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  “Have you ever been owned by another sorceress?”

  “Yes, I was born into the household of a sorceress. One with a family. It was . . .” She thought it over. “During the dark fever, in her frenzies, her husband would usually seek to control her, up to a point. But he feared her—I think the husbands of sorceresses fear them almost as much as their servants. And sometimes he would try to placate her by giving her what she wanted, at least up to a point. When I was still a child, she became convinced that I was spying on her for a rival sorceress. She wanted me killed. Her husband prevented that, but he did arrange to have me sold, very quickly. I had time to say good-bye to my father, but not to my mother, before I was whisked out of her household and into another.”

  “When Zivar bought you, were you worried?”

  “Yes. I would have been worried even if she hadn’t been a sorceress, though; it’s always frightening to go somewhere new.”

  “Have you ever thought of spying on her and learning magic, just as she did with her own mistress?”

  Nurzhan looked at the bead in my hand, and then back to my face. “I have seen Zivar’s darkest days and her wildest frenzies. When the dark fever has her, she believes that the entire universe has united together to torment her. Thank you, but no, I would not become a sorceress for any price. I think Zivar must have wanted power very, very badly to study as she did.”

  I closed my hand around the bead, then slipped it into the silk pouch and tied it around my throat, as Zivar had. “Are you going to clean up Zivar’s tools if I leave them out?”

  “Not unless Zivar stirs herself and seems better.”

  I nodded, and went to the stairs. “Good night, then.” I will not work through the night. That’s fevered sorceress behavior. And I am not a fevered sorceress.

  Not yet, anyway.

  Nurzhan snuffed the lights behind me as I left.

  Tamar was sleeping when I returned to the room, but stirred and sat up as I came in with my lamp. “Where have you been?”

  “Making a spell-chain.” I took off my slippers and crawled under the quilt. “I decided to come get some sleep.”

  “Good,” Tamar said, and pulled the quilt back up to her ear. I lay back against the pillows.

  I had expected to slip easily into sleep, but instead I lay awake for a long time, tossing and turning and listening to the faint whistle of the fire. Very late, I heard the wind suddenly pick up. It was probably snowing outside again. When I closed my eyes I could almost see the whirl of flakes, like a million falling stars, or the glittering crystals of a spell-chain.

  Lauria.

  It was Tamar’s voice—but I had fallen asleep, I realized, and stood in the strange borderland of whirling colors. Lauria. Her voice caught me like a bird in a net, and I found myself standing on the summer steppe. Her cheeks were flushed, as if she’d just been riding. I fell back a step; it had been her voice, but it made no sense for Tamar to try to talk to me this way when she could simply wake me up.

  “It worked!” she said, delighted.

  “What worked?”

  “I got you. I found you!” Tamar gave me a hug. “I’ve been trying to do this for weeks—no, months. And it worked. It worked! I came to the borderland, I called you, and you came.”

  “Do you think you’ll be able to do this again?”

  “I know I will.” Her eyes were alight. “I’m a shaman now.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  In the morning, I checked with the servants to make sure that Zivar was still indisposed, then went up to her workroom. It was snowing hard outside, and the workroom’s light was veiled, her window half-covered with snow. The fire in the little stove had been built up for me, and the room was warm and comfortable. I looked around at the shelves of jars full of beads, then pulled one down, choosing one at random. The jar held beads of carved jade. I tipped them into my hand and looked at them. Some skilled person had carved each one into the shape of a tiny animal. There were dogs, cats, horses. No mice. I wondered if Zivar, of the stone carved mouse guarding her doorway, had used up any carved mice on past spell-chains.

  Zivar had talked about the beads singing to her, and having tasted the swirling colors of the borderland I visited in dreams, I had a faint inkling of what she meant. I closed my eyes, holding the beads, but heard nothing. I popped a bird-shaped bead into my mouth, but it tasted like a slightly dusty piece of rock. I spit it out and stared at it, perplexed. After a moment, I took the karenite bead out of the silk bag at my throat and set it in my palm as well.

