Tytiana

by Marc Secchia

  Tytiana

  By Marc Secchia

  Copyright © 2019 onward Marc Secchia

  All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher and author except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  www.marcsecchia.com

  Cover art copyright © 2019 Joemel Requeza and Marc Secchia

  Cover font design copyright © 2019 Victorine Lieske

  www.bluevalleyauthorservices.com

  Author’s Note

  Tytiana is a novel on the Shapeshifter Dragons timeline, set 100 years after the events of Aranya.

  Chapter 1: Egg Encounter

  NO, SHe was not mistaken. Her kitten had just laid an egg.

  Tytiana vented an irate shriek as her quill splintered between her clenched teeth. This was the last, the very last silken thread in her day! What filthy caricature of a joke was this? Whoever the prankster was, she would personally haul them over a white-hot heap of coals before discharging the full wrath of the House Cyraxana upon their luckless, misbegotten heads. She would slap them off the Island. Bounce their idiot skulls off the Yellow Moon for good measure, and grind whatever of their bones dared to return, into fine bone meal suitable for fertiliser! And if that didn’t suffice, she would seize her walking stick and – ahem.

  She would control her temper.

  “No, no, no, Tytiana!” Bite that tongue. “Don’t let them get the better of you.” Someone was most likely watching, the skanky purple-banded larvae cluster – agog, smirking in anticipation of another infamous explosion from Tytiana the Red, as everyone privately called her.

  Not to her face. That would be a mortal mistake.

  Red for the ridiculous hue of her brazen mop of curls. Red for the pyretic power of her temper, recently made infamous during a lavish banquet held in her alleged honour, by Tytiana belting her latest suitor across the cheek with the business end of a stout rainbow trout sourced from Gemalka’s finest stock and shipped to Helyon upon a bed of Immadian ice. Honestly. Besides that overweening dullard effortlessly seizing first prize in the village idiot competition, the explosion of succulent pink meat against his fleshy jowls had been a waste of a fine fish – for which girl, at fifteen, wanted a lip-smacking suitor who thought to impress his potential beloved with a gift of a fly rod for trout fishing? That, coupled with a severe case of feral-Dragon halitosis – ugh!

  “Unbelievable!” she snorted into the air.

  Worse, it beggared belief that her father appeared fully intent upon Dragon-shipping her away into the matrimonial suns-set with indecent, not to say illegal haste!

  “Preposterous!”

  Maybe nuptials at fifteen were legal on some Islands? She should research that. Her father probably had some devious plan up his brocaded sleeve. Most brides did not have to cope with having one and a half legs, however. Nor a father who had not very flippantly suggested that if she might contrive to get a suitor legless, too, he’d be able to ignore her impediment.

  “Thanks, father. What a tasteful non-joke.”

  She began to drum her fingers upon the worktop, but tiny sparks crackled from her fingertips. She snatched her hand back. Gracious. Again? Static was white. This familiar phenomenon was always red, always associated with her flying into a rage. Besides, having this much of a temper was exhausting. Every hour of every day, it seemed she roamed about like an ambulant volcanic eruption. Sparking. Growling. Simmering. How could this be good for a person – or sane, arguably? Tytiana glanced irately about her arboretum and workroom, but if someone was hiding nearby to watch her inevitable fury erupt, the prankster had either done well or fled with cowardly haste. She bit back an unladylike word she had almost used on that last suitor fellow. Much more fun, the trout slap. The shock effect had been priceless.

  Aye. Deeply satisfying.

  Rounding upon the hitherto innocent Askarmyn Tiger cub, Tytiana fixed her with a glare that could have melted the wire mesh separating them with ease. “And you? What do you have to say about that, you oversized fur ball?”

  Mrrwwwll, purred the kitten, licking her paw with studied unconcern.

  “Insouciant wretch!”

