Firebrand

by A. J. Hartley

  “I do not—” I began, catching myself at her grin. This was going to take patience.

  “Why don’t you have a seat,” she said. “You loom. Did you know that? It’s not very ladylike.”

  A lot of patience.

  I sat in the wingchair opposite her. She pulled a face.

  “Let’s try it again,” she said, “only this time, let’s try to settle into the chair like a person, not like a sack of root vegetables being dumped into a cellar.”

  I bit my tongue, got awkwardly to my feet, and sat again.

  “Hmmm,” she mused. “Sitting is apparently too advanced. Let’s save that for another day. Let’s practice standing. No, not like a statue. Not like that either,” she said, watching as I adjusted self-consciously. “Are you made of steel? And must you have your feet so far apart? It’s really most unseemly. I’m sure I don’t know where to look. No, not with your weight on one hip! You look like you’re about to light a pipe and offer to carry my case. Good grief, woman, look at yourself! You look like an off-balance crane poised to fall and kill the bystanders.”

  “That has a kind of appeal,” I said.

  “Then let us hope I die at the hands of an Istilian aristocrat, and not a Lani steeplejack. I don’t think I could bear the shame.” She got to her feet, a fluid, easy movement that left her straight but composed, elbows drawn in, hands crossed demurely below her waist.

  “Perhaps if you did things other than sitting and standing around,” I remarked, “you’d be less particular about them.”

  “I suppose we’ll never know,” she replied. “Relax your shoulders and straighten your back. Chest up, stomach flat. Chin level with the floor, head centered over your feet.”

  “This hurts.”

  “Good. We learn nothing in life from what comes easily. Keep still. I’m going to balance a book on your head.”

  “Or you could put a knife through my ribs,” I muttered through clenched teeth.

  “All in good time,” she said. “Now, keep your chin up.”

  She set a heavy book on top of my head and carefully drew her hands away.

  “Better,” she said, smiling. “Doesn’t that feel better?”

  “No.”

  “Well, it looks better, and that’s what counts. Now take a step toward the fireplace.”

  The book fell. Of course the book fell. I considered picking it up and throwing it at her, but I knew that would just give her more opportunities to criticize my posture. Dahria gave me a withering look, and at that moment, we heard the distant creak and thud of the front door. Her expression slipped back into secret pleasure.

  “What?” I asked, immediately suspicious. “Who is here?”

  “Your dressmaker,” said Dahria, looking my old, masculine clothes up and down scornfully. “Didn’t think you were going to Elitus dressed like that, did you?”

  Though I had not actually been a steeplejack for months, I still wore the clothes of one: charcoal gray jacket and trousers, heavy leather belt, heavier boots. I tipped my head back, eyes closed, and exhaled showily.

  “Oh, spare me the theatrics,” Dahria said, going to the door. “Most girls your age would kill to get to dress as you will be doing.”

  “I’m not most girls,” I shot back.

  “On that, Miss Sutonga, you have my complete agreement.”

  It wasn’t a compliment.

  The door opened, but it wasn’t the dressmaker. It was Willinghouse. His sister’s momentary joy was instantly replaced by bored irritation, and she threw herself into a chair, closely mimicking my earlier performance of root-vegetables-going-into-the-cellar.

  “What do you want?” she demanded. “We were just about to have a little fun for once.”

  His eyes flicked to mine and his face managed to acknowledge that my idea of fun and Dahria’s might be different.

  “I sent the dressmaker away,” he said.

  “You did what?” Dahria demanded, her spine stiffening.

  “I’m not comfortable with Miss Sutonga’s comings and goings to this house being observed by every servant and street person in the district,” he said. “I include your gossipy dressmaker. We should reconvene at the estate, away from prying eyes.”

  “The estate?” Dahria exclaimed, disbelieving. “And who there, pray, has the skills to dress an Istilian princess?”

  Willinghouse took a breath and gave her a level look.

  “You must be joking,” said Dahria with a disbelieving stare.

