(eng) Naomi Kritzer - Dead Rivers 02 by Freedom's Apprentice

Author:Freedom's Apprentice [Apprentice, Freedom's]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER EIGHT

In the morning, I checked with the servants to make sure that Zivar was still indisposed, then went up to her workroom. It was snowing hard outside, and the workroom's light was veiled, her window half-covered with snow. The fire in the little stove had been built up for me, and the room was warm and comfortable. I looked around at the shelves of jars full of beads, then pulled one down, choosing one at random. The jar held beads of carved jade. I tipped them into my hand and looked at them. Some skilled person had carved each one into the shape of a tiny animal. There were dogs, cats, horses. No mice. I wondered if Zivar, of the stone carved mouse guarding her doorway, had used up any carved mice on past spell-chains.

Zivar had talked about the beads singing to her, and having tasted the swirling colors of the borderland I visited in dreams, I had a faint inkling of what she meant. I closed my eyes, holding the beads, but heard nothing. I popped a bird-shaped bead into my mouth, but it tasted like a slightly dusty piece of rock. I spit it out and stared at it, perplexed. After a moment, I took the karenite bead out of the silk bag at my throat and set it in my palm as well.

Something about the color of the karenite seemed to match with a carved jade horse. I set the horse on the table and tipped the rest of the beads back into the jar.

The next jar I chose held glass beads: tiny swirls of color, crimson and yellow and azure blue. I thought about Zhanna's meditation lessons, when she was trying to train me as a shaman: I tried to slow my breathing and to focus, just for a moment, on the beads. My ears still heard nothing but I decided, after looking at them for a long moment, that one of the beads went with the horse the way the horse had gone with the karenite. It was striped yellow and blue. I set it beside the horse and poured the rest of the beads back into their jar. I put the karenite back into the pouch around my throat.

The next jar held metal beads, and four of those seemed to fit, somehow. And so it went. I realized after a while that I needed some way to keep my chosen beads together. The giant shell from the sea that Zivar used was empty, so I took it carefully down from the shelf and put my beads inside.

Choosing perhaps twenty beads had taken me hours and I still wasn't sure I was doing it right. I would need at least twice this number to make myself a single loop of a reasonable length. If I wanted a nice long strand that could be looped two or three times around my neck, I would need eighty beads or more.

I reached for another jar.

As the day wore on, the pile of beads began to grow.

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