Rafe finally stood, rigid. His mouth worked soundlessly for a moment until he was able to speak. “My lord.” He reached for cold rage, fumbled for it in the whirling tumult of his emotions. Found anger of a sort, but only mixed with agitation, confusion, doubt. “I fear I must take my leave. I’m late for . . . I have a . . .” And without finishing the sentence, he put on his clothes and left the room.
He staggered down the grand stairs, the paintings on the wall of Tremontaines past in their gilded frames mocking him, the odor of salmon wafting up from the ducal kitchens, the smooth grain of the wood balustrade under his hand, the creaks and sighs of the ancient house settling mocking him. Oh, how great a fool he had been played for! His face tightened, his chest constricted, his skin hot, his breath unsteady, and he all but collided with a woman in silk and lace ascending the stairs.
“Pardon me,” she said, and even he could hear the frost in her voice.
Rafe found the rage he’d been searching for. “I don’t think I shall!” he cried. “Why should I? You’re all the same, toying with our lives and then discarding us when you grow bored and going back to your damned chocolate! The world is changing, you know, and soon none of this”—he gestured wildly at the grandeur around them—“is going to matter at all! If it even lasts.”
She paled, which only spurred him on.
“That would just serve you right, wouldn’t it?” he said. “I hope you lose every last stick of furniture you have, I hope you have to wander the streets, begging for scraps of food like the rest of us, while the people with power turn you into their playthings, your hopes and dreams and desires nothing but cards in a tiresome game played for minnows!”
She swayed slightly on the stairs, her face completely white. A meaningless victory, but a victory nonetheless. Rafe grinned viciously, ran down the rest of the stairs and out the door into the street, where servants and coachmen looked curiously at him as he passed.
Her meeting with the awful student was not, to the sorrow of the Duchess Tremontaine, the most difficult moment she was to face this day. She was already on edge about what would happen to her resources, even to her marriage, should her efforts with the Kinwiinik fail to bear fruit: for to lose Highcombe, the great Tremontaine property she had staked as surety against her secret but substantial interests in the ill-fated trading ship Everfair would be a humiliation too great to contemplate.
But when her maid handed her the sealed paper a gentleman had given her, a gentleman waiting below, who had vowed that it would ensure that the duchess would wish also to see him, and Diane opened it, she was utterly unprepared for the shock of terror that ran through her body.
The gentleman—if one could call him that—was shown up. He was wearing a most vulgar striped jacket of which he seemed inordinately proud, but his bright hair, pretty face, and nonchalant manner made it clear that he expected to charm her, as he showed her a certain object that had long been in his family’s possession; an object, he was sure, of the greatest interest to her.
The duchess held it in her hand. And in that moment she knew that, however precarious her previous position had been, she stood now on the edge of a blade sharper than that wielded by any swordsman. Before, she had been facing humiliation. What Diane de Tremontaine faced now was total destruction.
The gentleman asked one question, and, without hesitation, the duchess gave him the only answer possible.
And so it was with a light heart and a light step that Benjamin Hawke left Tremontaine House and walked in the direction of his own, whistling again the air that Ixkaab Balam had overheard earlier that day in Riverside.
But the Duchess Tremontaine, her hands trembling, sat frozen in a brocade chair that—along with every other part of a life that she cherished—she might very soon see for the last time.
* * *
Doctor Volney was talking about triangles, which were Micah’s fourth-favorite regular shape, after octagons, hexagons, and triskaidecagons. Of course, she had a separate list for irregular polygons; you’d think that would go without saying, but then one day she had been drawing with a stick in the dirt out in front of the house and Aunt Judith had asked her whether she liked the regular heptagon better than the concave hexagon (of course, Aunt Judith hadn’t known their names then, and neither had Micah) and had been absolutely unable to understand why it was a ridiculous question, so there you go.
“And so we see,” said Volney, “that the ratio of the length of each side to the sine of its opposite angle is the same as the ratio of the length of each other side to the sine of its opposite angle. Which means what, in terms of our earlier discussion? Milner?”
“Given the derivations we’ve just been through, sir, the ratio of the length of any given side of the triangle to the sine of its opposite angle is twice the radius of the circumscribed circle.”
“Good for you.” Micah looked at Rafe on the bench beside her, about to grin, and then realized his mouth was still scrunched up and his eyebrows drawn together, just like when he’d walked into the room, and that meant he was upset about something.
She would ask him later what it was. Because right now she was just too happy to think about it. Of all the lectures Rafe had taken her to, Volney’s delighted her the most, because it was Volney who talked most about the kinds of things she had always spent all her time thinking about. Sine. Cosine. Tangent. The very words tasted delicious.
“It should be clear, then, that, if we know the radius of the circumscribed circle, all we need to learn the length of any side is the angle opposite.”
Circumscribed circle. This, this was why she was willing to put up with people who got upset with her. Amos and Judith and Seth never talked about circumscribed circles.
“Given that,” Volney continued, “suppose a right triangle with an additional angle of sixty degrees. Suppose further that the radius of the triangle’s circumscribed circle is seven and one part in two. Now, lay the triangle we have hypothesized on a sphere. What then is the length of the side of the triangle opposite the other angle?”
