Freedom's Apprentic Read online

  Zivar had arrived only minutes before. As I came in, she used tongs to open the door of a brass stove, shoved in a couple of sticks, poked the fire a bit to encourage it, and then closed the door again. Then she took out one of the spell-chains that was tucked under the fabric of her dress. There was a key tied to the end, which she used to unlock a metal padlock that secured a box that appeared to be built directly into her wall. Out of the box came a velvet bag; she tucked two of the pieces of karenite into the bag, pulled it shut with a drawstring, put the bag back in the box, and locked the box again. The remaining piece was still in her hand. She sighed faintly and turned her attention back to her desk, ignoring me completely.

  There was nowhere for me to sit. Zivar didn’t seem to consider that her problem, so I stood.

  Zivar took out a set of files and laid them out on her worktable, side by side. Working from the coarsest file to the finest, she began to smooth down the rough edges of the karenite. The process took a long time. Bored, I looked around the room. Shelves above and behind Zivar’s worktable held beads. Beads of all colors and kinds were jumbled together in bowls, in teacups, in metal goblets, in what appeared to be the shell of a large tortoise. There were beads as large as my thumb and beads as small as a grain of rice; there were beads made from gold and silver, beads of carved stone, beads of painted clay, glass beads, wooden beads. No karenite beads, of course, but that was clearly what she was making.

  There was not a great deal of daylight left when she began working. As the sky on the other side of the glass darkened from gray to dusk, a servant came up with a tray of food and a lamp. Zivar ignored the food, but moved the lamp to a holder above her table, and worked in the narrow circle of light. I could barely see what she was doing. After hours of filing, she seemed to consider the edges adequately smooth. She rubbed it clean with a polishing cloth.

  It was still much rougher looking than the karenite beads I’d seen on spell-chains in the past, but I’d only seen a handful of those up close. Zivar fixed the karenite into a small vise, and then took out a tiny drill with a bit so narrow it looked like a needle. She stood up to do this, working quickly and precisely. A few minutes later, she blew dust off her bead. It was complete.

  Out of a drawer she drew a tiny silk pouch, with a drawstring closure. She put the bead into the pouch, pulled the strings to close it, and then tied it snugly around her neck so that it rested in the hollow of her throat. A woven scarf was quickly arranged over that, as if to conceal it, and then she turned toward the door, hesitating when she saw me, as if she’d forgotten I was there. “You should go get something to eat,” she said. “The servants should already have brought food for your companion.”

  “Are you going to keep working?” I asked. “Because I’d rather watch you work.” My stomach growled.

  “I’m going to go take a bath.” She sniffed. “Oh yes, that reminds me. Have the servants draw you a bath before you come up here again, and wash your clothes. You smell foul.”

  I wasn’t sure how I’d find my way to the room where Tamar and I would be staying, but a servant was waiting at the bottom of the stairs when I came out of Zivar’s workroom. “Lady Xanthe,” she said with a slight bow. “No doubt you’d like something to eat.” She flicked her hand, and a younger girl came to join us. “This is Mysia.” Apparently the older servant was going to continue to wait for Zivar to come down; Mysia, lamp in hand, showed me down another hallway and up a flight of stairs to a guest room.

  “Zivar wants me to take a bath,” I said.

  “Yes,” Mysia said. “I’ll have more water drawn and heated, and come get you when it’s ready.”

  Tamar had already bathed and was wearing borrowed clothes, presumably while her own dried. She was wearing a dress, and it occurred to me that it had been a very long time since I’d seen her in Greek girl’s clothes. She looked nervous and on edge, refusing to relax into the pillows while she ate her dinner, but she didn’t immediately try to convince me to leave as soon as I walked in the door, which I took to be a good sign. “The horses are all settled,” she said. “I’m going to try to sell the packhorse tomorrow, so that we have some money if we need it.”

  “That’s a good idea,” I said.

  “What did you do this afternoon?”

  “Watched Zivar.”

  “Do you know the secrets of spirit binding now?”

