Fay walked through a summer-lit northern forest. Larch cones flattened under her little shoes. A silver apple sat obtusely in a flowering hedge against a pink midnight sky. A blue-handled hunting knife was in her hand; by the logic of dreams, it had always been there.
The little girl approached the pearly mass, finding on closer inspection it was neither silver nor an apple; unsure what it was, she cut the bloated sack open, causing a million baby spiders to pour out as it collapsed. The translucent tiny things clambered up her arms, invaded her denim jacket, and nettled her everywhere and nowhere with their infinitesimal fangs, screaming, “Ma! Ma! Ma!”
The swarm covered her face blind. The wooly mass pried open her lips, worked its way under her tongue, and caused her mouth to erupt in pain. Her lungs sizzled as arachnid enzymes filled them, and then her ears filled with a sibilant hiss as her insides turned to smoke.
“Ma! Ma! Ma! MAAA!”
The little girl squirmed, as if she could by doing so throw herself into the outer reaches of space, or cause herself to collapse into a dense point, or spin so fast she broke out of existence, anything to no longer be here.
Upright, covered in sweat, she grabbed her cramped stomach. Hours had passed, leaving no sense of restoration but a void that had been dreamless up to its awful last lights. She had been in the woodpile, fighting to keep her mind together, and now she was in an unfamiliar bed staring at an unfamiliar ceiling.
“Drink,” said a woman’s voice in the darkness.
Farisa grabbed the glass of water handed to her. “I wasn’t trying to get out of work. I swear to it.”
The woman adjusted Farisa’s pillow. “Just rest for now. We’ll deal with that tomorrow.”
Farisa, given the tightness in her neck, could barely swallow the water. Her shoulders could not bear weight or pressure, so she could not roll over on her side, though her legs would have preferred it. Taking a full breath made her back twinge. It was too dark here to do anything but sleep, but shutting her eyes led to imagery incompatible with rest: brass men with gears falling out of themselves, tiny people imprisoned in glass eggs, and those horrible hungry spiders all again.
I fucking hate you, Marquessa.
She would have to settle for an open-eye trance, gaze fixed on the ceiling with allowance for her mind to drift, in which time seemed to stutter and glide. She had covered her day clothes, unchanged since the afternoon, in sweat under covers. Morning light crept in gradually, and she could tell by it that she was on the second or third floor of Mason Hall.
As a nurse entered the room, Farisa sat up.
“Please stay down.”
“I have to get back to work,” Farisa said.
“The headmistress has written you five days off.”
Farisa groaned. “I don’t need it. I’ll get back to—”
“She insists. I’ll bring breakfast. She’ll be in to see you before noon.”
Farisa doubted her throat and stomach would stand for any eating, but she managed to get through most of a banana and five bites of oatmeal. There were books on a nearby rack, but cramps in her sides would make it impossible to find a comfortable reading position. The sun, as Raqel did when trying new perspectives on a sight, moved through the sky.
The headmistress came in around eleven thirty. “I understand you’ve had a rough night.”
Farisa sat up and blocked the sun on her brow. “It was nothing. One of those one-day stomach bugs.”
She pulled a chair to Farisa’s bedside and sat. “A stomach bug?”
“Something I ate, maybe? Not that the food here isn’t excellent. It is. I’m better now. Can we pretend this never happened?”
“It did happen, so no.”
“I should be getting back to work. I don’t want you to think of me as a burden.”
“A burden? You could never be a burden. You are hardly the first mage to come through here. I know how bad the Sickness gets.”
“Blue Marquessa,” Farisa insisted. She was not sick, so much as she had been chosen by a force outside herself for continuing battle.
“Whatever you call it, it is not your fault.”
“I can’t expect to be paid for doing nothing.”
“Very well.” Katarin opened her purse. “I was going to give this to you later.” She handed her a canvas-backed brown book with yellowed pages. “I don’t have many copies, so return it when you’re done.”
“Analysis of Place by Sarah Leonova.”
“I expect it to take you some time.”
Farisa flipped through the pages. She had seen plenty of mathematics books, but this one had, in addition to equations and theorems, strange diagrams of fabrics that had been stretched like rubber sheets and glued back to themselves in impossible ways.
“It is one of the better topology textbooks, I would like to think. It only took me twelve years.”
“Twelve years to read?”
“To write.”
“You’re Sarah Leonova?”
“I wasn’t born Katarin the First.” The headmistress closed her purse, then stood up. “So, you’ll read it?”
“Of course,” Farisa said.
“Good. It will take more than one sitting, but there should be time. I do not plan to go away anytime soon, I hope.”
#
January 13, ’92 (27 Months before the Fire)
Sitting opposite the headmistress in her office, Farisa cocked her head and said, “I’m not afraid of you, old bitch.”
The woman’s mouth opened.
Farisa had not expected to have to offer the next word. “So...”
“Did it work?”
“It seemed to,” Farisa said. “This ‘Blue Marquessa’ is, after all, no more than a defect of my nerves, a cloud of fear that comes from inside me.
“Unless you believe in three-thousand-year-old ghosts, which I don’t.”
“Me neither. If my mind can make her, it must have a way to unmake her. Place, replace. Your mind is the place you make it.”
“Rhazyladne.” The headmistress sipped tea before looking outside. Snow, a rare occurrence, was falling. “No attacks since the one last fall?”
“None.”
“I am glad you are feeling better, then. So, are you up to the assignment?”
“Easy done,” Farisa said, trying on a phrase she’d heard the highborn use. If she could project their fluent confidence, she had reasoned, she would one day attain it, and this would help her socially as well as in her defensive war against the Marquessa.
