The Office of Shadow

Paet tapped his cane on the ground. "You'll be hearing from me shortly," he said.

Silverdun and Everess watched him leave. Silverdun blinked, and that same odd trick of the eye occurred, foreground into background, and Paet was gone.

"Interesting fellow, isn't he?" said Everess, once he'd vanished.

"I can't say I'm in love."

Everess chuckled. "Give him time. Paet's a good man. His experience has made him what he is. All for the love of Seelie. The Seelie Heart; isn't that what Mauritane called it?"

"Mauritane excels at convincing others to fling themselves at death in the service of abstractions." Silverdun sighed. "You're not helping your cause."

"This is good work," said Everess. "We need you. And let's be frank. You need us."

A remark leapt to Silverdun's lips, but he suppressed it. Perhaps if he stopped arguing the point, Everess would shut up about it.

"Tell me this, Everess," said Silverdun, quiet. "Was I chosen for this because of my strengths or because of my ability to get intelligence from the Arcadians?"

"I never do anything for only one reason," said Everess. "Either way, it's time for you to stop pissing around and get to work."

Silverdun wanted to disagree, but couldn't.

"You're mad," said the goat, hopping up and down. "I am indeed," the bear replied."But there is strength in madness."

from The Goat and the Bear,'' Seelie fable

he Copperine House sat on an estate nearly a day's ride outside the City Emerald, set back from the Mechesyl Road, just beyond a small ridge dotted with spruce and fir trees. This was the beginning of the Western Valley, where the high mountaintops held snow year-round, and the evergreens were the only trees that grew. Here, though, the conifers mixed in with deciduous life, speckling the landscape with points of darkness in a world of color.

The house was relatively new, less than three hundred years old. It had been donated by the sixtieth Lady Copperine after the unfortunate incident that claimed both her son's life and the lives of the twelve others in the cafe with him when he'd lost control of his Gift of Elements and turned them all into sand, including himself. The incident was hushed up by the Royal Guard, a fire set, and the heir apparent to the Copperine title was mourned appropriately. Devastated, his mother donated the family estate to the Crown, with the explicit instructions that it be used to prevent other such tragedies. Once her affairs were settled, Lady Copperine drank poison and joined her son in death.

The house itself was large and rambling, having been added on to and spellturned rather haphazardly in its day. The unfortunate lady's great uncle had been something of an amateur turner and had made a number of ques tionable choices regarding the estate's architectural layout. Now the house was three times as large as it had been when built, though there were rooms in it that had been lost forever. The residents of Copperine House had it that an unlucky niece had been inside one of the lost rooms when it was badly turned, and haunted the building into the present day.

Sela's favorite place was the tiered terrace that overlooked the small valley behind the house. There was nothing artificial in this view. Only trees, sky, earth, and small animals that could sometimes be cajoled into eating corn from Sela's hand. If she were able, Sela would have waited for a rainy day, then stepped down each stone tier, walked barefoot through the grass as the rain plastered her hair against her face, and disappeared into the forest, never to be seen again.

This was a fantasy, of course. Beyond the terrace was a fence of pure Motion that would stop her in her tracks, and unpleasantly so, were she to take more than a few steps into the lawn. That the small animals could come and go through it while she could not was some small comfort to Sela. The part of her that was them, at least, was free. This was something she knew intellectually, but could not bring herself to feel. Not in this place. Not with the Accursed Object wrapped around her arm.

The Accursed Object was a band of cold iron, three inches thick, that encircled her upper arm, resting snugly against her skin. It was coated with the barest plating of silver to keep it from burning, but its presence disrupted her re enough that she could barely think, let alone employ her unique skills.

Some others in Copperine House attempted to escape from time to time. Horeg the Magnificent, a mestine of some great former renown, once chewed off his own arm at the shoulder, but the attendants discovered him bleeding to death halfway to the road and dragged him back in. All the way he shouted to them that he had a performance at the Principal Theater that could not be missed. Once it was all over, the attendants had whispered in Sela's hearing that the Principal had been closed for over six hundred years, and Horeg the Magnificent wasn't that magnificent. He was only forty-five.

Panner-La, a military commander, had been able to dig a tunnel forty feet long beneath the house before he was caught. He'd managed the feat by whittling away at his own Accursed Object just enough to use Elements to turn the earth to air, an inch or two a day, over the course of twenty years.

Many attempts at escape had been made, but Sela didn't know of any that had succeeded.

The cold iron bands kept most of them in check, but there were some whose Gifts were so strong that they could not be fully stifled. There was Brinoni, the daughter of a courtier in Titania's court, whose Premonitory Gift was so powerful that she lived her entire life in the future, several hours ahead of reality. Her body jerked and dragged as she attempted to move in time with her future actions. Her speech was so much nonsense, always responding to words as yet unsaid, and thus disrupting her own visions. Brinoni lived in a future that no one else would ever experience, the future that would have been had she not been there to see it.

Some of the patients' Gifts were so extreme and so dangerous that there was nothing for them but to keep them sedated at all times. Prin had once been a Master of the Gates, but had been caught between worlds and lost his mind. Left fully conscious, Prin was capable of transporting the entire house and a good portion of the countryside to another world entirely, or to one of the dark places, or of spellturning the house into itself. Sela thought his case was unbearably sad, and would have put Prin out of his misery if she'd been able to work out a way to do it without being caught. Because even with the band around her arm, Sela could feel Prin's anguish despite the drugs they gave him. His misery ran so deeply that she'd almost managed to form a thread toward him. But not quite. There hadn't been any threads in quite some time.

In Sela's case, the band was highly effective. Her talent required concentration, and the Accursed Object kept her just off-kilter enough to render her essentially powerless. Of all the patients at the Copperine House, Sela was the only one who was not mad. Nor was she a danger to herself. What kept Sela at Copperine was the simple fact that nobody knew what else to do with her.

Sela understood that she could not be allowed free. Or at least, she understood that her keepers believed that to be the case. Sela knew-or remembered knowing, as her mind was one of the many things that the band hampered-that, if free, she could find a way to be of no danger to anyone. But given her history, it would be difficult to convince anyone of that.

Thinking of her history led her to thoughts of Milla. The thoughts of Milla, on those occasions when they came, overtook her and she broke down. Today was no exception. While the rain pattered down just past the terrace awning, Sela experienced Milla's pain all over again, still fresh no matter how many Accursed Objects they wrapped around her limbs or how much bottled forgetfulness they forced down her throat. Milla was real, and Milla was dead and it was Sela's fault. It was truth; a hideous truth. One that could never be undone.