Taminy by Maya Kaathryn Bohnhoff

laughter,” she said, “has colors. The blues of sorrow, the reds of anger,
the gold and silver of true joy.”
    Gawping
again, he shook his head. “How do you know these things?”
    “I
live with an Osraed. My father ... was a Cirke-master. I’ve always been drawn
to the Meri’s doings.”
    “You’re
no mimic.” The gangly gawper was gone, replaced by an astute Osraed. “You speak
as one who knows. You see the laughter with your own eyes, not Osraed Bevol’s.”
    She
shrugged. “I have been accused,” she said carefully, “of being fey. Once, some
called me Wicke and charged me to prove I was not.”
    “And
did you?”
    “I
was unable. I tried, but the Meri’s will out. She decided my course. It brought
me here.”
    “You’re
not Wicke,” he said as if his own certitude would make that true for all.
    She
laughed. “No, I’m not. But you won’t convince Marnie-o-Loom of that.” Her eyes
travelled to the shadowed side of the bright booth where a pinched face trained
glitters of jet on them.
    Wyth
shivered. “And she calls those eyes.” He held out his arm. “Will you have a
cider, Taminy-a-Gled?”
    “Aye.
If you will have a dance.”
    He
agreed with minimum awkwardness and she took his arm and let him squire her
about before all eyes. They ate, they drank, they danced, they strolled the
battlements. And when he looked at her oddly time and again, she knew it was
only because he had just realized, time and again, that she was not
Meredydd-a-Lagan.
    Ah, but a part of you wants me to be that.
    “What
did you say?”
    She
glanced up at him. He was a layer of darkness, the Meri’s Kiss glowing from his
brow, a silhouette against the gleaming, moonlit peaks of the Gyldan-baenn. She
had been watching them, though they had neither moved nor changed for perhaps a
million years, and he had been watching her, whose changes were more recent.
She had let him watch her, let him see that even under layers of darkness, she
was not Meredydd.
    “You
have sharp ears, Osraed,” she told him. “I didn’t speak.” And a rare man, it is, who hears words that are not spoken.
    “You
tease me. I can’t hear your thoughts.”
    “You
feel what others feel. You see the color of their laughter, the shadings of
their words.”
    “Shadings
only. But you spoke. There were words.”
    “There
were words. But I thought them.”
    “Why?
Why should I hear your thoughts and no others?”
    I told you I was fey . She could feel his
eyes holding her moonlit face, his other senses straining through layers of
darkness the moonlight could not penetrate. He had heard her. He had not seen
her lips move.
    “Bevol
has brought you here for a reason. Why has he brought you here? Who are you?
Why do I know you? How do I know you?”
    “Perhaps,”
she said aloud. “Perhaps you have seen me in a vision, as I have seen you
through someone else’s vision.”
    The
Kiss between his brows puckered with thought.
    Taminy
laughed and laid a hand on his arm. “Don’t glower so, Osraed Wyth. You must
learn to laugh more and frown less.”
    oOo
    Perhaps
it was the words or the gentle, laughing voice that delivered them or the
moonlight on pale hair. Perhaps it was all those things that set up, in Wyth
Arundel’s head, a sudden whirlpool of thought and sensation. A second of
disorientation was followed by the sharp, clear memory of Master Bevol’s
aislinn chamber, of a pool of darkness that would not be still, of a Being of
Light and a girl on a beach. No, two girls—one entering the water, one leaving
it; one familiar and beloved, the other-
    “Osraed
Bevol,” said the moonlit lips, “I have not breathed for a hundred years.”
    The
whirl stopped so suddenly, he was nearly dashed from his feet. Like a man
plunged in cold water, he trembled, while just beneath his skin, blood pulsed
in fitful heat, scalding him. His face burned. He raised his hands to cover it.
    Taminy.
Taminy-a-Cuinn. Gifted in the Art, decried as Wicke, condemned to a