“Good.” Katarin gathered the pencils on her desk, arranged them parallel to each other, and put them in a glass jar. “Winter is, in my mind, the best time for exploration.”
“The leaves are off the trees, so you see farther.”
“Precisely that.” The headmistress laid a map over her desk and put her finger on a triangular cluster of three dogs, next to the number 3167—the elevation of the site. “Here is where I expect you to find it.”
“Find what?”
“If I told you, you might not.”
“I hate riddles,” Farisa said.
“What is that old saying? Things are always in the last place you look.”
“Vacuously true. Who continues searching for what is already found?”
“In my experience, many people. Never mind that, though.” Katarin leaned back and paused. “Are you certain that you are—?”
“It’s just a walk in the woods,” Farisa said.
She was, in fact, daunted by the task. Her loss of nerve in the woods had led to more questioning by the servants as to whether she should be here even at their low level, because she had gone unassigned—languishing in the dead letter office, perusing maps of the shut-away tunnels under campus, conducting late-night experiments in the chemistry lab that no one had permitted her to do—more often than not, after that event, and so the black streaks left in her aura by a failure in October, now in January, still lingered. She felt safe as long as she clung to a track, a path, a series of places and times; when she departed from routine, the Marquessa’s shadow was never far away.
“It is seven miles each way,” said the headmistress. “The snow gets deep up in the mountains, so you’ll want waxed denim and boots.”
“I have them,” said Farisa, mildly insulted until she remembered that she was probably the only person who possessed Tevalon winter gear.
She hid her shaking hands. Her heart seemed to be spinning in place. The length and conditions of the journey raised no concern, as she and Claes had been through worse not one year ago, but it struck her that she would be doing this alone and that, if the Marquessa did take her, it could be hours or days before she was found. At the same time, to confine herself to an ever-shrinking set of places her nerves considered safe, allowing the Marquessa to take more and more territory, would converge on the collapse of her zone of safety to a single point, then an empty set. It would be better to recalibrate her mind in a place where real danger, from terrain and weather, existed.
The headmistress said, “I do worry about you.”
“This is how I handle the Marquessa. Enta musa-ki noro eska nu verin.” From Lyrian: If the negative proves absurdity, the positive is true. Marquessa, absurd; Farisa, true.
“Proof by contradiction. I know it well, but....”
“The Marquessa is my problem, not yours.” I’m not afraid of you, old bitch, she told the Marquessa again. “In fact, I will go today.”
“You will not go today,” said the headmistress. “It is almost noon. Our winters are mild by your standard, I know, but it still gets dark early. I will not have you stranded out there.”
“Then I will request an early wake-up tomorrow.”
“No need. I have put one on the board for you.”
#
Farisa entered the cafeteria and filled a small canvas bag with nuts and fruits before dawn the next day, then was on the trail by sunrise.
“It’s just a walk in the woods,” she said, needing to hear it from her own voice.
“Up the mountain, down the mountain.” The air was fresh this morning. “Nothing more.”
In fact, she had overdressed for Cait Forest’s mild winter, because even though this was the coldest morning so far, the low temperature had not been worse than minus-one and the lowlands were above freezing by nine o’clock or so. She was in fact quite hot, so she opened her jacket.
Two miles from campus, the trail’s gravel pebbles grew smaller and smaller. As she climbed the first major hill, the stones turned rare in favor of exposed soil. The path switched back and forth through bare-branched deciduous trees, which yielded to evergreens around mile three. The odor of pine resin hung in the air as she powered her way up the steepening slopes. Her heart was racing and her face damp with sweat, but she had not realized how high she had climbed until she reached an exposed cliff. The buildings on campus were visible and seemed starkly close together from here. Coyotes howled in the expanse below. Mason Hall’s bell tower and the spire of Hooke Chapel could be seen for a moment, but then fog rolled into the valley, concealing campus from view.
The trail turned back into the woods, growing rocky and steeper in both its climbs and drops. A copse of scarlet oaks, the ones that retained a few dark leaves even into winter, broke up the blackbark pines and cedars. A pair of red-veined pitcher plants guarded a corner where the path turned sharply at almost a hundred and eighty degrees. She came into the open again at much higher elevation—she guessed this was twenty-five hundred feet—where she crossed a ledge on the upper side of a rock face.
As a child, she had climbed trees and the occasional wall, and this footpath was safe by comparison, but the exposure to an increasing northerly wind left her feeling vulnerable as much as she was now cold. She began to outguess her balance; the world seemed like a coil or spring, primed to lurch like a listing chip and throw her over the cliff.
No, Farisa, that’s absurd. Land simply did not do that. She reminded herself of Cait Forest’s historical immunity to disaster—no fires for five thousand years, no twisters on record at all; an occasional small tremor but nothing like an Exmore quake. This is still the safest place in the world.
“I’m not afraid of you,” she said to the Marquessa.
She walked on, but she found her pace slowing, even as the howling wind changed direction and no longer opposed her. She felt the presence of wild eyes on her skin, but could not position it in space. The sound had been wind through a crevice, nothing more, she told herself. The snakes here were harmless even in summer and would be in hibernation. If a bear had spotted her, she would have been the first a hundred years to find one. Still, the sky seemed both low and bright, and she was not sure why this ordinary rock ledge had become upsetting to her...
A dark blur moved itself out of sight, behind an outcropping.
It’s gray. There are no stormcats here. There are no wolves here; now, I wish there were. What’s gray? The image struck her mind of Company boots, lifting and falling in synchrony, united in their will to punish the ground for the crime of its existence. A Globbo? No, Farisa. Cait Forest is neutral. Cait Forest is neutral. Was it gray? What was the size of it?
