The Office of Shadow (24 page)

It is tempting to imagine that one might avoid this
problem by channeling ever greater amounts of energy
into e, but regardless of the value of m, the required value
of e will inevitably approach infinity before the sourcepoint completes the transition.

-Dynamics, chapter 8:
''Channeling Methodology in Closed Bindings'

A shopkeeper from one of my villages came to me with
a problem; he'd been advertising an opening in his shop
and had thus far received only two applicants. One was a
penniless drifter, the other a retired mestine.

I counseled him to hire the drifter, his being the
slightly more reputable profession.

-Lord Gray, Recollections

he first rehearsal following a tour was always the worst. The props had
been put away roughly after the final show in the last city, and the sweaty
costumes were dumped in trunks without being washed or folded. Everyone
was sick of it all, and nobody wanted to come back to work.

The Bittersweet Wayward Mestina had finished its sweep of the southern
cities and had finally returned home to Estacana after four weeks on the road.
They'd then taken a well-deserved week off, having done a brisk business
while away. But now the week was over, and it was time to get back to work.

Faella let herself into the theater early and stepped up on the stage, alone.
The theater was called The Snowflake, and it had been her father's dream.
Father, however, hadn't lived to see it.

Ironically, it seemed that all this time, Father had been the one standing
in the way. While he was running the Bittersweet Wayward it had only ever
been marginally profitable. Usually they could afford to eat; usually they had
comfortable lodgings. But it wasn't unheard-of for them to sleep in the
wagons outside the walls of a city, crowded up on makeshift beds of costumes
and curtains.

It wasn't until after Father had died, and Faella had inherited the business,
that she realized how incompetent he'd been. Always the showman, always the
promoter, he'd managed to secure business across the kingdom, but he'd mismanaged the funds horribly, given away too much of the gate to unscrupulous
theater owners, squandered money on expensive theatrical detritus: props,
amplifying cabinets, real velvet costumes when felt would do just as well.

No, Father had been a deeply impractical man. Faella had loved him, and
had grieved when he'd passed away just after the end of midwinter, but now
she rarely thought of him. And now, just a year later, The Snowflake was hers.
The down payment had been made with gold that she herself had earned
through hard work and perseverance.

The problem was, it wasn't anywhere near enough.

She stood upon the stage and bowed deep to the empty theater. Legions
of imagined adoring fans applauded her. She stretched, sang a few scales.

Faella had been a brilliant mestine since she was a little girl; that was
common knowledge. She'd been the star of the Bittersweet Wayward since
she'd been old enough to speak. All the other mestines in her employ knew
it and grudgingly accepted it.

It had never occurred to Father, though, that Faella might not have
wanted that for herself. He'd just assumed that because she was so talented,
and because she enjoyed it so much, that she'd never want anything else.

Faella knew she was meant for more. She just knew it. She'd hoped that
owning the theater, being in charge of the mestina, would do the trick. But
quite the opposite was true: It only made her feel more constrained, more
trapped in her tiny life.

There must be more than this. It was as though there was a living thing
inside her that yearned for greatness, that lived inside her heart and pummeled at her to be released from the tedium of her days.

Such thoughts always led to thoughts of Perrin Alt, Lord Silverdun.
She'd met him on the way to Estacana, during the dead of midwinter. She'd
fallen in love with him on sight. Foolish girl that she was, she'd assumed the
feeling was mutual because he was attracted to her.

Silverdun was everything she'd ever dreamed of. Gorgeous, talented,
intelligent. And important.

Silverdun was a lord. A nobleman. He could sweep her away, make her a
lady. Surely that would fulfill her longings? In her headstrong desire, she'd
made an ass of herself, thrown herself at him. And when he'd done what any
man would have done-that is, bed her and then leave her-she'd become
furious. Beyond furious. If only she'd known then how vile other men could
be, she might have been a bit more forgiving. But not so then.

Then something very strange had happened. The thing inside her that
knew she was destined for greatness had leapt out at him. It had done something. It had made him ugly. Changed his face somehow. Not that there was
really a thing in her. It was her. The part of her she'd been pushing down all
her life.

At first she'd thought it was just a very well done glamour that she'd
done, despite the fact that she knew deep down that it was something else
entirely. She'd written a spiteful note on the mirror: Be as ugly out as in. That
would show him!

Then he was gone, and she wished she'd done something different. She
played back every minute of their time together and realized that at every
turn she'd played the desperate common girl to the hilt, that she'd been petty
and foolish. He'd liked her, and he'd slipped through her fingers, and his last
memory of her would be that stupid glamour. And yes, it had simply been a
glamour, nothing more. What else could it have been?

Yes, he was gone, off on his secret mission or whatever it was with gruff,
gruff Mauritane and that scary woman and the human and the sullen fat one.
Off they'd gone, into the Contested Lands, and she'd never seen him again.

A month or two later, though, she'd been paging through one of the
court papers, reading gossip about people she hated to admire but did
anyway, and there was a likeness of Silverdun. He was a hero now. A true war
hero from the Battle of Sylvan.

Of course. Just her luck. The one she let go would turn out to be not just
a nobleman but a war hero to boot.

