THE MEMORY OF STONE

Michelle West

THE Guildmaster Gilafas ADelios, commonly acknowledged by The Ten houses to be the most powerful man in Averalaan, stood in front of the long window by which he might survey the eastern half of Averalaan Aramarelas. He had no throne, no place in the Hall of Wise Counsel, no direct route to the ears of the Kings, the two men who ruled the breadth of the Empire of Essalieyan. But money counted for much in the Empire; what The Ten owned in the political realm, he rivaled by the simple expedient of wealth.

He was not a young man, nor a particularly tall one, and his hair, on those days when he had no onerous public duties, fell in a white plume down the back of his head.

On this particular day, it was a solid braid.

He glanced out of the window, his eyes skimming the surface of the ocean beyond the seawall. Light sparkled there, in a pattern the makers of the east tower were doubtless attempting to capture. It reached his eyes but no more; he looked away.

The ocean’s voice was strong. The strongest of the voices that he heard.

“Master Gilafas.”

Certainly the most welcome voice. Gilafas was an Artisan. But in truth, he was only barely that; the weakest, the most insignificant of the Artisans the guild had produced in centuries. It galled him when he thought on it, and he was a maker; he could dwell upon any fact, without pause to eat or drink—or sleep, for that matter—for a full three days.

Duvari, the man who had spoken, knew it.

He was called the Lord of the Compact, the leader of the Astari, the men who served in the shadows the Kings cast. Although the

Lord of the Compact understood Artisans as well as any not maker-born could, he was not by nature a patient man. Nor was he a man that anyone angered without reason, and that, only a good one.

Gilafas ADelios turned. He did not bow; Duvari’s rank did not demand such a gesture of respect. Indeed, his presence today almost demanded otherwise.

“Master Duvari.”

“Duvari.”

“Duvari, then. How may I help you?”

The insincerity of the question was not lost upon the Astari, but it brought a cold smile to his lips, his austere face.

“You may help me by tendering to the Kings their due.”

“You’ve become a tax collector, have you?” Testy, testy words. The door opened. Sanfred, Gilafas’s assistant, and a Master in his own right, froze beneath the steepled wooden frame, his robes swirling at his feet. Clearly he had run the length of the hall.

He had the brains to bow instantly. “Guildmaster.”

“I am afraid, Sanfred, that we will begin the testing late today. Tell the adjudicators to stand ready.”

Sanfred was not a subtle man. He hesitated. But he was not an Artisan either; the only madness that possessed him possessed him when he made, and none of the makers worked without the leave of the Guildmaster during the testing. “There are—”

“Not now, Sanfred.”

“Yes, Guildmaster.”

The doors swung shut. Gilafas turned to face the man who ruled the Astari. “The applicants are waiting in the city streets.”

“Indeed.”

“The adjudicators will not begin without me.”

“Then I will be brief.”

“Good.”

Again, the winter of Duvari’s smile crept up his face. Gilafas wondered idly if Duvari had a smile that did not make his expression colder and grimmer. The Guildmaster was not, however, a simple noble, to be intimidated by a mere expression. “The Astari had heard that you were to personally oversee these applicants. A highly unusual step for a man of your rank, is it not?”

“Your business, Duvari. Please.”

“It is my business.”

“You overstep yourself. It is guild business; an entirely internal matter.”

“May I remind you, Guildmaster Gilafas ADelios, that in the history of the Guild of the Makers annals, the Guildmaster has only presided over the testing when he has had reason to suspect that among the applicants, he will find someone … unusual?”

Gilafas shrugged, and considered, briefly, the folly of giving himself over to the ocean’s song. As Artisan, he could almost do so without giving offense. Frowning, he lifted his hands; they were shaking. He had not expected that. “A moment,” he said, more curtly than he had intended. He reached out and gripped the edge of curtains heavy with the fall of chain links. They snapped shut audibly at the force of his pull.

“Guildmaster, is there any chance that you seek your successor among the applicants?”

Gilafas chuckled. “No chance whatsoever, Duvari. Is that all?”

Duvari did not move.

They stood a moment, two men assured by their successes in life of their rank, their power.

To Gilafas’ surprise, it was Duvari who spoke first.

“I was sent to tell you,” he said stiffly, “that the Orb in the Rod is now white.”

Ah. Gilafas closed his eyes. Were he any other man, he might pretend that the words had no significance; he might ask, in a pleasant, modulated tone, What rod, what orb? But that game was not a game he could play. Not against Duvari; Duvari served the Kings.

Behind the shell of closed lids, he could see not the Kings, but the hands of Kings, and in them, the items gifted their line by an Artisan centuries ago: the Rod and the Sword. Wisdom. Justice. Weapons for the oldest of the Empire’s many wars, and the most important: the war that was its founding. Magic lay within them and upon them, bound to the blood of the god-born.

He had never touched either Rod or Sword. Had prayed that he never would. He could not say what force they summoned, what spell they contained, but he knew them for more than simple ornament. They were weapons against old magic, old darkness, old wars.

And they had slept for centuries.

When he opened his eyes again, Duvari was closer; had closed the distance between them without making a sound. “You expected this,” he said softly. It was the first accusation he had made.

“Aye, we expected it,” Gilafas replied, weary. Why now? Why today? He brushed nonexistent hair from his eyes. Yes, his hands were shaking; the pull of the ocean was stronger than it had been in weeks, and he would have to take care.

“What of the Sword, Duvari?”

“The Sword?”

“The gem in the sword hilt.”

“It is as it has always been.”

“And the runes upon the blade itself?”

“The King has had no cause to draw the Sword.”

“He has cause,” Gilafas said, forcing strength into words that wanted to come out in a whisper. “Tell him—ask him—to draw the blade. Read what is written there. Return with word of what it says.”

“I suspect, from your demeanor, that you already know.” Duvari held his gaze, and that, too, was a threat. “Very well. I will return with your answer.” He walked away then, and only when he reached the doors did he turn and proffer the most perfunctory of bows.

Gilafas waited until he left, and then he made his way to the grand desk that served as this great room’s foundation. There he paused, running his hands over the surface of a very simple box. It was a deep, deep red, and the carvings across its face were not up to the standards of the least of the guild’s makers.

But he had been told what lay within.

Cessaly stood between the twin pillars of her mother and her grandmother, her knuckles white as the alabaster statues in the distance.

Distance was a tricky thing to measure. There were men who could do it; they could tell you things by the length of cast shadows, the rise of buildings beneath the fall of sunlight some arcane measure of the shape of the land. Or so her father had once said. He had stayed in the Free Town of Durant. Said his good-byes at the edge of the fields that had yet to be tilled and planted, his face dark, his eyes squinting against the light. Except that the sun had been at the back of his head, a shining glint over the brim of his weathered hat.

Her brothers, Bryan and Dell, had hugged her tight, lifting her in the twirl and spin of much younger years. They hadn’t said good-bye. Instead, they had offered her the blessing of Kalliaris, asking for the Lady’s smile, and not her terrible frown.

She had offered them gifts. Wood carvings, things made from the blunt edge of chisel and knife. To remember me by, she’d said. In case I don’t come back.

A bird. A butterfly. Nothing useful.

But in those two things, some quickness of captured motion: tail feathers spread for flight, beak open in silent song; wings, thin and fine, veined and open, devoid only of the color that might have lent them the appearance of life.

Dell had handled the butterfly as carefully as he might had it been alive; his clumsy, heavy hands, callused by the tools of their father’s trade, hovering like wings above wings, membrane of wings, afraid that his grip might damage the insect’s flight.

Her father had taught them that, each in their turn, and butterflies sometimes sat on the perch of their steady fingers, wings closed to edge, feelers testing wind. Birds had been less trusting, of course, and they were predators in their fashion, beaks snapping the skein of butterfly wings in a darting hunt for sustenance.

Cessaly loved them, hunter and hunted, because they were small and delicate when in flight. She had never been large.

Her brothers took after their father; they were broad of shoulder,

silent, slow to move. But they put their backs into the labor that had been chosen for them, taking comfort in the Mother’s season.

Cessaly had tried to do the same, she a farmer’s daughter. But the hoes and the spades, the standing blades of the scythes, often spoke to her in ways that had nothing to do with the Mother. She might be found carving mounds of dirt, or fallen stalks of wheat, into shapes: great fortresses, sprawling manors, even small castles— although the poverty of her splendor had become apparent only when she had reached the outskirts of Averalaan.

They thought her clever then.

Her father would often cry out her mother’s name, and the deep baritone of his voice, cracked by the dry air of the flat plains, returned to her. Cecilia, come see what your daughter has made!

Even her mother’s habitually dour expression would ease into something akin to a smile when she came at her husband’s call, and they would stand, like a family of leisure, for moments at a time, oohing and aahing.

She had loved those moments.

But those moments had led to this one.

“How long?” her grandmother said, when the man in robes came out from the distant building and walked down the streets, a pitcher of water in hands as callused as her father’s. She asked it again when he was ten feet away, repeated it when he was before them.

His face was lined with shadow, eyes dark; his chin was bereft of beard. But he smiled, and if the smile was curt—and it was—it was also friendly. “I fear, good lady, that it will be some hours yet. You are not at the halfway mark.”

“You’re sure that they’ll see us all?”

Again, he offered her a curt smile. “Indeed.”

“We’ve brought some of her work,” her grandmother said. “If you’d like to see it.”

“I would, indeed.” His tone of voice conveyed no such desire. “But I fear that my opinion, and the opinion of the guildmasters, do not have equal standing here.”

Her grandmother frowned and nodded, allowing him to pass.

There were others in the line who were just as thirsty as they were, after all, and if she was anxious, she wasn’t selfish.

“Cessaly, stand straight, girl.”

I was, she thought sullenly, but she found an extra inch or two in the line of her shoulder, and used it to blunt her grandmother’s nervous edge.

Her mother had not spoken a word.

The halls of the guild’s upper remove were unlike the simple, unadorned stone that graced its lower walkways. They were also unlike the halls in which the makers worked, for those stone walls were decorated, from floor to vaulted ceiling, with the paintings and tapestries, the statues, the interior gargoyles, that were proof of the superiority of the artists that had guild sanction.

No; in the halls of Fabril’s reach, the walls were of worked stone. These contours, these rough surfaces, these smooth domes, took on the shape of trees, of cathedrals, of Lords and Ladies, of gods themselves; they began a story, if one knew how to read it. There were very few who could, in the history of the Guild of the Makers, for such a reading could not be taught; it could be gleaned if one had the ability and the time.

No, Gilafas thought, with a trace of bitterness. It was the ability that mattered; time was what the inferior could add, if they lacked ability in greater measure.

Guildmaster Gilafas, to his shame, was only barely an Artisan. No Artisans had survived in the generation that preceded him in the guild, and no men remained who might have seen the spark of his talent in time to kindle it, to bring it to fruition.

Or so he had told himself. It was not his fault; it was not his failing. And on the day that he had been completely overtaken by the voice of the ocean, on the day that he made, out of crystal, a decanter that returned to the waters of that great body the clarity and the purity of its essential nature, the acting guildmaster had cried tears of joy.

There is magic here, Gilafas. Look. He had lifted the decanter to the eye of the sun. The waters placed in this vessel can safely be drunk. Do you understand? You are not a simple maker—you are an Artisan.

The old man had, with great ceremony, ordered the opening of the upper remove, and installed the young man within its stone folds. What you need to learn, you will learn here. Or so our history says.

Aye, history.

That old man had been dead twenty years. Dead, a year and twelve months after the day he had made his joyful discovery. Gilafas had attended him for the two weeks he lingered abed with a fever that he could not shake. Healers had been sent for, and healers had been turned away; the guildmaster would have none of them.

