Gods, I need to sleep. I’m restless and fidgety, and I keep looking around like there’s something I’m missing, something different. Like maybe someone’s sitting nearby. But there isn’t anything, and no one comes up to the attic but me, and there’s no such thing as ghosts in Heyrland, so it can’t be that either.
To the desert with this; I’m going to Orfeo.
* * *
263. Oh good, a bit about me! I’m fed up with you most times, but this must be . . . ah, Stroekshall, right? That day.
264. Makes you look dowdy and bland.
265. Wonderful.
266. Delightful.
267. And such a confection it is!
268. Shhh. Shhh. It’s a wonderful fashion. Gods bless the tailors who invented it.
269. Agreed!
270. Mmmmm. Yeah . . . It’s great. It’s a really good fashion.
271. Okay, but did you ever see the ones that are shorter than that? There are some that just have really short breeches, not even halfway down the thigh, and the hosen just goes allllll the way up. It’s a really, really good fashion.
272. So, uh . . . I don’t know if anyone told you, but did you know what that looked like at a bit of a distance? The pale peach underlayer of the breeches was just about the same color as your skin, and you had matching hosen, so from across the hall it really looked like you weren’t wearing anything at all under your trousers—like it was just the slashed overlayer showing bare skin beneath. You know that was intentional on Sterre’s part, right? She dressed you up like that to be just on this side of scandalous.
273. Sigh. Of course you did. I don’t know what I expected.
274. Dowdy! Moth-eaten! Just another way you’re failing as a Chant—you ought to dress like you did at the auction, or like I do: bright and splendid and eye-catching. Sterre knows it, even if you don’t! A Chant is supposed to seize the attention of the room! The ancient Chants did—it’s said they wore bright colors and shining things to draw Shuggwa’s Eye.
275. Heavens, is that why? I love it. I love them, and I love it. May the gods smile upon the tailors.
276. Oh, you sweet innocent thing. You really believed her when she said it was a uniform? With trousers like that?
277. I’m sobbing with laughter. I honestly had to stop and collect myself. Oh gods! Presentable, she said! And you believed her, didn’t you! You believed that you looked presentable instead of like the human version of a tray of assorted chocolates. Presentable! I have tears in my eyes!
278. All right, mirth aside, and as much as I approve of her taste in clothing for Chants, the two of you should never have been left alone in a room together. Alone, you each have your allotment of sins. Together, your sins grow exponentially—her greed fuels your heresy, and you both go tumbling down into the muck of petty evil.
279. I have mixed feelings about this, but I’m going to let it slide because “Fuck what anyone else thinks” is a personal philosophy that I hold very dear.
280. You knew what you were doing. You did it on purpose. I’m furious once again—and now I see why you put in all that blather about Orfeo and falling in love—you knew this part was coming. You wanted to soften me up. You wanted to make me sympathize with you, so that I’d forgive you a little for this atrocity.
281. There are no words. You knew. You knew the whole time. You used your words to weave a fisherman’s net, and you cast it for an evil cause. You used your words to trap and exploit hundreds of people. I’m not even capable of anger anymore. I’m just . . . desolate. This is not what a Chant should be. This is never what a Chant should be.
282. Except it wasn’t their attention, was it? It wasn’t their eyes that you’d felt fall upon you. (Hello again. Mistress Chant-from-the-future, flipping back again to check that I remembered this right. I did.)
283. I stand by what I said.
284. Oh, I forgot I was angry about the clothes at the time. Hm. I see why I was, but—well, I’d rather see you dressed as a Chant ought to be.
285. I paid for myself, because I don’t turn my nose up at the idea of saving money. What am I supposed to do when I get old, otherwise? What if I get injured and can’t speak?
286. I wasn’t yelling at you.
287. Good. You’ve admitted already that I’ve been right before. I was right about this too—you’d done something terrible that day.
