Hearts of Tabat

by Cat Rambo

  He pushed the thought from him and opened his eyes as Letha moved her hand away. Her face was still too close to his; he could see the papery wrinkles around her eyes that had not been there when he was a child. When had his mother gotten so old? Affection and gratitude suffused him and he patted her hand as she retrieved it.

  “I knew you’d fix it,” he declared, but she shook her head.

  “There’s something in the wound making it not heal,” she said. “It happens sometimes with the wounds that Beasts make when something happens to them afterward, as though the two were tied together. Though if she is in the menagerie, I do not know what harm might have befallen her. Other times, it seems to depend on how much magic the person is exposed to and I suspect in your case that is plenty.”

  Sebastiano scoffed. “I’ve never heard of such a thing, and my treatises are all on Beasts.”

  Her smile was bright. “Yes, but there at the College, you do not work with Beasts the way a regular Beast Trainer does.” She cocked her head. “Did you not tell me once that all the Beasts at the College have geases laid on them, so they may never harm a Human being, no matter what?”

  “Many of them,” he said cautiously. The way she said it made it seem unnecessary and overzealous, but it was the way things had always been done in the College, since its founding, several hundred years ago. One of the joys of the College was the wealth of tradition and custom that suffused it. You always knew what you were supposed to be doing and how you were supposed to be doing it at the College.

  “And so I knew you would never come to be injured by one,” she declared. “But I did not know the College would have you running errands for the Duke, bringing his packages to him.”

  Sebastiano blushed. “No, it’s not like that,” he said. “But a Mage oversees any cargo that is magical in nature, that’s required, and it was my day for duty by the docks.” He paused. “But what should I do, if it will not heal?”

  “Give it time,” Letha said, but a shadow slid behind her eyes that he did not like at all.

  “How much time?” he demanded

  She shrugged, standing up and turning away from him to go to the window. She rested her hands on the sill, looking out at the snowy branches and two tiny blue finches huddled there. Sebastiano knew the birds built their nests in that bush each year, and that his mother would employ a servant to watch over them and keep cats and Fairies away. She said, “Give it a purple month, and then come back and let me look at it again.”

  Her tone was calm and he felt reassured by that. Time, that was all it would take. He pondered why the magical energies might delay the healing process. He felt a surge of excitement. This was something that might yield another treatise and if it was true, if Beast injuries were something dangerous to other Mages, then he would do a good thing for all of them by learning how such danger might be warded off.

  “A word with you, Sebastiano.” Corrado, looming in the doorway.

  In the study, out of Letha’s earshot, Corrado leaned forward over his desk, its glossy surface reflecting the angry droop of his moustache, the fierce battlements of his knitted eyebrows.

  He said, “I have asked you before to lay aside your Magework and become a proper Merchant. It would not be all that difficult to change your title, given enough coin.”

  He hadn’t wanted to come in answer to his father’s summons because it would be this discussion again.

  Sebastiano said, “I am a better Mage than Merchant.”

  He thought his father would snap back some denial. It astonished him when his father dropped a long, slow nod.

  “And you could be excellent at setting yourself aflame,” Corrado Silvercloth said, settling back against the chair’s overstuffed cushion. “Yet that would not mean I’d want you to follow that path.”

  “We have been over this again and again! Few Mages go mad.”

  “You speak of it as though it were a Summer cold.”

  They both knew it was much more serious than that. A Mage who went mad, fell prey to the energies and exertions of working magic, would be put down as swiftly as possible, before he or she could be seized, possessed entirely by Magic, and become a Sorcerer.

  He’d seen it happen twice in his decade and a half at the College. Each time it had been a student who’d been too eager, too bold. Too sure of the strength of their mental walls.

  Why did his father think him weak? It stung. To be sure, it was every Mage’s fear. It was why they monitored themselves for eccentricity, for quirks, for changes that might signal the onset of madness, the shadow always lurking at their heels.

