Green

Leaving Home

The maggot man and I walked the better part of the day. My small brown hand was folded tightly within his huge pale one. He had looped a silken cord around both our wrists, lest I slip his grip and flee. I realized he was not a maggot, but a corpse. This man had walked into our village from the lands of the dead.

My heart flooded with joy. My grandmother had sent for me!

It did not take me long to understand how foolish that was. The maggot man smelled of salt and fat and the crispness of his cloth. The dead smelled-well, dead. If a person had been made ready for the sky burial, or an animal for the sacrifice, that was one thing-but anything that died under our sun soon became a stench incarnate.

He was alive enough. He must have been burning with the heat.

So instead I eyed the cord. It was a color of green that I had never before seen, bright and shining as the wings of a beetle. Women had their silks, but even my child’s eye could see this was another quality altogether. The threads of which it was made seemed impossibly small.

The cord did not matter so much anyway. We had walked past the huge baobab tree that marked the extent of my worldly travels up until that day. The road we followed was a cart track, but the maggot man and I might as well have been the last two people alive under the brassy sky.

I know now that my father had a name besides Papa, and my village had a name besides Home. The world is wider than a woman can walk in a lifetime, perhaps a hundred lifetimes. Every town and bridge and field and boulder has a name, is claimed by some god or woman or polity or tradition. That day, I knew only that if I turned and ran far enough, fast enough, I would reach the old baobab and follow the hollow clop of Endurance’s bell all the way to my little pallet and my own silk beside my father’s fire.

The fields around us had changed even with this short walk. They did not harvest rice here. There was no endless network of watery ditches full of frogs and snakes. Fences stood instead, dividing one patch of stone-filled grass from another identical patch of stone-filled grass. Faded prayer flags hung on fenceposts, almost exhausted by wind and sun. A few narrow-bodied cattle with large sagging humps watched us pass. No light stood in their eyes, nothing like the spark of wisdom that had dwelt in the fluid brown depths of Endurance’s gaze.

Even the trees were different. Skinnier, with thin, dusty leaves instead of the broad gloss of the nodding plantains at home. I turned, slipping my wrist around within the loop, to walk backwards and look down the long sloping road up which we had been walking.

A ribbon shone in a broad land below us, silver bright with curves like the sheltering arms of a mother. Fields and orchards and copses surrounded it for a distance of many furlongs, punctuated with the rough nap of buildings and little smudges of forge fires. Was that water? I wondered.

The maggot man slowed his stride to allow me my stumbling backwards progress. “What do you see?” His words were thick and muddled, as if he had only just learned to talk.

A land of rice and fruit and patient oxen, I thought. Home. “Nothing,” I said, for I already hated him.

“Nothing.” He sounded as if the word had never occurred to him before. “That is fair enough. You leave this place today, and will never see it again.”

“This is not the way to the sky burials.”

Something in his words miscarried, because he gave me a strange look instead of answering. Then he reached for my shoulder and twisted me around from the past to face the future once more. The clasp of his fingers ached awhile.

We walked into the failing of the day, sipping every now and then from his leather bottle of water. The road we followed grew stony and thin. Even the fences gave up, the land unclaimed or unclaimable. Dark, rough rocks were strewn about, some so large the track was forced to bend around them. Everything that grew up here was dusty green or pale brown. Each plant wore a crown of thorns where in my home they would have borne flowers. Insects hummed loudly enough to pierce my hearing before falling stone-silent at the sharp cry of some unseen hunting bird.

The shadows of the few remaining trees grew long about the time their numbers began to strengthen. I stumbled in my fatigue. Recovering my step, I realized we were heading downward for the first time since setting out.

Before us, at the foot of the slope, I could see an iron-gray plain gathering darkness onto itself.

“This is the sea,” the maggot man said. “Have you ever heard of it?”

“Is it stone?”

He laughed. For a moment, I thought perhaps I heard the true man within the cloak of black cloth and muddled words. “No. Water. All the water in the world.”

That frightened me. A ditch was one thing, but enough water to cover all the land like a rice paddy was another. “Why do we walk there?”

“To see how strong you are.”

“No, no. Why do we go to this water?”

“Because the sea is the next step on the journey of your life.”

The immensity of it was beyond description. I saw how the far edge of the water faded into the distance. “I cannot swim so far.”

The maggot man laughed again. “Come. There is a house farther along our way. We can eat there. I will tell you of…” He paused, grasping for a word. “Water houses,” he finally said, and looked embarrassed.

Young as I was, I knew perfectly well that no one built their house of water. Either the maggot man was an idiot, which did not seem likely, or his words had failed him again.

“I am hungry,” I told him politely.

“Walk,” he replied.

We ate stew that evening in a wayhouse. I now realize how small and mean the place must have been, especially by the standards of my captor, but he’d had his purposes. It was much like my father’s hut-mud walls set with beams to make the frame of a thatched roof. The room was larger, though, so big that four tables could fit within and there still be room for the cook’s fire and her black iron kettle.

I had never seen such a great building.

We sat on a bench at one table. A few other folk were around. All glared at the maggot man. No words were said, but I knew even then that trouble followed him, that he was seen as a curse. He’d slipped free the cord. In memory I cannot say whether that was more to ease his dining or to make less of a show of his trade.

Our stew was served within shallow bowls of earthenware. I peered at the outside where it angled away from me. A pattern of lizards and flowers chased one another around the curve. The lizards I could understand in this sere, hard place, but the idea of flowers must have come from my home, for no one born here would see them among the thorns and rocks.

The dark brown stock filling the bowls was almost bitter. It had been made with some small polished nut that split neatly in two beneath my spoon. Instead of homey rice, grains floated in the broth. A few leaves swirled loose, along with chunks of pale meat that tasted like ditch frog.

“Fish.” The maggot man smiled. The effect was ghastly on his pale face. “It is always good to fill your belly after a day.”

“Fish,” I said politely. I wished I had a plantain.

When he was nearly done, he pushed his bowl between us. A dark green mallow leaf floated in the brown puddle at the bottom. “I have asked the word of the house woman,” he told me, almost proudly. “Boat. See this mallow leaf? It is like a boat.”

“There is mallow growing in your sea?”

The maggot man sighed. “I am trying to tell you why you will not have to swim.”

“I never swam because of mallow.” I poked his leaf. “Taro tastes better anyway.”

“Wood floats,” he said.

“So do I.”

“We will travel on a boat of wood, which floats like this mallow leaf in your stew.”

“I thought you said the sea is made of water.”

He threw up his hands and muttered at the rough ceiling of the wayhouse. He then looked at me with a frown. “You will be fearsome once you speak Petraean.”

I’d never realized there were more kinds of words in the world. “Will my father speak Petraean, too?”

A shadow clouded his eyes. “No,” he said in a clipped voice. “We must go. It is another few hours’ walk to the port.”

I followed the maggot man into the deepening gloom of night. My feet began to get in each other’s way. Keeping my pace was especially difficult when the road made a sharp bend or wound through a steep drop along some gully.

The maggot man walked on. His stink had blown off with the evening breeze. Instead my nose was tickled by the scent of salt, and a rot I’d never smelled before.

I was ready to go home. The next time I stumbled, I let myself fall to the ground. The green cord slipped from his wrist. I bounced up off the road and sprinted away.

The maggot man was faster than I might have credited. He was upon me in a dozen steps, grabbing me up into his arms while I kicked and screamed, then working one hand free to slap me very hard across the mouth.

“Do not break from me.” His voice now was stone, hard and unforgiving. “Your path is set. The only way forward is at my side. There is no way back.”

“I am going home,” I shrieked at him through the taste of blood in my mouth.

“You are going on.” A rueful smile slipped across his face. “You have…” He reached for a word a moment, then gave up, instead saying, “Fight. You are strong in body and spirit. Most girls would have run at the first, or fallen crying later in the day.”

“I don’t want fight. I want to go home.”

He still held me in a very tight grip. Together we turned, looking back up the road. “How far do you think you could find your way across that wide country of rocks and thorns? If I had not carried water, what would you have drunk?”

I would lick the sweat from my hands, I thought, but the sting of his blow was a sharp, hard lesson that warded my lips. “I will go to your sea,” I told him grudgingly. “But then I am going back home.”

“You will come to my sea,” he agreed. He said no more than that.

Quite late in the evening we found an inn. I had finally collapsed of sheer fatigue. I made the last part of this journey slumped across the maggot man’s shoulder. The moon gave the night land a sheen like silvered tears. I wondered if it would polish me bitter bright as well.

He had a little room already taken, I realized much later. At the time, we walked through a huge kitchen and up what I later understood to be a flight of stairs to a high room with nets draping from above. A hutch stood within, a thing of bars and boards. Alongside it was a bed and a rough table, all beneath a sloping roof with an inset window tightly shuttered.

Before I knew what he was about, the maggot man dumped me into the hutch and slid the latches across the door.

“You stay there,” he said. “No running. I must do things, then sleep.”

I howled, screamed, hurled myself against the bars, raged at the top of my lungs. The world did not hear. The maggot man sat at his table with a carefully trimmed candle and for a long time poked a narrow stick into a little packet of papers sewn together within leather sheets. Every now and then he smiled at me, somewhere between indulgence and mirth.

My bell for the day was unsewn. I did not have my silk or my needle. I knew then that I was little more than an animal to him. Caged, kept, to be taken over the mallow-filled waters of the gray sea to whatever dead land the maggot called his home.

I cried until sleep claimed me, though his candle flickered and his stick scratched and scratched against the paper. In my dreams that scratching became the claws of a mangy wolf, pale as death, jaws set to drag me away through a frog-filled ditch the width of the world.

I was awoken by words I did not understand. The maggot man had opened the door of my cage and held a plate with fried dough twists and slices of yellow fruit I did not recognize. He spoke again.

“You utter the tongue of demons,” I told him.

“Very soon I will speak to you only in the language of your new home,” he said in my words, “except at extreme need.” He shook his plate at me, then repeated whatever he had said before.

I did not want to come out within reach of his hard slap, but my stomach had other ideas. The dough smelled good, and the fruit looked sweet enough. I followed the growling of my hunger from the cage.

“Eat,” he told me. “Then we will go find our boat.”

The dough tasted every bit as delicious as it had smelled. Likewise the fruit-sweet and fleshy and sour all in a single mouthful. This was as fine a morning meal as my father had ever made for me.

When I had finished my food, I looked to see that the maggot man had gathered up a fat leather satchel. He held out his hand with the green twist of silk already around his wrist.

I could have fought harder. Perhaps I should have. I do not know what good it might ever have done. I am still fighting even now, so perhaps I only began the resistance slowly and never stopped. That day my curiosity overtook my anger as I willingly bound my hand to his. Decent food and a weariness of struggle were all it had taken to break my young spirit to the maggot man’s desire.

“Come,” he said, “let us see to our boat.”

“I do not have to swim?”

“No, you do not have to swim. We shall sit easily as we pass across the sea.” He added something in his words, which I of course could not then understand.

We set out into the bright morning along a muddy street in a village larger than I had imagined could exist. We passed amid a cacophony of men and horses and dogs and ox-carts as we headed for the water’s edge. I even heard the clop of ox bells, but none were the tone of Endurance’s. No one remained to call me back, while this strange, pale man continued to push me forward on the path he had chosen for me.

I followed him into the future.

My memory is a curious thing. Though I was quite young, I clearly recall these early conversations. They were of necessity in the tongue of my birth, for I spoke no Petraean yet. I even recollect Federo-and how young he was then-looking for words he did not know, such as boat . I did not know what a boat was either, not in those first days. My memory supplies the substance of the conversation rather than the specifics, so as I think back to that time, it seems to come back to me in the language of my enslavement rather than the language of my cradle.

Likewise with the memory of my first ship. I know from recalling those days that she was named Fortune’s Flight, for those are among the first words of Petraean that I learned. Years since, I have looked in the ship books at Copper Downs, and so I know that Fortune’s Flight was an iron-hulled steam barquentine. She was built on the shores of the Sunward Sea, where the princes of the deep water have foundries to make such things. This knowledge fuses into my memory so I can recall the arrangement of her masts and sails and smokestack as she rode at anchor offshore, even though at the time they must have seemed to me nothing more than strange trees, while the mysteries of steam would have passed beyond any understanding I could have summoned.

Fortune’s Flight rises white-hulled and gleaming on the waves of recall. A cloud of gulls circles her fantail, crying their soulless lament. Swabbies move about her deck, and whistles blare orders in those codes that all sailors know. She is lean and beautiful, her narrow stack streaming pale smoke. She is a house upon the water, a hunter’s courser set to carry his prey back to the manor hall to be dressed and hung.

I must have then seen her as a white building with a treed roof, for I cannot imagine another view to my youngest eyes. Now that I know her power and her purpose, I cannot look back on the ship of my captivity with less awareness than I possess today.

How we were transported from my first view at the water’s edge to her decks is clouded by forgetfulness. There must have been a boat. Whether it was a local man earning a tael for his ferry work or one of the ship’s company come to fetch her passengers, I cannot say.

She was crowded with drums and bales and capstans-all the furniture of navigation and its intents. We looked back at the shore from the rail. Much water stretched between us and land, a river wider than all the ditches in all my father’s fields laid together. I tried to imagine how many rice paddies could be flooded from this sea that was kept so far from my home.

The look of the water desert was alien, strange as if the sky had been bound directly to earth. Shore was more familiar. The houses and barns seemed so small. They were built with mud walls, just like Papa’s hut, except here in this place people washed their buildings over with pale colors. Some bore painted designs, flowers and wheels of lightning and lizards and things I did not have names for. The land rose behind the town, bearing with it the single road we had walked down the night before.

“You brought me far to test my strength,” I said.

“Hmm.” The maggot man did not lend any words to his answer.

I had walked that distance. I could walk the same distance back. I stared at the land so brown and gray above the ragged colors of the town at the edge of the sea. After a short time, he tugged gently on my shoulder. I turned to the chaos of the ship. The maggot man and I headed for a little house amid the jumble of men and equipment and cargo.

“Here,” he said as we pushed within. “Here we stay.” This was followed by another burst of his Petraean gabble.

My first thought was that the floors were wood, not dirt. The place was handsome enough, lit by a round window filled with glass. There were two beds, each larger than any I had seen in my life until then. A table with a chair before it clipped to the floor. A black mounting gaped in the ceiling, from which a chain depended, holding a small oil lamp with a hooded glass.

No cage waited in the middle of the room.

I had never seen such a wealth of space and privacy. Not to be shared, surely as our room the night before was, but dedicated to one man and his needs. One man and his girl.

The iron rail at the base of the bed was firm and cold to my touch. The paint was textured with generations of repetition, layers over layers of flecking and pitting. “What do we do here?”

He answered in Petraean.

I whirled on him, my voice rising as my dignity slipped away from me. “What do we do here?”

The maggot man smiled, his mouth tight and sad. He answered once more in Petraean. He then added in my words, “We journey across the Storm Sea to Copper Downs.”

I seized on petulance, the last refuge of children. “Don’t want to go to Copper Downs. Want to go home.”

His smile shrank to nothing. “Copper Downs is your home now.”

This I considered. We had not brought my silk with my thousand bells. “Papa will be there? And Endurance?”

“Your new home.” This was followed with another burst of his alien words.

Lies. All was lies. He had lied to Papa; he lied to me. Endurance had tried to warn me, but I’d followed my father’s words in coming with this man.

Had Papa lied to me as well?

I resolved I would go home and ask him. It only waited for my moment. I gathered myself on one of the beds and watched the maggot man carefully.

Soon enough he tired of watching me in return, and set to his little table. He brought papers from a box and made more of his scratches. Once in a while he glanced at me, but his heart was in his reckoning, not in being my guardian.

The floor groaned and swayed like a tree in a storm, though the window’s light was bright with a clear sky. The yip-yip of the sailors seemed unexcited. The boat shifted, I realized, like Endurance settling in for the night. Below the floor, something huge chuffed and squirmed. Perhaps they had a giant ox to tow them through the sea?

It did not matter to me. I was leaving soon. Though I could no more stop my mind wondering than I could stop my lungs breathing, I did not care.

This game was over.

I waited until the time between each of my captor’s glances at me was more breaths than I could count. It was easy enough to occupy myself studying the latch on the door to this little house. A great shiny lever was placed below a handle which was obviously meant to be grabbed. When we entered, the maggot man had used it to close the door.

