Everyone’s attention swung over to Agna as the pair separated. She was the outsider in this scenario, in this studio where she’d never set foot, pretending to know all there was to know about the art market that those two lived and breathed every day. Letta nodded in reply to a question too quiet to hear, and her paramour turned and approached Agna with his hands out.
“So good to finally meet you in person, Agna. I hope you had a good trip.”
“Yes, thank you.” She accepted his formal handclasp and hoped her palms wouldn’t sweat. He was half a head taller than she was, and she tilted her head awkwardly to mime the cheek kisses proper for extended family. “Pleasure to meet you as well, Marco.”
Soon enough she would have to meet more of her artist contacts. She couldn’t freeze like this every time. But then, she hadn’t stayed up late writing about her theories and worries regarding her career with the rest of them. She hadn’t begun to regard the rest of them as her co-conspirators, her counterparts in the world her father had groomed her to lead. Just this one.
“We were thinking about dinner.” Letta’s hand rested on Marco’s arm. “Seems only fitting to celebrate, the four of us.”
“Perfect,” Marco said. “The usual?”
“Works for me. Lin?”
Lina was already on her feet, dusting her clothes off. As if in reply to the question Agna did not ask, Letta said, “There’s a little place right around the corner. The food is amazing, and they don’t have musicians, so it’s quiet.”
“Sounds nice,” Agna said. The brunch her parents’ new cook had made seemed very long ago. It didn’t seem possible that she had woken at sea this morning.
Letta stepped away. “Let me wash up and change, and we can get going. It’ll give you a chance to catch up.”
Catch up with what? In her letters she’d already spilled everything she hoped and believed with regard to her art career, and she’d mentioned her healing practice in passing, too. What else was there to talk about?
Letta and Lina gathered up the brushes and carried them to a sink in the corner. Marco’s shoes tocked on the floor as he walked toward the stack of canvases. “I heard you were back in town before noon. It’s the talk of the agency, Raniero’s heir returned at last.”
“Not for good.” He knew that, but she had to keep saying it.
“It’s a shame, on one hand. We could use you at the agency, these days. But on the other… I know how important this is to you.”
The hot shame that had collected in her chest alchemized into relief. Someone at the agency, in the heart of the serpents’ nest, understood. She should have known he would; he’d always been enthusiastic about her plans in his letters.
He was the wrong person in the wrong agency. He couldn’t really help her. Still, it wasn’t without meaning. “Thanks for understanding.”
Marco leaned on the wall with his arms folded. “I do hope you can find a way to consult, even at a distance. I want more forward-thinking buyers in my network.”
Agna found herself beginning to smile at his blithe confidence. My network, indeed. But the dream he held out — keeping her gallery, staying in touch with the agency — was beautifully tempting. “It’s too bad you aren’t my father’s heir instead. He’d never go for something like that.”
Marco’s voice dropped above a whisper. “Not for lack of your father’s trying, I assure you.”
A cool phantom wave swept through Agna’s skin. She’d once argued with Keifon about this impossible idea, that her father’s arrangement of the correspondence between herself and Marco was a front for a more troubling scheme. Coming as he did from a culture where arranged marriages were an everyday occurrence, he’d suggested that Agna’s father had hoped to connect Agna’s fate to her aunt’s ambitious underling’s. The kiss Marco had just shared with Letta buried that idea, but it didn’t mean her father hadn’t had those intentions all along.
She rolled her shoulders, fidgeting out the tension between her shoulder blades. “Not all of the old man’s ideas are good ones. I hope he hasn’t embarrassed you too badly.”
Marco shrugged. “I don’t take it personally. I’m the product of hundreds of years of political marriages; why would the suggestion bother me? It’s not that bad an idea, ultimately.”
Agna jerked her chin toward the sink, where her sister and cousin washed brushes with their backs turned. Marco’s mouth twisted ruefully. “Let and I are fine. A certificate from the courthouse doesn’t determine how we feel about one another.”
