Hearts of Tabat

by Cat Rambo

“Yes. She asks questions of the world, does not hide them behind piles of rhetoric and half-truths.”

  His tone was bitter, his eyes downcast.

  “Where is your cousin? I have never seen you without him.”

  Now his eyes rose and pain thinned his voice. “Very ill. He’s very ill.”

  “I am sorry to hear it.”

  He made as though to gather the parcel to his chest, then thrust it at her. “Here. This has a new beginning. It tries … it tries to be honest. It tries to speak to the heart, as you said.”

  ADELINA LOOKED out at the gathered crowd and squared her shoulders. How many of them expected her to fail again, expected to see her dash all of Emiliana’s hopes anew? But she could feel the power of the drug running through her, steeling her spine, smoothing her face.

  “My fellows,” she began, and launched into the speech she had prepared the night before. She hadn’t rehearsed it. Would that be her undoing?

  But this time it feels so different.

  This time the words sang through Adelina, flew out to the crowd and convinced them, a whole plaza’s worth of Tabat citizens standing out in the cold to hear her, their breath fuzzing the air as they breathed, listening.

  She could see their eyes shining, could feel them out there, connected to her by invisible strings. She could see Emiliana looking at her with wonder and pride, smiling at her. This was a marvelous day.

  The powder Jilla had given her had been bitter, but this was sweet as Fairy honey.

  The Trade Gods sent me Jilla. This is how life should be.

  How did it go by so quickly? She barely remembered it afterwards, standing amid a press of people, hearing Emiliana’s congratulations along with all the rest.

  “I’m so proud of you,” Emiliana said, smiling, and the words sang to Adelina all the way home.

  THAT NIGHT, she took, as was her habit, a manuscript to bed.

  She’d give Reinart one last try.

  HOW DOGS CAME To The New Continent

  This is, of course, but the briefest preface to a longer, more detailed study. To my best knowledge, I am the first Scholar in either Tabat or Verranzo’s New City to set down the history of dogs on this continent (aside from the sundry jottings of Beast Keepers). I have written hastily, despite its lack of decorum, in order to pay tribute to my cousin, closer than any brother, recently deceased. In these pages, I will answer the charges made against him as well as my father and myself.

  The following 1512 pages contain detailed lineages for the city’s significant dog lines, along with accounts of their exploits and advances. While I have neglected many of today’s lesser breeds, Appendix G lists the current species available, ranked in order of popularity, from teapot poodles to the dangerous miniature basilisk/greyhound mix. It is indicative of the softness of our society that the lapdogs known as Mops top the list.

  At any rate, this work is indeed a scholarly effort, but also one that details the lineage of the heart dearest to me in all this world.

  WHEN THE MAN the history books know only as Verranzo’s Shadow Twin established the city of Tabat, he opted for differing territory than his brother Verranzo, whose New City lay on the Eastern Seaboard, an advantageous but sometimes dangerous proximity to the Old Continent.

  Adelina flipped ahead a few pages.

  Much work presented itself in those early days. Tabat grew quickly as refugees from the Old Continent landed and set to building the city to come. The Duke planned the city with an eye that looked to the far future. This was laughed at when crews found themselves building sewage systems, canals, and avenues through the wilderness, but in the century to come, the Duke’s layout would prove his remarkable foresight.

  Over five years, the eastern swamp was drained, creating rich farmland. Deposits of fine-grained alluvial clay were discovered among the stumps, and the first factory began to produce brick and roofing tile in the region later become known as the Slumpers. Neighborhoods sprang up and found themselves efficiently and neatly arranged. Along the cliffs, terraces were smoothed, and staircases and winding roads laid out in careful order.

  Adelina snorted. Some of this recapped her own work. She flipped again, pausing at a surname she recognized.

