Beasts of Tabat (11 page)

“Please, I can’t take your only chair,” he said, trying to stand. The rocking chair was small and low to the ground, contending with his legs’ lanky length to keep him from rising.

She shook her head. “I’ll fetch us both a mug.” She turned away to pull crockery down from the cupboard.

He coughed, trying to clear his throat. He pushed half-heartedly at the floor with his heels, but truth be told, it was pleasant to be sitting after the long walk and run from the upper river docks. It was nice to be fussed over.

As he looked around, he saw a fat black rat warming itself in the shadows of the stove. It sat upright on its hind legs and regarded him.

When the old woman approached again, the rat slid back into darkness. Even so, she cursed and handed Teo the mug. Stooping, she grabbed a coal from the basket and threw it with surprising force and decisiveness into the shadows. It hit with a clatter that said its target had eluded it. Granny Beeswax muttered something.

“Drink up, drink up,” she said, giving him a motherly pat on the shoulder. He gave her a grateful smile in turn.

She stared expectantly at him.

He raised the mug to his lips, but its bitter, unpalatable smell reminded him of spring nettles. He lowered it again to his knee.

“What’s wrong with it?” she demanded.

“There’s nothing wrong with it,” he faltered. He took a tiny sip and smiled broadly.

“A boy likes some sugar, I reckon,” she said, leering at him. She fetched a bulgy-sided pot from the cupboard and used a spoon to tap a few white grains into the mug. Two delicate clinks sounded against the rim as the sugar sifted in. “There. Try it now.”

He took another sip and set it down. “Did you have a message to be sent back to Mr. Canumbra, ma’am?” He wondered how impolite it would be to broach the subject of the payment Canumbra had promised.

She sighed in exasperation and reached out, whispering something rapid under her breath. Her fingers grasped his sleeve.

His senses swam, strings plucked by each syllable that passed her lips. The walls pressed in, then away, then inwards again as though breathing in time with him. It had gotten very hot again—he wasn’t sure when that had happened.

“What?” he gasped. He tried to gather his feet beneath him but his muscles were weak and watery. Granny Beeswax’s hand pressed down on his shoulder with the strength of a steel-jawed trap.

“Drink your tea, boy, it’ll make you feel better. You must be wracked from the trip. It’ll settle your stomach and set things straight for ye. Drink up, drink up.”

Teo let the mug fall from his fingers, despite Granny Beeswax’s words and the waves of weariness spreading outward from her touch. How could she have drugged him without him drinking any? Was this magic? Was she casting on him? He lurched, falling forward and away, landing on the floor on his hands and knees and scrabbling away on all fours from her outstretched hand.

“Settle down, boy! I mean you no harm!” But she kept reaching for him as he kept scrambling forward, managing to gain his feet and grab for the door’s latch, fumbling with it.

“Sit down!” she snapped. For a second it felt as though his muscles were not his own, as though he were a puppet, strings twitching to turn him. He shrugged it off, his fingers seeking the latch again.

“Still standing,” the old woman rasped. “What are ye then?”

The china knob rattled as the door swung open.

“None of that!” she said, yanking at his sleeve again, pulling the breath from him. He managed to stagger his way out the door’s slippery outline and into the alleyway. He flopped and lurched along, his limbs still reluctant, managing to stay ahead of the crone’s frenetic hobble. Cold washed through him as his senses returned.

Gaining the safety of the larger street didn’t seem to matter though, and he heard her still coming up behind him. She shouted, “Stop! Thief!” and the sound of doors opening spurred him on.

With every step more of his strength ebbed back. He hobbled, sobbing for breath, up a staircase, and into an almost-deserted avenue lined with aetheric lights.

The city streets seemed much less friendly now. He heard more shouting as he ascended a staircase. He hesitated, but this was in front of him, not at his heels. He pressed on, wondering what was happening.

He saw the answer spelled out in the first frozen moment after he came around the corner from Eelsy to Whiteroofs. Blood on the cobblestones, clockwork skeletons crouched above them. Were they leopards, tigers, chimeras of gears and pointed steel? Whatever they were, the ducal insignia blazed on their sides in blue metal, glittering in the sunlight that had toyed with the city all afternoon, appearing and disappearing.

“Peace Keepers!” someone shouted. The acrid smell of lightning and sulfur in the air hurt his nose. Teo shrank back into the shadows as the crowd dispersed, chased by the machines.

