by Jay Lake
“So you listen, little Emerald. We have a year or two left with you at most. If that. Once your flow begins, you will be beddable. At the price you command, you will be bedded. Spread wide and smile sweetly, and your life will be very good for decades to come. Turn your shoulder and raise that pride I’ve never been able to erase from your spirit, and you can still be cut and turned out like any servant girl who fails to give satisfaction.”
She patted me on the shoulder and walked out to leave me alone in the darkness, contemplating the price and purpose of my beauty.
The next months went by in an uneasy peace. My lessons continued, but they were more for practice than for further education. The Factor did not return, which suited me just fine. Neither did Federo visit in that period. My feelings about his absence were more ambiguous.
He’d taken me away once. In quiet moments, I found myself daydreaming that he might take me away again. Given that Federo was the Factor’s man through and through, I knew those for hollow, girlish hopes.
It was the name Emerald that stuck in my ears like a needle in my finger. Every time Mistress Tirelle uttered that word, my blood ran hot. By then, I was old enough to have a care for how well I could conceal my feelings, at least most of the time, but she must have seen the anger.
What was different now was that my tormentor turned away more often than not.
It finally dawned on me that she was finished with me. We awaited only the onset of my flow, or the whim of the Factor and his master the Duke, for me to leave the Pomegranate Court and some other girl-child to arrive through that barred gate.
That thought brought a special terror of its own. A part of me wanted to stay here in the hated center of my universe.
Was I safer within these walls or without?
The answer, of course, was that I was safe nowhere at all.
Even the Dancing Mistress seemed to be marking time with me. We ran familiar routes, worked on the same flips and falls and kick-steps as always. She was no better than Mistress Tirelle in her waiting.
“I don’t want my name,” I told her one night as we ran the Eggcorn Gallery, well west of the Factor’s house. I hated the truculence in my voice, but somehow couldn’t change the tone.
“Girl.” Her voice carried a tired weight. “A name is like a mask. You can wear it for a day, a season, or a lifetime, then put it aside at need.”
In truth, she had not once referred to me as Emerald since the day the Factor had dubbed me so. Somehow that didn’t make me feel better.
“What do you know of names?” I demanded angrily. “You don’t even have one.”
The Dancing Mistress broke her stride. Her eyes were black-shadowed from the faint glow of the coldfire in my hand as she stared at me. In that moment, I knew I had pushed her too hard, as I had done a few years ago over the matter of Federo. I was suddenly desperate that she not leave me now as she had then.
“I am not your enemy, Girl.” I could almost hear her claws flexing. “You might do me the courtesy of recalling that.”
Bowing my head in the dark, I forced an apology between my teeth. “I am sorry, Mistress. Everything since the Factor’s visit has been too out of sorts.”
She turned and resumed her run. I sprinted after, stumbling in my first steps at a strange twinge in my groin. I was not in the habit of faltering, but pride kept me from saying anything. I supposed anger kept her from answering.
That, and she knew well enough what was happening to me. Teaching girls was her business, after all, and every girl becomes a woman in her time.
Far too soon, my monthlies came upon me. The twinges in my back had been a warning, recurring at irregular intervals for a number of weeks. One day cooking with Mistress Tirelle in the great kitchen-we were working over a brawn terrine-my stomach seemed to flip over on me. Without any warning, I bent double and spewed my breakfast on the tiled floor.
Instead of raising her hand to me, Mistress Tirelle smiled and sent me to clean myself. When I lay down afterwards, my nausea returned. I had to work to hold my stomach behind my teeth.
In time, I was forced to roll to my knees on the cold floor, spewing. My mouth stung; I loosed a bit of my bladder. This disgusted me until at a furtive touch I realized there was blood trickling down there.
Mistress Cherlise will be proud of me now, I thought. I am beddable at last. I tried to ignore what this would mean for me in the Duke’s eyes.
Soon enough, Mistress Tirelle brought me cool water and cloths.
I had never seen her beam so.
