Auralia's Colors

  He could hear something—a voice, a low humming, a rumble, a deep song. He opened his eyes, expecting to see nothing but the moon’s pale impression like a shining coin floating above him, but there was something else…an immense shadow passing between him and the surface.

  He felt compelled to call out. But he had no strength.

  A strong current sent him spinning upward, and he found himself drawing in lungfuls of night air. Something bumped against his head, driftwood perhaps, and his feet kicked against rising ground.

  He splashed forward three steps before falling, his legs half-dead. He lunged onto a shore of smooth, slippery stones. The waves washed in and around and over him and then receded, and he was left there, soaking in the shallows, icy lakewater running out of his head through his nose and ears, his heavy coat holding him down.

  Soon, I will be able to feel again, he thought, watching his desperate breaths puff away in the breeze. That will hurt.

  His body felt like that of an old, enormous man. One foot was still held fast. With quivering fingers, he untangled a rope from his ankle and realized it was the tie to the bag that held the clay sipping cups and some flasks of ale. They rattled together like shells as he felt around inside; they were all there, two of fourteen cups were broken, but at least the disaster was not a total loss.

  He tried again to stand, but made it only to his knees. He blinked and made sense of the high shadow wall. Cliffs, with caves gouged in the base. The moonlight they reflected was full of soft colors. He looked back and saw nothing but the quieting waters and the lights of the royal float so far in the distance they might have been fireflies clustered on a lily pad.

  And then the trembling took over. Water trickled off his skin, and yet he felt colder. He clutched the bag against him, evidence that he was still alive, still the ale boy, still a person of some responsibility. But nothing could ever be the same, for now he knew with certainty that something hid beneath those waters.

  His face was wet with tears as he shook from the impact of betrayal—the adults had lied, and he had been punished a time or two for suspecting what was indeed true—and of hope: in his dreams, the creature had been gentle and sheltering.

  A warmth encircled him, heavy, soft, like a blanket. It was a blanket. And there was that voice of welcome.

  “I hoped you would visit me.”

  She was saving him again, wrapping him in warmth. She crouched beside him, a hunched figure in a hooded robe woven with all kinds of darkness.

  “But you coulda come by land, you know. I’m not so hard to find.”

  She was already busy, collecting wet, sharp-edged shells that the waves had given the shore. “Really,” she laughed, “the Keeper should be more careful.”

  8

  THE UNGUARDED GALLERY

  R oots like carrots bled orange dye. Taters from the house-kitchen rot bins could be mashed into pastes of brown, white, and grey. When fading summer brought the water level down from the doors of the caves, wide plates of slate lay safe for Auralia’s painting. Colors rivered and washed in tides in her head, and she swept them accordingly across stone canvases. The moonlight was enough, and when it was not, she worked with shimmering hues that danced up the cliffs to light the tree trunks and illuminate the outstretched, wind-shaped boughs.

  Ever since she could crawl, she had collected the colors of the Expanse, discerning the secrets of their making, and she had not been idle with the secrets fifteen years had taught her.

  All this she shared with the ale boy, walking through the caves with torch in hand as though discovering the colors for the first time. Many experiments had collapsed, and many inspirations had come to preposterous conclusions. But sometimes the work had revealed itself and become a thing of beauty or a device she had never imagined. She laughed, embarrassed by some of the garish displays she had made.

  He laughed too, because such passion seemed so dangerous—and sure to be stolen or destroyed. The walls were pockmarked with hand-carved indentations, each housing an exquisite invention. A small pillow of white feathers loosely bound by yellow grass and fringed with burgundy moss. Walking sticks, gnarled and smooth, stained in a spectrum of colors from regal blue to burnished gold. Autumn leaves spread into fans, sun dried, glazed with amber, ready to be brandished against summer’s stifling heat. A stonecutter with a bone white grip and a bold red sheath. And bowls, bowls of all shapes and colors. “I like to make things that can hold other things,” she said. As she ran her fingertips along the wall, she murmured reminders about what needed “work,” what was “good enough,” and the ale boy even caught her arguing with herself over the proper recipient for each gift.

