Carryl led the other two girls to the top of the dormitory. Nanade was up the ladder quickly after Carryl, Merry stayed behind and called up “Are you sure we’re allowed to be up there?”
But Carryl chuckled. “I am absolutely sure that we are specifically not supposed to be up here. But the view is magnificent and it will be happening soon.”
Meanwhile, Nannade was moving between the crates and barrels, inspecting something Carryl could not see in the dark, before she moved to the hatch and got outside. Carryl followed her and made sure to put a board in the hatch to keep it open. She would not be trapped up there again. Carryl sat right down at her previous spot to witness the sunset, but Nannade walked around the edge of the roof looking down as if the ground was a mere foot away. “How did you find this place?”
“I just like exploring dark places and secret passages.”
Nannade nodded and hummed. “I like being high up.” She walked over to Carryl and sat down next to her. Merry was slowly emerging from the hatch behind them. “In the hut of the witch that trained me, I slept in a hammock right under the roof. That felt nice, above the issues and matters of the world, at least for the night.”
Carryl realized that this had been the first time Nannade had indulged them in something from her past by herself. She decided to grasp this moment of openness. “When did you get there? I heard mystics and mediums need to be trained early, they cannot wait around like us mages.”
Nannade nodded. “When I was around 9 years old, I was brought there.”
Merry, wobbling on all fours, slowly crawled towards them. “This was too much wine. Why did you buy me that much wine, Carryl?”
Nannade chuckled. “Be careful, I just felt a gust. Better close your robes or they might catch the wind like a sail and carry you off into the sky.” She made a wavy motion towards the setting sun.
It elicited only tortured sarcasm from Merry. “Ahahahahaaa, make your jokes. I can’t crawl around in trees with lanky arms and graspy toes!” She finally arrived by their side and sat down with a worried sigh. “Were your parents very sad to see you go? Are you allowed to stay in contact or is it like a monastery?”
Nannade merely turned her head to look off into the distance and scratched her neck. Before she could brush away the question, Merry followed up.
“I am sorry, I guess we should stop asking you all these personal questions. We can leave it at that, if you wish.”
But Nannade closed her eyes, exhaled and shook her head. “No. I owe you at least some explanations.” She undid the bow of her blue scarf and pulled it off her neck. Instead of fur the colour of grain in the fall, there was fleshy pink in mangled scars there, as if strangled with a red-hot iron chain. “I was born around 1331, I don’t know what day, in Nisumski into slavery. I spent 9 years there before I was rescued by the Lodge, who heard of my plight from spirits. By the time they could save me, my parents were already dead.”
There was silence between them. Carryl was still fixated on the scars. At first, they had seemed chaotic, but now a pattern became obvious to her. “Are those... the sigils of slavery?”
“Yes. My parents had the sigils upon them and so did I. My mother was an exotic beauty people were willing to pay for and so, her body had to be brought to heel without injuring it too much. I would have seen the same fate.”
“How were they broken? I thought once they were branded onto the life force, they were unbreakable without death.”
Nannade closed her eyes again. “They are. But it wasn’t my death that broke them.”
Things started to make sense. Carryl chastised herself for her fanciful tales of political wards and farewell gifts from her parents. It was ridiculous now, but she would not have dared to impose such a tragedy on someone in her head.
Merry inspected the scars closer. “You said it was ten years ago that there were broken? These scars looks so pink and fresh.”
Nannade nodded. “That’s the last cruelty of the blood magic. My very life force is forever scarred. They will never truly heal. I still can’t shake the feeling of something burrowing into my flesh, seeking to send pain into my veins. I hate the feeling of magic coursing through me, it feels too similar.”
Merry spoke with a choked-up voice. “I am sorry, Nannade, I am so so-“
“Do not pity me!” Nannade snapped at her with a suddenness that made both of the other girls flinch back. There was a short moment of silence between the three. “I didn’t mean to be this loud, sorry. But do not pity me. I am here because I rose above this. I am here because I stood in defiance of my past. I need no pity nor help.” She exhaled. A familiar creature crawled up her neck and out her collar, wrapping around her scars as if to soothe them, pulsing her muscles like a blood vessel herself. “I already have plenty of comfort with me.” Nannade stroked her familiar’s scaly body and felt her undulations. “And besides, You don’t want people to pity you either, isn’t that why you keep... something bottled inside?”
