Neveryóna, or The Tales of Signs and Cities

5. Of Matrons, Mornings, Motives, and Machinations

‘DAWN IS THE LOVELIEST time in this garden,’ Madame Keyne said. ‘One would think that these blue dahlias, that those black tulips had been set in the shadow of this high rock or banked beside that grotesque stone beast to catch the precise subtlety of this light and no other. Will you walk with me up this path?’

‘I’m very confused, Madame Keyne,’ Pryn said. ‘Why have you brought me here?’

‘No doubt you are also frightened. The Wild Ini can be very frightening if seen in the proper light. But she is useful. She tells me she pulled you from the arms of a street pander — put a knife in him, too! You do not look like a woman used to such violences. Certainly you must have been terrified!’

Pryn thought of her dragon, of her own killings, of the carnage in the cellar. The pale-haired woman’s blade (whose thrust into Nynx Pryn had not even seen) had, if anything, brought the mayhem to a close; and because Pryn had not seen the thrust, it had also seemed a closing that was, somehow, external to the mayhem rather than of it. ‘Madame, I was — and am — more confused than frightened.’

‘Ah?’ Madame Keyne’s blue skirts floated back in the light breeze from more sheer blue. (Pryn remembered the thick cloth from her aunt’s loom.) ‘Well, I understand. Such violence engulfs the person caught up in it the way air supports a bird or water suspends a fish: one moves through it; it contours one’s every move. Yet one hardly realizes it’s there. I understand your state, believe me. A young woman of your sensibilities, brought to a strange house in a strange, if beautiful, suburb of the city, ministered to by unknown servants, made to sleep in a strange bed, unsure of who might enter during the long night, while the violences of the day vanish simply through incomprehension — surely this calm and alien domesticity has produced in you the real terror?’

‘Was that big woman who took my clothes and gave me a bath last night a servant?’ Pryn asked. ‘I’ve heard of servants, but I’ve never really seen one — up close.’ Pryn looked down at the new dress she had been given. Her side was much less sore this morning, but she knew that beneath the green material was a wide, purplish bruise. ‘Before she turned down my bed and told me to sleep, she said I had nothing to be afraid of.’ Recalling the nights she had slept beside the road in the forests and the fields, Pryn wondered how to explain the half-sleep that had become natural to her. ‘It was easier to believe her — and sleep — than to doubt and lie awake till morning. Again, Madame, I was not so much frightened as confused.’

Madame Keyne sighed. ‘My entire life I have found things seldom to be as most people expect them, and I have grown wealthy catering to people’s expectations by my manipulations of the real. Yet my own expectations are as hard for me to let go as the superstitions of some barbarian living in ignorance and squalor in the Spur. I expect you to be terrified, and, quite mechanically, against all your protests I have done everything to alleviate that terror. Even accepting your protest is, for me, a matter of assuming my efforts have been successful — rather than admitting there was no need for my concern.’ She smiled at Pryn with an almost elderly irony. ‘So. You are no longer terrified. Very good. Perhaps we both can accept that. Such a marvelous morning!’ Madame Keyne’s white hair was coiled about her head on silver combs. Her dark skin, here smooth at cheek and forearm, there wrinkled at wrist and neck, glowed like noon. ‘Acceptance is so simple! I walk in my garden, here, at dawn, to find simplicity. Look around you — at the rising paths, the falling waters, the protective walls ranged about us, the tiled mosaics decorating my home, the large statues there, the little ones over here. For me, that is simplicity. And for you, it’s confusion.’

They were walking up a path paved with red brick — the same brick, Pryn saw, that had covered the market place. Here, however, moss reached across it from the path’s edge or lapped out from carefully tended flower banks and sapling groves.

They gained a rise.

Beyond the garden wall, Pryn could make out another house, a house about whose upper stories much tiling had fallen away. A dozen men, some with spears, all with leather helmets, ambled the roof behind cracked crenellations.

‘Really, you know, I am the despair of my gardeners.’ Madame Keyne pushed her bracelets up her wrist — most of which fell jangling again. ‘One would think, by custom, this is the time they would be up, preparing the grounds for the later risers. But I have demanded Clyton keep the place free for this first hour after sunrise so that I might come and walk. But I notice your gaze has strayed to my neighbor’s lawns — if one can call them that. The garden there is no longer tended at all. His soldiers stamp along the balustrades. Now and again someone rides up to shout an incomprehensible message, and someone rides away…’

‘Do you know,’ Pryn began, ‘your…your neighbor?’

