“Well, and you won’t, neither. The world has its mysteries. The gods have designs into which we and the world are woven.”
“But—” She stopped herself. “But how can anybody know if the things they’re doing are part of that plan or not?”
Dymphana smiled. “And aren’t you the deep thinker?” She tousled Leodora’s hair. “Better be careful asking that sort of question aloud, or the archivists of the Library will hear and come take you away to teach them.” She laughed at the look of bemused terror on Leodora’s face. “Oh, it’s just a myth, dear heart. The Library’s just a story.”
“It is?”
“Of course.”
In that case, she wondered, why hadn’t Soter taught it to her?
Two years later she did know the story of the Library of Shadowbridge, and far more than that.
By the time she turned fifteen, Soter had given up all his stories, and there were mermen and archivists of the Library in among the tales, along with Meersh, and two brothers who coveted each other’s gifts, and brides who drowned their husbands and husbands who beheaded their wives—of course Bardsham could have spun even more stories, but Soter had attended so many performances that he remembered a great many of them.
Now, instead of teaching her stories, he taught her how to take the elements and mix them together to make new ones. “Not until you can improvise from all you know will you become a true shadowmaster,” he told her. “That’s where your father truly excelled.” The way he said it suggested that he didn’t anticipate her excelling there ever. Yet she was devoted to the craft. She had every intention of succeeding. The world of the spans was going to be her oyster. She had decided. But while she laid her plans and dreamed of far-spun fame, other forces were conspiring to demolish every dream and keep her a prisoner there forever.
FIVE
Even before she opened her eyes that morning, she heard the strange murmurous call. It woke her nearly every morning now, no louder—if such could be said of something silent—than when she’d first heard it as her grandfather held her at the railing of the span, ten years before; since she had moved into the boathouse it had become more insistent, urgent, although the urgency gave her no guidance, no advice, no real idea of what to do in response. She climbed from her bed and crossed the narrow garret to stand in the window, to stare across the water as if this morning she might spy the source. It—whatever it was—might suddenly top the horizon to reveal its shape, and in appearing explain why it called to her and no one else. What did it want of her? It wasn’t calling her to come to it, but by the same token it was not going to let her forget its existence.
The curtains flapped in the breeze. The light coming off the ocean was gray and vaporous. It smelled of rain, though there was nothing of rain in the sky.
Melancholy joined her then, a late-awaking twin. Leodora leaned out the window like a figurehead on the prow of a ship, and stared along the shore to the north, out across the point and past, where the call was strongest, like a smell on the breeze or a gull’s cry wrapped in the wind; loud in its silence, bright in its subtlety, overwhelming in its absence—the source of her soul’s unease. One day it would surely appear and she would have her answers. She had learned to accept the frustration of not knowing when. The call remained, but she let it recede into the sizzle of the surf, and withdrew from the window.
It took her a few minutes to dress in her ragged and stained clothes for Fishkill Cavern. She climbed down the steps into the boathouse, where her uncle’s small esquif lay on supports, the hole in its side aimed at her like an empty socket. He was never going to repair it—she understood that now. It was linked to her mother and now to her, because she lived here.
She walked barefoot across the planks and picked up a wicker basket as she pushed open the wide double doors. She jumped down the stone launching ramp then padded across the beach toward the water. Streamers of seaweed were scattered all along the shore, and she collected each one, shaking out the sand and debris and little perturbed creatures before placing it in