Beasts of Tabat (23 page)

She will drag everyone into this if she can. I will protect Skye. And Teo. I will send him to the circus that Miche has suggested. That will keep him safer and unassociated with me.

She does not go away immediately. I hear her shouting at the door, which is not thick enough to keep out all the ugly words. Abernia’s steps come up the stairs, and then her voice speaks, low and reasonable, but firm. Somehow she coaxes Marta away. I begin to sit down in the chair she has left, but her smell still clings to it, and it twists my stomach. The smell seems to fill the room, a too-sweet musk.

I open the window and let snow and wind, crisp and cold, sweep the smell from the room. I look out into the darkness. The lights of the city glimmer and gleam here and there, but the snow obscures so much.

***

Chapter Twenty-One

Teo Goes to the Circus

The only small flaw in life with Bella was Miche, who seemed so fascinated by Teo. It seemed to Teo the man watched him. He wanted something from Teo. But what?

He mulled it over as he fell asleep. The man’s face swam in front of him, and a voice began to talk to him.

It was almost familiar—a forgotten friend—talking and telling him its story while hazy visions of its words floated before him. It said:

My father’s tower was full of Beasts. They were the only company beside myself that he allowed. He bred them, created new things that the world had never seen, all of us living there together. The tower was immense and ringed with windows, the last remnant of a great castle.

Teo wanted to ask who the voice’s father was, but it ignored his silent question and continued.

The Beasts shat in the lowest level, as did we, and in time that grew to such a vile pit that Father had a staircase built out of one of the second floor windows. After that, we used it to go in and out, while downstairs massive heaps of composted shit accumulated, so rich and magic-tainted that it spawned mushrooms—spotted, speckled, and sometimes bearing eyes on tenuous stalks, or unfolding from their caps’ flesh and gifted with speech. When anyone went downstairs or tried one of the outer doors, they broke into floods of incomprehensible babbling, and at night we’d hear them singing old folksongs against each other, none singing the same as any of the others, like bizarre, broken rounds.

Far away, Teo could hear the sound of the mushrooms singing, a shrill piping on the edges of his hearing.

When I turned fifteen, my father let me start selling the fungi to traveling peddlers, who fit them into tiny, soundproofed vials with two or three pinches of the tarry basement soil, to take and sell as wonders in the city. Kept damp and sheltered, the mushrooms could keep for weeks, perhaps even months.

Teo could smell the rotting compost and hear the squeaks of the imprisoned mushrooms.

You might think otherwise, but one thing I never did in those days was dabble in my father’s magic. He taught me that lesson early.

He had gone out—to bargain with a nearby farmer for beef to feed the Beasts. I went to experiment, having watched him cast a spell to cure my toothache the night before. I did not know he had set a charm on his equipment.

I reached out to touch a beaker that bubbled with lime-green liquid. As soon as my finger came in contact with it, my hand blazed with agony.

I reeled away, clutching my burning hand, blundering against the cabinets and shelves, in crashes of glass and paper and clanging metal. Finally the pain died away, little by little in a teasing way—it kept returning just when I thought I was finally rid of it. I did not clean up any of the damage I had caused—just looking at that table made me break into a cold sweat, made my fingers coil into my palm in remembered torment.

For the first time there was pain in the other’s voice. Teo wanted to reach out, to touch his shoulder, but they were suspended in mist and fire and flickering water. The voice steadied and went on.

When he returned, he said nothing about the mess. He whistled a charm and the shattered glass sorted itself into piles of the salvageable and the unsalvageable. All of us went barefoot, including the Beasts, so he whistled away every scrap, every splinter. That night when I went to bed in the pile of blankets I nested in, I found a great long shard, clear as ice, from the largest beaker lying across them. I put it away and did not look at him.

We had many Beasts throughout my childhood. Their lifetimes varied, but most are short. Only the most humanly featured Beasts have long lives—those and the Dragons as they used to be. Not as they are now.

For a while, we had a Catoblepas, its body buffalo-wide and scaled, its shaggy head always pointing downward due to the heavy weight of its tusks. It ate poisonous vegetation harvested from the sward beside the marsh, which I gathered wearing great canvas gloves that extended past my elbows, nearly to my shoulders. And a dwarf Unicorn, whose hooves left shining, icy footprints wherever it walked. Riddling Deer grazed in the forest around the tower, but I never succeeded in catching one to hear it speak.

