Mienthe found that she was trying to follow the sound, only it turned and turned back on itself, wound itself higher and higher… She could not actually hear it; it had become too high and faint to be heard. Only she could feel it, turning and turning, and that was when she realized at last that she was somehow listening to some kind of mageworking. That she had been listening to it for some time, and that she’d somehow been wound up in it herself. She could no longer see the shine of lamplight against the glass of the windows, or the dim shapes of the town outside, or the stars above, or the sparks from the torches guardsmen carried out in the gardens. In fact, she could not see even her own hands, though she thought she lifted them and opened and closed them before her eyes. She might have been sitting in a chair, or standing, or lying in her own bed, dreaming. She could not tell. She could see nothing, hear nothing. There was only the dark, winding tight all about her, and the sound that was not exactly a sound and that she could no longer hear.
Young people who discovered the mage gift waking in them went to high Tiearanan to study, those who found in themselves the necessary dedication. That was not all of them, not nearly. Mienthe had known one boy, a servant’s son. When the boy, whose name was Ges, had been about twelve or fourteen, his mother had shown Bertaud a kitchen spoon made of delicate, opalescent stone and nervously explained that it had been ordinary wood until her son had stirred soup with it, and now look! Bertaud had run his fingers over the spoon and asked the boy whether he had indeed changed it, and Ges had answered, even more nervously, that he didn’t know but he was afraid to touch anything else. He’d said that he thought he’d started to hear the voices of the earth and the rain—the earth spoke in a deep, grinding mutter, he said, and the myriad voices of the rain flashed in and out, glittering.
Mienthe had been jealous of the boy, not because of the spoon or even because he could hear the voices hidden in the rain, but because he’d gone to Tiearanan. Her cousin had given Ges money, and more to his mother, and sent a man of his with them, and though the man and the mother had returned to the Delta before the turning of the year, the boy had not. Mienthe supposed he was a mage now—or maybe still studying to be a mage, because his mother had said they studied for a long time and she didn’t know how any boy could have the patience for it, but that Ges had seemed to like it. But then, he’d always been a quiet, patient sort of boy, she’d added, with understandable pride.
Mages—young people who woke into magecraft and then actually decided to be mages—studied for years to learn how to use their power, and here Mienthe was, trapped in the dark, with a single high-pitched note winding up around her, and neither teachers nor time to study.
She did not panic. Or maybe she did panic. She had no way to run in circles, and no way to hear herself if she screamed, so how could she even tell? There was nothing in the dark with her except the inaudible whining note—other people heard the glittering voices of the rain, and here she was with nothing but this unpleasant mosquito-whine. That seemed almost funny, though not really.
Mienthe followed the sound she almost heard because it was the only thing she could follow and she could not think of anything else to do. She could not have said how she followed it, because she had no sense of actual movement. Nevertheless, she pursued it up and around, up and around, up and around. She found herself curving in a tight inward path. It wound infinitely tight, she knew. It would never, ever let her out… she might have panicked then. She wanted to panic, but she still had no way to scream or flail about or cry, so instead she fled back the way she had come, down and around, down and down further still.
The sound deepened and deepened. Mienthe found she could see it, running before her, a narrow, faint ribbon of glimmering light—well, it was not light and it did not glimmer, but it was like that, in a way. It widened, and widened again. Mienthe could not see her own body, she could not see anything but the ribbon of light, but she imagined herself running, her legs moving, her arms, the impact of her feet on the road, the wind of her own motion against her face.
The ribbon widened and widened, and opened; Mienthe skidded down it at a great rate so that she began to be afraid of falling, of the height from which she might fall, of where she might fall to, only she was more afraid of stopping, of being trapped motionless within the confines of the path. Though it was not very confining, anymore. It had widened so far it seemed to encompass the world. Its faint light surrounded her, pale as the glimmer of moonlight on pearl, and then she saw that a faint light did surround her, that it was moonlight, and with a tremendous sense of motionless, forceless impact, she found that she was standing once more in the night-dark solar, with the windows open before her and moonlight pouring through her hands and the breeze chilly against her face.