Beasts of Tabat (19 page)

“Come back to bed,” I say and drag him back through the wash of moonlight from the many-paned window, its shadow an inky net on the floor.

* * *

Teo found the book lying beside the pile of boots he was supposed to shine for Bella, thrown there in a pile of other discards, a torn scarf and a glove worn past mending. He picked it up reverently. Books were not something that he had seen much of in his village. They were rare and precious, to be saved for teaching with. And here was one that Bella apparently did not want.

When he opened it and began to read, he realized that it was about the place where Bella had spent her early years, years only mentioned briefly in the penny-wides, sometimes not at all. It was about Jolietta Kanto, the preface said, told by a Centaur that had once belonged to her.

He took the book with him to his room, and that night, by candlelight, began to puzzle it out. It did not begin with Jolietta Kanto, actually. It began with the Centaur in his own land being captured by slavers and the adventures that gradually took him to Piper Hill.

The book made him sad. When he read of the Centaur, packed on a ship with the other slaves, taken forever from his home, he found himself crying. He closed it and wiped his face. What was the good of a book that made you weep? Books should thrill you, should tell you of adventures, not of sorrows.

He was tempted to throw it away, as Bella apparently had. Perhaps it had made her cry as well, although he found it impossible to imagine her in tears. But it was a book, after all, and therefore valuable in and of itself. So he tucked it with the few other belongings he had accumulated: a battered comb, a change of shirts, and a few pretty shells picked up below the docks while scavenging. Elya would have liked them, and he had a notion that sometime he might send them to her.

For now, though, he would give them no way to trace him. Like the Centaur, he would never see his home again.

***

Chapter Eighteen

Bella in Training

“You almost never speak of your life before the Brides of Steel,” Skye says. I’m showing her how to throw the sharp little star-knives that fighters from the Rose Kingdom favor.

When I’d entered the lobby, she’d been there, throwing snowballs in the courtyard with some of the other girls. I’d joined in at first, but found her by my side, chattering away as we defended the fountain in the center. Somehow now we’re here, by ourselves.

A target flutters on the wall, made of cheap orange-tinted paper, concentric circles drawn with charcoal in its center. I can hear the shouts and smacking snowballs outside still.

I say, “Perhaps I feel that I had no life before I came to the Brides of Steel.” My hand flickers, and a knife quivers in the target’s innermost ring, trembling with the force of its impact.

“But you had a childhood.”

Skye lines herself up and throws, biting her lip in concentration. The knife hits an outer ring.

“Better. Hold your elbow as I showed you.”

“Bella!”

“What?”

I collect knives from the target, plucking them out as though selecting flowers for a bouquet.

“You had a childhood. You did not hatch from an egg at age fifteen, there at the gates of the Brides of Steel.”

“Yes, I had a childhood. I had toys and holidays. I was raised by parents, and when they died, I was sent to first to live with my cousin’s family and later my aunt.”

“Jolietta Kanto.”

I turn. Skye’s face is flushed. She’s been talking about me to the others.

“If you know all this, why do you ask me?” I say. “Or better yet, why not go read a penny-wide for clues?”

“Because I want to know,” Skye says. “What made you what you are today? Why did you come to the school so late in life? What was it like being raised by a renowned Beast Trainer and why do you refuse to deal with Beasts now?”

“My aunt,” I say, clipping each word off with cold, displeased precision, “had many theories on the raising and training of Beasts, which she was delighted to test on a Human child. Do you want more details, Skye? I can assure you that you will not find them palatable. Nor will you wish to replicate my experiences.”

Skye takes a step back in the face of that hostility. “I’m sorry,” she falters. “I just wanted …”

“What you want does not concern us here,” I say. “What I want to do does, and that is to teach you. Before tomorrow, be able to hit the second ring three times running.”

Thrusting the handful of knives on Skye, I make for the door.

