What were these crows that must be fed each day from that magic bowl?
Who had made the magic?
She studied the averted face of the kitchen maid as well, wondering if they changed randomly, or if it had been the same one all Ysabo’s life. She had pretty eyelashes, the princess noticed, long, thick, and black as crows’ feathers; her pale, thin, milky face looked quite young. But who knew? Maybe she was as ancient as the bowl.
“Do you bring the bowl to me every day?” Ysabo asked. “Or are there others?”
The maid’s eyes flew open. The princess’s words seemed to bounce off the stones around them, transform into words spoken underwater, words shouted from a distant hill, fraying as they flew. Ysabo glimpsed eyes as green as newborn leaves. Then the maid screwed them up in terror, clapped the scrap bowl over her head as though to hide herself from the princess, and fled.
Ysabo sighed.
She had no other task until noon. She spent the morning with Aveline and Maeve in Maeve’s chambers overlooking the sea. Ysabo, docilely embroidering, kept feeling their eyes on her, swift, wide-eyed glances, as though her silence disturbed them more than if she had raged again, or wept, or dared again to ask a question. She sent her needle in and out of the linen, making yet another length of colorful flowers and vines to hang over the cold stones around them. Through the open casement she could see trees, the distant profile of the headlands, the sparkling blue-green waves bursting into froth against the cliffs. Emma had told her that people lived among the rocks. Fishing boats and ships sailed into the harbor below Aislinn House, which Ysabo could see out a different window: a stretch of blue beyond the wood as placid as a mirror. But no matter which window in all of Aislinn House she looked from, she never saw what Emma saw, only the wood, the cliff, the sea, as though her Aislinn House existed before the human world began.
Aveline and Maeve, whose silence never lasted long, had listened long enough to hers. Their voices pricked the air with little isolated stitches at first, then longer threads. They drifted into reminiscences; some threads seemed to have no end, just ran into the fabric of memory and disappeared. Others, unexpectedly colored, snagged themselves on Ysabo’s attention.
“No, it was still autumn. The last day of it, I remember, the color of iron, and as cold as. Little flecks of snow in the wind, and the last black bitter leaves falling into the lake, where the cold silver shield and the torn pennant still lay on the tiny island in the middle of the water. The end of a world, it seemed. He said it was important. A sight to haunt this world through the centuries. I didn’t understand; I was too young.”
What memory? Ysabo thought. What worlds?
“And then he went away.” Maeve’s voice was thin as frayed thread.
“But he came back. He always did.”
“Until then.”
“No—he came back again to take us to supper with Queen Hydria in her great court. You must remember, Maeve! The knights’ banners hung from the ceiling, all the rich threads of red and blue and gold glittering in the torchlight. Blagdon himself was there beside the queen, an old man as hale as a tree, bearded with moss, tussocks for eyebrows and ears like dried leaves. I was older then.” Aveline’s voice grew dreamy, rich as cream. “I wore pale green and dark blue, with gossamer over my hair. I remember the queen’s eyes, how beautiful they were. The colors of my gown, blue and green together. Do you remember?”
“Yes. Now I do.” Ysabo heard Maeve’s needle pierce the taut fabric in its frame. It was another mystery, the queen whose name Ysabo had heard every day of her life but who remained invisible except in her mother’s and grandmother’s stories. “I do remember that wonderful feast. Twelve stuffed swans floating on platters of polished silver and twelve fat salmon on platters of gold . . . I don’t remember eating any of it, though. Did we? Do you remember?”
“No. I remember music, though, but not the musicians; it was as though the music came out of fire and air.”
Their voices trailed silent; their threads spoke, pushed and pulled, in and out. Ysabo felt again their little, fretting bird glances. So she turned to the musicians playing old ballads softly on harp and flute near the hearth.
“That was lovely,” she told them, though she had scarcely heard what they had just finished. “Play it again.”
Their music wove its own thread into the morning. Maeve and Aveline’s voices added texture, soft at first, then gaining depth as they misjudged the reasons for Ysabo’s abstraction.
“I remember having trouble with that, too,” Aveline murmured. “I couldn’t wait for supper to begin, so I could see for certain which it was.”
“And did you?”
“Not at first. You know how they are. Not one face told me anything. They were lost in their own ritual. Do you remember?”
Ysabo felt Maeve’s gray eyes, cold as cloud, drift over her face, away. “Very little. The ones you do remember—”
“Yes,” Aveline said instantly. “Yes. The ones you remember are the ones you never meet during the ritual. Those you meet outside of time, in a stray hour, before beginnings, after endings ...”
“Who? Tell,” Maeve commanded, her hands dropping onto her work, between stitches.
Aveline’s voice went very soft. “The one who taught the young knights how to fight. He had the most amazing eyes.”
Maeve’s hand rose, covered her mouth. “You didn’t.”
“Didn’t I?”
“You went down there? To the training hall?”
“That’s where the young men were when I was young. He talked to me, he wrote me poetry. Best of all, he saw me when he looked at me.”
“What happened to him?”
“Nothing. For all I know, he’s still down there. But I got married.”
Maeve’s voice leaped out of her like a frog. “You weren’t—” “A virgin? No.” Aveline’s voice had resumed its normal volume, in case, Ysabo guessed, her daughter needed to hear this. “It didn’t seem to matter at all.” She added, a bit defensively, “You never told me it might.”
“Well, how was I to know—” She rocked forward, laughing suddenly, her hand back over her mouth. “I remember this much: neither was I.”
“Tell,” Aveline demanded then, and Maeve picked up her needle, her voice going soft again. Ysabo heard Aveline suck breath sharply.
“Nemos himself?”
“Sh,” Maeve breathed, softer than smoke from a dying candle. “Sh . . .”
Ysabo stitched the name into her memory.
At noon the knights rode out. The household gathered in the great hall to watch and pay honor, as two long lines of knights in their silvery mail and white cloaks threaded with red knelt together on the flagstones. They held their unsheathed swords point down on the stones, both hands folded on the hilt. Their heads were bare, bowed. Sun from the high narrow windows crossed them in blades of light.
Ysabo stood between Maeve and Aveline at the head of the lines. The three of them held gold goblets ringed with jewels along the rim. Ysabo’s cup held water; Aveline’s red wine, and Maeve’s a murky, bitter potion that smelled of herbs and dead insects. One by one the knights rose, came forward, chose their cup, drank. They could drink what they liked; if all the knights chose the same cup, it never emptied. Courtiers, old knights, ladies and their ladies, all of whom Ysabo rarely saw except at supper, surrounded the lines, each holding a long, thick, burning candle. Trumpets sounded at each sip. The enormous doors opened wide to the courtyard, where the horses in their caparisons waited restively. The knights mounted as they left the hall. The doors were closed after the last knight had crossed the threshold.
No one saw by what gate they left the yard; there were none when Ysabo looked out. No one saw them ride beyond the walls of Aislinn House; no one saw them return. In the time between those two pieces of ritual, Ysabo had to work her way through a labyrinth of small, strange, and bewilderingly meaningless tasks.
