Hearts of Tabat

by Cat Rambo

  An odd trick of the light happened as she looked; the statue’s shadow overwhelmed Obedience’s shape, until all Adelina could see was Sparkfinger, one of Tabat’s strongest symbols of death and misfortune, reaching for her. The childhood stories had terrified her, particularly the defacement of his statue after his crimes had been discovered and the terrible vengeance he’d carried out on the responsible parties. She’d even been afraid to the point of not daring to look at it in passing, lest she attract his ghost’s attention. Now she had …

  With a little shriek that embarrassed her, she took a step back.

  Obedience detached herself from the statue’s shadow. She’d been crying. She was not a child whose appearance was rendered more attractive by tears, Adelina noted even as she hurried forward.

  “Obedience, dear heart, what’s to do?” As the child clutched her, she noted a pungent and unpleasing aroma.

  “I wanted to change apprenticeships!” Obedience wailed. “And they laughed at me. They laughed at me!”

  “Who did?” Adelina said. She extracted a lace kerchief from her pocket. “Here. Blow.”

  “Is that real Altos lace? It’s too pretty,” Obedience said, regarding the lace as though its devastation might drive her into a fresh bout of tears.

  “Nonsense.” Adelina forced the handkerchief on Obedience’s nose and relinquished it into Obedience’s hands after the requisite operation had been dutifully performed. “You may keep it.”

  “Really?” The gift cheered Obedience considerably.

  “Now then, who rejected you as apprentice?”

  “The Mages.”

  “They don’t take apprentices, Obedience. People are willing to pay well for the privilege of learning there.”

  “That’s what they said. But they didn’t have to be mean about it! Now I have to go back to the tannery! And it smells!”

  The lingering odor was corroboration enough. “Look,” Adelina said. “I’ve been thinking about this anyway. Why don’t I take you on as apprentice?”

  “At the Press?” Excitement lit Obedience’s face, making Adelina smile.

  “I will speak to your brother,” she promised. She thought of Eloquence’s earlier scowl, then glanced down at Obedience.

  Marbu, what am I doing?

  IT WAS ENTIRELY chance that Jilla and Reinart coincided in Adelina’s office’s antechamber, and it was not the best of luck. How had Jilla come up with such an idea while they were waiting together for only a short time?

  “My pictures contained in the book will make it a kind that has never been rendered before,” Jilla said. “You say you want a book that folks will remember, and this is it!”

  Reinart was not quite as convinced, Adelina was happy to see. “This science renders things as exactly as possible?” he said unhappily.

  “Yes, and that is an excellent thing!” Jilla said.

  Reinart looked around as though to consult someone, but his cousin was, for once, not there. “I will think it over,” he said. “I am not opposed to the idea, but I wish to consider it well.”

  Adelina kept herself from rolling her eyes. “I do not know that the illustrations are the trouble,” she said, and tried to bite the words back as they flew out of her mouth.

  As she could have predicted, they stung Reinart to the core. “What do you mean?” he demanded.

  She tried to explain. “They are dry and not about things of everyday people. They have no connection with the heart.”

  He harrumphed, which fascinated Adelina a little, because she had never before heard anyone actually make the sound.

  She gazed after him as he left. “Oh dear,” she said. “I have insulted him.”

  “You can stand up to him,” Jilla said, “if you are not enthused about the book. You need to stand up to people more. Like your mother.”

  “Mothers are hard to stand up to,” Adelina said. “Has that not been your experience as well?

  “My mother died in childbirth,” Jilla said. “My father was a kindly man.”

  “Then you know what it is being raised as an only child by a single parent, feeling yourself the focus of all their hopes and disappointments.”

  “Disappointments?”

  “Those follow on the heels of hope,” Adelina said. “The more you hope, the harder the disappointment.”

  “What a bleak philosophy,” Jilla commented. “Is that something that you hold true throughout? What about love?”

  “I have felt love, certainly,” Adelina admitted. “Of several sorts, of friend, and parent, and also of bedmate. But the one I loved the best moved on after only a handful of white moons.”

  When Bella first started to break with me, I refused to eat for six days and then realized that it would make no difference to Bella whatsoever.

  “So you will speak again. Will you try my remedy?”

  “Aye,” Adelina said.

  “Good.”

  On her way back, Adelina paused by Serafina’s desk. She studied the secretary, who looked up. She wore her usual plainly cut clothes, one of the signs of a worshipper of the Moon Temples. That was, as far as Adelina could tell, Serafina’s only similarity with Eloquence, but most of what Adelina had ever known of the Temples previously had been historical accounts. The Temples were for non-Merchants, Humans from the lower classes.

  Despite knowing the frown it would evoke, she asked, “Serafina, how does the Temple handle marriages?”

  “The Priests arrange them, when people are ready,” Serafina said.

  “How does the Priest know when they are ready?”

  “They come and ask the Priest to find them someone, and they prove in conversation that they are prepared to be with someone in that way, and to begin to raise a family.”

  “Is that the point of the alliance, the family?” Adelina said, intrigued. “Are there Triad marriages, as there are among the Merchants?”