288. To hell with you!
289. Gift? I’ve never heard a Pezian call it a gift.
290. Context is important. The context here is that a bunch of merchants, who are already inclined to be easily impressed by gaudy displays, think you did a good job. Are they a reliable and objective source of information in this situation?
291. Hah! The boy didn’t know how right he was. Quicksilver drives people to madness and ruin, after all.
292. I just don’t know. He’s up to something now, even if he wasn’t before.
THIRTY-EIGHT
So I went down to Orfeo last night, and I invited him to exhaust me so that I’d be too tired to dream, and it . . . only sort of worked. It was different, at least. I didn’t wake up choking again and again, like I had been before, so that was something.
Every time I closed my eyes, I was struggling through the swamp, the stars-in-the-marsh towering above my head and filling the air with the suffocating, fetid stench of death. The air above me was alive with buzzing insects that bit me and flew into my eyes, my nose, my mouth. I fought them off, pulling the cloth of my tunic over my face, and surged forward through the thick, slurping muck. I struggled until I was too weary to go on, falling time and again into the water until I could move no more, and then, with my last breath, my last whisper of power, I looked up.
I saw the sky. All was dark except for the flowers, and just before the water closed over my head, a cloud moved aside, and—there it was, clear in the sky as it always is, a spiral of stars hanging in the black: the Eye of Shuggwa. That’s what the Chants call it.
I said, “No more of this, please. Please, no more.” And then the water closed over me.
Something seized me by the collar of my tunic and dragged my head above the water—I gasped for breath and felt a breeze on my face. The air on my tongue was sweet and fresh. Pure.
I opened my eyes and saw the bird, the one that had been pecking at me before. It was a cormorant with golden-brown feathers,293 floating beside me and holding me up by the scruff of my tunic, as if I were no heavier than a small fish. It was fanning its wings to make the breeze, and I breathed and breathed.
And then I heard something coming through the muck and the tall stalks. The sound of water lapping on wood—a boat, I thought, a moment before it appeared, pushing through the thicket of flowers.
In the stern of the boat, there was a person, sitting very still with their hands folded on their knees.294 They didn’t row—the boat just moved steadily forward of its own volition. It was a punt, I saw now, a squarish boat with a shallow draft and a flat bottom—good for marshes like these, where it wouldn’t run aground even in water only a few inches deep. The figure wore a cloak of rushes and a broad-brimmed hat,295 and a lantern hung on a stick behind them, casting their face into shadow so I couldn’t see it at all.296 The cormorant tugged me forward and jumped up onto the prow of the boat, and the moment I put my hand against the wood, the boat stopped dead, as still and steady as if it were on dry land, and the figure in the back turned their head and looked down at me.
“Please,” I said. I was too weak. I could barely lift my hand above the water. The figure leaned forward and grasped me by the forearm, dragged me into the boat, then sat back in the same position as before. All I could see of them or their clothes was a tiny corner of hem by their ankle, embroidered richly in a style I’ve never seen before. I sat up, and the cormorant croaked at me. “Thank you,” I said. “I thought I was going to drown.”
The figure leaned forward and brushed my cheek with their fingers.297 “Ylfing,” they rasped, so quietly I couldn’t t
ell anything about their voice.
And then I woke up—naturally, for once, not clawing my way out from the bedding.298
* * *
293. . . . Wait. Wait.
294. Oh, what the fuck. What the fuck.
295. What the fuck. You’ve got to be kidding me. No!
296. No, this doesn’t make sense. This is Heyrland; we’re thousands of miles away from the seat of his power. He doesn’t reach this far. There’s no way he could.
