April 26, ’94 (after the Fire)
Farisa’s eyes opened to a dawn-lit sky and a ground cover of fine soot. Black skeletons of trees curled like accusing fingers. Night and dream and twenty years of life before had swirled, shifted, and then settled back into what seemed to be their rightful lines, but those too might have been moved in her sleep. The fire had come through, become forever a part of her, but spared this stretch of riverine soil, granting her uncanny survival. The blaze was gone, aside from a few smoldering remnants, but could never be undone. She, on the other hand...
She remembered removing her waterlogged dress and draping it over a rock, facing the fire so it would dry out, but she could not recall on which stone she had put it. The sight of her body in this state was not pleasing. Flash burns had discolored her arms and legs. A lamprey bite from the river swim sat in the fold her stomach made as she sat up. Those marks would heal, but the one that worried her the most was the long scar along the sole of her left foot, which could not be attributed to any remembered cause. Did someone try to cut me? Was I seen...? She shuddered.
On the bank of the brown river, she washed her legs. Stone piers stood with no bridge to support, but seemed not to miss it. She judged the vertical distance of her fall, which had seemed endless at the time, as no more than fifteen yards, before making sight of the dress, crumpled but reasonably dry. She must have stolen it, as it was the sort of gaudy, expensive thing she would have never worn if there had been any other choice. As she put the garment on, she checked its pockets for money. None. The red sun was now rising, and time’s run would be out of her favor, so she would be on her way as soon as she found...
Shoes. I did remember to take shoes, did I not? She looked up and down the muddy bank. She considered climbing a tree, ashen and still hot and unlikely to support her weight, but decided against it, instead using a vantage point atop a boulder to spot a mound of ash under which she might have left a pair of boots or clogs or even closed-toe sandals, but found no such aid therein. Shoes, for a Lorani woman, were a matter of survival. It did not matter that she was thousands of miles from the place and culture of her birth. A proper woman of her ethnicity simply did not go about barefoot where the soles of her feet might be seen by men. Finding no possessions other than the purloined dress now on her body, she hoped to acquire some proper footwear—and safety, as a close second priority—before being seen at all.
It was probably near six, according to the civilized world that kept time, if that still existed, and the day’s armies would soon be searching for her, so she began walking east, ignoring the unpleasant coarseness of the ankle-deep ash. As the miles unrolled, her legs ached and her thighs chafed, and she realized she must have covered an impossible distance—fifty miles, maybe more—overnight, because Cait Forest’s western mountains should have been visible, but the charred land was dead flat in all directions.
“It’s about ten in the morning, and we’ve made good distance,” she said to nobody. Hours passed. Light moved. She hoped, if there was anyone here in the charred forest, she would see before being seen. “It’s noon, and I’m a little bit hungry.”
Often, her eyes would itch and she would sneeze, and she hated this, because every time her eyelids shut, veins of flame spread, forming scowling faces. Were these the people the fire had killed? Were they angry at her, and did they have the right to be?
This all became a long conversation with herself, because to hear words, even her own, gave her a better chance of dislodging a memory that might explain what had led to this. She whispered, of course, because even though she had seen no one in any direction all day, she was in an itchy ratty dress, with her feet unshod, and to be seen as one who talks to herself on top of all this would put her in any eye’s judgment in only one category: madwoman. Still, she needed to know her voice still worked, so she argued, as if in front of a magistrate, that the fire had not been her fault. She began to find her arguments convincing.
In the haze, the afternoon sun turned orange before its time, and though there were a couple of hours of daylight left, she realized she would have to find food, lest she spend a night in the dark, alone with increasing hunger. Roseberries were in season, but those bushes would have been torched as soon as the fire front crossed over them. Wild onions and spring leeks, if insulated by windblown ash, could have survived, so she kicked around for about an hour, but found nothing and decided to move on. Less than an hour before sunset, her path came parallel to a dolomite ridge, and she knew there might be edible fungi inside, so she reached into a crevice, too small for her body but deep enough that daylight did not penetrate it. Rough stone scratched her wrist and forearm, and the awkward angle of her stretched arm made her shoulder hurt, but at her fingers’ maximal extent she caught something slippery, which she broke off its purchase. The flexible tangle of pink matter, its gills barely visible, reminded her of something—or someone. As she put a tiny piece of it on her tongue, a bolt of bitterness shot up her nose, causing her eyes to shut and forcing into mind the image of a blonde woman, face bloated and purple as if hanged, with a pink ribbon in her hair. She spat it out, and she screamed.
“Come on,” she said to herself as if speaking to a child whose health and attitude were failing. “The sun will set soon.”
She was walking under a rising full moon when a bat flew overhead. Twilight birdsong, a few hundred paces beyond, returned to the woods. Here, a few mounds of grass had survived, and some of the trees had kept their spring leaf buds. The odor of pine, redolent of her lost home, rolled through the forest.
“I’m so hungry,” she said to herself, holding her stomach. “I’ll find food tomorrow. I will. I will, and I’ll feel better.”
A memory stirred. She considered it probably true that she had been, not long ago, in a cozy cabin writing a letter.
“What I wish I could say to you...”
...is: Thank you. You show up. You care. You’re mine, mine, mine. I haven’t made it clear enough, but I love you. This woman, for the least of you, would go to the edge of the world...
“... with the stars and the galaxies at her back.”
The stars and the galaxies. She knew where she needed to go. There was a place—137 Andor Street, central Exmore—that would offer sanctuary to a woman whom no one else would dare shelter.
“Stars and galaxies,” she said again with confidence. A pale light—Alfad Sophya, on which she’d made so many wishes as a little girl—had come out in the eastern sky.
