November 5, ‘90 (3½ Years Before the Fire)
The man in the heavy brown coat watched from ten miles away as Tevalon fell behind a curtain of dreary autumnal clouds. The storm had passed here, leaving a chilly dampness as well as turbulence in the river. Knowing which fish surfaced in such weather, he switched his bait. The air smelled of a season’s last days—of odors winter would soon freeze out of existence. He hoped he would have enough money to rest at home all winter, because crabbing boats didn’t pay what they used to.
He cast the line and waited for the next bite. He had tried more ambitious careers, finding them unsuitable. At fourteen he had run away from home to join the crew of a pirate ship—the Global Company tolerated and even protected high seas larceny, so long as its own interests were never obstructed—but could not keep the required pace of work while nauseated by the swells, so his crewmates left him drunk in shabby port town after two months. He had spent his late teens on the other side of this river, where the ancestors of the Ignae had lived six thousand years ago—but had never found more than brass pennies and bullet shells, recent artifacts impossible to pass off as genuine. He had tried honest trades like cattle ranching. He had tried dishonest ones like chart-shaping—printing inaccurate maps and travel guides to steer traffic toward the taverns and inns that paid for the favor. He had even tried mummy fraud, a lucrative field for people with the right talents, but found that, like so many of his relics, he lacked the stomach.
These days, he caught and sold fish. It made use of his time. His buyers would add dyes and use chemical additives to relabel this area’s common catch as more expensive species to be sold in the south, but this was not on his conscience. His life was simple now.
He’d done so well—even after spoilage, this might be a thirty-grot day—to have forgotten how fast night could fall, this time of year. He looked at his map, finding no roads or shelters he would reach before dark. He would have to spend the night out here.
A bed would be his top priority, not for comfort, but because he would freeze to death if he slept on the ground, so he cut trees he knew were soft enough to come down quickly. Without the time to build a real covering, he put his makeshift bed and emergency sleeping bag in a natural ditch that would block as much of the wind as he could hope for, and hoped it would not rain. He would, next, need a fire for as long as he could keep one, although fuel was scarce in this marsh. The reeds and twigs were still wet from the day’s rain, and nothing from a live tree would light in these conditions. He gathered fallen boughs, thick enough to have dry tinder inside, and cut them apart.
Food, at least, he had. Once he’d started his campfire, he used its light to gut and cook and eat the two fish he determined would be hardest to sell. Once he had finished eating, he slept next to the flame, warm for now, knowing from childhood experience that it would go out halfway to midnight, allowing him only a few hours of decent sleep before he faced a long hell of shivering blackness, of counting the seconds till dawn when he could get out of this place.
When dawn came without the anticipated misery—in fact, he was in fact quite warm—he wondered if he had frozen to death and awakened in the afterlife. Had that puny fire survived a November night in the Far North? Surely not. Yet, when he opened his tent, he saw smoke. The embers had turned to ash, but the mud beneath was still producing smoke and heat. A miracle? Had he been called by God to found the Church of the Burning Mud? No, of course not. Miracles never happened for working men, men with surnames like his. He had found something better than a miracle...
To test his theory, he dug a shallow hole with a crude spade. Viscous black sludge welled up. If this could be found with hand tools, there had to be a lake of it underfoot, and demand for oil was infinite—the Global Company’s war machines burned a million gallons per day.
He had not held one political belief in his whole life. He had never been part of a trade union or anti-enclosure movement. He was not Vehu, not Igna, not a member of the Zol-Inae tribes. What happened to this place meant nothing to him. Four cents on every hundred grot drilled here—a pathetic fraction, but generous in comparison to the hanging for treason he would face if the Company ever learned he had made this discovery had not reported it—would, if his instincts were right, fund a comfortable retirement. He dropped his sack of dead fish and worthless possessions, and then he hurried to the nearest Global Company field office, where he sent by telegraph the message that would end the Far North’s decades of peace.
#
The same day, in the Library of Tevalon’s second-floor coffeehouse where Farisa and Raqel had taken a table, rain streaked across a window’s outer pane. Distant flashes of lighting aside, the day had not broken out of twilight, though it was past noon. Even Raqel was drinking coffee; tea wasn’t strong enough for a day like this.
“Mother’s getting worse.”
“She seemed to be improving.”
“She was, until Exile. She needs to see the sun.”
“The weather wasn’t bad two days ago,” Farisa said. “Even if it’s four flags below, never let winter sunlight go to waste, right?”
“If she sees one cloud, she won’t go outside. If there’s a hint of snow, she stays in.”
“The next snow that falls will probably stick around till April.” Farisa looked over at coffee drinkers playing cards. “I know! You should take her to Cait Forest. It’s much warmer down there.”
Raqel shook her head. “Father would never allow it. He doesn’t want me going, let alone her. The doctors say her problem is psychological, which, to Duriad Ahava, means it is not real.”
Farisa scratched her neck. “If it’s psychological, it’s more real than real.”
The library’s steam pipes clanked. A flash, followed by a low rumble, purpled the sky.
Raqel frowned. “I don’t think I can go to Cait Forest.”
“Chan-Zadik’s quite good.”
“What I mean is that I don’t think I can go to university at all.”
Farisa lowered her voice. “It is an opportunity people would kill for.”
“To me, it feels like that kind of decision.” She paused. “Duriad is useless. If I leave, I am terrified that I will one day get a letter, or a telegraph, or a visit to tell me that Mother has...”
“Your father can hire care. He has money.”
Raqel rolled her eyes. “He has money he intends to be buried with.”
Farisa straightened her legs under the table. “I might be able to help her.”
Raqel leaned forward. “What do you mean?”
