In a notebook she made a notation for her growing file of cross-referenced art and buyers. Ink or graphite, figures, hatching — Luntu, from Little Green Fork. Someday she’d find a patron who would want just this style of work from an unknown artist. She would look for clues, and remember everything she’d seen.
This was the work, she thought, as she sealed the envelope with wax. This was the work she’d trained all her life to do. But at home, she’d have files upon files, hundred-year-old accounts, and no opportunity to build new connections or uncover new talent. Everything had been accomplished years ago — everything that mattered had already been done. There was no room for the discovery of a talented ink artist in a print shop in a distant town, or for the unraveling of a new patron’s preferences, delivering just what they wanted even if they had no words to explain what they wanted beyond good. She could have been pushing some patron’s great-nephew’s unimaginative paintings to a society drone who only cared about what everyone else had hanging in their parlors.
Of course, working for the Despana Agency had its advantages. She was sugarcoating her own so-called noble struggle, overlooking the benefits of her father’s path. She would have taken her place in a venerated legacy. She would never have had to worry about taking double shifts to afford a studio table, or making payments on an apartment, or convincing people that art was worth appreciating even if it didn’t depict yourself or your ancestors. It was a trade-off, a choice.
She set the reply aside and picked up the second of the artists’ letters. She’d answer those, then her father’s letter, before reading Nelle’s. Studying before novels. Dinner before dessert.
Midway through the third artist’s letter, Keifon approached, resting his hand on the other chair in the writing nook. “I think the beans are ready. How’s it coming?”
Agna stretched her arms over her head. “It’s going well. Thank you. Out of the twelve artists’ names I got from Dara, two are retired, and seven have responded to at least say maybe. Not bad odds.”
“Good. I can try this recipe, if you’d rather keep writing. At least the mashing part.”
“That’s all there is, really. Nah, I’d like a break. Unless you’d like to trade, and convince my father that I don’t have to go home and be lectured.” She stood, planting her hands in the small of her back to stretch.
“Is it that bad? Do they need you at home? ‘Cause I’ll—”
“Stop,” she said, lifting a hand. “There. Stop. It’s a contest of wills, that’s all. We’ll argue till the end of the world, or until my sister’s future kids take over the business. Till then, it won’t kill me.”
He sighed. She translated: nothing is as important as the continuity of the family legacy, even our lives and happiness. She could have smacked him again — his family had taken everything they could take from him, including his name, to save their reputations. Family legacies could go hang. Besides, it wasn’t as if the company would go under without her. Her father wasn’t impossibly old yet, he had good junior agents, and either his grandchildren or his grand-nieces and nephews — Marco and Violetta’s future children would be artistic geniuses — would carry the business on down the line. It could skip a generation, like left-handedness or the ability to whistle. Agna refused to bow to it. That would mean fear, and admitting that her father had been right all along.
The kitchen had begun to fill with the scent of baking bread. Keifon had just fed the kittens, who bent over their bowls in intent silence. Agna drained the pot and mixed spices and garlic into it before taking up the masher. It was the ideal instrument for working off a little aggravation. It anchored her in her real life, here and now. Her life in Murio was another world, another lifetime. Her parents never had to cook for themselves, let alone needing her to do so. Her role there wasn’t to take up tools. Her role was to be one. In Wildern, she could pick up ingredients at the market square and burn her first attempts at new recipes and share the successes with her companion. It was common and prosaic, and that alone set it apart. She was supposed to be destined for greater things, and to take joy in a well-made dinner was its own small rebellion.
Perhaps it was childish, but with every day that passed in Wildern, it seemed stranger to get up in the morning and leave the bed unmade and swan out into the sitting room to have your housekeeper serve you breakfast. It was how she’d lived every day of her life until she went away to the Academy, and she no longer knew it. This was real, now. She wiped her forehead on her sleeve and stretched her shoulders.
“Need any help?”
