Things were different after that. Mistress Tirelle remained angry, but also nervous in a strange way. Some edge had shifted with the little competition of foods. It was as if I had won a point, even while passing perilously close to a forfeit of the entire game.

I did not become reckless, but I became bolder. I was quicker to ask permission to speak. My questions were pointed, challenged my instructresses more. I tried to think several steps beyond what was being shown. Food was for eating, but it was also a weapon, a display, a competition, a threat, and a challenge. Dogs were servants and also in their strange way masters—their shallow, sharp-edged minds seeing the world through the brittle lens of scent and pack loyalty to bring news of old happenings to the ears of their handlers. The language of cloth and fold and pattern was focused tight as any logical discourse of Mennoes the Great or the Saffron Masters.

So I asked, and challenged, and turned, and was turned on in my time. My mind unfolded at this. Strangely, the beatings became more infrequent. I had found my stride and was running the course. As Mistress Balnea would say, the rider had laid free of the whip.

The Dancing Mistress showed me steps and falls a night each week for the entire turn of the moon. “This is the most basic of the work,” she said. “To keep your center and find your feet and not be broken by the throw.” I learned to see and step around the blows she launched, though she demurred from teaching me the strikes. “Another time. Later. We have years yet.”

I had asked to be made safe for the streets. She was making me safe for the streets, no more than that. They would have nothing to fear from me.

Finally, on the turning of the next moon, we met again at the base of the pomegranate tree. Mist was in the air to bring the chill that would banish summer once again. I slid down in my blacks to find the Dancing Mistress waiting as always. We had not regained the comfort of our prior friendship, but reason and compassion had been restored between us. Though I hungered for more, that was enough for now.

She set a hand loosely on my shoulders. “Are you ready?”

“Yes.” I grinned.

“No,” she said with a much smaller smile. “You are not. But you are never ready—you merely go forward when the time comes.”

“Then we should go forward.”

“You have a ten count to top the wall.”

I raced as though my legs were afire.

Later that night, I took out my imaginary silk and set another bell in place. Then I spent a long time telling myself a story in the words of my birth, of a girl who swam in ditches and was watched over by an ox named Endurance. Only he, with his great brown eyes and his endless patience, had not betrayed me by dying or sending me away. That my words were few and difficult pained me. I knew that the poverty of my own language was more to do with my age when Federo took me away than with any lack of the tongue itself, but still this was distressing.

I cried at that. The pillow swallowed my tears and eventually the racing of my mind as well.

 

A few days later, I was out in the courtyard with Mistress Tirelle, whipping off a blindfold to spot fruits on the moment. What had begun as a simple cruelty was almost a game between us now. As I moved to replace the blind after a good pick, the little man-gate inside our greater gate was opened from the other side.

We both looked to see Federo stepping through.

This day he was dressed as a gentleman-merchant of the city. Mistress Leonie had of late been training me to recognize the meaning of hats, feathers, scarves, and pins—how their array signified rank and station, and also how they changed over time so that no lesson remained true for long.

He had two peacock feathers sweeping crossed on the left from a violet felt snood. His suit was a matching violet cutaway in the same felt, over a cream-colored shirt buttoning on the left and a thin collar with three silver clasps. His trousers were a dark herringbone tweed seamed in the Altamian style with the tapered cuffs over dark purple leather half boots. A scarf so deeply blue that it was almost black had been thrown across his shoulder.

I thought he looked rather silly, for all that his attire spoke of his elevated station in the ranks of society.

“Hello, Girl.” Federo then nodded briskly to Mistress Tirelle. “How fares the candidate?”

“My report will be made when time comes, sir.” She shot me a glare for having the temerity to be present during this conversation.

Bowing my head, I waited to see what he wanted of me.

“I would speak to the girl a little while.” His voice was pointed.

“You may find me in the sitting room.” Mistress Tirelle waddled off with another expression that promised misfortune.

I clasped my hands as she clumped into the shadows of the porch. I had long understood that Federo and the Dancing Mistress must in some fashion be in league over me. I could not see what it came to—but then, so little of my life was clear.

He dropped to one knee. “You need to know that I will be gone awhile. Possibly a year or more.”

I nodded.

“Speak, Girl. I am not one of your horrid Mistresses with a mousetrap mind and cheese for brains.”

“Fare well,” I said. Though I had no desire to be rude to him, facing him down, all I could think of was the day he had bought me away from Papa. Was he off to purchase more girls from their cradles?

“I hear you are learning well.”

“The dancing is good.”

His answering smile told me I had struck correctly. “Excellent. I can do little to help you, except to watch over your progress. Others . . . she . . . may do more.”

“I regret my rudeness before.”

His face grew long a moment, shadowed by memory. “Truth may be hard, but I do not call it rude.” His hand touched my chin, as if he wished to tilt it back and examine me once more. “We each pace against the bars that cage us.”

“Your cage is the world,” I said in frustration, though I did not mean to strike for his heart.

“Everyone’s cage is the world. Some worlds are smaller than others.”

With that, he went to speak to Mistress Tirelle. I was left with the fruit picker and the last pomegranates of the season.

 

______

 

My next run with the Dancing Mistress set the tone for the work we did through the winter. That night she took me over the wall for the first time, to venture inside one of the Factor’s empty houses. We slowly climbed dusty stairs, pausing every two or three to sweep behind us and spread the dust again. That was something of a revelation for me—under Mistress Tirelle, I had learned at great pain that dust was an enemy. Yet here it was a friend to conceal our trail.

Even at that pace, we gained the roof in less than ten minutes. Spread before me was a landscape of sloping tiles, chimney pots, small peaks with inset windows, pipes topped by little rain caps and vents. In short, terrain. Like the groves of home, except these trees were metal, wood, and brick.

“This is a rooftop,” the Dancing Mistress said. “When we run here, there are many ways to be unlucky.”

“Yes, Mistress.”

“Even on the ramparts of the Factor’s house, you are largely safe except from some accident of discovery. Here, a loose tile or a slick stone could easily send you to your death.”

“Yes, Mistress.”

She sighed. “At some point, when I judge you ready, we will begin jumping.”

“Thank you.” She seemed to be waiting for something, so I asked the question that hung in my mind. “If the danger is so great, why do we pursue this course?”

“So that you will be everything you can someday.”

“You do not dance so with your other students.”

“No, Girl. Almost never.”

Her smile was sad. I could see it even in the darkness.

We began to walk the roofs of that block with whispered warnings and brief lectures through the moonlit dark. How to stand or slide on a slope, the virtues of ridgepoles, which chimneys to avoid and what were the tells that warned one off. The street had been complex with faces and odors and dangers of a certain kind. This place higher up was complex with angles and textures and dangers of a different kind.

When the ice came, the rooftops were a whole new variety of danger. Even the street was hard to cross with snow betraying our steps. We worked the quiet darkness of the blocks around the Factor’s house all the winter, except for those weeks when the weather was too much to be out without catching some grippe that would betray me to Mistress Tirelle.

The duck woman noted the improvement in my spirits that season, though her response was to question me closely about whether one of the other Mistresses had been bringing in some forbidden material to my lessons. I would never tell the Dancing Mistress’ secret, so I led her to watch Mistress Leonie, Mistress Danae, and all the others with increasing suspicion. It amused me to see these mean and bitter women snipe at each other all the more. They sniped at me as well, but at least they were not conspiring at my humiliation.

 

True to his word, Federo did not come back for over a year. I continued to grow, unfolding into a coltishness that I was repeatedly told I would not lose until my womanhood came upon me. I became clumsy, which distressed both the Dancing Mistress and me at our daily lessons in the practice room, and far more so on those nights when we sought to climb and run the high air.

Mistress Ellera arrived to teach me the arts of paint and charcoal, and together we discovered a gift that none had suspected in me. Quite soon I was fit to draw a most pleasing portrait in blacks and grays on a pinned-up sheet of foolscap. I amused myself sketching each of my Mistresses, until Mistress Tirelle forced me to stop. She seemed to fear a descent into cartoonish mockery. Still, Mistress Ellera’s palette of colors and shades and brushes showed me a window into the world that I had never expected.

I nearly lost my privileges the week that all unthinking I produced a portrait of Endurance standing to his knees in a rice paddy. Mistress Tirelle somehow suspected the picture for what it was, but I lied convincingly enough to persuade her it was Prince Zahar’s divine cow from one of Mistress Danae’s storybooks.

Otherwise I endured the occasional beatings for forgotten lessons or talking out of turn. Life was as always.

Clumsy or not, the Dancing Mistress and I ran ever farther on the rooftops. We followed streets farther away from the Factor’s house before climbing a shadowed drainpipe or a vine-wrapped trellis. The presence of people no longer gave me such worry and distraction, but I still preferred the high silences.

We met a few others up there. They were fellow skulkers and travelers for whom silence seemed the best greeting and fondest farewell. All of us shared a secret under the stars, and I loved those nights in the open air.

My existence had settled into a rhythm that suited me when I did not think too hard about the terms of my confinement. I still kept my imaginary belled silk close every night, but my burning sense of injustice had faded beneath the combination of almost-comfortable habit and the continuing discovery my lessons had become.

 

______

 

That summer, as I began to look time and again toward the gate to see if Federo would return, the Dancing Mistress made another change in my training. Instead of running the roofs, she brought me two blocks from the Factor’s house and into a narrow court crowded with garbage and glint-eyed rats. Only a sliver of sky showed above. The odor was foul, and the refuse rustled strangely.

“We travel a different route tonight,” she announced. “Can you tell me where?”

“Not above, and not within.” I looked around, then at the metal grate beneath our feet. “Is there a below?”

“Below is the life of a city.” Her smile flexed toward the feral. “Now you will learn the truth that lies beneath.” She took up my hand. “Never stray away from me down there. Not for a step or a corner. You can always climb down off a roof if you become lost, and find the pavement and from there your way back. Below, there are no landmarks as you know them. Exits are rare and tend to be located in odd places.”

Going from a rooftop block to another rooftop block involved much climbing up and down, which in turn required a great deal of waiting for a quiet moment and good shadow. I could immediately see the value of traveling Below, if there was a place in which we could make the run. “How far does it go?”

“Not everywhere,” she admitted, “but more places than you might think. There are layers beneath this city.”

“The water flows deeper?”

“The sewers are channeled to the harbor, for the most part. But mine galleries run beneath them, and warrens from some other age of history when people here felt a need to build below the surface.”

I was fascinated.

We pried open the grate and looked down a mossy hole that smelled of mold. Rungs were set in the wall, just as slimed over as the bricks around them. “I will always go first,” she told me. “Unless I instruct you different in the moment.”

She slipped down the rungs. I followed. Having no way to pull the grate after me, I left it standing open.

At the bottom of the climb, there was a drop of eight or nine feet. The Dancing Mistress helped me land. I looked back up to see a circle of stars, as if the new moon had inverted itself to cover the entire night sky and left only a single disc of stars behind.

Water trickled. The mold smell had given way to damp stone and old rot. I could see nothing at all when I looked around me.

“You can step into a pit and never know it.” Her voice was not where I had expected it to be, and I jumped in startlement.

“There are things that live down here. Most of them are nasty.” The Dancing Mistress had moved again, again without my knowing. She walked in absolute silence. Her unpleasant little game made me realize how much I depended on my eyes.

“There is no light except that which you bring.” This time I thought I heard her feet pad on stone.

“Close your eyes and spin round.” Her hands touched my shoulders and moved me. I spun. Strangely, closing my eyes made it worse, as if my balance were partly anchored in what I saw even within the impenetrable dark.

She spun me around time and again, then eventually slipped me to a halt. “Take a step.”

I tried, and collapsed. I bit back a cry of surprise and pain. The stone was slimed beneath my touch, and my knee felt as if I had wrenched it.

Something writhed beneath my hand. The squeak that left me was no more in my control than was my heartbeat.

“Do you want to be here?” the Dancing Mistress asked from close above me. Her breath was hot, and I thought I could see the faintest spots of gleam where her eyes were.

“Y-yes.” I held on to my fear, clutching it close as I clutched my anger and sadness when I stood inside the Pomegranate Court. This was freedom, too—free as the starry skies over the roofs, and more so, for I could find direction and distance here. Mistress Tirelle would cut me and cast me out, if she did not kill me in the moment, for being down in this place.

Going underground was the greatest rebellion I knew. I needed the Dancing Mistress’ hand in mine to pursue this. There were no walls Below except the bounds of tunnels. A cage the size of the city lay beneath the feet of my captors.

“Yes,” I repeated. “I want to be here.”

“Good,” she said. “Never forget the fear, though. It will keep you alive down Below.”

Fear doesn’t keep me alive, I thought. The account that I must repay keeps me alive.

 

“Take this.” The Dancing Mistress handed me a length of dark cloth.

We were out in the courtyard on a chilly night nine days after she’d taken me down beneath the grating. I was eager to run in the underworld again.

“What is this for?”

“Draw it over your eyes.”

That was an old game. I had done the same with Mistress Tirelle often enough, when we worked on my seeing. I triple-folded the blind, then tied it around my head so that my eyes were fully obscured. Though I did not realize it, one of my most valuable lessons was about to begin.

“Now slowly walk from here to the horse box.” Her grip tightened on my arm, until the claws caught at my skin. “Slowly.”

She turned me toward the far wall of the courtyard and released me. I took a confident step and slammed my shin into the low wall around the pomegranate tree. I stumbled at that, and fell hands-first into the bark. Pain erupted in my forearms to match the throbbing ache in my shin. I swallowed back a shout, then stammered, “Y-you t-turned me!”

I could not keep the sense of betrayal from my voice.

“No,” she said. “You turned yourself. All I did was point you wrong.”

“That’s not fair.”

Her voice hissed close to my ear, just as it had down Below. “Is the world fair?”

“N-no.”

“Then why should I be fair? You’ve lived here more than three years. You know every cobble of this court. How is it that you need my help here?”

I shook her off and stood still.

Her breathing dropped to near silence, just the faint passage of air. I extended my arms without moving, and looked with my ears.

It was silent, as always in the Factor’s house. But the silence of a city is not an absence of noise, any more than there is silence wherever people live.

At home, when I was very small, the fire had crackled, even well after it died to coals and the eye-watering odor of ash. Endurance whuffled in his pen, his gut rumbling all night long. Animals yipped in the stands of trees. Night-hunting birds sang their prey songs.

Aboard Fortune’s Flight, the sea had constantly slapped the hull. The boiler’s kettle burbled below the deck, while someone always must run to orders or coil a line or call out a log reading, even in the deepest hours of the night.

Here the silence was eased by the faint snap of a fire within the house. The streets away from our walls echoed their noises. The wind eddied differently around the high, blank inner wall than it did rattling through the pomegranate branches or sliding along the copper-clad roof.

Now, concentrating, even the Dancing Mistress’ breathing seemed loud.

I listened to the tree a moment, let its damp bark smell tell me where it was. I turned from there toward the faint echo of the breeze worrying at the inner wall. One slow step, to find the slight slope of the cobbles away from the pomegranate tree’s little circle of stone-bounded soil. Another slow step to the flattening out. Vague echo of street noise behind me. Wall before me. I began to walk with deliberation, keeping my hands loose and ready for a fall should there be an unstable cobble or some trap left by my Mistress to teach me further wariness.

After twenty-two of my paces, I reached up to touch the inner wall. I’d known it was there. The horse box should be a few steps to my left. I listened for a while. The box made no noises, for it was fairly compact and had sat there through many seasons. It was too small to trap the slight breeze that blew. Memory would be my guide.

I turned, took a step, and slammed into it. The stones caught me hard as I fell flat.

She was above me a moment later. I heard the last of her footfalls, while her breath huffed close. “You know this place as well as you know the fingers of your own hand. Yet mark where you are right now. How will you fare below ground?”

“By following you, Mistress.”

“By following me.” She knelt—I could tell by the faint creak of her joints, the rustle of her tunic, and the change in the sense of warmth as the Dancing Mistress came closer to where I lay flat. “I see differently from you, Girl. Heat is almost a color to me. Underground tends to be very wet, and the water is not at all like dry stone in that view.”

“I do not see heat, Mistress.”

