“She’s always favored him, rather like she favors those hounds of hers. Faithful pets, eh?”
They laughed, but fell silent as others entered the chamber, maybe Andevai.
“Maestra,” said the elder of my attendants in a low voice. “Your clothes?”
“I… I… Am I meant to bathe? I don’t know—”
“Did the young magister not tell you?” she replied with a grimace.
The other spoke over her. “He wouldn’t likely know it needed telling, would he? He hardly knows himself. The spirit works in peculiar ways, does it not? Such a potent brew poured into so inappropriate a vessel.”
“He’s just ignorant, Brigida. Here, now, maestra. To enter past the warded gates, you must be purified. For you, immersion is enough. When the mansa accepts you formally, there will be other rites, and lessons in the proper rituals.”
My ancestors had a similar ritual. Stripping off my clothing and dunking myself in heated baths I could manage. I unbuttoned my riding jacket as they worked on the fastenings of my riding skirt.
“We can bring you new clothing, something more… suitable, maestra.”
“I’d rather keep—”
“Yes,” they agreed, as if expecting nothing else from an outsider like me. When I was naked, they looked me over much as they might examine a broodmare, studying its conformation. “Your hair, maestra.”
I unpinned it.
“Ah! Ah!” they exclaimed as my tresses fell free, and on the other side of the curtain fell a silence, voices stilled, ears listening. “What lovely hair, maestra! A true glory!” Their voices rang within the stone, and I wondered if they were speaking so loudly to make sure the men across the way could hear their praise.
Only a curtain separated that side from this. I was vulnerable. How easy it would be for someone to brush past that curtain and thrust themselves onto this side. I ventured a toe in the water, thinking I could hide in the pool. It was blessedly warm.
“No, maestra. Here is a brush and soap. Clean yourself first.”
I dipped the brush into a bucket of hot water and scrubbed until they were satisfied.
“Maestra! The bracelet! The locket, too. You must enter with nothing.”
I removed both.
“Is the bracelet a gift from your mother?”
“No.” I would not tell them that I had only two things left of my mother: first, the warning she had spoken that had taken root in my head; second, a single memory not of her face but of a strong arm carrying me, of her body smelling of sweat and steel. I descended steps into the water, to my knees, to my hips, to my breasts. The water lapped around me, stirred by a similar descent on the far side of the curtain, and I thought, that is him entering the pool naked like me, and I ducked under to let the water swallow me because it was easier than thinking of his body.
Like all the pure elements and like mirrors, water offers a conduit into the spirit world that lies intertwined with our own. What lies in the spirit world we cannot see; we haven’t the vision to perceive it. Some can reach into the spirit world and draw out filaments of its essence. In this wise, blacksmiths handle fire, potters earth, bards and djeliw the air that gives breath for songs and tales. As for the cold mages, no one outside the Houses understands the source of their power. It exists, as the great ice sheets exist, covering the northern reaches of Hibernia, covering the lands north of the Baltic Ice Sea, covering the Helvitic Alps. Reaching, so Kehinde at the inn had speculated, across the northern pole of the world to join with another vast shelf of ice that smothered the north of the continent we called Amerike which lay beyond the western ocean, the continent that had given birth to trolls instead of humans. How my father would have wished to converse with Godwik, who had also seen the face of the ice!
A shining face, masked and unkindly. The cold sun, glinting on the ice, blinds. A sharp deadly voice says, We need a new weapon for the war. A courier who can walk between the lands.
I came up gasping for air, my heart thundering as if I had woken from a nightmare twisted out of my memories and fears.
“Again,” called the women.
From behind the curtain, I heard a splash as Andevai came up, his attendants calling to him as mine had called to me: “Again.”
With a gasp, I dropped beneath the surface, eyes open.
Diviners pour water on a flat surface and see true visions within.
I saw Bee, striding down an unknown street on her short legs in a haste of anger and weeping, her mouth moving in full furious spate. She was yelling at someone, but it wasn’t a street after all; it was a canal of rushing light, and she was walking all unaware into the mouth of a golden dragon whose fire flowed like water to obliterate her.