Though I had seen few doors in my life, animal pens had gates. This was no different. I had been wrong about the lack of a cage, I realized. This cage was bigger, the bars less visible.

At his next glance and return of attention to his papers, I was ready. I leapt from the bed, grabbed the handle, and threw open the door. Head tucked down, I sprinted past the knees and thighs of the sailors toward the rail. I was faster than any of them suspected. The floor of the boat was just as crowded as before, with more ropes coiled as great cloth sheets were raised snapping into the wind.

Men shouted, but it was less than a dozen steps to the edge. No one had been waiting for me. No one had been watching for me.

How far could we be from the shore?

But when I vaulted the fence and dove for the sea, I saw there was no land nearby. Water was water. I could swim here as well as in a ditch at home. Unfortunately, this ditch had grown to the width of the world, too far to reach the other side.

Then I was in the sea. The water was colder than I had thought, and stung my mouth terribly. This was the taste of the sweat of the earth. Everything beneath was dark and gray. I could see nothing.

I found the surface easily enough and began to swim away from the boat.

Behind me they shouted. I rolled to my back and looked as I continued to swim. Angry men lined the side rail, pointing and yelling. I smiled at their discomfort even as one raised a great spear.

With a flash, a silver arrow sped toward me. I started to scream as it passed above my head. I turned again, almost slipping beneath the water.

For a long moment I could see the end of everything. I don’t imagine death meant anything sensible to me at that age, but I knew people did die, and once dead they did not return.

A triple arch of jagged teeth yawned above my head. This monstrous thing was the very mouth of hunger loosed in the sea. I could see the pale curves of its maw behind its teeth, narrowing to a dark throat that could take me down whole. A chilled stench of blood and filth shivered my spine.

That dart flew into those pale geometries and embedded itself in the roof of the monster’s mouth. A blue spark exploded in that darkness bright enough to sting my eyes. I heard a shriek like a woman in pain.

With an enormous splash, the mouth closed. It sank beneath the water, dragging with it a rough, gray head larger than Endurance. For a long, slow moment, somewhere between one of my heartbeats and the next, a black eye stared at me. It was ringed with flesh as pale as the maggot man’s skin, and had the filmy hue of the dead. Though this glaring orb lacked the wisdom of Endurance’s brown eyes, or even the simple flickering life present in the eye of the smallest birds, still I felt the sea-beast place my name among the secret hatreds graven into its frozen heart.

I kicked in place a moment, my heart chilled as cold as the surrounding water. The monster had nearly taken me. Worse, there was no land to reach, no matter how far I swam. The boat creaked and groaned behind me, men calling out as it turned to fetch me from the waves.

Water at home had held only snakes, frogs, and turtles with knife-sharp beaks. The sea held every kind of throat ready to swallow me whole. When they threw the ropes down to me, I grasped readily enough at the rescue.

The tears I cried for my home were mixed in with salt spray when they hauled me aboard. Once more I went willingly into the house of my captivity. If I did so a third time, I knew I would be lost to myself forever.

Federo handed me back the slate. “Write the letters once more, girl,” he said. In Petraean.

Despite my resolve, his language was sinking into me like dye in cloth. Many of the deckhands spoke it, as did all the officers. Federo used the tongue almost exclusively with me. He gave me no name at all except “girl” which would serve to call half the world.

“I have written them a hundred times,” I said. “Snake,” I muttered in my own tongue.

He slapped me hard across the top of the head. The blow stung, but little more. I did not cry out. I never cried out, not where Federo or any of the sailors could hear me, which was everywhere on this ship.

“Then you will write them a hundred more.” He leaned close. “Without letters, you are nothing in the world where you will be moving. People’s lives and deaths are written in polite notes that must be passed among the powerful like dance cards.”

These words. I had no writing to master at home with my father. I had never even heard of letters. You talked, people listened, or they did not.

Letters were a way of talking so anyone could hear you at any time. Like standing on the corner repeating yourself forever, but without the endless effort. Their shapes were strange, though, bearing no resemblance to their sounds-bent trees and stumbling drunkards and the wanderings of chickens. “Whoever made up such a thing?”

He slapped me again. “In my language.”

I clenched my fist around the chalk and tried again with his words. “Who made these things up?”

“I do not know a name, girl. I do not know. Much like fire, the gods gave letters to men.” His smile was crooked. “Some might say they were the same gift.”

We had no gods back home, not really. Just dead people who watched over us, and the tulpas who moved among the dust and clouds and hid their faces in the ripples of the water.

If I had a god, that was Endurance. But he was as real as me, while gods were more of an idea. Like letters, really.

“What if the gods are in the letters?”

Federo opened his mouth, closed it, then opened it again without speaking. He sat heavily on his bunk. “Your mind is a jewel, child.” He sighed. “Hoard it well. Others will be jealous of the way your thoughts sparkle. Mark me”-he waggled his finger-“play the dullard a bit and you will live a happier life.”

I refused to be distracted. “And what are gods?”

“Gods are…” He paused again, gathering his thoughts. I already knew that Federo chose his words for me with care. I resolved to learn what lay in the dark spaces between the light of speech. “Gods are real. More real in some places than others. In Copper Downs we… Ours were put aside for us a very long time ago.”

“They are dead?”

“No. But neither do they live.”

“Like a tree,” I said. “Cut to make this ship. It moves as if it were alive. It is not dead on the ground.”

He laughed. “Except that we do not use our gods for much in Copper Downs. The Duke has found better ways to occupy the spirits of his people.” Leaning forward, he tried his best glare. “Now, you owe me some letters, young lady.”

I could not escape. There was nowhere to go but the ship itself. At the same time, it was clear to me that rebellious silence would serve nothing except to make a point my captor already understood quite well. He looked less like a maggot to me as the days went by, and more like a man. He spoke; I listened. I asked; he answered.

His words sank further and further into me every day. Now that I had some decent Petraean, Federo refused to acknowledge me if I spoke in my own tongue. His was a language of ideas, thoughts bigger than a barnyard or a rice paddy or a frog-filled ditch. I felt guilty at finding any pleasure in my captivity.

Just as true was the fact that I now ate better than I ever had before. I slept on sheets, a thing unheard of at home. Simple dresses covered me from shoulder to knees, the first time in my life I had not mostly been clad in sunlight. I had soap. Whatever god had given these maggot people that boon had indeed granted a blessing. I had never imagined what it was like to be utterly clean. At home, we were washed so thoroughly only at birth and at death. The rest of life was for living amid the dust of the world.

When he was not at his figuring and scribbling, or mastering me at lessons, Federo would read to me. He skipped past the little box of simple books for children, instead picking from his personal collection of texts on trade, geography, the engineering of steam power, the working of metals. Most of it meant little to me, but there was always a harvest of new words, and questions piled on questions, which he would answer as best he could.

Maps were my favorite. At first, making my mind understand that a picture on a sheet of vellum could be one and the same as the land and sea around me was like forcing myself through a small box. Once understanding dawned, I saw how I could travel without ever getting up from my seat on the bed.

Federo showed me distant places-the channel connecting our Storm Sea to the Sunward Sea, which ran below the ironbound overwatch of the Saffron Tower, far to the east; the Rimerock Range and its endless northern majesty; the extents of empires so long vanished that their cities were remembered only as rock quarries. The entire plate of the world could be scribed rock by stream on papers. We looked at everything he had to show me, except my homes old and new.

“Why will you not show me Copper Downs?”

Federo set his lips. “I am forbidden.”

“By who?”

“By whom.”

“By whom?” I muttered in my own tongue: “Stupid words,” then continued. “Why can I not see the pictures of my home?”

“You are to be unspoiled.”

“You have said you take me to Copper Downs, but you have never said why.” My chest shuddered at a memory of Endurance’s placid gaze. There would be no bells for me in Copper Downs, neither my silk nor the ox’s.

“You are to be raised up as a great lady. Every moment will be a lesson. Hush now, and let me show you what I can.”

A few days into the voyage, as Federo and I settled in to our routine of living, I begged a length of cloth from the sailmaker. He gave me a stretch of poplin torn from a wrap for sails, and two old needles nearly blunted. These I hid beneath my bunk while I considered the problem of bells. I picked threads out of my sheets, and sewed a knot for each day of my captivity, vowing to add the bells when I could, and to make up once more the thousand bells sewn at the start of my life by my mother, then my grandmother, then me.

Pleasant as he might pretend to be, I would not allow Federo to steal this from me.

Once the bosun conceded that I wasn’t likely to jump the rail again, I was permitted to be on the open deck. There were at least a few hours each day where I was doing little enough, so I wandered about Fortune’s Flight in small stages to watch the crew at their business and look for something that might serve me for the tiny bells I required.

The sailors mostly found me amusing. Some growled, others gave me long, cold looks, but many merely smiled and showed me their work. We had an easy voyage, unusually free of storms, as I later came to know. The great steam kettle at the heart of the ship did most of the work of our passage. The master set the sails to gain the extra push the winds might lend her progress.

I watched ducks being herded from their pens to the fantail to take the morning air. I watched the ropemaker splicing and braiding his hemp. I watched the deck idlers shift cargo as the quartermasters sought better trim, or just for the practice. I watched the gun crews work their pieces, though they never actually fired. In time I wondered if the guns functioned or were just for show. I watched men fish off the stern and cast harpoons from the waist of the ship. I watched the carpenter rebuild braces. I watched the smith hammer out hinges.

From him I found something to serve as a bell. Clearly I did not want any actual ringing in my cloth, for Federo would know in a moment I had some small treason afoot. But the smith had nails and scraps, and a dozen kinds of iron slivers and shims.

“I am playing at soldiers,” I told him the third day he’d tolerated my presence at his forge.

He was a huge man, in the manner of smiths everywhere. His hair was pale, though always slicked dark with sweat, and his eyes the cutting blue of a gemstone. “Aye, and is yer winning, missy?”

“No one wins at war,” I told him primly. “Some lose less than others, if they are lucky.”

The smith chuckled. “And I am seeing why the dandy man has taken such a liking to yer.”

Dandy was a new word to me. I set it aside for later consideration. I understood even then that I should not ask Federo why the smith had called him so.

“He is good to me,” I lied. “But he will not play at soldiers.”

Another chuckle, then a storm of metal noise as the smith hammered at an iron collar meant for some cross-tree high above us.

“Can you give me a few soldiers, sir?” I finally asked. I looked him in the eye as I spoke-that directness seemed to work best with these pale men from across the sea.

He paused his work, wiping sweat from his brow with his right wrist while still holding the hammer in that hand. “I do not have the casting of lead for toy men, missy. T’ain’t no one on board for that, ’less one of the gentlemen of the stern plays with little men in his bunk at night.” The smith snorted with laughter. At the time, I did not take any of his meanings.

“Just shavings or scraps or nails, sir,” I said quickly. “That I might march them in martial array.” That was a phrase from Federo’s reading the evening before, an epic poem concerning a battle that seemed to consist largely of a competition of colorful uniforms.

“A bag of sharp, pointed oddments the missy wants.” He gave me a long stare, a spark of inner shrewdness rising from the well of his usual bluff density. “Well, yer not loading a cannon, nor running from foot nor horse.”

“No, sir,” I said quietly.

He leaned close, hammer still clutched in his hand. “Don’t call me sir, missy. Iron you wants, iron you shall have.”

Later I stole some pliers from the carpenter’s mate, to bend the nails and scraps with. So it was that I began to affix bits of metal to my poplin, to stand in for the bells and silk of my home. I would sew quickly when I knew Federo to be at the captain’s table, or late at night when his breath was slow and even. I pretended the clanging bells that marked the hours of the watches were Endurance watching over me, that the rumbling of the steam belowdecks was the bellows of the ox’s great lungs.

So I marked the days of my passage across the calm sun-drenched waters of the Storm Sea in learning everything that my captor could put before me. My nights I observed by pricking my fingers in remembrance of a home that already seemed infinitely dim and distant in my recall.

We packed away our belongings as Fortune’s Flight made her approach to the Stone Coast. Which was to say Federo packed away his belongings with some small assistance from me. I had nothing except the cotton shifts he had given me to wear, and my length of poplin folded away beneath my bunk with my stolen supplies.

The problem of how to get that ashore loomed large. The only answer I could imagine was to fold it into Federo’s baggage somehow and hope to sneak it away from him later. He was keeping a close eye on me that day. I suppose he was afraid I’d dive over the rail again. I knew better-how would I walk home from Copper Downs?-but he had no sure way to trust.

I finally tried slipping the cloth beneath my shift as he was distracted, but my waist bulged in such a strange manner that it was impossible to keep it hidden. I dropped my burden beneath the bunk as he turned. The clatter caught at his ear.

“What have you there?” he asked me in that slow, gentle voice that meant he knew I was about something he would not approve of.

“Just trinkets.” That lie which stands closest to the truth stands tall as well, one of his books had told me. “I have wrapped some little metal soldiers in cloth, for my playthings.”

A strange expression flickered across his face. “I have never yet seen you at play, girl.”

“It is only when you are away,” I said modestly.

He bent to look beneath my bunk. I itched to kick him in the neck, or at the fork of his legs, but did not. To what purpose? I could not escape on my own. Not unless I could swim the ocean.

“Let me see.” He tugged the wrapped bolt of cloth out. It fell open, spilling pliers and needles and thread and iron bits upon the deck. Federo gave the fabric a shake. Nothing jingled, for there were no proper bells at all, but the sewn-on bits of metal clicked. “Ah.”

I withstood his long, slow look.

“I should beat you purple for this,” he finally said. “And make you eat some of these filings. But you are no silly thing to be cowed by force or fear.” He bundled it up again, and my tools within. “Listen to me, girl. Mark me well. Forget the bells of your silk. Where you are going next, any effort to reclaim the land and standing of your birth will be almost the worst offense you could hope to commit. Your journey is forward, not back.”

Stubborn resistance rose within me like flowers under a spring rain. “My feet have not chosen this path.”

“No.” His voice was sad. “But still it is your path. You cannot unchoose what has been done. You can fight the journey, gather bruises and scars until you fail and are cast aside as too broken to complete. Or you can run ahead, beat the racers at their own game, and claim your prizes.”

“What prizes?” I hissed.

“Life, health, safety.” He grabbed my chin, not too hard, and tried to send me some secret message with the narrowing of his eyes. “The right to make your own choices once more.”

Releasing me, Federo tucked the roll under one arm. “We have never spoken of this. I will not recall our conversation again. Best you do not either. Set it aside, along with the entire matter of the bells.”

He stalked out of our hatch, across the busy deck, and without a glance back at me idling in the doorway, he threw my poor attempt at reclamation into the bay.

I knew I had been told too much, but I did not then know too much of what. Adults almost always speak above or beneath children. It is an error I remain mindful of even now. That day all I saw was another betrayal in a line of betrayals.

I will not willingly take his binding a third time, I promised myself.

“Come,” he called from the rail. “See the city that is your new home.”

Slowly I dragged my feet across the deck.

My bells were lost to me, but Fortune’s Flight had her own. They rang brazen-bold as she moved into harbor, along with scores of streaming pennants like prayer flags. Bells floating on little platforms in the harbor answered in time to the swell of the waters. More bells ashore and aship responded in their own manner.

Copper Downs mocked me, displaying endless ringing rounds in a reminder of what had been stripped from me. I resolved anew to hate the god-raddled city and her pale, dead-skinned people.

This place was greater than a thousand of my villages. There were more people before me than I had thought to exist in the entire world. Buildings stood far taller than even the burial platforms of my home-those pillars are the highest things we make, in order to carry souls closer to the freedom of the sky. The city spread along the shore at least an hour’s walk east and west of the jetties toward which the harbor pilot even now steered Fortune’s Flight. An old wall rose ragged amid neighborhoods along a hill just to the west. East of the docks, I could see great rooftops clad in the shining metal that had given the place its name.

Despite my anger, the city fascinated me.

“The Temple District,” Federo said as he followed my gaze. “Houses abandoned by the gods, though their doorsteps are yet swept by priests.”

“Those are warehouses by the shore.” I pointed to the huge buildings by the docks. “Where the wharfingers and freight brokers ply their trades.”

“Indeed.” I could hear a smile in his voice. I had learned so much already on the voyage.