‘Know him? He’s no acquaintance of mine! That isn’t even Sallese — over the wall is Neveryóna, the old neighborhood of Kolhari. Look how it’s falling to pieces! That’s what inherited wealth leads to, I tell you. Though he certainly didn’t inherit his! Well, it’s not surprising he would take over some ramshackle mansion there! Know him? Know this Liberator all the city talks of? I’m terrified of him! He rented that old run-down shell of a house six weeks ago. Everyone who borders on it thought he would soon have workers and artisans repairing, refacing, bringing that once-beautiful property back to a state we could all admire. But as you can see, he keeps his headquarters no better than a barracks. And within those littered halls and peeling chambers sits our Liberator — planning and plotting liberation, no doubt. It’s quite unsettling. You spoke of servants? Six weeks ago, there were three times as many of them working here as there are today — he’s scared them off! Myself, I think they’ve gone to join him, those that haven’t simply fled. And you can be sure it’s not my liberation he’s planning! Terrifying, yes. If that’s the way he treats his own house, what may he eventually do to mine?’ Madame Keyne shook her head and took Pryn’s arm — very gently — to lead her around a stone hut that had broken from the bushes at the top of the rise. Had Pryn been more used to gardens of such extent, she would have assumed it a storage shack for tools. As she wasn’t, however, she wondered who might live in the little enclosure, for it had no windows — only some grilles set high in the walls. The recessed door was hewn of thick plank. The hedges and trees around it were arranged to hide it from you completely while you were not actually on its circling path. The stone bench at the hut’s back, however, offered an extraordinary view. ‘Come, sit with me.’ The bench itself was a sculpted replica of one of the split log seats Pryn had seen in the inner city. Madame Keyne sat, patting the stone beside her. ‘That’s right. Right here. From where we are, the Liberator and his ugly home are comfortably out of sight — though, like so many such phenomena, once they have been put behind, they tend to pervade all that lies before. You can see almost the entire city from here. I had this bench set so one could sit and contemplate Kolhari, for there is no prospect opening upon it quite so impressive, at least from within city limits. There, of course, is the High Court of Eagles. That break among the buildings is the Old Market, just across the Bridge of Lost Desire, where you were last night. The trees there mark the Empress’s newly designated public park; only a street away, in that open space between the buildings lies the New Market — the Old Market in the Spur, I fear, has become merely a quaint and archaic metaphor for commerce, whereas really to know the life and pulse of this city, one must lose and make a fortune or two in the New Market — don’t you think?’

‘I don’t know,’ Pryn said. ‘How could I? Madame, why have you brought me here?’ Pryn was, indeed, thinking of the ruined house behind her. Perhaps because Madame Keyne had suggested it, or perhaps because the suggestion was simply true, the notion of the Liberator had begun to extend for Pryn over the whole of the city, so that, though she was not really sure he was still alive, much less in the dilapidated mansion, he had become a figure of such invasive power that her next question, a moment before she asked it at any rate, seemed logical enough: ‘Does my being here have anything to do with the Liberator?’

Madame Keyne looked surprised. ‘Only insofar as many of the residents of both Sallese and Neveryóna have felt more confined to our own little worlds since he has been about in the great one. You might say one reason you are here is that I am attempting to live my own life more intensely.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘Yet there is nothing so strange about it, really. I have frequently taken an interest in the careers of exceptional young women. When I first saw you in the street, riding behind that scarred country gentleman, you struck me immediately as someone who…well, had seen the stars, descried cities in the clouds, ridden dragons, gazed into the ocean and seen through to secrets the tides obscure!’

‘I did?’ asked Pryn.

‘Oh, yes! Such characteristics always show on a woman’s face — if another woman has eyes to read them.’ Madame Keyne sat back and regarded Pryn. ‘You are clearly a young woman who knows her own name.’

‘I am?’ asked Pryn. ‘I mean — oh, I am!’

‘I thought so.’ Madame Keyne folded her hands on her lap’s blue. ‘Perhaps, then, you might tell me what it is…?’

‘Oh! Of course.’ Pryn looked around by the bench leg for a twig. She found one and bent down to scratch in the dirt. ‘It’s Pryn.’ She glanced up at Madame Keyne, then turned back (her side was still sore) to glyph the syllabics, majuscule and minuscule, and add, finally, the diacritical elision. ‘“Pryn,”’ she repeated, sitting up and taking a breath. ‘There.’

‘Well!’ Madame Keyne bent forward. ‘Not only do you know your own name, you know how to write it.’ She sat back amid tinkling bracelets. ‘That does make you exceptional!’

Pryn was surprised; she’d thought that was what the woman had been speaking of all along. But the pleasure of the compliment lingered despite her misreading — as did Madame Keyne’s smile.

‘My aunt taught me,’ Pryn explained. ‘Whenever anything new came to our town, like reading, or figuring, or writing, or a new kind of building, or a new medicine, my aunt was always there to see what it was and how it worked — at least she used to be. But she’s very old, much too old to take care of me now. She’s even older than you.’

‘To be sure,’ Madame Keyne said. ‘You ask why you’re here? Well, shortly after we had our first surprising encounter on Black Avenue, one of my servants, on an errand back in that direction, reported seeing you put down on the street by the men you rode with. Clearly you were a mountain girl, unused to the city. My servant’s account of your indecisions and hesitations over which way to go were sure signs you were on your own. I sent our little Ini to look for you in the three places an unaccompanied woman might end up in Kolhari. She found you, I might add, in the most predictable. Now you are here.’

Pryn looked out at the city. There was no fog this morning — or rather, since they were within the city, the fog was only a general haze about them, and no longer a visible object with location and limit. ‘But certainly, Madame Keyne, many young women must come to Kolhari — many every day; from the mountains, from the deserts, from the islands, from the jungles. You can’t possibly take an interest in the careers of them all…’

‘But my dear, the thought of a poor child, a stranger in our town, without prospects or friends…? It would not have let me sleep for a week! What do you suppose might have happened if our little Ini had not been there with her quick blade?’

To Pryn, Madame Keyne’s words seemed more like ones that should have come before her question than after it. Indeed, trying to locate an answer in this woman’s so sensible protestations was like trying to see the fog that, from here, was only the faintest of dispersions. ‘Madame, my gratitude is real. But so is my confusion. Gratitude doesn’t end it.’

