Weight of Stone by Laura Anne Gilman Page B

use of magic, that soaring into the air? He still had no idea how he had managed that, and no resources or time to study it, to understand the structure of the magic the way a Vineart should.
    Priorities. In a storm, the vines were protected first. In this storm, he needed to ensure his safety—and the only way to do that was to wipe clean Sar Anton’s accusation, and the Washers’ penalty of death.
    “We don’t know what’s happening,” he said finally. “We don’t know if they’re still looking for me—if they’re looking for all three of us. It doesn’t matter. My master sent me to discover information, track down some truth in the rumors, a source to the trouble. That hasn’t changed. If I can’t return home, then I need to follow the taint. So that is what I will do.”
    “Then we will go with you,” Ao said, and Mahault nodded, her face set in determined lines. “We will see this through.”
    Jerzy should have felt satisfaction, or relief, but his stomach roiled in a way that had nothing to do with the motion of the ship underneath him. It all came back to the taint, the odd, unpleasant scent of magic that seemed to underlay every attack, every oddity, every uncertainty they had encountered, the way the taste of the soil ran through every spellwine, identifying its origin.
    Jerzy had sensed it first in the flesh of the sea creature that hadattacked the Berengian shore—the flesh that Master Malech said was spelled into life, but by no winespell he could identify—and then again in the court of the lord-maiar of Aleppan, Mahl’s father. There, the taint had been centered in an aide, a man of no importance, no status within his own right … no magic within his soul. In order for him to carry it, the way the serpent had, someone had imbued him with it. Someone, or something.
    Merely the thought of that moment when he had tasted the taint, as others argued his fate around him … it took him back in the swirl of fear and anger and despair. Of being dragged by the arm down corridors, others stepping back and staring at him, whispering; the fear when the servant had attacked him, trying to steal the mirror that was his one connection to Master Malech; the confusion when Sar Anton killed the servant to save him, then warned him to stay silent; and the realization that it was not he they were after, but Vineart Giordan, for reasons he still did not understand … and then Giordan’s raising a storm within the council hall itself, and Ao dragging him to safety, and flight …
    The sound of Ao’s voice, normal and steady, was a path out of those dark and unnerving memories, and Jerzy followed it gratefully.
    “Follow it? You can … sniff it out? Like a dog?” Curious as always, Ao looked at Jerzy as though he might suddenly have grown a longer nose, and a tail.
    “Like a Vineart,” Mahl told Ao, rolling her eyes at him. “The way they know when the vines are ready, the grapes are ripe. Right?”
    “Something like that,” Jersey acknowledged, clinging to the familiarity of their voices to keep him anchored in the present, letting their trust restore some of his own confidence. In truth, he did not know how he had found it or, absent a direct source, if he might ever find it again. He had been hoping for some message from Malech, some sign of what he was to do, even hoping silently, secretly, that the Washers would find them, give him no choice. In the end, though, there was no choice. If he did not want to be useless … he had to be useful.
    And he knew what the taint tasted like. Not Master Malech, whohad only tested the dead, near-rotted flesh of the serpent, had not touched it in living, breathing form. Only him.
    Jerzy faced into the wind, and his nostrils flared, trying to take in as much information as he could, although it wasn’t a smell he was seeking, exactly. The taint could be found only with the Vineart’s Sense, something that was neither taste nor smell nor sight, but something