Utta’s long, strong face looked troubled. “But not yet.” She sat up straight.
“We have an hour left before the evening meal, Princess. Shall we spend it usefully? Learning may perhaps keep your mind off your sorrows, at least for a little while.”
“I suppose.” Briony had cried so much she felt boneless. The room was quite dark, with only one candle lit. Most of the light in the spare apartment came from the window, a descending beam that ended in a bright oblong climbing steadily higher on the wall as the sun dropped toward its evening harbor. Earlier she had felt sure the worst had happened, but now she thought she could feel the shadowy wings still beating above her, as if there was some threat as yet undiscovered.
“Teach me something, then,” she said heavily. “What else do I have left?”
“You have learning, yes,” Utta told her. “But you also have prayers. You must not forget your prayers, child. And you have Zoria’s protection, if you deserve it. There are worse things to cling to.”
Finished examining the boy, Chaven reached into his pockets and produced a disk of glass pent in a brass handle. Flint took it from him and looked through it, first staring up at the flickering lamp, then moving it close to the wall so he could examine the grain of stone in the spaces between the tapestries.
Maybe he’ll make a Funderling yet, thought Chert.
The boy turned to him, smiling, one eye goggling hugely behind the glass Chert laughed despite himself. At the moment, Flint seemed to be no more than he appeared, a child of five or six summers.
Chaven thought so, too. “I find nothing unusual about him,” the physician said quietly as they watched the boy playing with the enlarging-glass “No extra fingers, toes, or mysterious marks. His breath is sweet—for a child who seems to have eaten spiced turnips today, that is—and his eyes are clear. Everything about him seems ordinary. This all proves nothing, but unless some other mysterious trait shows itself, I must for the moment assume he is what your wife guessed him to be, some mortal child who wandered beyond the Shadowline and, instead of wandering back again as some do, met the riders you saw and was carried out instead. “Chaven frowned. “You say he has little memory of who he is. If that is all he has lost, he is a lucky one. As I said before, those who have wandered across and returned before now have had the whole of their wits clouded if not ruined.”
“Lucky. Yes, it seems that way.” Chert should have been relieved, especially since the child would be sharing their house for at least the present, but he could not rid himself of a nagging feeling that there was something more to be discovered. “But why, if the Shadowline is moving, would the the Quiet Folk oh-so-kindly carry a mortal child across the line? It seems more likely they would slit his throat like a rabbit and leave him in the foggy forest somewhere.” Chaven shrugged. “I have no answer, my friend. Even when they were slaughtering mortals long ago at Coldgray Moor, the Twilight People did things that no one could understand. In the last months of the war, one company of soldiers from Fael moving camp by midnight stumbled onto a fairy-feast, but instead of slaughtering them—they were far outnumbered—the Qar only fed them and led them into drunken revels. Some of the soldiers even claimed they mated with fairy women that night.”
“The… Qar?'
“Their old name.” Chaven waved his hand. “I have spent much of my life studying them but I still know little more than when I began. They can be unexpectedly kind to mortals, even generous, but do not doubt that if the Shadowline sweeps across us, it will bring with it a dark, dark evil.”
Chert shuddered. “I have spent too much time on its borders to doubt that for a moment.” He watched the boy for a moment. “Will you tell the prince regent and his family that the line has moved?'
“I expect I will have to. But first I must think on all this, so that I can go to them with some proposal. Otherwise, decisions will be made in fear and ignorance, and those seldom lead to happy result.” Chaven rose from his stool and patted his bunched robe until it hung straight again. “Now I must get back to my work, not least of which will be thinking about the news you’ve brought me.”
As Chert led Flint to the door, the boy turned back. “Where is the owl?' he asked Chaven. The physician stiffened for a moment, then smiled. “What do you mean, lad? There is no owl here, nor ever has been one, as far as I know.”
“There was,” Flint said stubbornly. “A.white one.”
Chaven shook his head kindly as he held the door, but Chert thought he looked a little discomposed.
After checking to make sure none of his servants were in sight, the physician let Chert and the boy out through the observatory-tower’s front door. For reasons he did not quite know himself, Chert had decided to go back aboveground, out through the Raven’s Gate. The guard would have changed at midday and there should be no reason for those on duty now to doubt that their predecessors questioned Chert closely before letting him and his young charge into the inner keep.
“What did you mean about the owl?” Chert asked as they made their way down the steps. “What owl?”
“You asked that man where the owl was, the owl that had been in his room.”
Flint shrugged. His legs were longer than Chert’s and he did not need to look down at the steps, so he was watching the afternoon sky. “I don’t know.” He frowned, staring at something above him. The morning’s clouds had passed. Chert could see nothing but a faint sliver of moon, -white as a seashell, hanging in the blue sky. “He had stars on his walls.”
Chert recalled the tapestries covered with jeweled constellations. “He did, yes.”
“The Leaf, the Singers, the White Root—I know a song about them.” He pondered, his frown deepening. “No, I can’t remember it.”
“The Leaf… ?” Chert was puzzled. “The White Root? What are you talking about?”
“The stars—don’t you know their names?” Flint had reached the cobblestones at the base of the steps and was walking faster, so that Chert, still moving carefully down the tall steps, could barely make out what he said. “There’s the Honeycomb and the Waterfall… but I can’t remember the rest.” He stopped and turned. His face beneath the shock of almost white hair was full of sad confusion, so that he looked like a little old man. “I can’t remember.”
Chert caught up to him, out of breath and troubled. “I’ve never heard those names before. The Honeycomb? Where did you learn that, boy?”
Flint was walking again. “I used to know a song about the stars. I know one about the moon, too.” He hummed a snatch of melody that Chert could barely make out, but whose mournful sweetness made the hairs lift on the back of his neck. “I can’t remember the words,” Flint said. “But they tell about how the moon came down to find the arrows he had shot at the stars…”
“But the moon’s a woman—isn’t that what all you big folk believe?” A moment of sour amusement at his own words—the boy was but Chert’s own height, even a little shorter—did not puncture his confusion. “Mesiya, the moon-goddess?”
Flint laughed with a child’s pure enjoyment at the foolishness of adults. “No, he’s the sun’s little brother. Everyone knows that.”
He skipped ahead, enjoying the excitement of a street full of people and interesting sights, so that Chert had to hurry to catch up with him again, certain that something had just happened—something important—but he could not for the life of him imagine what it might have been.
6. Blood Ties
A HIDDEN PLACE:
Walls of straw, walls of hair
Each room can hold three breaths
Each breath an hour
—from
She did not make her dwelling in the ancient, labyrinthine city of Qul-na-Qar, although she had long claim to a place of honor there, by her blood and by her deeds—and by deeds of blood as well. Instead, she made her home