‘But I don’t know if I can speak of the reasons you want to hear.’ Madame Keyne suddenly turned to touch Pryn’s shoulder. ‘Say that when your companions nearly ran us down in the street — say that when the horse on which you rode first reared to avoid us, say that when the morning sun caught so in your unkempt hair…when the hooves stamped on the pavement, when you drew a breath so that your eyes widened in a particular way — well, there was a smudge of dirt on your calf, I recall, that I could not shake loose from my memory the whole day. It’s gone, now, brushed from you in your bath last night by one of those marvelous new sponges, only recently imported from the Ulvayns. But it is fair to say that if the smudge, or the angle of your arm about the sweating chest of your rider, or the particular width of your astonished eyes had been other than what, in that instant, they were, you would not be here. There are, alas, no better reasons I can give. Girl — ’ The hand on her shoulder had grown heavier. ‘You are not traditionally beautiful; and you know it. We women do. But what most people mean by beauty is really a kind of aesthetic acceptability, not so much character as a lack of it, a set of features and lineaments that hide their history, that suggest history itself does not exist. But the template by which we recognize the features and forms in the human body that cause the heart to halt, threatening to spill us over into the silence of death — that is drawn on another part of the soul entirely. Such features are different for each of us. For one, it is the toes of the feet turned in rather than out; for another it is the fingers of the hand thick rather than thin; for still another it is the eyes set wide rather than close together. But all sing, chant, hymn the history of the body, if only because we all know how people regard bodies that deviate from the lauded and totally abnormal norm named beauty. Most of us would rather not recognize such desires in ourselves and thus avoid all contemplation of what the possession of such features means about the lives, the bodies, the histories of others, preferring instead to go on merely accepting the acceptable. But that is not who I am. That is not who I have struggled to be. Have I been struggling just the slightest bit harder since the Liberator has confined me, as it were, to my own garden? Perhaps.’ Madame Keyne lifted her hand. Bracelets clinked toward her elbow. ‘Say that you are simply here by magic. Do you know what magic is? It is power. But power only functions in the context of other powers — which is the secret of magic. The strongest man in the world — even the Liberator, who they say is a giant of a man — may only “liberate” as the play of power about him allows. Set him raging alone in a desert, and he will be as ineffectual as any other isolate, angry child — while the proper word spoken to the proper official of the Empress, whose reign is numinous though knowable, may result in the erection of a granite and basalt temple to the greater glory of our nameless, artisanal gods.

‘Why are you here?

‘The truth is simply that you are a young mountain woman who has come to the city. That is to undertake a kind of education. I, my secretary, the servants of this house, our little Wild Ini, are merely some among the instruments through which part of that education will occur. The city is very different from the country, girl. It is a kind of shared consciousness that begins its work on you as soon as you enter it, if not well before, a consciousness that begins to separate you from the country possibly even before you decide to journey toward it. It encircles you with forces much greater than the walls and gates which imitate tinier villages or towns. People who come to it come seeking the future, not realizing all that will finally affect them in it is their own, only more or less aware, involvement with the past. The way we do things here — really, that’s all there is to be learned in our precincts. But in the paving of every wide, clear avenue, in the turnings of every dark, overhung alley, in the ornaments on every cornice, in the salt-stained stones of each neighborhood cistern, there are traces of the way things once were done — which is the key to why they are done as they are today. And you — you wish to know why a woman, knowledgeable in her city’s history of infamies and generosities, would snatch an untutored country girl (of exceptional tutoring, as it now turns out) from the very arms of pain, abuse, and dishonor?

‘Be content with this: It has been done before. No doubt it will be done again.

‘And iteration abolishes the strangeness of any human action, making it merely repetition, while it reveals the purely human — desire — impelling it. Have I done what I was going to do? My girl, leave me a while and walk about the garden on your own. Yes!’

‘Madame Keyne…?’

For the woman, suddenly, lightly, closed her eyes and sat as though she were a moment away from major distress, hands surrounded by bracelets loose in her lap. ‘I have done it!’ Moment followed moment.

‘Madame Keyne, are you all right?’

‘Leave me,’ Madame Keyne repeated, calm enough but with eyes still closed. ‘Enjoy the gardens, the flowers, the falls, the fountains, the views of the city in all directions. And remember, there is nothing here to hurt you. I would die first before I would let anyone hurt you. I would die. Now go.’

Pryn started to touch the woman’s arm. But Madame Keyne, whether she sensed it or saw it from beneath lids only half closed, leaned away.

Pryn withdrew her hand.

What had begun as confusion had become by now a mental turbulence, like fog a-broil over waters through which she could make out no single wave. Pryn rose, began to walk away, glanced at the woman sitting on the bench, back against the hut’s stone, eyes still closed before the city’s panorama. Pryn, walking, glanced again — till the path’s turning hid the woman, then the hut, with shrubbery, trees, flowers…

A faint frown on her round, brown face, Pryn, in her new green shift, descended to the lower garden. She wandered about the grounds a while without seeing anyone else. Once she heard voices — more servants? She thought to push through the hedge to see. Then, with decision, she turned in another direction.