  He didn’t tell his father that every morning he woke and conducted a mental inventory, that sometimes when he looked in mirrors he was afraid he’d see Madness grinning behind him.

  He smiled, trying to put as much sanity and reassurance in the expression as his face could hold, and said, “I swear to you I will not go mad.”

  His father stared down at his own interlaced hands, heavy rings on his thumbs and forefingers, one the signet of the House, required for all important Silvercloth paperwork.

  When he was five or six, Sebastiano had loved playing with that signet, measuring a dollop of silver wax onto paper before impressing the ring in it and pulling it away to reveal the House’s emblem: three coins in a triangle, a goblet below them, reminder of their origins, when a Silvercloth ancestor had overseen the development of the city’s water system, and been awarded a Merchant’s holding as a result of her skill.

  His father’s words echoed his thoughts. “It was simpler when you were young. If I saw you put a hand out to touch the fire, I’d slap it away without thinking. Now you are an adult but still it hurts me to see you reach for this new fire.”

  “I am not a child,” Sebastiano said, trying to keep his resentment out of his tone.

  “You are not,” his father said in acknowledgement, words heavy and weighted with sorrow. Pushing himself away from the desk, he stood.

  Sebastiano waited for him to say something more, but his father stood and wandered the room, picking up a book from the mantel and examining it before replacing it beside the candlestick where it had sat.

  When he went to the window and stood looking out at the ice-covered back garden, impatience sparked in Sebastiano.

  “And?” he said.

  His father turned, hands clasped behind his back.

  He’s getting old, Sebastiano thought. When did those lines deepen around his eyes and mouth? When had his hair lighten to that shade of gray?

  “I cannot forestall you from this fire, but I will not ease your path to it,” his father said. “Do you think they would let you stay there if you could not pay your dues? There might be an expense or two connected to your upkeep where the House could save coin.”

  “What do you want of me?” Sebastiano demanded. “I agreed to begin courting!”

  “With no signs of success to show me yet,” Corrado said. He turned, braced himself to shoot a question at Sebastiano. “Have you actually spoken to any of these girls?”

  “Lilia.”

  “And?”

  “She is uninterested.”

  “Your odds are good enough. Two left. What of them?”

  “I have visited Marta but she is not a sort that would suit.”

  “Your pace is unacceptably slow!” Corrado’s fists clenched with his vehemence.

  I will not speak of Adelina until I know for sure. “These things take time!” Sebastiano snapped back, finding his temper matching his sire’s.

  “Results within the purple moon or you are cut off!”

  His College dues were paid through the end of the quarter, and his room for another month. Surely that would be enough time to win Adelina, especially if he enlisted his mother’s help. So he simply spread his hands.

  His father had expected more argument, Sebastiano could see. His eyes narrowed as he ran through what Sebastiano suspected were the same calculations he had just made.

&nbs
p; “My mind is made up,” his father warned.

  “I know it is,” Sebastiano said as he left. “Mine is as well.”

  MURGA’S TENT had an unoccupied look despite the things crammed into it. A layer of dust rode the shelves constructed of crates, two set side by side, three high, and bound together with tarnished twists of copper wire, orange rings marking their most recent dismantling.

  Sebastiano had thought to thank Murga for the salve, but the Circus Owner was not there. A girl had shown Sebastiano into the tent to wait.

  Books and papers jutted from the shallow depths: three atlases, the third and largest’s girth expanded by the multiple additional charts and papers interspersed in its pages; a dictionary from the Rose Kingdom, next to a slim book bound in red and green variegated leather; orange folders, ranging from a fresh, poisonous tangerine to a faded dun, their paper almost thick enough to be cardboard, but most of it age and wear-softened to a leathery consistency; one crate was devoted to a heap of red-bound books like the one Murga had given him, all exactly the same thickness, identical in their dimensions; a packet of good paper, creamy white, and matching envelopes, while its partner beside it held accounting ledgers.

