It was sometime later that I escaped from Tanwen’s lair, dressed now in cast-off silks, my body perfumed with scents that made me want to sneeze, my hair braided, coiled, and pinned into a neck-straining arrangement atop my head. Silver leaves trembled on elaborate hair forks, sticking out on either side of my head. Tanwen had dressed me up as if I were her doll, and called in acolytes to make alterations to the deep blue gown I now wore. They had stayed behind to work on three more outfits, Tanwen insisting that the jewel-toned colors didn’t suit her.
The lapis blue did suit me: it called out shimmering echoes of its color in the gloss of my black hair. Tanwen’s mirror had shown a far different creature than the dowdy child who’d stepped in front of it earlier in the day. She’d made me look . . . magical.
Her intent, perhaps: make me appear like a fellow sorceress, to impress the acolytes and her guests. And of course she was trying to curry favor and win me as her ally.
Sygarius had once told me that bribes always work, even when the bribe recipient thinks he’s tricking the bribe giver. Once you accept a bribe you feel beholden to the giver, whether you are conscious of it or not.
I was going to be sorry to free myself from the bondage: it was the prettiest, softest garment I’d ever owned.
As I moved down the corridor, I caught a whisper of sound. I stopped, head cocked.
Someone was weeping, and trying hard to hide it. The sobs came in fragments with silence between, creating a strange sensation in my ears. It was as if I held them plugged with my fingertips, and then opened them at random instants, just long enough for half a breath of crying to penetrate before they were jammed shut again.
I followed the notes of sound, curious. They led me to a doorway with a curtain pulled across it. I pulled the edge aside and peered in.
Gray light seeped through the closed shutters, casting the cold little room into hues of charcoal. The only color came from an orange hint of dying coals in the brazier. For a long moment there was no sound at all and I thought I had the wrong room, but then: a brief pressure on my ears, and a wet, gulping breath.
“Hello?” I said softly, staring at the dark lump that must be someone lying curled on her bed. As I stared, looking for movement, my eyes shifted of their volition, sliding off the girl and landing on the shadowy wall above. I blinked and looked at her again, and could see nothing except a pile of furs and bedclothes. I must have been mistaken, seeing someone there.
I was about to let the curtain drop when a mist of white caught the corner of my vision. “Una?”
“What do you want?” she said, her voice soggy. I caught the motion of her hands wiping her face. She was under the pile of furs, her head in the darkest corner of the room.
“May I come in?”
“As you wish.”
I slipped through the curtain as Una sat up, leaning against the wall at the head of the bed, drawing her knees up to her chest. She snuffled. I wasn’t sure how she’d react to a hug or my getting too close, so instead I found the basket of wood by the brazier and stirred up the fire, coaxing it back to life with bits of kindling while giving Una a chance to grow accustomed to my presence. The flames cast a welcome light, turning Una’s face from the white of snow to the warmth of amber.
I sat on the edge of the bed.
“Those are my mother’s clothes,” she said.
“A gift from her.” I pulled loose the silver forks, and coiled braids fell down over my shoulders. I sighed and massaged my scalp.
“She doesn’t let me touch her things.”
“That must make you want to do it all the more.” I held out one of the forks to her.
Una took it, and slanted me a sly look. “I go through her things whenever I want, and she never catches me.” She swirled the fork between her fingers, making the leaves dance. “I could catch a raven with this. They can’t resist shiny things.”
“What would you do with it, once you had it? I don’t imagine ravens taste very good.”
She thought a moment, then grinned. “I’d set it loose in the great hall during one of the banquets. I could catch a whole flock of ravens, and send them flying through the air while those men are having their cocks sucked and bouncing their white butts and groaning. They’d scream like little girls and think themselves cursed and never come back.”
“You don’t like the banquets.”
