The Best of Beneath Ceaseless Skies Online Magazine Year Eight, Page 9

  And so each morning I walk instead in the opposite direction. I cross the bridge above Katríu River that separates the rich neighborhoods from my old haunts, the tenement buildings unsupported by deepnames or other infrastructure, their paint long since peeled and replaced by graffiti. Mists float below the bridge, mists made up of vapor as delicate and quiet as my magic, powerless to shift anything much, useless if not for this work.

  Every morning I am in the healing room, waiting for patients. I sift through my thoughts, finding nothing in them that is worth writing down. My insignificance is vapor covering the river, infinitesimally small droplets of water that disappear with the heat. And at the end of the day I will be again beside my lord’s heat, which is more than I ever wanted, and certainly more than I ever deserved.

  It is growing late. I can feel the approaching sunset in the slight darkening of the glass—a change of mood, a subtle shift in the dampness that permeates the walls. If I wanted, my lord would imbue the structure with deepnames, reinforce it to maintain an even, pleasing temperature in all seasons, allow no moisture or dryness beyond the amount established as the strong builders’ standard. Even now he frowns sometimes, coming here, and I feel his fingers itch with the desire to act. I asked him to leave it like this, and he does, but it makes him unhappy. He wants everything that is his to be beautiful.

  I don’t know how he doesn’t put me aside after all these years. Perhaps the beauty he craves is in what we’ve been through together—a complex perfection created by memory, by story, rather than by my many inadequacies.

  As always, in the evenings I crave to return, to be by his side once again, and as always I dread that moment, the possibility that he will look at me and see me as I see myself, as everyone saw me before him. I fear that he will turn away from me, indifferent and cold, his gaze already moving on to other matters.

  I have nothing to take with me. When the knock comes, I have already put on my coat and waved off the single candlebulb light.

  “Come in,” I call from the darkness, relaxing once again into this new direction. A patient comes; I heal. Reacting is restful.

  A person edges in. I cannot fully see them in the gloom, but I can feel their hands shake. Their voice, when it comes, is tentative and young. “Mister. . . Healer Parét?”

  I draw on my three-syllable deepname to create a new candlebulb, and call again, “Come in!” Releasing a magical light is easy for me, but it is a waste as I have just extinguished another. I do not want to do magic that is unnecessary, to imprint the world with my will. I seek to pass lightly, unnoticed, perhaps to adjust what has gone warped out of shape, here and there; but in my lord’s shadow I have been called to such deeds that went beyond me, great healings and remakings that I’d rather unremember.

  “Your pardon, Healer Parét. . .”

  I lift my eyes to the young man. He is agitated, unhappy. I have not seen him before, but the simple pants and pleated shirt under a patched jacket identify him as respectable within this neighborhood—perhaps a petty trader, or an artisan. He is a simple, and thus unable to draw on magic. I wonder what ails him, but nothing seems seriously amiss. I bow to him, and as I do so, I get from him a feeling of fear, the familiarity of it sweeping me into its grip. Whatever is wrong with him, it is temporary. “Someone in your family. . .?”

  My visitor whispers, “He is old, and cannot come here. . .”

  “Why are you afraid?”

  “That you will say no. . .”

  There is more to this, I sense. This old man he wants me to see—a father or a grandfather, perhaps an older relative—has he turned violent? Did the family send a representative here, unbeknownst to the one whose healing they so desire?

  “I do not turn patients away.” No, never. I walk to people’s homes to see those too frail to come here. Out of respect for my station and out of shame, families go to great lengths to conceal from me how they live. But I have lived it all, and I have seen it all—families cramped in a single room, elders and youngsters who become suddenly violent, children with only shirts for clothing, decrepit apartments scrubbed painfully clean for me. People dying of illnesses of the flesh which could have been easily treated by magic, but I am the only free option available. And I only heal minds, and that under certain conditions.

  I say, “Please understand, I do not heal anyone who does not, in full consciousness, consent to the healing.” If they are not conscious, I do just enough to enable them to make that choice.