Farisa looked around. Using her other hand to hide the act, she lit a table candle with her finger.
“Don’t be ridiculous. I know what it costs you.”
“I do.”
Farisa had, for some time, been afraid to use her talents at all, but she’d read of late that not using one’s abilities could accelerate the Marquessa’s progress as much as overuse. If she were likely to die young either way, it seemed better to be useful to others.
She had been practicing minor movements; of late, she had turned a copper coin on its side from ten feet away.
Raqel said, “Isn’t it...? Didn’t you say it’s...?”
“Dangerous? It can be.” To enter a mind was a complex spell, unlike any she had ever performed. “It’s not a thing to do without care.”
Raqel finished her coffee. “I’ll ask her about it.”
“I mentioned it to her last month.”
“What did she say?”
“She expressed interest.”
“Does she understand what you were offering to do? What it could cost you?”
“She does,” Farisa said. “If she changes her mind, I won’t do it, but if she wants me to try, I will.”
Raqel said, “I don’t know how to thank you, Farisa.”
“Don’t thank me yet. I will need at least two more months to learn how it works.”
#
One month later, on a cold afternoon after fresh morning snow, Farisa sat cross-legged next to Umrah, Arvi and Skaya’s black tundra dog with a splash of white on his chest. She patted the animal’s massive head with her gloved hand.
“Let me know if you don’t like this, and I’ll stop right away.”
The dog seemed to understand.
“You’re not cold, are you?” Farisa noticed the sun’s reflection in the dog’s brown eyes. She needed a thick coat and jeans to be out here, but Umrah seemed to be in perfect comfort. “Of course not. You’re built for this place. It’s why they call you a tundra dog. Are you ready?”
The dog barked.
The mage shut her eyes and projected her mind in front of her own face, settling about six inches beyond the bridge of her nose, seeing nothing but close-eye gray at first but, after stilling her mind, gaining awareness of what mages called “the blue,” a place capable of overwhelming the mind because the human brain had been fitted to two human eyes, not 360 degrees by 360 degrees of liquid sight. No gravity existed here, so to find the “up” and “down” of the solid world was a feat. She needed to steady her sense of scale, as well—she could neither afford for her mind’s body to diffuse to infinity nor for it to collapse into a point. With needle-eye precision, she moved her sprite-like subtle sense along Umrah’s warm throat, up his vagus nerve, and into the center of the dog’s head, where she moved herself in a studied motion—a glyph—and dropped, like a marble down a tube, into a warm spherical opening.
(She bounds, four legs in haste, across a grassy field into the lap of a younger Arvi. Scratches behind the ears send waves of calm through her body.)
I’m not that fast anymore. Like my humans: old. A pulse of orange—Umrah’s smile—filled the blue.. You must have something to say, if you’ve come all this way.
I’d like you to tell me something, Farisa “said” to the dog, that I don’t already know.
(A puppy runs through the second-floor drawing room. An olive-green teapot sits in the bottom drawer of an open chest.)
Farisa said, That’s Toqqulese porcelain!
If you say so. I’m just a dog.
Thank you, Umrah.
She exited the blue. She was now freezing as if she’d been plunged into a pool of frigid peppermint oil, even though the winter air was no colder than it had been ten seconds ago. She ran inside and collapsed, exhausted, on the couch.
Several hours later, still sore and fatigued, she walked upstairs and found the chest Umrah had shown her. Inside she found, exactly as it had been inside the dog’s mind, the porcelain teapot. Half of the spells in the old sources did not work, but this one had.
Farisa joined Arvi and Skaya for dinner, but made little conversation. It hurt to swallow, let alone speak. She went to bed before eight o’clock and, the next day, woke up with stiff legs and a headache. The cloudy sky seemed flashy and unstable; her sense of weight, too, fluctuated with each step. Her eyes ached as if she had been sleepless for days. If entering a dog’s mind to bring forth such a simple memory had brought this much fatigue, what might it cost to do more complex work inside a person?
She would do her best to help Raqel’s mother, but she knew the spell would exhaust her even if she traced the glyph perfectly. A small error, in conditions or her own practice, could lead to catastrophe. She asked herself, again and again, if she was making the right decision. What place did a seventeen-year-old girl have in the mind of an injured middle-aged woman? The mages who played God tend to be the fastest to go mad. A mind that could mix with the world’s chaos endured the risk of chaos mixing into it.
#
Ten days later, the two young women were in Raqel’s bedroom. Farisa had spent so much of the past four weeks in study that she had lost her sense of ordinary time, but the wind-up clock said it was early evening. The winter solstice had just passed and Verida Shev, the city’s most progressive temple, was throwing a ball tonight for Tevalon’s young.
“I admire your industriousness, but you have earned a night off,” Raqel said.
Farisa lifted a bare shoulder in front of a mirror. “Maybe I have. Hey, are you sure this dress doesn’t show too much of me?”
Raqel chuckled. “The backs of your knees might be visible.”
“Be serious.”
Raqel adjusted her hair in front of the bedroom mirror. “Nothing to worry about. I’m glad you’re coming. You could stand to lighten up.”
Farisa smiled at Raqel’s reflection.
Beth came into the room and laid a pair of thick trench coats on the bed. “Both of you, wear these on the way over.”
“It was so warm today,” Raqel said. “Almost one and a half.”
“It is still winter, and ‘… a sunny day a brings a chilly night.’”
Farisa added, “‘As frost is the daughter of starry light.’”
“You know that poem?”
“She knows everything, Mom,” Raqel said.
Farisa glared at her.
“Well, you do.”