“I’m an old man,” he had said, “And close to death, and I’ll not drag a healer there and back for the scant benefit of a few more months of life.” His hair across the pillows was his shroud, his chosen shroud. “And I’m happy to go, Gilafas. You’re here. You’re Artisan. You will guide our guild.”

“The Artisans,” he had said, “all went mad, Nefem.”

“Not all.”

“All of them.”

“Not Fabril.”

“I’m not Fabril, Nefem.”

“No. But you will be guildmaster. You are an answer to the only prayer I have ever made. I give you the responsibility of the guild, and its makers. They are fractious. You’ve seen that. But fractious or no, there is no greater power in the Empire.” He lifted a hand. “Say what you will. The mages can kill men; they can raise them to power. But they cannot accomplish what we have built here.”

“The Kings—”

“Even the Kings, when they choose to come here, come as supplicants. Be the guildmaster, Gilafas. While you are alive, the guild will have no other. Listen to the halls in the upper remove, hear the voices that we cannot hear. You have the ability.” His cheeks were wet. “Protect what I have built.”

The maker’s cry. “Protect what I have created.” Never “protect me.”

Gilafas had become a maker without parallel, and in the streets of the city, in the streets of the Holy Isle, that counted. But here, within the stretch of the great hall in which the Artisans had lived and worked since the founding of the guild, he was almost inconsequential. The walls spoke to him seldom, and when they did, they spoke in a language that was almost entirely foreign. Until the day the demon voices had filled the Old City with the cries of the dying.

The halls had been dark as thunder-clad sky when he had come to them, gasping for air, desperate now for the answers that his meager talent denied him. He had starved himself of all sustenance: company, food, and water. For three days, while the moon rode high in the harvest sky, while the winter waxed with the bright, jeweled ghosts of the Blood Barons and their legacy of indulgence and death, he had had for company, for clothing, for sound, nothing but the walls themselves.

The walls. He had traced their passage from one end of the hall to another, over and over, creating a maze of his movements. Closed eyes, open eyes, breath creaking through the passage of a tight, dry, throat, he had lost his way. Become lost in his home of decades. Lost to stonework. Lost to the hand of the Artisan.

And lost now, absolved of all dignity, of all power granted him by the accolades of other men, he had come at last to the altar.

It was in a room that did not exist. Sanity knew: sanity had denied him entrance. Some part of his mind, stubborn, sane, anchored to the world of his compatriots, could not be dislodged, but it had been shaken so thoroughly he had at last his proof of the truth of his existence.

The halls had opened the way, for him, and he had walked it. And he wept, to think of it now; wept bright tears, salt tears. Ocean tears.

For he had come across the broken body of a young woman, her pale, pretty face scarred in three places by the kiss of blade’s edge—her only kisses, he thought, the only ones she had been permitted. Hands bleeding and blistered by some unseen fire, she was the sacrifice.

Demon altar. Dark altar.

And upon it, across the naked skin of her pale, upturned breasts, she clutched them, broken, the Rod and the Sword of Kings.

He heard laughter; could not think that it could be hers, she was so still. This was a monument the Barons would have been proud to own.

When Sanfred and Jordan found him again, wandering naked, bleeding, skeletal, they had taken him in silence to the lower halls, and he had made good his escape.

But in escape, he carried knowledge: the Rod and the Sword would fail. The orb would be shattered, and the runes on the blade would speak in the tongue of an accusation he understood well: they were hollow vessels, their metal and their finery too superficial for the task at hand.

The line stretched on forever. Grandmother, mother, and daughter, they faced it like a family faces drought: grimly, silently. Cessaly was uncomfortable in the present, and she was young, adept in ways that her elders, too slow and rigid, could no longer be. She sought past. Found it.

Cessaly’s father, his pride contained in the scarcity of his words, had taken some of the things she had made to market when the merchants began their spring passage through the Free Towns on their way to the Western Kingdoms, those lands made distant and mythical because she would never set eyes upon them.

She had been younger, then; a good five years younger, and still prone to be mistaken for a boy whenever she traveled in the company of her brothers. But she had gone with her da when he took the wagons into the common, and she had stood by his side while he offered the merchants—at some great cost—the fruits of her half-forbidden, half-encouraged labor.

She had made horses, that year. Horses fleet of foot and gleaming with sunlight, manes flying, feet unfettered by the shod hooves that the merchants prized.

“You made these?” the merchant said, lifting the first of the horses.

Her father had shrugged.

“These are Southern horses. You’ve seen action, then?”

He said nothing. The Free Towners knew that her father had been born on the coast; knew that he had survived the border skirmishes that were so common between the North and the South. They also knew better than to ask about them.

“You’ve a good hand,” the merchant continued, eyes narrowing slightly. “What do you want for them?”

Her father had named a price.

The merchant’s brows rose in that mockery of shock that was familiar to any Towner who had cause to treat with him.

They had bickered, argued, insulted each other’s birthplace, parents, heritage. And then they had parted with what they valued: her father with the small horses, the merchant with his money.

It might have ended that way, but Cessaly, impatient and bursting with pride and worry, had said, “What’ll you do with ‘em?”

The merchant raised a brow. “Sell them, of course.”

“To who?”

“To a little girl’s parents in the West. Or in the East. They are … very good. Perhaps if you had paint,” he had added, speaking again to her father. “For a price—a good price—I might be able to supply that.”

“You wouldn’t know a good price if it bit you,” her father replied, mock angry.

“We want the paint,” she’d answered.

And he turned to look at her, at her eager eyes, her serious face.

“What will you do with paint, child?”

She smiled. “I don’t know.”

And then he frowned. “Did you make these?”

“Yes.”

“By yourself?”

“Yes.”

“And who taught you this, child?”

Her turn to frown, as if it were part of the conversation. She shrugged.

The merchant went away. But when he came back, he handed her—her and not her father—a small leather satchel. “You can keep these,” he told her, “if you promise that I will have first pick of anything you make with them.”

“If the price is right,” her father told the man. “If we don’t like the price, we’re free to take them elsewhere.”

“Done.”

To find sunlight again was a blessing. Master Gilafas paused at the foot of the steps and bowed. Sanfred was at his side before his stiff spine had once again straightened. He felt the younger man’s solid hand in the crook of his elbow, and was grateful for it: the memories of that early passage through Fabril’s reach had teeth, fangs, gravity. To struggle free of them today was almost more than he was capable of.

Once, that would have pleased him. And perhaps, if he were honest, it pleased him in some fashion today. But triumph gave way to horror, and horror sent him scuttling away like insect evading boot.

He cleared his throat. “The applicants?” “Waiting, Guildmaster.”

“Good.”

Sanfred had never once asked him why he had chosen to oversee this testing. No one had.

By unspoken consent, the makers, fractious as only the creative can be, granted him the privacy of their admiration. What he could make—in theory—no one among them could ever hope to make.

A mage could, he thought, irritable. A mage of lesser talent and no ambition. But he had too great a love for his authority to speak the words aloud.

“Take me.”

“Yes, Master.”

“And bring the box on that desk. I do not need to remind you to handle it with care.”

After that day, Cessaly’s size was no longer a problem. Her father spent some part of the summer building a small addition to his barn, and he placed her tools, her paints, the pieces of wood that he found for her use, beneath its flat roof. He had no money for glass, but the doors themselves opened toward the sun’s light, and Cessaly worked from the moment it crossed the threshold of the room, ceasing when it faded.

The merchant returned three times in the year, bringing different tools, different materials, different paints. He asked if she had ever seen metal worked, and when she shook her head, he offered to take her to a jeweler in the largest of the Free Towns. It was an offer that was flatly rejected by both her father and her mother.

They were very surprised when, two years later, that jeweler made the trek at the merchant’s side when the caravan returned.

“This had better not be a waste of my time,” he said curtly to the merchant.

“I’m paying for your time,” the merchant had replied, with a very small smile. “But I know my business.”

“Where is your young paragon of creativity, Gerrald?”

“In front of you.”

“What, this girl?”

“The very one.”

The jeweler frowned. He was balding, and the dome of his skull seemed to glow. “How old are you, child?”

“Twelve.”

The frown deepened. “Twelve. And you’ve never apprenticed to anyone?”

She shook her head.

“Well. I’m not sure that I can offer you such a position—I’ve heard that your parents won’t hear of you traveling, and this

town is not my home. But Gerrald has offered me much money to teach you for the summer, and I admit that the offer itself is unusual enough to have piqued my curiosity. If you are willing, I would teach you some small amount of my craft.”

He brought with him gold and silver, sparkling gems and glossy pearls, opals and ebony, a small dragon’s hoard.

But he brought something better, something infinitely more alluring: fire. Fire, in the heart of the rooms her father had built.

She had waited for her father’s permission, and her father had granted it.

The man in robes came again, three times, the water jug heavy in his hands. She watched his shadow against the cobbled stones, and her hands ached. Her grandmother’s hands ached as well— but she blamed that ache on the ocean Cessaly could taste when her tongue touched her lips.

Cessaly had not yet seen the ocean; she had seen buildings, horses, and streets that went on for as far as the eye could see. There were white birds in the air above, birds with angry, raucous cries; there were insects beneath her feet among mice and rats; there were cats sleek and slender, and dogs of all shapes, all sizes.

There was no workshop; she had been forbidden all of her tools. When traveling along the road, she had been permitted to idly carve the pieces of wood she had taken from the farm; they were gone now.

She wanted them.

There was no dirt beneath her feet; there were stones, smooth and flat, longer than she was and at least three times as wide. There were fences, too, things of black iron or bronze. Nothing that she could work with.

She plaited her hair instead, until her mother caught her at it, and grabbed both her hands, stilling them.

“Not here,” she had said severely. “Not here.”

Her hands began to ache; her eyes began to burn. She could not wait forever.

The jeweler stayed in Durant for four years. He bought a house for himself, very near the common; he built his workshop, sent for his apprentices, and brought his business to the town. He also made a room for Cessaly, and her mother brought her to it, and took her from it, every day except for the Mother’s day.

Cessaly worked with gold, with silver, with platinum. She handled his diamonds, his emeralds, his rubies, the blinking eyes of curved sapphires, the crisp edges of amethyst and firestone. He had begun by telling her what he wished her to achieve, and had ended, quickly, by simply giving her material to work with.

He often watched as she worked; often worked by her side, making the settings upon which he might place the results of her labor. He was not a man who was given to praise, and indeed, he offered little of it—but his silence was like a song, and his expression in the frame of that silence, a gift. Cessaly liked him.

And because of that, she decided that she would make something for him. Not for the merchant to whom all of her work eventually went, but for Master Sivold himself.

Because she wished the gift to be entirely hers, she chose wood to work with; wood was something that she could easily afford on her own. The merchants came in the spring, and when they did, she asked if they might bring her something suitable. But she did not ask for soft wood; did not choose the oak that came from the forests a few miles outside of the village. She requested instead a red, hard wood, something riven from the heart of a giant tree.

She was so excited when the merchant placed it in her hands; she was absorbed by the tang of wood, its rough grain, the depth of its unstained color. She wanted to rush back to the workshop, to begin to work right away.

But she heard its voice, wood’s voice, and it bade her wait. Voice? No, not voice, for the words it spoke were not quite words, and the wood offered her no more than that; she could not speak to it, could ask it no question and receive no answer of use. But she could feel it in the palms of her hands as if it were a living heart; could see it move, shrinking in size until the truth of its shape was revealed. She waited.