She turned away from the counter. Keifon still had oven mitts on from checking the bread. He looked so concerned that she had to smile. “I’m fine. Thanks.”
“Let me know.”
She saluted with the masher. “I’ll do that.”
Keifon: On the Path
Keifon felt increasingly conspicuous as he walked west. After the theater district, he passed through a wide band of middle-class city houses interspersed with corner tea shops and greengrocers and the occasional small, leafy park. At this hour of the morning, even on a festival day, the children were in school, and many of the shops and offices were still open for business. The streets were quiet.
He’d spent both Resurrections since coming to this country in the same mountainous area far to the southeast; it was a side effect of working on a year-long traveling circuit. The caravan’s presence at the local festival had infused more money and people into the economy, and their celebration had grown joyously out-sized compared to the size of the surrounding towns. Here, where the shops stayed open till noon, they might not take the holiday as seriously. Still, he could not pass up the chance to find the Daranite church at last and then spend an evening out with his friend, even if Wildern’s observation of the Resurrection was lacking.
Beyond the middle-class neighborhood, the streets emptied, apart from a few walkers and carriages heading in the same direction as himself. The houses were larger and detached from one another; some were separated from their neighbors on wooded lots outlined with ironwork fences. They still looked like Wildernian houses to him. Architecture was Agna’s strong suit, not his. They had similar timbers across their facades and similar pitched roofs, even if they were another story or two taller, with rambling wings and the occasional decorative tower.
This was where Agna should have moved, he thought, running his hand percussively over the bars of a fence as he passed. All of this — the planting beds laid out with flowers and shredded bark, the sweeping driveways, the carriage houses as big as their apartment — spoke of young patricians. These were not ancestral estates, but these houses and the servants who ran them would keep well-to-do young couples in comfort as they started families and moved up in their parents’ businesses.
The gentle strikes of the fence bars were making his fingers tingle. Keifon linked his hands behind his back.
She had chosen this life freely. She had turned down a life like this, the life her family had offered her, to chase her dream. Every day in that apartment, every meal they cooked for one another, every hour that they sat reading on the new couch with the kittens stretched out on the cushion between them, she drifted further from the life she should have led. Everything he tried so hard not to love, to depend upon, was an instrument of her slow downfall.
She had chosen it, and all he could do was to watch. Was this how Eri had felt, watching him destroy himself? He watched his shadow preceding him, gliding along the walkway. That had been wholly destructive, though. The only good that had come of it — apart from the few precious hours of nothing inside his head — was the camaraderie of his youth. They’d packed elbow to elbow into any tavern that would take their apprentices’ pittances. He’d traded his health and his sanity and his self-respect for friendship then, as well as for that cherished numbness. He’d met Fan in that crowd. He’d met Eri.
Living under her rightful station wouldn’t do the same damage to Agna that he’d done to himself
. It was a loss of potential, and a turning away from her true place in the world. She was destined for better things. As much as he might want things to be different, she did not belong with a nameless foreigner in a second-floor apartment over an empty dry-goods store.
A horse snorted in the street, startling Keifon from his thoughts. He squared his shoulders and pulled the scrap of paper with Dr. Rushu’s sketched map out of his pocket. Just ahead. The streets were sprawled out and lined with trees here, so he might not see it until he was close.
He mentally practiced his greeting, and hoped that nervousness would not exacerbate his accent. Hello, I’m Keifon the Medic, from the Benevolent Union, formerly of the Yanweian National Army. Blessed Resurrection. He did not have a family line to recite anymore. It would have to do. The only way he knew to settle his nerves for good was to put on the joking, flirty tone that he had used so often in the traveling clinic, which was hardly appropriate for a Daranite church on its highest holiday. He’d slipped into it once or twice in front of Dr. Rushu, when his patient’s pain or fear called out for a distraction — a diverting joke while he set a bone, or a smile while he tested for reflexes. He didn’t want his mentor to take him as frivolous.