  “Would you consent to come and ask?” His voice has a breathless quality to it, and I wonder why there’s been no ease to his fear.

  “Yes,” I say. “Of course.” I wonder how long this will take, and whether my lord would worry for me, but he knows that this kind of thing happens.

  As I cross the threshold of the healing room and step into the street, my lord’s wards wash over my head. For a moment I am afloat in this warmth, the caress, my lord’s secret heart and all it contains.

  The young man calls my name and I hurry away from the feeling. The candlebulb floats after me, its feeble light heartening but only barely helpful in the afternoon’s dimness. I do not have the heart to extinguish it. Candlebulbs are easy to make, the first act of magic every named strong learns. I have always had a weakness for them, a feeling that they are on some level alive, as alive as deepnames in the mind and lights beneath the earth, just in a more simple fashion.

  “Where do you live?” I ask as I walk. It is chilly, and I huddle in my woolen coat. My visitor has only a scarf, old and patched.

  “Not far now. . .”

  A subtle change in his voice makes me suddenly wary. Certainly he would not dare to rob me or harm me, to anger my lord—

  I wonder whether to activate the wards now, but what reason is there to alarm him, to tear him away from his work? Certainly a slight tremble in a stranger’s voice is no reason for panic. I stop, wondering whether to draw on my deepnames, but there is a peculiarity with my configuration, something only my lord knows about, which prevents me from constructing a defensive stronghold. A three-named strong has nothing to fear, because a three-named stronghold cannot be collapsed—at least in theory, but I. . .

  The young man turns around and beckons, his face looming pale and frightened out of the swaths of his scarf.

  “Where are you leading me?” I ask.

  He grimaces, and suddenly a cloud of scent, spicy and floral and strangely comforting, envelops me. I inhale, I stupidly inhale. There is a presence behind me. I try to sense for menace but feel nothing; I am floating in the brown soft cloud of peppery gray rose and alyta blossom as the stranger’s deepnames shine behind me, through me. My legs buckle. I struggle, but my world dims too quickly for me to draw on my names or to activate the wards. As resistance and consciousness leave me, my body floods with shame. So easy—I have grown too careless, too secure in thinking no one in their right mind would cross my lord.

  The last sound I hear is a hiss as my candlebulb fizzles and dies.

  ~ ~ ~

  I come to in fits and starts. I am in a moving—vehicle?—that rattles over lumpy ground, cobblestones. My head is too fuzzy to draw on deepnames or wards, and the taste of the rag—bitter mint and verbena intensified—still churns in my mouth. Somebody’s voice floats above me.

  “Please, Healer Parét, I beg for your forgiveness for this.” A new voice, masculine and deep. “My father would agree to see you only in utmost secret. You are our last hope.”

  My sight clears. I am in a carriage, softly and pleasantly lit by five candlebulbs and the ruddy light of sunset that streams past a half-open curtain. No attempt is made to draw the blinds or to apply bonds, to make in truth a prisoner of me. We are moving across the bridge, out of the slums and towards the richer neighborhoods north of the river. No more than ten minutes must have passed since my abduction, likely less.

  I turn my head towards the speaker. It is a middle-aged man, about my age, dressed with understated elegance in a
midnight-blue velvet long jacket and pants. A lacy pale-green shirt peeks from under the jacket. My lord, in fact, is responsible for bringing this color to the height of fashion in Katríu, but what looks impeccably sophisticated against my lord’s dark olive skin makes this nobleman look as pallid as a fish three days dead and out of the water. “Mind healings are such a delicate matter.”

  It troubles me that I don’t understand why he did not ask me quietly in the healing room, or better yet, arrange it the usual way. I shuffle my lips, more comfortable with speech with every passing second. “You should have asked my lord to arrange the visit. He is always discreet.”

  My hand itches to touch my earring, concealed under delicate invisibility wards when we’re not on the Coast. I can pull on it now, alert my lord—but what would be the point? This isn’t a plot against him or a political kidnapping. Just a rich old man too ashamed to admit his need for a mind-healer, too self-conscious to reveal a weakness to a peer. I, of course, am not a peer.