Four days later, at the height of summer, during the longest day of the year, she began to carve. To cut. To burn. She worked until the sun had begun to touch the colors of the sky; worked until the first of the stars was bright.

And when she was finished, she saw that her mother was asleep in the great chair in the corner; that the lamp had been lit and rested on the table beside that chair; that the workshop itself was empty.

She was very, very tired, but she tucked the box away, hiding it beneath the heavy cloths that protected the gems and the metals from sawdust and insects. Then she woke her mother and together they went home.

The next day was the day that changed her life.

She came to the workshop later than she usually did; her mother had had a great deal of difficulty waking her, and was concerned that she might have fetched ill. But Cessaly wasn’t running a fever; she didn’t cough or sneeze, didn’t shake much, didn’t throw up—and in the end, her mother had relented and accompanied her to the jeweler’s house.

There, shaking off lethargy, Cessaly ran inside, ran to her workbench, and grabbed the box she had made. It was simple, perhaps too simple for a man like Master Sivold. But it was not without adornment; she had carved a pattern around the lip of the lid that made the join between lid and box almost invisible. Only with care could she see it herself.

“What’s that, then, Cessaly?” he said, as she approached him.

“Last month you said that you’d run out of space for the things—the things that you can’t bear to part with.”

“Did I?”

She nodded. “And I—you’ve done so much for me here, you’ve shown me so many new things, you’ve let me make what I—what I have to. I—”

His brow rose. “Is this for me?”

“Yes. I made it. For you. Only for you,” she added. “It’s not for Gerrald. And anyway, it doesn’t matter if he does see it. It won’t do him—or anyone else—any good.”

He smiled and held out his hand. “It’s very elegant, but a little

too plain for Gerrald’s taste. Or for his customers.” He lifted it, examining the carving around its side. “Cessaly, what is this?”

His fingers brushed the trailing strokes of letters, letters hidden in the movement of leaves, the trailing fall of their branches.

“Your name,” she told him.

“My name?” He frowned. And the frown deepened. “Why do you say that, child? It does not say Sivold.”

“It doesn’t?” Her eyes widened then, with panic and fear. She reached for the box, and he must have seen the horror on her face, for his frown eased. But he did not return it to her hands.

“My eyes are not nearly as good as they once were, and your work here is so delicate, child. Perhaps I am misreading.” He shook himself, and the smile returned to his face. “I didn’t know that you knew how to spell or write.”

She didn’t. She said nothing.

After a moment, he lifted the lid from the box, and then his eyes grew wide, and wider still; his lashes seemed fixed to his brows.

“Master Sivold?”

He continued to stare.

“Master Sivold?”

And when he finally blinked, his eyes teared almost instantly. He closed the lid of the box with great care, and set it down on the workbench. “When did you make this, Cessaly?”

“Yesterday.”

“Yesterday?”

“Yesterday. And a little bit of the night.”

He raised his hands to his face. “I knew we were doing you a disservice, child,” he said, when he at last chose to lower them. “But I thought that your parents would be happier if you—if you worked in the Free Towns.” He shook his head. “You must send for your parents, child. Tell them I need to speak with them. Tell them it is urgent.”

And so she had.

They had come to speak with Master Sivold, and the closed door came between her understanding and their adult words—but she had waited just beyond the reach of the door’s swing, and when it opened, it opened upon her pale face, her wide eyes.

Master Sivold was angry. Her father was angry. Her mother, grim and silent, stood between them, hands curved in fists, knuckles white as the bone beneath stretched skin.

She knew better than to ask what had been said. It was obvious that their anger had had no good place to go, and she wasn’t about to provide one.

But Master Sivold’s anger was pointed, directed; when he turned toward her, it smoothed itself away from the lines of his face. She almost wished it hadn’t; he looked old as it left him.

“Cessaly, I want to ask you a question.”

She gazed sideways at her father; his glance spared her nothing, but his nod was permission.

“How did you make the box?”

“How?”

He nodded. Gentle, that nod, as if she were a babe. She didn’t like it. “Same as I make anything else.”

“Tell me,” he said again. “Take as long as you like.”

“I chose that piece of wood,” she said, “because it was the right wood. It took a little while.”

“How did you know what to carve?”

“Wood knows,” she said quietly. She never talked about her work, and it made her nervous to speak now. She wasn’t sure why. “I wanted to make it for you,” she added. “And I started the minute I got the wood home, but it told me to wait. It told me to wait for the longest day.”

“And how did you know what day that was?”

“I didn’t,” she said again. “The wood knew.”

Master Sivold turned to look at her father. Her father, whose shoulders seemed smaller somehow.

“And the sun knew,” she continued, thinking about it, feeling the wood in her hand, the warmth of that sun on the back of her neck, her head, its light on the dark streaks of grain.

“Tell us what the sun said,” Master Sivold told her.

She looked at his face for a moment, seeing in the lines around

his eyes and lips the movement of wood grain. She reached out, unthinking, to touch him, to feel the surface of that skin, that grain.

And when she opened her mouth, when she began to speak, she left bruises there, around his lips, where her fingers grazed flesh. There, and in the dark of his eyes.

They kept her until the harvest’s end, and then they traveled east, east to the Empire of Essalieyan. Her father and mother had argued three days—and nights, tucked in the battleground of their bed, their voices loud and rumbling, their words muted by log walls—and in the end, her mother had won, as she often did. Her brothers were to stay; she was to travel with the caravan until she reached the city, and from there she was to seek the Guild of the Makers.

“But—but, Da—”

“It’s your mother’s decision, not mine. I don’t send my kin to—”

“Father,” her mother had said, clipping both ends of the words between tight teeth.

Cessaly wanted to be happy. Or she wanted him to be happy. She wasn’t sure. “But if I’m a maker—we’ll be rich. We’ll be rich, Da.”

“You’ll be rich,” he said gruffly. “And we’ll be farmers, here, in Durant.”

“I don’t have to live there.”

He looked at his wife. His wife said nothing.

She did what any sensible girl would do. She went in search of Dell. Bryan was older, and minded his father’s commands.

“Dell?”

“Aye, Cessaly.”

“Why can’t I live here?”

“They think you’re maker-born,” he said.

“But all of the makers don’t live in the Empire.”

“No.”

“Then why do I have to?”

“Because you made that damn box, is why.”

She wanted to tell him to burn the box, then, but she couldn’t quite say the words. Wasn’t certain why. “I did bad?”

“You did too good,” he told her, when he heard the tone of her voice. “And now they’re all afeared. Master Sivold—”

“What?”

He shook his head. “It’s nothing. They think you’ll go crazy, Cessaly.”

“Then why are they sending me?”

He shrugged. “Because all the crazy people live in the Empire?”

So she hit him. Lots. He wasn’t supposed to hit her back.

The crowds wavered like a heat mirage in Gilafas’ vision. The great doors had been rolled back, and light skittered off the sheen of marble and brass, abjuring its smoky green, its black, its curling grays. Beyond the open doors, the grapple of a thousand people moved and twisted like the ocean’s voice; he could make out no words because he could hear them all so clearly.

“Master Gilafas?”

He lifted a hand. “I think—I think, Sanfred, that I will have my pipe. Now.”

“Your—ah. That one. Yes, Guildmaster.” He hesitated for just a moment, and then he waved another maker over and relinquished his grip on Gilafas’ elbow, forgotten until that moment.

Everyone hovered. It was annoying. Their shadows against the floor, the fall of their feet, the drifting haze of their cloudy beards, made him think of the storm. He waved them away. Ocean voice, he thought. What am I to do today? It is not the time.

Sanity. That was his curse. He listened to confusion dispassionately, refusing, as he had always done, to allow it reign. His brief dalliance with insanity had given him no cause to regret that decision.

The pipe came, and he lit it carefully, inhaling bitter smoke. It was not to his taste, and not to his liking, and it would be less to his liking on the morrow when he woke to the taste of something dead and stale on his tongue. But the alternative was less appealing.

“Send them, then.”

“Yes, Master.”

Hours passed. Of the many hundreds of hopeful applicants, Guildmaster Gilafas found two he was certain belonged within the guild walls. He treated them not only with the respect of their future rank, but with the affection reserved for kin, no matter how distant, who have found their way home against almost insurmountable odds. It was not an act. There was a brotherhood among the men and women who were, by nature of birth and some quirky, divine providence, driven to these strange acts of creation.

That brotherhood buoyed him, although he was not entirely certain that some part of that warmth was not caused by the contents of his pipe. It had been some hours since he had filled it, and he hesitated, hand over pouch, to do so again.

Looking up, he realized how costly that hesitation had been. He had never walked so close to the edge without realizing it; somehow he had stepped across it.

Had he the voice for it, he would have cried out in fear or horror. It was the only thing in the long day that he would be grateful for later; his dignity was spared.

For the doors were there, they were open; the makers were in attendance; he was not in Fabril’s hall, and the visions of that complicated, terrible place did not hold him in their painful grip.

Only memory did, but memory was enough, more than enough. He handed his pipe to Sanfred, hands shaking so much he feared to drop it before it held what he required.

And he tried to smile at the young woman who walked toward him.

In the privacy of his thoughts, he was still a coward, had always been a coward; he told himself that he was mistaken, old, befuddled, that the voices of the ocean and the voices of the Maker had grown strong because he had done too little, these past few days, to still them. He tried to tell himself that what he remembered could not be real.

But cowardice provided no shelter: he recognized the girl’s face.

She had lain upon a bloodied altar in a hidden room that he had never tried to find again.

When Cessaly saw the man who sat behind a table that was larger than any she had ever seen—including Master Sivold’s workbench—she froze.

“Cessaly,” her mother said, impatient, fearful, angry.

But for once, her mother’s voice was almost beneath her notice.

As if he were wood, or silver, or gold, the man caught the whole of her attention, diverting daylight, the vast rise of ceiling, the width and breadth of wall. Only the ocean’s taste grew stronger as she met his eyes, and the inside of her mouth was dry as salt.

She should have remembered that when she approached wood, or gold, or silver, she approached first with ax, chisel, knife, fire; that the only voice allowed these things that waited transformation was hers.

She said to him, before she could think—and this, too, was akin to her movements with wood, with silver, with gold—“You make things.”

It lacked manners, which would have been a crime in a different place; lacked them in the presence of a man of obvious import.

But it spoke to the heart of the matter.

“Yes,” he said gravely. “I make things.” His hand reached out, and out again, as if he would touch her; it stopped inches short of her face, and fell.

She had seen glass in windows, although her family’s home had had none until the third year of her work with Master Sivold, and she understood that the one that stood between them now was closed.

You make things.

“Yes. Yes, I make things.”

She lifted a hand.

“I do, too.”

He would never hear the ocean again, not as he had. A man’s mind had room for only so much madness, and Gilafas’ less than any Artisan before him.

“Sanfred,” he said, rising, pipe somehow no longer a danger.

“Master Gilafas?”

“I am done for the day. This girl is maker-born; ask her—mother?—for the information we require, draw up those forms that you deem necessary, do what needs be done.” He rose. Picked up the box he had ordered carried to this table with such care.

“This was once yours,” he said.

She looked at it, and her expression twisted. “It was never mine,” she told him solemnly. “I made it for Master Sivold.” She frowned when she said it, and her face lost some of its luster, some of its terrible lure. “Are you upset about it, too?”

He nodded. Before he could catch himself—if he would ever be able to catch himself—his chin fell and rose in a sharp, jerky dip. “But for a different reason. I have not seen the inside of the box. I could not open it.”

“Would you like me to open it for you?”

“If you would.”