But then she'd noticed something even stranger, that had made her
forget all about her own self-pity.

Silverdun's face was still changed. It wasn't quite the hideous face she'd
given him in her rage. But it wasn't the face she'd met him with, either. It was something in the middle. Oddly, she liked it a bit better than the pretty
face he'd started out with.

But if he was still wearing it, then it was no glamour. There was no way
to elude that nagging feeling anymore. The thing-no, not a thing-Faella
had done something that she wasn't sure anyone knew how to do. Certainly
not an uneducated girl from a second-rate mestina in a second-rate city on
the wrong side of the kingdom.

But there it was.

Faella reached out her hand and began the motions of a new mestina
she'd just begun to write. It was called "Twine." She glamoured two thin
strands of pure color: one red, one gold. The two threads weaved around her
in the darkened theater, bathing her face in their light. She moved her wrist
slowly in rhythm and the strands began to move more quickly, circling one
another.

Once she'd begun to believe that she'd truly done something unusual to
Silverdun, it seemed to set something off in her. It started small. Little
things: The very item she needed would find itself to hand without her
having to look; a dress she'd been longing for would turn up drastically on
sale at the boutique on the Boulevard. That sort of thing.

But soon inexplicable things had begun to happen. One night, when the
first month's mortgage payment had come due for the theater, she'd opened
the cash box to find precisely the amount she'd needed to pay. What made
this even more remarkable was that it was at least twice the amount it should
have been, given the ticket sales that night.

Never anything astonishing. Never more than what she needed at a given
moment.

The red and gold strands circled each other, then dove toward one
another, twirling around and around. They dipped and dodged and wove in
and out. Twining about in a perfect braid and then-

The two strands became tangled; they hitched in the air above her, in a
snarl. She let them go and they fell limply to the floor in a disappointing
knot, then faded away.

Certainly the others should have started appearing by now. Mestines
weren't known for punctuality, but they were seldom this late.

"Miss Faella!"

Faella looked up and saw Bend, one of the stagehands, running into the
auditorium.

"Bend?" she said crossly. "Where is everyone?"

"Apologies, miss. I looked for you at your home but you'd already left."

"Why? What's going on?"

"It's Rieger," said Bend. "He's hurt bad, stabbed."

"Oh, hell," said Faella. She and Bend ran from the theater together.
Rieger was Faella's on-again-off-again lover, but more to the point he was one
of her best mestines.

Estacana was an unusual city, having been built for giants; its roads were
too wide, its windows too large, its steps too tall. Faella liked it. She liked
things that were larger than life. But today the city didn't hold her interest
as it usually did. She followed Bend through the streets to the fourth-floor
garret where Rieger lived.

The room was crowded with players and hands from the Bittersweet
Wayward, all standing around looking worried. Leave it to mestines to
become melodramatic and useless in a crisis.

"Everyone out," she barked. "Go to the theater where you can be useful."
She began shooing them out.

Once the room was cleared she found her way to Rieger's bedside and
looked down at him. A physician, an elderly woman in a starched-neck black
dress, was tending a wound in Rieger's abdomen with herbs and smoke,
blowing the white healing vapor into the cut. Rieger's sister Ada sat next to
him on the bed, holding his hand.

The physician looked up at her. "Who are you?" she said.

"I'm Faella," she said. "I'm his employer."

"Will you pay for my services?" asked the physician.

"Yes. Use whatever cures you have at your disposal."

The physician nodded, reached for her bag, and rummaged through it.

Faella knelt next to Rieger and ran her fingers through his hair. He was
unconscious, breathing rapidly.

"What happened?" she whispered to Ada.

"You know him," Ada said. "Out drinking and carrying on until day break. He and another fellow at the tavern got into a drinking competition,
and somehow a fight started. Rieger went into it with his fists, but the other
fellow had a knife."

"Do they know who it was?"

"Oh, sure," said Ada. "Malik Em. But he's with the Wolves, so they
won't touch him."

The Wolves were a band of thieves who were clever enough to invest a
portion of their earnings with the City Guard. Untouchable.

"I see," said Faella. She looked at Rieger, and a sudden wash of pity ran
through her. She didn't love him, and he certainly didn't love her. But she did
care for him. He was tender and talented and he made her laugh.

She looked down at him. The physician had cleaned away the dried
blood, leaving the ragged knife wound fully exposed on his belly.

She took the physician aside. "What do you think?" she said.

The physician looked at Rieger, thinking. "I have a few preparations I
can try, but I won't lie to you. It doesn't look good. I'd say he'll likely die as
not, no matter what I do. The cut's too deep and has done too much damage."

"I see," said Faella.

She knelt again by Rieger, looking again at the wound. She couldn't take
her eyes off of it. One tiny little cut, no longer than a finger. That's all it took
to kill a man.

It seemed absurd. Laughable. How could something so small accomplish
so much?

She wanted to touch it; she didn't know why. Ada was on the other side
of the room with the physician, who was showing her how to apply a new
poultice. Feeling guilty, Faella reached out and ran her fingers along the
jagged red opening.