Jay Lake - Green

“I’m not afraid of the Factor like these other biddies,” she snapped. “You will be perfect, or you will be nothing, by my own hand.”

Two good things came from this new flood of Mistresses. One, my days were more varied and busy than when I had first arrived. This meant less time with Mistress Tirelle, and more distractions to occupy me. The world was already unfolding in a way I would never have imagined finding within a cage such as the Pomegranate Court. I felt guilty for comparing this favorably to spending my days swimming in ditches beneath the brassy sun.

Still, I was never beaten at home.

Two, with more Mistresses coming and going, I had an increasing sense that there was a world beyond these bluestone walls. Sounds rarely reached within the courts, and when they did, such noises were indistinct and meant little. The women who taught me came and went to other errands that implied they had responsibilities, schedules, things required of them. They often stopped to chatter. Care was taken to keep the words from my ears, but not always and not enough. Their bits of gossip told me of other girls being raised in other courts of the Factor’s house. These girls were all rivals to one another and to me-this sweetling was a genius of spice and flame in the kitchen, while that little flower inked calligraphy to match the very angels.

I was but a small child when such words first crossed my ears. They only strengthened my resolve to master everything before me. Someday I would walk free.

My bed was a great square so soft that I sometimes slept on the floor beside it. At night, when Mistress Tirelle had retired huffing and grumbling to her sleeping room, I would lie awake and tell myself stories in the language of my birth. I quickly came to realize how little I knew of my own tongue, compared with my increasing mastery of the rough, burred Petraean of these Stone Coast people. I could speak of fruits and spices and tailoring and the finer points of dogs only in the language of my captivity.

In my own language, I did not even have a word for dog. Endurance had been our only animal, besides a few scrawny jungle fowl scratching about Papa’s hut. I could chatter of turtles and snakes and biting flies, but still the world those words encompassed was small enough to crack my heart.

One day I had pieced together another few lines of Seventeen Lives of the Megatherians. Mistress Danae believed that a lady should always reach beyond herself. The words were gigantic, speaking of ideas I did not understand at that time. What does a small child know of transmigration and condonation? Still, the sounds were present in their tricksy, shifting letters. She guided me through them one slow, patient step at a time.

I rose from my lesson. My bladder was full, and it was not quite the hour for me to assist Mistress Tirelle in the upper kitchen. With her keen sense of cruelty in full flower, she had decreed we would work with soups for a while.

To my surprise, she waited just outside the door of the common room. Mistress Tirelle was not in the habit of standing about in the cold. Not without great need.

“Girl,” she said, then paused a moment. Such a lack of assurance was also unlike the duck woman. “A new Mistress is here for you to meet. She is… is not on my schedule, but Federo has sent her.” Eyes narrowing, Mistress Tirelle went on. “Be warned. This is not someone you should warm to as you have your other Mistresses.”

It was all I could do not to burst out laughing. Who had Mistress Tirelle thought I might have warmed to? That she should imagine such an idiotic thing was beyond credibility. I nodded instead, then looked down at my feet to hide the light undoubtedly dancing in my eyes.

“You believe that I jest.” She grabbed my ear, then thought the better of it even as I braced for the shock of pain. “This is something else, Girl. None of your little rebellions-no foreign talk, no thieving, no nothing. You get the urge to earn a beating, you just come tell me and I’ll knock the pores right off your skin. But do not play the monkey with this new Mistress.”

I nodded, still not meeting her eyes. Was this new Mistress a fearsome queen of arms? Or some mighty priestess with a hex in her milky eyes? Mistress Danae’s stories were full of such women, strange beyond measure and powerful in quiet ways that escaped the notice of most men.

Mistress Tirelle led me downstairs, through the receiving room and to the practice room. I followed with my head still bowed, my face hidden, until I was looking at my feet, streaked with dirt, standing on the straw padding of that place.

“Girl,” the duck woman said in a voice overloud with the pitch of fear, “this is the Dancing Mistress. Mistress-ma’am. This here’s our Girl. The candidate of the Pomegranate Court.”

“Thank you, Mistress Tirelle.” The Dancing Mistress’ voice was deeper and rougher than I had heard before among women. I raised my eyes and looked up at someone too tall, too thin, covered with fine fur, a tail whicking behind her. The tips of claws peeked through her oddly blunt, wide fingers.

Dangerous, monstrous even.

A shriek rose up within me. The Dancing Mistress touched her mouth with her finger in the simplest of shushing motions. Her gesture was so unexpected that it distracted my panic, as she must have known it would.

Not a monster, I realized, but someone who was far more different from me than these pale maggot people of the Stone Coast. Her ears were high on her skull, set back with small round flaps above them almost like a mouse. Her forehead was high, over water-pale violet eyes in a pointed face descending with a mouth split wide as mine or anyone else’s, rather than the fanged triangle of a beast. Her nose was flat, but also human rather than animal.

What had startled me most was the silver fur that covered all of her that I could see. People could look like anything, be many colors and sizes, but no person I had ever seen or heard of was covered with such fine and beautiful fur. Nor did people have tails that swept to the floor, as the Dancing Mistress most certainly did. At the same time she was clearly a person, clad in a wrap of blue cotton printed with a subtle flowered pattern. The clothing covered her bodice and hips, just as any lady would take care to do.

“I am a woman of my people,” she said quietly. “Your kind refer to us as pardines. I am come to live among the humans of Copper Downs and work for my own living. I teach girls and women, and a very few men, to dance, to walk with grace and balance. Sometimes they learn to move so fast and fall so far that they can avoid the sorts of pointed dangers that come driving out of the shadows of great houses.”

I stared. No one had ever before surprised me so much that they stole all the words from my mouth.

She stepped away from me and sat on the little wooden bench of the practice room. Mistress Tirelle had departed without me taking any note of her movements. “We shall require mirrors here, I am afraid.” The Dancing Mistress seemed regretful. “Now tell me of yourself, Girl.”

“I am to speak?” I almost choked on the words.

“Yes,” the Dancing Mistress answered. “You are to speak.”

“I… I am a girl of my people.” I took a deep breath. For the first time since being brought here, I would risk the truth. “Stolen away to live among the enslavers of Copper Downs and work toward my own freedom.”

Blows did not fall. Nor shouting, slaps, shoving. Instead a deep wave of melancholy passed through the Dancing Mistress’ angled violet eyes. She opened her arms, and I stepped into them-to be clasped by friendly hands for the first time in my recent memory.

I did not sob into her fur, though I mightily wished to do so. I just let her hold me a moment while my breathing steadied.