Authors: Caitlin Sweet
I chose the plainest dress in the wardrobe: a dark green one with darker green stitching around the neck and hem and copper-coloured ribbon laces up the bodice. It fell to my ankles. A woman’s dress, not a girl’s.
The bird cooed at me when I turned back to it, and I laughed. “Ah—you like it? So do I.” I twirled once and the soft, light cloth rose in a bell-shape around me. “Very well, then,” I said when the dress lay once more against my bare legs, “show me this house.”
The door was open a bit. I remembered Orlo closing it behind him and gave my own low whistle. “I don’t know how you did this,” I said, opening the door wider, “but I commend you.”
The bird preceded me into the corridor, its silver talons clicking on the wood, then silenced by carpet. It paused at the door next to mine, which had a regular metal knob. “The teaching room?” I said, recalling what Orlo had mentioned on the stairs. The bird bobbed its head. This door was also open, just a little, and I put my hand to the knob, but I did not push.
No
, I thought,
he should be the one to show me what’s inside.
Despite its slender grace, the bird waddled to the head of the stairs. I waited for it to fly to the bottom but it did not; it hopped instead, from stair to stair, sometimes raising its wings for balance.
There was a mirror at the bottom. I had not really looked at any of the mirrors, earlier; now I looked into this one. I saw myself—my whole self, from head to feet. I had only ever seen my face reflected back at me, and that only in thick, dented pieces of metal. This was glass, and it was smooth. I touched it—fingers meeting fingers—and my image was so clear that I did not recognize myself. A girl with short, reddish hair and skin made golden by the courtyard sun. Freckles across my long, straight nose, which somehow did not look quite as long as it had in the brothel mirrors. My eyes were very green—or perhaps the dress was making them appear that way. I leaned closer, staring at my own stare. There was a narrow rim around the outside of my eyes, between whites and centres. It was dark grey or light black, just a shadow now, but someday more. I remembered seeing Yigranzi’s eyes for the first time and shivering. I remembered Chenn’s. Othersight, Otherworld; people marked by power. I smiled at myself: at my eyes, my freckles, my breasts (small but noticeable beneath the cloth), my waist, which looked narrow because the hips below it were widening. “You are beautiful,” Bardrem had written—and I thought,
Yes
, with a certainty so strong and sudden that it was not even pride.
The bird burbled and I turned away from the mirror. I followed it into another corridor, lined with portraits and dark with closed doors. The bird was the only brightness, bobbing in front of me with its tail feathers splayed and dragging like a gown of impossible colours.
We turned a few more corners and came to a hallway with narrow windows and no portraits. At the end of it was an enormous oaken door with a brass ring in it instead of a knob. “What—you can’t open this one?” I asked the bird, which blinked at me but stayed silent. I pushed on the wood and the door opened.
My mother’s scarred table and dirty rushes and guttering, smoky fire; Rudicol’s stone hearth and cluttered countertops and the narrow pathways between them. These were the kitchens I’d known. This one was like the
rest of the house: it had details familiar to me, but so grand that they looked Otherworldly. There were two hearths so big that I could have walked into them and spun around with my arms out and not touched their stone walls. A counter of some dark, burnished wood ran down the centre of the room. Pots and skillets and large-bowled stirring spoons hung from hooks above it. The walls were lined with shelves that held smaller bowls and plates—plain brown ones and lovely, blue-and-gold painted ones that must have been used only for special meals.
It was a very neat room. Everything was clean, hanging or standing in place; even the wood for the hearths was stacked in perfect, matching piles against the wall next to me. I thought of Rudicol, who always shouted about cleanliness and order but never produced them. I thought of Bardrem, of what he would do if he were standing beside me (his eyes would widen beneath the loose fall of his hair, and he would gape, then seize me and dance me up and down the wide spaces around the counter). These thoughts made my chest ache. I turned to face the three windows, as if the sight of flowers and trees and sky would distract me. And it did—for I saw that the light was the deepening bronze of late afternoon, and I realized that I was ravenous.