She committed herself to six more steps, followed through, saw the blur again.
A man. A gray man. He’s surely stronger than me. He could throw me over the cliff, to my death, and no one would know.
Farisa picked up the largest stone that could fit in one hand, a granite five-pounder. The air, in addition to being damp and cold, felt viscous as if nature objected to her borrowing one of its weapons. Winter’s white light, so soft until a minute ago, gave menacing clarity to the ledge’s features, to the odors of the mountains, to the sharp visible contrast at higher elevations between black granite and white snow, those edges so sharp it hurt to look at them.
He’s here for me. No one comes out here. I’m six miles from rescue and it’s freezing and he’s...
Keep yourself together, Farisa! Your hands are shaking, Farisa!
Rubber burned in the sky; the scent of kerosene rose from Farisa’s upper lip.
“Phantom smells, old bitch?” Farisa scoffed. “Learn a new trick.”
The air was still again.
“I’m not afraid of you,” she told the Marquessa.
But if you have to say it…
She crept forward. “A trick of vision, no more. There is no Globbo here. Cait Forest is neutral. Cait Forest is neutral.”
But if you have to say it…
She inched forward, still holding the heavy stone, less than half a yard from the mouth of the cave she had seen the shadow enter. Careful not to be heard, she slid her boots soundlessly over snow. Her heartbeat became a washing sound in her ears. The hard stone was still in her hand as she reached the cave, and as she turned toward the opening....
Bats. The cave was shallow, its back wall visible by natural light. The stone fell from her hand. Bats. Six of them. Nothing more.
Fuck you, Global Company. It had, with no expense, recruited her nerves to give her a beating. She felt exhausted enough to lay down for a nap, but days were short this time of year and no light could be wasted, and her heart would race for the next few minutes whether she walked with her sore muscles or rested, so she kept going.
After that, the rest of the climb was easy. The steep rocky scramble to the summit did not faze her. The cold and lightly falling snow were no bother. A coyote locked eyes with her, raised its head for a moment, then walked away. At the summit, wind unbroken for miles touched her face, and a countervailing sense of satisfaction warmed her body. She let out a scream, a sort of war cry, to celebrate triumph over the hundred fears she’d surmounted to get here. Although much taller summits stood at her back, this spot gave an unobstructed view of Cait Forest’s true expanse, making the places of her new life seem small and wieldy.
Katarin had asked Farisa to take note of everything she saw up here, but what had been meant by “everything?” She removed her pack, drew out a notebook and pen, and began writing, realizing quickly that there were too many details for her capture: the winter-yellow grasses, the red-stemmed bushes, the soft fog that stretched out east, covering most of campus. Crows were circling over the forest and prairie. There were veined crusts of ice that gave a pleasing crack when stepped upon. There were fences of stubby shrubs that whistled as the wind cut through. There were mountains two or three times smaller than this one, but seeming almost close enough to touch. She walked about the summit. This place was almost upsettingly beautiful, even on a cold cloudy day, but what had she been sent up here to observe?
She found a rubble of stones, cut for an arch that had collapsed long ago, possibly quarried a thousand years ago, as the structure here had once been some kind of small medieval keep. This was not Cait Forest’s only deserted domicile, nor the most impressive one—she had passed two abandoned grain mills on the way up here—so she doubted this alone merited such a long trip.
A brown rabbit, visible in contrast to snow, darted away and down a scree slope too steep for snow to have accumulated on it. Farisa followed, descending carefully, and noticed an off-color rectangular patch on the ground, where she dug with her fingers and found a wooden trapdoor that had no handle, but was so far gone in rot that a clean stomp broke through it, exposing a stone stairwell.
She descended, going further underground, letting her eyes adjust to the cave’s low light, until the staircase ended and she found an iron ladder going straight down a shaft. Unable to see the bottom, she climbed down, feeling for each step before committing any weight, until she reached a landing in complete darkness. She opened her pack for an oil lantern and lit it, finding herself in a natural corridor, a fissure between two granite slabs with wide veins of quartz on each side. Her path was straight and did not fork, so there was only one way to go. At the end, she found an iron ladder just like the one she’d used to come down here, which she ascended, a little faster than she had come down the other one, into dim light to find another set of stairs, which she climbed to the surface. In the open, she found... that she had already been here. She had come up the way she had gone down.
She shook her head. How could that be? She had gone down, then straight for a few hundred paces, then up, which ought to have placed her somewhere else on the mountain, but she had emerged in the same hole on the same scree slope.
I got myself turned around in that cave. But how? I walked straight. It was not a circle.
She went down again, this time taking note of every detail, as the headmistress had asked her to do. She counted forty-seven steps, sixty-one ladder rungs, and three hundred and seven paces in the long underground corridor, as straight as a Cait Forest hallway, which she checked for spurs and openings, finding none. The ladder at the end had sixty-one rungs; the staircase up had forty-seven steps, leading right back... to the same entrance.
I’m losing my—no, Farisa. You can’t think thoughts like that.
This defied all physical intuition. The world had become a stage magician, but magicians were not sorcerers—were not witches like her—and mechanisms, puzzles to be solved, could always be found. She went down a third time, tying a bandanna to a chest-high rung of the ladder, looking back with every step to make sure her distance from it was always increasing, until it had fully left the envelope of her lantern’s dwindling light. This subterranean corridor seemed tighter than before, but the exact straightness had never changed. She took note of the exposed stone’s features, the smooth ripples of granite and the tiny quartz crystals, listening for sounds like running water—nothing—and the flapping of bat wings—also, nothing. She counted every step, as she had before, finding no oddity except a slight queasiness on footfall number one fifty-five—halfway, if her counting had been correct. She arrived again where she had started, finding her bandanna on the rung around which her fingers closed.
