Wenoura rolled her eyes at Tris, who had finished the onions and started on the parsnips. It was getting stuffy in the kitchen. The cook went to a set of shutters and opened them.
“But there are voices, don’t you hear them?” asked Zhegorz suddenly.
Tris freed her string of breeze now that she was finished with the onions, letting it mingle with the larger one. The maids had returned, their voices blurring Daja’s and Zhegorz’s. One of them took over on chopping.
“Well, the maids are back,” Daja told him. Tris removed her apron and hung it up, then went to wash her hands near where the pair sat so she could hear.
“No!” Zhegorz cried. “Voices everywhere in the cities and towns, voices in the air, talking of love and fighting and money and families and—”
Daja trapped his hands in hers, holding his eyes with her own. “Calm down,” she told him sternly. “You’re safe.”
Tris dried her hands with a frown.
“But sometimes the voices and visions, though I haven’t seen so many visions, sometimes they have secrets and if you let them slip, husbands and fathers and soldiers come for you with knives!” protested Zhegorz. He trembled from top to toe. “They hunt for you and they hurt you to see how you know their scheming, so nowhere is safe—even when it’s just the blacksmith meeting his best friend’s wife in a barn, they hurt you because they think you spy!”
Tris went over and closed the open window.
“It’s hot in here!” Wenoura protested. “We need fresh air!”
Tris turned to look at Zhegorz. He had gone silent, white-faced under his stubble. Daja released him so he could cover his face with his hands. He was still trembling.
Tris opened just one of the shutters this time, the half that wouldn’t let air blow directly toward Daja’s table. Neither Daja nor Zhegorz seemed to notice, though the cook and maids sighed their relief. The kitchen was heating up.
Tris went over and plumped herself down next to Zhegorz. “Where are you from?”
He flinched from her.
“Stop scowling at him,” ordered Daja, frowning at the redhead. “You’d frighten a Trader’s dozen of crazy people with that frown. Zhegorz is my friend, and I won’t have you scaring him.”
“She’s not scaring me, I don’t think,” muttered Zhegorz.
“Well, you should be scared,” Daja told him stoutly. “Most sensible people are.” She forestalled his protest by raising her brassy hand. “You’re sensible enough, even if you are crazy.”
“If he is, maybe he has reason to be,” Tris said, closing her eyes. “How old are you, Zhegorz?”
He blinked, his thin mouth trembling. “I…don’t know,” he said at last. “One emperor and two empresses…”
“Forty-five, maybe fifty,” Wenoura said behind Tris. “Were you too little to remember the old emperor’s death?”
Zhegorz shook his head, appearing to search his memory.
I don’t envy him the task, Tris thought, watching him count on his fingers. No doubt it’s under layers and layers of magical potions and treatments and being locked up. It wasn’t readily apparent to her daily vision, but that could mean simply that if he did have power, as she suspected, he’d tried to bury it. Deep inside herself she worked a change over her vision, closing her eyes before she brought it up to them. For the second time that day she placed a layer of magic over her eyes, though this was very different from the one she had used to see the fishing fleet. Once she felt her eyes begin to sting—they didn’t like this trick, not in the least—she opened them.
Normally she saw magics, including traces, as silver. This particular spell, one she had learned not long before her return to Emelan, showed her different magics in different colors. From this perspective, Zhegorz was coated with patch on patch of power, different spells from different mages. He’d been given all kinds of healing potions for his madness, ordinary healings for illnesses, broken bones, and decayed teeth, and a number of truth spells for the secrets he wasn’t supposed to know. Threaded around and through them, almost vanishing under her gaze before it emerged in its full strength, or part strength, was a bright gold thread that belonged to Zhegorz himself.
Tris got up and walked around the table, eyeing him from every angle. The man was an insane patchwork doll of all the spells that had been worked on him since—“When did they first say you were mad?” she asked him.
He would not look at her. “Fifteen,” he mumbled. “For my birthday they sent me to Yorgiry’s House, because I talked to the voices. I went home sometimes after, but I always got worse. They began to leave baskets of food and clothes at the garden gate, but they’d lock the gate. They wouldn’t come out until I was gone. That happened two or three times. Then one time the healers let me out and my family wasn’t there anymore. They had sold the house and moved away. I think I was twenty.” He looked at Daja. “The old emperor died around my fifteenth birthday. All of us who were mad got new black coats to wear for mourning.”
“He’s fifty-two or thereabouts, then,” Wenoura said. “By that count.” She turned: The maids had all stopped what they were doing to listen. “I don’t see supper magicking itself onto the table,” she said sharply. “Get back to work, you lazy drudges. We’ve supper and breakfast to fix and food for them and the nobles to eat on the road tomorrow while you gape like a field full of cows!”