That night I stared out my door at the moonlight. The yard of the Pomegranate Court was silvered like a jewelsmith’s dream. I was to be Emerald, a jewel in the Duke’s box, placed in a glorious setting to be admired for twoscore seasons before being allowed to fade to some tower apartment with a few aging servants.
The histories Mistress Danae had given me to read were clear enough concerning the fate of unwanted wives and lemans, especially those of low birth.
All that time between now and that end would be only a blink of an eye, once it had passed. There would be nothing for me. Nothing.
The moonlight was beautiful, but I resolved that I would not be a jewel. No Emerald, I, to be sold in the market of women at the Duke’s command.
I wondered what it was that Endurance would have done. The question was beyond pointless. The ox was property. Papa could drive him or slit his throat and have him dressed for meat.
They could slit my throat, too. Mistress Tirelle had made that threat to me often enough, though I suppose she meant more to notch my ears or fork my tongue when she said I could be cut and turned out.
What market is there for great ladies of ruined beauty and broken spirit?
I did not care. They would never render me into such a beautiful array of meat. I was more than these people, better than them. Even the kind ones, such as Mistress Cherlise, were molding me to the Factor’s will. I was merely a thing to any of them, a means to advance a purpose. My allies, the Dancing Mistress and Federo, wanted me for their own purposes only instead of the Factor’s. Whatever petty plot occupied their hours was no concern of mine.
There was no way I would be a toy for the ageless Duke, used for a few decades then tossed aside. The daughters of the great houses could have him.
I slipped from my bed and down to the great kitchen. There I had learned to cook with saffron and vanilla and other spices worth far more than their weight in gold. What would we have had at home, Papa and I? A little salt, and some dried peppers from bushes that grew at the edge of the trees. Salt we had here as well, along with parsley and other common pot herbs.
We also had a drawer full of knives.
Much of what had been kept from me early on had been added in the growth of trust. The strange trust between master and slave, jailor and prisoner; but still it was a species of trust that had stood between me and Mistress Tirelle.
I found the small, sharp cutter I normally used to separate meat from bone. The blade was already well honed. No need to risk a noise to set an edge now. Instead I went outside to sit beneath the pomegranate tree in the failing moonlight and stare at the blade I had taken up in my hand.
The Factor had named me Emerald. Marked by beauty, trained to grace. Certainly this blue-walled prison was far more comfortable than the hut of my youth. “I miss my belled silk and my father’s white ox,” I whispered to the blade. There was so much that I longed for-the water snakes and the hot winds and the silly lizards pushing themselves always closer to the brassy sun with their forelegs, as if they could ever reach its heavy fire.
Miss those though I might, I could no more throw away my years of training here in the Factor’s house than I could throw away time itself. Federo had taken me away from what was mine, while the Factor had made me into a creature of the Duke of Copper Downs.
I was no ox, nor carriage, nor cart horse. I was no animal nor thing. I could escape this place easily enough by climbing the walls as the Dancing Mistress had show
n me, but I was valuable. My grace and beauty and training were the work of years by dozens of women in the Factor’s employ. They would hunt for me, and they would find me. Doubtless his blindfolded guards could ride across the leagues to wherever I hid. Doubtless the Duke would ask after his new-grown playpretty, and the entire city of Copper Downs would try to make an answer.
As I was, I was worth far too much for the Factor ever to let slip through his grasp. I could not throw away those years or the knowledge they had brought me. With this blade in my hand, however, I could throw away my beauty.
I will show them whose spirit will break first.
Endurance’s brown eyes glinted in the dark as I reached to slash my right cheek. The pain was sharp and terrible, but I had stood through a lifetime of beatings without crying out. Then my left, echoing and balancing the first hurt I had done myself. I reached back and cut a single deep notch in the curve of each of my ears.
“I am Green,” I shouted at the moon in the language of my birth. Blood coursed warm and sharp-scented down my neck to tickle at my shoulders. “Green!” I screamed again, then began sobbing into the night.
Mistress Tirelle came following the racket I had made and found me bleeding down the white cotton of my sleeping shift.
