But now was not the time to hesitate over such concerns. The best thing she could do for Tasia now was to find the sword, slay the deathless king and the undatai within him, and free herself and her love from Persopos.
She began to walk, angling north. The gardens covered several acres, but beyond them stood the palace’s northern gate. She suspected that if she left the palace grounds, she would leave the q’isson created by the king altogether.
But instead of the garden’s hedges and potted plants and blossoming fruit trees gradually thinning and ending at the low garden wall, they kept going. At first, Joslyn thought that perhaps she had misremembered the way. She turned on a stone-paved path at random, following it until it reached one of the garden’s circular courtyards with a fountain in its center and benches around its edges.
This couldn’t be right. She knew this courtyard. It was the same one Tasia had led Mace to when they first met, sitting him down upon a bench and warning him that he would never be a true Emperor if he married her. Unless Joslyn had completely lost all sense of direction, this courtyard should be behind her, much closer to the palace’s dining hall than its northern gate.
She glanced at the sky, gauging the position of the sun. She hadn’t gotten turned around; she had definitely been walking north, not south.
Joslyn tried again. She left the courtyard behind by the pathway that branched off to the northwest. This pathway should eventually end at the garden’s main promenade, the one that led directly to the northern gate.
But a few minutes later (had it been minutes? Hours?), Joslyn found herself back where she’d started – at the green lawn beside the pond, where her own form and Tasia’s lay sleeping next to a picnic basket.
She stood there for a time, staring at her own sleeping body.
Distance, she realized suddenly. There was no distance within the Shadowlands, because the Shadowlands were naught but mind. She’d discovered that once, when she and Milo had entered the Shadowlands to seek out the undatai and destroy it.
Walking through the gardens would not take her out of it; if she wanted to free herself from this q’isson, she needed only to see the gardens for what they were – an image of mind.
As she had with Milo once before, Joslyn kneeled, closed her eyes, and placed her palms upon her thighs. She focused upon her breath until the peace came.
“Once the peace comes,”Ku-sai had taught her, “shift your focus without disturbing that peace. Be like a fish, swimming through the water without leaving ripples on its surface.”
Gently, Joslyn shifted her focus without disturbing the peace that had washed over her.
These are not the palace’s gardens,she told herself. This is not the palace at all.This is mind only, painted upon the canvas of the Shadowlands.
Joslyn held her attention there until she felt the truth of it, until the words fell away and thought became belief. She let it fill her. Several minutes later, with one last, long exhalation, she opened her eyes.
The gardens were gone, replaced by the empty expanse of the Shadowlands.
Empty except for two figures lying supine a few yards away – her own form and Tasia’s.
The sight immediately threatened the peace Joslyn had gained through meditation, calm quickly replaced by anger.
The deathless king and the undatai within him would not be nearly so deathless once Joslyn retrieved Ku-sai’s sword. She would make them pay for what they had done – for the untold number of lives lost in the East, for each attempt on her life and on Tasia’s, for the bargain the undatai had once forced upon her and the way it tainted her mind even now. And they would pay especially for this – for imprisoning them with the intention to take their bodies for its own as soon as its strength returned.
It was time to retrieve the sword. Except she had hidden the q’isson well, deep within the recesses of her mind where the undatai could never find it.
Too well.
Vaguely, very vaguely, like the dream of a dream, Joslyn recalled the need to hide the sword somewhere the king would never find it. She couldn’t even remember how she’d managed to do what Ku-sai had once done – to take something physical from the mortal realm and hide it within the Shadowlands.
Where did she put it?
She should start with what she could remember. She remembered finding the echo of Ku-sai in a q’isson that was nearly blank – an empty expanse with a campfire at its center. Had she created an equally blank space for the sword? Joslyn didn’t think she would have done that. Since it was where Ku-sai had hidden the sword, it was exactly the type of place the king would think to look for it the moment he realized she’d hidden it from him.
A memory,she thought suddenly. The last time you created a place within the Shadowlands, you started with a memory.
