Jay Lake - Green

“So I am to understand the arts in order to assess the work of others.”

“Precisely.” She smiled, her delight in me as her pupil overcoming the power she preferred to hold above me. “If you know a Ramsport stitch from a pennythreaded seam at a glance, you can tell much about the person who stands before you.”

“I might know if they had a good tailor, or only a swiftly made copy.”

“Again, you have the right of it. Now turn this sleeve over and show me what we have missewn. There is an error, I assure you.”

In the course of that work, which was one of the most pleasant days I had passed with Mistress Leonie, I was able to free some silk for my purposes.

It took me many nights of effort to find the best way to thread a pomegranate seed. Little meshes such as I had used aboard Fortune’s Flight with the metal scraps were no good. Instead I employed a stolen needle for a drill and cut my way through each pip. I then sewed it to my silk.

The cloth was nothing like a proper swath of bells from home. It made no noise except when I folded it on itself. Then the beads clattered with a wooden whisper. Still, they were there, nubbins beneath my fingers that resumed the twice-broken count of my days.

I found a place in the ceiling of my sleeping room where beams met the wall. There I stored my silk, my seeds, and my little sewing kit. Nothing else here at the Pomegranate Court belonged to me, not even my own body. This was mine.

While I was plotting at my past, winter settled in outside with a blanket of frozen misery covering the stones and the ghostly branches of the pomegranate tree. I spent the cold nights abed as I clutched my silk close and ran my fingers over the pomegranate seeds. I hoarded enough of them to account for every day of my life, or as close as I could reckon. They were not bells, but their shapes beneath my fingertips reminded me of who I truly was, beyond the arts required of a lady of Copper Downs.

Would these count? Did they serve to mark my days and give my soul a path when it was needed? What would my grandmother have said? Endurance would never have minded. My father would not have known what to say-I am not sure the affairs of women had ever made much sense to him.

Which is why he sold you, a traitor thought whispered in my head. A boy he would have loved enough to keep.

I cried then, open tears for the first time in months here in this cold place. I did not think I was sobbing aloud, but in time Mistress Tirelle came to find me curled on the floor wrapped in misery.

“Girl,” she said, her voice soft with the huskiness of sleep. “What is that cloth clutched in your hand?”

She drove me out into the snowy courtyard with a wooden spindle. Mistress Tirelle seemed to have no regard for the marks of the beating this time. She almost shrieked her fury with each blow.

“You will let go of this obsession, you idiot trollop!”

“I’ll never let go!” I shouted in my words. My old words.

Her fist caught me on my chin to send me sprawling. My shift was already soaked with sweat and blood. The snow traded its cold through the damp, clinging fabric to chill my spine and ribs.

“So help me, if you speak that heathen trash one more time, I shall fork your tongue. The Factor will have you sold for a tavern wench, and you’ll be dead of men before you’re twenty.”

I tried to get away from her, but she swung the spindle again and caught me across the knees. The pain was stunning.

“You will burn that silk now, out here under the stars.”

“There is snow-” I began to answer, but Mistress Tirelle slapped me.

“You were not given leave to speak. Remain here.”

She waddled back to the porch and up the stairs. I sat shivering in the snow, swallowing my own blood and wishing I had a way to die.

The duck woman was back a minute or two later with one of the copper coal urns used to keep our sleeping rooms warm during a winter night. “Here,” she said. “Tear the silk in pieces and lay it within.”

Crying, I did so, or tried to. The silk was strong, as its kind of cloth always is. Mistress Tirelle found a knife within her swaddles and nicked the swath for me.

My tears stood near frozen on my face as I fed the strips to the glowing pit. She handed me a vial of oil. “Pour it over.”

I poured. The days of my life burned away as if they’d never been. The pomegranate seeds crackled in the heat, popping in little groups, taking the ghosts of what had been mine away with them.

May this burning reach my grandmother, I thought.

When the fire had died, Mistress Tirelle forced me to carry the urn to the upstairs kitchen. Even through a heavy pad, the metal reddened my hands and wrists. When we arrived, she rubbed oil of the palm on my burns with a rough, careless grip, then found a wide, low pot of the sort used for cooking small fowl atop the fire rather than within it.

She scooped the ashes of my silk and the burnt husks of pomegranate seeds from the warming urn to the stewpot. Some wine and some water followed, and a generous handful of salt. Mistress Tirelle mixed this awhile, watching it bubble until the mixture steamed.

The smell was awful.

Everything fit into a large serving bowl, which she set before me, saying, “Eat.”

The stew was a mass of grayish brown.

“Eat it,” she said, “and we are done. Do not eat it, and you are finished.”

I choked through the bitter stew of ashes and salt. I was eating my past. But I vowed that I would still have a future.

Later in my rooms, I sat in the bed and looked outside the door, which Mistress Tirelle had left standing open. In the shadows of the snow-heavy pomegranate, for a moment, I thought I saw a sleeping ox. I knew it could not possibly be so, but still the sight comforted me.

After my first year in the Pomegranate Court, new Mistresses entered as well, for other arts. Mistress Tirelle still worked with me in the kitchen. Mistress Leonie continued with the sewing and fabrics. Mistress Marga, who was much younger than the other two, came to show me the ways of a true and thorough cleaning of the building, northern style. Mistress Danae brought sheaves of paper and the wandering letters of Stone Coast writing to me, renewing what Federo had begun aboard Fortune’s Flight.

Each in their way demonstrated the mysteries of their art. Mistress Marga showed me how different oils were selected for varying woods, depending not only on the nature of the material itself, but also on how heavy the use and whether it met with direct sunlight. She spoke hours on starch, and why the proper stiffening of a cuff or collar could speak so thoroughly of a gentleman’s worth and station in the life of the city.

Mistress Sualix came to show me the secret magics of numbers, how they danced in lines and columns and arrays to give birth to new numbers. Her voice was close and quiet, and seemed careless of the discipline in which the others held me. To her, all the world was numbers. They moved ships and coin and the booted feet of swordsmen. She soon had me believing this, too, so that I thought I heard the measured breathing of the entire city in a small stack of coin.

Mistress Balnea came to instruct me on horses, dogs, and the rarer pets of which some women made their playpretties. She displayed tinted pictures rendered on stretched hides, and spoke of shoulders and stance and colors, and promised me a ride of my own in the spring. I did not see much point in mounting a pony only to circle the courtyard outside, but I did not tell the horsemistress this.

Music came, too, in the form of Mistress Maglia, a thin, vengeful woman who made Mistress Leonie’s malices seem like caresses. Her feelings were not personal, quite the opposite, but she made it most clear that I was nothing to her but another instrument. Her purpose was to fit my voice to the singing best regarded among these northern folk, and ensure that I knew a spinet from a harpsichord. I was still quite small when Mistress Maglia first began my training, and my voice had that angelic sweetness that very young children may possess. She warned me of the wreck I would become before I finished growing, then threatened to break me before my time if I did not mind every note and work exactly as she bade.