“How should I know? It’s a woman with a list and a grievance.”
The magician tests his mouth, his remaining arm, with its two fingers and thumb. He loses nothing, he thinks, but when he goes to bed that night he realizes his pillow is gone.
It’s a little thing. He could request another pillow in the morning, but somehow this matters. He feels sorry for himself. If he thinks about the people he has disappeared—the women outside the wall, the first woman, the entire population of the northeastern mountain province—he would collapse into dust.
I can tell he’s done before he can. I’m watching him, as always, and I know, as I’ve known before. He cries himself out on his bed.
“Why?” he asks this time. He has always asked “how?” before.
Then, because I know he will never utter the word again, I speak to him directly for the first time. I whisper to him the secret: that it is powered by the unquenched desire to know what powers it, at whatever the cost. Only these children, these hungry youths, can wield it, and we wield them, for the brief time they allow us. This one longer than most. His desire to lay things bare was exceptional, even if he stopped short of where I did. I, no more than a whisper in a willing ear.
I wait to see what he will do: return to the marketplace to join Blind Carel and Gretta and the other, lesser magicians, the ones we pay to alert us when a new child lingers to watch; ask to stay and teach his successor, as his tutor did. He doesn’t consider those options, and I remember again that I had once been struck by his lack of cruelty.
He leaves through the servants’ gate, taking nothing with him. I listen for weeks for him to take up the mourners’ litany, as some have done before him, but I should have known that wouldn’t be his path either; his list of names is too short. If I had to guess, I would say he went looking for the things he lost, the things he banished, the pieces of himself he’d chipped off in service of someone else’s problems; the place to which teeth and fingers and problems and provinces and maids and mourners and pillows all disappear.
There was a trick, he thinks. There is always a trick.
The Persistence of Blood
Juliette Wade
Beneath her squirming two year old, beneath her rustling gown, Selemei could feel herself bleeding. It had started an hour ago. A subtle trickle of guilt—and, like a trickle of falling dust at the border of the city-caverns, it warned that the way forward was dangerous. Selemei squeezed Pelli tighter. Her daughter squeaked protest, so she released a little, nuzzled down between Pelli’s puffed curls, and inhaled the sweet scent of kalla oil where her hair parted. She risked a glance down the brass dinner table at her partner, Xeref.
Xeref sat deep in conversation with their elder son, the fingers of one pale hand buried in his silver hair, while their younger son listened raptly. Seeming to sense her glance, Xeref looked up, and his lips curved into a smile.
She knew those fingers, those lips. A lick of heat; the memory of pleasure—and then the fear struck her in the stomach, as unspeakable as the blood.
Oh, holy Heile in your mercy, preserve my health, keep my senses intact…
Selemei hid the tremors of her hands by rubbing them into Pelli’s back. With a giggle, Pelli started kissing her cheeks. Selemei managed to return a few kisses, then tried to pull away by looking up at the electric chandelier that hung from the vaulted ceiling.
Eight-year-old Aven tugged at her left hand, playing with the ruby drops dangling from her bracelet. “Can I wear your bracelet, Mother?”
Caught in the breath of doom, she couldn’t bear to make Aven frown. “Not now, but someday, all right?”
Aven circled her wrist with her thin fingers, golden like Selemei’s own, and sighed. “It’s so pretty.”
Not the word she would have used. The rubies looked like drops of blood. She had no doubt what Xeref had meant by them: blood is precious. When she’d first begun her bleeding, Mother had taught her the same. In this age of decline, the noble blood of the Grobal Race was not to be wasted.
Well, she hadn’t wasted it! Seven pregnancies in twenty years of partnership with Xeref. Five live births, four of the children perfectly normal. And while Pelli’s albinism might be recessive, it could do little harm here in the city-caverns. Their beautiful, brave Enzyel had just partnered into the Eighth Family to great acclaim. Meanwhile, however, the decline continued, and no success was ever enough—even success paid for in blood.
Another trickle made her want to scream.
“Off you go, now,” she said instead, lowering Pelli’s feet to the floor. The girl ran to her nurse-escort and patted the leg of his black silk suit. The escort frowned—his Imbati castemark tattoo furrowed between his brows.
“Pelli,” Selemei scolded. “We don’t touch the Imbati. Are you a big girl?”
“Big girl.” Pelli lifted her white hands away and wrung them over her head contritely. “Big girl.”
“And who are a big girl’s hands for?”
“Pelli.”
“Ask if you want your Verrid to hold you.”
Pelli’s lip trembled, but she managed, “My please?”
“Of course, young Mistress,” the escort replied. He swooped her up in a twirl that turned the threatening tears into a cry of joy, and carried her from the dining room.
Selemei sighed. Pelli was so big now. Perhaps if she’d been smaller, more dependent on the breast, this doom could have been postponed. To Aven she said, “Time to get ready for bed, darling.” Aven’s escort caught her glance and passed it to other Imbati of the Household, who quickly withdrew. At last even her sons Brinx and Corrim came to kiss her and excused themselves to their shared rooms.
She had to speak now, while the blood could still protect her. She turned toward Xeref at the head of the table, but fear twined up into her throat.
Xeref gave her an uncertain smile.
Xeref’s Imbati woman moved, noticeable now as she left her station behind his shoulder. Imbati Ustin—tall, broad-shouldered, and muscular with her hair in several long braids that looked almost white against her tailored blacks—easily pulled out one of the brass chairs that stood empty between them. Xeref stood up, still smiling, and moved to the new seat. Then Selemei’s own manservant, Grivi, pulled out the chair beside his.
Oh, to be close to him again!
She couldn’t move.
If she got close, they would kiss—if they kissed, they would make love—if they made love, she would get pregnant again—and even if she managed not to lose the pregnancy, there would be labor, and pain—not just pain, but pain like with Pelli. The screaming. The blank darkness. She’d wake up feeling like someone had dismembered her, her left leg dead to the hip, and this time, maybe her right, too. Maybe this time she wouldn’t regain her ability to walk. Or maybe this time she wouldn’t wake up at all.
“Xeref, I can’t,” she blurted.
“Selemei?”
She stared down at her hands clutched in her lap, at the beautiful bracelet. The ruby drops looked dark in the shadow of the silk tablecloth. “I know blood is precious. I know my duty to the Race. But I just can’t anymore.”
The guilt sharpened when spoken aloud. She tried not to imagine what words might come from his mouth in reply. Perverse—selfish—unworthy—
Xeref cleared his throat. “Selemei?”
Something touched her shoulder—oh, mercy, that was his hand! Her whole body clenched in on itself, hardened. Her chest felt like a geode, unable to admit breath, crusted inside with fear.