"A mother you be not, if there is no worry. They will endure, though, without you, and if they could not, you could not save them, like as we would that it were other."
Anna still worried.
"An' ye still worry. That be always the lot of us who bear. Not that worry helps." Essan took a deep swallow from the goblet. "Not that it helps, sorceress woman, not that I need tell you."
The sorceress agreed there.
"Ye be here now, and here be where ye must stand. Poor Barjim. Always was he wishing it were otherwise. Otherwise it is never, and we must live the melody played. Even you, sorceress.
Even you." Essan fell silent.
"The melody played..." mused Anna, in the silence that followed.
The door creaked, and Synondra peered in. "Lady Essan "you needs must rest.''
"Rest? Rest be all I have left." She winked at the sorceress, then added. "Visit an old woman again."
"I will," Anna promised as she stood. "I will."
As the sorceress walked back down to her own room, she felt the tower shudder, as if the ground beneath were a string vibrating in sympathy with a massive chord plucked from the depths of Erde. Sweat beaded instantly on her forehead, and her hand went out to the stones of the wall. The wall was warm and firm.
She paused on the stone steps for a moment, but all was hot and still, without a trace of motion. Had she imagined the tremor?
She shook her head. She had felt something, even if she couldn't identify it.
80.
Anna set down the pen and capped the ink bottle, laying sheet aside to dry. As the note lay on the table, she read the note once more, her eyes skipping across the words.
"Elizabetta- This will not seem believable, and I do not know how else to reach you-magic here works through song, but it is strange....I can send this, but I cannot send myself. Sometimes, 1 can watch you, in a sort of magic mirror- like the time you sat on the deck of the New Hamp- shire house and told your father-I think-that I wouldn't willingly leave you. I wouldn't, and I didn't. I was summoned by a sorceress... and now I am stuck here. So far, I have found no way to return....
"I love you and Mario, and I miss you both terribly, and I do not know if this is the right thing to do. I do not know if I can ever figure a way back from here, and it is a terribly savage place in many ways. Yet I can't just let you think that I left you willingly. I don't know if this will reach you, but I must try. For whatever reason, I cannot seem to see Mario. My 'magic window' does not show everything I wish, and I may not be able to do this much longer. Please tell him that I am well, and that I love him, as I love you.
"I leave it to you whether you tell your father. I worry that if you do tell him he will accuse you of being irrational and making it all up because you could not face my disappearance, but you must do what you think is best for you....
"If this letter does reach you, and if I can see it... I will try again, but if I do not, it will be because I cannot, not because I have not tried."
Once she was certain the ink was dry, Anna folded the letter and slipped it back into the envelope, along with the gold and silver coins, her watch, and the small drawing of her on the tower.
Then she took out the lutar, and began to sing the minor song.
All that appeared in the mirror was a towel on the lake beach, and the mirror frame began to smolder. Anna closed off the spell hastily, and sank onto her bed.
She sighed. She hoped Elizabetta was swimming, or water-skiing, or whatever, although she had the sense that it should be fall in New England, or close to it. For whatever reason, the spells did not show matters well around water, which Anna found abstractly amusing since she could use spells to purify and cool water.
She slipped the envelope under her pillow. While there was really no place in her room safe from search, she didn't want to leave it out in plain sight, either.
She paused to look out the window. To the west rose a high plume of dust, whipped higher by the late summer- or was it early fall?-winds. No, Falcor certainly wasn't in Iowa-or Kansas.
Her cool-air shield/spell protected her room, but she could hear the whistling of the rising winds, and see dust and small pieces of wood swirling through the courtyard below.
She watched for a few moments as the dust turned the late afternoon sun red, nearly blood red.
Then her eyes went back to the gowns in the corner. Two, and once she had had dozens. Yet the dozens had not brought her control of her own life.
She shrugged. Neither had the two, and she needed to eat. She hated having to eat all the time, even more than she'd hated never being able to eat without gaining pounds. Why was life like that-always on the extremes?
81.
WEI, NORDWIE.
The dark-haired woman stands at the window to the north, its shutters drawn back despite the chill of early fall, and looks down from her hillside vantage point at the swirling brown, debris- filled water that surges into Vereisen Bay and has flooded the dock district and the warehouses.
At a discreet cough, she turns.
"Honored Ashtaar? You requested my presence?" asks the heavyset Kendr.
"I did. Please come here."
"As you wish, your mightiness." The seer with the plaited muddy-brown hair waddles forward on thick legs.
Ashtaar opens her mouth, then closes it, and waits for Kendr to reach the window.
"This wasn't normal." Ashtaar gestures through the open window to the expanse of water that covers the lower sections of Wei. "I sent you, a message."
"Yes, honored Ashtaar. I received it."
The spymistress gestures to the armless chair that sits on the far side of the high table she uses as a desk. "Sit down." She closes the shutters before seating herself.
