Part 4 (1/2)

Foursie! Fourth Daughter-her younger sister's real name-had been a little girl when she'd left.

And she'd be twelve now. And that fairylike child running out of the kitchen with a gourd of water for the three teyn and two old women slaves grinding corn under the other side of the kitchen gallery: That child had to be Fifth Daughter, Twinkle, whom everyone in the household called Our Little Twinkle Star.

”Daughter?”

Shaldis looked back at her father, waiting in the doorway of the shadowed dormitory of the maids.

”I'm sorry.” She followed him through the dim room, long and narrow with the girls' wicker chests crowded against the single wall that didn't have a divan, the bedding stowed out of sight in its few wall cupboards for the day. ”Was that Twinkle I saw downstairs? She's going to be beautiful!”

”She is, isn't she?” Habnit smiled with a gentleness that told Shaldis that while she'd been watching her mother in the court her father had nipped on through and gotten his cup of wine from his own room, then come back. A second glance showed her that, yes, he had the half-finished cup in his hand, and there was no more talk of getting a tablet and stylus from his room. ”Maybe too beautiful-Strath Gamert tells me his son doesn't want to marry Foursie, and wants Twinkle instead. . . .”

Shaldis was shocked. ”Twinkle's only . . .” She counted on her fingers. ”Twinkle's only eight! You mean Forpen Gamert? Who was supposed to marry me?”

Her father stopped in the doorway that led to the gallery above the garden, his face filled with infinite weariness and infinite shame. ”We need Strath Gamert's partners.h.i.+p,” he explained-as he'd explained, with that same expression, two years ago when it was Shaldis who had been signed over as bride to the harness maker's foul-tempered son. ”Threesie and Twosie were already spoken for-Lily Concubine and Green Parakeet Woman, I should call them.” He gave the two sisters their names in the old style, the names their husbands (or more probably their husbands' fathers) had picked for them, with the proper suffixes-Woman and Concubine-that were now falling into general disuse.

”Forpen Gamert doesn't like Foursie, and because the original contract was breached . . .” There was a trace of accusation in his eyes as he regarded the daughter who'd fled the house and her marriage contract and caused him all this inconvenience. ”. . . Strath says he should be able to choose. We're still negotiating.”

Which meant Grandfather was still negotiating. And if you say a single word in reply to any of this, Shaldis told herself, following her father out onto the next gallery, you'll be dragged back into the affairs of this family, for another sixteen years of rage and helplessness, to absolutely no purpose.

But she still felt sick anger at her father and grandfather for little Twinkle's sake.

One more thing, she thought, to see if I can maneuver.

As she pa.s.sed through the arched doorway of the maids' dormitory she reached out and brushed the wood with her hand, and felt it.

The tiniest whisper of magic, as if the fibers of the wood had been slightly warmed.

”But if you say only women can work magic,” fretted her father as they turned along the latticed gallery that led to her grandfather's rooms, ”surely you can't mean it's a woman in this household?”

”It's either a woman of the household or a woman who's not in the household,” said Shaldis. ”If it's a woman who's not in the household, it has to be a woman whom Grandfather has hurt, insulted, or endangered; a woman whose family-if she has one-Grandfather has hurt, insulted, or endangered; or a woman who is in the pay of, or being blackmailed by, someone Grandfather has hurt, insulted, or endangered . . . which is a fairly long list of candidates.”

”But you're sure it's a woman?” Habnit gestured with his wine cup. By the smell it was sherab-distilled wine, nearly as strong as opium. Two years ago, thought Shaldis sadly, he hadn't started in on the sherab until after dinner. ”Father says-”

”Grandfather doesn't know what he's talking about.” Shaldis halted on the gallery outside her grandfather's bedchamber door. ”Men do not have magic. The same way, ten years ago and for all of time before that, women did not have magic. They just didn't. And now men just don't.” Healing no longer flows from their hands, a voice had cried in her dream. ”The problem is that everything-laws, family, who we're taught to obey and respect-hasn't changed.”

”I should hope not!” exclaimed Habnit, truly distressed at the idea. ”But a woman in this household.”

”I admit that any woman in her right mind who's conscious enough of her own magic to slip door bolts and elude the camel drivers would use her power to escape the house rather than stick around and try to murder Grandfather.” Shaldis pa.s.sed her hands over the door's wrought-iron handle, over the wood just above it, where the latch inside was.

Magic there, strong and sweet now, like a little song. It didn't feel like the spells of the Raven sisters Shaldis knew best, the ones to whose power and souls she had united her own with the Sigil of Sisterhood: Summerchild, Moth, Pebble, and Pomegranate.

