by Cat Rambo
The air smelled of old apples and perfume from the candles, which he’d stolen from Silvercloth stores, the lavender and carnation smell that his mother Letha preferred. A single window was propped open an inch to let air in. He’d learned the hard way that to leave it all the way open was to invite all sorts of small invaders, with the tiny dragon mites the most difficult of the lot to dislodge and the only pest whose removal required actual magic.
He made his way to the couch and sank into it gratefully. The flickering light washed over the bare floorboards and wavered on the bumpy spines of the books stacked in knee-high columns, the shaggy stacks of manuscripts that he had promised to review two white moons ago and had never gotten to, and another stack of research manuscripts, the writings of other students, the master writing required to gain them entrance as an equal—in theory, at least, he sourly reflected—to the College.
It irked him how those writings got shoved into the shelves in the library, catalogued by nothing but student name. It made his palms itch, thinking of all that might be contained there. Most Mages, their worth proven, turned to other studies and, if told their idea might gain them—or the College—money, they would have stared as though presented with a fish a full white moon dead.
He knew. He’d experienced it often enough. None of them took him seriously; the Merchantly part of him tainted him so in their eyes. It was infuriating, albeit predictable.
He sighed, realizing the thought had made him hunch forward. I used to be so patient with everything, he thought. As patient as Letha, ever his role model when things (usually his father) grew annoying. She was imperturbable.
Well, he could be perturbed. What’s more, he was, by the Moons and all the Trade Gods too. It was absurd how the College was a construction of ancient feuds and practices whose origins were lost, centuries old and long forgotten. He unclenched his hand and wished he hadn’t given Fewk all his apricots. He thought hopefully that the tin on the shelf above his desk might contain crackers, but investigation revealed only crumbs.
If he slept here overnight, he’d wake even hungrier in the morning, but he could eat at the student hall and even please Faustino, who was always asking the full Mages to mingle with the students, in the process. He said it was to inspire them, but Sebastiano rather thought it was to keep them paying their fees.
He ran through possibilities in his head, but short of going down and getting a handful of oats to chew on, there was no way to assuage the hunger in his belly. He wished it was possible to conjure food from the air like a storybook magician, gesture and say a few nonsense syllables to summon up a piece of fruit or a juicy steak. Or, he thought, as his stomach rumbled anew, even a piece of dry bread.
He fumbled behind the sofa and found the blanket knitted for him by Letha when he was still a boy, and she’d been confined to bed with the sister who’d lived only a few days before expiring, the sister she had never spoken of since. The blanket was coral pink and sky blue and grass green, once-bright colors muted to pastels by the years. I’m old, he thought drowsily as he settled the throw over his long legs. Papa was younger than I am now when I was born. The thought startled him awake for a moment to turn it over.
He could hear the constant rustle of the wind outside the window and a stentorian drone from below that he knew was Fewk snoring. An owl hooted in the air and he heard the heavy flap of its wings as it passed the window.
Lulled, he fell asleep.
CHAPTER 6
O bedience was a horrid name, because it really wasn’t something that you could pursue the way most people pursued their names. Instead you were supposed to just do what everyone said. Mamma had said it was a special name, and that she’d picked it very carefully, but Obedience wondered how true that could actually be. With eight daughters, maybe her mother had gone out of her way to find a name intended to minimize trouble.
Everyone else in the family was named something easy, and that was another of the many unfairnesses that ruled Obedience’s life. What was she supposed to be obedient to? Everything? It showed how unjust the world could be.
Things could be worse though. She eyed the cart trundling along past them and the Centaur that pulled it. The ragged shawl around his shoulders, fastened with a wooden button, barely reached to his midriff, showing a line of bare flesh before it flowed into horsehair. His hands, each as large as her head, were wrapped around the cart harness, bearing the weight rather than letting most of it rest on his shoulders. Beasts had to do whatever their owner told them to. Apprenticeship was like that, but your master couldn’t kill you or hurt you too bad, and sooner or later you were done with that and could practice a trade.
She thought about apprenticeship a lot lately. Everyone else had theirs and she didn’t.
It was very hard being the youngest, even though everyone thought it wasn’t, and called her the baby and told her she had it easy. Being the youngest meant there were eight older sisters to boss her around and tell her what to do and why whatever it was that she was doing was wrong and against the teaching of the Temples.
Being the youngest meant that you had to follow whenever an older sister got the idea that she wanted to go somewhere on her free day, but they never would go with you.
Obedience mused on all of this as she followed along behind Grace, kicking lumps of ice out of the way. Her shoes were soaked through and she’d reached the point where she didn’t think her toes could get any colder. Her jacket had grown too little, but Compassion was not ready to hand hers over yet, so a line of cold belted her unpleasantly.
She would have rather stayed inside. There it was warmer, and there would be fresh bread later, but Mamma liked the house to herself and had told Grace to go and do something useful.
“How much further?” she asked plaintively, but Grace ignored her. “I said, how much further?” she insisted.
“Don’t whine,” Grace snapped.
“I’m not whining. I’m cold!”