  Gifts. Hundreds of them. Not showy gallery exhibits. Auralia had stored up ready remedies and surprises for the Gatherers. The fan—“Poor Wenjee is always too warm.” And the pillow—“Rishella’s gonna birth her baby soon.”

  Impossible that such a menagerie glittered unguarded within Abascar’s reach, and yet the king had not found and buried these things in the Underkeep. “Nobody bothers with this end of the lake,” she explained. “Sometimes traders or soldiers’ll pass by, but it’s like they’re blind. They don’t look closely, or they’re looking for the wrong things. They come out with a mind for conflict, not for savoring. The farther from Abascar, the more they sharpen their swords and move all hasty-like.”

  “But isn’t it dangerous, living out here alone?”

  “Of course it’s dangerous,” she snapped bitterly. “More dangerous every day. But aren’t there dangers inside Abascar’s walls? And really, what do they expect? The woods wouldn’t be so dangerous if they hadn’t left it to run so wild. Now they’re afraid of it and probably ashamed.”

  “Ashamed?”

  “Ashamed they’ve forgotten how to live here. They’re too busy making piles of things they think they need and then buildin’ walls around ’em. Makes ’em think there’s nothin’ out here they need. But out here they’d remember that they’re small and that they need help.”

  The ale boy nodded as though he’d thought of this before. He was, after all, painfully aware of his smallness and his constant need for help.

  Auralia stopped to whistle at a cavebird, with its oily feathers and bulging lidless eyes. “Why should the forest care what becomes of Abascar, when they’ve left it in such a state?”

  “Why do you stay then?”

  She shrugged. “How could I leave the Gatherers? They found me. Took care of me until I could walk. Gave me a place. They didn’t have to help me. And I wanted them to know…”

  “But they know,” he interrupted. “They’ve known a long, long time. Whenever I visit the Gatherers, they’re talkin’ about you. They worry about you. You’ve repaid them, I think, Auralia. You don’t have to stay. You can get away before something happens. Before officers start tellin’ you what kinda colors you can’t use.”

  “Perhaps. What do you want me to do?”

  “Stay.” He blushed.

  She blinked at him. “You’re a funny thing, ale boy.”

  Feeling very small indeed, the ale boy watched the waves of light splashing across the waiting gifts. He was tempted to ask if he could stay here in this heart of craft and care, a place so different from the Underkeep’s corridors with their unsettling, transient winds, their mysterious groans, their tangled and knotted labyrinths.

  He had caught a glimpse at last of what made Auralia skirt Abascar’s borders and resist the pull of its gravity. Auralia’s way was to bless the undeserving, not reward those who gave her what she wanted. What hope could she have when Abascar punished orphans who did not learn to follow instructions?

  Unless…

  He returned to questions that grew stronger every day. Why was he an exception? He had never been cast out. He had never been awarded badges or subjected to the tests. What had he done that Abascar favored him? What had set him apart from orphans who were given over to the Gatherers’ insufficient care?

  Fear kept
him from voicing such questions, lest the matter had simply been overlooked, lest officers should investigate, mutter their regret, and toss him into the wilderness. But now he wondered if there was some secret bargain that could be struck that would allow Auralia to dwell freely within the palace as he did. What was this third path, this life beyond the two extremes—the tedious exchange of labor for protection within Abascar’s enclosure, and the scramble for survival on the perilous side of Abascar’s walls?

  He began to wonder which of Auralia’s inventions might be useful to bribe an official or win a special pardon.

  “Not even the palace stuff’s good like this,” he told her, picking up two discs of polished seaglass in a small rectangular frame of twigs.

  “Try holding ’em up to your eyes.”

  He propped the frame on the bridge of his nose and peered through the discs. Auralia and the torch loomed larger, a bit blurry but unmistakable.

