Dust and Light (28 page)

“I fussed a bit and asked what Prince Perryn had to do with you and said I understood you had no kinsmen alive. The witch said it was naught to concern you nor me, neither one. But I persisted. She said the prince is set to honor the anniversary of Caedmon’s Writ and all the politeness between the Crown and the Registry it signifies shortly after he returns to the city—a tenday from now, more or less. Perryn’s to come to the Tower to honor his father’s late Royal Historian.”

“My grandsire.” It seemed so odd.

“Seems to me it might be an interesting occasion. On a night when there will be comings and goings and hullaballoo and strangers in the Tower, even ordinaries, even princes, so all the purebloods will be in masks, yes? And an intruder might have a chance to look at certain portraits hung there out of common sight, don’t you think?”

My head popped up. “It would be a terrible risk.” My fingers rubbed my sprouted chin. A beard might change my appearance just enough. “For you, too, if I’m caught, which would be more likely than not. You’d allow me?”

The glow of his pipe pulsed again and the smoke surrounded me before he answered. “Told you, pureblood, I solve one mystery, I get a witness for the other—the biggest has ever fallen in my lap, a mystery that could affect the future of this kingdom. I’m good at what I do, just as you are. But I’ve
needed the right partner. Unfortunate that he’s brought me a pot load of trouble, but then, Serena Fortuna and I’ve had a testy relationship nigh on forty years now. And I’ll not deny, you’ve got me blasted curious about matters beyond imagining—this vanishing business, and portraits that show things you couldn’t know. Yes, indeed, I believe you must do both. Visit Arrosa’s Temple to learn of our murderer and attend this lordly celebration in your grandsire’s honor.”

We sat in silence for a while. Partner with an ordinary? Risk my freedom to discover an ordinary child’s murderer? My ancestors must surely turn their backs on me in shame. Yet the pride and certainty that had given shape to my life lay in ruins. Perhaps the foundations I clung to remained intact beneath the dust and rubble; perhaps they didn’t. But Bastien offered me purpose and a chance to find answers. All I could do was scratch my head in amazement and relish the opportunity.

“I’ll need clothes for both Temple and Tower. Fine ones. A heavier pureblood cloak than that ridiculous thing they left me. If my boots were cleaned, they’d do, and I presume these damnable shackles will come off. Most important, I’ll need a new silk mask, different from my old one. An ordinary tailor can make it and I can apply the enchantments. . . .”

He didn’t interrupt. The next pulse of fire from his pipe revealed the pale gleam of his teeth. He was enjoying this.

“You gamble my life quite easily, Coroner, considering I’m the best coin you’ve ever had.”

He broke into bellowing laughter and slapped my shoulder. “You play the game hard, my prickly servant. Exactly as I do. But we’ll do better together, eh? We, the lowly, shall bring our arrogant adversaries to their knees.”

T
HE WAKING
STORM

“S
carce a shadow.” Bastien stuck his head through the door of my prison studio. “I thought now you knew, you might manage it every time. Vanishing could be a most useful skill.”

“It would,” I said, examining the portrait of my latest subject, my third of the day.

The bony, gray-skinned young woman lay peaceably on the bier. It was difficult to resist pulling up my shirt to ensure no one had slashed open my gut. The portrait explained the truth of her . . . her emaciated hand laid over a belly swollen with child. Someone had cut the babe out of her. Murder? Necessity? My magic couldn’t tell us—nor whether the child lived.

The coroner took the drawing from my hand. “Requiring a corpse at hand whenever you wanted to vanish could be an inconvenience, though.”

“Whatever makes it happen, it’s not sketching the dead.” I dragged the sheet over the woman’s lifeless features. “In the Tower cellar, I was using only my bent for history. Today, I’ve called on each bent alone and both together.”

“I’ve one more interesting subject for you; then we’d best figure out how to burgle the temple.” Bastien didn’t wait for my agreement before the door slammed shut behind him.

We had decided to learn what we could of my vanishings and the child murderer in these few days before Prince Perryn visited the Registry. We both knew my chances of returning from a venture into the Tower portrait gallery were tenuous at best. Perhaps I could learn to vanish from in front of a captor—and not return to the same place.

I hobbled over to the window, chewing the dates Constance had left in the laver. Rain again today. Spring had arrived and Caton was awash in mud. A full-loaded deadcart had bogged down in the east gate, blocking the road all morning. Constance was screeching at her laborers to empty it. My windows displayed a distant sliver of hillside free of snow. Unfortunately it wasn’t green, either. Mud meant no planting.

Juli detested rain. “Snow is perfection,” she’d once said. “It hides ugliness. Rain just turns the world to muck.”

