The Spirit Gate (8 page)

Janka had laughed, showing strong, white teeth. She had a
beautiful smile, did Janka. “Ah,
Kassia, if you’re
not a liar, then you’re
a madwoman. I don’t
suppose that should surprise me, considering all the misfortune you’ve brought upon
yourself . . . and those around you.”

Kassia’s
arrogance shattered, loosing white-hot fury. “Damn you, sister! I did not cause that flood! Nor
did our mother cause that flood. Our households were destroyed because we lived
on the northern shore, and we lived on the northern shore because the people of
this village—people
like
you
,
Janka Telek—would
not let us live among them. If it’s
anyone’s fault
that our father and my husband are in the bosom of Itugen, it is yours. Yours
and your husband’s
and all the other cruel and bigoted people of Dalibor.”

She had left then, not giving her sister a chance to reply.
But she had seen the expression on Janka’s face and knew that recalling it would bring her
more satisfaction than guilt.

It was nearly dark when she found herself at the door of
Devora’s bakery,
not sure why she was there. When Devora appeared to answer her knock, hands
coated with flour, she was struck mute, unwilling to ask for favors, but the
older woman ushered her into the shop and prompted her.

“Why,
Kassia! I was surprised not to see you today. How’s it gone for you at market?”

“Not
as well as I expected.” Kassia took a deep breath and plunged ahead. “It went better at Lorant.” She dove into the story
then, since Devora wanted all of it, and in the end, she didn’t have to beg favors.
They were freely offered.

“I
don’t know what
that Blaz Kovar uses for brains,” Devora said, shaking graying curls, “I sometimes suppose it to be the same as he sits
on.”

Kassia laughed, partially with relief, partially because she’d secretly had the
same thought about her brother-in-law. “He
believes he’s protecting
his family from my curse.”

“Oh?
A curse that hasn’t
taken effect in three years? Well, and what does your sister Janka think?”

Kassia bit back a snide retort and said mildly, “Much the same thing.
That I might doom her family with my very presence.”

“Well,
I’ve no such
superstitions. Look, now. It’ll
be dark as pitch in less than an hour. Why don’t you and I go and get Beyla and your things and
get you settled into my parlor?”

“Mistress
Devora, are you sure you want to do this? It’s such an imposition—to take up your whole parlor—”

The baker got to her feet with an alacrity that always
surprised Kassia, given her age and stature. “Nonsense. That parlor is a luxury pure and simple.
I lived without it for many years before my youngest son married away to Tabor.
It’s more bedroom
than parlor anyway what with that trundle bed and all. It’ll be happy to have a
little boy sleeping in it again.”

They lit a lamp for the walk up to the Kovar cottage; old
Dalibor had no street lamps like her younger twin. Kassia thought that both she
and Beyla would very much appreciate sleeping in a happy room.

oOo

The remainder of the week passed slowly for Kassia. She
visited the marketplace, managing to earn a few more rega for Ursel Trava, she
helped Devora and her daughter about the bakery to earn her keep, she read the
kites over Lorant, and often she gazed up the cobbled way toward New Dalibor,
agonizing over the red-haired girl and her infant son.

Every thought of them bruised her heart, making her feel
weary and impotent. Yet, there was nothing she could do. Any attempt to let her
thoughts drift toward them ended in a panicked retreat. Perhaps she could ask
Master Lukasha how to be certain that a warning had been heard or a blessing
bestowed—oh, and
she had thrown blessing upon blessing toward New Dalibor, praying with every
fiber of her soul that Itugen and Mat would hear her and shield the unknown
child.

“Beneath
cupped hands,” she begged Mat during her nightly meditation.

As the new week opened onto Celek morn, Kassia journeyed
with Beyla and Devora across the Pavla Yeva, through the ruined forest and up
Little Holy Hill to the cesia for Matyash. She had much to celebrate, she knew,
and though she was already beginning to tremble in anxious anticipation of the
morrow, though she missed one sister and had rejected and been rejected by the
other, she had much to be thankful for.

