The Adorned

by John Tristan

  They had fed me well, the monks, but my ravenous body had used up all it could in healing itself. I had gone from slim to bony, scars taut over my hips, knees knobbly as a yearling colt’s. I felt hunger, but only at a remove. My thin and ragged frame seemed to belong to someone else, along with all its urges. Still, I forced myself to eat at least a little and was glad I did: I felt better for it.

  I knew I couldn’t stay here, not for long. I wasn’t the only one left without a home after the fires; even now, I thought, there would be others looking for warmth and dark places to hide. I had been small enough to slip through a gap in the boards, but the boards would not keep others out forever.

  I stayed a little longer, though, until the sun had risen. The new light through the cracks made the empty room seem homely and ancient, like an old attic.

  In Lun, we had kept my grandfather’s clocks in the attic. My father had put them there after my mother died, not wanting to hear them tick. I hadn’t understood it, then. Now, it seemed the only thing he could have done.

  I had never missed my mother, not truly. I had been so young, and always my father’s child. I stood in the half light and tried to remember her face; I couldn’t. I only saw my father, like me and unlike me with his green eyes and heavy brow, and the way he had looked putting the clocks away.

  Now that everything else was gone—my home, my Adornment, my master—there was sudden room to mourn him. It came quiet and unexpected, less a burden than a whispering presence. I accepted it, let it lie on my skin like my scars, and carefully shouldered my rucksack.

  Meret’s house had been empty, but there were other places I could go, other hopes still to exhaust. Not far from here was the Rose and Crescent, Amere writ-Meret’s tavern. If anyone knew where Meret and the other tattoo-masters had gone to, it would be her.

  If the tavern had been empty and shut up as Meret’s house had been, I do not know what I would have done. I found it open, though, the door ajar and the windows tilted to let in the light. There were no lights lit within, though, and the sun only had partial entry. It seemed empty and dim as I toed my way inside.

  “Hello?” I sounded hoarse and small in the dark hollow of the tavern.

  “Can I help you?” A burly man with a black beard stood up and peered at me with no small measure of suspicion.

  “Is Amere—” I did not know if she still went by her writ-name. “Is the mistress of the house here?”

  He grunted, shaking his head. “Amere’s gone. I’m Ared, her brother. I’m watching this place ’til she gets back.”

  “When is she coming back?”

  He grunted again. I realized it was a kind of laugh. “When I send word it’s safe again. Maybe once the spring comes.” He shook his head. “Famine! Fire! Riots and assassinations! Seems to me the world’s gone mad for a season.”

  I sagged into a chair. I felt a low ache down in my tendons and bones. “I’m looking for someone.” I swallowed. “Roberd Tallisk.”

  “The name rings a bell,” he said, “but not a recent one. We’ve not had many customers lately.”

  I dug out one of the coins Brother Iyan had given me and put it on the counter. “Do you have any almond milk?”

  He did; he served me a tall glass of it, white and sweet. His face worked as thoughts passed over it. “Tallisk, Tallisk—isn’t he one of those needleslingers? Meret’s boys?”

  I looked up, startled into hope. “Yes, that’s him.”

  “Well, I can’t tell you where he is, but I can tell you where Meret is.”

  I cleared my throat; it was clenched with nerves. “Can you please?”

  “Of course.” He bent down over the counter, peering at my scarred face. “If you tell me why you’re looking.”

  “Tallisk—Meret’s old apprentice. He was my master. I am Etan writ-Tallisk.”

  He drew back in surprise. “Ah, I didn’t know. I’m sorry.”

  I shook my head. “No need to say sorry.”

  “He is staying with friends of his in Tarry-Here Street. It’s in Gressey, not far from here, near the storm-temple. The house is on the corner, with a red roof. You can’t miss it.”

  I finished my almond milk. “Thank you.”

  “No need for that.” He slid my coin back to me across the bar. The pity in his eyes was hard to take; I turned away from him. “If you cannot find your friends, you come back here. Amere always had time for fellow Adorned.”

