The Office of Shadow (11 page)

The house was relatively new, less than three hundred years old. It had
been donated by the sixtieth Lady Copperine after the unfortunate incident
that claimed both her son's life and the lives of the twelve others in the cafe
with him when he'd lost control of his Gift of Elements and turned them all
into sand, including himself. The incident was hushed up by the Royal
Guard, a fire set, and the heir apparent to the Copperine title was mourned
appropriately. Devastated, his mother donated the family estate to the
Crown, with the explicit instructions that it be used to prevent other such
tragedies. Once her affairs were settled, Lady Copperine drank poison and
joined her son in death.

The house itself was large and rambling, having been added on to and
spellturned rather haphazardly in its day. The unfortunate lady's great uncle
had been something of an amateur turner and had made a number of ques tionable choices regarding the estate's architectural layout. Now the house
was three times as large as it had been when built, though there were rooms
in it that had been lost forever. The residents of Copperine House had it that
an unlucky niece had been inside one of the lost rooms when it was badly
turned, and haunted the building into the present day.

Sela's favorite place was the tiered terrace that overlooked the small valley
behind the house. There was nothing artificial in this view. Only trees, sky,
earth, and small animals that could sometimes be cajoled into eating corn from
Sela's hand. If she were able, Sela would have waited for a rainy day, then stepped
down each stone tier, walked barefoot through the grass as the rain plastered her
hair against her face, and disappeared into the forest, never to be seen again.

This was a fantasy, of course. Beyond the terrace was a fence of pure
Motion that would stop her in her tracks, and unpleasantly so, were she to
take more than a few steps into the lawn. That the small animals could come
and go through it while she could not was some small comfort to Sela. The
part of her that was them, at least, was free. This was something she knew
intellectually, but could not bring herself to feel. Not in this place. Not with
the Accursed Object wrapped around her arm.

The Accursed Object was a band of cold iron, three inches thick, that
encircled her upper arm, resting snugly against her skin. It was coated with
the barest plating of silver to keep it from burning, but its presence disrupted
her re enough that she could barely think, let alone employ her unique skills.

Some others in Copperine House attempted to escape from time to time.
Horeg the Magnificent, a mestine of some great former renown, once chewed
off his own arm at the shoulder, but the attendants discovered him bleeding
to death halfway to the road and dragged him back in. All the way he shouted
to them that he had a performance at the Principal Theater that could not be
missed. Once it was all over, the attendants had whispered in Sela's hearing
that the Principal had been closed for over six hundred years, and Horeg the
Magnificent wasn't that magnificent. He was only forty-five.

Panner-La, a military commander, had been able to dig a tunnel forty feet
long beneath the house before he was caught. He'd managed the feat by whittling away at his own Accursed Object just enough to use Elements to turn
the earth to air, an inch or two a day, over the course of twenty years.

Many attempts at escape had been made, but Sela didn't know of any that
had succeeded.

The cold iron bands kept most of them in check, but there were some
whose Gifts were so strong that they could not be fully stifled. There was
Brinoni, the daughter of a courtier in Titania's court, whose Premonitory Gift
was so powerful that she lived her entire life in the future, several hours ahead
of reality. Her body jerked and dragged as she attempted to move in time
with her future actions. Her speech was so much nonsense, always responding
to words as yet unsaid, and thus disrupting her own visions. Brinoni lived in
a future that no one else would ever experience, the future that would have
been had she not been there to see it.

Some of the patients' Gifts were so extreme and so dangerous that there
was nothing for them but to keep them sedated at all times. Prin had once been
a Master of the Gates, but had been caught between worlds and lost his mind.
Left fully conscious, Prin was capable of transporting the entire house and a
good portion of the countryside to another world entirely, or to one of the dark
places, or of spellturning the house into itself. Sela thought his case was unbearably sad, and would have put Prin out of his misery if she'd been able to work
out a way to do it without being caught. Because even with the band around
her arm, Sela could feel Prin's anguish despite the drugs they gave him. His
misery ran so deeply that she'd almost managed to form a thread toward him.
But not quite. There hadn't been any threads in quite some time.

In Sela's case, the band was highly effective. Her talent required concentration, and the Accursed Object kept her just off-kilter enough to render her
essentially powerless. Of all the patients at the Copperine House, Sela was the
only one who was not mad. Nor was she a danger to herself. What kept Sela
at Copperine was the simple fact that nobody knew what else to do with her.

Sela understood that she could not be allowed free. Or at least, she understood that her keepers believed that to be the case. Sela knew-or remembered knowing, as her mind was one of the many things that the band hampered-that, if free, she could find a way to be of no danger to anyone. But
given her history, it would be difficult to convince anyone of that.

Thinking of her history led her to thoughts of Milla. The thoughts of Milla,
on those occasions when they came, overtook her and she broke down. Today was no exception. While the rain pattered down just past the terrace awning,
Sela experienced Milla's pain all over again, still fresh no matter how many
Accursed Objects they wrapped around her limbs or how much bottled forgetfulness they forced down her throat. Milla was real, and Milla was dead and it
was Sela's fault. It was truth; a hideous truth. One that could never be undone.