Poison. This is an old mine. I could be getting damped out. It would explain her disorientation, the mismatch between her local experience of the place as a linear corridor and its observed fact of circling back on itself. The lantern went out, and her face felt heavy, as if she’d been hanging upside down, so she she realized she couldn’t spend any more time down here, climbed the ladder in haste, rushed up the stairs, and was thankful to the flat white sky that she had reached the surface.
#
The sky began to darken, the snow falling more heavily, when she was halfway back to campus and trying to decide if there was anything worth adding to the fifteen pages of notes she had taken up at the summit. She had done as asked, but felt sure she had not found what she had been sent to look for.
Leaves rustled as she came down through a copse of oaks. She had scared up a small black animal, and only by winter’s lack of cover and white ground cover could she follow its path.
Could you be a...?
No, she decided. That would be ridiculous. Cait-shih, for which the forest had been named, had probably never existed, and certainly were not running about now. Magic was taxing enough for humans; the idea that trickster cats could develop the talent struck her as absurd.
On the other hand...
Maize had been thought extinct until Bezelian settlers had found it growing feral in orcish ruins. The absurd theory that the world had once been two flags cooler had been proven true by archeologists half a century ago. It did not seem impossible that wild cats existed here who might seem, by their uncanny intelligence, to be magical. She followed the animal, as silently as she could, in the hope that its reflexes would not outdo her, but always causing it to dart out of sight before allowing a decent look. After a full hour of this stop-and-creep pursuit, it ran into a den covered by leaf litter, the opening too small for her to follow, and so she decided, by lemma of convenience, it had been no more than a raccoon.
Snow became misty rain as she descended to the flat, then had turned back into snow when she heard Mason Hall’s bells ring five o’clock. Afternoon’s last light had left the sky, but she was close enough to campus to find her way by its lights. The headmistress was still in her office when Farisa arrived.
“So, what did you find today?”
She described the ruined keep at the summit.
“I know about that. What else?”
Farisa detailed the animal she had seen.
“A cait-shih?” The headmistress adjusted her glasses. “I have always said it is possible, but I agree that he was probably a raccoon. If cait-shih still exist, they are smart enough to be seen by no one.”
She described the underground shaft where, befuddled by some unknown mine gas, she had walked forward only to double back on herself.
“That does sound dangerous. I will send someone to wall it off.”
“I can do it,” said Farisa.
Reading on Amazon or a pirate site? This novel is from Royal Road. Support the author by reading it there.
“No need. You have done enough.”
“Have I?”
“Have you followed my instructions?”
“I believe so.”
“Did you check the compass every thousand feet, as I asked?”
“I didn’t need to. The trail was easy to follow.”
“That I know.” Katarin looked to the side. “That was not why I asked. I was curious to know whether you would discover any magnetic anomalies.”
Mason Hall’s steam pipes clanked, scaring a tiny spider on the wall.
Farisa said, “I’m sorry. I’ll check tomorrow.”
“There’s no need. You did well.”
“I did? I found nothing.”
“Nothing is what I expected you to find. That is either very good or very bad for us.”
Farisa watched the spider climb. “I must admit I am confused.”
“Have you finished my book?”
“Analysis of Place?”
“Unless you are aware of a pen name I intend to keep secret until my death, that is the one.”
“It’s well written, but it’s very dense.”
“Pun intended?”
“Maybe.” Farisa laughed. “I set it next to my bed, still open.”
Katarin smiled.
“I’m in the seventh chapter. I’m not a mathematician.”
“You’re Farisa. A girl with your brains can be whatever she needs to be.”
She looked at her open palms. Was that a compliment, or was she guilty of some shortfall to be revealed in the next few words?
Katarin continued. “Do you see a connection between my work and what I asked you to do?”
“A connection?” Farisa scratched her neck. “I’m not... uh...”
She suspected, given recent happenings, the headmistress had some concern pertaining to Cait Forest’s defenses. It had been said that Cait Forest was protected by ancient magic, leaving it inaccessible but over Rooksnest Bridge, but no one could be sure of the truth of such a claim, because no one had ever tried to invade. Farisa massaged the bridge of her nose and her gaze drifted around her fingers to the back wall, right over Katarin’s chair. The spider crossed a corner. The animal existed in three dimensions, but its shadow, if it were alive, would only know two.
“Kasa,” Farisa said. “That’s what you wanted me to look for, isn’t it?”
The headmistress nodded. “Five thousand years without fire, without war. That is no small feat. My fear is that Cait Forest’s neutrality may rest, as the Company itself does and must know it does, on reputation alone.”
Farisa straightened out wrinkles at the elbow of her dress. “It has never been done, because people believe it cannot be done.”
“Precisely. The western mountains are a barrier, but the eastern marshes could be drained. The Lepid River is navigable, with skill. It is famously said that anyone who tries to come in other than by Rooksnest Bridge gets hopelessly lost—and incurs bad luck, but I don’t believe in that—but, with modern surveyance and navigation, it must be easy to get in for one who is determined enough.”
“I wouldn’t know what a kasa is supposed to look like,” Farisa admitted. If they had ever existed, the ability to make them had died out thousands of years ago, when magic’s power was said to have been much stronger. “I saw ordinary space, in all directions.”
“All is as expected then,” said Katarin.
“Is that all?” Farisa said. “I have fifteen pages of notes.”
“I will review them, but that is all. On an unrelated note... I have good news for you.”
“Good news?”