“So you’ll be back tomorrow,” Skye says, so softly that I can pretend not to hear as I leave.

* * *

When I run into Miche in Berto’s, I invite him home with me. I try to lose myself in the bed, thrusting thoughts of Skye away while his body clamors against mine. His muscles are lean, sliding under the skin, a slide that reminds me of the feel of a great serpent. He is good, one of the ones that make an art-form of lovemaking. There’s always a certain distance to those, as though they were watching from afar, judging breaths and grimaces and measuring them against previous encounters. It is better than Alberic, who takes without ever questioning his right to do so.

Long afterward, tangled in sleep’s petticoats, I dream of a house, the kind I grew up in: several-storied and many-roomed. Passages that go up- and downstairs, staircases hidden behind cupboards and tapestries, cellar tunnels winding torch-lit through the earth, attics full of rats and packing cases.

I know this dream. I’ll be inside the walls for a little while—just moved in or investigating the place for a friend or relative. Things will begin to move. Turning to see something settling to a table, I’ll know, that seconds before, it was hovering in the air. More and more objects, until finally half the room is floating, lamps and books and knick-knacks and pots of blue flowers.

I stand there, knowing that if only I can say something, I can dismiss this malign entity, this poltergeist. If only I can speak, say something, anything. My jaws work, but no sound comes forth, not even a hiss or whisper.

In the dream kitchen downstairs, a tool lies on the table, glinting in the red moonlight. Am I supposed to dull the ghost? Then I realize it’s the other way around. I’ve already gentled the ghost, long ago.

I wake in a cold sweat.

Moonlight still pours through the window and I see with muzzy surprise—am I dreaming or awake?—Miche near the chest at the bed’s foot. Is its lid ajar? If so, only for a moment before he stands, chilly witch light gilding his form.

“What are you doing?” I say.

“I got cold, I was looking for another blanket.”

“Moons, it’s warm enough in here to stifle an eel!”

He laughs. “I’ve been down south. You haven’t known hot until you’ve been through summer there.”

“There’s more blankets in that cupboard, on the top shelf.”

“Here?”

“That’s not the warmest one, there’s a knitted one up on top.”

“This will be fine enough.”

He drapes it over his side and crawls back into bed, curling up against me. He feels clammy and heavy, but the musk of his hair is pleasant.

After a few moments, I feel myself falling asleep as I watch the moonlight continue to spill through the window, silver strands weaving, embroidering themselves on the air, outlining the white flowers with a poisonous glow, filling up the shadows until the chamber seems bright as day. The red moon has passed, and only the white moon remains.

* * *

Adelina’s offices are in the heart of the building. She pretends to be only a clerk here, but in truth it’s her printing house, no matter how she lies to her mother. If I were her, I’d flaunt it and let Emiliana see that I’d made something entirely my own, despite all her efforts to steer her daughter’s course.

My presence has earned this building the little silver tile set with a white sword that sits to the right of the arch of bricks surrounding the door, amid a rainbow of others. I tap it with my finger as I go past.

Serafina, the clerk who serves Adelina, ushers me into a waiting room. It’s not often that Adelina makes me cool my heels, but Serafina is apologetic, deferential, and brings me tea and pastries. I eat half of a fat, sugar-rolled doughnut, wrap the rest in a napkin, and slide it in a pocket for later.

The little room is well-used but comfortable. There’s a shelf of the Trade Gods associated with printing: Accuracy and Advertising foremost among the little crowd of figurines. Books are stacked everywhere. An entire shelf holds the purple-bound volumes of my adventures. I pick up the nearest—
Bella and the Sea Pirates
—and settle down to read about myself.

These are the books that built this printing house. Adelina had been having little success with her historical monographs when one drunken night she proposed writing up my adventures and seeing how they sold in a penny-wide, one of the news sheets spewed out daily to amuse the citizenry.

Now we have these little books. This one has been made for the upper crust, bound in expensive Dragon leather. Gilt dusts the edges of the pages.

