to dream of white & gold

prologue

The white place is infinite, and deathly quiet.

You frown.

You are not sure where you are, nor how you arrived. The white stretches as far as you can see in every direction. There is nothing here but space: no landmarks, no features, no variation in the white emptiness that might show you the way.

You are not sure where you are going.

You take a few tentative steps forward. Nothing changes.

You spin around and move back. ‘Hello?’ you call. Your voice cuts through the silence without a hint of echo.

There is no answer.

You suppose you should be afraid, but the place is peaceful. You do not feel lost, nor trapped, though you have no clue as to how you will leave.

The thought is not as alarming as it should be.

You look down and frown. A slender golden line emerges near your foot, thinner than twine but thicker than thread. Its ends snake to disappear into the white; a long, gleaming tendril in the mist. You reach down to touch it.

As you do, an unfamiliar weight shifts in your pocket. Your hand slips into your steel-grey tunic and pulls out a pair of silver scissors.

They are old, tarnished in places, but their shape is slender and elegant, their blades honed to a terrible sharpness. Your fingers fit neatly through the handles, as if the scissors have been crafted for your hand.

Moving slowly, almost against your will, you bend to pick up the golden line, pulling it up from the white. As you do, you realise that below your feet are thousand upon thousand of the same lines, and that the white of the infinite space is not an absence of colour but rather the white that comes to the fore of the eyes when you spend too much time staring at the sun. This white comes from brilliance, not from lack.

The line settles in your hand, warmly snug in your palm. It is unexpectedly heavy and you fight to lift it up, struggling against its drag. With effort, you hold your hand before you, and for a long moment, you stare at the gold.

You carefully position the blades of the scissors, and in one smooth, decisive movement, you cut.

chapter one: market

The midday sun was merciless, golden and high in the unbroken sky. It beat down, relentless and inescapable, burning skin and heating sandstone brick, turning the air in the Kingstown forum into a turbulent clamour of sweat and scent and spice and sound.

It was Lyda’s favourite kind of weather.

She wove between the packed bodies, avoiding the spill of arms and legs and the swing of hair and bags of goods. She wasn’t always lucky: she swore as a blacksmith twice her size stepped back onto her sandalled foot, almost crushing her toes under the weight of his bulk. She narrowly avoided being pushed against a stall selling iron pots, slipping under elbows to escape, listening to the tangle of accents around her. The language was mostly the fast, clipped Eilin spoken by the city-dwellers, but she could hear the drawl of northern Eilan too, and, as she moved further into the crowd, the caressing lilt of Brinnican. Looking around, she spied a group of envoys from the cold northern country, all dressed far too warmly for an Eilin summer’s day, their pale skin turned pink by the sun, sweating in their fur-trimmed tunics.

It was the only reason she’d agreed to do this favour for her father: the summer market day was always an overwhelming mess of people, and Lyda liked to look at them all. Familiar Eilins manned stalls selling everyday things, the wool and knives and grain and cheese that would stock pantries for the coming winter. Vendors from further away - honey-skinned Setiians with caramel hair and black-eyed Auterans from the desert land - sold the objects Lyda coveted but could never afford: beautiful tapestries woven with gold and silver thread, glass blown with rainbow colours, scarves printed with careful patterns of birds and flowers and waves, and cunningly wrought mechanical toys for the children of lordlings. She ignored those stalls with difficulty, pushing further into the crowd, though she stopped for a moment to stare longingly at a display of Setiian scents, the table shaded by gauzy fabrics to protect the precious wares from the sun. The tiny vials were worth a small fortune each, and came in a distinctive woven green bag. Lyda’s sister had been given one as a courting gift, and though Maya hadn’t kept the man, the vial was one of her prize possessions. At almost eighteen, Lyda wasn’t too old to wait until Maya left the house to steal into her room and sniff it longingly, though she’d never dared dab some of the precious liquid on her wrists.

