Page 139 of The Ragpicker King
A bright running gold rim of fire. And then silence. And darkness, unpunctuated by light or sound. She thought she could remember the sensation of being carried. She had dreamed in bursts of images: flame and glass, the toppling pillars of a temple, walls collapsing into powdery fragments.
My stone,she thought, then jolted. The Source-Stone. A quick check let her know that it was not pinned to her clothes—she wore a clean tunic and trousers; she could not help but wonder what had happened to the clothes she’d worn at the trial—nor anywhere among the bed linens.
She slid from the bed to the floor. For a moment her legs refused to support her, and she hit the ground on her knees. She crawled across the floor to the trunk at the foot of her bed.
The hinges creaked when she flung it open. Inside were familiar objects. Her clothes, some of them, folded neatly. A scarf Josit had given her. Her father’s compass, which he had used on the Gold Roads. The thin gold chain that had born her mother’smagal.An anatomy book, a pair of gloves Mariam had sewn for her. Several packets of seeds, neatly labeled. She picked through them, a cold feeling growing in her belly. Each was labeled with Chana’s handwriting; each a type of medicinal plant that grew only in the Sault.
Someone who knew her well had packed this trunk. Several someones, it seemed. It had been prepared with a knowledge of what Lin herself would take from the Sault, if she knew she was never coming back.
She flattened her hands over her stomach, as if she could hold in her rising panic. She knew she should get to her feet, go out intothe mansion, seek Andreyen and the others. But she could not make herself move.Breathe,she told herself, as she had told so many of her patients.Breathe through it.
There was a knock at the door. Lin raised her head. “Come in,” she tried to say, but her mouth would not quite form the words. She frowned, started to try again, but the door was already swinging wide.
The Ragpicker King stood in the open doorway. He seemed impossibly tall and thin, a stick figure with a stick staff in his hand, entirely black save for the white oval of his face. The sight of her on the floor beside the open trunk did not seem to surprise him. He crossed the room and sat down on the foot of the bed.
In a characteristic gesture, he folded his hands over the top of his cane before speaking. “Lin,” he said. “I wondered when you would wake. It has been three days.” He looked at her, sitting on the floor, the trunk open in front of her. “You must have questions.”
What happened?she tried to say, but again, she could not quite seem to form the words. Instead, she said, “Mariam?”
Andreyen’s green eyes were sharp. “You may have trouble with speech for a short while,” he said. “Thegematryyou performed was so powerful that some of it tore its way free of you, of the Source-Stone. I suspect it nearly killed you—” He broke off at the expression on her face, acknowledging her question with a nod. “Mariam Duhary is well,” he added. “As if she had never been ill. She will live a long life, thanks to you.”
“Oh.” A great tension went out of Lin, one she had been carrying for so long that she’d nearly forgotten the weight of it. “I want to see her—”
“Lin,” Andreyen said. He turned the staff around in his hands, his characteristic gesture. “You fainted when the power ripped free of you,” he said. “It was like a leashed tiger, suddenly freed. It poured out of you, into the world. A wall of the Sault burned, and an old temple to Anibal in the Maze was destroyed.”
Lin’s vision swam.Blood and fire.“Was anyone hurt?”
“A few minor injuries. Scrapes and burns. You were lucky: The temple has been disused for years, and the Shomrim were not on the walls. And the Ashkar, with customary diligence, are already rebuilding. In the meantime, Castelguards have been posted where the wall is broken. By the order of the Prince.”
He searched Lin’s face with his eyes. But she was thinking of someone else.Conor.Conor, making sure the Ashkar would be safe. But perhaps it had nothing to do with her. Perhaps Mayesh had asked him to do it.
“I need to see my grandfather,” Lin said. Her words were coming back at least; they came out clear and stern. As if she could order the Ragpicker King around. “And Mariam—I need to see Mariam.”
Click.Andreyen tapped the head of his cane with his fingertips. “Lin, do you understand why you’re here? In the Black Mansion?”
She shook her head. Not because she could not guess, but because she could not bear to say it. The pain felt like a bone stuck in her throat, something that stabbed and choked her from the inside.
“You have been exiled, Lin. You aregalut.Ashkar no longer.”
She felt the heat behind her eyes. Tears, anger, refusing to show themselves. “It makes no sense,” she said. “They asked to see power. I showed them power. They wanted a Goddess.The Goddess brings fire.It is in our lore, our stories—”
“They wanted the idea of the Goddess,” said Andreyen. “It is one thing to wish for a Goddess to return; it is another to look upon holy fire. People are terrified of the Gods, Lin, and the Ashkar are no different. The Goddess is a tale of past glory and strength. But she is not in this world; she wanders the outer darkness, and that itself fulfills the human desire to hold one’s Gods at a safe distance. For what happens to those who come too close to the Gods? Only ruination.”
Lin said nothing.
“If it’s any consolation, I understand it was a contentious decision. You do have your supporters in the Sault, but the decision isultimately up to the Maharam, and he said that the Goddess would have been able to withstand the use of such power and would not have collapsed as you did. That whatever source of power you used, it must have been corrupt and evil.”
Lin stared blankly at the objects in the trunk. She wondered again who had packed it. She imagined Mariam’s gentle hands folding her clothes, Chana painstakingly writing out the names of the plants in the physick garden.
I cannot say I was not told,she thought.Over and over Aron tried to warn me. Mayesh, too.“I do not know what else I expected,” she said. “I am not the Goddess, after all. Just a girl with a magic stone.”
“Speaking of which.” Andreyen drew the brooch from his waistcoat pocket and lightly tossed it to Lin. She caught it in her hands, turning it over, feeling a wave of relief pass through her. Relief, and surprise. For there was still light in the stone. A burning heart, suffusing it with a dark glow.
“I would have thought,” she said, “that they would have destroyed it.”
“I doubt half of them know what it is,” Andreyen said, and there was an odd bitterness in his tone. “Mayesh Bensimon was the one who brought you here.”
“My grandfather? But he never knew I worked with you... did he? Why would he bring me here?”