Everyone in Tabat reads these. The Humans, at least, and I suspect a few of the Beasts who illicitly learn to read as well.
The Tales of Bella Kanto
.

So little of it is true, but they all believe in it so strongly, this borrowed glamour.

Who’d have thought a dry historian could concoct such stories? And racy ones at times, to boot. Her imagination is richer than any life ever could be.

True, she has me as the central point. Surely any tale launched about the Champion of Tabat will sail a worthy course.

But still. No City’s Champion has ever reigned so long.

Adelina enters. Her cheeks are flushed. She’s been flirting with someone. I know that sparkle, and I feel a twinge of jealousy and put it down as sternly as Leonoa would want.

As though evoked by the thought, Adelina says, “Leonoa was here this morning. The Bank has frozen her money, saying that she preaches sedition.”

“Is that legal?” I ask.

Her shoulders move in a shrug, a graceful motion that makes the jealousy prick at my ribs again.

“She said she would appeal to you, but you have been quarreling.” Her eyes search mine.

“Those pictures,” I say, the words slow and careful. “Adelina, perhaps they
are
sedition. Beasts and Humans, this is the natural order of things.”

Adelina settles on the couch to examine the selection of pastries Serafina has brought. She picks a hyacinth cookie and nibbles at its edge as she thinks.

“I’m surprised to hear that,” she says. “I always assumed—because of your upbringing—that you sympathized with the Beasts.”

We’ve rarely spoken of my time with Jolietta. I’ve never told her the entirety, only enough to explain why I rejected my training, why I chose to become a Gladiator rather than follow in Jolietta’s footsteps as a Beast Trainer.

“I object to her methods,” I say. “They were harsh and unnecessarily cruel. Beasts are like children. They should be guided. To put one on a footing with Humans would be a disservice to both.”

Is that true?
I think of Phillip.
Was he not as well-spoken and as wise as any Human?

But there are always exceptions that prove the rule.

“You feel so strongly about this that you’d renounce your cousin?” Shock fills Adelina’s tone. To Merchants, family is always first and foremost.

“No, no, of course not,” I snap. “But she has been scolding me lately. Forgive me for not leaping to her defense.”

“Scolding you about what?”

I hesitate. I don’t want to pry open this particular barrel. Too many rotted things could lie inside. “Many things,” I finally say, and am relieved that she accepts it.

“Will you help her, Bella? Or shall I?”

The insinuation that I wouldn’t nettles me. “I am short at the moment,” I drawl. “I am sure the fortunes of Spinner Press can cover this.” She can remember whose adventures built those fortunes easily enough; I need not remind her.

***

Chapter Nineteen

Teo’s Life with Bella

Teo liked accompanying Bella on errands. People often came up to greet her and compliment her, which she always took with a gracious smile and a cheerful reply. There were some who muttered and scowled at her, and she smiled just as cheerfully at them. If they said something, her spine would become steel, eyes gone not hard but absent and impersonal, a shield so obdurate no amount of rudeness could ever get through.

This trip was less interesting because it included Miche. Bella didn’t talk to Teo as she usually did. Instead he trailed behind the two of them with Abernia’s basket as they chattered back and forth, en route to the press that printed the penny-wides about Bella.

The press was near the Slumpers, the factories that tinted the river here a deep orange with their residues. He knew now that this was the reason the cheapest paper in Tabat was pale orange, used for penny-wides and scratch paper and wrappings for meat and bread and cheese, giving it what people called “Tabat savor,” a coppery edge that Teo had found most unpalatable at first.

They went along Spring Avenue, then took the Eastern Tram down. Teo clung to the railing, gazing wide-eyed over the city. It was like flying in a dream, slow and even over a changing landscape, the snow covered trees and bushes texturing the garden strip running alongside the Tram, broken on the odd-numbered terraces by wide streets and on the fifth and eleventh terraces by the double-broad Spray and Salt Ways.