  “It’s safer this way,” said Willinghouse. “We can’t have Miss Sutonga associated with this house.”

  “Joss!” she exclaimed. It took me a moment to realize that she meant him. Josiah. The nickname humanized them both, and for a second he looked ordinary and abashed.

  “It’s the only way, Dahria,” he said, recovering his dignity. “You’ll need to go too, of course,” he added, not looking at her.

  “No!” said Dahria. “You wouldn’t. You will not send me to that place with … her.”

  Again it took me a second to realize that the pronoun was not directed at me.

  “Her?” I inquired.

  Dahria glowered at her brother and there was a long, smoldering silence.

  “Fine,” she said at last, ignoring me. “I will babysit the steeplejack in the wilderness with that woman, but don’t expect me to like it.”

  She swept out, slamming the door behind her.

  “My dear sister,” muttered Willinghouse after her, “I would expect nothing less.”

  “Er…?” I began. “Who is that woman? And … wilderness?”

  CHAPTER

  7

  I WAS, AS I have said, a city girl. Yes, the Drowning, and the other edges of Bar-Selehm blurred the idea of city to breaking point. And yes, the riverbanks were almost always wild places even when they fell within the limits of the town, but I had spent the bulk of my life surrounded by brick and iron, cobbles and concrete. The bush and, more particularly, the creatures that called it home, frightened me.

  As they should have. Mine was no irrational phobia, nor was it the paranoid anxiety of the cossetted and civilized. I knew danger, after all, in all its city forms, from the long fall that haunted all steeplejacks to the footpads and degenerates who might be skulking in any dark alley. They were the monsters I had grown up around and, since they were predictable perils, I had learned strategies for keeping them at arm’s length.

  The beasts of the grasslands and scrub forest, however, were anything but predictable, and I avoided them by staying away from the places they called home. Some of the white city folk romanticized wild animals, but if the Lani had learned anything from the black Mahweni who were native to this land, it was a healthy—and fearful—respect for the elephants, weancats, clavtar, snakes, and one-horns that roamed the land around Bar-Selehm. I had spent my life avoiding what Dahria had referred to as the wilderness. The prospect of venturing into it in order to learn how to better play a civilized lady at an elite club was more than ironic. It was terrifying.

  Just once, I thought, it would be good for my task to be somewhere familiar, somewhere I belong.…

  In my pocket I still had a single sorrel nut, a gift from Mnenga, and I took it out now and felt it, hard and smooth between my fingers. I told myself I carried it as an emergency ration, a tiny mouthful that would give me a little strength if I had no other food, but that was a lie. I kept it because it reminded me of him, a young man who seemed to take his village with him everywhere he went, always at ease, always sure of who he was. Or so it seemed to me. Maybe he was as lost as I was. Maybe his people thought of home less as a place and more as a set of relationships. I didn’t know, and I couldn’t ask him because I didn’t know where he was, and that was my fault too. He had wanted to be closer, and when I did not reciprocate his feelings—decided not to reciprocate his feelings—he had slipped away, and I had let him. Perhaps when I returned to my rooms, I could recover my aborted letter to him, smooth it out, make it right.�
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  Willinghouse, Dahria, and I sat in silence in the family’s horse-drawn carriage as we left the city behind in the softening light of the late afternoon and headed north. My employer cradled a shotgun uncertainly in his lap, his eyes fixed on the landscape outside as it rolled slowly past. Slowly, because the road deteriorated fast. Within minutes of leaving the city, we had joined an uneven turnpike paved with river rock, and a half hour after that, we took a rutted dirt road, which narrowed till the dry shrubs on either side brushed the sides of the carriage. I leaned out and looked back toward the smoggy sky over the receding city, watching its towers and chimneys through the leaves of thickening marula and thorn trees, listening to the way the distant sounds of machinery and steam engines were steadily replaced by the whine and screech of insects and birds in the tall grass. With each quarter mile I felt more uneasy, more lost, and I eventually drew my head back inside and pulled the blind down, preferring the cramped interior to all that uncluttered sky. For a while I listened to the driver murmuring encouragingly to the horses, and then we were slowing, slowing, stopping.