Nor did it feel like the magic of Foxfire, Lord Mohrvine's fourteen-year-old daughter, though Shaldis wasn't as sure of that. When the Sisters of the Raven had united their power with the rite of the sigil, Mohrvine had forbidden his daughter to join them, lest they be aware of it should she work some great spell clandestinely. Mohrvine's mother, the formidable nomad princess Red Silk, had likewise held aloof from the rite of the sigil, as had the seventh Crafty woman of Shaldis's acquaintance, a greedy busybody named Cattail who'd formerly been a laundress.

Magic, Shaldis had long ago learned, did not automatically convey either benevolence or wisdom, any more than blue eyes or a sweet voice did. It simply was.

With the magic of these last two, Shaldis had had little acquaintance, but the taste-the vibration-of power she sensed in the wood of the door didn't feel familiar. What Cattail's spells-or Foxfire's or Red Silk's-would feel like if they were sourcing their power differently she wasn't sure. From the earth, for instance, or fire, rather than from the sun. Nor could she tell what difference it might make if they worked magic while drunk or drugged or under any number of other conditions. She simply didn't know.

She followed her father into the room.

Chirak Shaldeth had all four upper chambers along that side of the court, connected by inner doors as well as doors onto the gallery to form a single suite. In the crowded conditions of a city house it was a shocking amount of s.p.a.ce, like his claim to the whole of the inner garden. Her brief mental query about why he'd had the camel drivers sleep out in the gallery rather than in one of the rooms of the suite evaporated the moment it formed. Her grandfather despised the men who worked for him as he despised his family, and kept them away with the same mixture of random physical abuse and arbitrary rules.

Of course he'd keep three rooms empty because they adjoined his own. That was how-and who-he was.

He didn't even use them as Shaldis would have, for a library or a laboratory or to fill with pretty or curious things. She raised the latch on the inner door that led from the bedchamber into the next room along, and saw that second chamber was simply empty: cupboard doors shut, floor swept of the city's eternal dust, divan cus.h.i.+ons clean and untouched.

The latch was on the bedroom side. The a.s.sa.s.sin wouldn't have needed magic to dart through and escape the camel drivers, but she would have needed a mage's ability to see in the dark.

Magic had definitely been used in the bedchamber.

It wasn't as localized as the whisper in the wood of the door where the latch had been raised from the other side, but Shaldis felt it everywhere. It clung like perfume to the cedar pillars of the bed, whispered from the folds of the mosquito netting that more and more people were buying now that magic wards against those pests no longer kept them from the windows: every house in the city was beginning to smell of the various smudges people were experimenting with, to drive them away.

None of the Raven sisters had yet been able to place a mosquito ward that worked for more than a few hours.

Yet in her dream the voice had whispered, We command the fire and the serpents and the stinging insects.

WE who?

The woman whose power breathed like the faintest of distant sounds in the air of the dim bedchamber?

Like the sound of . . . what? That rhythmic roar.

Shaldis touched the carved doors of the wall cupboards, the chest beside the bed. All of them locked tight, as were the latches on the window shutters: tight as her grandfather's heart. The magic here felt strange, very unlike the spells of opening that lingered on the door. . . . He had spoken of a knife cutting at him out of the dark-had they kept any slashed bedclothes?-but she wondered if the alien power she sensed like the whiff of smoke around the bed was some kind of death spell.

It was very strange, whatever it was. Something she'd never encountered before.

It seemed to her for a moment that instead of the booming crash, she heard the faintest tickle of evil music- Raeshaldis.

She felt the calling, clear in her mind. The overwhelming urge to look into her crystal or a mirror or a pool of water, anything that would summon an image. ”Excuse me, Father,” she said, and retreated to the door. Before leaving her cell she'd slipped the white crystal from the Citadel scrying chamber into her satchel, and this was what she angled, so that its central facet caught the light.

And within that facet, like a trick of the light, she saw Summerchild's face.

”Summer, I'm sorry,” said Shaldis quickly. ”Did everything go all right at the council? Something came up, something that I need to talk to you about-”

”And we need, very badly, to talk to you.”

EIGHT.

What was that?” Pomegranate finished las.h.i.+ng the makes.h.i.+ft sunscreen of palm branches and reed mats into place on the ruins of the hut, and Soth-who'd fetched them from the ruined village while the old woman kept watch on the lake-lowered his telescope from his eye.

”Hokiros,” he replied. ”Who a month and a half ago was as much a legend as the water dragons in the Lake of the Moon.”

While in the village, in spite of an arm that slowly stiffened from its injury, he'd also refilled their water bottles from the well and located a couple of gourd cups and a quant.i.ty of almonds and dates. These he proceeded to organize into a makes.h.i.+ft lunch-during her days as a beggar Pomegranate had learned never to pa.s.s up food, and the weaving of the ward spells had left her ravenous for sweets. She put several dates on a plane-tree leaf and set it on the hut's clay floor for Pontifer. ”He's had a frightening morning,” she explained, and patted her rotund pet's head.