Freedom's Apprentic Read online

  “Janiya knows you talk to me?”

  “I am a shaman,” Zhanna said calmly. “Janiya wants to know why you are sending us freed slaves, men who didn’t free themselves.”

  “Uljas freed himself once, but I hunted him down and brought him back to Kyros,” I said. “I’m trying to atone for my past mistakes. His companion—” I winced. “There was another man whom I also took back to slavery. Burkut. He died just as we reached the steppe.”

  “Without your intervention, would Uljas have reached the Alashi that first time?”

  “How can I possibly know what would have happened?” I said. “I always told myself that Burkut would have died without me. But no one can know what he might have accomplished.”

  “Who else do you plan to send us?”

  “No one before spring.” I caught her hand. “Zhanna, I have a question for you, too. Why can I free bound djinni? I’ve never heard of anyone being able to do this before. Have you?”

  Zhanna shook her head. “But there are many different gates to the country of the djinni.”

  “Gates. That’s what the djinn said when I freed it, it said, you are a gate.” I knew that I was staring at her like a puppy, expecting that she’d be able to give me the answers I wanted so badly. But she shook her head again.

  “Lauria, I am a young shaman. A very, very young shaman. I was an apprentice myself until last year. I don’t think I ever told you that last summer . . . I will ask the wiser shamans what they know about this.”

  “And then come to me again. I’m only here because you wanted to talk to me. When I’ve tried to talk to you . . .”

  “It helps if you can hold something that connects us.”

  “I don’t have anything of yours.”

  “It doesn’t have to be something that belongs to me. Just something that makes you think of me will do.”

  I wondered what Kyros focused on to dream of me. The thought made me fear that he was near, and I turned and lurched into wakefulness. Tamar muttered in her sleep and rolled over beside me; she flung out her hand to rest gently on my hair, and I settled back down again to try to sleep.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  The first time I had visited Casseia, I had approached it from the air, like a high-flying bird, in a sorceress’s palanquin. It was a fascinating and baffling way to see a city—the streets and houses spread out below me like toys arranged on an elaborate rug, the canals like glittering silver chains. I’d knelt on the silk pillows and clutched the railing as I looked, hardly daring to peer out the window. Kyros had smiled indulgently as he leaned back against the cushions. I’d thought him very worldly, not to want to look. I had later realized that he didn’t like flying at all; it made him feel sick.

  Now, the city was blanketed with white snow. Everything, as I’d told Tamar, was new, including the wall around it. I hoped I wouldn’t ever find myself needing to climb this one, as it was in much better repair than the walls around Elpisia or even Daphnia. The bricks of the wall formed a pattern: huge diamonds chased each other around the city, outlined in reddish-gold bricks against the gray, with blue-black forming a dark center. A weaver’s pattern. But then, this was the Weavers’ city. I should have been ill at the thought of living here—the Weavers were the enemies of the Alashi, and my enemies, after all—but instead I felt myself beginning to smile with reckless delight at the thought of living in a city, a huge city, with no mother, no Kyros, no one to tell me what to do.

  “What’s that?” Tamar asked. She was pointing at a narrow white tower that jutted up, impossibly high, over the city.

  “That’s a tower attached to the Satrap’s palace. They built the city with djinni so they could build really tall. That’s the tallest thing in the city. I think they may have just piled stones on top of each other until they were afraid it would fall down if anyone breathed on it.”

  “Does anyone actually go up there?”

  “There aren’t stairs. You need a palanquin to get to the top. But yeah, I think sometimes people do. There’s supposed to be a room. They call it the Needle.”

  This time of day, the gate was watched but not really guarded. Even in the snow, a press of people were going in and out of the city: merchants, soldiers, farmers, travelers. Two vast statues were carved into the wall beside the gate: Athena, her owl on her shoulder, and Alexander, his horse Bucephalas at his side. Each statue was six times the height of a tall man and painted to be lifelike; I cringed a little as we approached, as I couldn’t quite shake the feeling that they were looking straight at me. The snow had melted underfoot from all the people walking over it; Krina lifted her feet high and snorted at the mud. I stroked her neck. “You’ll be clean and dry soon, I promise,” I murmured.

