. I want . . . an answer that is not obliged. If such a thing is possible.”
“I will give you your answer,” I say, folding that memory of Areemu to myself, lustrous as the best nacre-silk.
It is the code of Ormodon to be true to the self. Hold your soul before a convex glass each dawn, her superiors said, and study it without mercy. Let no secrets elude your gaze, for it is their way to suppurate. Instead, mine every last one to find its strength; hammer the metal of your secrets until it is supple and strong. With this, sheathe your will. Your desires shall not be weakness but armor for the weapon of your mind.
This is what she has not mastered, her one flaw. This is what she must master now.
Before, it was simple to sort her small wants, her transient hopes, into those that might be acted upon and those that might not; those that she could do without and those she could not. What is prohibited, what may be obtained. None of them was ever so tangled as this.
It doesn’t have to be. Erhensa will say yes. Marriage to an officer is better than gold, and Ysoreen can give the islander everything. Elevation, if Erhensa wishes it. Unquestioned right to live where she does; do as she pleases.
A daughter who lives and grows, to help Erhensa forget the golem. They’ll need a blood-rite and a willing womb. There’s never a shortage of refugee women who will take on the burden; it earns them three years of wanting for nothing and a chance at citizenship.
Ysoreen doesn’t wait. She passes the manservant in the corridor, who gives berth and stammers that his mistress is in her study, does the Hall-Warden not require directions, does she . . .
“She knows the way.” Ys
oreen finds herself laughing, her steps buoyant. An aviary of possibilities in her chest.
Erhensa looks up, and Ysoreen fancies that her mouth flexes toward a smile. There is a circle of color in the sorcerer’s irises that she hasn’t noticed before, the shade of good citrines, and she marvels at this newfound clarity.
“A question, you promised.” Erhensa’s voice is a caress.
The cautious eagerness of that. And why not? Those glances, those gestures. Ysoreen gathers herself and goes to one knee before the sorcerer. Bolder than she feels, she clasps Erhensa’s hand; savors with a frisson the texture of it, soft-rough, calluses. “Mistress Erhensa, I’d like your leave—”
“Yes,” Erhensa exhales. “Of course, yes.”
Ysoreen’s thoughts teeter and tip over. Momentum alone drives her to complete her sentence. “Mistress Erhensa. With your leave I would court you, and at a later date ask to be yours in marriage. Would you have this?”
But the answer is yes, already; her throat needs not dry, her heart needs not race – hunter chasing prey – after her desire.
Except Erhensa’s fingers do not knit into hers; except Erhensa does not clasp her face or bend to kiss her. All she says is, “Oh, Hall-Warden,” before she frees herself from Ysoreen.
On her knee still, Ysoreen swallows, breathless. She does not— “You are saying no?”
“I believed you would ask an entirely different question, and it is that which I answered. The shape of your moods, the direction of your temperament. I couldn’t be surer.”
Her armor jangles – too loud – as she comes to her feet, quick as the burn of shame. Quicker. “But I thought . . .”
“I was a fool, singular in my purpose.” Erhensa shakes her head. “Hall-Warden, you’ve a future ahead of you, a ribbon that spools incandescent around the core of your spirit and station. What could you want with an immigrant sorcerer as old as I?”