Stargazy Pie

by Victoria Goddard

  Violet was beautiful; everyone granted her that. Part-Shaian ethnically, she had deep brown crinkled hair and deep brown limpid eyes, and skin that went from ivory to fawn over the course of the year. In the lamplight she was golden, even with the streaks of mud running across her face and the shadows from her hood. I hesitated a moment and then offered her one of my extra handkerchiefs.

  She took it with a twisted mouth and a sardonic imitation of courtesy. “Thank you, Jemis. Always the gentleman.”

  I pressed my lips together. “Mr. Dart, did you—” but was interrupted by her lowering the handkerchief from a split lip and laughing.

  “So much for standing up against social injustice,” she said, and the disdain in her voice was so clear that Mr. Dart stopped admiring her and instead gawped incredulously before realizing what he was doing and closing his mouth.

  I found another handkerchief and dabbed at a scrape across my palm. The dirk was heavy on my lap. It had a plain, useful look to it; no decorative blade, this, but one meant to be used. Violet had been one of the best knife-fighters in our sparring matches. One of the brightest and best in the whole university, in fact. Or indeed, the best and brightest; she’d been class valedictorian, and tipped to graduate First. I swallowed against furious acrimony. “There is a time and a place for courtesy, Violet.”

  “It’s true you were very polite about it when you set about destroying Lark’s life.”

  Mr. Dart said, “I say!”

  “Didn’t he tell you how he challenged one of the notable students in the year on the grounds that she was a sophist? I wouldn’t have thought you so craven as not to admit it, Jemis. I thought you were proud of it. Standing up for the truth, you said. Protecting Morrowlea’s reputation for promoting good scholarship and good thought, you said. Arguing that trite thinking, however beautifully presented, is still trite. Betraying—”

  My voice burst out. “It was more than trite!”

  “She was studying rhetoric! Of course it was supposed to be stylish. You betrayed her.”

  Expressions of horror, nobly-restrained humour, and concern were chasing themselves across Mr. Dart’s face. I swallowed tautly. “She betrayed herself.”

  “She betrayed you, you mean! That’s what this is about, isn’t it?”

  I sprang up, then sat down again when there was nowhere to go but to gesture with the dagger. At Mr. Dart’s wary glance I set it carefully down on the table. “She betrayed all of us, Violet! Why didn’t you stand up against her? Why are you still defending her now? You know as well as I do that her paper was all style and no substance, and not only that, it was cruel, pusillanimous, and petty.”

  “It was rhetorically perfect!”

  “And intellectually bankrupt.”

  Mr. Dart said, “I say!” again, more faintly.

  “You’re just jealous—”

  “Jealous?” I let loose an involuntary crow of laughter. “Why would I have been jealous of Lark? I loved her—I would have done anything for her.”

  Violet laughed bitterly. “Anything. Up to and including cutting her down before the whole school.”

  “Let us remember the whole school supported her.” Something was fluttering in my throat, words I hadn’t been able to say to myself, or to anyone—not even to Hal, certainly not to Mr. Dart. “Even you, Violet. Even you. The only person who stood behind me was Hal.”

  “Because you were destroying her reputation and her life! What do you think happens to someone who fails their final paper and barely scrapes a pass at Morrowlea?”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” I said with heavy irony, thinking of how my own final term had been disastrous long before the viva voce examinations and the intense shaming by the rest of the school and the sight of my tutor solemnly and ceremoniously ripping my own final paper in half.

  She held herself still for a moment, staring at me. “You didn’t use to be so sarcastic, Jemis.”

  I was so disgusted I could barely look at her. I stared at the dirk in my hand instead. She didn’t add anything else, and neither did Mr. Dart. I swallowed again, the tendons in my throat feeling as if they were about to snap from the tension. Finally I spoke.

  “I suppose that was before the woman I loved betrayed my confidence, my trust, and her own honour. Before a woman I respected and admired for her courage and divine love of the truth was too cowardly to stand up for what she knew was right.”

