September 8, ‘91 (31 months before the fire.)
“The headmistress will like you,” said Bjorn as he led Farisa across Mason Hall’s atrium. “I am sure of it.”
“I hope so,” said Farisa.
As they climbed the marble staircase, window glass gave oblique sunbeams a soft tone, as if the light had taken from the twilight of some prior age. The wooden doors of the hallway were all closed, and the carpet quieted the sounds of their steps. Bjorn knocked on a door, was invited to come in, and opened it. A slight woman, about seventy, stood up from an upholstered chair. Her blackwood desk was flawless, both in construction and freedom from clutter. A glass map table sat with four chairs spaced so evenly around it, she doubted the arrangement had ever been sullied by use. An abstract painting by the window showed an orange that had been cut into pieces, put into suggested motion by a blurring technique, and reassembled into two identical copies of the same fruit.
“I see you still have that,” said Bjorn.
“One of my students made it,” said Katarin. “I would not sell it for the world.”
The man said, “But for two worlds?”
“As I do not have a measure of the second, I might give it some ponderance.” She looked at Farisa. “I am glad to see you safe.”
Farisa nodded. “I am glad to be here.”
Bjorn said, “My job is done, so I shall offer my leave.”
The headmistress smiled. “It is accepted.”
He shut the door and left. Once he was gone, Katarin added, “You can sit down.”
Farisa did so, in a chair that was alarmingly comfortable.
“Did you make any mistakes on the way here?”
Farisa scratched her neck. “Mistakes?”
“Claes and Bjorn and I know who you really are. Does anyone else?”
“No.”
“Did you ever use your—?”
“No. Of course not.”
“Good. That is what I wanted to hear. That addressed, please open the door.”
Farisa got up, looked around the office as if this were some sort of test, since Cait Forest had formalities and protocols she could perceive but had not yet learned, and was not sure how open the woman wanted the door to be, so she let it settle two paces ajar.
“I like to have an ear on whatever is going on.” The headmistress’s blue eyes did not drift; her practiced hand struck a bell. “Before we discuss serious matters, let us break the fast. A servant wearing a white shirt arrived. “I’ll have black coffee, two slices of melon, and scrambled eggs.”
The servant said, “I know your preferences well.”
“Also, is cheesecake on offer?”
“Today’s flavor is matcha,” the servant said.
“Green tea,” the headmistress explained to Farisa.
“I know what it is.”
“I will have one slice of that,” she told the man. “Farisa, what would you like?”
Farisa had no sense of what the right answers were, so she said, “I’ll have the same.”
“Very well,” said the servant. “I’ll be back in ten minutes.”
“Will do.” The servant left.
The headmistress said, “If one-tenth of what I’ve heard about you is true, there is no need for an entrance exam.”
“Claes thinks too highly of me,” Farisa said. “There should be.”
“Oh, you will be tested.”
Farisa looked at a blackboard full of equations that had run to the bottom, leaving no space for the last line. “The final result there is minus one-third cosine of x cubed.”
“Are you sure about that?”
Farisa looked again, then nodded. “Yes, I’m sure.”
“Close, but wrong.”
“I checked twice.”
Katarin folded her hands and leaned back.
Farisa groaned. “Plus a constant.”
“There you go, and because I am using it for a differential equation—”
Farisa said, “The integration constant actually matters.”
“It certainly does. It is a detail we all miss, time and again.”
The servant came with their food and coffee. Farisa’s mug had a lion’s face on its side, the creature’s tail making the handle. He asked her, “Do you take your coffee black?”
“Good coffee, I do.”
After the servant left, the headmistress said, “I hope our coffee is up to your lofty standard.”
Farisa sipped. “It is.”
“We should eat before we address our matters of discussion.”
There was a snappiness in matters of discussion that left Farisa uneasy. She had expected a placement exam, and she had been diagramming Lyrian sentences and balancing chemical equations in her head, convincing herself she would be disappointed if not awarded a second-year start. She knew the names of about sixty rhetorical patterns and could recognize them in daily speech. She had less confidence in her fluency with questions never asked, such as how to hold a fork while cutting fruit or whether to put salt, and how much, on scrambled eggs.
When they finished, a servant came to collect the dishes, then was gone.
Farisa said, “So....”
“Farisa, you are a woman of immense promise. It is on that word, ‘promise’, that I must confess regret and failure. Circumstances have changed since spring.”
“I—”
“I cannot admit you as a student.”
She leaned five degrees forward, as if about to stand, or as if wanting to hear more closely something she had misheard. Farisa had done nothing wrong. She had come here through polar cold, stifling heat, and the smoke of war, over a period of seven months, and we should not let herself be abandoned at the final station.
“I know that this isn’t what you wanted to hear.” The headmistress pointed to a closet door. “Open that.”
Farisa looked at her hands. She could refuse this request, leave this office, and walk away from whatever game was being played around or against her. Still, a door was in front of her, and she saw no harm in seeing what lay behind it. She grabbed the brass knob and turned it. A beige dress sat on a hook. Its cut was tasteful and conservative, but she had seen this garment before, having been here for nearly a day. It was a serving girl’s dress.
“If you mean what I think you mean...”
The headmistress looked aside.
“I refuse. You can’t imagine what it took to get here.”
“Seven months, between boat and saddle. I have an idea.”
“It feels like you’re taking advantage of me. You told Claes you would do one thing, so be brought me here, and now that he’s gone, you—”
“I intend nothing against our mutual interest.”
“You made a promise.”
“The promise I made to Claes was that I would keep you safe. One year ago, it seemed best to admit you as a student, but matters have changed.”
