Hearts of Tabat

by Cat Rambo

  She could tell that Leonoa would have liked to have argued things out further as Adelina pulled her away from the windows, but the artist shrugged and followed Adelina with pragmatic haste.

  Indeed, the rioters had made no attempts to interfere with the work of those servants appointed to undertake the event. Adelina didn’t know whether the lack was oversight or an act of courtesy. Probably the former, given that riots seldom hold to the usual standards of etiquette.

  CHAPTER 2

  They were not the only people with the wisdom to flee. At the immediate exit of the building, a few had accumulated, arguing whether to attempt to face the mob in front in order to gather their vehicles.

  The earlier rain had thinned and turned to snow, dots of ice drifting down through the crisp air to disappear before they ever reached the ground. High overhead, the thin cloud layer seemed too insubstantial to produce any form of snow—wispy cirrocumulus clusters, the three Moons touching them with red and purple and white light, almost gaudy against the night sky.

  A burst of fireworks, matching the Moons, collided with the darkness. Somewhere the Moon Temples were having yet another political rally.

  “They’re pretty enough,” Leonoa said, “but I’m looking forward to being able to fall asleep in the evenings without fireworks and shouting.”

  The wind reached long fingers down the back of Adelina’s cloak and made her shiver. Leonoa looked more lopsided than usual, as though she had withdrawn into herself at the same cold touch but had been unable to do so evenly.

  “We’re only a staircase away from the tram,” Adelina said.

  “I’m sorry,” Leonoa said. She gestured ruefully at her legs.

  Adelina flushed, embarrassed. She prided herself that she did not make the delicate painter feel as though her deformities, the result of some childhood disease, made her less than anyone else. Small consolation that it took a riot to drive me past the bounds of etiquette.

  “There really isn’t enough time to stand here letting you feel guilty about that, not if there’s not enough time for me to pontificate about art,” Leonoa said, nudging her.

  “Very well,” Adelina said. “I will save feeling guilty for some other occasion.”

  “That’s always what Bella says she’ll do, but she never seems to get around to it,” Leonoa drawled.

  They would have laughed, but they heard shouts from behind them, and a whoosh of flame. Heat flared and the snow around them in the air vanished.

  “The building’s going up!” Adelina gasped, and pulled Leonoa across the alleyway and down a few houses. They paused there. Adelina would have been flummoxed as to what to do except for the sight of a pedal cab, apparently en route to the front of the gallery. She waved and flagged it down. We could go to the Press but Leonoa looks almost done in. We will go and sit quietly and drink chal at Dripkettle and give her time to recover.

  “What’s happening tonight?” she asked the driver as she climbed into the basket beside Leonoa.

  “A fire at Bernarda’s gallery, very close,” the driver, a freckle-faced Northerner, said cheerfully. “All sorts of crabs in tonight’s nets.”

  “But something else must be happening,” Adelina insisted.

  Leonoa gave her a curious look. “Why do you say that?”

  “Listen,” Adelina said. She gestured towards the distant sound of the fire and the crowd. “The Duke’s Peacekeepers have yet to show up. Why would it take them so long?”

  Leonoa frowned. “That’s odd.” She cocked her head. “No, you’re wrong. There they are.”

  The distant whistles were audible to Adelina as well and she knew what they meant. But still. They should have been there nearly as soon as it started. “And how did news of your paintings spread far enough to such a crowd without anyone realizing there would be trouble?”

  “They did take a while,” Leonoa admitted. “Would they have been coming from somewhere distant?”

  “I cannot think of where,” Adelina said. She tapped the driver’s shoulder. “But now we are bound for Dripkettle, in the Plaza near the waterfall.”

  “Aye.” The driver picked up the yoke and headed out into the middle of the street. Her hair was glazed with ice crystals, and Adelina put her own cloak around Leonoa, trying to shelter her from the worst of the cold.

  “Oh, do stop fussing,” Leonoa snapped, but with enough good nature in her tone that it didn’t sting. “I’m not a child.”

