I sat there with the blank page in front of me.
“Write, Connwaer,” Rowan said without looking up.
All right. I dipped the metal nib of the pen into the ink.
No, I couldn’t start my letter that way. I tore off the written-on strip of paper from the top of the page and started again.
Stupid. Now that I’d left Wellmet, he wasn’t my master, was he? I tore off more paper and tried again.
I looked it over. A good beginning. But my handwriting was terrible. Nevery hated it when he couldn’t read my writing. I tore off another strip of paper.
Inkblots. Messy. Tear off paper, start again.
To Nevery, I printed. What next?
Drats. I’d run out of paper.
I put down the pen, leaned back in my chair, and looked up at the curving white ceiling of the tent. Candlelight flickered; Rowan’s pen went scritch-scritch. Then it stopped.
“You’re not making much progress,” she said, putting a new piece of paper on the table in front of me.
I would have shrugged, but shrugging hurt my shoulder.
“I’m sure Magister Nevery would like to receive a letter from you, Conn. Otherwise he’ll worry.”
I wasn’t sure of that at all.
After a few silent moments Rowan went back to her journal, and I watched the shadows flicker across the tent ceiling.
“Get on with it,” Rowan said, turning her paper over.
All right. I picked up my pen and got to work.
To Nevery,
Rowan asked me to write to you. I joined her envoyage to Desh. I am very well.
I hope Benet is better. Please say hello to him for me and tell him I miss him and I am very well.
I am very sorry, Nevery.
From,
Connwaer
We went on across the grassy plain, under the blue-bowl sky.
When we left the forest, we left the rain behind. The air was dry here, and warmer. The road was two narrow wagon-wheel tracks with a strip of grass in the middle.
In the middle of the day Kerrn got off her horse by a wagon and handed the driver the reins. Then, as the wagon and her horse went on, she waited for me to catch up. She held her sword, unsheathed.
I stopped in the middle of the road. What was Kerrn up to? She wasn’t going to attack me with the sword, was she? Or grab me and search me? I had my knife in my coat pocket and her knife hidden in my boot. I wiped dust out of my eyes with my sleeve and got ready to run.
“You should not allow Sir Argent to riposte,” she said.
Riposte?
“When he parried your blade and touched you with his. A riposte.”
Oh. She wanted to talk about swordcraft.
“I will show you something.” She held up the sword; it glinted in the sunlight. “‘Keep your guard up’ means you must position your arm and hand like this.” Standing on one of the hard-packed wagon-wheel tracks, she showed me.
I nodded. Why was she telling me this?
“Now you,” she said. She handed me her sword. It was heavier than the wooden ones we used in practice.
I stood as she’d shown me, arm up. The dust from the wagon and horses settled.
“I noticed, at the first lesson, that you started with your right hand and then switched to your left,” Kerrn said. “That was not good. You must hold the sword in your right hand.”
I shook my head.
“Why? It will be easier for you this way.”
I handed her the sword and started walking again, to catch up with the wagon. “I hurt my shoulder and my ribs on that side,” I said.
Kerrn, walking beside me, shrugged. “He did not hit you that hard.”
“Not Argent,” I said. “I got hurt in Wellmet.”
She narrowed her eyes. “You got into trouble in Wellmet, I think. What did you do?”
I didn’t answer. She’d hear about it soon enough. As soon as Rowan got a letter from her mother, I guessed.
When she saw I wasn’t going to tell her anything, Kerrn stalked back to the wagon, got on her horse, and rode back to the front of the line.
That night after supper, when it was time for my swordcraft lesson and Rowan held the practice sword out to me, Kerrn stepped in and took it.
Then she beat the fluff out of Argent.
Letter from former apprentice. Almost cast it in fire. Would have, but Benet awake, lucid. Asked why Conn had not visited him yet. Told him boy gone to Desh.
Benet asked—He coming back, sir?
Told him about order of exile.
Benet said nothing more.
