Clariel

by Nix,Garth

  “You would, of course, be an officer, and not live in barracks,” said Ader. “The Goldsmiths maintain a large company, and there would be a place for you. But if that was your intention, then I would send you there at once, for soldiering is a trade best learned young. So tell me, is there some path that you do wish to follow?”

  “Yes,” said Clariel reluctantly. She hesitated, sure that she was about to invite the scorn of this elegant, poised woman, then said, “I want to join the Borderers, and live in the Great Forest.”

  One painted eyebrow rose a fraction of an inch, but there was no other obvious reaction and no immediate outpouring of derision.

  “Curious,” said Ader, at last. “Perhaps I begin to understand more of your desire to be solitary.”

  “In the right place,” said Clariel. “The forest.”

  “Your parents, I presume, do not support you in this ambition?”

  “No.”

  “I am not overly familiar with the organization of the Borderers,” said Ader. “Their chief house is near Hafmet, is it not?”

  “Yes,” said Clariel, surprised that Ader knew even that. The Forest fort called Greenstilts was only a few leagues from the town of Hafmet, and it was there that the Borderers’ chief officers dwelled, the stores and records were kept, a hospital maintained, and most importantly as far as Clariel was concerned, recruits were trained.

  “But they do not take in anyone who has not already been a forester, wood-warden, or suchlike for some years,” said Ader. “Five years, if I remember aright.”

  “You do, Mistress,” said Clariel eagerly. “But I have worked as such, off and on, since I was thirteen. If I can only plead my case at Greenstilts, and show my skills, I think there might be a chance they will take me.”

  Ader looked at her for a moment, then slowly shook her head.

  “No. This is not achievable. Not now.”

  “Why not?” asked Clariel. “I am as good . . . almost as good a hunter and tracker as Sergeant Penreth, I have learned a great deal of herblore from my aunt Lemmin, I—”

  “Stop,” said Ader, without raising her voice or changing her tone. “It is not simply a matter of your skills. While it is very unlikely the Borderers would enlist someone so young in normal times, they simply could not enlist you now, no matter if you were half-beast yourself and the finest hunter ever seen.”

  Clariel opened her mouth to ask why not, but Ader held up one forceful finger and continued to speak.

  “They could not, because like all the royal institutions, they have no money, and their future is in doubt. In fact, if the King does not reassume his authority, or if the Guilds do not take over the Borderers as they have done the Royal Guard and the Wall Garrison, then the Borderers must eventually be disbanded, when they run out of whatever funds they still possess.”

  “But that would be madness!” said Clariel. “The Great Forest alone needs constant attention, lest it run totally wild, and there is the West Wood, Great Sickle Wood . . .”

  “Madness is unfortunately not incompatible with government,” said Ader. “So. You cannot join the Borderers, not now, perhaps not ever. What else might you do?”

  Clariel was unable to answer. She stood there, cold inside, part of her grappling with the idea that the Borderers might not be there to join, that her dream was even more foolish than she’d thought, while another part of her wanted to erupt in fury, to show this overcalm old woman that she would be a Borderer, that she would make the King pay them again, though she didn’t know how she would do that . . .

  “What else might you do?” repeated Ader.

  “I can still be a hunter,” said Clariel. “Live in, and off the Forest. Make what coin I need on top of that by guiding those from the town or the city who wish to hunt, but do not know the woods.”

  “You will need capital to establish such a business,” said Ader. “It would be slow to start, particularly at your age, but it is not an impossible notion. If you can talk your parents into supplying say . . . at least fifty bezants a year, for your first five years, I would adjudge it an achievable ambition.”

  “Really?” asked Clariel. “I thought you would . . .”

  Her voice trailed off. She did not want to say that she thought that the Academy was the kind of place that would make its pupils only want one kind of life.

  “You thought that we limit the choices of our students?” asked Ader. “We do not, but it is a sad fact that the great majority limit themselves. You might find it best to keep your ambition secret, Lady Clariel. Many here would consider it too small, a thing to be made fun of. However, all I am concerned with is that we equip you both for the possibility of other futures, and for the one you yourself envisage.”

