Jay Lake - Green

“Price. Life is nothing but prices.”

“To be sure.” She picked up a needle and began to sew where I had left off to eat. “You are twelve years of age now, yes?”

“I believe so,” I admitted.

Federo winced.

The Dancing Mistress continued. “At home, you would marry soon.”

Mistress Cherlise had told me I’d be wife to some sweating farmer. True enough, I supposed, and I didn’t wish for that life. But what had I become instead?

She went on as if I had answered. “Here in Copper Downs, you were almost ready to be turned out as consort for the Duke, or one of his favorites.”

“Monthlies or no monthlies,” muttered Federo.

“What of it?” I asked.

She was implacable. “You are afraid of that change. Both your fates have been denied you. You were born onto a path that Federo bought you away from. You were trained within the walls of the Factor’s house for a different path. Even our night running work was little more than a twisting of that second way. You cut that fate away when you marred your beauty and killed Mistress Tirelle. What remains?”

“Fear,” I told the silk I had once more gathered into my hands.

“Choice,” she said. “Which you have exercised to join Federo and me in this latest effort.”

I wasn’t afraid of what would happen, I realized. That was almost beyond any control of mine. I wasn’t afraid of my choices, either. She did not quite have the right of that. Even with all her cruelty, Mistress Tirelle had always prepared me for some kind of greatness. I had been spared the jaws of the ocean leviathan. Endurance had watched over me with a purpose. The prospect of extraordinary effort did not daunt me.

Everybody died. That was fearsome, but this fear was more than that. Everybody hurt. The fear I felt was somehow still more.

I thought awhile as I sewed. My grandmother had gone to the sky burial wrapped in her shroud. My silk was supposed to be the track of my life, the thing that told my days. Each bell should have had meaning, this one when I met my husband, that one when I bore the first of my children.

Finally I decided that I was afraid for my spirit.

I looked up at the Dancing Mistress once more. Her sloped eyes gleamed in the light of our little lamp. She was waiting for me to speak.

“Do your people have souls?” I asked her.

Maybe her answer would tell me more about mine.

She thought for a while, glancing at me as she worked. The hooded lamp glowed between us. Federo picked with his needle. He seemed content to wait out the conversation.

Finally the Dancing Mistress spoke. “When a child is born, we bind the soul with flowers and food. The community feasts to share the soul. That way it is not lost if there is an accident or disease, but kept alive within the hearts of many.”

Curiosity competed with my fear and frustrated anger. “What about your names?”

She smiled. “Those are for our hearts alone.” She gathered up a handful of the silk and shook it at me. Hundreds of bells jingled, those not swallowed in the folds of the cloth. “Here is your soul, Green. Do not fear for it. Most people never find theirs. You are making yours as real as your hands.”

The sound of the bells brought me back to the memory of my grandmother’s funeral procession. I was hers, through my nameless father and his nameless hut in a nameless place on some road in Selistan. I did not know his name, or the name he called me. Federo had not bothered to ask, for to him I was just a girl.

In all the years within the Factor’s house, I had forgotten too much. If I lived through these days before me, I resolved, I would return to Selistan and reclaim my life.

We were done with the silk in the middle of the evening two days later. This time they’d both stayed with me. All of us sewed, talking quietly from time to time, working to be ready. The silk was flecked with droplets of blood from stabbed fingers, and my own hands were most unpleasantly stiff, but we were done.

“If you still agree with the plan,” Federo said, “we will guide you out of the warehouse before dawn. You can walk the streets once it is full light and the life of the city resumes. If the Ducal guards take you then, there will be witnesses.”

“Being arrested in front of witnesses tends to be healthier,” the Dancing Mistress observed.

I folded my silk close, letting the bells wash over me. We did not know the true number, and so we had settled on four thousand four hundred-twelve years. They jingled like the pouring of water on a metal roof. My past held me close in that moment.

“Show me what I must know.”

The Dancing Mistress drew certain words in the dust of the floor. I studied them as my bells shivered in time to my breathing. In their way, the words were simple enough. A conversation with the powers of the land. I did not know if their might stemmed from the intention of the speaker, or if there was something inherent in the arrangement of sound and meaning. In any case, these words were-or should be-the ravel that would unweave the spells binding the Duke to his life and his throne.

Federo looked at them with me, then nodded. The Dancing Mistress erased the words. “Do you have any questions?”

I looked at him. “ ‘Shared’?” I asked. “I do not know that word, nor the term for ‘hoarded’ in my tongue. Otherwise, I can say this easily enough.”

“Share,” he said in the Selistani language. Seliu, I had learned that it was called. “It carries the sense of something freely given, without taking.”

“That will do,” said the Dancing Mistress.

“As for hoarded…” He thought for a while, then suggested a word in Selin. “It means gathering too much. As in, well, overharvesting. More foolish than greedy, I think.”

“The sense seems good to me,” I said seriously.

The Dancing Mistress nodded. “You have the words in your head?”

“I do.”

“Good.” Federo’s voice quavered. He looked nervous to the point of being ill.

I knew how he felt. My anger would carry me through, when I found it once more. Right now, I mostly felt sick myself. “I am ready,” I lied.

I needed to attend to one last bit of business before we set out. My fears and worries had stalked me all through the night and into the early morning hours as we prepared ourselves. Most of them were beyond my reach. One was not.

“Federo,” I said as he packed away the last of our supplies.

“Mmm?”

“I want to mark Mistress Tirelle’s passing. Do you have any notion what she might have believed about her soul? Is there some prayer or sacrifice I can offer her?”

He gave me one of those long looks. In the shadows beyond him, I saw the Dancing Mistress nod almost imperceptibly. She had done the same when I had performed well in a difficult exercise but we were not free to communicate.

“I don’t know, Green,” Federo said after a little while. “Not many people in Copper Downs are openly observant. Especially not the locally born.”

“Deaths must be marked in some manner. The passing of a soul is not simple.” We did not have oxen, bells, or sky burials here; that much I knew. I was uneasy at the duck woman’s fate-I had sent her from this life, after all. That fear and guilt belonged to me. My hope was to ease her passing.

“There is a common offering for the dead,” he said. “Two candles are lit. One is black for their sins and sorrows. The other is white, for their hopes and dreams. Sometimes a picture of the dead is burned, if such a thing is to be had. Otherwise, a folded prayer or a banknote. That usually depends on the intentions of the person making the offering. You speak a kindness, spread the ash to the wind, and let them go.”