The press was a graceful, three-story building of gray-green marble and black iron fretwork. Three cupolas rose on its spiky roof, wide windowed and overlooking the rainbow water of the river.

Adelina awaited them on the steps. She and Bella embraced before Bella swung back to introduce Adelina and Miche so they might exchange cordial nods.

Bella took the armload of books Adelina was holding, checking the spines before she handed them off to Teo. “We are bound for chal at Berto’s next, if you’re free.”

“No—I’m meeting with a new writer.”

“What, someone other than me?” Bella teased.

“Indeed! A river Pilot, who makes stories as alive as any I’ve ever read. I’ve spoken of him to you before.”

“What’s his name?”

“Eloquence Clement.”

A pang rooted itself in Teo’s chest, pinning him in place. His eyes widened. Miche’s side glance caught him, the older man’s eyes considering, taking in the information like a Merchant sliding a few coins into a purse.

“Is he due here soon? I’d like to meet him.”

Teo was made of glass, poised to fall and break. He tried to catch Bella’s eye, to shake his head “no,” but all of Bella’s attention was set on teasing Adelina, who’d gone pink-cheeked.

“You like this fellow! And yet by the name, a Moon follower. You and Leonoa, setting all the rules on their edges.”

“You’re a fine one to talk about that,” Adelina snapped back, quick as a closing trap.

Miche cleared his throat. “Let’s be off, Bella,” he said. “The boy and I are hungry.”

He smiled at Teo, but the expression was cold and unwarming. It was a smile of reckoning, a smile that said,
You owe me now
, with the careful precision of the many versed and numbered Trade Gods’ catechism.

* * *

Abernia kept him well-fed. Teo could feel himself filling out and getting stronger. He liked to sit in the kitchen, polishing silver or sharpening knives, while she chattered away to him about city life. She told him stories about the founding of Tabat by Verranzo’s Shadow Twin. It made him think of his own Shadow Twin, of her coin. Was he safe here from the Priests? Bella had said they would not search the city for him, that he need not worry that anyone in the house would turn him in, but it was still with some trepidation that he finally confided in Abernia.

“You needn’t worry, boy,” she said, folding dishtowels. “Sure, if someone went to the Temples and said where you were, they’d come looking for you. And the law would think that right of them, for technically you belong to them. They have the legal right to take you, and certainly they would punish you, to discourage others from following your example. But have you many enemies willing to betray you to them?”

Her eyes twinkled. He was safe.

But it did not content him. It was odd that it wasn’t until he was safe in Bella’s house that Teo truly felt homesick. All the weeks of scrambling for existence, of trying to find shelter, the days when he counted himself lucky when he found a nook in which he could doze for an hour or two, none of those had been accompanied by this longing.

There was no sense to it. Here he was warm and fed, here he was safe from the Temples. Here he was in the household of his hero, the woman whose adventures he had followed for so long. And yet at night, as he fell asleep, longing crept over him.

Not longing for his village overall but longing for little things, like the taste of his mother’s spice rolls and the feel of Elya cuddled up to him beside the fire. The look of Lidiya’s hand gesturing out how to harvest a particular plant, or even, most oddly of all, the smell of his father’s cloak.

Somehow it showed itself in his face at breakfast. Abernia gazed at him and said, “Homesick, lad?”

He started to shake his head, then nodded.

“It makes no sense to me,” he said. “I couldn’t go home. I don’t want to go home.”

“Sometimes, knowing that you can’t return makes it all the more precious,” she said. She tapped her teeth with a fingernail, considering him, her head tilted to one side as though contemplating a brisket to decide how many hours it would take to roast.

“You need a day to yourself,” she said.

It startled him. “What?”

“Oh,” she said, “don’t think that it will be a day free of work, but I have errands I will send you on, Teo. That will give you a chance to see the city. No wonder you have the megrims, you’ve been shut up in here.”

