this way and that. The wilderness rose behind her, far more pale but likewise divided.
'I can distinguish between the created and uncreated,' she said with something between embarrassment and pride. 'I am one of the Few.'
Achamian whirled, scowling both at her and the brightness.
'What? You're a witch?'
A deliberate nod, made narrow by a smile.
'I didn't come here to find my father,' she said, as though everything until now had been nothing but cruel theatre. 'Well… I thought you might be my father, but I really didn't… care… that much, I think.' Her eyes widened, as though turning from the inner to the outer on some invisible swivel.
'I came to find my teacher. I came to learn the Gnosis.'
There it was, her reason.
There is a progression to all things. Lives, encounters, histories, each trailing their own nameless residue, each burrowing into a black, black future, groping for the facts that conjure purpose out of the cruelties of mere coincidence.
And Achamian had had his fill of it.
She sees his face slacken, despite the matted wire of his beard. She sees his complexion blanch, despite the sun's morning glare. And she knows that what her mother once told her is in fact true: Drusas Achamian possesses the soul of a teacher.
So the old whore didn't lie.
Almost three months have passed since her flight from the Andiamine Heights. Three months of searching. Three months of hard winter travel. Three months of fending against Men. She travelled inland as much as possible, knowing that the Judges would be watching the ports, that their agents would be ranging the coastal roads, hungry to please her mother, their Holy Empress. It seems a miracle whenever she recalls it. That time in the high Cepalor when the wolves paced her step for weary step, little more than feral ghosts through the soundless snowfall. The mad ferryman at the Wutmouth crossing. And the brigands, who tracked her only to turn away when they saw the caste-noble cut of her clothes. There was fear in the land, fear everywhere she turned, and it suited her and her needs well.
She spent innumerable watches lost in revery during this time, her soul's eye conjuring visions of the man she secretly named her father. When she arrived, it seemed that everything was the way she imagined it. Exactly. A lonely hillside spilling skyward, trees scarred with sorcery's dread murmur. An even lonelier stone tower, a makeshift roof raised across its collapsed floors, grasses growing from rotten-mortar seams. Stacked-stone outbuildings, with their heaped wood, drying fish, and stretched pelts. Slaves who smiled and talked like caste- menials. Even children skipping beneath great-boughed maples.
Only the sorcerer surprises her, probably because she has expectations aplenty of him. Drusas Achamian, the Apostate, the man who turned his back on history, who dared curse the Aspect-Emperor for love of her mother. True, he seemed entirely different in each of the lays sung about him, even in the various tales told by her mother, by turns stalwart and doubt-ridden, learned and hapless, passionate and cold-handed. But it was this contradictory nature that had so forcefully stamped his image in her soul. In the cycle of historical and scriptural characters that populated her education, he alone seemed real.
Only he isn't. The man before her seems to mock her soft-bellied imaginings: a wild-haired hermit with limbs like barked branches and eyes that perpetually sort grievances. Bitter. Severe. He bears the Mark, as deep as any of the sorcerers she has seen glide through the halls of the Andiamine Heights, but where they drape silks and perfume about their stain, he wears wool patched with rancid fur.
How could anyone sing songs about such a man?
His eyes dull at the mention of the Gnosis-the inward look of concealed pity, or so it seems. But when he speaks, his tone is almost collegial, except that it's hollow.
'Is it true, what they say, that witches are no longer burned?'
'Yes. There's even a new School.'
He does not like the way she says that word, 'School.' She can see it in his eyes.
'A School? A School of witches?'
'They're calling themselves the Swayal Compact.'
'Then what need do you have of me?'
'My mother will not allow it. And the Swayali will not risk her Imperial displeasure. Sorcery, she says, leaves only scars.'
'She's right.'
'But what if scars are all you have?'
This, at least, gives him pause. She expects him to ask the obvious question, but his curiosity seems bent in a different direction.
'Power,' he says, glaring at her with an intensity she does not like. 'Is that it? You want to feel the world crumble beneath the weight of your voice.'
She knows this game. 'Was that how it was for you in the beginning?'
His glare seems to falter over some inner fact. But it means less than nothing, winning arguments. The same as with her mother.
'Go home,' he says. 'I would sooner be your father than your teacher.'
There is set manner to the way he turns his back this time, one that tells her that no words can retrieve him. The sun pulls his shadow long and profound. He walks with a stoop that says he has long outlived the age of bargaining. But she hears it all the same, the peculiar pause of legend becoming actuality, the sound of the crazed and disjoint seams of the world falling flush.
He is the Great Teacher, the one who raised the Aspect-Emperor to the heights of godhead. Despite his words to the contrary.
He is Drusas Achamian.
That night she builds a bonfire not because she means to, but because she cannot overcome the urge to burn down the Wizard's tower. Since this is impossible, she begins-quite without thinking-to burn it in effigy. After throwing each hewn branch, she stands so that the walls appear to rise miniature from the crackling incandescence, crouching just enough for the flames to garland the little window where she thinks he sleeps.
When she's finished, she stands in its blazing presence, takes comfort in the stink of her exertions, and tells herself the fire is in fact a living thing. She does this quite often: pretends that worldly things are magic, even though she knows otherwise. It reminds her that sorcery is something she can see.
That she is a witch.
She scarcely notices the first drops of rain. The fire seems to beat them into steam, to lap them from her clothing and skin with invisible tongues. Lightning flashes, so bright the flames become momentarily invisible. Then the black heavens open up. The surrounding forest lets loose a vast white roar.
For a time she crouches against the downpour, her leather hood hitched over her head, the fire spitting and steaming immediately before her. The water sends long tendrils through the crease and seam of her cloak, cold roots that gradually sink to the depth of fabric and skin. The dimmer the bonfire becomes, the more the misery of her circumstance oppresses her. To suffer so much, travel so far…
She never recalls standing, and certainly not drawing back her cloak. It seems that one moment she's sitting before her fire, her teeth clenched to prevent their chatter, then she's standing several paces away, soaked to drowning, fairly floating in her clothes, staring up at the crippled contours of the Wizard's tower.
'Teach me!' she hollers. 'Teach meee!'
Like all involuntary cries, it seems to encompass her, to gather her like leaves and cast her into the sheering wind.
'Teach me!'
He simply has to hear, doesn't he? Her voice cracking the way all voices crack about the soul's turbulent essentials. He needs only to look down to see her leaning against the slope, wet and pathetic and defiant, the image of the woman he once loved, framed by steam and fire. Pleading. Pleading.
'Teeeeach!'
