Beasts of Tabat (12 page)

I do that now as I pass along Salt Way. Part of a previous century’s civic beautification efforts, fountains are spaced at each crossroads along the broad street. A stone effigy of one of Tabat’s long past notables watches over each of them. I pass the noseless effigy of Sparkfinger Jack. Someone’s chosen to use him for politicking, which strikes me as ill-omened. Still, there in the statue’s hands is a placard advertising a Jateigarkist rally next purple moon.

I’ll be glad when the elections are over and their silliness no longer crowds the streets.

By the time I step off Salt to find the top landing of the Tumbril Stair I’ve flipped ten coins into fountain basins. I hurry down the steps. Closer to the harbor, the damp air smells of tar smoke and salt. Seagulls arc like inverse pendulums above me. An air Sylph rides the winds among them, wings gleaming like mica. The city attracts vermin and scavengers of all sorts.

That is what I want to talk to Leonoa about.

But Glyndia opens the warehouse door.

“She’s gone to buy brushes,” she says without preamble. Then, like an afterthought, “You can come up and wait for her if you wish.”

Stairs creak beneath us as we ascend. From behind, all that is visible of Glyndia is the satin fall of her wings, her dark hair a shadowy wick to the burning gold.

Sunlight fills the studio, the curtains thrown wide. The light is why Leonoa rents this place. Its brilliance mutes the metallic splendor of Glyndia’s wings. She wears a blue silk dress with intricate ruching across her chest, expensively tailored.

“I do not drink chal, but I can offer you barley tea,” she says.

I shake my head. “When do you think she will return? How long ago did she leave?”

“Just moments.” Glyndia stands at the fireside, refilling her mug from the steaming kettle. Despite the seeming frailty of her mechanical limbs, they are strong. The swan-woman might prove a formidable opponent in the ring.

Then I realize what Glyndia has said. She didn’t mention that I might have been able to catch up with the slower-walking Leonoa. She deliberately waited until it was far too late.

My jaw tightens. Is this the way of it then?

“I’ve changed my mind, I needn’t wait,” I say. “Tell Leonoa I called.”

Glyndia shrugs. “Suit yourself.”

She doesn’t bother to see me down the stairs.

* * *

That evening, I build the fire high in my room to keep out the chill that creeps in through the window glass. The wood snaps and pops, sending up sparks, and the smell of burning sap makes me think of summer. For a moment, I think it would be nice to be warm.

I crawl into my bed, burrow down under mounds of feather comforters, feel their soft embrace like an undemanding lover’s. I take the package that Adelina has given me and set it on my lap as I prop myself back against the clean white pillow, smelling the scent that Abernia sprinkles on linen before she sets an iron to it.

I don’t like to read much, as a rule. It isn’t a particularly useful skill. There are too many things you can’t learn from a book, from how to birth a basilisk whose eggs are stopped (one of the most delicate arts Jolietta taught me) to how to deflect a dagger blow. And things in books aren’t true sometimes, something which I know better than most.

I don’t usually read what she’s written about me, actually. I just give them back and say I’ve no complaints. But lately there’s been so many people urging me to step down, so many people who feel I should not be Champion of Tabat, that I start to wonder where they are getting the idea. Surely not from the penny-wides that Adelina has written?

When I open the bundle that contains the proof, I find not one but two books there. The second is bound in cheap red cardboard. There’s a note inside it from Adelina that reads only,
I thought this would interest you.

It’s the same book Leonoa tried to press on me. I can understand why my cousin and friend think this would interest me, that I might find something of myself in its pages, but I don’t want to read about Jolietta. I need no reminder to help me summon up her face in my mind, the wrinkle that sat between her eyes, the narrow nose, the scar on her temple that I never asked about.

I feel no need to return to Piper Hill, even in memory. My life didn’t truly begin until I reached the Brides of Steel.

I put the red bound book beside me. It can go on a shelf, and if Adelina asks after it I will tell her that I haven’t had the time and imply that it is there to be read, even though I have no intention of ever opening its pages.

It does cross my mind to wonder which of Jolietta’s creatures has put these words down. Perhaps one of the Minotaurs, in which case I
know
I do not wish to read it; I do not want to see my aunt through their loving, loyal eyes, which never marked her cruelty because it never fell on them. But satisfying that itch is not sufficient to prod me into what I know I will not like, what I fear will bring me nightmares.