  I paused, but she didn’t say anything. I shuddered, my fingernails digging into the leather hilt. All the exhilaration from the brief run and the briefer fight was draining out of me, leaving me feeling shaky and tired. I glanced over at Violet, whose face was set.

  “Perhaps I was more cheerful before all my friends but one looked away as the rest of the school turned against me. Before the faculty of a university so committed to the inherent equality of man they refuse external markings of wealth and honour let my fellow students stone me.”

  Before my uncle told me I ought to leave my home town, before Dominus Gleason propositioned me with something decidedly unpleasant, before Saya Etaris told me she was waiting for me to commit treason or suicide like my father. Before the Honourable Rag set me firmly into my new place, before Dame Talgarth cut me, before—I bit my lip and refused to say all those things. There were good things, too—Mr. Dart—Mrs. Etaris—my sisters—

  “Before a former friend attacked me in the dark. Perhaps I am the tiniest bit cynical as a result.”

  There was a long and strained silence. I breathed stertorously, trying not to cry with tiredness and shame and fury and sheer disappointment. Mr. Dart fiddled with the oil lantern and tried not to look at me. Violet’s face was pinched and pale, as if something I said had struck home.

  I didn’t know what else to say, but the words pushed out: “I am so disappointed in you, Violet. I really thought you were more than that.”

  It was her turn to swallow tautly. “Not Lark?”

  I took a deep and unpleasantly noisy breath, wanted to hide behind my handkerchief again. Sighed. “Not when I saw what she wrote. The person I loved … wasn’t who I thought she was. As soon as I read what she’d written I knew she was just like it: superficially perfect and utterly hollow. It was as if all the lights came on. All I could see was the fact that not only had she betrayed my confidence in writing what she did, not only had she betrayed my belief in her, but that she always had. She always did, you know—I saw that so clearly.”

  Violet held herself very still, staring at me with an expression I couldn’t quite read. Disapproval, dismay, disgust. I looked down again.

  “All of a sudden I could see that she had spent all the time we were together manipulating me for her own amusement. She didn’t care that I was sick and couldn’t study—you were the one who convinced me to read our books aloud to you, who badgered me into writing my papers, who made me go to class. Lark always wanted me to skip class, to avoid work, to do her work when she wasn’t well. Lark was using me the whole time. But you … I really thought you were better than that.”

  I looked up at her, where she sat smaller than she had, tucked into herself, no longer coiled and ready to spring but deflated. I shook my head vigorously, trying to remind myself that she was a good actress, had played in the school performances. (I had, too, before Lark had said they took too much time away from her …) I was savagely glad she seemed finally touched by my words.

  “Lark betrayed me every moment, every day. She played me for a fool, and I fell for it. I suppose the fact that you were her best friend should have made me suspicious, but I never thought you knew what she was doing … not until that moment at the end, when everyone turned against me and only Hal came down, and I looked at you—and you looked away. You looked away.”

  I hadn’t realized until that moment how much that betrayal had hurt. There had been something about Lark, some fragility or conditionality to her love, that had always made me feel I had to make things up to her, that I had to be careful or else the gloriou
s thing that we had would break—as indeed it had, in the end. Somehow I had always known with Lark that I had always to be hers, while she was only mine for a certain degree of mine. I was hers entire—but she was maddeningly partial.

  At the time that had seemed a delicious prolongation of the joys of courtship, as if I had always to pursue her, to woo her, to shower her with my attention and devotion, while she bestowed her company as reward for that attention, that devotion, that blind adoration.

  But Violet—Violet—Violet had been different.

  Violet had been a very good friend, right up until she chose Lark over the truth.

  “I suppose I ought to admire your loyalty to her,” I added on that thought, trying very hard to keep my voice even.

  Violet looked up, her eyes hooded from the shadow cast by the lantern. Smiled sadly. “Don’t.”

  “Violet—”

  Even I could hear that all I wanted was for her to make some apology. Her name hung in the air between us. She stood, her back straight and proud. For a moment I thought she wasn’t going to say anything else at all, and then she said: “I ran away from an arranged marriage when I was fourteen. Lark’s family took me in. I … Jemis, you were right in the spring. You’re right now. But don’t admire my loyalty. Some things ought to be indefensible.”

