by Cat Rambo
He put on his best Mage’s robe and, still smiling at himself in the mirror, decided that it would be a fine day to go and breakfast at his parents’ table. There would be cheese pastries and berry-studded pancakes, and plenty of hot, strong kappa, the tea fresher than any in the city, for Tiggy would have been down at the docks buying it fresh from the latest arrived ship.
The day was a dazzle of sunlight. Really, had it ever been so splendid this early in the season in recent memory? Daffodils lined the Auspicious Hand’s Stair and there was a shine on the kittenbud trees all along the canal separating the thirteenth and fourteenth terraces. Two children and their nurse had paused to stroke the fuzzy bumps. In the canal, an amorous drake pursued a small white duck.
Something’s happened, he thought, and really, I should be more alarmed than I am. But it’s hard to be apprehensive when everything is so beautiful and shining as a poem! A peddler was selling wreaths of wildflowers as he passed through the City Market and so he bought one to take to his mother.
Letha admired it inordinately when he presented it to her, pretending to pluck it from the air as she watched the doorman take his coat away to be brushed and hung up.
“You are looking well,” she said, touching a pink blossom as she raised them to her face to sniff.
He laughed cheerfully. “Things are going splendidly!”
“Oh?” Her expression was delighted anticipation. “Then the courtship is progressing well? No, wait, don’t tell me alone, come and speak in front of your father too.”
She gave the flowers to a servant and took his hand, pulling him into the breakfast room. It spoiled things a little, to broaden the audience—he had liked that almost flirtatious moment of him and her, and his confiding words, telling her his secret self.
His father sat at the head of the table, cloaked by a steaming platter of eggs in which two steamed fish swam, just delivered to the table. His brows beetled together at the sight of Sebastiano.
“I trust you have good news to deliver us,” he said gruffly, and speared a fish with a practiced twist of a long-handled fork.
It deflated with a hiss and puff of steam. Sebastiano felt as though he’d been stabbed, as though the anticipation and excitement had been released to hang in the cold air for a second before vanishing.
“He says it’s going well,” his mother said.
“What is?”
“The courtship.”
“Which part?”
“I don’t know.”
“Then why, woman, are you telling me this rather than him doing it himself?”
Both parents turned their attention from each other and bent it entirely on Sebastiano, which was not the most pleasant sensation he had ever endured.
Slowly, deliberately, he took a plate and began to assemble his breakfast.
His father watched.
Sebastiano selected three pancakes well matched in size, and flanked them with two sausages.
His father watched, chewing on his moustache.
Sebastiano added two thin pickle stalks and then several sections of orange. He stood looking at the arrangement absently, as though wondering what else might be to his liking. His mother nudged a plate forward.
“Bread?” she said, even as the senior Silvercloth exploded.
“Don’t stand there namberpandering around like a chef interviewing for a position as a carpenter! Sit down and tell me which of them it is to be!”
Sebastiano was determined to elicit what drama he could from the moment.
“Not Lilia,” he said. “I’m sad to say that she is gone, killed in the attack that I have been investigating.” No need to tell them she hadn’t been interested, he thought.
Corrado Silvercloth narrowed his eyes. “And Marta Coinblossom?” he demanded.
Sebastiano paused, chewing his sausage and pretending to think. He wondered how hard it would be to drive his father into an apoplectic fit, if he stretched things out sufficiently. From the corner of his eye, he monitored Corrado’s expression.
In the end, though, his mother’s anxious glance at her spouse’s purpling face made Sebastiano relent. “Adelina Nettlepurse is my choice,” he said.
Both his father and mother looked pleased. “Shows unexpected good sense, in my opinion,” Corrado said, even as Letha said, “She will be a good companion to you, Sebastiano, you’re very alike.”
He was torn between being pleased that his mother approved and disappointed that his father did as well. Still, perhaps it was best to take the highest ground. “Thank you,” he said to neither of them, and poured fresh syrup over his pancakes.
THE NOTE he sent to Adelina was written on thick glossy paper and contained in two separate envelopes. Her name was written in his elegant, stiff cursive on the innermost. “Would you allow me to take you to a poetry reading?” the note at its heart said. “Dinner beforehand.”
Hers said yes, and a quick flurry of more notes established date and time. He was pleased with himself.
At the Tailor’s, he had his robe taken out a little at the back. Bess pinned it up adeptly, and stitched it into place as he waited.
“Wooing, are you, sir?” she said, winking.
He felt vaguely offended, but his lack of reply did not put her off.
“Black robes like that, they catch the eye, but a pretty piece of jewelry or two lends a little flash to your appearance,” she said.
He was still put off, but there was a hint to her badinage that made him venture, “Perhaps you have something like that for sale?”
“Deed I do, deed I do.” She beamed at him before fetching out a wooden case from under the counter.
The jewels inside were blue-black butterfly pearls, twisted loops to be worn in the hair or on the ears. They were beautiful, deep ocean shimmers, and he knew that they would look well with the ebony of his robes. But he couldn’t help but think that the peacock shine would look best in Adelina’s dark curls.
He picked out a pearl set comb. “Send the bill to my father,” he said smugly. “And the cost of repairing the robe as well.”
