In this, as in all things, she was exacting. She made me sip vinegar or take a spoonful of honey before reading certain passages. She complained about the dampness of my teeth and made me suck hard on a piece of flannel cloth before reading. She turned the pages for me when necessary, and that was how I learned where pages ended and how to pause convincingly at the base of one before moving to the next. I copied her emphasis and volume, and her inflections—sometimes too well, imitating her voice, and she would stop then and scold me for mockery, although I hadn’t intended it.
A strange thing that quickly became apparent when I started reading aloud was the behavior of my Hair. It did not react this way when I listened to Mother read, but when I myself spoke a story aloud, it would rise from my scalp and float. Mother said that if I were a proper mage, using my Hair as a source of power, strands would disappear with each casting as they burned up in service of the spell. As I could not read, however, and therefore could not cast on my own behalf, the Hair could do nothing but drift aimlessly about my shoulders.
“It does not matter,” Mother said. “You are my little helpmeet. There are many ways to serve the great work. If you cannot read or cast, then you will aid me with the bookmaking.”
“Serving the great work” sounded noble. The actualpractice of making books, however, is dirty, difficult, and usually foul-smelling, and those were the parts that Mother assigned to me. It was worth it, though, to bask in the sunshine of her approval, and she certainly needed the extra pair of hands as she made spellbook after spellbook, honing her craft as she gradually worked to construct the one great book that would contain the mysterious enchantment she had spent my entire lifetime weaving. I spent hours standing at our stove—first on a stool, when I was very young, then on tiptoe, and finally with my bare feet on the floor—stirring a great cast-iron pot full of glue for the bindings I had made from boiled bones, flour, and melted-down rabbit hides. I made Mother’s inks, too, by soaking the oak galls I chiseled from the trees by the river and blending them with rainwater, vinegar, tree sap, and ash, adding sugar for gloss and drops of clove oil for preservation.
Sometimes Mother required color, which came in the form of ground beetle shells, woad, or verdigris that I scraped off aging copper. We found most of what we needed in the lands around the Tower, but if her work ever called for an ingredient we lacked, she would send off the pigeons to one of her mysterious contacts. That is how we obtained gold leaf and lapis lazuli—and how I received my first packet of proper embroidery needles and colored threads, of which I shall speak shortly.
My most difficult work really came in at the time of binding, and that was why Mother had taught me stitchery in the first place. I was eight years old before she trusted me to stitch spellbooks—to take the block of papers and, using a bone needle as thick as my little finger, sew it onto the tanned leather supports. The layers of parchment might have looked as delicate as flaked pastry, but when crushed together became more like a stale loaf. My hands soon became more callus than flesh.
Despite its difficulty, however, I found myself strangely drawn to the task. The needle just feltright, and I found myself keeping hold of it throughout the day, rolling it over the pad ofmy thumb, enjoying the sensation. The more I touched it, the more my head filled with colors and images, and I itched to make them a reality.
To this end, I begged some scraps of fabric and leftover thread from Mother, and got to work, practicing on coarser fabrics before I turned to silk. I was clumsy at first, leaving bloodstains on the white cambric, but soon anything I envisioned took form as easily as a dream beneath my fingers: flowers, birds, strange beasts, symbols … and shapes that weren’t quite any of those, or were somehow all of them at once.
Mother looked down on embroidery as something pampered ladies did to keep themselves occupied—nothing more than frivolous decoration and an occupation for idle hands. What she did was an art, she said, the spellwork and bookbinding. I knew better than to argue. But secretly, I preferred my needle. Words inked on a page stayed inked. Stitches could take on any shape; move in any direction; surprise you at every turn. I filled the Tower with my embroidery, which no one but me (and Mother, when I forced her to look) would ever see, and I think it stopped me from going mad through all those lonely years.
And then, one autumn, I turned twenty. Twenty years of seeing no one but Mother. Twenty years of sweeping, cooking, cleaning, sewing … so muchdoing, in so many different forms, and so very littlebecoming. The clothes I sewed and embellished for myself might have fit differently as I grew, but so little else about me ever seemed to change. How could it, when I never saw or experienced anything new, and couldn’t even escape into books, stories, and songs, other than endlessly repeating to myself the ones I had already learned?
