Radiance (Wraith Kings Book 1)(42)
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
If there was anything more odorous than an amaranthine dye house, Ildiko had yet to learn of it. She covered her nose with a handkerchief and followed the master dyer into the billowing clouds of choking steam that poured off the tops of open kettles suspended over fires. The smells of salt, soda ash, and shellfish combined to make her eyes water and her throat close.
Kai laborers worked in teams, taking turns at tending fires, dunking cloth in boiling vats of amaranthine, and setting the cloth to dry on wooden horses. The house’s muddy floor looked like an emptied battlefield before all the blood washed away in a rainstorm. Puddles of water in shades from palest pink to deep ruby splashed across her boots as she trudged through the muck. She was far too busy trying to keep her balance to pay much attention to the stares her presence drew.
Anhuset muttered under her breath as she followed Ildiko. “It would have been easier to have someone deliver samples of the cloth to the fortress.”
Ildiko chose not to answer her, preferring to keep her mouth closed and the odor of the dye off her palate as long as possible. It would indeed have been much easier to order samples brought to the fortress, but Ildiko wanted to see the dye houses and learn how the Kai made the valuable commodity that made the human kingdoms covet the vivid amaranthine.
She listened closely as the master dyer, a weathered Kai with hands permanently painted reddish-purple, described the process of extracting the dye from the freshwater bitter mollusk they fished from the nearby lake and dying the stacks of bleached linen, wool, and silk stored in another room. It was messy, smelly, sometimes dangerous work involving boiling the mollusks, racking the slime and impurities from the top, straining the dyes and boiling them again with salt and soda ash.
Fabric dyed in the jewel-toned magenta was stretched on the wooden horses in various states of drying. The master dyer had explained to her and Anhuset how the amaranthine didn’t fade after years in sunlight as other dyes did, but instead, grew more vibrant over time with the saturation of light. Ildiko thought it ironic how a people who shunned the daylight were known for creating something that grew more beautiful with exposure to it.
Mollusk slime racked from the top of the boiling dye was pushed into a noxious pile near one of the middens. The congealing heap glistened in the moonlight, glowing green from the thousands of buzzing flies that swarmed its surface. The smell sent Ildiko’s stomach into an endless tumble, and she turned away before she lost her breakfast.
Anhuset stood beside her, hand over her nose, a thunderhead of disapproval darkening her brow. “That bow-legged Beladine rooster isn’t worth this.”
Ildiko silently agreed, but she wasn’t here solely to handpick a gift of hospitality for Serovek’s visit. This was one of four principal dye houses in the Kai kingdom and under Brishen’s guardianship. Ildiko felt it her duty as his wife to learn some small thing about the product that had secured an alliance between her people and his and this marriage between them.
She inhaled a grateful breath of clean air when the dye master led them outside and away from both middens and the pungent steam roiling out of the kettles. He pointed to another set of vats, these planted on the ground with no fires beneath them. Kai dyers used pulleys to raise and lower dripping cloth into more of the dye.
“This is the cold dye stage, Your Highness. The color has been racked and strained and left to sit in the sun for eleven days. We dye the silks in this amaranthine.”
Ildiko drew closer to one of the vats and peered into a contained sea of magenta-colored liquid. The dye shimmered under the glow of hanging lanterns strung from poles driven into the ground. Her typical everyday garb reflected the colors she preferred – blacks and greens, dove grays, and the ambers and browns of autumn. She had never before favored reds or pinks, but staring at the lustrous amaranthine tempted her to consider a scarf in that color at a later date.
She leaned farther into the vat.
“Be careful you don’t fall in, Your Highness.”
The dyer’s warning came too late. While Ildiko didn’t pitch headlong into the vat, the necklace she wore slipped its clasped and fell into the color with a gentle plop. Its onyx cabochon and chain sank, leaving behind an expanding pattern of circular waves to mark where it fell.
“Oh no!” Ildiko didn’t hesitate and plunged her arms all the way in into the vat until the dye lapped at her collarbones. Heedless of the dyer’s and Anhuset’s cries, she flailed in the dye, fingers clutching until she caught the tail end of the sinking chain on which the cabochon hung. She jerked it out of the vat, splashing dye across her neck and the underside of her jaw.
The necklace hung from her dripping fingers, and she lifted it to show Anhuset. “Got it!” she crowed triumphantly.
The master dyer stared at her silently, features pinched. Anhuset also stared at her but with eyes narrowed and lips alternately twitching and compressing as she held back her laughter.
Ildiko glanced down at herself, soaked to the skin in dye. Her green tunic had turned a muddy brown, and where the color had washed bare skin, she was painted an interesting plum shade. She looked again to Anhuset whose sharp teeth flashed in a wide grin. The master dyer didn’t share in her amusement. The pinched look had been replaced by a wide-eyed stare and a face gone pale as old ash. Even Ildiko couldn’t mistake his dread.
She hastened to assure him. “No harm done, Master Soté. Nothing a good scrubbing with soap and hot water won’t fix.” Ildiko almost smiled but changed her mind at the last moment. She might not possess the fangs the Kai sported, but that didn’t mean they found her smile any more reassuring than she found theirs.