Silence as students around the room scratched on their slates. Micah caught sight of what Rafe was writing and was surprised to see that he was on the wrong track. She grunted softly and, when he looked up, gestured to his calculations and shook her head, at which point he stopped writing, his hand hovering in the air with the pen.
Finally a voice from somewhere in the room called out, “Three and three parts in four.” Micah sighed: This was exactly the same error Rafe had been making.
“Just right, Pearson.”
Micah’s brows knit in consternation. Why was Doctor Volney teaching them something wrong?
“The trick here is in recognizing—since we started with a right triangle, a known radius, and an included angle—that the hypotenuse of a circumscribed right triangle is always equal to the circle’s radius.”
Micah began breathing hard. She pulled urgently on Rafe’s sleeve, but she knew from the expression on his face—confusion was an easy one to recognize—that she was on her own. She felt an immense pressure somewhere deep within her. She knew this feeling well and she hated it fiercely, but she could never seem to control it. The pressure built and built and built. She had to do something. The pressure was almost crushing.
“Now, if we assume that—”
“No!” She knew it was the wrong thing to do, but she couldn’t help herself. “That’s wrong!”
And now everyone in the room was looking at her. She wanted to make herself tiny, or run away, or disappear into thin air. The horrible pressure was now joined by a hideous embarrassment. Her breath came even faster, and she began rocking back and forth very quickly, her eyes wide with fright.
Rafe put his arms around her and squeezed hard. “Want to do angles?” he said, and she nodded, grateful. “Tell me the angle in an equilateral triangle,” he whispered in her ear.
“Sixty,” she said at once, deeply grateful to have something else to focus on.
“In an equilateral pentagon.”
“One hundred eight.”
“Square.”
“Ninety.”
“Breathe, breathe slowly. Hexagon.”
“One hundred twenty.” She saw the shapes as he named them, and, though her breath was still heavy and her hands gripped the bench no less tightly, at least she was able to stop rocking.
“What, if I may be so bold to ask,” said Doctor Volney, “is your name?” She knew the answer but somehow couldn’t speak to say it.
“Octagon.”
“One hundred thirty-five.”
“Breathe. Decagon.”
“One hundred forty-four.” Micah remembered telling Rafe that this helped her. She also remembered that if she breathed deeply it helped her calm down, so she inhaled. Exhaled. Inhaled.
“Did I fail to speak clearly?” Doctor Volney again. She needed to answer him. “What is your name, boy?”
She could breathe again now, so she could speak. She shrugged Rafe off, and he stopped whispering. She could do this. “Micah, sir. Micah Heslop.”
“And, Master Heslop, would you be so good as to honor us by explaining yourself?”
That one was easy too.
“Your conclusion. It’s wrong.” She was glad he had asked her. Immediately a small pulse of relief diminished her urge to rock.
You could have heard a feather fall. “Oh? How so?”
But she had to continue; speaking made it better. “How can you not see it?” She couldn’t keep the frustration out of her voice. “The numbers you’re talking about are right if the triangle is on a flat surface. But if you’re on a sphere, the surface changes, and the number of angles in any triangle would have to add up to more than one hundred eighty, which is impossible. You can’t lay a flat triangle perfectly on a sphere without breaking it somewhere, and then it’s not a triangle anymore. The question doesn’t even make sense.”
There. She was still agitated, but her breathing, if fast, was at least even, and most of the pressure had gone. She looked up at Rafe and saw that his eyes had gone wide.
“Damn me for a dead swordsman’s lover!” he said.
“In twenty years of teaching at this University,” Doctor Volney said, his expression yet again altered, this time to something with narrowed eyes she found difficult to comprehend, “no student of mine has ever had the brazen effrontery to contradict me with such abysmal insults. You, Master Heslop, may take your leave, and you needn’t bother to come to future lectures of mine.”
This was confusing. “I’d rather stay. I mean, a lot of the things you talk about are pretty obvious, but there’s also lots that I’ve never thought about before.” She felt that something more was expected of her. “It’s interesting to be here.”
Without a word, the magister stalked down the aisle between the benches and out of the room.
Immediately, the silence in the room was broken by the rush of dozens of voices. The pressure she felt broke with it, mercifully, but people were still looking at her.
“Can you believe it?”
“What on earth was he talking about? Angles aren’t different on spheres.”
“Whether they are or no, Volney has had that coming for a long time.”
It was all too loud, and she turned, mute, panicked, to Rafe.
“You,” he said, with a grin on his face as wide as the river that flowed past Uncle Amos’s farm, “are a prince among men—nay, a king, an emperor, a god. This calls for kidney pie. And a great deal of beer.”
“No,” said Micah.
“Oh?”
“Not kidney pie. Tomato.”
“As long as the beer comes with it.”
