Paradigm by Chestnut_pod

Paradigm

Read Paradigm

One

Istyacalar went by her mother-name out of spite. That was a fire that burned within her despite the claggy darkness of Unlight blowing in sticky whisps out to sea and leaving a more healthful darkness behind it. Yet it was darkness still, and there were only so many woodpiles, coal scuttles, storerooms of old furniture, loose papers, and books to burn.

It was spite that drove her at last nearly crawling through the murk to Formenos, where blood still stained the cracks between the paving stones, invisible in the blackness but tacky underfoot and smelling of iron. She had not departed Tirion with her king or her liege upon her liege’s banishment — and thus, he became her liege no longer, and thus, she was no longer Rundamírë but Istyacalar, who had her mind and voice even if she no longer had her laboratory, her assistants, her materials, which after all had turned out to be his laboratory, his assistants, his materials. Thus, the work of discovery was no longer a gift forever given and received, but a doled-out pittance rewarding personal loyalty. She heard Melkor had found her liege’s great masterwork in a locked saferoom, illuminating four flat walls and a barred door.

She sneered and set the glass sphere in her hand down on the floor. Its tiny community of lichens and cave insects cast barely enough light to see shapes, certainly not enough to read. Istyacalar cared not. All the way from Tirion she had hauled a cabinet full of flat drawers, and into these drawers she began to stuff papers, journals, books. Decades of work filled this retreat, far too much for a single voyage — but a single voyage would do for a beginning. Her hands found her own work without need for eyes, for the work of an Elf’s heart was a part of them, a limb or extension of spirit. The cabinet strained her muscles and tired her joints as she dragged it back to Tirion, where the smoke from the burning added a new and acrid dimension to the darkness, but her own private fire drove her forward.

Istyacalar sat before the King’s House with her last seven candles shining one by one through a glass of water, and she read aloud her notes. The initial capture of starlight in quartz with water pockets. Creating crystals in water under enormous pressure, when the water already reflected the Trees, the stars. Crystalline resonance and the undulation of light. Color and resonance. Waves and particles and lattices.

As the first candle burned, she thought she might be slightly maddened by the dark, but then, she had been maddened before, an adventurer of the mind cut off from discovery. She thought true madness was to take all the lights from a city and leave it to burn its books if it would not follow, so she read on. By the third candle, she had an audience. By the fifth candle, the women of Tirion had brought out their jewels. The seventh candle guttered and went out.

The darkness did not rush in.

Istyacalar looked up and saw light glinting from necklaces, bracelets, earrings, lumps of raw quartz from the riverbed and vials of diamond dust scraped off the streets. The light was not the clear, steady, blue light of a Fëanorian lamp, no; it flickered and flared and was sometimes dim and sometimes overbright. These jewels were not purpose-made by artisan-scholars given over wholly to the study and creation of light. Nor was it the holy brilliance of the Trees, locked in silima or rushing in waves from Ezellohar. But it was here, which was more than any of the other options could say.

“So it does not have to be blue,” came a voice from the crowd, much as one of Istyacalar’s own assistants might have interjected, when she had assistants.

She cleared her raspy throat. “No,” she said. “It is only that the generative properties of blue crystals always seemed most stable.”

“The Silmarils shone white,” someone else suggested, their face a rainbow shadow above a glowing collar of opals. “So there must have been progress since Formenos recused itself from colloquia.”

Indeed there must have been. Istyacalar set down her journal, noting distantly that her hands shook.

“These were all of my notes, taken when I refused to go into exile. But I know where to find the rest,” she said. This time, there would be light enough in Formenos to read by.

