Hearts of Tabat

by Cat Rambo

  The stands swayed and creaked under their steps as they ascended to the second tier and the hallway leading behind that layer and up to the next. Obedience was glad she had grown taller last year—as it was, she saw mostly chests and backs, since she had yet to achieve her full growth (or so she hoped, she would not want to go through the world only four feet tall). People jostled by her in a hurry and the smells of food—sizzling sausages and bowls of spicy winter greens and cooked raisins strung on strings and rolled in sugar—filled the air.

  One vendor was selling penny-wides.

  “Bella Kanto’s latest adventures,” he bellowed. A waft of fresh ink reached Obedience’s nose as he brandished the broadsheet. Obedience would have liked to read it but she knew Eloquence had already spent all his coins on tea and tickets.

  Were they poor? Obedience supposed so, though they seemed better off than some of her friends, and certainly the street children she’d glimpsed, living from hand to mouth on the streets, were much worse off. But they did have a house, and when you were tucked in a bed with siblings, it couldn’t help but be warm, even though it had a heavier dose of elbows and kicks than were truly conducive to sleep.

  It was the hunger she minded, the quarreling to make sure everyone got the same amount of bread or porridge. It was never having coins to buy pastries the way that Adelina Nettlepurse had. She had handed over the bag as though it had never occurred to her that anyone might have to count coins, and a secret little part of Obedience wished that Adelina had given her the money instead.

  Everything was about coins, but they told you in the Moon Temples that you were not supposed to worry about coins, and instead take things as the Moons willed it. That the Moons meant for you to be where you were, but that if you changed it, that was what they meant you to do, which was a little confusing, but then again, so many things about the Moon Temple were. Eloquence said they were meant to be like that, that meanings were found inside of paradoxes and that was how you got wise, by learning how to solve them.

  But the problem was that even after they were explained to her, she never understood.

  Perhaps someone would discard their penny-wide after reading it. She kept a sharp eye on the ground, hoping.

  That was her downfall. When she looked up, Eloquence and the others were gone. She froze. Mamma had drilled into her—into them all—what to do in such circumstances—go to one of the Duke’s officers and ask them to escort her home. Otherwise, Mamma had warned, there were unsavory sorts about and she might find herself kidnapped, sold into slavery or worse on the Old Continent.

  But going home would mean missing the Game. Missing Bella Kanto’s victory.

  More jostling, people pushing back and forth with no regard for the diminutive girl in their path. It was hot, and noisy, and full of smells. Somewhere down on the Arena floor a trumpet blew.

  What to do? Her eyes searched the stands around her. Where had they gotten to? At least she was inside the walls, not outside lacking ticket and therefore entrance.

  Most of the crowd was headed higher. Perversely, she picked her way to the lower corridors, slipping under elbows, ducking around stomachs. There were private boxes down here, the purlieu of Tabat’s wealthier Merchants. Could she make her way into an unoccupied one and watch from there? After the match, she’d find a Peacekeeper.

  At the first door she tried the handle and found it locked.

  Another door yielded to her touch, but the room past it was filled with a press of people that looked up as the door swung open.

  “Who’s that?” a woman demanded, glaring at Obedience from the cluster of silk cushions where she sat.

  Obedience bobbed her head in apology and retreated.

  She’d try once more. That door, there, marked “Silvercloth.”

  At first Obedience thought herself entirely alone. Then someone stirred and looked at her. A lean, dark-haired man, dressed richly, in clothes that had never been handed down.

  “Hello,” he said. She didn’t reply, caught by the sight of the silver and purple feather cockade in the hat at his elbow. A Mage? Here in a Merchant box?

  She said, bluntly, “I’m not supposed to be here. Are you?”

  The corners of his mouth lifted. “It depends on who you ask. But I am Sebastiano Silvercloth. Who are you?”

  That had been the name on the door, so he must have some claim to this space. She felt abashed and dropped her gaze.

