Fractal Mode

Chapter 6

They came to the end of the row. "Come inside," her mother said. "I will bandage your hand."

Because they could not let it be known that the healing had taken place. After a week, yes, but not after a day. After less than an hour, actually.

Nona followed her mother to the house.

A week later the bandage was reduced to a thin wrapping around the finger, and that was masked by a spot illusion. Only those who actually touched her hand sensed the bandage. In a few more days she would remove that, and wear only a small scar- which would actually be illusion, because her finger had healed scarlessly.

The errant boy, Jick, had been severely disciplined. He now wore a muzzle. It would be long before he bit another person-and if he did, he might be subject to the discipline of the despots, who well might conjure away his teeth. Nona had been relieved of her assisting, not because they thought her injured or culpable, but because it was policy to let things settle after an incident.

She used the time to query her mother, when they could converse with minimal risk. Her father worked at the castle as a horse trainer, so was no problem in the day. It was not that he would willingly betray her secret, but that the despots could use their terrible magic to get anything from anyone who knew anything. Only complete lack of suspicion protected her. So she acted like a somewhat spoiled juvenile, sleeping late, until her mother hinted strenuously that she should help with the field-work.

Then, grudgingly, she went out to tackle the relentless weeds beside her mother, and only then, their real purpose masked by the charade, did they talk. Even so, it was in interrupted segments, so that any magical eavesdropping would pick up only an innocuous fragment.

Nona would soon be eighteen. If she did not find out how to save Oria before then, she might not be able to thereafter. She was the only one of all the theows who could do it. This was her window of opportunity.

"But why not longer?" she asked.

Because, her mother clarified in snatches between weeds, a woman"s magic came to her through her ancestry, and departed through her babies. With each baby she had, she would lose part of her power, until the ninth would take the last of it, and she would be no more than an ordinary caretaker. In addition, she would have to care for the children, and that would anchor her to her house. She could not afford to marry, or if she did, she could not afford to have children.

"But I don"t want to anyway," Nona protested. Indeed, whether because of her raising or her nature, she was appalled by the prospect of becoming a brood mare. Romance she could handle, but that notion stopped short of baby birthing.

Her mother only smiled sadly. Marriage and babies and deepening poverty were a theow woman"s destiny; everyone knew that. It was an aspect of the system. Only those who had significant magic lived well; the others got along as well as they could.