  She felt foolish as Serafina eyed her. I am treating her as though she was some sort of menagerie creature and that is unkind. Shame twitched at her even harder when Serafina patiently said, “No, our marriages are not about economic alliances in the way that Merchant marriages are. Such alliances would be reckoned a little sinful because they are apart from the norm, truth be told.”

  “What is their purpose then?”

  “To create children, who will spread the faith.”

  “Should the faith not spread itself, if it is good enough?” Adelina asked, even more fascinated, and realized her misstep when she saw Serafina’s frown. “I beg your pardon,” she said quickly. “It is only that …”

  “It is only that the Moon Temples are not much regarded among the Merchants and the Nobles because it is a religion of the poor,” Serafina said frankly. “To speak of things that are not reckoned in profit or loss is thought shameful among the Merchants, and the Nobles do not like talk of doing good for its own sake.”

  That startled a laugh out of Adelina, who had never heard her clerk be so cynical. “What has flushed all this truth from you, then?”

  “I’ve told you before, you should not pay attention to Eloquence Clement,” Serafina said severely. “It is not a match the Temples would approve of, and he is a fine young man, with a good future in them ahead of him.”

  “Is he to become a Priest?”

  Serafina shook her head before she nodded. “A layman’s Priest, someone who does not live in the Temples and do as the Priests do, but lives among other people and acts as a go-between and an example. That is a special role, and it is the one that has been prepared for Eloquence.”

  It occurred to Adelina that the Temples were a relatively small gathering and so Serafina had known Eloquence and his family all her life. She said, “I am thinking of taking an apprentice, one of Eloquence’s sisters.”

  “That,” Serafina said slowly, “could be a good or bad notion, depending on which you mean to do so with.”

  “The youngest one. Obedience.”

  “Ah.” Serafina’s frow
n cleared. “She gets picked on by the rest of them, I think. To be out from under all of that would be a good thing for her, let her shine a little and come into her own. But I thought she was apprenticed to the tanner?”

  “Eloquence said so the other day, but I cannot imagine she is happy there.”

  Serafina pursed her lips. “It is not for the child to determine her own apprenticeship. That is for her elders to do, with the Temples’ advice, in order to place her where she will be best prepared for life.”

  “But at the time she was apprenticed to the tanner, this opportunity was not available to her for the Temples or her elders to know about,” Adelina pointed out.

  “That is true.” Serafina wavered. “You should consult her brother,” she said finally.

  “I will,” Adelina said.

  “You’ve never had an apprentice,” Serafina said. “What would you have her do?”

  “Run errands,” Adelina said.

  “Do you have that many errands?”

  “There are always papers to sort and books to go over while she is waiting to run errands. I’ll prepare her a corner out here where she can sit.”

  Serafina made a face. “I’ll prepare it,” she said, as Adelina had known that she would. “But I won’t until Eloquence has agreed to it.”

  “Very well,” Adelina said. How hard could it be to talk Eloquence into the change?

  AS IT TURNED OUT, very hard indeed. So hard that they returned to the privacy of her office for the argument.

  “It has already been decided,” he said for the third time, his tone as even and implacable as the first two. “The Temples think she needs to learn the humility that life at the tannery will impart.”

  “But she hates it. And the sort of training I can offer her will lead to a better life than being a tanner,” Adelina said.

  She was getting tired of arguing, of saying what seemed to be the same things over and over and over again, but the facts seemed so clear to her. How could Eloquence not examine them and see how well they added up? Obedience had a need, Adelina had a need, and both would receive a better value in their eyes than what they were giving. Was this Eloquence’s way of saying that he thought Adelina’s profession was disreputable? But if so, what did that say, when he wanted to be a writer himself?

  “This is ridiculous,” she said, and saw him wince.

  “My religion is not ridiculous,” he said, a degree hotter than before. “And it is my sister’s as well. I’ll ask you not to encourage her to go against what the Moons decree for her.”

  “Perhaps they decreed I would find her,” Adelina said. “You should have seen the state she was in, poor child.”

  “Still, you are too kind. It hurts me to forbid it.”

  “There is no reason to!” She glared at him, stepping forward to look up into his face.

  “You know exactly what you are doing: meddling in things you should not meddle in,” Eloquence said. “Even if you were correct in what you were trying to do—which you are not—it is not your right to determine what someone’s family should do.”

  He leaned on her desk with both arms, pushing forward as though to emphasize his words.

  “But you have decided what she will do for all her life!” she said. “Is that not more her right than yours?”

  His face was a closed house, shutters barricaded against any breath of sense. “That is how I was raised, and it has done me well enough.”

  “Has it?” she said. “You told me yourself that they wanted you to be a Priest, and you refused. Why are you allowed the luxury of such a refusal, but she is not?”

  “I am her elder and must look out for her,” he said. “That is my Moon-bestowed duty. Adelina, why is this so important to you?”

  She couldn’t really say it all but it burned inside her, the injustice of it, the same sort of injustice she’d labored under all her life. It wasn’t as though she could save herself—no, she had done that on her own, with no help—but this was like a chance to help her younger self, to remedy that struggle.