  “What is it?” asked Dahria.

  Willinghouse shook his head and leaned out to look down the track. I had been glad of the carriage’s roof and small windows, but now I felt blind and trapped. The air inside was stuffy and thick. I was reaching for the paper blind on the window when something large outside moved and cast its shadow on the translucent screen. For a moment my hand froze. I could hear Dahria and Willinghouse breathing. My hand moved again, unsteady fingers grasping the cord below the blind, releasing it, so that it furled up in a tight curl and the carriage was suddenly filled with light.

  In the stillness, the snap of the blind sounded like a pistol shot. Suddenly the world outside the carriage was a chaos of leaping tan fur, pronglike antlers and dainty black hooves, perfect eye-shadow and mascara faces. Impala. Perhaps thirty of them, bolting as a herd, wheeling left and right like a flock of starlings, boiling briefly around the carriage and then vanishing into the undergrowth.

  Except one. One looked back at us, at me, still and seemingly thoughtful while the others fled as if it was guarding their retreat, and something in its elegant composure made me feel better, stronger.

  Willinghouse chuckled his relief and sat back, but Dahria continued to look about her, in case we might have disturbed something stalking the herd. For a second, nothing happened, and then the carriage rocked forward and recovered its former rolling pace. I found I was sweating unduly, and was grateful that I had not yet been confined to the layers of fabric, the crinoline and corsetry Dahria wore. Nonetheless, I kept the face of the sentinel impala in my mind and found myself easing out of the tension that had so gripped me since we left the city.

  I had known vaguely that the town house in Bar-Selehm was not Willinghouse’s ancestral home, and he had referred to the estate before, but I had assumed it was some remote ranch in the hinterlands far from the city, or somewhere close to one of the mining settlements where his family had made their fortune. I did not expect to see the stone walls, with their wrought-iron gates into which the Willinghouse crest had been woven, only an hour and a half from the city. The driver got down and unlocked them with a heavy key taken from his waistcoat, and as we began to move again, I gave the siblings opposite me a look.

  “Why don’t you live here?” I asked.

  “Out here?” asked Dahria, aghast. “Your sense of humor needs as much work as your posture.”

  “It seems nice enough,” I said, feeling safer now that we were within the walls of the estate. The carriage had gone just far enough to get through the gates before the driver had climbed down again and locked them behind us.

  “I prefer to be closer to the parliamentary offices,” said Willinghouse, “and to my constituents.”

  Dahria rolled her eyes.

  “And I prefer neighbors who don’t want to eat me,” she added, leaning out and gazing down the long, straight road to where a majestic three-story house built in the white, northern style sat like a castle, waiting for us. “Ah, the ancestral pile,” she observed dully. “I can feel myself getting less civilized the closer we get.”

  I couldn’t understand her response. The house was grand, monumental. It lacked the whimsy of some of the fashionable new construction in the city, but it had a sense of weight and purpose that almost compensated for its being alien to the wildness of the Feldesland terrain around it. In the old north, such a house might have risen above ornate formal gardens with green lawns and stone cherubs in fountains, but here the grounds retained their native irregularity and intense color. What order there was came from the carefully spaced mbeco trees that lined the approach to the front door, but each one had grown in its own tangled way, and their branches had intertwined so that they formed two unbroken walls of trailing blue-white flowers. Riding between them was like being flanked by fragrant waterfalls.

  “Ugh,” said Dahria sourly, as she pulled the veil of her hat down over her face. “The mbecos are flowering.”

  “So?” I asked.

  “Milk flies,” she said. “In an hour, there’ll be clouds of them all over the garden.”

  The evening was already gathering about the house, the sun painting the sky with red and gold as it dipped below the horizon.