Farisa held the coat in front of herself and looked in the mirror. “It feels warm. Thanks, Mrs. Ahava.”
“I’ll be downstairs if you need anything.”
Raqel closed the door and mouthed, “Finally.”
“She means well,” Farisa mouthed back.
“Oh, no doubt.” Raqel handed Farisa a white dress. “This is the last one I’ll make you try on.”
Farisa, changing behind a closet door, slipped into it, then stood sideways in front of the mirror. The contrast between the garment’s color and her dark skin, though bold, seemed to lengthen her arms.
“You look good.” Raqel’s eyebrows lifted, and her mouth narrowed. “Really good. This is the best of all of them, by far.”
“Are you sure I can pull this off? It isn’t too...?”
“No, it’s perfect,” Raqel said. “Let me close the window. I didn’t know you were cold.”
“I’m not.” Farisa stilled a shaky hand with the other. “I’m just nervous.”
“Everyone gets nervous.”
“Not like me.” Farisa straightened her back. “No one gets nervous like me. Still, I shall go. It’s what a normal girl would do.”
“You’ll enjoy yourself, even if I have to force you.” Raqel slid her feet into black sandals with one-inch heels.
“I wish I could wear those.”
“What are you talking about?”
Farisa pointed to her bare feet.
“There’s nothing wrong with your feet.”
“A Lorani woman never allows—”
Raqel completed the sentence lifelessly. “Never allows the bottoms of her feet to be seen by a man unless she has married him.” She paused. “It seems inconvenient.”
“It is,” Farisa said.
“What about swimming?”
“Water socks.” She shrugged. “It goes back to the time of Sixteen Winds. I think the idea is that men want to know, and you can’t let them know, whether you’re a clean-foot girl or a dirty-foot girl.”
Raqel tilted her head. “Which one is Farisa?”
Farisa flexed her foot behind herself. “You tell me.”
“Clean, I would say.” Raqel chuckled. “Definitely clean.”
“Thanks, I think.”
Stifling a laugh, Raqel said, “Sko zetra—”
“Oh, fuck you!” Farisa threw a pillow at Raqel. “Fuck you so hard. I should have never taught you that phrase.”
Raqel, catching the pillow, laughed. “What is a dirty-foot girl, anyway?”
“Good question.”
“They might have better stories to tell than we do. They might be less uptight.”
Farisa’s reflection rolled her eyes.
“You look great, Farisa.”
Farisa crossed her arms. She could make this look work.
“I have plenty of closed-toe shoes, if that’s a thing you’d prefer.”
“I would.”
Raqel went into her closet and returned with a pair of dance slippers.
Farisa’s eyebrows lifted as she tied her hair into a ponytail. “I hardly remember Loran. I was so little. People have told me about the heat and the spices, but all I remember is that it was noisy and that I wasn’t allowed to go outside. Stories are all I’ve got. What I know of my own culture comes from books. So, you can see why I hold some notions so tightly.”
“Sometimes I just want to hold you so tightly.”
“Let’s go, Raqel.” Farisa’s cheeks and upper arms were hot; her blush, if she’d had Raqel’s complexion, would have been visible. “We’re going to be late.”
They put on their coats and walked to Verida Shev.
Farisa found ballroom dancing easier than she had expected, as the boys either did not notice her inexperience or were equally novice, and therefore never commented. So long as she counted the steps, the rules were not hard to follow. At midnight, the band took a break. Raqel sat at the piano and, although she apologized for being out of practice, played the best rendition of “Take Me Over, Miss Rio,” two-handed chords and triple-beamed notes struck with aplomb, the guests had ever heard. The band returned, but with reluctance.
At two o’clock, the temple’s electric lights came on and “Goodbye Lake Va’ala” played.
“Get some rest,” said the middle-aged tanara to the crowd. “You have service etta-morrow.”
“That was fun,” Farisa said.
Raqel grinned as she showed her a key. “The night doesn’t have to end.”
“I told myself I’d get through three hundred pages tomorrow.”
“It’s the perfect hour for a swim.”
Farisa leaned back. “In December?”
“It’s an indoor pool, silly. Mother used to volunteer here. Boy, did that irk Duriad, for her to spend her time at a ‘heathen’ temple with ballroom dance and a swimming pool. I happen to know that the steam pipes run all year, so it’ll be warm. Come on.”
Farisa, also, did not want the night to end, so as Raqel hurried down a dark hall with a lit oil lamp, she followed.
Raqel opened a cabinet. “There are a bunch of swimsuits in here that no one has ever used. Unless you want to go into the water nude, like they used to.”
“Don’t be absurd.”
Raqel handed Farisa a woolen swimming top and a pair of trunks. “They’re two-piece, if that’s an issue.”
“It’s not. My people wear saria.”
The pool area had two separate stalls where they could change, then arrived at the pool’s rim at the same time. Raqel went in first. “Come in!”
The water had been heated, but Farisa had been in a hot ballroom for hours, so she felt its temperature chilly on her toes, calves, and knees as she waded in. It took her half a minute to get submerged up to the chest.
“Cold?”
“I’m adjusted. It’s not bad.”
“I told you so,” Raqel said before kicking the wall and swimming to the other side.
Farisa tried to match her speed. She had endurance, but lacked Raqel’s long limbs, so she couldn’t keep up. Still, the smooth motion relaxed her. She wondered, since she’d known how to swim since before she could remember, if the action might stir recollections of the first time she’d been in the water. The faster she swam, the warmer she felt, and she could almost see the sun over Loran, the white sands of the south-facing beaches, the colorful frigatebirds. She began to feel like she was in the ocean, connected to the world, and she kept going until her limbs were exhausted. She had, by this point, swum a few dozen laps. Raqel had already left the pool and was wearing a towel around her waist as she sat on a bench.