“I came here to be a normal girl.” She caught herself raising her voice, and brought her volume down. “If anything else is ‘safe,’ I don’t want to be safe.”
Katarin sighed. “I will not compel you to do or be anything. That is not how things are done in Cait Forest.”
Farisa looked again at the beige dress. It had been designed with Ettasi features in mind, and would clash with her skin color. She would look ridiculous in it. “It won’t work.”
“Tell me, what do you think it costs for a student to attend this place?”
Farisa gritted her teeth. “This is about money?”
“No. My decision is not about that at all. Please answer the question.”
She walked over to the headmistress’s desk, then knocked on its side. “Real blackwood. Antique, like the thought that prevails here, apparently.” She went to the window, where she tugged the drapes. “Oh, I’m sure these weren’t cheap.” She looked outside. “The grounds are well maintained, I’ll say that.”
After turning around, she looked for signs of emotion on the headmistress’s face, to see if she had reacted to Farisa’s borderline insulting way of answering the question, but there were none she could read.
A blue candle sat in a glass jar on the other side of the office. “Teroshi beetle wax,” she said. “Right?” She floated her mind to the candle’s wick. It lit.
“Blow that out,” said the headmistress. “And never do that again in front of me.”
“Okay, okay, I won’t. You asked me a question. Back to the math. Well-dressed staff, trimmed gardens, beautiful buildings—I’ll grant you all that. The upkeep must be substantial. I am going to guess that, to serve all of its students’ needs, you charge four hundred—no, five hundred—grot per year.”
Katarin’s mouth wrinkled. “Five hundred?”
“That seems fair,” Farisa said as she sat down.
“We have no need to charge tuition at all. Incomes from our Southridge holdings alone cover twice the cost of running this place. However, tuition for the upcoming academic year has been set at six thousand, nine hundred and ninety-five grot.”
“Seven thousand? Who can afford that?”
“Who do you think?” Katarin pointed east. “If it were up to me, we wouldn’t charge tuition at all.”
“If it were up to you? You’re the headmistress.”
“That is a mere title. I am just a teacher, as our esteemed Board of Macska College in Cait Forest never fails to remind me.”
Farisa shook her head. “You started a scholarship program.”
“I did. I have admitted sixty-seven students free of charge. For each, there has been a fight with our board. It takes five letters of character reference, an academic history going back to age five, and either truth or suggestion that the student’s financial inopportunity is a transient matter—that, if one were to look three or four generations back, one would find good breeding despite bad present luck. Otherwise, it is impossible to convince them—the board, that is—that the student will adapt to the culture here.”
“Of that, I have no doubt.” As quietly as she could, she said, “It is more than that. The Company has spies on the board. We are under scrutiny. To make your case, which I know to be very strong, would lead to an investigation of your past that might cost us your cover, which I will not have lost on my watch. The Globbos still believe that ‘that Farisa’ died fifteen years ago, and I intend to keep it that way. Your wave, as a servant, shall be nine grot forty per week, with food and lodging for free.”
A chill ran up Farisa’s arms. She could not see herself wearing that dress. She was not an orphan girl who had arrived of no account; she had traveled for seven months, and in doing so she had suffered more than to deserve a mere job, the kind a merchant’s daughter could get.
“I’m sorry, Miss Katarin, but—”
“Headmistress Katarin.”
“Isn’t Cait Forest supposed to be neutral?”
The headmistress got up and walked to the window. “Please, come.” She tapped a bony finger on the glass. “Do you see that boy down there?”
“Him?” The boy wore a scowl under his coiffed hair. His clothes were clearly expensive, but in shabby repair due to neglect. His imperious saunter—he moved his hand across his body as he walked in a manner that was vaguely sexual—suggested he had done something in secret that he was proud to have gotten away with. Even at third floor height, the sight of him made Farisa uneasy. “I see him. What’s your point?”
“He drinks like an unta. He has been in seven fistfights in three years, six of which he started. It is said he is no friend to women, but I shall not voice what has not yet been proven. His grade average is three-point-six out of ten.”
“I thought Cait Forest didn’t give grades below five.”
“Until he arrived, so did I. You see, if I had as headmistress the power you think I should have, he would have been gone long ago.”
“Why isn’t he?”
“You know the answer, Farisa.”
Her fists clenched. “Of course. A Company kid.”
“I prefer not to call anyone that. Neutrality starts with us. Nevertheless, Bufton’s mother is Cariya Bayne, daughter of—”
Farisa spread her feet apart. “Of course. So, let me get this straight. His grandfather butchered a whole city, his mother sells a million copies every time she writes a new blood libel about the Vehu, and his father—”
“Nobody knows what happened there.”
“—but he gets to reinvent himself, and his family name, here in Cait Forest? In the same world, Farisa La’ewind must be grateful to be offered the role of a servant. Do I have it right? The Company has well and truly won when even Cait Forest….”
Katarin didn’t flinch. “Please. Continue.”
“Forget it. If I haven’t made my point, nothing will.”
“Do you agree that we live in a time when one must be observant?”
Farisa rolled her eyes. “Sure.”
“Then sit back down and answer this for me. The man who took our breakfast order and served us, is he married or single?”
Farisa had seen the silver ring on his finger while he poured coffee. “He’s married.”
“Are you sure of this?”
“Yes. I saw the wedding band.”
“His hair, was it black, like yours? Or was it blond, like mine, before I made the rash decision to go gray?”
“Black.” That was easy; Farisa clearly remembered his face.
“Correct. Black hair. You have answered two questions correctly. One more: On which hand was his wedding ring?”