  “No. All she did this afternoon was to turn one of the pieces of karenite into a bead. It didn’t look like a particularly magical process. She locked up the other pieces, in a box built into her wall. She put the bead into a pouch that she tied around her neck.”

  “Huh.”

  “Anyway, if I’m going to make a spell-chain, I’ll need tools. She used files today, and a really delicate drill.”

  “The packhorse isn’t going to bring enough money for that,” Tamar said.

  Mysia came in to tell me that my bath was ready and I went down. Zivar had a bathing room, rather than a bathhouse, at the bottom of the house near the well. There was a tub full of water, but this wasn’t nearly as luxurious as the bath back at Zarina’s inn; the water was barely tepid and quickly cooling off. I scrubbed my hair and body with scented soap, then dumped water over my head and inspected the results. My hands and nails were still grimy from ground-in dirt and my hair still felt gritty; my feet were hideous, with blackened, broken toenails and scaly skin. I soaped up again and rinsed again. At least my body looked clean now, aside from my hands and feet, and I thought that I probably didn’t reek like yesterday’s refuse anymore. I washed my face again and my hands and feet one more time, rinsed off, and—shivering—put on the warm robe that had been left for me and dried off. Mysia had whisked away my clothes, and returned a little while later with a clean, pressed dress to loan me while my own clothes dried. I pulled it on. It didn’t fit me quite right, and in any case I felt very strange in a dress. I stepped on the long skirt as I was going back upstairs and almost fell down.

  “You look cleaner,” Tamar said when I came in. She was curled up with a wool blanket by the fire. “They brought you some food a little while ago.”

  A tray was waiting for me. I picked up my bowl. “Zivar’s servants are very efficient.”

  “She doesn’t have a family, does she?”

  “No.”

  “There was a saying that I heard back when I was a slave—sorceresses make the best mistresses, and the worst, and usually both at the same time. A slave never has more autonomy than when she’s owned by a sorceress with no family. This household is run by the senior slaves, not by Zivar.”

  “Why are they also the worst mistresses?”

  “They’re unpredictable, especially when the cold fever has them. Dark fevers are the worst. Sometimes a sorceress will become convinced of strange ideas—like her servants are trying to poison her, even if no one’s so much as become sick. She’ll drag everyone out and threaten to flog someone to death if no one confesses. And if someone steps forward to take the blame, to save the innocent victim, she’ll flog that slave to death, even if she’d done nothing, either.” Tamar shook her head. “My mother’s worst fear was being owned by a sorceress, or having me sold to one.”

  Zivar seemed so kind, and so calm—for a sorceress, at least—I found it difficult to imagine her doing anything like that.

  Tamar seemed to be following my thoughts, because she added, “They all get worse over time. All of them. Zivar is young, so she’s probably not as crazy as someone more experienced.”

  “But Kyros’s wife was sent away from the Sisterhood because she grew so frantic so quickly. And that happened when she was sixteen.”

  Tamar shrugged. “All I know is, if she’d stayed with the Sisterhood, she’d be a lot crazier now.”

  Zivar’s guest room was much like her receiving room, equipped with soft cushions, warm blankets, and a thick rug. Tamar or one of the servants had shuttered the window for the night and covered it with a curtain for extra warmth, and the fire warmed
the room nicely. My food had been left on a low table near the fire, and more wood was stacked neatly in the corner. There were wool hangings on the walls—woven tapestries with row after row of tiny blue diamonds, interlaced with green triangles. It reminded me of the pattern outside. I wondered if Zivar had woven these or if she’d had one of her servants do it, or if she’d simply purchased them. Maybe a friend had given them to her. If she had any friends.

  I’d heard that the Sisterhood of Weavers usually started out by demanding that apprentices learned to weave. I’d expected to have to spend the first part of the winter hunched over a loom. I wasn’t sure whether it had anything at all to do with their magic, but it was traditional. Zivar showed no particular inclination to teach me weaving. I wondered if this was because she didn’t like weaving and knew it had no value, or if it was because she wasn’t really teaching me magic.

