Beasts of Tabat (6 page)

Chapter Six

Bella’s Cousin

The warehouse overlooks Loom Way, but here on the tiny street a door leads into the stairwell to Leonoa’s studio. I ring the hand-bell beside the door, shivering. The rain clouds have lifted but have left ice on the streets in their wake, gleaming in mingled moonlight.

A window slides up; Leonoa stares down.

“It’s me,” I shout towards the sky.

“I’ll be right there.” Leonoa’s head withdraws. My cousin’s labored steps come down the stairway. The wooden bar slides back and the door creaks open.

As it opens, a wash of white moonlight enters to silhouette my diminutive relative. Leonoa Kanto stands with her habitual hunch, one shoulder drawn up half again as high as the other, a foot twisted sideways on the stairs.

“I suppose you’re planning on sleeping here tonight,” Leonoa says. Irritation and affection mingle in her tone. She beckons. “Well, come up.”

I trail behind my cousin on the splintery stairs, matching my pace to Leonoa’s. I wish I’d thought to bring something. Leonoa likes it when I pass along some of the dainties that admirers shower on me, particularly after a match. But this morning, I hadn’t thought I’d need the dose of comfort that contact with my cousin usually brings.

“I have a friend already here, so be warned,” Leonoa tosses back over her shoulder.

“Really? Who?” Leonoa rarely has visitors this late.

“A friend.” Leonoa seems about to say more but then bites back the words as we reach the doorway. “You’ll see.”

Inside, the painter’s studio is warm and redolent of linseed oil and turpentine and freshly ground minerals with an edge of rotten egg. The space would feel ample were it not for the stacks of canvases, the shelves of paints and pigments, the paint-stained rags on the floor. Leonoa uses her sitting room more for painting than just entertaining.

I pause inside the door, taking off my cloak, then curiously scanning the room.

My first impression of the friend is gold—golden hair, a Northerner? Then my jaw slackens in amazement, bemusement as I realize the golden glow isn’t hair. What is Leonoa thinking? What will her mother say? For that matter, what am I, Bella, going to say? Because surely I have to take a stand right now, here and now, or else forever keep my peace about this misalliance.

I look at Leonoa, see the tension around my cousin’s eyes, the set to her jaw, and think,
She believes I’m about to make her choose, and she knows which way she’ll go already.

So instead I smile and set my discomfort aside as I turn to the woman with golden wings where her arms would have been, covered with great rose-gold feathers like a metal swan’s.

As she moves forward in turn, I note additional details: the odd device that cinches her waist and chest, a chain and leather harness holding two metal and gear-work extensions—mechanical hands, five brass rods set like fingers in each one, agile enough for all but the finest work. A series of straps fit the harness to her form around her chest and belly, fine metal tendrils on each leading to the energy globe, caught in a netting of brass wire, that powers and controls the arms.

Who could be her owner?
I wonder. Magic is pricey, and the arms would fetch gold, not silver, from any pawnshop, particularly if fully charged. She is an expensive ornament.

“Pleased to meet you,” I say with pleasant, practiced ease learned from years of public appearances. “I’m Leonoa’s cousin, Bella Kanto.”

I don’t stretch out my hand, a calculation made in the instant I turned. It seems to have been the right one. The other woman’s Old Continent blood seems as apparent as Leonoa’s or mine in her dark hair, visible against the shimmer of gold feathers and her dusky skin. Perhaps she is some impossible hybrid? I’ve never seen anything like her before. She inclines her head in turn.

“I’m Glyndia,” she says.

Leonoa pushes past to fuss with the iron kettle nestled in the coals.

“I’ll make mulled wine,” she says.

“I can. You sit and visit with your cousin,” Glyndia says.

The smile she gives the artist is full of affection. Tension loosens in my shoulders, although I still eye the visitor with a touch of question. Is Leonoa actually playing at friends with a Beast? A dangerous game for either of them to take up. A dangerous game just to be associated with.

I say nothing of this but sit on the couch, drink wine, and chat. Outside the wind quickens, rattling the windows impatiently before rebuking them with renewed rain. Two whale-oil lamps flicker on the mantel over the smoldering hearth, flanking an elaborate porcelain and aluminum clock.

