Authors: Cat Rambo
Two Gladiators, one of them Danokin, stand outside, their cross-armed presence the crowd’s only deterrent. The protestors press forward in waves triggered by each surge in shouting, but the Gladiators form islands of stillness defined by the reach of their brawny arms.
I give the fighters a flat-palmed salute. Both return the gesture as I shove my way through the crowd. Most of the protestors recognize me and fall back, but one man, all beard and bristle, returns a shove and finds himself flat on his back. The printers observe the action from their windows, shouting down insults and catcalls at the crowd, agitating it.
“Danokin, Reticence,” I say, approaching with Adelina in my wake. “What’s going on?”
“Bella Kanto, an example to us all. Mostly shouting from this lot and more from inside,” Danokin answers.
A black, pearl-studded anchor and moon medallion glitters at his neck. “Nice trinket,” I say. Around us the crowd jostles and mutters, but all three of us keep an almost exaggeratedly calm manner. I know how to maintain a blank, bored face as well as how it can be used to goad opponents.
“Times are good,” Danokin drawls. “And yerself? When not inspiring future generations, that is.”
“Can’t complain.” I glance over my shoulder at the crowd and drop my voice, words coming more quickly. “Look, let us in, all right? That’s my cousin in there. Did the Duke leave already?”
“Aye, he was here snap at the hour. Marched off already, him and his dandy band.” Danokin spits, eying a burly man in a dockworker’s cap who’s come too close. He steps aside from the door. “Head on in.”
We push our way past a flurry of slogans through the doors and foyer.
I pause at the entrance, taking in the scene. A lifeboat-sized table is overturned in the middle of the immense room, appetizers strewn across the floor, almost to the polished edges parquetted in darker knotwork. Pink liquid puddles on the floor beside an overturned punch bowl. Shattered cups school around it.
As Adelina makes her way towards Leonoa, I meet the eyes of a woman near the overturned table: White-haired, dark-skinned, younger than me by perhaps a decade. Dressed in rich, strange fabrics, their cut formal and out of date. Drawn like a blade of sky-iron to its fellow-forged, I drift towards her. The woman wears no House chain. Perhaps she isn’t from Tabat, but from some other continent, the Eastern Desert Lands, or the Protected Empire.
The sweep of my bow is graceful, evocative, and languid as a post-coital yawn. I’ve practiced that bow before my mirror on more than one occasion and use it to deadly effect.
“A rose amidst the chaos,” I murmur, letting my lashes hood my eyes.
Is she amused or charmed? I can’t quite tell. This surprises me. I’m used to knowing the psychology of any opponent, either in the ring or in the bedroom.
“Selene,” the white-haired woman says, and lets me take her fingers to press a kiss on the tips. Her accent is pure as a tutor’s but tinged with a breathiness that makes my pulse race.
“Named for the moon, how pretty. Quite a bit of excitement, eh?” I venture. Adelina gestures at me from across the room, beside Leonoa. “Perhaps I’ll see you again tonight.” With a wink, I make my way towards my cousin, resisting the urge to glance back.
Leonoa stands on the other side of the table, fists planted on her hips, confronting Bernarda.
Canvases lie crumpled like fallen moths on the ground, their colors dun and fur and flesh, edged with splintered lines of gilt.
Angry scuffmarks set parallel on the white walls show where the paintings have been dragged down. Two men have other canvases rolled and bent like boomerangs in their hands while a plump and earnest young woman flutters around the fallen paintings, trying to stack them without looking at their surfaces.
I see Marta across the room. Her reddish hair is ribboned with pearly curves gleaming against its midnight fall. There is an unpleasant sneer on her face, as usual—but still—I take a moment, just a moment, to admire the curve of her cleavage before I feel Adelina’s elbow in my ribs.
“Eyes front!” Adelina hisses in my ear, even as Marta notices the stare.
Much to my surprise, the Merchant’s daughter doesn’t reciprocate with the lingering, come-hither look I expect. Rather, her sneer deepens as she regards Leonoa.
“Bitch,” Adelina mutters, loudly enough for Marta to hear her. Eyebrows that I called wings of victory and desire, which I’d dedicated last year’s late Winter to, rise.
Here she comes. Marta pushes past fellow Merchants, her usually graceful gait stiff and angry. I appreciatively note her translucent skin and the angry glitter to her eyes.