  The next day, Tamar took the packhorse out to find a horse dealer. I borrowed a stool from the kitchen and a cushion from the guest room and carried them upstairs to Zivar’s workroom. She barely looked up as I came in, arranged the stool and the cushion, and sat down to watch her work.

  This morning, she was gathering up beads. Some of the beads seemed to be chosen almost randomly. She would run her hands through a bowl of glass beads and pull out a small fistful, then select a half-dozen from there. I could hear the faint click as she would swirl them around in their bowls, like uncooked rice spilling out into a pot. Other beads took a great deal of thought. She would roll them between her fingers, smell them, or even pop them into her mouth briefly to taste them. I realized after a while that the large pile scattered across her desk was the discard pile. The chosen beads went into a bowl. She had a faint smile of satisfaction on her face as she worked.

  “Can you hear them?” she asked me after a few hours.

  I could hear the beads rattling faintly in the big glass bowl, so I nodded yes. She raised her eyebrows and muttered, “Maybe you’re going to learn something after all,” and went back to picking through her beads.

  At around noon, one of the servants brought up food—two trays, one for each of us. Tamar must have befriended the servants, I thought; I couldn’t imagine that Zivar, who frequently didn’t even see to her own food, would have arranged for food to be delivered for me. Zivar stretched her hands, put down her bowl of beads, and took a break. There was bread and cheese, and cured olives, and a little bit of salted meat, and watered wine. Since Zivar was away from her worktable and didn’t object, I went over to look in her big bowl of beads. She’d selected several dozen; they seemed to have nothing in common with each other. Some were glass beads of swirling colors; there were also some wooden beads, carved stone beads, and a few sparkling faceted beads.

  “Can I touch?” I asked.

  “Don’t take any out,” Zivar said.

  I stroked my finger through the beads, half expecting to feel warmth like a hearthstone, or some sort of strange vibration. But no, they were only beads, after all; they clinked gently against the side of the glass bowl, and smelled like nothing other than glass and stone to me.

  Zivar was at my side, so I handed the bowl back to her and went to eat the food on my own tray, only to find that Zivar had eaten it while I was distracted. My stomach growling, I sat back down on the stool and watched as she continued to work, silently, for the rest of the afternoon.

  When darkness fell and I went down to find Tamar, she had bad news for me. “No one wants to buy packhorses this time of year. It makes sense, if you think about it; no one’s heading out right now. Buying a horse means you just have to feed it through the winter.” She hesitated, then added, “I could have sold it, for a loss, and we’d have had some money. But we’re going to want the horse again in the spring, aren’t we? To get back up to the steppe?”

  “Yeah . . .”

  “If we don’t, the price of horses apparently goes way up in the spring. We could sell it then for a profit. Since it sounds like Zivar will feed all five of our horses without complaining . . .” Tamar shrugged. “I started asking after Thais, as well. Fortunately it’s cheap to bribe slaves. What does Thais look like?”

  “Beautiful,” I said. “At least, she was beautiful when I knew her. Beautiful but cold. Did I tell you that Kyros tended to go easier on the beautiful women? She was sold far away because when I brought her back, she spit in Kyros’s face. He couldn’t let that go.”

  Tamar let out a very faint snort. “What kind of beautiful? Back in Sophos’s harem, Aislan was beautiful. So was Meruert. But you’d never have mistaken one for the other.”

  “Thais was more like Aislan in personality, but more like Meruert for looks. Black hair, really long, a little curl to it. Long eyelashes. Round breasts, curvy hips. That kind of beautiful.”

  “She’s probably in someone else’s harem.”

  “Unless Kyros punished her by selling her to someone whose harem was all boys, and would set her to work scrubbing floors.”

  “I’d have been happier scrubbing floors.”

  “Not Thais.”

  “He really took her all the way down here?”

  “In a palanquin. They didn’t ride down.”

