Taminy (19 page)

“Uh.”
Wyth shook himself. “Uh, yes. Exactly.”

“But
a Printweave works on direct transference, and this would need to be modified
...” Her eyes were sweeping the shelves and cubbies over Bevol’s table. “Ah!”
She stretched and reached and came down with a flat piece of leaded crystal
about a quarter inch thick, edge-bevelled to look like a replacement pane for a
mullioned window. She followed that by collecting a couple of wire book stands,
which she arranged to form a spindly framework atop the table. On it, she
balanced the small pane of glass.

“Yes,”
she said. “I think that might work. Is there something in that little volume
you want to copy?”

Wyth
nodded. He picked up the book and scrabbled with it for a moment before finding
the passage. He held it out to her. “This one—verse three.”

“Here.”
She handed him the glass. “What you need to do, in theory, is to place the
glass over the passage and pull the text into the glass.”

Wyth
studied the idea for a moment. “Circumscribed, of course; the glass will cover
more than one passage.”

She
nodded. “Circumscribed, of course.”

“And
then what? I mean, assuming you could pull the image?”

“Then
place the glass over the empty page and push the image out onto the paper.” She
illustrated by slipping a blank sheet under the makeshift frame.

Wyth
saw the principle immediately. “And the further from the page the glass sits,
the larger the script.”

Her
mouth twisted wryly. “Theoretically.”

“Well
...” He held the glass out to her.

She
actually blushed and took a step back. “I can’t. You do it.”

He
didn’t ask, just then, why she was so reluctant, but did as he was told, laying
the little pane over the desired passage. After a moment of thought, he brought
out his crystal and set it on the table atop its padded purse. Then, eyes on
its golden depths, he withdrew into himself, reached above himself and, with
one finger, laid a circumscription inyx around the perimeters of the passage.

Taminy
watched silently, though her lips moved with the brief duan: “Limits there must
be, borders to confine. Boundaries encompass—tight within the line.”

He
paused. Pull the image. How-?

“Try
the water draw,” Taminy whispered.

He
glanced at her. Even in the tremulously rising globe light, her face was
pale—almost casting its own radiance. Her eyes were like dark fires, like the
sea before a storm, like deep green jewels that drank light and gave off heat.

“But-but
water is liquid.”

“Try
it,” she said.

He
did—putting himself into the duan, putting the duan into the inyx, weaving the
two together, drawing the image in his mind: The print rising, bonding to the
glass, becoming set in the glass. It was true, there were reserves of power he
hadn’t known before. He could feel them in a great, deep, wide reservoir behind
him, above him. Stretching, like the sea, into infinity, while he stood on the
shore and pulled with all his might.

“There,”
murmured Taminy. “That might do. Try that.”

Wyth
surfaced from the enveloping aislinn and took the little pane of glass gingerly
into his hands. He transferred it to the wire frame, adjusting it carefully
over the empty page. He could still just see the golden trace of the
circumscription inyx in the transparent panel and aligned it so it allowed a
margin. He did not ask himself if this would work. She was demanding it of him.
He would simply do it. Perhaps, he would fail.

“Now,
push the image through.”

He
held a hand over the plate and its improvised cradle—palm down, fingers
straight—and he imagined pushing against its transparent surface, forcing the
words out, down, onto the pristine surface beneath.

Nothing
happened. He concentrated harder. Still nothing.

“I’ve
no duan,” he murmured and reached for the crystal.

“No,”
Taminy said. “You don’t need that. Here.” She pulled his hand back into
position over the glass and laid her own atop it. Then she began to sing.

“Page to page, through the window.

“Word by word, through the glass.

“Line by line, let the words flow.

“Through the pane, let them pass.”

He
had never heard the duan before and thought she must have just composed it. It
worked, too, to order his thoughts, to focus his energies. Through the window,
he thought, and felt the movement of the Weaving beneath their hands.

On
the table in its bed of velvet, Wyth’s crystal caught fire. A golden rectangle
glowed momentarily on the page beneath the glass, then words appeared—a
paragraph of neat print, nearly a perfect fit for the new page.

Wyth
stared at it, hand trembling over the framed plate. “It worked! Dearest Spirit!
It worked!” He pulled the glass aside and picked up the loose page with its
fresh print. “It’s perfect! Well ... nearly so. It’s a little too wide for the
page, but if I adjust the height of the frame ...Look!” He turned and held the paper
out to Taminy.

