by Cat Rambo
He couldn’t blame her for taking up with those that lined their pockets illegally. Half the neighborhood around here lived the same way. But she jeopardized their position with the Temples, and it was through those that he’d gotten good apprenticeships for them all so far, starting with himself, back the first year after Da had died.
But Canumbra and Legio—he and they’d been in prime school together and they were a bad lot. Rumor held them responsible for all sorts of crimes, from press-ganging workers for the Southern Isles to smuggling sorcerous goods from the Old Continent. They did whatever they liked, that pair, as long as it brought them money.
Footsteps approached and retreated outside his doorway, leaving behind a clatter that smelled appetizing enough to coax him out of bed. The tray discovered when he opened the door held breakfast: hot fish tea, and fried bread stuffed with a mushroom and salt-fish paste, his favorite, and the sort of thing you could never get on the boat, which had no access to the caverns where Ellora’s fruit grew. Mamma didn’t want the confrontation any more than he did, and so he accepted the tacit peace and ate the fruits of it at his desk before he set it aside and tried to write.
All his words were hollow and wrong, and the more he tried to force them, the worse they seemed, a muddle, a meander on the page, random words thrown down like dice, devoid of meaning.
He tossed the pen on the desk, not caring how it spattered, and ran his hands through the thickness of his hair as he moved to the window, tugging as though he could pull his thoughts into alignment and set his mind back in the order that he craved.
He had written so well on the river, when the distraction of his family and life’s daily rituals were gone. He’d composed passages in his head while he piloted, examining the banks and thinking hard on how to exactly, precisely, perfectly describe the brown bristle of the cattails or the sinewy curve of retreating tail that was one’s usual glimpse of a river dragon. The way the paddles roared behind him, chopping the water to bits and foam as the boat shuddered forward. You could tell in an instant whether you were going upstream or down by that roar.
Ice crystals formed a silvery glaze around the edges of the window. It would be warmer downstairs, and perhaps there was no point in pretending he was writing. He would go down to the corner for more fish tea, and then, having sustained himself with that, he would return to his desk and write at least five good pages, solid ones.
But downstairs everything was girls and chaos and quarrels. Obedience was there, and Grace finishing out her off-day while Compassion started her own. They were fighting over the little bracelets he had spent time knotting for them on the journey, and upon questioning, none of them wanted the one he had made them but preferred someone else’s. He proposed swapping, feeling wise as a Judge with the suggestion, only to find that none of them wanted the one he had first made, which had a clumsy knot for its fastening.
He took all the bracelets back in the end. He could pass them onto the Temple to be sold, and they would give him a little of the money, and the rest would go to the Temples to support the poor, rather than his ingrate siblings. This action made them all cry or scream, depending on their temperaments. He looked to his mother to impose order but she silently wilted back into her bedroom, leaving him behind amid the sea of them.
He shouted, “Enough! Unless you are quiet, you’ll all go without dinner.”
He was pleased to see that they took that seriously enough, squelching words and tears.
He’d go to the Temple of the Moons first, tell them what had happened. He’d shade the story a bit, make it sound as though the boy had been confused and scared off. Maybe blame the Mage—everyone knew Mages were given to madness and a simple boy, confronted with one, might have thought himself in some sort of danger and run straight into whatever circumstances had killed him. Yes, that was the tack to take.
IT SEEMED A GOOD ENOUGH STORY, but it faltered under the eye of the Priest he found himself talking to when he reached the Temple. He’d been ushered into a small chamber, windowless and lit by a sputtering oil lamp. The Priest had come with tablet in hand, ready to record the details. Eloquence took a dislike to him right away: something about the officious slant of his nose, or the way he looked down it at Eloquence as though measuring his soul and finding it wanting.
He said, not for the first time, “I entrusted him to the Mage, who’d have thought the man would spook the boy so? There was no way of telling such a thing!”
“Indeed,” the Priest said with a little cough as dry as paper.
Indeed, Eloquence thought, you do not believe me at all.
“How long do you intend to be in Tabat?” the Priest asked.
“I do not know,” Eloquence said. “Long enough to visit my family and find another job on a steamboat. The one I came in on will be at least a few weeks getting re-fitted.”
“There are some,” the Priest said, voice thin and flat as a purple reed, “who would hold you accountable for the boy’s escape or even worse, his death.”
“Indeed, and there are many who would say nothing of the sort,” Eloquence said, nettled. “Shall we summon a Duke’s agent and see who is counted in the right?”
The Priest’s eyes were blue as Summer sky, and around his neck hung a coin marked with the fat-bellied crimson moon. He smelled of cinnamon and musk. “No need of that,” he said, voice gone greasy. “But if the Mage proves wrong and you find any word or sight of the boy, send word to me immediately. My name is Hyphe.”
What did the Priest think he’d done with the boy, Eloquence thought, still irritated by the implications in the Priest’s tone at their parting. That Eloquence had secreted him in a chamber to be raped and then tossed out? Or sacrificed to some God or another? The boy had eaten aboard the boat as though he’d never been allowed to eat his entire fill at a meal before. He would have been prohibitively expensive to house.
