Free Shade and Sorceress by Catherine Egan Page B

they roamed about the grounds, picking fruit to feed to the farm animals and trying to lure pale fawns out of the woods around the lake with berries. They had seed-spitting contests, which Charlie always won, and climbing or jumping contests, which Eliza usually won even though she was smaller. They never approached the dark wood in the northwest corner. Eliza felt inexplicably afraid whenever she looked at it. She wondered whether Charlie felt the same way but didn’t ask in case he then insisted they go have a look.
She ate her meals alone. Missus Ash and Charlie ate separately, in their own quarters, and Eliza was never invited to join them. After supper, she went to her room and practiced writing the Language of First Days with a brush and ink. She sounded out the words as she wrote and tried to make the sweeping characters as perfect and beautiful as the ones in the book she was copying from.
At night she had difficulty sleeping. She lay in the large bed fingering the barrier star around her neck and talking to Smoky, her only companion through the lonely evenings.
“What I cannay understand,” she told the cat, “is why they still want me here at all, aye. It’s obvious now that I’m nay a Sorceress. I cannay do any of the things they want me to! So why do they nay just send me home?”
Smoky tilted his head on one side and regarded her most intelligently, as if he was giving the matter serious thought.
Though Eliza did not know it, the Mancers were asking similar questions. Why try to teach a girl with no ability? Some of them had begun to openly question whether she was, in fact, Rea’s daughter, implying that she might be a trick or decoy. Finding her after a decade of searching had been a great triumph, a cause for celebration. But as the weeks passed with no evidence of her power the Mancers were plunged in doubt and morale was low. Kyreth tried to assuage their doubts, but he too was concerned. They needed incontrovertible proof of her heritage. They had to know if she had power, whatever the cost.
~
She was in the Library with Foss, who had just finished demonstrating how to mix a potion that turned the drinker invisible for a few minutes.
“A little spinal juice from a Tian Xia invisible eel makes it very potent indeed,” said Foss, “but I don’t fancy being invisible all day.”
He drank back the murky liquid, and to Eliza’s amazed delight he slowly faded away. She was trying to hit him by tossing pencils, giggling uncontrollably, when Kyreth appeared behind them.
“We’re working on her Deep Knowing,” came Foss’s voice from an entirely unexpected direction, sounding rather sheepish.
“You’re over there?” exclaimed Eliza. “I thought you were by the potion books, aye!”
But when she looked up at Kyreth she was chastened.
“Today I will teach you what you are,” he rumbled. “This lesson, you cannot fail to understand.”
He did not touch her but as if he had caught her by the scruff of the neck Eliza found herself trotting breathlessly at his side down the hallway, with Foss just behind them gradually becoming visible again. He took them to the west wing and down so many sets of stairs, first marble and then grey stone, that Eliza thought they must surely be headed underground. The corridors here were cold flagstone, narrow and dark. They came to a large iron door without any handle. Kyreth struck it with the palm of his hand and shouted a string of words in the Language of First Days. Eliza, insensitive though she was to Magic generally, could feel the potency of the words as they poured out of him, and she was reminded of the strange things she had seen in his study on her second day in the Citadel. The door swung open. Rather frightened now, she followed Kyreth down a narrow torch-lit stairway into a stone room so low the Mancers had to bend to enter it.
“This is the Treasury of the Sorceress,” said Kyreth. Eliza looked around her, puzzled, for the room was small and dark and