“A good place for a watchman,” she said. “You can find almost anyone who concerns you. Even better, they do not know you’re watching. I love to watch Ryllion.” She spoke with lascivious enthusiasm. “There’s a certain… ferocity in him.”
“My lady.” Cal-raven dropped to one knee and bowed. This relieved him of having to decide which image was really the queen. “I must address my people. I ask for an assembly tomorrow. The time has come for Abascar to move on. Autumn is coming.”
She laughed. “What a shame to move on just when the fun is about to begin. Tonight’s parade begins a week of revels in honor of my birthday. On the last day I’ll sail away on our greatest ship, the Escape, to visit the islands my husband discovered. Our house is full of hope right now. We can cast off the problems of the past and be the house we were meant to be. Explorers from all around the Mystery Sea will present their newest discoveries as gifts. You’ll see things you’ve never imagined. Let your people rest awhile longer, King of Abascar. Look there.”
Five queens gestured, and he glanced about, bewildered, until she described the scene he should be seeking. “One of your own has joined our glassmakers. He has an eye for it.” She laughed. “A sharp eye for fractures. He will help us perfect a new gallery of mirrors.”
He could not find the person she described.
“Come. I’ll show you something more. An unpleasant sight, to be sure. But you were a soldier once. You have seen this kind of thing before. See? Those are the carcasses of beastmen. Cartloads of them. Ryllion is cleansing the forest of those who resist the Seers’ endeavors.”
“What endeavors?”
“You haven’t heard? They aim to capture, tame, and train the beastmen to fight their own kind for us. Deuneroi dreamed of ending the curse. Ryllion is finding a way that will not cost us any soldiers’ lives.”
As she led him, her voice began to fade. Her reflections went out one by one as if someone were blowing out candles. Then she was gone altogether. And he was lost.
He stepped into a vast, open space and felt a great relief. For this was a space not of mirrors but windows.
He was in the high-ceilinged cone at the center of the glassworks. The brightening sunrise cast a gradation of pink, red, and purple against the failing night sky. This conflict played out on the curvature of the cone, and he walked forward staring up, transfixed. Pillars that supported the cone were also made of glass, and as he passed, small dark shapes within the pillars floated and darted about in swarms and schools.
Obrey was there, watching the drifting shadows. “Aha!” she said. “I thought you were playing Seek and Go Hiding.”
“How do they feed the fish?” Cal-raven pressed his hand to the glass, trying to get a clear view of the creatures.
“There are no fish.” Obrey knocked against a pane. “It’s a trick. Look.” She took him to a broad table where samples of glasswork were displayed. “Those glass bells will summon hoverbirds. Those will soften headaches. Those call dogs. These float-bubbles help our fishermen throw nets that will catch whole schools on the sea. Here’s a glass teapot, made for Queen Glyndere, Thesera’s mother. She’d take tea only from a glass teapot because she said that water tasted better boiled in glass. And here—this old stained-glass window opened and closed in the captain’s quarters of King Helpryn’s ship.”
Cal-raven marveled at the intricate scene depicted on the small glass disc—a soaring eagle with a crown on its head, snatching a fish from a curling wave. “I thought King Helpryn’s ship was lost.”
“Sailors found some wreckage. Hard to believe that the window was not destroyed.”
They walked across a crystal blue floor with the contours of rolling ocean waves. Cal-raven knelt to touch it. “It’s like walking on the sea.”
“The floor was sculpted by Lengle, one of the best glassmaking teachers.”
As they moved through this high-ceilinged hall, he slowed to gaze up into a canopy of misty light where suspended inventions swayed slowly—flocks of glass geese flying in an arrowhead formation, their translucent bellies full of brilliant raindrops as if they had dined upon jewels.
Here the stained-glass walls were murals of ancient mountains. Or perhaps they were magnified views of faraway places—he was not sure. They were simple pictures, abstract, and yet clouds drifted, rivers glittered, trees swayed. As his eyes traced the jagged horizon, he thought, I must not forget my vision. Fourteen bell towers of Inius Throan. They’re waiting for me.