One by one the creatures waddled or danced or slid by. The Catoblepas had whiskers like a catfish’s, and the scales covering its back were green and glossy. The Riddling Deer pranced on delicate feet, their eyes as brown as hidden forest pools.

Later what my father insisted was an Ypotryll—although it seemed much like any Chimera to me, despite its camel’s hump, and we had had such—and Gryphons and Hippogriffs—by the scadsfull. Traders knew my father would pay well for Beasts, so they brought any they laid hands on. Beyond that, at least two thirds of the inhabitants of the tower came because my father had acquired a name for succoring Beasts, for not requiring that they enact that same sort of servitude that other sorcerers demanded—even a Dragon once, before Bellanora—after that city’s fall, the Kettle King’s forces came and took her away—enough soldiers and Beast-hunters that my father did not stand in their way.

As they took her away, in anthracite chains that bit at her ankles and draped over her furled wings, she wept oily, sulfur-tinged tears. The sunlight glittered on her scales as they forced her to climb in minute steps, up a ramp to the bed of an enormous ox cart. She lay down there, still weeping, and the soldiers tossed more chains back and forth, prisoning her to the wood, unsoftened by straw or padding. Other soldiers stood by with hackbuts braced and ready, flared muzzles trained on her like ears listening to her betrayal.

The air smelled of rust and blood and rage.

My father was angry as he stood watching, as angry as I’d ever seen him.

“That man claims to rule the Sorcerers now,” he said to me. “But if any of them could ever look past their petty quarrels and learn to work in unison, he could be overthrown.”

I was wary. Who knew what sort of listening spells the Pot and Kettle King kept on each of the continent’s Sorcerers? Decades—centuries, even—of attrition had reduced their ranks to a few dozen. Few enough that he could watch all of them if he lived up to the legends told of him. And, as though he shared my apprehensions, my father spoke no more on that matter.

That night, I crept out a stone-arched window and, my skinny ass planted on a crenellated ledge, listened past the faint fungal sounds from far below, deeper, into the night’s heart. The fields near the tower had been allowed to lie fallow for years, and white owls hunted field mice and insects up and down the ancient ruts of rows. The land pretended to be level, but sometimes swooped up and down, breaking into folds that might hold a stream or grotto.

The mist settled and Teo could see the scene: the lanky, lonely boy, face turned away towards the purple moon.

An Enfield came creeping over the tiles towards me in the feverish double moonlight that gilded its fox’s ears and the tufts of its shaggy fur. Its talons clicked on the creaking tiles of the roof, which flared out here over the first floor. Reaching me, it rested its head on my knee and closed its eyes, nudging my wrist with a cold-nosed kiss into action, so I would pet it.

These creatures had a lesser intelligence—a smart dog’s, perhaps. What was the purpose of such a thing, the awkward melding of fox head and tail, the wolf’s body, the eagle talons? These had been created to ward a specific town—Enfield—by a sorcerer who my father frequently regarded as a rival and sometimes as a friend. How this one had come here, I was not sure—as far as I could tell, it had simply showed up one day.

I thought about my father. He paid me little attention, but at the same time, I was clearly his—like the Beasts—and not to be meddled with. Village children threw stones and dried mud clots at me and found them returned at a red-hot heat. Just as the woman who stole a Unicorn colt that had ventured too far away found herself drawn up in painful, inescapable muscle cramps.

I was with my father, trailing after him to see what he was up to that day, as I often did. He walked into the house and came out with the colt wrapped in a grey blanket, shining against the coarse fabric.

He walked out past the bed where the woman lay. Her back arched like a terrible scream, unable to do anything but a slow and dreadful writhing, her face a rictus as grim as the skull that sat on my father’s desk and was never to be touched, lest it bite.

What did it mean that he acted one way towards that woman—or me for that matter, setting my fingers ablaze—and another towards the Kettle King’s agents? How free was he? How free was I? I scratched the fur around the Enfield’s seamed neck, where fox red met wolfish silver, and watched purple Toj edge along the horizon.

For a moment, Teo roused. All around him the house was still and silent. Even the bard had given over practicing and gone to bed.

Perhaps he was still dreaming, though. Beside him, the voice said,
There is something about you. There’s magic in you, waiting to be harvested.