  “Forgive me.” The nobleman looks pained, embarrassed. “My father is especially wary of Tajer Kekeri. It took me years to convince him to see you.”

  “I understand.” I don’t exactly, but it does not matter. There are a dozen reasons for a Katran noble to fear or mistrust my lord. He, a Coastal nobleman in a sea of Katrans, represents the political power and influence of his homeland. The Coast, on the books an annexed province of Katra, supplies most of the country’s grain and wine, as well as the mightiest of its named strong. One of my lord’s titles is the Strongest of the Coast, but he is so much more, and he never forgets anything.

  “Who is your father?” I ask.

  “Lord Mezará Brentann.”

  “Ah.” If the Katran Oligarchy Governance were a dining hall, my lord and Brentann would be seated as far from each other as possible. Of course the old Brentann would never ask for any favors from my lord, nor ask for me—unless the need was truly great.

  “Thank you so much for not alerting him.”

  “You took some risks,” I say. Delicate political balance notwithstanding, my lord would march down to retrieve me with all the accompanying floodings and earthquakes, and I only wish I could jest about such things. I would much rather pass alongside life, unobtrusive and quiet. One day I will find the strength to say no even to healings, even to my lord when he tells me to write down what I know.

  “We are desperate, Healer Parét. The situation is not getting any better.”

  The Brentann family has grown so eager for a cure they have kidnapped me off the street. But cures are always an illusion. No transformation is complete and perfect in itself; a true change in the mind is gradual and requires a continuous application of will. The healer is only a catalyst.

  “I told your servant—” probably not a servant but merely a local they bribed to lure me in, then discarded—”that I do not heal without the patient’s consent.”

  The younger Brentann shakes his head sadly. “You will understand when you see. Please. . .”

  I shrug. I am weary and I want to go home, but I’ve never yet refused a patient. “I will take a look.”

  I could demand release, even threaten, but it is simpler to just go along. Rich people are strange around mind healings; everybody is, just in a different fashion.

  I do not speak more, and as the carriage passes through the middle neighborhoods and climbs towards the Oligarchy district, the younger Brentann makes no effort to draw me out. His head is half-turned towards the window, and a muscle jumps at the corner of his mouth. Grief, hopelessness—I wonder how bad it is going to be. Does he think his father unlikely to consent? And yet his father asked for me. . .

  The carriage stops in front of a gray heap of a structure, its marble arches chiseled with vines. The younger Brentann leans out to give instructions to servants, and the carriage continues around the building. Of course they wouldn’t admit me through the main entrance.

  I am taken in through the service entry, then through the narrow, tall-ceilinged corridors into a surprisingly comfortable sitting room dark but for a cluster of candlebulbs in a tiled hearth. The space is old-fashioned, with walls striped in some dark color, purple or blue. Clusters of flowers adorn the molding, where candlebulbs would float to greet better visitors. The armchairs look comfortable, but the pale pink brocade of the covers has not been in fashion since before the second Katra-Araigen war.

  Servants bring in heaps of clothing, a basin with water to wash, and elaborately painted screens for changing. Another servant carries in a small flat chest, which is presented to me. It contains jewels—fine emerald pins shaped like feathers; lapis lazuli and sapphire brooches that depict Bird as a titmouse, a finch, a sparrow. Thought has gone into this—the goddess takes many shapes, but for me she is always small, a bird that shivers through a winter’s night and waits, thin claws delicately clasping a frozen branch, for the first rays of dawn.

  “We do not wish to shame you, Healer Parét,” says the younger Brentann. “You had no time to change. Please, choose what you will of this, or if it does not suit you, please let your will be known to the servants.”

  The younger Brentann is painfully courteous. No, there is no strong in this land who would wish to provoke my lord. And yet I do not feel safe here. Fear, an old friend, raps its knuckles against my ribs.