  Everyone in town thought my father’s reputation was indefensible, I thought, and swallowed. I was the only person who had truly believed him when he said the disgrace was calumny, and it was hard enough to keep standing up for that, over and over and over again.

  If it had been someone else’s reputation—would I have stood, as Hal had stood, to the challenge? It was only because it was my father that I had been able to stand up against Lark. My father, whose indefensible reputation I had been defending since his first death.

  Would I have been able to say, This is wrong, for a complete stranger? For a story no one else knew or cared to know about? For an abstract ideal of the truth? Would I have looked in the face of my beloved and said, This is wrong, for anyone? Would I have found my voice if it had truly just been a matter of rhetorical sophistry?

  I had thought Violet a better person than me, I realized. I’d thought that she would stand, where I wouldn’t; thought that she would say, For this truth I stand, and will die for it. Thought she would cry foul for the sophistry, not needing to know it was also betrayal. Thought the fine words we university students all said were in her case no rhetoric, but pure belief. But only Hal had stood up.

  I hadn’t blamed Marcan that he hadn’t.

  “Violet,” I said again, and she stayed in the act of lifting her hand to raise her hood against the wind and the rain howling past the door. She was wearing a long grey cloak buttoned tightly at her breast in defiance of fashion.

  Grey cloak. I dropped my glance down. Long skirts.

  Someone who glanced back at my cry and then ran when they saw me.

  The words came unbidden: “You left the pie on the fountain.”

  She turned with her hand on the door, sharp as a whip, her face once again remote and dangerous. I stood up, conscious my hand was very close to the dagger, and also that Violet had almost always beaten me in hand-to-hand combat. “You knew I was here.”

  I wouldn’t have thought it possible to be more disappointed in her, but as I fumbled through thoughts falling into place like crossword puzzle answers, I was. My voice came out a thin whisper, and I nearly did start to cry. “You attacked me on purpose.”

  “I say,” said Mr. Dart again, even more faintly.

  I felt as I had when I read Lark’s essay, that rhetorically perfect piece about my father’s treachery, taking everything I had told her about his return and disgrace and turning it into a savage attack on the few things people still admired him for, the small pieces of respect I could hold onto. People always talked about fury being hot, white-hot, but I found it cold, sliding into my veins and my heart and leaving me numb to all the fine bright passions. When I’d read Lark’s essay all the fire was extinguished, dowsed in one moment with a hiss and a stench and a mess.

  Now my stomach felt cold and slimy as if I had a bellyful of the muck we’d just fought in.

  “I thought you were just not as strong as I believed you,” I said. “But you’re—what? A traitor?—”

  Her expression went fixed, flat as a wooden mask. “Jemis.”

  “What?” I cried, forcing my hand not to reach for the dagger, not to raise this to violence, not to fall to the cold fire. “What do you want with me? Why are you doing this?”

  “I didn’t know it was you.”

  “I don’t believe you!”

  She turned suddenly, crossed the space between us more quickly than I could react, took my hand. “Jemis—”

  Something about her touch made me think with horrifying clarity of Dominus Gleason, and my poor abused system revolted: I sneezed, pulling my hand automatically out of her grasp to cover my face. “Go,” I said, between gasps. “Go.”

  Violet had been one of my closest friends for years; she knew where I kept clean handkerchiefs. Had been the one to help me make extra ones, trading hemming for poetry reading. She had been the one to keep my academics afloat when the hay fever made my attention skitter with every sneeze and Lark had merely laughed and told me not to worry, that soon I would be better and everything would be wonderful. Violet had followed behind Lark, picking up the pieces.

  Violet reached into my clean handkerchief pocket and presented me with one of my spares. I took it automatically, with an automatic mutter of thanks, and blew my nose. She sat down beside me, and waited while I tried to compose myself. She smelled of sandalwood and mint. She didn’t explain anything; she said, quietly, “The Lady bless you,” as if she was completely and utterly certain the Lady would, and then she put her arm around me.