  “Are you lost, little girl?” he said.

  Indignation flickered. “My name is Obedience and I’m not a little girl!”

  “My mistake,” he said. “Are you lost, young Obedience?”

  “I know where I am,” she said. “It’s the others that are lost.”

  THE CHILD SAID, “Why are you here?”

  “Supposedly to look over prospective brides,” Sebastiano said, “but in truth to sit in comfort while watching the match and enjoy the excellent dinner basket that has been provided me.”

  Obedience considered this. “It doesn’t seem particularly hard, having to show up and sit in a box and eat from a hamper,” she said. “It’s not like you’re the youngest and everything’s a hand-me-down.”

  He studied her in turn: the square little face, chin set as though defying him to take offense at what she’d just said.

  “Fair enough.” He shrugged at her.

  The lines of her jaw slackened. She glanced again at the basket. “There’s a lot there,” she observed. Her eyes challenged him again.

  “Would you like some?” he offered, amused. This was more entertaining than seeing Bella Kanto defeat Spring yet again.

  He gestured her to a seat and unpacked the hamper. Under a layer of flower-damasked linen were square porcelain containers that fit into a wooden frame, carved as intricately as a puzzle. One held bits of duck meat smoked in tea, and another saffron-scented dumplings with crumbly bits of onion on top, greasy and flavorful as they dissolved beneath the tongue. Yet another offered salad rolled in thin pancakes, flakes of seaweed and chopped hothouse lettuce, their vinegar bite tempered with honey and crumbs of roasted nuts.

  The child licked her lips and dove in.

  “Do you have much to eat at home?” Sebastiano asked.

  She gave him an incredulous look. “There’s nine of us!” she informed him. “You see how far food stretches when everyone’s reaching for it at once. Nine!” She shook her head with the last word.

  “Well, if there were fewer, you might not exist,” Sebastiano pointed out.

  “If there were fewer of them, I might exist better,” she said darkly, as though sororicide was not entirely outside the realm of possibility.

  Sebastiano grinned. He was, unexpectedly, enjoying himself more than he had thought he would, even when bribed with a lavish meal . And he was having a conversation with a child. He rarely came into contact with children.

  Trumpets blared outside and three Gryphons roared a chord of challenge. One of them seemed to be wheezing a little. Cold weather was hard on their throats.

  “Is it starting?” Obedience demanded. She scrambled over towards the booth’s front, dragging a chair with her. She settled into it, head and arms draped over the railing until more of her resided outside the box than in. Sebastiano grabbed the back of her sash in time to keep her from tumbling out.

  “It is,” he said.

  She stood on her toes, denting the chair’s velvet cushion. Together, they and everyone else in the Arena focused their attention on its center, where a fountain of fire, hanging in mid-air, blazed thirty feet high. Three orbs of light, each several feet across, orbited above its highest point. Sebastiano snorted.

  “That’s new.”

  “Ssssh,” Obedience hissed, turning just long enough to put a finger to her lips. “We’ll miss something.”

  “It’s always the same,” Sebastiano said. “The fire will die down, the Duke will offer a few brief words that will be anything but brief, and the fighters will appear, first Winter in her
silver and crystal armor and then Spring in green and yellow enamel. They fight.”

  “Hush,” Obedience said, loud enough that several heads in the stands below turned upward. “You said the lights were new, so you don’t know everything.”

  Several retorts rose to Sebastiano’s lips but he had to admit the soundness of Obedience’s logic. Who knew what the upcoming political changes meant for the structure of the Games, if they were already altering it in a nod to the Moon Temples? Maybe it would be good for Tabat, shake up some institutions that had remained unchanged while around them science and magic pushed things forward.

  But as he had predicted, the fire died away with the suddenness of a water tap being shut off. The Duke of Tabat was revealed, standing where the flames had blazed.

