Bitter Moon Saga
Page 108
But now, getting ready to face an enemy who dealt with subtlety and intrigue, Yarri wondered how Trieste could trust her to manage either. Trieste’s mind must have been wandering in the same areas, because as she wielded the unpardonably tacky, gold-plated knocker, she cast a look at Yarri that was at odds with her soothing words the moment before. Yarri met her friend’s anxious look with one of her own, and Trieste managed a weak smile.
“Don’t worry about it,” she said gamely. “That mouse in my luggage was very subtle, remember?”
Yarri grinned. “That was what? Eight years ago?”
“Seven,” Trieste supplied, listening for approaching footsteps.
“I must have learned something in seven years, right?” Yarri asked hopefully, and Trieste gave her a warm, almost maternal grin back.
“Triane’s soft-footed slippers, girl, let us hope so!” Then the doors swung open, and they were welcomed into the lion’s den.
Aleta Moss must have possessed the worst taste in history, Yarri concluded as they followed a footman down the hallway. The walls were burgundy and black, and might have been fitting in a brothel, but in a visiting space they were just oppressive.
“Black carpet?” Yarri asked dubiously, and while Trieste kept a very schooled expression on her face, her reply of “Maybe it hides the bloodstains” was enough to make Yarri nearly lose her composure just as they were brought into the poisonous-blue sitting room.
Aleta stood up to greet them, with Essa at her elbow. Both women had their short, dark curls elaborately coifed and had something sprayed in their hair that looked like—Yarri said later—a combination of flour, water, and the glue the children used in their craft projects at the orphanage. They were both wearing dramatic puce and green, and Yarri, who had lived most of her life with her fist clamped around a crayon or a paintbrush, fought the nauseous stirrings brought about by the color around her.
Instead of throwing up on the black carpet, she pasted a smile on her face, followed Trieste’s deep curtsey with a more perfunctory one of her own, and managed a “pleastameetya” that almost sounded like real words.
A footman took their wraps and reached for their bags, but both of them waved him off with a smile, so they were gestured to a rather stiff-looking divan with no back to speak of. They met and rolled eyes and sat, getting a look around the room. Trieste smiled at Kerree and Lyssee, whom they recognized as two of Marv’s sisters in the spread of ten or so women who had arrived beforehand. Then Essa grandly restarted the conversation about how tiresome winter would have been if they’d had to stay in their holdings in the foothills.
Trieste nodded in response, and when it looked as though none of the other women were venturing to comment, she said, “Otham gets cold, but not too snowy—and really, there’s only room for one royal residence, so we pretty much stay there.”
“Ellyot says it’s very grand, though,” Yarri supplied helpfully, reaching into her bag for her current project and handing Trieste hers.
“Well, he’s only been once, and the circumstances were not wonderful,” Trieste said regretfully, tugging at her yarn end so she could make her first stitch. “I’d like to show you all the mass of it one day—Alec and I have had a wonderful time furnishing all the unused….”
She trailed off and looked at Yarri, and the two of them looked up to see that the crowd of women mesmerized by the work in their hands, and not in a good way.
“I beg your pardon,” Trieste said tentatively, shrugging at Yarri. “We didn’t mean to bore you all.”
“What are you doing?” Essa demanded with an incredulous gesture at the little sets of needles and bright yarn.
“Knitting?” Yarri answered uncertainly.
“What?” The young woman had a narrow, pointed face and a squashed, upturned nose, and although normally very attractive, her outraged squint did nothing for her appearance.
“Oh!” Yarri actually felt relieved—she could answer this question. “Socks! I’m knitting socks!” It was the same turquoise-and-orange pair she’d been working the night before, and she held the half-completed stocking up to demonstrate. “It’s one of Aunt Bethen’s best colors,” she said a little sadly, and Trieste patted her knee.
“Why?” Essa asked, and although she caught the jagged edge of sarcasm, Yarri was starting to wonder if, in addition to being mean, the woman wasn’t simple too.
