Before Ari could even ask Master Keating to elaborate on Hesperus’s actions in the Battle of Eirene, he held up a hand and shook his head, tossing his sleeve back for an extra touch of drama. ‘Alas, the story is not mine to tell.’ As if he hadn’t been telling it with relish for the past few minutes. ‘If you do want to find out, if blessed Sailen, our Child of Wisdom, is guiding you down a path of greater knowledge, then you must seek out Nicholas, whom you will most likely find in the workshop at the end of the wisteria walkway, for it is his story too.’
Natty’s bells jingled at the end of his speech, muffled even though she was standing right next to Ari. On the right. She exchanged a look with Natty and squinted at the tapestry-covered panel to the left, where the noise had come from.
The woollen threads wove out a picture of seven dancing figures around a circular lake, hanging from what looked like a curtain rail: simple to crawl behind for a hidden passage, a hidden space. Just like the one that she’d decided not to explore in Claribel’s manor.
She lifted a hand and jabbed at the largest figure on the tapestry – a knight with tangled brown hair and bright red lips – and said, ‘It is amazing what great art can do. There is such skill in the making of these figures that I even heard them come to life.’
Master Keating’s fists tightened until his knuckles grew white. If he had any eyebrows left, he would have knitted them. ‘Very well. I have known you since you were a girl. You are from Aquilon, and I believe you always took Cardinal Bec’s teaching to heart.’
All she’d taken to heart was that in the end, the Fated One would eat the stories harvested from their hearts.
~As Cardinal Bec has been dead for nearly three-hundred years, no, we haven’t met in this life.~
said Ari, attempting to school her face into a grave image of agreement. She hoped that Cardinal Bec’s teaching was something that’d match her current expression.
~It is different in the Church. Since he’s also mentioned my Aquilon blood, he must be referring to Cardinal Bec’s famous resolution that is engraved at the foot of his statue in Eirene Cathedral’s garden: ‘We must not sell men like cattle.’ Through his teaching, Ventinon no longer purchases slaves. In the Duchy of Aquilon, we don’t even have villeins.~
It took everything to not turn to Claribel in disbelieve. Instead, she nodded back at Master Keating, who was nodding at her in silence with a year’s worth of eye-contact.
~In Aquilon, all people are free! Free to be good or bad, I suppose. We don’t have villeins. Oh, don’t be so confused. What do you call them then? Serfs? Weren’t you working with serfs when you lived as Becky, only you were tied to a company instead of a land? They sold the company to Jack with all of you attached, and you all had to agree to work on Jack’s company for five days a week – quite mad, when no lord in Ventinon could demand any more than three – in return for a small portion of what the company reaps, but you weren’t given any ownership of it that I could see. Although… it is very strange to me that most of you were also tied to a land at the time, and paid rent to a different lord, owning nothing but an empty bank account by the end of the month. I suppose you could marry without requiring Jack’s permission, so you were freemen after all, despite owning nothing.~
This time, Ari had to tear her gaze from Master Keating and turn to Claribel. She didn’t know what was more ridiculous: those insinuations or the fact that Claribel could rummage through her head to grab details that she’d almost forgotten. Yes. Jack. There’d been a man like that, though she couldn’t recall his face. The Claribel who could gather that without a word couldn’t be the same as the one who’d traded seven questions with her.
Master Keating slapped his hands together, making her grip the hilt of her dagger. She must have nodded at him for long enough for him to say, ‘Since you’ve sent your fool to my bathhouse, and will be helping me come to an agreement with Madame Lucretia, we might as well lay our cards on the table.’
Well, if she didn’t know it before, Ari would never trust him with a secret. He lifted the bottom right corner of the tapestry, gripping the woven figure bathing in a fountain of wine, and rapped out a staccato rhythm on the oak-panelled wall.
With a click, the panel swung open, and out stepped a man with a head full of braids. Bells swung from the ends of each, revealing the culprit that had betrayed his presence. Ari would have liked to say that the first thing she noticed was his dazzling smile and the curved dagger at his waist, but there was a dark crimson tattoo of a decision tree, etched from his hairline to his brows, one, two, four. The lines were jagged and uneven. If Connor was here, he’d probably put a hit on that tattoo artist.