What is this garden other than a miniature forest? she thought. The number of trees, blossoms, and bushes whose names she knew from the mountains was overshadowed by the number whose names were unknown. The main point of it, she decided, was that one would never find such variety in the wild — at least not over such a limited space and laid out in such carefully edged sections. It’s like a map of all the forests, she decided, a map on which you can’t read distance or direction…A feeling of distress interrupted the thought, but she could not find the source of it till she remembered who’d given her those words.

This garden, this house, are all a part of the city, Pryn reflected. What is it here to teach me? It seemed a question she had been asking of the world from well before she’d mounted the winged beast. The real question, she decided, is not why this woman has brought me here. That, I suspect, is finally her affair. The question is what am I doing here? And I seem to have been doing a great deal lately. She stopped to look at a flower she had never seen before — a yellow and orange cornucopia smudged with black stripes. For a while she watched a stream break into three across a broad stone clearly carved for the purpose of diverting the water to three new paths, each winding off in its respective direction. For a while she walked beside a wall twice as high as she was, marveling at its permanence, its ponderousness, an image of all beyond it playing through her mind — an image which, as she examined it, was not much more than a vague castle in which dwelt a vague empress (whose reign was veiled and voluptuous), a market which was neither old nor new, and a strange house with missing tiles whose roof was patrolled by strolling soldiers. The rest of the city was a blur — oh, not a meaningless blur by any means, but the blur that marks a first encounter with the truly new which has no history to clarify it, to highlight it, to give it context, to keep it from being wholly a presence, instead of a play of more and more greatly deferred origins.

When she reached the house, Pryn turned to walk along the wall, scuffing her feet in the earth where the grass no longer grew, next to where the wall went into the ground. She passed behind bushes. The building’s front was all large pink and gray stones in gray mortar; but when she turned the corner, she found one section of smaller stones set in flaking yellow mud; then another of a single cement-like substance (with some large cracks in it); and another of irregular black brick, as though this side wall had been built (or repaired) at different times. Perhaps the builder, in the course of constructing it, had experimented with different materials…? Her great-aunt would have found all that interesting in a house; and though, when rebelling against her aunt’s tutelage, Pryn had claimed to be absolutely uninterested in the many such distinctions pointed out to her by the venerable woman in the various houses, streets, and official buildings in their walks around Ellamon, to read them, here, was nevertheless to engage in what was at least a familiar process; and thus, to feel more at home.

She passed one window with heavy cloth hangings blocking any view within; the next was boarded over, suggesting some window in the Liberator’s headquarters. She turned another corner. Ahead was a wall of wattle; in it was a window whose bottom sill was level with Pryn’s knee.

The opening was hung with a yellow cloth sheer as the gauze of Madame Keyne’s skirts.

Light seemed to pour from it.

Pryn walked up and, moving to the edge, peered through.

Reddled and waxed, the room’s stone floor was set perhaps two feet below the outside ground. Like some ancient great hall, it was without roof — though it was only of moderate size. The same sun that shadowed Pryn where the wall joined with the main house also fell out through the window over the grass and leaves.

Several counters inside were piled with square slabs, knives, reeds, splints, brushes, vella, and parchments. The only thing that moved in the room was the tiniest blue flame beneath a small tripod sitting by a few cups. The little fire wavered in the shadow of the long-handled pot above it.

Three stools stood about the sunken, sunlit chamber.

Then hinges creaked.

A shadow fell on maroon stone.

Someone walked in —

The woman — no, not last night’s servant — lugged in a cloth sack; wet, it dribbled down her tanned back. She set it on a counter, grunting, and stood.

Whatever was in it went very flat along its bottom, like grain. Only it seemed heavier than grain. The woman had strong, distinctly muscled arms. There was a bluish scar on her shoulder — but it was too regular for a scar: some sort of tattoo.

As Pryn watched, the woman stepped back, reached down, and shrugged up her dress (the same green as Pryn’s) over one wet arm. The red scarf was still tied at her waist. She left the other shoulder bare; one breast remained free. Her brown hair was pinned up; something about her carriage — it was the woman whom Pryn had last seen talking in the street with Madame Keyne when the horses had nearly run into them.

She turned to a curved ceramic mold that looked like a third of a large cylinder lying on the counter and, with her fingertips, lifted out first one, then another curved clay tablet and set each on a curved stand. Then she opened her bag, reached in, gouged, twisted, pulled something inside, took it out: wet clay.

She slapped the hunk, hard, on the counter; scraped it loose, slapped it down again; then again; and again. When the woman’s arm came up, Pryn could see her breast shake. Finally she broke the clay apart and examined the inner surfaces. (For bubbles…?) She smacked down each hunk separately a few more times, then went to put them in the mold. First with the heel of her hand, then with her fingertips, she pressed these new tablets into the corners.

At the side of the counter, under the metal tripod on top of which sat the long-handled pot, the flame flicked and fluttered.

The pot began to boil.

Bubbles climbed to the bronze rim and broke; a whiff of white whipped above.

Now the woman took the pot’s handle in clay-grayed fingers and poured amber into one of the ceramic cups sitting near.

She put the pot down. Holding the little cup just under her chin in both hands, she blew on it, sipped, smiled — Pryn drew back beyond the edge of the window as the woman turned slightly.

The woman blew again; sipped again. With one hand, she picked up a wooden paddle and smoothed the surface of the clay on the tablet mold. Whatever was in the infusion the woman drank while she worked finally reached through the sunny gauze. It suggested both spices and fruits, but in some odd refinement.

