The White Order

XXX

CERRYL WIPED UP the last of the stew with the dark bread, then took a sip of water from the battered brown earthenware mug that was his. In the cool of late winter, the hot midday meal warmed him all the way through. He was in no hurry to go back to copying in a workroom heated only indirectly by the kitchen stove, not until his fingers warmed up more, anyway.

“Ah, a good stew,” said Tellis, stretching.

“Everything I cook is good, master Tellis.” Beryal smiled from where she sat across the table from Cerryl. “But the next one won’t be so tasty.”

“It is,” confirmed Benthann. “I never complained about your cooking, Mother.” She raised her left eyebrow, arched so high that Cerryl wanted to laugh.

“Let us not get into that,” Tellis interjected hurriedly, then added, “Why won’t the next one be so tasty?”

“Spices-what few peppercorns I have would not season a mugful, and we have no saffron, no cumin, no-”

“Enough! I understand.” Tellis covered his mouth and coughed.

“Have you ever been to the traders’ square?” asked Beryal, looking directly at Cerryl and ignoring Benthann’s second raised eyebrow, this time the right.

“No. I’d never been to Fairhaven before I came here,” Cerryl admitted. “I’ve only been out around the square here, and to the farmers’ market.”

“There’s no place like Fairhaven anywhere,” said Tellis. “Lydiar is damp and rotting away, and they talk of Jellico and its walls, but inside the walls are crooked streets and hovels and beggars.” The scrivener snorted. “Fenard has a great and glorious history, but outside of history and walls, it’s a pigsty.”

“The white mages don’t need walls,” pointed out Beryal. “Who would dare attack Fairhaven?”

Cerryl didn’t voice an answer, but it struck him that there were probably people who would like to. . or someone who would sooner or later.

“You keep Cerryl inside the shop too much,” said Beryal.

“Apprentice has to earn his keep.”

“You can spare Cerryl for a bit,” noted Beryal. “He needs to see more of Fairhaven than the artisans’ way. What if you want him to run something for you?”

“Not too long, then,” answered Tellis with a theatrical sigh.

“I need four silvers, too.” Beryal said, her eyes straying toward the untended stove. “Spices do not buy themselves.”

“Four?” Tellis counterfeited an incredulous look, then winked at Cerryl, smoothing his face as Beryal looked up.

“Five’d be better,” countered Beryal. “Spices are dear this time of year, and will be getting more so.”

“Coins. . you’d think that this poor scrivener is made of coins.”

“Coins-not at all. Excuses, yes.” Beryal turned her eyes to Cerryl. “Well. . you best be getting ready, since you gulped down all there was to swallow.”

Cerryl slipped off the bench and headed for the washstand.

“After you wash, best you change to that new tunic,” Beryal said. “What you’re wearing is frayed at the elbows. And wear your jacket. I’ll wait, but be quick about it.” She turned to her daughter. “Today, you can do the dishes.”

“If I must.” Benthann raised her hands and dropped her shoulders in an overdone shrug. “A burden to bear.”

“Only if you wish to eat,” answered her mother.

Cerryl scurried back to his room and pulled off the brownsplotched work shirt and slipped on the pale blue tunic that Tellis had left one day on his pallet without a word.

“Better,” said Beryal when he reappeared in the common room holding the leather jacket from Dylert that still fit tolerably well. Tellis had left, presumably for the workroom.

“You look like a real apprentice,” added Benthann from the kitchen worktable where she sloshed dishes in the washtub.

“I don’t like to wear it around the inks and dyes and the glues,” confessed Cerryl.

“The boy thinks about his clothes,” said Beryal, “unlike some. Considering how they might be dirtied. . imagine that.” With a twisted smile, her eyes went to Benthann.

“Oooo. . I might drop one of these.” The younger blond juggled an earthenware platter, then caught it.

“Trust that you don’t,” suggested her mother, adjusting the short gray-and-blue woolen wrap that was too heavy for a shawl and too short for a cape. “Master Tellis may offer coin for clothes, but platters be another matter.”

Cerryl looked at the recently washed floor stones.

“We need be going,” said Beryal, touching his shoulder. “Out the front way.”

“Yes, Beryal.” Cerryl glanced through the open door from the showroom into the workroom, where Tellis was hunched over the stretching frame. The scrivener did not look up as they stepped out onto the street. Cerryl closed the door gently.

The sun shone through high hazy clouds, imparting little warmth to either Fairhaven or Cerryl. He fumbled the top bottom on his jacket closed and slipped his hands up under the bottom edge to keep them warm.