“Right hand,” Farisa said. “He must be from the east.”
“Are you sure of this?”
“I am. Black hair, silver ring on the right hand.”
“No man in this building meets that description.”
Farisa pulled her shoulders back. “You’re calling me a liar?”
“Not at all. I am calling you wrong.”
“I remember it clearly.”
The headmistress smiled. “Shall we make a bet?”
“I don’t have anything to wager.”
“You have your time. If you win, I will grant you a full scholarship. I would consider such a move unwise for both of us, given the meddling nature of our Board right now, but I will take our chances and admit you as a student if you do. If you lose, however, I ask you to be a servant here for two weeks.”
“Two weeks?”
“Two weeks. Then you are free to leave, and if you decide to do so, I will send you off with three months’ wages and a letter that can get you hired anywhere.”
Farisa did not think it wise to wager against someone whose job entailed knowing the answer, but she had never been more sure in the truth of her memory. She had seen the man’s black hair; it had stood out, because most men as pale as him had blond or auburn hair. She had seen the silver ring on his right hand, because he had served with his bare left. As far as a Cait Forest entrance exam could go, this was unreasonably easy.
“I accept.”
The headmistress leaned back and plucked a string tucked into a hole in the wall behind her. A black-haired man in beige arrived. “This is the man who took your order.” Another man, with sandy hair and a gold ring on his right hand, came shortly thereafter. “And this is the man who brought us our food.”
“Two different men,” Farisa said.
“You can leave,” the headmistress told them.
“That was low,” said Farisa.
“Was it?”
“You implied they were the same man.”
“I did. I also said you must be observant. Have you ever observed a world where no one deceives?”
“The test was unfair.”
“So is life.”
“Clearly.”
The headmistress looked at the back of her hand. “Why do you think I put you through that exercise?”
Farisa leaned back. “To humiliate me?”
“Not at all.”
“Then for what?”
“If I make you a servant, you shall be invisible. The people in beige go unnoticed, because people are embarrassed to see them. Such a job will give you access to places you could not go as a student.”
“You’re hiring me to be an errand girl.”
“That is not what I had in mind, no.”
“A spy.”
Katarin chuckled. “It is honorable work. Did you think, even for a minute, I would waste Kyana La’ewind’s daughter on menial tasks?”
Farisa looked at her nested hands. “I don’t know what to think, but I did lose our bet—and fairly, I suppose.”
“If I may be honest, I doubt our curriculum would satisfy you. If we gave our students the grades their work deserved, we would have to flunk out four-fifths of the Company kids, which would result in ten thousand soldats on Rooksnest Bridge. So, we have had to let academic standards fall. If I made you a student, you would be bored as a dog in summer.”
“Maybe I should be allowed to form that judgment for myself.” I came here to be a normal girl. A normal girl’s life is not boring, to one who has never lived it. I belong here. Can’t you see that, old lady?
Katarin smiled. “We both have long days ahead of us. I have twenty-nine problem sets to grade, and if one more student makes that joke about how I ought to let ekron be less than zero for a change, I may just lose my mind. Before you go, I have one more request.”
“I suppose I can’t refuse, boss.”
“Let us have another look through my window.”
Farisa got up and did so. More people were on campus, and the light had shifted slightly. “What am I supposed to see?”
“Beyond the maple trees, do you see the gray building with—”
“The green copper dome? Yes, I see it.”
“That is Bloom Library. It closes at nine o’clock, but”—she put a key in Farisa’s hand—“not for you.”
“My first work assignment?”
“No. This is no assignment, but an offer—a gift. Go to the library any time you want. Our wealth of knowledge is yours. Anything you want from this place will be yours, as soon as it can safely be made available, but I implore you to wait for peace.”
“I don’t see war here, Headmistress.”
“Let us pray it never sees you.”
#
The array of chalkboards on the first floor of Mason Hall’s south wing was where work assignments were posted. Duties were changed every five days, though Farisa had arrived mid-cycle, so her two-week commitment would put her in four rotations. Still, she decided nothing over so little time would be intolerable enough to merit breaking her commitment, especially when she had nowhere else to go.
On her first full day, she was assigned mail delivery, requiring her to carry bulky letter sacks from one corner of campus to another, but the forty-pound bags were not nearly as obnoxious as the special deliveries—fragile glassware requiring slow movement, greasy machine parts she had to hold away from herself so as not to soil her dress, and all the malodorous fertilizers for the greenhouse. Still, on these bright autumn days, it could be worse than to be outdoors, because in this sort of work she could invent her own line of thought with no need to halt it and talk to other people. A shift on this labor, for sure, was better than one in service or the kitchen.
The job quickly made Cait Forest’s social topography clear. Professors got their mail in person. Stewards, who oversaw servants and wore green instead of beige, had personal boxes in Mason Hall. Students shared mailboxes two-to-one; servants, four-to-one. Preferences and protocols existed pertaining to who would take delivery when—some professors refused to be seen before noon, while others complained if they were not the first in their building to be served—but Farisa gave them little not, because she did not expect to be here very long. She did realize that nonexistent room numbers—undeliverable addresses—were known to stewards to be requests of secrecy in the context of intrigue or affairs, but she refused to learn this secret code because she would only be in this job for fourteen days and there was no point. If she couldn’t decipher an address, she let the correspondence go to the dead letter office.
Love what you're reading? Discover and support the author on the platform they originally published on.
Thirteen days left. Twelve days. Eleven. Ten. She would serve out the term to which she agreed, confront Katarin, and be made a student or leave.