Farisa dried off and sat beside her. She noticed the open sketchbook. “You’re working at this hour?”
“You were having a good swim.” Raqel smiled, then leaned back, arms behind her, and gave Farisa a gaze that would have been impolitely intense from anyone else. “You know, one of these days, I want to paint you.”
“Paint me?” Farisa crossed her legs at the ankles. “You don’t mean like this.”
“I don’t mean like that, no.” Raqel raised her eyebrows, and her finger drew a circle. “I mean: minus the swimsuit.”
“Nude?” Farisa laughed. “What, you’re serious? Me?”
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“The human body is nothing to be ashamed of.”
“I know it’s not, but couldn’t you find someone more… fit for modeling?”
“To an artist, you’re the epitome of beauty.”
“To this woman, you’re ridiculous.” Farisa leaned forward. “Look, I have a shy navel.”
“A shy what?”
Farisa stood up. “Flat stomach, right? Like any other girl.” She sat down and leaned forward. As she did, her navel dimpled and became a line. She tugged at the tiny handle of flesh beneath her belly button. “Rolls, rolls, rolls.”
“Only when you sit down.” Raqel pinched Farisa’s side fat.
“Ow!” Farisa said.
“Is this your way of grabbing for compliments?”
“Raqel, you’re the one who’s grabbing.”
“You can’t blame me.” The arch of Raqel’s foot traced Farisa’s ankle, and Farisa’s breathing hastened as Raqel’s fingers pinched the soft flesh on her ribcage, and then... and then....
What Farisa wanted to do was put her hands around Raqel’s head, fingers deep in her dark wet hair, and kiss her on the mouth, but she was interrupted by the slam of a door opened by a gust of wind, causing cold air to enter the room.
“Raqel,” Farisa said. “I think you broke me.”
#
The two women walked back to Raqel’s house. There were few other places, at half past three on a winter morning, to go.
Raqel spotted the second-floor light in the large white house. “Duriad is awake.”
Farisa said, “Do you think we’re in trouble?”
“Fuck if I care.”
They snuck in through the house’s backdoor and crept silently upstairs. Farisa wanted to be here, because Raqel was here, but for no other reason, because every unlit wall corner was Duriad’s watching eye. If a candle flame bent, his breath had made it do so.
Still, lust—if that was what Farisa was feeling—had its own way of driving off the fog of caution. Once they had been together in Raqel’s room for ten minutes or so, and Farisa was confident that Duriad was unaware of her being there, she put her coat away and looked at Raqel.
“Raqel Ahava, I can’t stop thinking about you.”
Raqel lay back on her bed.
“I mean it.”
“I had too much wine at the dance.”
“You seem fine,” Farisa said. “No red in your face.”
“Let’s talk about this in the morning.”
Farisa’s mind turned through recent events. If the door hadn’t swung open. If she hadn’t been swimming in the pool for so long. If she’d had the courage.
“Sleep well, Raqel.”
“You too.”
They woke up at different times. Farisa was already reading downstairs when Beth came to make breakfast. The girls ate quietly, and Raqel invented a pretext to go downtown, and Farisa followed. More snow had fallen.
They were at least five hundred yards from the house when Raqel first spoke. “I’m sorry.”
“I’m not.” Farisa looked aside. “What’s to be sorry for?”
“Something I did or said must have given you the wrong idea. You’re beautiful, Farisa. You know that, right? You’re so beautiful and amazing and I know I will never forget you, but... we’re so young. Our whole lives are ahead of us.”
I suppose that is true for you.
They came over a hill. The snow underfoot seemed to crunch more loudly.
Raqel said, “It isn’t rare for girls—that’s what we are, we’re not women yet—to feel this way about other girls, and I feel it too, but I’m an only child. It would destroy Beth if I became a spinster.”
An icicle fell off a nearby house.
“She wants—she needs—to be a grandmother someday, and two women can’t make a baby.”
Farisa clenched her mittened fists in her pockets. “One Farisa can’t make a baby.”
Raqel, as if she had forgotten that whole fact of mages being infertile, fell silent. In a vain rhetorical sense, Farisa had won, but nothing about this felt like winning.
They continued walking together, in slow silence, until Farisa said, “Whatever you want from me, I’m around.”
Raqel stepped over a clod of snow. “I love you, as a friend. I really do. I’d do anything for you, but I’m not, you know, a…”
They walked by a concrete frustum with rounded corners, covered in snow. Words had been carved in Vehu letters at the base: 250:0000 VeHu uk lientsa, kazzuato. Up into the wind, destroyed.
“My mother said, ‘Had there been more of us, it wouldn’t have happened.’ She told me I would have six more siblings, but that of course never happened. So, it falls on me to give my mother grandchildren.”
Farisa increased her pace, because she wanted this conversation to end. The sun barely clipped over the horizon, this time of year, but the bare trees were orange against the wispy clouds. “It’s a pretty day.”
Raqel said, “When did you know, Farisa? How did you know?”
She was in no mood to answer this question.
“Did it come upon you at once, or was it gradual? Is it women and men, or is it just women?”
“I don’t know.” Farisa looked at the corner of Raqel’s mouth. “Let’s just forget the whole thing happened. I was... I guess I was inappropriate. It’s my fault. Can we leave it at that?”
Farisa had never asked to be different. Growing up, she’d had the same childish crushes everyone got, and she’d felt as much of this pre-sexual attraction to studious or comedically gifted young men as women, but crushes passed. She’d seen enough bookplate art to know that her eyes lingered on the female form more than the male one, but how much had that meant? Sexuality and aesthetics were different wells; everyone knew that.