  Khanda Kanto led Valor. Able second Nella Call organized the outfitting and saw the expedition equipped with a variety of supplies, including: trade goods (blue, white, and green glass beads, fireworks, cloth, and liquor); powdered soup in oilcloth packets, dried apples, figs, pears, and raisins, four pounds of baking powder; tea, coffee, pepper, bags of corn and flour; sacks of dog biscuit; twelve glass-bubbled messenger demons; waterproof brass compasses; notebooks, inks, and pens, along with watercolors for what Kanto called her “miserable talents in this regard”; waterproofed playing cards, and a case that doubled as backgammon or chess/checker board; fishing tackle, including line ranging from a pound to a hundred pound, with fishhooks sized accordingly.

  The poet Tullus accompanied them. Kanto’s journals deemed him “a poor shot, prone to whining while pretending not to do so,” although she warmed to him by the trip’s end, and more so when his Khanda’s Ballad was published.

  More pages flicked beneath her fingers, all devoted to those early expeditions and the dogs that had accompanied them.

  … the expedition later to be known as “The Beast’s Expedition”, set forth, organized by an independent Scholar, Fabula Nettlepurse. Where earlier expeditions sought to map which lands were inhabited by Humans and which contained only Beasts, Nettlepurse’s expedition thought to find lands where Beasts had formed their own governments. Such early Abolitionist thinking was seen as aberrant at the time. Several plays satirized the expedition and its improbable mission.

  While Nettlepurse’s findings were discredited almost immediately upon publication, many of her writings and observations resurface in Abolitionist tracts in following decades. She observed that many of the interior Beasts mirrored Sorcerer-created versions on the Old Continent, raising the question whether the Sorcerers had actually created or summoned them.

  Although no Ducal hounds companioned Nettlepurse’s expedition, it contained two dogs from the Southern Isles, whose like had not been seen on either Old or New Continent before. They were striped deep red and orange and black …

  Back to the dogs.

  Two weeks in, Fortitude found itself floating in the midst of a sea of feathers, a mass of white, black and gold covering the water’s surface for nearly a mile. Turning a bend, they found themselves among cliffs covered by birds in their Summer molt: white pelicans, and golden songbirds, and a host of black swallows of a kind no one had seen before. The noise the birds made was so deafening that the crew stopped up their ears with lumps of tallow lest they be driven mad. They gathered bushels of the feathers, and at their next trade stop, sent back several sackfuls.

  Flip, flip. How long could a foreword go on?

  Classes in Tabat’s schools were cancelled for three days, and the brass band that had been preparing for the expedition’s return since the previous year was finally given their chance. Merchants churned out replica “Explorer’s Hats” complete with a rainbow of feathers in a fanlike formation at the front, the first of what would become Tabat’s signature feather cockades.

  Flip.

  More problematic were the tribes of Beasts, not to mention tribes who appeared Human but turned out not to be. While procreation rarely results in offspring, many Humans shun such contact, deeming it to be unlucky and unseemly. The men of Perseverance took it upon themselves to defend the prowess of Tabatians, for the most part. Only one Beast/Human offspring is known to have resulted from this—the child was raised by the College of Mages and its descendents still live in its menagerie.

  But even more than the Humans, the dogs had been in demand, for many tribes hoped to crossbreed them with their own hunting animals. They had proven surprisingly fertile too—on Valor’s trip back, they encountered instance after instance of puppies greeting them. The Duke rema
rked that the dogs had a remarkably smug look.

  Flip. Again and again. She paused at words she had never seen before, added recently.

  When I was a lad of five, my father brought me a puppy, which the Duke had given for his services, one of the highest honors in Tabat. I named him Cavall in honor of a story I had heard at my nursemaid’s knee, and he and I grew apace together. But he matured more quickly. By the time I was thirteen, he had saved my life on three occasions: once from snakebite, once from drowning, and a third by Mandrake. My father loved him as well as I did, and called him in jest a second son. More than once I saw him regard the dog with affection mingled with deep gratitude.

  Throughout my childhood, I knew my canine brother a match for me in intellect, although he lacked the powers of speech. He comprehended it as well as I did, and I would talk to him by the hour, telling him all my hopes and dreams.

