Hearts of Tabat

by Cat Rambo

  “Thuya Butterbasket has fallen prey to Scandal!” Emiliana proclaimed.

  Adelina imagined Scandal as a pouncing Beast, flanked by Gossip and Bad Press, as was customary in the old illustrations from the third Duke’s reign. “Who is Thuya Butterbasket?”

  Emiliana’s hands fluttered in distress, gesticulating upward as though trying to invoke the Gods. “My prime candidate for Junior Council Member. And—thrice as bad—her designated substitute ate bad oracular meat last night and cannot stagger forth to speak.”

  “You always have a third contingency,” Adelina said. “You taught me that yourself.”

  Emiliana’s form stilled as she looked at Adelina. “I do,” she admitted. “You.”

  “Me?” Adelina blinked. “But I gave you no commitment to do such a thing.”

  “I thought that I’d have longer to persuade you to step up in one shape or another,” Emiliana said. “But surely this is a manifestation of the Trade Gods meddling, calling you to serve in the name of Influence.”

  “And if I acquire Influence’s favor, how and where shall I spend it?” Adelina said shrewdly. If I can get honest coin from her here, should I spend it on the revelation of my secret?

  “I had thought in your House’s behalf, but I am desperate enough that I’d contract for you to do so for the Press,” Emiliana said.

  Adelina almost stopped breathing. Partially at the magnitude of the offer, but primarily at the implications. Why would she grant such a boon unless she knows the Press is mine? What should I answer to best throw her off the route?

  Emiliana’s next words steadied her. “Surely that would help you advance in your employer’s favor. If you must lower yourself to labor for such a disreputable institution, at least you might be reckoned chief among their assets.”

  The Nettlepurse ancestors stared down at the transaction. She looked to the other Adelina but the painted eyes provided no inspiration. At least Leonoa’s heretical creations looked like living beings, requiring little stretch of the imagination to see them breathe or move.

  “Very well,” she said, but misgiving gripped her tight, hindering her breathing as though the stares intersecting her were steel pins.

  THE DAY WAS as uncomfortable as any she could imagine.

  Despite its chill, she was too warm, too constantly jostled. Her heart raced as Master Merchant Nove Wayfinder took her elbow and led her out to the center of the platform.

  “I wish to present you with a young candidate,” he shouted. The crowd cheered as though they’d been waiting for this moment for days.

  She looked out at the crowd, feeling a pleasant surge of anticipation. She would master this, as she had mastered the art of writing, becoming superlative at it.

  I’m versed in Dompri’s art, communication; I can put words together effectively, I know them like few others do and now I will exhibit that talent and finally impress my mother. Really impress her, in a way that feels satisfying, and not a pale washed out version of what satisfaction should feel like. Not like some achievement Emiliana has allowed me.

  Faces in the crowd, men’s and women’s, all ages, all different except for a single point of similarity—the cockade that they all wore, pinned in hat or a collar, the bright reds and blues that said they had already sworn their allegiance to the Jateigarkist Party.

  Something that would make this audience even more hers, since they came pre-convinced that the Merchants could lead them well.

  She opened her mouth to begin.

  And froze. The words refused to come out. Locked in her throat as all those eyes looked at her, held her pinned beneath them.

  In writing no one ever looked at you.

  This was … different.

  A panic that made your bowels loosen, your spine stiffen, your muscles feel weak and stiff all at the same time, straws unable to support the weight of one’s flesh.

  “I …” she managed, barely. But the word came out so softly that no one could hear her.

  Wayfinder’s hand had lingered on her elbow and now it felt as though it was the only thing holding her up.

  Was this some spell, some attack that had somehow slipped through all defenses? But her mother paid for every member of the household to be warded, and warded very well indeed. Adelina had no idea what a spell might feel like, but surely this was the work of magic and not her own body betraying her. She clung to that. If it was a spell, there was a way to counteract it. That must be it.

  She held to the thought, and let it buoy her up as the Master Merchant drew her aside while someone else stepped up to apologize to the crowd for her sudden indisposition.