Still, on that summer night when she had snuck into Tevalon’s opera house to see the traveling dancers, a troupe from her native Loran, she found a lead dancer, a woman of about thirty, to have one of the most beautiful shapes she’d ever seen: muscular arms, a soft but supple belly, and piercing eyes. Her dance seemed ecstatic and spontaneous, but every movement had purpose. The woman’s navel flowed with her swaying hips; her dark ponytail whisked the sweat off her brown shoulders. Transfixed by the older woman’s movement, Farisa felt something inside herself, sharp as a bee’s sting but pleasant, and knew by its atavistic aura that this sort of sensation was not supposed to be experienced in public. She crossed her legs and twisted her thighs into each other to stop it, but the sensation doubled, and her face grew hot.
She had known since childhood how badly the world viewed those who preferred their own sex, but she excused this deviant desire by telling herself that it was not the dancer’s body, but the power her movements had over men, that had caused such an overpowering feeling in Farisa, and this made it acceptable, normal even. As time passed, though, the male figure in this mental theater, always a camera and never a participant, became so distant as to vanish over time. She could understand male physical appeal from an analytical perspective, but only female beauty had the power to overwhelm her.
She and Raqel reached the waist-high stone wall of a park and they both sat on it.
“I don’t know who I am,” Farisa confessed.
Raqel’s eyes met hers.
“You’re right. It’s best we not entangle ourselves. We’ll stay friends.”
Raqel put her hand on Farisa’s denim-clad knee. “Best friends.”
Farisa squinted at the sun, white-hot but distant and weak. “You have Cait Forest ahead of you. I shouldn’t get in the way of that.”
“I feel like you deserve to go, not me.”
“It doesn’t work that way, Raqel.”
#
They were now in the so-called white season, the middle days of January where, due to snow drifts, Tevalon seemed uniform in color and the days, likewise, blended together. When it got cold, the town seemed to self-compress so that everything important happened within a five-minute walk of the Library District. Thus, Farisa and Raqel met each other often.
“Good day, Farisa,” said Raqel from around the corner of a frosted hedge maze that had been filled with ice sculptures.
“It is,” Farisa said with a smile. “It is a good day.”
“Have you seen—”
“I can do it. I’m pretty sure I can help your mother. I’ve discovered a glyph that should work.”
“Glyph?”
“Spell.”
“It isn’t dangerous?”
“If she isn’t getting better, and she wants me to do it, it’s worth taking the risk.”
Raqel said, “You really don’t have to.”
“Of course I don’t have to do anything.” Farisa was slightly insulted, as a mage needed no permission not to risk her life, but Raqel was her best friend and Beth was a lovely woman who deserved healing no one else could provide. “But I will.”
“If you’re doing it for me—”
“For her, Raqel. I’ll do it for her. If she wants it done, that is, and if she changes her mind and decides she doesn’t want my help, then I will respect her wishes and that will be as far as this goes.”
Raqel looked down. “I don’t deserve you.”
“Don’t say that.”
“Really, I don’t. It goes against your interests to help Mom. If she gets better, then I can go south to Cait Forest—”
“Which you should.”
“—and leave you here. If you were selfish, you wouldn’t offer to help, but because you’re not selfish—I mean, Farisa, you’re such a good person that I—”
“Stop,” Farisa said. “Just please stop fucking talking.”
#
The date of the spell was January 17, chosen because Duriad was on the other side of town for a client’s court appearance and would likely be gone till late.
“We should still do it downstairs,” Beth said. “In case he does come home.”
“Downstairs?” Farisa said. They were already in the first-floor dining room. “I’m not sure what you mean.”
“The bomb shelter,” Raqel said.
“It’s not private,” Farisa said. “It connects to the other houses.”
Beth said, “No one ever goes there in the winter.”
“Right,” Farisa said. “I understand, but cold could be a problem.”
She had been in the blue enough times to know that otherwise harmless sensations tended to evolve in that space. A passing chill or a mote of pain that would otherwise go ignored by the rational mind could turn into a personal earthquake, and because she would be in the blue with someone not native to it, precautions needed to be taken.
“I’ll need you to be as comfortable as possible.”
“I’m never comfortable in this house,” Beth said. “Cold is an easier problem. We have plenty of blankets.”
Raqel began to gather quilts and pillows, and Farisa did likewise. They walked downstairs with their arms full of these and created a makeshift bed for Beth, who had four layers between herself and the floor.
Farisa asked, “Is this enough?”
“I’m warm,” Beth said. “I could go to sleep here.”
“Good,” said Farisa as she put on her woolen gloves.
“How long is this going to take?”
“It will take me some time to get into a trance,” Farisa said. “The more preparation I have, the safer it is to go in. You won’t have to do anything but relax. The spell itself won’t take longer than five seconds—about as long as I can stay in the blue without making myself ill.”
“You’re going to enter my mind?”
Farisa nodded. “That is what it’s called. I could give you a Lyrian name, but—”
“I trust you. What will it feel like?”
“I don’t know,” Farisa admitted. “I’ve read that it’s pleasant, like stepping into warm water.”
Raqel adjusted her lamp. “Light or dark?”
“Low light,” Farisa said. “I need to be able to see, but just barely. Are you ready, Mrs. Ahava?”
The woman said, “I am.”
“Good,” Farisa said. She let her eyes lose focus. She let a low hum resonate in her lungs. She held her spine erect, but swayed side to side. Minor spells did not require such a prelude, but this was the sort that would require her to purge her ego and evict petty interests, to become the most selfless self she could be, so as not to befoul the process with unclean motivations.
