Jay Lake - Green

Her review was an echo of the Factor’s inspection. My anger rose fast. “I am no one’s tool. I will be the sword in no one’s hand.”

“All people are held in someone else’s hand.” She bent close to meet me eye to eye. “It is the way of Creation. The secret is to choose whose fingers are tangled in your hair.”

“Whose are tangled in your hair, Mother?” I asked in my nastiest voice.

Her smile dawned like a sun made of silver-rimmed ivory. I had never seen such teeth, and was caught for a moment in their strangeness. “I serve the Lily Goddess, my little Green. No man wields me. No ruler calls my step. No council reins me in.”

“No.” I could see this trap easily enough. “Your Goddess wraps her hand around your heart. Whoever she is.”

“You are of Copper Downs, my girl. Their gods have been silent far too long. The people of that city follow their own ways with a recklessness that will someday be accounted for. You are not understanding what a goddess is.”

“A goddess is a tulpa grown large.”

Still bent to face me, she shook her head in dismissal. “Tulpas. Country superstition. Little spirits who are being worshipped by ignorant farmers and disingenuous monks.”

I had thought them more like larval gods. Or very ancient ones worn to nothing. Fragments, like in the oldest stories.

Mother Vajpai continued. “No, Green. A goddess is the sum of all her believers, all the prayers and hopes and curses and despair ever uttered in her name. Our Goddess spans the lives of women, from the darkest night of a girl raped and left for dead in a waterfront alley to the silver-bright wedding day of the highest princess in the land. The hand of the Lily Goddess upon my heart is my own hand, multiplied a thousandfold. We serve Her as She serves us. We are Her, and She is us.”

I knew that for as great a load of claptrap as any myth out of Mistress Danae’s books. Gods were real, surely enough. Septio’s silent Blackblood back in Copper Downs had been real. The various theogenies and dieophanies I’d read of during my years under tutelage had made it quite clear that gods were bullies, children, pettifoggers, and taskmasters different only from the worst of men in the degree of the power they held.

The depths of my youthful hubris were staggering.

“As may be, Mother,” I said politely.

She stretched to her full height once more. “Of course, you are not believing me. How could you? You come to us from a country of apostates. There is nowhere here in Kalimpura for you. I know of your troubles outside the gates. You-”

“You do not know my troubles, Mother,” I interrupted. “You have not the least notion of them.”

She shook her head. “A girl of your age has not killed without great provocation. Where will you go, with that habit of anger in your heart and the killing already in your hands?”

That much of my troubles she did understand. “I will find a way,” I said, surly and restless now. I was ready to be quit of her.

“There is a way here for you.”

“For a killer orphan?” I snapped. “For a lost girl with murder in her eye who knows too much about nothing, and not enough about anything?”

“For a girl who can keep her balance, and knows her way around a knife, yes. I’d wager much that you have other talents as well.”

“I can prepare a banquet, sew clothes fit for a Duke’s court, and play nine different instruments,” I said, almost snarling.

“No doubt is harbored in my mind,” Mother Vajpai replied sweetly. “We have an order of guardians here in this temple. The Blades stand behind the younger daughters and widows who serve the Lily Goddess. They wield the Goddess’ will to the very hilt if needed. Their way can be yours.”

A test? A fraud? Did it matter? “What you offer me is a joining to your temple’s Blades. Shelter and fellowship in exchange for my skills.”

“Yes.” Her mouth wrinkled in a sad expression. “Your skills. There are never enough girls in a generation for what the temple needs. Not at the altar, not in the healing wards, not among the justiciars. Most especially not among the Blades of the Lily.”

“To kill once is hard,” I said, recalling Mother Meiko’s words. “To kill twice is easier. To kill three times is a habit. Most of your girls never take the hard road, do they?”

“No.” She sighed. “It is the Blades who oversee the Death Right.”

A thought occurred to me. “Who oversees the Blades?”

“Why, my dear…” Mother Vajpai smiled. “I do.” With those words, she spun into a snap kick that blended into a whirling slash of the edge of her hand.

I had walked for a month, and sailed a month prior to that, but the years before were filled with the Dancing Mistress’ lessons. They were in nowise lost on me. I slid beneath her kick and ducked away from the blow before throwing myself toward her balance leg.

Never kick unless you have no other choice, the Dancing Mistress had said. You are too easily downed with any of your feet off the floor.

Mother Vajpai had shown off. The hilt of my tight-wrapped knife struck the side of her knee even as I threw my weight against her ankle.

She went down hard, tangling in her red silks, but somehow her fingers caught me on the ear. We wound up rolling to a stop against some cushions on the floor. A slim blade poked into my throat, while the fingers of Mother Vajpai’s other hand were clawing painfully in my ear.

“Very good,” she whispered. My ear burned with the cut of her nails. The knife at my neck stung. “A new girl has never taken me down at the first lesson. But then you are not really being a new girl, are you?”

“It’s very nearly a habit.”

“Then you can learn so much more. We are done.” She released me. “Are you with us?”

“I have nowhere to go,” I said flatly as I rolled away from her.

“Now you do.” Mother Vajpai rose to her feet in a fluid motion I did not know how to duplicate, though I could see her knee troubled her. “You are one of us.”

I would be no tool. “Am I sworn?”

“Not yet. And not for some time to come. Go with Samma. She waits outside. She will show you the dormitories and introduce you to the teaching Mothers.”

Straightening my pale robe, I said, “I will be under no one’s lash, not ever again.”

“Go, Green. All will be well.”

For a while, all was well. I quartered with the Aspirants of the Blades of the Lily. Samma was my bedmate and dining partner and, more to the point, the one who guided me through the training exercises, through the winding halls of the Silver Temple, through the endless services filled with chanting homage to the Lily Goddess.

This was a reflection of the Pomegranate Court and the Factor’s house, except here was light to those shadows. Where Mistress Tirelle had kept me close within walls and isolated, the teaching Mothers herded their aspirants in a clotted little crowd, the nine of us who were currently passing through the Petals.

Other aspirants trained for the other orders of the Lily Goddess. I soon learned that the Temple took in girls from the great families and trading houses of Kalimpura and the rest of Selistan. Each renounced her social responsibilities and any direct access to her wealth to dedicate her life to the Goddess. In return, the girls were sheltered in powerful luxury and permitted to take up traditionally male arts such as healing and law.

Those girls were of the high and mighty, and they certainly knew it. The healing and justiciary aspirants were paraded about at services and on feast days, sometimes brought before the courts of the city-unlike Copper Downs, Kalimpura had managed to settle on and maintain a reasonable succession of rulership, even if the system was difficult for outsiders to comprehend.