There were other smells, too, some of them more pleasant than others. She edged past a row of stalls selling bread to hungry shoppers, when one of the stall owners - a small man named Torig - called hello. Lyda smiled and waved, regretting that the coins in the pouch tied to a ribbon around her neck were meant for something else. Torig made the best pastries in Kingstown, in Lyda’s opinion at least. His specialty was a mix of potatoes and peas swirled in a creamy white sauce and wrapped up in flaky, buttery pastry, topped with cheese. Lyda’s mouth watered just thinking about them.

The crowd thinned as she neared her target, the southern end of the city market square. For the first time since she’d arrived, she took a proper breath. It was here that the market square met the side of the public bath complex with a towering sandstone wall, and beneath its shade stood a row of permanent shopfronts, all identical and distinctly Eilin in design, with square facades and wide front windows. Lyda made her way towards a small shop that stood pride of place in the middle, its front step flanked with pots of wild white roses, its doorway crowned with a bunch of dried barley grass tied with black twine.

Lyda opened the door and breathed again, deeply.

The shop sold goods from the islands of Erbide, primarily honey and barley grain, although for a hefty price redwood products could be specially imported. Inside, its walls were lined with barrels, filled to the brim with different types of Erbidan grain, and shelves displayed a range of products: honey soaps and creams, candles and oil burners, wax for seals, and varieties of expensive flour sold in colour-coded paper bags.

‘Salu, little one! I did not expect you for a month at least.’

‘Hullo, Jorge,’ Lyda said with a smile.

The man behind the counter was typically Erbidan: tall and broad-shouldered, his golden skin sprinkled with freckles. His beard and thick hair had once been raven black, but were now peppered with grey. Lyda had known him since she could walk, and this was the only thing about him that had changed.

‘Where is Cathan?’

‘He was called to the Palace - one of the northern mares is foaling.’

Jorge made a tsk sound. ‘That is late in the season, is it not? I suppose you have come to rob me again?’

Lyda laughed. ‘Yes. Da says you charge too much.’

‘When you have braved the Kelti Sea you may change your mind.’

Lyda knew Jorge hadn’t sailed for years, though when she was younger she would spend as long as her father would allow listening to his stories. ‘I’d rather you braved it for me.’

Jorge smiled rather sadly, and selected a pot of honey from the shelf behind him, pushing it into a black woven bag. ‘Just the usual?’

Lyda nodded. The local honey was a golden yellow; the stuff in the pot was a thick, rich red, from Erbide’s southern-most island, Kell, and was worth its weight in coin.

‘You are going to eat this, are you not?’ Jorge said warningly. ‘Last time I found out that Cathan had smeared it all over a horse.’

Lyda bit the inside of her cheek and nodded, her face warming. She knew very well that the honey was going straight on a wounded piglet and nowhere near the kitchen. Honey staved off infections in wounds, and her father preferred to use the thick Kellith honey; Eilin honey was too thin, he would complain, and didn’t seal. The Kellith honey stuck.

‘Have you apprenticed yet, Lyda?’

She shook her head. ‘I’m still wearing Da down.’

‘That may take some time.’

She grinned. ‘I’ve had a lot of practice.’ Cathan Valson was well-known for his stubbornness, but his daughters had their own ways of working around it. Maya cajoled, strategically working on her father so gently he often didn’t realise she was doing it. Lyda was more forthright. ‘He wants me to go to Brinnica, and learn from his old master, but I told him I want to learn from the best, so I’ll stay in Kingstown and learn from him. He’s torn between wanting to be rid of me and knowing that I’m right.’

Jorge laughed. ‘Well, you have a month, no? Much can happen in that time. You may yet change your mind.’

Lyda didn’t think so. She had little interest in leaving Kingstown, and she didn’t like cold weather. Brinnica was often carpeted in thick snow and its capital city, the Kali’s Court, was inaccessible in winter. She chatted to Jorge a while longer, before they half-heartedly haggled over the price of the honey. Lyda handed over a sizeable amount of coin, though less than she’d expected, and before she left Jorge pressed a small paper bag full of bite-sized honey biscuits into her hand, just as he’d done when she was a child.

