Jay Lake - Green

All that time between now and that end would be only a blink of an eye, once it had passed. There would be nothing for me. Nothing.

The moonlight was beautiful, but I resolved that I would not be a jewel. No Emerald, I, to be sold in the market of women at the Duke’s command.

I wondered what it was that Endurance would have done. The question was beyond pointless. The ox was property. Papa could drive him or slit his throat and have him dressed for meat.

They could slit my throat, too. Mistress Tirelle had made that threat to me often enough, though I suppose she meant more to notch my ears or fork my tongue when she said I could be cut and turned out.

What market is there for great ladies of ruined beauty and broken spirit?

I did not care. They would never render me into such a beautiful array of meat. I was more than these people, better than them. Even the kind ones, such as Mistress Cherlise, were molding me to the Factor’s will. I was merely a thing to any of them, a means to advance a purpose. My allies, the Dancing Mistress and Federo, wanted me for their own purposes only instead of the Factor’s. Whatever petty plot occupied their hours was no concern of mine.

There was no way I would be a toy for the ageless Duke, used for a few decades then tossed aside. The daughters of the great houses could have him.

I slipped from my bed and down to the great kitchen. There I had learned to cook with saffron and vanilla and other spices worth far more than their weight in gold. What would we have had at home, Papa and I? A little salt, and some dried peppers from bushes that grew at the edge of the trees. Salt we had here as well, along with parsley and other common pot herbs.

We also had a drawer full of knives.

Much of what had been kept from me early on had been added in the growth of trust. The strange trust between master and slave, jailor and prisoner; but still it was a species of trust that had stood between me and Mistress Tirelle.

I found the small, sharp cutter I normally used to separate meat from bone. The blade was already well honed. No need to risk a noise to set an edge now. Instead I went outside to sit beneath the pomegranate tree in the failing moonlight and stare at the blade I had taken up in my hand.

The Factor had named me Emerald. Marked by beauty, trained to grace. Certainly this blue-walled prison was far more comfortable than the hut of my youth. “I miss my belled silk and my father’s white ox,” I whispered to the blade. There was so much that I longed for-the water snakes and the hot winds and the silly lizards pushing themselves always closer to the brassy sun with their forelegs, as if they could ever reach its heavy fire.

Miss those though I might, I could no more throw away my years of training here in the Factor’s house than I could throw away time itself. Federo had taken me away from what was mine, while the Factor had made me into a creature of the Duke of Copper Downs.

I was no ox, nor carriage, nor cart horse. I was no animal nor thing. I could escape this place easily enough by climbing the walls as the Dancing Mistress had shown me, but I was valuable. My grace and beauty and training were the work of years by dozens of women in the Factor’s employ. They would hunt for me, and they would find me. Doubtless his blindfolded guards could ride across the leagues to wherever I hid. Doubtless the Duke would ask after his new-grown playpretty, and the entire city of Copper Downs would try to make an answer.

As I was, I was worth far too much for the Factor ever to let slip through his grasp. I could not throw away those years or the knowledge they had brought me. With this blade in my hand, however, I could throw away my beauty.

I will show them whose spirit will break first.

Endurance’s brown eyes glinted in the dark as I reached to slash my right cheek. The pain was sharp and terrible, but I had stood through a lifetime of beatings without crying out. Then my left, echoing and balancing the first hurt I had done myself. I reached back and cut a single deep notch in the curve of each of my ears.

“I am Green,” I shouted at the moon in the language of my birth. Blood coursed warm and sharp-scented down my neck to tickle at my shoulders. “Green!” I screamed again, then began sobbing into the night.

Mistress Tirelle came following the racket I had made and found me bleeding down the white cotton of my sleeping shift.

When she realized what I had done, she shrieked. I broke her neck with a kick the Dancing Mistress had taught me, a flowing spin that sent the duck woman’s chin hard to the right with a snap that I felt down in my bones. She gurgled once, then slumped to the ground.

That was my first killing, amid rage and grief and confusion.

In some ways, Mistress Tirelle is the death I will always remember best. Her constant presence was as close as I’d known to love in all my days since being taken from Papa. She had held me at the center of her life. I repaid her with murder. Not even a shred of dignity, either, though death is rarely dignified. The dying generally do let go of whatever is within their bodies. I sometimes think the gods mean us to leave the world in a filthy state to remind us that we are made of dust and water.

I told myself then that though I hated Mistress Tirelle, I had not meant to kill her. That was not true, of course. My Dancing Mistress had taught me to kick. I had accepted her lessons. The responsibility was mine.

Mistress Tirelle’s blank eyes were already fogged. I scrambled up the pomegranate tree to fetch my running blacks. I missed my footing twice, but found them where they should have been. Back down on the ground, I stripped out of my bloody shift and dropped it over the duck woman’s face. Swiftly I tugged on the dark clothes.

No time now, I told myself, except to keep moving. Cut or uncut, they would hunt me, but I was my own possession now. No one else’s. Rage sent me swarming up the posts of the balcony to the copper roof of my house. From there, I gained the walkway atop the bluestone walls. I could already hear shouting within the core of the Factor’s house.

Sprinting for the corner where I could make the climb down, I stumbled again-I had not eaten all day, and was ill in my stomach with shock and fear and all my bleeding. As I swung over the wall, I missed my grasp and fell hard to the cobbled streets below.

The landing was poor, but not fatally so. I collapsed onto my back, breath heaving in deep sobs as gongs sounded within the Factor’s house.

A silver-furred face leaned close. “Come with me now,” my Dancing Mistress said. “That way you might live to see the dawn.”

“No,” I said in my own words. “I will have no more of you.”

She grabbed my arm. “Don’t be a fool. You’ll throw away whatever you think you’ve gained, and your life besides.”

Still shocked from the murder I had just wrought, I rose and stumbled after her. I muttered maledictions in my own language as we walked quickly through the nighttime streets of Copper Downs. Both Endurance and my grandmother’s ghost would be ashamed of me.

I shivered as we climbed down a culvert to an entrance to Below. This was one we hadn’t used before. The night wasn’t so cold now, but I was.

The crack of Mistress Tirelle’s neck echoed repeatedly in my mind. I had kicked high. That wasn’t defense-I had not meant merely to knock her down or disable her.

Words, my victory was supposed to be in words. Yet I’d ended her life.

That was a theft that could never be restored. In taking her life, I’d taken my own, too. I had cast away everything I’d known in Copper Downs, almost everything I could ever remember.

I’d meant only to take myself away. That was why my cheeks and ears still stung like hot coals, their wounds a horrid itch that intruded on my thoughts. In spoiling myself for the Factor and his patron Duke, I had ruined their plans.