House of Shadows

by Rachel Neumeier

  The new girl might well be tearful, thought Leilis. Though probably she feared the wrong things and for the wrong reasons. New girls always feared Mother, feared the senior keiso. But any new girl should instead fear the whispers that spread among the deisa. Those were the girls who would like to see a rival fail and sink into obscurity or mere servitude within the House.

  Curiosity drove Leilis down from the keiso-trodden regions of the House to the laundry to see if the laundry maids needed extra hands, which of course they always did.

  “Have you seen the new girl?” one of the laundry maids asked her. The maid was a tiny bit of a thing, too plain to dream of ever taking a flower name of her own. Her thin little voice was wistful. “More beautiful than the stars over the mountains, they say. Mother paid two thousand hard cash for her and would have paid twice as much. You should go see if she’s truly so beautiful and come tell us, will you, Leilis?”

  The maid, tucked away in the laundry, could not herself run up to see the new deisa. Few of the residents of Cloisonné House moved as freely as Leilis between the public and private regions of the house, between the servants’ areas and the keiso galleries and halls. Not that anyone but a laundry maid was likely to envy Leilis her unusual freedom. It was assuredly a poor enough trade for keiso glamour.

  Leilis made a noncommittal sound and took a set of the very best silk sheets up to Mother’s apartment.

  Narienneh was speaking with the embroiderer, who was showing her an overrobe embroidered with a frothy lacework of white and pale pink. “She’d look like an apple blossom in this,” Mother said, waving a dismissive hand at the froth. “Like an entire orchard. Something innocent is what we shall want, a clean design, something almost plain.”

  The embroiderer nodded, sketching quick patterns in charcoal for Narienneh to examine. Leilis slid past into Mother’s bedchamber and made the bed, then came back out to the front room. She snipped the faded flowers off Mother’s white roses and tidied away the clutter of discarded paper the embroiderer had produced. The embroiderer gathered up a rustling stack of sketches and went away.

  Mother sighed and sat down at the table in front of the window. But she did not gaze out the window at the river. She lowered her head against her hand, pinching the bridge of her nose and looking, now that she was alone, uncharacteristically frail. Mother’s hair, braided up into a crown on the top of her head, was flawlessly white, but her age was not what lent her this unexpected air of fragility. It occurred to Leilis to wonder for the first time how much Narienneh might really have paid for the new girl. Could it have been so much?

  Leilis slipped quietly away. Going again by the laundry, she gathered up another armload of sheets. Thus armored, she went up at last to the deisa gallery, where the new girl would have a narrow bed at the end of the row where all the deisa slept.

  The girl was there, sitting perfectly still in one of the straight-backed chairs by the window, her hands gripped together in her lap. The clutter of deisa belongings was scattered about: plain practice harps with extra strings coiled on shelves nearby, a kinsana, sets of pipes. Scrolls for the poems the deisa were learning were pinned open on a low table by the window, the narrow pallets taking up the rest of that wall. There were half a dozen small chests, one at the foot of each pallet, for each deisa’s personal possessions; the room’s single large closet would hold all their daily robes and slippers, which they did not own themselves. Leilis wondered what, if anything, this new girl owned of her own. And whether she had the sense to guess she should guard her things, if she had any, from the other deisa.

  None of the other deisa were present. Lily’s doing? Or merely that none of them were free at this hour? It was true the deisa had their lessons and their other duties, but it was strange that none of them had slipped away for a look at this newest addition to their number.

  If the girl had wept earlier—either tears like pearls or the more ordinary sort—she was not weeping now. Her eyes came up, tearless, at Leilis’s entry, and she sprang nervously to her feet. Her gaze, after a barely noticeable hesitation, steadied on Leilis’s face.

  Leilis, transfixed by a wide blue gaze as fathomless as the sea, stood motionless and looked back at the new girl across her pile of sheets.

  No wonder Mother had purchased this girl. Leilis suddenly did not doubt that Mother had paid a great deal for her. Not for her beauty, though the girl was beautiful. For that priceless look in those eyes. That immeasurable trusting innocence was nothing you could get for any price in any House of the candlelight district. It was nothing you could expect to find, come to that, anywhere. Leilis tried to imagine what kind of family this girl had grown up in to have a look like that.