‘For you and your sister,’ he said.

‘I can’t make any promises,’ Lyda said, smiling as she stepped back out into the noise of the summer market.

After a swift internal struggle, she decided that she would share the biscuits; the hospice where her sister worked had been quiet of late, and Lyda thought Maya would appreciate the visit. She pushed and elbowed and ducked her way back towards the main road, stopping to watch a weaver at his loom; as she moved away again, a display of jewellery caught her eye.

Brinnican gold and silverwork was the best in the four lands, but the woman behind the stall was not from the snow. Her skin was darker than the usual warm Eilin brown and her hair was braided across her head; beginning at the left temple, the plait pinned in a coil over her right ear. Her amber eyes were bright and lined with kohl, her frame strong beneath the simple white shirt and tan pants, tight to the skin like the jodhpurs Lyda favoured.

A familiar sadness tightened in Lyda’s chest. Her own skin was the same, and she wagered that if the woman was to unbraid her hair, it would fall in tight coils just like the ones she unsuccessfully tried to tame each morning, though Lyda’s unbound nest of hair was streaked yellow by the sun and this woman’s plait was closer to black.

The woman behind the stall was Myrae, a sea-maiden, one of a race of merchant women from the Isle of the Gods, which hid uncharted off the southern coast of Eilan. The Myrae rarely came inland, preferring to stay in view of their ships; it was said that they only went home for birth or death, and spent the rest of their days on the waves, sailing the four lands and beyond.

Lyda had no idea whether this was true, but it had not been so for her mother. Siva had died in the bed she shared with Cathan on the outskirts of Kingstown, with Maya asleep at her side and the newborn Lyda at her breast. Lyda sometimes wondered if it might have turned out differently, had Siva gone home to the Isle to birth her instead. Along her skin and her hair and her eyes, Lyda had a delicate white-gold chain set with a single sea-pearl that Siva had owned, which she wore alongside her guilt. She could never quite forget that she was the cause of her mother’s death. Her father’s reluctance to speak of his dead wife made the burden somewhat heavier, and the only stories Lyda had heard of her mother came from Maya, and they were so fuzzy that there might not have been any truth in them at all. Lyda constructed an imagining of Siva on every rare occasion she saw one of the Myrae, layering each woman upon the next over the solid base of her sister’s heart-shaped face.

The Myrae trader was fierce-looking, stern and aloof, so Lyda took her unwavering stare and mixed it with Maya’s warmth. Her cheekbones were as high and sharp as Lyda’s own, so she stole those unchanged. The thin lips could not come - both she and Maya had full, plump smiles that had not come from Cathan - but the eyes were of a similar shape, almond and framed with thick lashes, so Lyda used them, too, and transformed the irises into Maya’s piercing emerald.

She was so enthralled in the image she’d woven that when she stepped back, it was straight into something warm and sweating and far taller than she. She spun in surprise, and found herself caught up in a thick black messenger’s cloak. It clung to her as she fought to break free, and someone exclaimed crossly in Brinnican.

‘Sorry,’ she muttered, finally disentangling herself. ‘I didn’t see you.’

‘Clearly,’ the deep voice said, the lilt of an Erbidan accent heavy on the word.

For a moment, Lyda thought Jorge had followed her, but when she looked up she saw the flushed face of a young Erbidan man of twenty-six or -seven. His black curls were dishevelled and he had bruise-like shadows under his dark eyes. She frowned.

He frowned back, straightening; something twisted deep in Lyda’s chest, a tug underneath a rib. She stepped away, taking in the square leather letter bag slung across his body, and the golden cuff on his left wrist. He pulled his cloak back into place, hiding it. He studied Lyda’s face, blinking rapidly.

‘Who are you?’ he demanded.