She kept her eyes open. Raqel’s oil lamp, a luminant blur, diffused as if its light were bound to another time, able to give only hints of its existence, and then it could not be seen at all. Farisa’s breathing slowed. Her legs began to tingle due to her seated position, and she wished she had more flexibility in her legs, or that she had brought a thicker cushion for herself, because the floor was pressing hard against her tailbone. She decided to bring this pain also to a swell, ride its crest, and then, having accepted its presence, put it aside. She did this with the tension in her ankle bone, the restless nerve in her thigh, the ache in one finger—it all melted, flooding the room with white warmth, leaving her to feel as if she had landed in bright ocean water.
Disembodied thoughts came diving like cave bats. You shouldn’t do this, Farisa. You’re conflicted. You’re dirty. “Mere thoughts,” she said to no one. What happens if Beth learns you lust after her daughter? Don’t leave any of that in there! “Clouds of nothing. Clouds of nothing.” You’ll never forgive yourself if you botch this. Mrs. Ahava would never allow this if she knew what you really are—a deviant, a sick person, in no position to heal anyone. “I am a mage. I am a healer, I am Farisa.”
Clouds of nothing is all these thoughts are, and a cloud brings no harm but rain, and rain pulls a cloud apart until it is gone, leaving a calm blue sky, and that is what I am. I am calm.
She could see in all directions, the floor atop the ceiling, and as if under a hundred feet of limpid glacial water, she let her spirit’s eye drift toward Beth, taking a sinuous path that rose and fell with the breath of the mage’s own distant body, and soon found she herself inside a memory that wasn’t her own.
(A loud crack.)
One of those perfect summer days is interrupted by a swift sickening force that throws Beth to the ground. Her legs feel wet, but she touches her knee and finds it dry. This phantom wetness, this sensation of melting, climbs her torso. She tastes iron as blood fills her mouth. Vision goes black.
Beth floats over her body, fallen like a discarded object on a plaza where an explosion has occurred. People are running and there is gunfire. The dying woman searches her mind for one of God’s seventy-nine names and comes up short. She has memorized them all, preparing for this moment since she was a little girl, but the abyss fills itself not with divinity but a human face, an image in stark detail.
“Sedala,” says Beth’s own disembodied voice.
Sedala, that tramp. Sedala, that whore. Sedala, who hasn’t been inside a temple since childhood and would probably burst into flames if she ever drunkenly tripped into one. Sedala, who surely knows of Duriad’s wealth because she has a talent for flattering men who are despised by their families. Duriad isn’t special, wasn’t special, is not the first or even the nineteenth among the men she has seduced, but here—Beth is dead, she has lost her place in time, the future spills itself like melting snow—is Sedala, in a wedding dress, taking Duriad’s name, taking Raqel’s place in the world, taking Raqel’s inheritance...
No, she’s not Sedala. She’s a little girl. She’s laughing. She dressed better than any child could dress herself, and she’s walking forward in black space. She has Raqel’s gray eyes but her hair is blonde. Her lips part and her smile is one of hate. Sedala’s daughter is eight years old, it looks like, so I’m nine years dead, but it has felt like no time has passed at all. This is eternity. The world takes what’s yours in less than a minute. You spin your soul’s eye around and five hundred years have passed.
There were chirps of summer songbirds, sound being the last of the senses to go. “We’ll take her to Zadka-Mazita.”
No, Beth. Nine years have not passed. It is still June, it is still summer, and you are an idiot if you do not see that this girl, the one who will take Raqel’s birthright, has already been born. You knew it the whole time, Beth. You knew it and you just didn’t have the fucking courage to do anything about it.
The girl advances, holding a white flower. Beth knows that if she inhales the gift’s fragrance, she will pass on into peace—the chorae are clear about that—but if she leaves Raqel in ruin, if she leaves an artist of such talent to live on the market, then she will not deserve peace, so peace there will not be.
“No,” Beth screams. “You bastard girl, you will not win. You will not have Raqel’s life. I refuse it all. I refuse your offer. You should have never been born, and your existence is invalid, and I will go back to find you and strike you down.”
She hears her own voice screaming as she lands with a thud in a battered impotent body. Intense nausea spreads through her chest, and every breath requires force. “Stay awake,” says one of the men carrying the gurney. Beth’s feet and hands tingle with itchy internal heat. Nerve damage. She weighs nothing; a moment later, she weighs five times what her body’s mass should. She is not sure if she’s awake or asleep—this disgusting state of consciousness seems to be between the two. Time has been cut up and put back together but segments are missing. She was leaving for the Summer Market five minutes ago, but now it is night and she is in a hard hospital bed.
“Sedala died fourteen years ago.” She said it herself, though no one could hear. She said it herself, to herself, because it is true. Duriad is nearly infertile, and it’s a miracle that Raqel happened. That little girl could not have been Sedala’s daughter, she realized. “The tsovrae.”
“The tsovrae say...”
A dying person’s first sight of God can take any form—animal or human, male or female—but it is most common to see a little girl, seven or eight years of age.
Beth prays, screaming in her own head, for forgiveness. She had met God, rejected God, and been sent back here for punishment. I didn’t know. I didn’t know it was You. Please forgive me. Please, please forgive me.
And then it was fall. And then it was winter. Beth Ahava’s body looked as a body should in early middle age, but her nerves were failing and her mind had become a prison. Memories shifted like furnishings in a blind child’s house that had been moved overnight out of cruelty. Seven months had passed. Seven months had seen the sun rise in the west and set in the east, and now she was truly...
“Mrs. Ahava?”
She could not place the voice, but it was a comforting presence.