  Something about the color of the karenite seemed to match with a carved jade horse. I set the horse on the table and tipped the rest of the beads back into the jar.

  The next jar I chose held glass beads: tiny swirls of color, crimson and yellow and azure blue. I thought about Zhanna’s meditation lessons, when she was trying to train me as a shaman: I tried to slow my breathing and to focus, just for a moment, on the beads. My ears still heard nothing but I decided, after looking at them for a long moment, that one of the beads went with the horse the way the horse had gone with the karenite. It was striped yellow and blue. I set it beside the horse and poured the rest of the beads back into their jar. I put the karenite back into the pouch around my throat.

  The next jar held metal beads, and four of those seemed to fit, somehow. And so it went. I realized after a while that I needed some way to keep my chosen beads together. The giant shell from the sea that Zivar used was empty, so I took it carefully down from the shelf and put my beads inside.

  Choosing perhaps twenty beads had taken me hours and I still wasn’t sure I was doing it right. I would need at least twice this number to make myself a single loop of a reasonable length. If I wanted a nice long strand that could be looped two or three times around my neck, I would need eighty beads or more. I reached for another jar.

  As the day wore on, the pile of beads began to grow. Even in the muted, snow-filled daylight it sparkled; I dug my fingers into the pile and let the beads trickle out like sand, listening to the sound they made. It was a sleepy day; I felt tired, half-asleep as I worked, but that didn’t seem to make it harder to choose the beads I wanted. By nightfall, I had enough, I thought. I looked at the pile; it would make a nice long chain, big enough for two or three loops around my neck, or many more around my wrist. I wondered if more links made a more secure spell; intuitively it seemed like they should, since I had never seen a spell-chain big enough only to be a bracelet. Kyros had looped one of his spell-chains around his wrist, but it had been a many-stranded bracelet. Perhaps I should add more beads. No. This is enough.

  I was tired and hungry, but reached for the wire and tools anyway. I had watched Zivar do this, over and over, and now I tried it myself: thread a bead, twist the end of the wire into a loop, and then cut that link free. But when I tried to bend the wire into a neat little circle, it was a gruesome, misshapen thing. I tried to straighten it out to try again and only made things worse. I tried a few more times and finally snipped off the end of the wire; it was bent and weakened past repair, the metal wasted. I tried again, and this time created a fragile-looking loop. I snugged the bead against the loop, snipped the wire free, and bent another loop. My loops were nothing like the perfectly balanced circles of Zivar’s. Like selecting beads to go in the chain, this was harder than it looked. I’ll work on this tomorrow, when I’m fresh, I thought. But what if Zivar wakes from her stupor? I took a bag and poured my beads into it, tightening the drawstring and putting the shell back where it went. If Zivar wakes, I’ll wait for the next time she goes into darkness to make the rest of the chain. I dropped the twisted end and the single link into my bag as well, put everything else back where it belonged, and went down to have dinner with Tamar.

  She was eating alone, staring pensively into the fire. “Are you done?” she asked as I came in.

  “No.” I described my day’s accomplishments. “I’ll get back to it in the morning. If I’m going to teach myself how to bend wire, I th
ink I want good light for it.”

  “Fair enough.” She pushed aside her half-eaten dinner.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “The snow is making me restless.”

  “How deep is it outside?”

  “Haven’t you looked?”

  “I haven’t set foot outside since . . .” Days ago. “For a while.”

  “Well, maybe you should go look. Don’t annoy Zivar, because we’re stuck here until spring.”

  “If she tries to throw us out, I could threaten to expose her secret.”

  “That might work for her servants. I think she’d just kill you.”

  “What, with her bare hands? With a sword?”

  “She’d think of a way, if she thought she had to.”

  I crossed the room to the shuttered window and cracked it open, peering down in the last of the evening twilight. The snow was falling outside very gently, but it looked really deep. I closed the window and shivered a little. “I’ll be careful, then.”

  “You’re using her tools, her beads . . .”

  “Do you have a better idea for getting Prax out of the mine? For freeing Sophos’s harem? For finding Thais?”