With much shouting and the whistling of pipes, Fortune’s Flight was brought to a pier in the middle of the bustling dockside madness. I had thought her a great vessel when I’d seen her anchored off the shores of my home country, but here, she was just another ship. Few had her steam-kettle guts, though I didn’t know enough at the time to see it, for all the vessels sprouted the trees of masts with their webbing of lines.

Idlers and brokers and customs agents waited in a throng along the dock as the thick mooring lines were thrown down and the ship warped into place for her cargo to be taken off. Even this one crowd was more people than I’d ever seen. Compared with the masonry and copper immensity of the city, their numbers were far more personal as they stood shoulder to shoulder, shouting and waving colored ribbons or slips of paper. Each must signify something, I thought. A job or an offer of service.

Easier to focus on what they did than on who they were. I found scorn for my younger self who had asked Federo whether Papa and Endurance might be waiting here. The ox would be dinner for fourscore men, and Papa lost in the crowd as surely as a weed among the rice shoots.

Guilt flooded me at that dismissal. I know now that Federo had continued to take from me without my consent or even awareness, remaking me in the process of the voyage. His plan was steady, sure, and certain. All that I knew then was that he had caused me to wrong myself in some manner I could not define.

Federo grasped me tightly, more for safety than fear of flight, as the deck began to pour onto the dock and vice versa. The din was immense. Ship’s officers wielded stick and blade to keep order, or Fortune’s Flight would have been overrun. Still, it all had the flavor more of playacting than a brawl, as if the docksiders were expected to push and the ship’s company were expected to resist. A dance in five hundred parts, for men and cranes and plunging mules.

Federo leaned close and yelled something in my ear that I could not make out over the racket. I nodded as if I understood. The grip on my shoulder relaxed a trifle.

Soon enough the chaos sorted itself into a systematic ebb and flow. All the shouters had an intended audience. Everyone on deck knew who they were looking for. Gear was broken down and packed off quickly, hatches to the cargo holds thrown open, sailors told off for liberty with pay in their hands all in one swirling rush. Federo soon spotted his contact deep within the churn.

“Come!” he shouted.

Sailors carrying Federo’s gear surrounded us. With the aid of their muscles and fists, we pushed through the mob to a high-sided cart that waited on the cobbles at the head of the docks. Its surfaces were a deep, glossy red traced with gold striping and a small black design upon the door. The huge wheels were finished to match the body, with iron straps around their rims. A pair of large black animals, mad-eyed with trailing tails and flowing hair along their graceful necks, stamped in their traces under the watchful gaze of a man on a high bench at the front.

Federo opened the door and pushed me inside. He then slammed it shut to shout orders concerning the stowage of his gear. Several small windows admitted light, but the carriage was so tall, all I saw were rooftops, sky, and circling birds. I sat on a leather bench which was the softest thing I’d ever encountered in my life. Useless little buttons were set deep in the seat in a mockery of how I’d sewn my twice-lost bells. I picked at them and smelled the oils someone had used to polish the interior-lemon, and the pressings of some vegetable I didn’t know-until Federo returned.

He climbed in and took my hand with a firm squeeze. “We are almost there, girl.”

“I have a name,” I said sullenly. I must have still known it then.

His voice grew hard. “No, you do not. Not in this place. It is gone with your bells. Forward, always forward.”

As if responding to his words, the carriage lurched into motion. I could hear the coachman’s whip crack, the whistles and hup-hup-hups as he signaled his team, the curses as he shouted at the traffic. Soft as the seat was, the ride ran rougher than Fortune’s Flight even on stiff swells. Though Federo had told me of cobbles, I had never seen a stone road before that hour. The ride was miserable.

I stared at the passing rooftops and wondered if I should have thrown myself into the harbor after all.

We bounced past bright painted columns and burnished roofs and, once, a tree of copper and brass that overhung the road. I knew that if I climbed on my knees to stare outside, a parade of marvels would pass before my eyes. Later, I would wish very much that I had done so. In that moment, I merely wanted to go home.

The carriage passed through a large gate, then a smaller one, before finally creaking to a halt. Looking up through the windows, I could see walls all around us. The bulk of a large building loomed on one side, anchoring them. Walls and structure alike were made of a pale blue stone of a sort I had never seen. My entire village could have fit within this place.

Federo banged on the door. Someone opened it from the outside.

Our carriage could not be exited from inside, I realized. Caged again.

He stepped out and ushered me down. I saw the coachman climbing cautiously back onto his box. His eyes were now covered with a length of silk. That had not been true down at the docks.

This was a great puzzle.

Opposite the tall building was a low, wide structure of two storeys. The upper balcony provided deep shade for the lower floor. Its posts were carved with detailed scenes now overgrown with flowering vines. The second storey was roofed by more of the bright copper, backing up to the rise of the bluestone wall. A pomegranate tree grew out of a little circle of raised stone in the middle of the cobbled court. Somehow that lone, lonely tree reminded me of home.

Federo crouched to meet my eye level. “From here, you are among women. You have left the world to be in this place. I am the only man you will speak with, expect for the Factor himself, whenever he comes to see you. Use your head, little one.”

“I have a name,” I whispered once more in my words, thinking of Endurance’s bell.

He ruffled my hair. “Not until the Factor gives you one.”

My maggot man stepped back into the carriage and slammed the door behind him. The coachman cocked his head if listening, then drove his team very slowly around the pomegranate and through a narrow gate that shut behind him, pushed by unseen hands. The doors were some age-blackened wood, bound with iron and copper. They seemed as stout and unforgiving as the surrounding walls.

Though I saw no one, I heard throaty laughter.

“I am here,” I called out in my own words. Then I said it again in Federo’s words.

After a while, a woman not very much taller than I, but fat as any house duck, with protruding lips curved to match, waddled out from the shadowed porch. She was swathed in coarse black cloth that covered even her head. “So you’re the new one.” She used Federo’s words, of course. “I’ll have no more of that…”

The rest I did not understand. When I tried to ask what she meant, she slapped me hard upon the ear. I knew then that she intended me never to speak my own words. Just as Federo had warned me.

I resolved to learn her words so well that eventually this duck woman could never order me about again. I will clothe myself in bells , I thought proudly, and leave this place with my life in my own hands .

“I am Mistress Tirelle.” She didn’t look any less like a duck up close. Her lips stuck forward, and her two small eyes were so far apart, they threatened to sidle outward to her temples. She wore her black dowd like a badge of honor. I was never to see her clad in colors of any sort. Her thin hair was pulled back hard and thickened with some fiber, then painted black as a bosun’s boot.

She was a woman pretending to be a shadow pretending to be a woman.

Mistress Tirelle walked around me, stepping back and forth as she inspected. When I turned my gaze to watch, she grasped my chin hard and pulled it straight forward. “You never move without purpose, girl.”

I already knew there was no point in having that argument with this aging troll of a woman.

She leaned in close behind me. “You do not have purpose, girl, except what the Factor lends you. Or I in his place.” Her breath reeked of the northern herbs that had found their way into the stockpot aboard Fortune’s Flight -astringent without any decent heat to them, and strangely crisp, the smell gone half-sour from its journey through her mouth.

The woman continued to circle me. I remember this, like so much else in those days, through the lens of later understanding. In that first season, I was little taller than her waist, though by the time the end came between us, I could see the part in her hair without craning my neck. Somehow in memory I am both sizes at once: the small frightened girl whom Federo had spirited away from the fields of her home, and the angry gawk who fled those bluestone walls with cooling scrapings of a dead woman’s skin beneath her fingernails.

She was to be my first killing, at a time when I should already have known far better. I would have slain her that initial day, out of simple spiteful anger. It was the work of years to lacquer the nuances of a worthy, well-earned hatred over the fearful rage of the child I was.

Memory or no, I did not have any cutting answers for her. Federo had been too frank with me to awaken any sense of how words duel, and I suppose I was too young for a bladed tongue then. I stood while she circled me again and again. Her breath heaved like the steam kettle deep within the decks of Fortune’s Flight. Sweat sheened on her brow like rain on a millstone.

We had not moved from the spot in the courtyard where Federo had deposited me. No one was about-the possibility of hidden watchers would not occur to me for quite some time, and in the event proved false within the Factor’s cold, towering walls. I only had eyes for the withering pomegranate tree, occluded from moment to moment as she passed round me.

I startled when Mistress Tirelle slipped a gleaming blade from some recess in her wrappings. She was ready for that, and slapped me again. “Soon I shall not be able to leave marks on you, girl, but for today discipline is my own. Even later there will be ways. You. Do. Not. Move.”

The duck woman stopped behind me. I shivered, wondering what she intended with that blade. Surely Federo had not brought me over an ocean just to be cut open like a sacrificial goat. The left shoulder of my shift fell away with a snick. Another snick, and the right was gone, the simple dress with it.

That was my first encounter with scissors, and they startled me. Being bare-skinned in this place with such a shy sun and chilly air was strange to me as well. Much as Federo had done, Mistress Tirelle began to prod my back, my shoulders, my hips. As she pushed and poked at me, she issued terse commands.

“Hold your right arm out straight, and do not drop it again.

“Let me see your teeth. All of them, girl.

“Bend. Now touch the courtyard. With your palms laid flat.”

The examination was not painful, but it was thorough. Finally she was in front of me again. “I don’t suppose that young fop bothered to read your bowels.”

“He di-,” I began, but was stopped with another slap.

“When I want you to answer me, I will address you as Girl, girl.”

Even then I could hear the word becoming a name. My own words spilled out of me. “I have a-”

This time the blow caused my ears to ring. “You will take ten minutes of standing with warm ashes in your mouth every time I hear a single word of that filthy dog’s tongue out of you, Girl.”

I nodded, tears pooling hard and bitter in my eyes.

Words, it all came down to words. Federo had bent my father’s will with words long before that little sack had passed between them to buy me away. These northern people were continuing to remake me with words.

Someday I would own their words.

Mistress Tirelle dragged me to the shaded porch and bade me stand by a post. A moment later she was back with a ladle filled with ashes. I choked spooning them into my mouth, but I resolved not to give her reason to beat me further. She seemed to take much joy in raising her hand against me. In this I would not please her.

So I stood weeping, my chest spasming with coughs I was desperate to swallow. I kept my eyes tight set against her, and my heart closed.

After a time, the duck woman put an empty bucket before me. “Spit,” she said. “And do not trail your peasant slime upon my floor.” Once that was done, to much gagging and heaving, she gave me a little mug of tepid water to wash my mouth out.

I wondered if she had ever been schooled to hold ashes in her mouth and take beatings at the slightest word.

“I believe we understand each other now,” Mistress Tirelle announced. “This is the Pomegranate Court, in the House of the Factor.” Those names were just strange words to me at the time, though I came to understand them soon enough. “You are the sole candidate in residence within this court. This is as it should be. These walls around us are your world. You will see no one that I do not bring you, speak to no one that I do not introduce first. You belong to me and your instructresses, until the Factor says otherwise.” Her face closed in a scowl. “Filthy little foreign chit that you are, I should not think you will ever be so lucky.”

She pointed to the bucket and the mug. “I will show you where to clean these. Then you will learn the rooms of your world. Do you understand me, Girl?”

“Yes, Mistress Tirelle.” My tone gave no ground, but it made no assault on her dignity either.

We went first to the kitchen of the Pomegranate Court.

Much later I came to understand that all the courts in the Factor’s house are named for their tree. In a few cases, the tree-that-was. Whether Pomegranate, Peach, or Northern Maple, each court was substantially the same. I lived in a factory, after all, dedicated to the very slow and delicate process of manufacturing a certain kind of woman, run by ruthless termagants only too willing to find fault and cast a candidate aside like a badly thrown pot.

The ground floor of the building that housed the rooms of my little court was laid out simply enough. A kitchen stood at the eastmost end. Several huts the size of Papa’s could have fit within. It held ovens of three different types, two hearths, and an assortment of smaller fire vessels. Great blocks of cured wood, smooth-sanded stone, and a strangely porous ceramic stood awaiting use. Pans, pots, and cooking tools in a bewildering array of shapes and sizes hung from the high ceilings or along the walls next to bins for grains, roots, and produce. Basins waited for rinsing and washing. There was even a great box half-filled with ice.

The only thing missing was knives. I’d learned aboard ship that no cook is ever without a good blade, but whoever cooked here did their work with unaccustomed bluntness, or took their tools with them.

Though Mistress Tirelle gave me time to fill my eyes, I did not ask questions. She had not spoken to me, after all.

Some lessons are not so hard to learn.

Next to the kitchen was a dining room. A long table polished to the same sheen as Federo’s carriage was surrounded by spindly chairs that did not look strong enough to hold me, let alone adults. Where the kitchen’s walls had been brick and tile against the danger of sparks, here they were covered with a bellied cloth of pale amber shot through with gold thread. This room had been painted by someone with a very delicate hand. Birds were rendered in full detail smaller than the nail of my thumb by the application of two or three strokes. Where their eyes could be seen in their pose, some green stone had been affixed to the cloth in fragments smaller than a sesame seed.

These birds swarmed in a flock of hundreds around a stand of trees that I took to be willows. Each leaf and twig on the willows had been painted as well. A stream wound among them just above the low cabinets that lined the room. Bright fish and reeds and little flowers spun on its current.

I know now that those walls had been a lifetime’s work for some artist bound to the Factor’s will. All I knew then was that they looked so real that I might step within them.

For a moment, I longed to do so. The flight of the painted birds seemed beautiful and free. But I knew even at that first part of my life in Copper Downs that someday I would leave this room. Those birds were trapped forever in their moment of time, rendered immortal but static against the cloth of the walls.

Already Mistress Tirelle pushed me onward. My leaving was not someday, but in that moment.

The central room of the ground floor opened to the courtyard beyond. Hidden folded panels could be fitted in place at need depending on the weather, but otherwise the room’s low seats and padded benches were subject to whatever noise and wind stirred without. A hearth backed this room as well, while the walls were lined with frames and stands representing the tools of various arts. A rack of scrolls and books and bound sheaves of vellum and parchment stood on the west end, a door open in the midst of the shelving.

Still without words, Mistress Tirelle forced me on through.

The last room on the ground level was windowless just as the dining room had been. These walls were padded with a much coarser cloth. The floors were covered with tight-woven straw. No furniture was present except for a low wooden bench that seemed to have been abandoned on a whim. It did not fit the sense of purpose that coiled invisible but strong in the rest of this place.

“Outside, Girl,” Mistress Tirelle growled. I marched a quick step ahead of her fist, until she caught me across my still-bare shoulders. “Do not walk so-it is undignified.”

I bit back a reply. We were on the porch now, in the deep shadows beneath the columned ceiling that was the balcony above.

Mistress Tirelle turned me to face her with a bruising grip on my shoulder. “You will never be in these rooms I have shown you except as part of a lesson. Some Mistress will be with you at all times down the stairs. Do not descend to practice, or seek a lost scarf, or any other excuse which ever enters your foolish head.” She pointed to the end of the porch just outside the empty room. “We go up now. That is where you will sleep, and bathe, and take meals unless you have been brought down here.”

I stared at her, round-eyed and silent.

“You have leave to ask a question, Girl.”

“No, thank you,” I said. Not a question, and so I had pushed past the letter of her word.

She did not strike me for that. So there are limits to her limits . I made careful note of this discovery on the secret list that was already forming deep within me.

Upstairs the rooms were far plainer, though still pleasant and well-appointed beyond anything I might ever have imagined back in Papa’s hut. Neither Federo’s room at the wayhouse nor our cabin on Fortune’s Flight had approached this simple comfort and well-wrought craft.

The deep porch formed a wide balcony, with a few chairs and a table of woven cane and whip-thin wood. All these second-storey rooms opened outward rather than connecting within as below.

A smaller kitchen above the great one would still have served to feed our entire village at home. Walls and floor alike were tiled with ceramic squares painted in the pattern of a lion devouring a snake, which in turn devoured the next lion beyond, and so forth.

The eating room was dominated by a large but simple table polished smooth as the mirrored gloss of the great table downstairs. Instead of the unnaturally detailed silk, these walls were wood that had been washed over with a pale color.

Beside that was a sitting room with a few wooden chairs and small tables, and a smaller hearth than the receiving room downstairs. The two rooms past were sleeping rooms, the one for Mistress Tirelle next to the stairs. I had no doubt she slept with the ears of a bat.