When she realized what I had done, she shrieked. I broke her neck with a kick the Dancing Mistress had taught me, a flowing spin that sent the duck woman’s chin hard to the right with a snap that I felt down in my bones. She gurgled once, then slumped to the ground.
That was my first killing, amid rage and grief and confusion.
In some ways, Mistress Tirelle is the death I will always remember best. Her constant presence was as close as I’d known to love in all my days since being taken from Papa. She had held me at the center of her life. I repaid her with murder. Not even a shred of dignity, either, though death is rarely dignified. The dying generally do let go of whatever is within their bodies. I sometimes think the gods mean us to leave the world in a filthy state to remind us that we are made of dust and water.
I told myself then that though I hated Mistress Tirelle, I had not meant to kill her. That was not true, of course. My Dancing Mistress had taught me to kick. I had accepted her lessons. The responsibility was mine.
Mistress Tirelle’s blank eyes were already fogged. I scrambled up the pomegranate tree to fetch my running blacks. I missed my footing twice, but found them where they should have been. Back down on the ground, I stripped out of my bloody shift and dropped it over the duck woman’s face. Swiftly I tugged on the dark clothes.
No time now, I told myself, except to keep moving. Cut or uncut, they would hunt me, but I was my own possession now. No one else’s. Rage sent me swarming up the posts of the balcony to the copper roof of my house. From there, I gained the walkway atop the bluestone walls. I could already hear shouting within the core of the Factor’s house.
Sprinting for the corner where I could make the climb down, I stumbled again-I had not eaten all day, and was ill in my stomach with shock and fear and all my bleeding. As I swung over the wall, I missed my grasp and fell hard to the cobbled streets below.
The landing was poor, but not fatally so. I collapsed onto my back, breath heaving in deep sobs as gongs sounded within the Factor’s house.
A silver-furred face leaned close. “Come with me now,” my Dancing Mistress said. “That way you might live to see the dawn.”
“No,” I said in my own words. “I will have no more of you.”
She grabbed my arm. “Don’t be a fool. You’ll throw away whatever you think you’ve gained, and your life besides.”
Still shocked from the murder I had just wrought, I rose and stumbled after her. I muttered maledictions in my own language as we walked quickly through the nighttime streets of Copper Downs. Both Endurance and my grandmother’s ghost would be ashamed of me.
I shivered as we climbed down a culvert to an entrance to Below. This was one we hadn’t used before. The night wasn’t so cold now, but I was.
The crack of Mistress Tirelle’s neck echoed repeatedly in my mind. I had kicked high. That wasn’t defense-I had not meant merely to knock her down or disable her.
Words, my victory was supposed to be in words. Yet I’d ended her life.
That was a theft that could never be restored. In taking her life, I’d taken my own, too. I had cast away everything I’d known in Copper Downs, almost everything I could ever remember.
I’d meant only to take myself away. That was why my cheeks and ears still stung like hot coals, their wounds a horrid itch that intruded on my thoughts. In spoiling myself for the Factor and his patron Duke, I had ruined their plans.
But a life.
It made no difference that she had been awful to me. I was slave and animal and work to her. Never a real girl. Never a person.
Then I’d killed her. That had made me real, at least for the span of her last moments.
We moved quickly for being Below. The passages were close-walled and low-ceilinged, slimed over as happened mostly near the surface. The Dancing Mistress held a snatch of coldfire in her hands, which was enough for me to follow. Beyond that, I paid no heed to anything but my own misery.
She stepped through a doorway into some larger gallery. I followed, only to have someone clutch at my arm. I shrieked as I was startled out of my reverie.
The Dancing Mistress whirled. Whatever had been on her lips died there.
Mother Iron held me pinched in a grip that seemed tight enough to shear pipes. I looked into her eyes. They gleamed with the orange white of the hottest coals.
“So it begins.” Mother Iron’s voice was rusty as a grate. Her breath gusted like a wind from a great distance, and reeked of stale air.
