Erin Evans - The God Catcher

It had taken Tennora several hours, but at last she'd managed to fall asleep, arguing with her dead parents in her own thoughts as she did. Awake too early, she was tired and a little edgy.

She is in dire need of your aid, Tennora wrote. Please visit at your earliest convenience. Regards, Tennora Hedare, sixth floor (shoulder). She sprinkled sand over the wet ink, shook it off, and left it to dry a moment.

"Who is that?" Nestrix asked. She pointed her chin at a painting that hung between the door and the comer, a portrait of a woman seated beside a table covered in lilies and vinestars. The woman was slim, with elaborately coiffed hair the color of honey. She wore a peach-colored dress that seemed as if it were made of many layers of spider's silk, and many strands of rosy pearls-all the rage a decade earlier. Her smile, considered alone, was demure, but the look in her eyes made her seem as if she were laughing at the absurdity of the scene.

"My mother," Tennora said. "My, er, dam."

Nestrix considered the painting. "She looks like a thief too."

Tennora pursed her lips and waited a breath before replying, "She was a noblewoman." But she studied the painting, wondering what it was that Nestrix saw in her mother that Tennora had never realized was there. What she'd seen hiding in Tennora.

"A thief in noblewoman's clothing." Nestrix tilted her head. "I suppose that's where you get that look."

"No," Tennora answered.

Looking back in the light of day, there were clues. Her mother had been careful to raise Tennora to survive in her father's family's world. To read their emotions and hide her own. To please them when she could. It became a sort of game, to show one face and hide the other. The Hedares were only a generation past being considered bright-coin interlopers, the ink just drying on their titles. It made them touchy.

She remembered how angry her mother had been when eight-year-old Tennora had shown her how she could make a coin disappear after one of the pantry jacks had shown her some sleight of hand-the beginnings of her love affair with magic. Liferna's face had gone red. She'd demanded to know where Tennora had learned the trick and said it wasn't kind of her to lie to people. Frightened, Tennora had dropped the coin from her sleeve and was in the midst of confessing all, when her father came in from the gardens wanting to know what was happening. Her father had laughed and soothed his wife until she laughed too, but the pantry jack was gone the next day.

Lord Mesial Hedare, a younger son and a decade older than his wife, seemed to have grown tired of those manners and that life. He had always known how to make Liferna laugh, but never how to make her stop worrying that his family was watching.

When Tennora left her aunt and uncle's house, she moved into the God Catcher and, for the first time in her young life, tried to unfasten the tight halter of control she'd put herself into.

And now, she thought, looking up at her mother's portrait, that Liferna's reasons were growing clear,

Tennora knew it had all been for her mother's pride and never for her daughter.

"Well," Nestrix said, "whatever you want to call it, you get your look from your dam. Are we going to find Blacklock now?"

"Yes," Tennora said with a certain sense of relief. She picked up the foolscap. "I wrote a note. My rent is due today, and I'll slip it in with the coins."

Nestrix gave her a dubious look. "That's all? I could do that myself."

"You could not," Tennora said. She opened a drawer in the kitchen and took out the bag she collected her rent in. She slipped the folded note inside and crossed over to the window. Hanging off the window frame-and each window frame along the God Catcher-was a small basket, the perfect size to hold the bag of coins.

"It's easier for her to fly down and get them," Tennora explained. "And that's the best way to get her attention."

Nestrix frowned. "How long will it take?"

"We'll have to wait and see," Tennora said. Aundra was fairly punctual about picking up payments. When she'd deal with the note was another matter-if it was as quickly as she found someone to clean the flue when it needed it, they should hear back by the next morning. Tennora looked up at the sun reflected dully on the slate-colored sphere.

"So until then… we sit here?" Nestrix said in a tone that clearly said she couldn't think of anything less appealing.

Tennora looked Nestrix over-her hair was greasy and tangled, her shift torn and filthy, her skin dull. And the smell… suffice it to say, Nestrix did not smell like a summer storm that morning.

"I have a better idea," Tennora said.

The only thing Tennora missed about living in her family's manor-if she were to be brutally honest-was the bathing chamber. There was no room in the God Catcher for such a space, no servants to stoke the fires and carry the water, no way to cloud the room with perfumed steam without her neighbors all smelling it and complaining.

She usually went to the bathhouse a song's walk away. Clean, reputable, and well run-but the Queen of Hearts bathhouse was also terribly public. Not the sort of place to take Nestrix.

Instead, Tennora borrowed a copper tub from her downstairs neighbor, a heartwarder at the temple of Sune. Tennora then went down to the square and whistled at a quartet of children all carrying buckets. She sent them to the fountain and went back upstairs to stir up the hearth.

Nestrix had another book in her lap. She sat with her chin in her hand and scowled at the text.

"This is ridiculous," she said. "They may as well have printed a children's tale."

"What are you looking at?"

Nestrix held up the book, one of Tennora's older, leather-bound tomes, secreted out of her father's library. There was no title on its cover, but she knew it by sight: A History of Draconic Interactions. "There is a section on the great game. Have you read it?"

"Probably," Tennora said, adding some chunks of wood to the fire. A chimney grate extended up through the lower apartments, and warm air was wafting up from it, making the coals hot. "But not recently. What's the problem?"

"It makes it sound as if every dragon were a taaldarax. And as if xorvintaal were a matter of trying to kill one another. What sort of game would it be if you stood to be killed by a bunch of idiotic wyrmlings every time you made a move?"

"Well… a rather frustrating one, I'd suppose."

"Frustrating and idiotic. There isn't a dragon on Toril stupid enough to play a game like this, which is why most of the things the book says are against the rules. You should tell the writer of this book he's an idiot."

Xorvintaal. Tennora couldn't remember exactly what the book said-only that it claimed that dragons played a sort of game of thrones, trying to outwit one another. The book wasn't the only one that made such a claim; she knew she'd seen mention of the great game elsewhere, and assertions that the game involved the governments of many nations, the clergy of many gods, and gangs and businesses alike. It seemed a bit far-fetched, she had always thought, and most books on the subject of dragons agreed-they were beasts driven by simple desires.

But then there was Nestrix.

"Did you play this game?" she asked Nestrix.

"It is not to my taste," Nestrix said, dropping her eyes to the book again. "But my dam's sire, Chendarixanath, was quite the taaldarax. Very good at what he did. He wanted to bring me under his wing, but I wasn't interested. If I want something, I'd rather take it than have a minion's minion trick some idiot's idiot."

Tennora started to ask what exactly Nestrix's grandfather had been so good at and what xorvintaal had to do with minions and idiots, but Nestrix had sunk back into the book and was no longer listening. Tennora rolled her eyes and hurried back downstairs to collect the water.