“When you arrived last summer, I knew there were Company spies on our board, but I had not figured out who they were, nor could I prove my suspicions. In the time since then, I have achieved both. They are no longer welcome in Cait Forest. This being the case, I have time to focus on my real job, education. This gives us a chance to revise your situation.”
Farisa touched her hot face. Today’s fourteen-mile walk had exhausted her, from the climb and the cold, but she did not believe she had suffered impairment of hearing. Had she heard the headmistress right? Was she finally going to get the Cait Forest experience she had come here for?
“We have no Lyrian program. We should.”
Farisa nodded in assent. “Ella-fa prishen ynua torad ka.” (I’m surprised there isn’t one.)
“Poro topa ettoz ken wy corda renskala.” (First year, we focus on grammar and potatoes.)
“Renskala?” Farisa smiled. “Renshala.”
“I suppose I could improve my own renshala.”
“Sen, etta zosh etta koam.” (Yes, one word at a time.)
“In the second year, I suppose our students will be ready for the classics.”
“The Vehu chorae too?”
“There is no law against it here, so we shall start soon.”
“You’ve hired a teacher already?”
“If this is your way of asking for a pay raise…”
“A pay raise?” Farisa stopped. “You mean I’m the teacher?”
“Yva sen,” Katarin said.
“I’m flattered, but you can’t be serious.”
“Have you seen me be anything else?”
“Teach the course? How could I? I’ve never been a student, here or anywhere.”
“I am aware of this.”
“Surely, there’s someone more qualified.”
“If there were, I would have found that person. Since I have not…”
Farisa looked at the ceiling. The spider had gone. She took a deep breath. “I’ll have to think about it.”
She had no doubts about her ability to handle the workload, because she had discovered during the humiliation of unassignment how much time a long day really had in it, and she was more fluent in the language than anyone else she had ever met, though this hardly counted as high rank given the language’s obscurity. The prospect of standing in front of a classroom, knowing the Marquessa’s tendency to descend at the worst times, terrified her.
“Please do,” said the headmistress. “Please do think about it.”
Snow collected on the windowpane. Wind nudged it.
“As you can see on my face, I have been in this world for a long time, and it has become a worse place every year. When I was your age, the notion of Alcazar conquering the world was unfathomable. It has been done so thoroughly, the young see it as the outcome of an inevitable process. Private industry was welcomed as an upgrade over royal or central planning, but it led in turn to private authority, which led to oligarchy, which is taking our world all the way to ruin. The side of good—the side of humanity—has been playing defense for my whole life. I am exhausted, Farisa. What has this college been, the past hundred years? A five-year holiday for the rich. They come here at fifteen or sixteen, they leave having acquired skills and knowledge, but having changed in no deep way, so that everything we teach them is used to harm the world, not better it. You know what would be truly rebellious? To educate them. To give them an understanding of history, of philosophy, of religion for ends other than control, of science for ends other than war. If they had culture, Farisa, they would grow—”
“To despise the work of their fathers.”
“Precisely. And maybe, to destroy it.”
“I’m with you, Headmistress. Thousands of miles, I’m with you.”
“I believe you are. Yet I sense anxiety.”
“I have never taught before.”
“Until you have, you have not.”
“My Lyrian is—”
“Better than mine. I have full faith you will be ready to start on the first of March.”
Farisa’s hand shook. “That’s so close.”
She had lost her mind once, in front of Cait Forest’s ranger, an old man nobody liked. What would happen if this occurred during class? Even the headmistress would not be able to protect her if fifteen students—more than a hundred thousand grot of tuition annually—saw her break down. Still, this same woman had given her so many chances, overlooked so many early failures, and therefore deserved gratitude and loyalty.
You cannot let yourself be scared, Farisa. If you let this thing rule you, your world will get smaller and smaller and that is the way to the madhouse. Take the job.
“Ska zetra-fa ro.” (I’ll do it.)
#
Farisa put other interests aside throughout February to read, write, and analyze Lyrian sentences. She spoke to herself in the language whenever she could, though not in front of others—she had caught herself doing this a couple times, after others had reacted strangely. She memorized Lyrian’s modal verbs, so many of which translated poorly to other languages. She learned the differences between the dialects of the language that had existed over two thousand years. She decided to omit speculative register, a tonal system for evidentiality alluded to in old etiquette books, but that had left no written traces of itself. If even one student came in who had come upon or figured out the rules of third versus fourth distance—they seemed arbitrary and inconsistent, but had clearly once followed a pattern that even average speakers could use—she would be exposed as a charlatan and likely chased out of here.
The Marquessa, too, was a concern. One descent of the phantom crone would blow her cover; she would no longer be received as an expert in an antique language, but in timeless madness, a topic for which erudition brought no respect, as a million madhouse prophets could attest.
The headmistress had also overestimated the young woman’s ability to project composure and authority. She would have students who had been exposed to opera, to fine goods from all five continents, to a thousand unspoken mannerisms she was still struggling to learn about. Plus, she was a misfit even within herself, with a Tevalon accent and Lorani skin color—a person of unknown origin, but a rube.
On that fateful first day of March, when new arrivals settled into their first classes and first-years became second-years, forsythias were in bloom, turning hedges into bright yellow walls whose color seemed to stamp out winter, not that there had been much of one, for good. Green-headed sunbirds flitted from one high nest to another. Brown gravel crunched under her feet as she walked to the Old Schoolhouse, half a mile from campus and therefore available even though it was one of the three oldest classrooms on the continent, with every plank of wood replaced several times, and with its foundation requiring constant repair as imperious sequoia roots churned languidly beneath it, over the past two thousand years.