The high-walled courtyard, the baths in a cellar below the great kitchen, a double handful of rooms, and the struggling pomegranate tree were the entirety of my world for a very long time to come. All of it ruled by Mistress Tirelle.

I was clad in simple shifts much the same as what Federo had given me during our travels. There were three of them, and it was my responsibility to keep them exceptionally clean. A speck of dust on the hem, a spot of food on the front, and my ears were boxed or my head slapped.

At the first, we lived only upstairs. Mistress Tirelle was taking my measure in subtler ways than her ungentle prodding in the courtyard that first day. She had me cook, or at least try to. After my grandmother died, Papa had always prepared our rice mush for dinner. Besides which, I been too young to tend the fire.

She had me sew, and was surprised at my skill. The bells that had been between my fingers since before I could remember had taught their lessons well. I did not explain. Mistress Tirelle did not ask.

The duck woman also made a cursory review of the arts of the mind which Federo had begun to teach me, testing my comprehension of letters and simple arithmetic. I was careful not to show more wit than the questions were intended to discover.

Though she carped and grumbled at every little thing, and was quick with a hard hand, I took quiet satisfaction in seeing how little Mistress Tirelle had to complain about. Other than my attitude, of course, which she tried alternately to beat out of me or lecture to death.

I never did bow my head quite deeply enough, or answer quickly enough, or remain quiet enough for her. Mistress Tirelle had spent her life with candidates. She knew how to read the set of a girl’s back. Bidden to silence, in those early days my only weapon was complete obedience combined with a sullen insolence. We both knew it well, and hated each other for it.

So began the years of my education.

“First we shall learn to boil,” she told me one day. I had been there less than two weeks and was already keeping a secret tally against the day I found a way to reclaim my silk and bells.

I nodded. There had been no question addressed to me, no permission granted to speak.

“All life came from water,” Mistress Tirelle continued. “Water lies within us all. You spit water from your mouth and pass water from your vagina. So first we cook with water, to honor who we are and make our food separate from the browsing of beasts.” She gave me a shrewd look. “Do you understand?”

I did. Papa had boiled rice after all, though I couldn’t recall having the word boil before beginning to learn Petraean. “Yes, Mistress Tirelle.”

“What is it that we do to boil water?”

“We make a fire beneath a pot, ma’am.” I hastily added, “A pot filled with water.”

“Hmm.”

She wanted some deeper answer, but what I had said was true enough. After a moment, Mistress Tirelle went on: “Later we will discuss the size and shape of vessels, and why you boil some things thus and others so.”

I nodded again. Cooking seemed a strange place to begin whatever journey Federo had set me on, but here we cooked.

She built a fire in a little metal stove. After it was burning well, she drew a knife from within her black wrappings and proceeded to slice a bundle of dark green leaves shot through with pale gray veins. They smelled sharply of a strange yellowy scent on the edge of unpleasantness. “We cut these spinach leaves in order for them to cook evenly.” Something close to a smile quirked across Mistress Tirelle’s face. “Not all is ritual, Girl. Some purposes are as simple as everyday hunger.”

I forgot myself and answered her. “Hunger isn’t simple, ma’am.”

When she struck me with the knife handle, it left a mark on my forehead that was many days in fading.

“Obedience is simple,” the duck woman said, standing over me as I crouched on the floor, swallowing my sobs. “It is also the greatest everyday virtue any woman can possess. Most of all you.”

We cooked. We washed. We swept. We sewed. For a long time, there was no one but me and Mistress Tirelle. Food was brought to the gate and accepted there by her from persons unseen. I then carried it to the upstairs kitchen under her supervision. The slops and night jars went down a drain on the far side of the court, adjacent to the high blank wall of whatever central building lay beyond.

I came to realize there were more courts besides mine. If I stood at the deepest part of the porch, I could see two other treetops. Occasionally a voice would be raised, then break off. I knew there must have been an array of guards and servants elsewhere in this place, but Federo had spoken truly when he told me I was leaving the world to be here. I knew only the company of women, and of women only Mistress Tirelle.

The sun moved, too, growing a bit more southerly in its track across the patch of sky that had been given me. At home, if I climbed a tree, I could see for furlongs on furlongs, across rice paddies to the village and far beyond. Here, there was only a bit of the heavens, cold stone, and air that never tasted right.

The days also became shorter as the sun slid ever southward. The pomegranate came into fruit with the cooler weather. So began my first instruction beyond the basics of obedience and housekeeping.

“One mark of distinction is the ability to choose without seeming, and always be correct in one’s choice.” Mistress Tirelle held a small knife in one hand-I was still not allowed blades at that time. A dozen pomegranates were set before us on the wooden block in the large kitchen downstairs. This was the first time we’d used that kitchen for anything since I’d arrived here, and I was fascinated by all the half-remembered shapes and surfaces.

The fruits were several shades of pale melon red, ranging from unripe to ready to overripe. Some were irregular, their ends lumpy and misshapen. Others were closer to the most ordinary form of the pomegranate.

“Which one, Girl?”

I pointed toward one at the near end of the table. The fruit had even coloring and a pleasing shape. “That one, Mistress.”

She handed me the knife, reversing the blade as she did so. For a moment as the wooden handle slipped into my grasp, I imagined lifting it against her. It would be nothing, the work of a moment. Then she would have my feet out from under me and I would earn the beating of my life.

Instead I sliced open the pomegranate.

The white webbing within spilled out, reddish-purple seeds in their soft cases clinging to it. I touched a few of them, pulling the seeds away from their sticky entanglement.

“A fair choice. You looked well. Now put down the knife and pick a fruit from that basket behind you. You may look for only the count of three.”

I looked over my shoulder to see a basket tucked behind the small block. It was filled with pomegranates. All the fruits on top were unripe, several dusted with some molder.

Quickly I reached in and grabbed a firm one, then rushed to place it on the table.

The fruit was of good color, but the shape was distended, with lumpy ends. “A woman might eat of that,” said Mistress Tirelle. “But you could have done better.”

I wanted to ask how, but I had not been given permission to speak.

“Let us go outside.”

I followed her into the courtyard. The breeze was up a little, with a faint coolness on it I had never felt before. The tree was heavy with fruit. A few more lay on the cobbles around it. Most of the windfall was in the basket in the lower kitchen, of course, picked up by someone other than me.

“You have until the count of three to select one from the tree.”

I looked. There were a hundred in my vision if there was a one. I pointed at a flash of melon-colored flesh halfway up.

“Hold your hand steady,” she said, then fetched a long pole with a little metal basket at the end. I had never seen that tool before. The night sometimes brought so much to our little court.

Mistress Tirelle used the picker to bring down my pomegranate. I could not say how she knew which one, but so far as I could tell, she pulled down mine.

“The skin is split,” she said. “See? There are blackflies within. You will learn to pick well, the first time.”

We went back inside, where she made me eat the spoiled fruit I had chosen. The mealy flesh was bitter enough to bring tears to my eyes while the blackflies stung the inside of my mouth. I had the better of her, though, in that I sucked the flesh off some of the seeds and spat them into my hand, so I could keep them in place of my lost bells.

The following week Mistress Tirelle and I were in the courtyard beneath the shadow of our tree. The air was strangely chilled, the sun a wan and sullen disc in the sky. We were exercising my fruit-choosing skills. She would whip a blind off my face, and I would select a pomegranate with only a moment’s glance. Down it would come, and we examined its defects together.

“See now,” she said, “how much your eyes can know before your mind does. Let that first choice be true, and all else will follow from it. Let that first choice be false, and trouble will out every time.” The duck woman leaned close. “Never allow yourself to be seen to make the effort. It must come from within, on the moment.”

We were interrupted by an iron clangor which took me by surprise. I had not heard that sound once in the whole time since being brought here by Federo. Mistress Tirelle looked up and passed a quirk of her lips.

“Your next Mistress is here,” she said.

For a moment, I thought I might be free of Mistress Tirelle. That flash of elation must have shown upon my face, for her eyes narrowed and the smile that hadn’t truly been there vanished with the finality of a tight-closed door. She drew back her hand to strike a blow, then stayed herself, instead saying, “Come with me.”

We walked to the dark gate through which I had come. The archway was large enough to admit a carriage, but a postern was let within. A bell hung there, which Mistress Tirelle rang once. The door creaked open, and a slender woman of sour aspect stepped through. She was as pale and sharp-eyed as all the other maggot folk of this city, wearing a long apron of dark blue over gray skirts and a gray blouse.

“Girl,” said Mistress Tirelle. “This is Mistress Leonie. She will work with you on your sewing.”

Thus we moved on to the next phase of my education. I was broken to the harness. Now it was time for me to learn my tricks.

I received my first real beating shortly thereafter, upon being cross with Mistress Leonie. She was quieter and of gentler voice than Mistress Tirelle, and so I was lulled into a sense of trust. I’d thought anyone would be better company than the duck woman with her casual cruelties and calculated rages.

My basic needlework having already been established, Mistress Leonie had moved me into different kinds of stitches. We worked with an assortment of needles and types of thread. Some were difficult for me to manipulate. I hissed in frustration during our morning hours one day.

“What is it, Girl?”

“This silly needle slips in my hand,” I complained. “I hate the silk thread.”

“You will do as you’re told.”

“It’s stupid. We can use an easier thread.”

She looked me up and down, then stepped to the doorway and called for Mistress Tirelle. They whispered together a short while. Mistress Leonie came back and resumed her seat with a smirk.

Mistress Tirelle reappeared a moment later with a cloth tube in one hand. It was fat as a sausage and slightly more than a foot in length. “Remove your shift,” she ordered.

I glanced at Mistress Leonie in a rush of embarrassment. I still did not realize what was about to come, and thought only for my modesty. Even that idea was new to me, brought by the language of my captivity and the chilly necessities of life in the Factor’s house here so far north of the country of my birth.

Shrugging out of my shift, I faced her.

“Turn and bend to grasp your knees.”

Mistress Tirelle began to beat me across the buttocks and thighs with the silk tube. It had been filled with sand, then wetted, so it was heavy and struck me with a harder, deeper blow than the flat of her hand could do. I cried out at the first, which earned me a growl to silence and another, sharper blow. She laid into me for the count of twenty. Then: “Don your shift, and continue with Mistress Leonie’s instruction.”

Sitting was agony, but I did not dare show it. As I brought my shaking hands to the needle and thread, I saw the flush on Mistress Leonie’s cheeks. She looked happy.

Thus we went on. Now that the silk tube was out, punishments became far more frequent and for less cause. I was beaten if I used one of my own words. I was beaten if I came late to instruction or the table. I was beaten if I was thought to be disrespectful, something Mistress Leonie found to be the case at least two or three times each week. If I merely forgot something, Mistress Tirelle beat me for that as well.

Though Endurance had first taught me patience, Mistress Tirelle made that lesson my way of life. The slap of her sandals on the wooden floors took the place of the bell of Papa’s white ox. Her coarse, labored breathing was Endurance’s snorting to call me back, though now the danger was greatest at the center of my life.

The courtyard outside grew ever colder as my first northern winter arrived. Grim rains would set in that lasted for days. I was miserable with the chill. Mistress Tirelle swaddled herself in more wool than ever, but did not bother to offer me anything to put over my shift. I cured my pomegranate seeds in the small warming pot allowed me for the nights, and stole wisps of thread for my silk.

Soon, I would steal the whole cloth. I had only to find a way to distract Mistress Leonie.

She had brought a flat chest that opened from the top into a series of drawers like wooden wings spread ever wider. Cloth lay folded within-muslins, cottons, poplins, silks, woolens, and other fabrics-all of it heavy with the smell of camphor and the scent of the cedar wood from which the chest had been made. Some lengths were in colors that might have shamed a butterfly. Others were simple and somber.

“Each of these is as fine as you will discover in any market,” Mistress Leonie said.

I had never been in any market, but she was not interested in the tale of my short years.

“I have shown you how to tell the thread count. With practice, your eye will gauge the quality even from a distance. That is not everything there is to cloth, but it stands for much.” She turned a yard-long run of fine wool over in her hands. “I will bring a loom, for you should see how this is made.” That dangerous leer crept across her face, which spoke of a beating soon to come. “Tell me, Girl, what is the wool I hold?”

That question was a trick, for we had not yet discussed the kinds of wool. But I had overheard her talking to Mistress Tirelle of the materials, and so took a guess from the words I’d heard. “It is cashmere, Mistress.”

Her face fell. “You are clever. Mind how you use that knife between your ears.” Her pique already passed, Mistress Leonie called me close to feel the tight weave of the wool and discourse a short time on the husbanding of certain goats to be found in the Blue Mountains, whose very fur was as fine as all but the most costly thread.

With one hand behind me and out of her sight, I eased a length of silk from the box and let it fall to the floor. Mistress Leonie was with her goats in that moment, running her fingers up and down the length of cashmere, and she did not see.

I was content with that. She would surely see it, but without me trying to push the cloth beneath a chair or hide it somehow, its fall would be an accident of the cloth case and nothing more.

Her eyes were better than I had credited, though. When Mistress Leonie folded up the cashmere, she bade me stand beside the chest and went to call for Mistress Tirelle and the sand-filled tube.

An hour later, I was in the courtyard, shivering away the last of the day’s gray light beneath the pomegranate tree. The cold let me pretend I was not still shaking from the sobs. These people were wicked monsters. I would slay them all like a god before demons, then march home across the waters.

I knew better, though. Federo had taken me from my father with words, not a dandy’s dueling blade. I would take myself from these maggot women with words, not weapons.

The gate banged open, startling me. A mounted man swept in to ride at a trot across the Pomegranate Court. Federo, of course, appearing as if summoned by my thought of him.

He caught sight of me before reaching the building, and slid from his horse in a single motion.

“Girl.” A genuine warmth filled Federo’s voice, the first warmth I had found since coming to this place of stone and suffering. “How do you like it here?”

“Oh…” I was ready to spill my woe and fear. Then I glanced at the house. Mistress Tirelle stood in the shadows of the balcony. “The rain is cold, and the sun is too small in the sky.” That also was too much of a complaint, most likely.

“Silly thing.” He bent down and stroked my hair away from my cheek. “Wear a wrap, and you will be warm. This city is not so blessed by the sun.”

I had not been given a wrap, but I knew I could not say this where Mistress Tirelle might overhear.

He took my chin in his hands, tilted my head back and forth. He then looked at my bare arms and shoulder. My skin was still flushed and stinging from the beating, but there were no bruises. I realized in that moment the purpose of the sand-filled tube was precisely that: to discipline me without marring me.

“What have you learned?” he asked.

“I can cook spinach. And sew eleven different stitches.” I smiled; I could not help myself. “I know when to use the juice of lemons and when to use palm oil on a scratched table.”

“We will make a lady of you yet.” His grin was large, as if this imprisonment of mine were the best thing for everyone.

“What do you mean by ‘make a lady’?” I asked him. No one had yet told me my purpose here.

“In time, Girl, in time.” He ruffled my hair again. “I would speak to Mistress Tirelle once more. Mind my horse, if you please.”

I knew nothing of horses except that they were as tall as Endurance but with the mad eyes of birds in their long, slack faces. I decided to mind his horse from behind the pomegranate tree, in case the beast took a fit. A chill rain began to fall as I waited.

After a while Federo came back out with a troubled look. “You are more difficult than you should be, Girl,” he told me. “Your intelligence and your pride perhaps serve you too well. This is a game for the patient.”

“You are wrong, sir. This is no game.”

“No,” he said. “Perhaps it is not. Nonetheless we play.” He leaned close. “I will be back to check. You will tell me if things go awry.”

Things were all awry, had been since the day this man had dragged me away from Papa’s ox and my belled silk. That was not what he intended, and not what he wished to hear. “Yes,” I told him in the words of my birth.

He smiled and climbed back into his saddle. Mistress Tirelle waddled out and with very poor grace offered me a shabby wool cloak. “Here, Girl,” she said. “You might be cold.”

I stood in the growing icy rain and watched her march back into the shadows of the house. I wondered what words I might ever summon to break her down.

Mistress Leonie and I continued to sew clothes, but they did not seem to be for me to wear. Or for anyone else.

“You will never in your life lift a needle once you leave this place, Girl,” she told me as we pieced together the shoulder yoke of a blouson.

I nodded. That was sometimes safe. Of course, I was forbidden to answer, or question further. They were training me in all the arts of a lady, but I would be permitted to practice none of them.