“I don’t know—she’s always liked contrast,” Yarri responded, “and she really loves bright colors.”
“Why. Are. You. Knitting?” Essa spelled out, as though Yarri were simple.
Yarri was far from simple. “Because everyone needs socks?” she ventured guilelessly.
“Then buy socks! Your dressmaker must sell them.” Essa was looking wildly around for some support—Trieste, at least recognized the superior look she shot over their heads to the other women—but there was a ripple of kind laughter, and Trieste thought with wonder they might actually have allies before they even fought the first skirmish.
Yarri spoke slowly, as though to a traumatized child. “Why would I buy them when I have over thirty balls of yarn with which to make them?”
Essa spoke the same way, only with a tone of voice that would make that child whimper and cry. “Why would you make them when you are supposed to be having a conversation?”
“Oh—I understand now!” Yarri nodded her head, and Trieste caught the glint in her eye—she was being disingenuous now and getting angrier by the moment. “You think I’m not smart enough to do two things at once. Don’t worry, Lady Moss, if I can knit and teach children their letters at the same time, I can certainly knit while gossiping with you nice people.”
Essa gaped like a puzzled frog, and Kerree, perhaps sensing a screech coming that would possibly peel the hideous wallpaper off the walls, jumped in. “You teach children? You’re awfully young!”
Yarri gave a pleasant smile and a self-deprecating shrug. “Better heads than mine tend to the real teaching—I run the orphanage. When they get old enough, we walk them to the village school, but until then Aln, Evya, and I teach them their letters and read to them.”
“You run the orphanage!” Essa was destined to be outraged this day, but she spoke at the same time Lyssee asked, “How do you have enough orphans for an orphanage?”
Yarri chose to ignore Essa and answer Marv’s dreamy-eyed sister. “Well, mostly we get yours,” she began thoughtfully—an answer that suddenly had the complete attention of every woman in the room.
“What do you mean, you get our orphans?” a small, plain woman in a pin-neat, gray dress asked sharply.
“Well, the girls who have babies out of handfast…. I’m sorry—you call it wedlock. Their babies would get labeled and thrown in the ghettoes, and their mothers would be stoned to death or imprisoned, so they cross the Old Man Hills in the middle of winter to get their babies to Eiran.”
“How often does that happen?” Aleta said dismissively, trying to recapture the conversation.
“That’s half the orphanage,” Yarri shot back. “The other half are from women trying to get away from their husbands.” She thought of Junie, the young woman Torrant had sent back with Aylan a few years before. Junie had died exhausted from the journey to birth a healthy, happy little girl—who would never be beaten as Junie had. “Your priests tell the men that women are things. You can kick a thing in the stomach if it serves your dinner cold. The women who want better for their children come to Eiran. Sometimes they’re sick or hurt, and sometimes they just leave the babies at the doorway.”
Yarri looked around and realized the women were hanging on her every word, so she shrugged and kept going. “We used to just foster them, you know? But that’s two countries’ worth of foundlings in one small city-state. That’s when we started the orphanage.” She switched needles then, in the stunned silence, and looked at Trieste, who was nodding, her own needles clicking.
“Otham gets them too—right now, our foundlings get brought to the cas
tle, and we try to place them, but we’re going to fill up like Eiran.”
“Oh my!” Aleta snorted. “Whatever will happen when the little island of Otham is overrun with foundlings! Whatever shall we do?” She cackled then, an ugly sound, and Yarri answered her squarely, meeting Aleta’s poisonous green with her solid brown eyes and open anger.
“They’ll grow up and come back to the country that spawned them and left them, looking for revenge,” she said thinly, wielding her cable needle without thought. “Crimes against innocent people don’t just get ditched in a doorway or left to bleed to death in a washroom without some comeuppance, you know.”
Aleta started to sputter, but Essa, with a wide-eyed glance at her mother, was suddenly all diplomat. “Well, we’re only women,” she said lightly. “What can we do?”