“King Helpryn designed this hall for the queen. She comes every day.”
“My mother had a garden,” Cal-raven began but then stopped.
A man of deeply fissured, crimson skin stood among the floor’s turbulent waves, studying Cal-raven thoughtfully as if considering him for a portrait. “Is this your special guest, Obrey?” He scratched his chin through a long, wispy beard that was swept back over his shoulder.
“He’s ready,” she laughed.
The old man winked. Then he turned, walked up over a wave, and descended out of sight.
“That’s my grandfather,” she said with deep affection. “Bel Amica’s master mirrorcrafter.”
“The miner. What’s his name?”
“Fritsey, I call him. You can call him Frits. He makes glass trees that actually grow and flower. He makes walls speak about what the very best eyes have seen. He makes faces that tell stories.”
They followed Frits’s progress and came to a railing where the ocean floor fell away. On a level below them, lights flared—seven ferocious fires, a line of ovens set inside a soot-streaked wall.
“Furnaces,” said Obrey.
They descended a stair of glass so white that it caught and purged the light, emanating an aura pure as snow under a blue sky. It led them halfway to the workshop floor, where they turned onto a crescent-shaped balcony. They sat to watch the forgers work.
Three glassworkers fitted pieces of glass to long steel poles, then thrust those instruments into the open mouths of three furnaces. Their arms were reddened from the years of blasting heat. Their faces were shielded by cloth masks with thick glass discs that covered their eyes. They looked as determined and yet as vulnerable as the dragonslayers Cal-raven had seen illustrated in his father’s history scrolls. They withdrew molten shapes, blazing spheres that seemed to have been dipped into the cores of fiery stars.
The workers carried the rods to tables and set them down so their treasures hung suspended over the edge. Taking metal tweezers, they pinched the fiery pulp with one hand while rolling the pipes on the tabletop with the other. In this way they shaped and detailed the soft glass into spheres and cylinders, carving ridges and compressing slender lengths of stem beneath the bubbles that would become the bowls of chalices.
“They’re making goblets. And one’s for you.” Obrey poked his hip with her elbow. “It was Emeriene’s idea. She said you could choose an emblem for New Abascar.”
He thought for a moment, then drew a stone from his pocket. He plied the clay into a shape he had crafted hundreds of times. “This,” he said. “I want this figure upon it somewhere. The Keeper’s true likeness.”
“We can give you exactly that,” said Obrey. She took the figure and danced down the stair and onto the workshop floor, where she handed the figure of the Keeper to one of the glassworkers. Then she ran away through the workshop, stooping occasionally to pick through the jagged and colorful throwaways.
If she were a few years older, I’d swear Auralia had returned from the ruins.
He turned to a glassworker who sat farther down the bench. “Don’t you wish you saw the world the way she does?”
Even though her uniform cocooned her, the woman was clearly hypnotized by Obrey’s play, watching the girl through thick eyeglasses and wringing her white-gloved hands. He decided that the winding white cloth of her shroud was muffling her hearing.
A line of glassworkers pushed a train of carts across the workshop floor, containers full of large green spheres link
ed by heavy ropes that framed a fishing net. Distracted by the crooked stride of the man at the end of the line, Cal-raven jumped up and ran along the rail, down the stairs, and across the workshop floor. “Warney!”
Catching up to the parade, he grabbed the old man’s bony shoulder. But the face that turned and greeted him with a wide grin full of teeth gone wrong sent him stumbling backward. The man looking back at him had two eyes.
“I’m sorry. I thought you were. Warney?”
“Master!” Warney stepped out of the line and knelt down.
“Where have you been? Do you know that Krawg’s been chewing his nails off, worried that you fell off a dock?”
Warney blinked his eyes. Both of them. “Krawg said he was headin’ out to sea! So I went lookin’ for somethin’ to do.” Then the gawky old Gatherer stood up—a rather unnerving endeavor, as it looked like his legs were performing separate dances. “Old Frits, he found me. Told me he’d like to fashion me a replacement eye, just to see how it looks. It doesn’t work, but I’d rather wear this than that blasted old patch.”