Is this cowardly of me? But I am Bella Kanto. I am no coward. I simply do not have the time nor the inclination. Instead I pick up the proof and flip through it, not reading carefully and finding mistakes in the way that Adelina would wish, but simply letting the words flow over me, comforting in the picture they paint of me, my daring, my boldness, my heroism.

***

Chapter Eleven

Candy

The Fairies are quarrelsome today. I’ve seen them do this in preparation for driving out one of their members, but I can’t tell which of them in all the buzz and swoop of their wings. I’d planned on letting them take shelter in my room tonight, for I can tell it will be bitter cold, but not in this mood. They’ll make noise, create disturbance, and Abernia will be angry for days.

I put the handful of candies, plucked from a bowl at the castle, out on the ledge, lining them up one by one. The Fairies watch but make no move to come get them. That makes me uneasy. Tamed creatures don’t lose their training unless someone is doing something to them.

Yellow-hair hangs in the air watching me, but it’s not till I step back from the sill that she advances, dives to seize a candy, a ball of amber sugar as big as her head. As though she’s emboldened them, the rest come in turn. I try to see which of them might be looking more bedraggled than the others, but I can see little difference.

Jolietta kept chickens. There you’d see it. One more miserable than the rest, pecked and sat upon, with ragged bald patches. Animals have no patience for the weak, nor do Beasts. Is one of the Fairies ailing, perhaps? It seems to me there are fewer than usual. When they’ve taken their candies, I go back to the window, lean out despite the cold wind, and peer into the boughs. There, that little shape, is that a huddled Fairy? Snowflakes whirl, obscuring the sight.

What can I do? I cannot catch it. No one ever caught a Fairy except with lure or net. I don’t have the latter and I don’t want to alarm the rest of them. Baffled, I pull my head back in.

It’s only a Fairy, even if I’ve come to think of it as
my
Fairy. Only a creature. There are others. There are always others.

That’s how Jolietta taught me to think of them.

* * *

“It is necessary,” Jolietta said. Even as she lectured me, Jolietta kept at her work, checking and trimming a heavy hoof. “There are many practicalities in life that we would prefer not to exist. I am not fond of defecation, for example, and yet I do so on a daily basis.”

I tried to wrench my mind away from a vision of Jolietta’s sturdy body on a water pot. “It’s not the same,” I said. “You won’t die if you refrain from doing it.”

“Some might if I don’t. A gentled Beast is less likely to lash out at its trainers, or worse, at an audience member. I work with dangerous creatures, Bella—have you seen the Undine’s teeth? The Gryphon’s beak?” She slapped the heavy flank, investigating the musculature, which twitched as the goat tail twitched.

“They talk. Surely that means they have souls.”

“So do parrots. Should all bird cages be emptied for their sake?”

“Yes!”

My aunt snorted, a choked out laugh that never failed to leave me feeling small and embarrassed. “Childish, romantic notions!” She ran a callused hand through the Satyr’s hair, pulling his face down and back to check his teeth with the other hand. “This fellow, now, knows what biting would bring, don’t you, my boy?”

The Satyr nodded. Sweat beaded the thin features drawn in terror and starvation.

And even with the quickness of that nod, with the docile stance as Jolietta examined and discussed him in intimate detail before her apprentice, an hour later Jolietta drugged and castrated him while I stared down from the sliver of a window of the attic into which I’d been locked, kicking and screaming.

Phillip, the only Centaur Jolietta kept rather than trading, opened the door finally. I tried to push past him, tried to get to the boy, but his hand closed on my shoulder, inexorable in its strength. Like the boy outside, he was half horse, half man, but unlike the boy, he was rippled with muscle, his handsome face placid and unperturbed.

“She doesn’t have the right!” I said.

“The Duke’s Chorus wants a strong young soprano,” he said. “They paid for his siring, his bearing—everything has led him to that path.” He studied me. “Why are you so upset? You’ve seen geldings before.”

I turned away from his look, went back to the window. Outside a trio of crows circled past the window, shrieking protest while the rain sluiced down. There was blood on the cobblestones, and Jolietta was using a hot iron to staunch the bleeding.

The boy’s scream pulled a sound from my throat.

Phillip’s hand closed on my shoulder. “You didn’t do anything with him, did you?”

