by Angela Boord
“May I have the honor of an introduction?” he asked.
“My daughter,” my father answered, clipping the words in vexation. “Kyrra.”
I inclined my head. “I bid you welcome in my father’s house.” Out the corner of my eye, I caught my mother’s tight-lipped expression. But Cassis still watched me. When I handed him the goblet, our fingers touched.
There was a moment of staring too long, a jolt, a shiver. How does one describe these feelings afterward without making them seem boring and cliché? There is that moment when one is young in which all the clichés seem true.
His fingers slid away from mine, slowly. Then he raised the cup to his lips and drank.
“Your daughter does us great honor,” he said.
His eyes never left my face.
It is true I was a challenge to my parents. My mother said I was born screaming and didn’t stop until I was six months old. As a small child, I drove my nurses wild trying to contain me. Allowed to play in the garden, in a trice I would scale the cherry tree that dipped its branches over the garden wall. My hands and knees bore constant marks from my adventures, and my mother’s seamstresses despaired of keeping me in untorn frocks.
As I grew, my restlessness did not ebb. It wasn’t enough to ride in the coach to Liera or to watch the city pass by as we floated in the little wicker canal boats; I must be out in it. Once, when I was eight years old, I strayed from my mother’s side in the market and wandered all over the dockside before she found me, having befriended a tattered bard who regaled me with stories of the Spice Road and played me a Saien tune upon his harp. The strangeness of the day remained with me long after the cane marks faded on my backside, like the memory of an especially favored sweet.
I drove my tutors mad with my questions. I had a good head for numbers and a talent for languages, and I quickly moved beyond the borders of a lady’s education. It was only my father’s indulgence that gave me more. I learned to read, to play the harp and the lute, though not well—to speak Rojornicki, Tiresian, Qalfan, Vençalan, and ancient Eter, a language hardly anyone studied anymore. I could converse in most of the dialects of the peninsula. I had maps and poems and made a mess of a dozen canvases in my attempt to learn to paint like the Eterean masters. I never had the patience for sewing, but my mother made me do it anyway, the same way she made me study etiquette and practice the harp until I was sick of it.
That evening, hospitality demanded a dinner for Cassis and his men, and I went early to my rooms to prepare for it. But as I was standing at my bedside, trying to decide between two gowns, one mulberry and the other a soft gray, there was a knock at the door and one of my chambermaids went to answer it. I heard murmuring and the clank of porcelain and silver.
I paid it no mind. Instead, I lifted my curls and squinted at my reflection in the long, silvered mirror that stood beside my bed. “Do you think I should wear my hair up in combs, like this?” I asked my other maid, a woman named Mam who had been brought into our household as an orphan child. She wasn’t old enough to be called Mam, really, but everybody did. She said she thought it was short for her long-forgotten given name. At the time, her story struck me as incomprehensible; how could one forget one’s own name? But now I wish I could do the same.
She was a round woman with thick, dark hair and eyes the color of mossy wood chips. She put her hands on her hips. “You aren’t going to a ball.”
“She’s not going anywhere,” my other maid, Bella, said through the open door to my bedroom. It had been some misguided sense of humor that named her, I often thought. She was small and her doughy features were of the plainest sort, pale and not well served by her lackluster brown hair. She hadn’t been with me for as long as Mam.
“The Messera says she’s to remain right here.”
I turned around. Bella carried a tray on her right hand, a stand for it in her left. A full meal was laid out on the tray—a white porcelain bowl brimming with braised snails and salty pannenda ham; a plate of flatbread and olive oil; slices of orange and yellow melon; glistening black eggplant sprinkled with green basil. They’d be eating the same down in the courtyard, but the indignity of having to eat alone in my own chambers stole all the pleasure from it. Bella jerked her left hand and the stand unfolded, and she lowered the tray down onto it with a sigh.
I frowned at it, then at her. “I’m not a child,” I said. “My mother has no right to keep me here.”
Bella shrugged. “It’s what Utîl said, so it’s what we’ll do. Likely your mother doesn’t want you within reach of that Prinze. Isn’t it so, Mam?”