“There is nothing to fear,” she said to herself. She sniffed her wrist, where she had put a dab of scented oil, a pleasing real aroma to flush out any of the false ones her anxieties tended to create. “I am prepared. I have been studying for a month.”
She was glad she had been given a new garment: not beige, but an indigo half-sleeved dress, conservative but elegant. If she needed to remind herself while teaching that she had a right to be up there, she could look at her new color, one that better matched her skin as well as the way she was wearing her hair, tied up in a bun.
When she opened the Old Schoolhouse’s red door, the headmistress was already inside.
“Have you eaten yet?”
“No,” Farisa admitted. “I forgot. I was busy... studying.”
“Nervousness is common the first time. Biscuits and jam will arrive ten minutes before the hour. There will be enough for the whole class.”
“Thank you, Headmistress.”
“I feed them for your sake, not theirs.”
“Shall we practice?”
“Zha tasa-fe.” (If you want.)
The young teacher and the headmistress chatted in Lyrian, the former checking every sentence for grammar and word order before saying anything, but seeming to make no mistakes.
It was about three minutes to nine when the first student, a boy, entered the classroom.
“…so this is when she said, ‘In fact, I’m no bear at all.’”
The girl following him laughed; another boy responded with a crude remark.
Farisa stepped behind her long desk, realizing why the room had equipped her with it—it was a barrier, if needed—and arranged her books into stacks. She made sure her dress lay symmetrically on her body. Her closed-toe black clogs were comfortable enough and there was no risk of them coming off, because she’d tripled the knots of her shoelaces. She ensured that the bun of her hair would not come apart. She was dressed more conservatively than any of her students, as she preferred, but not by the sort of severe difference that would suggest having been summoned from some other century.
A few more students had entered the classroom.
“Are you teaching this?” one of the boys asked Katarin.
The headmistress pointed. “She is.”
Farisa waved and forced a smile.
Mason Hall’s bell tower, a quarter mile away, struck nine.
“So…” Farisa looked at her forearms.
Twelve students had come. She had prepared to address the one who would be talkative and disruptive—probably a boy, but not necessarily—to the point of being unprepared for this absence of noise that put focus, regardless of her readiness for it, on her. There was no one to tell to be quiet; everyone already was.
“I guess we can start with introductions.” She wrote her name on the board. “I’m Farisa. One S. Not ‘Miss Farisa’ and certainly not ‘Professor’ anything.”
“Farisa what?” asked a girl in the back.
“Just Farisa.” She wrote a sentence on the board. Aska mors na hurin ett te.
Silence.
She turned around. “Lyris-te?” (Anyone?)
No one responded.
“I suppose no one will object if I teach the first couple lessons in Ettasi?”
“I won’t tell anyone,” the headmistress said dryly.
She had expected that her students, coming in with superior cultural and linguistic knowledge, would have inverted the dialogue in the first minute, leaving her to trail behind them as they conversed fluently in the language—no one spoke it, but it was still taught at the best grammar schools—but it became clear to her that not one of them had retained more than the basics.
“Eska verus ponotto is all I know,” said one of the boys.
“We’ll get back to that,” Farisa said. “I’ll add parse marks. You won’t have them when you start reading original texts, because punctuation didn’t exist yet, but for now, I will indulge.”
(Aska mors-na (hurin ett) te)?
She said, “Aska is a copular verb for attributes, in the universal mode, while eska is for equation. In our language, I would say I am Farisa and I am short of stature, but in Lyrian, that would be eska-fa Farisa and aska-fa blie.” She pointed at the headmistress. “Eska-zi Katarin. Aska-zi zadka.”
“Such a flatterer,” said the headmistress.
“We’ll see other copulas, in other modes. You wouldn’t use the universal mode for your age, because it changes, and you wouldn’t use it for something you newly discovered, but you could write this.”
She wrote on the board: Eska zur wy wy, rosz.
She suspected the students had encountered Lyrian numbers somewhere. “This sentence means...?”
“Two plus two is four?” said a black-haired boy near the window.
“Kezen,” Farisa said. “Yva kezen. Aska tahs-fi te?”
The boy looked around before saying, “Aska tahs-ti Rainer.”
“Very close! You would say, Aska tahs-ta Rainer. You don’t need permission to call yourself Rainer.” She paused. “Now, in the sentence on the board, mors-na means ‘color and degree’ or ‘color and subtype,’ but this is a holdover from the time when gray, blue, and green were considered to be the same mors, so we will just use mors-na as one word for ‘color.’ Then, we have ett, which means...”
“One!” said a girl in the front.
“Very close,” Farisa said. “Etta means one, and ett functions as an indefinite article. They are related, but not the same. As for that last word, te, it’s a question word, an algebraic X. On the other hand, te-te means...?”
One of the boys shrugged. “I don’t know.”
“Precisely. The only thing you know is that X equals X. Now, this last word in our sentence is hurin, which means ‘shadow.’ So...”
(Aska (mors-na (hurin ett)) te)?
(Is//universal (color (shadow a)) what)?
“Szohl,” said one of the boys in the back.
“Kezen. Aska mors-na hurin-fya szohl. If I wanted to convey that I knew this on sight of one shadow, I might use isa instead of aska. Of course, one could argue that no shadow is truly black, but only a less illuminated shade than would exist without the obstruction. Still, yva kezen.”
One of the girls raised her hand. “So the verb goes first?”
“Sen,” Farisa said. “Lyrian is a prefix language: verb, subject, object. The verb is the root of the sentence, so it goes first. Adjective placement is more complicated. By default, adjectives are considered extrinsic, which means they’re auxiliary rather than essential, and do not change the core meaning of the noun. In this case, it follows the noun.”