“I’m right here with you. I’m Farisa. I’ve been with you the whole time.”
“Farisa! Beth’s friend, right?”
“Aye.” Farisa grabbed Beth’s wrist. The two women hovered together in the blue. “It’s me.”
Beth asked, “What is this place?”
“You’re safe,” Farisa said. “That’s all that matters.”
“I hope you didn’t see that.”
“No one will know any of it, Mrs. Ahava.”
“Am I dead?”
“You are not. You never died, and I do not think it is God’s way to punish as you imagined. If God exists, She is not insulted because you had a bad dream. You are alive for a good reason, Mrs. Ahava.”
“I deserve to be punished. I screamed at that little girl. I insulted her, thinking she was... not realizing...”
“Do you control what you do in a dream?”
Beth shivered. “Do I—”
“You were badly injured, and the doctors had drugged you to block pain. You were asleep.”
“It didn’t feel like sleep.”
“I am sure it did not, but you have done no harm. You screamed at a presence in your own mind, no more. Forgive yourself. You had a nightmare, that is all, and it is over.”
The blue shimmered. Farisa took this to represent Beth’s mental relief; Beth understood it as Farisa’s smile.
Farisa added, “I’m here and I’ll stay here, but I’ll leave you alone with yourself. What you remember, and what you forget, and how you remember it, that’s all yours to decide. Your mind is the place you make it.”
“Thank you, Farisa.”
Farisa felt buoyant as the blue’s color lightened. She had executed the spell perfectly. The hard work was over; all that remained for the two women was to ascend together from the depths. Brightness spread, for the surface was only five fathoms up, now four fathoms up, now three…
A blast of gray muddy light passed through them. The sound of grinding teeth filled the blue. A swirl of tightness and malaise enveloped them. Farisa felt as if her skin—not her body’s skin, the skin of her soul—were soiled clothing to be shed, and that it must be done at once. A belch of evil had come through the blue—it did not happen often, but the jolting strength of it was like an invisible waterfall and it had throw them back into the deep.
“Beth! Beth!”
The woman was sinking out of sight. Terror and fright, especial risks for those virgin to the blue, were dragging her into the abyss. Farisa flung herself like a diving gull.
“I won’t let go,” Farisa said upon restoring contact. “We’re almost out of here.”
“It feels so bad.”
“I’m right here with you. I never left.”
“What was that?”
“In the—up there, in the ordinary world, we must have felt a draft of cold air. Nothing more. You are safe. Your mind is not processing bodily sensations as it normally would, but we will be out of here soon, and we will get you as warm as you want to be. Raqel will make tea, or I will.”
“I’m so scared, Farisa.”
“This is harmless. It won’t last long. It simply sometimes occurs down here.”
“Down? Where is this down? Am I in hell?”
Farisa and Raqel had taken care to prevent the odors and noises and chills of the outside world from bothering Beth, so the mage reminded herself of this in order to sound calm. “This is uncomfortable, but it is not dangerous.” Not dangerous at all, but in the mind. Your mind is the place you make it. “Beth, I need you to listen to me. The spell worked. You are in no danger. You’re doing great. I need to stick with me. Five seconds, just five. We are going up, and I will be with you the whole way.”
“I don’t want to be here!” Beth’s voice sounded inhuman. Her anger jarred the blue, twisting it around itself. Cavitation bubbles imploded. Icy slabs ground Farisa’s bones to powder. The world was white and black and smelled like fire.
I must exit the spell. If I stay here, we both fall in.
Farisa opened her eyes to find her body shivering. Raqel stood motionless in terror. Beth was shaking violently, as if she’d been trapped under lake ice for an hour. One of the doors to the shelter had been opened, letting in wintry air—tolerable—but also a presence as cold as a lich’s soul. In that winter-noon light stood Duriad.
“What the hell are you doing? Beth, get up! Now!”
“It’s best that she not,” Farisa said.
She added her leather jacket to the layers atop the woman.
“Stay comfortable, Beth. You don’t need to listen to him. This is almost over.”
Duriad stepped forward. Raqel tried to block him, but he shoved her out of the way, then stood over his shaking wife with fury on his face.
“Let her be. I’ll explain everything,” Farisa said.
“Beth,” Duriad said. “Beth! Get yourself up like a grown woman or I swear I will…”
He looked at Farisa, first in confusion, then with furious understanding. He stepped within an inch of her, so close she could smell his breath, and his spit landed on the brown mage’s forehead as he shouted invective.
Farisa, as calmly as she could, stepped back to get out of Duriad’s reach. She turned to Raqel. “This woman needs a doctor. One we can trust. Get Arvi, now.”
#
Raqel had found Arvi at Zadka-Mazita. In the intervening time, Duriad had paced about nine hundred circles on the concrete floor. The smell of snow had made the world quiet. Farisa’s arms were covered in goosebumps—the spell was over, so it didn’t matter if she got cold—because she’d put every layer but her sleeveless camisole atop Beth to keep her warm.
The doctor made no small talk on the way in. Beth’s eyes moved, but she was rigid and did not speak. After a series of motion tests, Arvi sat the woman up and silently slipped a pill into her mouth, then laid her back down.
Duriad crossed his arms. “Well?”
“Pulse eighty-seven,” Arvi said. “High, but nothing to worry about. Temperature five-point-six. Low but, again, not unsafe. She is in a state of shock, but she’s stable.”
Beth’s eyes moved; she looked at her hands. Then, to everyone’s surprise, she spoke. “I feel fine. I’d like to know why I came down here.”
“That’ll come back to you,” Arvi said.
Duriad said, “Ask the witch.”
