Hearts of Tabat

by Cat Rambo

  “Ah, I do not know,” Leonoa said. “When a Merchant sets their mind to saving coins, they can do it with grace and ease. But most of them pay their due to appearances and make it seem a lesser effort than it truly is. Alberic is just not skilled in that thing to the point that he should be, in order to call upon the Trade Gods to the degree that he does.”

  I won’t argue anymore. Adelina glanced up and down the street.

  Leonoa said, “You would think there would be cabs enough here.”

  “They will be by soon enough,” Adelina said. “Most know this is an easy fare. There’s a pair right now, two so we will not have to quarrel over who should take precedence over the other until a second arrives.”

  Leonoa said, “Thank you for being a good friend, Adelina.”

  Adelina paused at the abrupt change in tone, but recovered quickly. “You are welcome,” she said, “always welcome when it comes to such things. You know that you can call on me for your own sake, and not just for my friendship with Bella, you know that by now, do you not?”

  “I do,” Leonoa admitted, “and I know I should be better about asking for such things. It is just hard, after being told all my life that I was not capable enough to earn a living on my own and that I would be indebted to the House forever. After that, it grates me hard to put my hand out for help.”

  “But such a pleasure to take such a talented hand and assist it,” Adelina said in a smooth tone, echoing Bella and one of her seductions, making them both laugh. They were still laughing as they waved to each other and got into their respective cabs.

  CHAPTER 3

  Where to?” asked the driver, a young Minotaur, and she gave instructions.

  At first the pools of light along the streets were cast by aetheric installations. Farther from the Plaza, the gas lamps’ buttery glow and the occasional flickering of a torch outside a doorway or carried by a pedestrian too poor to afford a sheltered lantern supplanted the more brilliant illumination.

  As they trundled along, fireworks spoke and bloomed overhead, still colored to echo the red, white, and purple Moons. The Temples are spending a lot on their rallies. Same as everyone else.

  Icy grit crunched beneath the wheels as the lights ebbed and waned, and Adelina found herself drowsing, thinking about Bella. How like her, not to show up at the teahouse. I should be outraged. Or worried. I would have been once. And now I have seen her extricate herself from worse hundreds of times. Another accrual, this indifference? Or a diminishment? Which Trade God oversaw that particular transaction?

  The cab shuddered to a stop in front of the Nettlepurse gates. The driver stomped his hooves to clear them of accumulated slush and huffed out steamy breath. She fumbled out three coins and put them in the wooden box on its strap around his neck, the lid sealed with a wax disk. She held out a fourth coin but he shook his head.

  “That is illegal, Merchant, you do know that.”

  “Small illegalities are overlooked by certain Trade Gods,” she said and pressed it on him. “Diahti will forgive us both. It is a cold night, buy yourself something hot to warm your stomach.”

  He took the coin with no hesitation this time and put it away in his belt, bowing. As courteous as any Human youth could ever wish to be. But they are always polite when domesticated. She nodded in return and entered the gates, passing through the barred moonlight that striped the path.

  When she came in, the majordomo was there and waiting for her despite the lateness of the hour, helping her slip off her coat and boots caked with sidewalk slush.

  A lean, fox-headed Beast, he’d seen her leave, and winked at Bella as they left. But once again he was seeing Adelina come home alone.

  At the thought, uncustomary impatience surged through her. Surely I am done with all this sadness and ill feeling. Bella and I worked it all out long ago. That’s why we can be friends now. We made that contract, sold love for permanency.

  But isn’t there always, in every relationship, one person who cares more? Even in friendship, I take second place to whatever toy has newly chanced to catch her eye.

  Nettlepurse ancestral portraits stared down at her as she went down the hall, the plush carpet swallowing up every sound.

  She knew each and every one from her earliest days. Beyond reading the history of the House (her mother was her only rival in the depth of such knowledge) she had led a lonely childhood in which imaginary conversations with a number of them played a prominent part. Her namesake, the first Adelina from a century ago, had been a favorite. She looked at that Adelina, the sympathetic, resolute painted smile, as she passed and squared her chin in imitation.