Rubbing her eyes, Agna tipped her head against the wall. He could still be her ally, even if he subscribed to outlandish notions about political marriages. Half of Keifon’s beliefs were more unnerving than that, and she managed to love him more than life. Either way, she would need to stay in touch with Marco if she wanted to stay in the loop about Murio’s art market; unlike her father, Marco would see her as a peer. She’d veer as far away from this marriage idea as she could until she was safely home in Wildern. Very far away. Continents away. Oceans. And then it wouldn’t trouble her again.
Letta returned from her sink and clipped her brushes onto a rack to dry, lined up next to her commission easel. With a wave to Marco, she ducked into one of the curtained-off sections of the studio. Marco and Lina chatted about the herbalists’ guild’s plans and which herbs were in season in her windowboxes, before moving onto the current theater season. Agna kept half an ear in that part of the conversation. Perhaps she could glean some interesting news or recommendations to take to Keth.
In a few minutes, Letta emerged, wearing deep red brocade and velvet in a modern fitted cut, polished knee-high boots, and a short cape. When she swanned up to Marco and linked her arm with his, they matched perfectly, an artistic parody of high-born excess. Next to them, Agna’s two-and-a-half-year-old dress felt like a sack. At least she could reclaim the rest of her old wardrobe, for what it was worth.
She followed her cousin, sister and pen pal down the stairs and into the streets of Letta’s neighborhood. As the sun had crept behind the buildings, the deep canyons between them had cooled, and lanterns drove off the shadows. The stalls selling textiles and pottery had given way to food carts and street-corner hawkers distributing advertisements for recitals and plays. In the cafes, patrons drank wine and Furoni coffee, sketching or writing in their notebooks or watching the crowd. Lina took Agna’s hand and held onto the edge of Letta’s cape as the four of them snaked through the press of people. Agna patted Lina’s arm, and her sister looked back with a thin smile. This was a larger number of people than Lina would have braved in a year’s time, when they were younger.
Before Agna could get her bearings or spot a sign, they had turned down a narrow staircase that clung to the side of a hill. It deposited them in a tiled courtyard full of tables, hemmed in by walls and laurel hedges. One side was bounded by a long tiled bar, and a series of doors led into the kitchens, which were built halfway underground. Another group of tables perched on the restaurant’s roof. Above them small candles were suspended along wires, shielded in glass globes, brighter than the incipient stars. A host swept up and guided them to a round table near a hedge, at the edge of the courtyard. Lina grabbed the chair that would put her back to the room, and Agna settled into one of the other spots.
The menu set her stomach to growling, even as a pang of homesickness struck her. She hadn’t been in a Nessinian restaurant in almost three years. There had been a time when she would hardly have had a concept of a Nessinian restaurant at all; her home culture had been invisible and omnipresent.
The group put in an order for wine and half a dozen dishes. Agna hadn’t tapped into her bank account yet, but she could pay for her share out of her pocket money when the time came.
When the wine came out, Agna seized the distraction and sipped a glass, listening to Letta and Marco’s conversation. Letta nimbly avoided particulars while bemoaning the uncreative requests made by some of her patrons — there were so many nobles’ port
raits, each as pompous as the last. Marco made the case that a sideline to her other work would demonstrate versatility, and tide over her work load when mythological and literary art was on the wane.
“Everyone’s shoring up their families’ reputations,” he said. “There’s too much on the line not to, these days. We buy art to show that we can, and to prove that nothing is wrong.” He thanked the servers as they covered the table with platters of olives, pickled vegetables, white bean spread and creamy cheese, and a broad basket of flatbread. The quartet filled their plates as Agna remembered the street signs and her mother’s elusive comments. The Families’ power struggles echoed into art as well.
“Marco, I was wondering. Are you going to be all right with this…” She twirled a hand in the air, taking in the atmosphere, the state of the nobility, Murio itself. “Have they pushed for your support?”
