The Red Wolf Conspiracy (9 page)

In the past half year Pazel had come to love Captain Nestef. The old navigator adored his ship and wanted a peaceable crew. They ate well, and had music after meals, and in each port the captain bought stories or travelogues or collections of jokes from the chandleries, and read them aloud on dull nights far from land.

Of course, he was still Ormali. Jervik in particular took care that no one forgot it. He despised Ormalis—despised anyone to whom he felt superior—and just last week had stolen his skipper's knife and ivory whale, the only objects Pazel cared about in the world. They would be Jervik's forever now.

But Nestef's kindness had made it all bearable. The captain had even talked of buying Pazel his citizenship, and helping him return to school. The very thought of
reading
again filled Pazel's mind with dazzling hopes.

And now Chadfallow had blasted them. He didn't know why the doctor was interfering again, but this time he had plucked Pazel from the best ship he could ever have hoped for. And
what
had he slipped into that tea?

He stood, threw a last nail into the water and turned to face the wharf. A new life: that was what he was choosing. A life without Arquali uncles. Without their protection, or their deceit.

Almost Free

3 Vaqrin 941

5:56 p.m
.

Niriviel, the moon falcon, shot by overhead, a cream-colored arrow. On the bench beside the splendid catfish tanks of the Lorg Academy of Obedient Daughters, the girl with blond hair felt her heart lift at the sight, and then an instant's regret at the thought that she would never see him again. An instant was all she could muster, for while she loved the falcon, she hated the Academy a thousand times more.

Behind her, a woman cleared her throat. The blond girl looked over her shoulder to see one of the Lorg Sisters frowning at her in silence. In her dark brown robe the Sister's face seemed whiter than the lilies in the tanks; whiter than the fish weaving slow paths among the stems.

“Good evening, Sister,” said the girl.

“Her Grace will see you in the hatcheries,” said the woman tersely.

Startled, the girl rose to her feet.

“After your meditation, child!”

The Sister turned on her heel and stalked off. The girl sat again, sidelong to hide her face from the Academy windows, and pressed her knuckles hard against the wrought-iron bench. A meeting with the Mother Prohibitor! It was a rare honor: girls did not have private audiences with the head of the Order except for the gravest of reasons.
It's a trap
, she told herself.
I knew they'd try something
.

The
Accateo
, as the Sisters liked to call it, was the most costly and exclusive school for girls in the Imperium. Also the oldest, which partly explained the Sisters' tendency to speak Old Arquali, and dress in cloaks like funeral wraps, and to serve dishes (horse-liver puddings, starling broth) that had vanished from even the most traditional Etherhorde dining rooms a century ago.

Also the loneliest, thought the girl, warming to her theme.

Also the darkest, cruelest, most ignorant heap of stone ever to disgrace the word
school
.

Her name was Thasha Isiq, and she was dropping out. It ought to have been the happiest day of the two years she had spent at the Lorg. Two years without a glimpse of father or friends, without hearing the ocean or climbing Maj Hill. Two years without laughing, except softly in corners, and at the risk of punishment.

But she could not rejoice in her coming freedom, not yet. The Sisters' power was too great. They woke you with their songs (guttural chants recounting the evil history of womankind); they studied your private journals, not just openly but with a red quill for correcting your grammar; they questioned you about your dreams; they compared you with the impossibly pure First Sisters in the time of the Amber Kings; they gave you chores in house or gardens, along with meditations to recite nonstop while doing so. Then came breakfast. And after that, the real labor: your education.

Thasha had known nothing about the Academy when Syrarys, her father's consort, announced that she was to be enrolled. When she realized Syrarys meant the walled compound with the grim towers and fanged iron gate, she refused outright. A great battle followed between daughter and consort, and Thasha lost. Or rather, surrendered: her father's illness, a brain inflammation that had lasted years, suddenly worsened, and the family doctor told her bluntly that Eberzam Isiq would not recover unless he was spared, temporarily at least, the work and worries of fatherhood.

To Thasha the diagnosis stank of trickery. Syrarys hated her, though she pretended love. And Thasha had never quite trusted Dr. Chadfallow, friend to the Emperor though he was.

The welcome letter from the Academy promised lessons in music, dance and literature, and for a while Thasha took heart, for she had dearly loved all three subjects. Today she almost hated them.

The trouble was evil. It was the great obsession of the Sisters, and with it they poisoned everything they touched. “Literature” meant poring together over the journals of former students, now wives in the richest households across the known world: journals that recorded in humiliating detail each woman's lifelong struggle against the inherent wickedness of her nature. “Dance” meant mastering the stiff waltzes and quadrilles of society balls, or the erotic performances certain families demanded of brides for twelve nights before their weddings. “Music” just meant sin. Confession of sin in whining arias. Regret for sin in madrigals that never ended. Memory of sin in low, groveling groans.

For close to a thousand years, the
Accateo
had spiritually mangled girls. They entered jittery, wide-eyed waifs; they left docile dreamers, hypnotized by the epic of their own rottenness and the lifelong struggle ahead to become slightly less so. Thasha looked over at a girl her own age, pruning the roses a few yards away: eyes heavy with lack of sleep, lips moving ceaselessly with her assigned meditation. Now and then she smiled, as if at some happy secret. A pretty girl, of course.

Thasha shuddered. It could have been her. It
would
have been her, if she had stayed much longer. When a single story about the world pursues you all day, every day, and even prowls the edges of your dreamlands, it soon becomes hard to remember that that story is just one among many. You hear no others, and if you remember them at all, it is like remembering snowflakes in the midst of a steaming jungle: silly, fantastic, almost unreal.

Of course, that was exactly the point.

