Shadowplay

  Chaven looked stricken. “Is that true? Have you been suffering because of me?”

  He shook his head. “I exaggerate. But yes, of course, we can make it dark.”

  As Chert stood on a stool to douse the lantern burning high in the alcove above the fire, Opal left the room and returned with a single candle in a dish which she set on the table next to Chaven. Already the exchange of the lantern for this single small light had turned the morning into something else, into eerie, timeless twilight, and Chert could not help remembering the murk of Southmarch city across the bay, the ceaseless dripping of water, those armored ... things stepping out of the shadows. He had dismissed Opal’s worries about doing this in the house, thinking that she was concerned only about a mess on her immaculate floors, but realized now that something deeper troubled her: by this one act, the lighting of a candle, and the knowledge that more was to come, the day and their house itself had been transformed into something quite different, almost frightening.

  “Now,” said Chaven, “I will need something to prop this mirror—ah, the cup should do nicely. And I want to put the candle here, where it will reflect without being directly in front of him. Flint, that is the boy’s name, yes? Flint, come and sit here at the table. On this bench, yes.”

  The straw-haired boy rose and came forward, looking not so much apprehensive now as confused—and why not, Chert thought: it was an odd thing for parents of any kind to do, foster-folk or not, handing their child over to a strange, bespectacled fellow like this one, a man who might be small among his own kind but here was too big for any of the furniture, then letting him do the Elders knew what to the boy.

  “It’s all right, son,” Chert said abruptly. Flint looked at him, then seated himself.

  “Now, child, I want you to move a little so you can see nothing but the candle.” The boy tilted a bit to the side, then moved the rest of his body at the physician’s gentle direction. Chaven stood behind him.

  “Perhaps you two should move to—where he cannot see you,” the physician said to Chert and Opal. “Just stand behind me.”

  “Will this hurt him?” Opal asked suddenly. The boy flinched.

  “No, no, and again, no. No pain, nothing dangerous, only a lew ques-tions, a little .. . conversation.”

  When Opal had taken her place, gripping Chert’s hand tighter than he could remember her doing for some time, Chaven began quietly to speak, “Now, look in the mirror, lady’ It was strange to think this same fellow, so soothing now, had been shrieking like a man caught under a rockslide only a few hours earlier. “Do you see the candle flame? You do. It is there before you, the only bright thing. Look at it. Do not watch anything else, only the flame. See how it moves? See how it glows? The darkness on either side of it is spreading, but the light only grows brighter . . .”

  Chert couldn’t see Flint’s face, of course—the angle of the mirror didn’t permit it—but he could see the boy’s posture beginning to ease. The bony shoulders, which had been hunched as though against a cold wind, now drooped, and the head tilted forward toward the mirror-candle that Flint could see but Chert could not.

  Chaven continued to talk in this soft, serious way, speaking of the candle and the darkness around it until Chert felt that he was falling into some kind of spell himself, until the pool of light on the tabletop, the candle and Flint and the mirror, all seemed to float in a shadowy void. The physician let his voice trail off into silence.

  “Now,” Chaven said after a pause, “we are going to take a journey together, you and I. Fear nothing that you see because I will be with you. Nothing that you see can see you, or harm you in any way. Do not be afraid.”

  Opal squeezed Chert’s hand so hard he had to wriggle his fingers free. He put his own hand on her arm to let her know he was still there, and also to try to stave off any sudden urges on her part to crush his fingers again.

  “You are a boy again, just a very small boy—a baby, perhaps still in swaddling, and you can barely walk,” Chaven said. “Where are you? What do you see?”

  A long pause was followed by a strange sound—Flint’s voice, but a new one Chert hadn’t yet heard, not the preternatural maturity of the nearly wild boy they had brought home, or the anxious sullenness that had come on him since his journey through the mysteries. This Flint sounded almost exactly like what Chaven had described—a very small child, only just up on his legs.

  “See trees. See my mam.”

  Opal got hold of his hand despite Chert’s best efforts and this time he didn’t have the heart to pull away, despite her desperate grip.

  “And your father? Is he there?”

  “Han’t got un.”

  “Ah. And what is your name?”

  He waited another long moment before answering. “Boy. Mam calls me boy.”

  “And do you know her name?”

  “Mam. Ma-ma.”

  There was another spell of silence while Chaven considered. “Very well. You are a little older now. Where do you live?”

  “In my house. Near the wood.”

  “Do you know its name, this wood?”

  “No. Only know I mustn’t go there.”

  “And when other people speak to your mother, what do they call her?”

  “Don’t. Don’t none come. Except the city-man. He comes with the money. Four silver seashells each time. She likes it when he comes.”

  Chaven turned and gave Chert and Opal a look that Chert could not identify. “And what does he call her?”

  “Mistress, or goodwife. Once he called her Dame Nursewife.”