  “I’ve been thinking about the harem,” Tamar said. “Jaran is a shaman. I found you in a dream, I could probably find him. We could plan something. If the slaves worked together, if we were on the outside to help them get up to the steppe once they were out . . . I don’t think we’d need the spell-chain. I think we could do it ourselves. I think they could do it.”

  “You’re assuming that no one would rat them out. Aislan is in the harem! How is everyone else going to plan something and keep it a secret from Aislan?”

  “That would be up to Jaran.”

  “And what about Prax? If there’s a shaman down in the mine, I don’t know who it is.”

  “You don’t even know if Prax is still alive.”

  “Yes, I do,” I said. “The djinn showed him to me. But I don’t know how I’m going to get him out without a spell-chain.”

  “There’s a way. There has to be a way. But you’re not going to see it unless you turn away from what you’re doing now. You’re focused on the sorcery, on learning to make spell-chains; if another way is right in front of you you’re still not going to see it.”

  “Even if you’re right, what are we going to do for the rest of the winter? As you pointed out, we’re buried in snow. We’re stuck with Zivar until spring.”

  “So we stay here. Until spring. That doesn’t mean you have to accept anything other than her hospitality.”

  “I’m never going to have this chance again,” I said. “If I put away my beads, and throw away my karenite, I could be throwing away the one chance I’d have to do what I’ve promised to do.”

  “You are the most pig-headed stubborn goat of a fool that I have ever met,” Tamar said. “What if you grab this chance, and the darkness the sorceresses walk along eats you like an owl eats a mouse? Gauhar, one of the servants here, used to work in the home of one of the big, important Weavers, a woman with a lot of apprentices. Do you realize that out of ten apprentices, five are sent away because the melancholia grabs them so strongly? And of the rest, three might end up killing themselves in a fit of dark fever? And of the two remaining, one might end up so mad that her spell-chains are taken away and she’s kept somewhere quiet and safe, forever? The powerful sorceresses don’t make their own spell-chains. They have apprentices who work in exchange for karenite. Zivar is probably hoping that you’ll complete a spell-chain so that she can steal it from you.”

  “She can try,” I said.

  “Ask Gauhar what happens to the apprentices who fail, if you don’t believe me,” Tamar said. “Even one attempt at making a spell-chain can do it. Even a failed attempt. You’re so busy grasping at your one precious chance that you don’t realize that you could fall into the middle of a raging river in spring flood. Look where you’re going.”

  I was too infuriated with Tamar to stay in the room, and too infuriated to go to bed, anyway, so I turned around and went back up to Zivar’s study to work on making necklace loops.

  The workroom was dark when I reached it; I lit the lamps and bent over the desk again, bending the wire into tiny circles, over and over and over. It was tedious work, and my mind went back over my conversation with Tamar again and again, the way you might touch a bruise. I clenched my teeth together, steadying my hand against the table and squinting to focus my eyes. When I could barely keep my eyes open, I laid my head down on the desk—just for a moment, to rest my eyes—and found myself drifting, like a feather in a snowstorm.

  Here we are.

  I was in a room full of women. My first thought was that I was seeing someone’s harem, but these women looked Greek, and many of them were old or unattractive. Still, they were dressed much like the women in Sophos’s harem, in loose white shifts of thin linen. Some of the women were slumped in corners; one paced furiously. Then I noticed that some of them bent over small looms, and I realized that I was seeing some of the failed apprentices.

  See.

  One of the women could see me, I realized. Slouched in a corner, she had raised her chin slightly and was gazing directly at me. I wanted to say something to her, but I had no idea what to say. “Where are we?” I asked, finally.

  “Hell,” she said, her voice conversational. “Or maybe Penelopeia. I can’t remember.”

  “How long have you been here?”

  “Who knows?”

  “Whose apprentice are you?”

  “I was apprentice to Ligeia.”

  “How many spell-chains did you make?”

  “Five,” she said. “All for my mistress.” She turned her head and spat on the floor.

  The room was fading around me. See, the djinn whispered in my ears, again. See see see see see.