  I nodded to him, not quite trusting my voice. There was a stone in my throat, hard and hot. I left the Rose and Crescent, blinking into the daylight, and started making my way toward Gressey.

  Chapter Fifty-Seven

  Gressey was one of the oldest parts of the city, where the alleyways followed the ancient logic of cattle runs or dried stream beds. As Ared had said, there was a storm-temple, hung with black banners for the gods of thunder and lightning. A priest lingered on the doorstep in ancient armor, his eyes tracking my movements until I turned the corner.

  Then, Tarry-Here Street, a narrow lane of pounded earth. There was a sharp, familiar smell in the air, not quite unpleasant: it was the loamy, mineralic scent of the springs below Peretim. Somewhere here they had an outlet, maybe a well sunk into the warm waters.

  Here, the fires had not reached, and there were the remnants of a barricade still standing. This street had been defended, I saw, from the chaos of the riots—this street was loved. The houses were old stone and well kept, whitewashed clean and bright in the sunlight. For the first time since going out into the city, I heard children laugh. They ran past me, trailing fraying ribbons and wooden toys.

  The house on the corner with the red roof stood with its door and windows open, white curtains blowing in the breeze. A man of maybe thirty, with a prodigious red beard, was sitting on the doorstep with a basket of artichokes, tossing away any rotten specimens. I stared at the discarded food. Before I had been burned, there might have been grown men fighting each other for a scrap of rotten artichoke. Brother Iyan had told me the city had deep-running wounds—but still, I thought, it was healing.

  The man on the doorstep looked up at me with a sunny smile—abruptly, it fell. He had seen the scars raw across my face. “Can I help you?”

  “I am looking for Deino Meret.”

  “Meret?” The man stood up and lightly kicked his basket to the side. “I might know of him.”

  “If you do, please tell him that Etan writ-Tallisk is here to see him.”

  The man’s red brows worked up and down, like snakes on the hunt, and he nodded. “Wait here a moment, will you?”

  I sat down on the stoop. The smell of roasting meat from within the house mingled with the fresh artichokes. Some of the children contrived to walk past me once or twice, looking from the corner of their eye at me. Their scrutiny wasn’t so different from that of the curious eyes at feasts, looking at my Adornments—there was no pity in it. I raised a hand to wave at them; they dashed away, giggling.

  “Etan?”

  I turned slowly to the voice behind me. It wasn’t a voice I had expected to hear, and the familiarity of it shocked me. Shakily, I stood up, and I turned to face Doiran. He stood in the doorway, wearing a stained apron. He had let his own beard grow; it was full and red as the younger man’s. They must be cousins, I thought, or perhaps even brothers. I should have seen the resemblance.

  Before I could speak, Doiran’s arms were around me, and I was pressed against his apron. He was speaking, but I could not hear him. He smelled of sweat and the kitchen, homely and alive, and I cried into his chest as he held me.

  I pulled back, wiping my eyes. Half-familiar Gaelta faces, old and young, were clustering around us; Doiran sent them off with a burst of invective—I’d never heard him speak Gaelte before—and ushered me inside, into the kitchen. He poured me a beer and sat me down, fussing over me like a mother hen.

  “Gods and glory, Etan, but I’d never thought I’d see you alive again. I went back to the house, and I saw—”

 
; “I know.” I drank the beer. It was lukewarm and yeasty, and the best thing I had tasted in weeks. “The fire.”

  “You were caught in it.”

  I nodded. “And Tallisk.”

  He swore. “Did you find him?”

  “No.” I traced a pattern on the tabletop with my fingers. My voice came out hoarse. “I had hoped you would have. Or Meret.”

  “Meret...ah.” He sighed. “He’s not in the best state.”

  “What happened? Did they—did they hurt him?”

  He looked at me a moment, quizzically. “No. But he got very ill. Many of us did, after the riots. There were so many people pouring into the city, weak with hunger, prey to every ague. They brought their ill humors with them.” Doiran poured his own glass of beer and sat down next to me. “Meret’s companion caught ill as well. She didn’t survive it. I went looking for Master Tallisk at Meret’s house and found Meret there instead. I couldn’t just leave him.”