The woman put down both her cup and her paddle, bent below the counter, and lifted a small jar from a pile of jars. She stood, holding it up to look at the marks scratched on its surface.

Pryn saw two things about it: First, the jar had no opening. Second, the scratches read:

se∙ven∙great

jars∙of∙oat

en∙flo∙ur∙of

la∙bor∙er∙qua

li∙ty

Above the flo and the ur was the eliding mark Pryn now knew to be part of her own name.

A shelf on the wall with many compartments held a number of such jars — all too small to be ‘great jars of oaten flour.’ The woman reached out to file hers in one compartment — then paused, looking to the side.

Pryn pulled back.

Someone must have been passing beyond the door Pryn couldn’t see.

The woman called, ‘Oh. Thank you, Gya, for preparing my morning drink.’ Her voice was feathered with the faintest barbarian accent — as startling to Pryn as her speaking at all.

A voice returned from someone obviously on her way somewhere else. ‘It wasn’t me, Madame Jade. Madame Keyne was in there the moment she got up, to fix it for you herself.’ Yes, that voice belonged to the servant who had bathed her last night. Pryn was sure.

‘Oh, she was…!’ Jade called back, surprised and smiling. ‘How nice of Rylla.’

Clay had dried here and there on her hands in lighter patches. She picked up the cup again, regarded the steaming amber, smiled again, drank again. ‘All her silly talk about that street girl was nonsense, then! I knew it when she left me working late in town at the warehouse yesterday afternoon. I knew it!’ She laughed, secretly, throatily.

A sound — surely just wind in leaves, Pryn decided as she stepped away — made Pryn think she’d better wander on. If, after all, some passing servant were to see her, it would never do to be caught spying through the curtains. As Pryn glanced back, the woman — surely this was the Radiant Jade whom Ini had spoken of last night — was checking over a handful of writing sticks, setting aside the dull ones for sharpening.

It was a task Pryn had done many mornings for her aunt.

She walked out into the garden and looked at more flowers.

Had anyone seen her, she wondered.

She walked back around the house.

Stepping through the arched corner entrance into the open, inner court, she saw the cushions, low stools, and benches on the raked white sand, the blue and green tiles, the fur throws kept marvelously clean. (Pryn recalled the gritty hides in the subterranean hall.) Diagonally across from her, the Ini appeared to have been asleep on a pile of cushions, for she was just sitting up. She punched first one fist overhead, then the other, her mouth twisting in a huge yawn as theatrical in its exaggeration as some mummer miming awakening on a performance wagon in a market skit. Ini’s short, yellow-white hair was every which way, like a heap of feathery down. Her deep-set eyes, tightly closed, looked like bruises on her face.

Smiling, Pryn prepared to say good morning as soon as the yawn reached the open-eyed point.

Then two other figures appeared. In her blue gauzes and tinkling bracelets, Madame Keyne stepped through the doorway just down from Pryn and paused, one hand on the jamb. And from the stairs leading to the lower level rooms, the barbarian woman Pryn had just seen in the writing chamber came spiritedly up. She was tall — taller than Pryn expected barbarians to be. And for all her great-aunt’s tales of Belham’s brilliance, Pryn found herself thinking that it was unusual to see barbarians so well attired or even so clean. Jade’s dress was now up on both shoulders, the red scarf neatly round her waist. Only some clay remained about her nails. The four of them, each near her respective corner of the courtyard — Ini on her cushions, Jade at the head of her steps, Madame in her doorway, and Pryn in hers — struck Pryn as an eminently pleasing pattern. She felt her ‘Good morning’ open up to include them all and was even contemplating something such as, ‘Well, here we all are!’ when the sunken-eyed Ini, recovered from her sky-shoving yawn, looked about and let out her hoarsest, most hysterical laugh.

The laugh twisted up Ini’s face into a howl. She rocked forward to punch the cushions before her, then leaned back as if she would cackle the decorative tiles from the balcony rail.

Pryn’s own greeting was stifled. The smile on her face suddenly felt awkward. On the steps the secretary had pulled her clay-grayed fist up before her breast, her own look as distressed as Pryn’s, behind her smile, felt.

Radiant Jade stared at Pryn. Her gaze went to Madame Keyne, to Ini, came back to Pryn, returned to Madame Keyne — as though judging some fine imbalance. ‘You couldn’t have! You wouldn’t have! Rylla, you didn’t really…?’ Suddenly she drew a breath audible through the Ini’s diminishing laughter, grasped the newel, and fled around into some door behind that led to other ground floor chambers.

Pryn looked at Madame Keyne — as did Ini, chuckling now. Unlike Pryn’s smile, the Ini’s seemed full of happy expectation. It reminded Pryn of the grin of a child who had just built some towering construction of sticks, pots, and stones, the moment before pulling away the lowest support to bring it all toppling.

Madame Keyne’s hand lowered from the jamb to her side. The faintest shiver crossed her face. She looked after the secretary — Pryn thought for a moment she might even follow.

Ini’s laugh had become a smile of simple curiosity.

Madame Keyne sighed. What had begun as a shiver became a small head shake. ‘Pathetic…’ she whispered, then realized Pryn and Ini were watching. ‘…she and I? And the two of you…so ignorant!’ She turned in a swirl of blue to reenter the garden.

Pryn was surprised to be included in such an epithet, however restrained; the beginnings of anger snarled with the beginnings of embarrassment. Her cheeks heated.