Although, what was one more mouth if you already had plenty to feed, he thought. He realized he’d forgotten to tell the Priest the Merchant Mage still had the boy’s coin. Well, surely the man could be trusted to take care of that, at least. Eloquence was done worrying about it.
He fished a scrap of paper out of his pocket and studied it. “Spinner Press,” he said aloud, and started on his way.
CHAPTER 9
Books, most of them from her own Spinner Press, filled Adelina’s bedroom, despite her mother’s best efforts to keep it uncluttered by forbidding any furniture resembling bookshelves.
Instead Adelina improvised wherever she could. The great wardrobe held scholarly treatises, and the little drawers meant for underwear were filled with notebooks and journals. Books lined the windowsills, being natural shelves, and they gathered dust frequently, since the servants found them troublesome to take care of. Indeed, the whole room presented a maze of obstacles to the servants, from the desk whose order must be preserved at all costs, to the garments whose pockets were stuffed with notes yet to be sorted and directed to the proper place, to the layer of books, her shadow wife, that accompanied her to bed each night.
She did not concern herself much with clothes. She embraced the idea of a Scholar’s robes, actually, adapting them to a more Merchantly presentation that created fewer difficulties around large machinery (like presses) as well as being easier to clean. She had also added a neat little belt of pockets, each with paper or pencil or other writing implements, and a handy dictionary of trading terms, and a penknife, and other useful appurtenances. She had always hoped to set some sort of style, in her secret dreams, but this one had never caught on.
Her windows faced west, over the garden that was her grandfather’s pride and joy, and which Emiliana kept up for the sake of appearances more than anything else. The only people making much use of the gardens, actually, were the servants. The windows were curtained with fresh silk in the Nettlepurse colors, an expensive and impractical luxury which Emiliana offset by donating the green and vermillion silk to the poor each season.
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sp; The carpet underfoot was an indulgence, a present from her seventeenth birthday, the same year the picture of her on the wall was painted. The silk carpet, imported from the Rose Kingdom, was woven in deep purples and blues and greens. Everyone that saw it coveted it, but very few had ever seen it.
Bella alone appreciated rather than envied. Lying on Adelina’s bed on her belly, form draped to touch the floor, she loved to pet the thick carpet like a cat, running her fingers along the soft piles of thread.
“It’s colored like the inside of your mind,” she told Adelina.
Adelina, three weeks into the wonder of this new relationship at the time, still had trouble sometimes addressing her lover, for all the awe that choked her. At that moment, she’d had one of those odd, doubled moments that had plagued her ever since she’d become a writer, as though she were hovering somewhere a few feet behind herself, watching the room, narrating it as things happened.
Bella Kanto, premier Gladiator of Tabat, turned to her lover, and said, It’s colored like the inside of your mind. Reaching forward, she laced her fingers through Adelina’s hair and pulled her forward for a long kiss.
It was simultaneously delightful, this internal narration of the current of her life, and irritating, like a song’s refrain that couldn’t be chased out of her head and kept popping up at odd moments.
“What do you mean?” she murmured against Bella’s lips, coaxing further compliment out of her lover.
Bella eased away. A smile danced on her lips as she regarded Adelina, almost as though she could read the other’s mind like a book, the book about Bella that Adelina was writing … her mind slid suddenly into an avalanche of realization, of possibility. She sorted through some of the implications, all the while waiting for Bella to elaborate.
“There are shells like this,” Bella said finally. “On the outside like any other shell—no imputing your appearance, only saying that you are a woman, like any other woman—but when you crack them open, there are colors inside that you see nowhere else, blues and greens mingled, shading into and out of each other. That is what your mind is like, Adelina. There is no one in the world that thinks like you.”
It swept her breath away, to have Bella Kanto saying such a thing to her, gazing into her eyes, their fingers intertwined, just as their bodies had so recently been, just as they would be again soon, judging from the look in Bella’s eyes and the way the pad of her thumb was smoothing itself back and forth, back and forth, against the tender skin of Adelina’s inner wrist, just where the pulse beat, quickening at the touch so Bella smiled and brought the wrist to her lips, letting the pulse flutter against them in a kiss that made Adelina want to melt, to become a pool of blue and purple and green desire surrounding Bella Kanto, containing and possessing her.
But no one can possess Bella Kanto. That was what she had been forced to realize, and part of coming to terms with that realization was knowing that it was that very quality that made one want to possess her. Bella was her own person, always would be, and moments of attention from her remained more enticing than devotion from anyone else.
Or at least—until now.
She should take a lover; it was long past time for her to do something like that—had it actually been two years since she’d scratched that particular itch?—but that took time and effort.
Bella had turned out to be so much more tractable as a character than in real life. Sometimes Adelina delighted in making her do things that the real Bella never would have done, things wildly romantic and much more dramatic than Bella, who was pragmatic to the core, would have ever undertaken.