Shadow attacks continue, worse than before. Half the factories in Twilight shut down. Sunrise locked up tight every night. Even so, people go missing. Report from acting-captain Farn, Kerrn’s second, that stone corpses seen in boats on river, passing below the Night Bridge.
Went out this morning, black birds flew onto my shoulders, tugged at beard with beaks. Odd behavior for birds. They always seemed to like the boy. Perhaps they miss him.
CHAPTER 21
At last, after a stay at a posting inn at a crossroads and three more hot, dusty days in the desert, we reached the city. We went up and up, over a pass and ’round the side of a low mountain, and there it was. Desh.
I stopped on the road to look at the city while the rest of the envoyage went on. In the middle of Desh, at the top of a rounded hill, was a gleaming white palace shaped like a star. Square pink clay-brick houses spiraled from the palace down the sides of the hill. Smudges of white and gray smoke came up from thousands of chimneys and drifted into the cloudless sky. The city was surrounded by a low, clay-brick wall, and outside of that was a wide band of burnt-dry fields.
Except on the far side of the city, where the fields ended and the land was scorched and black and pitted with wide holes and rusty machinery. What was it? Had an explosion happened there?
No. It was a mine, I realized. A slowsilver mine.
I followed the envoyage down to the city. Desh was bright with light reflecting from the pink-washed walls of the houses. The main streets were wide and lined with stalls made of faded, ragged cloth, and crowded with small, furry horses and dogs and people who stared at us and looked quickly away if we stared back. As we went along we saw empty fountains covered with cracked, colored tiles, and tall trees with naked trunks and dried-out looking feathery leaves high above. The air smelled of spices and hot bricks. Leading off from the busy main streets were narrow, shadowed alleys. The city’s magic buzzed in my ears, just the faintest sound like the hum of a gnat. The magic felt thin and faint, not like the warm, protecting magic of Wellmet.
Somehow, the envoyage got away from me. I was looking at a little lizard on a whitewashed wall, and they’d gone on along the road. I walked fast, looking around, until I caught up to them in the courtyard outside the white palace.
A servant led us inside.
We went from the brilliant-bright courtyard through an arched doorway into a long, cool, arched hallway, then out into another courtyard, this one filled with cactuses and pink rocks and a fountain that sent water spraying up into the air and splashing into a wide, tiled pool. That might be a good place to wash in the mornings. The servant led us inside again, and up a narrow, whitewashed stairway.
Then he brought us into the rooms. They had high ceilings and shuttered windows, which he threw open. The windows looked out over the city and let in the setting sun. Another one of the lizards clung with sticky toes to the wall next to the door.
“Now!” said the servant, clapping his hands. Other servants dressed in white robes appeared from the hallway. The lizard skittered away. “You are tired from the journey! You must rest, and wash, and dress, and you will be taken to be greeted by Lord Jaggus himself!”
Rowan Forestal
We have settled into our rooms in the very glorious and luxurious palace of Lord Jaggus. Argent, Magister Nimble, and I met him the day after we arrived in Desh. The city’s lord greeted us very graciously in a cool si
tting room full of green plants and comfortable chairs. In one corner was a pile of pillows covered with what looked like a blanket of furs. When I looked closer I realized they were white cats with sharp pink eyes and long, snaky tails. We drank cold tea out of silver cups and ate plums and sweet cakes.
Lord Jaggus is a very smiling man, and he is young, only a year or two older than Argent. Like many people in Desh, he wears his hair in many long braids pinned up in loops on the top of his head, then wrapped up in a gauzy cloth. Though he is so young, his hair is white, just like his odd cats. His eyes are blue and look very bright; he wears a long, flowing coat embroidered with silver and gold thread. He has a kind of contained energy. This may be a wizardly trait. Conn is the same way, as if he might burst into flames at any moment.
When I asked him about the tiny lizards that are everywhere in the city, he grimaced. Horrid creatures, he said. Then he looked over at his pile of cats and smiled.
