She did not dare light others; she might as well toss books onto the floor as leave a ring ot melted stubs around the room. He raised his face from the paper, found a cup of wine, apparently untouched, near his paint box. You were on the streets above all this time?” Mag shook her head, both hands over her mouth now. Some time later, he found himself sitting at a battered table, gazing at the face that had come out of his charcoal. No. “Someone left me like the morning bread in a basket on Faey’s doorstep. Arm yourself and do not leave the palace without a guard. Or did they go into it? It had closed by the time she reached it. And it may be just as well not to allow the prince to become too attached to his tutor. Then she melted as if flame had touched her, flowed away into a safer dream. She sank onto a faded love seat, closed her eyes with a sigh, then opened them again and sniffed at herself disgustedly. Waiting. You recognize them. The sorceress queried him with a sparse brow; he admitted, “I would have let Mag tell you that we met. “Steady.” “Yes,” Mag said, thinking: I am wax, I am a making, I am nothing. The man moved quickly through the crowds. “You could have asked her.” “Faey doesn’t know everything. Perhaps, she thought incredulously, it had not been Ducon at all but his ghostly-seeming other. Above her, cobblestones rattled continuously under carriages trailing black ribbons from their doors, making their way to the great, solemn funeral that would finally put an end to the tolling of the bells. If he turned to look at her, the woman he waited for would disappear; there would be only this stranger. Nothing else, no one, no true place. There was the shadow at the end of Glover’s Alley, which Mag’s sharp eyes noticed never changed position, morning or noon. Then, as Lydea’s eyes widened in fascinated horror, the sorceress shook her body back into its beautiful proportions. She would give him a rose, and he would give her a drawing of the city he lived in. He said, “Is this a secret place?” “This is your place. One hand, groping upward, caught Ducon’s shirt. When Ombria’s prince, Royce Greve, breathes his last—in palace rooms high above the city—he leaves his young son and mistress at the mercy of his ancient and powerful great-aunt, Domina Pearl. Now we can get some rest.” Mag’s eyes followed the charcoal as Faey turned to lay it gently in a plain wooden box. Apparently, her clothes had also offended the eye of the mistress of the mansion; she now wore a gown of rich green velvet, of a stark simplicity that hadn’t been fashionable for a hundred years or so. Faey, beginning to speak to the cauldron, did not answer. Not all the artists in the house had been dead and hung on the walls. “It was an impossible task,” he said softly, “given the circumstances. A small woman moved into the torchlight between the gates. Twenty-Six Time Out of Mind Mag, shackled to a wall in a room without a door, watched what looked like a huge moth with glowing golden wings beat incessantly at the glass sides of a jar on a shell. “How can you assume that I was — that I was left here because I was wanted? Mag, moving as quietly as one toward the busier inner cellars, wondered if Faey’s peculiar existence, half-alive, half-past, had wakened the memories in the ghosts who lived with her. And I will grant it because I am the moon.” “Then I must make a fox’s wish. “He sees,” she murmured, “more than he should. “I have only one passion in my life and that is the history of Ombria. “Change your clothes and get aired, my waxling. “Someone left you on my doorstep.” She turned, as Mag stopped again in wonder. The iron fence beyond the trees held back a black tide of mourners from the city. I would prefer to keep the boy alive to maintain a semblance of continuity. “Tell me. She’s tall, wiry, and not afraid of anything, not even of what she should fear.” He shook his head, trying to conjure her up and failing. Mag cut and tore paper and canvas, mingled cloud and city, tree and child and dying knight into the brew. The brewer’s son had trouble counting change and kept dropping coins until his amiably chatting father went to load a few kegs for a merchant. The tiny glove shop was surrounded by hulking warehouses, pools of water and blood from a slaughterhouse, and stained wagons bringing fresh hides to a tanner and taking tanned hides away. He began to run, inward and upward toward the secret heart of the palace. “Sozon planned a disturbance in another part of the palace. “The prince was tired, he said, of looking at so much black.” “So am I,” he breathed. A dangerous and compelling question, but not, in the end, what they asked him. It’s worth giving away for what I’m being paid to kill the bastard.” She paused, blinking, then touched her eyes with her fingers, and added with an unaccustomed hint of regret, “Well, the Black Pearl would have been the death of him sooner or later. The elusive, gleaming swaths of power seemed to draw closer around them, blurring