Vincalis the Agitator (23 page)

Wraith stood in the darkness at the very edge of the circle, hidden in the shadows of the houses, and watched them. A girl
in a pale green tunic and matching tights, with heavy cloth boots that tied just beneath her knees, stood up and began to
spin and leap and kick her feet high into the air. With each kick, her foot went higher than her head. Wraith found himself
holding his breath against the inevitable disaster when she lost track of the positions of the other dancers and her foot
went into someone’s nose—but she was fast and agile and she never even grazed any of the rest. Nonetheless, many of the dancers
moved to the edges of the circle to give the girl room. When she had it, her movements became even more incredible. She ran
on her toes, launched herself into the air, right leg pointing an arrow in the direction she sailed, her left leg trailing
behind like a flame in a high wind. Her arms arched over her head, and at the highest point in her leap she let out a shout
that would have woken the armies of the dead and stirred the warriors of old to bloodlust lust and magnificent feats of daring.
She leaped again, and spun in the air this time, her body a living impossibility. Wraith tried to understand how she could
be doing what she was doing. He would have suspected magic, but this place bore no artifacts of magical origin; it seemed
a place built in defiance of magic. Wraith could not think that in this place the girl’s tremendous feats of agility and strength
were anything but her own skill.

He simply had never seen such skill before.

She made two circles of the fire, and at the end of it retired to stand to one side, and a young man, who seemed to be waiting
for her to clear the makeshift stage, took her place. His dancing was as wondrous as hers. He was shirtless in the cold night
air, and his baggy pants and soft cloth boots only emphasized the perfection of his movements. He seemed to Wraith to be not
a man, but a creature of energy and light, as if he cast the light in the circle and the fire was merely his reflection or
his shadow. His muscles stood out as he spun and stamped and jumped, sweat-slicked and shining, and Wraith felt a stab of
pure envy. He tried to imagine himself in that circle, dancing, and groaned as he thought of his skinny, pale, weak chest
and arms, his thin legs, his big clumsy feet.

“You really shouldn’t be here, you know,” someone said at his back.

He thought for an instant that his heart had stopped beating, so sharp was the pain of his fear in his chest. He turned and
looked at the woman who had come up behind him. Plain-faced, of middling years, lean and muscular as any of the young women
dancers, she stood watching him with an expression cast between wariness and curiosity.

“I … hadn’t intended to,” he said. “I got lost.”

“Lost?” She looked at his clothes, his shoes, his face, and said, “I would have thought, stolti, that such a thing would be
impossible for you. A simple question asked to the air should set you right and take you to your destination.”

“I don’t use magic,” he said before he’d had a chance to think that perhaps he should not be confiding in strangers.

But those four words seemed to cast a form of magic of their own. “Who
are
you?” she asked, but she smiled when she asked it, and took him by the arm and dragged him toward the circle, toward the
beautiful dancers, toward the fire.

W
hat do you mean, he told you to get out of his life?” Solander stared at the sobbing Velyn, and then around the darkened theater.
Jess sat on one of the benches, pretending she wasn’t listening. Pretending she wasn’t gloating.

“He told me I ought to start looking for my perfect vowmate immediately, before I was too old to have children normally.”

Solander glanced over Velyn’s shoulder at Jess. She clearly loved every new detail in this confession.

“Why would he
do
that?” Solander asked. “Or did he find out about your … um, other interests?”

Velyn looked startled. “You mean the other men I see? I don’t think they had anything to do with it. He’s never asked about
them, and I’ve never mentioned them in so many words, but certainly he’s known that I’ve had other men in my life all along.”

Solander was shaking his head. “I’m rather sure he believes he was the only man in your life. You were the only woman in his.
Ever.”

Velyn looked like she’d just fallen from a roof in the Aboves and was on her way to the Belows with a clear view of where
she would land. “No. That’s nonsense.”

Jess laughed softly. “Not nonsense at all. I happen to know that he’s never been with anyone but you in his life.”

“You can’t know that.”

“Why couldn’t I? He told me about it. I have no reason not to believe him. It isn’t like he had anything to lose by telling
me the truth, or anything to gain by lying. He just told me, as part of a conversation we were having.”

“Oh … gods …” Velyn whispered. “But then, that makes the way he acted make a little more sense, anyway.”

“Why?” Solander asked. “All you’ve said so far was that he told you to get out of his life and tore out of here like a crazy
person.”

“He asked me to take vows with him. I told him I couldn’t—the thing about me being stolti and him not, and how someday I wanted
to have a vowmate with whom I could raise stolti children—but I told him I wasn’t considering this anytime soon. I thought
he would understand. But if I’m the only woman in his life—the only woman he’s
ever had
in his life …” She closed her eyes, and Solander saw the tears starting to fall again. “I thought he understood all along
that we could never be a permanent pair. I thought he realized that.”

“I would say he didn’t. In fact, if you had ever asked me, I would have told you that he had more plans for you than just
a few years of spending time together.” Solander sighed. “So … he proposed, you turned him down in the worst possible way,
he got his feelings hurt, said some things he’s going to regret tomorrow, and left. By any chance did you see which way he
went?”

Velyn shook her head. “Out the front door. That’s it. I … I was still in shock from what he’d said to me.”

“We ought to try to find him,” Jess said.

