House of Sand and Secrets (Books of Oreyn #2)(22)
I stop before a portrait of a kitty-girl. Her hair is dyed flame-red and she’s wearing only a thin shift rolled up to her thighs as she washes her feet in a small stone basin.
“Vulgar, don’t you think?” says a woman with a honey dark voice.
My heart lurches, a little rabbit in a noose. “I like it,” I say, pretending to examine it more intently to give myself time to act as if this meeting were as casual to me as it must be to her. “It’s real.”
The woman laughs. “So it is. I must admit to quite liking a bit of vulgarity myself.”
I turn to face Carien, my surprise at seeing her here tucked carefully away. Has she been thinking of me the way I have of her and so our thoughts are pulling us together? I imagine the roots of a smothering fig, spreading out and down around a blackbark until it dies. Which one of us has taken root in the other, I wonder. “Vulgarity?” I murmur.
“As long as it’s real.” She smiles. “There’s nothing as ugly as the mundane dressed up in finery it shouldn’t have.”
“And who decides what is mundane and what is fine?”
Carien claps her hands and laughs, clearly not caring that the low-Lammers around us are staring. “Who indeed, and what made you decide to come out here, down from your precious tower?”
I ignore the jibe. While it’s true I spend much of my time in the Pelim apartments, it’s hardly because I don’t want to mingle with people I think lower than myself. I don’t think so, anyway. “The review,” I say.
“Scathing, isn’t it?” Carien has a wicked smile, and there again is that wildness I recognize, that makes me want to reach out and touch her mouth, to feel how warm her breath would be against my cold fingertips. “Would you like to meet the artist?”
“You know him?” I raise one brow.
“Naturally.” Her smile grows wickeder and wilder – it is not done for House Lammers to count painters and crakes as friends and acquaintances. “I’ve heard you’re not a bad artist yourself.”
“I’m passable.” Painting is something I was taught to do regardless of skill or desire; all girls in the Houses have their artistic temperament encouraged. We are pretty things, destined to make pretty things. I am marginally competent. My real interest lies less with the art than with how I am able to use that art to record those things that interest me. “My paintings bring me more pleasure than they would others, I’m afraid.”
“Nonsense, I’m sure.” Carien takes my arm. “Come, perhaps our artist will deign to give you lessons.”
“I don’t think-”
“Oh hush,” she says, and pulls me along with her. “Live a little.”
And how long have I wanted to do just that – to forget about death and betrayal? And perhaps I was wrong about Carien. After all, House parties are hardly the place where you show others your true face. Guyin is bitter, and his view of all the other Houses is twisted by his self-imprisonment.
Carien sends my driver home while I stand there gaping. “Calm yourself,” she says. “I shan’t leave you stranded.”
I clamber as elegantly as I can into her coach, which is done in shades of russet and copper, with the windswept leaves that mark House Eline picked out in gold paint along the carriage doors. The two cantankerous unicorns pulling it are matched chestnuts, their single horns massive and gnarled, sweeping back over their high, rugged shoulders.
Carien doesn’t tell me where we’re going and I am not yet ready to ask. This close, inside the small carriage, I can smell the faint winter-pear and honey of her perfume. Underneath that is a wild note, like the mossy boles of forests. Jannik would be able to tell the different scents apart, could name them. Perhaps his own family made this one.
The one thing I don’t smell is scriv. She won’t be Reading me. I relax my back against the leather seat, secure that she will not be using the drug to pick her way through my emotions, to trick my secrets out of me by knowing when to say the right words. “You know his haunts?”
“Indeed. You could call me something of a patron of the arts.”
We turn into an area where I have never set foot. A white-washed pub called the Greenfinch stands on the corner of a long road of narrow houses huddled together, their grey stones overlapping, their tiles mingling. We pass the pub, into another street. This one is full of barrows and handcarts. It is too much like going back to Pelimburg’s Old Town; it reminds me of a past from which I have run. The coach clatters to a halt.
“We’ll have to walk the rest,” says Carien.
I follow her like a boggert in a dream. Here then is the hand offered for no reason other than the ones that are supposed to spur friendships. She is interested in me, we have the same lives, and under our silks and our masks and our marriages, the same vulgarity. I could tell myself some story that I am going with her because she’s a key to my mystery of the dead vampires, but it’s not true. For the first time in the months I have been in my chosen exile in MallenIve, I have seen the reflection of myself in someone else.
We leave the driver waiting and cross the cobbled street into a narrow alley way. The dream-like feeling ripples with shivery fish memories. It wasn’t so long ago that I worked in places like the ones we are passing. In Pelimburg I scrubbed my hands raw in a tea house called The Twice-Drowned Crake. The Crake was set against the warren of alleyways that make up Old Town, and the streets were crammed with shops and parlours and laundry houses and grimy narrow buildings where the girls wore hard dead faces. The boards were worn down by a thousand summers, by wind-flung sand. The heavy sea-smell of salt and kelp was tangled up in the nets and the masts, and there was no way to separate the city from the ocean. I breathe in deep, wishing for that taste of the crisp sea against my tongue, but all I get is MallenIve’s putrescent stench. The loss is so intense it pricks at my eyes. My breath comes sharp with regret. I had forgotten so much, and not wanted to allow myself to remember.