She took the box carefully, placing the left palm firmly beneath the center of its flat, legless bottom. And when she opened it, Sanfred understood what Gilafas had not yet said, because he was standing just to his right, and he was human enough to be curious.

The inside of the box itself was longer than the table at which the Makers now sat; it was as deep as a man’s arm from palm to shoulder.

“He needed more room,” she told him gravely, “for the things that I made. Will you give it back to him?”

“Yes,” he told her gently. He knew how important the answer was; she was maker-born, after all.

It took some hours to settle not the girl, but her mother. She would not leave without speaking to the Guildmaster—a sure sign of her ignorance of the workings of the Guild of Makers.

Therefore, Gilafas, exhausted and on the edge of compulsion, drove himself for a second time from the confines of his quarters in Fabril’s reach. Sanfred was nowhere to be seen; neither was the girl, although he had been quite specific.

It was only when he reached the visitor’s lounge that he realized that hours had not, in fact, passed; the sun was wrong for it—it was still in the sky. He steadied himself against this dislocation as Sanfred appeared. Sanfred who could hide mortal concern behind a placid, workman’s expression.

He sat in front of this dour woman, and she beside an older, dourer one. They formed the sides of a triangle; Sanfred, attending, was simple shadow, and moved like a trick of the light.

Master Gilafas had only one desire when confronted with this woman, and it was strong, terrible, as visceral as any need to make, or make again, had ever been.

Take your girl, take her as far away from this place as you can, and still live. Go North, to the barbarians; go South to the slavery of the Southern Courts; go West, to the kingdoms of which I know so little. Leave her anywhere but here.

But he did not.

“Will you take care of her?” the woman asked. She was fidgeting now.

“I assure you, there is not another place in all of the Empire where she will be—”

“Because she’s always been a bit odd.” The woman, having said the words, lost half a foot of height. Her hair, dark with streaks of gray, seemed to frame a face too pale to carry it. “She’s more than a bit odd now. We’re her kin, we know what she means when she speaks; we know there’s no harm in her wild ways. She’s a good girl. She’s an honest girl.”

He started to speak, but she had not yet finished.

“She won’t thieve, mind, not for herself. But she takes a fancy to things she sees—bits of wood or stone, mostly—and she’ll pick ‘em up.”

“We understand that, here.”

“And she’ll work funny hours, if you don’t stop her. It’s hard, but she needs to eat.” Care had worn lines deeply into the material of her face. “Don’t forget it: she needs to eat. And drink. And sleep. She’s got to be reminded; we let her work once, thinking she would stop in her own time. Waited to see how long that was.” Hands were clenched now.

He stared at her. To his surprise, he wanted to offer her comfort. “She will be treasured here in a way that you cannot envision. Sanfred, the man who is hovering, was trained to do two things: he is a painter, here, one of a very few. And he is a … baby-sitter. We all work the hours that your child would work, unminded. And we have learned to watch out for each other. She will not go hungry; she will not go thirsty. Sleep is harder to dictate.”

She wasn’t satisfied. He could see it.

He said simply, “There are things that she is beginning to learn that she should not learn on her own. The box—you saw it—is only the first sign of that. There are others things she might have made. In our histories, a boy much her age walked into the blacksmith’s forge shortly after a bandit raid. The raids that year were fierce and terrible, for most of the land had seen little rain, and the fields would not take.

“He made a sword. It killed. That was all it did. It was his rage and his desire; he wielded it. It sang. He carried it to the bandit’s home, and he had his revenge, and it was bright and bloody.

“But he had had no sword skills, and he was not a large lad; the sword itself contained both the desire to kill and the ability. In the end, the bandits themselves were not enough to slake its thirst, and he wandered into the village he had loved. Hundreds perished before the sheath that would hold that sword was created.”

She was pale, now, pale as light on his beloved ocean. But she asked, simply, “What happened to the boy?”

A mother’s question.

“He was mad,” he replied. “And he remained so.”

“They didn’t kill him?”

He hesitated. “No,” he said at last, and gently, “they did not kill him. They gave him, instead, to our keeping.”

Before she could speak, he raised a hand. “And in our keeping, in the safety of these walls, or in the stewardship of those best suited to such a task, he made such things as Kings wield, and his work helped to change the face of the lands we now call the Empire. He was honored, he was revered. In his fashion, he was loved.”

She closed her eyes. Opened them. “I can’t take her home,” she said, the statement a question.

“No.”

She rose then. “Let me say my good-byes, and I’ll not trouble you further.”

But she would. He could see it in the lines of her face, the depth of her concern. She would go home, to Durant, and the fate of her daughter would draw her out, again and again, to this vast, intimidating place. She would see a stranger in this daughter, and the daughter—he was not certain what the daughter would see.

Because he was sane. Because he had always been blind, that way. He rose and offered the woman his hand; she accepted it as if it were an anchor on a short chain.

To be a failure was something Gilafas had contemplated for the better part of his adult life. But he had contemplated it in the temple makers made of quarters an accident of birth had granted him. To do penance for his failure, he had strengthened the Guild of the Makers immeasurably, giving it the steady guidance that a madman could never have conceived of. This he did for the old man whose joy he had not the strength to live up to.

If he could not increase the mystery of the guild, if he could not add to the grandeur of its legends, he could at least do that.

And he had thought himself an honest man, had thought acceptance of his paltry ability had been his for the better part of a decade.

Now, it was unbearable.

The girl—Cessaly—had been moved to Fabril’s reach the moment her mother had left. He might have assigned the duty of settling her to Sanfred, or another of the makers who served him directly, but cowardice prevented it, presenting him with the first of many menial tasks he was to adopt.

Because Sanfred could not fail to see in the girl what Gilafas himself lacked. How could he?

So it was that Guildmaster Gilafas ADelios led her to the winding tower stairs that led to Fabril’s reach.

She had taken the steps timidly at first, her hands faltering upon the fine rails beneath the grand sweep of open tower, the fading light. She had no experience of this world, save in story—if that— and her fear made her precious to him, for he had no children.

But the fear itself was fleeting.

The light in her eyes was not; it was fire, of a sort, the fire of a forge, the fire of one maker-born who sees into the world of mages. Or gods. He could not himself say, although he had walked that path.

But he knew the moment that she lost fear to wonder; he could see it in her. Could hear it, in the whisper of moving strands of her hair, taken by a breeze that did not—and had never—touched him.

She carved birds; he remembered that the grandmother had mentioned it to Sanfred. Birds, butterflies, creatures not bound to the earth. And he? He worked water, and whales, dolphins, things of the deep that might break the bounds of their element in fleeting steps, with will and joy.

So she flew. Up, up, and up. She knew where the doors were. Were she not small, were her step not contained by the reach of short legs, she might have evaded him utterly. He could not let her do it. He could not let her make herself at home in Fabril’s reach.

Was ashamed of the inability.

We are not judged by what we create; we create. Maker’s motto. And what use that motto now? It was a lie.

Vanity had its use.

Cessaly stopped two thirds of the way up the stairs and placed her hand gently upon the wall. A recess in the smooth stone caught the shape of her palm, molding itself to her fingers as if the stone were liquid.

He heard the ocean’s voice then. A roar, a roar of water breaking stone and wood, rending cloth, burying men. She opened a door that he had never found.

And turned to stare at him, her eyes wide, her brows lost beneath the edge of poorly cut hair. Honey eyes, he thought, a shade too brown to be the eyes of a child of the gods. “Master Gilafas?”

He shook his head, lifting a hand to clear his vision. “I hear the ocean,” he told her bitterly. “Only the ocean.”

“Can you hear me?”

He stopped then, turned the full of his attention upon her, upon the question she had asked. She was a child. By age, she could be counted among adults, but there was nothing of that in her expression; she was made of curiosity, insecurity, joy, and fear.

“Yes, Cessaly. I can hear you.”

His answer was important. Because she could hear him. She could hear the ocean in his voice, could see it in his eyes, her first glimpse of the blue surface against which sun scudded. She smiled, her hand against something soft and warm. “I can hear stone,” she whispered. “I can hear wood growing. I can hear wind in the leaves, and the rain dance. I can hear the birds, seabirds, great birds. I can hear the sun’s voice.”

She had heard these things before, in the dells of Durant, in the furrows of her father’s fields, in the quiet of log and peat and moss yards from the river’s edge, where the water pooled before resuming its passage.

“I can hear silver,” she told him. “And gold. And the voices of rubies and diamonds. Sapphires are quiet.” She stopped. She had never said so much before.

“But I hear the voices. There, past the door. Other voices.”

“Open the door, then, Cessaly.”

She started to. Started, and then stopped. She felt the cold in the cracks between stone. The voices she knew fell silent, one after the other; the cold remained, and she began to understand that it had a voice of its own.

Death. Death there. The death of all things.

She drew back. Shook her head, although it was hard; all of her was shaking.

“Cessaly?”

Her hand fell away from the wall. “No,” she told him sadly. “The cold will kill us.” She turned to look at him, and she saw the shadows that the walls contained, straining for freedom, for something that might have looked like flight to a person who had never seen birds. Never made them, inch by inch, never carved the length of their flight feathers, the stretch of their pinions.

It was dark now. The world was dark.

But Master Gilafas was still in it.

He caught her hand; it was blue.

“Come,” he said gently. “We are not yet there, and there is no cold in Fabril’s reach.”

“Where is Fabril’s reach?”

“Up,” he told her gently. “Up these steps.”

“I can’t see them.”

“No. Sometimes they are hard to see.” The lights in the wall sockets were bright and steady; they had never failed, and he was certain they never would. Fabril had made them himself, had made this tower, the reach.

“Will you take me there?”

“Yes, Cessaly. Can you feel my hand?”

She appeared to be thinking, as if thought were her only vision. He waited.

“I can feel it.”

“Good. You have never made hands,” he said. “But when we arrive, I will bring you wood and tools, and you must try.”

“Just hands?”

“For now, Cessaly. Just hands.” Speaking, he began to walk, the steps as solid and real as the fading light of day, the passage of time, the Holy Isle.

After she had made her way up the stairs—and in his estimation it took some two hours—she had to face the gauntlet of the great hall.

It was in the great hall that his envy, his bitterness, his resentment gave way to something more visceral: fear.

She screamed.

She screamed, and pulled away from him. Pulled back, turned to flee. He lost her, then. The hall swallowed her whole. She was gone.

He cursed as he had not done in years, the reserve and distance of age swallowed whole by the intensity of emotion.

She heard the voice of stone. The voice of mountains, old as the world; the voice of the molten rock in the heart of its ancient volcanoes; the voice, insistent, of its cracking, sliding fall. All the voices she had heard in her life were made small and insignificant; she lifted hands to capture them, and they came up empty.

She had no tools. No way to speak to stone with stone’s voice, no way to soothe it.

But that didn’t stop her from trying.

Trying, now, clawing at things too heavy and solid, her arms aching with effort, hands bleeding.

Past midnight, the fear left him, sudden as it had come. He was drained of it, like a shattered vessel of liquid, and what remained was the residue that had haunted his adult life.

Think. Think, Gilafas.

What a maker heard—if a maker heard what an Artisan heard at all—did not destroy the world; it did not unmake a reality. Fa-bril’s reach, in all its frustrating, distant glory, was there before him. And he knew that the girl had come with him, slowly and hesitantly, eyes wandering across the face of its carved, misshapen walls.

And what of the door, Gilafas? What of the door that did not exist until she placed hand against wall?

It did exist. It always existed. I never found it. I never thought to look. I knew what the shape of the tower was—and is—/ knew that such a door at that place could not exist.

Think.

