by Jennifer Crow
in Issue 113, June 2021
Professor Halef caught me after breakfast. “I need a word with you. Regarding the cartographer.”
I struggled to swallow the last bite of toasted flatbread. “Yes?” I struggled to maintain a façade of calm. Everyone had been talking for days about the arrival of Embra the cartographer, and how she would save the city. Perhaps the professor had decided to purge his household of the unworthy before her arrival. I sank lower in my chair, so he seized my wrist and twisted it.
“Embra,” he whispered, “is not a worthy bearer of the cartographer’s bauble. I want you to get it from her, and bring it to me.”
That made no sense. “But why?”
“Don’t bother playing the fool.” Halef tightened his grip on my wrist. “You understood me. I need you to steal the cartographer’s bauble.”
“But—“
“If you want to stay in the college—and the gods only know why I’m even offering this—I need that bauble. She’s kept it from the city too long, and Mirlat’s barely holding together.”
“Isn’t she coming to fix it?”
“One visit in three decades! It’s unconscionable! And that bauble should have been mine to begin with . . .” He threw my arm back at me as if it offended him. “I don’t have to explain my reasoning to you, of all people. Just get it.”
After he’d stormed out, I sat back in my place and stared at my empty breakfast plate. Had Halef lost his mind? He’d certainly seemed crazed. I examined my arm, where his grip had left red marks that would become bruises before the day was out.
“You look glum,” Querm said when he appeared at the breakfast table. He tucked into a hearty meal of seasoned duck eggs and spicy mutton in yogurt sauce, chewing with his mouth open in a way that would have nauseated me even if I wasn’t contemplating the end of my world. I’d put in so much time already at the college, and with so little to show for it. Everywhere I turned, someone was calling me stupid or lazy, despite my efforts.
And yet . . . When I closed my eyes, as much to hide Querm’s mastication as anything else, I could picture every building and plaza in Mirlat, and all the shadowy places where the worlds folded together. If only I could remember Barzat’s Theorem and the Manifold Hypothesis of Feldoni as easily.
“Stop moping,” Querm told me around a mouthful of spicy duck egg.
“I just feel like such a failure,” I blurted. It was foolish of me to make such an admission to Querm. “And Halef wants me to steal the cartographer’s bauble for him.”
His mouth dropped open—not a pretty sight—but after a moment he gathered his wits and wiped his mouth with his sleeve. “Well, well, well. You’d think a post as the leading metaphysical instructor at the college would be enough for him. Unless . . .” He grinned and forked up another mouthful of egg.
“Unless what?”
“He’s been promising me new opportunities for months now. So maybe he wants it for me. But why did he ask you to take it?”
That was easy to answer. I might be terrible at writing essays on the relative importance of magical exports in Mirlat’s economy, but I comprehended the furtive and nefarious. I didn’t have much choice about obeying if I wanted to stay at the college, and I’d be easy to sacrifice if caught. “I guess I just need to justify my existence,” I said, and pushed away from the table.
*
I hurried to the marketplace, a long and narrow plaza that ran from the foot of College Hill to the main gate of Mirlat. Crowds spilled from temples and taverns all along the margins of the great plaza, to mingle, denounce heresies, and shop for trinkets. Though I’d worried it might be difficult to find the keeper, she proved easy to spot. She wore a scholar’s robes, sky blue slashed with scarlet, and balanced on the pedestal of Overik’s stela at the midpoint of the plaza, with one arm around the carved codification of our laws, and her free hand lifting a glinting sphere in the air.
I confess, for several heartbeats I gawked at the woman who so brazenly defied both good sense and public decency, her cerulean robes flapping about her ankles as she waved that miniature globe over the heads of passers-by. As I gathered my wits and shoved through the crowd to stand beneath the statue, she tucked the bauble away. “Better?” she asked a balding man in the livery of Mirlat’s town watch. He blew his whistle, three sharp tweets, and in a few moments an answering trill came from the region of the main gate.
“Yes, ma’am,” he said, saluting and offering her a hand down from the pedestal. “Thank you for seeing to it.”
“There’s more to do, I know.” Once on solid ground, she brushed off her robes with a grimace. A plain woman, she didn’t look like the sort of person to be carrying the object that supposedly held our world together. “It’s been too long since I came to Mirlat. It’s gotten rather raggedy at the seams.”
“Yes, ma’am,” he said again. “Can I escort you somewhere?”