  “Citizens,” he exhorted with an upraised hand. The tenth Duke of Tabat was past his prime at forty-two, but remained lean and commanding. In political cartoons, he was often identified as a sinewy weasel, long-toothed and ferocious.

  Sebastiano sagged back in his seat. “Blah blah blah, I’m the Duke and you’re not. That’s all that windbag ever says, no matter what.”

  “Blah blah blah.” Obedience’s imitation of Sebastiano was frighteningly accurate. “Maybe it’s the usual thing to you, but I—,” she thumped her chest with an emphatic fist “—haven’t ever been here before. If you’re going to talk and insist on explaining things, you might at least make them useful.”

  Sebastiano sat up. “Very well,” he said. “Spring is not always one of Winter’s students, but since Kanto has been Winter for over twenty years, the point has been moot. They’re not always candidates from the Brides of Steel. Three years ago it was a young man she’d tutored privately, you may remember him.”

  She nodded. “Danobert Smallnets.”

  “How old are you?” he asked.

  “Thirteen,” she said.

  He examined her with an upraised eyebrow.

  Her attention wavered between him and the Duke, who was well into his speech. “What?”

  “You don’t look thirteen.”

  “Older?” she said, hope in her voice.

  He shook his head. “The opposite.”

  She glowered. He felt a flush of shame and rushed to fill the silence with words. “Truly, this is your first time at the Games? I will tell you more about them. We have been having them here in Tabat for two hundred and fifty years, before the Arena was built, even. The Gladiators play out the Festivals of the city and often determine the course of what will happen, as now. If Bella Kanto, in Winter’s role, defeats her opponent, who is playing Spring, Tabat will remain cold and wintry for six weeks more.”

  “I know all that,” Obedience said. “Because of magic.”

  He considered, wavering a hand back and forth. “Because it is the way the Gods wish things to work.”

  The Duke was in full voice and his oration showed no signs of relenting. Obedience went back to the hamper and delved into the second layer. Chunks of fruit, honey and spice-glazed; chips of dried fish in cages woven from cumin-dusted dulse; nut butters spread inside roasted roots with tiny minnows in the very center. The foods of late Winter, when all you craved was something fresh and green, other than the weeds in your chal.

  Obedience said, “My brother says all Mages are mad.”

  Sebastiano felt a wave of dislike for this unknown, opinionated sibling, no doubt a fellow given over to irrational superstitions.

  “That is not even close to the truth,” he said. “Mages are saner than most, because we constantly monitor our mental health.”

  Obedience gave him a shrewd look. “Why do you monitor it like that?”

  “Because a Mage who goes mad is no longer a Mage but a Sorcerer. Or Sorceress.”

  “Why are some women Sorcerers and some Sorceresses?”

  “It depends on how they name themselves. Some women insist on the latter title, others do not.”

  “What makes them go mad?”

  “There are three of the jam cakes left,” Sebastiano said, pointing into the basket.

  Obedience took one but persisted. “What makes Mages go mad?” She crammed the cake into her mouth as she awaited Sebastiano’s answer.

  “Very well.” He steepled his fingers and rested his chin atop them, contemplating her. He marshaled his thoughts, going back to how it had been explained to him when he was just a student in his first year.

  “There are animals, which can be magical, like the phoenix moths, which burst into flame when they die and create new eggs, you know those? Or not, like the humming moths, which lay eggs and die, for new ones to hatch according to nature’s cycle.”

  She nodded.

  “And there are Humans and Beasts. Beasts can work magic because they are more animal than Human, and because they do it naturally, like the animals. They are magic, they have it within them in a way Humans do not. To draw on magic, Humans must derange their minds and think like animals and Beasts or else use the magics of such creatures to fuel devices. The effort of controlling such inhuman energies, of shaping and manipulating them, can, for the weak-minded, lead to them becoming controlled by such magic, prey to whim and malice, and always seeking to increase their power. On the Old Continent, when such things were not understood, Sorcerers came to power and took over the kingdoms there, warring between themselves till all became ash and waste.”

