Jay Lake - Green

“Where is it written that you should lie with animals?” growled Mother Argai.

Mother Vishtha waved her to silence.

“She is not an animal,” I told them, speaking urgently to overcome the glittering danger of the moment. “This is my best and oldest teacher!”

“Then let her speak.” Mother Vishtha pointed at the Dancing Mistress and snarled, “Defend yourself, miserable creature.”

“Wh-where is lodgings?” the pardine stammered in horrendously accented Seliu.

I glanced at her, amazed. “What?” I demanded in Petraean.

“I only know a few phrases,” she snapped, not taking her eyes off the crossbow. “I’d figured on having more time here to learn before things grew difficult.”

“The yowling of an animal,” Mother Vishtha announced. “Just as a bird may be taught to speak, so has someone taught this one.” She glared at me. “How could you?”

“Why did you come here?” I demanded hotly of the Mothers. Surely they had not trooped down the stairs to harass me over this.

Some of the anger left Mother Vishtha’s face. “To bring you before the Mothers in assembly.”

Mother Argai’s crossbow wavered slightly as she spoke. “The Street Guild and the Bittern Court both seek charges. One of the dead is a Master’s son.”

“Your little adventure today was badly played,” Mother Vishtha said. “We should have barred you from those blacks when you first made them.”

Only I’d done too well as a Blade, I realized. The runs, which were meant to embarrass me and turn the sentiment of the sworn women against me, had induced the opposite effect.

“Green.” The Dancing Mistress’ voice was thick and low.

“They are here to conduct us upstairs,” I told her. “To a hearing before the Mothers of the Temple of the Silver Lily. I do not know how this may go.”

“Will they kill us?”

“Likely not.” Not me, at any rate. Would that I knew more than “likely.”

“I am going to dress-”

“No,” Mother Vishtha interrupted. “Not in your ridiculous costume.” She threw me the pale robe of undyed muslin of an aspirant.

I slipped myself into the robe, directly over my skin.

“Will your animal need a collar?” asked Mother Argai in a nasty voice.

I waited until my head was clear and she could hear my words. “No more so than you.”

Her face tightened, but her finger on the crossbow trigger did not.

The Dancing Mistress gathered her torn, muddy toga close and followed me out. We went up the stairs with Mother Vishtha in front of us and weapons at our back.

We did not go to the little room high in the temple, as I had expected. I’d thought to see an inner court as I had once before, Mother Vajpai and Mother Meiko besides Mother Vishtha and one or two of the other senior Mothers.

Instead we entered the main sanctuary. Wednesday afternoon wasn’t time for services, but still the galleried seats were nearly full. Mothers in the robes and sashes of all the temple orders were present, as were a number of women from outside. I saw more than a few in the colors of Street Guild wives or the Bittern Court.

Of course the Bittern Court. I’d done them a bad turn, in the death of the man Curry when I’d dropped his key into the harbor. Whoever had arranged that killing now saw a chance to pay me out for my insolence.

“We are to be made an example of,” I whispered to the Dancing Mistress.

“You don’t say.”

Despairing of her fate, I fell silent then. There was little I could tell her, unless it came time for me to translate some speech or exhortation. Or sentence.

The Temple Mother waited before the altar at the center of the sacred circle. Always the woman in that role was the senior Mother of the priestesses, though she was advised by the Justiciary Mother, the Blade Mother-Mother Meiko since before I’d been here-and a few of the other senior Mothers from the healing and teaching orders.

I had never had much to do with the Temple Mother. She had lost her color with age, rather than never having had it baked into her in the first place as with a northerner under their tiny pale sun. Her name was Mother Umaavani, though I knew no one who called her by that name except Mother Meiko.

Today the Temple Mother stood and stared at me with those pale eyes as I walked downward among the ring of seats. The Dancing Mistress followed half a pace behind me. I knew from the prickle of my back that Mother Argai still stood at the top of the gallery with her crossbow, and probably the rest of the impromptu handle that Mother Vishtha had put together to come fetch me.

It was strange to be stared at by the old woman, who normally attended only to the altar and the progress of the prayers. This truly was a hearing and not a service-no incense, no bells, no scurrying priestly aspirants.

Just a very angry Temple Mother, me, and the woman who was both my oldest teacher and newest lover.

I stared back, gave her my hardest glare. Where I could make even Mother Gita look aside when the anger was upon me, there was nothing in me that would push away the Temple Mother. No more than I could push Mother Meiko, I realized.

In moments, I stood at the bottom of the steps in the circle of the altar. I had never walked here-never expected to, except when it came time to take my vows as a sworn Blade.

She must have been thinking the same thing, for the first words the Temple Mother said to me were “I had hoped to meet you differently, Green.”

“Mother.” She was the only Mother in the entire Lily Temple who required no name or title beyond that honorific.

“You seem to have been a great deal of trouble, dear.”

Though her voice and words were sweet enough, I knew the look on her face. This woman might well have run with the Blades at some time in her life. Not that I’d ever heard such a rumor, but the hardness was there.

“I have done what was needed, Mother.”

“Oh, yes.” She began to pace in front of the great silver lily as if the two of us were having a conversation, without the Dancing Mistress at my side and more than two hundred others looking on. “How did you know these things were needed? Did the Goddess speak to you?”

“At times,” I said baldly. If I could keep them talking, we might somehow both walk away. “But I never understood what was required of me. Her voice is like distant thunder, Mother, telling me of rain, but not how much water will flow across my doorstep.”

“So it is with the Goddess sometimes, child.” The Temple Mother’s voice was filled with sadness. “If She herself did not tell you what was needed, how did you know Her will?”

I took a deep breath. I did not know where these questions might yet lead. All I could do was follow, and try to jump where she pointed. “I judged for myself, Mother.”

“And did Mother Blade and your other teachers not tell you the one true rule of the Lily Blades?”

This trap I knew. I’d stepped into it as casually as a child walking into a mud puddle. I saw no point in pretending to coyness. “We do not judge.”

“She has judged,” the Temple Mother called out in a voice that rang to the heights of the sanctuary. “Even where we have taught her to do no such thing.”

Applause smattered above me, followed by the buzz of voices. The Temple Mother was speaking to the Street Guild, I realized. And the Bittern Court.

I must push, I realized. If they’d intended me to remain silent, Mother Vishtha would have said so coming up the stairs. “We judge every moment, Mother,” I called out loudly. “We are taught to judge when not to bare our weapons. We are taught to judge when to step into one dispute and when not to interfere in another. We judge all the time, for to make no judgments at all is a far worse error than to sometimes be wrong.”