The Lady Who Plucked Red Flowers Beneath The Queen's Window

I could not help but laugh, harsh and mirthless. Would this woman ask a piece of ancient stone wall whether or not it wanted to be displayed in a museum? Not even the worms who tried to steal my spells had presumed so much.

“I’m sorry,” said Misa. “I shouldn’t have blurted it out like that. I’m good at sniffing. I’m terrible with people. Usually I find the Great Ones and then other people do the summoning and bring them to the library. The council asked me to do it myself this time because I lived in a women’s colony before I came to the academy. I’m what they call woman-centered. They thought we’d have something in common.”

“Loving women is fundamental. It’s natural as breeze. It’s not some kind of shared diversion.”

“Still. It’s more than you’d have in common with Olin Nimble.”

She paused, biting her lip. She was still transparently excited even though the conversation had begun to go badly.

“Will you stay a while at least?” she asked. “You’ve slept dark for millennia. What’s a little time in the light?”

I scoffed and began to demand that she banish me back to the dark—but the scholar’s excitement cast ripples in a pond that I’d believed had become permanently still.

What I’d learned from the unrecognizable maps and scattered constellations was that the wage of eternity was forgetfulness. I was lonely, achingly lonely. Besides, I had begun to like Misa’s fumbling chatter. She had reawakened me to light and touch—and even, it seemed, to wonder.

If I was to stay, I told Misa, then she must understand that I’d had enough of worms and their attempts at magic. I did not want them crowding my time in the light.

The corners of Misa’s mouth drew downward in disapproval, but she answered, “The academy puts us at the crossroads of myriad beliefs. Sometimes we must set aside our own.” She reached out to touch me. “You’re giving us a great gift by staying. We’ll always respect that.”

Misa and I worked closely during my first days at the academy. We argued over everything. Our roles switched rapidly and contentiously from master to apprentice and back again. She would begin by asking me questions, and then as I told her about what I’d learned in my matriline’s locked rooms, she would interrupt to tell me I was wrong, her people had experimented with such things, and they never performed consistently. Within moments, we’d be shouting about what magic meant, and what it signified, and what it wanted—because one thing we agreed on was that magic was a little bit alive.

Misa suspended her teaching while she worked with me, so we had the days to ourselves in the vast salon where she taught. Her people’s magic was more than superficially dissimilar from mine. They constructed their spells into physical geometries by mapping out elaborate equations that determined whether they would be cylinders or dodecahedrons, formed of garnet or lapis lazuli or cages of copper strands. Even their academy’s construction reflected magical intentions, although Misa told me its effects were vague and diffuse.

“Magic is like architecture,” she said. “You have to build the right container for magic to grow in. The right house for its heart.”

“You fail to consider the poetry of magic,” I contended. “It likes to be teased with images, cajoled with irony. It wants to match wits.”

“Your spells are random!” Misa answered. “Even you don’t understand how they work. You’ve admitted it yourself. The effects are variable, unpredictable. It lacks rigor!”

“And accomplishes grandeur,” I said. “How many of your scholars can match me?”

I soon learned that Misa was not, as she claimed, an unimportant scholar. By agreement, we allowed her female pupils to enter the salon from time to time for consultations. The young women, who looked startlingly young in their loose white garments, approached Misa with an awe that verged on fear. Once, a very young girl who looked barely out of puberty, ended their session by giving a low bow and kissing Misa’s hand. She turned vivid red and fled the salon.

Misa shook her head as the echoes of the girl’s footsteps faded. “She just wishes she was taking from Olin Nimble.”

“Why do you persist in this deception?” I asked. “You have as many spells in the library as he does. It is you, not he, who was asked to join the academy as a scholar.”

She slid me a dubious look. “You’ve been talking to people?”

“I have been listening.”

“I’ve been here a long time,” said Misa. “They need people like me to do the little things so greater minds like Olin Nimble’s can be kept clear.”

But her words were clearly untrue. All of the academy’s scholars, from the most renowned to the most inexperienced, sent to Misa for consultations. She greeted their pages with good humor and false humility, and then went to meet her fellow scholars elsewhere, leaving her salon to me so that I could study or contemplate as I wished.