by Cat Hellisen
“Back ho – back to Pelimburg? But why – we can’t.” And damn him for making me want all over again. I miss the smell of sea air, the calling of the mews on the cliff-side.
“This city is sick, and it infects everyone in it. We stay here and we become like them.”
I could pretend I don’t know what he means but I’ve felt it too, the insidious way MallenIve breathes her disease into every living thing here. It’s so potent I can smell it – like scriv and rot – citrus combined with the reek of the filthy refuse heaps growing at her borders. I brush off his distress, and bury my own. “You’re being overly dramatic. Besides, we can’t go back.”
He sighs. “No. I suppose not.”
We have sins to atone for.
“Harun isn’t going to help us,” I say, thinking of the names on my paper, useless now.
“Whatever made you think that he would?” Jannik closes his eyes and slumps back against the one solid wall of the staircase. “Forget about this, Felicita, please. It’s not something for you and I to get involved in.”
“Give me a reason why not.”
He cracks open one eye, and waits for me to work it out myself.
“I don’t care any more if we draw attention to our House, if these MallenIve idiots don’t invite us – me – to their stupid parties–”
“It’s not about that.”
“What then – are you scared of them?” As soon as the words have bolted out my mouth, so casual and yet so damning, I feel myself flush.
“Yes,” Jannik says. “Now, we really should leave.”
For a moment, I don’t follow him. The vampire they found was mutilated, tortured. I picture Jannik’s arms ending in stumps at the wrist and his skin flayed, leaving only the meat and white skull. His fear flickers against my face like the wing of a startled bird.
STUDIES IN OIL AND INK
A new art exhibition has been announced in the late Courant. The black-and-white flash on the Amusements page does the pictures little justice. The headline calls the work that of a savage and naturally, I am intrigued.
I try to ignore the little article on the opposite page about the body they pulled from the Casabi. Another nameless bat. It chills me to read the words, knowing Jannik wants me do nothing. I force myself to pay attention to the vicious review instead. It has a certain incensed bluster that means it can only have been written by some House toady who feels his heroes have been mocked. The artist’s name is Iynast. Just that. I have no idea if it’s his true name, or the surname of some long-forgotten minor House.
Jannik has left for the offices already. Despite Carien’s promise – or threat – I have yet to try to secure a commitment of any kind from House Eline, or be invited to meet with her husband. Jannik’s unwillingness for me to pursue the matter of the body – now bodies - stops me from extending my own small invitation. Just when I think I am finally ready to go ahead and do it anyway, I find another reason not to: I need to employ a better chef, I need to have the house redecorated, the timing isn’t quite right.
It’s not just Jannik’s fear that makes me cling to all these excuses. Carien fascinates me. I want to see more of her, to feel that strange thrill that comes from watching the way she walks, her coiled intensity, the flash of wildness in her amber eyes. But she is dangerous to me and mine, and I’m not quite ready to have a Reader invade my home.
How much of my past would she be able to winkle out of me, just by being in my rooms? Would she pull all the secrets out of my coiled heart and lay them like little twisted miscarriages on a platter before me?
My brother’s death was no unlucky accident and only two people alive know the circumstances. Dash, who was the only other one who knew what happened, is buried now. I don’t even know where. I think Jannik may, but even I am not so heartless as to ask. Owen himself is interred in the family mausoleum, next to my father. From my mother’s last letter it may not be long before Owen’s sickly daughter is placed there too. The disappointment in that letter announcing Allegria’s birth was palpable. With Owen dead, there is no male heir to my House. There is only me. The heiress presumptive. How that must gall my brother’s shade.
But Jannik has my name and were I to have a son … .
I laugh at my own idiocy. I am no flower, pollinated by the wind.
Come, Felicita, let us turn our attention to more practical things. Whether or not House Eline have anything to do with the dead vampires, it will not matter if I conduct business with them. Surely we are not pretending friendship if I invite Carien and her husband to my house, so that we can talk of the price of silks and scriv? Even so, I’m loath to allow Carien time to uncover all my secrets. I would have to be careful, perhaps take something to dull my emotions.
