Part 5 (2/2)

With the dissolution of the Sun Mages, who for six hundred years had brought the rains to the Realm of the Seven Lakes, there remained eight women-only eight, none of whom completely understood how to make her own magic work-to summon the rains at the end of the coming winter.

The woman who had tried to kill her grandfather would make nine.

If they were lucky.

She pa.s.sed her hand again over the wood of the outer door in whose opening she still stood, half in shadow, half in light. While she couldn't imagine any reason Mohrvine's mother, Red Silk, would try to murder her grandfather, it wasn't beyond the realm of possibility. According to Summerchild, Mohrvine had connections with most of the wealthy merchants of the city and with a number of the crooked water bosses whose thugs ruled the slums outside the city walls. And Cattail would work for anyone's pay without asking who might be hurt in the long run.

It could be either of them.

Or not. The voice returned to her mind, the voice in her dream.

Help us. Our children are dying. We the Craft women . . .

WE the Craft women.

More than one.

Whoever they were and wherever. And whatever it would take to secure their alliance, to beg their help.

Shaldis took a deep breath. Summerchild had said she was sending someone with a horse, to bring her to the palace as swiftly as possible.

That didn't sound good.

Behind her friend's face, Raeshaldis had glimpsed the carved openwork walls, the polished wooden pillars of the Cedar Pavilion, where the king held his councils. Another bad sign. Whatever had happened at the council, Summerchild hadn't even waited to return to her own pavilion to call for help.

”When I come back,” she said, turning to face her father, ”I'm still going to want to talk to every woman in the household. Has there been anyone new since I've been gone?”

”Eight Flower,” he said a little numbly. He still looked as if he couldn't quite put together this tall, self-possessed young woman with the spindly, gawky girl who had walked out of the kitchen court that day two years ago.

”And your brother Tulik will be married next year to Vortas Brenle's daughter . . . You remember, the salt merchant Father trades with? She's been in the house a number of times. But surely she wouldn't . . . Surely no one in the household would . . .”

”I don't think so, either,” said Shaldis, which was not quite the truth. ”But I need to see everyone just to make sure.”

It was true that to her magic had meant escape, not retaliation. But whatever else could be said of him, Chirak Shaldeth was her grandfather. A slave woman might see the matter otherwise.

”Your aunt Yellow Hen Woman is still with us,” Habnit added, with a half-smiling shake of his head. ”Your grandfather tried to sell her last year to Namas the silversmith, but she made such a scandal-spreading the story to everyone in the market and causing such trouble to Namas-that Namas returned her. And your grandfather blamed her for being a bad example to you.”

”You'd think he'd learn.” Shaldis smiled a little in spite of herself at the thought of her aunt, whose crooked back, buckteeth, and ax-blade nose had defeated forty years' worth of Chirak's attempts to marry her off. Legally, of course, he was within his rights to sell her as a slave, but men who did so to their own children without the excuse of direst poverty were held in universal contempt.

And whereas Chirak Shaldeth didn't give a snap of his fingers for any man's opinion of him, he knew that contempt usually translates to a loss of business.

For as far back as Shaldis could remember, Yellow Hen had held on to her position in her father's house despite everything the exasperated patriarch could do, to Shaldis's secret admiration.

”It hasn't made her lot any easier.”

”I don't think an easy lot is what she wants.”

Shaldis had thought she'd seen her aunt from the gallery above the kitchen court, sitting in the shade with the teyn who spent the day grinding the endless amounts of flour and cornmeal required for the family's food. It would be good to have a few words with her now, while waiting for Summerchild's messenger. With her, with her mother, with Foursie and Twinkle and all her old friends and allies in the kitchen court.

”Father!” bleated Habnit, even at his age aghast at being caught in her grandfather's room.

Shaldis whirled, stifling her contempt for her father's guilty panic-What does he think Grandfather's going to do, beat him?-and at the same time bracing for the storm of the old man's wrath. But Chirak advanced into the room with his hands held out and his big yellow teeth bared in what he clearly imagined to be an ingratiating smile. ”Well, my dear, I trust your father's shown you everything you need to see in here? I've ordered the girls to make up a room for you, Eldest Daughter, a nice one in the front of the house beside your mother and your aunt.”

By aunt Shaldis knew he meant her uncle Tjagan's wife, Apricot. Yellow Hen slept in the maids' dormitory, where Shaldis herself and her sisters-and Tjagan's three daughters-had all slept, listening to the more venturesome of the maids giggling when they let one or the other of the camel drivers in, in the dead of the night.