  Bella is Bella, and there is no changing her. I take her as I find her. She has never lied and promised me more.

  As she reached the head of the staircase, Emiliana’s bedroom door cracked open.

  “Come in and tell me about your evening,” her mother called. Her tone was determinedly cheerful. She’d been irritated with Adelina earlier, and they’d ended with a fight in which Emiliana had told her she should stop “dangling after” Bella.

  Adelina hesitated. She was tired, and her mother’s interrogations usually had some other matter at their heart. She didn’t want to have to fend something off, to feel guarded and wary.

  Or to fight about Bella yet again, another of the fights that had begun the very first day she’d come home from an occasion, half-drunk not on alcohol but the heady delight of flirting with Bella Kanto, of knowing she was being pursued by the most beddable person in all of Tabat.

  She hadn’t thought about all the rumors, or rather she’d been able to pretend that she didn’t know she was just another in a succession. Later that realization was brought home, but even there she’d done something none of Bella’s other former lovers had accomplished: remained friends.

  I just want to go to sleep.

  But the Household head should not be denied. If she pled tiredness, there would only be more questions in the morning.

  The older woman’s bedroom held the suite of furniture inherited from her own grandmother, who had been head of the Nettlepurse House in her time. Severe in line, no carvings or fancy ornamentation that could gather dust or be easily damaged. The fabric was rich without being ostentatious—this was not a place for pageantry and pomp, a place to placate Ihobvioki, Trade God of Display—but at the same time there was a sense of propriety about it, as though Emiliana had assembled the bed of state in which she would be interred. A shrine to the Trade Gods held a host of tiny doors, all of them shut right now except for the open door of Yalunkwanko, Lady of Nighttime Doings, protector of the sleeping.

  The only artworks on the walls were maps of trade routes. Emiliana was not a sentimentalist, and kept the inevitable portraits of family members downstairs, where they would placate Vioyaovi, Ihobvioki’s underling, the God of Filial Display, one of the currently shut, tiny doors. The carpet underfoot muffled sound and kept the feet warm on cold Winters, like this one, and its color was simple blue, dyed to match the navy-colored bed linens and coverlet. On the table beside the bed was a vase of irises.

  She only allows herself that indulgence when she’s feeling particularly besieged. Politicking must not be going well. Does she think I can help with that somehow?

  Adelina’s eyes strayed further around the chamber as she waited for her mother to speak. Emiliana’s own sewing kit, a basket shaped like a schooner ship, sat on another small table. I’ve always loved that basket. When will it get shabby enough that she lets me claim it?

  Pulling open the door on the side revealed a cargo of shelves, spools in all the possible colors of thread, neatly arranged in order of shade, a rainbow washing across the inside. Another hatch opened to reveal buttons, made of bone and mother-of-pearl and white ceramic, and a doll, piloting the fore, with a pincushion for a captain’s cap, bearing a spiky helmet of pins and needles, bits of thread dangling like bright ribbons. Samples of various embroidery stitches covered the sails, each showing a different st
yle: that of the Old Continent, the designs of Tabat, and then a third miscellany with stitchwork from places like the Rose Kingdom, whose stitches were also their alphabet, its strange form so like thorns and vines.

  “How was the exhibition?”

  “More exciting than I’m used to,” Adelina said. “There was a riot at the gallery.”

  That made her mother blink. “A riot? Why?”

  “Leonoa’s paintings,” Adelina said.

  “Why, what did she paint?”

  “Beasts.”

  Emiliana’s eyebrow arched. “I see,” she said. “Beasts of what aspect?”

  “Beasts painted as though they were playing at being Human, dressed and mannering like Gladiators and Merchants and common folk.”

  Emiliana’s green eyes unfocused as she considered this news.