“No, you do not.” She touched my shoulder. “There are other ways. It is always dangerous to show a light down there. Fire mixes poorly with bad airs in some tunnels. Other people and . . . things . . . will see you from an unfortunate distance. But there are small lights, coldfire scraped from a certain mold on the walls, that can aid you without substantial risk of betrayal.”

“I understand the danger,” I said.

“Good. Now run the courtyard with your blind.”

I fell six or seven more times, but I ran the courtyard around the outer edge. I feared she would make me climb the wall, but she did not.

The next day, I wore an ankle-length skirt to hide the bruises. Mistress Tirelle said nothing, but I feared stripping it off for a beating, so I took care to be especially pleasant and tractable.

 

______

 

Federo came again shortly thereafter, somewhat beyond the conclusion of his promised year. Snow had not yet reached us, but frost was on the cobbles in the mornings. The pomegranate tree had shed the last of its leaves, while the wispy clouds that painted the highest part of the sky in winter had begun to make their appearance. I detested the cold, but the smell of the season always lent me energy.

When my captor appeared at the entrance to the upstairs sitting room, I threw myself into an embrace.

He caught me, staggered back, then pushed me to arm’s length so that he might give me a good look. I was able to do the same for him.

I knew he saw a girl longer in leg and arm, but still far from a woman. They had never cut my hair here, except to trim the ends, so it reached below my waist. My clothes were better—I had made them myself, of course.

As for him, Federo looked worn. The year of his travel had added five to his face. I did not remember him with lines in his skin before. The bones of his cheeks were visible.

“Have you been ill?” I asked.

Behind me, Mistress Tirelle cleared her throat with a hard-edged rattle. I had spoken out of turn, though I knew she lacked the nerve to discipline me in front of Federo.

“A bit.” He smiled, and I saw his teeth were yellow. “Sometimes foreign food does not agree with my digestion. I have heard good reports of you, Girl.”

It took great restraint for me not to look at Mistress Tirelle. Her eyes bored into my back fiercely enough, I was certain.

“I shouldn’t know, sir. I follow my lessons diligently and always mind the Mistresses.” He saw my face, and knew that I meant more than Mistress Tirelle heard. I added, “I may never use these arts again.”

“You are meant to be exquisite, not bent to labor. Even the labor of great ladies.”

Mistress Tirelle cleared her throat once more. Federo had said too much.

“I will speak to your Mistress now,” he said. “Go and play some instrument, should you have one.”

My bone flute sat on a stand downstairs, though both Mistress Maglia and I despaired of me ever wringing more than the most vapid melody from it. “Yes, sir.” Curtsying as I was being taught lately, I raced away.

 

______

 

The years unfolded. Federo passed in and out of my life on a schedule only he understood. Mistresses came and went, teaching me etiquette, lapidary, manners, fencing—that with the man’s blade so I would know what I saw before me—as well as architecture, joinery, the management of funds, and the true secrets of how goods were made and sold into markets and great houses.

At the same time, the Dancing Mistress worked me on jumping and tumbling and stranger things—running in place on the back of a teetering chair, or swinging from a curtain rod, for example. We danced as well, for the benefit of Mistress Tirelle and any other listeners: the bright pavane and the lesser pavane, the women’s sarabande and the season-wheel, the prince’s step and the Graustown bend.

One night every week or two, we ran the rooftops, the underground, and occasionally the streets. As I grew taller, she coached me in changing my climbing technique, forcing me to continually relearn my falls. In the darkness Below, we practiced some of the throws and blocks she had used on me the night I had tried in earnest to fight her.

That was an education all over again. Meeting a sparring partner in the deepest dark, moving only by sound and breath and marking the placement of her feet. The bruises on my face we explained as we always had to Mistress Tirelle—from hard work in the practice room. The lie had become notably threadbare, but whatever fear the Dancing Mistress held for Mistress Tirelle had not lessened over the years.

That all flowed through Federo, of course. Over time, it had become very clear to me that they were training me for some vigorous task. Not to bring about violence, I thought, for all the lessons in the night were about movement and defense and survival, but some other purpose, which entailed the risk of being a target. This was layered within the work of making me a great lady of the Stone Coast.

Those lies were threadbare as well, though it might be fairer to call them avoidances. The Factor’s women could hardly spend every waking hour sharpening my mind, then expect me not to use all the logic and experience being poured into me.

When things went well, I almost enjoyed myself. There is pleasure in painting, or reading a history, or making the numbers move to your command. Even today, I have not lost appreciation of those gifts.

Still, the hard hand was close behind. Except in the matter of the Dancing Mistress, I was watched as carefully as any virgin princess in a children’s tale. None of these women owed me love, or even respect. None of them thought of me as anything but a difficult task representing a risk of terrible failure.

Only the Dancing Mistress took me for who and what I was. Not what I had been—that was hidden to all but Federo, and he would never speak of it—but who the Girl was inside the forging they made of me.

To be fair, Mistress Tirelle in her strange way saw the reality of who I was. Somehow the fact that she could know something of my inner self, and still treat me with cruel caprice, was all the more hurtful.

I kept my imaginary belled silk under the invisible needle. My stories of the first days of life faded over time to mere images, though still sorted over in my mind as carefully as any box of prints brought to me by Mistress Danae or Mistress Ellera. The old words were there, but they seemed fewer and fewer with each passing season, slipping away in favor of the Petraean speech and all the knowledge that tongue brought flowing like a river through the days of my life.

One day I could not remember my name. I had been “Girl” for so long, and I had not heard my name since the first seasons of my life. This may seem incredible, but by then I had been in the Pomegranate Court for more than six years. No one had ever addressed me as anything but Girl. My true name, the secret name of my birth, I had not even whispered to myself in the quiet hours when I remembered my oldest stories.

Only the ox Endurance remained, his name as strong as he was. The other images from those first days—my grandmother and the bells of her funeral, the frogs in the ditches—they were strong, too. But both the words and names slipped away like sand beneath a tide.

I cried that night, so hard, the sound slipped from my mouth until I overheard Mistress Tirelle stirring. She made such noise that I found a way to stop. After a while, I realized her groaning had been purposeful. She had spared me another beating to leave me to my tears.

Was that a form of love?

The question made me cry all over again, this time in shuddering silence.

 

Over time, we began to meet people on the underground runs. Where the rooftop wanderers remained silent and separate as the distant stars, a different etiquette prevailed beneath the stones. When you crossed a path down Below, you paused a moment to let the other examine you.

“This is how we mark foes,” the Dancing Mistress explained after one such passage. “Someone who does not pause is as good as raising a blade to you. The beasts and those lost to reason will not stop, and so you know them dangerous.”

“What of friends?”

“There are no friends beneath the stones.”

“Not even us?”

“That is for you to decide, Girl. I am who I am to you.”

That remark I turned over in my head a long while.

Some months thereafter, the Dancing Mistress began to speak at certain of these meetings. “Mother Iron,” she whispered one night.

The other nodded. She was a short woman, only a silhouette to my view, though her eyes gleamed with the faintest reflection of the coldfire in my hand. She had a misshaping about her, though I could not say if it was clothing, armor, or a strangeness of her body.

“This is my student,” the Dancing Mistress said.

Mother Iron answered in words I did not understand. Her voice came from a deep place, as if she were much taller than she looked, with a chest the size of a horse—I had just then been studying more of the science of sounds and had acquired some sense of how they were made.

The Dancing Mistress answered in the same words. They both nodded, and Mother Iron stepped around us. She did not smell right at all, more like the bottom of the horse box beneath the leather and metal of the bits than any person I had met.

I knew better than to question there, but later I asked, “Who was that?”

“Mother Iron.”

We were crouched behind the pomegranate tree as I took off my blacks.

“But what manner of person is she? What does she do there?”

“She is her own, and pursues her own affairs.”

A spirit then, or some small god perhaps. “You will not answer me in this.”

“No, Girl.” The Dancing Mistress smiled in the moonlight. “But I will tell you this: Anyone you meet Below whose name I give you is not an enemy.”

“No one is my friend.”

“Yes. But should you find trouble, Mother Iron might attend. If it suits her. She is unlikely to further your woes with purpose.”

“Thank you. I think.”

“You are welcome,” she said gravely.

 

There was one Below who was far more than a name heard once or twice a season. We first encountered him under the warmest night of the year, in the middle of the passage of the weak northern summer.

The Dancing Mistress had me doing falls in the dark those months. She would bid me stand in someplace fairly safe, then slip away with my coldfire in her hand. A minute or two later, I would hear her click her tongue, one click for each yard-length of the drop. I needed to summon the courage to step forward, find the edge, and jump blind.

The first time we tried that, with a fall of less than three feet, I was terrified. With practice, though it never became easy, the discipline grew reasonable. I learned how to trust a partner, and I learned how to fall in the dark.

“You can already find walls by listening for echoes,” she told me. “We will work on you judging the depths the same way, once you know how to drop in safety.”

A strange exercise, but I’d long since realized her greatest purpose lay in pushing me past my own limits, time after time.

I stood on a balcony, a low rail a foot before me, though I knew that only from experience. The Dancing Mistress clicked four times. A fall of about twelve feet. That would require a forward tuck with a full roll, before I landed four points down. No need for the bone shock of striking on two feet when hands could ease the blow. The shoes and gloves spared my skin on these exercises, but I could twist a joint or jam a forearm or leg easily enough. My size would help avoid this, while I was still young.

As I was bending for my leap, someone touched my shoulder. I yelped and dropped. The stone balustrade trapped me immediately. My attacker bent close.

I caught him in a wide-handed slap. He backed away with a sharply indrawn breath. I could hear the soft noises of the Dancing Mistress hurrying to my aid. A moment later, the gleam of coldfire appeared.

“Ho,” she said softly.

“Unnh . . .” The stranger’s voice was muffled. I realized he had a hand on his face, and that he was in fact male. “You boke my node!”

“This is the girl, Septio. Girl, this is Septio.”

“Sir,” I said cautiously. My tongue was tied with a strange fear. I found my feet, but kept the drop behind me close in mind. If they came to blows, or even sharp argument, I’d go over into the twelve feet of darkness to be out of his reach and away from whatever violence this newcomer and my Dancing Mistress might commit together.

“I didn’t bead to scare you.” His voice was still strange. I scented a new metal-salty tang. So that’s how it sounds when a man’s nose fills with blood, I thought.

The Dancing Mistress chuckled. “Septio is a Keeper of the Ways.”

I heard it as a title. Titles had been much discussed lately in the Pomegranate Court. I wanted to ask for whom, and of what ways, but I chose silence. In my experience, others often would fill it.

“Do you know of the Ways, girl?” Septio asked, his voice clearing. I realized then from his tone that he was little older than I. A boy, down here in the dark alone.

The Dancing Mistress touched my shoulder. “She is from across the Storm Sea. What she has been taught is extensive, but very . . . focused. The Ways are distant from the agenda of her keepers.”

I had never heard so much said directly about the purpose of my time at the Pomegranate Court

She squeezed my shoulder harder. “You may answer for yourself.”

To speak to a stranger! “The sun is just as hot for every man,” I told him in my own words, my old words. By then that was one of the few things I could remember Papa saying. Then in Petraean: “I do not know, sir. The Ways are hidden from me.”

“The Ways are hidden from most people.” He took his hand from his face and drew a deep, snuffling breath. “You have good reflexes.”

He and the Dancing Mistress exchanged pleasantries; then Septio moved on into the quiet depths.

“That was a priest,” I finally said.

“They are not generally so young.”

 

I awoke one day to the sound of voices. A crowd of women had gathered in the courtyard. They were placing chairs and sorting themselves into positions in the dawn light. I had never seen so many people at once in the Pomegranate Court—four at the most before this morning. If not for the Dancing Mistress’ night runs, I would not have seen more than four people at once in the years since Federo drove me here from Fortune’s Flight.

Each one of the women wore a straight-backed gown in black satin, with ribbon cross-lacing bodices that were slashed to show gray silk beneath. A uniform of sorts, shared by the two dozen of them.

I dressed myself as well as my unprepared wardrobe allowed, then stepped outside to find Mistress Tirelle and Mistress Maglia awaiting me. Mistress Maglia was clothed to match the women below, while Mistress Tirelle was swathed as always.

“Come, Girl,” Mistress Maglia said. That was unnecessary. I could see what was wanted. Besides, it had been years since I’d let my rebellious nature overcome my curiosity.

I followed the Mistress until she set me in a chair upon a small riser. That placed me high up overlooking the uniformed women. Instruments emerged from cases, carriers, and sacks. Polished brass gleamed in the morning sun. Mellow brown woods shone in the shape of a woman’s curves. Narrow silver pipes trilled as their warming-up began.

What I had studied as harp and spinet and flute, one instrument at a time, was about to unfold before me in the array of a performance. I was entranced. My own skill with anything but voice was marginal at best. Mistress Maglia had given me only scraps and foretastes of this.

Mistress Tirelle stood close, stretching to speak with me. “You know the tests of the fruit. This is the same, with music.”

Mistress Maglia came to my other ear. “They will play pieces of music known to you. The first is the overture to Grandieve’s Trollhattan Moods. You will listen through. Then they will play again, but certain musicians will play flat or off-key or out of tempo from time to time. When you hear an error, you will point to the offender.”

I clasped my hands. She nodded, a sharp smile on her dark-browed features. “When I am wrong, what will happen?”

“Mistress Tirelle will record your marks as given by me, and show you punishment later.”

I had not taken a beating in almost two weeks. It seemed improbable that I would finish the day without a score of blows due to me.

When they played, the women made a beautiful sound, which twined around me. It must have been audible in the other courts as well. The Grandieve piece is a study of moods, a series of tone poems about an icy island in a high-walled northern bay. Mistress Ellera had once shown me a painting of Trollhattan. I could see the sound pictures even when I had first practiced it on my little flute.

The orchestra made it as big as the sky.

They played through perfectly, then fell silent. At direction from Mistress Maglia, they resumed. This time one of the horns was flat in the very first measure. I pointed, the woman nodded and set aside her instrument. Two bars later, a viol slipped out of key. I pointed again. Another nod, another instrument fell away.

By the end, I had missed but three. Only four players still carried the composition.

If not for the promised punishment, this would have been a fascinating exercise.

So began my training with others. All women, still, but more and more came to the Pomegranate Court in the months that followed. We staged dinner parties where some women wore black sashes to indicate they would be served and eat as men. Women in leather trousers marched in review as if they were a squad of guards. Women in pairs danced alongside me in the practice room or out in the court while a small orchestra played.

I was learning to be in the world. Somehow this was stranger and more frightening than being below the stones, because this was the truth of what they pushed me toward.

Every night I took my belled silk from its imaginary hiding place and added to it. These days, the bells were a cascade of tones and keys, different sounds that would have been a waterfall of music had such a thing ever existed in truth.

I loved it, for all that it was pure figment.

 

We found Septio again and again underground. Our paths crossed often enough that I soon realized it was not coincidence. He, like Federo, played a role in the silent conspiracy that wrapped my life with an invisible thread.

I did not strike him again, and Septio did not remind me of my first attack. Instead we took time to talk on occasion.

“The gods of Copper Downs are silent,” he told me. “They are real as the gods of any other country. I could show you their beds and bodies, except that their power would strike you blind.”

“It’s not merely silence if one has been reduced to bones.”

“Gods are different.”

Later, the Dancing Mistress and I spoke quietly while taking turns climbing an ornate wall and dropping free.

“His god’s name is Blackblood,” she told me.

“Not someone you should want to invoke, I think.”

“I do not know. Septio has common cause with others who disagree with the Duke of Copper Downs. Common cause does not mean common interests. My folk are not usually of significance to the gods of men, nor they to us.”

There was small purpose in asking the Dancing Mistress of her gods. She said so little of her people that I did not even know their name for themselves. Any more than I knew hers. I understood, though, that they were quite concerned with paths and souls and some connection that ran between them one and all.

“I am human,” I said quietly.

“You are not of this place. Your home has its own gods and spirits. They should be of importance to you.”

“Tulpas,” I said, the word leaping to memory. “Like the soul of a place, or of an action. An idea, I suppose.”

“The tulpas concern you. This city belongs to Blackblood and his fellow sleepers.”

“I am of this city now.” That was a hateful thought, but true. “I can scarcely converse in the tongue of my birth, while in Petraean, I can speak learnedly on dozens of topics. The music of my people is unfamiliar to me, but I know what instruments they play here. Likewise the food, the clothing, the animals, the weapons. My roots may be in the fire-hot south, but Copper Downs has been grafted over me.”