“Willa Hearth was a woman, and she ran the country,” Yarri replied mildly. “My Aunt Bethen takes… took her knitting to town council meetings and spoke when she needed to. Trieste here sits in with Alec’s cabinet….”
“With my knitting,” Trieste chimed in mildly.
“With her knitting,” Yarri amended with a smile, “and makes decisions every day.”
“Not the three rest days!” Trieste exclaimed, and although she and Yarri weren’t meeting eyes, Yarri knew that like hers, Trieste’s were twinkling.
“Your Aunt Bethen was on the town council?” one of the women from the back of the room asked curiously.
“Oh yes!” Yarri adjusted her seat so she could see more people and was not just facing her two dethroned hostesses. “You should have seen her—she was one of the driving forces behind the orphanage. The mayor kept trying to shut her down, but she’s… she’s been a force to be reckoned with.”
The woman who asked the question—obviously a friend of Jessee’s, a tiny woman with blonde hair and a pleasant little face—nodded and asked another question before anyone else could. “How did you come to run it, if I may ask? You are terribly young.”
Yarri laughed and flushed, but Trieste answered for her. “It may have had something to do with the fact that they couldn’t keep her away from it. She kept sneaking away from her schooling to teach the little ones how to draw and how to knit. The family finally just gave up and gave her the job.”
“How do you know the family so well?” another one of Marv’s sister’s asked—Kylee, if Trieste could remember correctly—and, for a moment, the conversation ebbed, drifted away from anything difficult and focused on Ellyot bringing friends home from school.
There was much that Trieste and Yarri left out. Neither of them mentioned Aylan, for one thing, and their stories of “Ellyot” were edited. But Aldam was described in detail, as were Roes, Stanny, and Starren. Cwyn was mentioned—but both of them grew tense and brittle when he was. Too much of what made up Cwyn was illegal and repugnant to the people of Clough—and Cwyn lived near enough to be prosecuted.
“But I don’t understand,” said Kerree. “She raised four children and helps run the town—why?”
Yarri and Trieste both blinked. “Because she lives there?” Yarri laughed. “She wanted some say….”
“Well, I’m sure the priest they sent there will cure her of that!” Essa laughed, and Yarri felt a flush steal up her bodice and hoped it didn’t spread to her face.
“Well,” she said with some asperity, her needles clicking madly, “since she kept this last one from being run out of town on a rail, I’d say his permission is immaterial.”
“So she’s willing to be converted?” pounced Essa eagerly.
“No….” Yarri pretended to think and then looked up brightly. “She just felt that this one was so stupid he couldn’t do too much damage.”
There were outraged shocks and gasps, but Aleta wasn’t going to let the insult to the priest go. “Well,” she said with a prim pinch of her thin lips, “Willa died, so we don’t have to worry about women running things in Clough!”
“That’s too bad,” Trieste said evenly. “Since many of the laws that Rath has passed pertain to women, it’s too bad someone in the Regents’ Hall doesn’t have a say.”
“What are you going to talk about—screaming children and their whoring mothers?” Aleta scoffed. “I’m sure the men have more to worry about than orphaned children in the Regents’ Hall, don’t you think?”
“I’ll be sure to tell the children that when they come back to Clough looking for blood,” Yarri said with such a gamine, playful look on her piquant little face that Aleta blinked hard, as if deciding how to respond, and by the time she opened her mouth to say something, someone else spoke up.
“Is that why your brother came back?” Kerree asked soberly.
Yarri put her knitting down and met Kerree’s eyes, reassuring her that her brother and his friend weren’t being used as pawns.
“If my brother returned for revenge, Rath would have woken up dead, and that would have been the end of it.”
“He’s not a god!” Aleta spat, and before Yarri could respond, Trieste spoke.
“Did you know Rath’s soldiers took Ellyot’s foster brother one Solstice morning? Just kidnapped him as he was walking through the woods, missing his sweetheart.”
“I hear the man is stupid!” Essa guffawed. “Are you sure he got the details right?”