“Who am I?” Farisa’s breath hung in the moonlight. “Who was I?”
#
Late October, ’80 (13½ years before the fire).
This log had served as a bridge over the creek between the orphanage grounds and the woods for more than fifty years. The mossy stone on the other side was an excellent place to read, and the little girl had spent most of the past summer’s long-lit evenings there, finding stories a better use of her time than “Monster in the Pit,” the favorite game of the other children. She had learned its rules quickly and did not object to the game itself, but she had resented always being chosen as the Monster.
Fay had been shown this place by Anna, the only friend she’d ever made here, a kind and studious Vehu girl who was “dopted” last June. This meant she got new parents and a whole new house, somewhere on the mainland far away. Upon learning of this, she ran to Raam, the monk who was also the school’s headmaster, to ask if she could ever be “dopted.” His answer was that any family would be lucky to have her as a daughter. She then asked if it was probable—dice games had taught her that all sorts of things were possible but that very few were probable—and the old man shook his head, saying that the Global Company was making orphans faster than they could be placed.
So she realized she would have to make friends here. And she could! The other kids never failed to remind her that she was the youngest and smallest one here, but she was smart and she was an excellent tree climber. She only needed the chance to prove herself.
“You clod!” she shouted after she fell off the log into the muck. She had crossed dozens of times easily, but had lost balance dodging Boof’s thrown pebbles. “You absolute clod! Raam will be so angry. You soiled my nice clothes.”
Lani chortled. “They’re not that nice.”
Jed laughed. “You didn’t know you’d get dirty out here?”
Lani and Jed were nine, two years older than Fay. Boof was ten, almost a hundred pounds, so he wasn’t afraid of anything. He had chosen the name because it sounded like someone being punched in the face. Boof, boof!
The four children walked through the forest, not exactly together. Wind pushed clouds across the bright blue sky. The trees were mostly bare, and the adults said winter was coming early this year, but a few red oaks were holding onto autumn. Leaves, dry and slightly rigid, crunched underfoot as the children followed the path. The air was quite pleasant, if one had a jacket, but it could turn cold any time, and the orphanage had a rule that no one could go into the woods once it started to snow. This could be Fay’s last chance of adventure—her last opportunity to prove her worth to the others—till spring.
The trail narrowed as they climbed a hill. They had to walk single file, so Lani and Boof argued about who belonged in front while Jed banged his metal pail against tree boughs. The children were walking as fast as they could, as if trying to lose Fay, but she hurried, refusing to let them.
“Hold on,” Jed said. “My bucket’s stuck.”
Lani fiddled with the widowed buttonhole of her patch-ridden jacket. “Why’d you bring that stupid thing?”
“Catch frogs,” Jed said.
“They’ve all gone to sleep,” Fay said. “It’s called hibernating.”
Boof ejected saliva between his front teeth. “Shut up, Professor Fay.”
“Why are you even with us?” Lani said. “No one likes you.”
“Anna liked me.”
“Anna’s gone.”
“She’ll visit.”
Lani chuckled. “No, she won’t. They always say that, but they never do.”
Fay knew Lani was right. She was stuck here with the other kids no one else wanted. She was good at so many things, but she had failed to win their friendship. They did not even regard her as a bothersome little sister, but a broken child with nothing to offer.
Jed shook his bucket by the handle. “Dum-ba-dum-ba-dum-da-bum-a-dum.”
“Boof,” Lani said. “Where are we going?”
The boy, rather than answer, repeated her question in mockery.
Lani pushed a stand of yellow ferns out of the way with her walking stick. “Boof, I’m serious.”
“Don’t worry. I know where we are.”
Fay shared Lani’s doubts. The main trails tended to be well groomed, because the monks and nuns used them to count migratory birds, but this appeared to be a spur path at best.
“Hey.” Jed tugged Fay’s jacket sleeve, causing her to fall back with him. “I wanted to ask you something.”
“What’s that?”
“Is your skin dark like that because you were inside your mom for too long and got burnt?”
Fay sighed. “That is not only a mean question, but a contemptibly stupid one.”
Jed jangled his bucket. “This is why you don’t have any friends.”
Fay hurried up to hear Boof and Lani, who were still arguing.
“You’re getting us lost,” Lani said.
He scoffed. “We’re not lost, Lani. I’ve been here a million times.”
“That’s impossible,” Fay said. “A million is a thousand thousand.”
“I know that, tarsha.”
“What’s a tarsha?”
Boof made an ugly face. “What’th a tarsha?”
Jed’s and Lani’s laughter made clear that tarsha was one of those words you didn’t say around adults or you’d get in trouble, and she could tell by the movement of their eyes that the answer was in the color of her skin.
Jed rapped a fist on his metal bucket. “Lani has a point, though. The trail doesn’t look like this.”
Boof said, “Would you please shut the hell up?”
“There’s a way to figure this out,” Fay said.
Boof rolled his eyes. “Professor Fay, I swear on your dead mother’s j—”
Rather than argue, Fay climbed a yellow-needled larch. “Do you see the white marks on the trees?” She pointed. “That’s where we’re supposed to be.”
As she came down the tree, Jed said, “You learn that in the jungle?”
“I’m from a city.” She could barely remember Loran, but had been told about the house her father had once owned. “There are museums and libraries and lovely gardens and it never gets cold there, not even in winter.”
“Then go back there,” Lani said.
Boof sneered. “She never shuts up.”
They walked for at least a mile more, coming up a steep hill to a plateau. The view rewarded the effort, as here the woods broke, giving clear sight of the tall white mountains, leaving her with a sense of having come into the true wild. A thin layer of snow, electric in the downing light, covered the grass.
