I looked … different. Like someone I had never seen before. Delighted, fearful. Pretty.
It was a strange feeling. Too strange. I hurriedly took the dress off, flung it over the back of a chair feeling increasingly foolish, and put my old things back on.
I was almost ten minutes late getting back downstairs, and Madame Nahreem was waiting for me. She stared as the butler showed me in and shot a pointed look at the clock.
“I know,” I said. “I’m sorry. I’ve just been—”
“I don’t care,” she said. “Follow me. We will begin immediately.”
She led me through the door behind the desk, and down the carpeted hallway where I had run the night before, but at the foot of the stairs, instead of going through to the kitchen and servants’ quarters, we took the other corridor past polished doors and out into a sunlit courtyard with a stone fountain, where one of the hyenas sprawled like a housecat. I gave it a wary look, and Willinghouse’s grandmother shot me a brittle smile.
On the far side of the courtyard, we entered another wing of the house entirely. The place was huge, far larger than I had realized. This portion was, however, less luxuriant, the floor matted with woven grass, the walls simple wood and plaster. We arrived at what seemed to be a kind of locker room with a sunken alabaster bath, a pair of benches, and an array of shelves and cupboards on the walls.
“You may leave your … clothes here,” said Madame Nahreem. The hesitation, and the critique it implied, suggested she knew about the green dress that had been left for me. I flushed and looked away. “Put these on.”
She nodded to a shirt and trousers made of what felt like heavy raw silk, smooth and pliable and gray. I frowned all the same. Why was everyone suddenly so concerned with what I wore?
“No jewelry,” she said.
I had Berrit’s sun disk around my throat with Papa’s coin.
“And take your boots off,” said Madame Nahreem. “You will perform this first exercise barefoot.”
I did as I was told, tottering as I plucked the first foot free so that she gave me a withering look, as if I was proving to be as incompetent as she had expected. I scowled, and when she did not look away as I prepared to undress, turned my back on her. When I finished dressing and looked at her again, she was giving me a disdainful smile.
“Modesty intact, I see,” she said.
“Is that a problem?” I responded. Her critical stare was getting on my nerves.
“Not if you are trying to spare my blushes,” she said, “though there is no need to do so. If it is a matter of your own embarrassment, however, then yes, it’s a problem.”
“How can my not wanting to parade around naked be a problem?” I scoffed.
“No one asked you to parade,” she said, her voice low and even, in pointed contrast to mine.
“If you had lived only a thin partition from a dozen teenage boys, you’d understand,” I retorted.
“Quite,” she said. “But you no longer live like that and need to put it out of your mind if you are to learn the deportment of a lady.”
“That’s just playacting,” I said. “Just tell me what to do.”
“No,” she said. “This is about being a lady. Being, not playing. You are used to being judged by your appearance as a Lani steeplejack—condemned for it even—and the result is that you don’t care what you look like, since nothing you do will counterbalance the assumptions made about you because of your skin. Believe me, I know.”
I stared at her, taken off guard by this moment of apparent solidarity, but her look of wry understanding slid away like a pit viper, and her face was as it always seemed, implacably hard and laden with scorn.
“So you have given up,” she said. “Your body rebels against civilization because civilization is for white people. The way you slouch, the way you roll your eyes when you are feeling superior, the curl of your lip when you are feeling resentful, the way you hang your head when you feel abashed—all of which you have done in the last thirty seconds—are beyond your conscious mind. They are not things you choose to do, so to stop doing them you must learn to think differently. To be different. So first I want you to be a body without a self,” she said, turning to a cabinet and opening it. On a shelf inside was a wooden box about a foot square. “Look here.”
She took the box down, unsnapped the clasp, and opened it.
Inside, sitting on velvet gray as my training clothes, was a mask.
It was an elegant thing, finely worked from some plain, almost grainless wood, smooth to the touch and remarkably light. It had eye, ear, and nostril holes, but the mouth was closed, and the face—the color of which matched my own skin almost perfectly—was blank. Two black ribbons were attached at the ears.
Disguise, I thought, unexpectedly pleased.
“I am going through this door,” said Madame Nahreem, nodding to a panel on the wall beside her. “When you are ready, you will follow me, and you will be the mask.”
I blinked at her.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“I mean what I said,” she answered. “You will study the mask. You will wear the mask. You will be the mask.”
“I don’t understand,” I said. “How can I be the mask? If it had a jackal or a vulture face or something, I could be the mask, but this is … nothing.”
“It is not nothing,” said Madame Nahreem, irritation flashing in her eyes. “It is neutral. That is what you must be. When you are ready, tie the mask so it sits on top of your head—that is the mask off position—when I give you the command, you lower it over your face—mask on position. From that moment on, everything you do must fit the mask.”
And without another word, she opened the almost invisible door, stepped through it, and closed it behind her.
I stared after her, then sat on the bench and considered the mask, weighing it vaguely in my hands.
Stupid, I thought. And a waste of time. How will this help me in Elitus?
