by E D Ebeling
“Damn.” He dropped his armful of sticks. Sarid fixed her face into a surprised expression. It didn’t work. “You made her run. And you think I’m stupid.” He pushed through the trees after his horse, dragging his pit of a shadow behind. “You don’t like my company, Boney Legs,” he called. “Good. A challenge. And don’t think I’m done with you.”
***
The wolf bite worked: Sarid slept straight through the night. An uneventful week followed, and late one evening Rischa made good his threat––he crawled through the fireplace with a puppy. She was very big and the color of butter.
“Don’t you have a proper door?” he said.
Sarid slammed her book in her lap and frowned at him. “No.” A couple years back she’d gone a month to see her father and sister in the mountains, and the real door was walled up by some idiot who didn’t recognize lived-in places.
“Oh, well,” Rischa said. “Good evening. This, my dear Boney Legs”––it wasn’t a nickname she would have chosen for herself––“is what the kennel master thinks is a defective wolfhound.”
She thought it a bit tactless that Rischa should choose a wolfhound. But he appeared to have blithely forgotten about Leva, and Sarid forgot, too, when he set the puppy on the table next to the chair. “Muzzle too short, ears too flat, body not long enough, and the arch of the loin––there is no arch. And because you are altogether against the killing of infants, you have won the position of being her last resort.”
The puppy squirmed out of Rischa’s hands. She fumbled at the edge of the table, and fell over into Sarid’s lap.
“Anyone would think you were describing something hideous,” she said. She stroked the neck, the short ears.
“Put her down. She’ll piddle on your book.”
The puppy found her own way down and began licking Sarid’s stockings.
“What should I do with a wolfhound?”
“Hide her until she’s grown. They’re harder to drown when they’re grown.” He looked around him. “As you live in the most cluttered, godforsaken, creepy part of the hall, it shouldn’t be difficult.”
“Drowned?” said Sarid. She looked at the puppy and was reminded of herself. Unloved, unwanted. “Sometimes that’s easiest.”
He sat on the table. His shadow rose like a black flame behind him. “Lucky your mother didn’t think the same.”
She shooed the puppy away with the book, stuck the book between her ankles, and said in one breath, “But the world would’ve been better off, probably.”
“You’re not so bad as you think.” He took a quill off the table and began cleaning his fingernails with it. “Been spending too much time with yourself, probably. Or someone like the kennel master.”
“You do like to talk.”
“Hush. Duhn, my tutor of manners––he runs a kennel. But even he would say nobody’s flawless. Except his daughter. I have no arch of loin at all, and Mari has a rounder arch than anyone would dare tell her, and you’re a rare collection of flaws.” He smiled, and she noticed how smooth his cheeks were––he was a perfect girl. “Your skin’s white as a snow bank, and you’ve got the face of a dove. Who wants a face like that?”
He didn’t even color. He reached down and scratched the puppy around the ears. “No wonder you’re all alone,” he said. “It must be tiresome to be looked at all the time.” The puppy nibbled his fingers, and he laughed. “But look. You’ve gone red. And I thought you were too ghostly for it.”
After an interminable pause she finally said, “You’re annoying.”
“There’s room for improvement in all of us.” He pulled the puppy away from the pillow she was chewing. “Even you, lout.”
“That girl called you an Eliav,” said Sarid, who suddenly remembered. She wondered what an Eliav, even one of negligible age and importance, should be doing up here in the north.
“You’re questioning my ability to improve?” said Rischa.
She laughed, involuntarily. “Are you?”
“Yes. By the honest work of my father, the Ravyir’s brother.”
“They say the Ravyir has silly daughters and charming nephews.”
“I’m obliged to say the Ravyir has charming daughters and silly nephews.”
“They say the title will pass to your father.”
“Yes.” He played with the buttons on his shirt. “My cousins have charmed their way out of it. The title will fall, if everything goes as it should, to my elder brother.”
“What does that make you?”
“A keg of powder.”
“Steer clear of fire.”
Rischa left her then, and after she shuttered the puppy into a corner with a dressing screen, after she crawled into her high, dusty bed that night, it came to her. Why she had been afraid.