I stepped in, eager to meet this odd woman, and fearful that I’d catch all sorts of hell if I let her arrive at the professor’s house without me. “Professor Halef sent me for . . .” I faltered. Simply calling her ‘the cartographer’ seemed disrespectful, or perhaps I was just embarrassed to have been caught not paying strict attention to all my instructions.
But to my relief, the woman covered any awkwardness with a smile that gathered all her wrinkles into a comforting tangle. “Oh, goodness, there you are! I was afraid I’d missed you in the confusion.” She tucked her hand into the crook of my elbow. “I did tell old Halef that I could find my own way to his house, but there are so many people. Thank you, dear girl. I don’t believe we’ve met—I’m Cartographer Embra.”
“I’m Yara,” I replied, as we swept through the crowd. “It’s a pleasure to meet you.”
To this day, I can’t decide if I led the way to Halef, or she towed me by my arm. Probably the latter, for she told me that carrying the bauble meant one was never truly lost. Even those times when the cartographer seemed to wander, she was only being led to a spot where her expertise was needed.
At any rate, I found myself in most unusual company. Though small in stature and stout of build, she moved with easy grace and no little speed. She’d gathered a pouf of curly, iron-gray hair in a loose bun atop her head, but even then she barely reached my shoulder.
“Not what you expected, I know,” she said. “And you’re a tall one, aren’t you? Do you sing?”
“A bit.” I had no idea where this conversation was headed. “Do you?”
“Oh, I croak along like an old raven. What I lack in ability, I make up in enthusiasm.” She dragged me to the side of the road, and sniffed energetically at Mistress Mordayn’s prize roses. “Gods backward and sideways, why did I wait so long to come back?”
We walked toward College Hill in silence for a while, until curiosity got the best of me. “Why did you wait so long?”
“To be honest, sometimes it’s the bauble that does the deciding,” Embra said with an airy wave. “Or maybe it read my doubts. Your master Halef has always resented the fact that I was the one who ended up as cartographer.”
“Really?” Not that the news came as a surprise. My master hated other people’s success almost as much as their incompetence. “Halef wouldn’t have liked wandering around all the time, though.”
“He never thought of that, now did he? Only the prestige of the job, such as it is. Though I did get a free sweet roll from a baker in Borig whose ovens almost disappeared with the alley behind his shop.”
“I suppose the glory of free baked goods would be hard to pass up.”
She chortled and poked me in the ribs. “True enough, Yara. True enough.” The fact that she remembered my name sent a thrill down to my toes. Half the people in Professor Halef’s house never called me by name, and the rest only used it when I was in trouble.
That thought made me wince. I kicked at a loose cobblestone. It shivered, its edges humming and fading. Embra bent over it with a muttered word. The bauble appeared in her hands, its gleam fracturing reflected light across the pavement. “I’m sorry.”
“It’s not your fault.” She closed her eyes, free hand tracing the edges of the stone. It solidified, and she set it back in place. Pedestrians parted and flowed around us, hardly seeming to notice us at all. “The universe is made in layers. This city is built on a hundred others like it, overlapping in different realms of existence.”
I considered that. Embra didn’t go on, so I said, “Does that mean there are worlds where this cobble doesn’t exist? Or isn’t in this particular place?” When I touched the stone, a spark leaped to my fingertip, stinging.
“Yes!” As I sucked on my finger, Embra beamed at me, the way she might a toddler who’d just taken her first few steps unaided.
I let my hand fall. “And you use the cartographer’s bauble to keep the worlds separate somehow.”
“Correct.”
I thought about that. “But I’ve always liked that the city has layers. What does it hurt if those two people—” I pointed at tavern, where two people sat at a table, their drinks overlapping, their eyes looking through each other because they sat in different Mirlats.
“You see them? I mean, you can see what makes them out of place?”
“Doesn’t everyone?”
“No,” she said, reaching up. I flinched, but she only patted my shoulder. “Obviously Halef hasn’t changed much since I knew him. Why do you stay?”
I hemmed around the truth, breaking a wayward twig or two from the neighbors’ shrubbery, examining a large centipede coiling in the shadows of a decorative chunk of smoky quartz. “I wanted to learn.” I loathed the childish whine in my voice. And I hated even more the sense of failure that inevitably followed.
“You say that as though it’s in the past.”
“It is, more or less.”
She tugged at my arm. “All right, listen. Sometimes the overlap doesn’t matter much—” She nodded at the tavern window, where two worlds drank together unawares.