  “No, but Bella said that Winters trouble your bones worse lately,” Adelina said.

  Leonoa grimaced. “My cousin takes far too much interest in the state of my health.”

  “What would you prefer she worry about?” Adelina asked.

  “So few matters trouble her,” Leonoa said. “It makes it refreshing to be around her. Bella makes no pretenses or promises. She simply is what she is and what she always will be.”

  “But will she always be it?” Adelina asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “She cannot be Champion of Tabat forever. That’s why we have the yearly match of Winter’s Champion against Spring’s. She cannot keep winning for more decades.”

  “True enough, but she acts as though she can,” Leonoa said. “Sometimes I think she does so because she cannot imagine herself living any other role. Without it, she might not know who to be anymore.”

  Adelina contemplated this. Resolute, infuriating Bella, so sure of herself—hard to imagine her somehow at odds with any situation. She said, the cold wind swallowing her almost-shouted words, “I hope Bel will be all right.”

  “Do you really doubt that she will be?” Leonoa said. She studied Adelina. “And what about you, Adelina? I thought perhaps you’d come to the gallery to survey for some new lover. You’ve been a while without alliances, as far as I know.”

  “I’ve got no time for entanglements. Hiding my business with Spinner Press from my mother takes long enough. I worry she’ll introduce some marital alliance sometime, some likely Merchant man or woman eager to tie themselves to the Nettlepurses.”

  “My family may not approve of my art, but at least they don’t prohibit it outright, the way you say your mother would if she knew.”

  “And she would, trust me. It would be the final straw of the bundle Bella built. Maybe that’s why she’s encouraged no other alliances. She’s afraid I’ll find someone worse she’ll hate worse than she ever did Bella.”

  They suddenly laughed together. The fear and hysteria of the riot ebbed away as they trundled along through the streets, climbing upward to the Plaza that lay directly below the cliffs housing the Duke’s castle. A center of social activity, the Plaza had been the first location (other than the Duke’s castle itself) to display the aetheric lights, brilliant, magical in origin, revealing magics and malignant forces, designed by the College of Mages.

  Dripkettle, a newer teahouse owned by one of the Duke’s many cousins, lay on the western side of the Plaza. Its rooftop veranda, pleasant in the Summer and not navigable in seasons like the Winter, overlooked the waterfall that thundered endlessly in the Plaza’s center, falling through a great silver hoop and not emerging from the other side, not a drop, to touch those on the Plaza just below it.

  The wafting mist touched Adelina’s coat and netted Leonoa’s dark hair with silvery, moist fuzz as they entered. Showy and pointless, so very like Alberic, the Duke who commissioned it.

  Inside the building, bulbous paper lanterns threw blue and gold light over a late-night crowd—Nobles and the wealthier Merchant heirs that the first group battened on.

  A guitarist was plinking out a song in one corner. “Come home to the marshes …” he crooned, eyes focused on his instrument. Gods, that old thing, Hearts of Tabat. What a sappy song. Why are love songs more popular when they are maudlin? And then, Yanyapri, when did I get so old? Am I truly already three and a half decades?

  They found an opposite corner towards the back, quieter than towards the front. Adelina nodded at the server, who hu
rried over with cups.

  The teahouse was spacious, but constructed to create a feeling of coziness. Low screens surrounded each table, creating isolated islands in which conversation could take place. Fish scales of paper rounds made up the screens, the fluttering circles strung together on wire and fastened into a framework that could be moved around to create rooms within rooms. The scales moved in every breeze, an effect that Adelina thought charming during the daytime.

  But now, in the late evening, with the corners of the teahouse abandoned, they created an eerie effect, as though the room they were moving through was breathing. Adelina found it unsettling.

  Much like thoughts of Bella.

  Leonoa looked around, rubbing her hands together. “Bella always insists on the Duke’s teahouse,” she said. “This place seems much livelier.”

  “Do you think she’ll ever settle down, start a family?” Adelina asked, curious.