  The touch was so unexpectedly comforting I started to cry, to my horror and Mr. Dart’s. He said, “I say,” yet another time, even more faintly, and I started to laugh. It turned to hiccoughs and I sat there, head bowed until my elbows were on my knees, Violet’s hand resting on my back.

  She spoke into the silence. “I didn’t come here to hurt you, Jemis. I didn’t recognize you in the square through the rain. I didn’t attack because I thought it was you.”

  I could see her out of the corner of my eye without turning or lifting my head. “Dare I ask why you did, then?”

  She fiddled with a bracelet she wore on her left wrist, silver etched with fine geometric patterns that caught the lantern light. Girded herself as if to speak; then sighed. “I am investigating a mystery. I intended to continue my studies, and was travelling beforehand. The pie was a curiosity, nothing more.”

  I didn’t believe her, but could see no good way to say so. “And you came to Ragnor Bella, why?”

  “It has its little renown, you know, for being the dullest town in Rondé. The fish pie was a diversion, in a day otherwise of dispiriting ordinariness.”

  “So you went out for a walk in a rainstorm, at night, and assaulted a perfect stranger minding his own business …”

  “I thought you said—something untoward. It wasn’t the best of ideas.”

  I sat up and frowned at her. That didn’t sound like the Violet I knew, who wasn’t impulsive and stupid. She looked at me and smiled sadly. “I suppose my thoughts on Ragnor Bella were coloured by Lark’s essay, even if it was … petty and—and pusillanimous. The phrases stuck in my mind.”

  They’d stuck in mine, too, especially in the black days of the early summer.

  The hinterland of Fiellan, home to a people so dull their greatest pretension to interest lies in the traitor of Loe … Jakory Greenwing, whose alleged valiancy in earlier campaigns was surely as much a trumpery courage as his treason was falsely brilliant. … Deserving of all calumny and curses … his treason was doubtless a major contributing factor to the Fall of Astandalas itself …

  “What was it about?” Mr. Dart asked, when she trailed off and I stared
at the ground. “It was … about Ragnor Bella?”

  His incredulous tone said well enough that Lark was right enough that no one ever expected anything to be of interest in Ragnor Bella.

  Violet glanced sidelong at me, but not with the expression that would have indicated she knew who I was. I braced myself for her account, which was mercifully brief. “It was the story of Jakory Greenwing, the hero of Orkaty and the traitor of Loe. He was from here, I understand.”

  Mr. Dart closed his eyes. “She wrote an essay about him?”

  “She was a rhetorician … she wrote a philippic, in the form of the goddess of Fame protesting History’s attempt to introduce Jakory Greenwing into her halls.” She paused a moment, and we listened to the wind howling around the priest-cote, a late moth buzzing around the lantern. I tried to shoo it away, but it kept buzzing back to butt its head against the glass chimney. Of course it did, I thought. “It was a magnificent piece of rhetoric, Jemis. But you’re right: it was sophistry pure and simple.”

  “And slander,” Mr. Dart said. Violet and I both looked up at him. The light caught her flawless profile, her eyes lined with kohl so she looked like something out of a First-Calligraphic period wall painting, with the streaks of mud glowing in the light like gold leaf. He glanced at me, then firmly at her.

  “I studied late Astandalan history under Domina Black of Stoneybridge, and made a special focus of the Alinorel armies of the reigns of Eritanyr and Artorin. Moreover, I am a man of the barony of Ragnor in the duchy of Fiellan, and my father and my older brother both were good friends with the Greenwings, including Major Jakory Greenwing and his wife Lady Olive. I will gladly take you to my brother, I will show you the books I brought with me from Stoneybridge, and I will tell you this, Miss Violet, that all the supposed disgrace brought to Jakory Greenwing was due to mistaken identity and the fact that he was on a scouting mission when the fortress of Loe was lost to the Stone Speakers by the action of a different and unrelated Jakory Greenwing. He was decorated by both the Emperor and by the Lady of Alinor for his extraordinary courage and valour.”