  Mulling it over in her head, trying to figure out where economic advantage can be taken of it, where the House might turn a profit. Worry gripped Adelina anew. And how I might fit into her scheme. The immediate reaction was the reason why her mother had risen to the position of head of the House, which was not at all a hereditary office but one that must be earned, through hard labor and genius and, sometimes, even luck. Emiliana knew the city and its trade institutions—it was the reason why she had become so concerned with issues of politics and who would run for the offices that were available to the Merchant’s Party.

  “Is this trouble so deep that her association with Bella will not carry her through?” Emiliana asked. “The Duke has been erratic lately.”

  Despite her uneasiness, Adelina felt vaguely flattered that her mother was asking her a question. It had been a long time since Emiliana had consulted her daughter, and while Adelina welcomed the thought that her mother would stop pushing her to leave being a Scholar behind, she missed that sense of being in the spotlight momentarily, put on the spot to assemble the best answer possible, given limited data.

  Emiliana rarely spoke of the man she had chosen to father her daughter, who had apparently died early on in Adelina’s childhood, long before he might have been introduced to his issue, but when she did, she said that he had had a good mind and was capable of thinking “quite logically,” high praise indeed coming from her lips. And so rarely the sort of praise that she gave Adelina.

  “I don’t know,” Adelina admitted, but hurried on before her mother could find the answer inadequate. “I was considering it earlier and right now I think that Alberic wants Bella—wants everyone, when it comes down to the heart of it—on his side. He cannot afford to lose any allies.”

  “But what about allies that he loses by supporting heresy?”

  “He had never been much allied with either the Temples or the Merchants,” Adelina said. “The Mages count it heresy as well, but they do not punish heretics as keenly as the Temples. There is a keen market in Abolitionist fiction as well—not that Spinner Press ever deals in such—but I have heard others saying it’s profitable enough to risk a trade fine.”

  “That is deliberate on Spinner’s part and not a question of a lack of opportunity?” Emiliana asked.

  Adelina’s heart sped up. Her mother’s tone was idly curious, but it pressed at the center of the secret that Adelina held the dearest—that she was owner, not just employee, of the Press.

  “I think so,” she said, trying to sound uncertain. “The owner does not talk much to the junior editors.”

  Emiliana shrugged, apparently losing interest in the cause of the riot. “I was wondering if you would be willing to help me write up the list of Merchant candidates this week?”

  Adelina nodded, grateful for the change in tack, before realization dawned on her. She always catches me off guard, and I agree to these things. Perhaps I can forget and then plead too much work.

  Emiliana was studying Adelina’s outfit in that way that meant a question was about to come out of her mouth that would accurately convey her low opinion of Adelina’s dress habits with some degree of plausible deniability. Her mother was excellent at constructing barbed sentences that sometimes would explode on you days later when you realized exactly what she’d been getting at and how triple or quadruple layered the insult was. She squared her shoulders, readying herself.

  But Emiliana simply smiled at her, an unreadable smile. “I’m glad you’re home safely,” she said.

  Adelina went up to her room, wondering what her mother had brewing. It was a given with a Merchant parent, that there were always schemes within schemes—it was a way you were trained, learning to see those schemes and figure your way through them. Every Merchant child developed this way of thinking. Only Bella had escaped it, somehow, when her parents died, and then Jolietta had put all the training awry, had worked in different economies than Merchants did, sums of pain and obedience of the sort exacted of Beasts on a daily basis, asked of Bella during those years before she came to the Brides of Steel.

  It was only rarely that Bella talked of those days, and only when coaxed. Even then, told with such pain that Adelina always regretted the moments when she’d succeeded in getting a drunken or tired Bella to talk about her aunt and the days at Piper Hill.

  When it had come to writing up those days for the memoirs published by Spinner Press, Bella had flat out refused to participate.