Riona comes into the room and begins to clear away the lunch dishes. She hesitates by me, fiddling with the cutlery, straightening things that do not need straightening.
I catch the troubled look that flutters across her face, the quick furrow before it is gone from her brow. “Is it your brother?”
She shakes her head. “No, my lady.” But she continues to stand, her fingers dancing nervously along the edge of a spoon handle.
I sigh. “What then?”
“I don’t mean to be forward,” she says. “But you don’t look well. Is there something I can bring you?”
“I’m tired,” I tell her, not certain how or what to explain. This thing with the Houses and the vampires is no concern of hers. What would she say if I were to explain? Perhaps she could be sympathetic, but how can I expect that from someone who looks at my troubles and compares them to her own, and can see only a vast gulf? I have money and privilege, what does it matter if others have more than me? I look away from her. We are not friends, and perhaps there is no way we ever can be. My time in Whelk Street taught me that much. Dash and his little gang never truly accepted me. He made me feel like I was a part of their group the better to use me, and the others knew it.
He was one person. I can’t spend my life trapped in ever-diminishing circles, repeating the same tired paths because I once made a bad decision. A child does that, refusing to grow and learn from their mistakes, and I am so certain these days that I have left my childishness behind. I suppose then this is the proof that I haven’t.
“Wait.” I reach one hand forward to touch her sleeve, to tell Riona all my fears, and hope that somehow this outpouring will fill the empty space between us.
Before I reach her, the pealing bells of the Seven Widows slam and clang through the air, always so unexpectedly deafening, and whatever I had planned to say is rolled flat under their noise. I look down at the paper, at the review. I drop my hand.
“Riona,” I say when the last chimes have faded. “It’s nothing. I just need a little fresh air. Have the grooms ready the chaise.” I will not sit in this house and rot, waiting for MallenIve to accept me. The heat is bearable; the winds are blowing the stench of funeral pyres out into the desert. There is an exhibition I would go see.
* * *
Iynast’s work is not on display at the MallenIve Gallery, but instead at a small house called the Sunstone. It’s far from grand. Low-Lammers are milling through the rooms, pointing and laughing at the paintings. They have a slapdash feel to them – broad brush strokes, bold black lines and vibrating colours. The themes are low-brow – serving Hobs doing dishes, or working in fields; studies of friends and acquaintances. No wonder the artistic elite of MallenIve loathe them. In our world only we are important, and our visages must be painted with restraint and lies.
I stop before a portrait of a kitty-girl. Her hair is dyed flame-red and she’s wearing only a thin shift rolled up to her thighs as she washes her feet in a small stone basin.
“Vulgar, don’t you think?” says a woman with a honey dark voice.
My heart lurches, a little rabbit in a noose. “I like it,” I say, pretending to examine it more intently to give myself time to act as if this meeting were as casual to me as it must
be to her. “It’s real.”
The woman laughs. “So it is. I must admit to quite liking a bit of vulgarity myself.”
I turn to face Carien, my surprise at seeing her here tucked carefully away. Has she been thinking of me the way I have of her and so our thoughts are pulling us together? I imagine the roots of a smothering fig, spreading out and down around a blackbark until it dies. Which one of us has taken root in the other, I wonder. “Vulgarity?” I murmur.
“As long as it’s real.” She smiles. “There’s nothing as ugly as the mundane dressed up in finery it shouldn’t have.”
“And who decides what is mundane and what is fine?”
Carien claps her hands and laughs, clearly not caring that the low-Lammers around us are staring. “Who indeed, and what made you decide to come out here, down from your precious tower?”
I ignore the jibe. While it’s true I spend much of my time in the Pelim apartments, it’s hardly because I don’t want to mingle with people I think lower than myself. I don’t think so, anyway. “The review,” I say.
“Scathing, isn’t it?” Carien has a wicked smile, and there again is that wildness I recognize, that makes me want to reach out and touch her mouth, to feel how warm her breath would be against my cold fingertips. “Would you like to meet the artist?”