When they were gone, he gawped at the bloodstains on the cobblestones, the scarlet film that glistened on the stone, transforming it into something new, a mineral he’d only rarely glimpsed in the wilds of the North.

In the very oldest days, Da had once said, every building had a spirit built into it, a sacrifice that might be animal or Human or something else, depending on what was at hand and how important the building was. He wondered,
What are they building on these streets that must come out of blood drenching the stone?
He imagined golems rising up out of the cobblestones and shuddered.

He kept walking, his legs moving like a mechanical’s, numb and unfeeling, until finally he ducked into a little park, and sat on a bench, shivering, his arms clutched around his knees, trying, unsuccessfully, to stop the shaking.

He wasn’t sure he had a handle on the city after all.

***

Chapter Ten

Bella Eats at Various Establishments

I hate the Duke’s Teahouse, the fusty old place, but Leonoa loves it.

Buying her lunch there I say, “You can’t expect me to believe you’re penniless, you know. There are limits to even my gullibility.”

“I like to make sure I have enough laid aside,” Leonoa insists.

“People always buy your paintings! Where does all your money go?”

“This and that and the other thing.” Leonoa shrugs.

I sigh and watch the plaza. Here towards the front of the teahouse, tall, narrow windows, barely more than slats of glass, are fixed into the front wall. Pedestrian shadows pass by in rapid succession, like the blades of a fan.

“Have you ever listened to the political speakers out there, Bel?” Leonoa asks, tilting her head towards the plaza.

“Not a one,” I say promptly, pouring myself more tea. “Why stuff other people’s ideas into your head? Don’t you have enough of your own?”

“Do you ever think we need to hear other ideas?”

“Sometimes they’re just a needless distraction.”

“Not so with art.” Leonoa’s face, pinched as a two-skiff needle, eases as she elaborates on her words. “Art needs new things, all the time in order to keep getting better. Maybe people are the same way.”

“I don’t think so. Where would we be if we were changing the Gladiatorial ceremonies all the time? Centuries of tradition discarded for the sake of some new trapping.”

Leonoa breathes out dissatisfaction, blowing on the surface of her tea to cool it.

“I get new ideas,” I say, trying to placate her. “I try new techniques all the time. Like you, trying new painting materials.”

This distracts her in the way I thought it might. She says, “I’m looking for silver talc right now. A painter from the Southern Isles spoke of it the other day.”

“Ah? I can keep an eye out for such, and talk to some folks heading that way.” I glance at the light coming in through the front. “I’d been planning on going down to see if the
Bloom
has come in yet—”

“It hadn’t as of yesterday,” Leonoa supplies.

“—and then if it has arrived today, I will be first to greet your mother.”

Galia Kanto has been gone for several months now, on a Ducal expedition to the Southern Isles, but Leonoa seems unimpressed at the prospect of her mother’s imminent return. Since her illness, her parents treat her as though she were a prodigy, a circus freak who should not even really be alive, let alone painting.

“I have a present for you,” she says.

I perk up at this. “Oh?”

She slides a package wrapped in brown paper across the table. “A new book that claims to be written by a Beast trained by Jolietta Kanto. I thought it might interest you.”

Not touching or acknowledging it, I lay coins down on the table. “Shall I come around and see you in a few days?”

“Glyndia will be there,” Leonoa says. Challenge rings silvery in her tone, echoing the coins.

“I have no quarrel with her,” I say.

“No? She said you made her uncomfortable.…”

I bark out a laugh. “Ah, wouldn’t want the newcomer uncomfortable.”

“She’s the best thing that has ever happened to me.”

“She’s the newest thing that has happened to you. You know how you are, Leonoa. Fickle as the wind.”

“Don’t take me for yourself. Irresponsibility in love is not some familial trait, just something you’ve perfected.” She leans forward. “Irresponsibility in everything.”

“What do you mean?”

“Have you never thought that there is something wrong in you holding the office that you have for so long? Something
unnatural
? Look at yourself, you barely age—in fact, you seem to improve as the years pass. You cannot fool the eye of someone who’s painted you. How are you still Champion if something other than yourself is not meddling with you?”

“You envy my health,” I say with chill courtesy. “Quite understandable, given your condition.”

It is an unspeakably foul blow but I cannot take it back. We leave, silent with anger and not looking at each other.