  Cute, though. Fluffy as a sackful of premium golden duck down. Eyes of soulful onyx. A slightly upturned mouth that hinted at feline amusement at the doings of flame-haired heiresses to vast wealth – sigh – as she was daily reminded. The month-old tiger cub already stood waist-high to her, however, so it did seem rather strange to be calling it a kitten or a cub. It was also better kept on the other side of the strong wire mesh, because its long, curved canines and set of razor-sharp claws could otherwise make a very nice mess of her very expensive, very marriageable skin.

  “Daddy wouldn’t want that, oh no!” Tytiana growled. “Imagine the scandal.”

  Imagine an egg-laying cat?

  The glittering white ovoid had no place being in that cage. Eggs did not grow up out of the ground. Nor did they fall from the sky, passing through solid crysglass and thick wire mesh. Not in her arboretum, thank you very much.

  And the kitten had just stood up off it for all the Islands in the ruddy Island-World as if she had been keeping it warm. Mother duck. Broody Dragoness?

  Weird.

  It certainly looked like an overlarge diamond. Ugh! This wasn’t the prelude to another proposal, was it? Creative, if so, but about as unwelcome as a luminous orange slug slinking about her dinner plate.

  Tytiana shot ocular arrows at the egg-laying kitten, meantime twirling her errant curls around one perfectly manicured fingertip as she imagined how she might amuse herself torturing a few of these nauseatingly persistent suitors. A hive of black wasps tossed into the bedchamber late one evening? Boil them in Helyon’s hot springs? Kick a fellow overboard during a romantic Dragonship ride to test his flying skills?

  Why under the heavens was she always so flaming aggressive? Forever possessed of an ire that seemed to take on an existence of its own, crimson and scorching and tempestuous?

  Both she and the kitten knew that a gleaming white egg, a little bigger than her clenched fist, had not just appeared out of thin air inside a locked cage holding a dangerous wildcat. No way under the suns. Not for all the silk in Helyon. She was also unreasonably irritated by the fact that the gold streaks in her silly shag-pile of a mane seemed to exactly match the kitten’s colouration, and since she made her living determining the slightest variation in shade that in turn determined the quality of the most superior silk in all of Helyon – this being her family’s claim to fame and fortune – Tytiana was qualified to draw such a conclusion. More than qualified. She was the best.

  Which – o fortunate girl – made her that much more desirable. And pricey.

  “The very Isle of Insanity,” she told the cub.

  Pricey despite the lamentable lack of sensible hair of a colour common to Helyon, say, such as a rich brunette or more desirable still, the long, fine, straight blonde of her three sisters, one older and two younger than her. They were also annoyingly sweet and friendly and compliant in public at least, endlessly patient when brushing out her knotted curls, and had a way of chortling at her temper tantrums that somehow frustrated her into a better mood. How did that work? They apparently did not possess an ounce of temper to share between them! Tytiana loved her sisters to distraction.

  Distracted was what she was right now.

  The youngest Chief Assayer of the House in history was not, as a rule, an easily distractible sort of person. The very notion made her arms itch as if she were breaking out in hives.

  “It’s your fault,” she accused the cat.

  This time, the feline did not even bother to grace her accusation with so much as a quiver of its long
, pale whiskers.

  “Absurd, that’s what this is. Just absurd.”

  With the realisation that she was finally running out of adjectives and succeeding in riling nobody but herself, Tytiana decided to indulge herself in a spot of gratuitous flouncing. Despite that the task was demanding given the limitations of her artificial left leg and her dark, hand-carved jalkwood walking stick, she flounced dramatically over to the bin and deposited her spoiled quill pen therein. She smoothed her crimson silken skirts with a brusque series of slaps, tugged several times at her fitted bodice in a futile attempt to stop the under-corset from pinching her left flank, and tried to sweep her errant curls back into something resembling order. That a neatnick like her had been cursed with such a raggedy spider’s nest of hair!

  “Unholy caroli!”