Lyda’s lips twisted at his rudeness and she tried to walk away, but he mirrored her movements. She glowered at him. ‘Get out of my way.’

His hand snaked out to catch her wrist, his eyes darting to the woven bag that hung from her elbow, taking in her face and hair. ‘Who are you?’

She tried to wrench her arm away. He held it fast. ‘Don’t touch me!’

‘Why are you here?’ he said, his brows drawing closer together.

‘Let me go.’

He hissed through his teeth. ‘I do not have time for this.’

‘Then let go of me.’ She wrenched again, increasingly desperate, fear starting to creep up her spine. She rose onto the balls of her feet, ready to run if she could break free. ‘I’ll scream.’

‘I would prefer that you did not. Where do you live?’

‘As if I’d tell you,’ she spat, twisting and aiming a kick at his knee; he stepped away derisively, and his fingers tightened on her wrist.

So Lyda did exactly what her father had taught her to do: feinted a jab to the stomach with her captured elbow, and slammed the heel of her palm up into the Erbidan man’s unprotected throat. He wheezed and let her go. For a moment, Lyda stood still, stunned by what she’d done, before instinct kicked in and she darted away, straight into the enveloping crush of shoppers. Her dance through the crowd was far swifter this time, fuelled by fear; she did not look over her shoulder, nor anywhere but forward, and in a handful of minutes she found herself at the edge of the forum and in the gutter of the Southern Way. She sprinted up the main road breathlessly, darting in and out of the arches of the aqueduct, ignoring the sideways glances and exclamations of surprise, the honey and biscuits still hanging from her arm as she ran as fast as she could towards the hospice and her sister.

***

The hospice was a solid, practical structure, designed by the Kingstown guild of architects and made from the local sandstone, like most of the city. It was circular, a mirror to the temple of Eianna, which sat opposite on the edge of the Southern Way, one of the arterial roads of the capital. Though the hospice lacked the marble facade and famed frescoes of the goddess’ temple, it still boasted high, wide windows, a white slate tiled roof, and an internal atrium, open to the sky with one large fountain and a gentle, peaceful garden. Maya often took her patients there to sit or lie in the sun and listen to the water; she was sure that the calm of the place and the sun on their skin helped them to heal.

The hospice was a labyrinth for those who did not know their way, but Lyda had been there so often with Maya that the way through was second nature. There were four main wards and a scattering of smaller rooms for isolation or surgeries. A considerable section of the building was richly furnished but empty, set aside specially for the Eilin King or Queen; to Lyda’s knowledge it had never been used, at least in her lifetime. There was a birthing centre, too, but most Eilin women birthed at home, so it served mostly as a place of respite for new mothers, bringing their babies in for midwives to look after while they slept and escaped the demands of the rest of their families.

Lyda never used the main double doors; there was a bell attached which echoed piercingly up the corridors when they opened, alerting the healers to a new patient. She entered through a small side door instead, flustered and sweating from her run, her stomach still clamping with panic. Being in the hospice did not help, as she never felt entirely comfortable there. Even though it was a welcoming place, the shadow of death always seemed a little too close, and Lyda could still feel the grip of strong fingers around her wrist.

Maya worked in the women’s wards, so Lyda checked them as quietly as she could, searching for her sister’s bright auburn braid. The ceilings were high and light streamed in through open windows; beds sheeted in flawless white and curtained in dark blue lined the walls. The whole place smelled fresh, a mix of sunlight and pine, and the floors were meticulously clean. The beds were mostly empty and there were no healers to be seen, so Lyda headed for what Maya jokingly named the refuge instead.

The refuge was a comfortable sitting room attached to a small kitchen, overlooking the main doors. It was home to a number of long couches the physicians could sleep upon, and a secluded, screened corner where Maya had once told Lyda they went to cry.

Maya and her mentor Jula were there, sitting at the small wooden kitchen table, their hands wrapped around mugs of tea. A third woman sat across from them; she looked up and frowned as Lyda rushed in.