  She lifted the lid of her writing desk and removed a piece of thick paper, which had a list of twelve things printed in a large legible type in bright blue ink down the middle, leaving a very generous margin to the top, bottom, and either side. Closing the desk again, she put the paper down, carefully inked a quill, and drew two nearly perfect lines through two of the items on the list. Then she renumbered the list from one to ten with large numerals in the margin, not in the order they were originally written.

  “This is our standard curriculum for those young people who will be venturing into their own business or enterprise,” said Ader. “I think two subjects would be superfluous in your case. You will attend the other ten lessons, starting with number eight, as that is about to begin, and work your way through each day, attending lesson nine on Belday, ten when we resume next week on Bethday, and so forth, to be repeated as you go on. Each room in the Academy has a name, you will find the location of each lesson in this list, and the name of each instructor. Your immediate class is in the Three Window Room, take the southwest stair there down two floors, walk twenty paces along the hallway and the door will be on your left, with a nameplate. After your lesson today, I suggest you to walk around and learn the names and locations of all the rooms, there are only nineteen.”

  Clariel took the paper, running her eyes quickly down the list of lessons. The two that had been crossed out were “Keeping a Count of Monies, the Twice-Written Method” and “The Calculation of Cost of Making Stuff and the Setting of Prices Thereof,” both familiar to her from her work with her father. The remaining ten were:

  On the Writing of Letters, Reports, Epistles, Writs, Bills, and Such

  The Proper Obtainment, Direction, and Discontinuance or Severance of Servants, Apprentices, and Partners-in-Business

  Music and Dancing, Courtly and Otherwise

  The Role of Each Person in Households, Great to Small

  The High, Middle, and Low Guilds and Great Companies of Belisaere

  The Direction of Feasts, Celebrations, Festivals, and Fairs

  Geographical Understanding and the Flow of Trade

  The Serving of Tea

  Matters of Law, Royal, City, and Guild

  The Exercise of the Body, Martial and Merely Aesthetic

  “The Serving of Tea?” asked Clariel. She knew what tea was, a new herbal drink that had been introduced to the Kingdom from somewhere far off five or six years before, though she had never drunk it herself. There was even a teahouse in Estwael that had been open a year with little sign of it becoming a permanent fixture. “How can that be helpful to anyone?”

  “Go and find out,” said Mistress Ader. “I shall see you again in due course, to discuss your progress. You may go.”

  Clariel hesitated, then bowed and turned around, heading for the southwest staircase. She had just taken her first step down when Ader called after her.

  “Lady Clariel. One more thing.”

  Clariel looked back from the top of the stairs.

  “I understand you are to study Charter Magic. It is a good thing for one of your heritage to study Charter Magic, as ignorance of it may prove fatal. Please pass on a message from me to Magister Kargrin when you see him this afternoon. Tell him I said, ‘None have yet passed
through, but I shall keep watch.’ ”

  “None have yet passed through, but I shall keep watch,” repeated Clariel. “What does that mean?”

  “It is a private message,” said Ader. This time, perhaps because of the angle, even at the greater distance, Clariel saw that there was a Charter mark on Ader’s forehead, showing through the whiteness. Or was there? When she blinked and looked again, she couldn’t see it.

  As she stood there, staring, Mistress Ader raised one eyebrow, and this was enough to send Clariel quickly down the stairs. It was odd, she thought, that she should feel more nervous about going against that raised eyebrow than she had when facing down a boar armed with nothing but a boar-spear, trusting to its cross-guard to stop the boar running up the shaft and slicing her to death with its tusks, teeth, and sharp trotters.

  She didn’t feel particularly nervous about the class she was going to, because she didn’t care about the people, or about the subject. “The Serving of Tea” sounded like an awful waste of time, but Clariel supposed she could endure it.

