Hearts of Tabat

by Cat Rambo

  And she’d been the one to first mention a marriage of three.

  He passed through Swan Park. Spring rain slicked the cobblestones underfoot, and the air was thick with the smell of growing things, like the new grass edging the pathways and the primaflora flowers, white but with hearts deep-filled with golden pollen, lying in the leaf-softened shadows of the evergreen bushes.

  If she did … if Adelina wanted to keep Eloquence as a companion, was it really within Sebastiano’s rights to object? And perhaps it would be foolish for him to do so, in any case. People palled on you after a while, after all, and who was to say he might not want someone new of his own sometime in the future?

  But he didn’t want that. He didn’t want any lips except his own kissing Adelina’s, didn’t want any ears but his own to be listening to the sound of her heartbeat and her breathing, or any other’s skin feeling the warmth of her as she drew close. He thought of the way she’d looked at the party, the pleats of her dress rippling like rain, elegant as an equation.

  He had magic at his disposal, but it would be worse than wrong to use it to pursue what he wanted. Using magic to persuade a partner always went awry, all the children’s stories told you that, like Lucy Silverhands. That was the pathway to becoming a Sorcerer.

  But magic to find out what someone else was thinking, would that be that bad? A little spell, just to find out whether or not she truly wanted Eloquence or whether he was, as Sebastiano hoped, just a tool for some purpose. It would be useful and efficient to know that, it would tell him whether or not he was wasting his time and if her intentions didn’t match his, then it would be good to know, so he could move on and find another partner.

  I don’t want another partner, a usually silent part of his mind said. He tried to ignore it but it spoke again, I want Adelina.

  It was unfair, it was utterly unreasonable, to be caught by such madness as this infatuation. And there was no reason for it—she was too skinny, knobby-wristed, and her hair usually in disarray. He had no reason to think she had any notion of how to run a household better than he did, given that she was a Merchant Scholar, which surely had little practice of husbandry about it.

  He kept walking. Sweat collected on the back of his neck, engendered by the sunlight, and ran down along his spine. He would arrive flustered and disheveled if he was not careful, and that was not a condition of authority.

  Deliberately, he slowed his pace and looked around. He was nearly at the end of the park, near the end where the pond was surmounted by a great alabaster swan that gave the site its name.

  He would go and drink chal, and compose himself.

  The Red Moon’s Sugar and Chal House had a flimsy and unfinished look to it—one door had a border of tiles half laid around it, ending at a shoulder-high mark where either tiles or energy had given out.

  The tables were all-of-a-kind but secondhand, marked with stripes and weather stresses, but the mismatched conglomeration of chairs could, upon study, be sorted into four groups: a set once marked with a noble signet, all chiseled away; a few basket-woven chairs, looking flimsy but more comfortable than the rest; a set of plain chairs, crude in construction and made of pine planking; and one rocking chair, set in the corner. The floor underfoot was unfinished planking, marked with spills and splotches and a Winter’s worth of grime in the grooves between the planking. The lower reaches of the half-shuttered, narrow windows were clad in gray slats, while their naked uppers admitted Winter’s chill light.

  A fat-bellied stove sat cold in the back of the room, while chal steamed in a vast vat near the till. A skinny boy sat there, reading a penny-wide and paying no attention to the room whatsoever.

  Sebastiano paid the boy a couple of copper skiffs and received a ceramic mug. The apparatus smelled as though it had not been cleaned in a while, but the chal was hot and surprisingly peppery. Sebastiano chose not to contemplate what the spice might be masking. He found a basket-woven chair with a low table beside it that was cleaner than the rest of them and sank down into it with a sigh. It creaked and murmured under his weight but held.

  No one else was in the teahouse, which was not a good sign. It had the feeling of a stage set, of something erected more for show than for purpose, and it made his encounter in the flower shop seem all the odder, as though he’d been catapulted into the pages of a penny-wide, something lurid and full of spies and secret words, made into a villain despite his best intentions.

