Prologue
A child can be a boon, a blessing, a burden—or all three at once.
A wide field of bitter herbs and thistle, gray-green and desolate, stretched from the shadowed woods to the loose scree of a small, isolated hill.
Across it, a young woman, cloaked and hooded, drove her pony and cart, whipping the beast to a bruising pace, ignoring its stumbles on the rough ground.
Beneath the shelter of her cloak, she clutched a baby close to her breast, and now and again looked over her shoulder to check that the crates of books and papers under the cart’s canvas cover were staying roped in place—and to make sure no one was following.
A raven cawed overhead. The young woman frowned at the sky, then pulled her hood down farther to shadow her face.
Ahead, a tower: The one remaining wing of a castle ruined by a long-ago war, a testament to a once-powerful family, it now stood alone and ominous at the top of a small, steep hill, with not even a nearby tree to challenge its absolute dominance of the skyline.
The walls around it were little more than rubble now, but some artistry in the tower’s construction—or perhaps sheer luck—had kept it completely intact while the building around it succumbed to the harsh winds that scraped the valley near bare.
The young woman halted the cart as close to the gap-toothed stone walls as she could and freed her pony from its traces, leaving it to crop contentedly at the windblown grass that grew almost horizontally along the hill’s base.
Hefting a pack onto her back, and still clutching the baby, she half walked, half climbed up the slope, keeping her balance with some difficulty.
Her teeth had been clenched with the sheer force of her anger and stubbornness for so long—years, it felt like—that her jaw ached, and her feet were more blister than skin.
But the aches and pains, the thorns striping her shins with blood, the poisonous leaves that left her skin stinging …
all could be ignored, in service of a higher purpose.
Even the child in her arms, its cheeks purple and swollen as plums, could be ignored—even as it cried with a stubborn determination that refused to be soothed.
The young woman murmured to it as she climbed, cupping the soft little head in one hand to keep it secure.
When she reached the overgrown path to the tower door, she placed the baby—still howling—on a patch of bare earth in the tower’s shadow.
While it kicked and protested and wailed, she took a broad, long-bladed knife and hacked at the tangle of bushes that had grown up around the doorstep, woody and thick at their center.
She tried to saw through them, but they proved stubborn—and so, swearing under her breath, she pulled a book from her pack, thumbed to a well-foxed page, and read the words out loud.
Her red hair floated about her shoulders, then settled—and the last tangle of branches gave way.
With a cry of mingled frustration and triumph, she wrenched open the door.
Inside was cold, but dry, and sheltered from the chill rains that threatened to descend over the mountains.
Leaving the baby where it lay for now, she carried her crates one by one from the wagon to the doorway, just far enough over the threshold that they wouldn’t get wet.
When she had finished, she took the traces off the pony and let it wander free. She would not need it any longer.
She wiped the sweat from her brow and turned back to the baby, which had at last fallen silent, as if sensing the significance of the moment.
It stared at her with bright, accusing eyes.
With a sigh, she hefted it back into her arms and carried it through the doorway and to the spiral of shallow stone steps.
As she climbed the stair, her booted feet kicked up clouds of long-stale magic.
Someone less intimately acquainted with it might have seen only dust motes, the drifts of beetle cases, and the brittle shed wings of crickets, but this woman had grown up hand in hand with magic of the most dark and powerful kind and could discern its sizzle in the air as it responded to her presence—the sensation of something waking that was simultaneously too small to see and too massive to comprehend all at once.
It settled like grit between her teeth. It smelled like heated copper and, more prosaically, a little like the sweet-bitter tang of rampion and parsley, the herbs that grew in such great quantities in the meadow outside.
It smelled of home—of her father’s library and his private study.
She took deep lungfuls of it, letting it tingle in her throat and sparkle in her blood.
After the long, dusty journey, it quenched a thirst in her that water never could.
“This is our home now,” she said to the baby. It craned its little head like a tortoise peering from its shell, as if it had understood her. In the corners, spiders scuttled into hiding behind their webs, astonished to see their silent domain invaded after all these years.
Over the next weeks, the young woman worked single-mindedly on the topmost room of the Tower, transforming it into her new workshop.
She hacked apart the few old pieces of furniture left behind when it was abandoned and made new ones, undaunted by the fact that she had never tried carpentry before.
Her stubborn belief that she could do it and her absolute refusal to admit that it might be beyond her capabilities carried her through, with many splinters and bruised fingers along the way.
She was able to create a makeshift desk for herself and an even more makeshift cradle for her daughter.
As the woman worked in the long evenings, frowning at her books and scribbling endless notes, the baby amused herself by playing with her toes, laughing at the motes of magic set swirling by all the housekeeping, and having long, gurgling, nonsense conversations with her hair, which was already long enough to brush her plump shoulders.
The woman knew little about the care of infants—her sister had been only a few years younger than she, and the little boy fostered to their family had been six years old during the brief time she knew him—but she told herself a baby was just a very complex spell, that was all, and nothing compared to those she had mastered before.
It was just a matter of feeling out the right words, the right actions, that would form the child in the manner she desired and, when it was time, would cast it into the world with the same assurance with which she spoke her incantations.
She told herself this even as the baby cried without ceasing and her head ached from lack of sleep.
This is nothing, she told herself; this is nothing compared to what will come.