Mam nodded. “And here you are, mooning over your dress, so I’d say she’s right. You don’t reach your majority for two more years, Lady Kyrra; you can wait that long.”
I glowered at them, but they were used to my imperiousness. My mother had made them into my two shadows, but I had failed to sway them to my confidence; they did her bidding, and her bidding alone. “I’m too old for nursemaids,” I said.
“And too young for men,” Mam told me as she walked out the door and over to the armoire that held the linens. “You’ll have your whole life for men and children. Your mother’s right to keep you away from Cassis di Prinze, if he’s anything like what I’ve heard.”
I had been twisting my hair in my hands, the way I did sometimes when I was annoyed or thinking. Overcome by curiosity, I let my hair drop and walked out into the sitting room, where Bella and Mam busily set the table, tying back the long muslin curtains so I could sit and enjoy the breeze.
“And what have you heard?” I asked.
Bella arched her brows as she ran her hand over the tablecloth to press out the wrinkles. “My cousin has cousins who serve the Prinze in the house, and they say he goes down to the smoking dens.”
“Dresda tells me he got a tavern girl with child but she lost it.” Mam looked at me pointedly. “And he’s Prinze. You never know what they’re up to. Weren’t the mistiri surprised to even see him here?”
I nodded reluctantly. “But he comes with an offer to buy my father’s silk. The Prinze have never offered that before. And anyway, it’s his father who’s Head of House, not him.”
“Acorns,” Mam said as she set out the plates, “do not fall far from the tree.”
I scowled. “It’s not as if I’ll seek a betrothal with him. But he is handsome, don’t you think?”
“My old aunt in the kitchens told me, ‘A pretty face will hide an ugly mind,’” Mam said.
“P’raps I’m lucky, then,” Belle said. “One look at my old self and the pretty ones run straight away.”
They laughed about it. I could never fathom the humor of servants, so I went back into my bedchamber and stepped into the mulberry gown. When my maids saw what I was doing, they stopped laughing and looked at each other.
“You won’t be getting out that door, Kyrra,” Mam said.
“My father may yet prevail. How will it look to the Prinze if the Aliente Householder doesn’t trust them enough to allow his daughter to eat in their company? Hospitality will be compromised, and my father could never allow that. Do my buttons, Bella. And my hair. With the combs.”
Bella and Mam traded glances, frowning, but Bella came. Her sturdy fingers rasped on the buttons as she fastened them. I held my hair up so she could do the ones at the back of my neck.
In the mirror’s reflection, I saw Mam standing in the doorway, watching me. She hugged herself loosely and frowned. Then she noticed me watching and eased her expression, turning around.
“You may be right,” she said. “But until then, you’ll sit and eat your pannenda like a dutiful daughter.”
I had never been a dutiful daughter. But I knew my father. And I knew the rules of etiquette from the hours of study my lady tutor had required of me. It would be a serious affront to Cassis to keep me locked in my room, an admission that my father didn’t trust his guest even though he’d taken an oath of no harm.
I had only raised the spoon to my lips w
hen the call came for me to attend.
Dinner was served in the gardens as evening began to fall, soft and blue, blessedly cooler. The scent of roses lingered from the day, mingling with the beginning of the nightly jasmine bloom. Our table was laid on a patio among the potted lemon trees, where we could watch the sun set over the western hills.
Because the Prinze visit was unexpected and for business, dinner was an intimate affair, only my parents, Cassis, and I. We would join the fosters and gavaros in the hall later, for dancing. Cassis was already there when we entered, and he stood as the servant swept out my chair for me.
“Lady Kyrra,” he said, bowing as I sat. “It’s a pleasure to be able to dine with you tonight. And your parents,” he added, almost as an afterthought.
I smiled at him. In preparation for my season of courting parties, my lady tutor had told me that women should grace their suitors with demure but enigmatic smiles, to entice them into further conversation. She was Vençalan, of course, and didn’t understand that our matches were mostly about trade. But I had not expected an opportunity to practice. Madame Vevant said I frightened people with my natural mannerisms, so I tried to make my smile demure and enigmatic.