The clock chimes as I turn. Two figurines emerge to dance around each other, just as a third thimble-sized automaton appears and circles them in turn, knife in hand rising and falling. The gruesome clock marks each hour with a different crime. Alberic bought it to amuse me, but Leonoa fell in love with it the first time she saw it chime out this murderous hour, eight o’clock. I yielded it up without protest. I found it more unsettling than amusing.

“Have you heard from your mother, Leonoa?”

“No, she’s still on her trip to the Southern Isles, though I think she’s back any day. That’s how I met Glyndia, actually. She accompanied a friend who’d agreed to come and model for me.”

“That’s an interesting change for you, isn’t it?”

Leonoa, ever restless, is cleaning brushes in the corner of the room. She’s on her second mug of hot red wine and she moves methodically. She dips a brush into a glass then wipes it clean with a rag, leaving red streaks on the cloth. “What do you mean?” Her tone is as sharp as the turpentine’s tang.

The shrug I give is as deliberate with ennui as any performance I’ve used to mock an opponent in the ring. “You’ve been painting Gladiators for the past few years. As far as I know, Glyndia moves in no Gladiator circles.”

I turn towards the other women, feigning amused curiosity. “Unless you’re from some new school that I haven’t become acquainted with?”

Glyndia’s smile is equally mask-like. “Shall we continue circling this topic or cut right to it?”

“What do you mean?” I ask, even as Leonoa says, “No, Glyn, you don’t owe her any explanation.” I feel a pang at the anger in my cousin’s tone, but it only strengthens my sense of self-justification.

“You are thinking,” Glyndia says with chilly precision, “that your cousin, whom you love and want no harm to befall, has taken up with a Beast.”

“And why shouldn’t I think that?”

“I am not a Beast. I’m a Human under a spell, as well-blooded as either of you.”

We stare at each other.

“I see,” I say. I sip my wine, which is warm and smells of cinnamon. The silence stretches out until the clock strikes the quarter hour with a chime and a twitch of the miniature knife, a blood pool irising open.

“I’d hoped to sleep here tonight rather than walk home in the rain,” I say into the silence. “Is that all right, Leonoa?”

“Of course,” Leonoa says. “If you don’t mind me keeping you up a while. I’m finishing a couple of canvases yet for my show. You’re coming, aren’t you?”

“Aye, probably Adelina and I are coming together.”

Leonoa sets the turpentine aside and moves a canvas onto its easel. As is her habit, she keeps the picture turned away from us. She is intensely private about her paintings up until their first exhibition.

“Shall we play cards?” Glyndia asks. I nod, pulling a small table over between us. I watch the brass hands shuffle the parchment deck and deal out the hands with deft movements. I wonder again who funded the expensive work of creating her mechanism. Surely not Leonoa?

“When are you going to let go of Adelina?” Leonoa asks. She picks up a brush, considering the picture before her, then sets it down again. From my vantage point, all I can see is the mug of wine, disappearing and reappearing.

“What do you mean?”

“Is she still in love with you? You’ve been keeping her dangling a very long time, Bel.”

I throw down the Hanged and Shrouded Moon to take a trick. “Isn’t that something best kept between Adelina and me?” I don’t care to have my business discussed in front of a stranger, not that I can think of any circumstances where I would have
liked
to have my cousin pass judgment on my life.

“You’re not being fair to her. You let her buy you presents—”

“No, no presents.”

“Dinners, then. And tickets to plays and pedal-carts home.”

Glyndia plays the Cask and takes a trick in turn. She is politely silent as though not listening to the conversation, eyes fixed on the cards.

“Adelina has plenty of money. She likes to spend it.”

“And you betray that generosity, for you will never give her anything back.”

The assertion rubs me even rawer. I am no betrayer. Adelina has said outright that she enjoys spending time with me. Is friendship with a Gladiator—a celebrity of Tabat after all!—worth so little?”

“I go about with her, do I not?” I say. “Adelina is pleasant company. Is one’s time not the greatest gift you can give to anyone?”

“Is that what she gets from you, time? Or just odd moments left over from more significant occasions? Time you would have spent running errands, or playing court to the nobility so they’ll sponsor your precious school?”

“I will not argue about this.” I snap a card down. Glyndia plays a False Prophet.

Leonoa rises and pours herself more wine. On the way back, she leans on the couch’s back, looking over Glyndia’s shoulder. She brushes her cheek along the feathers, which gleam like yellow silk in the lantern light.

