Glass Swallow (11 page)

As Rain had not lost a job but just needed to explain her situation, she decided she must be in the wrong place. She tried to attract the attention of the men at the desk and finally caught the eye of the one nearest her—the junior clerk.

‘Yes?’ he asked.

She cautiously approached. ‘Am I in right office?’

He raised an eyebrow.

‘I need help go home, not job.’

The clerk turned to the white-haired senior official, an incredulous smile on his lips. ‘Sir, she doesn’t think she needs a job. She thinks we hand out free tickets to return people to their homes.’

The man did not crack a smile. ‘Everyone works in Rolvint,’ he said, not even bothering to look up at her. ‘There are no free rides: you earn them. Sit down, girl, or I’ll have you thrown out of the city.’

Rain quickly returned to her seat, scared of finding herself back on the bandit-infested roads again. More people joined the queue below Rain and by nightfall she was near the front. Afraid she would lose her place if she went in search of a privy or a drink of water, she tried to ignore her body’s needs.

The cook exited with a blue stick, a smile back on her drawn face.

‘Next!’ called the senior official. He looked up. ‘Oh yes, the foreigner who doesn’t want to work. Do you speak Magharnan?’

‘A little,’ admitted Rain standing before the desk.

He tutted. ‘Not enough I warrant to hold down a proper job. What is your profession?’

‘I came with my betrothed. We are glassmakers. We came here with Ambassador Lintir but Jettan killed. On road.’

The official was not interested in her story. He had rules to apply and was not going to budge from following them even by a foreign presence in the system. ‘Where is your man?’

‘I think … I think he is dead too. With ambassador.’ She wanted to say so much more—about the commission, the contract, her need to return home, but could not find the words.

He tutted again, making it sound as if this were her fault. ‘He was a glassmaker; so what are you? You look very young. How old?’

‘Fifteen.’

‘Ah, that’s better. You do not break the law by not having a profession then. Until you reach eighteen, it is thought reasonable to be unassigned.’ He scanned a list. ‘We have a space in the retraining facility for servants.’

‘I want to be with glassmakers. My betrothed had a contract—’

He cut her off. ‘But that died with him. Ambassador Lintir’s grieving family will not want to be disturbed at this time and our glassmakers will doubtless be pleased to find the commission will now come to them.’

The third clerk snorted. ‘Jobs for Magharnans, not outsiders, as it should be. You won’t find a welcome there, lass.’

‘We do not need another glassmaker—too many of them,’ said the senior official coldly. ‘Yellow, do you think, gentlemen?’ He looked to his colleagues. ‘Strictly speaking, seeing that she is foreign, we have no reason to assist her, but the Master would want us to show charity.’

The junior clerk reached for a pile of sticks in front of him. ‘Yes, she’s too young to be made an outlaw and not skilled enough for a blue employment permit: it’ll have to be yellow.’

He held out the stick for Rain to take.

‘What do I do with this?’ she asked, realizing with a hollow feeling that this was all the help they were going to give her.

‘Take it to the matron at the House of the Indigent on Harrow Street. Move along.’

Rain found herself on the pavement outside the office. Stupid men, stupid system: why would no one listen to her? All she needed was help to get home. She’d pay them back eventually. But it appeared that the Magharnans were just not interested in solutions outside their normal methods. She looked down at the yellow stick: she was left with only one option if she wanted shelter.

After a bewildering time asking directions from curious bystanders, Rain found the right door on Harrow Street and knocked. It opened a crack.

‘Too late: we don’t take anyone after sunset.’ A hand pointed to a large sign on the wall that listed the rules of the house.

Rain held out the yellow stick to the unseen gatekeeper. ‘I was told to come here. They gave me this.’

‘Come back tomorrow.’ The door snapped shut.

Rain couldn’t believe it: after waiting for hours, she wasn’t going to be let in and it was already dark. Rolvint had to be the most unfriendly city ever! She wondered briefly if she should try and find the falcon man. He’d mentioned that he lived somewhere called the graveyard district—but she did not relish the idea of going to a cemetery now. It sounded scary. But then, sleeping rough in a strange city was frightening too.

She had no choice. Not being able to speak the language was a handicap: she couldn’t explain herself, didn’t know whom to trust, had no understanding of how the city worked. All she could do was find a safe corner and bed down, hoping that the House of the Indigent would let her in at dawn.

The streets were nearly deserted when she turned to seek a place for the night. The district looked poor, home to the lowest workers in the city with one-roomed houses and badly maintained streets. The smell was foul: rubbish lay in piles on any patch of unclaimed land. Rats flitted among the scraps, discouraging her from lingering. She walked on into an area of larger houses, their richer inhabitants signalled by the ornamentation around the doors and windows. She found a darkened house that had a deep porch with a pillar to hide behind. She crammed herself into the small space and wrapped her arms around her knees. Nervous, she could not sleep, but spent the hours listening to every sound: the voices in a neighbouring house, a drunken man singing on his way home, the wind in the tree that shaded the street corner. She was freezing: Rolvint had a harsher climate than Tigral; summers hotter, winters colder. The night felt damp and chill. Unable to stop her shivers, she hunched miserably in her haven, praying that no one would spot her and turf her out. In the small hours, sleep finally claimed her.

She awoke next morning when a bucket of water was upended over her head.

