Enelle seemed a little doubtful as she took the pouch, wondering perhaps whether cash conjured up in such a way might vanish when the light of the sun fell across it.
“Enkea will show you the way out,” Ankennes told her. “I believe you will find the way back to the door briefer and less disconcerting than the route you took in. Though that depends rather upon Enkea’s whim. She is a whimsical creature, I fear.”
The cat gave Ankennes a wide green stare. Then it jumped down from the table and looked expectantly at Enelle, who rose quickly to her feet but then turned rather uncertainly to Nemienne.
Nemienne also stood. She went to Enelle, embracing her. “Go on,” she whispered in her sister’s ear. “Go on, and don’t let anyone fear for me. This is a wonderful house.”
“Is it?” Enelle asked a little wistfully. “Is it really?”
“I promise you,” Nemienne assured her, glad she could speak with conviction.
“All right.” Enelle returned her embrace with fierce, concerned affection and then stepped back. “If you change your mind—if you don’t like it—if you get lonely—”
“She may write, of course. Or visit, if she wishes. At midwinter, perhaps.” Mage Ankennes was patient, but clearly waiting for Enelle to leave. The gray cat walked out of the room, its tail swaying gently upright.
Enelle hugged Nemienne once more, took a step after the cat, threw one more doubtful glance over her shoulder at the mage, and was gone. Though Nemienne had wanted to stay—though she far preferred this powerful mage and this magic-dense house to Cloisonné House, and though she was very grateful for the Mother of Cloisonné’s suggestion that had brought them here—it was still hard to watch her sister step through the workroom door and vanish, leaving her behind.
“Well,” said Mage Ankennes.
Nemienne turned her head and met his eyes. Light slid across them, as across the surface of opaque glass or deep water, hiding everything. He was smiling, an expression that was not unfriendly, but that told her nothing.
The mage said in a meditative tone, “Nemienne, is it, eh? And you like my house, do you? A satisfactory beginning, I should think. I wonder what we shall make of you?”
Nemienne wondered that herself.
CHAPTER 2
Though lively enough in its present incarnation as a keiso House, Cloisonné House was in truth made of silence and time. Leilis sometimes had trouble believing that the dozens of women and girls who dwelled within the house did not know that the echoing clamor of their lives and voices only masked the underlying silence. At its heart, Cloisonné House was a house of stillness, and there were places in it where even the most adventurous of the girls did not go—where no one went, where nothing was stored that anyone might want to find back.
One such place was the highest of the attics tucked up along the northwest edge of the roof. That attic had a narrow window that, set under the eaves, never admitted bright sun. Yet the diffuse light that came through the old glass always seemed to fill the attic—even in the evening, after the sun had set and there should have been no light. There was another quiet place in the deepest cellars, this one with a more perilous feel to it. Bottles of wine and casks of ale, barrels of pickles and jars of summer preserves stored in the far reaches of the cellars might last for months or years, as the cook’s girls avoided going down farther than they must.
And the last bedchamber down the keiso gallery on the fourth floor, a small room that had a slanting ceiling and an old, enormous fireplace with three cracked hearthstones—that chamber was another such quiet place, as though it were surrounded by the musty solitude of a cloister rather than the bustle of a busy keiso House. Fires set in its fireplace burned longer but with less heat than they should, and with a faintly greenish tint, or so it seemed to Leilis.
As none of the keiso desired this chamber, Leilis had been permitted to claim it for her own. She would lie at night on her narrow bed by the wall where the ceiling came down low, listening to the deep quiet beating softly through the darkness. Leilis liked the quiet, or had learned to because she liked the solitude it brought her.
Now she cleared the ash out of the fireplace and laid down new kindling and small logs. Then she carried the bucket of ashes out into the hallway and paused, listening. Whispers slipped through the quiet around her. She was not quite curious. But the whispers followed her down the stairs, tugging at the edges of her attention as she went out the barred service door that led to the alley behind the House.
Leilis tossed the ashes onto the midden heap, raising a puff of fine pale ash that tasted faintly bitter on the back of the tongue. The ash tasted of silence, she thought. Of silence and patience and the slow passing of time. It seemed strange that the memory of fire could taste of things so unlike the lively fire itself.