“Does it hurt them? When you pull them apart, I mean.” I started across the street before Embra. The two of them seemed happy enough at the moment, their glasses of ale passing through each other before reaching their lips.
“Not at all. Not them, anyway.”
I thought of the spark snapping when I touched the cobble and rubbed my fingers together. “It hurts you.”
“A little.” Her bright smile grew brittle at the edges. The smell of fermentation from the tavern turned my stomach a little, but Embra had already raised the bauble. The two intertwined drinkers noticed her almost at the same time, and stared. The air shimmered, and suddenly only one was watching her. He lowered his glass and frowned at us.
I’d always avoided pain. When I was twelve, and Halef had us all inoculated against the creeping pox, I’d hidden in the attic for the better part of a week before Querm tracked me down and dragged me, screaming, to the line outside the doctor’s office. My hands still itched to hold the cartographer’s bauble, if only for long enough to pass it on to Halef, but now that I knew a price came with it, I hesitated.
Here and there we spotted places where two different realities impinged upon each other. Each time, Embra used the bauble to pin our reality in place and banish the other. Sometimes I could barely distinguish between the two, but sometimes an intruding reality showed me glimpses of strange things. When they disappeared, it made my heart hurt a little. I sighed.
“What are you thinking?”
“Just that Mirlat is a little less itself when you do your work.” I waved a hand at an empty building that had been a bookshop only a moment before.
“But if I didn’t, the city would fracture, crumble, and vanish. It’s well on its way now.”
Before I could work my way up to being alarmed about that news, something caught my eye. “What is *that*?” I pointed between two tenements, where a shadow hulked as high as my shoulder, with rows of spines down its back and eyes that glowed red. “Don’t worry,” Embra said. “They travel between worlds, following me. Mostly they just growl.”
“Mostly?” I edged behind her as she raised the bauble. The air flickered, bending like the paper animals I folded for the younger students from the endpapers of the boring textbooks I wasn’t reading. The creature crouched and growled, a sound so low I felt it in my breastbone more than heard it. As it leaped, it vanished out of our plane of existence. Still, I ducked and cursed under my breath. “Do you meet things like that often in your travels?”
“Sometimes.” She pressed her hand to her forehead. The wrinkles there seemed to cut deeper into her flesh than they had before.
I caught her as she sagged, and she tucked the bauble into my hand. “I need to rest.”
“Of course.” I helped her to a fountain in a dim little courtyard and seated her on the mossy rim. “We’ll just sit here for a little while.”
*
We made the rest of the journey without incident, and I left the keeper in the hands of Professor Halef’s butler. As he led our guest in a more dignified procession up to the professor’s office, I paused to wonder where Embra’s luggage might be.
“She’s an odd one.” Querm had appeared at my side. Lanky and stoop-shouldered, he had perpetually watery eyes and a sniffle that left his sleeves smeared with snot. If he’d ever stood up straight, he’d have looked me in the eye, but his gaze always drifted like a rudderless boat.
“She seems nice.”
“Well, actually,” he corrected, “Professor Halef says she stole the bauble from him. You need to get it back.”
“I don’t believe it.”
“Of course you females always stick together,” he said, and slumped off like a mudslide.
I tended to dismiss everything Querm said, up to and including the color of the sky. But could Embra have stolen the bauble? That might explain her reluctance to visit Mirlat, however much the city needed her help. As I pondered, I finished the string of household chores I’d been given, and sat hunched over a thick tome of Mirlat’s history that made absolutely no impression on my brain.
By the time I’d given up, slammed the book closed, and waved away the resulting puff of old book dust, the dinner bell had rung. I just had time to wash library remnants off my hands and take my place at the bottom of Halef’s table. Well, maybe not quite enough time, as Querm and a few others glared at me when I slipped into my chair.
I murmured apologies, but attention had already drifted back to our guest. She’d changed into something sparkly that draped her ample curves, and two jeweled hair sticks peeped from the bird’s nest atop her head. There was no sign of the cartographer’s bauble, and I wondered if she carried it with her at all times. More to the point, I considered whether she might let me hold it, or if I could possibly sneak into the guest suite and try it out.
Conversation ebbed and flowed around me. I cleared my throat, which went unnoticed. So I screwed up my courage and half-shouted toward Embra, “I was wondering, is it possible for anyone to try the bauble? I mean, hold it and see what it does?”
The glare Halef sent down the table almost flayed me alive. “We do not bother our guests. In particular, those who have not earned the right to call themselves scholars may not enter discussions, nor impose on their betters.”
