I put on the garments and felt oddly naked in them. They were loose and the trousers came barely to my knees, but the sleeves of the blouse fell past my wrists. The fabric of both garments was light and a pale rose in colour. There was no way to carry the candle inside my new shirt. The sandals were a mystery but I finally strapped them to my feet. Beneath the clothing, I found a comb. The water had put my hair into tight curls, but I did my best to make it tidy. I folded the drying cloths and looked for a way to drain the grey bathwater but didn’t find one. It shamed me that someone would see how dirty I’d been. I steeled myself, tucked my worn garments, with the candle inside them, under my arm and left the bath.
Daylight had grown stronger and the morning was warmer than many a noon in Buck. Capra looked me up and down, with her gaze lingering on my bruised legs. ‘Leave those rags. Just drop them. A servant will dispose of them.’
I froze. Then, without a word, I reached into the bundle, and drew out the halves of my broken candle. I let my clothing fall. Capra scowled at me. ‘What’s that you’re carrying?’
‘A candle that my mother made.’ I didn’t show it to her.
‘Leave it.’
‘No.’ I lifted my eyes and met her gaze. Her eyes were peculiar. Today they seemed not pale-blue or grey, but a sort of dirtied white. They were hard to look at, but I didn’t break my stare.
She tilted her head to look at me. ‘How many candles do you have?’
I didn’t want to tell her, yet I could not say why. ‘It was one. It broke into two.’
‘One candle,’ she said quietly. ‘That’s interesting. But only one. Not like the candles in the dream.’ She said this as if hoping to provoke a reaction.
I did not let my face change. But abruptly, the day shimmered around me. I looked up at Capra and it seemed as if light spiked out from her in myriad directions. So many paths leading from her. From this moment, yes, but more than that. She was like the beggar, who was also the Fool. My father’s Beloved. I had no words for what I sensed about her. Like a crossroads, I thought, where one could go off in a different direction. I looked away from her, wondering how much time had passed while I had been caught in that moment. None, it seemed, when she spoke.
‘Very well,’ she said. ‘Carry them with you. It’s your nuisance to deal with.’ Yet from her voice, I did not feel she conceded to me so much as added the candle to my list of wrong-doing. Her guard’s expression suggested that I had been foolishly wilful. He was one of the men who had wielded the whips that ate Dwalia’s flesh. I set my teeth to keep my jaw from quivering at that memory.
‘Follow,’ Capra said. ‘You will be staying here with us, so I will show you the grounds. Later we will decide what you are to be here. Perhaps a student? Perhaps a scholar? Maybe just a servant.’ She smiled at me, a thin stretching of her lips. ‘Maybe a breeder. Or a slave to be sold. There are so many ways you might like to be useful.’
I did not think I would like any of them but I said nothing. I walked behind her, her guard next to me. The sandal straps bit into my feet but I gritted my teeth and walked on. She took me back inside, and I was grateful that the sun no longer beat down on my head. I did not realize how I had squinted against the glare of white light on white stone until we were indoors again.
She did not hurry but she did not pause. On the main floor, I was shown a room where five pale children were learning to write and being assisted by scribes in green robes. Each child had a scribe sitting by him, assisting him to guide his pen. The pale children looked very young, no older than three years. But if they were like me, I judged they were older than they looked.
We traversed a long, gently curving corridor and went up grand marble stairs to the second floor. ‘Here we welcome those who come to share our wisdom.’ She told me this as she opened the door to a room panelled all in rich wood and deeply carpeted. There was a grand table surrounded by carved chairs in the centre, and on it a decanter of some liquor and some tiny glasses.
In the next room six young Whites were at a table. Servants waited behind them. ‘Last night, they dreamed,’ Capra said quietly. ‘They will write down what they dreamed. Then the scribing servants will make copies, and each copy will be sorted into a category and placed with others similar to it. Perhaps they dreamed of candles. Or an acorn bobbing in a stream. Or the dream where one seizes a bee, and is surrounded by a hundred stinging bees.’ Her voice dropped. ‘Or of the Unexpected Son.’ She turned and looked down at me. Her smile stretched her lips flat. ‘Or a Destroyer. Over the last year, the occurrence of dreams about the Destroyer have greatly increased. That tells us that something happened, something we did not expect. Some event has made it more likely that a Destroyer exists and will come to us.’ She stretched her lips again. ‘Have you ever dreamed of the Destroyer?’
I dared not hold a complete silence. ‘I often have nightmares of how my home was destroyed by Dwalia and her luriks. Is that what you mean?’
‘No.’ That word was another mark against me. She led me out of the room. We paced that long hallway and ascended a stair to the next level. Here, the wood that panelled the halls was of a deeper colour. Massive wooden beams supported a ceiling painted with extravagant flowers. ‘This is our heart,’ Capra told me formally as she escorted me to a door and opened it.
This huge chamber was full of old scrolls and books. Racks lined every wall and reached all the way to the ceiling. I could not see across the room, for orderly ranks of tall shelves, all full of scrolls and large books formed a perimeter around the open centre of the room. In that open space, there were at least a dozen long tables. Scribes who seemed to have little or no characteristics of White heritage sat with pens and inkpots, comparing scrolls and papers and writing busily.