  This time the expletive did slip loose. Tytiana stamped her good foot. There were things about herself that she hated, and her foul temper was one of them. Her misspelled first name was another. It was meant to be ‘Titiana’ after the colour of her hair, and that had been her dying mother’s wish, but her father had changed it to Tytiana to match their House name, House Cyraxana. How he spoiled everything with the slightest touch. He loved to interfere, to be the spider pulling at the silken threads of inter-House politics and power struggles, and handling the nuances of trade. That predilection spread to controlling every aspect of his family’s life, from tutors to vocations, from dress style to a social life aimed unashamedly at finding the best – make that most lucrative – matches for his quartet of daughters.

  Daughters were immeasurably better value than sons, by virtue of their excellent trade value.

  Even the half-legless ones.

  Until her third summer of life, Tytiana had a propensity for climbing out of windows. One fateful day she had toppled out of their carriage’s window while en route to another House, and in a freak accident, tumbled beneath the huge, heavy ironbound wheels of a family’s carriage speeding in the opposite direction. All she remembered was the terrible scraping as the wheel snagged her left leg and dragged her along the road, and then lying beneath the blazing suns as her mother screamed over her and her father cursed everyone in sight.

  Then, learning to walk all over again.

  Painfully.

  She dropped her eyes to her note scroll as if its precise rows tabulating the necessary tasks and financial details that summarised the running of their House, could answer the question that burned like the everlasting, ever-present vehemence which lurked beneath the surface of her personality. What was that benighted egg doing in her cage?

  Her arboretum had been planned with meticulous care. The Dragon’s share of the research budget supported her work, which involved breeding stronger, healthier and more productive spiders to boost the profitability of their House’s estate, the sprawling silk orchards. The great crysglass building, supported by a soaring jalkwood timber frame imported at eye-watering expense from faraway Yorbik Island, was a great polygon set upon a hexagonal base and divided within to create six mathematically identical ‘wedges’. Four wedges were given over to ruler-straight rows of the shrub-like, burgundy-leafed fenturi trees of various subspecies and cross-grafts, and her animal and bird cages, while the fifth and sixth were half-planted and half overrun by her broad working tables and scroll racks. One table supported fourteen racks of breeding tubes and habitats for the long-legged, drab grey fenturi spiders, or silk-spinners as they were commonly called. Another was a well-stocked chemical laboratory. Not a tube or beaker stood a fraction of an inch out of place, and if one had dared such an intolerable degree of misbehaviour, Tytiana would most certainly have noticed and corrected it.

  “Neatnick?” she chuckled softly to herself. “You are just sad, girl.”

  With that, she returned to contemplating the tiger’s cage – the largest of her habitats in which she cared for injured creatures people brought to her, and also by far the most secure. She should check the cub’s wounds for signs of infection, and examine that unruly egg more closely.

  It was not just wrong. It was impossible.

  She loathed impossible.

  * * * *

  Jakani watched the young heiress’ antics from his perch amidst the multi-forked branches of a fenturi tree, oblivious to the grey spiders crawling over his body and nesting in his shock of black hair. This was where he had taken refuge the moment he heard her open the doorway of her arboretum. Fear had sped his feet. He had heard much about Tytiana the Red before being commanded to report here. None of it was good.

  None of the rumour had suggested how heart-stoppingly beautiful she was.

  Mostly, he understood that she would probably flay him alive for spying. She had the clout to do exactly that. After all, his status as a member of the despised lamko caste meant that he was fit for only the most menial jobs around Helyon – generally, dealing with trash, dead bodies and crawling beneath the fenturi trees to gather the valuable spider droppings. His ilk were never to touch the costly webs. Never.

  He curled his grubby fingers into a fist.

  Aye, Tytiana would have ample reason to punish him. She was like the stars were above the Islands, luminous and spectacular and so far beyond the thoughts that had just been cascading through his filthy, immoral mind …

  He could not move.

  He wanted to scream at the injustice of all he was.

  She had everything – position and status and wealth and lambent physical beauty – and he had nothing, nothing, nothing!