‘By Eianna, Lyda!’ Maya exclaimed, jumping up. ‘Did you run here? What’s wrong?’

Lyda tried to steady her breathing. Nothing had happened, not really, and she knew that if she told Maya her sister would insist on going back to the forum and calling for the city sentries. Lyda thought she’d rather just forget the whole thing. She didn’t much feel like explaining that she’d just hit a stranger in the throat, and she wasn’t sure the sentries would think because I was scared was sufficient justification. ‘Nothing’s wrong, May, there were just too many people at the market,’ she said, forcing a crooked smile. She held up the black woven bag. ‘Jorge gave me honey biscuits and told me I should share.’

Maya studied her sister’s face closely, but smiled in return. ‘I can’t believe you listened to him.’ She gestured for Lyda to sit and poured another cup of tea, adding milk and sugar, just as Lyda liked it, and cramming one of the biscuits straight into her mouth as Lyda took her place at the table. Jula nodded hello.

Maya’s mentor was a serious-looking Brinnican woman, tall and willowy and fair. Lyda still didn’t feel entirely easy around her, despite having known Jula for over five years. Maya shared Jula’s practicality and matter-of-factness, but in Maya it was warm and often tempered by a laugh; it had taken Lyda almost a year to see Jula smile. For all Jula’s reserve, Maya adored her, and Lyda knew that Maya was lucky to have been chosen to apprentice. Jula did not mentor often, despite her skill.

‘Alyda d’Cathan, this is Delia d’Artur,’ Maya said with her mouth half-full, nodding to the third, unfamiliar woman. Lyda dutifully smiled and said hello, and Delia smiled in a return greeting.

She was a slight Eilin woman, as small as Lyda herself, and Lyda wondered how she managed to find the strength a healer needed - Maya’s curves hid the muscles of a warrior - until her thick brown hair shifted and Lyda caught sight of the brooch pinned to Delia’s breast.

Lyda stared, shivering, then realised what she was doing and looked at her hands instead. Delia was not a physician, as Jula and Maya were; she was an illae-healer, marked by the golden cross fastened to her tunic.

By Eilin law, patients had the right to choose whether they were treated by a physician, using medicine, or by a gifted healer, using the power they named illae. Once, the hospice had been almost fully staffed by illae-healers, but their numbers had dwindled over the years, which made the choice simpler and put the skills of physicians in higher demand. Maya had told Lyda about working with gifted healers, her voice full of awe and a hint of jealousy, but Lyda had never actually met one of the gifted, so she sat quietly and pretended not to stare.

Lyda knew a number of stories about them - she loved history, and the gifted were part of it. Her favourite tales were of the terrifying Lightning Mage, who’d led a doomed rebellion against an Eilin King, and his lover, the Sea Witch, whose power could send a shudder through the ocean. Despite the faery tales, Lyda knew nothing of them as real people. In the past, the gifted and ungifted had lived side by side, bound by strict rules of conduct enforced by the Law of Tolerance, which protected the ungifted from the gifted and vice versa. The Law still existed, periodically pinned up as posters on sandstone city walls, but successive Kings and Queens had watered it down as the gift dwindled and it became less important. One of Lyda’s teachers had dismissively told their class that the gifted were nothing more than a footnote in history and they needn’t waste their time learning the Law, so Lyda had never actually bothered to read it.

The gift marked those that had it as other, and they were treated as such, cloaked in suspicion, living on the margins of cities and towns. Occasionally, the news criers would sing of a body washed up on the shores of the Lifeblood River, a golden cross pinned to its clothes. The sporadic murders continued a darker tradition of large-scale killings. The last purge had been just before Lyda’s birth: over a hundred women and men had been thrown into bonfires in northern Eilan at the orders of the then-King Jonas. Eilan didn’t have a history of constant warfare, like Erbide and Brinnica: instead, it had a secretive, slow massacre of its own people. Lyda tried not to think on it too often or too deeply, other than to hope that she never lived through another purge.