He ran to the closed doors of his workrooms, those vast, open spaces in which light dwelled when there was any light at all. He opened drawers and cupboards, looking for chisels, for the knives which woodworkers used; wood was not his medium, but all makers of note often dabbled.

When he dropped a drawer on his foot, when the slender tubes made for blowing glass shattered about him, he paused long enough to avoid its splinters. Just that.

He did not think to call Sanfred, and would wonder why later. For now, he continued to search until he found the oldest of his supplies; blocks of wood as long as his forearm.

Thus armed, he paused again. Think, Gilafas. Think.

No. Not think.

Listen.

By dawn, he found her, and in finding her, he found a room that he had never seen.

It lay behind the stonework on the west wall, between the arch made of the raised arms of two men whose likenesses were said to be perfect: the first Kings of Essalieyan. They were not overly tall, and the space between them just large enough to fit a small girl with ease. A large man would not have been able to follow that passage, and if he had never felt cause to be thankful for his lack of stature before, he was grateful now.

The passageway was narrow and poorly lit; it was cold with lack of light, and almost silent; his breath was captured by folds of cloth, muted.

He could not have said why he chose to follow this path. But having begun, he heard her, and hearing her, saw her clearly, small, fine-boned, clear-eyed. He thought of what she might be, robbed of color and lent the clarity of glass or crystal, and this helped; he could imagine the fires, the glass, the workroom, the movement of hands and lip, the changing contours of a medium that was fluid, as close to the ocean in texture as anything solid could be.

He had never had to work so hard just to walk in Fabril’s reach.

Fabril’s reach will teach you everything you need to know.

For the first time in years, he turned those words over in his mind’s eye, blending them with Cessaly until they were a part of her, a part of his making. What, Master Nefem, do I need to know? And if this is a part of it, why do I need to know it?

The hall ended; it opened into a room that had windows for a ceiling, a dome of fractured light. Crystal cut its fall into brilliant hues that traced the sun’s progress.

She huddled in their center, her hands scratching the surface of the floor. She did not see him; could not see him. What she saw, he could not say, but he knew that she would see it until she found some release from it, until it was exorcised.

He could see what she could not: blood, dried and crusted upon the palms of her flailing hands.

He did not touch her. Instead, he knelt by her side and placed those tools he had found into the hands that were so ineffectual.

For the first time since he had entered the room, her focus changed. He placed the wood before her, but above the flat, smooth surface of stone.

He would take her from this room, in time. But that time was not yet come.

“Cessaly,” he said, although he was certain she wouldn’t hear him, “make what you must; I will return.”

She loved the sound of Master Gilafas’ voice.

No one had ever had a voice like his, and she marveled at it, for there was a texture beneath the surface of his words and his emotions that moved her to listen. She had thought to miss home; to miss her da and her mother; to long for Bryan and Dell, the two people who had brought her close to flight in the days of her childhood.

She forgot that longing quickly. The soles of her feet forgot the earth and the tall grass; forgot the slender silver stream; forgot the soft mosses, the heavy leaves of undergrowth. The stone spoke to her in a voice that was so close to her own she felt it as a part of her. To lose that would kill her.

And the only person with whom she could share this strange homecoming was Master Gilafas. His friends, Sanfred and Jordan, were as deaf as the man who had helped to birth her.

Master Gilafas understood her. He came to her with bits of wood, smooth stone, raw gems; he gave her room in his workshop, and brought to her the glass that he loved. She did not love it, but she listened to its voice as it spoke to him, and sometimes, when the world was quiet and her hands could be still, she would sing a harmony to its quiet voice.

But at other times, the stones would lead her to rooms that Master Gilafas could not find on his own. She was afraid of the stone, then; afraid of being alone. She hated the darkness that lingered at its edges; it hurt her, and it promised to hurt her more.

She knew it. Because she heard what the stones said to him when he walked by her side. She would glance anxiously at his face when the stones spoke in their sharp, cold voices.

Sometimes she would ask him about the voices.

And he would take her hands in his and smile gently. “Yes,” he would say, “I hear them. But they are only words, Cessaly. Pay them no heed.”

And she would see her death in these stones, but his words and his voice were stronger.

He was reduced, he thought, to being a baby-sitter.

He had, in that first month, attempted to foist that duty upon

Sanfred’s broad shoulders, and Sanfred was more than willing to accept it.

But the greatness of the talent that all but consumed Cessaly was denied in its entirety to Sanfred. He could not hear what she heard. He could not see what she saw. Instead, he heard madness, and only madness.

The stories were there, of course. Every apprentice, every young journeyman, every man who desired to be called Master— and there were not a few of those in the guild—knew the stories.

The Artisans were mad. Gloriously, dangerously, mad.

Only madness could conceive of a small jeweled box in which the whole of a room might be contained. Only madness could create Fabril’s reach, bending the fabric of the real and the solid to the vision of its maker. Only madness, yes.

But madness had created more, much more.

And Gilafas was doomed to understand it. To see what he could not be; to almost touch what he could not acheive. His curse.

Sanfred lost Cessaly for two days. He came to Gilafas, ashen and terrified, and all but fell in a groveling heap at the Guildmaster’s feet, weeping. Two days, Gilafas searched; two days, he listened.

He found her at last in a room he had visited once in nightmare, standing before the effigy of altar upon which her naked body lay, cradling rod and sword. What he found in search of Cessaly, he was never allowed to lose again. It waited, that room.

He had carried her from it with care and difficulty; she had in her hands the softest of stones, and powder flew from it as she carved and polished its face, her eyes unseeing, her ears bleeding.

Two days later, she had begged him for gold. He had brought that, and more besides: gemstones, large as eyes. She was thin as a bird; lifting her, he could believe that her bones were hollow. She said, “I’m flying, Master Gilafas. You’ve made me fly!” And laughed, delirious. Insane.

He loved the sound of that laugh, and he understood, when he called Sanfred again, that Sanfred not only did not love it, but in fact, was terrified by it.

The fear galled Gilafas; the pity and horror that Sanfred could not hide when he next saw Cessaly enraged him. He had not expected that. Had he, he might have been more temperate.

More cautious.

“Do you not understand what you have witnessed?”

Sanfred was mute in the face of his words.

“The guild has not been graced by a talent as pure as hers since its founding. Do you not understand the significance of her presence?”

An ill display indeed, for he knew the answer. No. How could he?

“You … are not … as she is.”

“No, Sanfred, I am not. To my profound sorrow, I am not. Get out. Get out; I will tend her myself.”

He was her captive. He came to understand that. The whole of his life, his authority, his stature meant nothing to her. And where was the justice in that? For his life revolved around her. The hours of his rising, the hours in which he might sleep, were dictated by hers, and she slept the way a newborn does: unaware of the strictures of day and night, light and darkness.

She took food at her whim, and when that whim was weak, at his; she drank because he demanded it. Sometimes, when he was exhausted beyond all measure, he went to the apothecary and fed her bitter brew; it dulled her for some hours while he slept.

Sanfred, unable to champion Cessaly, became in all things Gilafas’ ears and eyes; only upon royal command did Gilafas choose to leave Fabril’s reach. He had lost Cessaly for two days; he did not intend to do so again.

Captivity breeds either hostility or resignation, and in Gilafas it bred both.

He was surprised, then, to find that in the stretch of the days from summer to Henden, he had learned to love the cage.

He discovered it thus: Duvari came to visit.

It had been months since their first meeting in the heights of

Fabril’s reach; the Astari had sent no word, and by its lack, Gilafas understood that the Sword at least was whole.

But when Duvari appeared in the doorway of his workroom, he knew that the lull had ended. Cessaly was in the corner, by the cooling glass. She had, in her fashion, been singing, and together they had blown a bubble in which one of her butterflies was encased, its lines brought out by light. They had learned to work together in this fashion, Gilafas the hands behind their mutual will.

“Remember, Cessaly, not to touch it yet. It will burn your hands, and you will not be able to make until they are healed.”

She nodded, too absorbed to look up.

Trusting her, then, he stepped away.

He was not dressed for an audience; indeed, he wore the oldest of aprons, the most worn of gloves. The glass that protected his eyes sat upon his head like a wayward helm; he almost lowered it when he saw Duvari. The threat in his presence was palpable.

But he did not do it. Cessaly was sensitive to gesture this close to making’s end, and she was always sensitive to the tone, the texture, of his voice.

“I would speak a moment in private,” Duvari said quietly.

In that, they were of a mind. Gilafas nodded politely. “I … would prefer … to remain in sight of her.”

“It was not a request. The matter is of a sensitive nature.”

“As is she,” Gilafas replied evenly.

Duvari frowned. The frown was unlike the one that normally adorned his features, and Gilafas instantly regretted his words.

“Very well, Guildmaster. King Reymalyn has sent me with a message.”

“And that?”

“The Sword,” he said softly, “was drawn this morning.”

Heart’s blow. He lifted a feeble hand to ward it, but it was far too late.

“I confess that I could not read what was writ in the runnels, although the words were clear to me. King Reymalyn labored under no such handicap.”

“The sword was forged by Fabril,” Gilafas said, the words leeched of the pride that once might have lodged within them. “If I was to guess, I would say that no one but the King Reymalyn— with the possible exception of the King Cormalyn—might read what is written there.”

“You are correct.”

“Why have you come?”

“If you must play at ignorance, I will indulge you. I came—”

“Gilafas, look!”

Cessaly had run from the room’s corner, her eyes bright. She reached out and caught his apron, tugging at it insistently. “Come, look, look!”

He followed her, aware that he risked Duvari’s wrath. Like a shadow, the Astari followed, dogging his steps. Gilafas, mindful of this, pried her fingers free, replacing cloth with the palm of gloveless hand.

In the circular globe, the butterfly hovered, wings flapping. They brushed the concave sides of the glass, and the glass trembled in response.

Duvari said quietly, as if there had been no interruption, “The Sword must be reforged, the Rod remade. They were meant to stand against the Barons; they were not created to stand against the darkness.”

“Then you are doomed,” he said, but without hope, “for the man who made those emblems of the Kings’ power is long dead.”

“Indeed. But it is not by his hands that they must be remade.”

Gilafas stiffened. He was surprised, but he shouldn’t have been. The Lord of the Compact, it seemed, made all secrets, all hidden histories, his business. “I had thought it might be by yours, Guildmaster.” He bowed, and when he rose from the bow, his face was as smooth as the surface of the glass that now contained the floating butterfly.

Gilafas had a moment of clarity, then, standing before the most feared man in the Empire. He saw the pity in Duvari’s face; the pity and the ruthlessness.

“It is trapped,” Duvari said, speaking for the first time to Cessaly.

“Oh, no,” she said, eyes round, face serious. “It is safe.” And then she frowned. “I have something for you,” she told him. “Can you wait here?”

He nodded gently. He, who had never done a gentle thing in his life.

Cessaly floated from the room, bouncing and skittering around the benches, her arms flapping.

“Understand,” Duvari said quietly, when she had vanished, “that the Kings have no choice in this. The darkness has risen, and it is gathering. The Kings cannot go unarmed into that battle, and they will go.”

“She is a child,” Gilafas replied.

“She is an Artisan, and if I understand the hidden histories well enough, she is the Artisan for whom Fabril built the reach. What she needs to learn, she must learn here, and she must learn it quickly.”

The Guildmaster closed his eyes.

“Because if I am not mistaken, she will not survive long.”

“She is not the power that Fabril was.”

“She does not have his knowledge,” Duvari replied, “nor the allies with whom he worked so long and so secretly. But the power?” Again, something akin to pity distorted his features. “Affection is a dangerous burden, Guildmaster. We go, in the end, to war, and the chance of victory is so slight we can afford to spare nothing.”

