Hearts of Tabat

by Cat Rambo

  “What’s your book about?”

  “A man who travels up and down the river.”

  “That’s not enough,” she said. “There needs to be a story at the heart of it. A journey’s not enough.”

  “The river changes,” he said. “It writes its own story, the river does.”

  His eyes met hers. They were both blushing. She squelched the little thrill that ran through her belly. I don’t have the time for that sort of thing nowadays.

  She looked away.

  No time for that sort of thing at all.

  CHAPTER 11

  O bedience shared her bedroom with her sisters, along with its furniture: three beds and two sets of shelves, made by Eloquence before she was born, so they only had eight shelves total. Instead, a wooden box under the bed held her treasures:

  Three penny-wides, much worn and loved; a china-headed doll, much chipped, and which was kept out of sight because, having been handed down through all of them, each sister considered their claim to it as good as anyone else’s, now that Obedience was too old to play with it; a wooden comb; a scattering of feather cockades (all of the girls collected them, and some of Obedience’s nicest ones had been taken from her, an injustice which still smoldered like so many others in her heart), and most recently the little heads salvaged in the gallery.

  The little mirrored box itself could not be entrusted there. She hid that instead in a niche of the night-closet, despite the pang of consigning it to that odorous little space. As the youngest, its cleaning duties fell her way; she could think of no safer place from the prying eyes of her sisters.

  The bedroom’s little window looked out over the street, a much less interesting view than Eloquence’s or her mother’s windows, both of which looked south and out over the harbor, down three terraces towards the sea. The curtains were faded green and red, some Noble’s castoffs that the Tailor had given Grace. That was the sort of apprenticeship one wanted.

  She’d thought when Eloquence was back that everything would be fine, that he would make sure that everything was fair, would make sure that her sisters didn’t bully her. But the Eloquence that had returned from the river was not one interested in policing his family, as long as they kept all outrageous acts out of sight. Obedience had bruises all along her ribs from being pinched, and Compassion had taken her only hair ribbon, so she had not been able to braid it this morning.

  She’d saved that grievance up, meaning to tell it to him as soon as he asked why her hair was down, but he did not ask, simply launched straightway into scolding her, telling her that a slovenly appearance was displeasing to the Gods, and that he expected much better of her.

  Behind his back, Grace smirked at her.

  It was too much to bear, and words rushed out of her in response. “But I have no hair ribbon, because Compassion took it.”

  “You do not need fancy ribbons to be neat and orderly in appearance,” he said. “A bit of string or cloth could tie it back just as easily. Go upstairs and make yourself presentable.”

  She dragged herself upstairs and found a bit of cording. She took her time brushing out her hair and braiding it with angry yanks but that was her mistake, because by the time she came back downstairs, breakfast was over, with nothing saved for her.

  Grace pinched her as she passed, and Compassion smirked.

  She hated them all, including her brother and mother. Still, when Eloquence went striding out, she followed.

  He walked a long way, all the way down near Printers Row, and she worried that this was somehow connected with the trip she and Grace had made to the gallery. Had someone somehow recognized them and complained?

  But Eloquence didn’t go as far as that. Blocks before, he stopped and nearly collided in the doorway of a building with a tall woman, dressed in Merchant blue. Obedience couldn’t hear the words they exchanged, but Eloquence followed the woman into the building, whose spidery lettered sign read “Spinner Press.” A building favored by the Trade Gods surely. What business did he have in such a place?

  She sat on a cold stone wall and waited. The Duke’s clock tower struck two quarter bells before the door opened again and Eloquence came out. He caught sight of her and smiled at first, then summoned a frown as he came closer.

  “You should be at home, working there, not loitering about in the streets,” he said.

  She ignored the rebuke. “What were you doing?”

  He took her hand. “Ah, your fingers are like icicles. Walk me home,” he said.

