Free Dust and Light by Carol Berg

mid-departure. “You can draw it again exactly, without the face in front of you?”
    “Yes.”
    “As many times as I might want?”
    Prideful fool. I oughtn’t have mentioned it. Copying was a tedious chore. Pureblood families often requested ten or twenty copies of their son’s or daughter’s anniversary portraits to pass around to families who might provide suitable marriage partners.
    Bastien waited, his brows raised high enough to take flight on their own. He had shown himself most perceptive, and I had pledged my family’s honor to this contract. Besides, I’d never been a good liar.
    “Yes. But for three days at most. After that, I would need to retrieve the true image by touching the original portrait. I could then copy it or determine if anyone had tampered with it.”
    “Hmmph. Useful.” His not-quite-a-smirk was immensely irritating. “But not now. Constance sent word we’ve another mystery.”
    Shuffling off annoyance, I clutched my parchment scraps and plummet and followed him into the courtyard.
    Our new mystery was a girl child of eight or ten summers. Her tunic and leggings were little more than sacking. Her dark hair was chopped off short. Though disease and harsh winter hit the poorer ordinaries very hard, she looked neither wasted nor ill. Had it not been for the scrapes andblack streaks on cheeks and brow and the mud all over—from tumbling into the ditch where she was found, so Constance surmised—and her unnatural pallor, one might have thought her a healthy child, asleep.
    “She were found in the hirudo ditch next the piggery,” said Constance, scratching her ear vigorously as if a bug had flown into it, “but none claimed to know her. Demetreo, the headman, swore it so when he had her brought here, with his honorable complinations to the coroner. Not that we’d believe a Ciceron’s barbling any more’n a frog’s spit. But she don’t have the visible of a hirudo kind, no matter her garb.”
    “Aye, look at her hands,” said Bastien, brushing dirt away. “No hirudo child.”
    Her fingernails were broken, with a thin rime of dirt underneath, but her hands were smooth and plump. And when the coroner pulled the tunic away from her neck, he grunted and spat. “No mystery as to her dying, neither.”
    Blue-gray bruises around her neck showed the very spread of the fingers that had strangled the life out of her. Bastien glanced up at me. “You’ve no magic can tell us whose hands made these marks, do you?”
    I shook my head. Not even a bent for history, fully practiced instead of a lifeless stump between my eyes, could pull such a revelation out of the air.
    “Then bestir yourself, pureblood. We’re like to get no bounty from her family, but catching a dastard who’s murdered without provocation tots up a decent fee.”
    Revulsion left me incapable of speech. The slim, pale neck could have been Juli’s but a few years ago, or the innocent flesh of my young cousins who died screaming in the fire at Pontia. I already hated this place, this life, this despicable world of ordinaries.
    Dispensing with preliminary sketches, my left hand traced her cold cheeks, her violated neck, smooth hands, and ragged hair. Then I reached deep into my bent. . . .
    The bawling, clattering business of the city of the dead faded. War and winter vanished. Past horror, present anger, and anxiety about the future fell away. My senses were aflame with magic that seared a river of fire through bone and sinew, engraving the image of the murdered child upon my spirit and pouring through my fingers onto a flimsy scrap of animal skin.
    Other images intruded. Bare white bones. Sinuous threads of silver. A heaving grayness streaked with moonlight. Odd. Cursing distraction, I shrugged them off and plunged deeper.
    Time lost shape, but at some point well in, an urgency forced its way into my awareness, and a blur swept between my eyes and the page like some great insect.
    I growled and shooed it away. I was not