Page 6 of The Summer War

“Father won’t,” Roric said. “I know he won’t.

I could become a great knight or the king myself and he still wouldn’t care.

But I thought you might, now that you know you were being stupid about Argent.

Because if you’d care—then I’d care, too.

Then we’d have each other, at least. And maybe I’m not Argent, but I know it’s better to care. ”

She stared at him, and then blurted, “ How do you know?” almost angrily. She knew he was right, even with the sharp bitter ache in her chest, or maybe because of it, but she didn’t know how Roric knew.

“Because she cared,” Roric said. “Your mother. She had the nurse bring me to sit with her every day. I was little, but she let me wind her thread, even if I dropped the bobbins, and pluck her lute strings. She gave me tea. And when we knew you were coming, I cried, because I thought she wouldn’t want me anymore, and she told me you’d be my sib, and love me, and asked me to promise to love you back.

But I couldn’t, after you killed her,” he added.

“I didn’t want to love you. And you didn’t want to love me, either.

But—I did promise her. So now I will, if you will,” he finished, defiantly, and halfway daring her to say no.

Celia wanted to say no. The place where Argent had been in her heart was still raw and burning-sore, and thinking of putting Roric in it instead felt like replacing silver with dross.

She wasn’t even sure that she could. She looked at Roric, thin and lank-haired and spotty, his teeth crooked and his shoulders stooped, awkward and not very clever and not very kind, and she couldn’t imagine it.

But she’d never known her mother. The only thing Father had ever told her was that she was a daughter of the royal house, descended of sorcery, and the only thing Argent had ever told her, vaguely, was that she’d been beautiful and nice.

And now it seemed that her mother had tried to give Roric to her.

She’d wanted her child to love Roric, and for him to love her. She’d cared.

“All right,” Celia said. “Yes. I’ll care, if you’ll care,” and she stood up and put her hand out, and he put his out, and they shook on the bargain.

Celia still wasn’t sure how to do it, but she thought about what Roric had told her, and then she went and found Unter and said, “What was my mother’s favorite winter sitting room?”

Unter knew, of course, and in an hour he had it opened up for her.

It was a round southeast tower room with three windows, each with a narrow border made of enchanted summerglass that made the light coming into the room brilliant and golden, even though the day outside was pale grey with a fine drizzle coming down, as days often were at Castle Todholme during the autumn and the winter.

Celia stood looking out at the shifting light of the clouds and the shadowy mountains when they peeked out of the mist, while the servants brought in furnishings gathered back from the rooms they’d drifted to over the years: two tapestries of silk and wool with a single red-capped song-spinner on each one, made to face one another and frame the doorway with lute and fife; three low-backed wide seats of gilt wood with velvet cushions that fit just beneath each window, and a few padded stools for other seats to fill out the room.

A screen of wrought iron to stand before the fireplace, and a soft woolen rug to go over the wooden floor; a few chests to hold shawls and blankets; a few small tables and one large one of inlaid wood and bone.

When everything else was done, Celia herself went to her rooms and brought back the beautiful tea service that Father had ordered taken out of storage and given to her on her tenth birthday: the magical teapot, of summer make, in the shape of a bird with its wings outspread and its beak open to sing the tea out, always hot, and the cups like nests with branches to hold them by.

She arranged it carefully on the large table, and then told Unter, “Please ask my brother if he’d like to come and sit with me to do his work.” Unter only stared at her blankly, and then she added, “Roric,” pointedly, and he twitched and said, “Of course, my lady.”

Roric came, with his box of figuring. Father had arranged for him to have excellent tutors from early on, and they were drilling the keeping of accounts into him, even though he hadn’t any gift for numbers.

If he didn’t finish all his exercises, he was punished, so he was always carrying the lap desk with his papers in it everywhere, when he wasn’t bent over it in some corner, scratching away with pen and ink and squinting.

He stopped on the threshold of the room and looked at Celia, and she said, “Come sit by the windows. The light’s good here,” and poured him a cup of tea, into one of the bird-nest cups.