  Chaven sighed. “Enough, then. You are now . . .”

  “She’s not well,” Flint said abruptly, his voice tremulous. “She said, don’t go out, and I don’t. But she’s sleeping and the clouds are coming along the ground.”

  “He’s frightened!” said Opal. Chert had to hold her back, wondering even as he did so whether it was the right thing to do. “Let go of me, old man—can’t you hear him? Flint! Flint, I’m here!”

  “I assure you, good Mistress Opal, he cannot hear you.” Something odd and hard had entered Chaven’s voice—a tone Chert hadn’t heard from him before. “My master Kaspar Dyelos taught this working to me and I learned it well. I assure you, he hears no voice but mine.”

  “But he’s frightened!”

  “Then you must be quiet and let me speak to him,” Chaven said. “Boy, listen to me.”

  “The trees!” Flint said, his voice rising. “The trees are . . . moving. They have fingers. They’re all around the house, and the clouds are all around too!”

  “You are safe,” the physician said.”You are safe, boy. Nothing youcan see can hurt you.”

  “I don’t want to go out. Ma said not to! But the door’s open and the clouds are in the house ... !”

  “Boy ...” /

  Flint’s desperate words came out in little bursts, as though he were run ning hard. “Not . . . the . . . don’t want . . .” He was swaying on the bench now, boneless as a doll, his head rolling on his neck as though someone were shaking him by the shoulders. “The eyes are all staring! Where’s my ma? Where’s the sky?” He was weeping now. “Where’s my house?”

  “Stop this!” Opal shrieked. “You’re hurting him with your horrible spell!”

  “I assure you,” Chaven said, a little breathless himself, “that while he may be remembering things that frightened him, he’s in no danger . . .”

  Flint suddenly went rigid on the bench. “He’s not in the stone anymore,” he said in a harsh whisper, throat as tight as if someone squeezed it in strong hands. “He’s not just in the stone—he’s . . . in . . . me!” The child fell silent, still stiff as a post.

  “We are done now, boy,” Chaven said after a long moment of stunned silence. “Come back to your home. Come back here, to the candle, and the mirror, come back to Opal and Chert . ..”

  Flint stood up so suddenly that he tipped the heavy bench over. It crashed onto Chaven’s foot and the physician ho
pped back on one leg, cursing unintelligibly, then fell over.

  “No!” Flint shouted, and his voice filled the small room, rattled from the stone walls. “The queen’s heart! The queen’s heart! It’s a hole, and he’s crawling through it . . . !”

  And then he went limp and fell to the floor like a puppet with its strings cut.

  “He only sleeps.” Chaven spoke gently, an unspoken apology behind the words, but Opal was having nothing of it; the look on her face could have crumbled limestone. She angrily waved Chaven and her husband from the sleeping room so she could continue dabbing the boy’s forehead with a wet cloth, as if the mere fact of their presence would compromise her healing abilities—or, as Chert thought more likely, as though the very sight of two such useless men made her feel ill.

  “I do not know what happened,” Chaven said to Chert as they turned the bench right-side-up and sat on it. Chert poured them both a mug of mossbrew out of a jug. “Never before . . .” He frowned. “Something has been done to that boy. Behind the Shadowline, perhaps.”

  Chert laughed, but it was not one of the pleasant kind. “We did not need any mirror-magic to know that!’

  “Yes, yes, but there is more here than I ever thought. You heard him. He did not merely wander across the Shadowline—he was taken. Something strange was done to him there, I have no doubt.”

  Chert thought of the boy as he had found him just days before, lying at the foot of the Shining Man at the very center of the Funderling Mysteries, with the little mirror clutched in his fingers. And then that terrifying fairy-woman had taken the mirror from Chert in turn. What was it all about? Was she the queen the boy was shouting about? He had said something about a hole, and Chert could see how a heart with a hole in it might describe her.

  “I don’t understand,” Chaven said. “Not any of it. But I cannot help feeling that I need to.”

  “Well enough.” Chert stood, wincing at the ache in his knees. “Me, I have more pressing things to worry about, like where we are going to go and how we are going to find something to eat without anyone noticing you.”

  “What are you talking about?” Chaven asked.

  “Because not only isn’t Opal going to feed us today,” Chert told him, “I think it’s pretty plain that you and I will be a lot healthier if we’re not sitting here when she comes out.”

  “Ah,” said the physician, and hastily drained his mug. “Yes, I see what you mean. Let us be going.”

  16. Night Fires

  Pale Daughter told her father Thunder that she had seen a handsome lord dressed all in pearly armor, with hair like moonlight on snow, and that her heart now rode with him. Thunder knew that it was his half brother

  Silvergleam, one of the children of Breeze, and forbade her to go out of the house again. The music between father and daughter lost its purest note.

  The sky above the god’s house filled with clouds.