“Do anything?” I said. Phillip’s fingers bit into my shoulder. There were old bruises there—Jolietta had shaken me for stubbornness only a few days ago. I knew without looking that they were re-purpling. “What do you mean?”

“You know very well what I mean, Bella Kanto! Did you kiss him, touch him? Your aunt would have more than his balls in such a case, and you know that!”

“She doesn’t know anything!” I pulled away, or tried to at any rate. “Phillip, you won’t tell her, and neither will I, so what’s the harm?”

He gestured outside where Brutus and Caesar were pulling the Satyr to his feet. “He could tell her. Or any Beast with an inkling of suspicion wanting to curry favor or harm you.” He groaned. “Why would you do such a thing?”

“I didn’t!” I protested. “Or, just a little, anyhow.” I remembered the feel of his eager fingers on my breast, the graze of his palm across the nipple, soft and sensitive as a new deer’s horns, like an opening of the floodgates of my body. Even remembering I felt that thrill deep inside.

Phillip shook me once, hard, then shoved me away. “This is not the place or time!”

I crouched, weeping, on the floor where I had fallen.

“Go tend the dragons and wash your face,” Phillip said. “Don’t let anyone see you mourning him—don’t go to him. No.” He forestalled my protest with an upraised hand. “You can’t afford to be seen talking to him. The Duke will be collecting him tomorrow at dawn, anyhow.”

I still tried to see him that night, but Phillip anticipated me and was waiting in the hallway.

“I have to say goodbye!” I hissed.

“It will do you no good. Jolietta has dosed him to unconsciousness. Go back to bed and dream your farewells, it will do just as much good.” His eyes were hard. “I don’t know why I bother protecting you from yourself, stupid girl.”

And why had he bothered? Did he think that in the end? I don’t know.

* * *

Far down past the florist on Greenslope Way is Ellora’s Daughter’s Candy Shop. That close to the College of Mages, plenty of shops and stores supply magical wares to the elite. Or things whose production is assisted or enhanced with magic; trinkets for the rich, like Glyndia’s arms or Leonoa’s clock.

Magic-animated, a swarm of candy soldiers jockey for possession of a marzipan chessboard in the shop window. Imagine what my Fairies would do to these tiny Gladiators. A crowd of street children watches wide-eyed, huddled with each other against the cold.

The candy-maker, Ilyia, is another dropout from the College, like the florist. These living confections are her specialty: butterflies with sugar-pane wings or elbow-long dragons that roar and breathe flame before falling apart into cake with green and scarlet frosting.

There’s always a mage or two in the shop, it seems, sneering at Iliya and her three busy apprentices while trying to hide unease at her success. The College likes to pretend that it doesn’t depend on money like the rest of us, that it only deals with higher things.

I’ve never liked the College, and they’ve never liked me that much either. You would think we would be bound by magic, but theirs is a different kind, a thing of calculations and ingredients. Mine is action, calling the Gods to me.

They take forever to pay their bills, Adelina tells me.

I step into the shop and an assault made of brewed burnt sugar, a thousand pleasant spices, fruit boiled in sticky syrup, and even scarce and precious chocolate.

I should like it, but it makes my heart race, my spine stiffen. I buy my bag of hard candies quickly and exit fast, despite the Human clerk’s attempt at flirtation.

Jolietta used hunger as a training tool. We’d supplement it however we could, knowing that if we were discovered eating illicit food we’d be punished for it and severely. Still, I’d go through the orchard picking up the windfalls. We were supposed to keep them for making cider, but a half-rotten apple was too much of a treat to resist sometimes.

On the rarest of occasions, when she needed to assail the particularly strong-willed, she assailed our resistance to tattling on each other with sugar. She kept trying to harden me towards the Beasts, to the things she said were necessary to train them. And each time she rewarded me with candy.

There’s a point when you’re growing so fast that you’d kill for something fat and rich. When your bones hurt because you’re growing, pulling on your internal reserves. I remember licking a finger dragged through the butter or across a pan’s bottom, rich with congealed fat and bits of browned meat.

She got her chocolate from someone down in the Southern Isles, a mage she’d known as a girl, who oversaw plantations of chocolate and sugar now. We’d know when a ship had come in: a crate would arrive, holding bottles of vanilla and thick bars of bittersweet chocolate, golden cones of muscavado sugar, and jugs of sticky, blaze-tongued rum.