  He sighed and slouched back in the chair, sipping at his mug. Was that the sort of story he had wanted for his life? He would prefer a love story, something simple and not too complicated, ending up happily in a way that promised a good life, with love and family and friendship and at least moderate wealth. Perhaps a well-respected and often-cited monograph or two.

  That is, he thought, not the story I told myself when I first came to the College of Mages. That was a younger man’s story, one of devoting himself to his craft, discovering things that no one had ever learned before, adding to the store of Human knowledge. A worthy enough ambition; but is it still what I really desire?

  Surely this was not the normal state. Surely people usually knew what it was that they wanted of life—everyone at the College of Mages seemed to, at least.

  Shadows flickered past the door as passers-by went down the street. The boy turned a page and kept reading. His lips moved as he sounded out words.

  Sebastiano felt dissatisfied, at odds with himself. Thoughts of the Oread still rankled him. Why had she thought he would do her harm?

  The thought came to him that she wished him harm, and that was why she had feared it from him, but he discarded it. Oreads were simple creatures, and no danger to Humans. They were rarer than Dryads, but their rocks were not harvestable, harnessable the way that the Dryad logs were. They had no fear that they’d be made extinct in the name of keeping the city running, only that their race would live in captivity, subject to Humans …

  He frowned. His thoughts were odd, those of an Abolitionist. What influences were working on him, to lean him towards that cause? He sniffed the chal again and set the cup down on the table. It seemed innocuous enough but a sudden paranoia seized him.

  What sort of scheme would that be, to work magic on the citizens of Tabat, and change their politics to a position so antithetical to the city’s very nature?

  No. He was tired and distraught and imagining all sorts of wild things, circumstances that could never happen. He needed to figure out what to do. And this morning had been a rash of bills, for tailoring and books and such. He would go and straighten that out, perhaps, see how many he could still forward to the Silvercloth House. Yes, that would be a step forward.

  He left his cup there, half-filled, and left without speaking to the boy, who did not raise his head as Sebastiano passed, but only turned another page in the red-bound book he was reading.

  ONE OF THE things Sebastiano appreciated about his quarters was that few people could find him and even fewer surprise him. As he sat sorting through the pile of bills, he heard the stable doors below open and Fewk make the musical sound of greeting that meant the visitor was unalarming and a possible source of fruit.

  Sebastiano could identify most of his visitors by the sounds of their steps, but this step was not one he had ever heard on the stairs before, and yet somehow sounded familiar: a march upward, each step in turn, the cadence calculated to add up to an arrival.

  Sebastiano went to his door and opened it before the visitor could knock.

  In all his time at the College, Corrado had never come to visit him. Now, here he stood in the doorway, looking a little smaller, a little less blustery than Sebastiano had ever seen him.

  Sebastiano started to take a step back to admit his father, then stopped. His lips firmed. Why should he admit his father, who did not pay for this space, who did not support him? Instead, he leveled his gaze at his father, trying to feel polite and adamant all at once.

  But all Corrado said was, “It’s about your m
other.”

  Sebastiano stepped aside.

  Once inside Sebastiano’s quarters, Corrado seemed reticent. He looked around, eyes narrowed, and Sebastiano thought he could have predicted the thoughts running through his father’s head: how unfit a place this was for a Merchant, how it showed yet again that Sebastiano’s inclinations did not lie in that direction.

  Corrado said, “I have been unfair to you. I know that the House will find someone to lead it, as it always does. But since the first day I laid eyes on you, all I wanted for you was the best and I could not—still cannot—imagine a better life for someone than that.” He sighed and went to the window, putting his hands on the sill and looking out into the early evening light.

  Sebastiano faltered for words, afraid to break the tenuous bridge that Corrado was building. “I appreciate that. I would want the same for my children, I think.”

  Corrado turned away from the glass, stood to mirror Sebastiano’s stance. “You will, if you have them. But that is your choice, my boy.”