“Not anywhere near the Temples?”

She said, “I keep telling you, they have no interest in you unless someone brings you to their attention. There is no reason to fear them, Teo.” Seeing how unconvinced he looked, she said, “No, I will not send you anywhere near the Temples.”

She took down a shopping basket. Turning, she handed him several coins. His eyes widened. Silver skiffs, not copper! She laughed at his wide eyes and said, “I know you won’t run off with them. Spend two copper skiffs of the change on yourself. If I write down a list, can you read?”

“Of course I can!” he said indignantly.

She shook her head. “There’s no shame in not being able to read. It’s not a skill I would have expected in a country boy. How did you learn?”

“The penny-wides,” he said. “Sometimes things come packed in them.”

Comprehension lit her face. “Of course. That explains so much.” There was amusement in her tone. “No wonder you came to Bella Kanto.”

* * *

He hardly knew where to put the coins. He was so worried that he might lose them. Not in a pocket, where they might slip out or fall prey to a pickpocket’s quick fingers. Not held in his hand, where he might drop them. In the end he adopted a simple trick he’d seen used on the street. He tucked them in his cheek. They seemed safest there.

Tabat’s main marketplace straddled a cluster of staircases. A Mermaid sat coiled in an immense bathtub whose clawed feet clutched wooden rollers. A brake lever was fixed in place, keeping the tub from rolling down the decline. Her hair had the same gilt gleam as the hot and cold taps wound round with strings of pea-sized pearls.

A chain soldered to the spigot led to the collar of an anorexic white kitten that wandered near the bathtub’s tail end, eying the Mermaid with mingled antipathy and fascination.

Copper and silver coins half-filled a basket fastened to the outside of the tub’s rim. The Mermaid sang as she combed her hair. Her gills were feathered ruffs in the hollows of her skeletal throat, veined like internal organs, dark blue arteries and fanned capillaries, anemone and embroidery.

He picked through the stalls following Abernia’s scrawled instructions: two loaves of bread, a packet of needles, an orange envelope of nettle tea.

Abernia had told him to buy the fish from a stall near the docks, and so he wandered down through the terraces. From the lowest one, he glimpsed ships being loaded and unloaded: broad-bellied Merchant vessels from the Southern Isles filled with bales of spices and cloth, the narrow schooners used for sorcerer hunting, towering war-ships which patrolled the western coasts.

The stall was next to a small dock where the fishing boats moored. Looking over the edge, he saw chalky white jellyfish floating in the water like deflated lace balloons, swaying back and forth with the waves’ movement.

A little street led up the hillside again. Drawn by the smell of cooking meat, Teo rounded a corner, still google-eyed. How did anyone become accustomed to this place? He wondered how far he could walk in a day. He sniffed the air again and saw the booth that was the source of the wonderful, rich smell.

Planking had been nailed together and draped with canvas, purple and blue feathers stuck along the booth’s top edge. Two platters of meat pies sat on a blocky shelf, watched over by a small, grubby child.

Buying two, Teo headed home. He bounded up the steps towards Bella’s house filled with renewed enthusiasm, Abernia’s basket bumping heavily on his hip. This was the best of all possible lives.

* * *

Rallies crowded Eelsy Street, so he took the long way round. Three stairs up, and he’d be on Greenslope.

Someone grabbed and shook him, hard enough to hurt. Coins fell from his mouth to ring on the pavestones.

“Ah, lad,” a voice said. He recognized it instantly: Canumbra. Legio was kneeling to collect the scattered coins. His heart sank. “I thought we’d run into you soon enough. Granny Beeswax would like to know more about ye. And so would I.”

The voice was closer as Canumbra leaned forward, hissing into Teo’s ear. His breath was foul and reeked of whiskey. “Make a sound, boy, and we’ll let them know you’re some sort of filthy Beast. Think anyone will come to your rescue, knowing that?”