Fay realized her shadow had grown tall. “We should turn back. It’s almost four.”
Boof crossed his arms. “How would you know? You can’t afford a watch. I know who your parents were.”
“My parents fought, you imbecile.”
Boof spat again through his front teeth. The jet of saliva nearly hit her face. “Your parents fought for the wrong side. The losing side.”
Jed pantomimed guns with his fingers. “Hampus Bell was like pow, pow, pow!”
Lani, despite her denim jacket, was shivering. “I hate to say she has a point. It is getting dark.”
Boof shook his head and looked at Jed. “This is why we never take girls along.” He whined, “It’s dark!”
Jed laughed, of course. If Boof said it, it was funny.
“Fine. We will go back, but I gotta take a piss.” Boof walked into a stand of weeds. “Anyone who looks is getting beat.”
“You wish, Boof,” Lani said. “Nobody wants to watch you pee.”
They waited for Boof’s return. Fay put her mittened hands in her pockets and looked again at the mountains. She imagined that she might not return to the orphanage, but instead make friends with the wolves and foxes and ice sprites who would teach her the arts of boreal survival. Nevertheless, they had come quite a distance for her little legs, and in spite of it having been warm when they had set out, the air was taking a chill.
Lani yelled. “Hurry up! It doesn’t take that long to pee.”
Jed rattled his bucket. “Yeah Boof, hurry up!”
"You better not be jer—"
Boof emerged from the weeds with a stocky black animal, arms outstretched so the creature’s flailing limbs could not scratch him. “Jed, give me that bucket.”
Jed did so. Boof put the animal between the ground and upturned pail, then stepped on the bucket, driving its metal rim into the dirt. Claws clanged on steel. Desperate yowls filled the woods.
“Don’t do that,” Fay said.
“Don’t do thaaaaat,” Boof whined. Jed and Lani cackled.
“He can’t breathe.” Fay’s mouth tingled and her vision dulled. “You’re hurting him. You’re killing him.”
“Stop it, Boof!” He took up a high, nasal voice. “You’re hurting him! Boof, you can’t!”
She had a sense of colorless terror, of wanting to run away in all directions at once, of being trapped between metal and earth in a space as airless as the forever-away void beyond the sky. Sounds turned placeless and oppressive, shrill beyond pitch, and the swirl of dread behind each eye was coming around front, covering her face...
The grass rustled. Lani screamed. Boof used Jed as a shield. The beast tore flesh from Jed’s arm, releasing blood in a color and volume Fay had never seen. Lani slammed her walking stick into the animal’s ribcage but the two-hundred-pound mother stormcat—as gray as granite, striped like a tiger, with the fury of fire—seemed not to notice.
Fay threw her mind—there was no other way to explain it—at Boof’s legs and the boy collapsed like a sack of pears. Feeling the same twitch in her mind again, she directed it at the metal bucket, which popped ten feet into the air, as if it had been kicked with an adult’s force. The stormcat cub darted into the grass and its smoke-colored mother followed. The woods returned to silence as soon as the black tuft of her tail was gone.
Lani’s face had turned white. Jed looked at his shredded forearm with his mouth open.
“We have to leave,” Fay said. “We have to leave now. I promised her we would never come back.”
Boof, as he stood up, said, “You did what?”
“I don’t know how it happened,” she admitted. She gave her account of events but, even to her young ear, it seemed as fanciful as those tales of trolls that ate misbehaving children.
“You were ten feet away from that bucket,” said Lani.
“I know,” Fay said. “I know, but I did it, and then I told her—”
“Her? The... monster?”
“—that if she did not harm us, we would go away forever.”
“N-n-nonsense,” Jed said with a stutter he would have for as long as Fay would know him. “You didn’t s-s-save anyone. You were just as s-s-scared as w-w-we were.”
I was scared. Of course I was scared. But it happened. I did something.
“Don’t listen to the freak,” Lani said to Jed. “Also, you’re bleeding everywhere. It’s disgusting. Let’s go.”
The other children ran off at full speed, leaving Fay to make her way home. She found her way back by the color of the sky. She felt, in the wake of that strange mental exertion, as if she had trudged a thousand miles with five times her weight in tow, aching everywhere as she fought the closing of her eyes with every step. Whatever she had done, although it had saved her life and three others, had exhausted her enough that she decided against ever doing it again.
When she came around the last bend and could see the lights of the orphanage, the sky was dark except for a pale western thread, and the snow was falling.
#
The little girl woke to an oil lantern’s light. She had skipped dinner and gone straight to bed, too tired for an appetite. She had removed her coat and hat and gloves but was still in her day clothes. It was after eleven o’clock, because the hallway lamps had been put out.
Tia, the nun who taught math, had come along with Raam, the headmaster.
The nun lifted a book from Fay’s tiny nightstand. “You’re reading The Travels of Dolores, I see.”
Raam said, “We can’t have you doing that sort of thing again.”
Fay sat up. “I’m sorry! I’ll put it back!”
Tia looked puzzled, then chuckled. “Oh, this book? No, Farisa, this isn’t about that.”
“If anything,” Raam added, “I’m impressed. Dolores is for people much older than you.”
“You’re not in trouble,” Tia said.
“No, none.” Lamplight gleamed on Raam’s bald head. “You’ve done nothing wrong.”
Fay tilted her head. “I’m confused.”
Tia adjusted her glasses. “How do I put this?”
She looked at Raam, who blinked while looking back.
Tia continued. “This conversation is rarely had with children as young as you. Have you noticed—well, you must have noticed—that you think differently from other children, and that you can do things the others can’t?”