“Perhaps,” she said after a little thought. “They have dozens of gods here in this city. Blackblood is only one. Each has their concerns, their purposes, their temples and priests.”

“It is like a market, then. Each stallholder calls his wares, and people pray where the fruit is freshest.”

There was something sad in the Dancing Mistress’ voice as her slow reply came. “You may have the right of it, but you miss the deeper truth. Gods are real, just like people. Petty, noble; vicious, kind; strong, weak. But you do not buy one for an afternoon and then throw her away. Each god means something to this city. They are always of something, called at need, staying until after all have forgotten them.” She sighed heavily. “So long as it is not I who calls them.”

 

Federo came time and again. He would sample my cooking, examine my needlework, or watch me dance. We would talk, but I always held my tongue from the words that counted. Mistress Tirelle lurked in doorways to overhear what we spoke of. If I expressed myself too frankly, or was too bitter, there would be a beating later.

Where I wish now that I had found a different way in those years was that Federo and I never spoke in my words. We never used that language for which I then had no name. He knew some of the words, to be sure, for we had spoken thus when he first bought me away from Papa.

Mistress Tirelle treated the words as if they were an infection. Federo was no different.

My stories had slipped further and further away in the nights when I lay abed and thought on my earliest memories. What always lay close to mind was Endurance, and the sound of bells.

 

______

 

I never did see the other candidates, but just as Mistress Tirelle had me working amid larger groups of people and showing more of my accomplishments, so the competitions increased. Hardly a month went by that the Factor did not send for something of skill and purpose from his girls. Calligraphy, in the classic style brought from the lands of the Sunward Sea. A dance designed by me and taught to a servant who would deliver it to him, set to the same piece of music used by others. A hound to be trained at a certain trick in two weeks’ time.

The outcomes of the competitions were not reported back to me. I could on occasion gauge by Mistress Tirelle’s mood when news had come, but precisely what news, I had to guess.

The truth of the whole exercise had become plain to me. The Factor manufactured women in his house, great ladies for the nobles and high merchants of Copper Downs and perhaps the smaller courts along the Stone Coast. There was pride to be taken in what I learned and mastered, but it was still slavery.

When Mistress Cherlise came, I knew this all over again.

She interrupted my nights as no one but the Dancing Mistress had done. We sat and spoke of how my breasts were beginning to bud, how my blood would soon flow. She had little books in dark leather covers filled with pictures of men and women in the throes of passion. Mistress Cherlise showed me those as well, before explaining how I would more likely be used—hard, with no thought to any pleasure but my lord’s, and required at all times to smile and beg and plead and always play the soft, warm hand.

The first time she put this forward, I grew angry. I held my emotion in check, but the Mistress must have seen it in my face.

“What do you think the lot of women is in this world, Girl?”

I spoke without thinking. “T-to choose, if nothing else.”

“You were not born here. You came from somewhere, yes?”

I nodded.

“A small village, or a farm?”

“Yes.”

“When you grew, what would your choices have been? A farmer, no doubt. A boy from some neighbor’s land who would know nothing more of love than what he’d learned from his father’s bullock. Here, at least, you know what can be, and how to achieve it if you get the chance. There, your choices would have been narrow as a thread, and brought you little joy at all.”

They still would have been my choices, I thought. That was my oldest argument with myself, and one I somehow always seemed to lose.

She showed me much, undressing her own body with casualness so I could see how a nipple perked with chill or damp or a gentle touch, how the curve of a breast felt beneath the fingers. Likewise her sweetpocket below. We discussed shaving and hair, how the blood coursed in the monthly rhythm, and the different fluids that came with sex. Mistress Cherlise gave me certain exercises to perform deep within my body.

“These will not defend you from a beating, nor save you from a fall, but they will help you manage your choices and keep your body safe,” she said.

We both lay naked on the bed in my sleeping chamber. “When will I need the exercises?”

“Soon. Always be ready.”

She sat up, and I helped her into her smallclothes.

Soon? I was not quite twelve years of age. How soon could it be?

 

When I had first come here, I had barely been as tall as Mistress Tirelle’s waist. Now I could see the wart at the top of her head. Almost nine years I had spent in the Pomegranate Court. Growing, learning, being remade time and time again. If not for the stolen freedom of the night lessons by the Dancing Mistress, I would have had nothing but the company of women within these bluestone walls that whole time.

My education was frighteningly detailed, but it was also incomplete. I could prepare ducklings Smagadine over cream and rice, and find a flaw in a polished silver service for forty-eight at a glance, but I had no idea how to buy a cabbage in the market, or where one might hire a cart. A great lady did not need to know everything. She needed to know only those things worthy of her attention.

There were other holes, as well. None of Mistress Danae’s books had discussed anything of the recent history of Copper Downs. If not for meeting Septio in the underground, I would have had no idea of the city’s gods, let alone that they had fallen silent for centuries. No one ever discussed the Duke within the walls of the Pomegranate Court, either. He was another thing I learned of only in my stolen moments outside.

Government, trade, the true state of affairs in the city: Why would these be hidden from a great lady in training? The Factor’s house was wrapped in mysteries enclosed in a circle of questions spiraling in on itself until the truth was swallowed like a shadow under the noonday sun.

I had added more than three thousand bells to the silk I carried in my mind. The tally of the wrongs done to me had grown so lengthy that I’d long since set it aside in favor of my original resolve to rule these people through their words. My own words I kept more carefully since I’d realized how many of them I had lost.

 

______

 

I lay in my bed very early in a morning of my ninth autumn in the Pomegranate Court and wished perversely that my arms were long enough to massage my ankles while leaving my legs straight. Mistress Tirelle swept into my room in a flurry of huffing breath. Her rounded face was flushed dark and miserable, like one of our tree’s fruits gone to rot, and she was sheened with sweat.

My first thought was for what I might have done to wrong her. My second was a nasty pleasure in her discomfort.

“Up, up, you lazy girl!” The duck woman slapped the covers away from me.

“I am—”

Her murderous glare cut my words short. “The Factor will be here within minutes. You must present yourself.”

It was not even daylight outside. He could not be so early. No one of importance rose before the dawn. Not in any book or story or hallway gossip that I had ever heard.

I remained calm in the face of her fear. Sitting up, I stretched. “Then I will wear the green silk shift. And take the time to brush my hair with a few drops of oil.”

The dress was the color of Federo’s eyes. It also set off my dark brown skin to great advantage. As for my hair, though I kept it coiled and pinned most often, when it was down, it flowed to my thighs and drew admiring glances from many of the women who came to work with me. Mistress Cherlise was especially taken with it. She’d advised me not to let my hair grow ragged with neglect, and never forget the effect it would have on men.

“I’ll not have you play the slut with him,” Mistress Tirelle breathed, her fat face close to mine, though she now had to tilt her head back to meet my eye at such range.

“This will not be so different from Federo’s visits.” My voice held more confidence than my heart did. The Factor was no friend nor ally. Rather, he was the man who owned me in every part and piece. I was his more abjectly than any horse in his stables.

Old rage stirred.

Mistress Tirelle pinched my cheek hard. “You listen, Girl. The Factor is very different from that idiotic fop. We would none of us have food on our tables or beds at night if not for him. His word is your life. Federo . . .” She snorted, close as she ever came to laughing. “That man is a wastrel peacock who flies the world bargaining for future beauty.”

He’d bargained for my beauty once. Every scrap I’d eaten since then had come from the Factor by courtesy of that idiotic fop. Once again, as she always did, Mistress Tirelle saw me as receiving great favor in this house. Such charity, to raise the little farmer girl to high estate.

The small rebellions of my thoughts were no matter. We launched into a flurry of activity. First I must be washed clean, though I always kept myself fair. Especially after the Dancing Mistress’ night runs, though it had been nine days since my last such. Mistress Tirelle used cotton cloths pressed into a bowl of rose water to lave my back, then set me to wiping my arms and chest and lower body while she piled my hair.

“You do not know,” she whispered fiercely. “I have tried every minute of these years to make you ready. You do not know, Girl.”

You could have told me what I do not know, I thought, but I said nothing. She would not beat me immediately before the Factor arrived, but there were always later days. Mistress Tirelle never forgot an infraction. She also cultivated a perfect recall of any perceived slight to her dignity.

So we worked quickly at the efforts of beauty. My hair was let loose, oiled, and brushed as swiftly as we could. I had not yet been judged ready for the scented waters and alcohols used by women full grown, but Mistress Tirelle outlined my eyes in dark kohl and touched my face very lightly with brushes from the paint pots. She traced my lips with dyes, and checked my teeth for untoward stains or flecks of last night’s dinner. Then we folded me into the shift I’d tailored from a bolt of green lawn cloth. Under the instruction of Mistress Leonie, I had sewn it with a hint of bodice to signal the change that was already on its way. My painted face and the cut of my clothing would lead where my body had yet to go.

Mistress Tirelle muttered and cursed as she worked to ready me for the Factor’s inspection. I submitted to her attentions. The soft touches and momentary efforts at arranging this and that were as close as she ever came to treating me with tenderness. In some strange way, we were family to one another. She had been as much a prisoner of the Pomegranate Court as I, locked within these stone walls just as I had been all these years. I’d never asked if she’d loved a man or borne a child or found a life somewhere else. I’d just accepted all the days she had given me, along with the lectures, the punishments, and the odd bits of joy.

What else was there to do?

I tried to imagine Mistress Tirelle wrapped in bells, atop Endurance’s back for the slow, hot trip to the temple platforms and the union of her soul with the wide world. I could not envision this terrible old woman following the ways of my grandmother.

Here in this city of silent gods with a stranger on the throne, who was there for her to follow? The Factor, perhaps. He was certainly the focus of her fear. Perhaps he was the focus of Mistress Tirelle’s faith as well.

Seeing her under the brassy sun of my birth was too much to contemplate. I could not bring the image full-formed to mind, but a smile slipped unbidden upon my lips.

“Do not smirk at the Factor,” Mistress Tirelle said with a growl. She stood me and turned me, checking me in the light of my candles and lanterns. “You will not shame us,” she added. “Your life has no greater moment than this.”

I could make no answer that would not provoke far greater conflict, so I held my tongue yet again. She propelled me out the door of my sleeping chamber to the porch. I walked ahead of Mistress Tirelle down the stairs. She followed, and retreated to the deeper shadows of the downstairs sitting room. “You will await him by the tree,” she whispered from her hiding place.

 

The pomegranate sheltered me in the dawn’s pallid light. The sky above glowed pearlescent, some combination of mist and cloud leaching the heavens of their color in favor of a generic, glossy beauty. It had not dawned cold, but still the air had enough of a chill to raise bumps along my arm. The tree was heavy with fruit. I had already spotted enough to fill both a good basket and a beggar’s basket from the pickings on the branch.

A solitary fruit lay windfall on the cobbles, out of Mistress Tirelle’s view, about where the Dancing Mistress would usually stand to meet me for our night runs. I looked at the sad deflation of its curve, deformed in striking the ground.

That was me, fallen away from my roots. Except I hadn’t been left to lie on the cobbles. I’d come across the sea as smartly as any fruit carried to the kitchen, and been dressed here for the pleasure of a great man.

Here I had come nearly the full circle round. Perhaps the Factor would take me to the harbor and we would board Fortune’s Flight for a trip across the sea to the hot land of my birth. Clad in white, picking up bells as I walked along the road that ran over the highlands from that small fishing port, I would return to my father on the arm of the Factor as he smiled and reported my great progress.

Even in the momentary fantasy, though I could remember the brown eyes of the ox as clearly as if Endurance stood before me even now, the only image I could bring to mind of my father was a dark-haired man with skin the color of my own hurrying away through the rice paddies as Federo tugged at my hand.

He had never looked back at me. I had never stopped looking back at him.

The past yawned behind me like one of the pits underground, threatening to swallow my sense of myself, my purpose so carefully crafted in this imprisoned life.

Then my thoughts were torn away by the screeching of the gate. Both great doors were thrown open, as was done only for delivery wagons or the very rare carriage. Horses stamped and snorted as they raced into the courtyard in a jingle of harness under the small-voiced yips and calls of their riders: soldiers in tall leather boots that gleamed like roach’s wings, their uniforms rough with wear but still elegant and carefully straight. Each rider was blindfolded that he not see me, but they carried swords and spears aplenty despite that handicap.

A coach followed the soldiers, rattling toward me to creak to a stop beneath the pomegranate tree. Its glossy black body swayed slightly on the leather and iron straps of its suspension. No sigil or heraldry was blazoned upon the door. The coachmen were blindfolded, too, and seemed less at ease than their escort.

Nothing happened for a time. No motion, no voice or sound from the darkened windows of the carriage. The door did not open.

The man within owned me, owned my life. By his will, Federo had first taken me from the hot lands of the sun and brought me here to the miserable precincts of the Stone Coast. My hands tensed in patterns the Dancing Mistress had taught me, but I forced them to loosen.

Patience was always the greatest lesson of the Pomegranate Court, the same patience that the sky taught to the very stones of the soil. I waited, wondering.

Surely I deserved a word from this man. The entire flow of my life had been directed toward this moment, toward his hands.

Then the door handle of the carriage turned. It creaked. For a long second, I would have given everything that was mine to give to be anywhere else.

The door swung open.

 

When the Factor stepped from his coach, my first thought was surprise that he appeared so ordinary. He was a man of middling height dressed in a dark morning suit of a classic cut, velvet lapels over a coarser cloth, with low quarter boots folded over at the ankle. His hair was brown, his skin had the sun-seared summer ruddiness of so many of his Stone Coast countrymen, his eyes were a strange gray flecked with gold. He’d run to fat in the middle and on his cheeks. Pipeleaf spilled down his ruffled silk shirt. He came so close to me, I could smell the oils in his hair, the ambergris-and-attar of his perfume. There was no scent of sweat at all.

He possessed a presence such as I had never really believed a person could have. Like a dark prince in the stories I’d read, the Factor filled all the space in front of me and around me as if he owned the world and I were some small intrusion. The breeze stilled at his appearance. The grackles and jays at their morning chatter on the rooftops stilled and froze, until one fled. The rest followed in a panicked rush of wings.

For a moment, the sun seemed to stutter in its passage through the sky.

He studied me. His face was impassive. I wondered if I should have curtsied, or otherwise presented myself.

The calculation in his eyes told me that I was no more of a person to him than the carriage behind his back.

This man is reviewing his investment. He is not meeting a woman. But he will someday.

Here was the true architect of all my troubles in this life. This man’s hand had tugged Federo’s strings and pushed at the invisible stick that penetrated Mistress Tirelle from arse to scalp.

Then he took my chin in his hand and tilted my head back and forth. He viewed the angles and planes of my face a moment. Releasing me without pain, he swept my hair away from my ears and inspected them. Taking first one hand then the other, he spread my fingers, checked their length, then examined each nail in turn. He walked around me twice before stopping behind me.

A horse nickered. Two dozen men breathed loud, though I looked at none of them. Never had our eyes met. I continued to be nothing to him. I began to wonder what the Factor was about back there when he tore my green shift away.

Cold plucked at my skin, raising pimples all along my back. Shivering, my joints ached in the chill, and tears rose sudden and unexpected in my eyes. To the Factor I wasn’t even an investment. I was livestock.

After a miserable time naked in the wind, I felt his fingers test the softness of my waist, then the firmness of my buttocks. He walked around me once more to gaze at the buds of my breasts and down to where my legs met my body.

The Factor nodded to Mistress Tirelle in the shadows behind me. He stepped to his coach, then turned back to finally meet my eyes.

My tears had been whisked away by the wind. In their place, a stinging tremble remained, which I knew would show as a redness should he choose to reach toward me and spread my eyelids back for inspection. Within, I was torn between anger and deep embarrassment. I had been masterfully trained to conceal both emotions, and so I did. I pretended the shivering in my body was the wind’s chill.

As he looked at me, I returned the stare. Something in his gaze made me think of the lifeless gray eye of the ocean leviathan that had nearly taken my life off the shores of my home.

Here was the root of his power, or at least a lens to peer within it. The Factor’s soulless eyes were no more alive than the sea monster’s had been—filmy, quiescent. Dead.