  I swallowed. “So there’s been no word of Tallisk?”

  He shook his head. “For good or ill. But Etan, it’s so good to know that you at least are alive. I wish with all my heart you had been unharmed, as well, but to find you alive? That is more than I hoped for.”

  “And I.” I licked my lips. “Doiran, have you heard of Yana?”

  “Yana.” His hands clenched on his glass. “She was killed in the riots. A stone caught her in the head. They weren’t even aiming at her.” He laughed bitterly. “Her mother is still alive, though. She joined a temple as a penitent elder.”

  For a long while I didn’t say anything. I looked at the amber slosh of beer in the glass, at the scratches deep in the old wooden table. My finger found one of those furrows, tracing it like a scar. “Was she...was she given death rites?”

  He nodded. “By her mother. And we said our prayers for her.”

  “That—that’s good.”

  I traced the carved old lines in the table again, following them like rivers. If I had died in the fire, or on that narrow bed in the temple, would anyone have said prayers for me? The monks would have given me rites, quick and perfunctory, and perhaps a nameless marker in their ossuary.

  Was that where Roberd Tallisk had ended?

  “Etan.” Doiran put a gentle hand on my shoulder, mindful of my healing scars. “You know that you can stay here with my family. For as long as you wish.”

  I had not known. I looked up at him with a kind of wild gratitude; he sat back, blinking.

  “Etan—”

  I shook my head. “I’m all right, Doiran. Thank you.”

  He held his hands apart in a philosophical gesture. “There’s two things you can do when the world comes apart: make it worse, or make it better. Too many try to make it worse. It’s up to us to right the balance.”

  * * *

  I’d worried that another mouth to feed would stretch Doiran’s family, but they folded me into their structure as if they were built for it. The man I had met peeling artichokes was Doiran’s nephew Padrig, eldest son to his sister Roisel.

  Roisel was a widow now, of three husbands. She had a sprawling brood, inside Peretim and out, and every one of them would have rather eaten their own hair than left their family without food or care. In a time when so many had scattered from the city, the Teinnes pulled together, an alloy stronger than steel. It had been the Teinnes who’d put up the barricades, though all of Gressey had helped to defend them.

  The city gates stood open, now, to all who wished to come or to leave. They had been forced open during the fires, and after there was no one who dared close them. Roisel Teinne’s children were coming back one by one, each staying a few days at least, bringing what food and coin they could and filling her in on news from all Keredy. They spoke Gaelte, all of them, lapsing into Keredy now and then for business talk or choice profanities. I was rusty with the tongue, but slowly it came back to me, in dribs and drabs, in the echoes of the children’s play. I remembered counting songs my father had taught me, songs I’d not thought of for years, and sang along under my breath when I heard their local variations.

  Gaelta and Keredy both lived in Tarry-Here. One girl, whom I saw playing with the Teinne children in the street, had deep green eyes and a Southerner’s dark skin—I wondered if she was like me, though I did not ask.

  Gaelta and Keredy also kept their own gods. The temple of the Storm Lords kept its doors always open; its priests and penitents kept the cobblestones clean and chased off any troublemakers. Roisel, though, kept a shrine to the old gods in her common room. Sometimes a few older Gaelta would gather there and sing their ancient songs.

  Whether it was their shared hardships or their long time in the city that had done it, I didn’t know, but I heard no one called greeneye or moss-brain. I heard no fights save the squabbles of children.

  I helped where I could, chopping vegetables or changing diapers or repairing an old book Roisel’s eldest daughter had bought off a tinker. And in the evenings, when the sun had set and the youngest Teinnes were asleep, I went to speak with Deino Meret.

  He had been given the attic to live in. It was a cool, narrow room; Roisel’s last husband had used it as a workroom of sorts, a place to hide from the chatter of his youngest. Now the Teinne children were leery of it; they could not tell which of its shuffling, muttering noises were Meret’s, and which belonged to their father’s ghost.