  Particularly as she now had a plan with a definite object. Fifty bezants a year. It wasn’t a great sum compared to the amounts her parents earned in the business. And there might be a simple way to get it. Clariel had always presumed that her mother was the stumbling block for her desire to become a Borderer, but perhaps it was really her father. Now she thought she had been wasting her time trying to get Harven to agree to her going to live in the Great Forest, when she should have been talking to Jaciel. Not that she ever really did talk to Jaciel, Clariel had to confess to herself. But surely this same question had arisen for her, and led to the falling-out with her father the Abhorsen. So she should be sympathetic.

  The big question was when to talk to Jaciel, or more importantly, how to get her to pay attention. Timing was everything, and it would depend upon what she was working on at the moment. If the necklace of golden tears was close to being finished, then there would be an opportunity soon, as Jaciel typically did not start a new major work for a few days after finishing the previous one. Not that she stopped work, she just didn’t pursue it with the same level of intensity.

  Clariel was thinking about this, and going through various lines in her head, wondering which would work best to broach the subject, when she reached the door that had a bronze plaque set squarely in the middle with the words engraved upon it in an ornate script “Three Windows Room.” The door was ajar, and she could hear the murmur of conversation on the other side. Clariel pushed it open and walked in.

  Five heads turned toward her, and the conversation stopped. Four of the heads belonged to people roughly her own age, somewhere in the vicinity of sixteen to twenty years old. There were two young men and two young women. The women wore the layered tunics of differing length in their Guild colors, and had their scarves tied around their necks rather than on their heads. The men had sleeves cut to show the inner lining of different colors and were bareheaded. None of them wore swords or daggers, or carried any obvious weapons at all.

  The fifth person was much older, perhaps fifty, and reminded Clariel of a crane, for he was very tall and thin, his nose was long, and he had tufts of grey hair that departed his head at angles that made them reminiscent of wind-ruffled feathers. Wearing a long coat of banded white and cream, clearly the colors of the Academy, he immediately stepped forward and gave a middle bow to Clariel and said, “Welcome. You are the last to join us. I am Master Dyrell, and this class is ‘The Serving of Tea.’ Before we begin, we shall practice polite introductions. You have entered the room, therefore it is to you that we look to begin.”

  “My name is Clariel,” replied Clariel, speaking to the room at large, without really looking at anyone other than Dyrell. “Daughter of Jaciel High Goldsmith and her consort Harven.”

  “No, no, Lady Clariel,” said Dyrell. “One at a time, one a time, beginning with the person of the highest order in the room.”

  “Who would that be, then?” asked Clariel. “And how am I supposed to know?”

  “It will be a trifle difficult before you have met many people,” admitted Dyrell. “But you can begin by looking at the indication of guild, which will narrow the possibilities. Here, you see, there is but one High Goldsmith other than yourself, so naturally that person will be of the highest—”

  Clariel interrupted him with a kind of snort that would not have been out of place coming from a disturbed boar, as she properly looked at the person in the white and yellow of the Goldsmiths. A young, handsome man with fair hair and strikingly blue eyes. Familiar eyes, that had winked at her the day before, just before the young man had made his escape after the mummery of his supposed attack upon her.

  “You!” she said, following the snort.

  “I don’t believe we’ve met,” said the man, with a smile that was nearly a smirk and very annoyingly, the shadow of a wink. “I am Aronzo, son of Kilp, Guildmaster of the High Goldsmiths and Governor of Belisaere, and his consort Marget.”

  “You see, that is how it is done,” said Dyrell, with a curious glance at Clariel and then back at Aronzo. “Then we have . . .”

  “Actually I believe I should have precedence, even over High Goldsmiths,” said a slighter, shorter young man with badly cut dark hair that made his fringe slant from left to right, above regular but not particularly handsome features, and skin rather too white to look healthy. He wore simpler clothes than Aronzo, dark blue on top with dull silver stripes showing through the cuts in his sleeves, with no other indicator, save a small silver badge of a single key high on his left arm, so unobtrusive Clariel almost missed it. “Being the Abhorsen’s great-nephew—”

  “Rat-catcher!” said Aronzo, making it sound enough like a sneeze for Dyrell to be able to ignore him, though like everyone else present he must have heard it.