There was little point to this that I could see. I had already resolved to be the best of them at everything they did. In service of that determination, I pushed my anger down.

Her next remark echoed my thoughts. “Do you know why this would be so?”

“Am… am I to answer that, Mistress Leonie?” My back itched in anticipation of the blows of the sand-filled tube.

“Yes. You may speak.”

“I am to understand these arts, without practicing them.”

“You are a little snip.” Despite her words, her voice was without rancor. “You will be called upon time and again to judge the worth of a thing, a deed, a place, or a person. Is this woman’s dress what a great lady of Copper Downs would wear, or an imitation crafted by mountebanks in pursuit of a daring theft? Is that room cleaned so well that a god might be received within and accorded due honors, or have the maids been lazy? What of that soup whose bay leaves were picked too green-will it poison your noble guests?”

“So I am to understand the arts in order to assess the work of others.”

“Precisely.” She smiled, her delight in me as her pupil overcoming the power she preferred to hold above me. “If you know a Ramsport stitch from a pennythreaded seam at a glance, you can tell much about the person who stands before you.”

“I might know if they had a good tailor, or only a swiftly made copy.”

“Again, you have the right of it. Now turn this sleeve over and show me what we have missewn. There is an error, I assure you.”

In the course of that work, which was one of the most pleasant days I had passed with Mistress Leonie, I was able to free some silk for my purposes.

It took me many nights of effort to find the best way to thread a pomegranate seed. Little meshes such as I had used aboard Fortune’s Flight with the metal scraps were no good. Instead I employed a stolen needle for a drill and cut my way through each pip. I then sewed it to my silk.

The cloth was nothing like a proper swath of bells from home. It made no noise except when I folded it on itself. Then the beads clattered with a wooden whisper. Still, they were there, nubbins beneath my fingers that resumed the twice-broken count of my days.

I found a place in the ceiling of my sleeping room where beams met the wall. There I stored my silk, my seeds, and my little sewing kit. Nothing else here at the Pomegranate Court belonged to me, not even my own body. This was mine.

While I was plotting at my past, winter settled in outside with a blanket of frozen misery covering the stones and the ghostly branches of the pomegranate tree. I spent the cold nights abed as I clutched my silk close and ran my fingers over the pomegranate seeds. I hoarded enough of them to account for every day of my life, or as close as I could reckon. They were not bells, but their shapes beneath my fingertips reminded me of who I truly was, beyond the arts required of a lady of Copper Downs.

Would these count? Did they serve to mark my days and give my soul a path when it was needed? What would my grandmother have said? Endurance would never have minded. My father would not have known what to say-I am not sure the affairs of women had ever made much sense to him.

Which is why he sold you, a traitor thought whispered in my head. A boy he would have loved enough to keep.

I cried then, open tears for the first time in months here in this cold place. I did not think I was sobbing aloud, but in time Mistress Tirelle came to find me curled on the floor wrapped in misery.

“Girl,” she said, her voice soft with the huskiness of sleep. “What is that cloth clutched in your hand?”

She drove me out into the snowy courtyard with a wooden spindle. Mistress Tirelle seemed to have no regard for the marks of the beating this time. She almost shrieked her fury with each blow.

“You will let go of this obsession, you idiot trollop!”

“I’ll never let go!” I shouted in my words. My old words.

Her fist caught me on my chin to send me sprawling. My shift was already soaked with sweat and blood. The snow traded its cold through the damp, clinging fabric to chill my spine and ribs.

“So help me, if you speak that heathen trash one more time, I shall fork your tongue. The Factor will have you sold for a tavern wench, and you’ll be dead of men before you’re twenty.”

I tried to get away from her, but she swung the spindle again and caught me across the knees. The pain was stunning.

“You will burn that silk now, out here under the stars.”

“There is snow-” I began to answer, but Mistress Tirelle slapped me.

“You were not given leave to speak. Remain here.”

She waddled back to the porch and up the stairs. I sat shivering in the snow, swallowing my own blood and wishing I had a way to die.

The duck woman was back a minute or two later with one of the copper coal urns used to keep our sleeping rooms warm during a winter night. “Here,” she said. “Tear the silk in pieces and lay it within.”

Crying, I did so, or tried to. The silk was strong, as its kind of cloth always is. Mistress Tirelle found a knife within her swaddles and nicked the swath for me.

My tears stood near frozen on my face as I fed the strips to the glowing pit. She handed me a vial of oil. “Pour it over.”

I poured. The days of my life burned away as if they’d never been. The pomegranate seeds crackled in the heat, popping in little groups, taking the ghosts of what had been mine away with them.

May this burning reach my grandmother, I thought.

When the fire had died, Mistress Tirelle forced me to carry the urn to the upstairs kitchen. Even through a heavy pad, the metal reddened my hands and wrists. When we arrived, she rubbed oil of the palm on my burns with a rough, careless grip, then found a wide, low pot of the sort used for cooking small fowl atop the fire rather than within it.

She scooped the ashes of my silk and the burnt husks of pomegranate seeds from the warming urn to the stewpot. Some wine and some water followed, and a generous handful of salt. Mistress Tirelle mixed this awhile, watching it bubble until the mixture steamed.

The smell was awful.

Everything fit into a large serving bowl, which she set before me, saying, “Eat.”

The stew was a mass of grayish brown.

“Eat it,” she said, “and we are done. Do not eat it, and you are finished.”

I choked through the bitter stew of ashes and salt. I was eating my past. But I vowed that I would still have a future.

Later in my rooms, I sat in the bed and looked outside the door, which Mistress Tirelle had left standing open. In the shadows of the snow-heavy pomegranate, for a moment, I thought I saw a sleeping ox. I knew it could not possibly be so, but still the sight comforted me.

After my first year in the Pomegranate Court, new Mistresses entered as well, for other arts. Mistress Tirelle still worked with me in the kitchen. Mistress Leonie continued with the sewing and fabrics. Mistress Marga, who was much younger than the other two, came to show me the ways of a true and thorough cleaning of the building, northern style. Mistress Danae brought sheaves of paper and the wandering letters of Stone Coast writing to me, renewing what Federo had begun aboard Fortune’s Flight.

Each in their way demonstrated the mysteries of their art. Mistress Marga showed me how different oils were selected for varying woods, depending not only on the nature of the material itself, but also on how heavy the use and whether it met with direct sunlight. She spoke hours on starch, and why the proper stiffening of a cuff or collar could speak so thoroughly of a gentleman’s worth and station in the life of the city.

Mistress Sualix came to show me the secret magics of numbers, how they danced in lines and columns and arrays to give birth to new numbers. Her voice was close and quiet, and seemed careless of the discipline in which the others held me. To her, all the world was numbers. They moved ships and coin and the booted feet of swordsmen. She soon had me believing this, too, so that I thought I heard the measured breathing of the entire city in a small stack of coin.

Mistress Balnea came to instruct me on horses, dogs, and the rarer pets of which some women made their playpretties. She displayed tinted pictures rendered on stretched hides, and spoke of shoulders and stance and colors, and promised me a ride of my own in the spring. I did not see much point in mounting a pony only to circle the courtyard outside, but I did not tell the horsemistress this.

Music came, too, in the form of Mistress Maglia, a thin, vengeful woman who made Mistress Leonie’s malices seem like caresses. Her feelings were not personal, quite the opposite, but she made it most clear that I was nothing to her but another instrument. Her purpose was to fit my voice to the singing best regarded among these northern folk, and ensure that I knew a spinet from a harpsichord. I was still quite small when Mistress Maglia first began my training, and my voice had that angelic sweetness that very young children may possess. She warned me of the wreck I would become before I finished growing, then threatened to break me before my time if I did not mind every note and work exactly as she bade.

“I’m not afraid of the Factor like these other biddies,” she snapped. “You will be perfect, or you will be nothing, by my own hand.”

Two good things came from this new flood of Mistresses. One, my days were more varied and busy than when I had first arrived. This meant less time with Mistress Tirelle, and more distractions to occupy me. The world was already unfolding in a way I would never have imagined finding within a cage such as the Pomegranate Court. I felt guilty for comparing this favorably to spending my days swimming in ditches beneath the brassy sun.

Still, I was never beaten at home.

Two, with more Mistresses coming and going, I had an increasing sense that there was a world beyond these bluestone walls. Sounds rarely reached within the courts, and when they did, such noises were indistinct and meant little. The women who taught me came and went to other errands that implied they had responsibilities, schedules, things required of them. They often stopped to chatter. Care was taken to keep the words from my ears, but not always and not enough. Their bits of gossip told me of other girls being raised in other courts of the Factor’s house. These girls were all rivals to one another and to me-this sweetling was a genius of spice and flame in the kitchen, while that little flower inked calligraphy to match the very angels.

I was but a small child when such words first crossed my ears. They only strengthened my resolve to master everything before me. Someday I would walk free.

My bed was a great square so soft that I sometimes slept on the floor beside it. At night, when Mistress Tirelle had retired huffing and grumbling to her sleeping room, I would lie awake and tell myself stories in the language of my birth. I quickly came to realize how little I knew of my own tongue, compared with my increasing mastery of the rough, burred Petraean of these Stone Coast people. I could speak of fruits and spices and tailoring and the finer points of dogs only in the language of my captivity.

In my own language, I did not even have a word for dog. Endurance had been our only animal, besides a few scrawny jungle fowl scratching about Papa’s hut. I could chatter of turtles and snakes and biting flies, but still the world those words encompassed was small enough to crack my heart.

One day I had pieced together another few lines of Seventeen Lives of the Megatherians. Mistress Danae believed that a lady should always reach beyond herself. The words were gigantic, speaking of ideas I did not understand at that time. What does a small child know of transmigration and condonation? Still, the sounds were present in their tricksy, shifting letters. She guided me through them one slow, patient step at a time.

I rose from my lesson. My bladder was full, and it was not quite the hour for me to assist Mistress Tirelle in the upper kitchen. With her keen sense of cruelty in full flower, she had decreed we would work with soups for a while.

To my surprise, she waited just outside the door of the common room. Mistress Tirelle was not in the habit of standing about in the cold. Not without great need.

“Girl,” she said, then paused a moment. Such a lack of assurance was also unlike the duck woman. “A new Mistress is here for you to meet. She is… is not on my schedule, but Federo has sent her.” Eyes narrowing, Mistress Tirelle went on. “Be warned. This is not someone you should warm to as you have your other Mistresses.”

It was all I could do not to burst out laughing. Who had Mistress Tirelle thought I might have warmed to? That she should imagine such an idiotic thing was beyond credibility. I nodded instead, then looked down at my feet to hide the light undoubtedly dancing in my eyes.

“You believe that I jest.” She grabbed my ear, then thought the better of it even as I braced for the shock of pain. “This is something else, Girl. None of your little rebellions-no foreign talk, no thieving, no nothing. You get the urge to earn a beating, you just come tell me and I’ll knock the pores right off your skin. But do not play the monkey with this new Mistress.”

I nodded, still not meeting her eyes. Was this new Mistress a fearsome queen of arms? Or some mighty priestess with a hex in her milky eyes? Mistress Danae’s stories were full of such women, strange beyond measure and powerful in quiet ways that escaped the notice of most men.

Mistress Tirelle led me downstairs, through the receiving room and to the practice room. I followed with my head still bowed, my face hidden, until I was looking at my feet, streaked with dirt, standing on the straw padding of that place.

“Girl,” the duck woman said in a voice overloud with the pitch of fear, “this is the Dancing Mistress. Mistress-ma’am. This here’s our Girl. The candidate of the Pomegranate Court.”

“Thank you, Mistress Tirelle.” The Dancing Mistress’ voice was deeper and rougher than I had heard before among women. I raised my eyes and looked up at someone too tall, too thin, covered with fine fur, a tail whicking behind her. The tips of claws peeked through her oddly blunt, wide fingers.

Dangerous, monstrous even.

A shriek rose up within me. The Dancing Mistress touched her mouth with her finger in the simplest of shushing motions. Her gesture was so unexpected that it distracted my panic, as she must have known it would.

Not a monster, I realized, but someone who was far more different from me than these pale maggot people of the Stone Coast. Her ears were high on her skull, set back with small round flaps above them almost like a mouse. Her forehead was high, over water-pale violet eyes in a pointed face descending with a mouth split wide as mine or anyone else’s, rather than the fanged triangle of a beast. Her nose was flat, but also human rather than animal.

What had startled me most was the silver fur that covered all of her that I could see. People could look like anything, be many colors and sizes, but no person I had ever seen or heard of was covered with such fine and beautiful fur. Nor did people have tails that swept to the floor, as the Dancing Mistress most certainly did. At the same time she was clearly a person, clad in a wrap of blue cotton printed with a subtle flowered pattern. The clothing covered her bodice and hips, just as any lady would take care to do.

“I am a woman of my people,” she said quietly. “Your kind refer to us as pardines. I am come to live among the humans of Copper Downs and work for my own living. I teach girls and women, and a very few men, to dance, to walk with grace and balance. Sometimes they learn to move so fast and fall so far that they can avoid the sorts of pointed dangers that come driving out of the shadows of great houses.”

I stared. No one had ever before surprised me so much that they stole all the words from my mouth.

She stepped away from me and sat on the little wooden bench of the practice room. Mistress Tirelle had departed without me taking any note of her movements. “We shall require mirrors here, I am afraid.” The Dancing Mistress seemed regretful. “Now tell me of yourself, Girl.”

“I am to speak?” I almost choked on the words.

“Yes,” the Dancing Mistress answered. “You are to speak.”

“I… I am a girl of my people.” I took a deep breath. For the first time since being brought here, I would risk the truth. “Stolen away to live among the enslavers of Copper Downs and work toward my own freedom.”

Blows did not fall. Nor shouting, slaps, shoving. Instead a deep wave of melancholy passed through the Dancing Mistress’ angled violet eyes. She opened her arms, and I stepped into them-to be clasped by friendly hands for the first time in my recent memory.

I did not sob into her fur, though I mightily wished to do so. I just let her hold me a moment while my breathing steadied.

“Girl,” she finally said. “Your thoughts are your own. I do not blame you for a syllable of what you said. But if you value your life, and any power you may ever hope to grasp hold of, keep those words within you and never let them out again among these walls.”

Her words were a scrap of hope fed to a starving girl. “Yes, Mistress,” I muttered, then pulled away from the fur and cotton of her shoulder. “What is it you are here to teach me, please?”

She looked surprised. “Why, dancing, of course.”

We danced awhile.

I could not see how to make another belled silk and keep it a secret. Instead I began sewing one in my imagination. Each night before I slept, I would count the bells of my life to date. First there were the simple tin bells of my time with Papa. Then there were the scrap iron bits of my voyage with Federo. Then there were the pomegranate seeds of my months in this house.

In my mind they all rang, even the wood and iron bits. Each night after I had counted them all to the best of my recollection-some spans of days I had to guess at-I would make a game of sewing another one on. Because it was only in my head, I could use needles of bone or ivory, steel or wood; likewise the thread was as I decided it was.

The important thing was to keep the count. In the Pomegranate Court, weeks were marked by the pattern of daily lessons, and by the delivery of certain foodstuffs. We kept no calendars. The count of my bells was the count of my days, and how else would my spirit know the way home when I was done with my life?

I never breathed a word, said nothing to anyone, even the Dancing Mistress. I could not do this thing without punishment falling so hard upon my shoulders that I would bleed rivers.

Even so, she was a hidden friend to me through the darkest days of my second winter and the wet, gloomy opening of the spring that followed. The one hour of any day where I could speak even the least portion of my mind was in the practice room with her. We worked on steps, balance, how I walked, my sense of my body and the space it filled. Sometimes it was truly dance, but more often it was just movement.

“Most people think of their bodies as being flat, like a drawing of themselves,” she told me. “Imagine that you made a paper poppet, and moved it about on a little stage. Except it’s not at all true. You have depth. Your heels and elbows swing back. When you turn, there is a curve your body fills in the space around you.”

While the words made sense to me, it was hard to understand the idea that lay beneath. She set me to skipping rope-a pastime of which I had never heard-first forward, then backwards. To hop as the rope came down behind me required that I know without looking where both the rope and my feet were.

