A Play of Shadow (59 page)

Stone or clay beneath the paint? She couldn’t help but touch—

The eyes opened, the mouth smiled, and a hand shot up to cup her breast while the other slipped between—

“Heart’s Blood!” Jenn leapt back and would have struck the presumptuous creation, but its eyes closed as did its mouth, and the hands fell harmlessly to its sides.

“May I help you?” The artisan had come through the curtain. He flicked a finger at his shoulder then waited, sucking on a stick of red candy.

Jenn touched her shoulder hastily, then bowed to be safe. “My apologies. I followed your chicken.” She frowned. “Why do you have a chicken?”

Out came the candy, to be aimed at the cot. “Hard enough to sleep here. The clucking helps. I’m Stevynn the sculptor. May I help you?”

Her role. “My name is Jenn. I represent a master merchant, interested in putting together a shipment of new works,” she explained. “He’s asked me to visit yours.”

The candy stick pointed to the naked man who’d groped her, then waved to encompass the rest. “These are commissioned. Bought and paid for. Private. Since you’re the one trespassing, I expect discretion.” As he spoke, Stevynn tried to scowl, which might have succeeded except that he looked just like their father whenever he tried to scold her and Peggs.

Both men having faces more suited to laughter.

“I won’t tell anyone.” Not that she grasped what was so secret about these statues; many of the other artisans exhibited nude forms, though none that were so—active. “Have you anything smaller?” she asked, hoping he’d lead her elsewhere. “We’ve cargo constraints.” The vague term Bannan had given her having proved its worth already.

Stevynn drew the curtain aside, nodding for her to go out. “I’ve samples of my public offerings. But my work doesn’t travel well. This would be the merchant?”

Jenn looked to find Bannan stood just inside the stall, doubtless alarmed when she’d disappeared. He touched staff to shoulder in greeting, but didn’t speak.

The artisan’s brows rose toward his hairless scalp, but he turned his attention back to Jenn. “Trusts your judgment, I see.”

“Yes.” Flustered, Jenn went to the nearest of the clothed statues, a woman with a fiercely intelligent face. She’d been carved with shoulders bared, breasts rising like waves beneath a web of gold beadwork, and the more Jenn looked, the more realistic the woman appeared. “Your work is astonishing.”

“Care for a sample?” the woman asked dryly, looking down.

While Jenn gaped, Stevynn pulled the candy from his mouth, wrapped it, and tucked it in a pocket. “My wife, Lianna. Always better at business. Please. Try for yourself.”

After what happened in the back of the stall? Jenn began to shake her head. “I really mustn’t—”

But Stevynn’s wife had already gone behind the curtain, returning with a flat square of unfired clay on a tray, and Stevynn stood waiting, something of Radd Nalynn in the shape of his face, and something of hope in his eyes.

Where was the harm? Besides, she was playing the role of someone who might buy this talented man’s work. “What do I do?”

“Touch to see,” the artisan sang, rather than spoke, “what yours would be.”

As her hand reached, Bannan stepped forward, crying “Jenn!” and she tried to stop. Too late. She felt the cool of clay on her fingertip.

Stevynn took the square and held it toward Jenn, singing again. “The Far Step need not be your last. Behold my gift, your living past.”

A figure pulled itself from the clay, as though rising from the ground. Colors ran this way and that. Cloth appeared and fluttered into place and with a final lift of her head, Frann Nall stood in Stevynn’s hands.

She was no taller than a cup, no more alive than before, and heartbreakingly real. When she smiled and raised her hand, Jenn bolted from the stall.

Hearing Stevynn call after her. “Order soon. The full version takes five days in the oven.”

“Ancestors Witness. I knew a man once,” Bannan commented. “Had his dead horse stuffed and put into his hall. He really loved that horse.”

Jenn gave him a sidelong look. She’d passed two more stalls without slowing and they’d begun to stand out from the milling crowd, but he didn’t protest. “What they did there. It wasn’t right.”

“They harm no one.”

“We don’t keep our dead!” A passerby glanced at them and a flush appeared on the cheek he could see. Jenn lowered her voice. “You know what I mean. The departed leave their shape, to be Blessed Ancestors. It makes no sense to buy those—those copies! Besides,” with familiar practicality. “What does one do with such a thing? Show it to friends? Stand it by the table for meals? Cover it to keep off dust?”

Not the truth. Not what drove her forward, as if in flight.

Bannan understood. Who better? Leaving for the border hadn’t eased the pain of losing father and mother, only added the recurring one of fallen comrades. He’d learned. Only the dead could be left behind.