It bubbled to the front of her mind as she pretended not to study Delia, but it grew increasingly difficult to be surreptitious, as the woman was staring back openly, her brow drawn into a frown. Lyda was used to this, as most people assumed that she was Myrae and wondered what she was doing so far from the sea. She tried not to take Delia’s stare personally, though her gaze was very close. Lyda shivered as a breeze ran over her bare arms.

Delia opened her mouth to speak.

‘Patient!’

The scream came from outside the open window, and in a moment, all three healers were on their feet and hurrying towards the hospice doors, tea and biscuits forgotten. Lyda followed them at a distance as a young woman was carried inside by two men, one at her shoulders and one at her feet. Blood followed them, dripping onto the tiled floor from a wound on the unconscious woman’s temple as they rushed her into a ward and settled her gently onto a bed.

Lyda hovered in the doorway, not wanting to get too close. She knew she would be in the way, and even from a distance she could tell that the young woman was badly hurt: she could see exposed bone. Had it happened to an animal, Lyda’s father would have advised a fast-acting poison of opium; as it was, Delia lay her hands on the patient’s cheeks and closed her eyes.

An odd pull came through the air; the hair on Lyda’s arms and neck rose. She could feel the pull around her, but most unnervingly in her chest, as if a rope had wrapped around the deepest part of her and was dragging her inexorably forward. Her breath hitched as Delia’s hands began to glow. Lyda blinked hard, certain that she was imagining it, and she took a step towards the bed, almost against her will.

‘Get away,’ the young woman slurred. Lyda planted her feet, shocked. ‘Get away!’ The patient’s voice rose to a shriek. ‘Filthy sluah!’

Lyda’s eyebrows rose at the slur: the bloodthirsty sluah were the worst of the fae, banished from the underground Seelie-Court and forced to wander across Eilan, living in the mists of peat bogs. It was one of the worst things you could call a person, and the one time Lyda had said it Cathan had sent her to bed without dinner and not spoken to her for a full day.

Delia stepped away from the bed with a twist to her lips, wiping her hands on her apron. Jula and Maya worked on the woman, but there was clearly nothing they could do: for a while, Lyda watched her sister pick slivers of bone from the wound and gently try to stem the steady flow of blood, but in the end Maya simply moved to the side and took the young woman’s hand, waiting.

Lyda fled before the young woman died, retreating to the calm of the refuge. The biscuits lay waiting on the table, but she had no appetite. She had seen dying people before, but never witnessed someone so close to the moment of death. She felt surprisingly calm, if a little tired. She lit the oven and moved the kettle back onto the flame to make fresh tea, emptying and refilling the pot, taking comfort from the familiar movements.

Delia appeared in the doorway, smelling strongly of soap, a fresh apron covering her tunic and pants. Lyda stared at the golden cross for a moment, then lifted her eyes.

‘She’s gone to Eianna,’ Delia said shortly. She sat and poured herself a mug of tea.

‘I am sorry,’ Lyda said haltingly. ‘I’m sorry she said that.’

Delia shook her head. ‘No matter. I’m used to it.’

Lyda looked out the window onto the wide, cobbled road. ‘Could you have saved her?’

‘Possibly. It was a very bad wound, but I might have made it better.’ Delia sighed. ‘Wounds to the temple, though … Even if she’d healed, she might not have been the same afterwards. I would have needed a reader’s help, and there are no readers in Kingstown.’

The sun was getting low; Lyda turned her face up to the sky, not entirely sure what Delia meant. She hadn’t realised how late it was.

‘You should head home before the dark,’ Delia said, echoing Lyda’s thought. ‘I will let Maya know. She will be some time yet.’

‘Thank you,’ Lyda said. ‘Goodbye.’

Delia smiled. ‘See you soon, little one,’ she said, and Lyda slipped out of the room.