 

Two

Oriellë stared at her garden — the oily patch of blasted earth that had been her garden. She had known it was dead, but only now, with a great glowing lamp of crystal brought from the square before the King’s House, could she truly see it. Where the oaks that provided her meal had been, there were splinters of gray wood, as though the trees had not just died but rotted from the inside. The bromes which set out their seed heads in the oaks’ shadow were only lumps of dirt, no longer rich and loamy in the hold of the grass roots, but desiccated and slick at once. There was no trace of her squash patch or the stalks of maize which trellised the vines, only a slimy ooze over more deadened soil. She would not soon starve from the Unlight which had dripped upon her home of a thousand years, for the royal cellars held cheeses and wines happy to wait their turn to be eaten, and the dry maize stored around the city would last perhaps another year. But her spirit cried out in hunger.

This was her garden, which she tended and pruned. The land gave forth fruits, which she ate, then gave back to the land in her turn. She thought that by now, each particle in her bones, each strand of muscle, was created from the soil here, mediated through the oaks she had tended from saplings, the seeds she shaped into cakes and scattered again year after year, and the rabbits whom she trapped for fur and meat, but whose warrens she left alone. She supposed the rabbits had not survived. When she herself had reached out in the spirit, the dead patch had dragged at her fëa like sucking mud, driving her to her knees. It had taken her days to recover.

While she lay in bed convalescing, she pondered the incarnate nature of Elves. This had been a favorite occupation of hers when it meant sipping chocolate in The Clarkia and debating whether snow-walking and grass-walking implied an Elven affinity with water. It brought her no pleasure to direct those thoughts towards the question of whether an Elf could die of starvation, either spiritual or physical. Oriellë thought she understood, now, the Elves who had refused the Journey. How could they have left the land they loved, if its loss felt like this?

So she would not starve at once. So the Maiar said they would remind the plants how to eat starlight, this year or perhaps next year. So the dried maize might last so long. This was her garden, and she would not give it up, no more than the Ainur who usually healed the land would give up the children of Telperion and Laurelin.

Heart in her throat, Oriellë stepped to the ragged edge of the Unlight scar. She laid a trembling hand on the earth. It broke apart beneath her fingers like sand, silent and lifeless, but she herself was not struck down. Her garden was dead, but not antithetical to life. She could not sing to it, but she could touch it. She got to her feet and brushed off her hands. Her crafts had never been those of the forge and gem-crucible, but all children of Tirion knew the laws of experimentation. With her jewel-lamp lay twine, stakes, notebooks and pens. She set to work.

This square of the grid would be turned over with ashes left over from the great light-burning before Istyacalar’s return, she thought. Grasslands regrew after fires, so perhaps rich, organic ash might help, if she provided the seedlings. This one beside it, she would layer with kelps and seaweeds which Ulmo’s people brought to Tirion as though to prove they bore no grudge to these Noldor. They brought too much, always. Where the oaks had been, she could perhaps humor her sister, whose devotion to Yavanna expressed itself in a grand orange orchard. Her crops had been spared, but would rot before anyone could eat them all. Oriellë would simply pile the fruit here and see. It might block the stench from the next plot, anyway, which would hold city waste, which after all still had to go somewhere.

She hammered stakes and strung twine and carted load after load of ash, kelp, straw, waste, oranges, pure saltpeter, and anything else she could think of and get people to give her. Who knew what might work? No one had ever truly had to think about enriching the soil this way before, when a Maia was at hand to enliven it, or a song of plenty would revive a tired patch.

It was difficult to tell the passage of time in the darkness and perhaps even worse in the unchanging light of the jewel-lamps. Oriellë counted time in the blisters she developed and the slow work of turning the friable earth over and over, each square of her garden taking in its new nutrients one at a time. She dumped the last basket of ash onto its gridded square. Her blisters wept a little, but she ignored them; they would heal soon enough. Gingerly, she took out a notebook and a pen. She was, after all, a Noldo.

She gridded the pages after the new pattern of her garden.

Day One, she wrote at the top of the first page. Control plot: barren. Plot Tinco (orange peels): barren. Plot Parma (saltpeter): barren. Plot Calma (wood ash): barren. Plot Quesse (kelp): barren.

