Beasts of Tabat (4 page)

The food tasted of smoke and home. He tasted his mother’s spice mix now in the meat. When this was gone, there would be no way for him to remember other than memory, and that would slip away, bit by bit. Would he lose that flavor entirely? What would things taste like in Tabat, where the great ships laden with goods from the Southern Isles, like cinnamon and hot peppers and other spices, sailed into harbor to distribute their wares?

Far in the distance, wolves howled. He presumed wolves, not dogs, but who knew out here? There used to be no wild dogs at all, his father had told him once, but expeditions from Tabat had always had such creatures with them, and sometimes they stayed behind, for one reason or another, a gift or an escape. Now they saw packs sometimes. His village refused to kill them, saying that they looked too much like the Shifters that took on wolfish form.

But they were only animals, and if they thought that they could get a meal from him and this fat Priest, they would be on their heels. Only the fire would be able to drive them back. He shivered, not entirely from the cold. The howling went on, taken up from one distant spot, then another, then another, like a chorus tossing a melody back and forth among its members.

He did not mean to sleep, but in the end, he did, curled near the heap that represented Grave, which breathed in ragged pants, a sound that followed him into his dreams, becoming dogs at his heels, dogs chasing him down.

The song continued, even though he was no longer listening, deep into the night.

In the morning, things were worse.

***

Chapter Four

Bella in Daily Life

The Centaur is just a boy, a beautiful one.

The air smells of leather, horse shit, straw, and fresh pine from the lumber pile stacked head-high in the north corner. Lucya knows I don’t like working with Beasts. That she’s been willing to bring me here means she’s all but given up on the boy.

His glossy pelt shines on his spindle-thin legs, his eyes are like tumbling chestnuts. He tries to struggle to his feet at my approach before he gives up and lies on his side, coltish legs protruding and his thin torso twisted at an odd angle. His stringy, matted hair falls to tangle with the straw on the planking. His eyes roll and stare off into space, their intelligence given way to vacancy.

From a few feet away, I study him. “Bite?”

“It doesn’t react much at all,” Lucya says. She leans down to touch his shoulder. The head swivels in ragged jerks to regard her.

I palm his face and tilt the heavy skull to catch the late morning light available through the wide stable doors.

This close I can see them, twin punch marks, as big as a freckle, set where eye meets nose. They’re raw still, weeping clear fluid. “Bring me a wet cloth?”

Lucya steps to a bucket near the stack of pine. I wait, releasing the boy’s head. It nods back to stare at me. Little intelligence is left in those eyes; perhaps a dog’s or one of the smallest ape’s.

I use the damp cloth to blot away crusts of blood.

“Are you building something?” I nod over at the lumber before I hold the boy’s face to the light, examining it.

“We’re enacting a battle in support of the New Year’s political rally next month. A small group of students, lots of flash and pageantry. You’d know about it if you were here more.”

It’s not the first time Lucya has needled me like this. It’s why I’m not here more, actually, or at least that’s what I’ve told her, too much responsibility here. At the time I helped stake the expansion of the Brides of Steel, I told her that I didn’t want to be an owner anywhere, I just wanted to be behind the stage.

But I like working with the students here. What would I do without that to occupy me but wander about and grow fat eating pastries? I shrug.

“And if you appeared at more of the school events, more nobility and wealthy folk would take us up. They may think my Northern blood uncouth, but they’d be more than willing to overlook it for the chance to rub elbows with the famous Bella Kanto.”

“Mmm.” The Centaur boy tenses as I finish wiping his eyes, even though I try to be as tender as I can. His long legs and knobby hooves
thunk
across the floor as he tries to gather them. I hiss under my breath, letting the air susurrate while I rub his shoulder. He relaxes and sinks back to the floor.

“He’s been dulled.” I rise. “Recently, too. Maybe a purple moon at most.”

“Dulled?”

“It’s a procedure a few Beast Trainers use.” I wipe my hands against each other to remove the feel of his slack-weight skull. “They insert the end of a duller—that’s a long piece of wire with a handle—there where the eye meets the nose alongside the eyeball. Then they push and punch it back into the skull. Twirl the wire a few times and you have a dulled Beast. Usually they lose the ability to speak, sometimes not, but either way their faculties are much diminished. The procedure’s saved for unruly or dangerous Beasts, and it’s not always reliable. Most Trainers don’t know the knack of it. Can’t say much for your stabler if he’s never heard of it.”

Lucya makes a face of wry distaste. “So it’ll stay like this?”