She nodded, but wasn’t sure what was being asked.
“You have talents. I’m not talking about academic—well, you have that too, but what I mean is—you have to be careful, because...”
“You’re a mage,” said the old bald monk.
Even at seven, she could see fear in Tia’s eyes. “You can’t let anyone know.”
#
The November sky had lit its first stars, and snow had piled up a little each day over weeks, covering the orphanage grounds. Shoveled paths cut tunnels amidst waist-high walls of snow. Fay was headed for dinner when Boof, hidden behind a tree, stepped into her path.
Jed, who had come along with Lani, said, “You tried to k-k-kill us with that s-s-stormcat. You’re a v-vitch.”
This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
Fay held her schoolbooks close to her chest. “Don’t be ridiculous. There’s no such thing as witches.”
Boof shoved her. As she fell, her books landed in the snow. Before she could gather them, Jed kicked her in the side. Lani grabbed her hair and started dragging her. Fay’s fingers dug uselessly into the snowy ground. Other children joined, chanting, “Witch! Witch!”
She looked around, hoping one of the adults would intervene. None were in sight. She had backed up against the main dormitory’s side wall, ten feet of red brick. Seven children, all larger than she was, had, by some insectile instinct of formation, made a perfect semicircle around her.
Boof puffed out his chest. “Fay Little, you stand accused of sorcery. You are known to conspire with all manner of ghosts and devils. How do you plead?”
“I’m not playing this stupid game,” she said. She looked up at the second-floor windows, hoping to see one lit. “Ghosts and devils don’t exist.”
Raam had told her, some months ago, that nighttime oddities—invisible noises, milky shadows in a closing eye’s corner, the odors that came of no cause—were nothing to worry about.
Lani crossed her arms. “If they don’t exist, then how come you’re good at school? Tarshas aren’t s’posed to be smart. You cheat with your demon powers.”
“My n-n-neighbor w-w-was a v-vitch,” said Jed, smiling with the glee of an imp cutting up worms. “No one would m-marry her because she c-c-an’t have kids, and with no h-h-husband to clean out her jammy, it got b-backed up with g-g-gross girl stuff. Sh-she ended up in a madhouse.”
“You tried to kill us,” Lani said.
Fay said, “I saved you.”
Boof shouted, “Hear that? She admits it. She just admitted everything.”
The kids closed in. The brick wall pressed into her back.
Boof’s voice came as loud as a grown man’s. His breath, even in air too cold to carry most odors, stank. “This court has given Fay Little the chance to repent for her deeds, in sight of men common and high. She has refused. The penalty for this is...”
She wished she were a bird, so she could fly away, or a shadow, so she could melt into the snow and tunnel beneath the others, or a sprung bullet capable of escape at destructive speed, and this gave her the idea to spot the weak link: the boy next to Lani, who had fallen from a tree last summer and still walked with a limp. If she buckled his bad leg, she could break free. She ran toward him with all the force her small body could muster, and—
Jed’s arm swung. A flash of white exploded in her eyes. Lani threw a piece of ice at Fay’s lower chest, knocking breath from her. A shard of brick, aimed at her head, hit her hand, causing her fingers to bleed, as she blocked it. The others closed in. Boof pushed her, making her fall. She threw her arms over her face so no one could see her crying. A boot crashed into her tailbone, sending a spike of pain up her spine.
“Sh-sh-shit!” Jed said. “It’s Raam.”
The old monk carried a birch cane. Fay had never seen him this angry. The children ran. Raam shouted Boof’s real name. “You can’t run forever. You’ll freeze to death.”
The boy stopped and looked back. Boof was less than pleasing to sight in the best circumstances, but fright made him truly hideous.
“Leave,” Raam said to Fay.
She did not heed this order, but hid behind a snowy bush as the boy dropped his pants. Raam, face unmoving, caned his buttocks to first blood—the point at which, by Vehu law, corporal punishment of a child must stop.
“Pull your pants up,” he said. “If you touch that girl again, you’ll see how cold the nights can get up here.”
Boof sobbed. “I didn’t mean to hurt her.”
“The matter of intention is between you and God. My job is done.”
#
After that, Raam and Tia kept Fay under close watch, and there was not much to do outdoors. The winter of ‘80–81 proved frigid, even by Medvesziget standards, so the yard and a half of snow left by a series of blizzards in late November did not melt under the meek sun of December, nor did the winds of January disperse it.
“A mage I am.” She was alone in her third-floor bedroom on a dark cold night. When she couldn’t sleep, it soothed her to talk to herself. “A mage I must be. This being a mage... means what? A mage... I am? Why? Why a mage?”
She remembered Jed’s taunt, the one about mages being childless and going mad. She was old enough to consider Jed’s opinions worthless, but she’d heard so many people use the phrase, “as mad as a mage,” she worried there might be truth in it.
Anxiety moved her lips. “Farisa is a mage. I am a Farisa. I am a mage, a mage is a witch, a witch is Farisa, no?” She sat up, left the bed, and put on her day clothes. “Witch Farisa. Which Farisa? Farisa, the witch.”
Fay had left the dormitory and was walking through six inches of new snow to the orphanage’s small library.
“The witch I am, I must be.” She climbed the slick steps, slowly and with arms outstretched to keep her balance. “I must be that I am.”