The book stays behind on the table. Let the waiter find it and be educated.

I know enough about Jolietta and her methods.

* * *

When I met Adelina first, I didn’t know she had hidden depths. She was a pretty thing, dark-haired, dark-eyed, tall and slim as a willow. It wasn’t until we had our first fight that I found out her secret.

Perhaps she knew my patterns—knowing Adelina, she would have researched them before we ever went to bed. Or else she guessed that was how I usually begin pushing lovers away when they pull closer, by picking fights over petty things, and becoming unreasonable.

Either way, it worked. She confessed her secret, and it was so intriguing that it renewed my interest. I thought I knew all the rooms of her soul. Then she opened the door, and I realized I’d only been wandering in an entryway furnished to deceive casual visitors.

That’s a strained metaphor, as I understand them. Adelina is the one gifted with words, able to spin them into nets of story.

She told me her tale, how in school she began writing penny-wides in secret, keeping the money hidden. And when she had enough coin, she bought a printing press and pretended to her mother that they hired her, all so she could have her secret still.

Her mother Emiliana would be furious. She barely let her daughter escape the ties of the family business to become a Scholar. She pretended to be appalled by the choice, but I’ve seen the gleam in her eyes when she speaks of the honors Adelina’s scholarly histories have garnered. She’s never dreamed her daughter might be concealing a merchantly soul the equal of any in Tabat, pricing paper and ink, driving bargains with provisioners, calculating the mysteries of supply and public demand as accurately as her mother on any day.

But I will take some credit for the success of the press. It was not until Adelina and I came up with the idea of telling my stories that she truly became successful. My adventures, some actual, others entirely fictional, fund every other book that Spinner Press produces.

Someday her secret
must
come out. That’s the nature of secrets. You cannot count on them unless you keep them entirely to yourself. The moment you tell another person, that secret begins to make its way out into the world, because that person will tell another person, swearing them to secrecy of course, an oath they will evoke from another in turn as they continue to spread the story.

Today I am, as always, not telling secrets. Instead we are coming up with lies, not even based in truth this time, in order to create the next penny-wide. We’ll plot it out, and then Adelina will take the scraps of conversation, the handful of ideas, and somehow turn them into something that will enchant and delight. I don’t know how she does it. I think I am good at telling a joke or two, but I cannot hope to enrapture people the way that Adelina does when she begins. They listen to her when she speaks.

Sometimes I envy that a little because the only way that I can speak is by
being
. Being Bella Kanto. Being the person who lifts sword in Tabat’s service. All these decades now.

Adelina says, “I was thinking of sending you back to the Rose Kingdom.”

I object, “People know I have not been there in a decade.”

“Yes.” Adelina paces the room, tapping the end of her quill on her face, eyes narrowed and intent on some internal vista. “But we could always say this is an adventure from that previous visit, one that was never set down on paper before. After all, only two penny-wides came out of that trip.”

“That’s because, all in all, it was a very boring trip. The Rose Kingdom is much safer than anyone gives it credit for. The Hedge keeps it so.”

“Which gives us plenty of room to create new and exciting tales.”

“At least,” I tease her, “I know that you will never add your voice to those who urge me to step down. What would Spinner Press do without Bella Kanto as the Champion of Tabat?”

Annoyance narrows her eyes. “I think it could hold its own,” she retorts. “I’ve just taken on a writer who is devoting his stories to tales of the Explorers, and the exploration of the continent beyond and up to the north. People like to read such stories. And his have the advantage of being entirely true.”

I haven’t heard that tone in her voice for a long time. It’s one that used to be reserved for me.

“Who is this fellow?”

“His name is Eloquence Seaborn. A river Pilot.”

I shrug. “What sort of stories does he spin? We sailed a day, then anchored. Sailed another day and anchored. Came to a town and bought furs. Then back to Tabat.”

Adelina snorts. “You’d be surprised. River pirates and mountain lions. Not every danger occurs in the arena, Bella. You don’t have a patent on heroic actions.”

“I never said that,” I protest. But she has turned away already, avoiding this discussion, and is fishing through the stacked papers on her desk.

She turns back, a packet in her hand. “I need for you to go over these proofs, see if there are any mistakes or inaccuracies that need to be fixed.”

I roll my eyes. “You always ask that, but there are never any problems that I find.”