I nodded, staring down at my plate, and tried to take a bite of mango. It stuck in my throat, and felt like a ball of nails.
The scholar went on, “Have you even mastered today’s lesson? Can you tell me the five main historical periods of Mirlat?” When I held my tongue, he clucked like a chicken. “I thought not.”
I told myself it was only the usual humiliation. Only Halef’s harsh words and Querm’s snickering and the awkward, darting glances of the dozen or so students and junior professors gathered at the table. “It’s just so *hard* to learn from books,” I blurted. “The words jumble together . . .”
The laughter at the table grew more pronounced. I bit the inside of my cheek until I tasted blood, willing the tears that stung my eyes to stay unshed. I was on the brink of walking away from the table, and Halef’s house, when Embra spoke up. “You know,” she said, her voice thoughtful, “I always had trouble studying the way my teachers wanted. It was like I had to learn through my fingers, rather than my eyes.”
The other diners fell silent. Halef made a harrumphing sound, unwilling to cede the conversation. But Embra spun tales of her journeys, of the cities she’d mapped, the streets and buildings she’d brought back from the edge of oblivion. She never answered my question, which I supposed I deserved, and she never talked of how she’d come to be the bauble’s keeper. But the plates emptied and the dregs of our tea grew cold, as Embra took us across the whole of Ektana with her.
“And now,” she said, “I am back in Mirlat, with work to do.”
When she didn’t elaborate, Querm spoke up. “What sort of work?”
“The city’s coming apart,” she said. “So I’ll need to pinpoint the trouble spots. And I suppose it’s time for me to train an heir.”
Halef harrumphed again. “You’ll want Querm, I’m sure. He’s the best student I have. And it’s taken a bloody long time to get him adequately educated.”
“I will certainly consider him,” Embra said, “since you recommend him so highly.”
The dinner party broke up a short time thereafter, and I helped clear the table as Professor Halef escorted Cartographer Embra to a party at the Kestigan consulate. As I carried half-empty wine bottles back to the kitchen, one of the downstairs maids, her arms full of plates, whispered, “Do you really think the lady will take Querm away? That would be wonderful.” I couldn’t help but agree.
At the same time, a sour gnawing had taken up residence in the pit of my stomach. As I scribbled my assigned journal pages, detailing the places I’d been during the day and any changes I’d noticed in the shape of the city, my foot tapped out a beat of frustration. Of course Embra’s heir had to be Querm—Querm, who passed every test with ease, who discussed issues of sanitation and transportation, population and nutrition like one of the professors—but I didn’t have to like it.
“She’ll get tired of him soon enough,” I muttered, as I put away the journal and pulled out a sheet of parchment that covered the whole top of the desk. On it, I’d made notes of all the oddities I’d seen around the city, some of which had to be of concern to a true cartographer. Maybe Embra would ask what *I* knew. Maybe I’d show her this, and she’d tell Halef I had the makings of a real scholar.
I laughed at the thought, a bitter little sound. Embra was out with Halef, no doubt hearing a litany of my sins. Still, she’d tried to be kind to me at dinner, and given my assigned task, that only made my guilt the brighter.
*
I couldn’t relax. I’d listened to the servants and other students settle in their rooms for the night, but I sat bolt upright in the chair and tapped my fingers together to keep from pacing. The house whispered around me, tiny mouse-movements and the memory of memories, so quiet that ordinarily I’d have slept through it all. At last I crept out of my room. The wide floorboards were cool and smooth underfoot, not quite silent. I’d spent enough time sneaking around after hours that I knew which squeaky spots to avoid.
When I heard voices, I leaned deeper into the shadows around the great hall and eased closer to the source. Halef, I recognized at once. He didn’t bother to speak softly. I had to strain before I recognized Embra as the other half of the conversation. She kept her tone even, but I heard a thread of tension nonetheless.
Having been on the receiving end of Halef’s bullying more times than I liked to recall, I sympathized. At the same time, I knew if he was browbeating Embra, it would keep her occupied for a while. That offered me an opportunity to find the bauble. The memory of it glowing in the afternoon sunlight clung to me like a sharp-clawed kitten. I’d lain awake with it dancing behind my eyelids.
I had to hold it. I had to know what secrets it whispered to the one who carried it, before using it to save my academic career.
Embra had been given the second-best guest suite, a subtle insult that probably slipped right by her while giving Halef secret satisfaction. The door had a simple lock, but Embra hadn’t even bothered to fasten it. I hissed through my teeth; she was too trusting.