Most afternoons, she had finished her work by three or four, at which point she’d go to Bloom Library and read, or to the chemistry lab on the second floor of Ydenvale Hall. She had read a lot of chemistry in Tevalon, but here she could perform experiments herself, once she learned how to use the equipment. The students who were most condescending at first turned out to be the easiest to charm, and the most helpful once won, so she quickly got four male students competing to show her how to use the beakers, the burners, and the instruments. Instruction equaled permission, she decided. It had taken her only seven days to rediscover the process by which ancient alchemists had made a powder called mare’s mane, said to be a cure for nervous agitation including the kind mages faced, but she chose not to ingest it upon realizing it was a toxic chromium salt. Yes, a sufficient dose would cure the Marquessa, and all of life’s other ailments, but not in the way she wanted.
In daily life, there were more pressing worries than the Marquessa. With servants sleeping six to a room, good rest was hard to come by. At least four of the other five women snored. One of them got up, multiple times per night, noisily enough to wake her. She had no sense of privacy, nor relaxation, so when her two-week deadline passed, she felt the urge to force the issue with Katarin, but the woman was never available when she dropped by, and nothing about her new life was difficult or offensive, and job postings and wages continued to come, so she remained.
Her eighteenth birthday came—the first of October here was not even autumn—and went. She missed Raqel. She missed the cold starry nights and orange leaves that, in Tevalon, had already arrived.
As Claes had intimated, the people here complained about the weather, in spite of its temperacy. A mist fell, they called it rain; the sun shone, it was too damn hot. They all griped to each other, as if feigned misery were a social currency, about an oppressive workload that had kept them up till two in the morning, but she rarely saw anyone study outside of the chemistry lab, and their reading assignments seemed pedestrian. She would, after working hours, try to join conversations at the student pub, inventing issues of her own that would not betray her servile status, but that would present her as a normal girl, but never managed to crack their code of cavillage—she either overdid the peevishness, or laid too thick the irony, or otherwise inflected her protestations in such a way as to make clear that she had never been in their world as more than a beige ghost.
Farisa did not see the headmistress once in her first month, but the woman must have known or heard that she had become unhappy, because she had been given a fresh assignment—catering of the Midnight Salon, a monthly gathering of the university’s professors, on October 10. It meant she would only have to work a few hours that day, but it also gave her access to an event where even students and servants couldn’t go unless they had a reason to be there. She served delicacies she had, before, only read about: peppered calamari, pickled mountain berries, alligator sausage from the Continent’s palm-lined southeast.
She had expected more of the conversation. More professors were discussing incomes and rents from their land holdings than philosophy or art, and most of them made clear their wish for the woman in beige to disappear as soon as appetizers had been taken, but she did find that one in four would match her speed. She debated the Vehu religion and theology with the head of the religion department, who had read the chorae and tsovrae but whose knowledge about Exile was two centuries outdated. She discussed electricity with a chemistry professor, who had developed a new zinc–carbon battery design. Bjorn was not present, but a history teacher offered his unconventional and uncharitable views about the settling of Bezelia. She felt normal, for a night.
When she returned to her sleeping quarters at half past two, her knapsack had been turned inside-out, emptied, and placed on her pillow. She ran to the dormitory’s night clerk, who followed her outside with a lantern as they gathered her possessions, scattered across the lawn.
Farisa said, “Who the hell did this?”
The night clerk, a dark-haired man of about thirty, said, “Had I seen them doing it, I would have stopped them.”
She began to pick up and pair socks. “Did I do something to deserve this?”
“In my view, no.” He lit a cigarette. “You catered the Midnight Salon.”
“As I was assigned to do. I did my job.”
“You got a choice assignment in your first month. People talked about it. This shit happens.”
“Why?” Farisa growled. “I don’t decide anything here. I’m in the same beige dress they are.”
The night clerk offered his cigarette to Farisa. She shook her head. “This is why I work at night. I’ve been here for ten years, and I can’t stand anyone. Some of us just don’t fit, wherever we go.”
“That’s not me.” Farisa borrowed the clerk’s lantern to walk the lawn once more, ensuring she had gathered everything. Eighteen was old enough not to say things so rude as this, but she knew that she did belong here—just not as a servant. “The life that is for me is somewhere. Somewhere, I fit. It might as well as be here.”
“Very well, then,” said the night clerk as he went back inside.
#
“Watch where you’re going!”
Farisa’s ankle twisted. The collision had caused her to fall. Her mail sack had opened and letters were spilled on the grass. The girl in brownface, with no apology, continued running, chased by some giggling idiot boy.
“Aren’t you going to help me?” she yelled as she gathered letters and placed them back in the mail sack.
No one did.
Today was October 21, the date of Captain Plumm’s Run, an absolute waste of this pleasant afternoon, the first of the season to feel like autumn. Last year, one of the crotchety old math professors had nearly been fired for, in a principled stand, scheduling an exam on this absurd non-holiday. The boys, in privateer hats and wearing eyepatches, had been drinking since nine in the morning. Those young women who wanted to be chased—it did not seem that those who did not want it were spared—wore brown- or blackface, often in outfits caricaturizing traditional apparel from foreign cultures, usually mismatched by thousands of miles. Farisa did not mind women who went barefoot or in sandals—that was her culture, not theirs—but this clashed horribly with Lorani saria. A Salinese turban did not belong on the same body as a necklace made of dog teeth. Farisa would also have bet that the woman she’d seen wearing Dyuri characters on her blouse could not read them—they said: Cheapest horse milk in town.
