House of Shadows (27 page)

Mother made a faint gesture of disdain, but at the same time her mouth crooked into a slight smile.

“I shall suggest appropriate Houses, then,” Leilis said, with a small formal bow of acquiescence. “And I shall advise her to dry those tears of hers and try each one smiling. Resilience and a bit of spirit will do better for her than piteous tears. Have you other advice I should convey?”

“If advice would make a fool wise, there would be no fools in the world,” Mother said tartly, and sighed, the sadness in her face belying the sharpness of her words. She added in a lower tone, “Perhaps I should make Lily keiso at once. Perhaps that would…” She did not complete the suggestion.

Leilis bit back an exclamation of dismay. She lowered her eyes instead, and murmured, “Cloisonné House may surely set the style for lesser Houses. But yielding to foolishness among the deisa may
not end their envy.”
Rather the reverse
, she did not say. It was hardly necessary to point out the obvious. Mother was already waving away her own suggestion. She said merely, “You may deliver that reference, Leilis.”

Leilis bowed obedience and rolled up the parchment. It was only a pity, she thought, that she was not delivering this reference to Lily. Except she doubted that any reference, no matter how generously worded, would open a place for Lily at any house other than Cloisonné… at any house where the Mother was not so blinded by partiality that she could not see that Lily’s malice was not the ordinary jealousy of any deisa.

Well… at least Sweetrose’s dismissal should make even Lily cautious. For a while. So for that little while, Karah should be safe. Leilis tapped the parchment against the palm of her hand and lengthened her stride down the stairs, hurrying to be sure she would catch Sweetrose before the girl left the house. There was a pleasure in the hurry, a kind of pleasure Leilis had almost forgotten. Not the cold satisfaction of settling the affairs of Cloisonné House properly, but a warmer feeling, born of unaccustomed kindness.

And yet Leilis did not think she had ever been deliberately unkind toward the girls and women of Cloisonné House. Indifferent, perhaps, to the concerns that moved them and were so often so petty. But unkind? Surely mere lack of interest was not the same as unkindness? And if she had for years been unmoved by the small troubles of keiso and servants and, especially, servants, then… why now should those troubles move her? She turned a corner and went down a flight of stairs, frowning.

CHAPTER 10

N
emienne woke up out of unremembered dreams with a sharp thrill of terror and a conviction that she had almost heard a scattering of delicate musical notes. She understood the terror only after she felt it. It woke her, and she sat up with a sharp gasp. Only then did she realize that she was not in her bed at home alongside her sisters, nor in her small, pretty room in Mage Ankennes’s house. Instead, she sat on cold stone. She was surrounded by stone, enclosed by a great, heavy darkness. It was the darkness that smothered light; the darkness that seemed as though it might smother breath as well. In the far distance, Nemienne could not hear music now, but only the slow, distant dripping of water.

There was stone under her hand when she pushed herself to her feet, stone above her and all around her. She couldn’t see it, but she knew it was there: a crushing weight above and to every side. This heavy darkness was the shadow the stone cast, she understood suddenly. That was why it weighed so heavily, because there was so much stone… She understood as well, and just as abruptly, that she was still dreaming.

Over the past days, Nemienne had learned to summon first warmth and then light into the commonplace darkness that lay in an ordinary unlit room or outside under the high stars. But she had never yet been able to break through the heavier darkness that lay under stone.

She was embarrassed by her failure, though Mage Ankennes
was patient. Nemienne was grateful every day for his patience, but she resented the fact that he needed to be patient. Mage Ankennes said she would learn. He said she had been born to be a mage. Nemienne was determined to make sure he was proved right. But still she could not learn to summon light into the darkness.

But it seemed unfair—silly, even—that she should not be able to summon light in a
dream
. In a dream, you should be able to do
anything
. In the dream, then, Nemienne lifted her hands and tried again to call light. Or not call, exactly. She found she was more searching for light that might already be here, light that would not do battle with the surrounding darkness, but would exist in companionable peace with it.

And light came. But not any familiar light. Not the clean white light she’d wanted. This was a pale greenish light that clung to her hands and illuminated… well, very little. Nemienne knew she stood on stone because she could feel it underfoot. She knew that somewhere far away water was dripping into a pool from somewhere very high above. But the light she had found did not press back the darkness very far, and she could see nothing else.

Then a glimmer, up ahead of her, turned out on a second glance to be Enkea’s white foot. The cat was just visible, standing like a statue at the farthest boundary of Nemienne’s light. She turned her head and looked at Nemienne over her shoulder, and her eyes flashed green as the light—greener: green as the shade under beech leaves, green as the light that filtered through the sea… The slim cat turned again and walked away into the dark.

Nemienne walked forward, following the cat through her dream. The pale light that clung to her hands trailed behind her as she moved, ribbons of light that undulated through the dark like waterweed through the moving sea. Nemienne felt that she herself drifted like that through this dark, as though it had as much substance and body as water and she almost swam through it rather than walked.

It occurred to Nemienne, as she followed Enkea, that behind the dripping of the water, she could once more hear the breathy,
delicate sound of pipes. The music was not loud, but the pipes possessed a pure fragile voice—no, two distinct voices. One was pitched low, to match the weight of the surrounding darkness. The other was pitched high… to match light? No, of course not, she realized at once. The higher voice of the pipe was pitched to lay a path through the dark, but not a path into light… Nemienne hesitated, drawn to follow that strange harmony and yet doubting suddenly where that path might lead.