She wrote on the board. Satsa fa heni szohl. “I see a cat that is also black.”
Then she wrote: Kovo satsa fa szohl henyar. “I only see black cats.”
“In the first sentence, the speaker sees a cat, and the fact of the cat being black is a refinement, but the sentence remains valid without the detail. The second pertains to cats who must be black, or they are otherwise invisible to the speaker. You’ll also see this with compound nouns. Adjectives of purpose are almost always intrinsic—a fishing pole is not a pole that is fishing.”
A curly-haired girl raised her hand. “Verbs are prefix, but so are conjunctions, right?”
“Yes, unless it introduces ambiguity, in which case we need to use tying particles, but that’s for another lesson entirely.”
“Explain sophya wy fariza.”
“Ah!” Farisa was starting to have fun, because what she enjoyed most about Lyrian was not its rigid, logical structure, but all the exceptions and breaches and subtle impolitenesses. “Excellent observation.”
She wrote sophya wy fariza on the board. “Knowledge and virtue. The word wy doubles, pun intended, as the conjunction ‘and’ as much as it is the number two. Wy konar plioa: berries and melons. W’aeoska ydenja: summer and winter. So why is it ‘sophya wy fariza,’ not ‘wy sophya fariza’? Rhetorical infixation. There’s no grammatical rule here. The rule is deliberately flouted to say, ‘Hey, this is important.’ People in ancient times were not as proper as you’re led to believe. They broke their own rules all the time.
“In fact, this is common in the historical study of language. The specimens best remembered, the ones preserved so we might come upon them, are often notable not because they followed all the rules but because they broke them well.
“Great observation, Miss— I’m sorry, what is your name again?”
“Rahel. Rahel Vanta.”
“Thank you, Miss Vanta.”
“You can call me Rahel, Farisa.”
Farisa was interrupted by the audible growl of her own stomach.
There’s food on the front table. The headmistress made sure of it. She had not eaten for almost twelve hours, but she could not eat in front of her students. That would be too familiar. It would be improper. She was a woman, and rules existed, and she had held composure for half an hour, but would not give it up now. I should not have skipped breakfast. I should have eaten something. She was tired now, tired enough to faint, and the dryness in her mouth was starting to build up a bad taste. Had the temperature in this room gone up two flags? She walked over to a window and opened it to feel cool air on her face.
“There’s food on the front table.” Food, that stupid word was still in head. Food. All words, overused, repeated, became a bit shrill, a bit cloying. Foooooood. A plaintive moan, a train up a hill, chugging and chomping. Eating eating eating. Mouths. Tongues and teeth destroying matter they did not make. What was language, but the rush of air through stinking food-holes? Foooooooooood-holes. Sounds, such sounds! Chewing, endless chewing. Crunching. Teeth. Smells. Noisy children. Curdling milk. That word, food, that word, that word...
Teeth. So many teeth. Spit and mush down a red gullet. Lips smacking. Sound from the floor, sound from the ceiling. Slurping, gulping, glopping. Stomach acid. Language is reverse flatulence and I am teaching it, using it, and oh could not I feel worse could I not feel worse. Out, out, out out out I must get out of here.
One of the students said, “Is she sick?”
They know. They fucking know. I can’t handle this job and it’s obvious to everyone. Eyes are on me. I am seen from too many angles and I cannot control them all.
She pulled her hair till the roots stung, because only pain would keep her on the world’s surface. A dark incoherent mind was yawning inside her and she could only exist apart from it if there was something real to fixate on, and her scalp was better than nothing. Sunlight. Window open, March breeze. The chalk in her hand. I can beat this. This is just anxiety. The headmistress believes in me. I can return because... because it was a beautiful day in early spring, and nothing was wrong. Nothing was wrong, nothing was wrong, nothing was—
But if you have to say it…
The room spun into a blur. Unreadable faces darted around her. She was still the scared little girl, the refugee, the disliked weird kid she had been all along. Her students could tell she was a mage; the madness was spilling out of her and smelled like chlorine. Dark shapes clustered at the door.
They’re leaving. They’re going to tell everyone. Word will spread like a brush fire. “Get this mad witch out of Cait Forest before she kills us all.”
The concrete floor cracked and a mound of twisted naked roots rose out of it until they settled into the form of a slender woman, nearly twice Farisa’s height, who spread her arms and shouted. You stupid girl, Fay. You stupid, stupid girl. Can’t you see you don’t belong here? You’re a fraud. These people will never like you. Burn the place down and kill them. Do it! Do it! Do it all, all I care. You’re sweating like an animal, brown sap half an inch thick on the floor. Your branches are splitting. You’re shitting out your life, it’s disgusting. Take off your dress, you broken slut, you spent mage. Open your guts and dance.
The room swam; it moved in her. Oblique sun was burning her face and the world stank in all directions of open mouths eating and laughing at the same time. A wire self-crossing at a point behind her brow shorted, making glow a point with no inside nor outside, a spot of zero resistance and infinite current and intolerable heat. Thoughts piled up faster than she could discharge them. At fault. Her mind was a frayed pink ribbon on which those two words had been written: at fault. Her mother’s death, her father’s death, her state of flight from the law, the danger she brought to everyone she cared about. My fault, all my fucking fault.
The headmistress’s voice came pitchless, from everywhere and nowhere. “You’re fired, Fay. Into the bucket you go, into the bucket like the cat. Fifteen years. Fifteen years of running. Caught you now! You stay in the back. Put her under the bucket. Jed, where’s the bucket? Jed? Jed? Where is it?”