Another laugh from Ini brought Pryn’s eyes back from the empty doorway. She blinked.

Ini rolled off the cushions and stood, adjusting straps and buckles on her complex body harness. ‘I like you, little girl,’ she said suddenly, without looking at Pryn.

Pryn blinked again.

Ini pulled one strap down over her shoulder and let the buckle tongue slip into a hole two notches further on. ‘That’s lucky for you — because if I didn’t…’ She made a terrible face.

Pryn actually took a step back —

— And realized Ini’s grimace was at the strap’s tightness.

‘I don’t like killing women as a rule.’ Another tongue slid into another hole. ‘I much prefer men. I don’t understand men. And I don’t like them. They’re much more complacent about misunderstandings. And that’s why.’ She looked up again, deep-socketed eyes showing white above and below the gray irises. ‘There, is that what you wanted to know? Everybody else does — you too.’

‘I don’t want to know such things!’ Pryn declared. On top of the moment with Madame Keyne and her secretary, such a statement seemed the purest and most unrelated madness; and she was a bit frightened by this creature. ‘No, I don’t — ’

‘Now there,’ Ini said. ‘Even though I know you’re lying, I understand everything going on inside you: the fear, the curiosity, the fact that the fear happens, right now, to be greater. If a man were standing where you happen to be — just as afraid as you — he would say, “How interesting!” Or perhaps he would smile and try to agree with me as far as he could, or maybe he would try to change my mind — explain to me that I was illogical, or ill, or evil. Those kind of lies I don’t understand at all. That’s why I don’t want a man standing where you are.’ Her eyes had gone back to the buckles; she finished the last strap and looked up with a faintly puzzled frown. ‘That’s why I stay here. That’s why I’d kill him.’

Had she been threatened herself, Pryn would probably not have felt nearly as agitated. This odd safety she had been granted, however, was absolutely uncomfortable. Logic and reason were what were needed, and logic and reason seemed precisely what was here being attacked in favor of a kind of honesty that, at this moment, Pryn did not understand in the least. What calm there had been to the morning had, in these last minutes, vanished.

Just beside the doorway through which the secretary had gone were the stairs that led up to the room Pryn had slept in last night and had woken in that morning. She hurried across to them and started up.

‘At least in this house — ’

Pryn glanced back down. The Ini had fallen to readjusting all the straps and buckles to entirely different tensions.

‘—there’s less chance that a man would be standing where you are.’ Then she called: ‘You and I, we’re in the same position here, now!’

Pryn hurried on. She had no notion what the Ini might mean, but the thought of any similarity, known or unknown, with the little murderess made Pryn as frightened as she ever wanted to be. Terror was only a step away.

A balcony, its heavy newels carved into lions, snakes, bulls, and birds, ran along two walls of the court. Off this balcony were the rooms.

Pryn had left the plank door to her own wide open when, that morning, she’d gone down to wander the garden.

It still stood gaping.

She rushed inside and closed it loudly.

In the midst of her remarkable adventures, Pryn had woken here not an hour ago and seen nothing remarkable about it. Returning now, however, she saw the entire chamber — its plaster walls, fallen away from the stone in one corner, its rough wooden bed, heaped at the foot with an embroidered quilt worked with golds, reds, and blues, its intricate washstand holding an unglazed bowl with a cracked side — as marked with contradictions, contradictions within which she could read of all that was ominous without, as clearly as if warnings had been scratched across the pale designs on the painted plaster between the ceiling beams or inked over the waxed red floor tiles.

Some chairs stood along one wall, a few piled one on another. Was this some kind of balcony storeroom in which she’d been housed? Well, it wasn’t a dungeon. All the dungeons Pryn had ever heard of were in basements, not on balconies.

How to get out? Simply walking through the door again seemed impossible, and the window, from which she could see the garden, was too high to jump.

There was a knock.

Startled, Pryn looked around.

The door pulled slowly open; Radiant Jade, holding a tray, edged in. She stood there for seconds with a very uncertain smile. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said at last, ‘but almost all the servants except cook, gardener, and a few of the kitchen help have gone. Really, it’s some very nice fruit, though.’ The barbarian accent was so light Pryn kept losing it — and listening the harder for its faint feathering on the s’s and r’s. ‘Rylla said to stop my nonsense and bring you some fruit…and some honey with it. But myself, I never take honey with my fruit in the morning — still, if you want, I’ll go back…?’

‘Oh, thank you,’ Pryn said. ‘No, I don’t need any,’ and thought how nice it might have been to have had some.

‘You’re not used to servants, are you?’ The secretary crossed the room and put the tray down on the window ledge. ‘Well, neither was Ini when she first came. But she got used to them fast enough. Just in time for them all to leave, too. So this morning everyone must double as house and grounds staff — nor are they happy about it, either. I won’t be surprised if we lose another today. But not cook, though. Not gardener.’ While she’d been speaking, she’d been looking out the window. Here she leaned out further. ‘Gya and gardener are faithful.’

‘Why…have they left?’ Pryn ventured. She was not really being disingenuous but simply felt that in uncertain situations it was better to explore the already familiar. ‘What do you think the reason is?’

‘You can’t see it from here as well as you can from my room.’ (Pryn was not sure if that were part of an answer — or even if her questions had been heard.) ‘But it’s there, nevertheless.’

Pryn rose and went to the window. ‘What are you looking at?’