My teeth ached as my breath shuddered in my chest. The Factor didn’t seem to breathe at all, something I realized only when I saw him inhale.

“Emerald,” he said, clearly and distinctly.

Then he was gone in a swirl of horses and men and clattering weapons. Even blindfolded, the guards circled with a strange precision, yipping and whistling to mark their places and guide their mounts. They moved like water gyring down a drain. Some men went through the gate first with weapons high. The carriage followed, then the rest of the men.

In a moment, they were gone as if they’d never been present. Only a few mounds of steaming dung marked the passage of the soldiers and their horses. That and the turmoil within my heart.

After a while, Mistress Tirelle waddled out to me. I heard her steps stumping on the cobbles of the courtyard before she rounded the pomegranate tree to look me over. Her face was bent into her almost-smile. She appeared nearly pleased.

“Well, Emerald, you passed.”

“Emerald.” I tried the word in my mouth as if it were a name. Girl had been a name that meant nothing, a description only. He had named me Emerald to mark me as a precious possession, no more.

In the language of my birth, I did not know the word for emerald. I determined that I would use that tongue to call myself Green. That was as close as I could come, and it was a word that belonged to me rather than to these maggot people. The Factor’s precious belongings I would mock with the profane infection of my own tongue.

This was also the greatest change that had come upon me since Federo had met my father at the edge of the rice paddies. I looked into Mistress Tirelle’s eyes and found all unexpected a strange species of sympathy there. “What becomes of me now?”

Her face wrinkled in thought a moment. Surely she knew the answer, and was just picking through the secrets she thought might be fit to tell me now that I had a name and standing in the Factor’s dead, dead eyes.

“That depends on whether the Duke fancies a new consort within the next two years or so.” She poked me in the chest. Her rough nail snagged at my bare skin. “Otherwise you’ll fetch a spice trader’s ransom anywhere along the Stone Coast.”

Those words chilled my already heavy heart so much, I could not hide the shiver that crawled along my spine. Somehow I had thought myself in waiting for the Factor, or a great house here in Copper Downs. I had long known that this blue-walled house manufactured women fit for thrones, but I’d never fully considered what it meant to me, for who I was. For what the Dancing Mistress had once described as the power I might someday hope to grasp hold of.

Federo had not bought me for the Factor. Not for the man, at any rate. Federo had bought me for a market. Meat with two legs and deep eyes and a face and body on which he’d wagered years and untold wealth in hopes I would grow to beauty. Salable, brokerable beauty.

Federo had bought me for meat, and my father had sold me for a whore.

Words, I told myself. These were all words. The maggot people of the Stone Coast lived and died by their words. I’d known this from the first. “Emerald” marked me as a jewel in the Factor’s case. Nothing more, nothing less.

I blinked away the sting of some new emotion I could not yet put a name to, and followed Mistress Tirelle back to the rooms that boxed my life.

 

There were no lessons that day. No Mistresses, no practicing, no drills or dances or calligraphy or punishment or anything. This was the first idle time I’d experienced in all the years since I’d come to the Pomegranate Court.

I sat before the hearth in the downstairs sitting room and wandered through my memories. Endurance, the frogs in their ditches, my grandmother’s face, her bells still jingling with every step of the ox. I turned the imaginary silk over in my mind, counting the days.

Nothing helped. I was overwhelmed by the bitterness in finally reaching a true understanding of what I’d known all along: I was nothing. No person lived behind Girl, Emerald, Green—whoever I might pretend to be.

I found myself wishing my instructresses had come. The snappish ill will of Mistress Leonie would have given me some focus for the rising of my discontent. Mistress Danae would have distracted me. The Dancing Mistress would have set me through paces to draw the energy forth.

Of course, I could step to the practice room or pick up a book or sit myself before the spinet. I did not need a Mistress to tell me to do those things. It was just that nothing mattered.

In time, I noticed the shadows had moved across the floor. A plate was laid next to me, with slices of bread and cheese upon it. Mistress Tirelle had come, then. Did we speak? I wondered.

I could not see how that mattered.

Darkness eventually stole into the room. No one had eaten the bread or cheese. Both had gone stale. My bladder finally moved me from the chair. I stumbled out to find a chamber pot.

Mistress Tirelle sat before the door. She was almost lost within the shadows.

“Emerald.” Her voice was soft. “Tomorrow your days begin again as always.”

“I think not.” I did not bother to ask permission to speak. If she wished to take after me with her stupid tube, I would feed her the sand, and follow it with the silk.

“Nothing has changed.”

“Everything has changed.” I pushed past her to spend a little time alone in the privy.

I emerged with my hunger reawakened to find Mistress Tirelle awaiting me. She seemed almost sad in the darkening shadows of evening.

“When a candidate is given a name by the Factor, that is the signal honor which declares he has found her fit.”

“Who is he to find me fit?” Rage crept into my voice.

“He is master to us all, and answers only to the Duke.” Her own voice hardened. “Sit down and listen.”

Almost a decade’s worth of habit sat me down quickly enough.

“The Duke is all in this city. We are not permitted to instruct the candidates in the recent history of our times, but you will learn.” She glanced around, then back at me. “His eyes and ears are everywhere. He was on the throne long before my grandmother was born, and he will be on the throne long after my grandchildren grow old.”

I was briefly distracted by the thought of Mistress Tirelle having children and grandchildren. The flare of interest died within the gloom of my thoughts as quickly as it had risen.

“He is everything to us, forever,” she went on. “To be raised up as his consort is an honor beyond measure. The daughters of the greatest houses would cheerfully slay their lovers and their chambermaids alike to stand where you do today.”

I will trade them freely without the need for murder, I thought.

“So you listen, little Emerald. We have a year or two left with you at most. If that. Once your flow begins, you will be beddable. At the price you command, you will be bedded. Spread wide and smile sweetly, and your life will be very good for decades to come. Turn your shoulder and raise that pride I’ve never been able to erase from your spirit, and you can still be cut and turned out like any servant girl who fails to give satisfaction.”

She patted me on the shoulder and walked out to leave me alone in the darkness, contemplating the price and purpose of my beauty.

 

______

 

The next months went by in an uneasy peace. My lessons continued, but they were more for practice than for further education. The Factor did not return, which suited me just fine. Neither did Federo visit in that period. My feelings about his absence were more ambiguous.

He’d taken me away once. In quiet moments, I found myself daydreaming that he might take me away again. Given that Federo was the Factor’s man through and through, I knew those for hollow, girlish hopes.

It was the name Emerald that stuck in my ears like a needle in my finger. Every time Mistress Tirelle uttered that word, my blood ran hot. By then, I was old enough to have a care for how well I could conceal my feelings, at least most of the time, but she must have seen the anger.

What was different now was that my tormentor turned away more often than not.

It finally dawned on me that she was finished with me. We awaited only the onset of my flow, or the whim of the Factor and his master the Duke, for me to leave the Pomegranate Court and some other girl-child to arrive through that barred gate.

That thought brought a special terror of its own. A part of me wanted to stay here in the hated center of my universe.

Was I safer within these walls or without?

The answer, of course, was that I was safe nowhere at all.

 

Even the Dancing Mistress seemed to be marking time with me. We ran familiar routes, worked on the same flips and falls and kick-steps as always. She was no better than Mistress Tirelle in her waiting.

“I don’t want my name,” I told her one night as we ran the Eggcorn Gallery, well west of the Factor’s house. I hated the truculence in my voice, but somehow couldn’t change the tone.

“Girl.” Her voice carried a tired weight. “A name is like a mask. You can wear it for a day, a season, or a lifetime, then put it aside at need.”

In truth, she had not once referred to me as Emerald since the day the Factor had dubbed me so. Somehow that didn’t make me feel better.

“What do you know of names?” I demanded angrily. “You don’t even have one.”

The Dancing Mistress broke her stride. Her eyes were black-shadowed from the faint glow of the coldfire in my hand as she stared at me. In that moment, I knew I had pushed her too hard, as I had done a few years ago over the matter of Federo. I was suddenly desperate that she not leave me now as she had then.

“I am not your enemy, Girl.” I could almost hear her claws flexing. “You might do me the courtesy of recalling that.”

Bowing my head in the dark, I forced an apology between my teeth. “I am sorry, Mistress. Everything since the Factor’s visit has been too out of sorts.”

She turned and resumed her run. I sprinted after, stumbling in my first steps at a strange twinge in my groin. I was not in the habit of faltering, but pride kept me from saying anything. I supposed anger kept her from answering.

That, and she knew well enough what was happening to me. Teaching girls was her business, after all, and every girl becomes a woman in her time.

 

Far too soon, my monthlies came upon me. The twinges in my back had been a warning, recurring at irregular intervals for a number of weeks. One day cooking with Mistress Tirelle in the great kitchen—we were working over a brawn terrine—my stomach seemed to flip over on me. Without any warning, I bent double and spewed my breakfast on the tiled floor.

Instead of raising her hand to me, Mistress Tirelle smiled and sent me to clean myself. When I lay down afterwards, my nausea returned. I had to work to hold my stomach behind my teeth.

In time, I was forced to roll to my knees on the cold floor, spewing. My mouth stung; I loosed a bit of my bladder. This disgusted me until at a furtive touch I realized there was blood trickling down there.

Mistress Cherlise will be proud of me now, I thought. I am beddable at last. I tried to ignore what this would mean for me in the Duke’s eyes.

Soon enough, Mistress Tirelle brought me cool water and cloths.

I had never seen her beam so.

 

That night I stared out my door at the moonlight. The yard of the Pomegranate Court was silvered like a jewelsmith’s dream. I was to be Emerald, a jewel in the Duke’s box, placed in a glorious setting to be admired for twoscore seasons before being allowed to fade to some tower apartment with a few aging servants.

The histories Mistress Danae had given me to read were clear enough concerning the fate of unwanted wives and lemans, especially those of low birth.

All that time between now and that end would be only a blink of an eye, once it had passed. There would be nothing for me. Nothing.

The moonlight was beautiful, but I resolved that I would not be a jewel. No Emerald, I, to be sold in the market of women at the Duke’s command.

I wondered what it was that Endurance would have done. The question was beyond pointless. The ox was property. Papa could drive him or slit his throat and have him dressed for meat.

They could slit my throat, too. Mistress Tirelle had made that threat to me often enough, though I suppose she meant more to notch my ears or fork my tongue when she said I could be cut and turned out.

What market is there for great ladies of ruined beauty and broken spirit?

I did not care. They would never render me into such a beautiful array of meat. I was more than these people, better than them. Even the kind ones, such as Mistress Cherlise, were molding me to the Factor’s will. I was merely a thing to any of them, a means to advance a purpose. My allies, the Dancing Mistress and Federo, wanted me for their own purposes only instead of the Factor’s. Whatever petty plot occupied their hours was no concern of mine.

There was no way I would be a toy for the ageless Duke, used for a few decades then tossed aside. The daughters of the great houses could have him.

I slipped from my bed and down to the great kitchen. There I had learned to cook with saffron and vanilla and other spices worth far more than their weight in gold. What would we have had at home, Papa and I? A little salt, and some dried peppers from bushes that grew at the edge of the trees. Salt we had here as well, along with parsley and other common pot herbs.

We also had a drawer full of knives.

Much of what had been kept from me early on had been added in the growth of trust. The strange trust between master and slave, jailor and prisoner; but still it was a species of trust that had stood between me and Mistress Tirelle.

I found the small, sharp cutter I normally used to separate meat from bone. The blade was already well honed. No need to risk a noise to set an edge now. Instead I went outside to sit beneath the pomegranate tree in the failing moonlight and stare at the blade I had taken up in my hand.

The Factor had named me Emerald. Marked by beauty, trained to grace. Certainly this blue-walled prison was far more comfortable than the hut of my youth. “I miss my belled silk and my father’s white ox,” I whispered to the blade. There was so much that I longed for—the water snakes and the hot winds and the silly lizards pushing themselves always closer to the brassy sun with their forelegs, as if they could ever reach its heavy fire.

Miss those though I might, I could no more throw away my years of training here in the Factor’s house than I could throw away time itself. Federo had taken me away from what was mine, while the Factor had made me into a creature of the Duke of Copper Downs.

I was no ox, nor carriage, nor cart horse. I was no animal nor thing. I could escape this place easily enough by climbing the walls as the Dancing Mistress had shown me, but I was valuable. My grace and beauty and training were the work of years by dozens of women in the Factor’s employ. They would hunt for me, and they would find me. Doubtless his blindfolded guards could ride across the leagues to wherever I hid. Doubtless the Duke would ask after his new-grown playpretty, and the entire city of Copper Downs would try to make an answer.

As I was, I was worth far too much for the Factor ever to let slip through his grasp. I could not throw away those years or the knowledge they had brought me. With this blade in my hand, however, I could throw away my beauty.

I will show them whose spirit will break first.

Endurance’s brown eyes glinted in the dark as I reached to slash my right cheek. The pain was sharp and terrible, but I had stood through a lifetime of beatings without crying out. Then my left, echoing and balancing the first hurt I had done myself. I reached back and cut a single deep notch in the curve of each of my ears.

“I am Green,” I shouted at the moon in the language of my birth. Blood coursed warm and sharp-scented down my neck to tickle at my shoulders. “Green!” I screamed again, then began sobbing into the night.

Mistress Tirelle came following the racket I had made and found me bleeding down the white cotton of my sleeping shift.

When she realized what I had done, she shrieked. I broke her neck with a kick the Dancing Mistress had taught me, a flowing spin that sent the duck woman’s chin hard to the right with a snap that I felt down in my bones. She gurgled once, then slumped to the ground.

That was my first killing, amid rage and grief and confusion.

In some ways, Mistress Tirelle is the death I will always remember best. Her constant presence was as close as I’d known to love in all my days since being taken from Papa. She had held me at the center of her life. I repaid her with murder. Not even a shred of dignity, either, though death is rarely dignified. The dying generally do let go of whatever is within their bodies. I sometimes think the gods mean us to leave the world in a filthy state to remind us that we are made of dust and water.

I told myself then that though I hated Mistress Tirelle, I had not meant to kill her. That was not true, of course. My Dancing Mistress had taught me to kick. I had accepted her lessons. The responsibility was mine.

Mistress Tirelle’s blank eyes were already fogged. I scrambled up the pomegranate tree to fetch my running blacks. I missed my footing twice, but found them where they should have been. Back down on the ground, I stripped out of my bloody shift and dropped it over the duck woman’s face. Swiftly I tugged on the dark clothes.

No time now, I told myself, except to keep moving. Cut or uncut, they would hunt me, but I was my own possession now. No one else’s. Rage sent me swarming up the posts of the balcony to the copper roof of my house. From there, I gained the walkway atop the bluestone walls. I could already hear shouting within the core of the Factor’s house.

Sprinting for the corner where I could make the climb down, I stumbled again—I had not eaten all day, and was ill in my stomach with shock and fear and all my bleeding. As I swung over the wall, I missed my grasp and fell hard to the cobbled streets below.

The landing was poor, but not fatally so. I collapsed onto my back, breath heaving in deep sobs as gongs sounded within the Factor’s house.

A silver-furred face leaned close. “Come with me now,” my Dancing Mistress said. “That way you might live to see the dawn.”

“No,” I said in my own words. “I will have no more of you.”

She grabbed my arm. “Don’t be a fool. You’ll throw away whatever you think you’ve gained, and your life besides.”

Still shocked from the murder I had just wrought, I rose and stumbled after her. I muttered maledictions in my own language as we walked quickly through the nighttime streets of Copper Downs. Both Endurance and my grandmother’s ghost would be ashamed of me.

 

I shivered as we climbed down a culvert to an entrance to Below. This was one we hadn’t used before. The night wasn’t so cold now, but I was.

The crack of Mistress Tirelle’s neck echoed repeatedly in my mind. I had kicked high. That wasn’t defense—I had not meant merely to knock her down or disable her.

Words, my victory was supposed to be in words. Yet I’d ended her life.

That was a theft that could never be restored. In taking her life, I’d taken my own, too. I had cast away everything I’d known in Copper Downs, almost everything I could ever remember.

I’d meant only to take myself away. That was why my cheeks and ears still stung like hot coals, their wounds a horrid itch that intruded on my thoughts. In spoiling myself for the Factor and his patron Duke, I had ruined their plans.

