All blackened stone now, and wood petrified by fire.
Above, the stars. Glimmering, untouched, they burned but could not be burned. She yearned to reach out to them, within them, and take hold of it. That which she knew hovered in the emptiness. The Word.
But he was almost here. He was climbing the tower’s side, clinging like a shadow to the uneven stone. She had to wait. Until he was here, his glimmering Stone set in the cross guard of his sword.
She saw it then. A movement at the lip of the tower, where stone met sky. Two pale hands, flexing and grasping. Lifting his big body up, until he had hauled himself over the edge, was on his knees with all of it behind him: the sky rising above, the city fallen below. She heard him hiss her name as he rose to his feet, hand on the pommel of his sword, his long black hair falling to hide his face, but still she could see his eyes. Still, she knew him. Would always know him—
“Lin?”
Lin jolted awake, a sharp pain darting through her hand. She blinked at Merren Asper, sitting across from her at his worktable in the Black Mansion, his pale eyebrows uplifted.
“Did you just fall asleep?” he said.
Lin looked down at her hand; she’d been clutching her brooch, the edged setting digging into her skin, leaving faint red lines. She slipped it into her pocket and tried to smile at Merren, who was stirring a thick black concoction with a glass pipette. The images from her dream still clung to the perimeter of her vision: shadow and fire.
“I haven’t been sleeping much lately,” she said, half apologetically. It was true enough. When she did sleep, she was troubled by wild dreams. Often she stood atop the tower of Balal and looked out upon the burning plains: Over and over she watched dream-Suleman approach her, and felt herself racked by a desire that left her body aching when she woke.
Sometimes she dreamed that she flew among mountains in the shape of a raven, and watched an old man hurl books into the sea. She had not dreamed again the dream she’d had at the Palace, where she had crawled into a cave halfway up a mountain and seen a blinding, fiery light. She’d asked Mariam the meaning of the words hi nas visik, and been surprised when Mariam had told her they meant: You are real.
“It is a sort of expression of incredulity,” Mariam had said. “As if you cannot believe what you are seeing.”
And Lin was troubled. How had she known Malgasi words in her dreams that she did not know in her waking life? But she could not think too much on it. Ever since the night she had healed the Crown Prince—so thoroughly, it seemed, that it was as if he had never been whipped at all—her whole mind had been focused on the way she had seemed to be able to use Petrov’s stone （no, she should not call it that; it was her stone now） to accomplish something beyond anything she had ever accomplished before. Beyond anything she had heard of gematry accomplishing before.
She could still recall the image that had appeared before her mind’s eye as she stood by Prince Conor’s bedside: the swirl of smoke inside the stone, the appearance of that single word: heal. She could feel the pulse of the stone in her hand.
And she could still feel the stone go cold in her hand. Ever since that night, it had lost all its color and life. It had gone a milky, flat gray color, like a dull pearl. No matter how she angled it, she could no longer see depth in the stone, nor the suggestion of words.
She had tried again, with Mariam, regardless of the change in the stone—asking Mariam to lie down as the Prince had done, and concentrating on the healing talismans Mariam wore at her neck and wrists. But nothing had happened. It was driving her mad. Why had it worked on the Crown Prince, but not Mariam? And it had worked on Kel, too, she knew now, speeding his healing, though not as impressively as it had done with Prince Conor. She still remembered the feeling that the stone wanted her to use it, the burn it had left on her skin after she had treated Kel. Yet it had done nothing like that again with any other patient, though she always wore it when she did her rounds.
She did not understand it. And she was still without the one thing that might help her understand it: Qasmuna’s book.
In the past fortnight Lin had been all over Castellane in search of it. She had met with several unsavory charlatans who had promised they had the book, or something like it, but they had never had the real thing—only silly, pasted-together “spell books,” filled with chants and rhymes meant to “bestir love” and “enhance beauty” and no mention at all of any way to actually access magic, to draw it up out of oneself and save it, so that it could be used without killing the practitioner.
This morning, she had taken time away from her search out of necessity: The Etse Kebeth was full of girls and women preparing for the Tevath, and it had been impossible to use the kitchen there to mix up her cures and remedies. So she had come to the Black Mansion, where Merren had seemed only too pleased to have company in his workroom. He looked up as the noise of a dull cheer came from outside, wrinkling up his nose in momentary puzzlement. “Something’s happening now, isn’t it?” he asked. “Is the Prince getting married?”
“Not married,” Lin said, gently. She had come to regard Merren as something of an innocent savant. He loved his potions and poisons, yet seemed to regard the rest of the world through a gauzy, fond bemusement. “The Princess from Sarthe, whom he’s meant to marry, is arriving today. They’re welcoming her in Valerian Square.”
“Oh,” Merren said brightly, and went back to stirring his black-brown concoction.
Lin had passed through the crowds on her way to the Black Mansion that afternoon; they thickened like cream at the top as she neared the center of the city and Valerian Square, where the Crown Prince would today be welcoming his Sarthian bride.
It ought to have been a festive day. Lin still recalled her mother telling her about the arrival of the young Princess Lilibet in the city, thirty years ago. Crowds had lined the Ruta Magna, cheering as an open chariot carried her into the city. Now that she had met Queen Lilibet, Lin could more easily picture her as her mother had described her: black hair flying, her lips painted red as lacquer, a green silk cloak fastened at her bare shoulders with emeralds, green fire blazing in their hearts. More emeralds burning in her crown; the citizens of Castellane had thrown red pomegranate flowers and dark-purple tulips, the flowers of Marakand, in her path and shouted, “Mei bèra, the most beautiful!”
They had been proud then, of the woman who was to be their new queen, of the beauty and fire she would bring to their city. But there was none of that pride now. A few balconies bore sprigs of white lily, the flower of Sarthe, but the general mood seemed—well, bemused seemed the best word for it.
The news of the betrothal had broken over the city like a storm. Lin heard little about it in the Sault, where the activities of the Aurelian family were only considered interesting if they affected the Ashkar. Prince Conor was not their prince; he was merely an important personage in Castellane. Their prince was Amon Benjudah, the Exilarch, currently traveling the Gold Roads with the Sanhedrin.
Lin, however, had gotten an earful from her patients, especially Zofia, who seemed to have a personal dislike of Sarthe. “Such a disappointment,” she had grumbled, waving an old cutlass in the air. “What a waste. Such an attractive Prince, and such a dull person to marry.”