  “You know old Radish? His eyes’re so bad he can’t see what’s in his spoon before he lifts it to his mouth.” She hushed her voice as if the old Gatherer might be nearby.

  As they wandered through the ascending passage, the ale boy saw more and more and more—things pieced together so perfectly it was hard to imagine why no one had done so before. What did a tree cone have to do with an array of butterfly wings? When fitted together just so and then tossed skyward, they became a spinning, gliding top. What did honeycombs have to do with the spines of husktree leaves? In her hands, they became slow-burning candles with brilliant gold flames.

  “I never knew there were so many colors. How do you find so many?”

  “I put two colors together just to see what they’ll do with each other. This one’ll swallow that one. This one, mixed with that one, disappears, but it makes this one weaker at the same time. Sometimes they join.” She clapped her hands. Echoes of applause sounded round about them, as though a hundred other children answered from a hundred different caves. “And woosh! You see something new and amazing.”

  The ale boy thought of Obsidia Dram mixing her wines and tasting them.

  “I just know there’s got to be more of ’em.” Auralia’s pale brow was crumpled in concentration. She walked faster, her finger tracing a yellow spiral painted along the wall in a line like that of a windblown leaf that never settles. “I know there’s some colors missing. I can feel it…here.” She paused before a heavy vine-weave curtain that veiled another cave, closed her fists and pressed them to her temples. “It’s like I used to see other colors, and now something’s keeping them out of my head. Without them, everything seems unfinished. Everything.” She spread her arms wide. “It’s all imperfect. And I don’t know how I know.”

  Everything here is perfect, he thought. Isn’t it? “If he saw this, King Cal-marcus would ask you to paint the walls of his house.” He reached absently for the curtain.

  “Paint the walls? They should let me rip ’em down.” Auralia grabbed his arm and drew him forward to the first bend in the tunnel. The torch grazed the wall, showering sparks and ash. “Used to be the walls were there to keep out the beastmen. But now they keep out everything.”

  She drew in a sharp breath and looked back. Then she clutched his collar, pulled him forward, and cast the torch down into a pile of stones. “Cover the flame! Put it out!” she whispered.

  The quavering light dimmed. They huddled together against the wall. Smoke flowered from the stones before them, then dissipated on the low-moaning wind. Their heartbeats thundered. The ale boy, still wet with grimy lakewater, pressed against Auralia’s heat.

  He heard it now—heavy, wet, uncertain steps. A gurgling wheeze choked with lakewater. The visitor advanced, one step, another, up the long stretch, until he stopped a few steps from the corner. The passage was suddenly illuminated by a warm glow.

  Auralia peered around the corner, toward the entrance. A moment of stillness, and she gestured for the boy to share the view.

  The corridor was empty. Light touched the wall opposite the curtain, which had been drawn back to release streams of shimmering color. The ale boy could see the shadow of their visitor, a crooked figure outlined on the wall, one massive hand pressed against its head as if to an injury.

  “It’s the stranger,” Auralia said in his ear. “He’s come back.”

  “What stranger? From Abascar?”

  “No.”

  A chill ran through him, and he began to crawl backward, but Auralia grabbed him by the sleeve and shook her head. “Don’t be scared. He’s not a normal beastman. He’s different. This one, he comes for the colors. He stays. He sleeps. Sometimes I think he cries. Eventually he goes. I don’t bother him; he doesn’t bother me. I think the colors are helping him.”

  The shadow vanished as the visitor let the curtain close behind him.

  “Are we safe?”

  “For now.”

  The ale boy felt a scorch of envy for the visitor, who had immersed himself in the light. “The colors.” He stood up and stepped back around the corner, drawn toward the music of the hues. “They move.”

  Auralia pulled the sputtering remnant of the torch from the stones and followed on tiptoes. “I know.” There was awe in her voice and fear as well. “They’re changing. Can’t say how I made that happen.” She put her lips to his ear. “We shouldn’t stay. As long as he’s here, it’s not safe.”