She
had withdrawn to the center of the room, hands tucked beneath her arms, tears
glittering in her eyes. A fine sheen of perspiration stood out on her cheeks.

Wyth
was amazed, appalled. “What, mistress? What’s wrong? Have I-?”

She
was shaking her head. “So hard. Such a simple thing. Once I could have breathed
and woven that Rune. Once I was beyond the weaving of Runes, beyond the
chanting of duans. I
was
a duan. Now,
I’m all but deaf to the music.”

“But
it was your duan that completed the Weave. It was your power. I felt it.”

“But
weak. So weak. I had thought I would remember more ...” She shook her head and
grimaced. “No, it’s not the memory. I do remember—the feelings, the energies—as
a cripple remembers walking, recalls the feel of earth beneath her feet, the
freedom of movement. The memory of an act is not the same as the act, Wyth. I
remember how to walk. My legs will not support my weight.”

Wyth
let himself down into the chair before the workbench. “I don’t understand. You
were ... you were the Meri.” He said it. It still seemed impossible, unreal.

“No
longer,” she said.

“Then
... what are you?”

She
laughed. “An upset balance struggling to right itself. Relearning what it is to
be human, while remembering what it is to be Divine. I am dust-”

He
opened his mouth to protest.

She
raised her hand and smiled, then. “But dust with potential.”

“Is
it ... is it that way for all ... ?”

“Osmaer,”
she murmured, losing the smile. “Divinely glorious.”

Osmaer.
The name Ochan had given his great crystal. The Stone for which two wars had
been fought, before which Cynes were crowned and wed and plighted treaties.
Wyth’s reasoning all but drowned in the significance of it. “You ... you are
not the first?”

“Never,”
she said. “Every hundred years or so-”

“The
Cusps! Of course. And always ... always a girl?”

Taminy
nodded. “Thearl was Cyne when I journeyed.”

“One
hundred and fifteen years ago,” marveled Wyth. The very thought... “And before
that?”

She
tilted her head and smiled a little. “There was another. A Hillwild girl with
silver eyes. Cyne Liusadhe the Bard styled her a Wicke. And before that ...”
She shrugged. “Well, it’s a very long Tell, indeed.”

Wyth
was certain his eyes must fall from his head and his lungs forget how to
breathe and his mouth stay eternally open. “But ... are you all given back from
the Sea to wander homeless, forgotten?”

Her
eyes sparkled in the muted light. “Oh, not homeless. There is always someone
sent to give us a home. And not forgotten. She doesn’t forget. She’s always
here, watching, guiding, waiting.”

“Waiting?”
Wyth repeated.

She
didn’t explain that but, instead, turned and moved toward the study door. “Osraed
Bevol will be with you in a moment,” she said, pausing in the archway. “You
might want to try that Copyweave again. Do you remember the duans?”

“Yes.
Yes, of course.” He came to his feet. “But without your help-”

“You
will do quite well,” she said, and left him alone to try.

oOo

He
had seen the Castle Mertuile from the Cyne’s Way
before. As a child he had sat beside his father in an open carriage and driven
toward it, awed by the way it perched atop its craggy hill like a great owl
hunched on a blackened stump. But his real knowledge of Mertuile ended at its
gates. Everything he believed of the great heap of stone was founded on history
lessons and embroidered by legend and hearsay.

In
his childhood imaginings it had been a dark and curious casket full of bearded
sages and grizzled warriors, its halls haunted by the wraiths of sorrowful
Cwens and treacherous courtiers, its throne room inhabited by the jewels of
Creiddylad and crowned, always, by a wise and just Cyne.

Leal
squinted up at the dark walls, trying to see where the ancient foundations met
the newer structures added since the reign of Cyne Earwyn—a Cyne so wise and
just, his warring had invoked the wrath of the Meri and caused both his castle
and his capitol to be ravaged by enemy fire. But the stones of Mertuile offered
no clue as to which of them were there as a result of Earwyn’s folly, and Leal
pulled himself up straight and approached her lower gates.