She opened the unlocked door and walked to the shelf where sat the Encyclopedia Veridica, twenty-four volumes broad. This would become a morbid nightly habit: she would choose one of the leather-bound books, open it to a random page, and scan until she found a biography entry of a well-known historical sorcerer. Then, she would subtract the year of birth from that of death to answer, in some sense, the question of her total life span. Emma Nordich: Twenty-six years. Johann Broff: Nineteen. T. M. Kane: Twenty-eight. Andor Mazra: Thirty. Another thirty. Twenty. Twenty-two. Seventeen. Thirty-eight—not so bad. Twenty-four and sixteen days. Thirty-one. Fifteen. Fifteen—what had happened there? She turned the page...
Every night, the rest of the winter, she read like this, keeping watch on the library’s grandfather clock so as to be back in bed by four, because this time of year the adults were up long before first light. If she grew tired, she would keep herself awake by reading aloud.
“Ancient records suggest that, even as recently as two thousand years ago, mages were able to bear children, and lived as long as the unafflicted.”
Unafflicted. A new word for her. She looked up the word affliction in the dictionary. “To burden with hardship or pain; to cause disease.” She paused. Disease? Does this mean I am sick? What could I be sick with, and how can I be sick and not know?
She learned the name of the illness common to all mages—the Blue Marquessa, whose earliest symptoms matched hers to the grain. She had even seen the weird woman—a shade in a midnight periphery, a face that melted like wax under direct gaze, a decrepit and very tall crone with a serpentine neck—exactly as described.
Some historical cultures viewed magic as inherently demonic and considered the illness to be a sign of a diseased, complicit spirit. But I never chose this, reasoned the little girl, and I’m not evil. Modern clinicians, more scientific in their approach, insisted the malady was merely a nervous disorder, as open to study as any other, though they had found no answer. Why did less than one mage in a hundred live to the age of forty? No one knew. She feared death, but more than that, she feared insanity, the long nightmare of locked doors and cold floors, of soiled air and warping wallpaper, of canvas jackets tied outside themselves so the wearer could never remove them. Fay decided she would refuse such an end. If she were to perish, she would do so on her own terms. Her parents had taken up arms against the Global Company, dying with honor intact, opposing evil to the red last breath. If madness ever came for her, so would she.
#
Rooftop snowmelt dripped outside Fay’s bedroom window. The March sun had made it too hot under her quilt to sleep, but breakfast wouldn’t be served till seven forty-five, so on these lingering mornings she would often listen to downstairs conversations that traveled through the steam pipes, as the monks and the occasional nun debated literature or philosophy over a board game. She learned a lot of new words that way, but the language they were using today, given the pressing nature of the discussion, was swift and ordinary.
She overheard Raam say, “The Company knows there’s a child mage here.”
A woman whose voice she didn’t recognize said, “Do they know which child mage?”
“Does it matter?” Raam said.
She heard unintelligible murmurs.
“Given who she is—”
More murmurs. “The risk.”
“I must unfortunately agree, which means—”
“We must take her to the mainland.”
She was old enough not to deceive herself. She had done nothing wrong, but they could not be talking about anyone else, so she was in some kind of trouble, and it did not surprise her when Raam and Tia, unsmiling, arrived at her room fifteen minutes later.
“I heard.” She started gathering her belongings. “I understand.”
Tia said, “I’m sorry, but there won’t be time for you to say goodbye to the other kids.”
“They won’t miss me.”
“You’ll love the Library of Tevalon,” Tia said.
Raam said, “It is, like our orphanage, adjacent to a monastery.”
“City people tend to be more accepting.”
Fay nodded. “Thank you for everything, Tia. You have been a splendid teacher.”
“I will take you,” said Raam. “Our boat leaves in an hour.”
“The Company will not stand forever,” said the nun. “Until and after it falls, we need people of conscience who understand industry and science, and those rely on mathematics. So you better keep practicing your long division.”
Raam led her outside, where it was cold and sunny. “A steamship could get us to Black Harbor in four hours, but we'll be taking a sailboat. We do not want attention from people we do not know.”
Fay hurried to follow him to the dock, where the small ship had arrived ahead of time. By midmorning, they were out of land’s sight. When the captain served lunch, Fay couldn’t finish hers, so she slipped a piece of fish to the sailor’s green-eyed black cat.
“Be careful,” he said. “Feed ’im too much, and ’e won’t do ’is job.”
"I'll stop," Fay said.
"Naw. Ye're fine. I'm just bustin' yer ballast."
“How’s the sailing been?” Raam asked.
“I can’t complain. Calm seas into spring. I’ll never take that for granted.”
“It isn’t often like this in March, is it?”
“Naw, sure ain’t. I know you land folk don’t like when it stays cold so long, but it’s when it gets warm that the polar winds break and the swells come up. This time tomorrow, the seas will be too rough for a little boat like this.”
Raam said, “So is this your last day on the ocean?”
“Aye, till the first of October or so.”
“That’ll be my eighth birthday.”
“Well, happy future birthday. May you have a hundred.”
“I won’t,” she said, “but I’ll be happy with ten more.”
The men looked at each other, as if neither knew what to say, and she felt like she had made some unspoken mistake. She looked at the sleeve of her jacket, which Claes had given her two summers ago when she came to the orphanage. He had kept her safe across thousands of miles, but she couldn’t even remember what he had looked like, or why he had done this for her at all.
“Raam,” she said.
“Yes, Farisa.”
“Who is Claes, really?”
Raam paused. “Claes Bergryn was a friend of your father’s.”
“Does that mean...?” She trailed off, unsure what question she had wanted to ask.
“I suppose you want to know why he left you with us, instead of taking you to his home.”
“That would be it, I think.”
“Claes lives in the South, too close to the railroad between Exmore and Moyenne. He thought you’d be safe up here, so far from everything that no one would look.”
“But now I’m not safe?”