***
Four years ago Sarid’s nanny, Masha, was still alive. “Run out to the small ebony hall,” Masha had said one night. “The dinner should be over by now, and you can get yourself a bit of the food. It was interesting things Mel carried in. Oranges, pomegranates and such, to please the lordly folk just arrived. Mind you don’t get underfoot, though, or you’ll go straight back to your papa in the wild.”
Masha said the word “wild’ as though it were a special torment. And certainly Sarid was wary of her father. But the truth was, everything but the wild was a torment. Sarid shied away from everyone, and Masha encouraged it, telling Sarid and anyone interested in her that bad blood should be locked away; so it was a sign of Masha’s great age and failing memories that she had said to Sarid, “Run out to the small ebony hall.” And Sarid, who but for wishing to try the strange food would have avoided the place, went.
Almost everyone had left, except for the servants clearing the plates, and two others.
The boy was almost a man, his dark loose curls tied back with an amber ribbon. He spoke in the corner with an agitated manservant in rose and gold livery. The heraldic device on the manservant’s front was something Sarid hadn’t seen before: a spotted cat rampant on a rose field, with a white disc in its mouth.
A point of brightness caught Sarid’s eye––half an orange, wrapped in a napkin, on a table close to them. She wandered over, mixing with the menials, keeping an eye on the man and boy. They seemed interested in nothing outside themselves, and she pushed nearer and nearer until she was close enough to pick up the orange. The rind had little bumps, like gooseflesh. She bit into the wet part. It sprayed her cheek and she grinned, at the taste of sunlight in midwinter, and at her foolish delight.
“Sir,” the manservant was saying, “I daren’t get involved, I won’t sink myself into this further. I’ll lose my post or worse––And I’d get in trouble, even for running notes, I would. I ran this to you, but I won’t run more. I care for the lady, truly, I do, but her dam will fry me into a burnt stick––”
Exasperated, the boy thumped his hands on the table. “Forget her mother, Pavel, she won’t know.”
“Won’t know? If she steps down, everyone will know.”
“Who cares? Who will think of you?”
“They’ll think of you, and by extension, me.”
“I’ll take all the blame. Will you do it?” The man balked and shook his head. “For gods’ sake, Pavel.” The boy waved a handkerchief in front of his nose. “What could anyone guess?”
“With all due respect, sir, I won’t.”
“No one’s as craven as you,” said the boy. “Anyone would do it. A child would do it.”
Sarid, half-hidden behind a bowl of roses, had sucked the orange dry. She was looking at a fruit on the boy’s plate––small, shaped like a pear. The skin was purple, with iridescent veins and blushes of color—–red, pink, peach, yellow––like an earthenware glaze. It fascinated her.
“Little girl,” said the boy to Sarid. She started and ducked. “No use hiding under the table––I’ve already seen you.” She stood up, and he said, “You’re very brave. Will you deliver this kerchief to a lady?”
She
trembled, could feel a blush spreading across her forehead and down her neck.
“She’s thinking of running,” said the boy. “Don’t run. Pavel looks like a lion but he won’t hurt you. Eying my fig, weren’t you? Looked ready to drool.” He smiled kindly, and Sarid grew even more abashed. “Well, you can have it. But first you must deliver this to Princess Rochel.”
Pavel put his hands behind his back. “You’d give it to a child? Well, I guess the worst she could do is drop it or lose it to a dog.”
“She looks the age of my brother,” said the boy. “They seem babies, but they know a fair bit.”
Sarid stared at the fig. She took a deep breath and said, “I can take it, sir. I can take it. But I don’t know where to go––Is the lady far?” She chewed the words into unintelligible pieces.
“Dear me,” said Pavel. “The princess shall be beleaguered.”
“Quiet, bear-bait.” And the boy gently told Sarid where to go and asked her to bring back something, a ribbon perhaps, from the princess as a token. Then he gave the white silk kerchief into her fist and commanded she keep it out of sight.