By
tradition, he was clad in ceremonial tunic with stole and prayer chain, the bag
containing his crystal, Bliss, prominently displayed on one hip. The Gate
Guards took note of this from their stone and log kiosk, greeting him with
respectful smiles. The most senior of them dispatched himself to escort the
Osraed Lealbhallain through the massive double arches, beneath the sheltering
outer curtain, into Mertuile’s outer ward.

There
was much activity here. Jaggers unloaded their wagons in one corner. In
another, a blaec-smythe hammered at a huge horseshoe while his client munched
hay. A row of shops marched out of sight along the northern flank of the inner
walls. Here, a group of young boys swept the cobbles; there, a bevy of women
sat, spinning wool in the sun, their children playing a game nearby with
brightly colored wooden balls. Near the broad archway Leal’s escort led toward,
a knot of soldiers, dressed in the gold and green of the House Malcuim,
conversed jovially.

They
paused to afford him smiles and courtly bows, then took up their dialogue
again, loud as before.

It
was like Creiddylad in miniature, Leal thought, as they passed beneath an open
portcullis into the inner ward—a village unto itself. Of course, there were
times in its history when the great Castle of Malcuim the Uniter had been
forced to self-sufficiency. Times when the countryside teemed with rebellion or
the streets of Creiddylad with betrayal.

Within
the inner walls, Mertuile bested Lealbhallain’s imagination. The rough stones
of the outer ward gave way to carefully laid tiles and brick. And before him,
across the narrower inner yard, the facade of the Castle itself glistened with
native stone, while thick, faceted panes of glass flashed sunlight from every
window embrasure. Banners bearing the clasped-hand insignia of the House of
Malcuim snapped crisply in the sea breeze, saluting him, he imagined.

The
only denizens of this inner circle seemed to be fine-liveried guardsmen, all of
whom watched the approach of the young Osraed with apparent interest. Leal’s
escort took him past these guards and up a broad flight of imposing steps,
replete with stone bannisters that mimicked silkies. At the top of these they
passed through immensely thick wooden doors into a circular anteroom. Here,
Leal’s resistance to being overwhelmed faltered and he succumbed to awe,
gawping at the chamber like a rural schoolboy—which was really, he thought
wryly, what he was, after all.

Fortunately
for his Osraed dignity, the guard had also stopped and bid him wait a moment.
The man disappeared through the center most of three doors that opened from the
chamber, affording Leal the time to admire the multi-hued tiles, gold leaf and
polished stone that graced the walls; the elaborate, pennanted chandelier that
hung from a gilded dome whose up-side down bowl spilled sunlight onto the
mosaic of the Malcuim crest worked into the tiles beneath his feet.

He
was gazing up into the second floor gallery, trying to recognize the motif
worked into the bannister, when the guard returned.

“I’m
to take you to the Cyne’s Durweard,” he said and led the way back from whence
he’d come.

Through
vaulted corridors they moved, up a flight of pale stairs and into a room so
full of sunlight, Leal thought it must surely have just replenished itself from
that extraordinary vestibule. In several rapid blinks he got his bearings and
saw, seated in a throne-like chair near a row of tall windows, a youngish man
in splendid dress. The man smiled in greeting and rose to bow deeply before
him.

“Good
Osraed, I am Daimhin Feich, Cyne’s Durweard.” Feich gestured to a chair of only
slightly less grandeur set at angles to his own. “Pray be seated and tell me of
your mission here. The sergeant tells me you bear a message from Halig-liath.”

Leal
nodded, seated himself, and drew the Durweard’s attention to the leather
portfolio he carried. “I am the Osraed Lealbhallain,” he said. “I have been
commissioned this Season by the Meri and sent to Creiddylad.”

“Yes,
of course,” said Feich. “And your message?” He gestured at the folio.

“This
missal is for Cyne Colfre from the Osraed of Halig-liath. It concerns the time
of the next General Assembly, and its agenda.”

“Ah.”
The Durweard nodded and extended his hand. “In that case, I shall take it to
him immediately.”

Leal
laid the folio in his lap and folded his hands over it. “I’m sorry, Durweard
Feich,” he said, and wondered why he was not shaking at his own impertinence, “but
I must deliver this to the Cyne with my own hands and witness that he opens it.
Those were my instructions. And—” His tongue seemed quite willing and able to
continue of its own accord. “And I have messages for the Cyne from another
Source as well.”