She filled in the whole grid of experiments, then closed her book and stared out at the land. Beneath each plot, she had pressed acorns, brome seeds, bay nuts, all the germs of life she had saved, as the Valar sought to save the last fruits of Laurelin and Telperion. As they waited, so could she wait. Her garden would grow again, from the orange peels or the kelp or the ash, under the light of the new jewel-lamps, and then she would tell all of Aman how she had done it, so all of Aman could be a garden once more.

 

Three

The toyons were already spoiled and the acorns infested.

Helkien knew it was not the custom of the Eldar to hoard food. Winter in Tirion beneath the Trees meant salmon spawning and fresh herbs encouraged by the rains, no less bounteous in its way than midsummer. Farming meant dedicating oneself to a particular patch of land, creating great gardens of food plants or pruning Yavanna’s woods so they gave fruit and nuts in their season, an act of worship as much as an act of sustenance. If someone hungered, they went out and fed. Some enjoyed the craft of pickling or fermentation, or made a hobby of reproducing the dried provisions of the Journey — but not all. They had never needed to imagine a season of lack, for all seasons in Valinor were seasons of abundance and harmony.

Equally, they had never needed to imagine a season of overabundance, for Tirion and its hinterland were filled with people needing food to eat and flocking to each delicacy in its season.

But now there were no seasons, and the balance between plenty and poverty was overset. First, the master farmer Oriellë had discovered endless regenerative uses for the manifold effluents of cities to heal the deadened patches where Ungoliant and Moringotto had dribbled Unlight, and then the plants of Valinor had been reminded of how to eat starlight, but still the seasons did not wheel as they had under the Tree. The Ainur crowded still on the hill of Ezellohar, coaxing strength from the corpses of the Trees in hope of light. If, of a sudden, the toyons burst into fruit, there were simply not enough people to eat them in time or provide the labor to dry them.

Helkien, chatelaine of the King’s House, collector of the tithe even when the King abandoned his city and no longer enjoyed his usufruct, stared at her ledgers and wondered if Tirion could be convinced to eat nothing but little-apples for a week until the glut was over. Of course, by that time the remaining whole acorns would be entirely eaten by weevils, who were surely just doing their own best in the darkness.

The lump of quartz illuminating Helkien’s ledger flared brilliantly and went out. Cursing, she cupped it in her hands and sang the sequence that would return light to the lattices within it, the notes almost second-nature by now. The Ingathering of Lamps in the courtyard below had worked out the creation of white light, but not how to make it as stable and long-lasting as the blue Fëanorian lamps. Lady Istyacalar said it was a question of preservation of energy. Oriellë said it helped the plants preserve their natural rhythms.

“It preserves my energy and natural rhythms not to have to look at my books as though they were underwater,” Helkien groused.

She turned over her empty goblet of little-apple juice so the light of the white crystal, just a tad too brilliant for comfort, was diffused. If only there were simply more time for the harvesters to harvest, and the dryers to dry, and the picklers to pickle. Irruptions of food, Helkien came to find, were nearly as difficult as its lack, for they merely delayed lack in the scramble.

She nudged the goblet so it rang gently, running its edge along the quartz. A trickle of juice ran down the glass to stain the table. Helkien grimaced and stood. A visit to the Ezellohar to lend what strength she could would be a better use of her time than staring at her books.

So she returned after some endless stretch of time, to be told by her staff that all the acorns had indeed been eaten up by weevils, but in the meantime, all the salmon had remembered how to spawn in the dark and there was not enough wood to smoke them and getting enough salt to cure them would take too long. She let her head rest on the cool wood of her desk and stared into the light of her quartz. Her sore eyes rested on the goblet she had overturned before her departure, and she winced, for surely there would now be rotten little-apple lees on her table.

But when she lifted the glass, the juice and lees were as fresh as though she had just dumped them out ten minutes before. Helkien put the glass down before she dropped it. She ran a finger through the juice, and not without hesitation, tasted it. A little tart, a little sweet. Her heart began to pound.