Ahead of her, Enkea turned her head again and mewed, a thin sound that slipped through the dark without disturbing it. Nemienne hurried forward after the cat. In the way of dreams, she was suddenly running… She no longer felt the stone under her feet, but the sound of each water drop striking into whatever pool hid in the darkness echoed around Nemienne like the stroke of a brazen bell.

Ahead of her, she suddenly saw someone. In the way of dreams, she knew at once who this was. As though this knowledge brought her through all the darkness and across all the distance that separated them, she found herself immediately at her sister’s side, reaching out to grasp Karah’s hands. She was only tangentially aware of someone else, another presence, a man, a stranger… but whoever he was, she did not know him, and while she clung to her sister’s hands, he walked away from them both, following the music of the pipes into the darkness.

Karah, Nemienne knew, had also been following the voices of the pipes. And, without understanding why, Nemienne knew her sister must not follow that music. That neither of them dared follow it, or like the stranger, they would vanish along the path the music laid down into the dark. As though the very realization broke some strange spell, the sound of the pipes faded into the distance… faint and fainter, and then gone. And as though the vanishing sound of the pipes took confusion away with it, Nemienne realized that she was awake.

In the greenish glow of light clinging to Nemienne’s hands, Karah blinked, shook her head, and blinked again—much as though she herself was waking from a dream. A shape half hidden
by her hair stirred, and Nemienne saw that her sister carried a kitten on her shoulder. The small animal seemed made of silver and smoke. Its eyes were green as water. It peered down from Karah’s shoulder toward Enkea, who sat with her tail coiled around her feet and blinked up at it in calm disdain.

“Karah?” Nemienne said, and was surprised by how self-possessed she sounded. Almost as if she spoke with someone else’s voice, someone older and much more experienced. She could not, after all, decide whether she was dreaming or awake. She pinched the skin of her wrist between her fingernails, blinking at the sharp pain.

“Nemienne?” Karah said in return. She gazed, bewildered, at her sister and the greenish light, and then around at the powerful darkness that surrounded them both. Then she scrubbed her face with her hands, shook her head again, and asked, “Where are we? What is this… place?” The last word sounded doubtful.

The kitten leaped down from Karah’s shoulder, dashed toward Enkea, flung itself flat on its side, slid across the stone, and wound up nearly underneath the adult cat, reaching up with one little paw to bat at her nose. Enkea drew herself up to her feet with an affronted hiss and stalked away, pausing only to glare back commandingly over her shoulder at Nemienne.

“Um…” Nemienne did not know how to answer her sister. Instead, she drew Karah around, never letting go of her hand, and tugged her after the cat. The kitten dashed after them, making little forays out into the dark but always circling back to the girls. Several times Nemienne nearly tripped on it, until Karah finally picked the little creature up and put it back on her shoulder. Then it hid itself in her hair, peering out with eyes that reflected the green light like emeralds.

“Where did you get the kitten?” Nemienne asked at last, because that was a question that might actually have an answer.

“Oh, she was a gift,” answered Karah, and blushed—actually blushed, visible even in the strange light, which made Nemienne
laugh. Karah laughed, too, a warm chuckle that invited her sister to share her delight not only in the gift but also in the fact of the giving.

“You’re already receiving gifts! And from whom? Is he wonderful?” Nemienne asked, teasing.

“He might be. Maybe he is,” Karah said, laughing again, seeming both happy and embarrassed. But then she at once turned the subject: “And your cat? Where did you get her? I think Moonglow is special, I mean really special, not just special to me. But your cat must be special, too, don’t you think? She certainly seems to know where she’s going.”

“Oh, she’s not mine,” Nemienne said, and started to say that Enkea belonged to Mage Ankennes. But then she was not sure this was exactly true, either, and so she said instead, “She always does seem to know where she’s going—and she always seems to think I should follow her, usually into uncomfortable places!”

“As long as she leads us out again,” Karah said, glancing around once more at the surrounding darkness that pressed in on all sides.

Somehow Nemienne didn’t think this was the right time to explain that the last time Enkea had led her into the dark, the cat had not in fact led her back out.

Trails of green light rippled behind them where they had passed, brightest near at hand and trailing out to invisibility about twenty steps behind them. “That’s so strange,” Karah said, glancing back, and echoed Nemienne’s own thought: “That light of yours looks like undersea plants stirred by the current. But a current through, I don’t know, darkness instead of water. Where
are
we, exactly?”

Nemienne began to say that she didn’t know, but what came out was, “I think, beneath the mountain. Kerre Maraddras, I think.” She paused, hearing this answer echo away into the dark. Hearing the truth of it. She said, exploring that truth, “I’ve been here before—there’s a way into this place from Mage Ankennes’s house. At least one way. But this time I only woke up and I was here. I think I came here this time because you were here. But however did
you
come to be here, Karah?”

Her sister answered slowly, “I was asleep, too, I think. I think, in my dreams, there was piping.”

“Piping!” Nemienne almost thought she might have heard pipe music, too, just as she had woken into the darkness here, but she was no longer sure.

“Yes. I followed the music. I didn’t walk through darkness, not then. It seemed I walked through a marvelous place, but I can’t remember anything of that place now. Or maybe it only seemed that the piping was leading me somewhere marvelous… Then you caught my hands and I… woke up.” She glanced around doubtfully, probably wondering whether she was truly awake after all.