Her vision collapsed to a point. Freak, I’m a freak. My nipples poke out of this dress. If I sit down, they’ll see the tiny roll of fat on my belly, they’ll want to grab it. My knees are dusty too, because I’m little Fay who plays in the dirt where the frogs and bugs go. I sweat like an orc. It’s all my fault, the slush, the red brick wall, it’s all my fault.
The Marquessa’s skin and hair had taken on the color of expired seaweed. The crone, now taller than the room’s ceiling, having fused with and grown through it, cackled. You deserve all the misery in the world, Fay. You rejected a mother’s love.
Farisa trembled. “You lie. You’re not real. You’re a defect of nerves inside me.”
The Marquessa, taking unkindly to the assertion of her nonexistence, clapped her lands, emitting sounds of whooping laughter as Farisa’s chest and diaphragm began to tingle as if starved of blood. Her muscles, like an orchestra whose conductor had collapsed, lost all rhythm. How did one breathe, again? How did one ensure one’s heart beat in the proper way, the pieces all in order? What were the motions, the neural necessities of survival? I’ve forgotten everything. I’m out of breath and can’t remember how to— Those million tiny movements, those things a sleeping person could do but a wakeful person had to manage, seemed like words repeated so often their meanings were forgotten, seemed so foreign, so inimical to nature as... as... as...
... to light a candle from twenty feet away.
Mage. I’m a mage. I’m Farisa, Farisa La’ewind, eighteen years and five months old. I belong here. This is precisely where I belong, because I’m Farisa and I belong anywhere I decide I do. So fuck you, Marquessa.
The old crone dissolved. Faces in the room singled themselves in Farisa’s gaze. Her fears had not been realized. No one was laughing or taunting, and no one had left the room.
“Kelsa par masig?”
“Ter,” the headmistress said. Three. Three minutes.
“Kezen.” Farisa picked up a nub of chalk she had dropped on her desk. “Now, where was I?”
#
The rest of the lesson went smoothly until two boys in the back, who looked alike enough to be brothers, began to snicker.
“No, you ask her.”
Farisa turned to face them. “Do you have a question for me?”
Neither said anything.
“Guys, I’m your age. You can ask me.”
One of the boys asked, “Does Lyrian have any curse words?”
“Ha!” Farisa smiled. “I was hoping someone would ask that.”
Many of the students laughed.
“No, I’m serious. It’s an interesting topic, profanity. You learn a lot about a culture by the distinctions it assigns to words. We call ‘shit’ a swear word, while ‘feces,’ meaning the same thing, is a polite word, if for an impolite subject. Why is this? Why should two words that mean the same thing garner such different reception?
“Often, it comes down to history. Social class distinctions, especially as linguistic groups merge, tend to be a major factor. The victorious culture’s words for bodily functions or religious ceremonies become accepted, while those of the disfavored one are considered ‘bad words’ or ‘curse words.’ The disliking of people who use a word becomes, in time, disliking of the word itself.
“It’s hard to know, from a historical standpoint, which words are considered profane, because it’s not a stable distinction over time, and we’ll be reading works written over a span of more than a thousand years. See, if a word is so despised that people stop using it, it is forgotten, and the stigma fades as well. Five hundred years ago, not one of you would have used the word ‘bolinoots’ in front of me, but today that word is inoffensive and, pun intended, quaint.
“On the other hand, there are words people continue to use in spite of—or even because of—their vulgarity. When this happens, the word acquires new grammar rapidly, because when you’re not supposed to use a word at all, anything goes. So linguistic creativity flourishes around these words—it abso-pissin’-lutely does. This accelerates polysemy—that is, causes new meanings to proliferate—and, as mundane usages dilute the offensive older ones, it can even turn into a true expletive, a throwaway word tossed in for flavor and cadence. It loses its sting.
“Lyrian, understand, grew to be used all over the Far North, from the Syoni in the Bronze Age to the Vehu in the Castle Age, crossing the Polar Ocean at least three times. These people didn’t always get along, so it’s probable that many words were considered profane for periods of time, but this tended, as I’ve said before, to lead a word either to disuse or overuse, and either trajectory removes the profane aspect in a couple hundred years, making it a matter of estimation, for a historian, which words are profane and in which usages. In all my study, I have only found one sentence so severe as to be unmentionable across the millennia, and it is a strange one, because its four constituent words are ordinary and inoffensive.
She wrote on the board: l’tae qeru teru flara.
“A modern version of this curse lives on in the saying—”
“Farisa,” the headmistress said.
Oh, shit. I shouldn’t have put that on the board. Am I in trouble?
“Farisa, it is ten o’clock.”
“Oh.” She laughed. The bells of Mason Hall were ringing. “I guess it is. Class dismissed. I’ll see you all tomorrow.”
Once the students were all gone, Farisa grabbed a tangerine from the food platter and began to peel it.
“You are a natural,” the headmistress said.
She put an orange slice in her mouth. “Don’t flatter me.”
“I would never dare.”
“I was so nervous. So nervous. You have no idea what was going on in my head.”
“I think I have an idea.” Katarin stood up and walked toward the door. “In spite of it all, you did well. I believe I have told you that I am the first woman on the Continent to run a university. I also suspect I have had the privilege of living long enough to meet the second.”
“I hope you’ll introduce me to her someday.”
Katarin chuckled. Before leaving, she said, “In Cait Forest, you will have the life you were meant to have, so long as I am around.”
“Thank you, Headmistress.”
Farisa sat down at her desk. The lesson had gone well. The Blue Marquessa had come for her, at the worst possible time, and she had won. She savored the triumph, exhausted as she was. She had finally found a job she could do—at which she excelled; which she enjoyed. She felt a new sense of belonging in Cait Forest. It would last for about a year.