But a life.

It made no difference that she had been awful to me. I was slave and animal and work to her. Never a real girl. Never a person.

Then I’d killed her. That had made me real, at least for the span of her last moments.

We moved quickly for being Below. The passages were close-walled and low-ceilinged, slimed over as happened mostly near the surface. The Dancing Mistress held a snatch of coldfire in her hands, which was enough for me to follow. Beyond that, I paid no heed to anything but my own misery.

She stepped through a doorway into some larger gallery. I followed, only to have someone clutch at my arm. I shrieked as I was startled out of my reverie.

The Dancing Mistress whirled. Whatever had been on her lips died there.

Mother Iron held me pinched in a grip that seemed tight enough to shear pipes. I looked into her eyes. They gleamed with the orange white of the hottest coals.

“So it begins.” Mother Iron’s voice was rusty as a grate. Her breath gusted like a wind from a great distance, and reeked of stale air.

“We move swiftly,” the Dancing Mistress answered softly. “To stay ahead of the hunt that is even now being summoned.”

The old woman-thing—I was mindful of Septio’s sleeping gods—squeezed my arm again. “Be true and hold your edge,” she told me. Then Mother Iron was gone, vanished like mist before breaking sunlight.

The Dancing Mistress took my hand. “I had not expected that. Are you well?”

I tried to answer, but could only laugh.

Her eyes narrowed to gleaming slits as she shook me slightly. “Stay away from that clouded place in your mind, Girl.”

That sobered me quickly. “My name is Green,” I snapped. Hot, hard anger filled my voice.

“Green, then. I see that you are back.”

 

Our flight ended with a climb of a wooden ladder screwed to a brick well. The Dancing Mistress led. I followed, stewing in anger rather than lost in despair.

How dare they snatch everything away from me? I knew my thoughts held no logic at all, but I cherished the burning spark. Guilt and fear lay not far behind it. I would much rather have my path lit by fire than wrapped in gloom.

We emerged in a large half-empty building. A bit of moonlight leached in through wide windows set high on the walls to make solid, silvery shadows of stacks of crates. I glanced around the room, seeing as I had been trained to do. Eight of those windows on each side, some accessible by climbing the stacks before them. One end was swallowed in deep shadow where a dozen horsemen could have waited invisible. The other end gleamed with the cracks of a large doorway lit by gas lamps outside.

A warehouse, of course.

“What is in the shadows?” I asked, mindful of the Dancing Mistress’ earlier words about the hunt being called.

“What do your nose and ears tell you?”

I closed my eyes and sniffed. Dust, wood, oil, mold. The scent of the two of us. No horses. No sweat-stink of soldiers. Likewise the noises. A cart rumbled past the other side of the doorway, paced by the clip of hooves on cobbles. Within were only the sounds of an old building, wood settling and the whistling scurry of rats.

There might be a lone, quiet person in the darkness, but no more. I said as much.

“There might be anyone, anywhere,” she agreed. “Here in this moment, we are probably safe. Now we hide some more.”

The Dancing Mistress began climbing an array of boxes toward one of the grease-smeared windows. I followed her. I wondered where we were going, but did not ask. She reached the window, then stretched tall to touch the ceiling above it. A section of slats slid away to the noisy squeal of wood on wood. I winced at the sound and looked back down for our mythical assassin.

No one was there. Above me, the Dancing Mistress hauled herself into the ceiling. I followed to find us in a much darker space with another ceiling so low that I nearly struck my head.

The roof of the warehouse, I realized: a very low-angled attic. The texture of the shadows suggested that this space was used for storage. Objects bulked dark within deeper darkness. A single window gleamed at the far end, barely brighter than the shadows, as it was so obscured with dust and grime.

“The stairs were torn out fifteen or twenty years ago,” the Dancing Mistress said. “They widened the doors to admit heavier cart traffic with a turnaround, and were forced to give up this space in the process.”

“A waste.” I was focusing on the trivia of where we were.

“Everything has a reason. Right now we are in a hidden location above a building that no one has ever seen us enter. We are safe while we consider what should happen next.”

“Safe?” The panicked laughter began bubbling up within me once more. “I will never be safe again. I will always be trapped by what I have done. I—”

She smacked the top of my head as my voice rose. “Whisper. Even better, think before you speak at all.”

Anger rushed back fast as flame on oil. Mistress Tirelle hit me constantly. Now the Dancing Mistress did the same. Who was she to raise a hand to me?

“You must eat, then sleep,” she continued. “Your fears and regrets are carrying you away.”

“I am afraid of nothing!” I shouted.

Her voice was so soft, I had to strain to hear it. “Right now you are afraid of everything. Or at least you should be.”

I flopped to the floor. Finally still, I realized how badly my body ached. The slip coming off the wall of the Factor’s house had bruised my hips and jarred my back. The run had stretched and warmed my muscles, but here we were quiet and I could feel myself cooling down already. My foot stung where it had clipped Mistress Tirelle’s chin.

“Everything hurts,” I told her quietly.

“Then sleep.” She offered me a piece of crumbling cheese and a wad of leaves.

I took them. The cheese had a deep ammoniac scent, overlaid with salt and the veining mold of a blue. The leaves were dry-cured kale with lard smeared amid the rolled layers.

It all smelled like paradise to my rumbling gut. I ate quickly, then just as quickly was starved with thirst.

“There are water barrels near the window,” the Dancing Mistress said. “They are filled with rainwater collection, and might taste of the roof.” She bent close again. “I must go out and be seen. There can be no suspicion that I am part of what is still happening in the Factor’s house. Will you remain here and keep absolutely quiet?”

“Yes,” I said around a mouthful of kale.

“No matter how angry or despairing you may feel, do not stamp your feet or throw things. Men will be working downstairs on the morrow, and they may hear you.”

I looked at my hands, full of half-eaten food. Mistress Tirelle would never eat again. “No, Mistress.”

“When I can safely do so, I shall return. Probably tomorrow night. Federo may be here as well.”

My heart leapt at that; then I wondered why. Even my friends were trouble for me. “I will remain silent.”

“As best as can be hoped for.” She ran a hand through my hair. “We will do what we can to see that you are well-served. I am not sure how much is left to us, though.”

“Good night,” I said, and then she was gone.

 

Sleep brought only the memory of death. My relationship with my dreams continues uneasy to this day, but that night was the worst I have ever known. I don’t recall my dreams when Federo first stole me away from Papa. The dreams of small children are said to be as unformed as their thoughts, but that cannot be true. My thoughts were well-formed even then. I knew what I wanted and did not want.

Later I dreamed of the past, Endurance and my grandmother and my little life among the ditches and fields of Papa’s rice. Those were about loss and regret. As I grew older and my training became more complex, I often dreamed of the sorts of things one does then—endless loaves of bread spilling from the oven, or reading a book that bred new pages for itself faster than I could turn them.

That night, though, all I could dream of was death. Perhaps I had once killed my grandmother. How had my mother died? Mistress Tirelle’s head spun away from my kick over and over as her neck snapped. The scent of her voiding her bowels as she died. The way her body collapsed, as if she had already stopped trying to protect herself the way any living person does, with or without training.

How many ways were there to kill? How many ways were there to die? Those questions chased me through the sick regrets of that night, until finally I awoke with the answers ringing in my head.

There are as many ways to die as there are to live.

There are as many ways to kill as there are killers to try them.

 

My body ached as if I’d been trampled by one of the Factor’s horses. The pallet on which I’d slept was kicked aside, and I was lying on the old wooden floor. I didn’t feel much like a killer, but I knew I was. I also knew that someday I would die. Possibly very soon, depending on whether and how the Factor’s justice caught up with me.

I climbed to my feet, swaying with fatigue and an overwhelming sense of weakness. Last night’s fear and rush had taken their toll.

Morning arrived amid a vague silvery light that struggled through the round window at the end of the attic. The filth on the glass looked to be at least a generation of neglect. I knew exactly what a maid would do to cut it down.

This room was huge, though a tall man could stand only in the center, where the peak of the roof ran. The low edges were filled with odd equipment—the frames from old looms, mechanical devices for which I had no name. All was covered in deep dust.

Finding the rain barrels, I drank from a little tin ladle there. The water tasted of tar and sand. Even at the edge of foulness, it was refreshing after breathing the dry air all night.

Otherwise I had nothing to relieve the itching of my cheeks and ears, and the mix of feelings in my heart. No food, no distractions, nothing.

I spent a long time simmering in my anger before Federo appeared. He surprised me in climbing through the floor in the middle of the day.

“They are at their lunch below,” he explained to my unspoken question. He looked worried, and was dressed like a common laborer of the city. “I have stood the warehousemen a round of ales down the street once a week for quite some time. No one wonders at me in this neighborhood.”

“You are not unusual anymore.” I recalled my lessons at the art of the swift eye.

“Precisely.” He pulled a paper wrapping out of his pocket. “Here is some salt beef with cold roast potatoes. It is the best I could do right now. I will be back with the Dancing Mistress tonight. We need to think on what to do with you next.”

“You will do nothing with me,” I told him coldly. “I will decide what to do with myself.”

He looked unhappy, but retreated beneath the floor.

They would not use me. Not the Factor, not the Duke, not this little conspiracy of child-stealer and rogue Mistress. I spent the afternoon imagining ways to flee, directions to run in, but I knew nothing practical of the city or its surrounds. If I could go back to Endurance, I would, but all I remembered of the way home was that I should cross the water.

At that time, I did not even know the name of my birth country, let alone the village where Papa’s farm lay. I had no money or maps or practical experience of any sort.

I realized that I had done nothing more than exchange one prison for another. This one was far less comfortable and more dangerous. My anger rose once more like a burning tide. I might be free of the Factor, but my choices continued not to be my own.

Why had Federo and the Dancing Mistress guided me toward a sense of my independence? I wondered. Would I have not been better off in ignorance? I could have grown into a lady and lived the life that had been bought for me.

They would have no satisfaction of me either, I resolved.

 

My rescuers came back that night with several sacks. I assumed these contained provisions. He was once more dressed like a common laborer, while she wore the same loose tunic as usual. The Dancing Mistress pushed their sacks to one side of the cleared space of floor that marked our area; then she and Federo made up a little table of two crates and three lengths of lumber. She produced a hooded lantern from one of the sacks while Federo found smaller boxes for us to sit on.

Soon we were gathered around a little table with knobby carrots, a string of sweet onions, and a handful of small brown rolls to share for our dinner. Both of them had been silent through this process. I was determined not to speak first.

“We are civilized,” Federo finally said. “People at table with food before them.”

“The shared feast is a tradition of my people,” the Dancing Mistress added.

Both of them spoke in the tone of someone desperate to return a bad moment to normal.

I said nothing. Instead I simply glared at them both.

They looked back, Federo seemingly puzzled, the Dancing Mistress with a blank-eyed indifference that I was not sure how to read upon her nonhuman face. We all stared awhile.

My resolve broke first.

“She was a cow,” I said in my language.

Federo rubbed his eyes. “Within two more years, we could have had you inside the Duke’s palace.” He suddenly sounded terribly exhausted.

The Dancing Mistress sighed. “We should have known.”

“Known what?” I demanded.

Federo stared at me. “Stop talking like a barbarian,” he snapped. “This is Copper Downs.”

“Barbarian?” I bit off a shout. “You are the . . . the . . .” I didn’t have a word for barbarian in my language. Certainly I’d no reason to know it when I was a tiny child. “Animals. You are animals.”

“That could have been changed,” he said. “With your help.”

The Dancing Mistress gave me one of her long, slow looks. “Please, speak so I can understand you. Or we won’t get far.”

I begrudged her the words, but I recalled that Petraean wasn’t her home language either. “Very well,” I muttered, knowing my own poor grace for what it was.

“Emerald,” Federo began.

“Green!” I slammed my fist into the planks of our table. “My name is not Emerald. You may call me Green.”

The Dancing Mistress waved toward Federo in a shushing motion. “Well, Green,” she said. “Federo had always thought you might have the heart-fire to hold your spirit true against the Factor’s training. You—”

“You did,” Federo interrupted. His voice had a note of pride, even now. I hated him for that. It was as if he’d made me who I was, merely by being clever enough to buy me in the market.

“Too much heart, perhaps,” the Dancing Mistress went on.

“What of it?” I demanded. “Was I to be your creature instead of the Factor’s? I am a person of my own, not some thing to be shaped by him or you or anyone else.”

The Dancing Mistress’ claws drummed on the raw wood of the table. They sent splinters flying. “We are all shaped by life.”

“Indeed,” said Federo. “And there is much you do not know. Am I correct in thinking you read nothing more recently published than Lacodemus’ Commentaries?”

“Yes.” What did this question signify? Lacodemus had been fascinated with men risen from the grave and people who lived on their heads, speaking by the motions of their feet. I hadn’t taken him seriously. The world obeyed a certain order. Just because a tale came from far away did not mean that common sense could be cast aside in judging it.

“Then know this little bit of recent history here in Copper Downs.” He leaned forward and pressed the palms of his hands flat on the rough wood. “There has not been a Ducal succession in four centuries.”

“Mistress Tirelle told me as much. She did not say it so clearly.” I thought of the Factor’s dead eye, sullen and fatal as that of the sea creature that had tried to take me so long ago. Lacodemus had been right, in a sense. “This city is ruled by immortals.”

The Dancing Mistress laughed, her voice soft and bitter. “Immortal, no. Undying? Well, yes . . . so far.”

“You meant for me to kill the Duke,” I breathed, barely lending sound to the words. Killing the Duke would cause the Factor to lose his power. Women . . . girls . . . would be safer. Even a new tyrant could hardly rebuild the power of this Duke’s long rule with any speed.

“That was one hope, yes,” Federo admitted. “There were other plans. We had played at a game of years here.”

I gave voice to his unspoken conclusion. “Until I tipped over the board and set fire to the rules.”

“Well, yes.” I could see a smile flirting with his face despite himself. “That spirit of yours rose up, I think.”

My fingers brushed at the itching scabs upon my cheek. “For all the good it has done me. What now of your plans?”

They both stared me down. Dust flecks and wood shavings floated between us. Eventually Federo’s face fell back to his recent dismay. “If you can escape detection by the patrols roaming the city right now, and survive the substantial bounty that has been placed upon your head, you are free to flee Copper Downs and find a life of your own elsewhere.”

The Dancing Mistress slipped a claw-tipped finger across her own furred cheek. “But you have made yourself too distinctive for safety, I fear. Easily recognized should there be a hue and cry.”

I thought of Endurance’s great brown eyes, and of my grandmother’s bells ringing for the last time beneath the hot sun. What would my grandmother have wanted from me? Or Papa? What did he want? Endurance, I knew, wished only to call me home.

What did I want?

To go home.

But even more than that, I realized, I wanted never to see a child sold to these terrible people again. Not to the Factor and his Mistresses, not to Federo and his charming ways. This trade in thinking, talking livestock must end.

I could not say then who was more guilty, Federo for having bought me or my father for having sold me to him. It did not matter. They were but pawns on a larger board. The Duke, and his procuring agent the Factor, had first set the machinery of guilt in motion. I realized my mistake in fleeing the Factor’s house, when all I had to do was stand my ground and keep my spirit inflamed in order to fight back with my beauty as my weapon.

The weapon I had thrown away in a moment of anguished passion before murdering a woman whose only real crime was to serve her masters.

A new thought dawned upon me. “There must be another way,” I said. “Or we would not be speaking now. You have some proposal. One of the ‘other plans’ you mentioned.”

Federo and the Dancing Mistress exchanged a long look. I saw fear in their faces, but I held my tongue.

He nodded slightly and began to speak in a rush, as if he did not quite believe his own words. “Allow yourself to be captured. Tell them of a plot against the Duke. Tell them of us. You will most likely be taken before him for a hearing, both for the sake of the accusation, and even more because you are his lost jewel. He will be jealous of you. Once in his presence, if you can . . .”

“If I can?” Once more laughter at these idiots bubbled up. “If I can what, kill him? I am a girl of twelve. I would be standing before him in his court. If I had been his bedmate, that might be one thing. But surrounded by men and their weapons? You are fools.” In my own language, I added, “I am but a girl.” My laughter slid into a snarl. “I can kick old women to death, but not a man on a throne surrounded by guards. He is beyond my reach.”