  We dismounted as we approached the gate, leading our string of horses. We attracted only an incurious glance from the guards at the gate, and passed easily into the city.

  “Now what?” Tamar asked. “Do we start by finding an inn?”

  I hesitated. We were almost out of money. “I think we need to go sell some of our gems first.”

  “That could attract attention . . .”

  “Trying to go through an intermediary has its own risks.” Being inside walls again made me itch to get the karenite out of our pockets as fast as possible.

  “Do you know who you’re going to approach?”

  “No.” I planned to avoid the sorceress I’d met while traveling with Kyros. She might not even be alive and probably wouldn’t recognize me, but there was always the chance. That left hundreds of possibilities, though.

  Someone was coming through with a large wagon; Tamar tugged gently on Kesh’s reins so that she sidestepped out of the way. “Let’s get off the main street,” Tamar said.

  I nodded. “This way.”

  We led our horses through a courtyard filled with old women selling scarves, hats, and other warm clothes; beyond, an alley curved and then joined with a path that led past some high, crowded buildings, stairs running up the outside wall to each apartment. The shutters were all closed up tight.

  “Where do the Weavers live?”

  “They’re scattered all over, but the most influential live near the Temple of Athena.”

  “We probably don’t want one of those.”

  “That’s what I was thinking, too.”

  The tower was the tallest building in Casseia, but the whole city was tall; I felt like a mouse in a stable crammed with horses. Daphnia had started out as Chach, pieced brick and stone by the Danibeki inhabitants long before Penelope had figured out how to summon and bind djinni. Casseia had been built by sorceresses, or rather, by their djinni. Unfenced by scaffolding, unconstrained by the difficulty of lifting heavy blocks, they could go ridiculously, impractically high on a whim, which was more or less what had happened with the tower. No one really wanted to have to climb thousands of steps just to get home to bed, plus very tall buildings could be unstable, so the ordinary buildings were much shorter—but most were still six stories high, and some were ten. The tall buildings, packed together, crowded out what little sun there was on the cloudy winter day.

  Under the gray sky and the sloppy snow, Casseia didn’t look as fresh and new as I had remembered. I found myself noticing crumbling mortar, broken shutters that had been patched but not painted before winter, a block of houses that had fallen victim to a bad fire and stood empty and roofless in the snow.

  “This looks like a sorceress’s house,” Tamar said. The street we were on had forked. Set into the fork was someone’s home, with a surrounding wall forming a neat triangle. The door was built into the point of the triangle, with pillars on either side; the door itself was closed. A carved statue of an owl stood beside the door; the knocker was shaped like a wreath of olive leaves.

  “Not this one,” I said.

  Tamar shrugged, and we continued on.

  We passed another sorceress’s house a few minutes later. This one had had her wall painted to form a pattern like the city wall; the pain
t had been freshly applied before winter, because it was still bright and fresh. I could see smoke coming from a chimney inside the compound, and I found myself thinking about how nice it would be to get inside again. This sorceress had no statuary. I looked at Tamar; she was looking at me. Her look said, I’m not going to tell you how to do this. If you want me to walk all over the city, all afternoon, I’m not going to say a word. Not me.

  I lifted my hand to knock, then changed my mind. “Maybe we’ll come back,” I said.

  Tamar shrugged and followed.

  I bypassed the next one as well, and the next. And the next. I almost knocked once at the one with the beautiful statue of a horse by the door; the horse even looked a bit like Krina. But no smoke rose from within, and that gave me a bad feeling, so I passed it by. Tamar shrugged and said nothing, though I knew she was wondering what, exactly, I was looking for. I was wondering what I was looking for.

  It shouldn’t be that hard to sell this. I need to just choose someone and be done with it.

  Just as I was starting to think that I needed to choose and choose now, we passed another house with statuary—a waist-high pillar with an exquisitely carved statue of a mouse. The mouse was sitting back on its haunches, holding something in its paws and nibbling away. Unlike the horse and the owl, it was actually life-sized, and for a moment I thought it was a real mouse.