It paused as though waiting for an answer from Teo, but he said nothing. He knew if he only waited long enough, it would tell him exactly what he needed to know. But before that could happen, there was water between them, washing into the room, washing him into someone else’s dreams, someone else’s memories, once more.

I sold mushrooms for three years, conducting business while my father stayed in his tower. I’d come in and give him the fruits of my bargaining. I never dared hold a coin back. I knew if I did, he’d leave me writhing, like that woman.

It was the voice again. So familiar. Who was it? He should know this man.

I hated going down in the damp stink to gather mushrooms. For one thing, they’d howl. It’d be all noise and stench and queasy lantern light guttering over the oily, slick piles. I wrapped a scarf soaked in vinegar over my face, used that to filter the fumes, and plucked each noisome morsel up to put in the moss-lined basket hanging from my belt.

It paused, and a turtle swam past, glowing in the darkness. It clacked its beak at him and he thought it would say something but instead the voice continued.

One day I found a new kind of mushroom.

Then Abernia was leaning over him, shaking him. “Time to get up, boy,” she said briskly. “Work to do.”

* * *

Teo could tell there was something different about the girl Skye, who sometimes accompanied Bella. She was a student, and there were other students with Bella sometimes. She took them on walks, or rather runs, usually, throughout the city, or down to the docks to buy them treats, and any number of other field excursions. She’d told Teo that she did it to reward the ones who tried hard.

But Bella didn’t act like Skye was just another student. She listened to her, for one, in a way that Teo, even though he adored Bella, had to admit she extended to no one else. It was one of the things you could count on about Bella, in fact, that she usually wouldn’t be listening as hard as she could, and that if you caught her at it, she’d only give you a grin and shrug, as though to say,
that’s how I am
.

Bella catered to Skye, allowed her suggestions to shape the route or pick one destination, such as a favored chal shop, over another.

She was pretty enough, but she wasn’t all that. Not when you took apart her features. It was simply that they combined in a way that clearly pleased Bella. Maybe she reminded Bella of someone else.

She reminded Teo of Biort back home. She had a way of standing as though she didn’t doubt she was the most important one in the room. Bella did that too, of course, but Bella had earned it. She was Bella Kanto, after all. Who was this chit that she should set herself up as Bella’s equal, and worse, have Bella act as though the opinion was justified?

He found her irritating enough that he ended up avoiding Bella’s company whenever Skye was around, which made it even more irritating when the amount of that time grew and grew.

It was a shame. Bella, when by herself, could be coaxed into telling all sorts of stories or imparting advice, or even, thrillingly, showing them how to attack someone using a candlestick or a kitchen knife. Bella by herself was sister and mother and father and hero and instructor and entertainer, all rolled up into one. She was everything he could have ever imagined her.

Except when she was with Skye. Then she was entirely different.

* * *

Bella called him in early in the morning, directing Abernia to send him up with more chal.

“Miche has spoken to me again,” she said. “He has mentioned his cousin’s circus once more. He says it is called
The Autumn Moon
, and they are here in Tabat through the elections.” She paused. “I think it best if you go there.”

She was sending him away? Had she caught one of his looks at Skye, his disapproval of her? She was choosing between them, and he had lost.

“But …” he said. He trailed off. What could he say to convince her? And a circus. That would not be entirely bad. He could lose himself there as easily as here. If he stayed on its grounds, surely Canumbra and Legio would not find him.

All he could manage was, “Could I come visit you still, though, sometimes? Or perhaps you’d stop by when you come to the circus?”

“Of course, Teo. I won’t abandon you.”

But she already had, he thought. Still, he squared his shoulders and went downstairs to tell Abernia and gather up his things.

* * *

Miche’s cousin sent a messenger for him after dinner, a bored looking Satyr who barely spoke to him along the way.

He wants to be rid of me as soon as possible,
he thought, and it saddened him. Was that what circus life would be like? Had he made the wrong choice? “Isn’t that the College of Mages?” he asked nervously as they turned on Spray Way. He worried that the Mage might be looking for him too.

He’d read the stories. The exploits of generations of Dukes and Duchesses, the boldness of the Mages, the perfidious attempts and plots of the sorcerers, constantly trying to spread their ancient war from the Old Continent to the New.