I still can’t stand the taste of rum or the smell of it on someone’s breath.

I see the Sphinx from the College of Mages coming down the street. She nods to me as we pass one another. She spent some time herself at Jolietta’s, a half year while her temper was sweetened for the College. She and Phillip were good friends, but I never spoke to her. Something about her frightened me then.

Not so now, when I’m not afraid of anything. But she makes me uneasy still.

We’ve never spoken of Jolietta. Or what happened to Phillip.

* * *

Abernia knows not to bring me breakfast every fifth day. Lucya likes the instructors to eat with the students every once in a while, and today I’ll be doing that. Still, I pause in the kitchen to grab something from her tray, one of the pastries they call eyes, a hard-boiled egg wrapped in spiced dough. I eat it, scattering crumbs for the sparrows, as I jog down the Tumbril Stair towards the school.

The room where the students eat was once a ballroom: high ceilings and ornate frescoes on the wall, now faded with age, peeling and chipped, marked where students have decided their legacy should be preserved. The room somehow manages to retain its graceful proportions, built by Serafina Silvercloth, who Adelina tells me was an important historical figure. She’s admitted I’m one too. She wants to write a proper biography, something serious rather than all the lurid stories she and I (mostly she) have concocted.

I don’t want that. It would mean going back. Reliving moments I don’t want to relive. I won’t return to Jolietta, even in memory. She’s dead and gone, despite the handful who still mourn or worship her—or rather, her training secrets.

Ten long wooden tables, each packed with students. I sit where I always sit, amid a flight of giggling girls excited by my presence. All twelve girls are exemplary students, chosen to sit here as prize for something or another. Skye is among them. She’s too inexperienced to recognize how quickly she’s risen in the fighting ranks here. Agile in mind and body. Possessed of a determination that might match my own.

“The cook skimps on spices here,” the girl, the little Khentor, beside me complains. Like most of the girls here, she craves spicy, or overly sweet, or salty. Preferably a combination of all three.

I don’t reply, but beside her another chimes in, “We eat terribly! My mother says with this exorbitant tuition, the table should be better than the Pot King sets.”

Skye catches my eye before looking down at the grainy lumps on her plate and grimacing. She looks up again, thinking to make me laugh.

Displeasure stiffens my spine. What is it about this girl that eats at me so, lets her get under my skin like a burrowing insect?

And what does she know about hunger?

Skye is spoiled. The child of a minor Merchant house, she’s never known want. Never known hunger. Never known the sort of appetite that could make any breakfast palatable. And it’s not as though the Brides of Steel sets a bad plate, although the food is plain.

She’s upset by my reaction, I can tell. She doesn’t understand it. I find myself softening, shrugging at her. She’s not entirely satisfied, but ducks her head back towards her plate and begins to eat. She doesn’t complain about it anymore.

The windows here, multipaned, are not clean. I’d take a complaint about that more seriously than the cuisine. It’s just food, Jolietta used to tell us, and that woman could pinch a copper skiff until it shat gold.

I remember early mornings at Piper Hill. Jolietta ate fresh-baked bread, and sausages, and dragon eggs boiled in the shell, their pale pink yolks glistening on her plate. We had bowls of cooked oats with nothing to make it more palatable, unless you’d managed to snitch a lump of the sugar she kept for training.

If you worked outside, you could glean a little: wayside berries or a carrot stolen from the bunches you gathered. That was when I learned to chew anise seed, filling my mouth with flavor if nothing else.

Even now, when there’s plenty, when I know I’ll never starve again, I still fall into the habits of those old, bad days: I break a pastry in half to tuck part away in my pocket against later hunger, and measure my plate against others to make sure I’m getting my share. To eat to repletion remains my favorite luxury, and stinting myself for training fills me with resentment, even with no target for that emotion other than myself.

Adelina figured that out early. Rather than woo me with jewels or flowers, as so many had, she brought me edibles: a steaming pastry from the cart she’d passed on the way or a handful of spiced nuts from the seller down by the docks who makes the best in the city, crunchy and hot, with a bite of spice and sugar mingled. No other lover really figured that out, and I miss it still, moments of bed-play where I licked syrup from her breasts, sating one appetite while bringing another to full boil.

Skye steals a look at me as she takes another bite. Seeking my approval, her pretty face is uncertain. She wants to please me.