***

Cathan Valson’s worn leather bag was sitting outside the back door when Lyda arrived home. It was one of her favourite things, shaped like a small chest and lined with pockets full of glass vials, needles and threads, knives, herbs and whatever other miscellany her animal healer father required that day. When she was smaller, Lyda used to sit on it when she went with her father to do his rounds, watching intently as he worked.

She crossed the small back garden - a modest patch of clipped green grass bounded by small flower and herb beds - and walked into the shade of the stable block. The dimness was a relief after the harsh afternoon sun, and Lyda sniffed appreciatively, breathing in the scent of fresh hay and oats. She searched the stalls for her father, eventually hearing the shuffle of feet from the very last stable; she approached quietly, taking the pot of honey from the black woven bag.

‘Do you have it, love?’ her father said by way of greeting, not taking his eyes from the piglet he was ministering.

In answer, Lyda handed over the pot and watched as Cathan unscrewed the lid and used a small spatula to smear the honey on the piglet’s neatly-stitched flank; it was no easy task, as the piglet was running around the stall happily, snuffling at the straw.

‘Marnie will be pleased,’ he said once he was done. Marnie owned the neighbouring farm and had done for as long as Lyda could remember; she had two sons, one older than Lyda, and one almost exactly her age, who Lyda had spent rather a lot of time with behind the stable block and out of sight of both houses. Cathan turned from the piglet. ‘How was the market?’

Lyda told him, leaving out the Myrae woman and the Erbidan stranger; the mention of the merchant women made his jaw clench and shoulders tense, and Lyda thought Cathan would not appreciate a stranger grabbing his daughter’s wrist and demanding to know her name. She followed her father as he washed his hands and started readying the nightly feed for the horses, measuring out chaff and adding molasses to buckets after he’d divided oats and sprinkled in some bran.

Cathan was a bear of a man, with broad shoulders and a height that Lyda had never seen matched. His work kept him fit, but he also had a generous appreciation of food, and his strong bulk granted him an almost overwhelming sense of size. Lyda thought that Siva must have been far more petite, as neither she nor Maya were tall nor wide. They had other parts of Cathan, though; much to Lyda’s annoyance and envy, Maya had inherited his wavy waterfall of auburn hair, while Lyda had his dark brown eyes and angular face. On her, the angles were almost too sharp; a wide-set jaw and cheekbones tempered Cathan’s angles into noticeable handsomeness, at least, Lyda reflected, when he kept his beard trimmed.

He was young, to have two grown daughters, not more than forty-two summers. Despite his relative youth, he had never shown interest in remarrying, and other than his reluctance to speak about her dead mother, Lyda knew that she didn’t have much to complain about when it came to her father. When her school friends were forced to spend a week each month at temple, learning to serve the gods, Lyda and Maya went on rounds with Cathan, learning to stitch and splint and bandage and administer tonics and deliver foals. When the temple patriarchs knocked on the door after one had caught Maya climbing out a first-floor bedroom window, Cathan laughed in their faces and told them to mind their own beds or he’d take them before a Justice Sitting for harassing his daughter. Lyda thought that holding her tongue when it came to Siva was a fair price to pay for a father who let his daughters run free.

It was Lyda’s turn to make the evening meal, and Maya returned home when she was elbow-deep in a pile of chopped vegetables. Maya was pale with exhaustion and miserable, and she sank down at the kitchen bench and buried her face in her arms. The young woman’s husband had arrived not long after Lyda left the hospice, finding his young wife’s body cleaned and dressed in white. As was often the way with people in the first throes of grief, he was cruel to Maya and aggressive towards Delia, whose brooch he had spotted just before he left with his wife’s carefully-dressed body lain in his wagon.

‘She might have lived, if she’d made a different choice,’ Maya said sadly, taking up the cup of tea Lyda made for her.

‘You did everything that you could, May. Delia said that she might not have been able to help in any case.’

‘I know.’ Maya rubbed at her temples, her eyes closed, red lashes brushing her cheeks.