the battling figures, the noise. That’s tomorrow’s sheets in order. So he let the charcoal imagine what might lie on the other side of the door. “Let no one enter,” she ordered. I think she has a special knack for writing these wonderful "odd" young female characters like Luna, Peri, Saro and Sybel, and Mag joins their ranks with her own unique struggle and transformation. The white marble had darkened, weathered through centuries. Which was her father’s? Then she studied him. Faey, her words as staccato as the heels in the streets high above their heads, told him what it said before he read it. He had stopped before she realized it. She moved soundlessly behind the shelves, her hands rising to find a suitable pin. Ducon, gripping Mag’s arm to keep her upright, bent speechlessly to rub his shin. Ombria in Shadow is one of McKillip's adult works. “Ducon — Who?” “You saw them,” Ducon said very softly. Meanwhile, in a dreamlike underworld peopled by Ombria’s ghosts, a … “Well,” she whispered back, “what goes up must come down. “I searched for you,” she said, perplexed and suspicious. “That’s why I asked you about Ducon Greve. Kyel moved abruptly; the blade cut. Along one road Ducon stood alive. She lifted her cup daintily as the door closed, then returned it to the saucer with a clatter, sloshing coffee. “I found your charcoal,” she said. The crazed human face of the manticore rampant across his tunic seemed to display his true feelings. Very little was said about the matter. It crashed onto her bed. The bread had slid out of her hand. Who told me where to find the Rose and Thorn?” Mag nodded. He roams through Ombria, sketching or painting whatever catches his eye. It was, he realized, her version of a smile. That and the young prince are all he seems to care about. That’s what Faey calls her.” He nodded, enlightened. Don’t get lost with Camas.” “I don’t intend to.” Something in his voice made her look sharply at him. Could a bastard of the House rule Ombria? She was so startled by the sound she made that she jammed the handkerchief against her mouth. He didn’t speak immediately either. Someone rolled the darkness off him and he saw the manticore of thread again, a knife neatly severing the bloody swords where they crossed. “He knew and didn’t tell her; he would be caught in his own lie. Other candles emerged under her flame; she lit them all, and saw what she was standing in. She seemed to be listening to something within herself, or in the dark beyond the pretty illusion around them. I want her dead. Something glinted at the periphery of Ducon’s vision; he felt a cold, thin edge of metal against his throat. And I don’t know what she would do to me if she caught me. I loved it that much. The guards’ feet pounded hard on Lydea’s heels as she ran a scared rat’s path through the maze of hallways, taking every turn. Faey could not have been weeping. But I couldn’t find him, I couldn’t, though I’ve looked everywhere—” “What,” Camas Erl asked, his wide eyes no longer an owl’s, but fiercer, fixed and predatory, “exactly are you?” “I don’t know,” she answered, reckless with the truth. Hillocks of laundry were being sorted into other hillocks. A dead prince, a common mistress cast bak into the streets, a young heir, a trapped cousin, a queen of pirates and dark arts, an underground sorceress, a girl made of wax, plotting nobles, a hidden city and a tutor who wishes to write the history of Ombria. But he only said, thinking she meant to look for work, “Perhaps it’s best.” He bent, reached into the petrified boot behind the bar where he kept his money. Her waxling slunk quietly away like a cat avoiding the other boot and found her own untidy room. She locked me in without knowing that I was there. I can pay you.” She shrugged a little, righting the ink pot before it fell. “And pieces that don’t yet fit. But he did not seem to notice. And yet you can glimpse the tale there in all those books. He asked sharply, “How will I find you again?” She told him. Faey, also in wine silk, her unruly dark hair coiled neatly around white rosebuds, looked as if she had shut herself up in a closet as punishment for having misplaced her waxling. I will tell you this: if I find you watching me again I will unmake you so well, past and future, that not even Faey will remember you existed. She blinked, then dismissed the half-glimpsed idea that had rolled like a sea creature on the surface of her mind, then dove back down, so deeply that she had forgotten it before she returned to her chamber. So against her inclinations, she stayed put. You should rest; you’re beginning to look like one of the household ghosts.” But I’m not, Mag thought with a fierce, burning triumph, as she lay in her own bed with the locket in her hands. He examined everything with interest, but murmured, “This is now, not past. But I was also thrown out into the streets for wearing them. Who am I? All the broken piers he had wandered over must be fixed; the troubled, dangerous streets he had roamed