She looked at him askance for a minute but the confidence in his tone convinced her. He tucked the box in his pocket, smiling to himself.
THOUGHTS of his rival made him fuss that evening in front of his mirror in a way he’d almost forgotten, checking to make sure that his hair was in immaculate order, wishing, just a little, that it was longer, darker, wavier.
There were ways, weren’t there, to make his eyebrows a little less shaggy, his smile a little brighter, the blotchy patch along his left jaw a little less noticeable?
It was ignoble to think that Adelina paid much attention to these things. She was a Merchant, after all! Practicality had been bred into her very bones.
But look at Bella Kanto, who she had been in love with, even if she wasn’t now: a figure that was glamorous, beautiful. A figure with a million desirable traits that Sebastiano lacked.
He scowled at his reflection, which looked unhappy and worried, ugly dark lines around his eyes and a twitch to one lid. The College wanted results, to know what had attacked the Della Rose estate, but at the same time they were summoning him whenever Murga’s Manticore coughed or sneezed. The College wanted to know what was so special about this Manticore, as opposed to any other Manticore. He’d be damned if he knew what had enabled the damn thing to think, to talk, to make quips as though it were well read.
Thoughts of the anxious, pinched look around Adelina’s eyes ached at him. He went to walk beside the College of Mages and went past the Circus, but the giddy, blaring music made him feel sour and old. There was no delight in the evening.
This isn’t good, he thought. Am I giving over all of my happiness into Adelina’s hands? What if she doesn’t care for me at all, what if she turns out to be cruel, or worse, careless in a way that shows how little she feels for me?
He groaned and reached his right hand out to touch the iron curlicues of the fence, feeling the bite and tingle and d
rag of the spellwork on his fingers.
Too much of that and he’d have half-burns, luminous lesions beneath the skin, on the pads of his fingers. He’d seen it happen when he was working in the College’s free clinic—workmen whose jobs had been overseeing the magic-lit tiles that were all the rage right then. Even Sebastiano’s parents had given into the fashion and tiled an outside patio in them, throwing a party that made the most of the clattering space before they allowed it to fade back into social obscurity.
The workmen had called the ailment curse blisters, and said that ground pearl and fishbone averted them. They carried the bones in their pockets, speckled with opalescent grease, wrapped in bandanas, rough patches showing where the magic had taken hold—or so they said. Sebastiano had helped lance the blisters, drawing the shining fluid off into glass tubes for one of the Mages, who was studying the phenomenon.
He snatched his fingers back. It took a long time to build the accumulation of fluid to the point where the blisters formed, but still, it was better to be safe than sorry.
The noise of the carnival made him feel even sourer and more self-loathing. Who am I becoming? he wondered, a little panicked. But he moved on to the buildings of the campus, through the pools of light surrounding each lamp-post.
Some buildings were entirely darkened, while others—the Library for example—were lit, attic to basement.
As long as I can’t sleep, I’ll work, Sebastiano thought, making his way to the Library. He put the lantern on the front desk, where the Night Warden nodded him in and took it, extinguishing it and putting it near a rack of other lights. Inside the building, aetheric lights lit everything, a bright and pitiless glare that made manuscript reading significantly easier.
Up on the fourth floor he had a favorite desk, a spot near the staircase where one could see comings and goings, but not so close that the noise of conversations from the floor below, where there was a lounge for the use of the teachers and whatever students were bold enough to sneak in when the teachers were not using it.
He settled himself in with Anzi’s Codex, which spelled out the lineage of many of the more notable Beasts of Tabat.
How long had the Sphinx been at the College of Mages? The life span of such creatures was centuries. But as he read, he realized she was much newer than he had thought, had only been at the College for a couple of decades, replacing a Sphinx named Serafina. This one had been given the name Makaila in place of her birth name, Ajana, but somehow the name had not stuck. As the years went by, she was only “the Sphinx” over and over again in the records.
He closed the book with a puff of dust, frowning. Why would anyone forsake their name?
“Ah-jay-na,” he said out loud. There was silence from the shelves all around him, a waiting stillness. Was that a gasp, a sandy exhalation from somewhere in the stacks? He listened until his head ached, but heard nothing more. At length he made his way home and to bed.
By the next morning, he felt more chipper. There was something about a morning full of sunlight that made it difficult to be in a bad mood. On the way to breakfast at his parents’, he stood on the Anchor landing, and saw that the swallows had returned to the city. They darted and swooped above the water.
The birds’ lines were as elegantly, as gracefully drawn as a well-cut evening coat, and their coloring was as beautiful, violet-blue wings, a flash of black beak and white throat and an orange-red underside, lovely as flowers as they swung past like irregular plumb-bobs in the morning air. Out in the harbor it seemed as though every small ship possible was out on the water. The sails were colored white and purple and orange, like the swallows.
By the time he climbed the steps before his parents’ mansion, he felt even more cheerful. Things would work out with Adelina. By the time he had passed the topmost stair and the urns of frilled pink flowers filling them, he felt that everything was going well, quite well indeed. Once Corrado heard how well, he’d be ready enough to subsidize the courtship.