‘There.’ Radiant Jade pointed. ‘The Liberator’s headquarters.’

Leaning over the wide ledge, Pryn could see, across the wall at the end of the garden, somewhere off in the next yard, the cracked balustrade with its ambling soldiers.

‘I despair of having to replace cook. Training a new housekeeper will be bad enough — though heaven knows I’ve done it before. Still, cook is a position you don’t want to keep reestablishing in a house like this. But gardener is faithful — Gya, gardener, and me!’ She pulled her head back in. ‘Isn’t it interesting: it takes much less to liberate servants than it does slaves. For servants, it seems, all you have to do is move in next door.’ Jade turned her back to the sill.

Pryn took up a yellow peach from the blue bowl on the tray and turned too, biting.

‘Do you think he’s going to liberate us here?’ The secretary folded her arms and stepped away, looking quite on edge. ‘I wonder if he thinks that simply by moving in next door, he can loosen her grip on the subjects she rules?’

‘The Empress…?’ Pryn took another bite.

Radiant Jade glanced back with a kind of bafflement that made the girl simply feel stupid. ‘…rules us? Here? In this house?’

‘…Madame Keyne?’ Pryn offered.

The secretary shook her head with a tragic little grimace. ‘You think she is ruler here…?’ Suddenly another thought seized her, and she dropped her arms and straightened her back.

Pryn thought she was about to leave and said: ‘You’re a barbarian, aren’t you?’ She took a third bite of the peach, which, for all its size and color, was completely unripe. The flesh was as hard — and as tasteless — as raw potato.

‘Yes.’ Apparently Jade was not leaving but only waiting to change the subject.

‘Do you speak the barbarian language?’

‘Till I was seven years old, I spoke nothing else.’ She walked around the bed once and then sat on the foot, her hands on the knees of her green skirt.

Half sitting on the sill, Pryn asked, ‘Do you…know what nivu means?’

Amusement joined the conflicting emotions already on Jade’s face. ‘Where did you hear a word like that? Did you hear some barbarian call our home here a chatja nivu?’

‘I don’t…remember if that was the phrase,’ Pryn said, quite sure it wasn’t. ‘And I don’t think they were talking about Madame Keyne. What would it mean if I had?’

‘Chatja nivu means a house where the women refuse to cook for men. But that doesn’t tell you much, does it!’ Radiant Jade laughed. ‘In many barbarian villages, ones that still have very little contact with Nevèrÿon, there’re lots of customs that more civilized folk are likely to think of as magic. In most tribes, for example, work is very strictly divided between the sexes. Only men can kill certain animals. Only women can kill certain others. Lashing together the thatch for the roof of a new hut is work only men may do. Cooking food — and no one may eat uncooked food in the south — is work only done by women. But sometimes when a husband sufficiently angers his wife, by refusing to do his own work, or by making love to another woman, the wife may refuse to cook for him. Then the man must wander about the village, begging other women to cook. And if no woman will — and they usually won’t if his wife has real reason and simply isn’t sick or busy — he will finally starve to death and die.’

Pryn’s eyes widened; she took another bite of hard peach.

When a woman refuses to cook for a man, that, in my language, is nivu.’

‘But I’ve heard the word on the street,’ Pryn said. ‘I mean, here in the city. The barbarian women talk of nivu this and nivu that. All the barbarian women in Kolhari can’t be starving their husbands…?’

Jade laughed again. ‘Customs change when people come to the city — in most barbarian tribes customs have changed well before people leave. Here, today, on the streets of Kolhari, nivu may mean any lack of support a woman may show a man. Even the silliest disagreement may be spoken of with the word — in the city, I think there are always such disagreements. But you see, it also has the other meaning that is older and more powerful.’ Jade turned her hands back and forth on her knees. ‘In our own land, it is one of the most powerful of women’s words — and here in yours, it has become one of the most trivial. Well, it is still a good word for you to know, even if you are not a barbarian — since you have found refuge in a chatja nivu.’

‘Doesn’t the cook in this house cook food for the gardener?’

‘Yes.’

‘And still this would be called a…a chatja nivu?’

‘Your accent is very good.’ Radiant Jade moved her head a bit to the side. ‘But as I said, nivu does not have to refer to cooking.’

Pryn was about to let herself smile, when Radiant Jade said:

‘You know I’m not happy you’re here. I think it was dreadful, dragging you off like that. But Rylla is impulsive.’

‘I might not be alive if she weren’t!’

‘So I’ve heard.’

Despite the fruit’s hardness, Pryn’s teeth, in the next bite, touched pit. ‘I suppose I’m not that happy to be here either. I don’t understand why I’m here. I know Madame Keyne likes to influence people and events. But if you’re going to influence people, don’t you think you should do it with their consent?’

The secretary pursed her lips. ‘You’re better off here than you would be running loose in the streets.’

‘Maybe,’ Pryn said. ‘Probably, even. But still, nobody seems to want to tell me why I’m here.’

‘Rylla — Madame Keyne — has simply…taken an interest in you.’

‘But her interest is so confusing,’ Pryn persisted. ‘Why me in particular? And why does she keep that frightening creature downstairs in her employ? Why are you here…?’