at all hours must be made safe; the street urchins must be caught like stray dogs, fed and schooled. The undercity wandered into caves, bridged side streams, flowed toward a distance with no horizon, its streets breaking over chasms in which, far below, other lights patterned the dark water. Pages 120 That morning they had been soft as feathers, jewelled, polished, perfumed. He said, “If I fight her, I die and Kyel is left with her. How do I make you see? “You raven-eyed hag, some bitter bird ate your heart out so long ago you don’t even remember how to be human. It’s outside of time, and you’ll remember better afterward.” “Wait what out? He may be only a child, but he is the Prince of Ombria, and if his heart dies so soon, so will Ombria. “Would Mag do this for you?” she asked abruptly. He cried out desperately to the distant figure, “Wait!” He found himself alone, walking the maze of hidden rooms within the palace toward the place where, he knew with absolute certainty, the stranger who wore his face waited. They might have been kin, though he lived in the palace above the world, and she beneath it. He still held Ducon’s arm; his fingers tightened slightly, before he spoke. Kyel’s nurse, Jacinth, had supervised much of that for him. What, for instance, precipitates the shift from city to shadow city? I love all of McKillip’s work, as least so far. Like you, she was drawn to this door.” Ducon’s fingers, closing suddenly on his father’s wrist, melted slightly into a glinting aura. What is the Black Pearl?” He was silent, thinking, a furrow trowelled across his forehead. She asked, her voice trembling in the aftermath of the scream, “Where are you taking him?” “To my house.” “Why did—Who wanted him killed? “You,” she said acridly. The House of Greve is dead. You don’t look as though you are afraid of anything, Mistress Thorn.” “If you leave,” Kyel said abruptly, “I will go with you.” “My lord,” she answered carefully, “I do not intend to go anywhere until you learn enough to write the story of the fan in several languages.” “Will that take a long time?” “A very long time,” she whispered, “since I will have to learn them first. You are her — what? She dropped a curtsey, which erased the hairline furrow in his brow. If I say I am human, then where do I belong? Mag stared it down: it was dream, a wish of Domina Pearl’s, nothing. She goes places, does things for me. Ducon can look for her. There’s a lot going on here: the magic behind Faey and her waxling, the magic behind Domina Pearl, Ducon’s father and Mag’s origins… And there’s characters you can’t help but care about: Kyel, so alone; Lydea, who loves him; Ducon, the bastard son with no designs upon the throne, who spends his time drawing, searching, learning the city. Give me the box.” That night, the Prince of Ombria, who had suffered odd, sudden ailments all his life, grew very ill. Mag sat long past morning beside the chimney that rose into the roots of the sunflowers, listening to snatches of gossip echoing down the stones, as carriages of physicians and far-flung family rattled through the gate. “It seems we have been in mourning forever.” Sorrow caught her, as it did sometimes unexpectedly: a thumbprint of fire in the hollow of her throat. Then expression stirred in his eyes; he found the past again, remembered what death was. The Black Pearl pushed her roughly toward the door. The age and richness within the sorceress’s mansion, the changing glimpses from room to room of older times, the antique velvet Lydea wore, made her feel ghostlike, as if she were haunting her own memories of life within the palace. The courtiers came back out; the dead prince did not. He heard the chaos around him then, a tempest trying to be as quiet as possible, grunts, thuds, a hissed shout. He recognized her, though she wasn’t wearing the face in his dreams, or even the face he had glimpsed above Lydea’s when she had knelt beside him in the rubble and said his name. Ducon’s hand tightened on Kyel’s shoulder; he breathed quickly, “Draw it for me. By the time she was seven, she knew doors all over the city. As what? Exactly where they vanished on their way to bid farewell to the dead man, no one was able to explain to Domina Pearl, though everyone, she was assured, had been watching the two of them at all times. It’s like the last spell,” she added to Mag. When he tried to step across it, he felt nothing beneath his foot. I forbid it.” He lifted the falcon puppet; it stared fiercely at them both. But it was you who searched for us in your drawings, you who saw into shadow, you who opened the door.” “Camas guessed that much,” Ducon said, balanced between bitterness and wonder. When she reached it, all the fish turned into laundry, stirred and beaten in steaming cauldrons by glum, limphaired women as wet as mackerels. He leaned the broom against the bar, folded his arms, his expression like another barred door. He said nothing, but she glimpsed the deepening despair in his eyes. Eyes the color of walnut