House of Sand and Secrets (Books of Oreyn #2)(23)

I miss the girl I was in Pelimburg. I miss Nala and Lils and Verrel and Esta. I miss Dash. How stupid and strange. I wasn’t really one of them, but at least I was never alone. How different it could have been if I’d been nothing more than just a girl – perhaps I could have scraped myself a shallow place in that world, and let Pelimburg’s doomed revolution roll over my head and pass.

“Does the air here not agree with you?” Carien snaps.

No. I suppose it does not. I smile thinly. “Should it?”

She snorts out a small un-ladylike laugh. “This way.”

The buildings are high overhead, and several arch above us, their balconies kiss-close. Very little sun manages to filter down and the cobbles are slick and mossy. There is a smell of drain water and earth and fungus. And tea.

“In here.” Carien pushes open a smoky glass door into a tiny tea shop. The place is warm, lit with fatcandle lanterns, and the greasy smoke competes with strong teas, the citrus oils and Pelimburg small-leaf tisanes. The place is half-full. The Hobs look at us then away; pretend they have never noticed our unwelcome presence. “Have you ever been in a Hob tea shop?”

“I–” I look around at the high tables; listen to the familiar hiss of the tea-urns, the distant clink of porcelain from the scullery, remember my own hands chapped and wrinkled by dishwater. “I’ve not yet had the pleasure.”

“Sit,” she says. “You’ll get used to it, soon enough.” She takes a seat at a small corner table wedged by a window made of little rounds of coloured glass.

I sit down smoothly opposite Carien, just as a low-Lammer girl in a bleached apron comes to take our order. Carien asks for sweet aloe and poisonink. I frown. ‘Ink is a poet’s drug, a madman’s. Not to say that I haven’t seen my share of it, but it’s not a vice the Houses normally bother with. Too mundane for them. It’s strictly the province of the lower castes.

“You won’t tell, will you?” She winks. “Garret thinks it awfully revolting and goes on about how it makes the Hobs even more useless than they already are, but I find I quite enjoy it.”

Why is she doing this – telling me her secrets as if we were friends? I don’t trust her and her hunger for the vampires. She’s still half-smiling at me, although one corner is faltering as she grows noticeably nervous. Perhaps, after all, she is just like me, a girl caught out of place. She’s married into House Eline, and they are a cold people. She’s a woman of woodlands and dapples and shadows, not icy glass.

I remove my gloves. The skin is white and soft; the evidence of my rebellion smoothed away with hand-creams and balms. “We all have our vices,” I say. “A redbush, with honey, please.”

The girl runs off with our order.

We wait her return in a flickering, uncomfortable silence. Around us the tea-shop murmurs and buzzes, but here it is as if we are trapped in a bubble of air under water. Carien watches me with her cat eyes, appraising me. I wonder what it is she sees.

“The artist,” I say, when our drinks are steaming before us.

“Oh, yes. Him.” Carien pouts. “He’s here.”

I look around the shop. There are the poet-caste – crakes – scrawling poems, a Hob or two taking lunch, and a few low-Lammer youths of no particular House. None of them look like my idea of an artist.

“In front of you.” Carien holds out her hands and waits.

“You?”

Her palms smack against the red wood of the table and the cups skip in their saucers. “Me.”

“Surely you’re not serious?” But her small hands are elegant despite the stubby fingers. They dance when she talks; they can never be still and silent. I suppose those are the hands of someone who would paint. I ask the first thing that pops into my head. “Where did you find a kitty-girl to sit for you?”

Carien wrinkles her brow at my odd question then shakes her head. “Where does one usually find a kitty-girl?” she says, half laughing. “And besides I paid her well, better than she would have earned on her back.”

“I see.”

“You don’t approve.” She draws back a little. “I thought you would, and I rarely misjudge a person.”

“Misread,” I correct. “I’m not judging you. If anything, I’m intrigued.” Always a bad idea for me. “Does Garret know?”

“Oh, he knows I paint. It’s a suitable enough hobby.”

I want to go back to the Sunstone and look at her work again. She has a good eye: it captures more than merely form and composition. She catches people’s hearts and the truths that lie behind their masks. The things that make them people. My own talent is meagre – enough to let me record the things I want. I’ve long ago accepted that, but I find myself stabbed by a bitter, sputtering envy that I cannot do what she can.

You idiot, Felicita, what good would talent have done you?



“I confess I didn’t really bring you here to talk about my paintings,” she says, and takes a long slow sip of her tea. The smell of poisonink wafts toward me, stirring sticky-handed memories of the girl I used to be. Just over six months ago. More than a life time.

I’m seventeen now. A lady of my own House. Married. I carry all of Pelim’s heavy history on my back. It’s time to forget the childish wants of my past and focus on what I can do for my House. I have so much for which I must atone. And if that means cultivating Carien’s friendship, then surely that is no great hardship. “I see. What did you bring me here for then? To listen to the mutterings of crakes?” A childhood forced to learn Pelimburg’s histories in verse has rather turned me against poetry, I’m afraid.