“You’ll be more safe in Tevalon,” said Raam. “Some centuries have been kinder to us Vehu than others, but the Old City has never been breached.”
The ship’s sway increased as the gliding afternoon sun lowered, and she found it hard to read, so she went to bed shortly after dusk. Her sleep was calm and dreamless at first, but resolved into a conscious darkness that could not help but fill itself with imagery. The red brick wall was at her back, the slushy ground would swallow her if she fell, and she heard the voices of the taunting children as if their sounds had stored themselves forever in her face. Thrown stones. Kicking boots. Faces, laughing faces. Fury. There was no pain this time, but she would have preferred it be there, because pain had a peak and then dissipated but she expected no end of this falling, falling in all directions, a terminal cooling, a final dissipation, a collapse into profound powerlessness—this would not stop, they would not stop—that lifted her with a night wind’s speed and resolved into a sprinting bounce, as if crossing a bridge, and then... and then...
“Out for a morning run?”
She noticed that Raam had wrapped his jacket around her.
“What’s chasing you?”
“Nothing,” said Fay. Seven years and five months old was too old for nightmares, especially of the kind that produced a screaming run out of bed. “I’m very sorry. I will go back—”
“There’s nothing to be sorry about.” Raam drank from a pewter tankard, then looked out over the starlit black ocean. “You can stay up, so long as you keep yourself warm.”
“Are you sure?”
“You don’t have class tomorrow, and it is a beautiful night. Don’t you dare take off that jacket.”
“I won’t,” Fay said. The down coat was too big for her, requiring her to hold it tight at the waist, but it did keep her warm.
“Can you see Alfad Sophya?”
Fay pointed to a bright star. “That one.”
“You are correct.” Raam set his tankard on the ship’s railing. “I think you’ll find the Library of Tevalon an excellent place for an inquisitive girl like you. They have the largest collection of books in the Known World. You’ll find the answer to every question you have.”
“Every question?”
Raam chuckled. “Knowing you, maybe not.”
As the boat rocked, Fay spread her feet to steady herself. “Where do you think my parents are?”
“Most likely, I’ll know the answer to that one before you.” Raam looked at his hands. “I’d like to say I’ll write back, but there seems to be a strict rule against it.”
“You believe they’re somewhere, though... right?”
“I do.”
“So, where?” Fay looked up at a faint shooting star. “What’s that place like?”
“I don’t know. As Vehu, we focus on doing what is right, down here, while we’re here. We believe God is just and He lets nothing go to waste, but as for specifics…”
“Are you so sure that God’s a ‘He’?”
“No.” Raam laughed. “Not at all.”
“What if there’s no God? What if death is just... nothing?”
Raam, spotting the captain’s cigarette butt on the rail, flicked it into the sea. “It’s funny that you ask me that. You must picture me as having been born like this—an old monk—but I wasn’t. I didn’t find God until I was in my forties.”
“Where’d you find Him?”
He chuckled. “It’s an expression. I did not find God in a physical place. Faith, which I view as fortune rather than virtue, came to me gradually. By the time you’re my age, you’ll have met all sorts—saintly atheists, devout hypocrites—and it seems to me that the not-knowing must be part of the thing. You are who you are when no one is watching, so if God popped in every hour and announced Himself—”
“Or Herself.”
“—or Herself—then we might never reach spiritual adulthood. Being good matters, but only because, in terms of eventual recognition and reward, it might not.”
“I think I understand.”
Raam drank the last from his tankard. “In this world, it’s hard to be a believer.”
“Why so?” She had never heard a religious person confess this.
“Aging is hard. Sickness is hard. Death is hard. If you believe there’s a world after this one, though, they are merely the fare to reach the other side. Evil, on the other hand, is a challenge. Why does God allow it to exist at all?”
The wind picked up. “I don’t know.”
“Of course.” Raam looked up for a moment as if he had lost something in the sky. “No one knows.”
He continued. “A gazelle is prey five times in its life. If it outruns a lion, it does not stew in stress or misery. It recuperates, to run again. Age will slow it. Some day, it will be killed and eaten, but this happens only once. The gazelle fears its predators enough to escape them, but it does not hate them. The aberration, for us as humans, is that we hunt each other. God never asked us to do that. Thus, when we are made prey, we do not survive the experience with the gazelle’s grace. Instead, we hold the memory, too deep and for too long, and it festers. It can break us.”
“I hope that never happens to me.”
“I hope for that too.” Raam looked out at the sea. “Are you familiar with rex?”
Fay had played it a few times; she remembered the checkered marble board and the solid wood pieces. “Tia taught me.”
“Let’s say we were to play the game, with one alteration: Green may use only basic moves. No lancer promotion, no chariot locking, no corner covers. Gold can do anything.”
Fay said, “That sounds unfair.”
“It’s not fair at all, my friend. Which player would you expect to win?"
This question seemed too easy. “Gold.”
“Right. You expect the player with more options to win. Apply this to good and evil. There are things no good person will ever do, but evil is under no constraint. A good man cannot do evil, but an evil man can do good things for years, even decades, if it suits his aims. Good is restricted; evil has all the moves. Why, then, hasn’t it won?”
“Evil has won,” said Fay. “The Global Company owns everything.”
“Its victory remains incomplete. It does not own the stars. It does not own the ocean beneath us. Evil ought to be, given its native advantage, favored a trillion to one. We should expect its triumph to be complete. That heat would pass from a cold place to a hot one is not impossible, but so improbable it is never observed. Evil should have taken power, to hold it forever, generations ago. Why does good remain in existence at all? I have studied questions like this for decades and must tell you I do not know the answer. Perhaps God’s light, though faint, shines everywhere—in me, and in you.”