shells…” His voice trailed away; he looked suddenly puzzled, as though he had remembered her from some dream, perhaps, or within a different light. A few steps upward took them into a windowless chamber on a secret floor of rooms invisible from outside the palace. If she still had a father, he had not been inclined to let her know. She pulled herself into herself, suddenly cold, huddling within the shapeless wool. In that brief moment he thought how easy it would be to crush those dry bird-bones at her neck between his fingers. He saw nothing. Show us your stars, just show us, and we’ll leave you be. I would recommend this book to people who really enjoyed Peake's. Street drains, unused cellars, holes beneath steps, were doors that even the city urchins had discovered. “I thought,” she said uneasily to Faey, “that it was you making all the noise out there. The falcon gave her leave. “You’ve no one to sweep.” “I have myself. A short, harsh sob shook him; he vanished, without answering, out the Black Pearl’s invisible door. There were dark half-moons under the child’s eyes, but he looked more weary than frightened as the officials bowed to him. She stopped her headlong ramble into childhood. I’ll miss him.” Another figure formed in memory, with impossibly long, autumn-leaf hair, and perpetually chewed fingers. “He reads and works on his history of Ombria. Nestlings, all of them, thinking they will succeed where their fathers failed and died. Then, with painful slowness, he lifted a few inches of velvet and glanced at his own nakedness. She felt her body tense, preparing to emerge unexpectedly through the nearest armed ghost. Across the other, Ducon lay dead. How you know me here, now, even when nothing or anyone else in this place is familiar. Where had she gotten it? Another silent maze of passages it seemed, unguarded and empty. She added what she found and left them there while she went to wash and change. Mag, frightened thoughtless, threw whatever she could reach at the golden moth to break the jar, including her shoes. “For now,” he said evenly, “I must do as I’m told.” He took her arm again, and caught an amazed stare from a young woman tying her apron as she passed them. A shadow intruded, a faceless figure falling starkly across the polished floor. If that is what you want.” “I don’t know what I want,” Mag said helplessly. He felt it as the tutor straightened suddenly, and propelled a shoulder into Ducon’s chest, trying to push him into the river. My uncle would have seen something very different. For the cook, she bought violets. It will not matter anymore, he thought in sudden surprise that his life ended there, at a step through a mirror. Then their lowered eyes found the shoes in her hand, the sapphires catching light and casting quivering rays of blue everywhere, as if a star had fallen into the tavern. “She cannot hear you now. I will teach you how to read and write.” “She sent you away,” he whispered, his voice no more than the scratch of quill on paper. Nobody appeared to be listening to anyone, except perhaps the slender woman clad in outdated black brocade and an enormous hat like a mushroom shot through with jewelled pins, whose veil totally obscured her face. “These others, you never tell them yes, you never tell them no.” “For Kyel’s sake,” he whispered. She sat on the floor next to the untouched food and water, her face withholding expression as his flame fell over her. “No,” she agreed softly as Lydea knelt beside him. That might be simpler.” Mag’s skin chilled at the thought. It was what had drawn her there, that sense of recognition. He would have other attendants now, chosen by the Black Pearl to give orders to the faceless company, numerous and quiet as mice, that flitted through the halls of the palace. Ducon rejoined the desultory company. We are supposed to be fighting the Black Pearl, not each other.” “I told you—” “You told us nothing. She heard a murmuring within the wall, and put her ear against it. “Bastard. In view of the young prince’s age and bereavement, Camas Erl had cut short much ritual fanfare, including the traditional parade of the newly crowned ruler through his city. “I’ll search as quickly as possible, and return before she comes for the prince. She must have died a century ago; it’s a wonder her bones don’t clatter when she moves.” “What does she want?” Mag asked, putting a name to the description. Domina Pearl is right,” she added, “about one thing. She tried to summon him back here.” “He wouldn’t come?” “He didn’t seem to hear her.” He paced a step or two restively, then turned back to Lydea. She said weakly, “It’s not an easy place to find.” “Oh.” “You could help me now, though.” “How?” Lydea asked promptly. “Who, now?” he asked curiously. Domina.” A word Lydea had not said for five years jumped into her mouth; she pinched her lips with the goose’s beak. Turning into Sheepshead Lane, she saw the painted rose hanging beneath the moon. “You, down there. Silently, eye to eye, the toad