Beasts of Tabat (20 page)

Are you all right? What happened? Who were those men?
The questions pressed in on him, but he managed to reel away and out the Tram’s entrance onto the landing, past the entranced stares of passersby and to a quiet corner where he sobbed in a solid breath for the first time and then doubled over, spewing out the bilious contents of his stomach.

* * *

Abernia did not scold him when he returned without the basket, but she frowned and looked displeased. Reaching out, she tilted his head to study the bruise. “Been fighting, eh?”

“No,” he said. “They came at me, took it, tried to throw me off the Tram.”

“The Priests?” Disbelief filled Abernia’s tone.

“No, two men. I met them when I first came here. They tried …” He trailed off. They’d tried to send him to Granny Beeswax, and she’d sensed something about him when she’d tried to magic him. Best not to lead anyone down that path. He swallowed hard. “They took the basket and what was in it. I’m sorry, Abernia. I’ll save my money and pay you back.”

A knock sounded at the door.

“Go answer it, boy,” Abernia said. “If it’s for Miss Bella, she’s gone for the evening, and knowing her, she won’t be back till well into the morning. She fights as Winter soon, and she celebrates beforehand, not after.”

An auburn-haired young woman stood there. Teo took a dislike to her immediately. Something in the way she stood managed to be accusatory, and her mouth was pinched at the corners. She surveyed him with disdain, and said, “Fetch me Abernia.”

Abernia hustled out when Teo told her of the visitor, wiping her hands on her apron nervously. “Come into the parlor, Miss Marta, and we’ll talk,” she said. She glanced at Teo. “Here now, since you lost the other bread, you’ll need to fetch some from Figgis. Can you stay out of trouble there?” When he nodded glumly, her voice softened. “Get yourself a meat roll while you’re at it.”

He obeyed. Why did Abernia want him out of the house for a bit? All the way to Figgis, he kept a nervous eye out, fearing Canumbra and Legio would spot him again. But the trip was uneventful.

Coming back in, he snuck along the hallway towards the kitchen, but Abernia heard him.

“Is that you, boy?” she called.

“Yes.” He popped his head into the parlor doorway, trying to give the impression that he had been coming to see if she needed him.

The visitor was still there, but in the act of standing and pulling on her coat. “She still takes my flowers then?” she said to Abernia.

Abernia’s eyes flicked to Teo as though in warning. “’Deed she do, Miss Marta.”

The woman nodded and came to the doorway. Teo hastily stepped aside, but she stood, staring at him, lip curling.

Or rather at his chest. He looked down at himself. He wore the jacket Bella had given him, its brass buttons gleaming in the streetlight.

She sneered. “I see Bella’s dressing her household in lover’s castoffs. Or are you hopping in her bed like all the rest, is that why she’s taken you in?”

Indignation pulled him up to match her height. “I beg your pardon?” he said, channeling Bella in the iciness of his tone.

She was unimpressed. Her eyes flicked over his form, looking him up and down. Then she simply smiled and left.

The smile stayed with him. It had been an extremely unpleasant smile, the smile of a predator. It chilled him to the bone, even when he was back sitting in the kitchen, drinking Abernia’s steaming chal.

* * *

After Abernia had gone off to bed, he crept upstairs to Bella’s rooms. What had the visitor meant about the flowers?

Bella was out still. She often came home in the earliest hours of the morning. The crystal and silver armor watched him as he went to the bouquet on the side table.

They came every three days, these bouquets, full of fragrant, waxy-petaled flowers. Bella looked amused, sometimes, when watching him change a new bouquet for an old one, but she’d never said anything about it. The smell was sweet and reminded him of Fairy honey.

The bouquets always came in their own vases, made of thick green glass, thick with bubbles and occlusions. Carefully he lifted the bouquet from the vase, not even sure what he was looking for.

Tied at the bottom of each stem was a bit of black thread with a silver bead. He tugged one loose and squinted at it. The bead was skull-shaped, intricately detailed.

He heard noise at the door as Bella came in. She looked askance at seeing him.

He held out the flower to her. “I think there are spells on this.”

She took it and examined it and made a wry face. “Indeed. Here.” She picked up the flowers.

He followed at her heels as she marched it downstairs, then out through the garden. “What are you doing?”

“Running water drowns most magic,” she said, holding the back gate open for him. The vase arched out twenty or thirty feet, to splash into the canal’s center. They stood together watching the water as though afraid the curse might re-emerge.

“How did you know?” Bella said.