The day was horrid, from nine to nine, with obnoxious drunken behavior by students tolerated—there was too much of it for the stewards to bring discipline—and double shifts for all the staff. It was fifteen minutes after ten and, by lousy lamplight, Farisa was still working on kitchen cleanup.
She scrubbed a cafeteria tray, sticky with beer and cornflakes. She said, audibly to the other women but to no one in particular, “Plumm’s Run shouldn’t exist.”
None of the other women responded.
“He wasn’t some heroic explorer,” Farisa added. “He was a murderous slaver. To celebrate him is stupid and offensive.”
The shift manager, a heavyset woman, glared at her. “It’s not just this place that does it. Plumm’s Run is an old tradition.”
“So was girl cutting once. We don’t do it now.”
“What, are you going to run to Katarin about it?” A couple other servants laughed. In a whiny voice, she added, “Headmistress, Plumm’s Run hurts my feelings.”
Farisa threw a used dishrag into a wash barrel.
“It splashes when you do that.”
She grabbed another cloth and began to lather it in soap.
“You got my dress wet, Miss Parthendi.”
“Sorry.”
“Is that all you have to say?”
“It has been a long day. I would like to finish my work.”
“Now you’re quiet,” said the heavyset shift manager. “I don’t like your name. Farisa. It sounds like a rich girl’s name, but you’re with us, so you ain’t rich.”
Farisa turned around and spread her feet apart. “If you’d like to raise the issue with my parents, I can arrange a meeting.”
The wide woman, who would not have recognized Farisa Parthendi as an orphan, did not take the threat, which Farisa preferred, because she did not want to get into a fight with someone two inches taller and fifty pounds heavier than she was. She turned around and got back to work.
A rag, abrasive to the touch, nevertheless failed to scrape dried oatmeal from a bowl. She used her fingernails.
The shift manager, in no mood to quit, raised her voice loud enough for the entire kitchen to hear. “Remember when Hampus Bell came, last month? He wanted to buy this place. I wish they’d let him do it. We wouldn’t have to take this...”
Ignore her, Farisa told herself. There were stacks of dirty bowls and plates to be cleaned, and she wanted to finish her work before twelve. She said nothing until she heard other women murmuring in assent, and it was the general sense of agreement forming amidst them that made her feel like a brown spot on a white plate, and brought her to speak. “Trust me, you do not want to work for the Globbos.”
“Trust you?” The shift manager scoffed. “What do you know about the Global Company?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“Under the Company, people hold place. They have that going for them. People knows their ranks. No one goes around getting favors from Katarin.”
Farisa’s wrist had become sore from scrubbing. She massaged it with a thumb.
The woman continued. “Pay’s better, too. We get, what, a grot thirty-five a day? Company pays two.”
“You’re misleading,” Farisa finally said.
“You calling me a liar?”
“No.” Someone had set a new stack of soiled dishes next to Farisa, adding ten minutes to her sentence here. “The Company is the liar, but liars dine on the work of honest fools.”
“Watch your mouth, Miss Parthendi.”
Farisa realized, as unhappy as she was in Cait Forest, that even Katarin deserved this much defense—she was no Hampus Bell.
“You’re slowing us all down with your—”
Farisa turned around. She’d had enough. “Two grot per day, you say? Under Company rule, you’re only paid for days you work—for days you can get work. If you’re sick, or if you’re unassigned, you get nothing. Fourteen grot a week if you work every day. Here, you have a free bed, but in Globbo towns there’s a thing called rent. Have you ever heard of that? Forty grot per month, minimum, for dorms twice as crowded as ours. Whenever there’s a refugee crisis because of all the Company’s wars, rent goes up to fifty and wages drop.”
“You’re so full of bullshit, Farisa. If wages is two grot a day, and rent is forty a month, no one could afford to live in a Company town on Company wages.”
“That’s exactly how it’s designed. You will end up in debt to the Company, no matter what you do. Every week you can’t pay it off, it gets bigger. More costs, more debt—just for existing.”
The shift manager rolled her eyes. “I’m not going to listen to this.”
“She’s right,” said a woman with dark hair on the cusp of gray. Farisa suspected she was Vehu, which she confirmed with her next sentence. “If I lived in a Globbo town, I’d have to wear a blue badge, and I wouldn’t be allowed outside after six. My sister ended up in one. The food is lousy and the sanitation’s awful. Those towns have a wave of typhus or cholera every year, and if you end up in a hospital, you have to pay for that too.”
A redhead with webbed fingers on her left hand said, “The brochures say the Globbo hospitals are the best in the world.”
Farisa scoffed. “Best in the Bronze Age, maybe. She’s right about the hospitals. They charge for every pill and bandage. It’s all tracked, and you get a massive bill when you leave, which puts you further into debt, which means you have to work more to pay it off, which of course you never will, and if you’re a more than a hundred grot deep in the Company and try to leave town without permission, that’s considered treason, and that means...” She drew a finger across her neck.
The shift manager walked toward Farisa, stopping close enough that she could see the tiny red spots on the woman’s chin. “We all know why you don’t like the Company.”
“Oh?”
“You’re a...”
Farisa raised her eyebrows. “I’m a what?”
The woman’s eyes darted. “It doesn’t matter. Just get back to work.”
Farisa stepped forward, leaving their chests an inch apart. “No, finish your sentence. What am I?” On hearing no response, she tapped the woman on the arm with two fingers before stepping back and turning around. “Yeah, I thought so.”
“You’re a tarsha.”
Tarsha. The word had followed her here. It clung to her skin. Its masculine form, tarshi, had surely been in the mouth of the two-penny soldat who had slain her father.
Farisa spun on the balls of her feet. Her palm stung and the old woman’s face was red.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I shouldn’t have done that.”