  Only Jakani’s eyes moved. Observing. Desirous. Wondering at the golden filaments that seemed to fire her hair from within. He had never seen anything to compare. Alive, vibrant, mesmerising. He wanted to touch the phenomenon just to know if it burned as much as his heart did. He dreamed of stroking just one strand to know if her tresses were truly as sheer as Helyon silk. The cost of her crimson silk dress alone could have fed his entire family for a dozen years. He noted the imperious jut of her chin, the stride that despite something being wrong with her left leg – another unanticipated facet of this complex young woman – owned everything it traversed, the notorious rage that flared at the slightest pretext and burned incandescent. It had taken him several long minutes to work out that the source of her ire was that tiny white egg lying in the tiger’s cage.

  He had never seen an Askarmyn Tiger up close before. They were man-killers, the stuff of bedtime terrors; fearsome beasts that broke into villagers’ huts to drag off infants in the night. The one in the cage was young, he saw, and had been wounded in the left foreleg and across its lower back and belly. Someone – most likely her – had dressed the wounds and bandaged them. She must have drugged the beast before doing that.

  Yet, she called it ‘fur ball.’ Fondly.

  The heiress kept many injured creatures in the cages – northern peripols and parakeets chirruping their melodious songs, black-ruffed screeching monkeys and placid vervets and a golden marmoset, which was snoring stertorously in a cage-encased tree not four feet behind his head, and several cages holding small felines that must be peoples’ pets. One wore a silly conical collar, another had a neatly splinted foreleg. Almost every household in Helyon had cats to fend against caroli, the plague-bearing orchard rats that could devastate harvest and population alike. Cats were treated like royalty. Certainly better than any lamko.

  Watching Tytiana was like watching a flame burn.

  Entrancing.

  Perilous.

  Moth to her candle, he could not help himself, and this insight brought every ounce of Jakani’s shame – product of a lifetime of ignominy and humiliation – boiling to the surface. Let them test him in this way. He would treat the Chief Assayer, the noble Scion of House Cyraxana, with absolute decorum. He would hold his own household’s honour high, mean and despised as it was. This time, his longsuffering parents would have nothing to hold against him.

  After all, his chief skills in life seemed to be that he possessed an infallible nose for a fight
, and the ability to blend in so well, people forgot he existed.

  Tytiana had looked right past him. Through him.

  Was she truly so oblivious?

  Or was he just worth far less than the dirt beneath her delicate slippers?

  That said, the ambulant flame did seem to talk to herself a great deal. Eccentric? Two rainbows short of a full quartet? He had heard that wealth made rich people lonely. He supposed that this truism was supposed to make poor, landless serfs happy with their lot in life. Pity he was not so docile. The girl certainly did not seem happy. Everything Tytiana saw or did seemed to fuel that simmering caldera of rage within her breast; her words spat from her like sparks absconding from a roaring bonfire. He had always thought of violet as a cool colour, but her eyes seemed to mirror the violet heart of the hottest fires he knew, those in the central furnace of the weapons and armour forge where his father oftentimes worked as a day labourer.

  He smiled when she cursed, however. Not so much the lady, then! She probably put on perfect manners at the dinners and banquets and dances where she doubtless set the halls ablaze with her unforgettable beauty, but here, in private, it was a different matter.

  Or did they secretly despise that injured leg of hers? Whisper behind her back? Oh look, what a shame, her beauty marred … so unfortunate – people could be so cruel. He should know.

  Did she even have a leg?

  With graceful, economical movements, the girl scrutinised her surroundings once more before placing that scroll she held on the nearest worktable. Eschewing the stick this time, she marched over to the tiger’s cage and bent to unlock it. Definitely something unusual, yet not unattractive, about her gait. The habitat for the big cat was large, but not so spacious as a girl could hope to escape that dangerous beast once within. It might be just a fuzzy cub, but the way it was growling and pacing out the bounds of its territory … a shout of amazement strangled in Jakani’s throat as Tytiana casually stepped inside and latched the wire mesh doorway behind her!