Merry’s face spoke of a sudden fear, as if she had been exposed. “What? How did you...”
“I have a deep connection to past tragedies, to childhood sadness. The ripples your thoughts make on the veil between the worlds appear familiar and obvious to me. I do not mean to snoop, but you are not always as merry as you want people to think. I do not judge you for it, but I have been rather honest with you, haven’t I?”
Merry took a moment. Even Carryl leaned closer just to hear everything she might say. The aggressive friendliness of Merry was surely apparent, but it had never occurred to Carryl that it might be hiding something. Then Merry spoke up. “I told you that my father is from Watubara. And for most of my childhood, that is all I knew as well. He never talked about it, until my mother, in secret, told me that he had a family before us, a wife and a son and a second child on its way. But in Watubara, there is a sickness that makes you fall asleep with open eyes, just waste away. He watched them die before his eyes, tried to save them. After he failed, he drank himself almost to death in some sailor bar. But he learned from a sailor of the Gimean islands that they had never heard of such a disease there, so he figured he could get away from the memory there. And he kept it hidden.”
“And you carry that sadness with you? Because your father refused to share in it?”
“I guess. I just think a lot about how if he had been lucky, if he could have saved his family, he would be happy and I would not exist. I couldn’t be here without his sadness. It kind of made me think often of how important sadness might be, y’know? So I just try to accept it and help people and make them happy.”
Nannade put a hand on her shoulder. “And that feels like an impossible task?”
Merry shook her head slowly. “People don’t like me. The children in Aeoldonys think I’m a stranger and the people here think I’m dumb. But it doesn’t matter. I already know there will be sadness but also joy and happiness and new things to create. The future is where happiness is, y’know?”
Nannade then hugged Merry, tightly wrapping her long arms around her body in a gesture of deep understanding and whispered something in her ear that Carryl could not hear. Then Merry hugged her back. “Let’s just be frank with each other from now on, shall we?” Then Nannade drew both of them together in her wide embrace and chuckled through a single tear in her eyes. “Am I glad to have met the two of you of all the people here.”
Carryl could not withdraw herself from the giggling that followed and she felt like the dumbest little girl, but she felt good.
They observed the sun sink ever lower towards the horizon as the city sank into a deep red and the shadow of its walls. Finally, Carryl decided to speak up again. “Professor Tominet said that we cannot tell whisperings of spirits from our own thoughts. Why is that? Do they hide? Are they sneaky and just wish to manipulate us? Then why ally with them as you did? Why try to wield their power?”
Nannade furrowed her brow, as if struggling to decide what to tell them. “You cannot grasp them because, as I said, every living thing causes these subtle ripples that only become apparent if you amass thousands of acts of them into a pattern. Arcane magic of you mages is used like a tool, something you can just put away, you separate acts into magic acts and mundane acts, but spirit magic is never truly done. It is worked by the way people get up in the morning, in the songs they sing, in the foods they eat, all adds ripples. The spirits do not whisper from secret places, they are part of us so much that we cannot perceive them. Like the air we breathe we only feel it when it blows into a storm.” She reached into her robes and drew forth a flute of bone, engraved with lines painted in many colours. “Even this simple bone contains the memories of a living thing. You cannot tell them from the material of the bone or from the sound it makes because it is all part of the same. Us mediums can separate all that, as if he could speak to the wind to ask it what it meant when it blows through the leaves.”
She blew into the flute and the sound filled the two of them, like a solid basis of something that was not material. Carryl felt as if she was breathing in a new kind of air with her ears, as if for the first time, she was actually being nourished by it. Then Nannade began to draw a melody from the bones, in accordance with the meaning that was already inside. It spoke of rising to the sky and being blown away by the wind, being carried away to far away shores, familiar and new. She could almost see something in the wind and closed her eyes to better see. Then she saw something as clear as if she could reach out and touch it.
An island of granite stood in the blowing waves that crashed upon its shores. A cliff rose steeply from the waters and atop stood a tree, mightier than any other Carryl had ever seen, with green leaves and red bark and around it stood familiar people, all dressed in white. There was her mother and Roy and his mother, the Lord Father and the Lady Mother, eldest brother Donnie, youngest brother Fingan, cousins Oshy and Sunny and her nephew Collin, barely able to stand yet, but all of them stood at the base of the tree. Carryl approached them, but her look was drawn upwards, towards the branches. She wanted to reach the top and grabbed the lowest branch, pulled herself towards the sky and through the dense foliage, only to emerge at the top and finally see...