  After a few steps, his fingers warm in hers, he said, “I am writing a book about what river life is like and hoping the Press will publish it. They publish that sort of thing. The woman I was talking with, she tells them whether or not something is worth publishing.”

  “How does she know?”

  “She reads it.”

  Obedience had rarely seen her brother so happy. She took full advantage of the bliss, coaxing him to talk of his book all the way home. He told her stories of the time river Nixies had stolen all their boots and of the morning he’d seen two distant Dragons circling a mountaintop.

  “No wonder she wants your book,” she said when he paused for breath.

  His smile faltered. “That remains to be seen.” His lips firmed. “But I will have this. I have decided it and if I am good and proper, the Moons will help me see it through.”

  “Why would she not want your book, after reading it?” They went up Eelsy and then ascended a zigzag staircase. The steps were clear of snow, but drifts lay on either side, slumping the bushes.

  “She has not done so yet. I did not bring it,” he said.

  Obedience frowned. “Why not, if you want her to read it?”

  “It is a stratagem. She cannot have it yet, and so she will want it more, and remember wanting it when she finally has it.”

  “That is very tricky,” Obedience said. She turned the idea over in her head, trying to figure out how she might apply it to her sisters.

  “I will do whatever it takes,” Eloquence said. He smiled sidelong at her. “Fortunately, she is a pretty woman and it is no hardship to be pleasant with her.”

  “Does she follow the Moons?” At his headshake, she said, scandalized, “You cannot consort with someone who does not follow the Moons!”

  “I know I cannot be truly allied to her, but that doesn’t keep me from pretending,” he said. “Her own Trade Gods preach such business practices, so who am I to countervail them?”

  “But that’s against the Temple teachings!”

  “You have to be a grownup to understand how it all works.”

  But the rest of the way she kept poking at the thought, the idea that sometimes it was all right to pretend not to follow the Moons. The odd thought gave her a weird little thrill, like stealing something and knowing she had succeeded, even though the Priests said that sort of feeling was bad.

  Undoubtedly they’d say this one was too.

  CHAPTER 12

  In the morning, Sebastiano was refreshed but ravenous. He drank deep from the well in the stable yard, and fetched a pail of water for Fewk before he headed towards the dining hall.

  The early morning sun was just starting to steal over the campus, touching the snow on the uppermost boughs of the pines with glints of yellow and amber. Snow had continued falling overnight, and the walks were still unswept. Only students, no instructors or other full Mages, made their way along the pathways, drifts crunching underfoot.

  He followed a chattering group into the dining hall, a large building built of brown bricks that always reminded Sebastiano of a child’s toy. The students pretended to ignore his presence, though he caught more than one eye rolling backward in his direction when they thought he wasn’t looking. He’d been the same way himself—half-dreading, half-courting attention from the instructors and other adults here.

  Every student wanted to be the Chosen One, the one who somehow was destined to outshine all the rest. Without much effort, Sebastiano thought sardonically,
which is most of its appeal. Wizarding is hard work.

  The College’s food hall hosted two dining rooms serviced by the same kitchen, the smaller one intended for the faculty and full Mages, the larger for the students themselves. But the smaller room, which Sebastiano remembered as being well-appointed from a glimpse his second year as a student, was perpetually closed off, a measure attributed to a desire to let the students mingle on a daily basis with those who’d reached what they aspired to.

  It wasn’t that, of course, Sebastiano suspected, but the fact that, given their druthers, most of the Mages would have loitered in that lounge, drinking chal and eating hyacinth cookies, as his father Corrado would have said.

  Two servants moved among the tables, filling glasses and removing tableware. Some students lingered to talk after their meals, but most hurried out on their duties.

  High among the College’s tenets are the perils of idleness and the virtue of hard work, Sebastiano thought as he took a plate and mug and made his way to a table of food, but none of that is applied to the daily maintenance of their existence. Even as the apprentice Mages toil, scrubbing laboratory glassware for their alchemical instructor, someone else is shining their shoes and preparing their food.