I must have looked as if I’d eaten a sour candy. Cassis blinked and looked so confused that I lost my concentration on “demure” and instead bit my lip to hide a laugh.
One of his brows flicked upward.
Perhaps men weren’t as intrigued by demure as my lady tutor wanted me to believe. I put it down as another tick against her and bent my head to look at my plate so I wouldn’t start laughing.
Cassis sat across from me in a rustle of silk. All I could see were his long fingers curling around the stem of his wineglass. Another tourmaline flashed on his ring finger. The setting was intricately worked silver, a sea serpent eating the stone. Diamonds edged the serpent’s tail, which curled up on the other side of the ring.
“It’s been a while since we’ve visited the city,” my father said to him, “What news have we missed, up here in our hills?”
“I hardly know where to start, Mestere. How many months has it been since your last visit?”
“Oh, late winter. It’s hard to get away during silk season.”
“They’ve a new theatre in Padera now,” Cassis said. “To entertain for the summers. And I hear that the playwright they’re employing is extraordinary. He’s dug up some of the old Eterean plays, given them a new twist. I hope to see one of his performances after we make this last buying trip.”
“Old Eterean plays, eh? So, he’s using actors, choruses—not mummers.”
“Mummers,” Cassis scoffed. “Mestere d’Aliente, only the rabble go to see mummers now. Gavaros, laborers… they’ll even let in kinless at some of those shows.”
“What plays are they doing in Padera?” I asked.
“Oh, I think…The Fall of Attrasca. And The Doom of Ires.”
“My goodness,” my mother said. “Such heavy plays for summer.”
“They say that in The Doom of Ires, they pour a river of brandy down a giant model of a volcano and light it on fire.”
“I would like to see that,” I said.
My mother made a soft, dismissive sound as she unfolded her napkin over her lap. “It’s only for spectacle, Kyrra. That’s all it is.”
“But that’s the point, isn’t it, Mother? Why go to the theater at all if it’s only to see the same old rituals acted out? The dancers paint themselves in white paint and bound across the stage as stags. A man in a deerskin is shot by his brother and falls to the stage.” I rolled my eyes. “It’s boring. Why not add a little spectacle? I should like to see the volcano.”
I looked up at Cassis. He flashed a smile at me—handsome, bright, easy. “Exactly,” he said, and my heart stuttered. He gestured with his fork for emphasis. “Tell the old stories in a new way for a new age. That’s the philosophy behind the new theater. I’ve heard that Attrasca actually falls from a great height in the play, into a net, at the end. People who’ve seen it say you get an excellent sense of what heights the emperor aspired to and the depths to which he subsequently fell.”
He turned the fork on a big chunk of melon, slicing through it with the side.
“I hope in the play it’s clear that Attrasca was pushed,” my father said, frowning. “When Attrasca fell, it was a sad day for the Empire. Probably the beginning of its end, though it took hundreds of years to unravel. But the seeds were planted then.”
“Attrasca was your ancestor, wasn’t he?” Cassis said.
“The Aliente trace their roots back to him, yes.”
“I’ve always thought Attrasca a fascinating character. All the stories make it sound as if he formed the Empire singlehandedly. And then to lose it all…”
“On a betrayal,” I said. “His wife gave him up to her lover, didn’t she?”
“No, you’re thinking of something else, Kyrra,” my father said absently, teasing a piece of snail meat from its shell with a tiny, two-pronged fork.
Cassis looked up from his plate. “It’s a fairy story, right? The one they recast as a romance last season. With the prince who leaves his kingdom on a search for knowledge. When he finds it, he wraps it in golden cloth and locks it in a golden casket and returns to his castle, only to find that his wife has taken a lover and they’ve been plotting to steal this beautiful thing he’s brought back.”