The Dancing Mistress shifted her weight. Her eyes locked on mine. They did not swiftly flick away again as anyone else’s would have done. I knew her well enough to see that she was measuring her words, so I kept her gaze and watched in silence.

Finally she spoke. “There is another way.”

“Of course there is.” I kept my voice hard as I could manage. “You taught me to kill.”

“Actually, she taught you how not to die,” Federo said, interrupting. “Listen to me, Green. If you wish to throw us away and walk out into the streets, that is your choice. You are no prisoner here.”

“No?”

“Did you try the trapdoor?” he asked. “It has been unlocked this whole time.”

“Oh.” For a moment I felt foolish.

“You may go as your heart tells you. I beg this, for the sake of whatever goodwill you might have borne me, listen first to the Dancing Mistress. She speaks difficult truths that may not come to pass. But before you choose, know what you are rejecting.”

“This time,” I said bitterly. His message was clear enough. Back at the Pomegranate Court, I had chosen in ignorance. Though I did not want to admit it, I saw the wisdom of his plea now.

“There is a thing about the Duke that is known to very, very few.” The Dancing Mistress’ words came slowly. “His, well, agelessness . . . it is bound by spells wrested from my people. There are other spells that can release those bindings—things that need to be said to him in close confidence to have their power. Not”—she raised her hand to me—“the quiet of the bedchamber. But close nonetheless. They cannot be spoken in this Petraean tongue. The Duke through his magics has bound the very words to himself, lest someone utter them in his presence.”

“Can they be spoken in my tongue?” I asked.

She looked very unhappy. “I do not know if the forces will heed you. This is not my soulpath, to understand spells and how they work. Since the Duke took his throne on the strength of our magics, my people have folded away their own power like an old cloak. I can teach you certain words through the expedient of writing them in the dust here, though neither of us can speak them aloud. If you say them in your tongue . . . who knows what effect they will have? I certainly do not.”

I was incredulous. “In four hundred years, no one has ever tried this?”

“It is not a common wisdom,” Federo said dryly. “Suffice that we have managed to coordinate intentions now. Will you help?”

At that point, my decision was simple enough. Where else would I go? I could not swim the seas to home. If I said no and simply walked out the door, the Factor would buy more children, then Federo and the Dancing Mistress would raise another rebel in the shadows of his house. Some other child would have to make my choices anew someday.

Here I was; here I would stand.

“I will do this thing.” I spoke carefully. “You may teach me the words. Federo will need to help me with my own tongue, for almost certainly I do not have enough of it to make a worthwhile saying from whatever you write before me in the dust.” I turned to him. “Bring a dictionary of my people’s speech, if such a thing can be found here in Copper Downs. Also, before I will try this magic for you, I want seven yards of silk, needles, spools of thread, and five thousand tiny bells like those used for dancing shoes.”

“Five thousand? Where am I—?”

“You know what I want them for,” I said, interrupting him again. “I should not want to walk toward my death without the bells of my life ringing about me. Don’t pretend this is not murder of another kind. For the Duke if I am lucky, and for me almost certainly.”

“No, n-no,” he stammered. “You have the right of it.”

“Then we are agreed.”

The Dancing Mistress nodded slowly, pain written on her patient face. I gave her a small, real smile. She deserved something from me besides my anger and contempt. The girls who would have followed in my place deserved everything from me. Even my very life itself. When this was done, one way or the other, I would be home.

My grandmother would have approved. As would the ox.

 

______

 

I have never known the true number of the days of my life. The count had broken when Federo took me away from Papa. I did not understand then, but the bells of my long-lost silk would have remembered for me until I was old enough to tally the days myself. Though I had tried and tried again to return to my silk, the number had always been a guess. The count I had been keeping in my imagination these years since was more of a guess at a guess.

These were the days that were mine. I had lost almost everything from the beginning of my life except a few memories.

The attic was close and warm even in the autumn weather. Federo and the Dancing Mistress were gone once more, this time for a while. “We cannot pass in and out without drawing attention to you,” he had said.

“We will return when we have gathered your needs,” she told me.

I sat with salty cheese and stale bread and water that tasted like rooftop and wondered what I might have done differently. What I might do next.

When I grew bored with regrets and should-have-dones, I paid attention to the world beyond this latest prison of mine. I did not clean the window, for fear it would attract attention. The grime covering it kept me from any real sight of the street. I could hear the warehouse below without difficulty, and I discovered that if I sat just beneath the round window, I could hear what passed in the street.

Some sounds were readily understood. Teams of horses passing by, accompanied by shouting or the crack of a drover’s whip. Occasionally they stopped with a squeal of iron-shoed wheels on stone. The beasts would whicker to one another as the busy noise of the warehouse took in the drover and his cargo.

People passed in conversation. No words reached me except for the occasional exclamation of surprise or excitement. I took comfort from the murmur of passing voices nonetheless.

I could hear more from the warehouse beneath me. Loads shifted in, loads shifted out, and some foreman with a high-pitched voice bawled orders I could clearly make out. Most of it was meaningless to me, the chatter of men at work: “The other cannery stack, damn your lazy boots!”

This was like being inside the Factor’s walls and hearing the world outside. Except in this place that world was much, much closer.

In the late afternoon of the second day since I’d once more been left alone, I heard the tramp of men marching in unison. Someone shouted orders in clipped syllables I could not follow. I heard the clatter as a few were told off to my warehouse. I heard the argument that followed. Men would be told to work into the evening. There would be no pay from the city or the Duke. They would rot in hell. They would be happy to send them there. An argument without names or sides, just shouting men and, once, the meaty thump of a hard strike by someone’s fist.

After a while, the boxes began to move. I heard crates shift and clatter. More cursing, of the ordinary, working kind. I lay on the floor with my aching ear pressed against dusty splinters, waiting for death to climb the walls below and find me.

Why had I insisted on my silk before I would follow their plan? I could have gone forth and had some small chance at changing the order of the world. Now I would be taken up without the words to break the Duke’s spell.

If I could have stilled my breathing, I would have. Not to make myself die, but to be as silent as a piece of ceiling lumber. To be quiet is to live. I did not stir for cheese nor bread nor water nor the piss pot all that evening. They continued to move below me. An officer came occasionally, shouting for someone named Mauricio each time.

Eventually the warehousemen were released and the great door rumbled shut. I had never felt such relief as I did when quiet reigned below.

I sat up with my dry mouth and my urgent bladder only to realize that if this Mauricio were canny, he might have left a man behind to lurk silently within the warehouse. What if an ear were pressed to the underside of my floor, waiting for me to move and scrape and sigh?

That new terror kept me in place very late into the night. Finally the need in my bladder became so urgent that I could not put it off for all the fear in my heart. I crept silent as fog to do my business. The splash of the stream sounded like thunder to me, but there was nothing to be done for it except finish, then continue to hide until the danger was gone.

I realized the danger might never be past.

 

I was startled out of dreams of being hunted across ocean waves in a small boat. Legs kicked as I reached for something with which to defend myself. I was brandishing a small hunk of cheese before I realized that Federo had lifted the trap. A quick glance at the round window showed it was still night outside.

“I do not think that Fencepost Blue is so dangerous,” he said mildly. “But I will see if I can find something a bit less stout the next time I go shopping.”

Giggling, I collapsed. “I thought one of those soldiers might be hiding downstairs to catch me moving up here overnight.”

“Soldiers?” Federo’s face grew alarmed. “A moment, please.” He reached down through the trap and brought up a pair of bulging canvas sacks. After repositioning the flooring, he sat and asked me to explain exactly what it was I had meant.

I told him what I had heard the day before, and mentioned the name Mauricio. Federo looked troubled. “They suspect you to be in one of the warehouse districts. Not that this is surprising. They searched here all evening, then departed?”

“They searched the whole area. The troop I heard marching dropped a small group of men here.”

“Hmm.” He took off his laborer’s flattened leather cap and stroked the back of his head, thinking. “I will see what I can learn. But this is not something I can ask too many questions of. I am under suspicion already, if only for having known you. It will not take long before they realize how much contact the Dancing Mistress had with you.”

“Far more than her other candidate students?” I asked.

“Of course.” He reached for one of the bags. “But here, I bring news and better.”

Out came a bolt of fine silk, tussah weave and forty-two inches across. Unrolled, the silk was seven yards in length. And beautiful, too. I set our hooded lamp on the floor to light the cloth. It showed a rippling sheen like water flowing down the threads. The color appeared green in the lamplight, some medium shade, though I could not say what in that illumination.

“This is most beautiful,” I said quietly.

“There is so little I can ever give back to you. I thought at the least you should have a good quality measure of cloth.”

He showed me the bells, a great mixture of kinds. “I could not buy so many silver bells in any one place,” Federo said by way of apology. “So some are brass, or iron, and some are larger than I might have liked.”

Still, they were bells. Real bells. The bells I could remember from home had been little tin cones on a pin. They tinkled, but they did not ring. Some of these were fit for a choir to sing the hymns of grace to. “I shall have music like a tulpa when I walk in this,” I told him. Their multitude of tiny jingles brought me a sense of peace.

Federo produced a velvet roll with needles stuck into it. “In case some grow dull or bend.” He also had several sticks with spools of thread stacked upon them.

I readied a needle and took up one of the tiniest bells. This one resembled a little silver pomegranate seed, and made a single plaintive tinking noise when I dangled it between my thumbnail and fingernail. With a silent thanks to my grandmother, I sewed the bell to one corner of the silk, which flowed like a green river from my lap.

Federo sat on his heels and watched me sew awhile. After a time, he asked, “May I help you sew, or is this something you must do for yourself?”

I considered that. The answer was not immediately obvious to me. I had always thought of the silk as something a woman made for herself. Clearly, I had not sewn my own bells as an infant, though. Just as clearly, whatever tradition demanded had long been abused and discarded in my case.

The outcome was what mattered most now.

In a sudden rush of thought, the decision was straightforward enough. “I would be pleased to have your help, but at a cost.” I caught his eye in the faint light rising up from the hooded lamp. “Tell me where I came from, as you understand it. I remember the frogs and the plantains and the rice and my father’s ox, but I never have known the name of the place. None of my studies ever showed me maps across the Storm Sea.”

He picked up a needle and struggled awhile to thread it. I did not press him at first for words, for I could see the thoughts forming behind his eyes. Finally Federo got a bell sorted out and bent to his side of the silk. He would not meet my gaze as he began to speak. “Surely you know there was the strictest order never to mention your origins within the Pomegranate Court.”

“Which is foolish. All one need do is look at my face to see I was born nowhere near the Stone Coast.”

“Of course. The beauty we all prized . . . prize . . . in you was founded in part on that very thing. But to mention your birth-country would be to remind you of the past, and goad you into keeping those memories strong.”

“Unlike how you and the Dancing Mistress treated me,” I said dryly.

“Plans within plans, Green.” He finally glanced at me, then looked back down at a fresh bell he was embarked on. “You hail from a country called Selistan. It is found a bit more than six hundred knots west of south, sailing from Copper Downs out across the Storm Sea.”

Selistan!

I finally had a name for my home. Not just a place of frogs and snakes and rice paddies, but a place in the world with a name, that appeared on maps.

“Wh-where in Selistan?”

“I am not sure.” He sounded uncomfortable. “Kalimpura is the great port where much of the trade from across the sea comes. I landed at a fishing town some thirty leagues east of Kalimpura, in a province called Bhopura. The town itself is called Little Bhopura, though I know of no Great Bhopura anywhere.”

“We walked far from my village to Little Bhopura,” I said cautiously.

Federo laughed. If his amusement had not been so obviously genuine, it would have hurt my heart. “We hiked about two leagues across a dry ridgeline separating the river valley where you were living from the coast where I landed.” He smiled at me fondly. “You must recall that as a vast journey, but think how small you were then. I doubt you’d ever been more than three furlongs from your father’s farm in your life. Today you could cover the distance in a few hours. You would not even notice the effort.”

I recalled the sense of enormous space, walking the entire day, stopping to take a meal. He was not mocking me; he was describing my earliest childhood. Everyone begins small.

Another bell wanted threading. I focused on that a moment to gather my thoughts. Federo’s silence was inviting, not angry or defensive. Below us, the warehousemen pushed their great door open and began their day.

When I spoke again, my voice was low. “Where is my father’s farm?”

“I . . . I do not know. Not anymore.” He sounded ashamed.

Federo was not telling me something. I picked at the thought awhile. I did not wish to push my anger at him. That well was deep and inexhaustible. Right now I was thoughtful, not angry. “Federo. What was my father’s name?”

His face was so close to his sewing, he risked poking himself in the eye. “I do not know.”

“What was my name?”

He would not meet my gaze at all.

My anger raced. “You bought a girl whose name you did not ask from a man whose name you did not know.”

Federo looked up at me, though his face was mostly in shadow. “I have bought many things from many peo—”

“I am not a thing!”

We were both silent, staring at one another as some crate crashed to the floor below us.

“I know you are not a thing,” he hissed after the rumble and mutter of voices below resumed. “I am sorry for how I spoke. But please, Green, you surely take my meaning.”

Bending back to my own sewing, I grumbled that I understood. But how could he not know? How could this man buy me like fruit at a market, strip me away from my family and all my heritage, and recall nothing?

Federo resumed speaking. “I can tell you this much: A man there watches for families with children of . . . potential value.” His voice dropped as he blushed with shame. “F-families where there is trouble. No money, or the death of a parent.”

Which made me what? A commodity, of course. A brokered, broken child. “I suppose you have a bill of sale?” I asked in my nastiest voice.

“No.” Now he sounded weary and sad. “You were a cash transaction. I have a note in my account book.”

“Was I a bargain?”

He stared at me a long while. Then: “I believe I am done with this conversation.”

I wanted to make a fight with him. I wanted to rage at him for stealing everything from me and then pouting at my questions. Federo had claimed the privilege of power when he bought me, and now he claimed the privilege of injured dignity in order to remain silent concerning the truths of my life.

There was no purpose in attacking him. It might satisfy my pride, but anger from me would not prompt him to tell me any more than he already had. Patience was a hard lesson. My teachers had been very thorough.

 

The Dancing Mistress joined us that night. She brought more food, this time strips of smoked venison along with dried braids of shallots and garlic. After our conversation failed, Federo and I had spent the day sewing in silence. Occasional comments passed between us, but the best thing I could find to do with my anger was let it retreat back down the well from which it ever bubbled.

Her arrival was a fresh breeze stirring our thickening air of mistrust. She looked at us both and must have understood what had passed. Eventually I came to understand that her kind did not judge human faces so well, but they could read human scents quite clearly. The two of us reeked of the banked fire of our argument. That evening, all I knew was that she sat down and laid out a simple meal, then quite literally interposed herself between Federo and me.

“You have made great progress.”

We’d sewn over twelve hundred bells. Less than four years of my life, but a good day’s work. My fingers ached with the myriad stabs of the needle. That was progress.

“Yes,” I admitted.

The Dancing Mistress inclined her chin as she nodded gravely at Federo. Her voice was pitched low. “Your day was good enough, I trust.”

“We spoke of things past,” Federo muttered.

She turned back to me. “This upset you?”

What an astonishingly stupid question. I just stared at her.

“You are afraid,” she said.

“Angry, not afraid.”

“Fear and anger are opposite faces of the same blade.”

I’d read versions of that statement in half a dozen texts. “Don’t quote platitudes at me!”

“Just because words are often repeated does not rob an idea of its truth.” Her voice remained mild. “Some might even think the opposite.”

“I have a lifetime’s worth of anger. What am I afraid of, then?”

The answer was simple enough. “The consequences of what lies behind you. The price of what lies before you.”

“Price. Life is nothing but prices.”

“To be sure.” She picked up a needle and began to sew where I had left off to eat. “You are twelve years of age now, yes?”

“I believe so,” I admitted.

Federo winced.

The Dancing Mistress continued. “At home, you would marry soon.”

Mistress Cherlise had told me I’d be wife to some sweating farmer. True enough, I supposed, and I didn’t wish for that life. But what had I become instead?

She went on as if I had answered. “Here in Copper Downs, you were almost ready to be turned out as consort for the Duke, or one of his favorites.”

“Monthlies or no monthlies,” muttered Federo.

“What of it?” I asked.