  He broke off. Obedience looked bored.

  “Listen,” said Sebastiano. “The Duke has stopped talking. The Games are about to begin.”

  CHAPTER 18

  The Duke vanished through an archway as the crowd cheered.

  Obedience leaned forward. She would not get a chance to see an Arena match from a vantage point like this ever again, she thought, and the thought made her feel sad and resentful, all at once.

  Bella Kanto stepped out in a gleam of silver armor, sparkling like clear ice, while Spring danced out in flowery colors, but just as dazzling. Beside her, Sebastiano snorted amusement at something.

  “Sssh,” she hissed sideways without taking her eyes off the two fighters as they advanced towards each other. They touched blades three times. Everyone in the stands roared, and Obedience did too, even though she wasn’t sure what the cheer was for. The match’s start, she realized, as the fight began in earnest.

  She had never seen anyone fight like this before, with swords, only the occasional fist fight, and now she realized how poorly those fighters would have fared if matched against either of these Gladiators. They moved so quickly! And every time the swords clashed, sparks flew into the air, and the crowd gasped.

  It was not quick. The two circled each other, moving this way and that, angling for advantage.

  “That’s odd,” Sebastiano said. “Something just made Kanto pause. I’ve never seen her do that before.”

  Bella Kanto glanced up towards the Duke’s box, and her opponent seized the moment, stepping forward. The fighters closed in a flurry of blows so swift Obedience couldn’t see the swords, just a flicker, before they pulled apart again.

  Despite his pretense at boredom, Sebastiano was leaning forward at the same angle. They watched the two close again.

  “Ugh!” Sebastiano said. “Did you catch that kick of Kanto’s, right for the kneecap? Look, Spring’s down.”

  But the flower-colored figure grabbed the icy one, pulled her down as well. They grappled. Everyone in the stands was on their feet, trying to catch the action. Spring, then Winter, was on top, and then a blade flashed downward.

  Spring shuddered and died.

  Bella stood there, accepting the screams of the crowd, armor shining between the snowflakes.

  Winter had claimed victory.

  DEATHS WERE NOT unheard of in the Arena, but there was an angry mutter to the crowd, a tenor that Sebastiano had never heard before. Had anger at Kanto reached such heights?

  Shouts began, followed by people throwing things into the Arena. Chaos, screams, and thumps shook the walls around them. Se
bastiano wondered if it would be best to wait it out or try to press his way through the hallways, take the child to safety? Last week a crowd had set fire to a building. The Arena would go up quickly.

  “Can’t you cast some magic that will get us out?” Obedience asked.

  “Magic takes time and special apparatus to work,” he said. Still, the trust in her eyes made him stand straighter. He was a Mage after all, whether or not “Merchant” was prepended to the title.

  Obedience’s eyes were wide as hen’s eggs as another crash shook the wall. She said, “What will we do?”

  Sebastiano kept his voice light. “I will escort you home,” he said, “but we will wait while the crowd spreads to the streets outside. When there are fewer people outside, we’ll slip out as well. I do have some magics with me, and I’ll layer them on you now.”

  At least she could think herself protected. It might help. He took his scrying lens out, slipping the chain it hung from over his head and around her neck in turn. He focused his will into the casing around it, charging it so the crystals would sparkle.

  “I don’t like that,” Obedience commented. “Your eyes went all funny and white.”

  “The sclera of the soul eye,” he said, automatically instructive as though with a student, then stopped. It would be cruel to teach this child things above her station, he thought.

  They waited for a half hour. Obedience finished off the food in the basket.

  When they heard a frenzy of shouts and screams in the distance, they froze.

  Sebastiano said, “That’s farther away and not in the Arena itself. Are you ready to venture out?”

  She nodded.

  “Keep my hand,” he commanded. “But stay a step back, and get behind me if there is trouble.”