She had never learned to cook well, for her father had done all that, but she had a few cooking vessels of glass, and certainly she had light-crystals aplenty. There was no shortage of salmon in the city. If her assistants thought her run mad to shove dead fish under casserole dishes and illuminate them with diamonds, at least it was no madder than anyone else had run since the light went out.

Some spoiled; some spoiled dramatically. Helkien gagged and aired out her kitchen and took copious notes on the back pages of her ledgers. The salmon swarm abated, to be replaced by a sudden surfeit of chestnuts. But one salmon persisted, trapped under the perfect clear glass of a mysterious art object made by Helkien’s niece, glowing pink and unspoiled in the light of a quartz crystal.

Helkien found she could duplicate the quartz crystal; her niece was prevailed upon to duplicate the art object, and eventually simple domes of crystal set with tines to hold the appropriate stones, some the size of bread loaves, some the size of horses, and some the size of houses, to hold Aman’s confused bounty in trust.

The weevils did not approach the chestnuts held in their glowing glass vaults; the squash and maize did not wither or rot in theirs. Helkien left the first successful salmon where it was, however, unmarred and glistening, until new light drowned out the glimmer of the quartz.

 

Four

Even if her horses would not starve to death, they would still die of old age. And if the light ever came back, and Roccowendë blinked in its sudden dazzle, but there were no horses, then who would she be? She, who had carried a foal across the great ocean from one darkness to light, her husband carrying another, the foundation of this very herd?

Roccowendë blinked back tears for the thousandth time, leaning against Larkatal’s stolid bay shoulder. Her husband, who had taken all the stallions with him when Prince Nolofinwë departed across an ice bridge, without a care for her or their herd. Without even a care for the obvious illogic of taking flighty, distractible stallions into battle! Or perhaps it had been a last sign of love, even as he abandoned her, for the mares were the heart of any herd. And he had, after all, left her one stallion — although that must have been because her beloved Larkatal, prize-winning, fire-hearted, gentle-eyed Larkatal, was nearly too old to trot from one end of the pasture to the next, let alone to a different world.

She argued herself around and around as the dark years – or whatever unit they would later devise to mark the passage of this strange time – rolled on, until the gray hairs on Larkatal’s muzzle outnumbered the black ones and even the baby fillies who still suckled their mothers when the Trees were sucked dry were full-grown mares. Mares who had never given milk or foal, because Roccowendë would not see them bred to any old nag, not these mares, whose thousand-times great-granddam she had carried across the ocean.

Then, word arrived from the city about Helkien’s Domes, along with a pleasantly solid example for her own kitchen, just roomy enough for a plucked pullet or a large loaf. Something about the relief of knowing that the produce of her own unpredictable kitchen garden would not spoil before she could eat it, even if she still had to worry about stooking the hay and laying out the windrows of fodder with only her own labor and that of her remaining daughter, brought her peace enough to rest, sometimes. The darkness was almost soothing, if one was bone-weary. She would find Larkatal out in the pasture, sometimes, the one she had so carefully smoothed so the horses would not stumble in the endless night, and stand chest-to-chest with him, feeling out the increasing bow of his spine, the lengthening of his teeth.

“If only I might place a dome over you and keep you for all my days,” she murmured one night. Perhaps it was only that she was well fed and at last certain that she would remain that way; or perhaps it was divine inspiration. (She liked to claim the latter when particularly stuffy reactionaries, of whom there were rather fewer now than in Fëanáro’s day, to be fair, irritated her most.) Regardless, the idea came to her in a flash, so much so that she looked up from Larkatals’ muzzle in wonder, only to see the usual dark sky.

In later years of light, she always felt that the less said about how she coaxed forth a few precious vials of Larkatal’s seed, the better. But she wrote it up, of course, as a true Noldo, for future use. The difficult part, really, was the invention of the syringe, which took three engineers, a shepherd, and a broideress to truly perfect. But all the time, those few vials stayed fresh and ready, even as the hollows over Larkatal’s eyes deepened into pits.