Lyda decided to change the subject. ‘There was a Myrae woman at the market today.’

The ploy worked, and Maya plied her with questions; she was as fascinated with their mother’s people as Lyda was, and Lyda described the woman in great detail until their father came inside and they ate, sitting at the kitchen bench, the windows open to the summer night’s air.

Lyda left her father to clean up and climbed into bed not long after, opening a worn copy of The Eilin Histories that Maya had lent her. She had completed her schooling six months prior, but her history teacher had given her a list of books ‘to keep Lyda going’ until she apprenticed. Lyda wondered if the inclusion of this book hadn’t been some odd joke on her teacher’s part: it was so dry that she’d barely finished one chapter in the months she’d been trying to read it. It didn’t help that she was more tired than usual this night, her eyes and arms oddly heavy. After struggling through a few pages on the Five-Years Brinnican War she gave up, blowing out her candles and pulling a light summer blanket over her bare shoulders.

When sleep came, her dreams were full of blood. It dripped to pool on the tiled floor, the sound echoing through the hospice ward, the scarlet of it stark on the woman’s temple and against the bed’s blue curtains. The pool of red grew larger and larger until it began to lap at Lyda’s boots; it was then she realised Maya was beside her, breathing shallowly. As one, they turned and ran, but instead of finding safety in the refuge, the hallway led them back to the ward, back to exactly where they’d been standing before, and the young woman’s blood began to drip once more.

Lyda desperately tried to wake, but the dream held her. She pinched herself, she stamped her feet, she shook her head, but all the while the red kept dripping. Eventually, she shouted; Maya looked sideways, exclaiming in surprise, and the dream dissolved. Lyda found herself in her own dream, one she had often, where she swam in a deep, cool rock pool, far under the surface, and looked up to see green light glimmering off the water. The sandy bed was carpeted in silky seaweed, and Lyda spent some time running her hands through it, luxuriating in the feeling.

Bang.

Lyda looked up in surprise, but nothing in the dream changed.

Bang. Bang. Bang.

She sat up in bed, her heart pounding, her spine soldier-straight. The rock pool dissolved.

It took her sleepy mind more than a few moments to realise that the sound was a knock, coming from the front door. It came again, with more urgency; as it was not unheard of for either Maya or Cathan to be sent for at any time of the night, Lyda wrapped her blanket around her shoulders and stumbled up the hallway, yawning. She felt tired and drained, as if she’d been riding all day. She had to will her legs to take each step and her knees were trembling by the time she reached the door.

She pulled it open, letting the now-cool night air into the house. ‘Yes?’ she said sleepily, her eyes half closed, hearing Cathan’s soft tread on the floorboards behind her.

‘I have never searched a city for a woman before,’ a rolling voice said, more hoarse than the last time she’d heard it. ‘I cannot say I wish to do it again.’

Lyda’s heart hammered against her chest and she looked up to see the Erbidan man from the market giving her a wry half-smile, his fingers tapping lightly on a deep red bruise that spread across his throat. She shook her head and tried to close the door, but Cathan took the handle and opened it fully.

‘What do you mean?’ her father said sharply, pushing Lyda behind him. ‘Do you need a physician?’

‘Delia helped me in the end,’ the black-haired man said, and he rolled up his sleeve, showing Cathan the golden cuff that sat snug around his wrist, then a matching signet ring marked with a cross, resting on the pointer finger of his left hand.

Cathan stared at it for some moments, then into the man’s face, as if trying to place him. ‘Which estate?’

The man stepped back and offered an Erbidan bow, one hand stretched to the side, his empty palm facing Cathan. ‘Kell.’

Cathan blinked. ‘Well,’ he said. ‘You’d better put the kettle on, Lyda.’ He stood to the side of the door and gestured. ‘Do you prefer Illarus, or Priom-Oidre?’

‘I prefer Jakob,’ the man said, and stepped inside.

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