But even as these thoughts came to her, Thasha felt a stab of guilt. Hadn't the Sisters themselves taught her all this about her mind? This, and a thousand other lessons? That there was more to love in this world than gossip and rich food and a dress from the Apsal Street tailors? And she thanked them with hate. By detesting them, laughing at them inwardly. By slandering them to her father. By dropping out.

She looked down at her hands. There was an ugly scar on her left palm that looked as though it had been made with a jagged stick. Almost two years ago, on her fifteenth night in the Lorg, Thasha had run to this bench in tears, guilt like she had never dreamed of hammering in her chest: guilt for existing, for not loving the Sisters as they loved her, for letting her father waste his fortunes in sending her here, where she spat on every opportunity. Guilt for questioning the Sisters, guilt for trying not to feel guilty. It was unendurable, this guilt, even before the elder Sisters caught up with her. We warned you, they said. We told you exactly what you would feel. A girl who chooses to be weak may hide the truth, but her heart knows. What does it know? That its owner is a vain and useless blight upon the earth. A canker. A parasite. Tell us we're wrong, girl. Thasha could only sob as they prattled on, adding up reasons for grief, and then she reached out and snapped off a brittle rose stem and drove it straight through her left hand.

The Sisters shrieked; one hit her on the back of the head; but the act of mutilation saved Thasha's life. She knew it: another minute and she would have died of self-loathing. As it was her head cleared instantly, and she thought,
How obvious, how brilliant, to make us love them for torturing us!
And before the Sisters marched her to the infirmary Thasha swore that however long she stayed, she would think her own thoughts and feel her own feelings when she sat on that bench.

Yes, she had become a woman here. By fighting them.

Thasha rose now, and with grateful fingers bid her bench goodbye. Then she turned and moved swiftly toward the fish hatcheries. She could see the Mother Prohibitor's red cloak through the translucent glass.
Don't explode, don't attack her
, she thought.
You're almost free
.

Some girls would never know freedom again. The Lorg had no graduation process. You simply stayed until you found a way of leaving, and there were not many of those. You could drop out in highest disgrace, which was Thasha's choice, even though the furious Sisters had promised to warn every other school in the city of her “spiritual deformities.” You could murder a Sister, which was slightly less disgraceful. You could be recalled by your parents, as Thasha had begged her father to do in fifty-six letters, starting her first night in the Lorg. You could (this was Thasha's invention) climb Sister Ipoxia's weeping cherry until the rubbery tree bent over with your weight and dropped you over the wall; but the local constables had sharp eyes, and hauled runaways back to the Academy at once, for which they received the blessings of the Mother Prohibitor and a handful of coins.

Or you could marry. This was the one entirely legitimate way out of the Lorg. The school sponsored two Love Carnivals a year, when the Sisters dropped their teaching, gardening, wine-making and catfish cultivation to become frenetic, full time matchmakers. One of these started in just three days: by then Thasha wanted to be far from the Lorg. Her timing had enraged the Mother Prohibitor. Someone had heard her shout in the vestry: “Three hundred men seeking Love Conferences, and she renounces? What are we to tell the nine who put her at the top of their lists?”

(Nine suitors
, girls had whispered behind Thasha's back.
And she's only sixteen
.)

As the Sister who taught Erotic Dance had told them yesterday (exhausted into something like honesty; her skills were in great demand this time of year), one needn't be rich to attend the Lorg. The school also recognized merit—that is, beauty. Thasha's classmates included a number of exceptionally lovely girls from modest households. Not a bad investment for the Lorg: what their families could not pay, their future husbands would gladly make up for in matchmaking fees.

It was a thriving enterprise. The girls nearly always consented. Marriage to a wealthy stranger felt like charity once you believed you deserved nothing more than contempt.

The Mother Prohibitor was a lanky, quick-moving old woman; in her red rector's cloak she put one in mind of a scarlet ibis looking for dinner among the tanks of newly hatched fish. When Thasha opened the door of the glass house enclosing the tanks she looked up sharply, and gestured with a dripping hand-net.

“My eyes begin to fail me,” she said, in her surprisingly deep voice. “Look at their tail spines, girl. Are they yellow?”

Thasha gathered her cloak and knelt by the tank. “Most are yellow-tailed, Your Grace. But there are some with green stripes. Very pretty fish, they'll be.”

“We must catch them. Those green ones. All of them, right now.”

She held out the net. Thasha noted the great emerald ring on the woman's pale hand. Girls gossiped about that ring: it bore the words
DRANUL VED BRISTÔLJET DORO
—Where thou goest, I follow fast—in silver Old Arquali script about the priceless gem. Some girls thought the phrase a magic charm. Others held that it was the motto of a secret order, not the Lorg merely but some guild of crones scattered across the world and elbow-deep in the plots and schemes and stratagems that ruled it. Thasha felt the old woman watching her. She took the net from her hand.

The tank was shallow, and Thasha caught the dozen or so green-tailed hatchlings in a matter of minutes, dropping them one by one into a bucket next to the Mother Prohibitor.

“They will not be pretty fish, Thasha Isiq,” said the old woman when she was done. “They will not be any sort of fish much longer. The
Accateo
now specializes in bili catfish, these yellow-tails. A more succulent meat, they have. They fetch an excellent price, and the Slugdra ghost-doctors will also pay for their intestines, which they use in love potions. There, Sister Catarh has brought your street clothes.”

Thasha looked up quickly at the Sister in the doorway, who set down a bundle tied with string, bowed and withdrew.

“I will thank you not to grin like an imbecile,” said the Mother Prohibitor. “Get up! So you're leaving. Did you meditate this morning on your tragically altered fortunes?”