“It is not in my hands,” he said stiffly.

That was his truth. It was not, it had never been in his hands.

“Is it not?”

She came then, before he could frame an answer, and her hands, so often spread wide to touch the surfaces of the world around her, were clenched in loose fists. Sunlight caught the edges of gold, the brilliant flash of diamond.

She walked up to Duvari without even a trace of her usual caution. “These are for you,” she told him gravely.

“Forme?”

“Well, maybe for the Kings.”

He held out his palms very slowly, as if she were a wild creature. She placed in them two pendants. They were eagles, the guildmaster thought, wings spread in flight, flight feathers trailing light. At their heart, large as cat’s eyes, sapphires. To Gilafas’ eyes, they glowed.

“These will help,” she told him quietly. “With the shadows.”

“The shadows, Cessaly?”

She nodded. “We have them here, and I don’t like them. I made one for me, too. When I wear it, I don’t hear shadow voices. Only the other ones. The stones,” she added, by way of explanation. “The wood, and the gold—the sapphires are quiet, but you need the quiet—and Master Gilafas.”

“You hear the shadows here?”

“Don’t ask her that!” Gilafas cried out.

But her face had turned, from Duvari, from him. Skin pale, her eyes darted along the workroom’s walls. Here, the voices of nightmare were weakest; this was Gilafas’ space.

But the nightmares had been growing stronger; there was now not a single moment in which she could safely be left alone without some sort of work in her hands. She jerked twice, as if struck, and then turned and fled the room.

Gilafas, prepared in some fashion for these episodes, ran to the workbench and swept up the satchel in which the most portable of her tools were contained.

“Guildmaster,” Duvari began.

“Not now, Duvari.”

He did not expect argument; he did not receive it. But he was angry enough that he could not stop himself from speaking as he strode to the door. “If I have lost her again, you will pay. One day, she will go someplace where she cannot be found; she will be beyond us, working until she starves. If that day is today, I swear to you—and to the Kings you protect—that the Guild of the Makers will never again serve at your command.”

He did not wait for the reply.

And perhaps he would have been surprised to know that none was made.

Cessaly did not run far.

Had she been afraid of Duvari, she would have, but she found

herself liking the man; he was very quiet. He wasn’t cruel, but he wasn’t kind; he was almost like the stonework on the walls: made of a single piece, and finished. He needed nothing from her.

The shadows were not afraid of him either. The moment he mentioned their voices, she heard them clearly, and they were some part of his. But although they touched him, he somehow did not touch them.

Important, that he never heard their voices.

She had used sapphires to capture quiet, and diamonds to capture light; the eagle was simply the ferocity of a flight that did not necessarily mean departure. She had made those in the round room because she had been afraid. But she had made three. One, she wore; because she wore it, she could now find her way up— and down—the winding stairs that led to the below.

But two she had simply held, and when she had seen Duvari— when he appeared at her side as the butterfly began its flight—she knew why: they were for him.

But she didn’t like his “thank you” very much, and she wasn’t certain if she wanted to see him again.

Maybe. Maybe she wanted to be able to see him.

She frowned. Things she had not tried now suggested themselves in the brilliant hues of the floor of the round room. She had her stone, of course, and she carved while she paced the floor, a hollow feeling in throat and stomach. She would ask Gilafas for what she needed. He always gave her what she needed.

He found her almost instantly, which should have stilled his anger; it did not. She was working, although not in a frenzy, and when he entered the chamber—her workroom, as she often called it—she offered him a smile at home in the deep, soft rainbows cast by sun.

“Master Gilafas,” she said, as he bent a moment and set his knees against those colors, “could you bring me a loom?”

“Yes. Yes, Cessaly. After lunch, I will bring you a loom.” He did not tell her that such an undertaking would take more than a single morning, and did not ask her where the loom should be set; he did not speak to her of cost, the responsibility of expenses, the things that had always balanced his momentary, frenzied desires.

She did not care; could not.

And in truth, neither did he.

The loom should have been foreign to her; the working of metal was a gift that had been taught over the course of months. But he was not surprised to hear the clacking of the great, wooden monstrosity that now occupied some part of his workroom. There were no other rooms that could house it in Fabril’s reach—at least none that he was aware of, and if Cessaly knew otherwise, she did not choose to enlighten him.

He considered her carefully as he worked, and he did work; the voices were upon him, and they rode him unmercifully. He no longer knew if ocean’s voice drove his hands, or if hers did—or worse, if his own now moved him, with its anger and its self-contempt. Not good, and he knew it; not good to be driven by that last voice. Men died for less, grabbing in a frenzy at those things that might still it—and not only the maker-born; all men with hollow power.

But it drove him.

Glass was before him, broken, colored, and around it a skein of lead; the things he knew better than he knew himself.

The loom was racked with the passage of her hands. It seemed fitting that they should work in this fashion. He was surprised that he was aware of her at all, for he knew by the feel of the glass in his hands that he should have been beyond her.

He failed in his duty, this day; he forgot to feed Cessaly. Forgot to feed himself.

Was not aware, until Sanfred forcibly removed his hands from his tools, of what he was making.

But Sanfred, having wrested the cutters from his hands paused, frozen, in front of his mosaic.

For the first time, Gilafas permitted himself to see what the glass contained.

Cessaly.

Cessaly, who, in bleeding hands, carried two things: a Rod with a crystal Orb that must deny all hint, all taint, of darkness, and a Sword whose edge glittered like the diamond wings of her eagles.

And he looked at the sky, red and dark, sun bleeding into the night of the horizon. Three days, for three more days, the light would wane early, the night sustain itself. The heart of the month of Henden would arrive, and with it, the longest night.

Duvari returned two days after his first visit with Cessaly. He came without warning, which was wise; had he offered warning, the Guildmaster would have forbidden him entrance, and personally would have dismissed anyone who disobeyed that order.

But he offered no such introduction; worse, he did not come alone. The companion he had chosen to bring to the Guildhall had caused concern and quiet outrage long before the two men had mounted the stairs that led to Fabril’s reach.

Gilafas understood why the instant he laid eyes on the second man. His hair was long and white; it fell across his shoulders like the drape of an expensive cape. He had not chosen to bind it, which was unusual; Gilafas had never seen that hair escape the length of formal braids.

“Guildmaster,” the man said.

“Member APhaniel,” he replied coolly. “To what do I owe this … singular … honor?”

“To the busy schedule of Sigurne Mellifas, alas. The Council of the Magi occupies all of her waking time at the moment.”

“I had heard there was some difficulty.”

Meralonne APhaniel shrugged broadly. “Among mages, there is always difficulty.”

“Among makers, the same can be said.” But only grudgingly. “Although I confess that I have seldom had cause to resent the difficulties that keep Member Mellifas away, I resent them this day.”

A pale brow rose in a face that was entirely too perfect on a man of Meralonne’s age.

“It is understood. Sigurne is better at handling difficulties of this nature. In all ways. But perhaps I am not entirely truthful.”

Gilafas snorted. “Of a certainty, you are not entirely truthful.”

“No? Ah, well, perhaps my reputation precedes me.” A glimmer of a smile then. “And one day, when we both have time, you must tell what that reputation is. The dour and incommunicative Duvari cedes not even the most paltry of rumors to the mage-born. He is significantly less … suspicious of the maker-born.”

“Not, apparently, of their guildmaster.”

“Well, no, of course not. The Guildmaster actually possesses power.”

“Gentlemen,” Duvari said coldly, “may I remind you of the scarcity—and therefore the value—of our time?”

Meralonne reached into his robes and drew from it a long-stemmed pipe. “May I?”

“Of course.”

“You might join me, Guildmaster.”

Gilafas started to say that he did not smoke, and thought better of it. He did, and he guessed that the mage-born member of the Order of Knowledge knew exactly what it was that burned in his pipe when he chose to bring it to his lips. He reached for pipe and box, and bitter, bitter weed. Spread dry leaf in the flat bowl of his pipe.

“I have seen the work of your apprentice,” Meralonne said, when smoke lingered in the air. “The two pendants.”

“And they?”

“You must guess at what they do, Guildmaster.”

“I confess that I have not the resources—nor the desire—to test them. They are effective in some measure against the— against our enemies?”

“Yes.” Meralonne’s cheeks grew concave as he inhaled. “I had not thought to see their like again, not newly made. But yes.” He turned, then, to the corner of the room in which Cessaly lay sleeping. In sleep she was much like a cat; she found it as it came, and took it where she sat, stretching out against floor or chair.

“She is young,” he said at last.

“She is.”

“Do you understand what it is that is asked of her?” He could not find the words, but for once, he didn’t need to. He turned to his bench, and lifted the gauze he had placed across his work, setting it aside with care; he wanted no dust, no wood shavings, no metallic slivers caught in its threads. Then he lifted the glasswork, the mosaic of transparent color, and he turned its bitter accusation toward the magi.

Through the wild skein of her hair, he saw the golden skin of Meralonne APhaniel.

“I see,” the magi said quietly, “that she is not the only Artisan to busy herself in Fabril’s reach.”

“I have always worked in Fabril’s reach,” Gilafas said dryly. “Oh, indeed. But you have only twice created something that blends the skill of the maker with the deeper, wilder magicks. Ah, I stand corrected; this is the third, and if I were to guess, the most subtle, the most powerful, of the three.” Gilafas’ turn to be surprised. “Is it?” “The most powerful?” “A work.”

“Do you not know?” He said nothing.

“Magic—such as mine—is not sanctioned within these halls, Guildmaster, but were it, I am not certain it would divine the purpose behind your creation. Certainly it will not tell me more than you yourself know. But I will say this, and perhaps I say too much. I am not Duvari. I am aware of what is asked, of both you and your apprentice. Duvari accepts all cost and accrues all debt in the cause of the Kings. I? I do not believe that debt ever goes unpaid, and I am loath to accumulate it. “And I believe your apprentice is waking.” Gilafas frowned; he had heard nothing. But he did not doubt the Magi. He turned to see that Cessaly had taken to her feet. She was smiling shyly.

“Have you come to see my work?”

“I have,” Meralonne replied. “And I have come to bring you something. Which would you have me do first?”

“My work.” Her smile was unfettered by such things as caution or suspicion. She walked over to the closet Gilafas had emptied for her use, and drew from it three bundles of cloth. One was as blue as cloudless sky, one as dark as midnight, and one the color of light seen through the fog of cloud. “I made these,” she said, as if it were not obvious.

“Did you make them for anyone?”

“I don’t know. But I made them. They are all too large for me. The loom moves quickly and the cloth chatters.”

She handed him the darkest of the three, and as he unfolded it, Gilafas saw that it had a hood. A cloak, he thought.

“Put it on.” Her little, imperious voice was the only one in the room.

Meralonne did not hesitate. He laid a hand against the weave of the cloth, and ran his fingers across it, his eyes wide. “Child,” he said softly. Just that. But there was no mistaking the longing—and the wonder—in the single word. “You remind me of my youth.” He caught the cloak by its upper edge, and twirled it backward until it fell over his back, obscuring the length of his hair.

He raised the hood, and then, with a smile, fastened the silver clasps that hung at his collar. Gilafas was not surprised to see him vanish.

Cessaly clapped her hands in glee.

The hood fell, and the man reappeared. “My lady,” he said, and he fell to one knee before her laughing face. “We have come to beg a boon of you.”

“Member APhaniel—”

“We have brought, for your inspection, two things.” He gestured. Magic, the Guildmaster thought.

