Viola tapped her graphite pencil on the pad of paper in front of her, her sketch of the fire-gutted building across from us paused. “What do they do? The nobles.”
“They deal with a little unfairness,” Kristos muttered.
“That’s not what I mean—literally, what do we want them to do? Become tinkers and tailors? They’re not exactly skilled labor. I could hire myself out as a portrait artist, of course, but most of them are utterly useless.”
“I think that’s something we have to accept that we’ll work out later,” I said softly. “I know. These are people you know, people you care about. But… but we can’t care about their troubles to the detriment of everyone else, can we?”
“If any have skill with a sword, perhaps they can try their luck with the Serafan army,” Sianh said. “They seem to like Serafans, given how many of them have run to West Serafe of late.”
“Now, that’s a fair offer.” Annette shared a sly grin with Viola. “Our families have both inquired as to the state of our villa in Port Royal.”
“They were quite content pretending we didn’t exist until we had a nice house away from all this nasty democracy business,” Viola interjected.
This earned a laugh, but Theodor quickly slipped back into pensive quiet, his brow furrowed with unspoken concerns. “Perhaps,” I said, “we should have a game of cards.”
“We could play snapdragon!” Kristos said with an impish grin.
“I am not,” Annette said, “falling for that again.” Setting things drenched in alcohol on fire was Kristos’s favorite tavern pastime, but Annette had been unimpressed with burning her fingers for sport fishing flaming raisins from a dish.
“Burning Skies?” he suggested.
“I do not know what that is,” Annette said firmly, “and I do not wish to find out. Don’t you play anything civilized, like dominoes?”
“Perhaps he would be amenable if we set the tiles on fire,” Sianh said with a smile. “Come, Kristos, I will play this snapdragon with you.”
Despite the warmth of the parlor and the chorus of laughter as Sianh and Kristos squared off in their game, Theodor stayed so quiet that I almost didn’t notice when he slipped away to our bedchamber.
59
FIRST THING THE NEXT MORNING, I HURRIED ACROSS THE CITY toward the temporary hospital set up to accommodate the wounded of both sides of the battle for the city. The Lord of Coin’s offices were still imposing, but the façade was now hung with gray-and-red banners as though signaling that it had been taken, officially, from noble control.
“Sophie!” Emmi shouted across the crowded ward, earning sharp looks from the surgeons on staff and several of the nurses. She didn’t notice as she trotted across a floor cluttered with pallets, blankets, bandages, and bodies to bowl me over in an embrace. “You’re here!”
“Yes,” I said, grinning despite myself. “And so are you.”
Her smile faded, though she fought to keep it bright. “It’s—we’re trying, Sophie. We really are. I wish I’d learned more from you.”
I surveyed the ward. This wasn’t even the worst of the cases, I knew—they were taken to the offices and anterooms of the old Lord of Coin’s establishment, not this open room. Still, the misery was written broad across the floor, as wounded and ill men bore patiently their pain or gave way to quiet moans or sobbing. Bandages binding heads, faces pale and sticky with fevers, red edges on the linen wrappings on shoulders and limbs, bodies absent arms and legs.
What could a few clay tablets do against such suffering?
“Get the others,” I said quietly. Swiftly, Emmi fetched Lieta, Venia, and Parit from corners of the room where they had been working. I waited, trying to avoid catching the scents of death and dying that settled in pockets and were borne on every puff of wind or passing nurse’s skirts.
They greeted me briefly, but I cut our embraces short. “I know you’re doing your best,” I said, “but I think if we work together we can do more, in less time, for all of these men.”
“How?”
“I—there are ways of casting we didn’t learn from our mothers,” I said with a faint smile.
Lieta’s brow constricted. “You found new ways of casting?”
“Of course she did—our mothers didn’t teach us to sew with charms,” Emmi said.
“Not just that. I can’t explain now, but I will.” I bit my lip. Part of me didn’t want to spread this knowledge, to expand who had access to the power I had uncovered. But what gave me the right to withhold it, to hoard it for myself? “For now, just hold hands.” I took Emmi’s hand in my left and Lieta’s in my right, and each reached out their free hand to Parit and Venia.
I began to pull a thick cloud of charm, and I felt the energy of the women next to me building alongside it, surging as they saw the golden haze swelling above us. Like handling a fat fistful of carded wool, I drew threads of light, twisting them to strengthen them and then driving them into blankets and bandages, embedding them deep in the fibers. I worked like the machines in Fen, keeping multiple threads whirring at once, mechanized in rapid clockwork like the gears of those hulking iron looms.
Beside me, Emmi gasped, and Lieta’s face shone with amazement. Parit went ashen, and Venia gripped Emmi’s hand so tightly her knuckles were bone-white. She reached a hand for Parit, and they closed the circle. The power around me surged, and I caught it, magnified the cloud of charm above me, stabilized it. Within a half hour, every shred of fabric I could find was worked through with charm, glowing golden to our eyes only.
“Sophie,” Lieta said softly. “What miracle is this?”
“It’s what you do, grandmother,” I whispered, struck reverent by the power of charm casting shared. “But carried out a little differently.”
“But all of us together—you can do it alone?” Emmi asked, incredulous.
“Yes,” I said. “But I wouldn’t have been half as quick, nor the charm as powerful.”
“How did you find out how to do this?” Parit asked, half-inquisitive, half-accusatory.
“I knew I could draw it without the needle and thread once I saw how the Serafans use music.”
“We know all about that,” Venia said with a sardonic smile. “I’ve never been that ill before, except maybe on a particularly bad day of morning sickness.”
“So I knew that you don’t have to handle a material, don’t have to work a charm into it by hand. That you could cast directly. I just combined that with what I know about charming materials,” I said with a shrug.
“By all our ancestors, Sophie.” Lieta shook her head. “You make it sound so simple.”
“We should tell the head nurse,” Parit said. “So maybe they’ll let us take a break.”
Emmi, Venia, and Parit went off in search of the ward mistress, but Lieta hung back. “Sophie, I—do not take offense, please. But I had heard rumors of your casting. I did not believe them, but now that I see you know things I did not think possible, I must ask.”