‘A Khurammian follower of the Creator!’ Claribel took a moment to recover from her exclamation back into a polite calm. ‘May you make your Maker proud,’ she said, bending her fingers into a pair of upside-down bunny ears that mirrored the man’s tattoo.
‘And may the Fated One savour you,’ said the man, pressing two fingers to his lips.
‘I knew I could count on you, Lady Claribel!’ cried Master Keating with another clap of his hands.
‘Lady Claribel from House Aquilon?’ The man cocked his head, sending the bells jingling again.
‘The very same. And my lady, this is Ogun, a Divine Warrior before his capture in their civil war, then sold to our mines. The Creator made him strong enough to be worth something to the traders, but not threatening enough to kill off, in case he should ever return to Khurammian shores. Oh, my lady, I am so glad that I have not misjudged your intelligence. Sometimes I think being a Master mage in and of itself should be proof of having more than wool between your ears, but I have unfortunately been well-acquainted with Master Rodber. Treasurer? Pah. He doesn’t even know how to treasure his wife. Did you know he–’
This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.
Ari cleared her throat as politely as she could, only to find herself out of words, tangled in Claribel’s now-tangible mess of emotions: hope, fear and… guilt? ‘This is Aquilon’s famed jester, Fabia,’ she said, signalling Natty to steer the conversation away from Master Rodber’s wife, who probably wouldn’t be revealed as the mastermind behind Ogun’s current state or Tristram’s murder. There must be a better line of conversation than the ideas flashing through her mind, such as ‘whose bright idea was it to go into hiding with bells in your hair?’ and ‘do you need me to assassinate whoever bought or sold you?’ Most of all, ‘What the hell was this? A magician’s jazz-hands reveal of a slave for Claribel to gawp at? Really? But then again, Master Keating had saved him, hadn’t he? That must be why he was hiding the man, mustn’t it?’
‘Hello,’ offered Natty, followed by a smile and suffocating silence.
‘So…’ She should have let the conversation ramble. ‘Spirit possessions. I don’t think you people are responsible.’ Because she was responsible for both that and her instant regret for saying those words.
Ogun opened his mouth to reply, but Master Keating took over. ‘That’s right, my lady! I am glad that you are not one to forget our peaceful co-existence with the followers of the Creator. All this recent spirit-possession talk is spiralling out of control. I don’t believe Ogun’s people are responsible for it, but I’m not as pretty as Lady Oriana – not even with a wig – so our beloved Cardinal Octavus is going to issue me more than a few days of isolation for the disrespect. Sometimes I do think that I should shut my mouth.’
‘Indeed, there has only been one man with the power of possession,’ said Ogun, turning to the tapestry behind him to point at the figure bathing in wine. ‘Acren. Child of Wine and Dreams.’
Natty’s eyes glistened. ‘Children,’ she whispered, like Claribel had done back in the carriage. Children. ‘I have often wondered, though a fool’s intelligence is much more limited than a Master mage’s, why? I have asked many in Ventinon to no avail.’ Starting with a hum, she sang,
‘What are words but vessels of meaning?
What are children but fruits of their mothers?
Then why do you, when you are speaking
Call them Children and not another
Truer name, like Eye-Cutter
As they scream, “I cut her!”’
~I must say, it almost feels as if you’ve trained to be a fool,~ said Claribel, throwing an extra spoon of apprehension into the mixed bag of feelings that coursed through Ari.
Ogun forced a flash of his teeth. She’d seen men reveal passwords with the same fleeting expression, with her Glock at their temples. ‘Then you have not asked the right men in Ventinon. I am not a learned man, but every Khurammian child knows that the Children’s maker is not our Maker. “Then Lady Una formed the Child from the mud upon her shores and breathed into It with the breath of life, and the Child became a living being.”’
Her mouth felt too dry, her palms too damp.
