chapter nine

old secrets, new plans

That night, Jaciel came to dinner, surprising not only Clariel but also her father. They had already sat down, and the score or so younger apprentices and forgehands at the lower table were drawing in their benches when Jaciel appeared with two of the senior apprentices following subserviently, as if they were holding an invisible train on her dress. This appearance required everyone to stand up again, and the apprentice who had been just about to place the gravy boat in front of Harven spilled it, sending a flood of thick, spiced sauce across the high table.

‘Be seated,’ said Jaciel. She had been working when Clariel had returned from her magic lesson, smoke billowing from the workshop, but had washed and changed since then. Now she was wearing another multilayered dress of gold and white, this one trimmed with tiny, paper-thin gold coins at the sleeve and neck. ‘Sillen, don’t stand there gaping, scrape the gravy back in the boat and return it to the kitchen. Cook will give you a fresh service. You – Kellil – come up here and help her.’

‘Hello, Mother,’ said Clariel. Before she had agreed to help Magister Kargrin she had thought to ask her mother about why she had left her family, in the hope of finding some common ground. But now she had a definite way out on her own, she considered it best to stay quiet. Similarly, she had also decided not to talk about any plan for her to marry Aronzo, mostly out of fear that there really was a plan, and that by bringing it up she would make it more real, make it more than Kargrin’s suspicion. A polite exchange of greetings, followed by silence, seemed the best policy, as it had been so often in the past.

‘Clariel,’ replied Jaciel, taking the high seat, which here in their new house was almost a throne, a great thing of gilded wood, set with semi-precious stones: garnets and amethysts and chrysolite. Back in Estwael, she had been content with a high-backed chair. ‘Harven.’

‘Hello, my dear,’ said Harven. ‘I trust your work goes well?’

‘Well enough,’ said Jaciel, leaning back so yet another apprentice on table duty could fasten a napkin around her neck, the snowy linen suspended from a cord of twisted gold. ‘I will speak to you later about the latest delivery of the blue natron, which is not of the first quality. Clariel, you went today to the Academy, and then to Magister Kargrin, did you not?’

‘Yes, Mother,’ said Clariel.

Jaciel stabbed a long spear of poached asparagus with her silver fork, one she had made herself, as she had made all the cutlery on the high table.