MEMORIES—
Since yesterday, Nadya has been angling for Lisbet and Cora to be my charges. The last three meals, she has placed them directly beside me and murmured things like, “Lisbet reminds me so much of you” and “It is lovely to see how much Cora makes you smile.”
Or, more pointedly, “You haven’t taken on any new girls in almost two years, Dysi. ’Tis time.”
It is tempting. Cora was so sweet at the morning meal today, growing bolder with each hour she is here. And, oh, how infectious her laugh is. Meanwhile, Lisbet is sharp as a Sightwitch key. Question after question she plies at me.
Did I mention their resilience too? I believe I spent my first week at the Convent crying. Yet the girls offered only a few mournful looks after that first bout of tears at the Sorrow. Since then, they have both been chin up and gaze forward.
But I cannot take them on. The doors to each kingdom must be finished. Lady Baile and the others are depending on me—whole nations are depending on me.
And each day that passes without a solution is one more chance for the Exalted Ones to discover us. To discover me.
Two little girls are a distraction I simply cannot afford.
Yet I also cannot seem to drop the notion.
“What are those?” Lisbet asked when I pulled out my taro cards at the end of midday meal. Around us buzzed the voices of my Sisters, broken up by the clack of wooden spoons against clay bowls.
It is such a habit. Whenever I need to make a decision, my fingers move for my pocket. I withdraw the cards, a question spinning so I can ask Sirmaya directly.
“These are taro cards,” I told her. “You know the game?” At her nod, I explained, “I tied Sirmaya’s magic to these cards so that I may read the future.”
“Is that the Sight?” Cora asked.
For half a tight breath, the old shame swelled. But then it was gone. I had been a Sightless Sightwitch Sister for so long now, the claws of that truth had worn down to nubs. “No,” I said. “I don’t have visions like they have. I cannot look at something and recall it in perfect detail, and I cannot access the memories of the dead.”
“But that is what the Sight is,” Lisbet insisted, and I found myself floundering.
How could I explain this to a child? How could I succinctly describe the magic, the spells, and the all-knowing power of the Sleeper? This was not a Sight that I had been given but one that I had chosen to have.
Nadya came to my rescue. “There are signs in the world all around us, girls. Clues to what Sirmaya, our sleeping Goddess, needs us to do. If you know how to look, you can find these hints without the Sight.”
“There are no coincidences,” Cora asserted, her expression grave. A student reciting her latest lesson.
I couldn’t help it. I smiled.
“Precisely,” Nadya continued, offering me a smug side eye. “And the cards allow Sister Eridysi to see those portents more easily. Each card has a meaning, and the magic that binds the cards to Sirmaya dictates which card she will draw.” Nadya waved to me. “Show them.”
So I did.
Three cards I plucked, as is my usual method when a question plagues. One card for my question; one card for the action I must take; and one card for the future.
The Twins. Lady Fate. The Empress.
“Ah,” I breathed as the meaning became instantly clear—and as Nadya clapped her hands, entirely too overjoyed.
“Praise be to Sirmaya,” she declared, looking first to Cora, then to Lisbet, and finally to me. “It seems you three have been matched by the Sleeper herself—and as we know, Dysi dearest, there is no changing what is meant to be.”
LATER
After I resurfaced from the Crypts, the Rook pecked and pulled at my tunic. A sign he wanted me to follow him.
I feared one of the Nubrevnans had somehow wandered through the glamour … Yet at the same time, I also hoped one of the Nubrevnans had somehow wandered through the glamour.
Rule 37, the Rule of the Accidental Guest, is very clear, but I would have savored every moment of conversation before I carried it out.
It wasn’t until the Rook led me directly to the ladder at the lookout’s nest that I realized who had come.
A supplicant. Someone was at the Supplicant’s Sorrow.
Never have I climbed that ladder so fast. I was panting by the time I reached the top, and not from exertion. From excitement. From hunger.
A supplicant had come! Perhaps … perhaps it was someone I could speak to. Perhaps, even, it was someone who could stay!
Several minutes I waited, staring at the tree line beyond the Sorrow’s pond, until at last, a Nomatsi woman and child appeared. They were both pale as the moon, their hair coal black. Huge, teardrop eyes on the girl. Deeper-set eyes on the woman, who walked with resolve, the yellow grass snapping beneath her feet. The girl had to half run, half walk to keep up.
Once they reached the stone bridge, the old woman pointed toward the island. I couldn’t hear her, but I could guess she said something akin to what they always say: “Wait on the island beside the fountain. Someone will come for you.”
She then knelt and embraced the girl.
I confess, my throat went dry at the sight of it. I hadn’t been hugged … or touched … or spoken to in so long.
Goddess, it had been so long.
Quick. Efficient. The hug was over in a blink before the woman was standing once more and nudging the child onto the bridge.
The girl crossed, her steps cautious but surprisingly unafraid. She carried a small rucksack on her back, presumably filled with some personal belongings. The woman watched her, waiting stiff as a mountain, and I watched her too.
It occurred to me, as the girl took each of her forty-three steps across the bridge (if you have my legs, it takes only thirty-two), that I needed to clean the bridge again. I had scrubbed it fourteen days ago, yet already algae globbed up the south side.