I tried to ask Lord Jaggus about magical troubles, but he smilingly said that we must not discuss anything serious until we’d been properly welcomed. By that he means that he will give us a lavish ball and supper in a few days. I wonder if he is trying to delay me on purpose. Despite his oh-so-kind welcome of us, I do not trust him. He is all surface and no substance, and I don’t like his cats.
I fear for Wellmet, but I must do it his way, for now.
CHAPTER 22
I stayed in Argent’s rooms and read two of his books and ate plums and drank cold tea. One book was about horses, and the other was about swordcraft.
I didn’t think you could learn about horses or swordcraft from reading about them. But I had nothing better to do. Reading was better than thinking about Heartsease and missing Nevery and worrying about Benet, and feeling sick-certain that an order of exile had been passed by the magisters, and wondering if the Shadows had reached Wellmet yet. I was in Desh, but what did the magic of Wellmet expect me to do here?
After a few days, Rowan and Argent were invited to a fancy ball.
While they danced to the Desh music and talked to the sorcerer-king, who smiled a lot, I leaned against a wall in a passage outside the ballroom and looked at the floor. It was covered with tiny colored tiles that made a picture of a dragon, just like the dragon in the painting in my workroom at Heartsease.
My workroom at Heartsease before I’d destroyed it.
The dragon was made up of flame-orange tiles with paler yellow tiles on its belly and a bright red glass eye. It had a long, snaky neck and wings folded against its back. The dragon in my picture had been black, though it might’ve only looked black because the painting was so sooty and dirty. I remembered what Nevery had told me about dragons. They are extinct, boy. That means you will never see a dragon.
My stomach growled because I hadn’t gotten any supper, and I was tired of plums. One of the little lizards crept along the top of the wall like a spider, then crouched in a corner. They were everywhere, the lizards. Like the black birds of Wellmet, maybe, watching things for the city’s magic.
After a while Rowan came from the ballroom holding Argent’s hand. Rowan laughed and gave him her slant-sly look and said something—asking him to fetch her a raspberry sherbet. He bowed and went off. She wore a dress made out of green wormsilk. Her red hair was combed down and parted on the side, and she wore a tiara made of polished grass-green adamants and diamonds wrapped in silver wire.
Rowan looked up and spotted me leaning against the wall. “Hello, Connwaer. Why are you lurking out here in the shadows?”
“Hello, Ro,” I said. “It’s a nice tiara.”
She slanted me a glance. “Of course it’s nice. It’s jewels and silver; I’m not surprised you noticed.” She stepped a little closer. “Do you remember the ball at the Dawn Palace? When you stole your locus magicalicus from my mother’s necklace?” She smiled.
I shrugged. “Ro, I’m not going to steal your tiara.”
“I know that, Conn,” she said.
I stayed leaning against the wall. From the ballroom came the music and the smell of spices on the warm breeze.
Rowan tapped her foot on the dragon-tiled floor. “Do you know how to dance?”
“No.”
“As part of my training in diplomacy I learned other cities’ dances.” She did a few steps along with the music. “Would you like me to teach you?”
I shook my head.
“Hmmm.” She folded her arms and looked me over. “I believe you’re homesick.”
I was. The sadness of missing Nevery and Benet and the warm kitchen at Heartsease bubbled up in me. I looked down at the floor, blinking to keep the tears from gathering in my eyes.
Rowan stepped to the middle of the hallway, standing on the dragon’s tiled head, and held out her hand. “Then I’ll teach you a Wellmet dance. How would that be?”
I swallowed down my homesickness and pushed myself away from the wall. “All right,” I said. I took Rowan’s hand; it was callused from gripping a sword, and strong. “What do I do?”
She took my other hand and put it on her waist; then she rested her other hand on my shoulder. “This is the partner dance we do at the balls at the Dawn Palace. The smaller partner takes the lead,” she said. “In this case, that’s you.”
“No it isn’t,” I said.
She stepped out of my arms and looked at me, straight into my eyes. Then she stepped back and took my hand. “Very well, then. First you step out with the forward foot.” She slid one of her feet forward, and I did the same thing. “And now cross, and one-two-three.”