Lina’s eyes went wide, and Letta took a swallow of wine. Motioning for her to keep her voice down, Marco leaned in close. “Sorry. We’re in public. The less said about the Pircis, the better. I haven’t thrown in with them yet. They may fold before this is done, but I’m hoping your family’s support will float me. Better to be a Despana than a Pirci, these days.” He flashed a bitter smile that made Agna’s stomach sink.
“So why don’t you and Letta just get married?”
He looked past the tables of chattering young artists and nobles pretending to be artists. Not at Letta, and not at Agna. “Because we won’t have anyone forcing our hands. I’ll find a way out of this, some way that doesn’t turn our relationship into a staged farce just to keep me out of my family’s nonsense. It’s too important to cheapen.”
Agna drew back. “I’m sorry, I didn’t realize.”
“It’s all right.” He picked up his wine glass and returned to a normal tone. “Things are complicated. In my family, in your family, in the agencies. It’s unfortunate that you got pulled into it just now.”
“I’ve always been in it. I was just delaying the inevitable.” Agna tore off a chunk of bread. Marco’s last comment needled her. “Complicated in the agencies, how? Or our family? My father won’t tell me anything.” A look passed among the other three. Agna clenched her fingers on the edge of the table. “What?”
Lina patted her arm. “You don’t have to deal with it every day. I’m glad you don’t.”
“Deal with what?”
Letta flipped her hands. “The parents getting old and paranoid, mostly. Oh, you can’t stay young forever, hurry up and lock yourselves into repeating our lives so we feel better about ourselves. Mama’s got an excuse, the rest of them, well, no.”
It certainly matched what she’d seen from her father’s letters. “Excuse?”
“About a year ago she found something that turned out to be cancer. Spent six months back and forth from Blackhall. She’s more susceptible, you’d know more about that.”
The shift in her brain to scientific theory kept the worst of the anger out of her chest. People who had undergone the treatments Aunt Naire had undergone as a child, realigning her body to match her internal self, tended to run a slightly elevated risk of a few specific cancers. The more the healers changed in a body, the more they risked nudging the body’s energies out of alignment. Researching healers had worked on it for years, trying to perfect large-scale transformative healing without triggering such side effects.
So her aunt could have died. And her family had told her nothing.
Letta tore off bits of bread and tossed them at her plate as though she were feeding ducks. “They say she’s in the clear now. But she didn’t want word to get out. Doesn’t want to look weak.”
“Or start rumors that the agency was headed for a power vacuum,” Marco said.
Agna clamped down her wine-influenced urge to shout at them. They hadn’t come up with this pact of secrecy. They were only honoring Aunt Naire’s wishes. But the older generation was so stubborn that she wanted to wing a plate at her father’s head. “Do you think they’d re-merge Despana and Nocta, then? If they’re worried about the future, they’d be more secure shoring up one agency than spreading themselves too thin. Even with the risk of client bleed.”
Marco swirled the wine in his glass. “That’s just it. With the situation less than stable outside, they can’t take the risk. Not now. They’d need a better reason to merge, some positive catalyst, to explain it away.”
The air seemed to cool. “Positive?”
He did not look at her, or at anyone. “Turning both over to the same heir, say.”
“So… if I refuse to take over Despana, they can give them both to you.” As she spoke, her mind whirled through the ramifications. Handing over even a unified Despana-Nocta Agency — Despanocta? She bit down on the urge to giggle — would tie their reputation to the Pirci family, which, it seemed, was on shaky ground in the debate over the King’s successor. If one of the other Families forced the Pircis into exile, the agency would be discredited at best. “…No,” she said. “That wouldn’t work either.”
“Now you see,” Marco said.
“I do.” It would have been nice to have been told about this beforehand. But committing gossip about the nobles’ plans to paper and sending it overseas was a great way to get said Family undermined by a rival. It was already likely that Marco’s letters were intercepted and read, simply because of his name. Agna massaged her temples and dragged a bite of bread through a pool of herb-infused oil on her plate.
