Narienneh sat back in her tall-backed chair and tapped the feathered end of the quill gently on the surface of her desk. “One would not wish to be too easy.”
“Generosity is a certain sign of nobility of heart,” Leilis commented, in a slightly dry tone, because though this was always true in the theater and in dances, anyone who lived in a keiso House knew better than to believe artistic truths.
Mother made a faint gesture of disdain, but at the same time her mouth crooked into a slight smile.
“I shall suggest appropriate Houses, then,” Leilis said, with a small formal bow of acquiescence. “And I shall advise her to dry those tears of hers and try each one smiling. Resilience and a bit of spirit will do better for her than piteous tears. Have you other advice I should convey?”
“If advice would make a fool wise, there would be no fools in the world,” Mother said tartly, and sighed, the sadness in her face belying the sharpness of her words. She added in a lower tone, “Perhaps I should make Lily keiso at once. Perhaps that would…” She did not complete the suggestion.
Leilis bit back an exclamation of dismay. She lowered her eyes instead, and murmured, “Cloisonné House may surely set the style for lesser Houses. But yielding to foolishness among the deisa may not end their envy.” Rather the reverse, she did not say. It was hardly necessary to point out the obvious. Mother was already waving away her own suggestion. She said merely, “You may deliver that reference, Leilis.”
Leilis bowed obedience and rolled up the parchment. It was only a pity, she thought, that she was not delivering this reference to Lily. Except she doubted that any reference, no matter how generously worded, would open a place for Lily at any house other than Cloisonné… at any house where the Mother was not so blinded by partiality that she could not see that Lily’s malice was not the ordinary jealousy of any deisa.
Well… at least Sweetrose’s dismissal should make even Lily cautious. For a while. So for that little while, Karah should be safe. Leilis tapped the parchment against the palm of her hand and lengthened her stride down the stairs, hurrying to be sure she would catch Sweetrose before the girl left the house. There was a pleasure in the hurry, a kind of pleasure Leilis had almost forgotten. Not the cold satisfaction of settling the affairs of Cloisonné House properly, but a warmer feeling, born of unaccustomed kindness.
And yet Leilis did not think she had ever been deliberately unkind toward the girls and women of Cloisonné House. Indifferent, perhaps, to the concerns that moved them and were so often so petty. But unkind? Surely mere lack of interest was not the same as unkindness? And if she had for years been unmoved by the small troubles of keiso and servants and, especially, servants, then… why now should those troubles move her? She turned a corner and went down a flight of stairs, frowning.
CHAPTER 10
Nemienne woke up out of unremembered dreams with a sharp thrill of terror and a conviction that she had almost heard a scattering of delicate musical notes. She understood the terror only after she felt it. It woke her, and she sat up with a sharp gasp. Only then did she realize that she was not in her bed at home alongside her sisters, nor in her small, pretty room in Mage Ankennes’s house. Instead, she sat on cold stone. She was surrounded by stone, enclosed by a great, heavy darkness. It was the darkness that smothered light; the darkness that seemed as though it might smother breath as well. In the far distance, Nemienne could not hear music now, but only the slow, distant dripping of water.
There was stone under her hand when she pushed herself to her feet, stone above her and all around her. She couldn’t see it, but she knew it was there: a crushing weight above and to every side. This heavy darkness was the shadow the stone cast, she understood suddenly. That was why it weighed so heavily, because there was so much stone… She understood as well, and just as abruptly, that she was still dreaming.
Over the past days, Nemienne had learned to summon first warmth and then light into the commonplace darkness that lay in an ordinary unlit room or outside under the high stars. But she had never yet been able to break through the heavier darkness that lay under stone.
She was embarrassed by her failure, though Mage Ankennes was patient. Nemienne was grateful every day for his patience, but she resented the fact that he needed to be patient. Mage Ankennes said she would learn. He said she had been born to be a mage. Nemienne was determined to make sure he was proved right. But still she could not learn to summon light into the darkness.
But it seemed unfair—silly, even—that she should not be able to summon light in a dream. In a dream, you should be able to do anything. In the dream, then, Nemienne lifted her hands and tried again to call light. Or not call, exactly. She found she was more searching for light that might already be here, light that would not do battle with the surrounding darkness, but would exist in companionable peace with it.