  But if she said that to Eloquence, she would be saying that he had been part of what had boxed her in, and was that truly what she wanted to say to him? Wasn’t he a freedom for her? Because he would be, she thought. Ally herself with Eloquence and her mother would write her off.

  How was it that she could find so many words when speaking of things she’d never witnessed—“making history come alive,” a particularly clichéd reviewer had said—and yet when it came to the feeling inside her, it was as though she was trying to speak in a language that she didn’t know, a language of depth and complexity and nuance, but one of which she knew only a few basic syllables.

  His anger was a wall between them and she had no tools to break it down, or even to show it to him.

  “You think you can decide things for others because of your position,” Eloquence said. “All you Merchants and Nobles are like that. Money and blood are not the same as wisdom or common sense, and if they were in the way that you would all like us to believe, it would be a very different world.” He bared his teeth at her in a snarl. “Who are you to prescribe honesty to one’s soul when you keep up the daily pretense you don’t run this Press?”

  She started to say that she’d been forced to that, but even as the words began to leave her lips, the truth of it overcame her and dragged them back. Her family had not forced that, her desire to avoid confrontation and struggle had.

  She said, “I did not do this to hurt you,” and she could hear the pleading in her tone.

  It did not soften his eyes, did not change his face. “Does that matter?” he said. “If a bullet strikes you, does it matter whether or not the gun was aimed at you or someone else?”

  She lowered her head, letting her hair fall to obscure her face, trying to hide behind that curtain. She had never fought with a lover like this, tooth and nail and yet trying so desperately not to leave wounds. When it had come time for Bella to leave her, she’d used her intellect, had talked to others that Bella had loved, had figured out the pattern and how to change it. Not how to change it and nullify it—there was no way to dam that stream. But she had diverted it, softened it, and let it wash her into an unexpected cove, that of Bella’s friend, a space that had been deserted until then.

  Do I regret that now? Is that something that I should regret?

  “Even now you are calculating rather than speaking,” Eloquence said. “I cannot prevent you taking an apprentice and I will not pursue this by trade law as I should, but by all three Moons, Adelina, I wish I had never set foot in this Press!”

  Someone knocked on the door. Startled, Adelina took a hasty step away, colliding with a pile of books, which toppled, sending another and another sliding in turn.

  The door opened on the chaos. Adelina was surprised to see Leonoa, who raised an eyebrow, regarding her, Eloquence, and the shambles of the office.

  Eloquence made for the door. “I’ll speak with you later, Merchant Scholar,” he said, and was gone.

  “Well,” said Leonoa. “That was an eyeful all right. All leg and chest and soulful eyes and hair tousled till you want to straighten it for him. I bet he strips well. Does he?”

  Sometimes Leonoa takes the brash and outspoken artist thing too far.

  “None of your business,” she snapped. “Surely you didn’t come just to chaff me about my authors.”

  “No, but I’ll seize the podium when it’s pushed my way. You need someone better than Bella.”

  “Bella and I are comrades, nothing more, for years now.”

  “Years you have spent dangling after her, consoling her between paramours.”

  “You’ve told me this before.”

  “And will again, till you listen. Seize your handsome, sun-kissed man and enjoy the coming Spring.”

  “It’s not due for weeks now.”

  “Another way Bella interferes in your—and all of our—lives.” Leonoa reached out to touch her hand. “It’s not that I feel it
my right or place to meddle. But I would not see you consumed by the same candle that has burned so many.”

  “I’ll take it into account,” Adelina said. “Why are you here?”

  “The Bank will not deal with me! I am a dangerous Abolitionist!” Leonoa said, looking more pleased than irritated. “So if you will give me a little coin for the plates I did for the last book, I would be pleased.”

  “I’ll give you a draft to give to Serafina,” Adelina said. “But that will only serve a little while, Leonoa. What will you do after that?”

  The artist shrugged. “Something will come along.”

  CHAPTER 36

  M erchant Scholar Nettlepurse!”

  Adelina was coming down Eelsy, thinking over the argument with Eloquence, rather than the speech she had promised to deliver. How could he see this was a better position for Obedience, yet insist that the tannery would better fulfill her duty to her family?

  She looked up at the voice calling her name. The pleasure that lit Mathu Reinart’s face made her feel ashamed of the sinking feeling his appearance engendered. More talk of his manuscript, no doubt. Or he had decided to take up Jilla’s notion.

  Indeed, the parcel under his arm looked very much like a new version of the book. But he spoke of something else.

  “The conversation earlier made me think of so many things. I never got a chance to ask. Did Leonoa Kanto’s paintings move you?”

  She thought she’d glimpsed him and Cavall at the gallery. She hesitated. A wealth of heresy and treason lay in the possible answers but she met his eyes, seeing his look mild and earnest. Unthreatening. She said, “How could anyone look at them and not feel something? Though the crowd’s emotions ranged, we must admit.”

  He nodded, quick head jerks like a puppet’s movements. She could see the heartbeat in his throat. Why was he so nervous? Did he intend to preach Abolitionist politics to her?

  He said, “I found her honesty admirable.”

  “Leonoa’s?”