  The folding lap desk, unfolded and set atop a folding table, housed a slender vase bristling with quills and the interspersed spikes of pencils and the duller ends of bulbous-barreled fountain pens. A few papers were stacked atop it, neatly, and held down with a lump of white coral, hand-sized, looking like a fossilized angel’s brain.

  The cot was narrow and unsagging, as though new, made up with undented pillow and tucked in as neatly as a regimental soldier’s. Beneath it was a pair of boots, set heel by heel, each highset and made of blackened wood set with silver moons, the glossy black leather of the upper similarly spangled, for wearing when performing.

  A narrow wardrobe, its door half-open, in the corner served to hold a handful of clothes, all of it the formal wear that accompanied the boots into the ring each performance: two white-ruffled shirts, a red and white vest, sharply tailored breeches, their creases like knives. Despite the clothing, there was no sign of its maintenance other than a clothing brush set beside a comb on the folding table.

  The floor underfoot was well-worn canvas, clearly the carpeting for a multitude of days. It was dry, and from the corner where there was a heap of straw, came a smell of sandalwood and musk and animal hair. The straw was the only part that seemed occupied.

  At first he thought Murga some sort of shapeshifter, but then he recognized the form that rose from the straw. The Sphinx.

  In some creatures that had bodies borrowed from Humans, the torso size was comparable, but in others, like Minotaurs, Centaurs, or the Sphinx, the Human side was so large that it seemed inhuman, so big that only the largest Human could have produced it. Like most Beasts, she eschewed clothing, and her bare breasts, while they would have been considered proportionally slight on a Human woman, were still there and distracting, the dark purple-brown nipples as large as his thumb and perpetually erect.

  Her skin was a deep brown, with paler scars across the shoulders where they shaded into dun fur. Her eyes were not Human, lacking white and pupil, consisting only of a great black orb, midnight-dark. Her face had a cat’s symmetry, pointed and unkind-looking. Her hair curtained her face raggedly, filled with bits of straw and knotted towards the back.

  “What are you doing here?” he demanded.

  “There is a plague of fire-mites, and my quarters are unavailable till they and the rest of the northern buildings are cleansed. Master Murga offered me space since I come here often to speak with his Beasts.”

  “There are stables at the College,” he said, “which house the larger Beasts, like Fewk.”

  “And yourself, is that true?” She was looking at him with vast eyes, sorrowful and wise. And unreadable, he forced himself to remember. Sphinxes were masters of mental magic, that was part of their danger, and they consumed some forms of magic. This one was so bound round with coils of spells that she should be totally unable to use any such ploys, particularly against a Mage, but this had been an evening full of unexpected things already.

  Moreover, something had always impressed him about the Sphinx, like glimpsing a knife of uncommon sharpness on a mantel or a dangerous animal displayed at some gathering. You kept an eye on it, because you knew that while it was unlikely that anything would go awry, the consequences would be so great if anything actually did. The Sphinx held great power.

  That was one reason why she was so valuable to the College—while she was worth more being studied while she was alive, they both knew that the moment her last breath was drawn—perhaps even a short time before—her body would be taken apart, every bit of it harvested for the powerful magic that it held.

  “You have always been frightened of me,” she said. “I did not think I would be welcome there.”

  Her honesty startled the same out of him. “Not fear so much as caution.”

  “Why? I have been at this school twenty years now and never done harm to more than the occasional insect in my path while patrolling the grounds.”

  “Why have you never given the College your name?”

  Her eyes flickered. “You have studied me.”

  “Enough to find that out.”

  “Very well. The answer is this—Humans do not allow Beasts their names. They give new ones, or sometimes they even give the old one back as though it were a favor. Sometimes they even use it as a tool for ‘training,’ as they call it.” She pronounced the word with a bitterness he had never heard in her voice before. “Why should I give my name to that? And it had been so long since anyone spoke it that for a long time I scarce remembered it.”

  “All these years, no one?”