Her father was trying to pin her down to forestall the same kind of power vacuum, should anything happen to him. Her plans didn’t enter into the equation. This was bigger than her, bigger than the dreams she’d built. But Lina had been right, too. Simply following their father’s path benefited neither the agency nor anyone in it, and while it might not drive her mad, it would wear her down one day at a time.
“So what do we do?”
“Same thing they did,” Letta said breezily. “Make some heirs and dump it on them instead.”
“Not yet, thank you,” Marco said.
“Me, either,” Lina said.
“Not ever,” Agna said. “Not that much longer for you, at least, Li. Six more years.”
“Hm.” Lina refilled her glass. “So how do you like the food, Agna?”
Trying to let go of the frown that tightened her forehead, Agna followed the sidetrack. Talk of the restaurant’s offerings led to recommendations of more cafes and shops that Agna would have to try while she was in town. Her luggage haul for the return trip grew by the hour, it seemed — she’d have crates of art, at least one crate of delicacies, and now more cases of books and clothes, from her belongings in storage and from the shopping trips that tempted her now. Imagining all of this in her mostly-empty apartment in Wildern felt strange, as though she sought to lay a tracing of her old life on top of her new life.
The frivolity of the talk eased her worry for a while. Letta, Lina and Marco had been together long enough and shared enough common aspirations that chatter among them was easy and affectionate. When a shadow passed through Agna’s mind, it was only because she could not share her new life with them. It was easier to talk to them than it had been with the other healers at the hospital. Even though she had left and rooted her life in another country, she still belonged with them in some way.
Pushing an olive around her plate, she wondered how Keifon was getting along. He’d miss her, she could believe that much. This would be easier if she could talk it over with him. Or if, impossibly, her father had come to see her instead of summoning her home. That would solve half of her problems, if she could pull her father into the gallery by the arm and show off her first exhibit. She imagined taking Lina and Letta and Marco to the theater, or through the market square. She would pull together their tables in the kitchen and have a dinner party for everyone she loved.
Lina touched her arm. “Are you all right?”
“Sorry. Just… sorry you can’t come and see Wildern.”
“Someday.” Le
tta shrugged and popped a marble of cheese into her mouth. “When you have your gallery open I’ll have to exhibit there, right?”
Breathing more easily, Agna raised her glass. “It’s a deal.”
All of them had stayed behind the line of outright drunkenness, but as they meandered toward the stairs at the end of their meal, Agna felt unsteady on her feet. Letta threw an arm around Marco’s waist and the other around Agna’s shoulders, and Lina stepped in to close the circle. They broke before the lump in Agna’s throat could grow too tight.
“I’ll walk you home, Li,” Agna said as they climbed toward the street.
“I’ll be fine,” Lina said. “It isn’t far, you saw. And it isn’t that late.”
Agna squinted at her sister’s back. All their lives, she and their parents had needed to account for Lina. She couldn’t run errands alone. She wouldn’t leave the house after sundown. At holidays she could be trusted to shiver through one round of the relatives before bolting to her room, unless Esirel was there to cling to. Had Letta rubbed off on her that much? Or was she putting up a brave front?
Either way, she didn’t have the energy to argue at this hour. She let Lina’s refusal pass without comment.
At the street, Marco and Letta broke company with the sisters, as Marco offered sincere thanks for the opportunity to meet Agna in person at last. Reluctantly, Agna watched her sister turn toward her new neighborhood. Marco had paid their entire bill for dinner, over her protests, so she had more than enough money left for carriage fare to her parents’ apartment. Her pride could take the blow.
Keifon: Apple Season
Keifon set down the knife at the sound of a knock on the door. He pumped just enough water to splash the apple juice off his hands and dried them on his way down the stairs, tossing the towel across his shoulder as he opened the door.
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