That was the other thing about Bella that was endearing. There was a sense about her that she held the Bella identity up as a mask, interposed between herself and everyone else—and that might have been intolerable or uncanny—but at the same time she was laughing with you at the absurdity of it all, at the larger-than-life qualities about herself, a quiet “I know, right?” whispered in your ear, and your ear alone.
Pragmatic or not, Bella could make you feel like you were her special friend, someone worthy of all that grandeur and heroism and pageantry.
Which is what makes being cast out all the harder, when she does it.
THE NIGHTMARE that visited Adelina the most involved her mother, Emiliana, discovering the over a decade-long deception Adelina had practiced in the form of the title Merchant Scholar.
Emiliana had been reluctant to let her only child move from the path of full Merchant, but Adelina had promised she could fulfill the roles of both Merchant and Scholar well. She had loved history in school, and she wanted to research and write about Tabat, she’d said, shrewdly adding that she could begin with their own family—when was the last time they’d had anyone write them up, for instance?
But she’d founded Spinner Press in secret, at first just to publish her instructional pamphlets, because she’d loved sharing the tidbits of Tabatian history she gathered in her studies. Later, she’d started publishing penny-wides and started writing them about Bella.
Truth be told, by now she should have been called Scholar Publisher, if not simply Publisher, but Emiliana considered Publishers, who made most of their money off the penny-wides and newssheets, disgraceful scandalmongers. Spinner Press, whose owner was never seen or interviewed, was now one of the largest in the city, and Adelina secretly ran it from the narrow office at their building where she wrote her histories.
As far as her mother knew, Adelina made enough income to continue her scholarly work by turning it to Spinner Press’s advantage, advising them on what manuscripts to buy and how to edit and present them.
In truth, the line of “Adelina’s books” was only a small effort, a quarterly series of monographs, each examining a specific aspect of the city and its history. She hoped that someday they could be collected and annotated into a definitive overall history, the sort of work people mentioned as a matter of course, like Sweetgrasstle’s History of the Sorcerer Wars or Feathercup’s Rise of the Pot and Kettle King. Only a few people had tried to document the city, and no one in her century had tried to account for the recent changes, those of the last century, such as the rise in power of the Moon Temples, or commerce opening with the Rose Kingdom. There were so many interesting things about Tabat, and the most interesting thing was how they were all connected down to the smallest details, such as the orange paper that marked the cheapest grade of publication, so distinct to this city.
She did do histories, from time to time, with the graceful, clear prose that had always come easily to her. From the history of the Nettlepurses, she went on to a monograph on the significance of the cockades associated with each House (a fashion now fallen out of favor with the elections). Currently, she was working on a history of the early expeditions, the ones which had been sent out into utterly unknown lands by the first and second Dukes, in the spare time she had far too little of.
It ate at her that she could have done more with those histories, delved deeper, gotten to the heart of things, if only she’d had the time and passion to give them. She was, she freely admitted (although not to her mother), a second-rate historian at best, relying on sensational stories to carry her when she could.
But she was an excellent Publisher.
Her Secretary knew the secret and constantly urged Adelina to make the change of title public. Serafina yearned to be the head Secretary, over all the others at the Press. Only a wage three times what she would have normally commanded reconciled her to the office beside Adelina’s, where she went over much of the Press’s paperwork while pretending to correct historical manuscripts that were never published.
In the nightmare, Adelina and her mother were walking along Spray Road in the late Summer, when heat shrouded Tabat and the nights were shortest. They were always en route to some school performance of Adelina’s that she’d forgotten about, and that she was unprepared for. She’d be trying to compose her missing manuscript in her head.
Coming up the street, a Unicor
n-drawn carriage, the Duke’ device on its side, rumbling towards them. Adelina would know what was going to happen then. Dread settled around her, the sultry air making everything molasses slow …
… a Ducal messenger handing her a ribbon for her work as Publisher and with it the scroll changing her title, an event so rare that it would be cried aloud in the Halls of Justice when summarizing the day.
Moving with the dream’s slowness, Adelina would try to angle her body so her mother couldn’t see, trying to distract her and tilt the scroll away, but, inexorable as a fabled iceberg, Emiliana advanced, asked, and finally grasped the dimensions of the ruse that had been played on her all these years and then …
… her mother would frown, Adelina the size of a six-year-old, facing that icy fury, the slaps that had stung so, recoiling, sobbing, trying to get away from this thing that had been Emiliana and now was rage incarnate, screaming through the black void of her tight-lipped mouth …
She woke, flailing, sheets and blanket tangled, breathing hard and shivering, cold despite the thick wool blankets around her.
SOME REMNANT of that terror made her flinch when Emiliana spoke from beside her in the hallway.
“Where are you going this morning?”
“To write in my office, as I do fourteen days of every fifteen,” Adelina said, surprised, as she pulled on her respectable greatcoat: economical thick blue wool with buttons embossed with caravels.
“You promised you would help me write up the candidates for the Merchants’ Party.”
“We had not specified a time for that, I thought.” Adelina wrapped her scarf around her neck and considered the mirror before adjusting its knot. “Could I not help you with it this evening, after dinner?”