  “No one till Murga,” she said. “Him and him alone.”

  “What has he done to earn such trust?”

  “Not what he has done, but what he is.”

  “And what is that?” Sebastiano pushed.

  “He is the one that you should have that conversation with,” she told him. She shrugged herself into a more comfortable position, folding her massive paws in front of herself, reminding him of a great cat. She yawned. Her tongue was pink, slender as a snake’s. “May I take my rest then, Merchant Mage?” she said in a tone as pointed as that tongue.

  “When will he be back?”

  A shoulder rose and fell. “He is usually here in the daytimes. Always when a performance is due, but tomorrow is the Circus’s purple day. Perhaps you can find him wandering about the city.”

  “Perhaps you can tell him I am looking for him and direct him to come to me!” he said sharply.

  She yawned again. “Very well.”

  AT THE DELLA ROSE ESTATE, he was denied entrance, even though he heard the tinkle of music down their hallway, and the murmur of masculine voices. Lilia wanted to keep from wasting his time. It was a Merchantly motive of which he could only approve. Still, he paused outside the gateway, a little irritated that he hadn’t had his chance to let her know he wasn’t interested either.

  It was early evening, and the wind was warm, scented like Spring. Unexpected. What did it mean, the emboldened trees putting forth blossoms, the crocuses fringing window pots?

  He shook his head. The confrontation with the Coinblossoms would not go so smoothly. The sooner I get it over, the sooner it is done and I can focus on Adelina, he thought. Her face hovered in his mind, making him smile, his steps quick. The Coinblossom estate was close. These Merchant neighborhoods were high-walled and well patrolled.

  Usually he liked to see what Beasts the various Merchant estates employed as gatekeeper, but he saw fewer this time than usual, many of them replaced by Human servants, and those Beasts that he saw were nothing out of the ordinary.

  It perplexed him a little. Were Beasts somehow going out of style? What did that mean?

  The fish-faced footman admitted him with the usual lack of expression. Even in the Coinblossoms’ conservatory, the feeli
ng of Spring was rich in the air. It was a great shame that he couldn’t take Marta’s father rather than the girl herself, Sebastiano thought, looking around at the great glass chamber surrounding him.

  By now, he knew more of the orchid Fairies. He and Milosh had spent a pleasant afternoon discussing their wants and needs, for some required very specific diets indeed: servants’ tears and steel slivers, chopped-up cat whiskers, bits of rotting wool, and electricity collected in bell jars during Winter storms, each with its own whiff of ozone, salt, and burned hair.

  Domesticated orchid Fairies had pleasing forms. Some breeders focused on the spirit shape rather than the flower itself, dainty winged women and epicene boys. Wilder orchids had spirit shapes more like spiky insects, confusions of limbs, proboscises and wings of mother of pearl and sheets of mica.

  He gazed upward. The ironwork overhead was a style made popular five years ago. Fuzzy leaved vines, their surfaces as gray and furry as mice, the inner tendrils a dusty violet, swung their way along under the ceiling’s iron ribbing.

  Behind Sebastiano, Milosh cleared his throat.

  “I had not thought to see you again,” he murmured, his voice shy and diffident. “I have prepared a tank with several orchids in it. It’s my hope you’ll take it as a gift. They’re each examples of variations we spoke of the other day.”

  He moved over to a shelf to take down a head-sized bubble of green glass, stoppered at the top with a round of cork. Inside were three of the orchids, each with its flower clinging to its stem, looking anxiously at Sebastiano as they were given into his arms.

  He was touched by the careful composition of the tank. Was that a line of trefoil across the side? And there, a salamander, to fertilize the blossoms that chose to give way to its advances. They were all rare creatures. He could have turned around and sold this for the College of Mages tuition, he thought wryly, if he had been able to find any buyer other than the very man standing in front of him.

  “Do I dare think,” Milosh said, a quiver of hope thread-thin in his voice, “that your appearance today means you will continue to visit this House?”