House of Shadows (12 page)

And she was, of course, curious. Leilis wordlessly held out her hand to the child.

Moonflower, looking very serious, took Leilis’s hand between both of hers. For a moment she looked only puzzled. Then surprised revulsion came into her face and she jerked away, holding her hands out from her body as though they were contaminated. Confusion came into her expression next, and embarrassment. She held her hands up and looked at her palms, then rubbed them on her thighs and looked in even greater embarrassment back at Leilis.

It took a moment for Leilis to steady her voice, to speak with some semblance of her customary flat indifference. True indifference was not, right now, within her reach. But she was too proud to make a show of loss, of grief. Of the bitterness of failure. She said, “The effect is even stronger when a man touches me.” She had to cut the last word off short, or she would have lost control of her tone.

Moonflower cried, with intense sympathy, “But that is horrible! Couldn’t Narienneh—couldn’t Mother make it better?”

Again, it took a long moment for Leilis to flatten her tone. She said, her tone colder than she’d intended, “All the mages of Lonne tried, one after another. None of them could remove the spell. None of them understood exactly what Blueflax had done, or how she had done it so—powerfully. One of them tried Blueflax as an apprentice, but she had no aptitude. Another said I—said I was myself at fault, that there was some kind of intrinsic magic in me that had got slantwise to the magery in the curse. He thought if he could get rid of the curse I might have aptitude myself, maybe because of my father. But he couldn’t, so it didn’t matter.”

“Your father?”

“He was a mage, a king’s mage, from the Laodd. He never had much interest in the left-hand daughter whose birth killed her mother. I didn’t know him.” Leilis waved an impatient hand. “He’s dead now—it doesn’t matter.” It didn’t. No girl born to a keiso was likely to think overmuch of her
father
. In the flower world, mothers and sisters were everything. And, of course, as she was not keiso, Leilis did not truly have those, either. She set her teeth against sharp anger Moonflower surely did not deserve.

“Oh,” Moonflower said in a faint voice.

“But even though Mother wouldn’t send me away, of course I was ruined for the flower world.” Despite everything she could do, Leilis’s voice shook a little at the end of this explanation.

“This is
terrible
!”

“I’m accustomed to it,” said Leilis. But she had to wait a moment before she could go on smoothly. “It was years ago. But what happened to me made Mother guard you more carefully.” Though Leilis had had to work hard to make sure of it, and now found herself even doubting whether anything she’d yet managed could even begin to guard this innocent girl
enough
. Or whether she could stand the burden of Karah’s gratitude or trust or whatever it was the girl was offering… Suddenly desperate to recover her solitude, Leilis said, “You will be very busy. You have a great deal to learn. So you had best go back to Rue and rest while you have the chance.” She knew her tone had gone sharp, even savage.

“Yes,” Moonflower said, earnestly, without either apparent offense or fear, and bowed herself gracefully out of Leilis’s room.

She would, Leilis thought, make an unforgettable keiso. If only that would be enough… Narienneh might have required prompting to change the girl’s robe straightaway, but she shouldn’t regret her decision. Though Leilis had no authority or official reason even to consider such questions, though nothing about running Cloisonné House could ever legitimately be her business, Leilis couldn’t help but find satisfaction, cold though it might be, in that conclusion.

And if Narienneh remembered that the initial idea had come from Leilis… well, naturally it wouldn’t matter, because Leilis could never be anything more than she already was: not quite a servant, yet truly nothing more, either. She threw a knot of wood violently into her fire, scattering burning twigs out onto the hearth. She left them there, guttering on the hearthstones, and went to gaze blindly out the room’s small window.

CHAPTER 5

N
emienne sat cross-legged on cold stone, her hands resting on her thighs, her back very straight, surrounded by a heavy, ungiving darkness that pressed down upon her. It was not quite silent: A slow drip of water somewhere far away broke through the otherwise impenetrable boundaries of the dark.

She was trying to call light.

“It is a simple magic, and a necessary one,” Mage Ankennes had told her. “You learn the theory of magecraft quickly and this is good. You understand some of what you are taught, which is better still. But what I will begin to teach you now is the foundation of true magic. The featureless dark resists any form a mage tries to give it. It crushes the heart and muffles the mind. You will find that darkness may of itself smother light. Magic requires light and clarity. You must learn to strike through the dark and send it back to hide in its shadows so that you will be able to work.”

So far Nemienne had proved unable to do any such thing. She wondered how stupid she would have to be at summoning light before Ankennes would give up on her and send her home. Well, but it didn’t matter, she told herself firmly. Because she
would
learn how to do it.

She knew, though she could not see it, that a fat white candle sat on a saucer at her feet. “You may find it helpful to use fire to remind yourself of light,” the mage had explained. “Light the candle if you wish. Then, when you have reminded yourself of the
heft and quality of fire, blow it out and try again to summon a purer light.”

Nemienne had not yet reached for the candle. She had never been frightened of the dark in her life, yet she thought she could become afraid of this darkness. That didn’t help. It made her angry. That wouldn’t help, either.

Light. She needed to think of light… There was the pearly light of the early morning before the sun had quite risen above the mountains; there was the light of the morning sun that glittered on the waves of the harbor. Flames leaping in fireplaces drove away the chill. Slender tapers with tall narrow flames created a mysterious flickering light so sisters could huddle close and tell stories in the dark.

This
darkness did not seem to invite companionable stories. Nemienne held her hands in front of her face, opening and closing her fingers. Her hands were completely invisible.