Orlo had left my meal at the end of the counter closest to the hall door. There was a wooden stool there, and I sat down on it, already reaching. Brown bread and honey and clotted cheese; apples and one orange and dark, glossy, wrinkled fruit I’d never seen before (dates, I later learned); salt fish and chestnuts, roasted and peeled. I ate as I had on my first morning at the brothel (though that meal had been thin porridge and a slice of stale bread, toasted over the fire to make it more palatable—not that it had mattered to me, eight years old and partly starving).
I was licking orange juice off my fingers when I remembered the bird. It was beside me, gazing reproachfully—I was sure of it—at my face. “Oh,” I said, around my fingers. “Would you like some?”
It stretched up on its silver-scaled legs and plucked a date from the bowl. It transferred the fruit from beak to claw and nibbled at it, looking at me again as if to say, This
is how you should eat, here.
I rose and groaned at the fullness of my belly. “Yes,” I said to the bird, though I did not turn to it, “you’re right: it’s my own fault. Perhaps a walk will help.” There was another door, set between two of the windows; a low, wide one made of unvarnished, pale wood, which had probably been used for deliveries and as a servant entrance. I gripped the knob, jiggled it, leaned against the wood, but the door did not open. I looked through the window—between the iron bars—and out at the garden. Its blossoms were as vibrant in sunlight as I’d thought they would be: pinks and indigos, white with darker whorls inside and out. The trees were very tall, their trunks so broad that I would not be able to touch my hands together, if I put my arms around them. The grass around the glass-pebbled path was thick; I thought of how cool it would feel against my calves and rattled the knob again, as if I had merely done it wrong, the last time.
“Very well,” I said when it was clear that the door was, indeed, locked. “Let’s go back to the front hall.”
The front door was locked too, as was a side one to which the bird led me. I sat on the lowest step of the entrance hall staircase and leaned my head against its banister. The bird cocked its head at me and I sighed. “If I can’t go outside I’ll wait here for him. It’s getting dark; surely he won’t be long.”
I did not feel myself fall asleep. When I started awake the air around me was black, except for a wavering light that blinded me for a moment. I rubbed my eyes and blinked the lamp into focus. The lamp, and the hand that held it.
“Mistress Weary Seer,” said Orlo, “you do not need to sleep on the stairs when there is a perfectly good bed available.”
I stood up quickly. My feet tangled in the folds of my dress and Orlo gripped my arm so that I would not fall. “I’m sorry,” I said, hoping my flush would be invisible in the weak light, “I’m very clumsy. The Lady was always scolding me for it.”
Orlo’s smile gleamed. “It is a good thing, then, that grace is not a requirement for Otherseeing. Though we’ll make sure that you won’t be tripping over your own clothing by the time you arrive at the castle.”
By the time
, I thought, as warmth spread through my stomach.
Not “if.”
“I’m glad you slept a bit,” he said as we went up the stairs. “You’ll have to learn to rest during the day, since your lessons will almost always be at night.” He turned to me; I hoped he would not notice how awkwardly I was holding my dress, trying to keep it above my ankles as I climbed. “Did you enjoy the food I left for you?”
“Oh yes—I ate far too much, and too fast, and then I thought I’d take a walk, but all the doors were locked.”
We were at the top of the stairs, now. Orlo raised the lamp so that its glow lit both our faces. He was all hollows, in the shadow-light: his cheeks, his eyes, his mouth. “You must have wondered why,” he said.
“Yes,” I replied, though all I really remembered feeling was a mild sort of annoyance.
“Prandel is a clever man. I fear that he knows I am hunting him. I fear
he
will follow
me
, someday. What if he were to follow me here?”
I said, “Yes—that would be terrible—but if the doors were locked from the outside, surely that would be enough? If he couldn’t get into the house . . .?”
“And what if he got into the garden and waited there? You would go out, during the day when I wasn’t here; you would go into the garden and he would be waiting for you. . . .” Orlo was so close to me that I could feel his breath. It smelled of something strong and sweet—mead, perhaps, or wine. I should have wanted to turn away, for the smell reminded me of the few men who had tried to kiss me and paw at me, in the hallways I had known before. Drunken, brothel men. Instead I imagined leaning up and in, catching Orlo’s breath between my own lips. This time the flush swept from my face to my ears and down my chest, and I did not care if he saw it.