A rider turned across the walkway ahead of him, and he craned to see between the trunks of the next stand of trees. He could see a sliver of stone wall between the branches. Keifon cleared his throat and straightened his belt as he walked.
The rider handed over her horse to the stable minders at the nearest corner of the church grounds. Keifon waited for a pair of solid chestnuts to pass, pulling a small enclosed carriage, and nodded at one of the stable minders as he crossed their path.
Wildern’s Church of Darano rose out of the pine trees like an outcropping of the mountains. Marble statues of the crimson god, with his sword and shield, bracketed the front doors of the church. Keifon slipped into the stream of congregants as they converged on the door. From inside the church, he could hear a quiet hymn on drum and horn behind a polite murmur of conversation. He passed inside and let his eyes adjust to the candlelight and the oblique streams of morning light through the windows.
The benches were more than half empty, and many of the worshipers remained standing, milling about and greeting one another. All of the congregants seemed to be Kaveran here — he knew there were other Yanweians in Wildern, and part of him had hoped they might have been Daranites as well. Dr. Rushu herself gave a vague wave in the Tufarians’ direction, but had not attended in years.
Of course, that did not mean that he couldn’t find fellowship here. Keifon scolded himself for this as he weaved between the parishioners up the aisle to the altar. Despite the grand estates surrounding the church, the people attending this service seemed to represent a wider cross-section of Wildern’s population. There were young families with their children, distinguished patricians in heavy wool trimmed in embroidery and fringe, and elderly people in the front benches, laughing amongst themselves.
He reached the altar, dug his offering out of his money bag, and tossed it onto the pile before folding his hands and bowing his head. Blessed Darano, may Your justice be clear and Your power sure on this day of Your rebirth into the world. In Your name.
It was a crime in Yanwei to wear the insignias of an army he no longer represented, and his conscience would not let him break the law even in Kavera — but he had guiltily brought the army pins along in his pocket. He resisted the impulse to roll them between his fingers, keeping his hands locked in the god’s sign. And though I no longer live in Your name as one of Your chosen swords, may my life follow Your word and serve Your justice all the same. It might not make sense, and it might not be enough. But the crimson god would hear him. None of these parishioners here had dedicated their lives to Darano, and they were still welcome in the church. He was expecting too much of himself.
Keifon crossed before the front benches and made his way down the side aisle, in the angle under the shafts of sunlight. A Kaveran teenager in red acolyte’s robes — no armor yet, still an apprentice — intercepted him before he found a seat. “Blessed Resurrection!”
“Blessed Resurrection,” Keifon said, swallowing the rest of his greeting. The pause to pray had thrown him into a more contemplative mood than he’d intended.
The acolyte dropped his hands from the god’s sign, propping them on his hips as though they’d just met one another in a market square and not a high holy day. “I don’t think I’ve seen you before — are you new here?”
“Uh, yes, fairly new.” So much for his rehearsal. “I’m a doctor’s apprentice at the Benevolent Union hospital. Keifon the Medic.”
“Ahhh, like Fujia the Papermaker! I see.”
A jolt of dread shot into Keifon’s stomach. He did not know the name, but it didn’t matter. All nameless were the same. The young man had tossed off the name brightly, a simple matter of recognition, not condemnation. He clearly didn’t understand what it meant. Keifon couldn’t put together a reply before the acolyte went on. “Well, welcome, and be sure to come back for regular services. We have them every day at noon, every seventh day at dusk. All right?” Having delivered his breathless pitch, he moved on through the crowd. Keifon blinked after him as some part of his brain noted the information. Every day at noon, every seventh day at dusk. Yes. Now find a seat.