“And now you’re a glassmaker?”
“Frits said that I’ve learned to use this one eye so good that it’s better than it would be if I had two. Seems I can see flaws and fractures others can’t. Today we’re crafting a new chalice for Queen Thesera’s birthday.”
He leaned in and whispered, “King Cal-raven, what do you think?” He pointed across the floor to where Obrey had somehow linked a chain of glass from the broken pieces.
“She’s a stonemaster,” Cal-raven gasped.
“Does she remind you of anyone?”
Cal-raven met—or tried to meet—Warney’s half-real gaze. Then he shook his head slowly. “It can’t be her, Warney. Auralia came into Abascar so young that she’d be seventeen or eighteen years old now. Obrey…she seems younger.”
Warney’s real eye seemed to glow with hope. “A sister, maybe? Could Auralia.”
He quieted as Frits approached from across the workshop floor, a glass disc resting precariously on his left cheekbone so that it seemed to enlarge his left eye. With a knowing smile, he said, “You’ve noticed my granddaughter.”
Cal-raven nodded. “She has a tremendous gift.”
“Your king, Warney—he has good eyes.” Frits winked at the Gatherer through his monocle.
“You’re descendants of Tammos Raak, like me.” Cal-raven shrugged. “I guess that makes us family.”
Frits crossed his arms. “I have it on good authority that I can trust you, King Cal-raven. And I’m not a trusting sort. Not unless there’s good pay involved.”
“The Seers must be paying you well for you to pack up and leave your mine.”
When Frits replied, his mirthful tone had faded. “Who said we chose to leave?”
Cal-raven cleared his throat and changed the subject. “Who’s fooled you into trusting me?”
The glassmaker pointed at the departing line of wagons. “Warney, I’d appreciate it if you got back to your work.”
Warney hobbled off sideways, glancing back at Cal-raven with a gleeful grin. “Tell Krawg,” he said. “Tell him I’ve found what I’m for.”
The glassmaker put his arm around Cal-raven and led him in the other direction, moving through the rivers of heat that poured from the ovens. “It’s best you see this when Obrey’s distracted. If she catches you in her playroom, you’ll never escape it, for she’ll feel compelled to show you her favorite things. And that includes everything. It’s a very crowded room.”
The glass burner who earlier had ignored or missed Cal-raven’s question suddenly appeared at Frits’s elbow, her message muffled through the scarf that wrapped all but the glass shields over her eyes. She raised one of her mittened hands to point to the entryway behind them.
Frits and Cal-raven turned to find Queen Thesera sweeping into the room, the train of her gown streaming along behind her. The sharp-eared whiskiro in her hand shuddered, eyes enormous at the sight of the roaring stoves.
“She’s here to see our progress on her ceremonial chalice. I’ll attend to her.” Frits looked to the anxious glassworker. “Milora, my love, rescue King Cal-raven, would you? Take him to see…you know. But go quickly and quietly. Let no one follow you.”
The woman, her eyes dark behind the murky glass lenses, would not meet Cal-raven’s gaze.
“Another one from your mountain home?” he asked.
“The Seers dragged three of us from the mine in the mountains. Milora was sick. They promised to heal her with their potion work. It’s how they managed to persuade me.” He put his fist before his mouth to block his voice and muttered. “Funny thing. She wasn’t sick before the Seers showed up.”
Cal-raven watched the woman begrudgingly stride away to lead him.
“I almost forgot.” Frits ungloved a hand and reached into his pocket. “You’ll need this. I call it the lightkey.”
He handed Cal-raven a piece of clear glass that seemed unremarkable—a teardrop cut down the middle. His hands, however, were remarkable indeed—brown and cracked as bread that’s been baked too long, with such a web of scars upon scars it was difficult to find an unmarked spot.
Frits turned, drawing in a deep breath.
To avoid the queen’s gaze, Cal-raven followed Milora, running to catch up as she rounded the far end of the ovens.