  —from One Hundred Considerations out of the Qar’s Book of Regret

  A

  FTER SO MANY CENTURIES, it was hard for Yasammez to accustom herself to true daylight again. Even this shy, cloud-blanketed winter sun seemed to blaze into her eyes from the moment it rose until it slid down behind the hills. She disliked it, but also felt a sort of wonder: had it really been like this once, walking in these southern lands, moving beneath Whitefire’s orb every day in light so bright that it turned shadows into stark black stripes? She could scarcely remember it. She had taken the mortals’ city, but it was meaningless without the castle—worse than meaningless, because time was against her. Yasammez had prepared herself for fire and blood, for her own long-forestalled death, for meaningless victory or the finality of defeat, but she could never have prepared herself for this . . . waiting. The dragging stalemate was beginning to feel as though it might last until the unfamiliar sun burned out and the world went dark. She cursed the Pact of the Glass and her own foolishness lor agreeing she should never have let her hands be tied. Even if it worked, it would buy the one she loved only a few more moons of life and make the eventual loss even more heartbreaking.

  As usual, the traitor was waiting for her on the steps outside the great hall she had taken for her own, a market hall or court where the mortals had once performed the meaningless routines of their short, busy lives. The one the sunlanders had called Gil-the-potboy looked up as she approached and smiled his slow, sad smile. His face, so human now she could scarcely recognize what he had once been, seemed as unmoving and opaque as dough.

  “Good morning, my lady,” he said. “Will you kill me today?”

  “Did you have other plans, Kayyin?”

  Something that the King had done to him still prevented her speaking to him mind to mind, so they had fallen back on the court speech of Qul-na-Qar, the common tongue of a hundred different kinds of folk. Yasammez, never one to waste even silent words, could not help feeling that here was another way that blind Ynnir was thwarting her, robbing her mind of rest.

  Kayyin rose to follow her inside, hands hidden in his robe. Two of the guards looked at her, waiting for her to order this strange creature kept out, but she made no gesture as he trailed her through the door.

  “I do not wish to speak to you today,” she warned him.

  “Then I will not speak, my lady.”

  Their footsteps echoed through the hall. Other than two or three of her silent, dark-clad servants waiting in the gallery above, the tall, wood-timbered room was empty. Yasammez preferred it so. Her army had the whole of a city in which to nest. This place was hers, which made the presence of the traitor even more galling.

  Yasammez the Porcupine curled herself into her hard, high-backed chair. Her unwelcome guest seated himself cross-legged at her feet. One of her servants from Shehen appeared as if stepping out of nowhere, and waited until Yasammez flicked her fingers in dismissal. She wanted nothing. Nothing was what she had. She had been outmaneuvered and now she was paying the price.

  “I will not kill you today, Kayyin,” she said at last. “No matter how you plague me. Go away.”

  “It is ... interesting,” he said, as if he had not heard the last part of what she said. “That name still does not seem entirely real to me, although it was how I thought of myself for centuries. But while living in the mortal lands

  1 truly became Gil, and although in some ways 1 slept through those yers, it is like trying to shake off a powerful dream.” !

  “So first you betray me, now you would renounce your people entirely?”

  He smiled, doubtless because he had lured her into conversation, Even when they had been close, when he had been allowed as near to her as Yasammez allowed anyone, he had always enjoyed the sport of making her talk. No one left alive cared about such things at all. It was one of the reasons the sight of his altered, now-alien face filled her with such disquiet. “I renounce nothing, my lady, and you know it. I have been a catspaw—first yours, then the King’s—and cannot be faulted for insufficient loyalty. I did not even remember who I truly was until one moon ago. How does that make me a traitor?”

  “You know. I trusted you.”

  “Trusted me, you say? You are still cruel, my lady, whatever else time has done.” He smiled, but the mockery was mixed with true sorrow. “The King was wiser than you guessed. And stronger. He made me his. He sent me to live among the mortals. And it has borne fruit, has it not? For the moment, no one is dying.”

  “It would only have been sunlanders dying. We had won.”

  “Won what? A more glorious death for all the People? The King, apparently, has other ambitions.”

  “He is a fool.”

  Kayyin lifted his hand. “I do not seek to arbitrate the quarrels of the highest. Even when you lifted me up, you did not lift me far enough for that.” He peered at her from the corner of his eye, perhaps wondering whether this little gibe had shamed her, but Yasammez showed him nothing but stone, cold stone. She had been old already when Kayyin’s father had fought with her against Umadi Sva’s bastard off
spring, and she had held him as he died in the agony of his burns on the Shivering Plain. If it had been in her to weep at someone’s death, she would have wept then. No, she had no shame in her—not about anything to do with Kayyin, at any rate.

  After a long silence, the traitor laughed. “You know, it was strange, living among the sunlanders. They are not so different from us as you might think.”

  She did not honor such filth with a reply.