In the meantime, she held the baby to the breast when she cried (one-armed and casually, still writing with the other hand), rocked her and murmured stories, and changed her swaddling clothes and baby napkins when required.
There was a little stream downhill from the Tower where the young woman washed their laundry, and she pinned it on a string by the fire to dry.
As the baby grew into a little girl, she demanded particular stories that had become her favorites.
In the way of children, she memorized them—faster and more accurately than most, but more on that later—and if her mother tried to rush them, or change a word in the telling, she protested immediately.
One of her favorite stories was that of the Plague that had shaped Virelith for the last two hundred years, and she asked for it often.
“Once upon a time,” her mother would say, “magic ran wild in Virelith, used by almost everyone to varying degrees, and in varying forms—ranging from small gifts and affinities to grand powers almost beyond imagining.
To some, it was a tool; to others, a god.
Everyone practiced—or worshipped—as they personally saw fit, with no rules or restrictions.
But the abundance of magic in that time had one fatal drawback.
Any fools could snatch at it, use it, and call themselves magicians, with no respect for the terrible weight and gravity of the power they wielded.
Without words and books to bind the spells, there were no real restrictions on their casting.
The most potent of the mages, the incarnists, who used their own bodies as the source of their strength, were the most susceptible to being carried away by this nearly limitless power.
“As more and more people used magic indiscriminately, frivolously, it was inevitable that some among them would become corrupted.
There were those who preached of this corruption and warned of the terrible consequences—chief among them the disciples of the Temple of the One-Eyed God, a disapproving and exacting deity who demanded magic be bound and contained.
“That sickening of magic against which the Temple warned, the Plague, was started by the recklessness and ambition of one incarnist mage, a bone mage, who overestimated his control and understanding.
Bone magic rose from every grave, whispering with dead tongues, a punishment upon those who thought themselves clever enough to master power too vast to control with human will alone.
“The Temple and the incarnist mages came together, imposing order on the practice of magic to end the terrible Plague.
The Temple bound magic with words and ink, so that only the learned and the worthy could read and use it, and forbade the practice of affinities and of all magic that could not be written down and caged in books.
The incarnists intermarried with the nobility and the royal line to keep power out of the hands of the common folk, and bowed their heads to the Temple.
Magic was tamed again; civilized; made safe.
All across Virelith, graves and tombs were opened, no matter how ancient, and the Temple burned every bone they found.
People said that the kingdom was ankle-deep in ash for a decade.
They sealed away the Corpse Roads, also, and swore never again to let such magic rule the living.
“Still”—she always paused here, smoothing her daughter’s hair, her voice softening to match the whisper of cinders settling in their hearth—“the bones remember. They are never truly silent. One day, when the world has need, their voices may rise again. And when they do, my little daughter, only those with discipline and knowledge—those who understand the worth of words and books—will be strong enough to guide them.”
The little girl listened sleepily, thumb plugging her mouth, soothed by the familiar words.
Her hair—as red-gold as her mother’s—floated to caress her forehead in a soothing motion.
Whenever this happened, the mother watched it, not with surprise or wonder, but with a set jaw and a sort of resolve that might have seemed sinister to anyone watching the pair.
But no one was watching—not then, and not for the twenty years that followed, as the mother and daughter lived together in the Tower, set apart from the wider world, with no one to observe them but the spiders.
Over the years, the workshop grew. It became crowded with books, papers, inks.
The woman pored over them, scribbling and muttering to herself as the little girl played at her feet.
Inevitably, there came a time when she exhausted the volumes she had brought with her.
On this day, she opened one of her spellbooks and read from it, enunciating each word with care, her hair floating about her head.
The air filled with the hot buzz of magic.
When she had finished, she ran a hand through her hair, and it came free in a tangled clump of strands the size of a swallow’s nest. She balled it up and tossed it away, where it landed in a cobweb and startled a spider that had been expecting its breakfast. She did not bother to look where it had landed.
A new cluster was already growing in its place.
She waited. Towards evening, there was a tremendous whistling, rushing sound, like an approaching wind. The woman climbed the ladder to the attic, where there was nothing but beams and plaster and dust, and opened the little window under the eaves.
One by one, a flock of pigeons flew in to roost, drawn there involuntarily by her spell and wearing bemused expressions on their tiny pigeon faces—more bemused than usual, that is, because of course an air of confusion is to be expected from even the best of pigeons.
The woman set to work building them nesting boxes while they murmured to each other in soft coos, wondering what their lives would be from then on.
Now the woman could send and receive messages—and packages.
She sent the birds to all corners of Virelith, and received books, materials, and information in return.
Some of the books were so heavy that it took half a dozen pigeons to carry them in little woven nets.
They arrived exhausted, and she untied the knots from their spindly ankles and let them rest, feeding them the best scraps from her table.
Gradually, page by page, her work took shape.
Gradually, year by year, the child grew.
The child learned to walk, and to speak.
She toddled around the Tower room while her mother worked, careful to touch only those few things she was allowed to play with.
Every so often, her mother would take the child in her lap and allow her to look at the great spellbook over which she had labored for years—an imposing, pearly behemoth of a thing.
“The work is sacred,” she would say.
“Sacred,” said the child, as best she could. The “cr” sound gave her trouble, so it came out more like “sake-d.”
“The work is crucial.”
“Coo-shul.”
“And one day,” the woman said, holding the child’s soft cheeks between her quill-calloused hands, “you will help me with it.”