“I don’t like the men. They’re loud, and they smell bad and make a mess. They act like they own the hall, and everyone in it. Mother tells me to stay away unless I want one of them between my thighs, but no one knows I’m there; everyone’s too busy putting their faces in each other’s crotches to notice. So I watch, and think about how easy it would be to slit the men’s throats, one by one.” She looked at me, checking for my reaction. “Wouldn’t Mother be angry then?”
Una was of an age with Daella, and I couldn’t help but compare them. Daella, so brave and loyal and strong, and devoted to learning how to heal her fellow human beings. Then Una, who felt five years younger than Daella, and had both a small child’s ignorance of her own cruelty, and a petulant need for attention, good or bad. How different would each have been, I wondered, if forced to grow up in each other’s shoes?
An image sprang to mind, of Maerlin coldly laying waste to the robbers along the road. Then I saw Tanwen, forcing her brother to lie with her. Selling secrets. Using the acolytes for her own profit. With the blood of Maerlin and Tanwen in her veins, perhaps there had never been any path for Una beyond the one she was treading.
“Do you want your mother to be angry with you?” I asked.
“It’s funny when she is. She turns red and breaks things. She’s boring the rest of the time, fussing with her hair or making the acolytes lick her while she dozes on her bed.” Una made a face. “She must taste like pee.”
I grimaced as I realized exactly where the acolytes were licking Tanwen. “She lets you watch?”
“She doesn’t notice me.”
“Sounds like people don’t notice you a lot of the time. It surprises me.”
“Why?”
“You’re quite beautiful. People—both men and women—usually notice beautiful girls.”
Her eyes narrowed, and I felt her withdrawing, her walls going up. “Why are you lying to me? I know what I look like. I’m white like a maggot. A fish belly.”
“Frost on a bright winter morning,” I countered. “Snow in the moonlight. Or at this moment, a summer cloud reflecting the glow of the sunset.”
Her lips were pressed tight together in denial, but I could see in her eyes the reluctant wish for more.
“Sunlight reflecting off the water,” I said. “The petals of a lily when it first opens, and its perfume fills the air. Shall I talk about your eyes now? I have heard about the ice atop the mountains. They say that when you get close, you see that it is blue: a blue more pure than the sky, but buried deep inside the ice. You want to touch it, but it’s forever out of reach. Those who have seen it say that the memory of that blue will haunt you to the end of your days.”
Una’s nostrils flared, and she blinked. She worked her lower lip between her teeth, then burst out: “That’s the same thing Ligeia said about my eyes. I was only nine, but I remember.”
A shiver ran through me, and I tried to hide my shock, and the nearly overwhelming need to grab her shoulders and shake her until she told me everything she could about my mother. “Then it must be true, if we both thought it.”
“You remind me of her. You talk to me.”
Was that all it took? What a sorry life the girl must lead. “My mother would have asked you why you were crying. Would you have answered her?”
She shrugged one shoulder.
“Can you tell me?”
“It doesn’t matter. Not to you, anyway. You’ll leave just like she did, so why would you care?”
My lips parted and I caught my breath. You’ll leave. Not, you’ll die. Confirmation that Tanwen and Akantha had lied, as we suspected. My mother was not dead: she’d left.
“From what I remember of my mother, I think she must have had a very good reason for going,” I said carefully.
“It didn’t sound like a good reason. Who cares about finding a labyrinth?”
A shock went through me. I had a labyrinth tattooed over my genitals; I wore a gold necklace that copied its design, with a gold and garnet bee in the center; and in the market of Tolosa I’d met a Syrian merchant who had, on an island in the Internal Sea, narrowly escaped being sacrificed in the heart of a labyrinth.
Una went on: “Why would you want to find something that you’re meant to get lost in? Ligeia told me some of the stories about it, like the Minotaur and Ariadne. But she said those were later tales, and the truth was much different, and that we the Phanne were at the heart of ‘the labyrinth’s hive.’ That we’d built it, and only we could use its powers.”
Hive. Bees. The golden swarm that swept me up when I accessed my powers. I was afraid to speak; afraid to halt the flow of words from Una’s lips.