“It’s another five long blocks down toward the wizards’ square, not so far as the white tower, say three blocks shy of that.” Beryal shifted her basket to her left arm and started down the lesser artisans’ way toward the artisans’ square.

Cerryl shivered as they stepped back into the shadows of the narrow street. The shutters of all the shops were closed against the chill, and the light and fitful breeze occasionally carried the smell of burning ash to him. He thought he heard the click of the big loom as they passed the weavers, but it could have been the shutters rattling or the sound of the cooper’s wooden mallets.

“Are we getting anything else?” he asked when they stepped out of the shadows at the edge of the artisans’ square. The square was empty except for a man hunched on a white stone bench under a blanket.

“Besides spices? Not unless it be a true bargain.” Beryal laughed as she turned left and continued her brisk pace. “Like as I have to run out of things before Tellis opens his purse-for spices and stuff for the kitchen, anyway.” Her eyes went to the man under the blanket. “On the crew for the Great White Road, he’ll be afore long.” She shook her head. “Some folk never learn. Anything be better than that.”

Cerryl wondered at the slightly bitter undertone, suspecting he knew all too well to what Beryal referred.

“The history Tellis made me read, it says that the black mage-the one who founded Recluce-he worked on the white road and escaped, and that he was the only one who ever did.”

“If he did. .” Beryal laughed and lowered her voice to almost a whisper, “no wonder that he cared little for the white mages.”

“Is it that bad?”

“It is nothing to talk about.” Beryal shook her head. “Especially not where others can hear. Or Tellis.”

“Tellis?”

“Aye, Tellis.” Beryal lowered her voice. “His father was a white mage, save he knows not whom.”

“What?” blurted Cerryl, wondering why Dylert had sent him to Tellis, repressing a shiver.

“The mages, they cannot love a mage woman.” Beryal shrugged. “She would not survive the birth. Most times, anyway, they say. The children of the mages, for they have women but not honest consorts, they are raised in the pink house off the wizards’ square. They call it a creche. Some become mages. Some do not. Those who have not the talent, they are apprenticed into the better trades. Tellis is a scrivener.”

Cerryl forced a nod. “That. . I did not know.”

“I had thought not. Best you do, and say little.” Beryal seemed to walk a shade faster.

Cerryl stretched his own legs to keep up.

The artisans’ shops around the square gave way to a line of larger structures-an ostlery, then a long building without a sign of any sort, although two carriages waited by the mounting blocks outside the arched doorway.

Cerryl glanced across the avenue at the building, his view blocked for a moment by a wagon laden with long bundles wrapped in cloth that was headed in the same direction as he and Beryal. The rumble of the ironbound wheels on the whitened granite of the paving stones sounded almost like distant thunder.

“The grain factors’ exchange,” Beryal explained, lifting her voice above the sound of the wagons. A second wagon-its high sides painted bright blue and drawn by a single horse-followed the first.

What did grain factors do? Cerryl wondered. “How do they exchange grain there? There aren’t any wagons or silos.”

Beryal laughed. “They exchange pieces of parchment. Each piece of parchment has on it a statement of how much grain the factor will sell-something like that. Tellis explained it once.”

Cerryl nodded, understanding that such trading made more sense than carting grain from place to place. “Are there other exchanges? For other things?”

“I’m sure there are. Tellis has talked of them, but I’ve forgotten where most of them are. There’s an exchange for cattle somewhere on a square south of the wizards’ tower. I remember that because it’s near where they sell flowers from Hydlen.”

Beryal stepped off the stone sidewalk and into the avenue around a squat woman balancing a basket of folded laundry on her head. Cerryl followed, glancing down the avenue ahead. Another wagon was headed their way, but a good hundred paces away. He stepped back onto the sidewalk beside Beryal, still marveling at how many wagons rolled up and down the avenue.

Tellis, the son of a mage? He pushed the thought away.

The next block, past a cross street narrower than the way of the lesser artisans, held small stores-none seemingly more than ten cubits wide, and all with iron-banded doors left open. Cerryl peered around Beryal at one of the doors, getting a glimpse of a man working at a battered desk or table, and a sense of metals glittering.

“The jewelers’ row,” Beryal said. “Silversmiths, goldsmiths, those who cut and polish gems.”

A whole row of such? Cerryl shook his head.

“Nearly ten eight-days, and you’ve not been here?”

“I’ve been along the avenue, but always in the evening when the doors were bolted, and I wondered why.”

“Now you know. Even in Fairhaven, cold iron is the best protection for gold and silver and gems.” Beryal chuckled. “Though fewer try to break that iron here.”

“What happens to those they catch?”

“The road.” The woman shrugged. “It’s almost always the road, except for those that offend the mages. Most of them don’t get that far, they say. I wouldn’t know. . don’t want to know.” A shiver followed the shrug.

