touched me in a loving way.
“I know,” she said. “You have a stone in your heart, and some days it’s so heavy there is nothing to be done. But you don’t have to be alone for it. You should have come to me. I understand.”
My body clenched and suddenly the taste of plum filled my mouth again. “I miss her,” I said before I realized I was speaking. Then I bit it off before I could say anything else. I clenched my teeth and shook my head furiously, like a horse fighting its reins.
“You can say it,” Auri said gently.
I shook again, tasted plum, and suddenly the words were pouring out of me. “She said I sang before I spoke. She said when I was just a baby she had the habit of humming when she held me. Nothing like a song. Just a descending third. Just a soothing sound. Then one day she was walking me around the camp, and she heard me echo it back to her. Two octaves higher. A tiny piping third. She said it was my first song. We sang it back and forth to each other. For years.” I choked and clenched my teeth.
“You can say it,” Auri said softly. “It’s okay if you say it.”
“I’m never going to see her again,” I choked out. Then I began to cry in earnest.
“It’s okay,” Auri said softly. “I’m here. You’re safe.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
Questions
The next few days were neither pleasant nor productive. Fela’s admissions slot was at the very end of the span, so I attempted to put the extra time to good use. I tried to do some piecework in the Fishery, but quickly returned to my room when I broke down crying halfway through inscribing a heat funnel. Not only couldn’t I maintain the proper Alar, but the last thing I needed was for people to think I’d cracked under the stress of admissions.
Later that night, when I tried to crawl through the narrow tunnel into the Archives, the taste of plum flooded my mouth, and I was filled with a mindless fear of the dark, confining space. Luckily, I’d only gone a dozen feet, but even so I almost gave myself a concussion struggling backwards out of the tunnel, and my palms were scraped raw from my panicked scrabbling against the stone.
So I spent the next two days pretending I was sick and keeping to my tiny room. I played my lute, slept fitfully, and thought dark thoughts of Ambrose.
Anker was cleaning up when I came downstairs. “Feeling better?” he asked.
“A bit,” I said. Yesterday I’d only had two plum echoes, and they were very brief. Better yet, I’d managed to sleep the whole night through. It seemed I was through the worst of it.
“You hungry?”
I shook my head. “Admissions today.”
Anker frowned. “You should have something, then. An apple.” He bustled around behind the bar, then brought out a pottery mug and a heavy jug. “Have some milk too. I’ve got to make use of it before it turns. Damn iceless started giving up the ghost a couple days ago. Three talents solid that thing cost me. I knew I shouldn’t have wasted money on it with ice so cheap around here.”
I leaned over the bar and peered at the long wooden box tucked away among the mugs and bottles. “I could take a look at it for you,” I offered.
Anker raised an eyebrow. “Can you do something with it?”
“I can look,” I said. “Could be something simple I could fix.”
Anker shrugged. “You can’t break it more than it’s already broken.” He wiped his hands on his apron and motioned me behind the bar. “I’ll do you a couple eggs while you’re having your look. I should use those up too.” He opened the long box, took out a handful of eggs, then walked back into the kitchen.
I made my way around the corner of the bar and knelt to look at the iceless. It was a stone-lined box the size of a small traveling trunk. Anywhere other than the University it would have been a miracle of artificing, a luxury. Here, where such things were easy to come by, it was just another piece of needless God-bothering that wasn’t working properly.
It was about as simple a piece of artificing as could be made. No moving parts at all, just two flat bands of tin covered in sygaldry that moved heat from one end of the metal band to the other. It was really nothing more than a slow, inefficient heat siphon.
I crouched down and rested my fingers on the tin bands. The right-hand one was warm, meaning the half on the inside would be correspondingly cool. But the one on the left was room temperature. I craned my neck to get a look at the sygaldry and spotted a deep scratch in the tin, scoring through two of the runes.
That explained it. A piece of sygaldry is like a sentence in a lot of ways. If you remove a couple words, it simply doesn’t make any sense. I should say it
I rummaged around until I found a disused ice hammer in the back of a drawer, then carefully tapped the two damaged runes flat into the soft surface of the tin. Then I concentrated and used the tip of a paring knife to etch them back into the thick metal band.
Anker emerged from the kitchen with a plateful of eggs and tomatoes. “It should work now,” I said. I started eating out of politeness, then realized I was actually hungry.
Anker looked over the box, lifting the lid. “That easy?”
“Same as anything else,” I said, my mouth half full. “Easy if you know what you’re doing. It
I finished off the plateful of eggs and drank the milk as quickly as I could without being rude. “I’ll need to cash out my bar credit today,” I said. “Tuition’s going to be hard this term.”
Anker nodded and checked a small ledger he kept underneath the bar, tallying all the Greysdale mead I’d pretended to drink over the last two months. Then he pulled out his purse and counted out ten copper jots onto the table. A full talent: twice what I’d expected. I looked up at him, puzzled.
“One of Kilvin’s boys would have charged me at least half a talent to come round and fix this thing,” Anker explained, kicking at the iceless.
“I can’t be sure. . . .”
He waved me into silence. “If it isn’t fixed, I’ll take it out of your wages over the next month,” he said. “Or I’ll use it as leverage to get you to start playing Reaving night too.” He grinned. “I consider it an investment.”
I gathered the money into my purse:
I was heading toward the Fishery to see if my lamps had finally sold when I caught a glimpse of a familiar face crossing the courtyard wearing dark master’s robes.
“Master Elodin!” I called as I saw him approaching a side door to the Masters’ Hall. It was one of the few buildings I hadn’t spent much time in, as it contained little more than living quarters for the masters, the resident gillers, and guest rooms for visiting arcanists.
He turned at the sound of his name. Then, seeing me jogging toward him, he rolled his eyes and turned back to the door.
“Master Elodin,” I said, breathing a little hard. “Might I ask you a quick question?”
“Statistically speaking, it’s pretty likely,” he said, unlocking the door with a bright brass key.
“May I ask you a question, then?”
“I doubt any power known to man could stop you.” He swung open the door and headed inside.
I hadn’t been invited, but I slipped inside after him. Elodin was difficult to track down, and I worried if I didn’t take this chance, I might not see him again for another span of days.
I followed him through a narrow stone hallway. “I’d heard a rumor you were gathering a group of students to study naming,” I said cautiously.
“That’s not a question,” Elodin said as he headed up a long, narrow flight of stairs.
