Raven's Shadow (Raven #1)(27)

Seraph laughed a little at the memory. "My father was a showman. He didn't wait for the debate that followed, but excused himself to his tent and would speak no more about it. My grandfather always said that if you don't argue, you can't be proved wrong."

"So your father was the only reason the Travelers kept Traveling?"

Seraph shook her head. "No - it wouldn't have worked if they'd really wanted to settle down. It was hard enough for me to stay here - and I would have followed your father through the Shadowed's Realm if I'd had to. Staying was more difficult. Travelers are well named."

Jes followed her silently as she began her task again. Jes was good at silence.

"I remember going to two Gathers as a child," she said, taking out another mermora and setting it upright. "There were two hundred and thirty mermori held by just over two hundred clans at the first one. I can remember my mother fretting about how few there were. She died before I went to the second Gather, when I was thirteen. There were fewer than two hundred then - and many clans carried more than one."

The largest mermora she had saved for last, having left an extensive corner of the meadow for it. "The mermori were too dangerous to allow them to exist without safeguards, so Hinnum spelled them so that, eventually, they would find their way into the hands of the eldest of the closest relatives of those who had died and left the mermori lost."

"Mother," said Jes, after a bit. "There are two hundred twenty-four mermori here."

"I know," she whispered. "I've been acquiring them a few at a time since I married your father. Today I bought eighty-three from a tinker."

"Eighty-three," he said, startled into losing, for a moment, the aura of danger he carried. "How did you pay for them? They are solid silver and worth more than - "

"People don't always see that they are silver," she said, trying to pace off the area for the largest of them again - she kept losing count. "Sometimes they appear to be iron or even wood. Most people dislike them on sight. I paid six coppers for them, and the merchant I bought them from will shortly forget exactly what it was I bought, except that he came out ahead on the deal."

"Ah," he said and walked beside her for a while, gradually blending into the darkness until she couldn't see him if she looked straight on.

She caught glimpses of him sometimes when she wasn't quite looking. Sometimes she saw a man who looked like her husband, but more dangerous. At others she saw a dark animal that prowled on four legs. Sometimes if she turned her head and looked at him directly for too long, he disappeared into the night. It was only illusion, she knew, though he could take on shapes of animals if he chose. But illusion or not, it was disconcerting.

"What do they do?" he asked finally.

She set the last one in. "I'll show you. Come with me."

The meadow was set on a rise and she took her son to the highest point. She had never done this with so many before. At the Gathers, the elders from all the families would stand in a circle and chant together.

She held out both hands and shouted imperiously, "Ishavan shee davenadre hovena Hinnumadraun."

It had been so long since she'd allowed herself this much magic. She did only a little magic now and then - when they planted their crops, and when she warded the farm to keep the more dangerous creatures of the mountains away.

Even after so long, it came eagerly to her call, thrumming from her bones to the earth, reverberating through the dirt, rotting vegetation, and newborn sprigs of grass.

Jes let out a startled snarl as the meadow lit up with the windows of two hundred and twenty-four houses. Some were smaller than their cabin, but most were as large as the largest of the houses in Redern. By chance she'd put two in such a way that they blended into each other, sharing a wall - it looked so right that Seraph wondered if the houses might have stood in just such a relative location in Colossae. In the very corner of the meadow stood a small castle. The architecture of the houses was distinctly foreign, the windows open and rounded, the roofs covered with some kind of green pottery tiles.

"It's all right," she reassured Jes, though her eyes were held by the castle. "They are all illusion. The wizards could take only the most necessary of articles because they could not risk giving warning to the enemy before they fled. They couldn't take any of their libraries - So Hinnum created the mermori, which remember the homes of the wizards as they stood in Colossae so long ago. Come with me."

She led her son to one of the smaller ones, a brick-faced home no bigger than Alinath's bakery, though much more gracile. Ebony wood doors were worn near the latch, giving testimony of the age of the building. "This was the mermora my father carried from his father. It belonged to Isolda the Silent, who died when they sealed the city." Seraph pulled the door latch, felt the metal cool against her fingers. The door opened with a soft groan, and she stepped inside.

"Illusion?" Jes questioned, stepping in beside her. The light from Isolda's oil lamps showed a young man rather than a beast. "I can smell oil and herbs - some I know, like anise, henbane, but there are many I can't identify."

"Hinnum was a very great illusionist. Legend says he was four hundred years old when the city fell," she said, trailing her fingers over the familiar shawl that hung neatly on the back of a chair as if it only waited for Isolda to return from some errand.