Not the least of which, she thought, glancing aside at the
baker woman as they walked beneath the lacework of cedar boughs, was finding
out how true a friend Devora was. So, though it was not required of her, she
had brought along an offering. It was a book her mother had given her—a volume of
meditations Jasia Antavas had received from a saffron-draped monk. It was
something rare in Dalibor, where most books resided at Lorant. Those villagers
who could read (and there were few of those of Kassia’s age), had never held in their hands anything more
than the occasional rough-pressed scroll and crude, twine-bound booklets.

The people of Old Dalibor read the kites of Lorant, the
clouds, the wind and the currents of the Pavla Yeva. They studied the autumn
fogs that lay in the long river valley and the texture and content of the earth
in their fields. They read deer spoor and cat dropping. Those things made them
wise in ways the Tabori immigrants were not. But the newcomers had books, and
the books contained a new kind of wisdom.

A balance, thought Kassia, hugging her mother’s book to her breast.
Wisdom must be a balance of earth and sky. As with most things.

oOo

Matek arrived without fanfare. So excited was Beyla at the
prospect of going up to Lorant, he didn’t
close his eyes in sleep until near midnight. He was still dreaming deeply when
his mother rose to make ready for her first day as an Initiate.

Devora interceded before she could wake him. “Let him rest,” she chided. “He’s had hardly any sleep—though more than you’ve gotten. I’d hate to disturb him.” When Kassia opened her mouth to protest that she couldn’t impose, Devora put a
finger to her lips. “None
of that. I’ve my
own motives for letting sleepy heads lie. I’ll put him to work this morning, you see, and at
mid-day he can bring you up some dinner.”

Dinner. Kassia’s
mouth twisted. She hadn’t
even thought about what she would eat for dinner. That, like the amount of her
Initiate’s
stipend had lain forgotten beneath her amazement that Master Lukasha had
accepted her without quarrel.

If she had any thought that her first day at Lorant was to
be as easy as Lukasha’s
acceptance of her, Kassia was rudely disappointed. The Master Sorcerer was not
even there when she arrived. Instead, she was greeted (if one could call it
that) by Damek, and taken without ceremony to the first year studio.

Stepping into the high-ceilinged room, heart hammering and
palms sweating, Kassia found herself pinned by the gazes of students and
teacher alike. But it was not the intense regard that made her blush to the
roots of her snowy hair, it was merely that the average age of the Initiates
she faced was closer to Beyla’s
than to her own. Except for the class master—a young Mateu Damek introduced as Tamukin—she was the only adult
in the class.

She turned to Damek, mouth open to protest, but the little
man only smiled. “Here
are your classmates, Kassia. I hope you will be comfortable here.”

“But
they’re children!” she whispered.

Damek’s
smile didn’t
waver. “They’re first year
Initiates, Kassia. Just as you are. I assure you, they’ve all been tested and found to be of superlative
quality.” Which you have not, said the glittering eyes. “They can all read, they—”

“I
know,” Kassia interrupted him, cheeks burning, “I taught some of them, myself.”

Damek’s
lashes fluttered in momentary surprise, then he shrugged. “Yes, well . . .”

“I
want to speak to Master Lukasha. Surely he can’t mean for me to sit in a class full of children.”

The smug smile slipped back into place. “Master Lukasha isn’t here just now. He
was called away to Tabor yesterday morning. He said he’d try to be back in time for Induction next Celek.”

“Induction?”

“Of
course, you wouldn’t
have known since your admission was . . . well, hardly
conventional. The first week of your courses here will be mostly orientation.
The next worship day, there will be a ceremony in the college cesia and you and
your classmates will be officially initiated . . .” He looked her up and down,
then sighed. “It
may be difficult to find a robe that will fit you. Initiates are usually so
much younger.” He dipped his head then, and left her alone with her gaping classmates.

Kassia’s
first week at Lorant was a blur of frustration, boredom and loneliness. Except
for one or two, her fellow first year Initiates kept her at suspicious arm’s length. Some of them
seemed honestly afraid of her. Even among those she had tutored in reading and
writing, there was fear; they’d
never seen her without her hair decorously covered with either scarf or snood.
Now, they whispered behind her back and fled before her face.