  It didn’t make sense, but no one talked about it. To the students, of course, just barely out of childhood, everything was normal. An instructor could have told them they were to start each lesson standing on their heads and as long as enough flimflam or solemnity accompanied the directive, there would be no demurrals, no questions.

  That last part irked him. Itched him like a tight waistcoat or a pair of pants with crooked inseams. Sebastiano had always been a questioner himself, always asking, to the point where he’d driven everyone a little crazy, he realized now, but his rank as Corrado and Letha’s only child had protected him from anyone rejecting his questions out of hand.

  He picked through the half-burned bread. The College cut costs by buying seconds from Figgis Bakery rather than employing their own baker. Save a skiff and founder a galleon, he thought, extracting a mostly-intact slice. This sort of purse whittling leaves students unlikely to think of the College with fondness in later years. No wonder fewer and fewer students enter the gates each year.

  Only the ones who show an interest, and whose parents are willing to tolerate it.

  Both of his parents had been patient. Letha taught him everything she knew about Beasts—or everything he could hold, for he knew it would take him decades to reach her depth of understanding. And Corrado had taught him the Trade Gods and how they worked, how if you understood them, you could predict the ebb and flow of anything. The Moon Temples held that the future was decided, a stone walled tunnel with only one way out, but Sebastiano believed time more flexible, more changeable.

  More fickle, even, he thought, doling out watery chal into his mug.

  The student body of the College of Mages was far from being composed entirely of Mages—indeed, those who would, like Sebastiano, go on to become full Mages were few and far between and usually marked out by the instructors.

  The rest were teens—young women and men from the upper classes or Merchant caste—spending two years at the school for a curriculum more fashionable than informative. For every few dozen of these, perhaps one student intended to continue on to join the group of the College’s main inhabitants.

  An ancient grant of land—not just the territory the College occupied but a large vineyard, several farms, and a small copper mine—provided these inhabitants against life’s daily costs and more and let them do the research that advanced the city.

  The College was notorious for its stringent existece. Beyond the chal and bread, the school emphasized the life of the mind over the life of the body and its wants. Of the students who did attend the College, most were well-pocketed enough to go buy meals from the food carts that did a thriving business in the Plaza in front of the College.

  Sebastiano took spoon and knife and turned to survey the room.

  The hall was overlarge for the few here, all of them students unable to afford the carts: two scholarship students and a skinny, big-eared boy he recognized as having been enrolled only a few months ago. From somewhere on the Old Continent, wasn’t he? That was unusual. If he was remembering correctly, the boy had been taken into the College by virtue of the precocity he’d shown.

  The boy, younger than most, sat by himself, elbows poking out in a way that touched Sebastiano’s heart, like a defiant baby Gryphon, unfledged and unable to defend itself but still bristling against the world, ready for conflict.

  Sebastiano knew that pose. He’d taken it himself in his first few years here. His Northern blood, expressed in the pallor of his skin and the brown-blonde color of his hair, had been a flag to other children of privilege—he did know himself that, at least—who were themselves eager to find differences, to bond their pack through the sacrifice of a victim, some soul who had, through a mysterious alchemy of circumstance and personality quirk, been marked their victim.

  So he slid into the seat across from the boy and studied his downturned head. At first the boy ignored him—perhaps thought him another bully, come to bait him. Sebastiano took a sip of chal.

  How do they always manage to make it so flat and vapid tasting? he wondered. It was so consistent that there must be some formula to it. The boy raised his head and looked Sebastiano in the eye, with a fingerprint’s worth of defiance, the vaguest hint of touch me at your peril.

  “Hello,” Sebastiano said. “How are your classes going? I remember being in your boots.”

  The boy blinked. He would know, as all of the students did, who the Mages were. In theory, Sebastiano taught a class on the analysis of Beast magic, but it was a subject so unpursued that he had students only every other year, at most. Still, the boy knew that Sebastiano was faculty, not some random tormenter.