Larkatal died three harvests before the rising of the Moon. Roccowendë let the tears fall as she and her daughter buried him in the fodder fields, but they did not burn her cheeks so fiercely. It was said the great work of the Trees’ children was nearly complete, and, she knew, her own work was already completed. Larkatal would have new foals born under that strange new light, and with that in mind, the thought of bringing in new stock was not so painful.

Her daughter rested her hand on Roccowendë’s shoulder as she piled over the last spadeful of dirt. Roccowendë embraced her.

“Anyone could wish for a daughter like you,” she told her — and a sudden flash came to her again.

 

Five

Once the unwed maidens of Tirion began having babies with (he thought) random, randy young Elves afraid of commitment via the postal service, Nísimanar felt that the end of the world had fully arrived, regardless of what anyone said about the imminent rise of the Trees’ children, and so he might as well bake bread.

Fëanáro, in his yénnual address to the Tirion Association for the Protection of the Laws and Customs of the Eldar, had often touched upon the subject of yeast. There was a chain of logic there, after a fashion. After all, if remarriage was wrong – and Fëanáro was very sure it was – then divorce must be wrong. If divorce is wrong, then marriage must be inviolate. But what was marriage? The union of a woman and a man, like Míriel and Finwë, the most perfect example of an Elf marriage. (Here, perhaps, an Unbegotten protestor or two would have to be chivvied away from the amphiteater.) But what are men and women? Simply looking up the slopes of Taniquetil, or up north to Alqualondë, demonstrated a certain conceptual elasticity to the categories. But the yeast – the yeast would know! Everyone knew that yeast simply would not work, would not produce its bubbles and airy lift, for a man. (Or anyone else who was not a woman. Somehow, this was not touched on in Fëanáro’s addresses.) So, men never could and never should try to make bread. And, moreover, men should not even try to make egg-leavened pastries, or meringues, or what have you, because it would simply not look right.

But Fëanáro was gone, the young ladies of Tirion were taking their long-distance pick of the young bucks of Valmar, and Nísimanar wanted bread and did not want to go to the bakery to get it, because the women at the bakery looked askance at him, since they all knew he had marched with Prince Arafinwë and only turned back when threatened with Doom. The world had been plunged into darkness such that a baby born when the light went out was now a grown Elf, and damn the yeast, anyway.

Another thing everyone knew, if everyone were sufficiently familiar with pastry shops, was that confectioners liked to use ash water in some of their more delicate sponges, because, somehow, it helped the batter rise even further than the beaten eggs. What if, Nísimanar wondered, he could simply do that, but more?

There was a great quantity of wood ash still left in Tirion, waiting its turn to be plowed into the patches of Unlight. Nobody much minded if an elf took away a barrow-full or two. Nísimanar’s neighbors minded slightly more when he lixiviated the ashes, then spent days on end boiling down lye. His rightward neighbor, the laundress, demanded a pound of potash in recompense, which only meant he had to boil down more lye to replace what he had lost. It did not seem to him that their suffering was too terrible – for, as he found to his dismay, none of his experiments quite produced bread. Ash water alone made for a dismal kind of cracker; lye had been a nearly tragic mistake, and potash bread was, simply, disgusting.

The courtyard before the King’s House had become, more or less, a workshop, and Istyacalar stopped any unscientific arguments before they began. So, Nísimanar began to take his complaints to them, visiting in turn the alchemists, the chemists, and then anyone who would take the time to listen.

It was a glassmaker who, eventually, gave him the idea. If the potash was simply too strongly flavored, had he tried pearlash? It was far purer, after all, so he could disguise the taste more easily through the simple mechanism of using less. The glassmaker had plenty, as it happened, so Nísimanar could cease infuriating – and fumigating – his neighbors.