“I will keep you safe, Nola,” he said, very quietly. “If you wish to walk in the garden we will do it together—but when I am not here, you will be inside. You will
stay
inside. And only I will be able to get to you.”
“Yes.” An answer, though he had not asked me a question. My voice was hoarse.
“Good.” He stepped back. “Now, then. Did you go into the lesson room, on your journeys today?”
“No. I saw that the door was open, but I . . . I wanted to wait for you.”
He frowned. We had reached the door in question, which was firmly shut. “Strange,” he said, “I did not leave it open. I never do.” He gazed at his own hand on the knob and shrugged. “No matter. My great-aunt used to say that this was a house of mysteries, and she was always right about such things.”
The bird
, I thought as he pushed the door open. I glanced behind me and saw only hallway.
“Come,” Orlo said, and I followed him into the room.
In the entrance hall he had lit lamps; here he walked about lighting candles, which bristled from two enormous candelabra. I expected to see a riot of furniture and decorations—but this room was different from the others. It was larger than mine but seemed enormous, as it was nearly empty. The candelabras stood in each of the far corners. In the centre was something that I took at first to be the bowl of a fountain. It was round and shallow, set on a low stone plinth. I stepped toward it and the candlelight glinted, reflected—for the bowl itself was not stone, but metal. I drew closer yet, as Orlo watched me, and then I was above it, looking down into a pool of gold. Golden ripples, golden waves, facets and sky that opened up and drew me in and under.
“You will see many things, in this mirror,” Orlo said, from across the gold.
“This is a mirror?” I felt slow and dizzy at the same time. “It’s so big, and it’s made of real gold—isn’t it?—and I’ve never . . .” I swallowed, thinking of Yigranzi’s mirror, small and copper, warm from her knobbly-knuckled fingers. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”
“I know. You cannot imagine, Nola, how grateful I am that I will be the one to show you—that you will come into your true power here. Here.” He swept his arm out and I followed it with my eyes, looking over my shoulder when it pointed that way.
There was a cage by the door. It, too, was gold, and its bars stretched nearly to the ceiling, where they were fused together in a shape as intricate as spider’s web. Inside the cage was what seemed to be a real tree trunk, its leafless branches short and widely spaced. The bird was perched on the highest branch. Its feathers looked like silk, in the candlelight, and its eyes like real amber, hard and translucent.
“That is Uja,” Orlo said as he walked from the mirror to the cage. “Isn’t she a lovely creature?”
“Yes,” I said. “Yes—I saw—” I meant to tell him that I had met her already—that she had woken me and led me to the kitchen—but as the words formed, Uja spread her wings wide and gave a piercing squawk.
“Uja!” Orlo said sharply. “Quiet—you must not frighten our guest.”
She lowered her wings slowly. Her head was cocked; she was looking at me steadily, unblinkingly.
“You saw?” Orlo said, turning to me.
“I meant . . . I meant I
heard
. I heard something from my bedroom, and it sounded like a bird, but I thought I must have dreamed it.” I did not understand my lie, but Uja appeared to: she straightened her head and cooed, just as she had before, when we had been alone.
“She’s no dream, no—though she’s no ordinary bird, either. I use her to bring on the Othersight, and to show me someone’s Pattern with her talon-tracks and sometimes her beak.” He put a forefinger between her bars, reaching up toward one of her silver claws. She sidled along the branch, just far enough that he could not touch her, and he scowled. “When she’s not half in the Otherworld, however, she can be downright unpleasant. Perhaps she may be convinced to be friendlier with you.”
“Perhaps,” I said. This time my reticence did not feel like a lie; it felt like a game, or a strange, harmless, shared secret.
I looked away from Uja, at the wall on the other side of the door. (I think it was then that it struck me, belatedly, that there were no windows at all in this room.) The only piece of furniture was here: a sideboard with wooden drawers at the bottom and glass doors at the top. I saw shelves behind the doors, holding things I recognized: goblets and bowls, lidded glass containers full of different kinds of grain and different-coloured sticks of wax. I smiled at their familiarity—and then I glanced at the highest part of the sideboard and saw the knives.