But then Tanzi’s voice niggled at me again. Why bother, Ry? There’s no one around to see.
“I am the last Sightwitch Sister,” I murmured, “and if I don’t follow the Rules, Tanz, then what’s the point of being?” Yet even as I said it, I couldn’t shake the feeling that there was no here in being here.
And I couldn’t shake the feeling that I should have gone deeper into the Crypts.
When at last the child reached the island, the woman swiveled away and strode off into the pine trees. Not gone forever, I didn’t think. Since supplicants were not always welcomed inside.
Normally, a Sister would scurry out to the island as soon as she’d spotted the supplicant, but sometimes that took hours. The Sorrow was not observed all day; duty in the nest was only a few hours in the afternoon. So oftentimes, supplicants had to wait.
The day slid past.
For almost eight hours, the girl waited on the island for “someone to come for her”—for me to come for her. I, in turn, waited to see what she would do.
Yes, so lonely have I become that the prospect of company set my heart to racing with excitement.
I am pathetic.
But by the Sleeper, it was so much like that day nine years ago when Tanzi had been left by her grandmother. It was the first time Hilga let me go with her to the Sorrow, and I had been there to welcome little Tanzi into our ranks.
Not that I was very nice. She still teases me for how stiff I was …
Teases? Teased?
Teases. Because of course, Tanzi is still alive, and she’ll be back any day now. If I don’t find her first.
Yet I could not greet this new child like I had Tanzi. I couldn’t welcome her into the Convent.
Never.
I might break the Order of Two—and perhaps even Rule 9—but I only risked myself then. To break Rule 12 about accepting new children … That put someone else’s life at stake.
Not an option.
Although that truth didn’t keep me from imagining what it would be like to go to the girl. A hundred times over the course of the day, I dreamed it out in great detail.
She was clearly such a smart child—and fearless too. First, she explored the narrow spit of the island, even dipping her toes in the pond around it. Then she peered into the fountain, but there’s nothing to see. It was drained decades ago, and the carvings of the Twelve that once lined the granite floor have eroded into blank ovals of striated nothing.
The girl dismissed it in a heartbeat and moved to the northern shore where the land slants up into a tiny stone cliff. Rocks rest there, and she quickly set to stacking them. Taller, taller. She spent hours assembling pile after pile, like some miniature architect using strategy and elegance to keep each rock afloat.
I left several times throughout the day. The tomatoes needed picking, and the dill weed had, yet again, overtaken everything.
Yet I never lasted more than an hour at my duties before I would scurry back to the southern forest, my heart pounding as I wondered, Will she still be there? Then I’d shimmy up the ladder and into the lookout’s nest.
Each time, though, I would find the girl exactly as I had left her, with a few more rock piles towering around her.
Some hovered so high that even with her arms stretched upward, I do not think the girl could have reached the top. I’ve no idea how she got the stones up there.
Sixteen stacks she built, until the ground was barren. Eventually, she ate an apple from her rucksack. Then she napped amid the stone columns.
By the time the sun set, I had decided to retrieve her. To take her into the Convent, though it would surely be a death sentence for us both.
In fact, I had convinced myself that, No! Of course the woman would not return for the girl, and it would be more cruel to leave her here, where she would die of starvation, than to bring her in, where at least we could slowly rot away together.
“Dirdra!”
The voice, a cry from the forest, toppled my desperate day-dream and startled the child out of another nap.
“Dirdra!” the woman called again, and this time, she coalesced from the forest’s frayed edge.
The girl scrambled up, knocking into one of her piles. Somehow, though, it did not fall. It wobbled and swayed dangerously, yet remained upright. I might have wondered more at that had my heart not been splitting in two as I watched the girl scamper off.
Over the bridge she went, and into the woman’s waiting arms. A quick embrace before she shooed the girl into the woods without her. She waited until the girl was out of sight before marching to the island, around the fountain, and finally to the northern shore.
She looked directly at me.
I immediately dropped to my knees.
“Why will you not take her?” she shouted in accented Cartorran. “She is clever and she listens well! Please, Sightwitch, we have nowhere else to leave her.”
She can see me, I thought, crawling away from the nest’s edge. She can see me and the glamour has failed and I am exposed. I half fell down the ladder trying to get away. I needed to check on the Standing Stones—somehow, they must have broken and the glamour had fallen.
SHE COULD SEE ME.
“She will die out here,” the woman cried after me. “I am begging you to take her, Sightwitch. Please!”
I paused then, my pulse hammering in my eardrums. If I didn’t answer, would she follow? If the glamour was down, there was nothing to keep her outside the Convent grounds.
So I swiveled back and cupped my mouth. “And she will die here too! The Sightwitches are all gone, and there can be no home for her at the Convent.”
With that, I spun on my heel and sprinted directly for the Standing Stones.
It is only now, as I sit against the tallest monolith of the eight while the last of the day’s light fades, that I realize the woman must have been a Threadwitch.
All the Standing Stones are intact, which means the glamour spell that is bound to them still holds. She must have seen my Threads—not me—through the magic.
Which means she did not hear my answer.
Which means she will never know why I couldn’t take in little Dirdra.
For some reason, this makes me cry.
And cry and cry and cry and cry.
The grass tickles my ankles. The Rook preens atop a smaller stone nearby.
I miss Tanzi.