  If I were a sorceress, that’s the statue I’d put up, I thought. “This one,” I said, and thumped the knocker against the door before I could change my mind.

  The door swung open a crack and an elderly female slave looked both of us over. “What do you want?” she asked.

  Tamar handed me a wineskin and I slipped it into the slave’s hand. “I’d like to speak with your mistress.”

  She took out the stopper of the wineskin and sniffed at it, then swung the door open and let us in, along with our horses; the wineskin vanished somewhere while we were distracted. “Asem,” she shouted, and a girl came to hold our horses while we went inside to speak with the sorceress.

  Tamar leaned close to the slave and asked, “Is she in a good mood right now?”

  The slave shrugged. “She hungers but forgets to eat; work is the most important thing to her right now. The cold fever can be a brutal mistress, but I’ve seen her far worse.”

  That was about the best I could hope for, I decided.

  The sorceress’s compound was built much like the others I had seen: an outside wall, an inner courtyard with a garden (now faded and covered in snow), and a building. In Daphnia, the sorceress I had visited had several small buildings within her walls; here there was a small stable just inside the door, and then a single large house that rose several stories up. We followed the slave into a receiving room on the first floor. It was warm and very comfortable, with several pillowy couches draped with blankets, and a big rug. The windows were covered with parchment to keep in warmth while allowing daylight. The doorkeeper brought us cups of tea, gestured for us to take off our coats and make ourselves comfortable, and went to find her mistress.

  “We’re selling all four, right?” Tamar said. “Don’t forget to demand payment in gemstones.” She pulled the little pouch out from under her clothes and put it in my hand. It was warm from being next to her skin, and I put all four pieces of karenite into my hand and looked at them for a moment in the muted daylight. They looked like little gray pebbles, until the the fire flared higher for a moment and caught the spark inside of one. It flared blue-gray and I had a sense, just for a moment, of looking into that wash of color in the sky that I’d seen in the dream. The taste of kumiss was on my tongue, though I’d avoided drinking it even when I was with the Alashi. I swallowed hard and slipped all four pieces into my drawstring bag.

  Zhanna thought I had the potential to become a shaman. Could I become a sorceress, instead?

  “I hope you’re bandits, like my servant implied. You certainly look dirty enough. Do you have anything to show me?”

  The sorceress stood in the doorway. She had dark hair with hints of red in it, and wide violet-blue eyes. I could see the cold fever in them, but today it was like a lurking predator rather than a roaring flame. She was very thin, with long, bony fingers. Her skin was very clean, and I suspected that she might forget to eat, but she seldom forgot to bathe. She was young, compared to the other sorceresses I’d met—no older than thirty.

  Maybe it was the mouse statue, or her relative youth; maybe it was my years observing people for Kyros that told me in my bones that if I had to trust any sorceress, she was probably the one to choose. I glanced at Tamar, waiting. I hope she’s not too angry about this. I don’t have time to ask her what she thinks.

  “You’re hoping I have something like this?” I asked, drawing out one piece of the karenite. The sorceress caught her breath and looked at it with open hunger, but made no move to take it. There was an etiquette here, and I wished I’d asked Zarina about it when I’d had the chance. “I’m not here to sell, exactly. I want to trade.”

  “Horses? Slaves?” She glanced at Tamar, who met her gaze with a faint smile. “My servant tells me that you don’t lack for horses, at least. Shelter through the winter?”

  “That would be part of the arrangement. I want to be your apprentice.”

  Tamar caught her breath beside me, but did not interrupt. The sorceress looked at Tamar, then dismissed her; she was not the one holding the karenite. “For a single piece of soul-stone?” the sorceress asked.

  “I have four pieces. Three for you, one for me.”

  “That’s not much, for what you’re asking,” she said, but her eyes narrowed and I could see calculation, and hunger.

  “Should I go ask someone else?”

  “I’ll tell you what will happen, if you do,” she said. “You’ll find someone who will take you on and promise to teach you, who will take your soul-stone and not teach you anything. That I’d be happy to do for you. Let you live here, and let you watch me work, and put you off with pretty promises about teaching you the mysteries of spirit binding when you’re truly ready and not before.” She rubbed the back of her neck with her hand. “And admittedly, that’s more or less what my mistress did with me, when I apprenticed. Some knowledge is always stolen knowledge.”