“You know him?” I raise one brow.
“Naturally.” Her smile grows wickeder and wilder – it is not done for House Lammers to count painters and crakes as friends and acquaintances. “I’ve heard you’re not a bad artist yourself.”
“I’m passable.” Painting is something I was taught to do regardless of skill or desire; all girls in the Houses have their artistic temperament encouraged. We are pretty things, destined to make pretty things. I am marginally competent. My real interest lies less with the art than with how I am able to use that art to record those things that interest me. “My paintings bring me more pleasure than they would others, I’m afraid.”
“Nonsense, I’m sure.” Carien takes my arm. “Come, perhaps our artist will deign to give you lessons.”
“I don’t think-”
“Oh hush,” she says, and pulls me along with her. “Live a little.”
And how long have I wanted to do just that – to forget about death and betrayal? And perhaps I was wrong about Carien. After all, House parties are hardly the place where you show others your true face. Guyin is bitter, and his view of all the other Houses is twisted by his self-imprisonment.
Carien sends my driver home while I stand there gaping. “Calm yourself,” she says. “I shan’t leave you stranded.”
I clamber as elegantly as I can into her coach, which is done in shades of russet and copper, with the windswept leaves that mark House Eline picked out in gold paint along the carriage doors. The two cantankerous unicorns pulling it are matched chestnuts, their single horns massive and gnarled, sweeping back over their high, rugged shoulders.
Carien doesn’t tell me where we’re going and I am not yet ready to ask. This close, inside the small carriage, I can smell the faint winter-pear and honey of her perfume. Underneath that is a wild note, like the mossy boles of forests. Jannik would be able to tell the different scents apart, could name them. Perhaps his own family made this one.
The one thing I don’t smell is scriv. She won’t be Reading me. I relax my back against the leather seat, secure that she will not be using the drug to pick her way through my emotions, to trick my secrets out of me by knowing when to say the right words. “You know his haunts?”
“Indeed. You could call me something of a patron of the arts.”
We turn into an area where I have never set foot. A white-washed pub called the Greenfinch stands on the corner of a long road of narrow houses huddled together, their grey stones overlapping, their tiles mingling. We pass the pub, into another street. This one is full of barrows and handcarts. It is too much like going back to Pelimburg’s Old Town; it reminds me of a past from which I have run. The coach clatters to a halt.
“We’ll have to walk the rest,” says Carien.
I follow her like a boggert in a dream. Here then is the hand offered for no reason other than the ones that are supposed to spur friendships. She is interested in me, we have the same lives, and under our silks and our masks and our marriages, the same vulgarity. I could tell myself some story that I am going with her because she’s a key to my mystery of the dead vampires, but it’s not true. For the first time in the months I have been in my chosen exile in MallenIve, I have seen the reflection of myself in someone else.
We leave the driver waiting and cross the cobbled street into a narrow alley way. The dream-like feeling ripples with shivery fish memories. It wasn’t so long ago that I worked in places like the ones we are passing. In Pelimburg I scrubbed my hands raw in a tea house called The Twice-Drowned Crake. The Crake was set against the warren of alleyways that make up Old Town, and the streets were crammed with shops and parlours and laundry houses and grimy narrow buildings where the girls wore hard dead faces. The boards were worn down by a thousand summers, by wind-flung sand. The heavy sea-smell of salt and kelp was tangled up in the nets and the masts, and there was no way to separate the city from the ocean. I breathe in deep, wishing for that taste of the crisp sea against my tongue, but all I get is MallenIve’s putrescent stench. The loss is so intense it pricks at my eyes. My breath comes sharp with regret. I had forgotten so much, and not wanted to allow myself to remember.
I miss the girl I was in Pelimburg. I miss Nala and Lils and Verrel and Esta. I miss Dash. How stupid and strange. I wasn’t really one of them, but at least I was never alone. How different it could have been if I’d been nothing more than just a girl – perhaps I could have scraped myself a shallow place in that world, and let Pelimburg’s doomed revolution roll over my head and pass.