I tried to follow, but I wasn’t very good at it, and the music was wrong.
Rowan shot me a narrow-eyed glance. “I lead, Connwaer.”
At that moment, Argent got back with the sherbet. “Lady Rowan?” he asked. His voice had a good edge on it, enough to cut bread, at least.
Rowan let me go; I wiped my sweaty hands on my shirt. “Hello, Argent,” Rowan said brightly. She gave me a friendly pat on the shoulder. “Thank you for the dance, Conn.” She turned to face Argent and smiled at him, taking the little dish and silver spoon that he held out to her.
As they headed back into the ballroom, Argent looked back at me over his shoulder and scowled.
I stood and listened to the music for a little longer, and then went up to Argent’s rooms. They were dark, so I went to the window and opened the shutters. Outside, the moon hung huge and bright overhead, making the pink buildings of the city glow in the darkness. The moonlight spilled into the room. It was bright enough to read by. I fetched a book and pushed the table up to the window and sat down.
For a while I sat there looking at the book, but not reading it. A lizard crept out onto the page and sat there without moving. The moon climbed higher. A cool breeze blew in the window. From below, I heard the sound of laughing and music from the party.
I needed to figure out what I was going to do. All I really wanted to do was go back to Wellmet to help Nevery deal with the Shadows, but the magic wouldn’t let me come back until I’d done whatever it wanted me to do here. I put my head down on my folded arms to think about it.
After a while, a fluttering sound came from the window. I lifted up my head and saw a black bird, even darker than the night, land on the sill. Moonlight glinted off its wings. It cocked its head and looked at me with a keen eye. Then it looked down at the book, where the lizard was sitting.
“Hello,” I said, scrubbing my sleeve across my eyes.
The bird folded its wings and hopped inside. It looked like the same bird that had followed me in Wellmet. But what was it doing here?
“Is that you?” I asked.
It hopped closer, and I saw that it had a tube like a thick quill tied to its leg. The bird held still as I untied the tube. A paper was rolled up inside. A letter.
My hands started shaking. It was for me, and it was from Nevery.
Connwaer,
I have received your letter.
You asked after Benet. He is better, th
ough he still suffers from headaches and his arm has not mended yet. Benet’s recovery does not excuse what you have done, but it makes the magisters think somewhat less badly of you.
As you must expect, an order of exile has been passed. You are not to return to the city until this order is raised.
You cannot return here; yet you can serve Wellmet. The attacks by the Shadows continue, worse than before, and the people are frightened. We need whatever help is available. Report on what you have discovered about the Shadows, about the state of the city of Desh and its magic, about how Lady Rowan’s negotiations with the sorcerer-king go on, about Jaggus’s use of magic. If you have received this letter, it means my attempt with the bird has been successful. I expect to receive from you at least one letter every five days, sent by the bird.
—Nevery
I flattened out the paper against the tabletop and read it again. The moonlight made the letters look black-dark against the white paper. Benet was better, he said. A big part of the dark emptiness inside of me went away.
Report on what you have discovered, Nevery said. But I hadn’t discovered anything. I’d been so busy feeling sad that I hadn’t been paying attention. How could I have been so stupid?
CHAPTER 23
I decided to start discovering things for Nevery right away. If I’d had a locus magicalicus I would’ve done the embero spell and turned myself into a cat, because as a cat I made a very good spy. Instead, as the night had gotten cooler, I pulled on my black sweater and took off my boots. Leaving the bird perched on the windowsill with the lizard, I eased out into the dark hallway and down the stairs.
I was in luck. The fancy ball was breaking up. At the ballroom, the sorcerer-king stood in a wide doorway talking in a low voice to another man. Three guards waited for Jaggus, standing stiff as pokers in long-skirted white coats with red trim and white trousers with red boots. And swords. They stayed behind Jaggus, which meant I had a good view of him from the hallway where I crouched in a patch of shadow.