He didn’t want to implicate Abernia. Surely she hadn’t known what was going on. He shrugged. “They just felt off.” It was as valid an excuse as any. Everyone knew some people could sense magic, that powerful spells had their own presence.

Bella’s lips pursed but she said nothing. Overhead the purple moon chased the white one across the sky.

* * *

“You carry yourself as though you are afraid,” Bella said the next day after breakfast.

“I am afraid,” Teo pointed out. There were so many things to worry about in Tabat, even here in this household.

“Everyone is afraid of one thing or another,” Bella said. “But if you carry yourself in a way that shows it, new things will spring up.”

Teo could see the sense of that. But it was hard not to show what he was feeling.

“Stand up straight,” Bella said. She studied him intently. He sucked in his stomach.

“Now imagine what it is like not to be afraid.”

He thought about that. What would it feel like not to worry that the Priests of the Moon Temple were about to find him? Or that Canumbra and Legio were not watching for him? He tried to remember what it had been like at home, where none of these worries had ridden him. But even there, there had been fears and anxieties.

When had he ever imagined he was free of worries? It came to him that the reason he had always loved the stories of Bella was that she had never been afraid.

He tried imagining he was her. He closed his eyes and found himself standing a little straighter yet.

“Well,” Bella said. “That’s a start, at least.”

***

Chapter Twenty

Bella’s Life With Teo

Age has made me only better, I think, whistling my way out of the house in the morning. But there is nothing unnatural about that. I have always been quick of mind. Even Jolietta, who had hated so much about the young me, had been forced to admit that I never had to be shown how to do a thing twice, whether it was how to sex a hunting Dragon’s egg or how to trim a Centaur’s hoof.

That was what moved me so quickly up the Gladiatorial ranks, that and a dogged determination to succeed, a force of will that carried me through life with Jolietta and, once at school, pushed me to train harder, longer, more doggedly, than the other students.

The others hadn’t known how lucky they were. No one taught them how difficult and friendless life could be. They hadn’t had to fight just to survive, and that made them lacking in the ring.

And I’d had a promise to goad me as well: my promise to Lucya, that if admitted to the Brides of Steel despite my age, I’d prove the equal of any student the school had ever produced.

I lived up to that promise.

Skye’s face has been eclipsing my duty, as surely as the sun outshines the moon. I must put a stop to that.

I could have ridden the Great Tram down and found myself there faster, but I like the way the Tumbril Stair makes me breathe hard, especially at a pace fast enough to dance on the edge of recklessness, reveling in my surefootedness. It keeps me from dwelling on my mission as I descend the terraces, ignoring the occasional murmur, acknowledging the equally occasional greeting. But as I turn and my pace slows, the thoughts return.

Skye has been making it plainer and plainer where her intentions lie. By now I’m a touch unnerved, if flattered, by the pursuit. I’m used to being on the other side of such a chase. And the predatory gleam in Skye’s eyes, the scent of her when standing near, too near, makes me feel very much the quarry.

It will be better to have it out. To be firm with Skye. Let her know this is an impossibility and that we must return to normal. The tie between us is teacher and student. Nothing else.

Nothing else.

I find Skye alone in the former linen closet Lucya employs as a map room, hunched over a scroll. My step alerts her and she turns, releasing the edges so they roll up with a snap.

I’ve been rehearsing the words over and over in my head. I begin immediately, without pausing to greet her.

“We must talk, student,” I say.

Skye opens her mouth, but I raise a hand to forestall her. “Let me begin. We are teacher and student. There can be nothing else between us. Do you understand?”

Skye blinks. I see, to my horror, tears welling in my student’s eyes.

“Don’t you like me?” Skye says in a whisper so soft I can barely make it out.

“Ah, Skye,” I say, more quietly. “It’s not that I don’t like you, but that it’s inappropriate.”

The wrong thing to say, I realize from the way the girl’s face brightens.

“Then you do!” she exclaims. She takes a step closer. “I am of age and only a year left to go at the College before I can fight in public. Other instructors have had love affairs with students more than once, you know it’s true.”

“And I know that it’s wrong.”

Skye steps closer yet. “Is it true what they say then? That though you’ll share a bed, your heart’s as cold as Winter and you’ll never fall in love?”

It sounds like a quote from a penny-wide and forces a laugh from me.

“You do not hate me then.”

Skye stands very close. How has she gotten so close?

“No,” I say, feeling helpless.

Skye looks into my face. “You might even like me, under other circumstances,” she breathes in a waft of anise.