“Does the air here not agree with you?” Carien snaps.
No. I suppose it does not. I smile thinly. “Should it?”
She snorts out a small un-ladylike laugh. “This way.”
The buildings are high overhead, and several arch above us, their balconies kiss-close. Very little sun manages to filter down and the cobbles are slick and mossy. There is a smell of drain water and earth and fungus. And tea.
“In here.” Carien pushes open a smoky glass door into a tiny tea shop. The place is warm, lit with fatcandle lanterns, and the greasy smoke competes with strong teas, the citrus oils and Pelimburg small-leaf tisanes. The place is half-full. The Hobs look at us then away; pretend they have never noticed our unwelcome presence. “Have you ever been in a Hob tea shop?”
“I–” I look around at the high tables; listen to the familiar hiss of the tea-urns, the distant clink of porcelain from the scullery, remember my own hands chapped and wrinkled by dishwater. “I’ve not yet had the pleasure.”
“Sit,” she says. “You’ll get used to it, soon enough.” She takes a seat at a small corner table wedged by a window made of little rounds of coloured glass.
I sit down smoothly opposite Carien, just as a low-Lammer girl in a bleached apron comes to take our order. Carien asks for sweet aloe and poisonink. I frown. ‘Ink is a poet’s drug, a madman’s. Not to say that I haven’t seen my share of it, but it’s not a vice the Houses normally bother with. Too mundane for them. It’s strictly the province of the lower castes.
“You won’t tell, will you?” She winks. “Garret thinks it awfully revolting and goes on about how it makes the Hobs even more useless than they already are, but I find I quite enjoy it.”
Why is she doing this – telling me her secrets as if we were friends? I don’t trust her and her hunger for the vampires. She’s still half-smiling at me, although one corner is faltering as she grows noticeably nervous. Perhaps, after all, she is just like me, a girl caught out of place. She’s married into House Eline, and they are a cold people. She’s a woman of woodlands and dapples and shadows, not icy glass.
I remove my gloves. The skin is white and soft; the
evidence of my rebellion smoothed away with hand-creams and balms. “We all have our vices,” I say. “A redbush, with honey, please.”
The girl runs off with our order.
We wait her return in a flickering, uncomfortable silence. Around us the tea-shop murmurs and buzzes, but here it is as if we are trapped in a bubble of air under water. Carien watches me with her cat eyes, appraising me. I wonder what it is she sees.
“The artist,” I say, when our drinks are steaming before us.
“Oh, yes. Him.” Carien pouts. “He’s here.”
I look around the shop. There are the poet-caste – crakes – scrawling poems, a Hob or two taking lunch, and a few low-Lammer youths of no particular House. None of them look like my idea of an artist.
“In front of you.” Carien holds out her hands and waits.
“You?”
Her palms smack against the red wood of the table and the cups skip in their saucers. “Me.”
“Surely you’re not serious?” But her small hands are elegant despite the stubby fingers. They dance when she talks; they can never be still and silent. I suppose those are the hands of someone who would paint. I ask the first thing that pops into my head. “Where did you find a kitty-girl to sit for you?”
Carien wrinkles her brow at my odd question then shakes her head. “Where does one usually find a kitty-girl?” she says, half laughing. “And besides I paid her well, better than she would have earned on her back.”
“I see.”
“You don’t approve.” She draws back a little. “I thought you would, and I rarely misjudge a person.”
“Misread,” I correct. “I’m not judging you. If anything, I’m intrigued.” Always a bad idea for me. “Does Garret know?”
“Oh, he knows I paint. It’s a suitable enough hobby.”
I want to go back to the Sunstone and look at her work again. She has a good eye: it captures more than merely form and composition. She catches people’s hearts and the truths that lie behind their masks. The things that make them people. My own talent is meagre – enough to let me record the things I want. I’ve long ago accepted that, but I find myself stabbed by a bitter, sputtering envy that I cannot do what she can.
