Jay Lake - Green

How much did I care?

A servant younger than myself ran screaming from the sight of me in the next gallery. I still followed my memory of being led in, passing now from carpet to stone. Ahead of me, down a short flight of stairs, a small group of Ducal guards huddled before the great oak-and-copper doors. The entrance-way was surmounted by stained-glass windows. Everything was shut and barred; some of the windowpanes were broken out by cobbles strewn upon the floor within. The crowd just outside was very loud.

I walked toward the guards with my bells ringing. There was no point in pretense. One of their number, with a gold knot on the shoulder of his dark green woolen coat, looked up at me.

“You, there-don’t go through this door!”

“Why not?” I asked, drawing myself up with dignity.

“Coz they’ll kill you out there.” He sounded more exasperated than afraid. “Everything’s gone wrong.”

All the Duke’s immortals must have indeed fallen to dust. It was my great fortune these guards had no idea who I was. I thanked all the gods for the cloth that had hidden my face on the way in.

“Thank you, sir. I was visiting. Is there an exit I can use?”

“Try the Navy Gallery. Off to your left there.”

One of the men spoke up. “If you’re up for it, girl, just drop out of one of them windows. You’ll be in the Box Elder Garden, but it lets out on Montane Street. Crowd out there hasn’t yet remembered how many doors there are to this palace besides the front.”

“Be off with you,” the corporal added. “No use hanging here.”

I took them at their word and turned into what I hoped was the Navy Gallery. No shouts corrected me.

In an instant, I knew I was right. The ceiling was painted with a smoke-wreathed battle scene showing long-hulled vessels from a much older time surrounding a burning, fat-bellied hulk. Ship’s wheels and bells hung on the walls, while models stood on small tables-their detail was something I would have loved to examine at a different time.

The windows here were casements, with little cranks to turn out the glass on a hinge up the long side. I picked one in the middle and looked out at some rhododendron bushes backed by a stand of box elder trees just beyond. The noise was less here. No one seemed to be throwing cobbles at the palace.

A moment later, I was out among the bushes. Reason had crept up on pride, so I stopped there and rolled my belled silk into a bundle. I slipped out of the trees and into the stream of people approaching the front of the palace from along Montane Street. They had the rumbling urgency of a mob, complete with torches, staves, and iron tools.

A man in a pale suit with the cut of a middle-ranked trader grabbed at me. My heart chilled, and I twisted, hoping to kick his knee.

“Is it still happening in there?” he shouted. He was not even looking at me. His eyes rolled red and wild.

“I… I don’t know.” I hated how small and frightened my voice sounded.

“The Duke is dead, long live the Duke!” He glanced around, then seemed to see me for the first time. “Go home, girl. This is no place for a foreigner now.”

“Green,” I whispered. Nodding my thanks, I took the first side street that was reachable across the streaming flow of the forming mob.

It was done. I was free, and out of the palace, and on a path of my own choosing. I was my own person, no one’s property for the first time since coming to this accursed city. And they would send no more Federos out to buy children. Not this gang that I had laid low.

Heading for the docks, I aimed to take the trader’s advice. Copper Downs held nothing more for me. Perhaps I could return to what I had been-not a girl under the belly of her father’s ox, certainly, but to what that girl might have become.

Since I hadn’t expected to survive, I’d given no thought to what came next. I had a direction now-the trader had the right of it, so far as his advice went-but I was surprised to regret what I was leaving behind.

I had no trouble at all leaving the Factor’s House behind. That was a well-upholstered slave pit, and nothing more. Some of my Mistresses had been kind. Mistress Danae, for example. And if I had friends in this life, they were Federo and the Dancing Mistress.

Once I took ship, I would never see them again. What had not even been a worry before was now a swell of regret. The Factor could be dust for all I cared, but Mistress Tirelle plucked my heart as well.

Loping toward the docks, I wiped tears from my eyes. There’d been no time to say good-bye before. Now it was too late.

I had no idea how to interpret the chaos of the waterfront when I finally arrived there. The crowding bordered on panic, everyone heedless and hurried. I needed a ship to Selistan. If I took passage aboard a vessel bound for the Sunward Sea, that would likely be a permanent error.

It all rested on how well I spoke. Certainly there had been stories aplenty in Mistress Danae’s books about stowaways and travelers working their passage. Somehow none of them were dark-skinned girls.

My color hadn’t mattered within the bluestone walls of the Pomegranate Court. Out here, it might hold the balance of my life. Along with my words. As I’d always known, these people lived and died by their words.

I continued to walk briskly, bound on an errand to nowhere. If I were to stand and gawk, I would mark myself as a potential victim. Instead I looked as closely as I could at each ship I passed, each wharf.

Some had signboards out to advertise their destination. Most of these were cities of the Stone Coast-Houghharrow, Dun Cranmoor, Lost Port. These I recognized from the stories and maps I’d studied. One was marked for the Saffron Tower. Much too far the wrong way for me.

A signboard loomed ahead. In shaky handwriting, it read, “South to sun countries. Calling in Kalim., Chitta and Spice Pt.s.”

I trotted up to that gangplank. The ship had three tall masts, and no sign of a boiler below, unlike the smokestack I recalled from Fortune’s Flight. A man stood there with skin as dark as mine, though he was fitted out in the duck and cotton of a sailor. He held a long board to which papers had been bound with sisal twine. He glanced at me once, then back at his board.

“Please, sir, I would have passage,” I said. He didn’t even glance up at me. Then, in Seliu: “I want to return home.”

That got his attention. “Go back to your mother,” he replied, then some words I didn’t know.

“She is there,” I told him. “I was stolen.”

“You are a slave.” He looked at me with suspicion. “Trouble rides your back.” That last was in Petraean.

“Trouble rides this entire city,” I answered him, also in Petraean. “If I do not go with you, I may never go at all.”

“What is being your fare for passage, should I recommend to the captain that we take you?”

I took a deep breath. Here was where my plan would founder. “I have no fare, sir. Just the goodwill of my countrymen. I can cook to please the table of a lordly house, and my skills with needle and thread are worthy as well.”

He snorted, and my heart fell. “Next you’ll tell me you play the music of angels and can dance the Seven Steps of Sisthra.”

“I sing, sir, but only in the fashion of the Stone Coast.”

Something stirred in his face. “You do not know the songs of Selistan.”

Switching back to our words, I said, “It has been a very long time.”

Close by, a bell began ringing. Everyone on the dock looked around with frantic haste. Many ran off. An alarm, then. Riot approached the docks.

“Come.” He started up the gangplank. “If we cast off with you aboard, much of this discussion will be lacking in point. Captain Shields is not likely to toss you overboard as a stowaway. Especially if you can grace his table in style.”