“Under other circumstances,” I say hoarsely, holding very still.

Skye slides her hands up my arms. I quiver but refuse to move.

“Under other circumstances,” Skye repeats. “Circumstances where you might not object to this.”

Her lips against mine are like electricity, like kissing one of the little mountain Nymphs that haunted the groves near Piper Hill. Though they tasted of zinc and Skye tastes of anise.

For a moment, I waver.

Then I lean in to the kiss, returning it, and think, “What does it matter?”

I am Bella Kanto, after all.

* * *

The problem with staying on good terms with old lovers is that they continue to be interested in your life and consider themselves both entitled to comment on it freely as well as knowledgeable enough about the ins and outs of one’s personality to make such commentary bite deep.

Thus with Adelina.

She sits behind her desk piled with manuscripts and blue bound galleys as though it were a fortress. Leaning out from behind some spiritual parapet, a stone-built tower of self-justification based on the knowledge that she has never treated an old lover badly, she observes, “You could be kinder to Marta. It wouldn’t take much to assuage her feelings.”

No, not much. But I don’t like thinking about Marta. It makes me worry that someday I will find myself in that situation, chasing Skye after she’s rejected me. If I think about Marta’s feelings I worry in a way that is unfamiliar to me; me, who has slid through life thus far, at least ever since that first win, decades ago when I put on Spring’s robes, and won, and became Winter for twenty years.

Past Adelina’s shoulder are more blue-bound books. Strange to think that we’ve put together enough books, she and me talking it out in the evenings, to fill almost an entire wall, even though it is a shorter expanse than the flanking, longer walls would be. I can read the titles:
Bella Kanto in the Southern Isles
,
Bella Kanto and the Sorcerer’s Kiss
,
Bella Kanto and the Riddling Manticore
.

I say, “Why waste time thinking about those who seek to drag us down? We should think about those who lift us up instead surely.”

“Who is it that lifts you up, Bella?”

Who indeed? I run through figures in my head, old teachers, former opponents, noble historical personalities, even the Trade Gods and the traits each embodies. I always liked Fair Dealing but the truth be told, I don’t measure myself up against others the way I might have once, when I was young. I am all too well aware that no one matches me. Matches Bella Kanto.

Instead I’ve become that for so many, and much of that is due to the penny-wides, the successive chapters that Adelina brings together into these books, collected by a span of time.

I am nothing if not completed, when I want to be. I say, “I hold myself up to the figure you have made of me, Adelina. Tabat’s Champion.”

“And how do you think the Champion should treat those she leaves behind?”

“I don’t know,” I snapped. “In all those adventures, you’ve never shown my thoughts. Anyone could read anything into the paper doll you’ve made of me.”

Her eyes widen, and she takes a deep breath before replying. “I know you’re upset, but there is no need to point your rapier wit in my direction.”

I pull myself forward in my chair, propping my elbows on my knees, hunched as though to ward off a blow, I realize, consciously relaxing myself before I speak in turn. I should be reasonable. Adelina means only the best for me. She doesn’t nag me except in my best interests, but it’s nagging nonetheless. If I stay here we will be at each other’s throats, disagreeing and worrying over the point like dogs.

I stand and say, “I am sorry, I will lose my temper soon.” I leave it at that. She knows I prefer to sidle out rather than talk it all the way through to death and beyond.

She nods. “Will you call for me tonight?”

I refrain from saying, “Only if you can promise not to talk about all this.” Instead I nod and duck out the door.

I cut up along the stair that most call Eely but which I still know by the name it had when it first was built, Alberic’s Procession. This time of day, the latest of the lunchers are returning to their work or homes, only a few moving quickly as though they’ve just realized how late they are, while most amble in the same spirit that led them to linger over their meal.

Yes, Adelina is right, and if I treated Marta better a lot of the enmity would be turned away. But Marta has not acted particularly well. She has irritated me enough that I’m in no hurry to assuage her irritation. I don’t mind rubbing her a little raw, the way she’s worked at rubbing me.

I thrust it all away in some drawer of my mind. Slide it closed and hope that I’ll forget to re-open it, at least until someone else insists on forcing it. Too bad Tabat seems smaller than it should, at least when it comes to things like this. I run into Marta far too often, to the point where I avoid some occasions now. I used to fetch my dinner sometimes from the shop a few blocks away, but no longer after running into her there three times in a white moon.

