Shadowplay

you? And what information could you give us?”

“For one thing, Duchess,” said the queen gently, as if to a restless child instead of to a woman many, many times her size, “we believe we can tell you what happened to your son.”

“Are you sure?” Opal asked. “Perhaps you’re still too tired.” His wife, Chert noted, seemed to be having second thoughts.

“No, Mistress,” Chaven protested, “I am much recovered. In fact, I am ashamed at having let myself go so far last night.” He did indeed look rather embarrassed. “I count you even better friends for your kindness, indulging me at a bad time.”

“But, are you truly...?” Opal looked at the physician, then at her husband, as though she wanted him to intervene. Chert was quite happy to sit with a sour smile on his face. This messing about with mirrors had been her idea, after all. “Will you really do it here? In our home?”

Chaven smiled. “Mistress Opal, this is not some great, dangerous experiment I will perform, only the mildest bit of captromancy. Nothing will damage your son or your house.”

Son. Chert still wasn’t sure how he felt about that, but kept his thoughts to himself. Just in the months since Flint had come to them, the boy had grown another handspan, and now he towered over Chert. How could you consider someone your son who first of all didn’t belong to you, whose mother and father might be alive and living nearby, and who in a few years would be twice your own size?

Ah, I suppose it isn’t the height but the heart, he thought. He looked at the boy, sitting sleepy-eyed and faintly distrustful, curled in his blanket in the corner he had made his own. At least he’s out of his bed. These days Flint was like some ancient relative—asleep most of the day, barely speaking. The boy had never been talkative, of course, but until the moment he had woken up from his weird adventure in the Mysteries the vigor had practically sprayed off him like a dog shaking a wet coat.

“What do you need, Doctor?” Chert couldn’t help being a little curious. “Special herbs? Opal could go to the market.”

“You could go to the market, you old hedgehog,” she said, but her heart wasn’t in it.

“No, no.” The physician waved his hand. He looked a bit better for a night’s sleep, but Chert knew him well enough to see the hollowness behind the faA§ade of the ordinary. Chaven Makaros was not a happy man, not remotely, which made Chert even more anxious. “No, I need only Mistress Opal’s mirror and a candle, and...” Chaven frowned. “Can you make this place dark?”

Chert laughed. “Can we? You forget, you are a guest in FunderlingTown now. Even what we usually walk about in would seem like deep dark to you, and what you think is ordinary light makes my head ache.”

Chaven looked stricken. “Is that true? Have you been suffering because of me?”

He shook his head. “I exaggerate. But yes, of course, we can make it dark.”

As Chert stood on a stool to douse the lantern burning high in the alcove above the fire, Opal left the room and returned with a single candle in a dish which she set on the table next to Chaven. Already the exchange of the lantern for this single small light had turned the morning into something else, into eerie, timeless twilight, and Chert could not help remembering the murk of Southmarch city across the bay, the ceaseless dripping of water, those armored...things stepping out of the shadows. He had dismissed Opal’s worries about doing this in the house, thinking that she was concerned only about a mess on her immaculate floors, but realized now that something deeper troubled her: by this one act, the lighting of a candle, and the knowledge that more was to come, the day and their house itself had been transformed into something quite different, almost frightening.

“Now,” said Chaven, “I will need something to prop this mirror—ah, the cup should do nicely. And I want to put the candle here, where it will reflect without being directly in front of him. Flint, that is the boy’s name, yes? Flint, come and sit here at the table. On this bench, yes.”

The straw-haired boy rose and came forward, looking not so much apprehensive now as confused—and why not, Chert thought: it was an odd thing for parents of any kind to do, foster-folk or not, handing their child over to a strange, bespectacled fellow like this one, a man who might be small among his own kind but here was too big for any of the furniture, then letting him do the Elders knew what to the boy.

“It’s all right, son,” Chert said abruptly. Flint looked at him, then seated himself.

“Now, child, I want you to move a little so you can see nothing but the candle.” The boy tilted a bit to the side, then moved the rest of his body at the physician’s gentle direction. Chaven stood behind him.

“Perhaps you two should move to where he cannot see you,” the physician said to Chert and Opal. “Just stand behind me.”

“Will this hurt him?” Opal asked suddenly. The boy flinched.

“No, no, and again, no. No pain, nothing dangerous, only a few questions, a little...conversation.”

When Opal had taken her place, gripping Chert’s hand tighter than he could remember her doing for some time, Chaven began quietly to speak. “Now, look in the mirror, lad.” It was strange to think this same fellow, so soothing now, had been shrieking like a man caught under a rockslide only a few hours earlier. “Do you see the candle flame? You do. It is there before you, the only bright thing. Look at it. Do not watch anything else, only the flame. See how it moves? See how it glows? The darkness on either side of it is spreading, but the light only grows brighter...”

Chert couldn’t see Flint’s face, of course—the angle of the mirror didn’t permit it—but he could see the boy’s posture beginning to ease. The bony shoulders, which had been hunched as though against a cold wind, now drooped, and the head tilted forward toward the mirror-candle that Flint could see but Chert could not.

Chaven continued to talk in this soft, serious way, speaking of the candle and the darkness around it until Chert felt that he was falling into some kind of spell himself, until the pool of light on the tabletop, the candle and Flint and the mirror, all seemed to float in a shadowy void. The physician let his voice trail off into silence.

“Now,” Chaven said after a pause, “we are going to take a journey together, you and I. Fear nothing that you see because I will be with you. Nothing that you see can see you, or harm you in any way. Do not be afraid.”

Opal squeezed Chert’s hand so hard he had to wriggle his fingers free. He put his own hand on her arm to let her know he was still there, and also to try to stave off any sudden urges on her part to crush his fingers again.

“You are a boy again, just a very small boy—a baby, perhaps still in swaddling, and you can barely walk,” Chaven said. “Where are you? What do you see?”

A long pause was followed by a strange sound—Flint’s voice, but a new one Chert hadn’t yet heard, not the preternatural maturity of the nearly wild boy they had brought home, or the anxious sullenness that had come on him since his journey through the mysteries. This Flint sounded almost exactly like what Chaven had described— a very small child, only just up on his legs.

“See trees. See my mam.”

Opal got hold of his hand despite Chert’s best efforts and this time he didn’t have the heart to pull away, despite her desperate grip.

“And your father? Is he there?” “Han’t got un.”

“Ah. And what is your name?”

He waited another long moment before answering. “Boy. Mam calls me boy.”

“And do you know her name?” “Mam. Ma-ma.”

There was another spell of silence while Chaven considered. “Very well. You are a little older now. Where do you live?”

“In my house. Near the wood.” “Do you know its name, this wood?” “No. Only know I mustn’t go there.”

“And when other people speak to your mother, what do they call her?”

“Don’t. Don’t none come. Except the city-man. He comes with the money. Four silver seashells each time. She likes it when he comes.”

Chaven turned and gave Chert and Opal a look that Chert could not identify. “And what does he call her?”

“Mistress, or goodwife. Once he called her Dame Nursewife.”

Chaven sighed. “Enough, then. You are now...”

“She’s not well,” Flint said abruptly, his voice tremulous. “She said, don’t go out, and I don’t. But she’s