  “But you said…”

  “I said he hasn’t bothered me. He hasn’t seen you. Let’s not test him.”

  Back in the moonlight, their feet clattered on stones, the ale boy looking back at the tunnel with regret. The rising breeze was cold as buried bones. He wondered what she could have meant about the colors. He could think only of the warmth they promised. It was all he could do to move forward toward the lake. These colors spoke to him, of what he wasn’t certain.

  “I want to come back again. I want to see those colors.”

  “No,” she said flatly. “They’re too dangerous.”

  “How?”

  “They’re wild and moving when they’re stitched just so. They put that beastman in a trance. No tellin’ what they’ll do to you. Don’t want you to get burnt.”

  “Fire doesn’t scare me.” He touched the mark on his brow. “Remember?”

  “It isn’t a fire. It’s just threads. I just started weavin’ them together. They’re pieces of something, but I can’t see what. Not yet. Something’s still missing.”

  He found Auralia watching him, as if she hoped to find some answer in his troubled face. “Don’tcha ever get that feeling,” she said with the weariness of someone much older, “when you run up a new path in the woods that you’ll find something at the end of it…something you’ve never seen?”

  Yes, he did not say aloud.

  “Or maybe you see something move in the lake,” she said, “and you want to swim to it just to find out what it is?”

  The ale boy glanced quickly, nervously, toward the water. “The officers don’t want me askin’ about things that aren’t my business. It’s best I stay away from mysteries. They get me into trouble.”

  He imagined himself resting from daily errands, lying on a cot in his humble cave deep beneath the palace in the Underkeep, staring across the bridge-laced abyss of a thousand torches, watching sparks from lanterns in the brewers’ caverns spring out of their glass enclosures and gleam along the floor. A stray spark would sometimes tumble into a spill of ale. In its final hiss and glow, the color would change, swell, blaze, and suddenly fade, leaving a mark in his vision that stayed even when he slept.

  “There are no Abascar guards watching us, ale boy,” she said. “You don’t have to be afraid.”

  He took her hand, led her down close to the water, and found them a dry place to sit on a large, twisted driftwood tree. Taking the bag that had survived his desperate swim, he drew out the ale cups and lined them up on the tree. She remained close, curious. He took the four flasks made of skins, uncorked them, and smiled up at her with a glint in his e
ye that was more than just the moon.

  “Watch.”

  He filled four cups with ales of brown, amber, gold, and red. With the confidence of a juggler, he mixed different combinations in the remaining eight cups. There was purpose in his work. Auralia pounded her knuckles together while she watched. Occasionally she glanced back at her caves and then wrung the edge of her cloak. He could not repress his smile.

  And then he sat back, pulled his knees up to his chin, and grinned. “Ready? Take the torch. There’s still an ember there. Touch it to the edge of each cup.”

  She took the hissing branch, held it out to the cups, and rush! A flame leapt from the lip of the first. The next erupted in fire. She did not need the torch for the rest. The nearness of flame brought answering bursts right down the line, until there was a row of straight and steady lights between Auralia and the ale boy, each a different hue. One colder than blue, one bolder than red, and one a sort of rust she had seen only in leaves that clung to trees in defiance of winter. One burnt three colors at once, and where they joined at the base of the flame was a searing white gold. They laughed, his happiness rekindled by hers.

  “Fire patrols watch the breweries. A brewer dropped his torch beside a leaking barrel. Pow!” He fanned his fingers out. “There was nothin’ left of him when they stamped out the flames. It gave the king an idea. He had folks start makin’ traps for the beastmen—at least, that’s what Dram tells me. Soldiers can bait beastmen into pools that go up in flames and…”

  He abandoned his story, for the colors had distracted Auralia. It seemed she was listening to them, waiting for them to tell her where she could employ them. He felt a strange pride to see her so engaged.