  But he’s also used to being ignored by us. I remember that too. To the boy, this may just be more terror. He’s probably wondering if it’s something his enemies arranged. I had my own share of that.

  Sebastiano opened his mouth, then closed it, not sure what reassurances would be encouraging rather than alarming in their novelty. He gave the boy a tentative smile. With Humans—and most Beasts—you couldn’t go wrong by leading with a smile, as Abvioti, God of First Impressions, would have advised.

  While Sebastiano didn’t follow the Trade Gods he’d grown up with, they were, he’d found, such a useful way of looking at the world that sometimes he thought it possible they were an entirely mortal creation. When was the last time anyone had claimed to have advice from one? Two centuries, if not longer, although according to historical accounts, three had attended the city’s planning.

  The boy didn’t smile back as Sebastiano had expected, though his mouth remained a straight line, the final moment of a totting up that ended at a sum of zero. He said, “What do you want?”

  The hostility stung Sebastiano, like a repudiation from some former self. He sipped his chal, pondering his reply, before he set the thick white mug down.

  “Well,” he said cautiously. “I thought that because I had been in the same spot once, you might welcome advice.”

  The boy did not blink. “And what spot might that be?”

  Sebastiano found himself stammering as he gestured, his arm at an awkward angle. “Isolated from the other students. Because you are to be a Mage.”

  The boy’s face softened, then glazed back into an icy hauteur. “I doubt you have much to tell me.”

  Stung, Sebastiano looked away. I certainly have better options for breakfasting, he thought scornfully. Mother is always ready to feed me.

  They both focused on their respective meals.

  Sebastiano didn’t bother with what was left of his food on his plate, with the exception of the small pile of dried fruit, which he pocketed. The boy watched the gesture, disdain still written on his face.

  “Why are you doing that?” he demanded.

  “T
o feed my friend Fewk,” Sebastiano said, wiping his hands on a kerchief before folding it into a neat square and replacing it in his pocket.

  “Another Mage?”

  “A Gryphon Major,” Sebastiano said.

  For the first time, interest flared in the boy’s eyes.

  “Here on the grounds?”

  Sebastiano nodded. His anger died away at the pleasure in the boy’s narrow face. He paused before making the offer. “Would you like to see him sometime?”

  The nod was convulsive in its suddenness. Sebastiano kept from smiling. There were people who loved Beasts and those who were indifferent. It was evident that the boy, like both Sebastiano and his mother Letha, was among the former. He said, “I must go consult with Master Mage Faustino this morning, but I will come and look for you afterwards. How are you called?”

  “Maz,” the boy said. His smile was tentative as a baby bird’s flutter, but lingered even as Sebastiano stood, bowed slightly in the boy’s direction as befitted one Mage to another, and departed, feeling oddly cheered.

  CHAPTER 13

  He might, Sebastiano thought as he made his way over the now-swept walkway, be saved from censure for his use of the Gryphon, if only Master Mage Faustino Landoro had spoken in his defense before the Council of Mages. He had always thought Faustino, despite all his irritating affectations, a mentor.

  Faustino’s cramped little office was on the main floor of the Hall of the Arcane. He found the older Mage occupied with another visitor, as though he’d forgotten Sebastiano’s appointment.

  “Come in, come in, Merchant Mage Silvercloth,” Faustino said, beckoning him in. Sebastiano paused, seeing the newcomer in the purple robes of a Southern Master Mage. He sat on the couch beneath a towering bookcase heaped high with histories of experiments and other research conducted on the grounds of the College of Mages.

  “This is Master Mage Giralamo Khentor. And this is the Merchant Mage I was speaking of, Giralamo. Currently in hot soup for using one of the College’s most valuable Beasts, a Gryphon Major no less, to pull a cart last night. We have, by the way, decided not to exact some sort of penalty, Merchant Mage Sebastiano,” Mage Faustino said in a scolding tone with an unpleasant smile.