“Even if I’m not sure I believe in Him?”
“Even if.” Raam tapped his tankard lid. “I should switch to coffee. The hour’s pressing on three.”
Fay grabbed a railing as a swell struck the ship.
Raam continued. “It is common in the world’s religions to present evil as a rebellious force, as something invented by an angel or minor deity that grows envious of God’s creation and, out of its own miserable pride, decides to corrupt what God loves most. Life has convinced me this is not the real story. There is nothing rebellious in evil. Evil is what the human world expects. The Global Company has bet its existence on selfishness and cruelty. Good, and God, live in rebellion.”
Fay looked down. “My parents were rebels.”
“They were.”
“Which is why they’re...”
Raam took a deep breath. “Yes, they’re dead. As dead as I will be in fifty years and you will be in a hundred. They lived lives of merit, and their effects live on. The fight continues. We do not get to see the grand story, but God does. You and I and your parents and even Smitz Bell will be forgotten within three hundred years, let alone three thousand, but God remembers everything.”
“I feel better.” Fay handed Raam his jacket before walking back to the cabin for sleep. “Thank you, Raam. You’ve given me a lot to think about. I hope you’re right.”
She returned to the ship’s bunk, curled up there, and closed her eyes.
As before, she found sleep easy to catch and hard to hold. She was not sure if dreams intervened, but her mind must have been active, because she found herself again half-alert on the deck, unsure what had provoked her, in spite of sleep, to go out there. A cloudy polar dawn had begun, and when the boat rode high, she could see the barest marks of land.
She heard a woman’s voice. “Farisa.”
“Where are you?” The little girl looked around. “I can’t see you.”
A dry hot wind crossed her face and the sun was high, much higher than she’d ever seen it go, even in those blistering Lorani summers of her infancy. She was older—in her early twenties, perhaps—with wavy hair and a taller, thinner body, and surrounded by people she considered close friends. She was beautiful. A scar, a faint pale line, ran down her bare brown shoulder.
“This is me? My future?”
“It’s you, Farisa. I love you.”
Something older than memory knew the voice. “Mother?”
“I’m proud of you. More than you could ever know.”
“Proud? Of what?”
“Who you are, and who you will become.”
The vision dissolved. She returned to a child’s body. Fine snow blew around the mast. An arctic gull’s cry announced the arrival of morning.
“Mama, come back! I have so many questions!”
#
Shortly after sunrise, Raam and Fay docked in Black Harbor, where the monk introduced her to a woman driving a two-horse carriage. Fay called out to Raam, who would be returning without her, to thank him. With a sad smile, he waved goodbye.
The weather was cloudy but calm, and the horses followed the road with discipline, so they reached the Old City’s western gate with an hour of sun left in the sky.
The driver said, “If you don’t mind five months of winter, this is the best place in the world to be. No crime or poverty, no Company, and walls fifty feet high.”
On the other side of the stone wall, spring’s first flowers were growing in household gardens. The driver said that, in three or four weeks, the whole city would be bright with natural color. Prayer flags hung red, purple, and green over small alleys and grand boulevards alike. Tevalon was one of the few places where Vehu had no need to conceal their identities. The black-clad men and the women under crimson shawls wore their garments proudly.
The driver stopped the carriage. “Here we are.”
“It’s beautiful.” The little girl had never, not until now, conceived of the Library of Tevalon as a real place, but here was a five-story palace of learning, with pillars and arches and gilded roof finials that gave it a sense of delicateness, though the edifice’s sheer size, as they walked toward the door, became almost overwhelming.
“I suppose I should tell you that I am the head nun here. The monastery is on the southern half of the top floor, in three divisions. The eastern section is for us women only, and the men’s quarters are in the southwest. Other than that, I suppose you should consider the place yours.” She stopped. “Your name is on the entrance, even.”
“My name?”
The woman pointed at the ancient blocky letters of the arch. “Can you read those?”
“Lyrian, right?”
“That’s correct.”
“I don’t know it,” Fay admitted.
“Sophya wy fariza. Knowledge and virtue.”
“I’m virtue?”
“Well, I don’t know you well enough to say, but you know where your name comes from. And you know three words of Lyrian.” She chuckled as she added, “The other sixty-five thousand shall be next week’s assignment.”
Unlike many buildings in the Far North, the Library of Tevalon was warm and bright as soon as the front doors closed behind them. Curved marble staircases, steps the color of pearl and coral in alternation, rose all the way from the lobby to the top floor. The vanilla tea smell of fresh book paper was everywhere. Although the interior’s polished stone walls would have echoed any sharp noise to land on them, the building was quiet, and the people sharing this space had come from all corners of life—black-clad religious scholars, overdressed middle-aged women, teenagers with pierced noses and orange hair. Windows looked over a courtyard, full of rare trees and inner buildings that were, on their own, larger than some houses. This was not just a place where people read, borrowed, and traded books, but the center of a whole city’s community.
Farisa—she began to prefer her real name—would live here for almost a decade.
The day after the little girl’s arrival, the head nun left a copy of the Vehu chorae—in the original, along with a small Lyrian dictionary—on the stand by her bed. She was rarely asked to do chores, so she had plenty of time to read. By the age of eight, she knew enough Vehu history and theology to understand the arguments of the old monks who played checkers with the locals in the second-floor coffeeshop. By nine, she knew the library’s layout by rote. Contemporary novels and poetry could be found on the fifth floor. The fourth hosted science books and reference materials, including thousands of maps so brittle that only a few people were allowed to touch them, and only with special gloves. Religious and historical works filled the third floor; mostly, it was older patrons who went there. The second level housed a mix of foreign-language titles, old travel guides, and periodicals. The first floor was where they stored recent donations that had not yet been sorted, as well as geological curiosities and samples of the fifty-odd known chemical elements.