The first loaf he made with pearlash, he burnt, but that was only his own fault, for he could see that even the sadly carbonized lump of dough had been positively lofty to begin with. The second loaf was too wet; the third, too dry. Eventually, he hit on the solution of buttermilk, which seemed to have the right balance of liquid to acid to create a loaf that was positively edible. It was not chewy or stretchy, like yeasted bread, and certainly not spongy like an egg-leavened cake, but the dense, moist crumb had its own charm, he thought. As he chewed the piping-hot slice, his spirits rose high, then higher, expanding and bubbling over with delight.

He had thought to make this unyeasted bread in the privacy of his own home, for his own comfort, but what use was that? He had heard that a young lady in the weaving district had applied to Mandos for a vial of her deceased Kinslayer husband’s seed, because, she said, she should not be punished for his misdeeds, and the Valar’s handling of Finwë’s case suggested they strongly felt procreation trumped respect for the dead. Since her solution honored both, she could see no impediment. She had even supplied her own Helkien syringe. Now, Nísimanar thought, was indeed the time for boldness!

The next market day, he put out a blanket and laid seven loaves upon it. The brown flour had not worked as well as the white, but it was respectable enough. He had even studded his last loaf with dried blackberries, for flair.

Some people spat out the bread. Some people spat it out on him, and spit some curses, too. Istyacalar took one whole white loaf, which he had a sinking feeling she meant for experimentation, not delectation. But a few people came and took bites from his hand, and chewed thoughtfully.

“This would be lovely toasted, with salted butter,” said one alnerwen.

“Oh, yes, that would suit the cakelike consistency,” replied a man Nísimanar recognized from Arafinwë’s host, who usually pretended to ignore his existence.

“And you really don’t have to wait hours for the yeast to rise?” asked a woman.

So he brought more loaves the next market day, and more people ate them, and eventually, he began to bring little paper twists of the pearlash as well. Istyacalar did not return the loaf, but she did provide a detailed schematic for the addition of carbonic acid to pearlash, which, when Nísimanar tried it, produced a dense, fine white powder which in turn produced the lightest loaf yet.

It was then that the restaurant order began coming, for Tirion had, at last, regained something that might be called a cultural life, despite the darkness, and little enterprises were springing up everywhere. With crystal lamps, with food, with a mission, with little children, and perhaps even with good bread, it was far easier to meet the next dark day with equanimity, even hope, even a sense of daring. The first restaurant to reach out to him was, in fact, run by a woman.

Nísimanar balked slightly, then laughed at himself, covered in flour and salts of lye, cringing from the thought of a woman cook. It was the end of the world! The world marched on. He sold her a dozen loaves and the recipe for his baking powder.

 

+ One

The first day, the first new day, the colors shocked Lóquildis into silence. She had never seen Tirion under anything but the light of crystal lamps or candles, never shaded her eyes against the rainbow spangles thrown by the diamond dust on its streets or peered through a backlit screen of green leaves or admired the colored shadows that the stained-glass windows of her mother’s bedroom admitted. Everything felt new, unfamiliar, enchanted. Lóquildis, who had never known anything else, found out that her mother’s hair threw fewer red glints in the light of the Sun, but her skin gleamed bluer. She found that the sky was blue too, and that painters exaggerated the blueness of water unless in large bodies, and that yellow and gold were purer and brighter when lit by the yellow light of Laurelin’s last fruit, rather than the cold radiance of crystal or hot flickers of fire. Reds became rosy; black and grey grew warm or cold; and white glowed starkly against everything else. Nothing was as it had appeared the day before; everything had a spirit within it that snapped in through her pupils and wound through her veins so she wandered, wide-eyed, through a city that seemed twice as large as it should be, and half the size, crammed and expanded with hue and shade.

The second new day, Lóquildis went to her mother, who was still alternating between bursts of elation and bursts of grief. Lóquildis, who had nothing to compare the Sun to, did not understand the latter, but she understood the elation, and caught her mother as she spun in the courtyard of their home, holding her palms up to the sun.