“Jenn. Jenn—!” when she didn’t look around. He touched her elbow. “We didn’t bury our grief with Frann’s bones, Ancestors Dear and Departed. Or leave it in Marrowdell.” He lowered his head near hers. “We carry it. Sometimes put aside, but never gone. Nor should it be.”

“’Dear and Departed.” A tear slid down her now-pale cheek. “She looked—real. She smiled at me.”

The loss in her voice cut his heart. He lifted his head, making his own tone matter-of-fact. “Emon spoke of such statues. The movement’s drawn from the bereaved memory of the person, as is the appearance. That’s all they are, Jenn. The smile you saw was one you remembered. You don’t need a statue for that.”

She considered this in silence as they passed a stall with paintings that sang like the birds they depicted.

Then, “There were others, in the back.” Was that another blush rising? “They moved—differently.”

Love mimics? Emon, ever fascinated, had described those with great gusto. For a price, you could have the object of your unrequited lust, conveniently cooperative, if unreal. Being illegal, the originals more than willing to prosecute if their mimics were discovered, only added to the things’ allure.

It was Bannan’s turn to feel heat in his face. Jenn was learning more than he’d anticipated of city life.

“I’ve seen my first chicken,” she announced all at once, her voice happier. “I think I prefer my eggs from toads.”

Relieved, Bannan gently patted his purse. “Not that we need one now, little cousin.” Though what the toad might “make” next was a question he’d like answered. Eggs from pebbles; gauds from the hearts of fallen enemies; a mask from a moth.

What might come from dragon-melted iron?

That disturbing train of thought ended as Jenn exclaimed. “Look at those!”

She carried her grief. Thinking that, realizing the truth of it, Jenn felt lighter. Had she thought to honor Frann’s loss by burying that pain, by trying to forget? If so, she’d done them both a disservice.

Better this, the splash of ready tears as she gazed wonderingly at what Frann would have loved. Flutes, somehow suspended in the air, played themselves in exquisite harmony. There were small ones and ones longer than her arm. Some turned slowly, their intricate keys twinkling as unseen fingers rose and fell. Others were still and silent until she came close, then burst into trills that lay over the other notes like frost on a window.

“Are you all right?” Bannan asked quietly.

He’d known what to say because he carried more grief than she could imagine, yet lived life with such joy it spread to everyone around him. Despite that grief. Despite the scars he bore.

Or . . . could it be because of them?

Surrounded by music, Jenn touched her fingers to her shoulder as she met the truthseer’s apple butter eyes, being unable, in this public place, to take him in her arms.

“I will be,” she said, and saw his eyes glow with the truth of that.

They walked past the next artisan, a chandler. Jenn glanced inside, seeing rows of bronze candles on shelves set against the tent walls. Those ranks were unlit and oddly plain, in a market where everything moved or sang. They weren’t alone in passing it by. Few so much as noticed it.

Then Jenn saw one candle was lit, on a pedestal in the middle of the floor.

A simple candle, with nothing remarkable about it, yet she slowed. When had she seen a candle burn with such golden light?

“What is it?” Bannan asked.

“I’m not sure.” Jenn went into the stall, the truthseer at her side.

The closer she came to the candle, the gladder she felt. It was as though its flame shed happiness as much as light.

“Ancestors Blessed.” The truthseer smiled, going to the other side of the candle. They looked at one another across it and, for no reason, both laughed.

Jenn looked happy, he felt—as if every weight had been lifted—that’s how he felt and if a candle was responsible, Bannan couldn’t imagine why this stall wasn’t filled with customers.

Pat. Pat. The purse at his hip bumped and shook.

Unless the happiness was due to some drug and this a trap. Losing his smile, Bannan’s hand dropped to the lid. “Jenn, ask it what’s wrong.”

Keeping her smile, she said gently, “Nothing’s wrong, Dearest Heart. The little cousin’s happy too.” Her eyes gained the faraway look they had when she listened to what he couldn’t, then Jenn chuckled. “We’re expected.”

They couldn’t be. Bannan had time to worry before a man stepped through the curtain separating the private portion of the stall from the public and clapped, as if overjoyed to see them. A lion paced the skin of his shoulders and they’d never met, he was certain.

But there was something familiar about his round gentle face—The truthseer looked deeper.

To find pure joy.

He moved involuntarily to seize the man’s hands, meeting a strong, sure clasp. “You see me,” the man exclaimed with pleasure.

“I do,” Bannan said huskily, unafraid to speak. There was nothing but good in this man.

Here was another like Wainn and Wen.

Touched by the Verge, and magic.

Leott was his name and Jenn knew, even without the toad’s happy ~We’re here! We’ve come!~ and Bannan’s beaming face, that this was someone to trust. Without hesitation, they let the artisan lead them into the back portion of the stall. It wasn’t a workshop at all.