“Yes.”

She sighs. “Not much use in the arena. Well, I’m sure I can find some carnival or brothel that will take it.”

“You might try the Duke’s Menagerie for him.”

Lucya shakes her head. “It’s been neutered. The Duke prefers breeding stock.”

“Still, they might have some use for him. It’s worth a try.”

But I know she won’t. It bothers me, but I have no establishment where I can take him. Perhaps I’ll speak to Alberic, but Lucya is right, he wants perfect specimens.

Only the best for Alberic.

Like me.

* * *

I came to the Brides of Steel when I was fifteen, three days after Jolietta’s death. It’d taken a while to sort things out, days that seemed interminable to me then.

Nowadays I’m surprised they were settled that quickly.

Jolietta had named me her heir, the new owner of Piper Hill and all the lands surrounding it. Though even there she carped on how disappointing I had proved in an unnecessary series of paragraphs that the lawyer read aloud in an embarrassed voice as I and the others named in the will listened.

I did not weep at all. I waited for the lawyer to explain out all the hems and haws of Jolietta’s estate and all the ways she’d tried to tie me into her life as a Beast Trainer.

Afterward he apologized to me for doing that, said it’d been necessitated by law.

I didn’t care. With Jolietta’s death, a great weight had risen from my shoulders, leaving joy mingled with disbelief. I kept expecting her sly face to peek around the corner and say it had been only another of her tests and that I’d failed once again.

I gave it all into the lawyer’s hands, said to sell the house and the land. I did my best by the Beasts she had kept. I saw the Oracular Pig settled with the family that would keep her well and would not sell her flesh. I gave most of the Beasts to owners who would take care of them, although I will confess that the three who had made my life the most miserable, the cook and Jolietta’s two Minotaur bodyguards, were sent to auction.

I sent for Phillip, but I could not find to whom Jolietta had sold him.

I went through her books and papers trying to find the bill of sale, but it was not there.

The chamber was closed, the curtains drawn. A Unicorn’s hide covered nearly one wall, and she’d fixed the horn above the doorway like a spear awaiting an unwary guest. I flipped back through a year’s worth of pages. Nothing. Had she thought I might hunt for it when she wasn’t around?

I looked up from the ledger propped across my lap and saw a dish of candies beside her bed. I could smell her everywhere; that musky scent she wore mixed with the smell of leather. It made bile rise in my throat.

I couldn’t stay there.

After signing the necessary papers, I packed my things and went to enroll for training as a Gladiator without looking back.

It took me less than a day to get to Tabat. It was Autumn shading into Winter, and the skies were gray. I refused to take that as an omen. I caught a ride with a farmer who was going into market, sat in the back of his cart amid the turnips, and wondered how I would be greeted at the Brides of Steel. I’d heard of them, that they’d take on older students rather than requiring they enter at the early age most schools demanded. I knew that was where I wanted to be, I knew that was how I could become a Gladiator. They weren’t the best school then. I made them that.

What drew me to the Gladiators was a feeling that there I would find direction, that there I would find out how to be strong and how never to be pushed around again. Jolietta had come close to breaking me, but she didn’t succeed.

Tabat was how I remembered it. The fish-scaled green tiles of the rooftops glimmered greasily in the late afternoon sun. The last of the late-blooming sea roses filled the gardens and frothed down the terraces of the Stairway Park. Gulls hung overhead, riding the wind and watching a baker’s cart as though afraid it might escape.

I hadn’t been in the city for over five years. Jolietta never let us outside Piper Hill, even when she went traveling herself. It felt like home immediately. It felt like the place I distantly remembered from childhood. I should have sought out Leonoa’s family, which would have been the proper thing to do. Instead, I went straight to the Brides of Steel.

It disappointed me from the outside, although I don’t know what I expected. It seemed a little run down, even. Everything I knew about it I had gleaned from the penny-wides, and it was stories of the Brides of Steel that had made me pick that school rather than any of the others. It was the only one that took only females, but it was also the one that had produced the most Champions of Tabat.

The gate was made of iron. The pattern of crossed swords cheered me a little because that was more of the sort of thing I was expecting.

When I rang the bell, it took a while for someone to come to greet me. A woman answered, with her hands stained from digging in the garden, so I presumed her a servant. Back then, Lucya was still supplementing the budding school’s income by selling the simples and ointments she made in spare moments.

I said, “I want to see the head of the school.” I was very worried they wouldn’t take me seriously, so my tone was that of Jolietta’s dealing with a lesser creature.