“I saw the livery on the dead soldiers,” Trieste replied levelly, and now her knitting was in her lap as well, “and I can tell you the only thing you’ll ever need to know about Ellyot Moon. When it comes to protecting the people he loves, not a sword, not a soldier, not even a snowstorm is going to get between him and his people. He brought Yarri and Aldam down Hammer Pass in the dead of winter when he was not more than a child. He’s here to change what’s coming out of your country. If you want a say in that, you need to speak up—change is coming. We can hear the roar of it in Otham, and if you can’t hear it in Dueance, it’s because your own chatter over dresses and dances is drowning it out.”
“Well, isn’t that presumptuous of him!” Aleta said shrilly, finally getting a chance to speak. “Who says we need change here? My household has never had it better. Who says we need to change the way we’re doing things?”
“Besides the entire Goddess ghetto, that is?” Yarri asked, her knitting working furiously in her busy fingers, fueled by a healthy dose of anger.
“Those policies are meant to keep the rest of the citizens happy!” Essa responded sententiously.
“Oh yes?” Yarri’s hands were suddenly shaking too hard to keep knitting, and her cold, sweaty fingers were fouling in the fine yarn. “Tell that to Brina and Jarrid of Troy.”
There was a collective intake of shocked breath, and even Essa’s dark complexion grew pale. Her skin dewed slightly in the heat of the sitting room as the women sat shocked, regarding the two newcomers with wide, stunned eyes.
Trieste let loose a cross between a laugh and a sigh and stood gracefully. Yarri followed, trying hard to make her jerky movements smoother and only feeling clumsier by the effort.
“Don’t worry, Aleta,” Trieste said sweetly, as Aleta’s mouth gaped open and closed and the woman obviously floundered for the words to order them out. “We’re leaving.”
The two of them swept out of the sitting room, back through the hallway with the hideous carpet, and were pleasantly surprised to find that the footman had rushed back down the hall and was waiting in the foyer with their wraps. He apologized and told them both that the horse and carriage would be around shortly.
“So much for subtle,” muttered Trieste as they were waiting.
“You started it!” Yarri protested, and Trieste’s grin back was wry.
“I did indeed. I’m thinking your family has taught me a lot in the last years, yes?”
Yarri’s smile was all six-year-old girl. “It’s nice not to be the only one up in trees, hitting wankers on the head with rocks!”
Trieste laughed softly, and their carriage pulled up, and the two of them exited with their heads held high.
As Trieste predicted, many of them were there rescinding their mistresses’ invitations to visit.
But many more of them bore invitations and calling cards asking for further acquaintance and—Trieste was sure—further conversation about women and the leadership of Clough.
Justice for the Honored Dead
THE NEXT week, Torrant argued on the floor of the Regents’ Hall for the right to build a bonfire in the ghettoes in order to celebrate his honored dead on Samhain. It took him two days of standing on the floor and arguing alone, because the others agreed that only his passion could sway the floor from insisting that the time for the Day of the Honored Dead had passed.
His final argument, the one that swayed the entire assembly, was a demand to honor Djali, the son of Consort Rath, and his beloved, Triana.
The fact that he was not planning to be there for the entire ceremony sat in his stomach like a shattered glass full of acid.
That rest day was Samhain, and Torrant and the young regents spent the early part of the day in the clinic. Olek, brokenhearted as he was at the loss of his two children, kept the Amber Goose open for no other reason than to give his people hope. Torrant and Aylan hadn’t been able to tell him the truth about Duan—they’d told him that he’d died bravely, and for their people. Torrant had run behind the tavern and thrown up, the lie had rankled so badly.
But the clinic remained open, and on the rest day the regents were accompanied by Yarri, Trieste, and Marv’s sisters—all of them with armloads of blankets and supplies. The extra help made such short work of the waiting patients they were able to retreat to Trieste’s house for a few hours before the bonfire.
Trieste occupied the other regents in her drawing room. Torrant heard them reading aloud from one of the books he’d loaned Keon, while he sat quietly in the study, writing his letter to his honored dead.