Every now and then, a patron would ask about the basements—What was down there? She couldn’t answer, because she herself had never been allowed to go. The head nun, who possessed the sole key, admitted she had opened that door once and found very little, but when Fay asked for more detail, the older woman said very little. This building was ancient—built before the Vehu came; before the Melting, even—and people had concocted all sorts of theories about what had been stored underground—blueprints of flying machines built by long-dead civilizations, esoteric treatises on the art of sorcery, proofs or refutations of God’s existence, and even, for those truly prone to fantasy, maps of the Antipodes—but the boring truth was that all those texts, if they had ever existed, had surely been destroyed when the ground thawed three thousand years ago.
Summers and winters, Fay read insatiably. She finished the Vehu chorae shortly after her tenth birthday and had started on the tsovrae, or commentaries. She knew so much about the Vehu calendar and how holidays were computed, she could bore even monks to sleep. To be sure never to forget her childhood tongue, she picked up the centerpiece of Lorani literature, the Tales of the Sixteen Winds, available in five hardbound volumes. At eleven, she sailed the tropical seas to find “The Six Golden Tablets.” At twelve, she joined the Daughters of Ardelyn as they, longbows ready, protected the cedar forests from poachers and orcs. By thirteen, she was finally old enough to understand what “A Footprint in Sand” was about. Once she turned fourteen, Farisa found herself most partial to “The Faun of Alkahf”—she found its moralization trite, but the lyrical prose left her breathless.
At fifteen, though, she started to feel most like Rhazyladne, the captive heroine of the frame story, the teller of the Tales who had bound them for posterity, extending her life for one night every night as she spun another story for her monarch husband—in legend, those became the hundred and sixty-two stories. She wanted to be living a story, rather than reading or inventing them. She had no lack of fondness for the monks and nuns here—she could have given the blood in her veins for them—but, as chubby Fay grew into slender Farisa, she found in the heat of her skin a deep need to know what her adult body was for and what it could do. She listened to the whispers of other girls her age and learned of experiences she’d never had. She had never kissed a boy. She had never bathed in Izar Fountain on a warm spring night. She had never fallen in love. She was several months beyond three-of-fives, and there was so much in life she had not seen yet.
Farisa spent quite a number of days—in the summer, white nights also—on the library’s roof, watching the world move, wishing she were some part of its jostling, its joys, its noises. The city ran like a machine, a system of equations solving itself as pulses and waves, though most of its people were too ensconced in vital experience to notice such patterns, traveled from one place to another. Up at the Frostlight Wall, separating the Old City from its northern suburbs, congestion of carriage traffic would cause a cascade of motions and effects that would lead, five minutes later, to the black-clad, bearded men emerging from the Fifth Street Temple to change course. There was a whole world in motion, every day, but she often felt as if she were stuck in one place, one time, still a little girl.
She had read more books by age fifteen than most people did in a whole life, and so she had knowledge to share, but when she tried to enter a conversation she overheard, she found herself slow on the spot and, worse than that, awkward. She had a habit of knowing what had been the right thing to say... ten seconds after the time to say it had passed. Her body’s shape was a woman’s now, which brought the expectation of social graces she did not yet have, and the fact of her skin being thirty degrees of latitude darker than anyone else’s didn’t help, because it meant she was always, even if she said or did nothing, noticed.
She was closer to sixteen than fifteen when she decided that, before the summer was over, she would make friends from whom she could learn the lay of life. One would be a start.
This is how—this is why—she met Raqel.
Farisa spent most of July and August on the lower levels; her upstairs reading spots got too hot during the daytime. There was a wide open space on the first floor, with several artists’ tables, and a dark-haired teenage girl would come in, every afternoon around two o’clock, and start to work. Sometimes she would paint, but usually she worked in colored pencil. The first time Farisa saw her, she was wearing a banded hat and a white blouse with Vehu glyphs on it, as well as a denim skirt and seven-strapped black sandals. The day after, she wore a buttoned shirt—like a boy’s, but cut for a woman—with the sleeves taken off. Raqel never apologized for her presence; rather, she tuned out the world and she worked.
Farisa envied Raqel’s charm and poise, because even though they were roughly the same age, Raqel had more fully become a woman—the light adjusted to her presence as she walked. Farisa wanted that command of place for herself, but she wasn’t sure what she would have to do differently to attain it. She could learn from Raqel, perhaps, but if she approached the woman directly, she would be ignored or, worse, rejected. So it took days for her to build up the courage.
One late summer day, all causes of daring converged. The dry heat made her skin smell of sun. She was wearing her favorite outfit, with a black sleeveless tunic that exposed her shoulders. The noises of the day seemed not random but infused, to the step, with meaning. She read, knowing she would be distracted, a breezy picaresque novel that would not demand too much of her attention while watching Raqel’s usual table from a second-floor opening. Last of all, the artist came in half an hour later than her usual time, and Farisa realized summer would end and she would go back to school, so she would have to act now. She walked downstairs and over to Raqel’s table with an affected coolness, as if she had happened along by accident. About thirty colored pencils, red and green and brown and blue, lay strewn like fallen trees.
Farisa stopped and smiled. Even had she known the heartbreak and danger she was bringing on herself, she would have made the same decision every time.
Raqel set a purple pencil down. Her eyebrows lifted. “Uh, hello.”
“I’m Farisa. I have to get to know you.”