  “What do you want to say about mother? Is something wrong?”

  Corrado hesitated, assembling his thoughts into words. “She’s doing something dangerous.”

  “Dangerous? What sort of creature is it?”

  Corrado’s brows creased, then cleared. “Ah. No, she’s not nursing a Mandrake or Piskie this time. She is capable, you know. I trust her with those sorts of things, even if she has made me worry more than once.”

  “Then what?”

  “Think,” Corrado said. There was weariness in his voice as he stroked his moustache into place. How like him to try to make this a teaching moment, even now. “What sort of trouble runs around the city calling your mother’s name?”

  “Some sort of politics.” Sebastiano ran through possibilities in his head, then stopped, feeling his stomach lurch. “Ah, no,” he said. “Surely …”

  But he thought of the painting she had shown him by Leonoa Kanto.

  “I’ll talk to her,” he offered.

  Corrado turned around. “Good,” he said. He started towards the stairs, and then paused. “And the courting? I got a handful of new bills funding you. I’ve told them all I will not pay again.”

  Lilia was disinterested. He had refused Marta, and that was a thicket he was glad to have escaped. And now Adelina was interested in a scruffy River Pilot.

  But he could frame things as well as any rhetorician, he’d been trained in it. “We have opened negotiations,” he said, and left it at that bland fact, hoping the words might soften Corrado’s grip on his wallet.

  But his father only nodded and trudged down the stairs without further word.

  Sebastiano sighed.

  Tomorrow he would have to resort to something he’d hoped to avoid, something that went against every fiber of his being.

  CHAPTER 42

  A sad moment, but here it was.

  Sebastiano fingered through his closet morosely, examining each garment in turn for signs of wear and fabric cost, looking for touches like silver buttons or gilt embroidery, grimacing whenever he came across a particularly fine example of the Tailor’s art.

  He had always taken pride in his clothing, but now that he was examining the lot of it and totting up the costs in his head, he was afraid he might have to admit he had swum outside his depth here.

  Silk from the Rose Kingdoms, soft as a sigh, and tailored into an immaculate white shirt with touches of gold and blue on the inner cuffs. He remembered commissioning that shirt, just when the fabric was about to come into style. He’d felt smug in it for a good white moon, watching other Merchants cast their eye over it with eyes covetous and curious.

  He sighed and put the shirt aside. He’d taken good care of it, and it would still catch at least a handful of gold schooners.

  He had to strike a careful balance here—too threadbare, and it would hamper him in his wooing. That would work against him. Still, he could throw caution to the winds and sell much of his Summer attire—by the time he’d need it, he would have settled all of this and have free rein with his Tailor’s bill again.

  The shirt had a belt of embossed leather, a Gryphon buckle that had caught his eye in the Salt Market because it made him think of Fewk. But he had the real thing, after all. He didn’t need a miniature in metal. Onto the pile it went, followed by a tailored pair of pants and a shirt of Summer yellow linen.

  He hesitated over the velvet cloak, its inner surface embroidered with silver stars on midnight gauze that he loved, although he could not wear it without feeling faintly ridiculous. How had he accumulated so many pairs of leather gloves? No matter—they’d each fetch at least a silver skiff, the copper-chased ones even more, and the reason he had so many was because he rarely used them, after all.

  It wasn’t as though a Mage needed to be well dressed in order to impress. A Mage had magic after all, could control forces that no other Humans could wield. There was a nobility of position in being a Mage. That had always drawn him to it.

  “We Humans have responsibilities to the Beasts and animals in our care,” Letha had told him, more than once, and he believed that. They could not help themselves, could not help their natures, and so they needed Human attention, Human care. That was what made Abolitionism such a silly idea. It was the sort of thing that got put into the head of a Beast—it was downright unnatural if such thoughts sprouted there, because every Beast knew its place in the universe, could sense it down to its bones. He was sure of that.