  Emiliana was there, as alarmed as Adelina had ever seen her. “Let me pass!” she snapped, and shouldered her way past Wayfinder, making him release Adelina. “What happened?”

  “Magic,” Adelina said. “I think it was some spell. I couldn’t say anything!” Even now the words felt tight and sharp-edged in her throat, barbs that tore at it as she spoke.

  But despite her convictions as to the origin of the affliction, there seemed to be no trace of magic, or so the Physician Mage, one of the only two in the city and horribly expensive, Adelina was very well aware, assured them.

  Emiliana’s lips pursed as she regarded her daughter.

  Adelina remembered the moment she’d first disappointed her mother. She’d been very small, at a birthday party, perhaps her fourth or fifth. Emiliana had held out her hands in a grand gesture and opened them. In her left hand was a large copper coin, a galleon, and in her right a small silver one, a skiff.

  “Which do you want?” her mother said. “Choose wisely!”

  At the last words, everyone looked at Adelina, and there was an expectant hush in the air, as though this were very important in a way that the child Adelina hadn’t understood.

  Everyone watched. She faltered under the weight of that attention, reaching forward for the copper coin. It was the larger of the two, and that surely meant it was worth more.

  “Are you sure?” Emiliana’s voice halted her hand but then she remembered how fond her mother was of tests, and thought that this must be just another layer of it, and reached forward to pluck the copper from her fingers.

  Emiliana’s hand dropped away, worlds of dissatisfaction in the gesture. Adelina wanted to cry, but she knew that such an exhibition would only see her escorted from the party, the rest of the children left behind to enjoy the cakes and Fairy puppets, so she closed her mouth and raised her chin, then just as she did now.

  Her eyes lifted to her mother’s at the same moment, but Emiliana had already turned away. That was always the way of it, her attention withdrawn before Adelina’s defiance could begin.

  I’ve disappointed my mother once more.

  CHAPTER 15

  Sebastiano watched the servant bring in another breakfast dish. Pancakes, fragrant with orange and cinnamon, a syrup pitcher gleaming beside them. He gave his mother Letha a grateful look.

  Letha Silvercloth sat mending a piece of gilded harness, tools scattered on the table before her. She wore her silvery hair in a braided crown that glinted like the leather’s luster.

  Unfortunately, the pancakes could not be piled high enough to block out the sight of Corrado Silvercloth, Sebastiano’s father. The old man sat with every feature bristling, as though his infamous temper could not help but manifest even in silence. Morning sunlight from the high-paned window behind him picked out every detail, from the curl of Corrado’s waxed gray moustache to his brass buttons’ intemperate shine.

  The Silvercloth morning meal was a generous one, and Sebastiano tried to drop in and fill his belly on days when his father would not be around. Today he had miscalculated and the old man’s frown faced him across the table. The mound of pancakes was scant consolation.

  “Don’t they feed you at the College?” Corrado snarled.

  Sebastiano smiled, knowing it the expression most likely to irritate his father, and piled pancakes onto his plate. “Of course th
ey do. But you and Mother set such a fine table in the mornings that it seems insulting to forego it entirely.”

  “Thank you, Sebastiano,” Letha said, pleased. “Come, I will show you a recent purchase.”

  At the table, Corrado frowned deeply, but said nothing. Sebastiano wondered at that. Letha had a keen eye for art and knew what might appreciate in value, and Corrado had, in the past, taken pride in his wife’s unexpectedly keen eye for such things.

  Sebastiano trailed after Letha down the corridor, wishing that it were not Winter. Even the thick rug underfoot, blue wool worked with tumbling silver rounds along the borders, failed to keep the surroundings anywhere close to warm.

  Letha’s sitting room resembled a tack room more than anything else, but also one full of small animals and Beasts that required a specialized or particular degree of care, like the birdcage full of dwarf Piskies or the tank of flesh-eating snails. (The latter were contained with a special slide of glass that the terrified child Sebastiano had always been afraid to touch. Despite their slowness, the snails were a good two inches around and capable of a ferocious and mildly venomous bite that worked to paralyze their prey.)

