Jay Lake - Green

“Then when we set out, I will have two candles, and some of that paper you just packed away.”

We departed just before dawn, prior to the warehouse opening for the day. My belled silk was stuffed away in a sack along with the last of our tools and equipment from the attic. We couldn’t really hide the fact that someone had been there for a while, but we could certainly take our evidence with us.

The cobbles were slick with morning dewfall. A three-quarter moon was veiled by dripping clouds. This sort of wet would burn off with the rising sun, but the east was still barely a glower. The Dancing Mistress led us to a mercantile at the end of a row of warehouses, which, judging by its stock, catered to the laboring trades. Nonetheless, among the spools of rope and chain, the racks of iron tools and heavy canvas coveralls, and all the other gear pertaining to those who build and repair the stuff of cities, we found candles.

The black was a narrow cylinder, while the white was a fat little votive barrel. I was not bothered that they were dissimilar. Mistress Tirelle and I surely had not been similar in life. Federo purchased the candles, and he bought a new packet of lucifer matches as well, before we stepped back out into the damp.

“A park will have to serve.” Federo was grumpy. The risk of extra movement bothered him.

“I am sorry,” I told him. “I must do this last thing. Then we can shake out my bells and I will find the Ducal Palace and whatever follows from that.” The Dancing Mistress’ words were firm enough in my head.

“Federo,” she said. Her voice caught at him, and his nervous fear subsided into a muttering calm.

A bit later, we slipped between two marble gateposts. Winding paths led through lindens and birches beyond. Dew dripped from their branches as the eastern sky continued to lighten. The musty scent of night was infused with the opening of the earliest flowers, though something also rotted nearby. We trotted along a weed-infested gravel path following direction from the Dancing Mistress, until she brought us to a little folly.

Like the gateposts, this was marble as well. Six pillars in the classical Smagadine style mounted by architraves with carvings I could not quite make out in the early blooming light. This was topped by a pointed dome curved much like a breast. A little statue of an armed woman stood at the tip.

That seemed fitting to me.

Within, the floor was tiled in a mosaic of birds circling a stylized sun. The Dancing Mistress and Federo hung back. I knelt, though the cold tile hurt my knees even through the sweep of Federo’s borrowed cloak. I set the black candle down against the sun’s lidded left eye, and the white candle against his wide-open right, which seemed to be on the verge of surprise.

I truly did not know what was needful here. What I did know was that this part of my life had begun with a funeral-my grandmother’s-and ended with a death-Mistress Tirelle’s. I sought a balance, and a show of respect.

As I’d already realized, in her strange way, this harshest of my Mistresses had in fact loved me.

The match struck on the first try in a spitting flare of sulfur. That seemed lucky. Lighting the black candle, I rocked back and forth as I hugged myself against the cold.

“You treated me with a harder hand than I would raise against a cur from the streets,” I told the flame-and her soul if somehow she yet listened to me. “Your sin was to hew too close to the word of the Factor. But who are we, if we cannot tell wrong from right no matter what mouth it comes out of?”

I put the second match into the flame of the black candle. The flare made me blink away bright spots. I then set it to the wick of the white candle.

“You fed me, and clothed me, and taught me more than most people ever learn,” I told her. “You gave my life a direction, whether I wished it or no.”

Unfolding the paper I’d taken from Federo back in the attic, I smoothed it flat as I could against the mosaic floor. With the burnt stubs of my two matches, I drew an ox. Endurance, though no one but me would ever have seen that in the picture. The image was simple enough: the tilted horns of the aleph glyph, humped shoulders, a sweep of the hocks, and the forelegs to balance the composition.

Rolling the paper up, I set it to the white candle’s flame. Let the offering burn in the light of hopes and dreams. “May Endurance bear you onward as he once did my grandmother. His patience abides more deeply than mine.” With a shuddering breath, I added, “I am sorry that I took from you that which was not for me to claim.”

When the burning paper grew so short that my fingers began to sting, I dropped it to the tiles. It curled a moment longer, wisping to ash, before the dawn breeze hurried through the folly to snuff both my candles and carry the charred paper away.

Her shade did not answer. I had not expected anything. I had made this most unfortunate farewell.

Rising, I threw down Federo’s cloak. “Where is my silk?” I asked in my own words. He and the Dancing Mistress stepped forward to array me as carefully as any squires in a courtly tale of olden tourneys.

I walked along Coronation Avenue between the two rows of peach trees gone bare in the autumn damp. My cloak of bells wrapped me close. Beneath it, I wore dark tights and a calf-length shirt, as if I were prepared to dance in some mummer’s play. I carried no weapon and held my head high.

Look at me, I thought. Here is your bounty. The Factor’s emerald comes.

People aplenty were on the street. Wagons and carriages clattered by. Even a few of the great cog-carts, balanced with flywheels and driven by strange logics patiently punched into the endless loops of goatleather rolls stored within their guts. Tradesmen and servants passed, on the business of the great houses that lined the approach to the Ducal Palace.

It was almost too much. I had not seen so many people at once since my arrival at the docks nine years earlier. Too many faces, all of them half-familiar, all of them strange as statues in the dark. I saw them through the eyes of my training. Virtually everyone could be marked out by their clothing, their stance, the tools or equipment they carried, their headgear.

In ordinary times, I might have fled to a quiet alley, but my purpose guided my steps. I was glad as the crowding thinned as the street grew wealthier.

A pair of mounted guardsmen rode by without even glancing at me. The gentlemen and ladies on their business took no notice, either. I enjoyed a strange species of invisibility, difficult to understand or describe. I wondered whether these people would have looked at me had I been naked and armed with a flaming sword.

Where was the hue and cry that Federo and the Dancing Mistress had promised? Three days ago, patrols had been going through the warehouse district building by building. Now their attention had moved to some other urgency.

Everything worn was a badge, a signal, a symbol of what role the wearer played in life and how they intended to be treated. My attire signaled that I did not belong, that I was a strange person in a stranger land. My bells told my story to anyone with the ears that knew how to hear it.

No one on Coronation Avenue had those ears, it seemed.

The Ducal Palace loomed ahead. The building’s face was a vast sweep of marble in the Firthian style, with more windows than I would have imagined any structure having. I was accustomed to the blank walls of the Factor’s house. It seemed as if this building stared across the city with a hundred eyes. A great copper dome towered above the center. Smaller domes of the same metal topped each wing.

I was not sure of the distance, having spent my life behind walls or on night runs, where everything was only a step or two in front of me, but it did not seem I had so far to go to just walk right through His Grace’s front door. As I approached the palace, the street grew emptier. Quieter. My bells rang louder.