  Or else she was simple. That seemed likely, on a more collected assessment.

  The girl said, in a faltering sort of voice, “Please, are you—are you—is there something I ought to be—what should I do?”

  Leilis tilted her head to the side, oddly touched by this appeal. The artless manner seemed perfectly unstudied. Stepping across the room to the closet, Leilis put the linens she held away on a shelf. Then she turned and looked again at the girl, who was silent now, her amazing eyes wide with nerves.

  “How much did she give for you?” Leilis asked abruptly.

  The girl stared at her, deep-sea eyes wide and blank. Simple, after all, Leilis decided. It did seem a pity.

  But the girl said then, “Eighteen hundred. She gifted us eighteen hundred hard cash.” Her voice, though low and sweet, was not as shy as Leilis would have expected.

  “Us?” said Leilis, tilting an eyebrow at the girl.

  The girl blushed. It made her look more untutored and innocent than ever. “Them. My sisters. It was—we thought it was a good price…”

  “It was. Very good.” It was a remarkable price, especially this season, with an uncertain spring approaching and the city tense. Not that anyone doubted who would win if the war between Lirionne and Kalches resumed. Fifteen years ago, the Dragon of Lirionne had forced Kalches to sign the Treaty of Brenedde, ceding to Lirionne all the lands west of Teleddes and east of Anharadde. If war came again, then Lirionne would win again. All those disputed lands would belong to Lirionne forever, and after Kalches had been forced to accept its final defeat, everything would be fine. But still, at the moment, everything was more expensive than usual and every House hard-pressed. And yet Mother had paid so much for one girl?

  But when Leilis studied the House’s newest asset again, she could only shake her head. “You were worth every coin,” she decided. “Mother is wavering a little now, I think, and small surprise there. But she is wrong to doubt her bargain. What is your name?”

  “Karah,” whispered the girl. Her fine slender hands closed slowly into fists at her sides.

  “Don’t worry over Mother,” Leilis advised her, moved despite herself by the girl’s uncertainty. “Don’t fear the keiso. But be careful of the deisa. Especially Lily.” She paused, studying the blank look in those exquisite eyes. “Have you met Lily? Or the other deisa? Do you understand me?”

  “Yes,” the girl said, dutiful as a child saying off a lesson she had learned by rote. “Or no. I have not met them. I will be careful of Lily. Thank you.”

  Maybe she understood and maybe she didn’t, but Leilis could hardly stand behind her and coach her through the day. Besides, whatever happened in the deisa quarters was no concern of hers. Leilis gave a short little nod and turned to go.

  “Wait!” said the girl, coming forward a half step. She was clenching her hands again, Leilis noted disapprovingly. “What is—Who are you?”

  Leilis could feel her face set. “No one,” she said, and was gone on that word, leaving the beautiful girl behind with a hand half raised and a stricken look in her sapphire eyes.

  The deisa were gone from the kitchens, leaving the cook and her girls in peace to prepare for the coming evening. Preparations were now well along. A dozen plucked, headless ducks lay on the cutting table. Three fat red
fish, so fresh they looked all but ready to swim away, lay on trays of crushed ice behind the ducks. Loaves of fresh bread cooled on racks alongside the ovens, and a large pot of broth simmered gently on top of the nearest oven. The cook looked weary but satisfied.

  The cook was using a soft brush to coat the petals of flowers with beaten egg whites, then dusting the flower petals with fine sugar and placing each one on a wire rack to dry. Trays of brightly glazed pastries occupied the rest of the cook’s huge stone table. Her newest girl, a solemn little creature with coarse black hair cropped short around her thin face, had come back from the market and now moved silently around the kitchens, putting butter and cream in the cold box and a sack of river mussels in the big stone sink.

  Leilis leaned a hip on the edge of the cook’s big table and used a fine pair of tongs to lift candied flower petals from the rack, laying a single one just so on each glazed pastry.