I sighed my exasperation, then—realizing that the old bat could probably hear me through the walls—snatched up the mask, laced the ribbons around the back of my head, and tied it in place. It felt odd. I had expected to smell the wood or the oil it had been treated with, but I smelled nothing. My vision contracted a little, and my jaw felt constrained by the mask’s chin, but it wasn’t too bad. I pushed it up onto my forehead—what Madame Nahreem had called the mask off position—and stepped through the door.
I had expected a climbing apparatus or exercise equipment, but the room was quite empty, save for its matted floor and Madame Nahreem sitting on a solitary chair at the far end. I took a step inside.
“Stop there,” said Madame Nahreem. “Turn to face the door.”
I did so, feeling ridiculous and annoyed.
“Mask on,” the old woman barked.
I pulled the mask down over my nose and waited.
“Breathe,” said Madame Nahreem—as if I might have forgotten to—“and, when you are ready, turn to face me, as the mask.”
I waited for a dutiful second, then began to turn.
“No,” she interrupted. “Stop. Do it again. Be the mask.”
I paused, then did it again.
“No!” she shouted. “Again.”
I returned to my starting position with mounting anger, but I had barely even begun to move when she shouted at me again.
“No! Mask off.”
I snatched it from my face and stared her down.
“Did you study the mask?” she demanded.
“Yes,” I said.
“So why aren’t you being the mask?” she returned.
“What does that even mean?”
“Look at it!”
I forced my eyes onto the wooden face in my hands, its empty eyes and blank expression.
“Is that how you feel?” she demanded, still sitting haughtily twenty feet away.
“What?”
“Look at the expression on the mask,” she said, her voice rising now. “Does
its expression match your feelings?”
“Of course not!”
“Why not?”
“Because I’m angry!” I shouted back at her.
“Exactly. You are supposed to be the mask, but your feelings won’t let you. The mask is neutral. You must be neutral.”
“I am being.”
“No, you are not. You are behind the mask. You must be the mask.”
“This is absurd.”
“No, it is not. You merely cannot do it. The two are not the same.”
The barb struck home like a scorpion’s tail, and I winced, then flung the mask at her, as hard as I could. It arced oddly, half floating, missing her, and bouncing comically against the wall.
I stood stock-still, my anger boiling, and she watched as if she had been waiting for just such a moment.
“It seems,” she said, “that we need to work on your throwing.” When I said nothing, she added, “Your temper will get you killed, Miss Sutonga.”
I stared at her, fists balled, for a long moment, then I took a breath, held it, and blew it slowly out.
“Fine,” I said. “Show me how to be neutral in the stupid mask.”
It was more challenge than request. She said nothing, but got up from her chair, crossed the room in a series of brisk strides, and stooped to the spot where the mask lay. She picked it up, her back to me, and bowed her head, as if in prayer, though I think she was merely looking at the mask in her hands.
She raised it to her face, belting the ribbons around the back, and paused.
The room was utterly silent, redolent of the slight aroma of the dry grass matting, light filtering in through high, shaded windows. I watched her irritably, her back to me, and then she changed.
It happened before she turned, and I could not say exactly how it happened, but it did, and she became something different. Her posture shifted, straightening and softening at the same time, she became somehow balanced, and the anger I had seen only moments before leached out of her even though I could not see her face. When she turned, it was with a fluid grace, and there was no trace of her own personality in the person standing in front of me. She turned her head to one side, then the other, the blank face of the mask showing nothing but its own neutral equilibrium, and then she took two steps, a fractional hop, and moved into three poses from the Kathahry: weancat, river rock, and pine. Each motion was like wind or air or water moving her body from within. I gaped. Madame Nahreem had vanished. She had become the mask.
She moved toward me, close enough to touch, stood for a silent moment, then with the same uncanny ease, lifted the mask from her face. Her eyes, which had been so full of fire before she began the exercise, were empty, unreadable.
“Now you,” she said, offering me the mask.
I could not do it. I knew that. But I at least understood what I was trying to achieve, even if its purpose was still dark to me. So I did it, and when she stopped me, corrected me, I started again. Over and over. She pointed out the tension in my shoulders, the way I twisted my neck before I turned, the stiffness of my arms, and with each adjustment, I tried again. She told me I was too self-conscious, too deliberate, that I was thinking too hard, and at one point she made me step back into the locker room and consider the mask in silence, before trying again.
For two hours, we worked like this. She did not say I had improved. She offered no encouragement or support. But she criticized with less irritation, and that, I supposed, was as much as I could hope for.
“Why are we doing this?” I asked. I didn’t speak caustically or even skeptically, but I wanted to know.
“To be a lady, you must unlearn seventeen years of thinking yourself an underling. That is a difficult thing to do, perhaps an impossible one. So for now I want you to turn off your mind. But this is not merely about being a princess so you can fit into some ridiculous private club. This is also about survival.”
“How so?” I asked.
“My grandson said you were unsure of your combat skills.”