She led him out of the workshop and through a maze of passages lined with wonder after wonder that could only have been crafted by a child’s imagination. Playful bursts of abstract shapes, like collisions of colored hoops pinned together in rising circles, bigger and more exuberant as they ascended. Some were outrageous animals, dangling from the wires of mobiles that spun in the wind of their passage—winged dragons chasing each other in circles.
“How old is Obrey?” Cal-raven asked.
Milora shrugged.
She led him up a stair into a room no larger than his own chamber back in the tower. Dark curtains encircled the high-ceilinged space. Resting on a workbench, she planted her heels beside a row of multicolored seaweed sandals. Cal-raven stood against the wall opposite her, awestruck. All about him on the floor were thin filaments of glass; spools of transparent, tinted threads; bottles of glue; sticks of waxy dye. “This is where she plays?”
Milora gestured to a pile of blankets in the corner. He remembered the cushion where Hagah had slept in King Cal-marcus’s library.
“Is this what you wanted to show me? Your daughter’s window?”
Milora laughed behind her scarf, then leaned forward and gripped the bench tightly as if the question were a test of her patience.
“Frits told me that you’ve been sick. Is that why you cannot speak?”
“Oh, I can speak,” she growled through the fabric, and at last she raised the lenses from her eyes to reveal a bruised and frightened expression. He felt an urge to unwind the strips of cloth that encased her, for she seemed so stifled. But she gestured to the long golden cord of the curtain hanging down the wall beside him. “Look. But don’t linger.”
The curtains drew back from the far end of the room, sliding around the curvature to unveil a tall, arched window. But the window’s glass was not a solid pane—it was lace, filaments like a spider web of ice. Each line gleamed, each strand a different color. That it all held together was astonishing. Morning fog, moving out to sea from the mainland, teased the window, drifting into the chamber, so that the sunlight illuminating the glass infused the cloud with pulsing, shifting hues. It was as though the window were a sieve, straining colors from cloud.
He turned to her, amazed. “How did she—”
Milora was gone.
Obrey stood astonished in the doorway. The tiny “oh” of her mouth then burst into a glorious smile. “King Cal-raven! In my room!” She skipped across and took his hand, then danced about him in a circle. “Don’t you love my window? It’s my favorite thing in all of Bel Amica. It’s like a map.”
He looked at it again. “A map?”
&nb
sp; Explanations exploded into the room as Obrey excitedly traced a river of blue lace down through green patches she found to be forests. She pointed out gleaming tips like mountains and golden patches of open plain. A dark swath near the top she believed to be the Forbidding Wall.
Cal-raven gestured to a spot just above that crescent of purple near the window’s apex—an open space like an eye half closed. “And what, then, is that?” White hot with sunlight, whistling as cool air blew through, the space seemed strangely familiar.
“Didn’t Grandfather give you the lightkey?”
Cal-raven drew the crystal shard from his pocket. “This?” He felt a prickly sensation across his skin.
Rummaging in a small closet, Obrey began to grunt and growl. “Here. You. Go!” she announced, dragging a heavy stepladder into the chamber. “You’ll. Need. This!” It was heavy, for it was made of glass bricks. “I got in trouble…for using…the lightkey,” she panted once the ladder stood in front of the window. “I couldn’t reach. From the top step. So I had to stack things on top of it.”
Cal-raven took a step up on the ladder, then reached out to touch the delicate lace with his fingertips. He was surprised by its warmth and strength. “Why does House Bel Amica hide this window? It’s the most exquisite thing I’ve seen here.”
“The people don’t know about it.” Obrey shrugged, spinning a glass top and watching it zigzag across the floor. “Frits and Milora decide who gets to see it. They know who they can trust.”
“The colors remind me of something.” He sat down on the stepladder, regarding the girl suspiciously. “But that was far away and long ago.”
She blinked at him, tilting her head like a curious bird.
“Obrey, how old are you?”
“Not sure,” she answered and started counting on her fingers. “Frits thinks I’m fourteen.”
“Why did you end up here?”
“We didn’t want to. But the Seers kept offering fortunes and fame. Milora got angry. She shouted at them. She was worried about what would happen to the stuff we were making.”
“What happened?”