“I have the Kings’ writ,” Duvari said evenly, before Gilafas could voice even token outrage.

A bundle appeared in Duvari’s outstretched arms. He brought it to Meralonne APhaniel, and the magi unwrapped it with care, until he was left with two things.

Gilafas bore witness; he could not bring himself to move.

She came to Meralonne as if she could no longer see him; as if she had eyes only for what he held. Bright, her eyes, like liquid, like the ocean in summer. And dark, like its depths.

She took them from his arms and did not even notice their weight, although she buckled beneath it. She brought her knees to the ground, as if in obeisance, and touched the dull white of the broken Orb, the black and gold of the Sword’s scabbard. Her lips opened and closed, and Gilafas knew a moment of pride, for he could hear her voice, and he was certain the others could not. After a moment, she raised her head, and she looked at Meralonne APhaniel, all joy in the lesser creation gone.

She said, “You should not have brought these here.”

“We had no choice, Lady.”

She rose, staggering; she would not allow him to touch their plain surface. “But the demons will come now.”

“Yes.”

She woke in the dark of the night, in her bed, alone. She had gone to sleep there, her hands absorbed with the beads she had asked for, the strings upon which to place them almost full. Her fingers were stiff with the damp and the cold; she knew that she had worked them while she slept. Master Gilafas would worry. She knew it.

It was why she had forced herself to walk the halls, to come to this room, to let sleep take her while he watched. He only left her when she slept, and only when she was here.

But she had work to do; she knew it. The days. The days had gone; the nights had slowly devoured them. They waited above her head and beneath her feet, gathering the shadows and the darkness. All the voices were strong.

And steel’s voice strongest of all.

She slid her feet out of bed; the floors were cold, but she dare not wear shoes. She wanted no light, nothing to see by, and without it, her feet were her eyes; they knew the halls at least as well as her eyes did.

Beneath her bed, she found the Sword; found the Rod. Her hands knew them by more than their weight, but it was their weight that troubled her, for the Sword was so long it would drag on the floor, the metal of its sheath creating sparks and noise.

She struggled alone.

She understood, dimly, that she was not a simple child, but the child in her was often the only element that could survive the arduous task of making. The understanding clung to her as she struggled: she was not a child. She had come to Fabril’s reach because she was not a child, and she had remained because no one— not even her beloved Master Gilafas—could hear the voices of the wild as well as she.

But she was grateful; had she been at home, had she been in Durant, she was certain the town would have perished this eve. The longest night.

She was not dour by nature; not grim. Master Gilafas, haunted and tired, was both of these things, but she understood that he had come to love her, and because of it, she knew she must leave him. Because she understood the whole of Fabril’s intent, and had, from the moment she had found the room Master Gilafas so hated.

The Rod and the Sword were vessels; they were vessels, and those vessels had long lain empty.

She had listened to the ocean in Master Gilafas’ voice. She understood vessels, and what they contained, or could contain, because of that distant voice.

She was not so old that she had forgotten fear. In the dark of her room, she armed herself: she fastened the clasp of the pendant she had made, cold sapphire resting against the hollow between her collarbones. She drew cloak from an armoire that was otherwise empty, and ring from the box at her desk. She took no gloves, and paused a moment before the silver sheen of dark mirror.

In the dark, she drew the blade. She was not a swordsman; it was an awkward action. But she must do it; she must leave the sheath here. The blade, the Rod, they must go where she traveled.

The moon was high. Fabril had loved light, and if gold was the color of day, silver shone now, radiant and cool. Enough light to see by, but she did not need it; she could see in the shadows.

She hesitated for just a moment, on the edge of the master’s workroom. And there she laid down her burden, and ran lightly across the darkened threshold. Moonlight came through glass in all its muted color; she passed it by, again and again, until she reached the delicate globe of blown glass Gilafas had given her.

Inside, floating and fluttering, the butterfly.

She pursed her lips, touched the cool glass, and with a simple word, she set the butterfly free. It broke the meniscus of glass surface as if it were liquid and passed above her, circling her head three times.

She let it go and turned again to her task.

The Rod and the Sword had been forged and quenched in the whole of a single day. She knew it, by touch; understood what not even the cold man understood: that Fabril had made these in the light of the longest day, a measure of, and containment for, the summer. It was, as her simple jewelry box had been, an act of affection, a desire to help those loved and respected. And in summer’s season, the Rod had served the son of Wisdom, and the Sword the son of Justice: the Twin Kings who had, for centuries, given their lives to the Empire of Essalieyan.

But all things living know time and its passage, and all things living know the shifting of seasons. Summer had passed, the season so long that winter had been forgotten.

Aiee, she hated the shadows, the sibilance of their terrible whisper.

But what was forged in the grim stillness of winter, what lived in its ice and its blankets of pure, cold snow, was strong in a way that the summer itself was not strong, and that strength, cold and terrible, existed outside of the shadows.

Terrible power, scouring and lonely.

She had heard of men who had died steps from their homes when the blizzards had come; they could not see their way to safety, and what love and hope they carried as they struggled ended there.

Kalliaris, she thought, for the first time since she had come to Fabril’s reach. Kalliaris, smile.

She walked the long hall, seeing the frozen stone about her, fitting company, and silent, for this last voyage. She was afraid of only one thing: That she would finish what she had been born to

finish, that she would remake the Rod and the Sword that would be so necessary to the Twin Kings upon whom the Empire depended, and that there would be no one to bring them home.

Other fears would come later, to keep her company and ease her loneliness, but this fear was the wisest and the strongest.

She could not make anything while she walked, and she felt the gnawing hunger take her hands, felt this scrap of reasoned fear, this almost adult comprehension, fray about the edges, pulled like the loose thread in a weaving from her loom. So she cradled the blade with care against the cloak that protected her from the sight of men, and she ran her fingers, over and over, across the surface of what was writ in its runnels.

She began to descend the stairs, and it was hard: the floor was cold, and the steps steep. The lights that existed against the walls were dim; they did not speak a language that her eyes understood. But she did not need them; she knew where she walked, and when she reached the halfway mark, she set her hand against the wall and waited.

The door opened.

The door opened into the Scarran night, and the Winter Road wound from its step into the hollows of the ancient, wild way.

Gilafas could not say what woke him, not at first.

He sat up in bed as if struck, the full face of the moon framed in the windows of his chambers. The night was silent; he listened a moment and heard the distant thrum of ocean voice. It was not insistent.

He rose, clenching fists, and cried out in shock and pain; his left hand burned.

He spoke a word and the light flooded his vision, forcing his lids down; when they rose again, he stared at the open mound of his hand, his left hand.

In it, in the light, were shards of delicate glass, the broken form of butterfly wings above crescent pools of blood.

He listened, and he heard the ocean, and only the ocean, and then he understood.

He dressed like a madman, taking the time to don jacket over his sleeping robes. He grabbed a dagger, although it was futile; tore a light from the wall and clutched it in his bleeding fist.

He took no care to be silent; silence was not his friend, and the noise was a distraction, a welcome one. He ran to his workroom, commanded light, banished moon. There, on the farthest reach of his personal bench, he saw what he had dreaded: the globe in which he had encased Cessaly’s butterfly. This was their only common work, and it was empty now; what she built, he had in the carelessness of sleep destroyed.

What night? What night, he thought, frenzied. Was this the longest night? Or was it past him, was it gone?

But no: for once the darkness was blessed, for it lingered, deep and forbidding.

He began to search for Cessaly.

The first place he looked was her room, but it was empty; there was no trace of her presence in it at all, although the sheets were turned back and her cupboard door swung open as he approached.

The halls were long. He knew all of her rooms, for once she had opened the ways, they could not be closed. And he knew his own: the room in which her death was carved in stone, the obscenity of it stronger every time he chanced upon it.

He visited them all. All of them, and he found her in none, although his own horror waited around every doorway and every corner.

He had left her. In his exhaustion, he had chosen to leave her. If he found her, he promised whatever capricious god might be listening he would never leave her again.

No, Gilafas, fool. No. Think.

But thought eluded him, deluded him, sent him in circles that ended, always, with the workroom.

But the last time, the last circuit, had finished him; in agony, he retreated into the moonlight, his hands shaking.

The lights were dim; he could not remember dimming them. He started to speak, and lost the words as he turned to the great windows that formed a casement for the moon. No; not the moon, but some light that was much like it: radiant and cool.

In its heart, standing in robes the color of night, stood a ghost, a demon. He had brought the wind with him, and it was a foreign wind, devoid of the taste of salt.

He turned, and the light turned with him, and when at last this intruder faced Gilafas, he saw two things that he recognized.

The first, the least, Meralonne APhaniel, shorn of the emblem of the magi, the decorations of mage-born rank. His hair was white and long, his eyes the color of new steel; he wore no sword, no shield, no armor, but he was dressed for war.

The second, the source of the room’s light: the mosaic he had made; the likeness of Cessaly. Golden hair, honey eyes now shaded to the green that was either trick of light or whisper of power, blue dress, and red, red blood, these burned in his vision. The lead that held the glass was grown insubstantial and weightless, or perhaps it was fluid; he could not see it clearly. Did not try.

“You asked,” Meralonne APhaniel said softly, “what purpose this Work served, and I believe I have divined it. It is of glass for a reason, Guildmaster.

“It is a window.”

A window. He stepped toward it, and faltered in the glow of its light. “Why did you come?”

“I told you. I am not Duvari.”

“You are not truthful.”

“Not entirely, no. This is Fabril’s reach. Fabril was not seer-born; that was not his gift. But it is myth that he created the whole of this wing; he made it his own, but he chose it for a reason.

“For the summer, Guildmaster, and for the winter.” His eyes were unblinking. “You do not hear the summer voice; you do not hear the winter. That is both your gift and your curse. What Fabril wrought does not speak to you. But it speaks to her, to your apprentice, and this is the longest night, the Scarran night.

“And I believe that she speaks to you.”

Truth, Gilafas thought, but not enough of the truth.

“Why did you come here, mage?”

He was silent a moment, and then he said, “I believe that she

will be drawn to the Winter Road, and if she enters into a great Work upon it, she may never return.

“But her Work must return. Do you understand?”

Gilafas said nothing.

“Guildmaster.”

Silence.

“The Guild of the Makers has been waiting for longer than you can imagine, guardians against this age. It has waited so long, there have been those among you who have come, over time, to believe the wait has been in vain, a thing of child’s story. But you know now. And I, and the Kings. Open the window. Open it, Guildmaster, for I cannot.”

He cursed his gift for the first time in his adult life. Cursed himself for a fool for creating this window so small, although it was the gift itself that had guided the making. His hands shook as he approached her, trapped in glass, circled by lead. Her eyes were now closed.

They had not been closed when he had made her, for the width of her eyes was, among the many things about her, the one that he had come to love best.

He cried out in fear and reached for the glass, and his hands passed through it as if it were mist, or smoke, or veil.

The winds tore past him, then, and in their folds, they carried the screams of the dying, thin high ululation, the keening of the damned.

His eyes teared at once, and his cheeks froze; the wind was dry and cold, and it allowed for no liquid. Ocean voice denied him, then, and just as well. He saw darkness, felt it across the length of his arms. Frost formed in the folds of his jacket; flakes gathered against cloth and found purchase there.

Bodies lay aground, some writhing, most still. He saw an arm, a jerking hand, a fallen blade; saw a broken bow, its curve shattered, saw the spill of hair across snow, white upon white, with the thinning pink of spreading blood beneath it.

He could not count them all; he did not try. Once, in the whirl of the angry wind, he saw the pale skin of an upturned face, its eyes wide, lashes made of snowflakes. Too beautiful, he thought, although clearly the man was dead. Too beautiful to be a demon.

