I was wordless when Patience irritably told me to come inside, that I was late enough already. I perched on the edge of a chair with a crumpled cloak and some half finished bit of stitchery. I set my paintings to one side of me, atop a stack of tablets.
“I think you could learn to recite verse, if you chose to,” she remarked with some asperity. “And therefore you could learn to compose verse, if you chose to. Rhythm and meter are no more than … is that the puppy?”
“It’s meant to be,” I muttered, and could not remember feeling more wretchedly embarrassed in my life.
She lifted the sheets carefully and examined each one in turn, holding them close and then at arm’s length. She stared longest at the muzzy one. “Who did these for you?” she asked at last. “Not that it excuses your being late. But I could find good use for someone who can put on paper what the eye sees, with the colors so true. That is the trouble with all the herbals I have; all the herbs are painted the same green, no matter if they are gray or tinged pink as they grow. Such tablets are useless if you are trying to learn from them-”
“I suspect he’s painted the puppy himself, ma’am,” Lacey interrupted benignly.
“And the paper, this is better than what I’ve had to-” Patience paused suddenly. “You, Thomas?” (And I think that was the first time she remembered to use the name she had bestowed on me.) “You paint like this?”
Before her incredulous look, I managed a quick nod. She held up the pictures again. “Your father could not draw a curved line, save it was on a map. Did your mother draw?”
“I have no memories of her, lady.” My reply was stiff. I could not recall that anyone had ever been brave enough to ask me such a thing before.
“What, none? But you were six years old. You must remember something-the color of her hair, her voice, what she called you ….” Was that a pained hunger in her voice, a curiosity she could not quite bear to satisfy?
Almost, for a moment, I did remember. A smell of mint, or was it … it was gone. “Nothing, lady. If she had wanted me to remember her, she would have kept me, I suppose.” I closed my heart. Surely I owed no remembrance to the mother who had not kept me, nor ever sought me since.
“Well.” For the first time I think Patience realized she had taken our conversation into a difficult area. She stared out the window at a gray day. “Someone has taught you well,” she observed suddenly, too brightly.
“Fedwren.” When she said nothing, I added, “The court scribe, you know. He would like me to apprentice to him. He is pleased with my letters, and works with me now on the copying of his images. When we have time, that is. I am often busy, and he is often out questing after new paper reeds.”
“Paper reeds?” she asked distractedly.
“He has a bit of paper. He had several measures of it, but little by little he has used it. He got it from a trader, who had it from another, and yet another before him, so he does not know where it first came from. But from what he was told, it was made of pounded reeds. The paper is a much better quality than any we make; it is thin, flexible, and does not crumble so readily with age, yet it takes ink well, not soaking it up so that the edges of runes blur. Fedwren says that if we could duplicate it, it would change much. With a good, sturdy paper, any man might have a copy of tablet lore from the keep. Were paper cheaper, more children could be taught to write and to read both, or so he says. I do not understand why he is so-”
“I did not know any here shared my interest.” A sudden animation lit the lady’s face. “Has he tried paper made from pounded lily root? I have had some success with that. And also with paper created by first weaving and then wet-pressing sheets made with threads of bark from the kinue tree. It is strong and flexible, yet the surface leaves much to be desired. Unlike this paper …”