Kendr waits.
"Did you find out how it happened?"
"It was the Evult, I think," offers the seer. ''The ice is gone from the peaks above the headwaters of the River Ost."
Ashtaar's fingers slip around the polished finish of the dark agate oval. "How did this happen without a warning?"
"The sorceress from the mist worlds."
The spymistress shakes her head. "What does that have to do with the Evult?"
"The sorceress is powerful, and many of her spells shake the harmonies, even the earth deep beneath. She has done something to the Chean River, I think, but I cannot see what that might be."
"The Evult?" prompts Ashtaar.
"We cannot trace every great sorcery ... not and obey the duties the Council has laid upon us."
"Why not?"
Kendr pales and her mouth moves silently. Finally, she stutters, "I. . . none ... of us . . is that strong."
"Do we need more seers?"
"We have needed more seers for seasons, your mightiness."
"I know. I know." Ashtaar waves away the comment. "You say you are not strong enough.
How does this excuse your failure to discover that the Evult was planning mischief?"
"The blonde sorceress had sung many spells-she was trying to see the mist worlds, we think-and when another blow to the harmonies rang through the waters, I had no strength..
"And you thought, foolish seer, that it was the blonde sorceress again?"
"Yes, Ashtaar." Kendr looks to the floor.
"Then, you feared to tell me?"
Kendr does not answer.
Ashtaar' s fingers tighten around the black agate oval, and her lips clamp together. She stares at the seer, but the heavyset woman does not lift her eyes to the spymistress.
"Kendr?"
"Yes, your mightiness?"
'We all get tired. We all can make mistakes when over-tired. If you ever let your fear of one failure lead you to make another or fail to tell me in a timely fashion, you will indeed learn that I am 'your mightiness.' Do you understand me?"
"Yes, honored Ashtaar."
The spymistress looks toward the door, her fingers still tight around the black agate oval.
Kendr backs out of the room.
82.
After struggling through yet another medieval-style sponge bath, where she wondered once more about using sorcery to create a bathroom, Anna studied herself in the mirror. In addition to the youthfully idealized mature face, still too thin, she also had little body hair, except in the more obvious places, and what she had was fine and so blonde it was almost transparent. She'd originally thought that might have been a temporary result of the youth spell, but only the hair on her head grew.
Then, there was another troubling thing. While Anna clearly had the body and physical attributes of a young woman in her mid-twenties, she hadn't had a single period since she'd been in Liedwahr. First, she'd thought it was stress, but everything else was normal, except her cycle.
She didn't have one, and she didn't have an explanation ... unless. . . unless...
Brill's sorcery had frozen her physically so that she'd never have a cycle... and, young body or not, no chance at children. She wasn't sure she wanted to bring children into Liedwahr, and she certainly hadn't met anyone she would have wanted to love or father them-but she would have liked the choice! And it didn't look like she was going to get that, either.
She took a long slow breath and looked from the mirror to the two gowns once more.
In the end, she donned the green one, the more modest of the two, though neither was as daring as the recital gown that still lay in Loiseau, probably moldering, or plundered by the Ebrans.
Skent answered the bell pull, his eyes wide, and they headed down the stairs toward the middle dining hall.
Did she really look that good? Anna wanted to shake her head-his reaction had to be a youthful crush.
"How is Cataryzna?" she asked.
The page blushed.
"All right, young man. I won't embarrass you too much. Will I ever get to meet her?"
"She lives with her aunt in the south tower. That's the guarded one."
"I take it that her father is important?"
"Geansor is the Lord of Sudwei, and Sudwei is the gate to the South Pass."
Anna frowned. So Geansor was the key to the main trade route to Ranuak? Why was Cataryzna so valuable as a hostage, apparently for both Barjim and Behlem, when women didn't count for that much? "I find it hard to see why a daughter-"
Skent stopped and turned, lowering his voice. "Lady Anna..." He looked up and down the tower staircase.
"She's a hostage. I understand that. But why her? Doesn't Lord Geansor have any sons?"
"Lord Geansor was... wounded in the peasant uprising when she was small. She was his firstborn, the only one that lived. He can have no more children. The lord's only brother was killed by raiders two years ago."
Anna understood. Cataryzna was literally the only blood relative or possible heir, and that meant she would be married off-probably as soon as the mess with the Ebrans was resolved.
She shuddered at the thought of a world where a young girl was effectively imprisoned, if in a golden cage, until she could be imprisoned by marriage once more. Then, much of earth had been like that-and some still was. She put a hand out to Skent and squeezed his shoulder. "I'm sorry, Skent. Does she like you?"
The page forced a nonchalant shrug. "Who could say? I only deliver meals and such when Hestyr is ill or on other errands."
The sorceress could tell. Love had found a way, and that love seemed hopeless to both.
"Don't worry yet," she cautioned, as she continued down the steps toward the main level.