  The cook nodded thanks to Leilis and said over her shoulder to her girl, “Start whipping the egg whites for the meringues.” To Leilis, she said, “Do you think a red currant sauce for the ducks, or wild cherry? Did you go up and have a look at her, then?”

  “Cherry,” advised Leilis. “Her name is Karah. She’s a lovely child.”

  “Ah,” observed the cook wisely, “that won’t last.”

  “Lily, you mean.”

  “Who else? And Tiarella, and that little fool Sweetrose.”

  The cook’s girl brought the bowl of egg whites to the table and began to whisk them into a froth, listening covertly to the gossip of her superiors. Most of the residents of Cloisonné House passed through the kitchens several times a day, filching tidbits, so the cook was usually an excellent source of gossip. Leilis concentrated on laying candied flower petals delicately on top of the pastries and made no comment about jealous deisa or the risks this new girl might run among them. She said instead, “The true amount Mother gave for her was eighteen hundred. Hard.”

  “Ah. Mother won’t care to have her interfered with, then,” the cook commented, her eyes on the sugar she was dusting over flower petals. “Not paying as much as that. Especially this season, with expenses so tight. You wouldn’t believe the price of butter and cream in the market these days.” What the cook didn’t add was that Lily was unlikely to be held back by concern over Mother’s temper.

  And, of course, Leilis, of all women, hardly needed to be reminded of the grim possibilities inherent in deisa jealousy. “I warned her to be careful,” Leilis said. Her tone had gone a little defensive, she found, and she shut her eyes for a second and hauled herself back toward the cool neutrality she’d thought she’d learned long since.

  “Ah?” said the cook, meaning, What good do you imagine that will do?

  Leilis had to nod. They both knew it would do nothing. But why Leilis should care… She was deliberately uninvolved in deisa quarrels and petty jealousies. For years she had held aloof from such concerns. Why should this new girl matter to her?

  But, later, when most of the keiso and the deisa had gone out to entertain at Cloisonné’s banquet, Leilis filled a covered tray with plates of duck breast in cherry sauce, pureed parsnips with butter and slivers of sea-urchin roe, and cream-filled pastries. Then she slipped through the near-empty living quarters of the House, up the back stairs, and along to the House’s small dance studio.

  The studio was, unsurprisingly, occupied.

  Rue might have gone to the party, but large parties often took a raucous turn utterly unsuited to Rue’s own gift. Rue was a connoisseur’s keiso. Mother never asked her to attend the loud half-drunken parties that were the greatest pleasure of most of the younger keiso.

  Instead, Rue was standing before the wide studio mirror, back straight and face blank, in an esienne stance, one foot on the polished floor and the other arched with just the toes placed delicately before the other foot. Leilis’s entrance did not elicit even a flicker of attention from the keiso. The woman shifted slowly from the esienne stance through a floating cloud exchange and then to a kind of elongated cat stance, and from that back to esienne.

  Rue repeated the steps again. Leilis sat down against the wall, set the tray on the floor beside her, wrapped her arms around her knees, and waited while Rue went through the sequence yet again. And then again, this time adding three gliding cat steps and a long dipping turn back into esienne. Leilis finally recognized part of the middle sequence of the Departing Swallows dance from the Autumn Lament. Evidently Rue was considering an adaptation for the dance. It looked fine to Leilis, but Rue continued rehearsing and adjusting the steps, her face calm and intent, until she reached some level of perfection perceptible only to herself. Then she stood still a moment longer, in the esienne stance once more, the tips of her fingers brushing the rail.

  And then, at last, the remote intensity in her face slowly gave way to an awareness of the studio, and Leilis, and the tray. A smile broke into her dark eyes and she crossed the floor quickly and dropped down with a dancer’s automatic grace to sit next to Leilis.

  “Thank you.”

  Leilis uncovered the food. “It would be better hot.”

  Rue laughed. Though not beautiful, the woman had a beautiful voice and a warm, quiet laugh. “When do I ever have my supper hot?”

  This was true. Rue spent most of her afternoons and many of her evenings either with the dance master or alone in the House studio, and even the more penetrating bells of the timekeeper seldom broke through her focus. She exclaimed in pleasure now, seeing the duck. “A cherry sauce? Wonderful!”

