D Cornish - The Lamplighter

"Hullo to thee, Rossamund," he drawled, all charm and swagger. He leaned on Rossamund's shoulder and smiled knowingly at Threnody. He must have been down in the cell row cleaning up for eating and missed her petulant antics with the apple. "I see it's true.We have a fair Damsel of Callistia among us. Would you care to introduce her?"

"No, he would not," Threnody answered frostily. "Go away!"

Arabis' grin vanished. "Just making friendly," he retorted. He took his hand off Rossamund's shoulder immediately and straightened. "But you seem to know as much about being friendly as you do about witting." He clapped Rossamund on the back as he left. "Fair travels with that one, matey," he sneered, and made his way to the other table and immediately began to talk to the prentices there. Laughter rose, and these boys glanced over at Threnody in disapproval.

Rossamund glumly sucked at his food.

Threnody raised her chin a little higher-a telltale sign, he was beginning to notice, of impatience or anger or embarrassment.

"Did I hear your name a-right, lamp boy?" She was staring at him again. It seemed she needed someone to stare at right now.There was a vindictive gleam growing in her eye. "It can't really be so, can it? Rossamund?"

"Many folk find some fun in my name, though I don't," he replied evenly. "It is what it is and I am who I am."

Threnody had enough grace to drop her gaze.

For a while they ate in silence. Rossamund fretted vaguely and wished that, just for today, middens was not quite so long. Threnody poked at her food and screwed up her nose at the small beer.

"Too small by half," the girl muttered at the beverage.

"It certainly is that, miss. Much better down at the Harefoot Dig," Rossamund returned, happy to punctuate the awkwardness.

"Anything anywhere is better than here." Her face was tight and unhappy.

Rossamund could not be quiet in the face of such misery. "I don't understand. If all this makes you so wretched, why join us?" he asked.

"You're an impertinent little lamp boy, aren't you?" She sniffed loftily. "Since you inquire, I joined because I wanted to, why else?"

"Why not stay as a calendar?" Rossamund could not reckon such a thing. Calendars were mystical, romantic figures who resisted the powerful and helped the destitute. They confronted monsters whenever these threatened and offered help wherever folk floundered. The way of a calendar was a goodly adventurous life if ever one existed: making life better, not just mindlessly destroying monsters for pay like Europe or the other pugnators.

"If you knew my mother…," she replied thickly, almost to herself. "If you, too, were pinned in the never-relaxing clutch of Marchessa Syntyche, the Lady Vey, August of the Right of the Pacific Dove, then you would understand. No choices. No schemes of your own."

"But you did have a choice." He could not help himself. "You chose to come to Winstermill and be a lighter."

Taken aback, the girl pursed her lips. "That was a rare lapse of my mother's. For once she let her grip slip. Mother and I are always at odds. I go left, she goes right. I say black, she says white. If I want something one way, she will always have it the other. If I was ever truly listened to-if what I wanted counted, if she had ever faltered for a moment and remembered that underneath that waspy bosom she has a heart and think me her daughter…" Threnody seethed-her haughty mien subsumed by anger. "And not just a tool to preserve her precious clave, then I might never have become a blighted lahzar!"

Skilly forgotten, Rossamund listened, motionless.

"I wanted to serve the Dove as a spendonette, blazing away at monsters with my pistols, not…" Threnody pressed her knuckles against her brow, wincing. "Not spend the rest of my life swallowing down cures to quell revolting organs that do little more than ache!"

He knew enough about wits to know what she meant. Cathar's Treacle, twice a day, else headaches, spasms or worse would beset her.

"But once transmogrification was forced on me-well, I chose the path of the lightning-throwing astrapecrith just like the Branden Rose-"

Rossamund's attention pricked at the mention of Europe by her more famous title, but he did not interrupt the talk bubbling out of the girl prentice like froth from an over-shaken beer bung.

"— But oh no! Dear Mother was not having that! I was ordered to become a wit because the clave needed wits, and a good calendar always obeys her august. I would never have managed so long but for Dolours."

Middens was nearing its end. Other prentices were rising and depositing their pannikins, mess-kids and tankards on a broad palette for cleaning.

"Finally I made it all so terrible at home that Mother could bear me no longer. She's agreed to this," she said, looking about to show the mess hall and all the prentices, "only because it has made her life simpler, not through any care for me. And here I can become a pistoleer. Not quite the good calendar spendonette I wished for, but…" She shrugged, all angst submerged with baffling alacrity. "Well, you have my life's tale before you, so return in kind: why have you taken up with the lampsmen?"

Though it was time to leave, Rossamund paused in thought. "Because I had no choice either; because it was this or be cooped in the foundlingery forever. I'm a book child, and we get what we're given and say thank you, like it or no."

"How little we have in common then." Threnody tipped her plate, skilly and all, into the pail just meant for the slops. The attack on the calendars' carriage so close to Winstermill had caused no small stir among the lighters. It was universally agreed that the six fusil-bearing lads should all be marked with a cruorpunxis for their part. It would be a small drawing of a drip of blood, as was commonly awarded when a prentice had a hand in the slaying of a monster but the actual killer was not clear. In the bosom of many a hardened campaigner there rose too a genuine, almost paternal concern for the batch of young lantern-sticks. Such was this concern, it prompted the Lamplighter-Marshal to cancel the prentice-watch and move drills and tutelage normally conducted in the fields below Winstermill back within the fortress walls. Consequently, that afternoon, targets-the handling, firing, cleaning and right use of a fusil-was to be held in a long foyer of dark, aromatic wood called the Toxothanon in the westernmost end of the Low Gutter below the beautiful Hall of Pageants.

"Right, lads! Stand by twos at your lane!" Benedict, the Under-Sergeant-of-Prentices, stood behind the gaggle of lantern-sticks. "After two months of this I am expecting good aim and handy reloading." To those of Rossamund's watch he said, "As for you lads who prevailed last night, I am expecting to be dazzled."

Standing in her own firing lane beside Rossamund, Threnody took to the fusil with elegant aplomb, handling her firelock with an accomplishment equal to all but the frankest shot among the prentices. Much to Arabis' wry dismay, almost as many of Threnody's shots as his own found the center bull in the targets fixed to the great bales of straw at the farther end of the lanes. Benedict twice acknowledged her wicked aim and went as far as to say, "You might make yourself useful yet, young lady." Her self-satisfaction was so clear, Threnody almost glowed.

Unfortunately Rossamund, who was an indifferent shot at best, had the worst day at targets yet, missing many of his shots entirely, one ball lodging itself in a low crossing roof beam. His woeful aim did not, of course, escape the keen observation of the under-sergeant.

"Master Bookchild! For shame, not one solitary ball true, sir. Sergeant Grindrod would say your fusil work is a clattering, gaffing embarrassment and a wanton waste of powder. One night's pots-and-pans for you. Let's hope some good hours scrubbing will teach your arms to hold a franker aim."