She was implacable. “You are afraid of that change. Both your fates have been denied you. You were born onto a path that Federo bought you away from. You were trained within the walls of the Factor’s house for a different path. Even our night running work was little more than a twisting of that second way. You cut that fate away when you marred your beauty and killed Mistress Tirelle. What remains?”

“Fear,” I told the silk I had once more gathered into my hands.

“Choice,” she said. “Which you have exercised to join Federo and me in this latest effort.”

I wasn’t afraid of what would happen, I realized. That was almost beyond any control of mine. I wasn’t afraid of my choices, either. She did not quite have the right of that. Even with all her cruelty, Mistress Tirelle had always prepared me for some kind of greatness. I had been spared the jaws of the ocean leviathan. Endurance had watched over me with a purpose. The prospect of extraordinary effort did not daunt me.

Everybody died. That was fearsome, but this fear was more than that. Everybody hurt. The fear I felt was somehow still more.

I thought awhile as I sewed. My grandmother had gone to the sky burial wrapped in her shroud. My silk was supposed to be the track of my life, the thing that told my days. Each bell should have had meaning, this one when I met my husband, that one when I bore the first of my children.

Finally I decided that I was afraid for my spirit.

I looked up at the Dancing Mistress once more. Her sloped eyes gleamed in the light of our little lamp. She was waiting for me to speak.

“Do your people have souls?” I asked her.

Maybe her answer would tell me more about mine.

She thought for a while, glancing at me as she worked. The hooded lamp glowed between us. Federo picked with his needle. He seemed content to wait out the conversation.

Finally the Dancing Mistress spoke. “When a child is born, we bind the soul with flowers and food. The community feasts to share the soul. That way it is not lost if there is an accident or disease, but kept alive within the hearts of many.”

Curiosity competed with my fear and frustrated anger. “What about your names?”

She smiled. “Those are for our hearts alone.” She gathered up a handful of the silk and shook it at me. Hundreds of bells jingled, those not swallowed in the folds of the cloth. “Here is your soul, Green. Do not fear for it. Most people never find theirs. You are making yours as real as your hands.”

The sound of the bells brought me back to the memory of my grandmother’s funeral procession. I was hers, through my nameless father and his nameless hut in a nameless place on some road in Selistan. I did not know his name, or the name he called me. Federo had not bothered to ask, for to him I was just a girl.

In all the years within the Factor’s house, I had forgotten too much. If I lived through these days before me, I resolved, I would return to Selistan and reclaim my life.

 

We were done with the silk in the middle of the evening two days later. This time they’d both stayed with me. All of us sewed, talking quietly from time to time, working to be ready. The silk was flecked with droplets of blood from stabbed fingers, and my own hands were most unpleasantly stiff, but we were done.

“If you still agree with the plan,” Federo said, “we will guide you out of the warehouse before dawn. You can walk the streets once it is full light and the life of the city resumes. If the Ducal guards take you then, there will be witnesses.”

“Being arrested in front of witnesses tends to be healthier,” the Dancing Mistress observed.

I folded my silk close, letting the bells wash over me. We did not know the true number, and so we had settled on four thousand four hundred—twelve years. They jingled like the pouring of water on a metal roof. My past held me close in that moment.

“Show me what I must know.”

The Dancing Mistress drew certain words in the dust of the floor. I studied them as my bells shivered in time to my breathing. In their way, the words were simple enough. A conversation with the powers of the land. I did not know if their might stemmed from the intention of the speaker, or if there was something inherent in the arrangement of sound and meaning. In any case, these words were—or should be—the ravel that would unweave the spells binding the Duke to his life and his throne.

Federo looked at them with me, then nodded. The Dancing Mistress erased the words. “Do you have any questions?”

I looked at him. “ ‘Shared’?” I asked. “I do not know that word, nor the term for ‘hoarded’ in my tongue. Otherwise, I can say this easily enough.”

“Share,” he said in the Selistani language. Seliu, I had learned that it was called. “It carries the sense of something freely given, without taking.”

“That will do,” said the Dancing Mistress.

“As for hoarded . . .” He thought for a while, then suggested a word in Selin. “It means gathering too much. As in, well, overharvesting. More foolish than greedy, I think.”

“The sense seems good to me,” I said seriously.

The Dancing Mistress nodded. “You have the words in your head?”

“I do.”

“Good.” Federo’s voice quavered. He looked nervous to the point of being ill.

I knew how he felt. My anger would carry me through, when I found it once more. Right now, I mostly felt sick myself. “I am ready,” I lied.

 

I needed to attend to one last bit of business before we set out. My fears and worries had stalked me all through the night and into the early morning hours as we prepared ourselves. Most of them were beyond my reach. One was not.

“Federo,” I said as he packed away the last of our supplies.

“Mmm?”

“I want to mark Mistress Tirelle’s passing. Do you have any notion what she might have believed about her soul? Is there some prayer or sacrifice I can offer her?”

He gave me one of those long looks. In the shadows beyond him, I saw the Dancing Mistress nod almost imperceptibly. She had done the same when I had performed well in a difficult exercise but we were not free to communicate.

“I don’t know, Green,” Federo said after a little while. “Not many people in Copper Downs are openly observant. Especially not the locally born.”

“Deaths must be marked in some manner. The passing of a soul is not simple.” We did not have oxen, bells, or sky burials here; that much I knew. I was uneasy at the duck woman’s fate—I had sent her from this life, after all. That fear and guilt belonged to me. My hope was to ease her passing.

“There is a common offering for the dead,” he said. “Two candles are lit. One is black for their sins and sorrows. The other is white, for their hopes and dreams. Sometimes a picture of the dead is burned, if such a thing is to be had. Otherwise, a folded prayer or a banknote. That usually depends on the intentions of the person making the offering. You speak a kindness, spread the ash to the wind, and let them go.”

“Then when we set out, I will have two candles, and some of that paper you just packed away.”

We departed just before dawn, prior to the warehouse opening for the day. My belled silk was stuffed away in a sack along with the last of our tools and equipment from the attic. We couldn’t really hide the fact that someone had been there for a while, but we could certainly take our evidence with us.

The cobbles were slick with morning dewfall. A three-quarter moon was veiled by dripping clouds. This sort of wet would burn off with the rising sun, but the east was still barely a glower. The Dancing Mistress led us to a mercantile at the end of a row of warehouses, which, judging by its stock, catered to the laboring trades. Nonetheless, among the spools of rope and chain, the racks of iron tools and heavy canvas coveralls, and all the other gear pertaining to those who build and repair the stuff of cities, we found candles.

The black was a narrow cylinder, while the white was a fat little votive barrel. I was not bothered that they were dissimilar. Mistress Tirelle and I surely had not been similar in life. Federo purchased the candles, and he bought a new packet of lucifer matches as well, before we stepped back out into the damp.

“A park will have to serve.” Federo was grumpy. The risk of extra movement bothered him.

“I am sorry,” I told him. “I must do this last thing. Then we can shake out my bells and I will find the Ducal Palace and whatever follows from that.” The Dancing Mistress’ words were firm enough in my head.

“Federo,” she said. Her voice caught at him, and his nervous fear subsided into a muttering calm.

A bit later, we slipped between two marble gateposts. Winding paths led through lindens and birches beyond. Dew dripped from their branches as the eastern sky continued to lighten. The musty scent of night was infused with the opening of the earliest flowers, though something also rotted nearby. We trotted along a weed-infested gravel path following direction from the Dancing Mistress, until she brought us to a little folly.

Like the gateposts, this was marble as well. Six pillars in the classical Smagadine style mounted by architraves with carvings I could not quite make out in the early blooming light. This was topped by a pointed dome curved much like a breast. A little statue of an armed woman stood at the tip.

That seemed fitting to me.

Within, the floor was tiled in a mosaic of birds circling a stylized sun. The Dancing Mistress and Federo hung back. I knelt, though the cold tile hurt my knees even through the sweep of Federo’s borrowed cloak. I set the black candle down against the sun’s lidded left eye, and the white candle against his wide-open right, which seemed to be on the verge of surprise.

I truly did not know what was needful here. What I did know was that this part of my life had begun with a funeral—my grandmother’s—and ended with a death—Mistress Tirelle’s. I sought a balance, and a show of respect.

As I’d already realized, in her strange way, this harshest of my Mistresses had in fact loved me.

The match struck on the first try in a spitting flare of sulfur. That seemed lucky. Lighting the black candle, I rocked back and forth as I hugged myself against the cold.

“You treated me with a harder hand than I would raise against a cur from the streets,” I told the flame—and her soul if somehow she yet listened to me. “Your sin was to hew too close to the word of the Factor. But who are we, if we cannot tell wrong from right no matter what mouth it comes out of?”

I put the second match into the flame of the black candle. The flare made me blink away bright spots. I then set it to the wick of the white candle.

“You fed me, and clothed me, and taught me more than most people ever learn,” I told her. “You gave my life a direction, whether I wished it or no.”

Unfolding the paper I’d taken from Federo back in the attic, I smoothed it flat as I could against the mosaic floor. With the burnt stubs of my two matches, I drew an ox. Endurance, though no one but me would ever have seen that in the picture. The image was simple enough: the tilted horns of the aleph glyph, humped shoulders, a sweep of the hocks, and the forelegs to balance the composition.

Rolling the paper up, I set it to the white candle’s flame. Let the offering burn in the light of hopes and dreams. “May Endurance bear you onward as he once did my grandmother. His patience abides more deeply than mine.” With a shuddering breath, I added, “I am sorry that I took from you that which was not for me to claim.”

When the burning paper grew so short that my fingers began to sting, I dropped it to the tiles. It curled a moment longer, wisping to ash, before the dawn breeze hurried through the folly to snuff both my candles and carry the charred paper away.

Her shade did not answer. I had not expected anything. I had made this most unfortunate farewell.

Rising, I threw down Federo’s cloak. “Where is my silk?” I asked in my own words. He and the Dancing Mistress stepped forward to array me as carefully as any squires in a courtly tale of olden tourneys.

 

I walked along Coronation Avenue between the two rows of peach trees gone bare in the autumn damp. My cloak of bells wrapped me close. Beneath it, I wore dark tights and a calf-length shirt, as if I were prepared to dance in some mummer’s play. I carried no weapon and held my head high.

Look at me, I thought. Here is your bounty. The Factor’s emerald comes.

People aplenty were on the street. Wagons and carriages clattered by. Even a few of the great cog-carts, balanced with flywheels and driven by strange logics patiently punched into the endless loops of goatleather rolls stored within their guts. Tradesmen and servants passed, on the business of the great houses that lined the approach to the Ducal Palace.

It was almost too much. I had not seen so many people at once since my arrival at the docks nine years earlier. Too many faces, all of them half-familiar, all of them strange as statues in the dark. I saw them through the eyes of my training. Virtually everyone could be marked out by their clothing, their stance, the tools or equipment they carried, their headgear.

In ordinary times, I might have fled to a quiet alley, but my purpose guided my steps. I was glad as the crowding thinned as the street grew wealthier.

A pair of mounted guardsmen rode by without even glancing at me. The gentlemen and ladies on their business took no notice, either. I enjoyed a strange species of invisibility, difficult to understand or describe. I wondered whether these people would have looked at me had I been naked and armed with a flaming sword.

Where was the hue and cry that Federo and the Dancing Mistress had promised? Three days ago, patrols had been going through the warehouse district building by building. Now their attention had moved to some other urgency.

Everything worn was a badge, a signal, a symbol of what role the wearer played in life and how they intended to be treated. My attire signaled that I did not belong, that I was a strange person in a stranger land. My bells told my story to anyone with the ears that knew how to hear it.

No one on Coronation Avenue had those ears, it seemed.

The Ducal Palace loomed ahead. The building’s face was a vast sweep of marble in the Firthian style, with more windows than I would have imagined any structure having. I was accustomed to the blank walls of the Factor’s house. It seemed as if this building stared across the city with a hundred eyes. A great copper dome towered above the center. Smaller domes of the same metal topped each wing.

I was not sure of the distance, having spent my life behind walls or on night runs, where everything was only a step or two in front of me, but it did not seem I had so far to go to just walk right through His Grace’s front door. As I approached the palace, the street grew emptier. Quieter. My bells rang louder.

What might have been my wedding if my life had been different would instead be my funeral. I wished I could have ridden Endurance toward this end, much as my grandmother had.

From one moment to the next, I was surrounded by angry-faced guardsmen with swords drawn. They came upon me in a sudden swirl of rushing feet and shouting. My captors forced me to my knees, then down on the pavement. Someone kicked me twice, setting my bells to shivering all over my body. A blade’s point was leaned against my neck. I bit back my cry of pain at that, just as I bit back my anger at the rough treatment.

Save your passion for the Duke, I told myself. You will be lucky to have even a single chance. Do not spend it needlessly here.

A runner sprinted away. His sandals slapped the street. The man with the sword knelt close behind me, though I could only see his knee and part of the ringmail of his skirt. “May’s well be comfy, chit,” he whispered. His hot breath was prickly on the scabbed-over notch of my ear. “You ain’t got much left to live for.”

“Conspiracy,” I said to the cobbles. My mouth was half-pressed shut against stone that tasted mostly of shoeleather. “Against the Duke.” That was my tale, meant to be told and carried to the place bearing me on its shoulders.

“Sun rose in the east, dinn’t’t?” He laughed. “Course there’s conspiracy.”

After that, they acted almost like normal people. Some told jokes about the wife of an officer. Others asked after one’s sick horse, and complained of the food in their mess hall. Except for the sword pressing in my neck, I might have been nothing more than a street-corner idler listening to the chatter of men at their work.

No one was interested in me. I was just their capture. Meat, a thing, knocked down to be kept against possible future use, like a venison haunch in an ice room.

My anger began to boil again. These men were brutal and thoughtless in a way that Mistress Tirelle had never managed. Her cruelty was the calculated personal abuse of years. For the Duke’s guards, I was only the trouble of a moment.

They didn’t even care. At least she had.

It all flowed from the Duke. Everything wrong, poorly done, every hurt and hatred emanated from the way he bent the fate of Copper Downs. I kept the words in my head, waiting for my chance to use them against him.

In time, the runner returned. The men gathered in a whispered conference, speaking in awed terms of the bounty. They knew who I was now. I was dragged to my feet by a hard hand clawing into my shoulder. A man with a mild face and watery eyes threw a maroon duty cloak over my head. He laughed as he did it, then cinched a rope around my neck. I was tossed over an armored shoulder and hauled away.

We were heading to the Ducal Palace. Thus far, this was according to plan.

Or so I fervently hoped.

 

The gait of the guardsman rocked me with a bumping irregularity that jangled my bells out of all time and tune. The men’s chatter was gone, so I caught no further clues from them. We soon ascended a broad, shallow flight of stairs. I could hear other people moving, muttering, gathered around.

Whatever my humiliation was to be, it was beginning in a very public way. I decided to be encouraged by this. Their treatment of me seemed less likely to be a quick walk to a slit throat.

When they set me down, my captors were almost gentle. My feet slipped slightly on what felt like stone through my soft leather boots. Someone took my hand and led me stumbling through more hallways of stone. My training Below with the Dancing Mistress prepared me to recall my path, should that happen to matter sometime later.

As I walked, I could hear the echoes of the walls around me, and how they altered every dozen steps as we passed a recessed doorway. My bells still rang, but now they swung in time to my own movements.

The sounds were too discordant to ever be truly pleasing. It still gladdened my heart to hear them. I felt so close to my grandmother, except that she had not walked alive to her own funeral.

In time, my feet were on carpet. My boots crackled slightly, and slid in a new way. I smelled more now, not just dust and old stone, but also furniture oil and incense and the not-so-distant scent of baking. Doors opened and closed nearby as we walked.

No one said a word. We were among people who would not bother to question why a hoodwinked girl was being led past them. Later, I would come to understand the sadness of a city that had surrendered itself to the terror of a jealous and immortal master. Then, all I knew was that I was alone among strangers.

As always.

Finally I was stopped. A door creaked open. I smelled more incense and something musty. With a muttered “hup-hup,” I was propelled through, as if I were a horse to be driven to market. Hands released me as I stepped within. After another pace, I stopped. I feared barking a shin or tripping over something on the floor.