I’ll swing by the school, ignoring Lucya’s usual raised eyebrow. She wanted me at the school more often, and now she has me. She has nothing to complain about. I’ll drill the girls for a couple of hours, wash and change, and then perhaps take a handful of them with me to raid the shellfish carts down at the docks. She can’t object to that as it’s a practice I’ve done often enough in the past. And if Skye should happen to be among them, still, what’s the harm?

No harm there at all.

* * *

I go to the flower shop I always go to when wooing someone. It’s on Greenslope Way. I knew the owner, Lorelia, back when she was studying at the College of Mages, before she abandoned her studies and decided to use what she’d learned to grow flowers. She’s clever, I’ll give her that. Now she owns several greenhouses outside the city limits, and her shop holds the most sought after flowers in the city.

They are expensive. This is where Marta’s flowers came from.

I like the Oread, Cinnabar, who Lorelia employs to run the till. Her home, a rough tumble of boulders, crowds the tiny garden out back.

I come into the shop’s steamy, scented warmth from the cold air outside which makes my garments feel overly warm, clinging to me in a heavy embrace. The Oread is engaged with a customer, a thin woman picking out daffodils and tulips to surround a huge crimson blossom whose petals flutter like butterfly wings as she settles the other flowers around them.

She wraps it all in a cone of heavy brown paper, tucks the edges over, and tells the woman, “You’ll want to keep it warm, get it inside as soon as possible. Are you in a carriage?”

The woman nods. The Oread looks reassured and smiles at her as she takes the heavy handful of coins.

As she turns away I advance on the counter. Cinnabar should smile when she sees me, but her expression is odd for just a second before she puts on the expression I’m expecting.

Her fingers flicker in greeting, scout-talk.
How can I help you, Bella? What flavor of lover are you looking for this time?

What would Skye want? Daughter of Merchants, she’ll be used to opulence and expensive trinkets. I could afford such things, but she’ll be more charmed, I think, by elegance and simplicity. Flowers that speak of poetry.

I move to the case of simpler, unenchanted flowers, clots of color, tiny white bells sending out a powerful scent, pink roses, and tulips fresh from the greenhouse. I point to the irises, slender reflections of Tabat’s blue and gold flag, patriotic and yet graceful.

Cinnabar wraps the hard stems in damp orange newspaper imprinted with an auction listing before she hands me the flowers. She waves away the coins I offer her and says,
Mistress has said never to charge you, Bella. You know that.

I push the coins toward her on the counter and lift my hand away in order to sign,
Take them then and buy yourself something.

She smiles and scoops them up.
Very well then.

She pauses.
You have flowers that come each week to you,
she signs.

Marta’s order. Does she know something about the ill-luck spells on them?

But no, Cinnabar signs,
Are they to your liking?

I nod.
Pretty,
I sign.
Fragrant. But the order is cancelled now.

She bites her lip, eyes flickering past me to the door as another customer comes in.
We’ll speak of it another time,
she signs.

We bow to each other, another of the habits practiced by those that have hunted in the northern woods, an affectation on my part, perhaps, but one she embraces.

She seeks a bond with me, as so many do. It delights her to have something in common with the famous Bella Kanto.

* * *

Skye receives the flowers as I knew she would. She holds them reverently in her hands and sniffs at them before raising her eyes to my face. She smiles at me.

This is the moment in a love affair when we first confirm fondness for each other, turn guesses and hopes into realities. I know she’s experiencing this giddy rush. Being able to see it in her eyes reawakens memories in me. Not the same as that true first brush, but close enough. It still shines despite the edges that have rubbed away.

“You want to put those in water,” I tell her.

She nods and turns. “I’ll take them to the kitchen and get a vase.”

She takes a step, stops, and looks back over her shoulder. “You’ll be here?”

I nod. She vanishes through a doorway.

Someone clears her throat in one of the other doorways. Lucya. She steps out and puts her hands on her hips as she looks at me.

“Come a-wooing, Bello Kanto, have you?”

I blush. I’d been hoping to avoid this moment.

“What are you playing at? I’ve never known you to do this before. Has being the Champion finally gone and swelled your head so big there’s no room for thinking in it?”

I say, “This time it’s different. She hasn’t been my student for years and years. With one of them it would be inappropriate, but she’ll graduate within a year and be old enough then that there would be no questioning such a relationship.”

“Fiddle faddle. How long did it take you to think up that whirligig of justification?”

“Do you think I haven’t asked myself all of this?”

“You haven’t asked hard or long enough, it’s apparent.” She folds her arms. “These things are forbidden.”