Beryal didn’t say more, and Cerryl didn’t ask, but he understood the shiver, especially after what he’d already seen. . and heard.

After the jewelry row came the houses behind low whitened granite walls, each with a gate for pedestrians and one for horses and carriages. All the horse gates were open.

The avenue widened, forming another circle around a bare, stone-paved expanse. Every peddler and merchant in the square hawked from a cart-red carts, green carts, blue carts, green-and-gold carts.

“No dawdling.” Beryal walked briskly past the pair of white-uniformed guards who surveyed the paved stone expanse and the circle of carts drawn up upon it. Cerryl forced himself not to look at the guards but to keep his eyes on the carts and the handfuls of people surrounding them.

“Ser, would you have sea emeralds. . or the flame rubies from Southwind?”

Cerryl shook his head, wrinkling his nose at the oppressive scent of the cloth thrust practically under his nose and stepping back, bumping into a square-faced woman, who glared at him.

“My pardon,” he said quickly and turning.

“Oil soaps, smooth as a bairn’s cheek. .”

“Elixirs! Get your elixirs here. . the best in tinctures of the sea. .”

The apprentice dodged two thin women who bustled toward Beryal and him as if to separate them, then eased closer to Beryal.

“Where. .?” murmured Beryal to herself, rather than to Cerryl, as she strode past a blue-and-cream cart piled high with baskets and into a clearer space in the middle of the circular square.

Cerryl followed, glad to get an uncrowded breath.

A flash of golden-red hair by a green cart caught Cerryl’s eye, and he forced himself to turn slowly, so slowly he felt as though he were barely moving. The golden-red hair belonged to an older woman-one a good decade older than the girl Cerryl had seen but once in the screeing glass and never dared to seek again. The reddish blond-haired woman walked briskly away from a cart where roasted fowl turned on a spit, fowl placed there so recently that the skin was still dun and far from golden, and no savory odor filled the square.

Cerryl glanced sideways at Beryal, who seemed not to have noticed his momentary interest.

“There.” Beryal walked swiftly toward the red cart and a white-haired woman wrapped in a blue woolen shawl.

“Spices, the finest spices. . spices from Austra, fennel-seed and seristar from far Hamor. .” The seller stopped as Beryal stepped up to the cart. “Your pleasure, lady? Perhaps some seristar? Or sweetmint leaves?”

“I might be thinking of peppercorns,” began Beryal. “Were they not too dear.”

“The best in peppercorns are those from Sarronnyn, and you are most fortunate, for those I have.”

“I cannot taste the difference. Have you any from Hydlen?”

“They are poorer. See.” The white-haired woman fumbled with the pouches on the cart shelf, then extended both hands. “The dark and round ones-those are from Sarronnyn. The wizened ones. . from Hydlen.”

“Plump peppercorns oft be soft.”

“These are round and firm. See.” The seller placed one in Beryal’s palm.

Cerryl eased away from the two and toward the gold-and-green cart adjoining the spice peddler’s space. Several knives and daggers were laid out on a cheap cotton velvet cloth of green.

“Be wanting a short blade, young ser?” The man by the cart was built like a barrel and wore only a tunic in the chill sunlight. Blackened teeth marked his too-friendly smile.

Cerryl pretended to study the blades, then shook his head.

“Bronze blades, white-metal blades, iron blades, steel blades-whatever please you,” persisted the seller.

“They look good,” Cerryl said politely, “too good for a poor apprentice.”

“This one”-the big man pointed to a dark iron blade less than a span long-“good for eating, cutting in the shop, takes an edge with ease. Only a silver, just a silver.”

Cerryl shook his head sadly, not that he wanted any sort of iron blade. The darkness within the metal bothered him, for reasons he couldn’t even explain to himself.

“As you wish, young fellow.” The peddler turned to a brown-bearded man in faded blue trousers and a sheepskin jacket. “You, ser? A skinning knife? The finest in the eastern lands right here. .”

Cerryl slipped back toward Beryal, his eyes traversing the square-no sign of golden-red hair. Why did he keep thinking of the girl in the glass? It had been more than a year-more than two-since he had seen her, and only in a glass yet. He shook his head, but he kept studying the traders’ square while Beryal continued her haggling.

“You call that cumin? Looks and smells like water-soaked oris seeds.”

“Alas, my lady, a dry year it was in Delapra.” The seller shrugged. “This is what I have. Five coppers a palm, and a bargain at that.”

“One, and you do well at that,” countered Beryal.

Cerryl let a faint smile cross his face as he slowly surveyed the square and waited.