  “—and a cousin of the King,” continued the pale young man, ignoring the interruption.

  “Yes, yes, we have been over this,” said Dyrell testily. “This is not the old times, and in the modern age, certainly for the last very many years, it has been the custom in the city for Guild rank to take precedence, save in some of the old ceremonies—”

  “It’s all right, Dyrell,” said the black-haired man. “I’m just showing my cousin how things are.”

  He made a bow to Clariel and she saw a glint of mischief in his eye. Aronzo pointedly yawned and made a faint show of covering it up by turning his head a fraction, as the pale young man continued.

  “Greetings, milady. I am Belatiel, and as we are kinfolk, please call me Bel,” he said. “Unfortunately, since I cannot claim a Guildmember for a parent, I am something of a nuisance here. They never quite know what to do with me. I welcome a relative and—”

  “Now, Lord Belatiel, please, there are introductions remaining to be done, and there is a correct order to matters, tea to be poured, and so forth, before we can make conversation. Lady Clariel, the ladies present are of the Spicers Guild, red and yellow alternated in double bands; and the Vintners, purple, green, and silver. In the order of precedence as I have given them. Please introduce yourself.”

  “But they’ve already heard who I am,” said Clariel.

  “Please, Lady Clariel,” said Dyrell. “Once learned correctly here, you will never be embarrassed anywhere in the city.”

  “I don’t get embarrassed,” said Clariel frankly. “I think it’s because I don’t really care—”

  “Please!” beseeched Dyrell, with a flutter of his hand. “I do not wish to send you back to Mistress Ader.”

  “Oh,” said Clariel. She didn’t want to be sent back to that formidable woman either, though the whole thing seemed ridiculous. She turned to face the young woman from the Spicers, who was tall, blond, and even featured but not particularly attractive. Her nose was out of proportion to her face, and she made herself more unattractive as far as Clariel was concerned by looking down that long nose in a supercilious fashion.

  “Greetings. I am Clariel,” said Clariel q
uickly. “Daughter of Jaciel High Goldsmith and her consort Harven.”

  “Well met, Lady Clariel,” said the Spicer, though her face gave no indication that it was indeed a happy meeting. “I am Yaneem, daughter of Guildmaster Querem of the High Guild of Spicers and her consort, Wihem, also a Spicer.”

  Clariel immediately turned to the next young woman and rattled off the same greeting again, ignoring Dyrell’s wince as she sped through it. The Vintner looked a bit friendlier, Clariel thought. She was also tall and dark-haired, and perhaps could even be described as beautiful, or would be in a few years, as she had not yet grown into herself. She actually looked at Clariel as she replied, and there was warmth in her eyes, which were somewhere between blue and green.

  “Well met, Lady Clariel. I am Denima, daughter of Haralf of the High Guild of Vintners and his consort Jonal, Undermistress of the Guild of Upholders.”

  “Now, please my lords and ladies, be seated around the tea table,” intoned Dyrell, indicating a fairly low, hexagonal table of pale timber with a tiled top, set with an unlit spirit burner, a small tin of friction lights, a highly polished metal kettle, an enameled box that was open revealing tea leaves, a white ceramic teapot, and six very pale yellow ceramic cups on even paler saucers. The table had six curiously foreshortened chairs around it, as if like the table, it was made for people a foot smaller than usual. “Highest precedence to the north chair, there, then clockwise around.”

  Aronzo immediately sat in the north chair, and patted the seat next to him.

  “Here, Lady Clariel, before Bel tries to sit down.”

  Clariel didn’t move. She didn’t like the way Aronzo was patting the seat, like he was calling a dog to come and sit by him.

  “I will sit last, as Dyrell insists is the current mode,” said Bel. “Yaneem and Denima, I am sure you will be happy to sit before I do.”

  “Conversation after the tea service,” pleaded Dyrell. “You know that! Silence and decorum, please. A slight nod, a gesture, no more!”