“You’re whining about being cold.”
Obedience searched for a good retort, but Grace was much better at arguing than she was. All of her sisters were better at everything, only because they were older, and they all liked to rub it in. Maybe that wasn’t true—Mamma said it wasn’t, that they all loved each other, like little birds—but it felt true, and surely what felt true was as close to true as could be.
She trudged along the street, following in Grace’s footsteps, pondering this idea. It was either one of those things that you figured out and everyone thought you were terribly clever for doing so, or else it was completely wrong and everyone would laugh at her if she said anything of the sort.
It was hard to know which it might be without testing it, but Grace was decidedly not the right person to be trying it on. She was unkind about repeating Obedience’s mistakes in a mocking tone, and if she protested, Grace just told her she was teasing her so she’d be stronger and better able to bear up to teasing once she was sent to apprenticeship.
Like a cartwheel, her thoughts had rolled back to that again. That was right around the corner, that prospect. After your first decade, you were sent out to work, and half your pay given to your family, and the other half to the Temples, who provided so many of the staples of life, like the mushroom gruel that was their daily breakfast and often the main ingredient of their dinner meal as well.
“Grace,” she asked, despite herself, “when you were first apprenticed to the Tailor, did you know that was what you wanted to do, or did it become what you wanted to do because you had been apprenticed to it?”
“I did what I needed to do,” Grace said grimly, and Obedience thought to herself that the tone was answer enough.
“Do you know where they’ll send me?”
“Could be anywhere.” Grace’s voice took on a trace of relish. “I hear Ellora’s orchards always need workers.”
Obedience shuddered. The tunnels where the mushrooms called “Ellora’s apples” grew—named after the Mage who had created the f
ungus long ago—would be sheltered from the weather, but they were dark and stinking, and she could not imagine what life down there would be like.
“That’s not an apprenticeship,” she said. “Mamma said you went to an apprenticeship in order to learn skills. Anyone could grow mushrooms.”
Grace didn’t falter. “Think so? But it’s trickier than you think, keeping the right temperatures and dampness. Breeding new flavors.”
Despite claims that the fungus had different flavors, Obedience had never been able to distinguish anything but the main note, which tasted the way she thought dirt would taste.
Her stomach clenched. Surely that wasn’t really where she’d be sent.
She smelled bitter smoke amid the damp.
“Here we are,” Grace said. “Not too picked over yet. We can get firewood, at least. We’ll go in through the alley.”
The building had been two stories once, the first floor sized larger than the second, with wide windows now smashed and open to the sleeting rain. A few fragments of glass remained here and there, but most of the sills had been picked clean.
Grace led Obedience in through a back door that hung crazily on its hinges. Other scavengers stirred here, but no one dangerous: an old man packing up the last of the kitchen equipment, two young women dismantling a stove. The girls drifted through the half-burned building, picking up scraps: Obedience found a swath of tapestry, a good two arms’ length, with the edges burned away, and they bundled it up tightly, filling their bags with chips of wood as well.
In the main ballroom, much of the inlaid flooring had been pried away already, but Obedience discovered a tiger-striped bit, shaped like a diamond, and several triangles of ebony wood, shiny and looking as burned as the wall between this room and the next.
“What happened here?” she asked Grace.
“It was a gallery, caught fire in some riot.”
“A gallery? Like a boat?”
Grace’s brows met as she gave Obedience a scornful stare. “No. It’s a place where people come and look at pictures.”
“Oh.” Obedience considered that. She could understand why people might come and look at pictures. Her mother had two, views of the Northstretch River that one of Eloquence’s crewmates had painted in watercolors, and all the girls liked to look at the lines of pines and mountains and reeds and water and imagine themselves in that landscape, although only one of them, Silence, seemed likely to follow in Eloquence’s footsteps and become a freshwater Pilot herself.
That was a skill that would yield a good living, for sure. Obedience picked at a square of reddish wood as big as a plate, but it was firmly affixed to the floor.
“Do they pay to come look at the pictures?” she asked Grace.
Grace’s answer was slow, as though she were not quite sure of it. “No, they come and buy the pictures to take home afterwards.”
Painting was not a trade that Obedience had ever considered. She wondered what sort of apprenticeships painters served. This was a rich people’s place, and rich people would pay large sums of money for all sorts of things. She wondered uneasily if painting was a skill that the Temples would actually approve of.
The fire had burned both sets of stairs to the second floor away. One hung crazily, broken and charred.
Grace looked around to make sure no one was watching before she turned to Obedience. “If I lift you up,” she said, “you can help pull me up in turn.”
Obedience balked. “It looks dangerous,” she said. “Mamma wouldn’t want us doing anything dangerous. She said that when we were leaving, to stay safe.”
“That’s just Mamma’s way, she always says that,” Grace said. She laced her fingers together into a stirrup and proffered it to Obedience. Her scowl made it clear that there was no alternative. Obedience sighed and began the ascent.
The journey upward was full of splinters and soot, but both girls made it. They wandered through the rooms here, which were lower-ceilinged but just as once richly appointed as the downstairs had been.
