Page 16 of Minor Works of Meda

I scrubbed the kitchen basin and filled it with fresh well water, one bucket at a time. I swept the floor. Eudoria had been after me to do that for days. It seemed direly important now that I get it done, and that I shove the broom deep into the corners and under the furniture, like I usually neglected to do.

I skipped lunch, having no appetite, and climbed up to the workroom to dust, a task that was technically Kalcedon’s. At the entry to the workroom I faltered.

All the Ward’s magic rippled through the flickering spells that clung to the glass and metal. It wasn’t just bits of sigils that shimmered there now, but whole pictures. With my heart in my throat I stepped into the room and approached the wall, where Eudoria’s last spells echoed on and on.

Each shard showed me something different, something I supposed Eudoria had at one time searched for: her most recent spells. Faces and figures and places moved beneath my sight. The scenes in the mirrors kept evolving even after I moved on from each one, the stories Eudoria had sought out unfolding in their own broken worlds.

A crowned king choked on a drink from a goblet and tumbled from his seat; I quickly averted my gaze. A figure ran through a field, cloak snapping in the wind behind her. A great Cachian warship rode a swell, sails puffed tight in a mighty breeze. A mass grave was filled in: remnants of the killings in Doregall. That image must have been a decade old. I moved on from it even more quickly than I had the king. A foggy view, as if looking through the Ward, of a slate gray figure moving on the other side.

And a young blue-gray boy, digging his hands into the earth and then looking up with a grin on his face. Kalcedon, years ago. I lifted my fingers to the image. When had Eudoria scryed that particular bit of the past? It must have been recent, since the enchantment still clung to the polished silver, not yet cleaned away to make room for new magics. The thought of her pouring her power into a spell just to see the child she’d raised, the half-fae man who still lived under her roof, cracked open a part of me that grief had not yet reached, and crawled inside.

Eudoria herself was nowhere on the wall. I paused at the empty bowl. There was plentiful power heavy in the air, and I knew the phrasings I’d need to call her image. But my hands gripped the edge of the bowl and stayed there. My fingers refused to curl and carve the shapes. My eyes blurred, and I stumbled back away to the walls. I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t call up an image of her as she had been.

The little carved wooden bird still perched on a windowsill, its ridges roughly hacked by someone with just enough skill to make it recognizable, and no more than that. There were tiny specks of brown on the left wing that I thought might be the carver’s blood. Its right wing was twice the size of the left, its beak off-center.

The rest of the room was full of spells and books, and that was normally all I cared for. But this silly wooden thing, which had lived in the workroom since before I first arrived, called to me.

I couldn’t have said why, but I closed my fist around it. When I stumbled out of Eudoria’s workroom I took the bird with me.

I crawled into bed. It wasn’t dark yet, and I was hungry, but I could bring myself to do nothing else.

There was a loud crash from the floor below me. I stared up at the ceiling. Another crash. I drew a deep breath, dragged myself out of bed and stumbled down the stairs.

Kalcedon stood outside the cloth cupboard, his back to me and his arm braced on the door’s frame. A tangle of bed fabrics lay on the ground around him, alongside the wooden boxes of clothespins and soaps.

“Why don’t we have veils?” he asked without turning, his voice scratchy.

“Maybe she never needed them.”

“Well, we need them.”

“I don’t think she’ll care, if we aren’t shrouded.”

“It’s not right,” Kalcedon told me. He turned over his shoulder to look at me. His eyes looked purple and puffy, and his mouth was still a grim, tight line.

He wore his best clothes, the ones he’d worn to the wedding. He’d tied a black knot around his throat. Despite this obvious effort, there was dirt on his face and under his nails. His mess of dark hair was worse than usual, as if he’d run his hands through it too many times. I restrained the urge to reach out and fix his hair.

“We could use something else. Netting, or straining-cloth…” I mumbled.

“It’s not right,” he repeated. He grabbed another cloth off the shelf, a heavy blanket for the storm season. Kalcedon snapped it violently out as if he expected mourning-veils to tumble from the folds. When they didn’t appear he hurled it to the side.

“Do you want me to go down to the village, or…?”

“No. Fuck. Come on.” He turned abruptly on his heel and strode away.

I stumbled after him outside. It was nearly dusk.

He walked right past the place where Eudoria had died. I froze in front of the singed earth and the dead olive tree, but Kalcedon glanced back over his shoulder and said “come on” in such a clipped voice I had no choice but to follow.

We walked outside of the garden, to a scruffy bed of land with cracked soil and prickly plants. There was a cairn of stones there, each rock carefully placed. The top one hummed with warm magic, barely perceptible under the heavy power in the air. Kalcedon had crushed flowers from his garden with seed oil and used the orange pigment to paint the sigils for restful sleep. The enchantment cascaded like a blanket over the cairn, and I knew not a single stone would be moved out of place before the power in it faded away. Long enough to stop the vultures and wild dogs.

Eudoria couldn’t be under there. It didn’t make sense, for her to be. I could not fathom a world without the old seer. She’d been a fixture of the island for generations.

I glanced at Kalcedon. He stood beside me with a strange blankness on his face, as if the emotions had just drained right out of him. The half-faerie bowed to pick up two stalks of bear’s breeches, the stems frothing with flowers. He handed me one. I took it wordlessly. Then he moved forward, his steps measured and stately, and knelt to lay his flowers over the cairn. Kalcedon clasped his hands behind his back, knees still digging into the dry earth. I waited a moment before approaching, then carefully set my stalk of flowers beside his.

The air around us still burned with so much power I felt like I was floating through it. And yes, the Ward was back, but it had fallen. It had never fallen before. That had to mean something.

“It makes no sense,” I muttered.

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