Every bench probably had its regular family, lining up in the same order every day, every week — but on a holiday, when the vaguely observant showed up in droves, the natural order fell apart. Keifon found a seat near the door, separated by a stretch of polished pine wood from the closest parishioner. He leafed through the hymnal in the rack on the back of the next bench, waiting for services to start. He had come here to talk to new people, to get a sense of the community, and so far he had gotten one standard reminder from an apprentice and a nod to a stable minder. Maybe they had a social hour after services. He could hope. Until then, he didn’t have to introduce himself to his god. They were very well acquainted indeed.
He had discovered two things, then, aside from the service times. The Kaverans here accepted Yanweians well enough to know them by name, but not well enough to understand the difference between respectable folk and not. This papermaker might be a murderer or a tax dodger, or simply born in the gutter. In any case, he or she did not have a family to ensure his or her trustworthiness, the way Keifon had depended upon the Army and then the Benevolent Union. He recited their names after his own to explain that he was not dangerous, that someone was watching over his shoulder, that there were repercussions for his actions. He was beginning to doubt that anyone here understood any of it. Agna refused to accept it, but she was even more foreign than the Kaverans, from her strange, chaotic land of clashing individual wills. And she might be even more stubborn than the rest of her kind. He could believe that easily.
Keifon closed the hymnal. His thoughts had drifted to her again. Darano was not the god to ask for guidance on such matters — he was the arbiter of justice and the defender of rightness, but he did not govern the tidal shifts of human hearts. That was Lundra’s realm, and the Lundrans did not have a permanent church yet. His next meeting with Father Tufari was in six days. He would wait, and pray to the Lady in the meantime. That, too, would have to be good enough.
A man and a woman of about his age, trailed by a toddler, filed side-wise into his bench. They secured their child between them, where it could get into the least trouble. The man leaned down to peck the child on the head. Their clothes were neat but unadorned, not unlike his own, though they had Kaveran complexions. The woman glanced his way, and he swallowed and attempted a nod. “Is it all right if I sit here?”
She waved airily. “Oh yes, of course. We only ever come on holidays ourselves, you’ve got as much a right as we do.”
The priests who had raised him up from nothing had groused about the holiday attendees as they walked through the halls after the services. After months confined to the church grounds, Keifon had envied the fly-by-nig
ht parishioners, and then hated himself for it. He had been nearly ready to leave the Church’s care by the Feast of the Resurrection, and he had spent much of his waking hours trying to read the scriptures between his hours of splitting firewood and scrubbing the church’s floors. The scriptures said little about the frequency of attendance, but the priests had to know more than he did, so he accepted their view. Even they in their wisdom were conflicted. The church’s upkeep depended on the wave of donations that the festival brought, but so few of the festival-goers came back week after week.
He stopped himself before he could say anything. That had been his old self, a life and a half ago. What would his new self say? After an imperceptible pause, he smiled. “I’m sure it’s hard to make the time with little ones around.”
The young mother laughed, resting her hand on her child’s head. “Isn’t that the truth. We make it when we can.”
In the aisles the acolytes lit incense and candles, and the parishioners came forward in ones and twos to make their offerings. Keifon traced the swooping lines of the draperies, crimson and white. So much was unfamiliar here, if he thought only of his past life. But after two years in this country, the words he caught from the conversations around him were familiar, as were the tones and shapes of the strangers’ faces. He felt conspicuous at times when someone turned his way and stared for a moment too long, but he was no longer fully alien. Was it possible to be something in between, not born and bred on this soil, but transplanted and grown there? Another question for Lundra, perhaps.
He could ask Darano if it were right and fair, if he did wrong by trying to make a new life here instead of subsisting on the fragments of his old one. So far, his prayers and his readings had turned up no answers, only a belief that he was not doing wrong. The gods would not have allowed it to happen, if it were wrong. They would not have brought him to the Benevolent Union and to Agna; they would not have led him to the half-empty apartment over the former dry-goods store. They had given him happiness, and so it could only be a reward. The joy that filled him when he washed dishes next to Agna or watched the kittens fall asleep in his lap had to be part of the gods’ blessing.
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