“We move swiftly,” the Dancing Mistress answered softly. “To stay ahead of the hunt that is even now being summoned.”
The old woman-thing-I was mindful of Septio’s sleeping gods-squeezed my arm again. “Be true and hold your edge,” she told me. Then Mother Iron was gone, vanished like mist before breaking sunlight.
The Dancing Mistress took my hand. “I had not expected that. Are you well?”
I tried to answer, but could only laugh.
Her eyes narrowed to gleaming slits as she shook me slightly. “Stay away from that clouded place in your mind, Girl.”
That sobered me quickly. “My name is Green,” I snapped. Hot, hard anger filled my voice.
“Green, then. I see that you are back.”
Our flight ended with a climb of a wooden ladder screwed to a brick well. The Dancing Mistress led. I followed, stewing in anger rather than lost in despair.
How dare they snatch everything away from me? I knew my thoughts held no logic at all, but I cherished the burning spark. Guilt and fear lay not far behind it. I would much rather have my path lit by fire than wrapped in gloom.
We emerged in a large half-empty building. A bit of moonlight leached in through wide windows set high on the walls to make solid, silvery shadows of stacks of crates. I glanced around the room, seeing as I had been trained to do. Eight of those windows on each side, some accessible by climbing the stacks before them. One end was swallowed in deep shadow where a dozen horsemen could have waited invisible. The other end gleamed with the cracks of a large doorway lit by gas lamps outside.
A warehouse, of course.
“What is in the shadows?” I asked, mindful of the Dancing Mistress’ earlier words about the hunt being called.
“What do your nose and ears tell you?”
I closed my eyes and sniffed. Dust, wood, oil, mold. The scent of the two of us. No horses. No sweat-stink of soldiers. Likewise the noises. A cart rumbled past the other side of the doorway, paced by the clip of hooves on cobbles. Within were only the sounds of an old building, wood settling and the whistling scurry of rats.
There might be a lone, quiet person in the darkness, but no more. I said as much.
“There might be anyone, anywhere,” she agreed. “Here i
n this moment, we are probably safe. Now we hide some more.”
The Dancing Mistress began climbing an array of boxes toward one of the grease-smeared windows. I followed her. I wondered where we were going, but did not ask. She reached the window, then stretched tall to touch the ceiling above it. A section of slats slid away to the noisy squeal of wood on wood. I winced at the sound and looked back down for our mythical assassin.
No one was there. Above me, the Dancing Mistress hauled herself into the ceiling. I followed to find us in a much darker space with another ceiling so low that I nearly struck my head.
The roof of the warehouse, I realized: a very low-angled attic. The texture of the shadows suggested that this space was used for storage. Objects bulked dark within deeper darkness. A single window gleamed at the far end, barely brighter than the shadows, as it was so obscured with dust and grime.
“The stairs were torn out fifteen or twenty years ago,” the Dancing Mistress said. “They widened the doors to admit heavier cart traffic with a turnaround, and were forced to give up this space in the process.”
“A waste.” I was focusing on the trivia of where we were.
“Everything has a reason. Right now we are in a hidden location above a building that no one has ever seen us enter. We are safe while we consider what should happen next.”
“Safe?” The panicked laughter began bubbling up within me once more. “I will never be safe again. I will always be trapped by what I have done. I-”
She smacked the top of my head as my voice rose. “Whisper. Even better, think before you speak at all.”
Anger rushed back fast as flame on oil. Mistress Tirelle hit me constantly. Now the Dancing Mistress did the same. Who was she to raise a hand to me?
“You must eat, then sleep,” she continued. “Your fears and regrets are carrying you away.”
“I am afraid of nothing!” I shouted.
Her voice was so soft, I had to strain to hear it. “Right now you are afraid of everything. Or at least you should be.”
I flopped to the floor. Finally still, I realized how badly my body ached. The slip coming off the wall of the Factor’s house had bruised my hips and jarred my back. The run had stretched and warmed my muscles, but here we were quiet and I could feel myself cooling down already. My foot stung where it had clipped Mistress Tirelle’s chin.