It was not the best first impression I’d ever made. The woman straightened, wiped her hands on her apron, and gave me a look, eyes sharp and green. I’d come to know that look much later on, a look that was stern, a look that demanded the best of you, but somehow more subtly than Jolietta’s rigor ever had been.

“I’m Lucya,” she said. “I’m the head of this school.”

I blushed. I stammered out something about what had brought me there, my ambitions to become a Gladiator.

Her reply crushed me.

“You’re too old.”

“I will work harder than any student you have ever had,” I said.

She shook her head.

I put my hand up to the gate, feeling the cold iron bite at my fingers. I said, “Please. Please just give me a chance to show you what I can do.”

What I said after that may have been the thing that changed her mind, rather than my earnest face and my pleading tone. “I can pay. I can pay well.”

She said, “I can bring you in and let them test you. But I tell you again, you are too old. You have learned bad habits. Our students come when they are scarce a decade. They work for years honing their skills. You are close to the age of graduation, how do you think you will learn what you need in time to graduate?”

I said, “I have been Jolietta Kanto’s apprentice. You cannot work me harder than she did.”

The gate screeched protest as she swung it open and gestured me inside.

They did work me hard. They put me in match after match with scarce a break between them. I knew I was fighting badly, that I lacked the skills that my opponents possessed, but I was determined. Time after time, I lost and said, “I will try again.”

Later, Lucya told me she had never seen a student so determined.

And when they finally agreed that I could study there, on probation for the first year, I knew that they would not regret that decision.

I am Bella Kanto, and I never give up.

* * *

Usually I like working here. It’s the only all-female Gladiatorial school. The students vie for my attention. They defer, they dance attendance, they’re eager to catch my every word.

But today the unease the Centaur boy has stirred in me makes everything into aggravation and nuisance to the point where I wish I’d simply stayed at home.

Though I agreed to be a silent partner in the school years ago, I pretend I’m just an instructor. That way no one makes me wade through tedious decisions. Lucya’s competent to handle it all. But being an instructor obliges me to put in an appearance at least once a week, to justify the handsome wage they pay me.

And the girls enjoy the glamour of my lessons. Hero worship makes them try harder. It’s good for the soul. I had my own heroes when I was a pupil here. Striving to outdo them made me what I am. If the students knew how much hard work had gone into becoming Bella Kanto, they’d falter, stop wanting to be the same glamorous figure.

I make it all look effortless. That’s the problem. But that’s the point of being Bella Kanto, to making the difficult look as though it takes no more thought than breathing.

After the session, the school kitchen is out of hot soup and able to offer only broth and an apology.

I nurse my
chal
at the instructors’ table and try to turn my thoughts to more pleasant things. Conversation swirls around me. The Duke has cancelled payment for the Harvest Festival, saying its cost should by rights fall to whoever became Mayor, which puts the Festival overall, usually a moneymaker for the school, in jeopardy. I put all my loose coins into the basket brought round to fund the Festival. It’s a petty act on his part. Then again, Alberic has always been one to pinch a coin until it screamed.

Lucya grows increasingly insistent that I must shoulder more work with the school. She thinks I need to lay down the groundwork for work I can do after I retire from public fighting.

That’s not anytime soon, but she’ll remind me again that I’m Tabat’s oldest practicing Gladiator by a good five years. I don’t need reminding of such things, not on an already dismal day.

To top it off, I find my favorite student has left.

“Got called back to manage the estate,” Lucya says with a twist of a smile. She doesn’t like the way I “play pets,” as she calls it. It’s true, I do favor some over others. That’s how it works, how it always has. That’s how you encourage them to work harder, and make them earn your praise.

It’s a long trip down to the Southern Isles—a few weeks. I hope Naresh keeps up daily practice, that she’ll get there and find some able relative to take over her parents’ plantation, and come back swiftly, or at least in time to fight me in the next Winter Battle. I’ll have to find another to take her place. Jenka? Djana?

“We need to talk,” Lucya says. I sheathe these thoughts and focus on her sharp-witted face. She’s readying herself to speak, I can tell from the way the lines around her eyes tauten.

“A fine new flight of students are readying themselves to enter the arena in a few months, Bella,” she says. “And I just took on three of Dina’s.”

Dina’s school may be the Brides of Steel’s only rival. They suffered a fire last month. I cannot say Lucya was saddened by the news that they’ve had to close down for a year while making repairs.

I squint sideways at her. “Any of them good?”