and the sorceress conversed. Any of his doddering, whey-faced relatives in line to inherit would do as well for me, likely with less trouble. It was his small pale face, his quiet, hopeless weeping when he had been told that his father was dead and that Lydea did not want to stay with him any longer, that had cut Ducon to the heart. Ducon retraced his steps, slipped through a door or two and blew out his candle. Lydea took care of him, since you were nowhere to be found.” “She was here?” “You are echoing yourself. “Who made you really, I wonder? Faey’s cook was a mountainous, efficient woman who kept the kitchens dim and pretended not to notice who among her staff was real and who was shade. He’ll be very weak afterwards; he’ll need someone to care for him. Domina Pearl, Lydea had said, would be busy in her council chambers all morning. “Let him think. He studied Kyel’s drunken row of letters without seeing them and murmured, “Good, good.” In the time he spent writing numbers and puzzling over the grammar of an ancient language, Kyel’s eyes grew vague again. A thin gold chain slid into her palm, pulling a little locket of ivory and gold behind it. And now, despite all her intentions, he was dying somewhere, most likely helpless, alone, and completely bewildered. Once he turned to give an incredulous glance back at the mausoleum. Not you. She recognized Lord Hilil Gamelyn’s impetuous son, with whom she had once danced. Ducon may be back before I am. I need certain things. “What is it?” Camas pleaded of whatever was shattering the boundaries of history as it moved to meet them. This has worked not very well in some. When the charcoal shaped the jet head of a pin floating above a tangled cloud of hair, he stopped again, disturbed by what he recognized, wondering if she, too, had somehow vanished beyond the door. “Well, yes. “Here,” she whispered, “there are spells.” Caution, left idling at the bottom of the stairs, caught up with her. Her face seemed patchy, streaked with passion; her lips had all but vanished. Where does she keep her past?” He found it in her ghosts. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination o, cover He freed it finally, drew the blade back and drove it with all his strength into the wall. Don’t search for my waxling. Blurred colors and textures took shape slowly into damp earth and the tip of the sorceress’s blue silk shoe. He tossed his hands into the air with a groan, and she escaped. “I’ve tangled with my housekeeper. This is our only hope.” “But where in this maze does she keep her poisons?” Ducon opened the door. “What’s that?” “Silk.” “Did you really dance in them?” her father asked, looking torn between wonder and suspicion, as if, like her life, he could not quite bring himself to believe in them. No one else smiled at her like that, with eyes and mind. Welcome back. She was remembering the noisy, cluttered streets of her childhood: a blinding angle of light across an alley too black to see into, a house that was sometimes there and sometimes elsewhere… “Dea, Dea, how do they know?” She blinked. Where is the girl? Go and look for Camas when you’ve finished. She had opened the door long ago and gone in… but there was no inside. There was a curious expression on her face. If she were dead, she reminded herself. Someone left her charcoal. I’ve never had—” He stopped then, hearing something in Ducon’s inflexible argument. In a room colored the indigo and green of peacock feathers, the sorceress let Ducon fall among velvet cushions on a bed, and drew breath to call. “But there is no one else to ask about the charcoal.” He slid his own hand into a pocket as though to touch something familiar, reassure himself. “No,” she promised blindly, “I won’t.” Light footsteps pattered like rain, many of them on one side or the other of the ballroom, she couldn’t tell which. Lydea, the words catching in her throat, watched it. Ducon had gone to find Camas Erl; he would come back eventually and report to the Black Pearl. Ducon hovered where Kyel could see him, at a table near the throne. There was the little worm-eaten gate in the sagging wall behind the stables in the yard of the Raven’s Eye Inn. Hilil Gamelyn stared at him, his eyes as furious in death, it seemed, as they had been in life. “And safer,” he breathed. They were scarcely bruised; they must have overwhelmed Sozon with numbers and surprise. Dust and cobwebs furnished them, and the odd forgotten adornment: a silk pincushion, a watercolor of a child, a swan whittled out of soap, seamed and yellow as ancient ivory. “The oldest city in the world.” His lips parted, silently shaped a word. Get out.” The gate clanged shut with more force than necessary. He’s nowhere in the palace.” “Please—” “Domina Pearl won’t find you. Kyel’s wayward kin, they were, each with a labyrinthine link to the throne of Ombria. Perhaps, she thought, it was the tavern-wench he saw beneath the governess’s sober garb that drew him. 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