Kaab pushed open the dark, weathered tavern door. Chuleb’s office was passably clean, but when she’d gone back to Riverside in search of Tess the Hand, the sun-haired girl had still been nowhere in evidence. “She might be up at the University buying paper,” someone had said, so here Kaab was at the Inkpot. Not unlike a Riverside tavern: the same dark, heavy beams hanging overhead, the same tables scarred from years of abuse, though what littered these was not just mugs but also tiny bowls that looked to contain spices of various kinds: cumin, aniseed, fennel. This place was much fuller—only appropriate, given the time of day—and its clientele was composed almost entirely of long-haired young men wearing black robes in varying degrees of repair talking very, very seriously. The serving girls here were also less attractive.
Tess was nowhere to be seen, but there was the amusing boy, the merchant’s son she had met the day before her welcome banquet a week earlier, along with his friend, the short, stocky, easily flustered girl Kaab remembered from the protest the same day.
“Ho, there, Kaab!” the boy called, and leaped up so enthusiastically as she walked to his table that he might have been a dancer at the Festival of the Silent Ones. “Micah has just answered the greatest conundrum of the age!”
Kaab slid onto the bench as Micah moved down to make room for her. “What’s that? Discovering why you Landers prefer your food without flavor?” She looked around her. Two boys at the next table were staring at each other, rapt, and talking softly as if every word were a treasure. One of them had hair almost as red as that of Tess the Hand.
“Funny. No. He has solved the mystery of the heavenly bodies!” It still wasn’t clear to Kaab why he might be referring to Micah as “he”—perhaps it involved some strange Xanamwiinik custom with which Kaab was unfamiliar.
“I do not understand.”
“Well.” Rafe’s brow creased. “This will be difficult to explain.”
“Try.” Without ordering me a beer, she thought.
“All right,” he said. “But you need a beer.” Kaab sighed as he waved to the barmaid. “A beer for my friend!” He turned around, spoke to the boy at the next table who did not have red hair, accepted something he offered, turned back to her, and began to speak. “It may be hard to conceptualize,” he said, holding up the orange he’d taken, “but, though we seem to be walking on flat ground, the earth itself, taken as a whole, is a three-dimensional body.” He began turning the orange this way and that. “Now, my teachers at the University believe, as has been thought for three hundred years and more, that the sun is also such a body, and that it, along with the other fixed stars, orbits the earth. I have recently come to think, however, that—”
“I am sorry,” she said. His words made no sense whatsoever. “You believe that the sun circles the earth?”
“Well, I don’t,” he said. “But everybody else. The idiots at the University.”
Xamanek’s light, how barbaric could he possibly think she was? “But everyone knows that the matter is exactly reversed.”
His mouth dropped open so wide it looked like the lip of a small bean pot. He put the orange down next to his beer. “Everyone knows? You mean to say that heliocentrism is an accepted tenet in Kinwiinik society?” The boy with red hair threw his head back in joyous laughter.
The barmaid arrived with the beer and set it down in front of Kaab. Perhaps she could spill it. “The University is a center of learning, no?”
“According to the University.”
And these people thought her home was uncivilized! “The University needs perhaps to reconsider its opinion of itself.”
“You’ll find no argument from me on that point.” He shook his head in apparent wonder. “Anyway. I’m the only one here who believes what you say everybody in your land knows—even my friends think I’m a crackpot about this—and I’ve been trying to prove it, but I could never get the math to work out right. And now, because of my brilliant friend here and his geometrical insight, I know exactly what to do!”
“Well,” said Micah as Rafe lifted his mug, “not exactly. All I said was that it couldn’t be a triangle anymore. To know exactly what to do you’d have to figure out what it actually was, and if that’s the same every time or not, so I guess you’d have to start by measuring the—”
“The details,” sa
id Rafe airily, “are immaterial. The point is, I’ve been doing all my calculations as if the heavenly bodies were revolving in a horizontal plane. But, cretin that I am, it never occurred to me to question the most basic assumption of Rastin’s cosmology—but get rid of that and posit great circles that can start at any arbitrary point, and the numbers, at least those from last night, can be made to fit, because if you find the right oblique angle you can replicate the ecliptic! Now all we have to do is find that angle!” He glanced at Kaab’s beer mug. “Don’t you like it?”
Kaab brought the mug to her mouth and pretended to sip it. “It is delicious.”
“The problem,” said Rafe, “is that I could only make it work by positing another ecliptic, which—”
“I understand perfectly,” said Kaab, not understanding at all. It was clear he was talking about the mysteries of the Four Hundred Siblings. But beyond that he was using too many words she didn’t know and, she suspected, would never need to know.
Rafe shook his head. “I still can’t believe it. You know the universe is heliocentric. Will wonders never cease?”
That was it. Evidently there was no end to these Xanamwiinik’s arrogance. She would put him in his place. But first she would get rid of this disgusting drink. She reached for her beer and knocked it casually into her lap, making sure to start as the cold liquid hit her.
“Oh no! Here, I’ll get you a new one.”
“There is no need whatsoever.” But as the beer began to run down the dress, and the petticoat against her legs grew sodden, she thought, No more. Locals or no Locals, Auntie Saabim or no Auntie Saabim, I’m not going out dressed like this again. “But as far as the earth circling the sun—of course we understand that. If we didn’t, how do you think we would find our way here?”
Tremontaine Season 1 Saga Omnibus Page 14
