Jay Lake - Green

With that, she left me. I was no Blade at all, of course.

I shook off my fantasy of fighting such a large animal and followed Mother Adhiti out into the hallway. It was always warm and damp down here, where the temple extended out beneath the buildings and grounds around it. Really, all they’d done was lay claim to some of Below, walling off passages and bringing light and water where they could.

When we reached the stairs that spiraled up into the main part of the building, I found Mother Meiko sitting on the bottommost step. Her walking stick was propped beside her. She drew from a short, stumpy pipe. Today instead of our usual pale robes, she wore the oil-stained pale blue muslin of a woman of the Bucket Carrier Caste.

“Good day, Mother.” I set down my weapons and made the sign of the lily toward her.

“Green.” She sucked noisily on the pipe a moment, then cupped it loose in her hands. “Girl,” she added.

I waited. This woman had come down here for me. She would tell me what she came for when she was ready to do so.

“You desire to fight some great cow, or so I am overhearing.”

“A bullock, Mother.”

“Mmm.” Mother Meiko studied the smoldering wisp within the bowl of her pipe. “An animal. Tell me. What are you?”

“An Aspirant of the Lily Blades of this temple.”

“No. You are not that.”

I was surprised. “Nothing else, Mother.”

“If you were an aspirant of my Blades here, you would be sleeping in the dormitory. Attending, or teaching, the classes with the other aspirants.” She leaned closer. “You would be helping the children of our temple instead of mooning after those whom fate has swept away.”

My desire for an end to child selling was hardly mooning, but I was not willing to argue that with her. “I am what I am.”

“The Goddess has ceased speaking to you.” That was not a question.

“Yes,” I admitted. “I have not heard Her since before I fought alongside the rest of Mother Shesturi’s handle.”

“The rest of Mother Shesturi’s handle.” She snorted. “To be listening to yourself. You claim you are an aspirant in one breath, and a Blade in the next. Here is what you are, Green: You are being neither this thing nor that. You are being a girl who will not choose which of her fates she is to follow. You are being nothing at all.”

“Mother.” I tucked my chin low.

Her pipe tapped my forehead. “We are nearly upon the moon that brings us Vaisakha month. You are nearly being to your fifteenth summer. That is old enough to be an auntie or wife. Or a sworn Blade. When the month of Vaisakha ends, come back and be telling me if you will swear your vows.”

“Otherwise?” I asked, my voice barely above a breath.

Nothing pleasant rode in Mother Meiko’s smile. “Otherwise you will be cast upon the goodwill of the Goddess. Ask yourself how much care you have been showing Her, girl. Ask yourself how much care She is to be showing you in return.”

I was reminded then that this was the Blade Mother, who stood over all of us. She could kill as easily as she could count the days of the week and with no more remorse. Throwing me out of the Temple of the Silver Lily would be nothing for her. In a strange way, it might even be fitting. Mother Meiko had invited me to come in the first place, after all.

That evening I nursed my resentments as carefully as any babe at the breast. I will show them! I could free the children in the thrall of the Beggar Caste, race to the harbor to confront the most corrupt captains, fly over the curled and pointed rooftops of this city in search of some crime so foul that my redressing it would bring undeniable credit on the temple, along with the sweet revenge of my repudiation. Or perhaps just slink away into the night, leaving them to question where they had wronged me and wonder what had become of me.

In the end, I did what I always did these days. I slipped into my blacks and walked out a side door of the temple. Sometimes my trips to the docks were more about the drinking than the listening.

This was one of those nights.

I had a month to make up my mind, so naturally I spent the next few weeks declining to think about the problem at hand. My days and nights were full enough, and I suppose I must have believed the Goddess would move me somehow. The needle on the compass of my purpose had been spinning for a while.

Down along the Avenue of Ships, in the middle of a warm, rainy Wednesday, which happened to be the Festival of Coal Demons, the Goddess spoke to me again. I did not feel Her presence as I had in the past, but there was no mistaking the furred, rangy shape that stepped through the crowd near me.

A Stone Coast pardine.

I had never seen one of that race here in Selistan. Sometimes the Lily Goddess made Her will known through unlikely chance.

As I took a few strides more, I realized this was the Dancing Mistress. Only strongly drilled habit kept me moving when I wanted to stop and stare. She was bare-handed and barefooted, wore a light toga of some open-weave fabric, and carried a satchel over her shoulder-almost as she’d looked back in Copper Downs, except dressed for our weather.

I brushed past her, close enough to touch. Her pace faltered as if she’d noticed me, but I was clothed as Neckbreaker, not to mention three years older and taller than when last she’d seen me. The small riot of beggars and children who jostled in her wake kept her moving, or she might have turned to stare.

At least, so I fancied.

What is she doing here?

I took half a dozen more steps. Then I rounded a bollard, using our distance to keep her from noticing. I could follow this woman far better than she could follow me. Especially on these streets. With the Coal Demon festival in full swing, there were firecarts everywhere, people in blackface or redface, and vertical firepots of glazed terra cotta at almost every corner, burning even now with their rain chimneys on.

She was a canny woman, perhaps the most so I’d ever met, but this chaos would defeat her. At least so long as she was new to the city.

The Dancing Mistress must be new to Kalimpura, I realized. Else I’d have heard tell of her in the taverns. Possibly even as gossip in the temple. When one of the Red Men of the fire lakes had come to the city in the cool season, they had talked of nothing else at table for days.

For a pardine, they would gossip a whole season long.

I followed, watching the crowd that surrounded her. She walked as one did in Copper Downs, as if one’s business was one’s own and there could be an expectation of privacy. I recalled the shoving, crowded madness of my arrival here, before I had learned to move among the Kalimpuri. I further recalled how little the Dancing Mistress liked to be touched.

They were plucking at her fur, by the Goddess. I almost began to laugh. No one here had seen her claws, certainly, or watched her teeth bare as she worked through the angry hurt of a bad throw or a low blow.

She tried to step around the statue of Mahachelai on his Horse of Skulls, keeping the plinth close to her left hand. Two of the smaller beggar children slid between the Dancing Mistress’ thigh and the granite base. She kicked them away, and they began to squeal.

I immediately recognized the Broken Wing. It was a beggar’s takedown, which rarely worked on sailors or soldiers, but was sometimes effective on traders or captains in the company of their wives. Those unfortunates could not show the flint in their hearts with their women at their sides, and so while one child squalled and pretended to have been hurt by the horse or carriage, the other quickly insisted on a small sum to see his sibling home without trouble, otherwise the militia would be here quite soon, begging the master’s pardon.