He moved, although he could not say how; he knew that the window itself was too small a passage for a man of his size. Could not regret it either.

Until he saw her.

He knew her at once, although he could not see her face, for her hair was short and golden; not even the snow that clung there could obscure its color. He knew the bent shape of her shoulders, the moving jerk of elbows at play; he knew the shape of her back, even seen now, without cloth to obscure it. He knew the soles of her feet, for in the vastness of Fabril’s reach, she never wore shoes.

Had not, he saw, worn them now. She would freeze to death, she would freeze in the wailing storm, and he thought her unaware of it, for the madness was upon her.

He could hear it so clearly he almost forgot himself.

But she was not alone in that clearing; the trees themselves, like wrought-iron fences, surrounded her, and in their shadows a shadow rose, tall and slender and perfect.

It made a poverty of any beauty he had ever seen, and in the Guildhall, he had seen much of it. He was humbled, instantly, by the presence of this stranger, this Winter Queen.

She looked up then, and she smiled, and although she was beautiful, and the smile a gift, he was chilled by it in a way that not even the slaughter had chilled him.

“Yes,” she said softly, “I am the Winter Queen, and you are bold, to come here on this night.”

He could not speak; his legs would not hold his weight and he felt himself begin to bend so that he might place his life where it properly belonged: at her feet. Or beneath them.

But something held him up, something sharp and sudden. “I do not walk the Winter Road,” he told her, the words flowing through him as if they belonged to another. “I have placed no foot upon it, and I have taken nothing, touched nothing that belongs to the Queen who rules it.”

Her smile deepened, and it was chilling; there was no pleasure in it. “You are wise, who appear to be a simple, mortal fool.”

“I am not wise, Lady, or I would not be here, witness to winter; the mortal seasons are not your seasons.”

“No, indeed they are not, and mortals themselves are so fleeting.” And her gaze, the gaze he coveted and feared, slid from his face to the shuddering back of Cessaly. “But not all that is mortal is beneath my interest. You have come for the girl.”

“I have.”

“Ah. But she has not your wisdom; she has set foot, unencumbered foot, upon my path, and she has taken the lives of those who serve me.” She stepped toward Cessaly, and Gilafas followed. Somehow he followed.

He wanted to shout, to give warning, to raise alarm; he was mute. The words that were not his words failed him.

The Winter Queen laughed in the wake of his silence, and her laughter was almost genuine.

She turned to him then. “Has it come to pass, little mortal? Have the gates been opened, and the Covenant shattered? Does the darkness stride the face of the mortal world once more?”

He was mute. Mute, still.

“Leave,” she said. “Leave while I am amused and may know mercy.”

“It is not for your mercy that I have come.”

“Oh?”

“What the child carries belongs in the hands of the god-born; no other might wield or claim them.”

“The hands of the god-born do not trouble them now,” she replied, but amusement had left her face, and her lips were thinner. “And they have been made, remade, in my realm.”

“They have been made and remade in the wild realm, Lady.”

“And the wild realm knows no law but power.”

“The wild realm knows no law but yours, it is true. But your vow is law in the realm, be your oath ancient, so ancient that it is forgotten upon this plane. You cannot lay claim to the Rod or the Sword until those vows are fulfilled, and, Lady—if you seek to retain even one, they will never be fulfilled, and your power will be diminished by the binding.”

Her hair swept past her face; the gale had returned in the clearing.

“Perhaps,” she said, one hand falling to the hilt of the sword she carried, and the other to the horn. “But so, too, will yours, and the mortal kingdom will surely fail. The Sword and the Rod came to me.”

“Indeed.”

“And they might lie here, unclaimed, until the seasons turn.”

He fell silent again, the words stemmed.

And then she smiled. “I sense another presence, mortal. And perhaps this means that you do not understand what it is that you risk. What do you desire?”

His mouth opened. Closed.

Her eyes, her dark and golden eyes, flared; he felt a trickle of fire along his cheek, a caress that would leave a scar. “Speak,” she said again. “And speak freely.”

“I want the girl,” he said. His words now. His own.

“Let me grant you a gift,” she said coldly, “a gift of vision.” She lifted her arms, one to either side; in the wake of the moon’s light across the fine, fine mesh of chain shirt, the world darkened.

Dark, he knew it: it was his own. He saw the spires of the three cathedrals, raised higher than even Avantari, the palace of the Kings. They burned; circled in air by winged beasts and their riders, besieged by wind and shadow. They were empty, he thought; empty, he prayed. Beneath them, in the streets below, the flash of magic, the clash of armies.

Small armies, pockets of futile resistance.

The vision shifted as the wind changed; he flew over the dying city to the fields of Averalaan, and there he froze, for there he saw what they did not name.

Lord of Darkness.

It is not possible. It cannot be possible.

“Look well,” she told him softly, “for you will see no Kings upon the field, and few armies. All of the bodies are yours; the Lord of the Hells has risen.

“I cannot say that the Kings would triumph had they the Rod and the Sword for which so much has been offered. But you have not even the hope of that: the Kings perished in Avantari, bereft of the power granted them by the artifacts of Fabril. Yes, even with her hand upon them, they are his.”

She lowered her arms slowly, and the smile returned to her face. “I understand some small measure of mortality, Gilafas ADelios. It amuses me, and in this long, long winter, very little does.

“So I will give you what I have given few: a choice. You may take the child, or you may take the artifacts. But you may not take both. Choose,” she said softly. “Choose; I will not intervene as long as you take only one thing when you return. Either—she, or they—will be of interest to me.”

Gilafas was consumed by the winter, the winter’s chill. “The dawn is coming,” the Winter Queen told him. “In your world, in the world in which you now stand, the sun will soon rise. Delay, Gilafas, and you will have neither.”

He reached out to touch Cessaly; his hand gripped her shoulder. He had thought she would not notice, for she often didn’t.

But she turned to him, turned at once, snow spilling from her lap. Her hands were dark with blood, but he could see, as she lifted her palms, that that blood was not her own. She had never been so still, in all the time he had known her. In all the brief time.

“Cessaly?”

Her face was a young woman’s face, her eyes round and dark with exhaustion and fear. She lifted her chin, and met his eyes, and he realized that she had poured so much of herself into this making that she could at last, for a moment, know sanity.

It was terrible.

I will not do this, he thought. She is Fabril’s equal. She is his superior. What Fabril made, she can make again, and better. If we have her. If only we have her.

But he did not believe it. Desired belief more than he had desired anything, even the mantle of Fabril’s legacy.

Cessaly touched his hands, pulling them from her shoulder.

She was so cold he would not have thought her living had she not moved; her lips were blue.

And her eyes. Blue, he thought, and reddened.

“You can only take one thing,” she said softly. She raised the Rod; its orb was whole and glowing with fractured, colored light, a dance of fire, a thing not of this Winter place, although it had been born to it. “These.”

“Or you,” he said, and the words cut him. Guildmaster. Keeper of Fabril’s legacy. If she were gone, he would again be the only Artisan to grace the guildhall.

She said, “I have made these. They are your responsibility and mine. Protect what I have made, Gilafas. Protect my making.”

Maker’s words. Maker’s ferocity, in her sanity.

He shook his head. He knew; he knew what must be done. The Winter Queen had shown him the truth of that need.

“No. No,” he whispered. “Cessaly—”

She smiled, her jaw shuddering with the effort of maintaining that expression. “Thank you,” she told him softly. “I know what has to be done … but … thank you.”

Then, before he could speak, she placed the Rod and the Sword into his arms, and she rose, quick and catlike, and she pushed.

Meralonne APhaniel was not Duvari, as he had promised. He restrained Gilafas when the Guildmaster almost threw himself into the window again; he forced him—as gently as one could a man made wild and frenzied with grief—to see that the window had closed: he had a mosaic, some proof of the existence of a girl he had foolishly learned to care for, and that was all. To run at it would simply shatter it.

At the time, that would not have been a loss.

“You have what you want,” he had said. “Get out!”

But the magi had carried the stained glass to the window, and he had gestured there a moment, and when he had stepped back, it rested securely against the greater glass.

“This will not comfort you now,” he said softly, “and perhaps it never will. But I will say to you that the Winter Queen has always had an interest in the Artisans; that their madness in the end is proof against the madness she would cause.” He bowed. “I am sorry, Guildmaster.”

He looked up. “What did she mean?” he asked, dully. “When she spoke of the turn of seasons, what did she mean?”

“Nothing,” Meralonne replied. “For she speaks of the Summer Road, and it has been forbidden her for so long, I do not know if it will ever return.”

“And Cessaly?”

“She will never return.”

He was required to come up with a story that might explain a young girl’s disappearance, and he did, but Duvari judged the explanation itself unwise, and in the end, in disgust, he accepted the Lord of the Compact’s version of events and burdened Sanfred with its spread.

He labored in Fabril’s reach in a fruitless search for a door, or a window, into the winter world, and the days passed, spring becoming summer, summer fading into fall, and from there, the rain and the shadows of Henden. He counted them, and lost count of them as he toiled; he spoke with the wise, and when the wise gently turned him—and his money—away, he at last surrendered.

He did not accept her loss.

And perhaps because he could not accept it, could not accept the terrible silence of the absence of her voice, it was a full year before he chose to leave the guildhall, to take the road that led to the Free Town of Durant. This was not his penance; it was his duty.

To the mother, he carried word of her daughter’s greatest act of making, but the mother had no desire for the comfort of the accolade. Hero was a hollow word.

“You promised,” she said.

And he had bowed his head, old now, and shamed beyond the simple use of words.

“How long?” she had said, her voice rising, the tone fierce and terrible. “How long have you known?”

He could not answer.

“Why did you not come sooner?”

Why?

Because to come here, to make this pilgrimage, to stand before her just and terrible fury, her keening loss, was to acknowledge what he had so desperately refused to acknowledge. Cessaly was gone. Cessaly would never return.

“She is not dead,” he told her.

“How can you know that?”

He met her eyes, her wide, reddened eyes, and he bowed his head. “I know it,” he said bitterly. “And I had hoped that you might know it as well. She was your daughter.”

Fabril’s reach was no longer a cage. It was his home, the place from which he ruled the guild in the splendor due his rank. Empty splendor, as it had always been, but empty now in a different way. He heard the ocean, and only the ocean, and sometimes, in anger and desperation, he gave himself to its voice. More often, he gave himself to the numb detachment of bitterweed, and the business, the empty, hollow business, of the Guild of the Makers.

And then, one quiet morning, he felt it: something familiar, some hint of strangeness in the tower walls. He rose slowly and dressed, and then he walked the hall, fingers trailing the rounded surface of stone until he reached his workroom.

He opened the door, and as he did, something darted past him and down the hall. Had he been in any other place, he might have thought it a bat; in the heights, they were common.

But its flight was too delicate, too much the drunkard’s spin, and he frowned as he stepped through the door.

Froze there, in wonder. The upper reaches of his room were thick with butterflies. Butterflies of glass, blown in every conceivable color; butterflies of silver and sapphire, of gold and ruby, of wood and stone. Among them, smaller than life, were birds, and the birds, too, were the hatchlings not of egg and warmth, but of the things that Cessaly had loved to work with.

He turned to the window, to the stained glass, and his smile, in this room, was the first that had not been tainted by bitterness in a decade. He lifted his hand to touch it; felt glass, and only glass, beneath his palm.

But the butterflies landed upon his shoulders, his head, his arms; they rested lightly upon the back of his hands, and they spoke to him, and each of their voices held some echo of hers.

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