This was much like Mistress Tirelle making me pick fruit with a single glance, or Mistress Leonie’s endless tutelage on the niceties of seams. I had to see beyond what lay before my most casual gaze, to what was really there, as invisible to the eye as my own back was.

These lessons were strange, and quiet, but soon enough I could feel the grace they lent me. I could catch a dropped knife in the kitchen before it struck the tile, leap down the stairs from the balcony to the lower porch. I found I was strong, too. Very strong, the Dancing Mistress told me-more even than most boys. How was I to know? She helped me learn to use that advantage as well. Once the weather cleared a bit, I was able to climb the pomegranate tree speedily and without fear.

For that feat I was beaten so hard, I could not walk for two days. Mistress Tirelle and the Dancing Mistress had an argument, the only one I ever heard between them. Then the duck woman came waddling into my sleeping room. “This is your place,” she said quietly. “Do not look over the walls, do not peek out the gate.”

I forgot myself again and blurted out, “What is beyond, that I should fear it so?”

Mistress Tirelle pretended not to notice my infraction. “A world you will see when it is your time. Girl, you are being made ready for greatness. Let that making unfold in the way your teachers know best.”

Like Federo, she believed my being here was for the good of all. How could they think such a thing?

Spring became summer, the rhythms of the seasons continuing to mark my time in the Pomegranate Court. All I remembered from my earliest days was the endless heat and the sun pouring like a golden hammer upon the land. Here the heavens were a clock, a slow march of the long now following the course of plowing, planting, harvest, and fallow.

Not that I’d seen agriculture. Only my one pomegranate tree carrying its hidden burden of seeds, now lost like my bells, but far more likely to return. Once the art of reading had settled into my head, Mistress Danae showed me ever more books. Among them was a treatise on farming, The New Horse-Houghing Husbandry. This was the first truly old text I’d read. The book took me weeks on end to puzzle through, and I understood perhaps only one part in five.

Still, I had been born into the practice of farming. Papa and Endurance worked the paddies, brought in the rice, trod the husks. I recognized some of what Tullius, the author of this book, was describing. My interest was born of that-an echo of the familiar, mixed with stories of princes and battles and demigods and the colors of the world.

The other thing I learned from Husbandry was that the very speech of people could change over time. There were seasons to language, just as there were seasons to the years or to the lives of women. I went about for a while muttering in archaic Petraean, though I never had the nerve to answer Mistress Tirelle or my other instructresses in that form.

My lessons moved downstairs as well. We began cooking in the great kitchen more often. The selection of vessels, utensils, spices, and cooking methods was much more varied than upstairs. Mistress Tirelle and I broke our fasts there almost all the time. Some days we also took quick, simple midday or evening meals there. More to the point, downstairs was where I explored what could be done with food. The lessons were simple at first, but it was already clear to me that there might be no end to them if someone had the means to spend their lives in a glorious kitchen.

One day we were washing earth pears-small wrinkled lumps with purplish skins and hair-fine roots branching off them.

“This root must be cooked over a hot fire or on a high boil for at least ten minutes,” Mistress Tirelle said.

Nothing was ever written down. I was simply expected to remember. The array of details in the kitchen was staggering.

I clasped my hands briefly. This was how I indicated I wished to ask a question regarding whatever lesson was under way.

“You may speak, Girl.”

“What will happen if it is eaten raw, or poorly cooked?”

She gave me a long look. “A person could become quite ill, or even perish.”

It had never occurred to me that food could be a weapon. “So the earth pear is harmful?”

Mistress Tirelle put down her root and dried her hands. “Girl, your question runs ahead of your learning, but I will answer it nonetheless. Everything can do harm. The oils we use for frying would ruin your digestion if drunk down like wine. If I made you eat salt until you gorged, you would die of thirst soon after. Some herbs, or things that resemble herbs, can kill even as a small pinch of powder.”

“Then this art is like all the others I study.” I waved the earth pear in my hand to point around the great kitchen. “It is not that I should cook. It is that I should know cooking so well that I can see when someone is trying to poison me with salt or bad oils or the powder of killing herbs.”

Mistress Tirelle’s ghost of a smile briefly returned. “Federo chose you well, Girl.”

I looked down at my earth pear and wondered how I might feed it to her. Words, I reminded myself. You will triumph with words.

The lesson was clear: Anything could harm, if used in a certain way. Food. Words. A length of silk sewn into a tube and filled with sand. Even a person.

Are they training me to live well? Or to know different ways to kill and to die?

My lessons changed as the seasons did, along with the lengthening of my legs. Mistress Balnea brought the promised horse into the courtyard one day, and we began the study of the living animal instead of the illustrated scrolls and parchments. Our example was an old brown mare with a white blaze on her head who stared at me with empty eyes and suffered herself to be touched and poked and prodded. I was given to understand that in time I would be permitted to mount and ride, as if this were some great treat. At times she brought a dog instead, different breeds on different days, and pointed up their skills and purposes, what their requirements were, and the conformation of their bodies. The dogs had more spirit than the broken old mare, but they also seemed easily cowed.

So, too, other teachings changed. A great loom was delivered and set up overnight beneath the pomegranate tree, with a dyed canvas sheet for shelter from the rain. Mistress Leonie began to teach me the more commercial aspects of weaving. A whole pig carcass arrived, which Mistress Tirelle and I spent three days butchering so I could see where on the animal’s body each cut of meat came from. Some we cured; some we cooked. Much went to waste.

Whatever they truly meant to make of me, I became increasingly aware of the substantial investment of time and resources the Factor was lavishing on my education.

The best change in lessons came, as I might have hoped, from the Dancing Mistress. She arrived one evening after dinner, not her usual schedule. Mistress Tirelle’s habit at that time was to have me read or practice my calligraphy in the last hours. She would then retire early. Thus I was surprised to see any of my instructresses at such an hour-especially the silver-furred woman.

“Come outside, Girl,” the Dancing Mistress said to me from my doorway. Behind her, Mistress Tirelle made some grumbling huff at the bottom of her breath. Judging by the look that passed between them, this argument had already been waged and lost.

In the courtyard, the moon spilled careless light on the cobbles. The newest shoots on the twigs of the pomegranate tree were silver-dark, while the shadows seemed to breathe ink. We stood awhile under the cold stars, exchanging no words.

That, I was happy enough to do. Every moment of my life was ruled by a guided watchfulness. Sharing the airy silence with the only friend I had was a goodness.

“You climbed well,” the Dancing Mistress said. “This pleases me.”

I clasped my hands.

Her voice deepened with sadness. “You are free to speak while we are at this lesson.”

“Mistress, I enjoyed the climb.”

“Good. Would you do it again, by moonlight?”

“When the tree is dark?” How hard could it be to find my way up? I was still quite small then, and had little fear of fitting my body anywhere I was permitted to go in the first place.

“Your friend the moon will provide hints to your eyes, Girl.”

I wore nothing but a shift, under a rough woolen wrap I’d woven for myself. My hands and feet were bare.

Up I went. The memory of my prior climb was strong. The tree’s bark was knotted and twisted to welcome my fingers. The branches alternated, so I could reach them like the rungs of a ladder.

Climbing was a joy. This was as close as I’d come to freedom since first walking away from the sound of Endurance’s bell with Federo’s hand clasped firmly around my own. No wonder Mistress Tirelle had so violently disapproved of climbing. My spirit soared with the lifting of my body, and the ancient moon was my oldest friend.

If the tree were tall enough, towering over the whole city of Copper Downs, could I see all the way home to Papa’s fire and the whuffling breath of the ox?

The upper branches were light and thin. They swayed even beneath my then-small weight. I could see the roof of the Pomegranate Court, the copper sheaths that kept the rain off my head, gleaming back at the moon. The bluestone walls were topped with a wide, flat walkway that I could not see from the ground. A place for soldiers to tread upon their watch, I realized, thinking back on all the battle poetry Mistress Danae had read to me. At least, if this house were in need of soldiers. Rooftops poked beyond, hinting at the city I’d seen so briefly on arriving in the harbor, and had been hidden away from ever since.

I turned and looked the other way. The taller inner wall of our courtyard was more clearly seen as a tower. Other treetops were visible in the other courts I had glimpsed before. For a long, strange moment I wondered if other Girls had been set to climb this night, if I would meet the eyes of my rival slaves over the rims of the walls set to keep us isolate and inviolate.

The Dancing Mistress had not asked me to move with speed, and so I did not return right away. Instead I looked down at the canvas that covered the loom, at the chest where the gear for the horses and dogs was kept, at the gatehouse marking the path to freedom.

Mine was a tiny, tiny world, but still far richer than the frog-filled ditches of Papa’s farm. I had no word for farm in my own language-where we lived was where we lived. I would not have learned to read, or anything of arithmetic, or the finer arts of cooking with all the poisons of the world, if I had stayed there.

I would not have been a slave if I had not come here.

“No one will own me,” I said in my own words.

The climb down was more difficult than the climb up had been. I picked my way with care and still slid twice, before falling the last ten feet and just barely missing the loom’s canvas. Still, I landed upright and kept my stance.

The Dancing Mistress stared at me, her eyes hooded by shadow. “What did you see up there?”

I opened my mouth, then stopped. She did not want a report on the copper roof of my house. What had I seen? I wondered. I blurted the deeper answer as it came to me, without further thought. “The path to freedom.”

“Hold that in your heart. I cannot release you from this place, but together we can visit freedom.”

I longed to ask her how, but the patience that had been beaten into me was a lesson well-learned.

“Now you will run about the courtyard as fast as you can go,” she said.

“For how long?”

“Until I tell you to stop, or your legs slip from beneath you.”

Eventually I went back inside with my shoulders aching and my mind racing.

I had trouble walking again the day after that first run, though I was pleased this time rather than humiliated. The pain had been earned. There was no cruelty. Just honest effort. The Dancing Mistress told Mistress Tirelle that I had bruised myself practicing cross-steps.

Federo came again that day. He was afoot instead of ahorse this time, and appeared wrung out. The sea had stained his clothes so that his velvet finery was ragged, while the sun had colored his skin so he less resembled a maggot and more a ripening berry.

He found me in the courtyard with Mistress Leonie and the loom. She excused herself as soon as she noticed Federo and went in search of Mistress Tirelle, or so I presumed. He sat on her little padded bench and stared at me awhile.

I offered him the small smile that was all I ever let out.

“How is it with you, Girl?” he finally asked.

“I learn.”

“Good.” Federo reached out and took up my hand. He turned it back and forth, looking first at my wrist then my fingers, at my palm then the back. “Do you learn well?”

“Some lessons are harder than others.”

“Which of the Mistresses do you favor most?”

A real smile escaped for a moment. “The Dancing Mistress.”

His smile answered. “Good.”

“I have a question.” I had not yet found the nerve to broach this one to her.

“You may ask it,” Federo said formally.

“Why do all my Mistresses have names save her? She has only a title.” And not a squarely accurate one, I thought.

“A fair question.” He tilted his head slightly. I could see a bloom of blood marring one eye, as if his face had recently been struck. “Her people are a race of few numbers, scattered far. The pardines do not give their names away even to each other. It is their way, what they call the paths of their souls, to keep their true selves hidden. It is said those selves are so deep that they survive braided among the soulpaths of other pardines long after the death of the body.” He shrugged. “In any event, whatever the state of their souls, some have titles. Others might be called by the color of their eyes or their favored food.”

“I do not have a name.” Though I did once. “Yet my true self is not hidden at all. These Mistresses stare at every aspect of me all the time. They are remaking me by inches and days.”

The last of his pleasure fled as a bird before a storm. “It is not a lesson to be taken. Your circumstances and hers are as different as the stars are from the lamps of your house.”

“Both light the night.”

He touched my hair a moment. “Never forget who you are.”

“I am not yours,” I said in the language of my birth.

“Silence is your friend,” he answered in the same words.

I watched him walk slowly into the court to speak with Mistress Tirelle. After a short time, Mistress Leonie came out to resume my instruction in the textile arts.

There were stranger lessons to be learned as well. In my readings I came across the same story in two very different forms amidst Mistress Danae’s books. That tales of the gods could be told and retold was itself a sort of revelation, given how much priestly writing seemed concerned with assurance and certainty.

The first I found was a man’s story about the goddesses who made it their business to care for women. Much later in life, this tale would give me long pause for other reasons, but then it was simply the view of the world that caught my attention. T HE F ATHERS ’ T ALE Long ago, the world was a garden and each race of being and kind of creature grew in neat little rows tended by the titanic gods. Father Sunbones, first among them, walked each day among the rows and remarked upon the health of the crop. Mother Mooneyes came by night to prune the shoots and claim the harvest. Desire, their third daughter, was allowed to play among the fish-trees and the bird-vines, but forbidden the rows of anything that had fur or hair. “Your nature will wake them out of time,” Mother Mooneyes said as they feasted in the Blue Hall of the Sky. “Stay rather with the cold waterbreathers and the thoughtless fliers who will not feel your pull.” “It is not fair,” Desire complained in the manner of children everywhere. “Nothing is fair,” rumbled Father Sunbones. “We are lucky if we merely find order in this world, let alone fairness. Your brother Time complains of being denied the fish-trees for himself. He whines constantly of fairness as he walks among the trellises where the souled ones grow.” It was the souled ones Desire wished to sport among, those with two arms and two legs and thatches of forbidden, lovely, unruly hair. Though their eyes were not yet open and their souls had not yet flowered, she imagined embracing one then another, pressing her lips to theirs, touching their bodies with hers, until she hung like they from their trellises to voice her lust to her cousins the stars. “I know your thoughts,” whispered her brother Time. “Later, I will help you.” “It is always ‘later’ with you,” Desire hissed. “I want what I want.” “My power is in passage, not fulfillment.” Her brother smiled with faint promise. “Take me for what you will.” Desire could not keep her thoughts from the men in all their colors, as well as the ogres and fey and sprites and all their close-kinned kind, so she sought Time in his observatory tower at that part of the day where Father Sunbones and Mother Mooneyes exchanged their pleasantries in the privacy of the horizon’s blanket. “What is this help you offer me?” Time smiled again, the promise in his face a little larger. “Lie with me, for the fulfillment of my dreams, and in return I will grant you stolen hours to lie in the garden with the souled ones.” “Lie with you?” Desire laughed. “You are a stripling boy with a hollow chest and eyes as dark as Uncle Ocean’s dreams.” She touched her generous breasts through her shift, lifting them toward Time in mockery. “Why would I share my bounty with you?” Time smiled yet again. The promise had become great. “Because Desire will always be subject to Time. Absent in an infant, unformed in a child, raging in a youth, unfulfilled in an elder. My grant of hours to you will return a hundredfold in the world that is to come when Father and Mother awaken the garden.” So Desire lifted her shift above her head and showed her body to her brother Time. She was the perfection of woman, hair every color, eyes flashing so bright they were no color at all, lips as full and rich as the lily between her legs, skin smooth as a new-ripened peach. And though Time was hollow-chested and pale, and his manhood not so great, he could hold himself at stiff readiness forever if he chose-the power of his Name-and so he rode his sister long into the night, until her cries of pleasure became pleas for release. For even Desire can eventually pale of her appetites. Time finally spent the last of his seed upon her breasts. He rose, tore a strip from the nail of his least left finger and pressed it into his sister’s shivering hand. “Take this into the garden with you. Keep it close to your person always, and the time you need will be yours there.” Desire was so tired and sore that she shuddered to imagine another penis coming near her body. But she burned to put Time’s promise to the test. Gathering her shift over one arm, for she ached too much to reach up and draw it onto her body, Desire limped slowly into the garden. She smelled so of sex and fulfillment that even the cold fishes in their trees stirred at her passing. Birds thrashed on their vines, hungry for her flesh or just the hard salty scents on her breath. When Desire walked among the furred animals, they strained and bellowed, disturbed within their dreams. But when she came to the trellises where hung the fathers and mothers of all the souled races, their eyes flickered open pair by pair. Penises rose erect, nipples sprang from firm breasts, tongues crossed lips. Every being in that garden smelled her, wanted her, lusted for her. In her soreness and fatigue, Desire took fright and fled to the Hall of the Blue Sky. She dropped her shift and Time’s nail paring in the garden as she ran. Later when Father Sunbones came to check his crops, he found the souled ones awake and the animals disturbed. He also discovered the evidence of Desire’s passage and Time’s complicity. “The damage is done,” Father Sunbones told Mother Mooneyes. “Our children have roused the souled ones. The newcomers will go into the world with their spirits unformed.” He wept golden tears that seared the soil. Mother Mooneyes peeked out from the daylit heavens. “Perhaps that is well enough. Each can find his own path. Each can grow his own soul fit to suit who he is.” “But so many will be lost. Heartless, vicious, cruel.” “You name more of our children, Father. Not every child is Loyalty or Truth. Let the souled ones have their lives.” Father Sunbones listened to the counsel of his wife. He threw open the gates of the garden, plucked all that they had grown there, and herded his charges into the world. The fish fell into the rivers, lakes, and oceans. The birds took wing into the spring sky of a new world. Animals bellowed and fled across the land. And the souled ones took themselves to those places that suited each best and began to make towns and farms and tell each other stories of the hot dreams that invaded their long nights’ sleep. Then Father Sunbones went to Time’s observatory tower and cursed his son’s disloyalty. Ever more Time’s strength wanes with the year so that he passes all the pains of a life between each winter solstice. This is his punishment for lying with his sister Desire. Then Father Sunbones went to the Hall of the Blue Sky and banished Desire to her chambers for a year and day, so that she might not come out until her brother’s curse had fulfilled its first round and she could learn what had been done to him. But Desire had quickened with Time’s seed. While she stayed hidden in her chambers, she gave birth to a torrent of sisters, one for each little animalcule that her brother had spent within her womb. She fed the daughters from the seed that still lay upon her breasts, so that they drank milk of both man and woman. These thousands of sisters became the goddesses of women and spread out into the world in the aid of midwives and mothers and sapphists and prostitutes and girl children everywhere. Ever after, the gods of men made it their business to send these sisters home to Father Sunbones whenever and however they could, though it is a terrible and difficult thing to kill a goddess. The gods who were most passionate about this errand each gave a scrap of themselves to a holy order that raised the Saffron Tower in dedication to restoring the purity of souls and righting the wrongs of Desire.

