Page 102 of Minor Works of Meda

By the time I got to the tower, I wasn’t so angry anymore. Not at the old woman, anyways. She could go on being wrong all she liked. I had no energy for anger, not when tremulous, warbling grief sloshed back and forth in me like a trapped sea.

It wasn’t because of her, or even ignorant old folk like her, that the house was empty. It was because of the faeries and the Colynes king that I pushed open the door to an empty tower; that nobody answered when I foolishly, hopefully, desperately cried hello?

I knew nobody would answer. It was just a fantasy that Eudoria was still waiting for me. The silence put a final end to that hope; made me look straight at the truth I’d been skirting. The tower was empty.

It was because of the faeries that Eudoria was dead, that Kalcedon was missing. I didn’t even know what they wanted with him.

But I was going to find out. It had come to me in the hours I spent bobbing on the sea, sailing first one way, then another, feeling like I was going mad.

The day Eudoria died, I’d seen images flickering over the mirrors in her workroom, written spells waking from their sleep to paint pictures on the wall. One of those images had been looking straight at the Ward, at a hazy gray outland figure moving on the other side.

Maybe it wasn’t related. Maybe Eudoria had just been skimming along the Ward, seeing what there was to see. Or maybe she’d known something. She’d met Kalcedon’s mother, after all. And Kalcedon, like the blurry figure, was gray.

At first I’d wondered if the faeries wanted Kalcedon dead. He’d gotten in the way of their plans, rescuing Oraik from the tal-rih. But why spell him and carry him away if they just wanted his corpse at the bottom of the sea? And certainly they couldn’t have mistaken him for anybody else. There was nobody in the whole Protectorate that looked like him; who burned like him.

Even the other faeries didn’t burn like Kalcedon burned.

I’d already guessed at what the Colynes wanted: power. But I’d never thought to question the fae. Dominion over our isles seemed the obvious answer.

What if it wasn’t?

I walked straight up the winding stair to the workroom. I didn’t have the heat to fill any of the oiled sigils on the walls, but someone in Rovileis would. I walked along the wall, squinting my eyes as I summoned the memory and counting out which picture had shown the view through the Ward. I took it down and carefully strapped a cover over the mirror so it could be transported without smearing the precise sigils.

I’d spent so long on the ocean that by then it was already growing dark in Nis. I opened the door to Kalcedon’s room and curled up in the bed, pulling his blankets tight around myself. The urge to cry rose up in me, then sank like a heavy stone.

It was funny. The house felt even emptier than the sea, which made no sense. Out there there’d been no walls, no edges, no end to the vast and undulating water. Kalcedon’s room was tidy and chaotic all at once, crammed full of books he probably hadn’t read, and jars of seeds he was saving, and bad drawings of plants and somebody’s eyes—mine?—pinned to the walls.

But all that life made its emptiness howl.

I meant to leave at dawn. I swapped the old clothes out of my bag for clean ones. I almost left Kalcedon’s awkwardly carved little bird behind, with one wing bigger than the other and tiny bloodstains on its side, remembering how upset he was that I'd taken it in the first place. But when I pulled it out of my bag, I found I couldn’t get my fingers to unclench and set it down. It was a reminder of him and Eudoria, one I wanted close at hand.

When I wandered outside I spotted weeds in Kalcedon’s garden: round green seedlings nosing their way out of the dirt; thick bullying sprouts that carpeted the ground. Vegetables had ripened and rotted in his absence, inviting tiny flies. And though he mostly grew things which could survive the Nis-Illousian landscape, he did water some of what he grew, and those plants drooped miserably.

Kalcedon wouldn’t stand for it, but I had no time to fix it for him. I picked my way through the garden, cracking the stalks of a fennel when I stepped wrong. Then I paused, staring down at one of the larger plants. I moved a broad leaf aside. Here was one small thing I could do for Kalcedon. A taste of home.

When I left, I carried the first of the season’s white melons with me.

Chapter 46

I was halfway to Rovileis, more or less, when the Ward fell again. It was a shock to my body, after a day of being utterly numb, to have power sear through me.

For a moment I just sat in the wolf, hand on the tiller, shuddering under the weight of the magic. Then I remembered the mirror I’d just taken from Eudoria’s workroom, carefully swaddled in my bag. I tugged it out and balanced it on my knees, staring as the picture developed.

Everything looked distorted through the Ward. Softer, details lost. The male was as gray as Kalcedon. He paced along the Ward, then stopped by one of the stones. Turned and faced it, then looked through. I wanted to see the cruel face there, wanted to make out the features and measure them against the familiar ones I knew by heart. But I couldn’t. Smudges of darkness marked the shadows of the eyes, a bright ridge of nose. The clothes were dark. I could tell no more than that.

The figure turned and paced back the other way, then froze again and lifted his hands to his head. He was staring through the Ward again.

As if he were waiting for something. Because what could there possibly be to look at on the other side? What could be interesting even through the haze of magic? I could see trees behind the male, and sky, and grass.

I hadn’t watched any further than that, last time I saw the image.

But now, I watched another figure emerge out of the trees. The first male turned to look, and the figure drew closer. The newcomer was green-tinged, with paler clothes. I watched as they began to talk, or perhaps to fight. The gray male was emphatic. He pointed to the Ward, gesturing sharply. The second shook his head. They talked a moment longer, and the green male turned to walk away.

The magic in the air was cooling. I fed a sliver of myself into the sigils, not wanting to see the story end.

The first gestured again, the movements so complex that I knew them for sigil work without even being able to see what shapes his fingers formed. The retreating male turned swiftly, perhaps feeling a spell take hold. He began to draw sigils of his own, but not fast enough, because the first male had… disappeared him? Or, no. Turned him into a bird, because there was a bird now, a dark blue creature that fluttered pitifully.

Whatever happened next I’d never see. Those few seconds were all I could buy, and I’d gone too far, right up to the point of danger. I dropped the spell and managed to tuck the mirror back into my bag with trembling hands before I made it to the edge of the wolf and threw up. Waves didn’t mix well with chill.

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