‘Get off my doorstep!’ screeched a servant, shaking her fist at the vagrant. ‘Now I’ll have to scrub it clean before my master can go outside.’

Gulping with shock, Rain scrambled to her feet, the yellow stick still clutched in her fist.

‘Get lost! Scat!’ yelled the woman, prodding her with a broom as if she was a dangerous beast she feared to touch.

Rain wiped the water from her eyes, still disorientated by this rude awakening. The servant took a step back.

‘You’re a fey?’ the woman asked, clutching at her throat in fright.

Rain did not understand the question but knew it was well past time to leave.

‘Sorry, fey lady,’ the servant whispered, circling her breast. ‘Please, do not make the milk go sour because I threw water at you. I always leave a dish out for your folk and follow the old customs.’

Rain shook her head, annoyed by her inability to follow what people were saying to her.

The woman dashed inside, muttering to herself. With a sigh, Rain started off back towards the House of the Indigent only to hear a voice calling behind her.

‘A moment, fey lady.’

She turned. The servant thrust a round of bread in her hand. ‘Here, take this. It’s fresh. Don’t punish my house for my thoughtless actions, please!’

Rain’s stomach grumbled: she’d not eaten since before the bandit attack. ‘Thank you.’

The servant’s generosity lifted her spirits a little. Rain still felt tired, but with a drink from a street corner fountain, she was ready to meet the new day. Until she had sorted out a way home, she would see what the Magharnan system could do for her. At least it didn’t appear that she would starve. And there
had
to be a way for her to earn enough for the passage to Tigral; she just had to find it.

The door to the House of the Indigent stood open this morning. Rain passed over her yellow stick and was admitted with no more delays. It was a stern-looking building, stone whitewashed, grass clipped, even the shrubs were teased into regimented geometric shapes. A grumpy girl in a grey dress and apron showed her the way to the office where yet another queue waited. Resigned now to Rolvint bureaucracy, Rain joined the end of the line.

‘Name?’ asked the matron behind the desk, looking over a pair of steel-rimmed spectacles at Rain.

Rain gave her replies as she had the day before.

‘In my house, you must always say “thank the Master” every time you answer a question as from now on you owe everything to him.’

Rain resisted a comment on the absurdity of such a practice, guessing it would get her expelled from the room quicker than a slippery eel through a fisherman’s fingers.

‘I will try to remember, mistress.’

The woman sat back for a moment, considering her latest charge. ‘Your appearance is odd. What did you do to your hair?’

‘It is not strange where I come from,’ Rain explained patiently, then remembered to add ‘thank the Master’.

The woman was singularly unimpressed to hear Rain was a foreigner, seeing that fact only as a problem for her institution.

‘You’ll have to keep your hair covered. Your employers won’t like it. What with your eyes, the superstitious will be afraid of you and that won’t do. Keep them lowered at all times.’ The matron ran her finger down a list in front of her. ‘I have a training position available in the kitchens that feed the builders working on the summer palace. Basic duties: cleaning, carrying water. You’ll report to the cook each morning at seven and return here for curfew at seven in the evening.’

‘What is the pay?’ asked Rain, thinking of the cost of her journey home.

The woman snorted. ‘Pay? You are being given food and shelter by the Master’s generosity—that is your pay.’

‘Is there any way of earning money?’ Rain persisted.

‘Not till you are qualified.’

Rain didn’t know that word. ‘Qualified?’

‘It takes three years for a cook. By the time you are eighteen, you can hope for a small salary. Until then, you are reliant on us.’

There was clearly no point in arguing; she would have to look for another solution to her dilemma of getting home. Rain thanked the woman. ‘When do I start?’

‘Today. We have no idle hands in the House of Indigent. I will send someone with you to show you the way. First, you should change into our uniform. You cannot go around Rolvint dressed like a jettana. You are one of the lowest classes—not as low as a scavenger, of course, but still, you should not insult your betters by aping their ways.’

‘I’m sorry but I don’t understand what you just said.’

The woman rolled her eyes, having no patience with a foreigner and assuming Rain was slow-witted. ‘Change your clothes then work: is that clear enough?’

Rain nodded. ‘Yes, as clear as plain glass.’

The matron raised an imperious brow.

‘Thank the Master,’ added Rain reluctantly.

O
ver the cold months that followed, Peri often wondered what had happened to the little foreigner he had prematurely abandoned at the bath house. His enquiries via his father came to nothing. None of the glassmaker families knew of a girl from Holt; there was no discussion among the jettan class of the visitor. Peri had assumed that, as Rain was the first person from her country to visit the capital since the Holtish embassy the previous year, she would be treated as special. She should have been made a guest of one of the ambassador’s relatives, seeing that it had been Lintir who had brought her to Rolvint, but no one had heard anything. It was as if she had dropped off the face of the earth.

‘Perhaps she was a fey like you first thought,’ suggested Helgis one day when he caught his brother scanning the crowds outside the city gate waiting for market day to begin. Carters queued, arriving in heavily armed convoys to bring goods from the countryside. A huddle of fishmen stood to one side, baskets of fresh catch adding a tang to the air. Spring had just arrived in Magharna, and the roadsides were lush with new growth. Sunshine glinted on the distant rooftops of the palaces by the river, highlighting their delicate artistry, melting the last of the icicles dripping from the eaves. ‘I think she clicked her fingers and disappeared in a puff of smoke, back to join her folk.’