Toying with the scarf at her waist, Radiant Jade suddenly stood and began to pace the room, as though she were the one trapped — the door still stood wide. ‘Me? Why am I here? But I shouldn’t be!’ As she paced, she twisted the cloth harder. ‘I should be anywhere else! I should be in the forests, spearing hyenas. I should be in the mountains, hurtling onto the backs of winged worms to soar above the peaks. I should be on the sea, in a skiff, reaching to grasp the flying fish in my naked fingers. I should be — ’ She stopped suddenly and looked down — ‘in some little barbarian village, like the one where I was born, ignorant, dirty, illiterate…not in this great, confining city, in this great, confining house.’

Pryn wondered if she should mention her own dragon riding, or the part it had played in bringing her here. What she finally said was: ‘Why don’t you leave?’

Jade looked up.

‘You say the other servants have gone.’

‘With me — ’ the secretary blinked — ‘it’s different. Rylla needs me.’ The scarf-wringing ceased. ‘She can’t get along without me. Sometimes I want to leave…’

Pryn felt a kind of sympathy with the distress of this woman whom she had watched earlier work and smile. But she also felt an equal frustration before that distress’s indecipherable motive, a motive that insisted on remaining as hidden as the one behind Pryn’s own presence. ‘How long have you been here?’ Pryn asked.

‘Oh, forever…Many years — three years.’ Jade sighed. ‘But it seems like forever.’

‘Did Madame Keyne…take an interest in you?’

Jade looked surprised. ‘I never thought of it in those terms before. But you might say she did. Yes, you might very well say just that.’

‘Did she take an interest in the Wild Ini too?’ Pryn asked eagerly, for she thought she detected the beginnings of a pattern.

‘An interest?’ From surprise, the secretary’s face moved to total astonishment. ‘In the little Viper? I think she rather hates her and would like to see her dead!’

‘But hasn’t Madame Keyne hired her?’

Jade narrowed her eyes. ‘Yes.’ She looked down at her lap. ‘At last. Or at any rate, she has promised to — today. But it’s only because you’re here that she’s consented.’ Jade blinked at her hands.

While she was waiting, Pryn put the last of the hard peach back on the tray, picked up a pear and bit it. It was even harder.

Pryn put the pear down, moved the tray of fruit to the window’s side, turned, and sat on the sill. ‘How did you meet Madame Keyne? I mean, how did she first…take an interest?’

At the edge of the secretary’s lowered face, Pryn saw the expression change. When the face came up, it was smiling — which was not what Pryn had expected. ‘How did we meet?’ The fingers left the knees to mesh between them. Radiant Jade had very strong, reassuring hands, for all their current nervousness. ‘It wasn’t very complicated. When I left my little village, way in the south, I thought to come north to the city, because I had heard there was less chance for a lone woman to be taken slave here than in the smaller towns and holds.’

‘Did you ever see any slavers when you were traveling?’ Pryn asked. ‘I did. Three times.’

‘Yes — I saw slavers. And I hid by the side of the road till they passed.’

‘Me too!’ Outside, some cloud had pulled from the sun. Pryn felt her back warm; on the floor, both sides of her shadow, tiles reddened. ‘But how did you come here — I mean to this house?’

‘When I came to the city, the first job I took — ’ the secretary glanced behind her at the door, then looked back to Pryn — ‘was with a desert man who lived in the Spur and who brought in laundry from the rest of the city — and I and a dozen other barbarian women washed it. I hated the job and would take every opportunity to sneak off to the cedar groves — the place the Empress designated a public park two years ago. Once, when I was sitting on one of the benches, a woman — our cook here, Gya — came to talk to me and told me her mistress, who had occasionally seen me there, wished to make my acquaintance. I went with her — and met Madame Keyne. She took me to a tavern, I remember, on the waterfront; and in the curtained alcove for women at the back she bought me many mugs of cider. I thought it all terribly elegant at the time. Then she invited me to dine with her, here at her home, the same evening. When she first learned I was a laundress, she promised to give me all her laundry to do — then she found out I could read and write.’ Radiant Jade sat back and laughed. ‘So she made me her secretary — and for the next six months sent her laundry to the man in the Spur. She said she felt guilty for taking me away, though few of his girls ever worked for him more than two months anyway.’

Pryn laughed too. ‘Madame Keyne sounds like a very kind woman.’

‘Oh, she is!’ exclaimed Jade. ‘She is! Rylla is kindness itself! That’s why I feel so awful, so guilty! It isn’t fair — I tell myself that all the time. And yet there’s nothing to be done. There are some situations in which we are not our own masters. I think she knows that — I know she does. How could she not know it if she brought me here? If she brought you?’

These questions seemed to take things back into the discomfort and confusion from which, a moment ago, Pryn had thought they’d emerged. To insert a clear and comfortable fact, Pryn said: ‘I write — and read — too.’ She’d thought the statement a pleasantry, a sign of shared experience far less spectacular than their mutual experience of slavers, an emblem about which civility might flourish, if not a friendship grow. From Jade’s expression, however, Pryn realized that discomfort had intensified, if not purified.

‘You…!’

Fear joined the emotions struggling on Jade’s face, a fear Pryn herself had been fending off and which seemed equally divided between them.

‘You — ?’

Pryn stood up from the sill, then sat again when the secretary stood up from the bed.

Jade’s fingers jerked about, now toward her face (without touching it), now toward her hips (without touching there either). ‘You!’ She stepped unsteadily forward. ‘I should have known — the traitorous vixen! You can read — and write!’ She turned and fled the room.