It’d all gone wrong when she quit school and went to study with the Sibyl. If he asked Faan about those sessions, she got angry and accused him of spying on her. If he didn’t ask, she accused him of being tired of her, bored with her.
For a time she was obsessed with her mother; she pestered him and Tai-the Sibyl, too, for all he knew-for everything they knew about her, where she’d come from. After a while, though, she dropped it. There just weren’t any answers available.
Abey’s Curse on the Sibyl for teaching her how to open locks. No keeping her inside after that.
Abeyhamal’s Curse? Was that it? Wouldn’t let the baby alone, gave her that Talent… a Sorceror… couldn’t let her be a witch or something more natural… a Sorceror… it was going to get her killed…
Where did the baby go? Reyna pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes as if that would push the pain back. The baby who loved me without question, who followed me everywhere. Where did she go?
Quarrels. Every time they talked. Anything he said. He hadn’t lost the memory of how he’d been when he was that age, but he was terrified for her, he wanted to protect her from all the horrors he’d had to face when his father threw him out. He hadn’t forgotten, no, but nothing he did was right and he’d about run out of ideas.
At least she still came home.
And she still called him Mamay when she didn’t stop to think.
He sat for almost an hour without moving, then he sighed, got wearily to his feet and walked down the hall to the small room Faan had taken for her own, opened the door and went inside.
Faan dragged herself out of bed before the sun was up.
She scrubbed her face with angry violence, ignoring the stings as soap hit broken pimples and patches of rash from the face paint. When she was finished, she stared into the small cracked mirror, grimaced at the pale pinched face with angry oozing red spots scattered across it. Then she shrugged and began dealing with her hair, dragging a rake through the waxed spikes, combing out the plaited tress and rebraiding it. She fixed the bee-clasp on the end, shook her head, smiling grimly as the braid flipped about, the spikes shivered. The paint was flaking off the colored patches, but that didn’t matter, not this morning.
She rooted through the shirt drawer until she located a faded black pullover that Reyna kept trying to throw away and she kept rescuing from the ragbag, dug out an ancient black skirt that used to belong to Areia One-eye. She dressed and left the room, carrying her sandals, her feet silent on the grass drugget that ran down the hall.
She stopped in the kitchen a moment for Riverman’s treat, then left by the back door. He had a ferocious sweet tooth and made a sound like bubbles popping when she gave him honeycomb and pastry-lace and taffys from the Beehouse. HE’d listen to her without scolding her, the Wild Magic would go fizzing around her, playing their obscure games and making her laugh.
She loved it when water elementals came by, thrust-
ing their heads into the streaked and dappled air beneath the gatt so they could look at her. They couldn’t or wouldn’t talk to her, but that didn’t matter; she enjoyed watching them change shape, pulsing like the water lapping against the piles, and sometimes they brought her small gifts, shells and bits of coral, pearls and oddities off drowned ships.
And there was a bitty beast like a mix of mouse and boy who came and went as he chose and never spoke to her. Riverman told her one day that the mouseboy was a god, Sessa, Finder of Lost Rifles. That made her laugh, then cry-for wasn’t she a lost trifle herself? And neither Riverman or Sessa could or would tell her anything about who she was. So it didn’t matter they were gods or whatever, magic. They DID listen to her, though. At least there was that.
› › ‹ ‹
She brought out the wedge of honeycomb she’d taken from the kitchen, unwrapped it, and tossed to River-man. While he ate, she leaned back against the stones and watched the little people gather.
“I don’t understand what’s happening to me,” she said finally. “There’s… there’s…” she groped at air in crippled, aborted gestures as if even her body was stumbling in its efforts to express what was in her, “… there’s too… too MUCH! It’s like I’m going to explode, barn barn splat, bits of me all over the place… and… oh… I don’t know…
The Riverman drew his tiny gnarled hand across his mouth, then sat cradling the oozing comb. “Be specific,” he said. “Elucidate.” He brought the comb up to his mouth again and licked honey from one of the cells, but never took his black beady eyes off her.
Faan scowled past him at the head of a water elemental thrust up like a faceted lump of mountain stream in the midst of the muddy River. When it merged with the River and vanished, she said, “Last night… Tai and Areia One-eye were off to a clandestine rite in one of the Biashar towers as soon as they finished supper… they’re gonna be sent to the mines if they get caught, they don’t care… I get so worried… makes it so easy to… blow up… I’ve got a horrible temper… sometimes I want to kill… I can’t let myself think like that or… things… happen… You remember first time I came here… I nearly burned down the school… and me… ah! diyo diyo, River-man, I know. Stick to the subject. Reyna and Jea and Dawa, they did the evensong, then they left… I can’t help it, I HATE what he does… how he can… he’s not LIKE that, he’s… Mamay… oh, I know he’s not my mother… he’s a man… sort of… um… one time when I was crying because Utsapisha’s granddaughters teased me when they heard me calling him Mamay, he told me: I can’t be your Mamay in body, but I am in my heart. Never forget that. That’s what he’s like, not… but he goes and does… what he does… when I’m around him, when he says ANYTHING, I feel like I’m going to explode… I’m afraid for him… I’m ashamed… he loves me, but he tries to make me into… I don’t know… a perfect child… I’m not like that… I want… I want… I don’t know… it’s like there’s a hole in me that says WANT WANT WANT and it nor nothing else Will tell me what it is I do want.” She laid her hands on her knees, palms up, grimaced at the damp green stains from the moss.
Slowly, painfully, she told Riverman about the quarrel last night.
. that’s it,” she said. “That’s it. I got some sleep. Hour or so I suppose. Came here soon’s it was light. I’m afraid, Riverman, I don’t understand what’s happening…”
Riverman listened with all his tiny body-said ah at the proper places, uh huh, go on. He had no advice for her-what did he know of family and its terrors? He was sui generis, unique. But he let her talk and he listened, interested in this strange thing. Not like the Sibyl who seemed to know it all already.
A short while later she slipped from under the gatt and made her way to the Beehouse through the morning throngs of Verakay Lane, nothing resolved, but the storm in her blood blown away for a while.
Chapter 7. Prophet From Pain
Late and nervous, two months after his encounter with the Mal warrior, Reyna slipped in the back door of the Jigambi Joyhouse, scrambled into his Salagaum robes in the grimy closet Srikkar Jigambi misnamed a changing room, and loped up the service stairs to the third floor where the private rooms were. He pushed past the thick red curtains into the hallway where the floor had a ten-year carpet and the walls were carved into the hammer and anvil of Chumavayal and the polished famwood gleamed pale yellow in the light from the bronze lamps whose scented oils perfumed the whole passage. It’d been a while since he’d reached these levels, and never with an anonymous client. The secrecy clamped over the rendezvous bothered him; more often than not it meant the client had serious problems which might bring death or maiming for the Salagaum involved.