  I lifted my head from Zivar’s worktable and began to bend wire again. Five spell-chains. I only need to make one.

  Sometime after sunup, I heard footsteps on the stairs; the servants moved almost silently, so my first thought was that it was Zivar. I leapt off the stool, stuffing my nearly complete chain under my shirt, and then saw that it was just Tamar. “Good morning,” I said, trying to collect my scattered nerves.

  “It’s afternoon,” Tamar said with a shrug.

  “It is?” I realized suddenly that I was ravenous. No one had brought me anything to eat. They’d fed me as a courtesy to Tamar, so no doubt now they’d stopped bringing me food because Tamar had asked them to. I sat back down and picked up the tools again. “Any word of Zivar?”

  “She’s sleeping, apparently.” Tamar sat down on the rug. “Are you almost done?” I held out the necklace. Tamar stared at it bleakly, then shrugged. “How many more beads?”

  I did a quick count. “Ten. Plus the karenite.”

  “And once it’s done, is that it?”

  “No, I have to go get the djinn. That’s what I saw Zivar doing.”

  “Ah.”

  She showed no inclination to leave, so I went back to work. A few more minutes and I had a long single strand. I drew the karenite out of the silk bag and made a link for it: the circle was almost ready to be closed. I spread the necklace out and looked at it for a moment. All that glittering color. If I closed the circle right now, anyone looking at it would think it was a spell-chain. The potential seemed to hum in the air; I could hear the singing of the beads again.

  I remembered my glimpses of sorceresses in the past, draped with glittering spell-chains. I could make a dozen necklaces out of nothing but beads, dress up in fine clothing, and almost everyone looking at me would take me for a sorceress. Though they might wonder why I traveled by horse, rather than palanquin, if they saw me on the road.

  Well, this was a real spell-chain, or would be shortly. I looked up and saw Tamar watching me still.

  “Now I’ll have to meditate,” I said. “I think I’m going to do this in our room, if you don’t mind. I don’t think it matters where I tak
e the necklace, and up here I’ve been jumping every time I think I hear Zivar.”

  Tamar shrugged again and got up as I put away Zivar’s tools, all but the one set of pincers that I would need for this final step, which I tucked into my pouch with the spell-chain. Then she trailed me down the stairs and settled herself down on a cushion near the fire, watching me.

  During the summer, when we were apprenticed to Zhanna, she had tried several times to teach us to meditate. Some shamans opened their minds to the spirits through dancing or drumming; apparently the sorceresses did it through weaving. I’d never been able to meditate properly in my lessons with Zhanna, but after following Zivar to the place she called the borderland, I thought I might be able to find my way there again. The fire reflected against the glass beads like sun on water. I held up the necklace and let it spill down from one hand to the other, back and forth, back and forth, watching the play of flames against the glass.

  I could hear the smooth click of the beads. Then, faintly in the distance, I could hear a hum, the voices singing the same note. Yes, I thought, and I followed the hum.

  I was not surrounded by a circle of dancing flames tonight; I held it, I controlled it, and I could fling the net out across the dark plain that surrounded me. I’m here, I thought, I came here on purpose and I brought the spell. I am a Weaver! Or I will be, if I can take an aeriko.

  Of course, I had to find one first.

  I turned around and around, and then realized I could see a faint glow in the distance. Remembering the woman of fire that Zivar had captured, I started toward the light. As soon as I thought about movement, I began to move, gliding over the shadowed plain like a diving eagle. Approaching, I could see the aeriko. A man, I thought, shining like a star, or like white heat.

  “No!”

  The voice was in my ear. I turned and saw nothing but the dark plain; the voice was in my real ear. “No!” Tamar’s voice said again. “I’m not going to let you.”

  The man had seen us. He was moving, fleeing. I started after him, my movements sluggish and distracted. Then something cold and wet slapped me across the face. The darkness shattered around me like a dropped jar, and after a moment of intense nausea and a blinding pain in my head, the world settled around me and I was sitting, still, in front of the fire. Tamar stood in front of me, a wet rag in her hand and a faint smile on her face. Our eyes met for a long moment.