I had been stitched tidily into place in Mother’s world and would stay there forever—unmoving, unchanging. I felt a choking panic on that twentieth birthday, and ran from the Tower and across the meadow until I collapsed by theriverbank, staring at my reflection in the clear amber water. I was a woman now, indisputably, and yet in so many ways I was still a child. Mother’s wards kept the world out, and me in.
As always, when I was troubled, I turned to my embroidery. I stitched furiously that night, as if engaged in a race with my own needle. My Hair floated about my shoulders as I hunched over a little piece of fabric and embroidered the forest, the river, the meadow, and the Tower. I debated stitching myself into the Tower as well, a little figure with a floating red-gold braid, but I dismissed that as too sentimental. As my eyes followed the flashing in-and-out of the bone needle, I thought over and over,Find me. Find me.
I did not know to whom I was speaking, in the chaos of my own mind, but when I had finished the piece, I felt lightheaded and drained, somehow, as if I had unwound all my fears and frustrations and sewn them into that little square of silk.
When I had finished, feeling a little foolish, I took it to the window and flung it to the wind. It did not flutter to the ground as I had expected, but was caught by a gust and floated away from the Tower, over the meadow and the creek, into the tangle of forest that lay beyond.
Nothing happened for weeks. The wards continued to keep everything larger than a spider at bay—except for the pigeons, of course, who came and went as usual.
And then Baldbeak appeared.
When I first met him, I was feeding the messenger pigeons in our attic. For someone who never went more than a quarter-mile from her home, it seemed ironic that I spent most of my time with creatures that flew across the whole of Virelith almost daily. A small window allowed them passage in and out of their shelter, and I had fashioned a little wooden shutter on hinges that was light enough for them to push open, but substantial enough to keep out the chill. I had attached a metal hook to a long wooden pole that I used to open the hatch, leaving it hanging on the wall when I didn’t need it.
I was proud of all my little innovations. They didn’t compare to Mother’s great work, of course, but each one represented a small triumph for me—a way in which I had made the ceaseless daily tasks that little bit easier. In these ways, I felt I was truly her helpmeet, and found some comfort there.
To feed the pigeons, I had to climb up into the choking miasma of dander and dust, negotiate the guano-speckled beams without falling through the plaster between them, and try not to lose my footing when the close air filled with a hundred beating wings as each bird fought to be first to the food. The noise of all those wings and all those gurglingcooscould be deafening, and I was always glad to climb back down to our living quarters.
On that day, I heard knocking at the little window that made me jump. A huge black shadow blocked out the light, and an enormous yellow eye peered in with disconcerting intelligence. The pigeons shivered their wings and fell silent. For a moment I thought Mother might have summoned a demon—I wouldn’t have put it past her—but then the shadow flapped its wings, and I saw that it was a very large raven. I had always admired them, despite Mother warning me against them—their gleaming dark feathers and the intelligence in their eyes—and I was glad to see one up close.
I crumbled a piece of bread in my hand and went to the window, opening it a crack to offer the crumbs. There was something in the raven’s beak—a scrap of fabric. He dropped it and pecked at the food.
“How did you make it through the wards?” I asked him. As he snapped up the bread, I admired his iridescent plumage. The short feathers on his skull looked almost like fur, and they crept a little way along the top of his beak, graying as they went, making him look like he was balding there.
What are wards?
The words arrived directly in my mind. It was an odd feeling—a foreign consciousness dropping its own thoughts intomine, like someone throwing pebbles into a lake. The thoughts were indisputablyother, and equally indisputablybird, somehow, moving through my mind with the skittery, staccato energy of hops and pecks. I staggered backwards and sat heavily in a chair. Perhaps I was going mad, I thought. It wasn’t all that surprising, after my years of isolation. But the way the bird was looking at me, so expectantly …
“Um, the wards are barriers. Like a fence? But magical. Mother has put them all around the tower.”
The bird ruffled up his feathers.I felt nothing like that.
“How are you doing that?”
A questioningraark.
“Speaking to me. In my head.”
I do not know.
