“Ex-wife,” Hanner had answered, and the wizard had turned up an empty hand.
“Ex-wife, then,” he said. “I gave it to her, and haven’t seen it since.”
It could have been worse, Hanner told himself as he waited for an answer to his knock. At least Arvagan had still been operating the same shop, and had remembered the tapestry in question. The tapestry hadn’t been destroyed, so far as the wizard knew, nor sold.
And it wasn’t raining yet.
The door opened, and Mavi was standing there, but Hanner barely had time to recognize her before he was almost knocked backward by someone else shrieking, “Hanner!” and throwing her arms around him. “You’re alive!”
“Ah,” he said. “Who?” He looked down at the plump, dark-haired woman embracing him, her face buried in his shoulder. She lifted her head to look up at him, and he exclaimed, “Nerra!” She was heavier than when he last saw her, and her face was showing signs of age, but it was unmistakably his sister.
“Hanner,” she said, hugging him again. “We thought you were dead for so long, and then there were stories about warlockry not working, and the Called coming back, so I came to ask Mavi if she had seen you, and here you are!”
“Here I am,” he agreed, hugging her back. “It’s good to see you.” He decided not to mention that from his point of view, he had seen her – a much younger her – scarcely a month ago.
“What’s happened?” Nerra asked, raising her head and releasing her hold. “And…you haven’t changed! You look so young!”
“I…” He hardly knew where to begin. He looked over his sister’s head at Mavi.
“Hello, Hanner,” she said. “I wrote them out for you.” She reached over to a table by the door and held up a sheet of paper.
“What?”
“The children’s addresses. Isn’t that what you came back for?”
“Oh – actually, no,” Hanner admitted.
“Then what? You didn’t know Nerra was here, did you?”
“No, I didn’t,” Hanner said, looking back to his sister. “That was a pleasant surprise.”
“Then what did you want?”
Mavi and Nerra were both staring at him in a most distracting manner – Mavi, who he would have expected to be affectionate if not for last night’s events, looked downright hostile, while Nerra, who had never been very demonstrative of family feeling, looked almost adoring. Hanner could not get his thoughts sufficiently in order to answer.
“I see you didn’t bring your whore with you,” Mavi. “Did you think I might reconsider taking you back?”
“She’s not my whore,” Hanner protested. “She’s a fellow Called warlock. And I’m here on behalf of other Called warlocks – I need to know what happened to the tapestry I commissioned.”
Mavi’s stare changed from hostile to puzzled. “The one that got you Called?” she asked.
He started to argue that the tapestry hadn’t been responsible for his Calling, but caught himself before a single word escaped. It had gotten him Called, after a fashion, by letting him lower his guard, and besides, that didn’t matter anymore. “Yes,” he said. “That one.”
“We put it in storage with your uncle’s old things. I didn’t want it, and I thought maybe the Council would find a use for it someday. I thought maybe they could figure out what went wrong, why it didn’t work the way you expected.”
Again he was tempted to argue, since the tapestry had worked more or less as he had expected, but he resisted. “In storage? Where?”
“In the house on High Street, of course. Up on the fourth floor.”
So it had been right there in Warlock House all along? Or perhaps not – there was no telling what the Council might have done with it in the seventeen years since his Calling. “Where?” he asked again.
“I can show you,” Nerra said, before Mavi could reply. “Alris and I helped sort through your belongings after you…after you left.”
Startled, Hanner said, “You did? You can?”
“I’d be happy to. It will give us a chance to talk.”
“I’d like that,” Hanner said. “Thank you.” He turned to Mavi. “I’m sorry to have troubled you.”
He was caught completely off-guard, as completely as when he had emerged from the tapestry world into the attic of Warlock House and been hit by the renewed Calling, when Mavi burst into tears. He stood, silent and helpless, as she sobbed; he wanted to reach out for her, to comfort her, but she was no longer his wife; it wouldn’t be right. He started to reach toward her anyway, before he could stop himself, but she pulled away. He felt a tightness in his own throat, and a stinging in his eyes; he blinked.
Nerra turned to Mavi, and gave Hanner a shove. “Wait outside,” she said, stepping back into the house and closing the door.
Hanner waited, trying to regain his calm. He looked up and down Mustard Street, hoping he didn’t appear too suspicious or out of place. No one seemed to pay him any particular attention; the street was not very busy, and the people he saw were intent on their own business, walking past without giving him much more than a casual glance.
Then the door opened again – not fully, just enough for Nerra to slip out, a piece of paper in her hand. “Here,” she said, handing it to Hanner. “Those addresses.”
“Thank you,” he said, accepting the list. “I…Is Mavi…”
“Terrin’s comforting her. The sooner you get away from here, the better – shall we go?”
He had to blink away tears again. “Yes,” he said. He let Nerra take his elbow and turn him away from the door, pointing him toward North Street.
He wanted to turn back, to go back to Mavi, but he knew he shouldn’t. He let Nerra guide him.
“Alris will want to see you, too, you know,” Nerra said conversationally. “And your children, of course. It’ll be very strange for them, seeing you again – not as bad as for Mavi, of course, but…strange.”
“Yes,” Hanner replied, not trusting himself to say more just yet.
“The whole city is…well, it’s a surprise, having all you warlocks come back. No one expected it.”
“I know,” Hanner said. “Thousands of us.”
“None of you can do magic any more, is that right?”
“Almost none,” Hanner said, without really thinking about what he was saying. “The ones who were witches or theurgists before the Night of Madness got their old magic back. And…”
He stopped himself before mentioning Vond. He wasn’t sure whether Ithinia, or Vond himself, wanted it generally known that the emperor was in the city.
“So you spent seventeen years trapped in some cave in Aldagmor?”
“Not a cave,” Hanner said, still not paying much attention to the conversation. “A crater.”
“I’m surprised most of you didn’t go mad from boredom.”
“What?” That distracted Hanner from thoughts of Mavi. “No, no. We were all trapped in a preservation spell – we weren’t conscious. It was like being asleep, or in a trance. To me, that seventeen years passed in an instant; it feels as if I haven’t been gone even seventeen days.”
“A preservation spell? So that’s why you look so young?”
“Exactly.” He glanced at her, taking in the lines on her face, the sagging here and there. She had been thirty-five when he last saw her, and now she was…fifty-two? Was that right?
She was older than he was now – how very strange! He had gone from being the oldest of the three siblings to the youngest.
“Tell me all about it,” she said. “About the Calling, and your release, and coming back to Ethshar, and all of it. I’ve heard stories, but they were all third- or fourth-hand; you can tell me what really happened.”
Hanner took a moment to gather his thoughts, then said, “Well, I’d commissioned a Transporting Tapestry because I hoped to find a place warlocks could hide from the Call…”