  A fire roared in the hearth, kept tended even when she was not here for the sake of the hatching boxes. They were usually filled with baby animals—right now a clutch of dragonfoxes, which began to yip in high-pitched demanding voices as soon as she entered. The air smelled of liniment and animals and smoke from the coal fire, for Letha would not tolerate burning wood, saying she disliked its smell.

  The picture, hung over the fireplace, drew the eye immediately, demanding attention. A Centaur, but wearing armor as though Human. A deliberate violation, designed to shock and outrage. He considered it, head tilted.

  “I thought these paintings were outlawed,” he said. “More and more, the Peacekeepers chase down Abolitionists.”

  Letha shook her head. “I suspect that the Duke tracked who bought them,” she said drily, “but my eccentricities have ever been apparent.”

  What had possibly drawn her to this painting? He eyed the Centaur’s skin, rendered in velvety detail, muscles rippling under the shoulders, and felt a trace of unease at the thought that maybe the picture’s blatant sensuality appealed to his mother.

  Some students at the College coupled with Beasts, but it was a foolish practice for a Mage to engage in. Magical ailments were far harder to cure than the more mundane, and just being around the natural magic of a Beast could upset one’s balance unless one took the time and practice to cleanse oneself, a practice that Letha had trained him in, so she knew that as well as he did.

  I cannot imagine her having some romance with a Beast, he thought. Surely not. Surely any relationship was a matter of fantasy if anything.

  But her next comment, accompanied by a hand waved at the canvas, was, “I knew him, you know.”

  “Knew?”

  “Dead now. Slain for sedition.”

  Sebastiano frowned. “How did you come to know him?”

  “I tended his father, a long time ago.”

  The wealth of new details about his mother astonished Sebastiano, like looking at something, a flower perhaps, that turned out to be something else entirely: a Fairy, or some other creature capable of so much more.

  He said, feeling the words halting and lame, “It’s certainly an interesting piece.”

  “You don’t approve.” She tilted her head, examining him as though he had disappointed her.

  He said, “Beasts are always true to their natures, no matter what. To treat them as though they were more than that, as though they were, like Humans, capable of choice and change, is to question the reality of the world.”

  She blinked as though taken aback by the vehemence of his words, considering him. Then a smile slid onto her face like a pleasant, social mask, and her voice took on a bantering tone. “So I shall not commission a portrait of you and Fewk from Leonoa Kanto, playing side by side like brothers?”

  He could have accepted the offer in the same tone, but he stuck to the subject. “What will people think, if they see it there?”

  “No visitor comes to my study,” she said.

  “Beasts do.”

  Her head tilted back the other way, though the smile was still painted there. “And now you are saying that they matter, and in a way that seems at odds with your earlier words.”

  He searched for the right way to phrase it, some piece of logic that did not work against itself or the other things he’d put forth. He said, “It will encourage them towards bad behavior, teach them something that, once they learn it, will infect them forever with bad behavior. The idea of equality—impossible as it is—given to a Beast will always be misused by them. It is their nature.” He stressed that last word yet again. He wondered, How can she not see all of this? How can she not see that they must be kept in their place?

  She moved to the fireplace. Its shelf was chin-high on her, and he thought to himself that age had stooped her. Would it keep on doing that, keep on shrinking her down until at some point his mother would vanish, become imperceptible, unknowable?

  The painting pressed impatiently on his vision, gleaming greasily in the firelight.

  Wasn’t she already proven unknowable by all of this?

  He looked at her.

  This time her smile was genuine. It was as though the real Letha, the one who loved him, the ever-constant ally of his childhood, reappeared, swam back into sight. His shoulders loosened and the unhappy thing that had coiled tightly in the pit of his stomach relaxed.

  He said, proffering the words in apology, “It’s your study.”