  When I reached adolescence, my companion fell ill. He was put in the stable, where the Stable Keeper nursed him. Over the next two days, I went to visit him whenever I could, and sat reading to him from a book we had both been enjoying, a detailed account of Valor and its travels. We made our way from the wasp city to the western coast while he laid panting, white froth around his eyes.

  That midnight my father roused me. His face was troubled. We went to the stables. My dog was gone. In his place lay a boy my age, blonde where I was dark-haired.

  He opened his eyes and they were Cavall’s eyes. He struggled to sit up, pushing away the blanket covering him. Naked legs beneath it, spindly and thin as my own adolescent limbs.

  “Easy, son,” my father said, and laid a hand on his shoulder. At the touch, the youth calmed and sat looking between the two of us, his expression trusting.

  “Cavall?” I whispered.

  He smiled at me and half-croaked a response. As though the sound he made frightened him, he flinched back, then recovered himself. “Ca-vall.”

  The stable smelled of dogs and horses and the bitter medicine that they had dosed him in dog form with.

  “He is a Shifter,” my father said. “Do you understand what they are?”

  “Someone who can be both Human and animal.”

  He shook his head. “An animal that uses magic to take Human shape, which means it is a Beast.”

  He looked sadly at Cavall, who tried to croak again but was not understandable.

  “Shifters are killed on sight,” he told Cavall.

  Cavall nodded. Pushing the blanket away completely, he tottered to his feet, then to my father. He moved more gracefully by the end, smoothly enough that he simply rolled over at my father’s feet.

  He lifted his chin to expose his throat to my father’s knife.

  I interposed myself before my father could act.

  Never have I been as eloquent as I was that night, pleading for my brother’s life. I reminded my father how he would have lost me three times over, were it not for Cavall. We could hide his infirmity, I said. I would personally take charge of it. In Human form, he could be my cousin, sent south from Verranzo’s New City.

  And so Cavall came to be in my household, where we shared all things, and have done so all my life. In dog form and in Human, he has run with me and guarded me from all perils.

  When I was twenty-three, we traveled together to Verranzo’s New City. There are many Abolitionists there and we attended several lectures. After one, I told him that I would be glad to fund him if he chose to seek out others like himself.

  He laughed, and asked me how well I thought he would acquit himself in the wilderness? He told me he had grown fond of the advantages that civilization offered and preferred to stay with me. He made me chuckle, positing ridiculous examples of how he might live in the wild, but he was earnest when he told me he preferred to live with me.

  Only a few times have I denied what he is. The first to a young lady we both admired, who inquired of me if I did not think him (she referred to his Human form) a little odd. I denied this strongly, and praised him to her. It only occurs to me in retrospect that this was her way of telling me her preference. My life has been marked by such dunderheaded moments, though Cavall has saved me from many of them.

  Have I wronged Tabat by keeping him safe from its hunters? Have I damaged the order of things, encouraged abomination to walk on this earth? But how could one who loves me so be capable of anything but truth and honesty?

  It was, and still is, a hard choice, one I struggle with daily.

  But it has been taken from me. I am forty now, and while Cavall was still my age when he walked in Human form, in canine shape he grew gray-muzzled and slow-walking.

  Finally, last night I knelt beside him for the final time in that shape he could not forsake, as much as I implored him to.

  He licked my hand. He closed his eyes.

  His last breath shuddered from him, but even then, he grinned as only a dog can, promising to run before me and find the path.

  All that I have left of him is this tribute, this work. Does my acceptance of him make me an Abolitionist and even worse, a traitor to my race? Perhaps it does, but I have known a devoted soul, and it was as Human as my own.

  And so to all the Cavalls of this world—run freely and love deeply, my friends, and know that you will be loved in return.

  Adelina put down the last page with shaking hands. Her heart hammered in her chest and the air clutched tight and close around her.

  A Shifter? He’d lived in this city, walked the same streets she did, stood in this very office.