“What did you call me?” she demands of Adelina.
Adelina draws herself up to her full height in a stance that echoes her mother to a degree that would horrify the Scholar Merchant if she realized it.
Before she can speak, angry tones pull our attention elsewhere.
“I did not pay you for pornography!” Bernarda shrieks at Leonoa.
“I delivered what you requested. Forward thinking art, art which pushes the boundaries!” Leonoa shouts back.
“No one wants to buy such things!”
“You lie. Letha Silvercloth has already told me she’s buying three! You can’t rip down my paintings and then refuse my fee!”
“I can, and the law is with me. You are disturbing the City Peace and provoking a riot! You will be fined for this behavior, and I’ll see that you never show another painting on this continent!”
Leonoa’s body vibrates with fury like a demented top.
“You are a provincial, profit-blinded tart!” she spits out. Seeing us, she beckons me over with a hand quivering with anger despite her white-lipped efforts to control it.
The room blazes with unfortunate light, and the lanterns, augmented with sprays of witch-light, display the broken-winged, crumpled canvases in pitiless detail. I stoop to turn the closest over, Adelina peering over my shoulder.
The deep impressions of Leonoa’s brushwork give the picture a vivid presence. Fierce, clear light streaming through a many-paned window shows a Centaur, side-slouched on a sturdy couch. His pose should look awkward but doesn’t. The sunlight finds its answer in his heavy, well-kept mane, the orange foxfire of his eyes. His lips are full, pouting like summer-kissed grapes. His eyes are deep, bruised wells.
Regarding it, my senses kindle with a fire’s warmth. Old, guilty thoughts stir as I look away.
But the Centaur’s clothing chills me: the uniform of a Summer Guard, as though Beast and Human have been blended. The appalling, heretical juxtaposition hits me with a blow’s force. Beside me, Adelina recoils, her shocked breath audible.
I keep my face expressionless as I replace the picture and pick up the next. It shows a Dog-Woman dressed in Spring’s armor, gilt flowers mixed with real ones. A shiver continues down my spine, at odds with the room’s hot press.
“Leonoa, what’s going on?”
“This … trull says that she is closing the exhibition and will pay no monies for the paintings she has ripped down and destroyed!”
“These abominations do not deserve the name of paintings! They are no more than Abolitionist propaganda, showing Beasts as though they were Human!” Bernarda retorts, face purpling to match the velvet she wore.
“If you do not wish them here, I will take them, but you
will
pay me for the goods that you have destroyed—months of work, expensive paints, and not to mention model fees. And you will pay the sum listed on my invoice!”
“These are worthless trash!”
“To you, perhaps, but to me they are quite valuable. And from the look of Scholar Reinart, he thinks so as well.” Leonoa points at someone stooped in the act of tucking a painting torn from its frame inside his vest. It’s the fellow who lives downstairs from me, the one with the dog.
He blinks at Leonoa. “Trying to preserve it?” he ventures.
They say nothing. He sighs and hands it over to the plump young woman, who unrolls it away from herself, like someone battling the light and heat of too fierce a flame, and adds it to her stack.
Outside the crowd shouts and a stone crashes through the window beside my elbow. Danokin pokes his head in the front doorway.
“I wouldn’t stick around much longer,” he says.
The gallery lights are merciless as a theater’s light bridge, showing the lines of pain etched on Leonoa’s face and the crows-feet around Adelina’s eyes. Has it really been that long, I wonder, for them to have aged so?
Adelina looks at me with her customary reserve, but she senses the battle itch building inside me, the tremble so particular to the pre-battle moment. Leonoa and Bernarda continue to face off in silent fury.
Outside the gallery shouts are loud and angry. A tension fills the air that hasn’t been there before, mingled with the smell of spilled punch and sweat. Outside the nearest high window, slogans sway dizzily as though drunk on the prospect of violence.
I assess the exits. Fight strategies are second nature. I’ve been in crowds before when things have gone bad. The fact is, I’ve been in fights in nearly every bar in the city, not to mention the occasional Gladiatorial match where the crowd disagreed with the outcome—most recently, Merchants tired of Spring’s lateness.