I flushed and looked down.
“And there it is again,” she said, reading my look. “The collapse of poise, of self in the face of powerful feeling. You must learn not to be a victim to your emotions, your little rages and embarrassments, and not only because an aristocratic lady would not suffer such self-doubt. They put your life in peril.”
She saw the doubt in my face and came close.
“Some of what you are going to do will require you to think, to process, to analyze. Some of it won’t. In fact, some of it will demand the opposite, that you do not think or feel or even simply react. It will require you to be in your body. To act without thought, to move in the most efficient and fluid manner possible, and in ways that will not reveal your intentions to your enemies.”
“Enemies?” I cut in, uncertainly.
She ignored me, continuing as if I had not spoken at all.
“It will require balance. It will require the elimination of passion and personality. It will require you to do what your body alone requires, what it needs, what it demands.”
“You want me to have no personality?” I said, not liking the sound of this. “My feelings make me strong.”
“No,” she said. “They make you feel strong because you are caught up in them. But that does not mean you are strong. They do not give you control, or poise, and when you rely on your body for your work, your life, these are essential. You must strive to be neutral.”
“I’m not sure I want to be,” I said.
“What you want is irrelevant,” she answered flatly.
“Are you going to be like this all the time?” I said, tipping my chin up and glaring down my nose at her.
“If it helps to keep you alive,” she replied, “yes. Mask on.”
CHAPTER
11
FOUR DAYS I SPENT with Madame Nahreem, and in that time I saw Willinghouse only twice, both times at dinner, which, for all its opulence, was a harrowing affair that I came to think of as trial by fish knife. Each place serving was set with upward of a dozen knives, forks, and spoons of various shapes and sizes, all bafflingly arranged like the tools of an overly meticulous watch repairman. On the first night, I ignored them all, jabbing with a single fork, slicing what needed to be sliced with the sharpest available knife, and using my hands to scoop up the rest.
“Oh my God,” breathed Dahria, spearing me with her fascinated stare. “I have, and I mean this quite literally, seen baboons with better table manners. It’s like watching a jackal in a dress. If you would prefer, we could just put the food on the floor in a bucket.”
“Shut your face,” I said, raising my balled fist, “before I shut it for you.”
“Oh yes,” said Dahria. “An Istilian princess. The resemblance is uncanny.”
“I mean it, Dahria,” I said, through a mouthful of food. “I’ll take that whole plate and ram it down your reeking neck in a minute.”
“You will do no such thing!” said Madame Nahreem, her eyes alight. “And if you use language like that once more in this house, you will be sent packing back to the city, and I don’t care what Josiah thinks about it.”
“That’s your third helping!” Dahria remarked, eyeing my plate. “You should be the size of the house.”
“The trick is moving around,” I shot back. “Maybe you’d be able to eat more than a handful of crackers if you got off your arse occasionally.”
“Language!” exclaimed Madame Nahreem. “And Dahria is right in at least one thing, Miss Sutonga. You must stop eating as if each meal may be the last food you will ever see.”
Dahria grinned at me secretly, and I stuck my tongue out at her. I hadn’t yet swallowed all that was in my mouth.
Dahria made a disgusted face, and Madame Nahreem roused herself again.
“Are you an eight-year-old boy in a slum?” she demanded. I wasn’t, of course, but most of the people I had eaten with for the past decade or so were, near enough. “You must treat mealtimes as part of
your training.”
“Seriously though, Grandmamma,” said Dahria. “This is impossible. She’s a guttersnipe. The original sow’s ear from which no one could realistically expect to make a silk purse.”
I gave her a halfhearted lunge so that she flinched away and got to her feet.
“I think I’ll finish my dinner in the kitchen,” she said. “With the rather more sophisticated hyenas.”
As she stalked out, banging the door behind her, Willinghouse and his grandmother just sat there. I was stripping a mutton bone with my teeth and slurping up the tender filaments of meat.
“What?” I asked, feeling their eyes on me. “It’s food. I was hungry.”
“You make the mistake,” said Madame Nahreem, “of thinking that a formal dinner is about nourishment. It is not. It is a social activity, not a biological one.”
And so it went on. Everything I did, everything I was, had to be unlearned, rebuilt, while Dahria stayed in her room reading or walking the path around the garden in a gauzy veil to keep the insects off. When I wasn’t actively training or being dressed by Dahria, I studied a book of Istilian Lani phrases on which Madame Nahreem grilled me over dinner, correcting my pronunciation and inflection till I was ready to fling my food at her. Namud, the butlerish young manservant, took me running every morning and stood over me while I lifted weights, before banishing me to a bathroom fed by hot, sulfurous water from an underground spring, where I washed and soaked till my muscles felt supple again. Throughout, he kept a respectful and largely silent distance, so that I became convinced that he found the arrangement even more awkward than I did, and though I had reason to think myself—in many ways—his social inferior, he insisted on treating me as if I was an extension of Madame Nahreem.
Firebrand Page 9