  I bow low enough to soothe myself. I am grateful that at least they have not offered me earrings. My pants, shirt, and jacket are of Katran fashion, plain and unadorned, but of good quality. A servant’s garb. I hardly ever wear anything else.

  “With gratitude, lord, I would remain in this clothing.”

  “As you wish.”

  I wash my hands in the proffered basin and leave the room, with one last glance at the still-open jewelry box. There, the wings of a blue finch glitter with tiny aquamarines. As ever, the goddess reminds me that holy spaces seldom remain empty, that small creatures nestle in the crevices of any great power.

  I let Brentann lead me where I am most needed.

  ~ ~ ~

  He takes me up a winding staircase, its maple balustrade chiseled in the same vine-and-flower pattern that adorns the marble façade. Garlands of candlebulbs hang under the ceiling, wind around the cut-crystal arms of chandeliers, cast their brilliance upon gold-painted walls. I draw on the four-syllable, and then on the five-syllable, to construct a very thin weave to tune out some of the glitter. It is very subtle, unobtrusive, and the younger Brentann does not seem to notice. The old service room, with its darkness and almost no lighting, was so much better.

  He knocks on a tall door, then opens it, motioning me to enter. It is another dazzling room with even more crystal and gilt and innumerable candlebulbs, and I am grateful for the protection of my weave. In the middle of the concentric space, under the largest chandelier, there is a settee of gold brocade. The master of the house reclines upon it.

  He is older than my lord by a decade or more—late sixties, I guess. His eyes, sharp and blue in a sunken face, latch upon mine as I enter. “Ah, hah, HAH!” he exclaims, and I perceive. . . I do not perceive. My senses are dampened by the weave.

  The person—Mezará Brentann, I assume—waves a hand, the gilded lace of the sleeve like clumps of sunset-colored foam, and his son nods and leaves. We are alone.

  “So, so, so. The famous Parét. How much did my good-for-nothing of a son promise you, for me to take a good look at Ranravan’s ragi?”

  I draw my weave down and stand defenseless before the high lord Brentann. The room’s brilliance threatens to overwhelm, but I concentrate on the old man’s mind. Such turbulence. I wonder if he sees visions—I am quite confident he does, and it is nothing he likes. He wakes at night, I see. Dissatisfaction, anger, shame, the kind of yearning that can bend the mind’s naming grid out of shape. I wonder if he has the shakes, and how bad, and whether the shakes are caused by the moods, or the other way around.

  I can do many things to help this man—

  He just tried to ins
ult me, and called my lord by his old name, Ranravan, a name my lord has asked the world not to use anymore. It does not seem like the older Brentann would consent to a healing.

  I bow, low. The courtesy calms me. It is for my lord, whose presence permeates the world in which I walk and for whose sake these acts of respect I give others will always comfort me. “Lord Brentann,” I say, “there is no shame for me in serving my lord. I do so by choice, and with love.”

  I was born in Katra, in this city. I am local. But my home is no longer here. My home is with my lord, on the Coast, or wherever else he wishes to go, and his law is my law. The law of the Coast, where people take many lovers or none, where women, men, and ichidi live unashamed of their desires for each other. I have been called ragi, and worse, here and in other places. And yet, I am here to perform a healing—

  Lord Brentann sneers. “I don’t care how he fucks you. You are here to perform a healing, get paid, and go.”

  I wince. For all the nobles speak of me behind his back, most care to be polite—if not for me, then for my lord. . .

  He seems to sense my thoughts. “My son took you off the street, why didn’t you call on your master? Afraid of another fiasco, like when the river flooded?”

  “Please. . .” I whisper, unwilling to think about that day, unwilling to remember.

  “I hear you lost your wife to some random drunk. How helpful was the flood to you?”

  “There is no need for this,” I plead. “I will perform the healing and go.” I do not want his payment, his bird pins, his clothes. I am so, so grateful for my own clothes. There is a tear in my left eye. I swipe it off, and my left hand twitches to continue, to touch the invisible earring, but that would alert my lord.