How I would love to tell Juli of the Danae. My little sister’s dark eyes had ever gleamed huge in the candlelight as our grandmother spun tales of naked dancers in the moonlight, of blue-flame bog lights ready to lure the unwary traveler to his death, of the beautiful young man enamored of a Dané, dissolving as he followed her to her lair in the Western sea, nevermore to walk the earth. Were the guardians of the earth real? Every time I considered what I’d seen, my breath caught in wonder. Perhaps Juli’s sharp mind could help me learn what all this meant.

What have they done with you,
serena
? I should have been able to protect you. Instead I sent you into the lion’s mouth.

The scrap of parchment sent to save us from the fire lay on the plank alongside my drawings of the morning. I had examined it at first light—before we’d begun this futile experiment. The words were as Bastien had stated:
Leave. Now. Else suffer your blood-kin’s fate
.

One thing Bastien had not been able to tell me, however. Turning my bent to the scrap’s history revealed exactly nothing. Nothing of the page or the ink or their provenance, and not the least hint of the writer. Someone had left the page magically sterile—astonishingly worthless.

Manipulation of anything that touched learning or memory was a monumental skill. Perhaps one of the curators could do such things. Certainly not Pluvius, who was the logical sender. My grandsire said it was Pluvius’s skill for organization, not exceptional talent, that allowed him to take charge of the Archives and gain a curator’s rank. Had another curator sent it? Was a curator the murdering arsonist? At one time I’d have assumed no curator could countenance murder. Now I wondered. . . .

The heels of my hands gouged my eye sockets. My eyes were grainy with lack of sleep. Bastien and I had talked late into the night. Somehow the darkness had made it easier to speak of Capatronn and his indulgence of my dual bents, of the hurt when he broke with me, and all that had happened since. I’d told Bastien everything I could recall of my visions,
and he confirmed that the occasions he saw me vanish entire were the very ones when I had climbed the heights of the fingered peninsula at the verge of the unknown sea. He had pelted me with questions, as if I were his chief witness at an inquest—as I suppose I was.

I rubbed my ankles, chafing under their iron bands. What business partners ever agreed that one had best stay in shackles? I wished he would send in the next corpse.

Bastien had a keen facility for pursuing his threads of inquiry to their end. Some of his questions I could answer. Some sat in my gut like undigested food.
Was it your grandsire reported your philandering to the Registry in the first place? What if this Pluvius
did
visit you in the Tower?
And,
What are you wearing in these visions?

To consider the first fueled instant denial. To
instigate
the inquiry, to offer me up for such punishment as the Registry might require for my indiscretion, relying solely on his influence to mitigate it, meant my grandsire had put every person of his own bloodline at risk of dishonor, and those of my mother’s blood as well. Whyever would he do that? Indeed, now they were all dead, Juli lost, and I in shackles, with a madman’s mask waiting on the shelf nearby. Our name was ruin. Had he damned us all apurpose? Had I done something far worse than I knew? Did he think me mad? What was he afraid of?

As for Pluvius’s visit, the perfect logic that had named his visit a dream did seem thin in the daylight. I had seen and heard him clearly, felt his hand on my head. But to imagine what my grandsire might consider his “most significant discovery,” something that propounded a “terrible historical lie” that he had sworn Pluvius to destroy? I couldn’t even begin. Much of accepted history was lies.

The question about clothing was far simpler, and yet its implications stretched beyond my petty circumstances. In the Tower vision, I’d been naked, as I was when I worked the magic. In the two visions raised here at the necropolis, I had been clothed as I was here: in layered slops and breeches, prison tunic, my own filthy shirt, anything to keep me warm. That circumstance testified to the reality of my experiences. It was curious that no chains or silkbindings had hindered me. And yet . . .

I fingered the iron links joining my ankles. Had I been wearing any?

When I’d pursued my grandfather’s history in the Tower cellar, I was no longer required to wear restraints. And on my first day back here, when I experienced the displacement, Bastien had not yet replaced the mask or shackles. Mighty gods . . .

The door flew open. I stepped quickly to face the wall as the runners carried in my new subject. Yet I was near bursting with the need to speak.

Two sets of footsteps retreated—Garen’s brisk trot and Pleury’s shuffle. A heavy tread followed. The door creaked.

I spun around and yelled, “Bastien! Get these shackles off me.”

The door paused halfway and his face appeared in the gap. “Told you, if your friends from the Registry pull another inspection—”

“The magic
does
take me somewhere else!” Impossibility could no longer mask the truth. “My senses told me so, yet I couldn’t believe. But your question about the clothes: In the Tower vision, I wore none; in the visions here, the exact layers I was wearing that day. I could see the garments, feel them, smell them. How could some random dream be so exact? But in none of the incidents was I shackled or restrained in any way. Nor was I in truth. Perhaps it’s the chains make the difference; iron and steel interfere with magic. Or perhaps it’s just me, unable to bring my magic to fullness when I’m restrained. We need to try it with my feet unchained.”