”It's been too long, dear girl, since we've had the pleasure of your presence beneath this roof.”

It was as if the scene in his study had never taken place. Shaldis's eyes darted past the old man to the other figure standing in the doorway behind him. It took her a moment to recognize her brother Tulik, who had been barely more than a schoolboy when she'd gone away. He'd grown in two years, and grown more like her father in appearance. In another year or two he'd fill out with their father's broad-shouldered bulk.

But where her father's face wore an expression of amiable eagerness to please, Tulik's was already settling into lines of watchful intelligence, gauging everything by the standard of how useful it was or could be. Where her father's brown eyes were gentle under their straight, gingery brows, Tulik's were already hard.

”It is indeed good to see you, Eldest Sister.” Tulik came into the room and, like his grandfather, held out his hands to her. ”I can't tell you how grateful I am-we all are-that you've come to help us in this terrible time. Maybe-now that you're back with us-we can persuade you to look into one or two other little problems we've been having. With the teyn, for instance. Now that the spells of fear on their compound gates aren't working, we've had a devil of a time with escapes. They've gotten sulky, too. And I'll wager you've learned some really fine good-luck words to put on our caravans.” He winked at her. ”All in the family, of course.”

Shaldis stared at him, first blankly, then feeling the heat of rage climb from her belly to her face, so that she was glad of the shadowy dimness of the chamber. Even her grandfather's earlier fury, down in his study, hadn't been as bad as this.

”You'll have to excuse us if we're not up on how witches would prefer to be treated,” Tulik went on with a practiced, conspiratorial grin. ”But it's really something n.o.body's had to deal with before this. You'll let us know-Father or Grandfather or myself-if there's anything else you'd like. Whatever it is, we'll get it for you; we're that glad to have you back. Aren't we, Grandfather?”

”Absolutely,” a.s.sented the old man with a decisive nod and a glitter in his eye as if he were already planning which caravans to have Shaldis put a good-luck word on-and which rivals to grace with a bad one. ”With the Citadel closing down, I hear, it's high time you returned to us. But you could have come before, you know.” He ratcheted his smile wider.

Shaldis fought the desire to throw up. In a shaking voice, she said, ”I'm sure I could have, sir. But as you said downstairs, I was afraid I'd be taken for a wh.o.r.e.”

And brus.h.i.+ng past them, she left the chamber and the gallery, descending the stairs with her father's voice calling her name after her, and walked as swiftly as she could out of the house.

The guardsman Jethan met her where Sleeping Worms Street turned before it opened into the square before the Grand Bazaar. As Summerchild had promised, he led a horse, one of the cavalry's stringy little mounts; he sat his own with the straight-backed seat of a warrior.

”There you are.” His voice was accusing. ”The Summer Concubine-”

Shaldis caught the pommel and swung herself into the saddle: ”Don't you say one word to me.” After the unholy trio of her father, her brother, and her grandfather, she was in no mood for the big guardsman's defensive loyalty to Summerchild or his disapproval of females who studied the arts of magic and went running around the streets of the city unveiled and alone. The morning was already hot, and the square with its vegetable stands and its clutter of thatch-roofed booths and barrows seemed to float in a haze of golden dust.

She jerked the reins out of his hand, aware that it wasn't at Jethan that her anger had flowered, but too angry to care. What she really wanted to do was cry-for her father, for her childhood, for the knowledge that she'd have to revisit that house.

So she settled for jabbing her heels hard into her mount's washboard sides and plunging off at a trot through the red-and-blue kiosks, the makes.h.i.+ft stands selling eggplants and tomatoes and little yellow horoscopes, with Jethan-tall and frowning and, as requested, silent-riding in the cloud of her dust.

ELEVEN.

As always, the gardens that were the great luxury of the House of the Marvelous Tower quieted Shaldis's heart. They const.i.tuted almost a dwelling in themselves, some great rooms with long vistas, like the Green Court with its lawns and fountains and lines of rose trees, and some small and intimate, like the jungles of jasmine and gardenia that sheltered the Summer Pavilion in a magic enclave of quiet fragrance. When Jethan bowed stiffly at the entrance of the pavilion's garden and would have gone, Shaldis touched his arm.

”I'm sorry. My family . . . does that to me.”

<script>