#
Farisa had tried to get back to work, but been slow and distracted. Not an hour had passed before a green-vested steward arrived.
“See the headmistress. Now.”
Tonight was autumn’s first cold evening, and Farisa had not bothered to take a jacket. If cold struck her ill, it struck her ill. She had always intended to leave this place on her own terms, but now she had done the first thing to make banishment a possibility, and if she were destined to lose her job, she hoped that instead her heart would do the courtesy of seizing against itself so she would never arrive at her fate. The quarter-mile walk, however, did not do her in. Climbing the stairs to the third floor, likewise, failed to bring this effect. There was nothing to trip over on the walk down the corridor to Katarin’s office. She would have to face her fate on two feet.
Before Farisa could close the door, the headmistress said, “What the hell was that about?”
Farisa bit the corner of her mouth as she took the opposite chair.
“Well?” The headmistress removed her glasses and placed them on her blackwood desk. The low light cast severe shadows on the old woman’s face.
“She called me a tarsha.”
“That, I’ve been told, and I find her behavior unacceptable, but we are not here to discuss her.”
Farisa straightened her spine and slowed her breathing. “I made a mistake.”
“You did. I am glad you recognize that. You are not fired, but I order you not to go within fifty feet of that woman. Is that clear?”
“As glass.”
“A person like me, in some other professional capacity or none, might be inclined to say she deserved your response, but never mind her. “You are the one I am worried about.”
“It won’t happen again.”
“I know it will not.” Katarin folded her bony hands. “More generally, how is your health?”
Farisa knew the subtext of Katarin’s question. It was not a question often asked of an eighteen-year-old girl, but both women knew she had the Marquessa. “I am well.”
“Do you enjoy being here?”
“Are you seriously asking me that?”
“Please answer. I already said I am not going to fire you.”
“I feel like I don’t belong,” Farisa admitted. “This is the first time in my life I’ve been surrounded by so many people my own age, but I am invisible to them.”
“Right now, it can be no other way.”
“The servants dislike me.”
“That is because you insist on being different.”
Farisa scoffed. “I can’t change my skin color.”
“Not that, Farisa. Well, for a few, that may be a part of it. No, I refer to the words you use, the way you walk, your demeanor.”
“I do my job.”
“You do. Your manner of work is, if rarely expedient, impeccably thorough and, as a mathematician, I respect you for this. I would never ask you to change a thing, simply to be liked, as that matter is up to you. Nevertheless, if you seek others’ approval, you would do well not to draw attention to your differences.”
“I understand, Headmistress.”
Katarin opened a drawer. “As for belonging here, let me show you something.” She handed Farisa a piece of stationery. “Read this.”
“On the Twenty-First of May in the Seventy-Eighth Year of our century, we celebrate the Inauguration of Headmistress Katarin the First.”
“Katarin the First. My predecessor was John XIV. Before him, Rehze IX. Any name I chose, I would have been the first. Do you know why that is?”
“Because you’re the first woman to run this place.”
“Indeed. Salinay has elected women several times but, on this continent, the first woman to run a university washes her hands whenever I do.”
Washes her hands whenever I do. Farisa smiled. She had never heard that phrase, made polite.
“I still feel, every day, that I do not belong here.”
Farisa scratched her neck. “It doesn’t go away?”
“No, it does not.” As wind blew into her office, Katarin got up to close the window behind her. “Our esteemed board has thrice voted on whether to replace me. I have survived each attempt, but never by a thrilling margin.”
Farisa looked at her hands. “Why? You’re great at—”
“My job? You assume you know what my job is. The board has its own views of it, and they are orthogonal to education.” She looked aside. “It matters little now. I meant to ask you: What do you want here?”
“I think you know the answer. To study here.”
“On your first day, I gave you the key to the library. Are you not able to study?”
“I want to take classes, make friends, and attend parties—to have the Cait Forest experience. I want to be a normal girl.”
“Oh, a normal girl? It is one of life’s many wheels, is it not? The ordinary long to be extraordinary, and the extraordinary, well… we have Farisa, all of seventeen—”
“Eighteen.”
“—years of age, expressing a wish to be ordinary. I am not one of the fae or za’jiin of Sixteen Winds, so I cannot grant such wishes. Still, I surmise that when you reach my age, or even half that number, you will be glad you to have been born you.”
You’re assuming I live that long. “Maybe.”
“Are you free tomorrow morning before breakfast?”
“I was planning to sleep in. Tomorrow’s my day off.”
“Day off.” Katarin straightened some papers on her desk. “I have heard of the concept. I wonder what it is like.”
“I’m sorry, Headmistress. Of course.”
She handed Farisa a piece of chalk. “Take this, in case they do not have one at the wake-up board. Meet me at Hooke Chapel at six o’clock.”
“Six o’clock?” Farisa said. “It’ll still be dark.”
“It will be.”
#
The next morning, as she walked to the chapel, Farisa could still see most of the stars, as first light had barely broken in the east. Charred rolling paper and beery glass shards, both residues of Plumm’s Run, lay about on the lawn.
Katarin stood under the chapel’s doorway arch in a heavy jacket with a dim lantern. “Good. You are early.”
Farisa craned her neck to see Mason Hall’s clock. “By two minutes, looks like.”
The headmistress opened the red wooden door. A blonde woman in a white dress had passed out in the vestibule. “Miss Harrow, wake up.”
The girl staggered to her feet. She lazily pushed Farisa on her way out. At ten paces, realizing who had awakened her, she turned on her heels.
“Headmistress!”
“We shall ignore her,” Katarin said.