  “It is,” she said, but acceptance of his apology lurked in the corners of her tone. She stepped to him, slid her hand through the crook of his arm. “Come, we will go back to your father before he grows unduly lonely or irritated with our absence.”

  She led him back into the breakfast. “Would you like to take some with you when you go? I’ll have Tiggy make up a basket. And remember that Winter’s battle is coming soon, and that one of us must appear there to fulfill Ihobvioki’s burden. It is your turn.”

  “Ugh.” Sebastiano grimaced. “In that case,I will definitely require a basket, for your table is ten times more savory than the College’s.”

  Corrado Silvercloth’s eyes flicked towards her. “When your mother’s not spending all of her time tending to her Beasts and animals, she does well enough,” he said grudgingly. He directed his stare at Sebastiano. “But she’d do better keeping entirely to business. As would you. I’ve had just about enough of this Merchant Mage silliness.”

  “Alas,” Sebastiano said. “I lacked the skills to become a full Mage.” He considered a new serving of pancakes. “There’s always hope, though,” he added. He stared at the wall behind Corrado’s head, an embossed depiction of flying hawks, wing tips interlaced, like shadows on the white surface. The Silvercloth estate was among the oldest in Tabat, made of granite quarried from the same ridge that had fed the Ducal castle, centuries ago.

  Corrado’s indignant sputter, once he had fully taken in the words, was the reaction Sebastiano had hoped for.

  “Over my dead body! Bad enough that you neglect your duties, acting like a Stable Keeper there! And paying for the privilege no less!”

  “Much more than a Stable Keeper!” Sebastiano said. How was it that his father could move him from amused to annoyed so swiftly? “They value my knowledge. Much of it gathered from mother, I might add. In exchange for that and some monies to defray expenses, they continue to train me in magic.”

  Which he wasn’t particularly good at, but he refrained from adding that. Let the old man continue to worry Sebastiano might forsake his Merchant House entirely and become a Mage.

  It wasn’t as though Sebastiano had lived up to the Merchant part of his title for the last six years, renewing his leave of absence every red moon. Doing no work for the House meant no income from it, but so far he’d managed on just his allowance and frequent
presents from the generous Letha.

  “If you want to stay there, you’ll need to dance to my tune, I’ve decided,” the old man snarled around a mouthful of oat porridge. “I’ll settle for a damned baby, since you’ve been such a washout. You’d be worthless enough even if you did come back.”

  “I beg your pardon, sir,” he said. This sort of declaration was exactly why he avoided his father. He resolved, sadly, that even pancakes were not worth the risk. Then the first sentence eeled its way out of memory and he said, “A baby?”

  “Raise it right this time,” his father grumbled. “Train it from the start, without all this mollycoddling and flimflammery. No toys.” His brows knit. He blamed Sebastiano’s childhood entertainments for his wandering from the family path, in particular, the toy wand, more ornate than any real magical implement Sebastiano had ever met with, that his mother had given him at the age of eight.

  He directed another glance over at Sebastiano’s mother, who sat stroking the ferret in her lap. Letha Silvercloth lived for her animals and Beasts, and let her family revolve around her in abstracted orbits, occasionally making contact with one to perform some unanticipated, maternal act (the gift of the wand had been one such) and then disappear back into the pens to watch over a birthing Unicorn for days. She was the product of her Merchant mother’s liaison with a western trader, and Sebastiano owed his own unfashionable paleness to her whiter skin.

  Sebastiano thought his father’s future for his potential offspring bleak. “I’m not giving you a child as though it was a pet,” he said, obscurely annoyed on its nonexistent behalf. He had no intention of marrying, let alone starting a family. That would be work, time, and energy stolen from his studies.

  The elder Silvercloth glared at him from under beetled brows. It was a wonder the teapot didn’t freeze solid, caught in the crossfire of that wintry look, but it continued steaming as pleasantly as though they were discussing the latest Gladiator match. “If you want to stay at that College, you will! Because if you don’t do it, I will cut off your allowance, and you will have no more money to fritter away there.”