I opened the door with care anyway, in case she had some sort of arcane warning system in place. After listening for a moment that stretched far too long, I eased into the room and promptly tripped over a footstool.
The carpeting absorbed some of the thumping that resulted. I thought about fleeing back into the hall and pretending, if caught, that I’d surprised a burglar. But no one raised the alarm, so I decided I had a few moments to search.
Thin slivers of moonlight slipped between the shutter slats. I blinked, waiting for my eyes to adjust to the dim light before I began prowling around the sitting room. The bauble wasn’t sitting in plain sight, but I hadn’t expected it to be. Did Embra keep it on her person at all times? Disappointment soured my stomach, but I kept looking anyway, unwilling to give up since I’d taken the risk of sneaking into her rooms.
The bedroom was smaller, and smelled faintly of cinnamon and chocolate. I inhaled deeply; my position in the household didn’t offer many chances for sweets, to my regret. I slid open drawers and peered into vases. Finally I thrust my hand under the pillows on the bed, and m fingers brushed something smooth and warm.
I drew out the cartographer’s bauble, too thrilled even to smile. It pulsed in my hand like a living thing, and the faintest moonlight limned it so it glowed through my fingers. “But how do you work?” I murmured, cupping it in my palm.
My skin prickled, but I ignored the unpleasant sensation because what I saw fascinated me. The air shimmered, the walls receding before my eyes. All of Mirlat spread before me, buildings like beads, on streets like strings, the river’s silver curve and the hollow of the harbor, the hills wrinkling under the university, the plazas like spreading sheets of parchment on which I could watch the stories of Mirlat’s inhabitants.
But I saw, too, the lacunae: gaps where a house had folded in on itself, dead-end alleys that used to lead somewhere, places where streams had slipped too far underground to nourish the wells and fountains, government buildings with missing offices and doors that opened into . . . nothing at all. That horrid blankness made me shiver.
Conscience told me to put the bauble back. I liked Embra, and the thought of her face if she walked in and found me holding it—violating her trust and the rights of a guest—made my stomach clench. I tightened my fingers, relishing the warmth and the way it stretched my vision so far beyond ordinary boundaries, unable to relinquish it even though the tingling against my skin intensified.
The voices downstairs had grown quieter. I slipped the bauble into the pocket of my gray robes and crept out of Embra’s suite. Someone was climbing the main stairs, so I hurried to the servant’s hall at the back of the house. When I stood at the top of the narrow, uncarpeted stairs, I meant to go right to Halef’s study, but by the time I reached the bottom, I was having second thoughts.
I could take the bauble to him, let him deal with the mess in Mirlat’s streets. If I handed it over to him, I’d be his new favorite. I’d get to stay at the college. How could he not like me, if I brought him his heart’s desire? Stole it for him, even?
My hand drifted to my pocket, and my vision shifted and expanded. Somewhere was a world where I’d be a great scholar, trained by a wise teacher who respected me . . . But this was not that world. Halef would never respect me, no matter what I did.
I let myself out the back door and went out into the city with the bauble clutched in my sweating hand. As I walked, everywhere I looked the city was coming unstitched, scenes overlapping like a garden full of flowers unfolding under the stars.
At first I saw only the beauty of it, but the deeper I walked into the city, the clearer the problems became. A troop of soldiers manifested at the opposite end of one street. Rather than disappear again, they grew more distinct, and one of them used the butt of his weapon to break the windows of a shop so he could reach in and help himself to the goods inside.
“Oh, no!”
A plump hand settled on my forearm. Embra had joined me. “Time to get to work.”
Heat rose in my face, and I muttered apologies as I tried to push the bauble back to her. She shook her head. “Fix the problem. Then we’ll talk.”
I tightened my fingers on the bauble. “Picture the worlds separating, a wall coming up between them,” she said. I did, and the soldiers flickered and vanished.
I tried again to say I was sorry, but she said, “Follow the bauble. It will take you to the heart of the problem.” I went, somewhat reluctantly; the bauble rolled in my hand, tugging me in the right direction. But when I reached the right spot—where layers of worlds shuffled across each other like pasteboard playing cards—I hesitated.