“Headmistress! Did Ilana get in?”
“I am with someone,” the headmistress called back.
The drunk woman, laughing, ambled away.
Farisa whispered, “What was she doing in the chapel.”
“Sweating.” The headmistress closed the door behind them. “Alas, her sister Ilana did get in. She is transferring from City Private under terms that are not clear to me. Neither sister had the marks, but twenty thousand grot buys ‘holistic review’.” Katarin inspected the pews as she walked forward in the chapel, making sure they were empty. “Board decision, not mine. You will notice it is a common theme. Now, have you been here before?”
“I have not.”
“Good,” said the headmistress. “Then the painting up front will be new to you. This is the best time of day to see it.” She walked around the altar, standing by the eastern window. “Stand with me right here.”
Morning twilight sufficed to show the mural’s outlines, but not until the sun rose could Farisa see the painting in any real detail; it overwhelmed her, the way the entire portrait came into view at once. Mountains, identical to those to Cait Forest’s west, sat under thick snow. Slate-gray storm clouds shed purple staves of lightning. Background trees varied in shape and color, but suggested the middle of spring.
“Well, what do you see?”
“The craftsmanship is impressive,” Farisa said. “Faultless, really. There are cracks in the green paint, but I think that’s—”
“Intentional. Leaf veins. The artist knew how it would harden and adapted his technique accordingly. What about the foreground?”
A bare-shouldered pale angel drove her heaven-blue sword into the distended belly of a red, black, and brown dragon—a creature doomed to fall forever, with no respite of impact, with its reptilian mouth open and teeth bared in useless agony.
“That must be the Monster of Cait Forest,” Farisa said.
“If there is only one.”
“Only one?” She looked at the headmistress, whose hands were folded together, and who had not smiled. “The Monster of Cait Forest is a fairy tale, right?”
Katarin shrugged.
“You believe in dragons, Headmistress?”
“Dragons, no. The Monster, yes. It may not be supernatural, as almost nothing is supernatural once science finds a way to understand it, but it is very real. Whatever the Monster is, I feel it waking up in these old bones.”
Farisa stretched her arms, fingers interlaced. “Why would there be—Why could there be...?”
“The Monster, here? It preys on minds, I have read. What better hunting ground is there than a university? I suspect that in the past few years, some people here have seen it. Others soon well. Perhaps you will see it. Perhaps it is connected to you in some way.”
“If I see a dragon, Headmistress, you’ll be the first one I tell—unless, you know, it eats me. If that occurs, I’ll need some time off work, please understand.”
“Perhaps the Monster is you.”
“Me?”
“As far as I can tell, you are an absolute darling. However, I have lived long enough to know that, barring mathematical proof, nothing can be ruled out.”
“I am certainly not a monster.”
“I doubt you are. There are people, however, who see in you this dragon. Look again at it. I have sworn to protect you from them. So, I hope you see now why I could not make you a student, and why—”
“Why I still have to hide,” she said lifelessly.
Dust floated in a beam of sun, answering nothing.
#
Unassigned.
The headmistress could only do so much. Cait Forest’s stewards would not be prevented from fashioning their own feelings about the new serving girl, the one whose dark skin everyone noticed, the one who had smacked a shift manager and inexplicably retained residence and pay here. No one had requested her, so she had spent the past few days, possibly in violation of rules no one cared about enough to remember, in the dead letter office, reading those antique letters ruled undeliverable, living from the page the life she had come here for, but never been allowed to have. Handwriting fifty years old could be found here, letters students had written to parents because they’d had parents.
This is where I live now. Dead letter office. I sleep in one place, I eat in another, but this is home for the unassigned.
Yesterday, the twenty-eighth, she had arrived at the job board to find the other servants snickering as she approached.
“What’s so funny?”
“You’ll see,” said one of the women in beige.
“You’re not unassigned anymore,” said one of the stewards, a man of about thirty whose face was not ugly but would have looked less infuriating if properly punched.
“Let me see,” she said as she elbowed her way forward to the board. In the slot next to her name, the word FORESTRY had been written in the slanted, unadorned capital letters that had to be male handwriting. ”
“I’m happy for you, then,” said the first woman. “Enjoy it. Do it well. Better you than me.”
A lanky man, wearing a white sash to indicate he was only one step down from stewardship, interrupted. “To end up in forestry, you must’ve really—”
“There’s one good thing about the job. The Old Bear starts his day at eleven.” She raised a phantom bottle to his lips. “So you do get to sleep in.”
She precisely did. She’d not had one good night of sleep since coming here, and those soft hours after dawn, once the other servants had started work, often left the dormitories deserted and quiet enough to rest. If a forestry assignment meant she could start her day three hours later, work outdoors in the mild Cait Forest climate, and avoid interaction with other people, she would take it and do a better job than anyone ever had. She decided to arrive at the ranger’s office earlier that she’d been told, to have a look around, and go there at ten forty-five. When she did, he was already chopping wood.
He did not look up from his work. “You’re late.”
“I was told—”
“I know exactly what you were told.” He struck another log. It split like butter. “Your ax is over there. This isn’t much of a talking job, if you catch my drift.”
“That’s good. I’m not much of a talking person.” Farisa grabbed the ax. The polished haft was well-made, but most of the tool’s weight was in the head, so it felt awkward in her hands. “Can you teach me how to use this?”
“What’s to teach?” The ranger split another log.
“I’ve never—”
“Just three rules. One, don’t cut off your own damn leg. Two, your day doesn’t end on a bell, at five or six or whatever, but it ends when the work’s done, whether that’s noon or nine. I’d prefer you work fast enough that it’s not the nine, but firewood orders come in thick this time of year. Three, when you run out of wood from the pile, you need to take down a new tree—make sure it’s one of the condemned ones.”