  “I don’t know that she’s ever found anyone. And Merchants have so many contracts when it comes to weddings and alliances.”

  “You sound as though you’ve investigated it.”

  Leonoa shrugged. Adelina studied her. When Bella had described Leonoa’s latest love affair, she’d spoken as though it was a temporary, flimsy thing, but this meant Leonoa had thought to make the arrangement permanent.

  Bella had said the latest partner had wings, as though she was a Beast, and claimed it the result of a curse. How can someone who can be mistaken for a Beast deal with legal contracts and satisfying them?

  They would perpetually be in a terrible situation, miscategorized. Perhaps the woman that Bella had described, Leonoa’s odd lover, had simply given up and embraced it, pretending to be a Beast simply to get along? A very dangerous pretense, given that Beasts have no rights. Only their owners have rights.

  An unsettling thought curdled her stomach. Does Leonoa pretend to be her lover’s owner? That would be just as bad, surely. People fucked Beasts, certainly, but they did not form relationships with them. That would be like forming a relationship with your bed or your chal mug.

  Leonoa’s paintings had said differently.

  She thought about how to raise the question of the lover that Bella had mentioned. Did she prompt Leonoa to paint things so treasonous and heretical? Were Leonoa’s sympathies somehow twisted by the lover’s presence? What was the best way to bring up such a question, without seeming as though she was meddling?

  “You’re frowning,” Leonoa said, raising an eyebrow.

  “I am thinking that sometimes there are questions that one simply cannot ask, and that is such a one, if you were to ask it of Bella,” Adelina said.

  Leonoa simply nodded and they let the conversation lapse into comfortable silence, letting the gentle noises of the room, the clink and clatter of chal being served, the muted throb of talk all around them, take the place of speech. The comfortable silence of old friends. Adelina relished it in the place of the constant chatter that had filled the gallery, so full of people trying to play games with each other, with words that could be read in a multiplicity of ways.

  She said, “Shall we lay wagers whether or not she’ll show up? I’d lay coin she expects us to simply go home after we’ve been waiting long enough.”

  “I think that is farther than she would have thought it through,” Leonoa said tartly.

  They caught each other rolling their eyes simultaneously and laughed. While Bella had been the bond that had initially tied them together, a strong friendship had developed over the years independent of the Gladiator. Adelina had persuaded her mother to commission the portrait of Adelina and Bella that hung on her wall and, on more than one occasion had hired Leonoa to provide the pictures of Bella from which the black-and-white illustrations used by Spinner Press were derived. Bella’s exploits were the engine that had driven the Press to profitability. Adelina would have hired anyone to keep her pleased. Luckily Leonoa was very talented. Perhaps even a genius.

  The question that had circled in her head all the time they were fleeing through the darkened streets surfaced again. She blurted, “But why, Leonoa?”

  Leonoa did not pretend she hadn’t understood the question. She said, “I don’t entirely know. I had been thinking for a while now, though, that art should do something more than preserve an Age and show its costumes and customs. Its appurtenances. It should be more than a mirror—it should ask questions, because it can ask them in a way that people will heed.”

  “Did something prompt this path?”

  “Every few luncheons, I ride a tram up the hillside in order to sit in the Plaza here at midday and listen to the speakers. At first I simply went with a sketchpad. I thought, this is the changing of an Age, and someone must record these moments. Then I started listening, and the more I listened, the more I realized that the world was opening up, that wealth of possible changes hover waiting for us to reach out, to wield them.”

  Her voice’s throaty timbre gave Adelina pause. Had some spell been cast on the artist to enrapture her so, or was this simply a soul’s enthusiasm for what it believed to be right? Leonoa had always been given to deep passions, the sort of commitments many saved for their partners, and which Leonoa gave, unabashedly, to the causes that moved her.

  The sorts of passions Adelina had not seen since school days, when they had all given themselves to one cause or another, in the way that children of the privileged had throughout the centuries. Most of them had laid aside their loves when they returned to the world outside university life, but Adelina had been allowed to nurse her passion for scholarship. And now she feared Emiliana was going to choke that off.