She shrugs. “I call it due diligence. This way you can never claim that I put something in that shouldn’t have been included.”

The thought amuses me. “Did you think I would hire a Lawyer and haul you away to court if you violate some guideline? It’s not as though we have some sort of contract.”

“Actually we do,” Adelina says. “You signed it long ago. Perhaps you don’t remember.”

It’s hazy but I do recall her giving me some papers when we first started this storytelling.

“Is that really necessary, Adelina? We are friends after all.”

“And I intend for us to remain friends,” she says. “It’s for your protection as well as mine.”

“Very Merchantly of you,” I say. I don’t realize it’s a dig until it leaves my mouth and her lips thin in response. She holds the package out to me without another word and I take it, searching for something to say. What is it recently that causes me to put off the ones I love? At this rate, I will have no friends left unless I learn to watch my words.

Still, I find it nettlesome, this lack of trust. I take the packet from her and bow formally, meaning that gesture as a reproach, but it is one that seems to glide off her, for she only bows in return.

* * *

At Berto’s, the cages full of little birds house quarrels and squawks. One lets out indignant chirps beside my ear. Outside, the day is still blindingly bright, sending shards of headache up from every puddle’s reflection.

My mid-afternoon chal cup holds three squares of seaweed surrounded by clusters of oil circles besieging them. They float in a green triangle, Gladiators surrounded by foes in the cup’s arena. Back-to-back, compensating for left or right-handedness. Which is only a matter of training, for I’ve found myself ambidextrous within the last decade. I don’t remember exactly when I realized it.

Leonoa’s voice in my mind says
unnatural
. I ignore it, studying the battle. Training and thought can win out against hordes, but there is always a point where there are simply too many opponents.

In which case you consider other options.

Someone settles into the opposite chair. I abandon the tactical analysis of my tea to greet them.

It’s my former student, Danokin Smallnets, a one-time foe, fallen as Spring—how long ago now? Over a decade, surely. Well-favored enough, though I’ve never been attracted. But as oily as my tea. Still, I salute him, open-palmed, one Gladiator to another.

He returns the gesture, studying me.

“You’re looking well,” he says in his usual truculent tone. It’s habit with him, not active intent, and I ignore it.

“Doing well enough. And yourself?”

“Retiring.”

“What?” The startled twitch of my hand sends ripples across the tea. One square floats apart from its fellows. Oil blobs surround it, ready to drag it down.

“My knee’s never been the same since that Enfield tore into it three years back. I’ve been offered a good position, steady and plenty, for overseeing the security at Bernarda’s gallery.”

“May the Trade Gods favor you in that,” I say sincerely enough, but he grimaces at me.

“We can’t all be Bella Kanto and fight forever,” he says.

“I hear this chorus enough without you singing it,” I snap back. I’m prepared to say more, but just then three cages come to life, their occupants deciding to engage in the battle they’ve been sidling toward. Feathers fly and the birds scream as Berto flings black cloths over the cages to calm them.

“What’s wrong with them?” I ask as Berto muffles the cage near my elbow.

“Some have readied to breed too early and attack the others.”

“Nature is upset by all these late springs,” Danokin says. “Even small things suffer for your arrogance.”

I ignore him as I count coins onto the table. The last time I fought here in Berto’s, he threatened to ban me on the next occasion. Danokin sits. I can feel him, arms crossed, leaning back in his chair, studying me. Resentment roils from every inch of him.

Will Skye come to resent me like that?

Or is she the student I will be ready to step aside for?

I leave.

I have enough opponents that I don’t need to number Leonoa among them. My cousin will listen to my apology, will forgive me.

On my abandoned table, the seaweed floats as the oil pulls inexorably at its edges until, cooling, it sinks and drowns.

* * *

I will go back and apologize to Leonoa.

I will explain that I’m cranky, that since rising I’ve felt a tension around me, a vibration beneath my boot soles. Someone, somewhere, is working spells against me.

I know the sensation well. Each year it starts a few weeks before I’m due to fight Spring. Trip-you-can cantrips, barbed hexes, and encompassing ill-wishes smudging everything around me.

Leonoa would not work magic against me, but I will keep her sweet-tempered for her own sake. Ill-wishes should not worry me. I pay a hex-wife well to keep me warded, after all, and toss a coin in every fountain I encounter.