  “I think it’s beautiful,” I said. “All of it.” It wasn’t defiance. The words just came out because they were true. My love of the city was momentarily forgotten, and I felt only awe and an envious delight in what my traveling companions had grown up with. Dahria tipped her head to one side and considered me, her brow furrowed as if I had started speaking a foreign language.

  “Funny,” she mused. “What with all your running around and fighting for justice and whatnot, I forget that you’re still basically a child.”

  “I’m the same age as you, near enough,” I said.

  “Only in years, Miss Sutonga,” she replied sagely. “Only in years.”

  I glanced at Willinghouse.

  “Do you know what that means?” I asked him.

  He shook his head wearily, but Dahria had reverted to her usual, blank-eyed stare out of the window, as if she was bored by the world, exasperated by its failure to entertain her.

  We pulled up to the front door, and Willinghouse urged Dahria and me into the cool, carpeted hallway while he saw to the luggage with an athletic young Lani man who made eye contact with no one but him.

  “I’ll send for some tea,” he said, holding the door open to a well-appointed drawing room.

  “Not for me,” said Dahria. “I have a headache coming on. I think I’ll go to bed.”

  “Very well,” said Willinghouse. “Might I have a word first?”

  She scowled at him, as if having to retrace the three steps she had taken into the room was more than any reasonable person could expect of her, sighed, then went after him. The door latched closed behind her, and I was alone in the silence.

  I was reminded forcibly of the night I had been taken—blindfolded—to see Willinbghouse for the first time only a few months ago. That had been the night that changed my life. How long I could expect to put food in my belly and a roof over my head by doing odd jobs in service of the city’s out-of-power political elite I had no idea, nor could I imagine what might come next. After sitting in rooms such as this, perching on the edge of an overstuffed sofa waiting for tea in fine porcelain cups and saucers to be brought by a respectful butler, it would be difficult to rejoin the steeplejacks in the smog and soot of the city’s great chimneys.

  Difficult, I thought, but not impossible. I would not allow myself to believe that I had been utterly changed by my brush with life among the aristocracy. I got up and paced the room, idly picking up the elegant, decorative knickknacks and studying the paintings on the walls, each one of which was worth more than my entire working life and probably that of everyone in my family.

  Except Vestris, of course.

  That was the second time I had thought of my sister to
day. I generally tried not to, which was probably healthy, but her face came forcibly to mind now. Had this been her world? Elegant withdrawing rooms lit by luxorite lamps, brooding family portraits, and fine carpets? Had she spent her days in chambers like these and slept in silk and down besides…? Had Von Strahden been her only lover? Again, I had no idea.

  I mused on this for a while, then checked the clock on the mantel. Willinghouse and Dahria had been gone ten minutes, and in their absence, I had heard no sound at all beyond the ticking. I didn’t know that I had ever experienced such total silence. In the city there was always the rumble of distant machinery, trains, drunken singing, the footsteps of the night watchmen. In the Drowning, the walls of the huts were so thin and full of holes you could hear the river, the animal pens, and the snoring of people two buildings over. Here there was nothing. No sigh of wind in trees, no animal howls, no bustle of labor. Nothing at all. It was like being in a dream, a place outside reality.

  I recommenced my pacing, then checked the clock again. I had now been alone almost twenty minutes. I knew nothing of white person etiquette, but surely this was odd.

  My nervousness was returning. I sat down again. I got up. I checked the clock.

  Something is not right.

  That was the trusted instinct I used to feel up on the chimneys when a ladder gave just a little more than it should. I went to the door, opened it quietly, and peered out into the hall.

  There was a luxorite chandelier in the high ceiling, but it had been covered for the night, and the hall was lit only by what little bleed escaped the hanging, so the carpeted corridor and its silent doors brooded in the gloom.

  “Hello?” I said, softly. “Mr. Willinghouse?”

  Nothing.

  I took a few steps down the hall, pausing to listen at some of the doors as I went, but there was absolutely no sound from within. I moved farther, my boots noiseless on the rich carpet, till I reached the door at the other end.