  Leilis leaned back against the wall and watched the keiso eat.

  Rue’s father, a Samenian, had given her his narrow face and long bones; Rue was thus tall for a dancer, but she was not willowy. Her wrists and ankles were strong and her limbs muscular, so that she lacked the delicacy that made for true beauty. Her hair was Samenian black: not the desirable jet prized in the flower life, but muted with reddish highlights.

  None of that mattered. Rue had left the household of her wealthy father to become keiso because her heart was given to dance. A wife must be a wife, and a mother a mother; a lady must be a lady; only a keiso could make art the center of her life. Rue had become keiso on her nineteenth birthday, had bought out her contract at twenty-three, and now, at thirty-four, was one of the great ornaments of Cloisonné House and of all the flower world. Neither needing nor desiring to tie herself to a man, even the noblest or richest, Rue had no keisonne and would probably never accept one. Further, too secure within herself to concern herself with issues of status and rank, Rue was one of the easiest of all the House keiso for residents of lesser rank to approach.

  “The House has gained a new deisa,” Leilis told her.

  “Yes, even I could not miss the word of it.” Rue ate a slice of duck breast with concentrated pleasure and began to nibble the orange strands of urchin roe off the creamy mound of mashed parsnips.

  “A lovely girl,” remarked Leilis.

  Rue made a perfunctory sound of mild interest without glancing up.

  “Lily also thinks so.”

  Rue paused in the midst of her second slice of duck breast. She looked at Leilis, a searching look. “And so you bring me a tray?”

  “With cherry sauce.”

  A slight smile crooked Rue’s mouth. “I’m surprised you care.”

  Leilis did not know how to defend her own sympathy for the new girl. She said nothing.

  “Does she dance?” Rue asked after a moment.

  “Compared to you?”

  Rue smiled again and went back to her duck. She knew, all possible modesty aside, that there was no likelihood that this new girl would even be able to perceive the distant heights of her art.

  “Mother will want to protect her,” said Leilis. “But she won’t.” She meant, Not from Lily. The faint, bitter edge to her voice surprised her, and she stopped.

  The keiso, understanding, lifted an eyebrow in cynical agreement. “Children blind a mother. Even a Mother. Li
ly might have grown into a less selfish snip if Narienneh had fostered her out just as she’d have done with a boy.” Even Rue would not have said anything that direct to just any servant, but then Leilis was not an ordinary servant. Rue simply went on, “But as she hasn’t and won’t, what do you think I will be able to do for this new deisa of ours?”

  There was, of course, very little even an influential and well-disposed keiso could do for a deisa among deisa. Leilis lifted a shoulder in a tiny shrug.

  Rue finished the duck and thoughtfully broke one of the cakes in two, exposing the thick cream filling. She ate the cake in two neat bites and licked cream off her fingers. “Very beautiful, is she?”

  “She’ll surprise you,” Leilis promised. “Even though I tell you so now.”

  Rue made a skeptical little sound, ate the second pastry, and rose to her feet in one neat motion. “Will you take the tray back to the kitchens, or shall I?”

  “I ought to leave it for you. Then at least you would have to leave the studio for half a moment.”

  The dancer only laughed, not at all offended at this impertinence. She glanced at the rail, at the mirror, but pulled herself away and strolled toward the door instead. She said over her shoulder to Leilis, who had picked up the tray and followed her, “I’m going out to the theater with Lord Nahadde soon. He gifts well, but he wishes an attentive companion, so I had better not be late. I must thank you for bringing the tray, Leilis. I would have noticed later that I had missed supper!”

  Leilis watched Rue walk away, then turned and headed slowly back herself toward the kitchens.

  Cloisonné’s banquet would certainly continue into the small hours, leaving the House itself largely deserted until the keiso came wearily home to seek their beds. In the meantime, a deep quiet settled throughout the House. The young servants had already retired; they would rise early, while the keiso were still sleeping off their night. And the retired keiso who had never acquired property of their own and remained in the House were mostly elderly and abed with the sunset.