He sat down slowly on the second bench beside her and held the cup between his hands as if it were full of baby birds he was trying to save.

She’d opened one window to the breath of autumn air coming in, the cool rainy breeze, but the room was small and the fire kept it cozy, the colors of the rug and the tapestries bright in the summerglass glow, a jewel-box for them to sit in, as if they were both the jewels of their house.

Roric looked around, and his mouth trembled, and to stop it he bent his head and sipped the tea in silence until it was all gone.

The next morning, when he came to join her again, he brought a large silk bag, creased and crumpled as if it had been crammed in somewhere hidden away, and silently thrust it at her.

She opened it up and found it full of fine embroidery threads of wool and silk, and in another pouch, carefully folded up, a beautiful long panel of embroidery, meant to go around the bottom of a skirt when it was done.

A scene of the Summer Lands with knights in silver and gold chasing one another with their swords, with a red-capped song-spinner playing and a princess looking out over them from a tower made of grey stones; a shaihul with its wingscales done in iridescent purples rearing up against a dragon in red-gold, and at the end, over the Green Bridge, a grove of trees that was barely half grown in thread: the trunks just hollow outlines in pale birch white, with only a few green leaves upon the branches.

Celia held it across her hands, and touched it with the tips of her fingers.

She hadn’t ever been an especially brilliant needlewoman; she had always just done embroidery while she watched Argent training, to have a thing to do which Father would approve of enough not to speak ominously of idle hands.

But she knew she’d take care, she’d keep the fabric properly taut and make every stitch just right, to finish this piece for her wedding.

“I took her lute, too,” Roric said, a little belligerently. “But they found that and took it away from me. Father didn’t want me to have it.”

Celia understood why Father had done that, too. Roric’s mother had been a tavern musician; for Roric to play would remind others too much about the lowly match, and his own low birth, and Father had wanted the realm to forget about that, so the lords wouldn’t mind his heirs making royal matches.

“I’ll ask Unter to find it for me,” she said.

From then on, they spent most of their days together.

The lute was sour, but Celia got Unter to get a musician from the town to come and show them how to tune it, and how to play.

She pretended the lessons were for her, and not Roric, but she didn’t really need to bother.

Father didn’t even notice. These days he was spending most of his time sitting alone in his study, without a lamp, staring at a low fire and neglecting his affairs.

Roric worked on his figuring, and Celia had a stack of books to read, in the good light—the famous one that Witch-Queen Selina’s chief councillor Bertram had written about her and her Seven Wyrds, after her death, and others about the more-misty stories of the sorceresses of old before her.

The greater the Wyrd a sorceress evokes, the greater the power it raises, Councillor Bertram’s book explained, in what she’d once thought were dry and boring terms. The power thus raised will remain at her command, until spent in some working of her will, the which if it be a great action upon the world will consume a large portion of that power, and if a small one but a little, the rest remaining ready to her hand, until by many such acts she has made use of it all.

Then being so worn out, the supply shall not be renewed save by the evocation of another Wyrd, which cannot be done merely at will; this much Her Majesty told me, when once I asked her, and though she would speak no more of how her own Wyrds came, we may well understand, by those receipts of her days which I have herein recounted, and those tales we have of the sorceresses of older times, that a Wyrd comes only through a great wringing-out of the heart and mind.

The words now seemed painfully true to Celia: her heart had been wrung mercilessly, and magic had come squeezing out of it, in a gush of wrath and blood and sorrow.

She hadn’t done much more sorcery since, except to light five candles and put them out again, held in the hands of five witnesses of good character and true birth called up from the town by lots, to prove that the power was there.

She didn’t need to prove it to herself. She could feel it moving through her, like a current flowing hidden beneath the surface of a river, either cold or hot, sometimes quicker and sometimes dragging.

And she didn’t want to use any of it up if she didn’t have to.

She was sure that she’d need almost all of it to undo even part of her curse.