  “Hmm. Well, I’ll keep inquiring about her. Discreetly. We’ve got a few months, after all.”

  There was food waiting for me and I ate heavily, ravenous from another day watching Zivar work. “I had them send up food for you,” Tamar said, watching me. “Didn’t you get a chance to eat?”

  “Zivar ate my food.”

  “Really? I’ll have to tell the servants that. They usually can’t get her to eat during the day at all.”

  The next day, two trays arrived at noon, just as before, but this time the servant caught my eye and glanced at the trays and Zivar. I took the hint and wandered over to examine the beads as I had yesterday, while Zivar took a break to eat. The bowl of beads was perhaps a quarter full now: one by one, she’d added a handful of faceted red stones. She’d discarded another two handfuls. I looked at the identical beads in the bowl and the pile; I could see no difference. They felt the same under my fingertips, as well. I was tempted to try tasting them, like Zivar, but she’d again asked me not to take any out of her bowl, so I refrained.

  She’d eaten half the food on my tray when she stood up, but not all of it. As I sat back down, I saw the servant lurking at the top of the stairs with a third tray, which she slipped in to me with a smile. Zivar was absorbed in her beads again and didn’t notice.

  And so it went for several more days. Zivar picked through her beads. The bowl grew fuller, and the discard pile grew larger, until the beads from that rolled off the table and scattered across her floor like sand, making me wince as tiny faceted gemstones scattered into corners. No doubt one of the servants would set it all to rights when Zivar was done with this spell-chain, but I wondered how many precious gems were hidden under the rugs in this room. It occurred to me that I could steal them, if Zivar ever stepped out of her workroom and left me unsupervised, and she would probably be none the wiser. Her servants, though—they were another matter.

  When Zivar had filled her bowl, she took out a length of silver wire and new tools: pincers forged from hard steel, their tips as slender and delicate as needles. She chose a bead from her bowl, slipped it onto the wire, and bent the end into a hook, then a loop. She cut loose the wire and bent the other end into a loop. From her cluttered shelf, she pulled down a new empty cup, and dropped the link in; I heard the clink like a tiny muffled bell. Another bead on the wire: loop, snip, loop. Clink. Another bead: loop, snip, loop. Clink.

  This process seemed to require less concentration than selecting beads. She’d clearly twisted many, many links of wire, and as long as her eyes were on the project her mind could be elsewhere. “Where are you from?” she asked the first day she began her new task.

  “Daphnia,” I said. “Where are you from?”

  “Lysandreia.” It was a Penelopeian city, but far south of Casseia, down in Persia. She
twisted another loop. “So just how close are you and Tamar, anyway?”

  “We’re friends.”

  “Yes, but are you summer friends?”

  Her eyes were still fastened on the wire she was looping. I took a moment to compose myself. We’ve spent time on the steppe. Of course we’ve encountered the Alashi. Where else would we have gotten the karenite? But we probably still don’t know their customs. “I don’t know what you mean,” I said.

  “Lovers. Are you lovers?”

  “None of your business.”

  “Why did the Alashi cast you out?”

  How did she know that? “What are you talking about?”

  A long pause. Then she shrugged. “If you don’t want to talk about it, I won’t try to wrench it out of you.” Another long pause. “But really. You show up with a string of Alashi horses, cropped hair like Alashi sisters, soul-stone in your pocket, and you expect me to believe that you just happened to wander down off the steppe?”

  “We went up there and traded for soul-stone and horses.”

  “Traded what?”

  “Why do you want to know that? So you can go trade yourself for more soul-stone?”

  “After you learn my secrets and leave? Yeah, of course I want to know.”

  “I don’t think they’ll trade directly with a sorceress.”

  “I’ll chop off my hair and pretend I’m just a ‘merchant,’ like you.” She looked up from her work to look me over. “Maybe I’ll trade clothes with my housekeeper and tell them I’m an escaped slave. They like escaped slaves, right? I’ll tell them I’m an escaped slave who wants to take up karenite dealing.”