Here too, though, looters had stripped away most of the valuable things other than the built-in furniture, and even there the shelves that had once held drawers gaped openly. Bales of paper, blackened on the outside, fell aside at the touch to reveal white internals, blank and ready for words that would never come.
Two separate suites both faced out over Printers Row, and in one, rather than looting, someone had smashed a mass of crockery and a number of terracotta house dolls, every Trade God possible, it seemed. Obedience picked through the fragments, taking out the faces where she could find them, accumulating them into a little heap of smiles and eyes and pointed noses.
“What are you doing?” Grace said irritably. “Those aren’t worth anything.”
Obedience bit her lip and kept down on her knees, sorting through the fragments. She thought to herself that they had value because she wanted them, even if someone else might think they were worthless. Anger smoldered in her like a damp match.
“Do you think they’ll have some power, because they’re Trade Gods?” Grace persisted. “That’s foolish. Only the Moons are real.”
“I know that,” Obedience said. “I’m not a heretic.”
“Then why are you sorting those out? Do you think you can put one back together?”
Obedience shook her head. Grace pulled at her shoulder, a painful yank. If she were big enough, she’d hurt Grace back. Reluctantly, she swept the faces she had found, two handfuls worth, into her pockets and let Grace move her along.
The fire’s touch had manifested in every room, charring walls, blackening fabrics. It smelled overwhelmingly of burned things, which was not a smell that Obedience had considered unpleasant before this day, but now pressed at her nose until she found herself dipping her face into her shoulder, trying to breathe through the fabric of her cloak.
Grace seemed unaffected, rushing to anything she thought might yield some value, and forcing her gleanings on Obedience, whose load grew heavier and heavier as they sorted through the rooms: a brass lantern; half a picture frame, the edges gilded; a small glass jar full of an unknown white paste; a handful of yellowy-gold feathers, so bright that she thought they must be painted at first.
They both froze when they heard the noise from below.
“It is abominable!” a woman’s high-pitched drawl, the sort of voice puppeteers put on for snooty rich people, said from below.
A man’s voice answered her, the rumble making it harder to discern, but ending with something like. “… totaling the inventory.”
“Why bother?” the woman’s voice lamented. “It’s all gone, all destroyed or looted, and because of that arrogant dwarf.” Footsteps: the clack of high heels, then boot treads, following after.
Grace and Obedience exchanged glances. Grace’s eyes were wide as hyacinth cookies, Obedience was pleased to note, and her skin was moon-white. She held a finger to her lips.
Obedience nodded. They continued listening as the woman paced through the rooms, lamenting the state of things.
“I built this place from scratch!” she exclaimed. “There was no market for art before my time, only people commissioning portraits in order to give their descendants some idea of what they look like. Nowadays, they can just get a picture from a penny-wide. She’s ruined me, and I will see her ruined in return, and Diahmo, God of the Balanced Ledger, will bear witness!”
“Bernarda, be reasonable. Her cousin has deep pockets,” said the man. “Bella Kanto can afford to pay all sorts of legal fees on Leonoa Kanto’s behalf.”
“Then I’ll tie up both’s coins till they can’t spend a skiff! Pawning off such treasonous things on me!”
“Why did you not turn the pictures down when you first saw them, if they were so apparent in their seditious nature?” the man asked.
“She showed me different paintings,” Bernarda said after a moment’s hesitation.
“But you did check them?”
“Yes! A series of pictures showing
the Duke’s fleet. All very proper and martial. Now I’ll be lucky if I’m not fined for supporting sedition.”
The man said nothing at that, but there was a dubious quality about his silence.
The woman moved into a new room, which evoked an anguished shriek. “Look at this floor! Six hundred golden galleons it cost, and now it looks like the shambles of a chessboard factory.”
Obedience couldn’t help it; she choked back a laugh at that.
“Ssssh!” Grace hissed, and at that noise, all sound downstairs ceased.
“Is someone there?” the woman called after a few seconds. “Who is it?”
Obedience and Grace stared at each other. Obedience bit her lip in anguish. Should they answer? The other scavengers downstairs must have scattered when the woman and the man entered.
“Come out or we will summon a Peacekeeper and it will go very hard with you indeed,” the man shouted.
Obedience scrambled to her feet.
“Don’t!” her sister hissed, but Obedience had already moved to the shattered head of the staircase. “We’re coming down!” she called. Grace groaned but followed.
The trip down was much faster than the agonizing upward, and she fell the last few feet when a seemingly solid but blackened handhold crumbled to charcoal in her hand.
The man appeared in the door, followed by the woman.
His clothing was as plain and suitable as hers was elaborate and impractical, dress hem drooping with soot and water, shimmering cape splotched. Their faces were just as dissimilar, his as bluff and disinterested as a bank building, hers animated by curiosity and anger.
“Little thieves!” she cried, and darted forward to snatch the bag from Grace’s hand. She upended it and the lantern and other oddments they’d gathered clattered on the uneven planking.
“I’m so sorry, ma’am,” Grace said, her voice strained. “My little sister was curious.”