“And when the wife and her lover try to take possession of the chest, he must have them both killed,” I added eagerly, remembering. We had a troupe of mummers come and play the story for us at Midwinter…although I didn’t want to admit that part to Cassis. He’d just think me provincial. “But now the castle is hopelessly tainted by the tragedy of their love…”
“…and he rides off into the wood, giving up his throne forever and bestowing the golden casket upon a lowly servant girl…”
“Who, of course, turns out to be a long-lost princess.” I grinned, unable to help it. “There do seem to be a lot of long-lost princesses running around in these stories.”
“But it’s so romantic, isn’t it? I saw it performed in the Amphitheater itself. When the prince ordered his wife taken away to be executed, he actually wept real tears. You could see them reflected on his face in the lantern lights.”
I sighed. “I would so love to see a play in a theater. I’ve never been.”
“Mestere,” Cassis said, turning to my father. “This is a situation you must rectify. The new theaters are a measure of how far we have advanced. No longer can it be said that one must travel to Qalfa or Dakkar for learning and culture. Liera is no backwater town anymore. We are reclaiming our heritage.”
My father traded an amused glance with my mother before he answered. “Interpreting it, you mean,” he said.
Cassis paused in the act of cutting his eggplant. “But that is what one does with history, isn’t it, Mestere? One must always interpret it. One can’t just…lock it in a casket and carry it around under one’s arm. It’s a different world now than the one the Etereans left us. Why should the Qalfans claim all the navigation tables? Why should Dakkar own the technology that builds better weapons? Haven’t our shipwrights built faster ships than the Qalfans? Haven’t our engineers discovered again how to build clocks and arches? Why should our playwrights not celebrate the old stories for the benefit of Liera?”
“You know, all of this could have been prevented if more people simply learned to read Eter over the years. Then you would know what was really in the texts.”
“Aren’t the translations faithful?”
“Translations,” my father scoffed, and leaned forward to point at Cassis. “This, right here, is the problem. No one wants to know what Attrasca actually said, but what some puffed-up scholar in a university tower thinks he’s said —”
“Papa,” I cut in, before my father could get too far into one of his favorite arguments, “I believe we were talking about the possibility of me going to the theater.”
“Perhaps…” Cassis said slowly. “Perhaps it might be arranged…for me to escort you—your family—if you were to visit, Mestere. At least…to show you to your section.”
Above my head, my mother and father again traded glances, this time of surprise and alarm. I expected them to react in such a way, given that Cassis was a Prinze. Perhaps he could show my father to his section, but my mother? Me? We both had Caprine blood.
I cast all awareness of their fears aside. My attention was given completely to Cassis, watching as he rolled the stem of his wineglass between his thumb and forefinger, his eyes on the ripple of wine against the sides of the glass.
Then he looked up and caught my gaze. Just for an instant, until my mother turned the conversation deftly back to safer ground. But it was an instant that made me shiver.
“I think the weather may start to turn soon,” my mother said. “Already the breeze shifts and grows cooler.”
“Kyrra, that young man is like a fox among pigeons,” my mother told me later that night, as we sat overlooking the sweltering room where our minor nobles and gavaros danced. “He didn’t come here just to talk to you about the theater. He’s a Prinze; there’s something he’s after.”
I sniffed. “Perhaps the Prinze have realized that fighting the Caprine saps their treasury. Did Father take the offer to ship our silk?”
She faced me, and I had to look at her. “It’s a few chests of held-back silk, Kyrra. You are not silk. Be mindful of the chair in which you sit.”
She leaned over and touched the arm of my chair. It was a smaller version of my parents’ chairs, although theirs were carved with figures of Tekus the Father God and his wife, and mine was carved with figures of the goddess Ekyra, patroness of fortune, for whom I had been named. The chair was meant for the Aliente heir and had been left unfinished for a long time. Some months after I bled my first woman’s blood, my father presented it to me, carved with images of my namesake, a winsome woman with long, flowing hair. I had never liked the chair but would never tell my father so; it was uncomfortable, and in every pose, Ekyra’s face looked vacant as a wax doll’s. I could not imagine a goddess would be so lifeless.