He found his father in the back garden that edged the limestone mansion. The lawns were perfectly maintained, soft, velvety green grass in the full luxuriance of Spring. Purple and gold crocus edged the beds in profusion, and tulips were about to bloom, the vast majority still tightly closed.
In the eastern corner, where there was more sunlight, a few butterflies were slipping loose of their dull green chrysalises to reveal scarlet wings. Sebastiano’s father liked bold, bright colors in his flowers. Now that Spring had arrived, Sebastiano knew his father would spend each morning in the garden, spraying the leaves of the lilacs with a mixture of ground fish and water, dead-heading older flowers as they sagged, creating a perfect world.
The sight was just as it had been throughout Sebastiano’s childhood: a tea mug set aside unheeded as his father knelt, long capable fingers inspecting each upturned flower face, ruthlessly beheading the unworthy with a pinch between his square-cut fingernails. Only the hair was a little grayer, although bristle-cut and short as always. A valet trimmed it close to Corrado’s scalp each morning.
Corrado rose and dusted off his trousers, turning to look at Sebastiano as he picked up his cup. Petals from the cherry blossoms dusted the grass like an attempt at artificial snow, and accumulated in drifts along the edges of the flagstones.
“Well, will you meet the deadline?” his father snapped as greeting. The sight of his father in his lush, expensive garden, plants bred for their excess of petals, crayon colors, irritated him when he was scrimping to get along. And for what? Not for some mercenary cause but for the sake of knowledge.
He felt as though inside a jade box, lavishly floored with gems, useless and impractical. Despite all his good intentions, anger thrummed through him, like a second skeleton made of unpredictable electricity. He could feel magic pooling in his palms; he clenched his fists, curling his fingers tightly over the force, which moved as though alive, as though he were trying to contain serpents within his flesh.
All he could think to say was “What deadline?”
“I want an heir within a six-month.”
“I would have had to have started that three months ago,” Sebastiano pointed out.
“You know what I mean. I want you wed and her starting to show off the beginnings of a lusty baby.”
“What’s all this hurry about?” Sebastiano said.
“I don’t intend to be questioned in my own House! I want an heir that I can trust in place, while I’m still alive to train him or her!”
“You’re good for a number of decades more, father, unless I miss my guess,” Sebastiano said. “So I don’t understand the hurry.”
“I’ve told you what I want. I have yet to see any movement forward on your part to secure me an heir,” Corrado said. “I thought that perhaps I would emphasize the importance of the matter.”
“Why do you feel the need to emphasize it now?”
“I was speaking to Emiliana Nettlepurse, and she said she had not seen much of you. You ruled out two candidates for marriage, and now you are only half-heartedly pursuing the third? Are you hoping some other lover will swoop in and snatch her away so you can use that as an excuse? Or are you simply working on driving her away so you can blame the lack of success on her? You have gone through life blaming all of your failures on other people. What will it be now, who will have thwarted your best of intentions, while you remain faultless—although still failed?”
The words flew through the air like bees, striking him to the heart. Had his father despised him like this all along? He looked at the old man, at the flushed red face, the shoulders hunched forward as though to repel attack.
“You’ve never forgiven me, have you?” the elder Silvercloth said lugubriously.
Sebastiano stared at his father, struck speechless yet again. Pink petals drifted by, dotting the air. One struck and clung to Sebastiano’s cheek like an encouraging kiss. He would have wiped it away, but he was afraid that if he opened his fingers, he would release a curse, an imp, some baleful thing
that would strike at his father. Did he fear that or hope for it? He wasn’t sure.
“I’m afraid I don’t know what you mean,” he said.
“For not being there when you were growing up.”
“Between the age of five and eight, you mean?”
Corrado sighed. “I couldn’t turn down a chance at such a journey, such a chance for exploration, for knowledge.”
“I know that, Father,” Sebastiano said. “I’ve never blamed you for that. I’m sure I would have done the same thing in your place. Anyway, I was young and had plenty of nursemaids and tutors, not to mention Mother.”
But his father said, “After I came back, you turned away from me. You screamed and kicked and said I wasn’t your father, that I was a Sorcerer who’d taken on your father’s form. I came to kiss you goodnight, and you scrambled away and locked yourself in the closet, saying I was a monster.”
“I don’t remember that,” Sebastiano said untruthfully.
He did remember it quite well. At first he’d been genuinely frightened of his father. For weeks before his father had returned from the sea, his tutor had been telling him tales of Sorcerers and Shifters, giving him nightmares. Then the stranger had appeared, browner and hairier than in memory, and he’d screamed at the shock, thrust into the alien arms.
Later, after he’d come to realize that it was indeed his father and that this adult would be part of his world from now on, he’d seen his power to hurt the man by pretending fear. He had kept the game up for several days before dropping it abruptly, as though entirely forgotten.
He was embarrassed to think how much it had hurt his father. So much that the old man would bring it up right now.
His father said, “Sometimes I’ve wondered if you were actually my son.”
Anger flared again, a thousand times brighter.
“That’s shit to say,” he said. “I look exactly like you—the portraits of you and I that hang side by side could be twins! You’re just trying to hurt me, any way you can.”