The shouts outside grow louder and angrier. Another rock smashes through a window, sending a shower of glass across the floor, a crash followed by the tinkle of landing shards. Bernarda screams, holding her long-nailed hands up as though to frame her face.
“Torch the place!” someone shouts outside.
“You would think the Duke’s police would be here already,” I observe to Adelina.
“You would think so. What shall we do?”
Adelina’s calm confidence that I know what to do is reassuring, if irritating. Just once, I’d like to see a Merchant less assured that the world is run to suit them, that everything will be taken care of by someone else.
“There’s a door to the back there.” I nod at an archway half-hidden by striped damask curtains. “That should lead to the kitchen, then to the alleyway that heads out towards the street on either side. I would take the branch that leads away from the crowd. Unless they are more organized than most mobs, they won’t have watchers out there.”
“All right,” Adelina says. She turns to head over toward Leonoa but I catch at her sleeve.
“Wait.”
“What?”
“If we all leave that way, we’ll drag the crowd after us. I’d rather you and Leonoa slip out first. I’ll follow later.”
“You’re staying here? But what if they attack you?”
I grin cockily at her. What indeed?
She wavers.
Taking my friend’s elbow, I steer her through the room’s confusion. Bernarda is fluttering around near the window. Perhaps the next thrown stone will strike her, I hope uncharitably, or strike Marta, who is being dragged away by the man who brought her. Others cluster against the walls, unsure of anything except that they do not want to face the angry mob.
“But what about my fee!” Leonoa says when we explain the plan to her. “I know how this works, Bel. Let them get away with it once, and my prices start dropping, and then no one values my work anymore. I can’t afford not to sell these paintings.”
“Then I will buy the lot of them! Have Bernarda send me the bill. But let us get you out of here safely, so you can go paint more paintings and charge even more exorbitant fees for them.”
“I’ll stay with you,” the young man beside Leonoa says. He has hair of an unremarkable shade, pulled back and clasped with a black pearl and opal bauble. His face is bean-shaped, oddly askew, but appealing. He is clean-shaven and has little hair on his arms, which are exposed by the gauziness of his sleeves. Over the filmy shirt, a laced leather vest matches his boots.
I glance between the two of them. There’s something about him.
Or maybe it’s just the incipient fight. As I’ve noted before, fighting sets other juices stirring.
“This is Miche. He came to talk about buying one of the paintings,” Leonoa says.
Miche bows. I smile at him. Leonoa and Adelina exchange glances.
“Go,” I say, turning back to Adelina. “Triple moons, Addie! For once in your life don’t argue with me.”
“Unfair,” Adelina says. “That’s so unfair.”
I kiss her hand, conscious of Miche observing the gesture. “Yes, unfair. I’m sorry. Sweetheart, take Leonoa and get out of here. I cannot fight unless I know that both of you are safe. I will meet you at the tea shop on the Duke’s Plaza.”
“Very well,” Adelina says.
It’s not until they vanish through the doorway that I relax.
I can handle myself in any fight. But I’ve always hated the arena matches that require keeping some target safe from attack. Particularly when it’s a living target. Living targets are prone to panic, to running in the wrong direction only to spit themselves on a sword. It tries my patience to deal with such things.
There’s a reason why I’ve never had children. The teenaged students of the Brides of Steel mature enough to be interesting in time, but young children are annoying blanks, packages of squawks and yells serving no purpose but to give their parents something to worry about; just more targets to be protected.
Not that I mean to compare either Adelina or Leonoa to children, I think, checking my sword as I make my way towards the other Gladiators.
But still.
“Crowd’s grown,” Danokin says as I join him.
“How many?”
He shrugs. “Under a hundred.”
“Ah, and three of us. Sad to see them so outnumbered.”
We all grin. I feel a touch of pride. Gladiators, tough and bold, something out of legend. Heroes of Tabat. I can tell the others are feeling the same. Behind them, I see the white-haired woman—Selene?—and inwardly preen, forgetting Miche. Fighting is an aphrodisiac, for both combatant and bystander. Selene will be around afterward, surely.
Selene’s hair glimmers like white moonlight. She is the opposite of Skye’s innocence; there is a
knowingness
about her. Her lips are parted and her eyes seek mine. Deep inside, I feel a touch like a ship’s anchor colliding with some vast Serpent, setting the proud masts a-twang like a harp, forcing a gasp from me.