Oh, Milla.

An attendant, seeing Sela weeping on the terrace, rushed to offer a handkerchief, a cool drink, a cucumber sandwich. Anything to calm and please. The
conceit was that the patients at Copperine were, in fact, guests at a proper
country estate, and the staff all behaved as though this were the case. Many of
the patients chose to believe it, and those who didn't, like Sela, saw no reason
to spoil the fantasy. It was nice being treated like a lady, even if the lady
couldn't leave her estate. It was far better than what she'd grown up with.

The manor house is very large, bigger than anything Sela has ever seen.
Bigger than anything she's ever dreamed of.

Mother told her that she was a very lucky girl, that she must do everything that Lord Tanen and his servants told her. She was Lord Tanen's ward
now. Sela didn't know what that meant. Mother had said that she would
come to visit Sela soon, but later Sela heard Mother and Father whispering in
bed, and Father said, "Why did you lie to her? We'll never see her again."
And Mother only cried and said, "What can I do?"

A beautiful room in the manor house has been prepared for her. It's so
beautiful and fancy that at first she forgets all about Mother and Father, and
the farm, and her friends in the village. At night, though, she cries and
misses her family.

Lord Tanen calls the three old women "crones." He says that she is to do
everything they tell her, and that if she does not, he will come back and
punish her.

"Where will you be?" asks Sela.

"I will be in the city," he says. "But I will come to visit from time to
time."

Lord Tanen is old, and his skin looks like Father's old saddle. His breath
smells sour. She does not like him, so she is glad he is leaving.

"Don't you want to know why I've brought you here?" he asks her.

Sela hasn't thought about it. She doesn't know what a ward is, but she is
a good girl and does as she's told.

"Why?" she asks, because he wants her to.

"Because I have searched far and wide for a special girl like you," he says.
"Did you know that you were special?"

"No."

"Do you want to know what makes you special?"

"Okay."

"There might be something inside you called a Gift. Do you know what
Gifts are?"

"Magic," says Sela. Everyone knows that. "There are twelve Gifts. But
children don't have Gifts and, and farmers don't have them, either."

"That is mostly true," says Lord Tanen. "Children do not express their
Gifts; they only manifest during puberty. But there are ways of knowing in
advance. And while it is true that the lower classes show a far lower rate of
manifestation, it is not unheard-of."

Sela doesn't understand what Tanen is saying, and is getting bored. She
looks around her bedroom for something to play with.

"May I have a doll?" she asks.

"You won't have time for dolls," he says.

Sela was sitting quietly in the tearoom when Lord Everess stepped through
the door, still shaking the rain from his hair. He was the sort who seemed
jolly but, upon closer inspection, was anything but. Even with the Accursed
Object damping her down, Sela could see it.

"Sela," said Everess with a curt bow, the benevolent recognition of a
nobleman to a woman with no status whatsoever. Under normal conditions,
it would have been impossible for Everess even to address her, so there was
no appropriate greeting.

"Lord Everess," said Sela, rising and curtseying automatically, as she'd
been taught since her earliest childhood. Always ready to please. Always
ready to obey.

No. This was not Lord Tanen. All lords were not the same. That's what
Everess had told her.

She looked him directly in the eye. "How may I be of service to you,
Lord?"

Everess cracked a smile. He took a large pipe from the pocket of his voluminous overcoat and lit it, puffing quietly for a moment before speaking.

"Let me ask you a question, miss. How do you like it here?"

If Everess was expecting a polite response, he wasn't going to get one. "I
despise it here," she said simply.

Everess laughed out loud. To him, she was a puppy nipping, nothing
more. "Brutally honest as ever, yes. This place hasn't drained that out of you."

"I am what I was made to be," Sela said.

Everess watched her, puffing on his pipe, saying nothing. Letting the
silence between them grow dense.

Finally, he spoke. "What is it that you want?" he asked.

"Excuse me?"

"For yourself. What is it that you want for yourself?"

"I've never been asked the question before." Sela thought back. No, it
was true. At no time in her life had anyone ever asked her what she wanted;
not about anything that mattered.

"Well, it's not a complicated question, however novel," Everess huffed.
"If you despise Copperine House, as you say, then where is it that you'd prefer
to go?"

Sela glared at him. "You of all people should know that I can't answer
that question."

Everess smiled. Of course he knew. And he wanted to be sure that she
was focused on what she owed him before he made whatever strange request
he was about to make of her.

She decided to answer the question anyway. "I want to be useful," she
said, crossing her hands on her lap. The muslin of her skirt settled softly. "I
want to be ... good. Do good."

"Ah," said Everess. "Meaning what, exactly?"

"I want for my life to ... mean something. I sense the hours and days
and years going by, and nothing I do means anything to anyone. I might as
well not even exist. Sometimes I wish that I didn't."

Everess dragged a chair toward the love seat where she sat and planted
himself in it, leaning forward. He took her cold hands in his, which were
warm and meaty. She smelled tobacco and liquor on his breath.