  Meret did not come down the stairs. We brought his meals up, and anything else he asked for; it was not much. He suited the place, his bed wedged in among dusty woodwork and abandoned tinkerings, a fellow antique.

  A few precious trunks had been salvaged from his house; the rest had been fodder for looters. He wore the same two shirts, one while the other was dirty, and the same moth-eaten robe. Doiran had given him spare clothes, but he refused to wear them. He ate simply and kept out of the way.

  I’d expected the worst when I first climbed the stairs to see him: a man husked and rattling with his last few breaths. He was not so near Madame Death’s arms yet, though he shuffled rather than walked, and his once-proud back was bowed. His mind had not dulled, though sometimes it became unfocused, and he called me by names of friends or apprentices long-gone.

  One day, he called me Roberd. I went quiet and still, freezing in midair with his dinner plate half to his lap. His face changed then, slowly, half-cataracted eyes coming back to the present.

  “I am sorry,” he said, gruff and grudging; it cost him pride to apologize for those lapses.

  I shook my head, forcing a smile, and set the plate down. “Please don’t be, Master Meret.”

  He snorted. “‘Master,’ you call me.”

  “He did.”

  “He was my apprentice.” He toyed with the fine-minced meat on the plate. “So, did he bed you?”

  I made a face. “Yes.”

  Meret sat back and lifted a spoonful to his mouth. His hand shook, but only a little. “I’d hoped he wouldn’t, after the mess with what’s-his-name.”

  “Arderi Finn,” I said. I wouldn’t let his name be forgotten.

  He waved the spoon about. “Just so.”

  I set my jaw. “You know, he loved me. Loves me.”

  He snorted again. “I know. Roberd never did things half-arsed. If he took you to bed then he loved you, and would probably circle the seas twice if you asked. But then, if things go wrong, they go wrong completely.”

  “And look: they have.” I sat down on the edge of Meret’s borrowed bed. “Even if he still lives, even if he finds me, do you think he’d love me now?” I laughed. “I’m no companion for a man who loves beauty.”

  Meret watched me as he ate; how his half-blind eyes could seem so sharp, I did not know. “He told me you are talented in design. Did you ever use a needle?”

  I blinked at him. “Yes, once. On him.”

  He laughed, with real humor. “He let you mark him?”

  “He wanted to see—” I half closed my eyes. I could still smell the salve, see the welled drops o
f blood on his skin, feel his warmth close beneath my hand. “He wanted to see if I could.”

  Meret nodded, chewing his meat with slow care. Finally he put down his spoon and folded his hands in his lap. He raised his head to look at me and cleared his throat. “Then there is something I want to know, Etan writ-Tallisk. Do you think you still can?”

  Chapter Fifty-Eight

  No papers were signed and no agreements were made, but all in the Teinnes’ house began calling me Meret’s apprentice. I still did my share of cleaning and mending—never cooking, that was Doiran’s jealously guarded territory—but time I would have spent idle I was in Meret’s attic.

  First, we cleared away the dust—or I did at least, with Meret watching, leaning on his cane. The narrow windows were scrubbed and opened to let the light in. The tools salvaged from his house were taken out and polished, until light gleamed off the needles sharp as their edges. He told me their names, in a new language.

  There were poetics to the tattoo-master’s art that Tallisk had never bothered with, and they were dear to Meret. There were moth’s-wing brushes and cat’s-tail brushes, needles called the wasp or the lion’s tooth, ink in colors called blood-of-the-light and just-before-summer. Even the wooden hammers used to drive needle into flesh had their own rituals. Meret told me each master made their own when they finished their apprenticeship; they would bless them and give them secret names.

  I learned how to mix the inks and how to choose the best brush for a work. I painted on my few remnants of unmarked skin, or over the ridges of scars, learning the feel of the brush in my hands. I had been lucky with my hands. There were light scars at my left wrist, but they were otherwise untouched.

  I did not use the needle on my own skin, though. Meret said I had to, that each tattooist first practiced on themselves, but I refused. I might be ruined, Tallisk’s careful art wrinkled and deformed by fire, but I was still his.