"Aren't you going to eat, mistress Isana?" Beritte looked up from where she was carelessly slicing the skins from a mound of tubers, dropping the peeled roots into a basin of water. The girl's pretty face had been lightly touched with rouge, and her already alluring eyes with kohl. Isana had warned her mother that Beritte was entirely too young for such nonsense, but there she was, hollybells in her hair and her bodice laced with deliberate wickedness beneath her breasts-more eager to admire herself in every shiny surface she could find than to help prepare the evening's banquet. Isana had gone out of her way to find chores to occupy the girl's day. Beritte often enjoyed seeing young men compete with one another for her attention, and between her bodice and the sweet scent of the hollybells in her hair, she'd have them killing one another-and Isana had far too much on her mind to be bothered with any more mischief.
Isana glanced at the girl, eyeing her up and down, before she reached for the poker and thrust it back into the oven, into the coals where one of two tiny fire furies that regulated the oven wasn't doing its job. She raked the poker through them, stirring them, and saw the flames dance and quiver
a bit more as the sleepy fury within stirred to greater life. "As soon as I have a moment to spare," she told the girl.
"Oh," Beritte said, somewhat wistfully. "I'm sure we'll be finished soon."
"Just peel, Beritte." Isana turned back to the counter and her bowl. The water within stirred and then quivered upward, resolving itself into a face- her own, but much younger. Isana smiled warmly down at the fury. Rill always remembered what Isana had looked like, the day they'd found one another, and always appeared in the same way as when Isana, then a gawky girl not quite Beritte's age, had gazed down into a quiet, lovely pool.
"Rill," Isana said, and touched the surface of the water. The liquid in the bowl curled over her finger and then swirled around quietly in response to her. "Rill," Isana said again. "Find Bernard." She pressed an image from her mind, down to the fury through the contact of her finger: her brother's sure, silent steps, his rumbling, quiet voice, and his broad hands. "Find Bernard," she said again.
The fury quivered and swirled the water about-then departed the bowl, passing through the air in a quiet wave Isana felt prickling along her skin, and then vanished, down through the earth.
Isana lifted her head and focused on Beritte more sharply. "Now then," she said. "What's going on, Beritte?"
"I'm sorry?" the girl asked. She flushed bright red and turned back to her peeling, knife flashing over the tuber, stripping dark skin from pale flesh. "I don't know what you mean, mistress."
Isana placed her hands on her hips. "I think you do," she said her tone crisp and severe. "Beritte, you can either tell me where you got the flowers now, or you can wait until I find out, later."
Isana felt Beritte's fluttering panic, dancing around on the edges of the girl's voice as she spoke. "Honestly, Mistress, I found them waiting for me at my door. I don't know who-"
"Yes you do," Isana said. "Hollybells don't just miracuously appear, and you know the law about harvesting them. If you make me find out on my own, by the great furies, I'll see to it that you suffer whatever is appropriate anyway."
Beritte shook her head, and one of the hollybells fell from her hair. "No, no, mistress." Isana could taste the way the lie made the girl inwardly cringe. "I never harvested any of them. Honestly, I-"
Isana's temper flared, and she snapped, "Oh, Beritte. You aren't old
enough to be able to lie to me. I've a banquet to cook and a truthfind to prepare for, and I've not time to waste on a spoiled child who thinks that because she's grown breasts and hips that she knows better than her elders."
Beritte looked up at Isana, flushing darker with awkward humiliation and then snapped back with her own anger. "Jealous, mistress?"
Isana's temper abruptly flashed from a frustrated blaze to something cold, icy. For just a moment, she forgot everything else in the kitchen, all the events and disastrous possibilities that faced the steadholt that day, and focused her attention on the buxom girl. For only a moment, she lost control of her emotions and felt the old, bitter rage rise within her.
Every kettle in the kitchen abruptly boiled over, steam flushing out in a cloud that curved around Isana and flowed toward the girl, scalding water racing over the floor in a low wave toward her seat.
Isana felt Beritte's defiance transformed in an instant to terror, the girl's eyes widening as she stared at Isana's face. Beritte thrust her hands out as she stumbled out of her chair, the feeble wind sprites she had collected slowing the oncoming steam enough to allow her to flee. Beritte took a jumping step over the nearest arm of the onrushing water and ran toward the kitchen doors, sobbing.
Isana clenched her fists and closed her eyes, wrenching her mind from the girl, forcing herself to take deep breaths, to regain control of her emotions. The anger, the sheer, bitter rage howled inside her like a living thing trying to tear its way free of her. She could feel its claws scraping at her belly, her bones. She fought it down, forced it away from her thoughts, and as she did the steam settled and spread throughout the room, fogging the thick, rough glass of the windows. The kettles calmed. The water started pooling naturally over the floor.
Isana stood amidst the sweltering steam and the spilled water and closed her eyes, taking slow, deep breaths. She'd done it again. She'd let too much of the emotion she'd been feeling in another color her own thoughts, her own perceptions. Beritte's insecurity and defiant anger had glided into her and taken root in her own thoughts and feelings-and she had let it happen.
Isana lifted one slim hand and rubbed at her temples. The additional senses of a watercrafter felt like being able to hear another kind of sound- sound that rubbed against one's temples like eiderdown, until she almost felt that it was grating her skull raw, that blisters would rise on her face and scalp from the sheer friction of all the emotions she felt rubbing against her.
Still, there was little she could do about it now, but to control herself and to bear what came. One couldn't open one's eyes and later simply decide not to use them. She could dim the perceptions Rill's presence brought to her, but she could never shut them away altogether. It was simply a fact a watercrafter of her power had to live with.
One of many, she thought. Isana crouched down, murmuring to the tiny furies in the spilled water on the floor, beckoning them until the separate puddles and droplets began running together in the center of the floor into a more coherent mass. Isana studied it, waiting for all the spare droplets to roll in from the far corners of the kitchen.
The reflection of her own face looked back at her, smooth and slender, and barely older than that of a girl's. She winced, thinking of the face Rill showed her every time the fury came. Perhaps it was not so different from her own.
She lifted her hand and traced her fingers over her cheek. She had a pretty face, still. Most of forty years, and she barely looked as though she had lived twenty of them. She might look as old as thirty, if she lived another four decades, but no older. There were no lines on her face, at the corners of her eyes, though faint shades of frost stirred in her auburn hair.
Isana rose and regarded the woman reflected in the water. Tall. Thin. Too thin, for a woman of her age, with scarcely any curve of hip or breast. She might have been mistaken for a gawky child. True, she may carry herself with more confidence, more strength than any child could muster, and true the faint grey touches in her hair may have granted her an age and dignity not strictly warranted by her appearance-and true, everyone in the whole of the Calderon Valley knew her by name or sight or reputation as one of the most formidable furycrafters in it. But that did nothing to change the simple and heartless fact that she looked like a boy in a dress. Like nothing any man would want to marry.