I took a step, and my foot caught on a layer of road that wasn’t where it ought to be. “Gods backward and sideways!” I stumbled and righted myself, though I almost lost the bauble in the process. The world lurched around me, scenes superimposed, evening pedestrians passing through each other. And worse: in one Mirlat, the city was burning. Screams erupted across the wide main thoroughfare as a booth selling roasted nuts went up in flames. To everyone else, it would have seemed a spontaneous explosion of fire. But I knew that one world was imposing itself over my version.
In another Mirlat, unnatural darkness had fallen. Where that world’s edges appeared, more of the hulking spiny dogs appeared, fanning out through the streets. Something bright and scarlet that was not a moon hung in the sky.
The flaming market stall teetered and collapsed into its neighbor. A bucket brigade had begun carrying water from a nearby fountain, but the blaze was spreading, too quickly for the citizens to contain if the burning Mirlat impinged on us again.
I climbed onto the bed of a farm wagon so I’d have a better view, and thrust the cartographer’s bauble into the air. As it had in Embra’s rooms, it seized my mind and I found myself flung, in spirit at least, into the midst of the chaos.
The various Mirlats cycled in an endless, rapid loop. They passed through even my supernaturally enhanced vision so quickly, I wasn’t sure which one to grasp and anchor. Not the burning one, no, nor the one with the monstrous beasts . . . but so many of the others looked the same, more or less. I knew it mattered, though, in the core of my being. So I decided to heed that sense, and when my gut recognized the right Mirlat, I seized it.
An icy stab of pain tore into my belly as my arm spasmed. The edges of the world fluttered, trying to break free again. I jabbed my hand at the floor of the wagon as though I could physically pin the city in place.
And it worked. More or less. A rusty brown beast bigger than a prize bull bayed and galloped down the street, the passers-by shrieking and scattering. The bucket brigade didn’t seem to notice the clamor as they doused the charred remains of three market stalls. The rest of the buildings still stood, even if a few of them were singed.
“Not bad.” Embra limped to the side of the wagon and stretched out her hand. “That was . . . a bit more of a test than I anticipated.”
I blew out a sharp breath. “One of the dog things got loose.”
“They’re relatively harmless. It will make a good watchdog for some merchant.” She offered me a hand so I could leap down.
As we contemplated the wreckage—and I told myself it could have been much worse—guilt welled up in me. “I sneaked into your rooms,” I said.
“I know.”
Confession, I realized, lacks a certain drama if the other person insists on staying calm. “I told Halef I’d steal the bauble for him.”
She studied me, her expression unreadable. “Well, you have it now. What will you do?”
I sat on the tailboard of the wagon, turning the bauble over and over in my hands. The searing pain had faded to its customary tingle. “Halef wants to possess it. Maybe study it. He won’t care much about fixing the different versions of the world into place. Not outside Mirlat”
“No. Which I dare say is why I ended up with the damned thing thirty years ago when he was by far the cleverer of the two of us.”
“But if I don’t give it to him, I won’t be able to stay at the college.”
“Even if he didn’t want it, you wouldn’t be able to stay. The cartographer is needed all over the land, not just in Mirlat.” Her hand drifted toward mine, as if it wanted to touch the bauble one more time. With an effort, she clenched her fingers and dropped her fist to her side. “It’s a hard life, but worthwhile. At least, I’ve found it so.”
I considered. “And educational, I expect.”
“Oh, very.”
“And sometimes you get free sweet rolls.”
“Not always. But yes, there are side benefits to the job.” She stood and stretched, working a kink out of her back, before prodding me to stand. “You’ll have to go pack your things alone. I’ll make a show of sneaking out of the city, which will draw Halef’s attention.”
*
Embra’s sudden departure sent the whole household into a frenzy, and Halef most of all. In a towering rage, he threatened once more to evict me from the college, and then ordered me out of his sight. The thought of leaving, which had once crushed me, now felt like a door opening. I hurried to my rooms and packed a few things in a satchel. The bauble sat in my pocket like a promise.
As I was hurrying down the stairs, hoping to catch Embra outside Mirlat’s gates, Querm accosted me.
“Too bad about the mess with Embra,” he said. “But since you’re no longer going to be a student, I thought you could come with me to the garden. We can comfort each other in our failure to gain the prize, and perhaps talk about a mutual future.”
“Well, actually,” I said, my fingers drifting to the bauble in my pocket, “I must wander further afield than that today.”
©June 2021, Jennifer Crow
Jennifer Crow’s work has recently appeared in a number of print and online venues, including Wondrous Real, Kaleidotrope, and Analog Science Fiction. This is her first appearance in Swords & Sorcery.