Her only friend at Lorant, it seemed, was the old kite
master, Shagtai. Her first day, when she had retreated to the courtyard during
a break to find sun and solitude, he had been there tending his kites and had
shared a bit of his strong, black tea. It was both bitter and sweet and made
Kassia’s tongue
all but curl up in her mouth, but she so appreciated the gesture, that she
drank every last drop.

Devora appeared with Beyla at mid-day, bringing her a lunch
of bread and honey and Shagtai produced another pot of deadly tea and a story
for Beyla. When Kassia left them to return to class, an enthralled Beyla was
following his new friend through the forest of kite strings and begging to
learn how to fly them.

The last school day of the week ended early so that the
Initiates might take their Induction robes home and have them altered in time
for the Celek day ceremony. As for Kassia, there was no amount of alteration
that would make the child’s
gown of deep blue with its crescent moon badge and scattering of embroidered
stars fit her adult frame.

“I’m very sorry,” Master Tamukin had said in all sincerity, “but it’s
the only one we have that would even come close to fitting you. It was made for
a rather . . . large young man several years ago, but
unfortunately, he was also quite . . . short.” The young sorcerer’s
eyes were suddenly aswim with mirth-born mist. He cleared his throat in lieu of
laughing. “If you’d come to us in a
rather more traditional fashion, we might have had time . . .” He shrugged apologetically and Kassia took the little robe and hurried
away before she said something she’d
later regret.

Now, the robe wadded in her hands, she barely kept herself
from running all the way back down the Holy Hill to the village. The wind that
stirred the trees and fluttered about her face seemed alive with tension. It
lapped at her until she wanted to scream or cry or turn her “firebirds” loose in Damek’s
office to set it aflame. She threw herself into Devora’s shop and plowed through into the kitchens only to
hesitate in the doorway, her face plaintive and angry.

“Mother
of Spirits!” exclaimed Devora, glancing up from a lump of dough she was kneading into
submission. “Has
old Damek insulted you again?”

Kassia produced the Induction robe from behind her back. “I’m supposed to wear
this to the Induction tomorrow.”

Devora eyed it expressionlessly, then turned back to her
kneading. “Ay,
that’d be
tradition, right enough. The little ones always wear the night sky and the
stars.”

Kassia waved the thing in the air. “But that’s
the trouble, Devora. I’m
not a little one! Look at it! It’ll
come only to my knees—it’s supposed to be a
gown, not a tunic!”

Devora stopped kneading and wiped flour coated hands on her
apron. “That’s not what this is
really about, is it—an
Induction gown?”

“No,
it’s . . .
it’s about . . .
this whole week. I’m
not learning anything, Devora. My mother taught me what these first years are
learning when I was younger than they are. You should have heard Master Tamukin’s opening speech.” She affected a somber, lugubrious tone and said, in a sing-song voice, “It is not the wo-ord
that is good or e-evil, nor is it the element that lies bee-hi-ind the word,
nor is it the sentence the wo-ords form. It is only in-
tent
that
may be good or ill, only pur-pos-s-se—and
that is contained nowhere but in the invocation. This is why we are careful to
invoke only Mat and the Lady Itugen and why if you are caught carelessly
uttering invo-
ca
-tions as if they were
imp
-recations,
you will be quickly disciplined. A day or two alone in a cell with your own
thoughts should give you ample time to meditate on your err-or.”

Devora’s
mouth was a solemn line, but her eyes twinkled. “And of course, you knew this.”

“Of
course, I knew it! I knew everything Master Tamukin said. But to them, to the
little ones, it’s
all new. So when he asks a question of the class, I’m usually the only one who remembers the answer. It
doesn’t do the
children any good to hear me answering all the Master’s questions. None of us is learning anything. Least
of all me.”

Devora’s
eyebrows rose. “None
of it is new to you?”

“Well,
the Religion class is good, although Brother Sisa has to simplify a lot of
things for the children.”

“Children,” Devora repeated. “At
twelve and thirteen? My son worked full time in the bakery when he was twelve—knew everything about
baking I did. I never had to simplify for him.”

Kassia stubbornly missed the point. “Well, that’s
the difference, isn’t
it? My mother was shai; I was raised with spells and elemental equations.
Honestly, Devora, I could
teach
that class. I don’t belong there as a
student.”