“I don’t understand ‘Pontos potentos . . .’ at all,” Xulai had grumbled long ago.
“Oh, you really do,” the princess had responded. “Suppose I need to know something about horses. Do I go out onto the parapet and shout into the air, ‘I need to know about horses’?”
“No. You would go find Horsemaster.”
“And where did you find that name, Horsemaster?”
“In my head.”
“Right, and if you had not known that name, you would have known some other name of someone you could ask. Instead of sitting about saying ‘I don’t know,’ you can always start with something you do know to find out things you don’t. ‘Velipe vun / em euxati nun / corusus apun / zusa paflotun.’ ‘All wisdom grows / from curiosity seeds / planted in pots / full of ignorance.’ Paflotun, ignorance, is far better fertilizer than false certainty, which allows nothing to grow at all.”
“What about that other one, about connecting nothings?”
“Suppose I lost a bracelet. Then I saw a certain page flush deep red and begin to sweat when it was mentioned. Then later I saw him sneaking into the stable and coming out with dirt on his hands; what would you suppose?”
“That perhaps he took it,” said Xulai. “And hid it in the stable somewhere.”
“I am so glad you said perhaps. You would not know that for sure, but devo, piling, duxa devo duxa, little bit on little bit, assembles possibilities,” said the princess. “One should explore all the possibilities, though one may neither accuse nor exonerate until one knows for sure . . .”
There were years of the princess’s fumitos in Xulai’s head. Even when the princess could no longer speak aloud, Xulai had visited, sitting close, stroking the princess’s single long braid as it faded over the years from jet, to ash, to silver. She had spent hours chattering like a magpie about utterly boring and inconsequential things: the kitchen cat’s latest kittens in their box beneath the stove; the tree in the orchard she had climbed to pick fruit so Cook could make a tart for dinner; the new surcoat Nettie Lean, the seamstress, was making for her. Her mouth had grown numb with chatter designed to bore the serving woman sitting nearby, bore her until she fell asleep or went for a walk or decided to visit the privies. If Xulai babbled long enough, the watchers always did one or the other.
Then Xulai could lean forward to the woman’s ear and say what she had really come to say.
“I have done as you asked, Xu-i-lok. The Duchess of Altamont went by today in her carriage. I watched from a tree in the orchard. When she had gone, I collected dust from the tracks the wheels of her carriage had made. I have it with me.”
“Cast it on the red coals of the fire and say the words I taught you.”
Xulai took her handkerchief from her pocket, fluttered the dust that it held onto the fire, and murmured the words. At once, the room lightened and the air lifted as though a gentle breeze had blown through to make the fire burn brighter. Xulai returned to the bed and leaned forward until her forehead touched the forehead of the sleeper, making her mind empty as a broken bowl so the woman’s words could come into it.
“Take the little knife I gave you and gather some rosemary from the kitchen garden, some yew from the cloister. Get a bit of chalk from your classroom. Put them in my hands. Tonight, before dark, take them from my hands, draw a line from side to side on each windowsill and threshold in this room; lay a sprig of rosemary at one end of each line, a sprig of yew at the other.”
That evening, while the footman was having his supper downstairs, Xulai sneaked into the woman’s room and did as she had been told. On the following morning, she heard Dame Cullen say to Cook, “The nurse says she had a good night last night, free of those terrible dreams that make her tremble and moan. Her face is quite peaceful this morning.”
Then Xulai knew she had helped create barriers against a harassing evil that came through windows and doors. Were these barriers merely symbolic? Perhaps. Did they have intrinsic efficacy? Perhaps. Whichever it might have been, she learned quickly and applied what she knew relentlessly, “duxa de duxa,” piling little thing on little thing to make a larger understanding. Chalk, for example. Chalk was made up of the shells of millions of tiny creatures that had lived in the Far Before Time. Chalk’s very essence was one of attenuation, of existence stretched over time. The essence of rosemary was healing. The essence of yew was threefold: power in the wood, poison in the berry, panacea in the bark. The essence of chalk and herbs together weakened evil intentions and kept them at bay, though whether this was intrinsic or merely a conduit for some other power, she didn’t know.
She had learned how to defeat evil by putting bits of image-bound mirror at windows where the evil would be trapped by its own reflection and held there until Xulai gathered the shards in a basket of osier (itself emblematic of life) and cast them surreptitiously in the farrier’s forge. There, the glass melted into lumps with the evil trapped inside. The lumps could later be scratched out of the ashes and put somewhere as remote and unreachable as possible, for they could be destroyed only by a power greater than that held by the sender. The princess, in her weakness, no longer held such potency. Still,