297. Liar. Liar, liar, liar.
298. I’m . . . speechless. I’m speechless. I’m speechless at you, upstart Chant. Speechless at your ignorance, speechless that you would deserve a dream like that to begin with, and I . . . I can’t. That was Shuggwa. As clear as day, that was Shuggwa—all the signs were right. The cormorant was his messenger, Ksadir. His boat was there, and his lantern, and his cloak of rushes, and the hat shadowing his face from sight. That was Shuggwa. Not funny, bumbling trickster Skukua of Kaskinen, but proper Shuggwa of old, from the ancient days when he was powerful and terrible, and the people of the swamp gave him Chants, favored and indulged ones, to hold his gaze and protect anyone less favored from harm at his hands.
And you! You! Upstart! You with your disregard for propriety, you with your immoral, heretical beliefs. You, of all the Chants in the world, you draw his Eye, you win yourself a visitation? He comes to you when you call? He knows and speaks your name aloud? What did you do to earn that? What was it that brought him to you? Was it the spectacle you made of yourself in Stroekshall, wearing those tarty clothes and batting your eyes like a maiden until every red-blooded person in the room was aching for you? You have to be lying about it. You have to.
THIRTY-NINE
It’s been two weeks or so since I’ve written anything down. I’ve slept better than I have in months, now that I’m not dreaming of drowning every night. Just . . . silently sitting in the boat, with the cormorant in the prow and the stranger in the stern, and myself perched on the center thwart. No one speaks, but the cormorant flaps her wings every now and then, and the air stays fresh. It’s such a relief, and infinitely more restful, but . . . it’s so much more consistent now than it was. Before, there would be nights here and there where I wouldn’t dream at all. But now? Every night. Immediately, the moment I close my eyes, until I wake in the morning. That’s strange, isn’t it?299 I’d think it was some kind of magic, except that:
1. nothing interesting happens, and
2. the only magic like this that I’ve ever heard of is the kind in legends and wonder-tales. Even the hugely powerful magicians that crop up at random, one every two or three hundred years or so, don’t really do workings like “sending weird dreams about flowers and boats and birds and strangers to a single, specific Chant in Heyrland.”
If this were a wonder-tale, I suppose the dream would be significant—a prophecy, or something like that.300 A message of some kind.
But this isn’t a wonder-tale. It’s just my life, and life is fairly mundane. Yes, before, it would have made sense for the dream to be a message, even if it was just from myself to myself: me, slogging through the marsh, choking on the flowers that came from my master’s homeland? Easy enough to see what that means, because I felt like I was struggling through thick, soupy mud even in my waking moments.
Dreams are a lot like stories—they’re a way for your mind to come to terms with what’s happening to you, a way to look at a problem from a few steps away, the better to get a perspective on the whole picture.
Is the message just that I’m done with struggling, and that it’s safe to rest now? Or that I should accept help when it’s offered, even from a stranger? To be fair, I haven’t been doing much of that the last few years.
Maybe it’s just a weird dream, and I should stop trying to read things into it.301
We’ve had a few minor rainstorms, but I’m told they’re nothing compared to what we’ll get later: howling winds and driving rains that last for days sometimes. Sterre has had me working less, now that the greatest part of our work is done until the end of the season, but still there are dozens of errands to run, and contracts and papers to translate and deliver—I’ve seen the whole city now, all the corners and crannies. I’ve been to the palace, where the Council of Guilds meets twice a week to make laws and rule the city, and I’ve been dancing a few times with Orfeo. We’ve walked along every canal and crossed every footbridge. Orfeo even took me to see his family’s ship anchored in the harbor. We rowed out ourselves during a light drizzle and he showed me everything, from the figurehead to the captain’s quarters and the orlop deck and the hold, everything lashed down solid or covered in tarps for the storms.
The tides have been rising higher, and the first king-tide arrived last night, peaking precisely at midnight when the moons, both new, were directly beneath our feet, visible on the other side of the world where it was noon, if I understand my astronomy correctly.