In summer afternoons, heat poured down into the narrow streets of the city and ran, heavy as gold, along the cobbles. At home on those afternoons, she and her sisters would go out onto their balcony to sleep at night. Miande would let the fire in the oven go out, and Father would send out for cold soups or chilled noodles.

Nemienne closed her eyes, fiercely homesick. It was the fault, she thought, of this featureless dark. She could almost believe that when she opened her eyes, she would find herself in the familiar gallery, with the voices of her sisters echoing up to her from the house below.

She opened her eyes to darkness and cold, and the sound of the distant slow dripping of water onto stone. The candle sat before her in its saucer. She reached out to find it, ran a fingertip over the smoothness of its wax and the stiff little wick reassuring at the top. Yes. The mage had shown her how to light a candle: pulling a little fire from the air to light a candle was not difficult. She had done it seven tries out of ten only the previous afternoon. Only now, though she tried and tried, fire refused to bloom along the candle’s wick. Nemienne took her hand away from the candle, grimacing.

In the distance, water dripped from some unguessable height into an unseen pool.

Abruptly, the darkness folded back around her, and she found herself sitting on the floor of the mage’s workroom. The room was flooded with light and heat, from wide windows and lanterns and a fire roaring in the great fireplace. The darkness, so heavy and impenetrable a moment before, immediately seemed a distant, weightless thing. Nemienne blinked in the light, feeling half drowned by it, wondering how she could have failed to summon such a powerful substance.

Mage Ankennes sat at his writing desk, one elbow propped on its surface. Enkea perched on his knee. He leaned his chin on his palm and regarded Nemienne with a thoughtful expression very like the cat’s. “Can you light the candle now?” he asked.

Nemienne blinked again and lowered her gaze to the candle sitting on the floor by her knee. The heat of the fire beat against her face. Looking into the fire, Nemienne borrowed a little of its fierceness. Reaching out, she brushed the wick of the candle with the tip of her finger and, as he had taught her, let the fire run through her mind and into her hand. The candle burst into flame.

“Yes,” said the mage thoughtfully.

“It’s easy,” Nemienne said. “I mean, here it’s easy. I don’t know why it’s different in the dark.”

“Hmm. Tell me, what disturbed you most, in that dark place?”

Nemienne thought about this. She said finally, “The dripping water.”

“Mmm.” The mage studied Nemienne, seeming taken a little by surprise. “The water. Not the dark itself.”

“The sound of the water seemed too far away. Hearing the drops fall made the dark seem to stretch out too far. As though there was no end to it anywhere. And the sound seemed too loud for its distance.”

“Ah. A good observation. You are a perceptive child. Ordinarily one would expect insight to lead to practical achievement.” His tone gave her no hint whether he valued insight more than
practical achievement or the reverse, but he offered Nemienne a hand up without apparent disapproval, lifting her effortlessly to her feet. His grip was firm and impersonal, his hand almost fever hot, as though fire burned behind his skin. He said, “That is water that falls from one darkness into another without ever being touched by light. It carries power into the depths of the mountain. You felt that. Were you afraid of that darkness?”

“A little,” Nemienne admitted.

“That will pass,” said the mage. “You may read, hmm, Kelle Iasodde, I think. The fifth section, where he discusses the eternal darkness and contrasts it with the simple darkness of the ephemeral world. Write me, shall we say, a five-hundred-word essay? About the symbolism of glass and iron and their use in allowing a mage to shift between the worlds of the ephemeral and the eternal.”

Nemienne nodded, brightening. Iasodde was hard to understand in places, but that sounded interesting.

The mage smiled a little more widely, missing nothing. He said, “Good. You may try this again tomorrow, then. Or the next day, perhaps. Tonight, the essay. And you may practice calling fire to light candles even in the dark, eh? The ordinary darkness of your room, for now. And practice putting them out again. You’re clever enough with fire. Fire is sympathetic to light. Work with the one and the other should come to you more easily.”

Nemienne nodded again. “You mean, light and fire are in sympathy with one another because they are similar things? Fire is ephemeral, isn’t that what Iasodde says? And light is eternal. Fire brings light, but it isn’t really the same thing at all.” She had been reading about the principles of sympathetic magic, and finding the theory not quite impenetrably dense.

“Precisely so,” said the mage. “Very good. Read the fourth passage of the second chapter of Iasodde—yes, I know you have read it. Read it again. Write a second essay for me comparing fire and light, heat and fire, and sympathy and similarity. You will enjoy that, I think, and you may find that understanding the underlying theory
will lead to smoother application in practice. You will learn to hold both light and fire in your mind, a defense against any dark, though it stretches out infinitely far.”

Nemienne tried to imagine this. She would far rather write difficult essays than try to summon light into impenetrable darkness, but she didn’t say so. But she thought she understood why it was important to learn how. She asked, “Why
did
you build your house in the shadow of the mountain, stretching back into the mountain, if darkness is an enemy of magic?”

Ankennes smiled. “A good question. Your answer?”

“So you would remain familiar with the dark, through continually dealing with it? So you would be constantly reminded of light, through having to keep it in mind against the dark?”

“Both good answers,” said the mage approvingly.

As Nemienne had already learned was his habit, he did not give any suggestion whether either guess was actually correct. But he seemed happy with her, so she was tentatively pleased with herself despite her inability to summon light into darkness. Anyway, she would learn that. She would learn
everything
. She already knew—she had known from the first moment in the mage’s house—that she belonged here in this house of magic, in the shadow of the mountain and the shadow of magic. She wasn’t sure Mage Ankennes was perfectly confident of it; she never knew what the mage was thinking. But she meant to prove it to him by midwinter.