Her mouth twisted. “We the Phanne. Do you see any tattoos on me?” She shoved up her sleeves and stuck out a bare leg. “Mother wouldn’t give me any. She said I have no power, so am not really Phanne, and can’t have tattoos. I’m not a Briton or a Pict or a Saxon or one of the Irish, either. I have no tribe. Not that I want one. I’d rather watch out for myself.”
“You were born of Phanne parents. You are Phanne. The tattoos and powers do not decide it.”
“I don’t want to be Phanne. I don’t want to do what my mother does, letting men do those things to her.”
“What do you want?”
She shrugged again. “Not this.” She gestured vaguely at the world around her. “I hate this. I hate everyone here.”
“You must love your mother,” I said softly. “You almost killed Maerlin, trying to protect her.”
Her eyes welled with tears, her face pinching and her nose turning red. She heaved in a ragged breath, and began to sob.
I reached for her, wrapping my arms around her and pulling her head to my shoulder. She was stiff and awkward in my hold, her hands pushing against me, and then suddenly they were clinging to me, her arms tight around my waist, her tears seeping through the dark blue gown to my skin.
Part of her forehead touched the bare skin of my neck, but there was none of the sensation I had gotten from Maerlin, Tanwen, and Akantha. She felt like any normal person . . .
And then she didn’t.
It was a flicker, a tick of sensation against my skin, and then gone. I stroked her pale hair and closed my eyes, going inside myself and focusing on that point of contact between us. Listening. Sensing. Laying myself open, in hopes of catching another whisper of Una.
There. A feeling like an icicle running down my neck, then gone again. I tried to follow it, tried to feel my way into her, and could not.
“Una, what is it that has upset you so? Please tell me.”
“Why? You can’t change it.”
“Unhappiness is so much worse when you have no one to tell it to. It takes on a life of its own, and eats at you. Problems get smaller when you take them out of your head and put them in the open space between you and a friend.”
She lifted her head from my shoulder and pushed back, wiping at her nose with the back of her hand. “I don’t have any friends.”
I wouldn’t dishonor her by claiming to be her friend. As she’d pointed out, I’d soon leave just as my mother had. “Sometimes talking to a stranger helps, too.”
She leaned back against the wall and drew her knees up, wrapping her arms around them. She shook her head. “I don’t want to talk about it. It doesn’t matter.”
Clearly it did, but there was no point in pushing. “Una, if I ask you something, could you promise to keep it a secret and not tell anyone anything about it?”
Her eyes brightened. She gave a last swipe at her face and sat up straighter. “Who would I tell?”
“I mean it. No one can know about this.”
Una tilted her head, eyes narrowing. “Why are you trusting me?”
I leaned forward and lowered my voice to a whisper. “I saw you in a vision.”
“Doing what?”
“That’s the secret part. Do you promise not to tell: not your mother, not your grandmother, not anyone?”
She gave a fierce nod, then uncurled and sat forward on her knees, leaning close to me to whisper in my ear, “I swear on my life. You have to talk very, very quietly, though, because the acolytes are always spying for Mother.”
I put my lips near her ear. “In the vision, you had a green stone.”
She jerked back, staring at me with wide eyes.
“You know what I’m talking about?” I asked.
I raised a skeptical brow, and waited.
“Maybe I know about it. What do you want with it?”
“I need it. Is it something you can help me get?”
Una moistened her lips. “Maybe,” she said, and then in a worried rush, “Don’t ask my mother about it. She’ll never let you have it if she knows you want it.”
“No, I’d figured that out already.”
“She thinks she knows everything, sees everything. Controls everyone. And she does. Most of the time.”
“She told me that she lets you do as you wish.”
Una smiled crookedly, the angle of her lips more bitter than amused. “That’s what she tells people. She doesn’t want them to know the truth.”
“Which is?”
“Her daughter is the one person in the world she can’t control.”