“Are you almost ready for bed then?” Glyndia says. Her wing flexes, unflexes, shifts along Leonoa’s face in a caress.

“Let me put my paints away and I am.”

* * *

When the other two have withdrawn to the bedchamber, I shape myself to the narrow sofa, draw the knitted blanket about my shoulders, and watch the last coals gutter.

On the mantel, two automatons set fire to a tiny hut. Red glass flames slide out from behind the clockwork arsonists. A pea-sized face, arms upraised in appeal, peeps from an upstairs window.

I cannot help but worry. Whether Glyndia is indeed Human or whether she is some sort of Beast playing a trick on the painter, either way, it is unseemly looking for someone of Leonoa’s stature to take up with what is very close to a Beast in appearance, even if not in mind, which has yet to be proved.

I usually let people do as they will. It is one of my points of pride, in fact, my easygoing nature. But if there was anyone in the world I feel protective of, it is my little cousin.

I’ve never minded scandal. Once I wore Tabat’s armor, I might even have courted it. It amuses me to be thought outrageous.

But Leonoa has suffered so many slights over the years and gone on to make art that seizes the heart and refuses to let go. She must be kept safe.

I hear a murmur—who?—sweet and drowsy, with a smiling undertone that tugs at my heart. I remember Leonoa confiding in me that as a child, she’d lie awake all night. Some frailty of her eyes made darkness impenetrable to her. So she had lain there each night in a lather of imagination, hearing a
tap-tap-tap,
the scrape and slither of the window opening, a floorboard’s slow groan, a rustle of leafy robes.

My cousin’s nightmares were rooted in reality. When Leonoa was very little, visiting her grandparent’s summer home in their estate outside Tabat, a Mandrake broke into the nursery one night. Only a footman’s vigilance, noticing the open window as he emptied slops outside, saved her.

I turn over, thumping the pillow to soften its adamant outlines. After the attack, Leonoa lay in a stupor for four and a half days, waking for an evening before lapsing into bone-stretch fever for another three.

The disease’s delirious contortions permanently thwarted her spine, shortening one arm and leg, and throwing the plates of her skull awry, gnarling her like a knotgrass doll. Even after she recovered, even after the family had returned to Tabat, she lay awake, an insomniac each night, or plunged, despite her best efforts, into nightmares, shrieking the rest of the household awake.

Her parents, Leonoa told me, tried many remedies. Before he died, Coro Kanto sought apparati that applied magnetic or electrical energy, setting each muscle into feverish twitches, while Galia Kanto designed diets rich in milk or green leaves or fish or other ingredients that gave Leonoa the runs or made her stomach twist to the point of revolt. They tried poultices smelling of verdigris and brine; hot, cold, salt, and mud baths; an exorcism of the nursery; corsets of iron, leather, whalebone; chicken bone and feather charms; soporific candles; a harpist to play her to sleep each night.

But it was only when I, newly orphaned, arrived for a few days’ visit while my fate was being determined that the nightmares vanished, driven away by my presence.

The household slept at night, and the visit stretched to a year, then three, four, five, and more. But at thirteen, I was confronted with my Aunt Jolietta, a frightening, gravel-voiced apparition that arrived to claim me as an apprentice, despite the recently widowed Galia’s protests.

I roll onto my back and stare up at the ceiling. Dark times came after that, but I endured through the worst of them.

The clock strikes two, a
bing
and then a
bong.
I’m not sure what the figurines are doing at this time of night. Sleety rain sizzles on the wide gutter and against the windowpanes, lulling me to sleep.

* * *

In the morning, I’m dimly conscious of someone stirring, lowered voices, the noisiness of people trying their best to be stealthy. I burrow down under the knitted blanket, seeking its latticed warmth. Finally, long after one presence has left, the door slamming behind it, long after I’ve heard Leonoa’s halting steps preparing the morning fish tea and slicing bread to toast over the freshly-kindled fire, I roll over and blink at the sunlight coming in through the window.

To my dazzled eyes, the air seems full of golden light and floating dust motes illuminated by its glare. For a moment constellations hang around me, vast sweeps of stars. Then I blink and see Leonoa grimacing at me fondly, bread knife in her hand.