And Sarid went, thinking only of the beautiful fig with the iridescent skin. She only vaguely remembered what went forward. She remembered finding the princess’s quarters, the young woman who took the handkerchief from her and cried a little, the green ribbon she tied to Sarid’s wrist. She remembered getting lost in the upper south wing, growing more and more frightened that her reward would be taken away. She remembered reaching the hall at last, seeing unfamiliar folk wearing the same livery as the manservant.
Pavel had crept into a corner. The others surrounded the boy, who was standing now.
“You’ve compromised all of Lorila,” said a man, not yelling, but speaking with such intensity he might as well have been.
“The point is,” said a woman, “that you somehow knew what the girl was doing, and kept it a secret, even encouraged her dalliances with this––”
“Man?” the boy said.
“She has no business going forward with this. And you even less. Do you know what people will say?”
“I’m not stupid.”
“You would discount, supersede, her lifelong preparation, training in statesmanship––”
“Training is irrelevant. It never could’ve changed her gentle character into something more crass. She never wanted this. It’s filthy work.”
“That’s what you’ve been saying to her?” the man burst out. He was big and had a face like a bulldog. “Gods damn her father, the council. Given it away as if it were nothing.”
“Selya is a mere puppet,” said the woman. “You know it, you’ve been scheming all your life––”
“You have a prodigious imagination.”
Sarid looked for the fig. It wasn’t on the plate.
“I won’t stand for it.” The woman’s voice was shaking. “I won’t. You’ll be questioned. I won’t stand for it.”
“Sit for it then and hear me out.” Sarid saw now that he had the fig in his hand. He squeezed it. The flesh broke through, a burst of cottony seeds. He splayed his fingers and the mess of fruit hit the stone.
A hound crept cautiously forward, tail tucked in. It sniffed the fig, took it in its mouth, and spat it out.
Sarid stood still, anger washing her face hot. The anger gathered into a bead in the back of her mouth.
The boy looked up and found her in the doorway, his eyes like two holes.
Two
Sarid named the puppy Gryka. Northern Lorilan for lout.
Fed on scraps from the kitchens, Gryka grew past Sarid’s knees and kept growing. The year shrank into dark old age and the hound reached her gigantic, adult size. She was harmless: spare and bird-boned, more silly than her dour cousins in the kennels. And she was friendly to strangers. Almost embarrassingly so for Sarid, who had none of Gryka’s natural charm. Rischa Eliav occasionally crawled through the fireplace, curious to see how the two were getting along; and terrible shadow aside, Sarid grew fond of him, though she never let herself think it.
The days grew short and furious, and Charevost Hall countered them with gaiety. The dancing halls belched smoke and echoed with sloppy laughter, and Sarid became more and more miserable. Because Rischa soaked up the carousing, and then detailed the vile fetes and balls the next day with such enthusiasm that Sarid wished, almost wished, she had been a part of them. But she never let on, just sighed, and spent her time alone with Gryka. But even Gryka disappeared for hours at a time, showing up later with a smug look and kissel jelly clinging to her chops. All this began to be a matter of pique.
On the sixth night before Yule––the night of the second biggest ball of the season––Sarid was sitting by the window, patching the elbow of her jacket. She stamped her foot whenever she broke the thread, and Gryka groaned at intervals, flopping into increasingly apathetic positions. Finally the dog got up from her rug. She cocked her head in the direction of the fireplace, as though she could hear the ladies putting on their finery. She gave Sarid a sharp “Hah!” and padded through the fireplace.
She might as well have called Sarid a bore. “Oh fine,” she said to the fireplace. “Fine. I’ll go and see why he’s so excited over a bunch of nobs twirling in circles.” And she donned an overcoat, tatty by default, and crept through the fireplace after her dog.
She was beginning to feel hungry, so she went down to the kitchens and unwound a string of sausage from the rafters. She rolled it up in her skirts, tied the ends loosely, and made her way toward the green ballroom. She climbed a number of sweeping staircases and wandered a maze of corridors, and stepped suddenly into the smell: oranges, evergreens, sweat and powder. She heard a hundred voices and heels and viols. She turned a corner. The entrance was half hidden by a curtain of ivy and fern, so that it looked like the mouth of a cave.