“I want to become a dyer,” Lóquildis announced. Her mother had told her again and again that she did not need to worry that she had not yet found a craft; that it took many people many years to do so, that the honored Helkien and Roccowendë had not made their great inventions until quite late in life — but Lóquildis, who was after all very young, fretted nonetheless. In the singing, stinging, whirling land of color she now inhabited, Lóquildis felt quite silly for ever having doubted.

“I want to make colors every day; every color there is,” she said, and her mother smiled. (Lóquildis noticed that her teeth were not the same white as the courtyard’s marble flags, and not the same white as the clouds in the blue, blue sky, but a new and different white.)

“Let us be off to the Loom Shed, then,” she announced, and they paused only to put their still-hot luncheon under its little glass cloche so it would wait for their return before they were off.

The Loom Shed, for so it was still called in honor of its beginnings housing Míriel Serindë’s first great drawloom, though it was now a small village of halls and corridors and lesson rooms, had a gate, but it was thrown open. Lóquildis could not remember it ever being shut, in fact, although she knew that it had only been opened the year she learned to walk.

They walked in, and soon enough, someone found them wandering about the stinking vats of blue dye, looking with interest at the skeins of blue and green wool hanging behind them, and took them along to the Broideress. This name too was an archaism, for Saminië was no Míriel, nor even a relation, but she ran the Loom Shed with efficiency and spirit, and for that she received honor and a title which no one (much) begrudged.

Broideress Saminië steepled her fingers and observed Lóquildis, whose eyes still, on this second day, had a tendency to rove from patch of color to patch of color, rather than focusing on the person speaking to her.

Lóquildis, to her credit, was able to reply to Saminië’s questions, give a respectable account of her education and past interest in chemistry, and explain the sudden, dazzling advent of color in her life. Saminië smiled, half-wickedly, and pulled out an enormous stack of papers from her desk. These, she explained, represented a schedule of a journeyelf dyer’s education, which would take approximately a yén to complete. If Lóquildis still felt an interest in dye after this time, there were further mastery courses, and of course, independent research leading to scholar status. Lóquildis, taken by the way the black ink on the paper gleamed in the light, took the papers and almost touched her nose to them, inhaling their sweet and musty scent.

Then she looked up at Saminië. “That is all?” she asked. “No oaths of loyalty, no tithe to the King’s House, no requirements to attend court? I may be a ‘vial baby,’ but I am not innocent, though I intend no rudeness.”

Saminië steepled her fingers. “You must swear to abide by our code of conduct for students, which I do not believe you will find difficult. No chemical explosions, no weapons, no marriages with your panel, and so on. You will often be asked to supply your own materials; as gathering dyestuffs and creating mordants forms part of your education, I hope you will find this reasonable. No monetary tithe is required unless you take meals here, in which case you are put on the labor rotation. There are frequently events that take place at court, such as viewings and exhibits, and your classes may require you to attend these, but there is no need to seek Prince Arafinwë’s approval for your course of study.”

She glanced aside at Lóquildis’ mother, her stern mien slipping slightly. “This is not as it was, in the days before the Darkness,” she said. “I remember when you—” but she thought better of what she was about to say, although Lóquildis knew the story, or at least her mother’s version of it, and sent her own glance to her mother, who sat serenely before Saminië’s desk.

“Things must have changed indeed,” she said calmly, and turned to her daughter. “What say you, Lóquildis?”

Lóquildis shuffled again through the sheaf of papers describing the next yén of her life, should she choose to pursue it. The paper ranged from gray to fawn to pure white, she noticed, though the sheets were cut evenly and smoothly.

“I wish to learn,” she said at last, and signed her name on the course of study. Then she embraced her mother, bowed to the Broideress, and set out to find the others who so wished, blinking her eyes at the dazzle.