  Had smiled at her more than once.

  Had lived all his life loving a Human.

  If I print this book, I’ll be arrested, tried for consorting with a Shifter, even at this remove. Reinart and his House will be destroyed. He is the last of his family. Perhaps he feels this a better way to die.

  Stupid and foolish.

  And brave, so very brave. How could anyone be so brave?

  I’ll tell him to send it to Verranzo’s New City if he is bent on this. Serafina can write him, tell him to come speak with me.

  But one interview before that, with Emiliana.

  Can I be as brave as Mathu Reinart?

  Could she weather a storm like the one he was facing? His situation was so much more perilous. Even if her mother disowned her, she’d still have the Press and her friends.

  I can be that brave.

  I will be that brave.

  CHAPTER 37

  The scratch from the Dryad was more inflamed and sore than ever.

  Murga had sent round salve in a brown-paper wrapped parcel, but Sebastiano knew a better remedy. He tucked the package away on a stable shelf though. You never knew when such things came in handy.

  Come to me when the Doctor fails you, Letha had said, and so he would. He thought of his mother, and all the Beast Trainers and workers she knew. If the Doctor was right, and the main part of the malady was that it had been caused by a Beast’s claws, who would better know how to cure it?

  He found his mother in her room, tending to an addled Brownie. The sleepy creature sat in her lap, nursing on a green glass bottle full of whey and blinking as ponderously as a Judge after lunch. She smiled at him as he came in. “Sebastiano, what brings you here?”

  He hesitated, and then reached to brush the loose hair away from his face, exposing the worsened wound.

  She hissed like a cat under her breath. The creature in her lap, galvanized by the sound, dropped the bottle and shot like a rocket to her shoulder, eyes now round and totally unblinking, surveying the surroundings for any sign of danger and fixing on Sebastiano. It chattered angrily at him and, as Letha moved closer to him, abandoned her shoulder entirely in favor of the top of a cabinet, in a narrow cobweb-and-darkness choked slot between cabinet and ceiling.

  “So much worse, so soon? You should have come to me earlier.”

  Letha’s fingers were, unlike the Doctor’s, cool on his hot skin, soothing. She turned and took down a wide-mouthed jar along with several tin
y squares of rags.

  As she dabbed a rag, smeared with paste from the jar, along the injury’s edge, chill spread out from the contact.

  He smelled mint and more than that, the smell of Winter, icicle drip and snowflakes on razor-edged wind, before she closed the jar and screwed the lip tight. “Tell me again how you came by it.”

  “A Dryad did it,” he said. “I think she was trying to create a diversion so someone else could escape.”

  She took the rag and worked her way along the length of the pain. He sighed with relief as it began to ebb.

  He should have known his mother would be able to work some magic with it; she had always been skilled in the practical side of things.

  “Was she helping another Dryad escape?” she asked. Her breath smelled of wine and porridge and was warm on the clammy edges of his neck. He pulled away as she finished, daring to shake his head, and marveling at the lack of pain that accompanied the motion.

  “No. A Human boy, that’s who she was helping.”

  “Odd.” Letha’s tone was detached. “They don’t usually do that sort of thing, take to children. They tend to think children uncanny, or so I’ve been told.”

  The notion intrigued him. “Are you saying you’ve talked with one?”

  “No,” she said. “The Duke tends to seize any brought into town so I’ve never had the luck to do so, other than bits of conversation with the members of his menagerie.” She did something that pulled at the wound and he winced. “Sorry,” she said, but continued tugging as he closed his eyes, trying to shut out the reignited pain. “I’ve tried to find one, but they fall directly into the Duke’s domain, and any Dryads or logs are taken immediately to him.”

  Sebastiano knew what happened to the logs, although he was not sure that his mother did. His eyes flickered over to the woodless fireplace. Perhaps she did. As always, worry edged at the corners of his mind. This was a vast continent, truly, full of forests and other marvels, but would it be able to feed Tabat’s appetite forever?