“Condemned?”
He pointed. “See the trees with pink ribbons? That means you can take it down. No ribbon, the tree stands. That’s all there is to it. Keep pace and, with the two of us, we should be done before dark. Make sense?”
“I think so,” Farisa said.
“Good. Now get to it. I don’t want to be out here too late. This time of year, it gets cold once the sun’s down.”
“I’m actually hot,” said Farisa. The week of cool weather had ended; it wasn’t full-on summer heat, and at least it was cloudy today, but a swampish humidity had swept in.
He said nothing and cleaved another log. She watched his movements and tried to copy his process. The ax was hard to control once in motion and, when she made contact with the wood, it broke unevenly, as if it had twisted itself to give her assistance in finding the grain. “Is this good enough?”
The ranger shrugged.
“Guess so, then.”
Her motion lacked the ranger’s fluidity, and she never reached half his speed. The sun then broke out and she began to sweat. She wished she had a different set of clothing than this servant’s dress, tight around her forearms, because with every swing of the ax, she worried that it would rip and that she would have to go home with in such a state. Beige was truly an awful color for this kind of work; she had sweat stains under her arms, and was terrified that some passer-by would see them.
It didn’t take long for her to get thirsty. “Is there a drinking fountain nearby?”
“Too far,” said the ranger, handing her his canteen. She drank nearly half of it. The ranger shook his head, as if her parched existence offended him. “Bring your own next time. Also, would you speed up? We’ll be out here this time tomorrow if you keep making little-girl chops.”
She wanted to tell him to brightly go fuck himself, but she had screwed up too many times already, so she held back. She needed this job. Forestry was the lowest net over a lava pit. “I will work faster.”
“Good.”
She added, “Not that I wasn’t already working fast. I mean, I was, but—”
“Less talk, more chops.”
She split another log, then another one. She ripped bark away from useful timber. She threw twigs and autumn leaves into the wheelbarrow she would later take to the compost pile. The ranger’s contempt for her pace of work was wordless but audible, and she wanted to set a harmless fire from a distance to make a show of it, or to remind herself that she still could, but she put her aggression into the work instead. She cut down a ribboned tree, sectioned the wood, and took down another. She disliked this hastened pace, as it left her out of breath, but it did push time faster through the world to get things done.
“Is this the best you can do? Dammit Katarin, there is a reason I ask you for a man. Instead, you send me a girl who can barely—”
Rage. The birch tree in the distance had a ribbon around its trunk, and she thought it might be too thick for her to take down, but she made the attempt anyway, charging with the outstretched ax to use momentum, the tool’s bobbing heaviness rattling her arms when she hit. She slammed the tree again. If the ax’s head fell off, or its blade dulled, or its haft broke, it would be no matter. She would wrestle this tree out of the ground or, failing that, tear it apart branch by branch. A third swing hit the tree so hard that divots of bark flew into her eyes. A fourth caused a squeezing pain to cross her heart. A phantom knife twisted in her throat, but she could not buckle due to pain. She would prove her strength and fury to this man.
The odor of burning rubber filled her nose. Her hands lost grip. The ax fell.
He’s looking at me. I can’t do the job he knows I can’t do it I’m too weak I’m too slow I can’t work fast enough I’m going to lose everything I am fucked I am fucked I am so fucked I am worthless so fucking worthless because this job is my last chance, this job is my last chance... Farisa, Farisa, Farisa! Stop stop stop you can’t lose this job you can’t afford to lose this, you must find a way to push through this, you are just being weak weak worthless you are a worthless scared little girl Fay no you can’t be scared snap the fuck out just snap the fucking fuck just snap snap snap out of it…
The trees closed in. Branches swung. Clouds snarled the colorless sky. Her brain, like slaughtered meat, drained of blood. A scream crawled up her throat, fell back unheard, fell into her guts, into her guts the scream fell, the trees closed in, the branches swung, the clouds snarled... the clouds...
This cannot happen here, this cannot happen here.
Breath took double effort, then doubled double effort. Her chest burned like an archer’s draw arm, spent from a day’s abuse. She massaged her neck to loosen it, but the cords were tighter than steel. She was sweating brown tree sap, sweating so much she’d be cut down for firewood. Farisa, you’re disgusting, you sweaty freak, you’re covered in sap and tar. You sweat too much. You… you.... I want my mom! You want your mom? I want my mom, my mom is dead, I want my mom, I want I want… is dead. Dead letters, why’d you read the dead letters you weird girl, you witch, you sick witch who reads the dead letters you’re not safe, nowhere safe, not safe not even here. Why’d you read the dead letters, dead letters I want my mom. Mother, she sees me, she sees me! I am Fay, Fay I am, I am a scared little girl playing all alone no one will ever play with me, the loser orphan with a chubby bowl of mush for a belly…
The Marquessa grinned. The corpse-like woman, as tall as some of the trees, had disguised herself as one for hours, but now she had let the bark fall from her face and was walking, closer, closer, every step closer...
Farisa’s head tilted back, mouth open. The too-bright sun in the seawater sky plunged into her eye socket, scraped the back of her skull like a needle, dislodging bone dust, bone dust everywhere. The forest floor wobbled, liquefied. Her vision flooded with colors alien to nature: blood gray, venom green, devil’s blue. The Marquessa clucked her ancient tongue, arms up in victory.
Please don’t take me under, Farisa begged. Please, please, please don’t take me under.