‘Don’t worry, my lady, if your fool wants to talk to more learned Khurammians, I’ve got more! Running a clean bathhouse requires a lot of scrubbing, not just of men, but of walls and floors. Girls from establishments like Madame Lucretia’s previous one used to travel into establishments like mine, often into concealed private rooms to escape the eyes of the Church, even though so many visitors were men of the cloth. What can I say? They must leave their cloths behind to bathe. Nowadays, those rooms make good homes for escaped Khurammian – what do we call them? – official villeins, in-theory slaves? Or at least they did before His Majesty started getting his Royal Guards to hunt them down. Young Charlie from Lord Bernard’s manor? He builds good roof scaffolds, so the carpenters are collectively claiming that he’s Nicholas’s cousin. Ogun, on the other hand… Just one look at him and that forehead tattoo, and you’d know he’s not. Still, Ogun here has nearly made it! I’ve checked the date of his runaway report, and we’re nearly through the one year and one day to freedom. Sixteen more days and he’s a freeman! That’s why I’m hiding him here now. Don’t want to risk raiding the bathhouse when he’s on his final stretch.’
Ari swallowed questions about her own origins and tried to follow the flow of Master Keating’s words.
~Some villeins choose to run to towns and cities to become freemen. If they are found after a year and a day of the lord reporting them missing, then by the King’s grace, the lord no longer has a claim to the villein. It is a mark of a lord’s failure to have villeins taking their chances elsewhere. That branding on his forehead too… No lord is allowed to harm the men bound to them by their servitude.~
‘It may be insensitive of me to say so, but I do hope you have come from Lord Darien’s mana mines,’ said Claribel, turning to Ogun. ‘I do hope no other lord is unwise enough to treat their people with such disrespect. Villeins are not slaves.’
Which explained why Master Keating’s wife would rather tie the knot with the man before her than the heir to Auster.
‘I am sorry to disappoint you, my lady, but I was sold to the mana stone mines run by the Temple of Merta.’
‘The Temple of Merta?!’ Claribel slipped from her briefly regained calm.
~It can’t be. Merta is the Child of Love! How could the Temple of Merta indulge in such horror?~
‘It appears that the Temple of Love has fallen for the temptation of gold,’ said Natty, adding a touch of singsong to her words. ‘Ever since my lady discovered the true value of mana stones, those mines really have multiplied. She’s got everyone crying mine, mine, mine! Mining those is as hard as getting blood out of a stone, so they’re throwing blood at the stones. Let’s get those mana stones even if a man is stoned for chiselling too slow, as we chisel away at Cardinal Bec’s words. We must not sell men like cattle, no, but hey, if you’re after a certain type of chattel, let’s make the Maker’s followers cattle: a solution as neat as a sailor’s swig of rum.’
Claribel shrank under the barrage of Natty’s words. ~It’s true. It all started with me. I thought our discovery would change the world, and it did, just not for the better.~
‘My, my, Mistress Fabia, I had only heard of your famous tricks of the rear,’ said Master Keating, blowing a raspberry, ‘but to hear you speak is almost as entertaining. Indeed, men like Lord Darien are calling themselves saviours of the defeated faction of Khurammians, because if they’d not struck a deal with the new Khurammian king to ship his enemies to the mines, King Eletan would have simply killed them all. It is not as if certain lords and archbishops lent support to King Eletan for converting to the faith of the Fated One. Anyhow, now you can see what a difficult predicament I’m in, my lady,’ he said, ushering Ogun back behind the tapestry, then walking Natty and her towards the door. ‘I’ll come good on that silver certification. Put in a good word for me with Madame Lucretia. She’s sure to have many hiding spots spread across the city. These Khurammians are hardworking, and as they’d just escaped the mines, they don’t mind toiling away without seeing the sun for their year and a day!’
As they emerged back into the sunlight, towards the tunnel of bare wisteria vines, Natty said through gritted teeth, ‘Words have meaning, don’t they? Villains and villeins have the same root. What does that say about us?’