  “Well, all right then.” I shrugged. “Three pieces of karenite, and in exchange you will let us stay here through the winter, and you will let me watch you work.” She liked to talk. That was good. If I sat in her workshop every day, I thought I’d probably learn something of value.

  She hesitated, then held out her hand. I gave her three of the pebbles. “My name is Xanthe,” I said.

  “My name is Tamar,” Tamar said before I could come up with another name for her.

  The sorceress looked from Tamar to me, then at the karenite. “My name is Zivar,” she said. “And before I agree, there’s one other thing. I need to know that you are both women. Drop your pants.”

  “I’m your apprentice, not Tamar,” I said.

  “You might be planning to teach her,” Zivar said. “I want to know before we begin that you’re both women. Besides, I’ll have no men in my house.”

  I sighed, then untied my pants and lowered them. Very reluctantly, Tamar did the same. Zivar didn’t touch either of us. She just looked us over, gave a curt nod, and let us pull our pants back up. “I’d like to get back to work,” she said. “One of the servants will show you to a room where you can stay.”

  “I’ll come with you and watch you now, if you don’t mind,” I said.

  “Don’t you need to get your horses settled? My servant said you had an entire equine herd.”

  “Yes, Xanthe,” Tamar said. “If we’re staying here, there are a few things we’ll need to take care of.”

  “The servants will show you to my workroom when you’re ready,” Zivar said. The door swung shut behind her.

  I took a deep breath. “Tamar—”

  “Have you completely lost your mind?”

  “We’ll
be able to free Sophos’s harem if we have a spell-chain. And Prax.”

  “We don’t need a spell-chain! We can do it ourselves.”

  “I haven’t thought of a way. Neither have you. If we have a spell-chain—”

  “Then we’ll be holding a djinn as a slave! You will be enslaving the djinni.”

  “Just one. And I’ll set it free once we’ve freed Prax and the harem.” Tamar looked sick. “I was going to sell Zivar all four pieces of karenite! Do you think she’s ever going to free her djinni? You didn’t say a word about not selling the karenite!”

  “I know,” she said, her cheeks scarlet. “This is different.”

  “Look, at the very least, we’ll be here through the winter. We’ll be under her protection, in a sense—not attracting attention as possible rogue karenite dealers. I don’t even know that I’ll be able to learn how to do it. I held back one piece of karenite. If I can’t learn how to make a spell-chain, I will give you the karenite and you can decide whether to sell it, or to destroy it so that it can’t be used to enslave a djinn. Does that sound fair?”

  “Lauria,” she said. “You could have discussed it with me first.”

  “I didn’t even think of the idea until we were sitting here. I swear to you, Tamar, if I’d thought of it earlier I’d have told you and we could have talked about it.”

  “Very convenient, that you found such an unusual sorceress.”

  “I was just looking for a sorceress who wouldn’t turn us over to the Sisterhood.”

  “Yeah.” Tamar bit her lip. “I’ll go get the horses settled, Xanthe. You go on and follow Zivar. I’ll see you later.”

  That was the closest thing to approval I was going to get from Tamar, so I nodded and tried to force a smile to my lips. Outside the sitting room, a slave waited; she led me up a narrow staircase, through a hallway, and then up another narrow stair to a small room at the top of the house, where she bowed, and left me. The workroom was round, like the city tower, but a bit more practical. A loom gathered dust in a corner, strung with thread but with only a handful of rows completed; Zivar was a weaver in title only and didn’t bother to hide it. The room had a large window fitted with many small panes of actual glass, and despite the winter gray, the room was bright. Layers of rugs kept the chill off the floor. They were plush with ornate designs like huge cut gemstones, very different from the felt rugs the Alashi used. Each rug had its own colors, but together they created a colorful jumble like a spilled jewelry box. The one by the door had a dark blue background and rows of green diamonds with gold circles at the centers, and made me think of swirling spring water.