Certain Symmetry Read Online Free

She swept from the room as if her faded houserobe were grand
with embroidery and the stone floor not thick with dust.
    When she was gone, Lute looked up at the
beam with its dangling bunches of herbs, reached up and snapped off
a single sprig. It was no sooner in his hand than it vanished,
where, Moonhawk could not hazard a guess.
    That done, he went over to the table, pulled
out the bench and sat, his hands flat on the table, apparently
content to await Veverain's return in silence.
    Moonhawk drifted over to the wall bench and
settled in to watch.
    * * *
    "HERE," VEVERAIN SAID, and placed them, one
by one, on the table before her: a curl of russet-colored hair, a
scrap of paper, a gray and green stone, a twig.
    "That is four," Lute said, chidingly.
    "I have not done," she answered and raised
her hands to her neck, drawing a rawhide cord up over her head.
Something silver flashed in the lamplight; flashed again as she had
it off the cord and placed by the others.
    "His promise-ring," she said quietly. "And
that is five, Master Lute."
    "And that is five," he agreed, hands still
palm-flat against the table-top, in an attitude both quiescent and
entirely un-Lute-like.
    "What will you do now?" Veverain inquired.
Lute raised his eyebrows.
    "You misunderstand; it is not I who will do,
but you. If you expect that you will sit there and be done to, pray
disabuse yourself of the notion."
    "But," she stared at him, distress growing,
"I am no Witch. I have no schooling, no talent. How am I to build a
spell?" Moonhawk could only applaud the housemother's good sense.
By her own certain reckoning, it required some number of years to
become proficient in spell-craft.
    Lute, however, was unworried on this
point.
    "Have I not said that I have the way of it
from my master and all the way back to she who first received the
gift of the Goddess? I am here to guide you. But it is you who must
actually perform the task, or the spell will have no power."
    "I will--put these things in that bag?"
Veverain asked. "That is all?"
    "Not quite all. Each item must receive its
charge. The best technique is to pick up a single item, hold it in
your hand and recall--in words or in thought--the connection
between Rowan and the object. In this manner, the spell will build,
piece by piece, each piece interlocked with and informed by the
others."
    Which was as apt a description of spell
structure as she had ever heard, thought Moonhawk. But Veverain had
no glimmer of Witch-sense about her and the tiny flickerings of
talent she sometimes caught from Lute were not nearly sufficient to
build and bind the spell he described.
    Even if such a spell were possible.
    At the table, Veverain glanced down among
her choices, and put forth a hand. Moonhawk leaned forward,
Witch-sense questing, shivering as she encountered the raging gray
torrent of Veverain's grief.
    Veverain's hand descended, taking up the
bright lock of hair.
    "This is Rowan's hair," she said
tentatively, and Moonhawk felt--something--stir against her
Witch-sense. "When we had kept household less than a year, he was
chosen by the Master of the Vine to work a season at Veyru in
exchange of which we received a vineman of Veyru. The Master of the
Vine came with a delegation and petitioned my permission for
Rowan--as if I would have denied him such an opportunity! We had
been together so short a time, and Veyru is no small journey--I
joked that I would not recognize him when he returned. In answer,
he cut off this curl and told me that I should always know him, by
the flame that lived in his hair."
    Carefully, she put the lock into the small
leather bag. Lute said nothing, sitting still as a statue of
himself.
    Veverain chose the gray and green rock.
    "When Rowan left home for that season in
Veyru he bore with him this stone from our land, so that, wherever
he was, he would always be home."
    The stone joined the lock of hair in the bag
and there was definitely something a-building now. Moonhawk could
see two thick