  Would Adelina understand that he would never be Merchant, that he would always be Mage? Thoughts of her face, her hands, the way she squinted just a little when thinking hard, flickered through his mind and stirred his sense. He had kissed her when he was a child, but try as hard as he might, he could not remember precisely what it had felt like. He’d had his share of lovers, but no one had ever drawn his attention like this, insistent and constant.

  The bundle was not half as large or heavy as he’d hoped. He eyed the clothing that was left. He had a sense that this might be a first pass at culling such things, but that it was certainly not the last.

  He laughed, pulling out a pair of intricately lensed glasses from under a stack of handkerchiefs. I’d forgotten these, he thought.

  When Sebastiano had been at the College of Mages going on his eighth year, back when he and his classmates were just beginning to learn how to apply their skills, and the years of recitation and memorization they had engaged in were finally becoming instinctual, almost bone-deep knowledge of how to manipulate arcane forces, he had a classmate named Djon.

  Djon had been a soft-spoken youth gifted at grinding prisms and combining lenses into intricate apparatuses. At the end of his class on Sight, Djon had made a proof work to show his grasp of the concepts: a set of spectacles shaped of three overlaying lenses, each as thin as a half-forgotten thought. Together, the lenses enabled the wearer to see the malign world of sprites and impkins that controlled the weather of Tabat.

  Djon, Sebastiano, and their fellows had been entranced by the spectacles at first, vying to wear them. They delighted in this new, hitherto unforeseen, world, much as they had marveled at the animalcules to be seen when examining a tear drop through a microscope or the cosmological guidelines revealed when employing an aetherscope, the usually unseen, ruler-precise crosshatching that showed where the stars and Moons and sun all moved.

  But after a few days of seeing the puffy breezes that stirred through the parks and their wizened counterparts down near the Slumpers, of watching raindrops fall and dash their brains out against the cobblestones, Sebastiano had found this view of Tabat depressing.

  Something about that view of the world—a world full of tiny creatures devoted to making Human lives as miserable as possible—drove all the spirit out of him, made him feel like someone fighting with a damp dishcloth that was both weapon and barrier. One by one, he and the others had given up on the spectacles, moved onto other, less unsettling amusements. Had it been talking carp that year
? Growing Hamadryads and Lilyboys?

  He shoved them in his pocket. He would give them to Maz.

  After he got back from the clothing dealer’s.

  A bell later, his mood was sourer. Wet cobbles underfoot made the the street as slippery as swamp hummocks and edged the steam wagon wheels’ whine with a chilly, melancholy echo as they hurried past. He was on the third terrace, a neighborhood filled with Tailors and students who couldn’t afford more expensive lodgings nearer their schools.

  Nothing. Or close to nothing. That was what she’d offered him for an armload that had cost gold when new!

  It was bitterly cold. He was glad anew for the coat his mother had given him. He caught sight of himself in a bakery window, a blue blossom against a gray sky, and sniffed hungrily at the smell coming from its doorway as it opened and closed, opened and closed again.

  Beside the bakery, the Saltbroidered Purse served its pastries along with permutations of hot fish tea in a clutter of round tables and spider-legged metal chairs. A counter’s-worth of kettles sent up salty, buttery steam. He bought an egg-filled roll oozing greasy yellow sauce from its corners and settled to nurse a mug of tea.

  It was warm inside, with a pleasant bustle of customers. It was easy to distinguish who was student, who was Tailor, and who was a patron of either by looking at the clothes. Students wore black, practical and cheap, although with gaudy scarves at their necks. Tailors wore rich fabrics, often quilted or paneled with different kinds of weave, that served as advertisements of their wares. Their patrons dressed in richer fabrics in simpler cuts.

  He settled into a table near the back, out of the way of the doorway’s draft. The floor glistened with rain drip.

  He recognized the two men beside him with an incredulous eye. The universe had frowned at him with a wrinkle of synchronicity. For these two were the only ones who had clung to the weather-reading spectacles, the only ones who had kept on wearing them, long after the others had moved on to different things.