She looked through the ivy into a huge oval space full of soaring vaults and deep shadows. Chandeliers seemed to float through the thick air, and great tripod braziers cast a wavering glow over the walls. Smoke obscured the high ceiling. People obscured everything else.
But she couldn’t see any of them very well, and seized with curiosity, she stepped through the door. She stood mesmerized a moment. And then her heart went cold, and she crept behind a curtain into a small side chamber.
The air was cooler in here; there was a door open, looking into a garden. Sarid cracked the curtain she’d come through and stared in cynical awe at the dresses––mountains of silk and satin, squeezing and thumping, and filling in all the spare space. And the hair. Elaborately braided, crowned with tall, jeweled headdresses so the ladies looked like tropical birds. Sarid couldn’t take her eyes off them. There was no sign of Rischa.
But a man was approaching her curtain. He was small, with a red satin short coat, yellow knickers, and spindly legs. He made absurd swimming motions with his arms to keep his two wine glasses from spilling, and hummed along with the music, failing spectacularly to stay in tune. He threw aside the velvet––Sarid wondered whether it would be better to slip through and face the hundreds of dancers or stay and face the man.
She stayed. The man blinked two or three times. “Yah!” He spread his arms. “It’s little Gurd from the kitchens. Dancing behind the curtains. You’re Gurd, ain’t you?” Sarid nodded dumbly. “Thought so. Little Gurd smells like sausage and you smell like sausage. Can’t see well in here––’s all smoky.” He waved his hand in front of his face, moved closer. His breath smelled like brandy and nutmeg.
His armpits were wet, but he didn’t bother to hide them––he’d drunk well past the state of insecurity. He spread his arms again. “Gurd! Have a dance with me. I’m a pretty partner, ain’t I?” She smiled and shook her head. “Anxious over your locked door? You’re wasting your time. I go in for men. Not that you ain’t lovely as a lotus. Come! Dance with Yoffin. We’ll stay behind the curtain. You’ll be the prettiest girl in the room.”
“I don’t dance, sir.” She stepped away
from his brandy-breath. “I’ve never learned.”
He laughed so hard he started coughing and had to put his two wine glasses on a windowsill. “You don’t learn to dance. You just dance. Come, like this––” He grabbed her hands and jerked her along to the music. “Taddle, tit, tit––like this”––he nodded at his shiny red pumps––“tit, tit, no, no, Gurd, tit tit––” She tried to follow, but the sight of the pumps skipping around sent her into bouts of laughter. “You are not nice, Gurd. My kidneys are pricking against my sides, and I am too ugly for you.”
“Sit, then, Ugly.” Another man had quietly joined them, and was sitting on the windowsill, drinking from one of Yoffin’s glasses. “Let me have a dance with the kitchen girl.” His long legs were stretched out before him.
“Kind of you, Master.” Yoffin blew heavily through his nose. “Take and wear her down to a thin line. What she deserves, laughing at me, the bad monkey.”
“A thin line.” The man blotted his mouth with a sleeve; it made him look neat, rather than boorish. “She is already rather thin, I think, Yoffin. But I shall do my best.” Silently, not looking at her but a little above her, he took one of her hands in his own. He drew her in, putting her other hand on his shoulder. He was close, much closer than Yoffin had been, and Sarid sweated under her clothes.
She gave Yoffin a pleading glance. He was leaning against the wall, still breathing heavily. “Go on, Gurd,” he said. “The night belongs to the spry and handsome. No place for a sweaty rag like me.”
Sarid’s new partner’s hands were dry and cold; he smelled like winter. Though his posture was superb he somehow managed to keep his head bowed and in shadow, and she only saw the line of a hollow cheek, the glint of an eye. They began dancing––the music was in three, and slow.
Sarid wished only for it to be over. The tempo picked up, and the man led her on, ignoring her frantic eyes, her fumbling boots. She tripped; he dragged her feet over the floor. She was frightened now, out of breath, and she looked at Yoffin for help. The little man was oblivious, tapping his feet and drinking his wine.