Legio leaned in from the other side. “They’d kill you if they knew, boy.”

Heavy hands on his shoulders pushed Teo along. Panicked and stumbling, Teo didn’t dare call out—who here would be willing to help him? Visions of the pyre danced in front of him. Canumbra shoved him into the mouth of an alley, and he went sprawling on the icy cobblestones, trying to roll away but only to find himself crawling up the filth of a midden heap.

Legio guffawed. “Look at him now! Not so cocky, eh?”

Canumbra was sorting through the basket, nose wrinkling. “Fish and bread and needles. Scarce enough to buy your freedom.”

Teo tried to protest. They were treating him as though he’d wronged them by getting away, but that didn’t make sense. Nothing in this city made sense.

Canumbra’s boot was on his chest, pinning him. The sky was chilly blue and white behind his head. Grinning, the man leaned down, replacing the boot with a knee. “Think you’re smart, boy?”

“No,” Teo said honestly. “Please …”

“Think anyone will miss you?” Canumbra sneered.

“Yes!” Teo gasped. “I’ve got a job, and they expect me. I could give you money. When I’m paid, I mean.”

Interest flickered in Canumbra’s eyes. “Where’s the job?”

“It’s with Bella Kanto.”

Legio guffawed.

Canumbra said, “Pull the other one, boy. Tell you what: we’ll welcome you to Tabat, take you sight-seeing, visit the Tram.” Canumbra smirked down at him. “Come on. Have you ever ridden it?” The man suddenly oozed horrible charm, ominous beyond measure.

He held onto Teo’s shoulder as Legio paid for tickets for all three of them. He shoved Teo into the last of the tripartite Tram chambers and glowered at the occupants, a pair of pock-marked youths in ill-fitting suits, until they took the hint and moved along to another chamber.

Canumbra opened the window of the Tram and shoved Teo against it so he leaned out halfway. From here, the rooftops were quilt patches, bits of corduroy and calico. The tree branches were fuzzes of mold where the quilt had softened and gone to rot. The sky was very blue. Everything was very clear.

He could feel Canumbra’s erection against his hip, and for some reason he could smell fish. He wondered where they would throw him down off the Tram and how much it would hurt to fall and be broken. He remembered the pain of last Winter’s broken arm. He supposed it would be much worse than that. He thought about Canumbra,
What is he going to do, rape me here in front of his friend?
and wanted to giggle and then thought,
but that’s possible, of course,
and resolved to hold very still no matter how Canumbra’s hard sex radiated heat and need.

They were passing close to a staircase and someone shouted. He jerked his attention away from Canumbra. A well-dressed man stared straight at them.

“What’s that?” Legio jostled both of them from behind.

“Some toff interfering,” Canumbra snarled. He pushed Teo out a few more inches, his fist knotted in his jacket painfully tight and cutting off all breath. Teo could feel his heart speeding up.

“Do you understand, boy, that I’m not fooling around, that I’ll come kill you if you don’t come back with something to satisfy me?” Canumbra snarled.

Teo nodded frantically, trying to grab enough lung hold to breathe.

“All right then.” But Canumbra did not loosen his grip. “You think you’re smart, don’t you, boy?” he demanded. “Think you’re smarter than me, that’s been living in this city for years and years. Think that I can’t do nothing to you in public? That’s where you’re wrong. I could sling you out of this window, easy as eating a pudding.”

The Tram ground to a stop at the next platform. Teo could hear people shouting. Legio glanced out the window. “It’s the Richie,” he said. “Shove the boy out to distract them and let’s leg it.”

“No!” Teo tried to shout, but he found himself almost entirely outside the window dangling by ankles and wrists as he fought for handhold.

There were shouts—
Hold on!
And
There lad!
Then people were hauling him into the Tram basket, the structure shaking with the abruptness of his arrival. He was on his hands and knees, feeling the corrugated pattern of the metal floor against his palms.