Someone behind me loosened the rope about my neck and whipped the guard’s cloak off. The door banged shut immediately thereafter.

I blinked away dust and the confusion of close confinement. There was no sign of the Duke here. Only a wide wooden table with the Factor seated behind it. My heart twisted in a cold stab of anger and regret. Two other dead-eyed men stood to his left. All three watched me blankly as my shoulders slumped and the breath left me.

Our plan was lost. The game was blown.

“Emerald.” The Factor’s voice was calm, quiet, as ordinary as his face except for those eyes.

“Green. You may call me Green.”

A smile flickered across his mouth. “Emerald.” He tapped his fingers against his thumb a moment, as if tallying. I let my eyes rove around the room. Three high, narrow windows on one wall, a ceiling far above me, shelves lined with large and heavy books behind the Factor’s men and on the other walls. A door amid the shelves, a door behind me, and him in the only chair.

Nowhere to go. Nothing to use.

Whatever calculations he was making came to their end. His face was grim. “A valuable servant is dead. I now see that an extremely valuable possession has been mutilated and thus rendered worthless. I give you liberty to make a statement before I have you cast from the rim of the dome atop this building.”

I was wrong. His voice wasn’t ordinary. It was as dead as his eyes.

And I had nothing I could wield against him.

Yet I wasn’t bound. I wasn’t restrained in any way. Whichever guards had walked me through the halls to this place had vanished with the hood.

I was still me. I shifted my weight, testing the balls of my feet. The Duke was not here, but three of his dead-eyed servants were. More important, the Factor had ever been my enemy.

There was something I could do. Strike one of them down, any of them, and the rest might learn a little of the fear they’d beaten into me. I tensed my muscles, ready to spring and gain close purchase to pour my words in his ear. My cloak of belled silk jingled as I moved.

The Factor raised a hand, not toward me but at his two companions. “She may attempt an attack,” he said. “She will not succeed.”

“If you are certain, Your Grace,” one of them answered.

Your Grace! How many undying, dead-eyed dukes could there be in this city? I had found the Duke of Copper Downs after all! That he went abroad on his own streets under the name of the Factor surprised me, but I realized there was no reason it should. The people who ruled this city were like those sliding boxes brought in from the Hanchu ports that folded into themselves without ever reaching an end.

I relaxed. He would not bluff me. Why did he need to? He did not know I understood anything of the words of power. The Dancing Mistress had been uncertain of them. They were my hidden weapon. I did not know if their strength would hold now, but there was no way to find out except to put the question to the hardest of tests.

“You were wrong,” I told him.

“Wrong?” His smile flickered again. “A curious choice of exit lines. And no, I was not wrong. In what? Lifting a foreign guttersnipe from poverty? Raising you in privilege? Teaching you every skill of womanhood? Perhaps you would prefer picking rice in the tropics, bound in marriage to some laboring peasant. You were almost so much more than that.”

I’d had those same thoughts, but that did not make him right. The bells of my cloak jingled again.

Words, I told myself in the language of my birth. He tries to win once more through the power of his words.

What would my grandmother have done? What would Endurance have me do? I could hear the snorting breath of the ox as he sought to warn me back.

The only way was forward.

Flipping the cloak of bells away from me, I flung it at the Factor’s companions. I danced to my left, away from them.

He jumped to his feet and threw the table over, roaring words I did not—or could not—understand.

I leapt forward to balance on the edge of table. I had practiced this exact stance for so long. I spun into a kick from which the Factor ducked. Then I leapt to grab him around the neck.

“The life that is shared,” I whispered in his ear in the language of my birth, “goes on forever. The life that is hoarded is never lived at all.”

That was as close as Federo and I had been able to come to the Dancing Mistress’ words. Surely, though, inasmuch as she’d given them to me in the Petraean tongue of Copper Downs, their sense had come from whatever language her people spoke amongst themselves. I hoped and prayed that sense would carry forward into my own words.

The Factor bore me down under his far greater weight. His two companions grabbed me by the wrists. I feared suddenly the rape that Mistress Cherlise had warned me about. These men would tear my body for their pleasure before they tore my life out for their protection.

“You,” the Factor said. He couldn’t seem to find his next thought.

His hair began to twist. It jumped like snakes disturbed from their sleep. Ripples of gray, then white, shot through it. The other two loosed their grip on me, staggering back in their own sudden, shocked decay.

“You . . .”This time he looked surprised. Finally there was some gleam of light in those cold, dead eyes.

I pushed him away from me, sitting up as he fell. The Factor struggled with something mighty that was caught in his chest. The words worked. I leaned close, to be sure he could hear me even as he was dying.

“You may call me Green,” I said. “Green,” I repeated in my own language.

He gave me a look of utter despair, which gladdened my heart. Wind and dust erupted violently. The air stank of old bandages and rotten meat, while unvoiced shrieks echoed within my skull.

I held on tight, remembering who I was and what my purpose was here. I bore these noises and the fires in my head as I’d borne the years of beatings and abuses. My patience had been schooled by the very best this man could set against me.

A moment later, I was alone in the room, amid the splintered remains of his table and the shattered wood of his chair.

 

______

 

The motes floating in the sunlight from the high windows engaged my attention for a while. Were these the dust of immortality? Or perhaps just the room’s air stirred so much that every crack and crevice had surrendered its dirt.

Studying their texture awhile longer, I realized I was in the same shock that had possessed me after Mistress Tirelle’s death. Except I did not feel guilt this time. Or pain. I was not sure it even counted as a killing. All I had done was point the weapon of the Duke’s magic against him and those who served him closest. They had brewed their own poison and served it out in cups for generations. How could I regret these child-takers sipping their own bitters?

They were gone. The Duke and the Factor both. How was it no one in Copper Downs had noticed that the two of them had been the same man? Perhaps it had been one of those secrets that everyone understood but no one spoke of.

Everything about this Duke was difficult for me to fathom.

With them gone, I was free. The Factor was no longer in a position to pursue his complaint against me for the killing of Mistress Tirelle. The Duke was no longer in a position to offer a bounty for my head. I was free—free as any girl of twelve who stood out on these streets surely as a fire in the night.

Rarely had I thought to regret the color of my skin, for I found myself pretty enough to look at, but here and now among these maggot men, my fine brown tone made it impossible for me to hide.

What of it? I breathed deeply and searched for the courage that had driven me to face down the most powerful man on the Stone Coast, and indeed, in this quarter of the world. Resolve clutched within my throat, I stepped to the door and pressed my ear against the once-glossy panel. Now it was matted with dust and flecked with tiny pocks.

With that realization, I glanced at the backs of my hands. Dots of blood beaded them. I rubbed myself clean on my dark tights, then swiped fingers across my face. More blood, in faint smears, along with a sharp twinge of pain from the disturbed scabs.

Once more I tried to listen. No one walked or spoke immediately outside, though I heard distant shouting. I also realized there was a strange, faint roar, which I finally identified as a crowd of people giving voice outside the Ducal Palace.

I turned to gather my belled silk. It, too, had been damaged by the Duke’s demise, but was still essentially whole even with a forest of snags and tears. Handfuls of bells slid to the floor when I pulled it over myself. The cloth brought the grave-dust smell of him with me. I didn’t mind. That was the scent of triumph, after all. I might not live out the hour, but in this moment, I was free.

The hallway was empty. The wood of the threshold was scorched, likewise the carpet before it. The rug had abraded in a pattern of rays as if an explosion had taken place within my room. Papers were scattered loose against one wall, along with an empty slipper. People had fled in disarray. I shut the door and checked the gap at the bottom.

What had I survived?

We’d entered from what was now my left. The endless practice in the dark Below with the Dancing Mistress made it easy for me to find my way. Wiping my face and hands clean of bloody dust, I retraced my steps to the end of the hall, out into a wider gallery lined with bookshelves and decorated side tables.

This, too, was empty. The ceiling here was high, three or four storeys, with a long clerestory above serving to admit the light of the sky. Thin banners hung from the beams, descending about thirty feet to the height of a normal ceiling, a style I would eventually realize was typical of formal architecture in this city.

Farther from the explosion, people had also fled in panic. A dropped tray sat among a spray of shattered crystal and a pool of wine. Three leather folders were crumpled against the pedestal of a table supporting a statue of a wide-mouthed red god. Its eyes bugged like those of a frog, and seemed to follow me as I walked.

I could hear the roar much more clearly now, breaking into the separate sounds of people and horses and shattering glass. The noise of riot.

How had it happened so quickly? Unless all the Duke’s henchmen had also dissolved with him. I tried to imagine the officers of the court, the leaders of the Ducal guard, even a tax inspector at his counting table before a clutch of humbled sea captains newly in harbor. If they’d all cried out in surprise, then crumbled in a whirlwind as the Duke had before me, that would send an immediate shock throughout the city.

I began to wonder what I had truly done. A man could not rule through the passage of centuries without the habits of his power becoming the habits of everyone who served him or lived within his demesne. How much had the city been overset?

How much did I care?

A servant younger than myself ran screaming from the sight of me in the next gallery. I still followed my memory of being led in, passing now from carpet to stone. Ahead of me, down a short flight of stairs, a small group of Ducal guards huddled before the great oak-and-copper doors. The entrance-way was surmounted by stained-glass windows. Everything was shut and barred; some of the windowpanes were broken out by cobbles strewn upon the floor within. The crowd just outside was very loud.

I walked toward the guards with my bells ringing. There was no point in pretense. One of their number, with a gold knot on the shoulder of his dark green woolen coat, looked up at me.

“You, there—don’t go through this door!”

“Why not?” I asked, drawing myself up with dignity.

“Coz they’ll kill you out there.” He sounded more exasperated than afraid. “Everything’s gone wrong.”

All the Duke’s immortals must have indeed fallen to dust. It was my great fortune these guards had no idea who I was. I thanked all the gods for the cloth that had hidden my face on the way in.

“Thank you, sir. I was visiting. Is there an exit I can use?”

“Try the Navy Gallery. Off to your left there.”

One of the men spoke up. “If you’re up for it, girl, just drop out of one of them windows. You’ll be in the Box Elder Garden, but it lets out on Montane Street. Crowd out there hasn’t yet remembered how many doors there are to this palace besides the front.”

“Be off with you,” the corporal added. “No use hanging here.”

I took them at their word and turned into what I hoped was the Navy Gallery. No shouts corrected me.

In an instant, I knew I was right. The ceiling was painted with a smoke-wreathed battle scene showing long-hulled vessels from a much older time surrounding a burning, fat-bellied hulk. Ship’s wheels and bells hung on the walls, while models stood on small tables—their detail was something I would have loved to examine at a different time.

The windows here were casements, with little cranks to turn out the glass on a hinge up the long side. I picked one in the middle and looked out at some rhododendron bushes backed by a stand of box elder trees just beyond. The noise was less here. No one seemed to be throwing cobbles at the palace.

A moment later, I was out among the bushes. Reason had crept up on pride, so I stopped there and rolled my belled silk into a bundle. I slipped out of the trees and into the stream of people approaching the front of the palace from along Montane Street. They had the rumbling urgency of a mob, complete with torches, staves, and iron tools.

A man in a pale suit with the cut of a middle-ranked trader grabbed at me. My heart chilled, and I twisted, hoping to kick his knee.

“Is it still happening in there?” he shouted. He was not even looking at me. His eyes rolled red and wild.

“I . . . I don’t know.” I hated how small and frightened my voice sounded.

“The Duke is dead, long live the Duke!” He glanced around, then seemed to see me for the first time. “Go home, girl. This is no place for a foreigner now.”

“Green,” I whispered. Nodding my thanks, I took the first side street that was reachable across the streaming flow of the forming mob.

It was done. I was free, and out of the palace, and on a path of my own choosing. I was my own person, no one’s property for the first time since coming to this accursed city. And they would send no more Federos out to buy children. Not this gang that I had laid low.

Heading for the docks, I aimed to take the trader’s advice. Copper Downs held nothing more for me. Perhaps I could return to what I had been—not a girl under the belly of her father’s ox, certainly, but to what that girl might have become.

 

Since I hadn’t expected to survive, I’d given no thought to what came next. I had a direction now—the trader had the right of it, so far as his advice went—but I was surprised to regret what I was leaving behind.

I had no trouble at all leaving the Factor’s House behind. That was a well-upholstered slave pit, and nothing more. Some of my Mistresses had been kind. Mistress Danae, for example. And if I had friends in this life, they were Federo and the Dancing Mistress.

Once I took ship, I would never see them again. What had not even been a worry before was now a swell of regret. The Factor could be dust for all I cared, but Mistress Tirelle plucked my heart as well.

Loping toward the docks, I wiped tears from my eyes. There’d been no time to say good-bye before. Now it was too late.

 

I had no idea how to interpret the chaos of the waterfront when I finally arrived there. The crowding bordered on panic, everyone heedless and hurried. I needed a ship to Selistan. If I took passage aboard a vessel bound for the Sunward Sea, that would likely be a permanent error.

It all rested on how well I spoke. Certainly there had been stories aplenty in Mistress Danae’s books about stowaways and travelers working their passage. Somehow none of them were dark-skinned girls.

My color hadn’t mattered within the bluestone walls of the Pomegranate Court. Out here, it might hold the balance of my life. Along with my words. As I’d always known, these people lived and died by their words.

I continued to walk briskly, bound on an errand to nowhere. If I were to stand and gawk, I would mark myself as a potential victim. Instead I looked as closely as I could at each ship I passed, each wharf.

Some had signboards out to advertise their destination. Most of these were cities of the Stone Coast—Houghharrow, Dun Cranmoor, Lost Port. These I recognized from the stories and maps I’d studied. One was marked for the Saffron Tower. Much too far the wrong way for me.

A signboard loomed ahead. In shaky handwriting, it read, “South to sun countries. Calling in Kalim., Chitta and Spice Pt.s.”

I trotted up to that gangplank. The ship had three tall masts, and no sign of a boiler below, unlike the smokestack I recalled from Fortune’s Flight. A man stood there with skin as dark as mine, though he was fitted out in the duck and cotton of a sailor. He held a long board to which papers had been bound with sisal twine. He glanced at me once, then back at his board.

“Please, sir, I would have passage,” I said. He didn’t even glance up at me. Then, in Seliu: “I want to return home.”

That got his attention. “Go back to your mother,” he replied, then some words I didn’t know.

“She is there,” I told him. “I was stolen.”

“You are a slave.” He looked at me with suspicion. “Trouble rides your back.” That last was in Petraean.

“Trouble rides this entire city,” I answered him, also in Petraean. “If I do not go with you, I may never go at all.”

“What is being your fare for passage, should I recommend to the captain that we take you?”

I took a deep breath. Here was where my plan would founder. “I have no fare, sir. Just the goodwill of my countrymen. I can cook to please the table of a lordly house, and my skills with needle and thread are worthy as well.”

He snorted, and my heart fell. “Next you’ll tell me you play the music of angels and can dance the Seven Steps of Sisthra.”

“I sing, sir, but only in the fashion of the Stone Coast.”

Something stirred in his face. “You do not know the songs of Selistan.”

Switching back to our words, I said, “It has been a very long time.”

Close by, a bell began ringing. Everyone on the dock looked around with frantic haste. Many ran off. An alarm, then. Riot approached the docks.

“Come.” He started up the gangplank. “If we cast off with you aboard, much of this discussion will be lacking in point. Captain Shields is not likely to toss you overboard as a stowaway. Especially if you can grace his table in style.”

Someone on the masts called out. Sailors pounded the deck. The ship lurched slightly, then began to drift. I realized they had a line off the stern. A boat full of men pulled hard to tow this vessel away from shore.

I tugged at the man’s sleeve. “Please, sir, what is the name of this ship?”

He looked down at me and began to laugh. “Do not think me to be mocking you, little one, but this vessel is called Southern Escape.”

“Ah.” I looked quietly into his eyes. “But I am free.”

“Of course you are,” he answered. “At the moment.” He bent close. “I am Srini, the purser. I must go see to the captain. To be sitting with those bales over there, and for the love of all that is holy, get yourself in no one’s path.”

The deck clanged and rattled. Canvas boomed as sails were raised. I crouched upon the deck and told myself old stories in the language of my birth. I was on my way to a port from which with luck I could hear the sound of Endurance’s wooden bell. I was on my way to freedom.

I was on my way home.