“Her?” Beth tilted her head toward Farisa. “She’s not a witch.”
“Let Farisa tell you what you’re all doing here.”
“Your wife was never in danger,” Arvi said.
Farisa glared at Duriad. She was in danger, but it wasn’t my fault.
Beth seemed confused. “Danger?”
Raqel started to say something, but Duriad cut her off.
The man swelled like a tilting lake as he said, “Do you know about the oil field?”
Arvi glared at him. Farisa waited, curious to hear more.
Duriad continued. “Some fish poacher was out by Urva’s Fjord two months ago and struck black gold. You know what that means, right?”
He looked directly at Farisa.
“If I ever see you within ten yards of my wife or daughter, I’m going to have a nice conversation about you with a man in uniform, and I do not mean Tevalon police, if you catch my drift.”
“I do,” Farisa said.
“Good.”
Arvi had looked away. Raqel’s face had changed color. Farisa stepped in front of Duriad and put out her chest, standing on tiptoes to reduce the difference between their heights.
“I know exactly what you mean to say.” She put a finger very close to his chest, but did not make contact. “You mean the Global Company. You mean the Global Company that killed my parents, and if you ever make a threat like that again, I swear on your grandmother’s afterbirth that I will fucking—”
“Do what, Farisa? You will fucking do what, Farisa?”
The million vicious things she wanted to say arrived at her mind all at the exact same time, so her mouth gave sound to none. The man was still Raqel’s father; he was still Beth’s husband. Farisa would not harm him, for those reasons alone. Also, if there really was an oil field so close to Tevalon, the Company was on its way regardless of anything else, and if he had sold her name, she would have—like the Vehu of Doa and Fruhlock, a century ago—not a moment to spend on revenge, only flight.
Arvi interjected. “Mr. Ahava, that was unacceptable.”
Duriad turned his back and walked up the stairs.
“Duriad Ahava!” Arvi shouted. “Listen to me.”
The man turned around. In a flash, his cheeks had aged a decade.
The narrowing of the physician’s eyes was the only sign of emotion. To make his enunciation clear, he added a quarter rest after each word.
“We are both Vehu. We both know that the Global Company used to be Alcazar. You say it was a hundred and ten years ago; you say it cannot happen again, because this time, the Company employs Vehu. You say God brought the Bad Times on us for impiety, I know, because I have heard the argument from men better versed in it than you. God’s will aside, I will tell you that my grandfather died at Gyl-Vreska, two days before the camp was liberated. He weighed sixty-four pounds. If you bring the Globbos into Tevalon, to settle a score with this young lady or for any other reason, no doctor in this city will care if you live or die. You are healthy and forty-four years old, but everyone ages, and everyone gets sick. Consider that. Remember that. Apology, to this young woman you have threatened, is in order.”
Duriad said nothing. He climbed the stairs slowly, as if making a point with each step.
Farisa, this time knowing exactly what she wanted to say, called his name.
He did not turn around. He was consciously suppressing acknowledgement of the young woman.
Farisa said, “I was worried at first that your wife’s relapse had something to do with Tevalon’s winters. It gets cold, it gets snowy, and it gets dark, and I thought those were causes of her failure to recover. I was wrong. The problem is you, Duriad. It always has been.”
“Let’s go home,” Arvi said to Farisa.
She climbed into the doctor’s northbound carriage. She could not look at the sunlit snow—the headache worsened as the vehicle moved—and exhaustion had spread through her body to the point of dreading every turn. When the carriage parked and they left it to walk the last fifty yards to his house, she reckoned the sight of them would have been amusing to an observer—a woman of seventeen, struggling to keep up with a man of sixty-eight.
“You probably want to sleep,” he said.
She nodded.
“I’m strong enough to carry you upstairs, but I’ve also had quite a day.”
Farisa smiled. “No need. It might be all I do, but I can get up there.”
She barely remembered climbing the stairs and crawling into bed. Arvi brought her dinner around nine or ten, but she could only eat two bites. Reading was impossible, because focusing her eyes worsened the headache. The next morning, when Arvi took her temperature by mouth, he said, “You have a mild fever. Six-point-one. I am not surprised. That was quite an exertion on your part.”
Farisa scratched her itching arms. “How’s Mrs. Ahava?”
“She’s better than she was. What you did helped, but...”
There’s something he’s not telling me. “Meaning?”
“There’ll be plenty of time to discuss this, but there is nothing we can do now.”
“Did I do the right thing?”
“I would say you did, but the person whose opinion matters most is your own. Please rest, Farisa.”
When lunch came, she ate five or six bites. In the afternoon, the sun came through her south-facing window. She raised a hand to give shade to her eyes. Her joints hurt, and when she grabbed a glass of water, her back muscles twinged. She could read now, but not fast. Twenty pages of a not-demanding novel took three hours of effort, with her falling asleep twice in the process. She did manage, at dinner, to finish a bowl of Skaya’s delicious Vehu wedding soup that Arvi had brought up for her.
The next day, she was able to get herself out of bed and go downstairs. Arvi usually cooked breakfast, but this morning he had buried his face in a newspaper and was still wearing house clothes. Skaya’s hand shook as she drank her tea. Their sole servant, nearly finished fixing the meal, said nothing as Farisa sat down. Even Umrah, the high-spirited tundra dog, had taken on a dour mood, cowering in the corner with his white paws folded.
Farisa said, “I’m going downtown to see how Raqel and her mother are.”
“You won’t be doing that,” Arvi said. “You will stay in this house until you can safely leave Tevalon, and then you will have to go.”
Skaya said, “It is not all your fault, dear, but conditions are now of considerable danger.”