Solander considered how Wraith would react to him and Jess and Velyn going out and tracking him down by shouting. He’d be
embarrassed and humiliated and angry, and Solander figured Wraith didn’t need to get any angrier. And shouting would be about
the only way they could hope to locate him, assuming he wanted to be found. They couldn’t track Wraith with magical devices—he
simply didn’t show up on them. He was very possibly the only man in the Empire who could disappear in plain sight without
the use of magic.

“We’re going to have to wait for him to get over his hurt and come home. One of us can wait here, one of us can wait at the
Materan.”

Velyn said, “I’ll wait here, I suppose. At least I can still work on backdrops and scenery until he gets back.”

Solander stared at her. She really didn’t understand how much Wraith loved her—or how much he had been sure that the two of
them were going to be together forever. She was going to sit here painting scenery while Wraith crawled around the city with
a broken heart, and when Wraith came back, he would see that she was so little hurt by what had happened that she’d just kept
working. “I think Jess had better wait in Wraith’s rooms in the Materan School, Velyn,” Solander said. “And I’ll wait in here.
And I think you probably need to go someplace else for a while. I’ll talk to him—tell him that you didn’t mean to hurt him,
try to smooth over the rough edges. But I don’t think that you’re going to be the first face he wants to see when he comes
through the door.”

“He’ll get over it, won’t he?”

“
You
would get over it. But he’s … different. He’s different about everything. I don’t know that he will.”

She looked stunned. “You mean—you mean you think he might truly not want to see me again? To be with me again? But … that’s
ridiculous.”

Solander looked around the theater that Wraith and Velyn had designed together, that embodied so many of Wraith’s dreams and
so many of Velyn’s interests, and all he could think of was Wraith talking in dreamy tones about how he and Velyn were going
to do this and that, how he would write plays and she would create the sets to make them come to life, and how the two of
them were going to change the world together. But Velyn, who Solander thought did love Wraith in her own way, had no passion
for changing the world. Because it had been challenging and fun, because it had been something that Wraith had made powerful
and intriguing by his passion, she had wanted to be a part of it. But it hadn’t been her dream. For Wraith, saving the Warreners
and changing the magic system of the Empire had become—along with Velyn—the air that he breathed.

Velyn rose, gathered up her brushes and paints, and carefully cleaned everything. She didn’t say anything to either him or
to Jess; she just cleaned and straightened. And then, when she had finished, she gathered up her belongings. “I’ll be at the
house,” she said. “If he wants to talk to me. For a while, anyway.”

Solander said, “If he wants to know, I’ll tell him.”

She didn’t look happy about that “if.” She nodded without saying anything else and left.

After Velyn left, Solander turned to Jess, who sat quietly on the edge of the stage. He shook his head. And then he waited
for her to say something about Velyn, because in all the years he’d known her, she’d been rock-solid on one thing: She hated
Velyn.

But Jess said nothing.

“You aren’t happy he got rid of her?”

“She broke his heart. What sort of friend would I be if I could be happy about that?”

Solander walked over to the stage, vaulted onto it, and wrapped Jess in his arms. With his face buried in her hair, he said,
“And that is precisely why I love you.”

She kissed the side of his neck and said, “And I love you because you would think to ask.” And then she said, “I hope he’s
safe.”

Just for a moment, chilled by the worry in her voice, Solander wondered if this was the moment that would take her away from
him and carry her back to Wraith. He forced the fear aside. After all, he was concerned about Wraith, too.

As the fire began to die down and the dancers pulled on robes and settled around the fire, the time came for the singers and
the talkers to begin their turn. Wraith sat in the circle, watching a small carved stone being passed from hand to hand, and
listened as, one after another, the recipients of the stone told stories. Their stories were of the ways of the Kaan, the
name these people named themselves,
kaan
meaning “powerless” in the ancient tongue of the Brigomen, whose descendants this small village of men and women claimed
to be. This night they told their stories for him, because he was an outsider, but also a guest; so their tales were of the
settling of the islands of middle Arim by the Brigomen, and of the capture and enslavement of the people, and of their clever
escapes, successful protests, and delightful evasions and trickeries played upon authorities.

Wraith listened, enchanted, and then the stone passed into his hands, and after a moment’s thought, he told them who he was,
where he came from, and how he came to be among them that night. His was a long story, but no one protested, no one left,
and as the flames dropped lower and the Kaan moved their circle closer around it to conserve heat, more and more of them met
his eyes with understanding in their own.

If he had never felt that he belonged within the Warrens, if he had always felt that he was an outsider in the grand houses
and high cities of the stolti, in this place of hard and heavy stone dwellings, wood fires, and men and women who eschewed
all magic he felt he had at last found his place in the world.

When his story was finished, with the brief telling of the creation of his theater, his plans to make the people of the Empire
see the price of the magic they used so carelessly, and his sudden and painful loss of the woman he loved, the men clapped
him on the back and the women, with tears in their eyes, told him that a spirit such as his had not been born to wander alone.

And then one of the men said, “So—who will act in this theater of yours? Have you filled the roles? Have you found people
who can do the effects you hope for without using magic?”

He had to admit that he had not—that he would be holding the first open tryouts for actors, stagehands, makeup artists, and
others soon. That is, if he could find his way back in time.

“Why don’t you fill your major roles with the Kaan?” the same man asked him. “We could do everything you need, couldn’t we?
Perhaps there would not be enough of us in this village who were free to do everything you needed, but with some of us there,
you would have less trouble with your magic cripples, who will have to learn the simplest of nonmagical skills from the beginning.”

Wraith laughed. “You’d consider this?”