Without a word, he unlocked the shackles. Then he closed the door and left me alone. I’d not yet guessed where his spyhole was.

My new subject was near a skeleton already. A tall man, he was missing one arm and one leg, but from old injuries. The stumps were ugly, but showed no signs of recent sepsis or other disease. A soldier, perhaps.

I closed my eyes and breathed deep. Offered a prayer for skill and guidance to whatever divinities might care. Wriggled my lightened ankles. And this time, I invoked both centers of magic equally—forehead and breastbone, history and art—for surely every part of this mystery stemmed from their duality. Only then did my one hand begin its passage around the dead man’s cold, scarred flesh and the other touch pen to parchment, and when the glory was grown in me and the world trembled, I did not resist the breathtaking fall. . . .

R
ain drenched me to the skin in moments. Shivering as much from excitement as cold, I spun around on a rocky outcrop, hunting, needing . . . what? Sea, sky, and the land below had become one turbulent grayness, seamed by the bony ridges of white stone. A cluster of pines on a shelf of hillside above me swayed wildly, lashed by the wind. My sodden garments flapped.

“Lady Dané!” I yelled into the storm. “Are you here? Tell me what I’m searching for.”

Now I had accepted the truth of this place, I could give credence to the words she had spoken to me in the Tower vision. The beacon holds! she’d said, as if some signal fire were responsible for my arrival. And then she had remarked how my
makings
—my magic, surely—had twisted and strained the substance of the world. And she had said that
they
—the Danae?—were
divided
about what to do with me:
lead astray or grant sanctuary?

Those who had met me on the streets of Palinur had warned of dangers, too, of my need to learn and to heed my workings because certain boundaries were not meant for human trespass.

“Tell me what you want!” I called. “Tell me where I am! Is this where humans are abandoned when you steal them from their beds? Is this a sanctuary for mad sorcerers in prison cells? Tell me why I’m here.”

“As I suspected, thou hast no knowledge of the world, though thy makings draw upon its essence.” The voice, low and rich as sun-warmed honey, came from behind me. “Thou’rt like a youngling dancing with flame.”

The silver-limned Dané woman perched in a rocky niche, long arms wrapped about her drawn-up knees, head tilted to one side. Two breaths ago, the niche had been empty. All my bold words fell away.

She smiled. Knowing. “Thou dost walk the true lands of the Everlasting. Clothed this time, I see!”

The Everlasting. The blue-marked Danae had spoken of it, too.

“This is Idrium?” I croaked softly. “The gods’ own home? Yet I am not dead. Mad, perhaps, but not dead.”

Her long sigh wove with the wind. “Exactly as I have spoken: Thou hast no knowledge of the world. That’s why thou canst not remain here as yet or hear all I might tell thee.”

“The others told me the same. Warned me of dangers beyond my understanding.”

“Others?”

“In Palinur—the city where I live—two of you, male and female, came to me.”

She stretched out her arm, turning it so the silver markings gleamed. “And they were like to me? Or perhaps they were my excitable kin whose gards shine the color of day sky.”

“Blue, yes, but like you in grace and beauty. They, too, said I needed
to learn. They gave me no answers, either, and threatened to steal my wits. I
want
to learn.”

“Learning must come as it will. My kin know that, too, though their view of human usefulness differs from mine own. Ever more generous than they, I grant thee a second question. One only.”

So many questions. Did the Danae truly dance at season’s turn to renew the earth? Were they wingless angels, a bridge between a god and humankind, as the Karish claimed, or were they living aingerou—impish sprites entirely of this world? Would she know what caused Navronne’s disastrous weather? Her blue kin had called the world broken. Was this Everlasting even a part of Navronne, for if enchantment could snatch me out of the Tower prison or the necropolis, why would my destination be limited to our land? A thousand things. How could I choose?

She brushed aside her wet, tangled curls and widened her eyes, spreading the eagle’s wing so delicately drawn across her brow. “Ask or I shall choose for thee.”

“Before—that first time—you said you were expecting me. Why?” As soon as I blurted the question, heat flushed my wet skin.
Stupid
. Such a mundane query, when I might learn some secret of the universe.

But she dipped her head in approval. “A wise choice, as it speaks to the center of our dealings. Hear this, my answer: The Law of the Everlasting tells that all kinds reproduce themselves. Thus it was certain that one would be born to humankind with the gifts needed—blood that could perceive the beacon and follow the path it prescribes, and the proper talents to vanquish the boundaries between human realms and this fragment of the true and living world. To certain of my kind—those of us whose gards shine with starlight—and certain of thine own kind, thy gifts might be the answer to a long waiting. Or not. As my kin surely told thee, such strength, wielded in ignorance, brings dangers of its own, no matter thy intent. I cannot let thee cross until thy quality is proved.”