  Maybe she was being overly suspicious of her mother. The woman was busy, head of the Merchant’s Guild and on the board of two separate banks, not to mention managing the Merchants’ Political Party right now in a constant round of rallies, balls, and fundraisers. It was a wonder that her mother had time enough to eat and breathe. She would have no moments to spare thinking about her errant daughter.

  But there’d been something in the way Emiliana had looked at her as she had come down the stairs to meet Bella earlier that evening. An appraisal that assessed her as carefully as a balance sheet, a column of numbers representing strengths and weaknesses, her affiliations to the Trade Gods of Gregarity, Capital, Determination—scads of others, a complicated astrology that only sworn officials of the Gods could work out. Her mother was trained in these things, and somewhere in her mother’s office was a chart, labeled with Adelina’s name at the top, predicting her talents and weak spots, mentioning the moments that she should watch for throughout her life.

  Adelina suspected that her scholarly inclinations were clearly spelled out in the horoscope and that this—rather than any particular fondness or feelings of indulgence—had reconciled her mother to her child’s dependence on the world of the written word. If she knew Adelina had gone even further into it, she’d be furious.

  What would it mean if the charts were cyphering out some other path for her now? She knew that there was no such thing as fortune telling, but her affiliations to the various Gods of Trade and Commerce would indicate general directions and which would advantage her more than others.

  “Lost in thought?” Leonoa asked, and Adelina’s attention came back to the moment of the table.

  She said the first thing that came to her, as though she had been woken from sleep. “I wish that Bella were here. I know she’s fine—she always lands on her feet—but it would be good to know that for sure.”

  Leonoa and her reflection both stared at her in mute sympathy. Adelina felt a desire to protest, to say, “No, I don’t think of her as much as that sounds, I’ve grown accustomed to the friendship,” but knew enough to stop herself before those words spilled in turn.

  The second night bell sounded. She wondered again where Bella was.

  Leonoa tilted her cup to consider the dregs of her chal. “I am tired enough to go home, though. And my friend will be waiting.”

&nbs
p; “Friend?” Adelina asked, trying for an encouraging tone that might draw out details of Leonoa’s lover.

  She achieved something much less subtle than she hoped for, judging by Leonoa’s expression, the dark eyebrows like sardonic pen marks as the artist regarded her in silence for a moment. But after that period, all that Leonoa said was, “Good friend.” And drained the last of her chal.

  After a hesitation into which no words settled, Adelina scraped her chair back across the blue and gold tiles and stood. “Come, I will find cabs for the two of us,” she said. “It is far too cold and late to walk. This hour of the night, footpads might be about.”

  She paid the bill for both of them, despite Leonoa’s protest. “If Bernarda ponies up the money for your works, then you may buy the next meal,” she said. She was well acquainted by now with the manner in which a painter’s daily funds might fluctuate.

  “I don’t know that she will,” Leonoa admitted with a sigh. “She has always been prone to take advantage. If she can claim she was disaccommodated by my work, and, therefore she should not pay for any of it, I am sure she can find an advocate willing to bring it to the Duke. And do you know his plan for the Peacekeepers, after the elections, whether or not he should win?”

  Adelina raised an eyebrow. More rumors. Alberic was said to be coming up with all sorts of plans in the time before the elections, so much that it was reaching the point of parody.

  “He will bill whoever’s trouble caused the Peacekeepers to be summoned,” Leonoa said.

  “What if they cannot pay?”

  “Then their goods will be sold to pay what can be paid, and they will be thrown into debt-slavery until the rest is settled.”

  Adelina blinked as the idea collided with her Merchantly sensibilities. Unheard of, to deal in people as though they were Beasts. “What? That is possible by law, but no one pursues it nowadays.”

  “There is a reason they call him cheese-paring,” Leonoa said.

  “The ideas that people have of Merchants, he puts them all to shame.” Adelina scowled into her mug’s cooling dregs.