I was quite taken with the contrast between this strange story and the other, which I found a month or so later, the latter a woman’s view of what were obviously the same events. Mistress Danae could not tell me if these were true history or teaching stories, but as she said, did it matter? She also told me that I should have a theology Mistress, but that was never in the Factor’s plans, and so she gave me more books to read that discussed the strengths and failings of the gods.

For my part, I learned something from both these tales.

The Mothers ’ Tale

Once when the world was new, Mother Mooneyes ruled the skies as first among the titanics. Father Sunbones had not yet woken to his place at her right hand as consort, but rather slept endlessly on a bed of burning sand beneath her ivory-walled halls. Mother Mooneyes sometimes went to him when she rested from her labors in the heavens. Even in his sleep, she could draw forth Father Sunbones’ seed to make her children. Mother Mooneyes’ favored daughter was Desire. Desire was possessed of a beauty which challenged even that of her mother. Desire’s hair was the gold of summer wheat and the brown of autumn leaves and the black of winter ice and the palest rose blush of spring all at once. Her skin shone with the luster of starlight and the richness of cream. Her lips were more sweet than honey with the heady fullness of wine. Every portion of Desire mirrored the perfection of the morning of the world. Now it happened that Mother Mooneyes kept a garden in the lands around her ivory halls. This garden held all the promise of the world to come, ripening on vine and root and tree. To the east, cattle lowed and snuffled within their cradles of soil. Other beasts of the field were clustered around them, each with its own stalk and stem. To the north were the cold creatures and those on the wing, which partake of the world without fur or fang or thinking. To the south were the hot animals, those that would hunt and feast on the flesh of others once they stalked beneath the bright regard of Father Sunbones. Mother Mooneyes knew that to harvest the garden, she would have to wake her consort. Like all men, Father Sunbones would take counsel from his loins as much as from his thoughts. She held that dread day in abeyance as long as possible. In the west of the garden was the plot where the souled ones grew. Each lay at sleeping ease upon a bed of soft leaves. Each was watered and cleaned by a sweet spring. These were Mother Mooneyes’ special care, that the world would be populous and happy. There were men there in all their colors and shapes-aelfkin and dwerrowkin; nixie, pixie, and sprite; giant and troll-all the manifold imaginings of Mother Mooneyes’ busy hands in the long shadows of the morning of the world. Just as men had their sibs, so did Mother Mooneyes’ children. Desire sported with Love and Understanding, the twins Truth and Mercy, Justice, Obedience, and all her sisters. Outside their windows along the lawns of the ivory halls, their brothers wrestled and fought and hunted each other with arrows tipped with sky-iron. Watching the boys at their play, Desire had formed a lust for her brother Time. He was a likely lad, robust with all the years of the world on his broad shoulders. One day when Mother Mooneyes was about her travels in the heavens, Desire invited Time into her chambers. “Brother, come, I have a game to show you,” she said as they met upon the western steps. Desire licked her lips so that Time might not mistake her intent. “Is it a manly game?” he asked, for while men are ruled by their loins, those loins have two small brains each no larger than an olive and thus do not think well. Desire touched her breast and smiled. “The manliest of all.” Surely he could not misunderstand. “Then I shall invite my brothers!” Time declared. He turned to spread the word. Desire grasped his arm and pulled him close, as she set her other hand upon his sex. “A private game of man and woman,” she whispered in his ear. At last Time came to understand what she wanted of him. He followed Desire to her chambers, but was so eager in his lust that he pushed aside both her shift and her needs with a sweep of his hand and spent himself in moments of careless thrusting. She cast him from her chamber with hard words, chasing her brother out to the western steps. There he fled laughing. Desire’s breasts were heavy with need, and her loins were hot with the quick touch of her brother Time. She took herself into the west of the garden, where the souled ones were couched in their rest, and there she lay with them one by one, male and female alike, to slake her appetites. Each smiled in their sleep as she quickened their sex. Each murmured their thanks and slipped into the pleasant dreams of lust to which we all are heir. Finally Desire returned to the ivory halls. Though filled with seed and the scent of all the souled ones of the garden, her loins still quivered. She went beneath the earth to her father’s bed of burning sand and there took the guise of her mother. Desire rode him harder than any mortal man could bear, making her use of his godly strength, so that Father Sunbones woke fully in the midst of their coupling. Thinking he saw his wife, Father Sunbones drew Desire closer and made her body his toy in all the ways that a woman can be used. Mother Mooneyes came home to find much moaning in the west end of the garden, and giggling among her sons. She stalked quickly into her house, where Father Sunbones’ radiance already painted the walls with dawn’s orange glow. She found Desire coupled with Father Sunbones and in her wrath banished her daughter to her chambers for a year and day. Then Mother Mooneyes lay with Father Sunbones herself, to see if she could coax him back to sleep. It was too late. Desire had woken the world. Men stirred in their lust, and Father Sunbones rose from his bed aflame with heat and leapt to the skies. Much that is ill in this world comes from those early awakenings, but perhaps the good also. Desire’s daughters were born to her in her chambers, some for each of the races of the souled ones. She taught them all she knew-the lists of who had grown in the garden, the names and powers of her brothers and sisters, the constancy of Mother Mooneyes in her unvarying cycles-and sent them into the world to watch over the women of the souled races, whom she had mistakenly betrayed in the innocence of her lust. Ever after, the goddesses of women made it their business to shelter females from the predations of men and turn male urges to their advantage. The marriage bond, when wrought well, can bind a man to a woman’s bed. A coin spent for an hour’s fancy can at the least sap his anger away. The choice to lie only in the company of other women is another comfort and safety. Always these goddesses watch over their shoulders, for there is ever an angry man or his god at the window. And so the temples of women have thick walls and heavy doors.

Books and cooking carried me through the winter, but the following spring, the Dancing Mistress found a much better way to occupy my time. Our nighttime runs around the courtyard had long since grown sure-footed and stretched sometimes into hours. She also had me climbing the pomegranate tree for time, to see how fast I could go and how much I could better my previous records. We danced along a low wooden bar she had brought into the practice room, along lines of cobbles in the courtyard, up and down the stairs until Mistress Tirelle shouted for us to stop ruining her house.

All of that was great fun, and took energy from me almost as fast as it gave back more. But one night she came with a leather satchel over her shoulder.

“Here,” she said as we stood behind the tree, away from the sight of the Pomegranate Court itself.

I opened the satchel. Inside were several bundles of dark cloth.

“Climb the tree and place these within the branches. Hide them so no one looking from the ground or the balcony will easily spy them.”

“From Mistress Tirelle?” I hid nothing, not even my bowel movements, from the duck woman. Only my thoughts were my own. Sometimes I doubted even that.

“Hide them from no one at all,” said the Dancing Mistress. “No one and everyone.”

I climbed. I hid them, for by now I knew this tree as well as I knew my own bedclothes. I paused and thought, then climbed down. “Whatever it is you intend, it cannot be for the evening when Mistress Tirelle looks out and awaits my return.”

“No.” Her teeth gleamed with a small smile.

“When, then?”

“You will know.”

Then we ran awhile, with me tumbling through a roll just after I took every corner of the courtyard.

We ran every night that week, pushing me hard until my feet faltered and my breath burned. I fell into bed every evening wondering how I would know when to meet the Dancing Mistress and her mysterious dark cloths. I was smart enough not to fetch her bundles down during the day, when climbing the tree would earn me a beating. Our evening work outside was watched often enough that I did not even try to bring up the sense of the thing then.

When the riddle answered itself, I wondered at how slow I had been. As I was brewing a blackbark tea for Mistress Tirelle, I realized that I knew when to meet the Dancing Mistress. I crumbled some of the passionflower leaves into the infusion, to encourage the duck woman to sleep more heavily-we had once more been discussing the difference between savor, flavor, medicine, and poison. Then I drank a great quantity of spring water, so that the needs of my bladder would force me awake an hour or two after we retired.

That evening I received neither a beating nor a lecture. I lay in my bed until I could hear Mistress Tirelle’s snoring-her breathing was loudest when she slept soundly. Too much danced in my head for sleep, and as planned, my need for the chamber pot caught up with me before my elusive dreams ever did.

Getting up, I did what was needed. I then slipped out onto the balcony and padded very quietly past Mistress Tirelle’s door. She had set a line of bells at the head of the stairs, but I slipped over the rail and slid down the outside with my palms upon the banister.

Once on the porch below, I walked to the pomegranate tree and climbed. The bundles were where I had left them, of course. No one here besides me possessed the will or the means to climb the tree except for the Dancing Mistress herself. I gathered the cloth and slid back down to stand on the side of the trunk away from the Pomegranate Court.

Unfolding the bundles, I found leggings, a jacket, and a small bag that after a brief time I realized was a hood. They were cotton dyed black.

I pulled on the leggings, tucked my tunic in, and tugged the jacket on. The hood felt odd, but I pulled it over my head. I half expected the Dancing Mistress to step out of the shadows, but she did not. I waited a moment, feeling foolish, then began to run the circuit of the courtyard. Silence was my goal, and I moved quietly as I could. At each cornering, I took my tumble. I ran and ran under the starlight, for the moon was a dark coin already spent, though my legs and back ached.

When I rolled out of the tumble at the third corner, between the gate and the tackle box, the Dancing Mistress fell into step next to me. Her fur was dark in the starlight, and her face was deadly serious.

“Mistress,” I said, speaking within my breaths. “You were right. I knew when to meet you.”

The Dancing Mistress nodded. “Let me show you something new.”

I followed her as she climbed the post at the west end of the porch. We gained the copper roof, then swarmed the bluestone wall beyond to the wide, flat rampart I’d seen from the top of the pomegranate tree.

The street was open below us. Very quiet even during the daylight, at this time of night, it was empty. A row of buildings stared back at me, windows like vacant eyes beneath the irregular peaks of their roofs, though a few glowed with the light of reason within. The great structures of the city lifted beyond, some gleaming copper, some dull tiles, some with turrets and other features I could not name, for I had not yet had a Mistress who would discuss with me architecture and the life of cities.

The path to freedom lay before me.

“May I go now?” I asked.

“You are too young,” she said quietly. “Though your mind is sharp as any I’ve ever seen, and your beauty unmarred, you cannot make your way alone. Bide here, learn at our expense, but know that someday you will have a road if you need it. There may be different choices you will come to make.”

“No, I do not think so. I will never choose to be grasped within the hand of another.”

“Even birds build their nests together.” She gathered me close for a long time; then we went below to put away the tools of my newfound stealth.

As the spring warmed, the exercises grew more strenuous. All of them. Mistress Leonie’s textile arts were showing me things of which I’d never considered the possibility, such as the weaving of secret messages into the warp and weft of a courtier’s cloak. Likewise Mistress Tirelle in the kitchen. Sometime during a month spent with the making of sauces, we reached a nearly amicable truce around the rhythms of the cooking-she still raged and threatened and beat me away from the fires, but we found a calm before them.

I was permitted to mount a horse, and taught the ways ladies rode, and something of the styles of men that I might judge the quality and training of a horseman. A new woman, Mistress Roxanne, brought boxes of rocks and gems and colored cards to begin my lessons in jewelry. She was thin, sly, and chattering.

As my reading improved, the selection of my books broadened. At the time, it seemed to me that the whole subject of books was haphazard, though later I understood the pattern Mistress Danae was applying to my reading. No recent history, nothing of the city of Copper Downs, and nothing whatsoever concerning the Duke, of whose name and very existence I had then heard only bare rumor.

The greatest effort was expended with the Dancing Mistress. She did not slack with me during the day-we walked through movements, poise, and balance. She brought a clockwork box on a little stand that marked the measures of a rhythm and trained me to its timing. Padded benches and hanging bars arrived for the practice room. We talked about the way my muscles and bones would grow over the next few years, and how making them strong now would help keep them strong later.

After that first period of evening runs, she never again came back early when Mistress Tirelle would know of her visit. Rather, on days before we were to make a late-night run, the Dancing Mistress would leave a scrap of dark cloth on the plain bench in the practice hall. Once Mistress Tirelle was sleeping soundly, I would slip outside in my gray wool wrap and climb the pomegranate tree to dress in my blacks. Without fail, when I descended she awaited me at the bottom. I handed the Dancing Mistress the scrap of cloth, and we would begin our work against the stones.

There was a great deal of running. I climbed, tumbled, fell, spun, leapt. We used the walkway capping the outer wall, measuring distances for me to cross without touching the stone. Before long, I became accustomed to my view of the city beyond, and wondered when and how I would see more.

“Why do we run atop the wall?” I asked her one night in the late spring, as the northern summer was beginning to unfold. The air even at that hour still remembered the warm hand of the sun. “Does the Factor not have guards?”

We spoke as we climbed, practicing finding the cracks in the sheathing stone of the courtyard walls.

“No one would dare breach the Factor’s walls. Not even the most desperate, drunken petty thief.”

“Still, we are visible from the street.”

“No one without looks within. Even if they see us there, who are we? Who would they tell?”

“The Mistresses come and go.”

“Have you ever seen a Mistress come or go at night? Besides me?”

I thought about that. “No-no, I have not.”

“Consider that there might be great and terrible wards on these gates.”

“So they cannot be passed, even by the Factor’s friends?”

The Dancing Mistress laughed. “To be sure. Such a thing makes the guards lazy. As they are not permitted to gaze within the courts on pain of blindness followed by death, they do not watch what we do.”

As Federo had said, except for him, I would know only women.

One night our run was different.

I dropped out of the tree freshly clad. My thighs ached from time spent on a strange horse that day. I was still too small to sit properly astride with any comfort. The Dancing Mistress stood there, her tail twitching as it emerged from a slit in her own blacks.

“Mistress,” I said, bowing my head as I clasped my hands for permission to speak.

“You have the count of twenty to gain the walkway of the outer wall.”

I ran, swift and light as she had trained me. There had been no fog or rainslick tonight, so I could move in safety. I did not bother with the stairs, both for pride and to avoid risk of waking Mistress Tirelle. Instead I scrambled up the wall where the east end of the Pomegranate Court house met the bluestone, then gained the copper roof, then made the last climb to the top.

My count was sixteen.

A moment later, the Dancing Mistress was with me. “Next time you will have the count of fifteen.”

“Yes, Mistress.”

She guided me to the outer wall and pointed that I should look over the edge. The street below was a drop of about forty feet.

“How would you make your way down?”