  “You make it up,” she’d told Adelina, and would not budge on that score, no matter what arguments Adelina summoned up to persuade her. So Adelina had gone and talked to other Beast trainers and come up with what seemed like a reasonable account, which Bella had refused to read, even after it took off and carried the Press to profitability for the first time. Those years at Piper Hill hurt her in ways that I cannot even imagine, but sometimes I wonder if they really could have been as bad as some of the things I have imagined. Wouldn’t it be better to face them and stop letting them fester?

  Adelina laid her palms flat against the window glass, not caring how it smeared, feeling the surface’s cold bite. Across the Nettlepurse gardens, the fine snow fell in sparkling lines, flecked with white and red and purple, taking the moonlight and grinding it into powder, scattering it across the ground.

  What did the riot mean? Will there be others? Tabat was in chaos right now. Her mind sifted through historical records, trying to find similar periods, similar forces. How dangerous might the streets grow, if this continues?

  But this was all so new. The Beasts had always labored for Humans; that was how the world worked. Now it was more than that—sometimes they were killed for the magic inside them, in a way they had not been in the past. Rumor held that most of the machines at the College of Mages were fueled with such substances.

  And Tabat itself, trying to move from a monarchy to an elected council, all in one swoop, out with the Duke, in with the council. No transition. Plenty of historical precedent to show that’s a bad idea.

  She wondered if Bella had ever shown up at the teahouse or whether she was sleeping somewhere warm and comfortable—or not sleeping, but at least warm and comfortable.

  In someone’s arms, no doubt. Do I still begrudge her that?

  Surely not.

  Surely not.

  CHAPTER 4

  The cold made Sebastiano glad for the coat his mother Letha had sent last week for his birthday. Even blue wool, the cobalt of burning sulfur rather than more fashionable undyed fur, was warmer than his old coat.

  He tucked his gloved hands in his pockets, flexing his fingers. Standing under the gleam of the aetheric lights, which cast knife-edged shadows around him and made the bits of snow in the air sparkle, he watched the boat as it docked. The Eloquent Swan was never late, which was why Sebastiano always tried to commission its captain, Urdo, for his employer’s, the College of Mages, errands.

  Sebastiano rolled his eyes, seeing the sailors and crew, Urdo among them, lined up along the railing and gawping, wide-mouthed, at the fireworks arching overhead. A few days in Tabat, a few days of being accosted by political electioneers, vendors, and public criers, leaflets littering the
streets, he thought, and they’ll be as weary of it as I.

  The Merchant Mage touched his collar. He’d forgotten his own party’s purple and silver symbol when he’d switched from threadbare coat to new, and on his trip to the river docks, the absence had drawn cockade vendors for the Jateigarkist Party, the Dockworkers, and even the Rights for the Northerners vendor. The last had readily identified Sebastiano’s blue eyes and pale skin as showing a Northern affiliation, despite the respectable darkness of his hair. He glanced around, but no one seemed to be paying much attention to him, regardless of Merchant coat or Magely demeanor. Most hurried about, readying themselves to meet the Swan.

  Sebastiano was in no hurry. Looking impatient would, he knew full well, just slow things down. Still, he stepped forward and waved to Captain Urdo, who nodded back at him and held up a full hand’s worth of fingers twice before turning to shout something back towards the Pilot. Ten logs.

  Sebastiano checked the harness of the small wagon he’d brought, his breath puffing out into the air like smoke into the cold air, glittering with pinpoint-fine snowflakes. Ten logs wouldn’t overstrain the mount pulling it at all. Stepping to its shoulder, he slapped the side where feathers gave way to coarse fur and said, “A little while longer, Fewk.”

  The Gryphon huddled his damp wings around himself and gave him an indignant glare.

  Sebastiano laughed. “I have no more control over the weather than the Moons, my friend! And you’re the one who begged to come, making me risk another reprimand, just so you could see the city.” He felt through his pockets and took out a crumpled paper sack half full of dried apricots.

  Fewk’s ears twitched at the paper’s rustle. He stepped forward to pick leathery fruit from between Sebastiano’s fingers as they waited.

  More fireworks overhead, mop-headed blooms of purple and red and white.