Even as the thought occurred to her, the landscape of the Shadowlands disappeared, replaced instantaneously with a place she knew well.
In front of her, only a foot or two away, was the rice paper screen that separated her cramped corner from the rest of the Princess’s antechamber. She stood from the narrow cot and opened the chest at its foot. Inside was a brizat, the things she used for cleaning her armor and weapons, and the scraps of parchment where she’d been practicing her writing. There was a sword, but it was only a standard-issue Imperial short sword, the same one she’d once stolen from a drunken soldier.
The creak of wood told her someone opened the door between the antechamber and bedchamber.
“Joslyn? Would you be up for another game of Castles and Knights?”
Joslyn’s heart ached, and she nearly stepped out from behind the rice paper screen and went to Tasia. This was where their love for one another had quietly grown, on those evenings spent together playing Castles and Knights, or with Tasia teaching Joslyn to read and write.
But no. This place was too obvious. Tasia’s apartments would be one of the first places within Joslyn’s mind the deathless king would think to look for the sword.
“Joslyn? Are you in there?”
Joslyn resisted the urge to answer, forced the scene to shift again.
The antechamber morphed into a bliva, and for a moment, she thought it was the same bliva she’d accidentally created that first time she’d created a q’isson from a memory, in the Shadowlands with Milo. But this was not the bliva of her birth family.
“What’s wrong, girl? You look as though a spirit haunts you.”
Joslyn had to look up to see Mistress’s face. It was astonishing how accurately her memory had painted the tinker’s wife and the bliva where she’d spent most of her childhood. The face that loomed over her sagged with age and excess flesh, unyielding but not entirely unkindly; the cramped tent was suffused with the smell of horsetail mushroom tea.
“Joslyn?” a voice asked behind her.
Joslyn turned, and saw a girl staring at her. Ten or eleven years old, black hair in a single braid that fell just past her shoulder blades, thin to the point of being wispy in her coltish pre-adolescence, and yet every feature hinting at the great beauty she would grow into.
“Tasmyn,” Joslyn said, her voice coming out in a childish squeak.
“It’s not here,” ten-year-old Tasmyn said. “This memory is just as strong, just as obvious as your lover’s apartments. You’re too clever to have hidden it anywhere especially significant, any cornerstone in your life, because any significant memory would be too easy for someone who knows your mind to discover.”
“All right,” Joslyn said, nodding at the logic behind dream-Tasmyn’s statement. “So where do I find it?”
Her sister’s brow furrowed in concentration. “I’m not sure.”
“How do I remember a memory that is insignificant? Isn’t that a contradiction?”
“Yes and no,” Mistress put in. “You will have avoided key moments, any moment in which you made a choice that changed the course of your life, or any place in which something occurred that brought great joy, great sorrow, great surprise.”
“But those are precisely the moments I remember best,” Joslyn said in her child’s voice.
“Be that as it may, all of us are filled with a plethora of other memories, detritus of the mind that we remember for no particular reason at all,” Mistress went on. “These memories are much harder for a sorcerer or sorceress to find. You understood that intuitively when you hid the sword.”
“Do you know where it is, Mistress? Don’t toy with me. If I don’t find it, I will never escape – Tasia will never escape.” Her ten year-old fists were clenched and she was practically whining.
“Frustration and demands will not help you, girl.”
Joslyn had always detested Mistress’s imperious, self-righteous manner. She opened her mouth to say she was no longer a child, despite this remembered form.
“Stop. She’s not really Mistress,” Tasmyn said softly. “She’s only your memory of Mistress, just as I am only your memory of your sister. And it serves no purpose to become angry with a memory.”
“As usual, your sister understands things better than you do,” Mistress said. “You are wasting what little time you have. Before too much longer, your lover will wake within her palace gardens. You will need to wake with her, else the king will know that something is wrong and come looking for you. There are worse places he can put you than inside the gardens.”
Mistress – or the memory of Mistress – was right. Joslyn didn’t have time for arguments; she needed to find the sword and she needed to find it swiftly.