I thought a moment. “I might descend the outer wall, but I do not know if it is slick or rough, nor how well spaced the mortar joints are. Or I could fall, and try to slide along the stones as I descended. I do not think that would serve me well, as it is too far to let my body land in safety.”

“Hmm.”

I looked around. As I’d seen many times before, the walkway extended around the outer edge of the Factor’s house. We had never left the borders of my own court before, even though nothing on the walkway barred me except the distance between one step and the next. “If I pass beyond the boundary of the Pomegranate Court, there may be another way.”

Her voice dropped even lower, not so much a whisper as the shadow of one. “What will happen if you are found beyond the Pomegranate Court?”

“Mistress Tirelle would cut me, then turn me out for a tavern slave. The Factor has gone to a great deal of trouble to keep me bound here in quiet secrecy.”

She did not answer. I stood awhile, feeling a sudden chill that was not of the night air. What were they making of me here? Except for Federo mentioning that I should be a lady, no one had said. What would the Dancing Mistress make of me? Something Mistress Tirelle, and therefore presumably both Federo and the Factor, did not want of me.

“I am not your tool,” I whispered harshly, then sprinted east along the wall past the boundary of my life.

Federo returned to marvel at my height. “You have been growing while I was away,” he said with an easy laugh.

By then I thought myself sophisticated. Some of the lessons about jewels and clothes had sunk deep within my thoughts. This man was my last connection to my father and Endurance, and the only person alive who could tell me exactly where I was born. He did not dress the part, though. Instead this day he was windblown and carefree, clad in strange belled pantaloons and a muslin shirt that fastened across the shoulder.

Not at all the respect my station was due.

“I grow,” I told him. “And learn.” And count my bells, secret though they are.

“Good.” He bent his head, examining my face from an angle rather than turning my chin as he might once have done. “How much does she beat you?”

“Less so these days,” I admitted. “I have found the lock to my tongue, and fight only when I must.”

“Good. I was afraid your stubborn independence would lead you too deeply into trouble.”

With those words, I remembered once again that Federo was not my friend. A friend would have cared for my fate, not whether my words caught too much trouble.

“How is your hunting and trapping, then?” I let my voice grow nasty, much the way Mistress Leonie did when her talk slipped from gowns to gossip.

Federo looked pained, and turned away. “It is more than you know, Girl.”

I watched him walk away and did not feel sorry for a moment. This man had stolen me away from my life and family. What guilt was it on me that I hurt his heart for a moment? He would ride free, and I would remain here under the watchful eye and the hard hand of Mistress Tirelle.

Instead I closed my eyes and thought of the smell of rice paddies under the morning mist until the duck woman came to punish me for my insolence.

The next time the Dancing Mistress handed me the dark scrap during our daily exercises, I was ready for a night run. I wanted to show everyone how wrong they were, how shallow and evil they had been. Words were still my way out of this place, but if I could strike a few hard blows before I left the Pomegranate Court, my heart would be gladdened.

Dropping from the tree to the cobbles, I saw she was not there. I froze a moment on the fulcrum between panic and fear. Then I spotted her waiting for me at the top of the wall. I scrambled across the courtyard and up so quickly that the count would have been reset for me.

She watched me come, then caught me as I rushed toward her, spinning to throw me down. I rolled and fell, landing well enough, thanks to the training she had been giving me the past two years.

“What is it?” I hissed, regaining my feet.

“Are you too good for your friends?”

For the first time I realized how freely she and Federo must discuss me.

“No.” My breathing was hard, and my rib twinged.

“Much is risked on you. I cannot imagine you should be grateful. I would not be, not in your place. But you could at the least be respectful.”

“Of what? The risks taken by people who walk free each day?” I spat on the stones. “This slave girl does not sorrow for displeasing her owners.”

The Dancing Mistress gave me a long silence in which to consider my own words. They were prideful, but pride was all I had. Everything else had been taken from me, stolen away over and over.

Finally she spoke: “I do not own you. Nor does Federo, or even Mistress Tirelle.”

Taking a deep breath, I tried to find a voice that did not lash out with the sting I harbored in my heart. “No, the Factor owns me. You support his claim.”

“You do not know, Girl.”

“No, I do not.” I glanced at the street below. Surely we had meant to finally climb down the wall tonight? Dreading that I might be giving up my only escape with my next words, I said, “I will not be yours, any more than I will be his.”

The Dancing Mistress folded my hand around the scrap, which I still clutched. “Your choices are your own. When you are ready for me to come again, return this to me.”

“When I am ready?” I repeated stupidly.

“When you are ready.” Her face was lopsided with a mix of loss and anger. “Perhaps I will even come back then. As for now, fold away your blacks and climb into your bed. I will have no more of you for a time.”

I climbed back down, slipping twice, and forgot myself to the extent that I went back to my sleeping room still wearing the Dancing Mistress’ blacks, along with the soft leather shoes and gloves I always stored with them. When I tugged my gear off, I balled everything up, snuck to steal needles from the sitting room, then sewed it all into a little pillowcase I had been stitching with the design of pale flowers growing through a broken crown.

My heart was hard for the next weeks. I still had my daily lessons with the Dancing Mistress, but there was no warmth between us. She did not push me away or cause me to be punished, but neither did she embrace me nor spare me good words. A few times I thought I caught her studying me when she believed me too busy to notice, but that was her concern.

At the time, I thought we were done. Pride, like patience, can be taught. But as patience may be unlearned all at once in a hard moment, tenacious pride can be acquired in that same hot rush.

I had not lost my ability to stalk the future, and the villains who ruled my life. I had lost my ability to tell friend from foe.

Mistress Tirelle must have sensed that some break had occurred between me and my favorite teacher. She interrupted a long course of instruction on the mechanics of baking-leavening, flours, inclusions and exclusions to dough-to show me how we might make sweets. These were little crushed preparations of bitter almonds, oil-packed dates, and diced apples, which we rolled in sheets made of pastry and grape leaves. When they were fresh baked, I ladled pine honey over them to set up with the heat and a mixture of scents that made my mouth water unreasonably. We then experimented with sugar reductions, and how fanciful designs could be scribed on the sweetmeats with the appropriate flick of a spoon.

“You must know how someone is honored with the preparation of the final course,” the duck woman told me. “A person can be insulted as well, in the subtleties of preparation. Food is a language.”

I clasped my hands. She nodded.

“What of foreigners?” I asked. “Is their language of food known to us?”

My question earned me a suspicious glare. Mistress Tirelle had always been troubled that I had come from across the Storm Sea, as if the circumstances of my birth were somehow my doing. After a moment, she seemed to decide I was not making a subtle slight against her charter here in the Factor’s house. “Sometimes a cook will trouble to learn a foreign way of eating, to show a bit of respect to a powerful merchant or prince.” Her tiny smile ghost-danced across her face. “Remember, those from far away will never measure up to our standards. At need, we make allowances for them, but it is always a charity they should know enough to refuse.”

My unintended criticism is returned fivefold. I never seemed to be in good standing with any of my Mistresses, for all that some were civil enough. Only the Dancing Mistress had treated me fairly. Then she cast me off as well, I thought.

I stepped away a moment to tend the sugar kettle, which served to hide the tears in my eyes.

“Girl.”

Turning around, I looked at Mistress Tirelle, not even trying to swallow the misery that must have been naked on my face. To my good fortune, she seemed to believe her slight had cut me to the quick.

“We will be sending a fine bread out tomorrow.” Her voice dropped. “To be judged.” A strange, false smile drew her lips upward like dead men plucked reluctantly from the soil. “Think on what you will make that will reflect best on the Pomegranate Court.”

I clasped my hands again. She frowned, but tipped her chin that I might speak.

“Judged by whom, Mistress?” I asked. “Against what?”

“What happens outside the walls of the Pomegranate Court is no concern of yours, Girl. We’ll send your work out, and it will be judged.”

The answer seemed clear enough to me. There was to be a competition among the courts of the Factor’s house!

I swallowed my own answering smile. Several years in this place, and finally I could show my worth. I could only thank the sun there was not to be a riding competition. It might have been better for me if we were playing at tree climbing, those invisible girls and I, but this would do. This would do.

Early the next morning, I sifted through grades of flour and sugar in my thoughts. Duck eggs, for their richness, or quail’s, for their delicacy? I was still considering inclusions in the bread, but a wash for the top seemed apropos. Coarse sugar and cardamom could be sprinkled to accent the loaf.

My washing went quickly, and my cotton shifts were ever my cotton shifts. We were approaching autumn, but I did not need a wrap yet, not even early in the morning. Heat and cold were almost the same to me now, except when my breath stung or I was required to protect my feet.

Out on the balcony I saw a mist swaddling our little courtyard. The pomegranate tree bulked strange in the poor light, its branches splayed like broken fingers. The air smelled of cold stone and the not-so-distant sea. My eyes strayed to the branches where my night running blacks should be. They were stored away now, and the Dancing Mistress’ little scrap with them.

Baking was so much… less… than pushing myself in darkness. Would I rather be a girl who could make a pretty loaf to please a lord, or a girl who could gain a rooftop on a fifteen count unseen by those within the house?

Neither choice held a purpose, I realized. Mistress Tirelle had told me time and again I would not be expected to ply my arts. Only to know them very, very well.

A frightening question occurred to me: Were the Mistresses failed candidates? Perhaps Mistress Danae’s knowledge of letters or Mistress Leonie’s mastery of sewing and weaving were the result of a dozen years behind these bluestone walls before some defect or small rebellion had cast them out.

I wanted to go home. More than anything, I wanted my life back. But if somehow that never happened, I did not want to spend my years here teaching other girls lessons I’d learned under the blows of the sand-filled tube.

That brought to mind what I missed most about my night runs with the Dancing Mistress. Not the work, but having someone who would allow me to speak, and without reservation heed the words I spoke.

Then it’s too bad for her that she used me ill!

The anger buoyed me. That emotion I put away to sustain me through the day, and headed downstairs to the great kitchen. I would not break my fast until Mistress Tirelle gave me permission to prepare the morning meal, but I could look over my spices and flours and bring my earlier thoughts closer to the oven.

This was the best day yet with Mistress Tirelle. We had a project, and my skills had grown strong enough to lead.

The Pomegranate Court had recently taken a delivery of a batch of exotic fruits, which I was told had been grown in a glass house that brought a little sliver of the southern sun to the Stone Coast. I chilled plantains on ice, then sliced the fruits thin and fried them with sesame seeds. The smell of that cooking was heavenly, for sesame improves almost everything. At the same time, I reduced guavas to a jelled paste into which I folded crushed almonds. That sweet-and-bitter combination made my mouth water as well.

For the crust, Mistress Tirelle and I made a very buttery dough, which I stretched and folded and stretched and folded, layering coarse sugar and thin-sliced almonds in at the last. The dough I cut into a dozen squares. I spread the guava paste within these, arranged the crisped plantains, then folded the dough over again. I topped each with a wash of quail’s egg, more coarse sugar, a few grains of rock salt, and a scattering of sesame seeds. I placed a whole nut in the top of each so that they would bake up with a dent, into which I planned to place a slice of chilled plantain when the pastries were out and cool.

When completed, these little creations looked each as beautiful as anything Mistress Tirelle had ever made as a demonstration for me. She studied my work, sniffing and touching the pastries very lightly with a long spoon made of wood.

“Girl,” she finally said. One of those elusive smiles crossed her face. “These might do. You reflect well on the Pomegranate Court.”

I am the Pomegranate Court. I knew better than to speak, especially in the face of the only real praise she had ever offered me. Instead I nodded and answered with a smile of my own.

The day drove on in hard work with a brace of hounds, careful threading of a rug loom, exercises in the lettering and usages of the writ of the Saffron Tower far to the east, and all the sorts of things that fell to my lot. I did not have an hour with the Dancing Mistress, which I found odd. Much later, I realized she was never present when the Factor was in the house, but I missed her, then was irritated with myself for the missing.

We heard nothing that day. We heard nothing the next, either, though the Dancing Mistress was back. She had a new form to show me, a kicking dance from some islands in the Sunward Sea that involved two partners leaping past each other in a flowing lunge that crossed through the line where their eyes had met. I, of course, fell to the straw-padded floor a dozen times, bruising myself worse than I had on any night run. Just another round of small injuries for Mistress Tirelle to ignore, as if she had inflicted them herself.

Vengeance? A message? I wondered what it was she intended to tell me, then dismissed it. She would not get satisfaction from me. There were other proofs of my independence. Challenging the girls of the various courts at their games would be my triumph.

The day after, I stepped out of the sleeping room to a hard blow from the flat of Mistress Tirelle’s hand. “Strip your shift,” she demanded, slapping the sand-filled silk tube against her forearm.

Whatever had passed between us in the kitchen two days before was long gone, vanished within the bullying hatred that always intruded. She finally stopped the beating, breathing so heavily, it might have been a sob. “Your little baking experiment nearly got your tongue slit and you sold away,” Mistress Tirelle growled in my ear. I smelled wine on her breath, and the stink of fear. “Only that idiot fop Federo spoke for you, and saved you.”

I understood then that in saving me, Federo had saved her.

There was nothing to say, nothing to ask. I gripped the rail tight and let my legs shiver. Silence was my only armor as she resumed.

When she was finished, she slumped away, before leaning close again. Her hand gripped my shoulder so tightly that I knew I would have fingertip bruises there later. “One of the Factor’s household became very sick from your almonds. Her lips burned and she could not breathe. They called it poisoning at first, until a maid spoke up that the woman had always taken ill from certain nuts. Federo said you could not have known, and calmed the Factor’s anger. You are a very lucky girl, Girl.”

After Mistress Tirelle left, I gathered my shift and slowly pulled it back over my head. The greatest, strangest marvel of these people in the Factor’s employ was how they seemed to believe it was my luck to be beaten and abased by them. As if they had longed to be stolen away and treated without mercy all the days of their childhood.

Later that day, enduring my silent passes with the Dancing Mistress, I gave her back her dark strip of cloth. She said nothing, made no sign she took my meaning, but I knew. My muscles ached, and my legs shook. Still, I resolved to stand firm.

That night I waited for Mistress Tirelle to go to sleep, thinking on how I might strangle her in her bed, or smother her with a bolt of belled silk so that her death cries chipped her teeth against the metal. A good thought, but the Dancing Mistress had held the right of it when she told me to abide and gather what power might come to me.

Eventually I rose and plucked the seams from my pillow. The blacks were as I had left them, smelling of tree bark and my old sweat. I shook them out and slid into them there in my sleeping room, heedless of whether I might be caught. As I stepped onto the balcony, Mistress Tirelle groaned and stirred.

Freezing a moment, I stood silent as the mist that had once more risen outside. I heard a creaking, then the unmistakable ring of water being passed into the night pot. Even my breath was noiseless, held close and shallow.

She groaned again, then fell heavily back into her bed. With one last, regretful thought for the blanket I could wrap around her face, I took hold of the balcony rail and dropped to the stones below. No sense in risking the stairs.

I had miscalculated the effect of the muscle pains from the morning beating. The fall went bad, and I wound up flat on the cobbles, breathing heavily. A moment later, the Dancing Mistress stood close above me, her small rounded ears outlined against the sullen silver glow of the night sky.

She extended a hand. I brushed it away, still angry at her, at Mistress Tirelle, at everyone. Most angry at myself, truly, but I did not want to examine that thought too closely.

I found my feet and stood swaying. We eyed each other in the dark.

“First,” I whispered, “you will show me how you threw me down on our last night run. Then, when you are satisfied that I know how to see to my own safety, we will cross the wall and you will take me out into the world.”

“I do not accept orders from you.” Her voice was quiet and calm, but I could see her tail standing out almost straight.

“I, too, am done accepting orders.” Even as I said the words, they surprised me. “I will stay because I choose to. I will beat these Mistresses at their own game, better them and all the girls of the other courts, and eventually best the Factor himself. When I choose to, I will walk free of this place.”

Her silence answered me, though her tail flicked now instead of standing brush-straight.

“And you…”Even in the dark, I could feel myself blush. Surely my face was a beacon. “Will you teach me what I need to know to choose my path?” I stared down a moment. “P-please?”

“Hmm.” Her tail curled. Then she extended her hand again. I took it in mine, clasping my other across it as if I were asking permission to hold her close. “Let us talk of throws and falls.” She led me across the courtyard, over by the horse box, where we began to work on my center of mass.

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.