Jay Lake - Green

When things went well, I almost enjoyed myself. There is pleasure in painting, or reading a history, or making the numbers move to your command. Even today, I have not lost appreciation of those gifts.

Still, the hard hand was close behind. Except in the matter of the Dancing Mistress, I was watched as carefully as any virgin princess in a children’s tale. None of these women owed me love, or even respect. None of them thought of me as anything but a difficult task representing a risk of terrible failure.

Only the Dancing Mistress took me for who and what I was. Not what I had been-that was hidden to all but Federo, and he would never speak of it-but who the Girl was inside the forging they made of me.

To be fair, Mistress Tirelle in her strange way saw the reality of who I was. Somehow the fact that she could know something of my inner self, and still treat me with cruel caprice, was all the more hurtful.

I kept my imaginary belled silk under the invisible needle. My stories of the first days of life faded over time to mere images, though still sorted over in my mind as carefully as any box of prints brought to me by Mistress Danae or Mistress Ellera. The old words were there, but they seemed fewer and fewer with each passing season, slipping away in favor of the Petraean speech and all the knowledge that tongue brought flowing like a river through the days of my life.

One day I could not remember my name. I had been “Girl” for so long, and I had not heard my name since the first seasons of my life. This may seem incredible, but by then I had been in the Pomegranate Court for more than six years. No one had ever addressed me as anything but Girl. My true name, the secret name of my birth, I had not even whispered to myself in the quiet hours when I remembered my oldest stories.

Only the ox Endurance remained, his name as strong as he was. The other images from those first days-my grandmother and the bells of her funeral, the frogs in the ditches-they were strong, too. But both the words and names slipped away like sand beneath a tide.

I cried that night, so hard, the sound slipped from my mouth until I overheard Mistress Tirelle stirring. She made such noise that I found a way to stop. After a while, I realized her groaning had been purposeful. She had spared me another beating to leave me to my tears.

Was that a form of love?

The question made me cry all over again, this time in shuddering silence.

Over time, we began to meet people on the underground runs. Where the rooftop wanderers remained silent and separate as the distant stars, a different etiquette prevailed beneath the stones. When you crossed a path down Below, you paused a moment to let the other examine you.

“This is how we mark foes,” the Dancing Mistress explained after one such passage. “Someone who does not pause is as good as raising a blade to you. The beasts and those lost to reason will not stop, and so you know them dangerous.”

“What of friends?”

“There are no friends beneath the stones.”

“Not even us?”

“That is for you to decide, Girl. I am who I am to you.”

That remark I turned over in my head a long while.

Some months thereafter, the Dancing Mistress began to speak at certain of these meetings. “Mother Iron,” she whispered one night.

The other nodded. She was a short woman, only a silhouette to my view, though her eyes gleamed with the faintest reflection of the coldfire in my hand. She had a misshaping about her, though I could not say if it was clothing, armor, or a strangeness of her body.

“This is my student,” the Dancing Mistress said.

Mother Iron answered in words I did not understand. Her voice came from a deep place, as if she were much taller than she looked, with a chest the size of a horse-I had just then been studying more of the science of sounds and had acquired some sense of how they were made.

The Dancing Mistress answered in the same words. They both nodded, and Mother Iron stepped around us. She did not smell right at all, more like the bottom of the horse box beneath the leather and metal of the bits than any person I had met.

I knew better than to question there, but later I asked, “Who was that?”

“Mother Iron.”

We were crouched behind the pomegranate tree as I took off my blacks.

“But what manner of person is she? What does she do there?”

“She is her own, and pursues her own affairs.”

A spirit then, or some small god perhaps. “You will not answer me in this.”

“No, Girl.” The Dancing Mistress smiled in the moonlight. “But I will tell you this: Anyone you meet Below whose name I give you is not an enemy.”

“No one is my friend.”

“Yes. But should you find trouble, Mother Iron might attend. If it suits her. She is unlikely to further your woes with purpose.”

“Thank you. I think.”

“You are welcome,” she said gravely.

There was one Below who was far more than a name heard once or twice a season. We first encountered him under the warmest night of the year, in the middle of the passage of the weak northern summer.

The Dancing Mistress had me doing falls in the dark those months. She would bid me stand in someplace fairly safe, then slip away with my coldfire in her hand. A minute or two later, I would hear her click her tongue, one click for each yard-length of the drop. I needed to summon the courage to step forward, find the edge, and jump blind.

The first time we tried that, with a fall of less than three feet, I was terrified. With practice, though it never became easy, the discipline grew reasonable. I learned how to trust a partner, and I learned how to fall in the dark.

“You can already find walls by listening for echoes,” she told me. “We will work on you judging the depths the same way, once you know how to drop in safety.”

A strange exercise, but I’d long since realized her greatest purpose lay in pushing me past my own limits, time after time.

I stood on a balcony, a low rail a foot before me, though I knew that only from experience. The Dancing Mistress clicked four times. A fall of about twelve feet. That would require a forward tuck with a full roll, before I landed four points down. No need for the bone shock of striking on two feet when hands could ease the blow. The shoes and gloves spared my skin on these exercises, but I could twist a joint or jam a forearm or leg easily enough. My size would help avoid this, while I was still young.

As I was bending for my leap, someone touched my shoulder. I yelped and dropped. The stone balustrade trapped me immediately. My attacker bent close.

I caught him in a wide-handed slap. He backed away with a sharply indrawn breath. I could hear the soft noises of the Dancing Mistress hurrying to my aid. A moment later, the gleam of coldfire appeared.

“Ho,” she said softly.

“Unnh…” The stranger’s voice was muffled. I realized he had a hand on his face, and that he was in fact male. “You boke my node!”

“This is the girl, Septio. Girl, this is Septio.”

“Sir,” I said cautiously. My tongue was tied with a strange fear. I found my feet, but kept the drop behind me close in mind. If they came to blows, or even sharp argument, I’d go over into the twelve feet of darkness to be out of his reach and away from whatever violence this newcomer and my Dancing Mistress might commit together.

“I didn’t bead to scare you.” His voice was still strange. I scented a new metal-salty tang. So that’s how it sounds when a man’s nose fills with blood, I thought.

The Dancing Mistress chuckled. “Septio is a Keeper of the Ways.”

I heard it as a title. Titles had been much discussed lately in the Pomegranate Court. I wanted to ask for whom, and of what ways, but I chose silence. In my experience, others often would fill it.