...the last light of the day vanished as the sun had disappeared behind the horizon, sending a last sigh across the sky, only a hint of its presence and a promise of its return.
“What was that?”
“It was what is always with you, Carolinia of House Dwyllaigh.” Nannade had a smile deep like a thousand years on her face. “but you cannot hear it. I just quieted your mind so deeply that it broke through the noise of your mere existence. I calmed your soul and allowed you to look inward into the spell that was woven into your very blood.”
“Into my blood? Is there blood magic on me?”
“No, this is a spell that is worked over generations by the way your bloodline conducts itself. Marrying power to power, siring as many children from the most powerful mage of the bloodline, erasing the weaklings from marriage. Unlike Merry or me, your trauma of the past is yet to come. We left it behind, but you are moving towards it.”
“What is that supposed to mean?” Carryl was afraid. Did Nannade just foretell her future?
“You always managed to escape that dreadful thought, that person you hated who stalked the castle halls and who came to the boys and girls of your bloodline older than you with that letter you never want to see. But with your first bleeding, you knew the day would come and now that you are here, you know that the day is inevitable. He will call upon you, the keeper of your bloodline, with his book. Like a puffin at the edge of the cliff, you don’t know whether to jump off and fly or stay where you have security, honour and power. Your family pride is your rock, you hoped the university would be your wind.”
Carryl wanted to object, but the images that appeared before her eyes were true. She observed the puffins that stood at the cliffs not far from the spot she liked to hide at. They looked out to the see and inched closer to the cliff before diving into the cold, harsh waters to catch the food for their offspring in their warm nests where they cuddled up. Would she jump off into the waters? Would she ever want to return if she did? “Did you just do that? Did you put that into my head?”
“I put nothing there. I merely touched the water’s surface to make it ripple, but the patterns inside are all yours.”
Carryl just sat there, her shoulders slouched in defeat. “I guess I am afraid.”
“You don’t need to. I have seen the lives of families. I have seen love and felt it. There is nothing to be afraid off.”
“But what if I do not want it at all?”
Nannade turned forward, as if to avoid the question. “They are your wings, puffin. You have to flap them. Nobody can flap them for you. But if you do, then you can steer your own flight. Master the wind before the storm can take you.”
Carryl mulled over those words. She truly had been trying to hide her nose and eyes in books for most of her life. “Then what did you see, Merry?” She leaned back to see Merry lying on the roof, sleeping soundly, with a smile on her face. “Huh?”
“Not all have a mind inquisitive enough to break through the bounds of a spell like that, Princess.” Nannade smirked, then grinned and eventually showed her pearly white fangs. “Not all desire to break away from all they are so badly.” She looked at Merry herself. “If you must know, she dreams of two shores connected, not separated, by an ocean. As your family has woven power and duty into your blood, her parents wove their love for one another into hers, as did theirs and theirs again. She bears the love of two continents in her. But one did not love her back and the other could never love her to begin with.”
At that moment, Carryl envied Merry. She truly did want to be her, to be that girl that just moments ago was afraid to climb up a ladder, now sleeping soundly on the roof as the cold winds picked up, one of which seemed to shudder her and chill her awake. She opened her eyes and raised her head.
“Huh? AH!” She awoke fully from her stupor in fear. “Are we still up here?”
Both Carryl and Nannade had to laugh. “Well, we surely were not going to carry you inside!”
“Oh Nannade, I had the nicest dream. There was food and laughter there and so many new faces I knew. Can you send me back, please? I almost learned..." Her eyes drifted off to the south. “...his name. I think.”
Nannade waved the request away with a giggle. “Not today. Indulging too deeply in your self is not a good idea. Come on, I have to be back at La Madame’s mansion soon.”
Merry held on to her shoulder for a moment. “I meant to ask both of you: Do you want to come with me to the first Erutoris training tomorrow? I’m sure it’ll be fun.”
Carryl had to think of Teresa’s plans and almost shuddered. She would gladly avoid the dry and boring prattling of vapid nobility and much rather just run around in circles for a while. “Sure why not?”
Nannade nodded too. “I’d love to. It has been a while since I last had some good movement.” She reached Merry her hand and held her steady while the latter wobbled unsurely towards that hatch. Before Carryl left the roof she turned around and watched the gulls carry the last catch of the day back to their nests.