Just as Mevrouw Basisi said, we were quite dry. The water came right up out of the canal and spilled onto the streets, lapping an inch or two above the lip of some of the canals but no farther. I thought it would be terrifying, but it isn’t—the water is filthy, of course, because this is a city of a hundred thousand people. But we have water-boots when we need to stamp about in the wet. I haven’t needed to yet—I have three days off, by Sterre’s command, with the rest of the clerks and workers in her offices, and that will be extended if a bad storm hits before the water’s gone down. Orfeo couldn’t leave either, so we’ve all been holed up together in the inn, quite cozy and comfortable. I catch him looking at me sometimes with a strange, thoughtful expression, but whenever I ask him about it, he gets very flustered and denies that he was doing anything of the sort.
There’s one thing that’s nagging at me, and that’s the flowers. They’re more expensive now than I or Sterre ever imagined they would be. Regardless of the increasingly inclement weather, the coffeehouses are filled with people buying and selling futures—there’s hundreds of these contracts now, thousands. All the people who bought early are offering to sell their bulbs next season, when the plants can be safely uprooted and moved around.
I heard a rumor, a few days ago, of someone selling three bulbs for the price of a house. It’s . . . unbelievable. Sterre says that it’s wonderful news, and that as soon as the ships come in a couple months from now, when the storms are over, we’ll all be rich beyond our wildest dreams. She keeps promising me money. I don’t really care about the money. After the auction, she gave me a small purse of gold, and all I did with it was dump it into the jar in my room where I keep the rest of my coin.
The flower in the pot in my room sprouted at some point. I haven’t been up in the attic as much recently, because I’ve been spending so much time with Orfeo. The soil has to be kept extremely damp, so I bought a wide, shallow pan, four inches deep, and I fill that with water from the rain barrel by the kitchen door so the flower can drink all it likes and I only have to check on it once a week or so. I went up once to refill the pan, and the next time, five days later, there were four leaves and the stalk was already six inches high.
It’s so strange to think that I could buy a third of a house with this one plant. I could go anywhere. I think that’s why I keep taking care of it now. I could buy a cart like Mistress Chant’s—ten carts, even. I could buy one of every instrument and lessons to learn them. I could set up as a merchant like Sterre or Orfeo’s uncle. I could take the money and go somewhere remote and never do anything again—I could be like Zaria the fisherman, with a cottage halfway up a mountain, and I could sit on the edge of a cliff and tell stories to the wind.
And if I did that, I’d never feel anything again.
I’d never have to. Or . . . I’d never get to. I’m still not sure which one of those is true, whether feelings are a burden or a treasure.
* * *
299. Only impossible.
300. Fuck off.
301. What if you’re not reading enough into it?
FORTY
First, a few days ago: Sterre called me into her office on some trivial matter; she wanted to crow to someone about an artist, someone she had been trying to hire to paint a still life featuring the stars-in-the-marsh, who had finally succumbed to her gold and guiles. But that’s not the part I need to record.
“Whatever you’re doing that’s different than when you started with me,” Sterre said to me as we sat on opposite sides of the desk, “you should keep doing it. It’s doing you good. What are you up to? Eating better? Getting more sleep?”
“Both,” I said, but I’ve always blushed easily, and she saw the color come into my cheeks.
“A lover, is it?” she asked, impish.
“Um, sort of,” I said, clearing my throat.
She hummed and shuffled through some papers on her desk, sketches the artist had delivered earlier that day. “I’m glad to hear it,” she said demurely. “As I said, it’s doing you good. I can’t imagine why you wouldn’t confide in me such pleasant news.302 Surely you didn’t think I would object to you falling in with some nice . . .” Sterre eyed me up and down, and guessed, “Mann?” and I nodded. “Right. A nice Heyrlandtsche heerchen, doing you a world of good—of course I’d be happy to hear such a thing. I hope it goes well.”
“He’s not Heyrlandtsche,” I said. “And it’s only temporary.”
She paused, her brow furrowed. She sat forward. “What do you mean, not Heyrlandtsche? He lives here, doesn’t he? That makes him Heyrlandtsche.”
A Choir of Lies Page 25