“Green,” she said, then began to stalk toward me.
The Dancing Mistress moved with such intensity that I wondered if I was about to fight an old teacher for the second time in a handful of days. She would be as difficult to defeat as Mother Vajpai. At most, I could battle her to a standstill and then hope to escape.
Sliding from my stool, I prepared to palm my short knives and studied her in the few seconds I might have before violence erupted.
The Dancing Mistress looked wild, as if she were as fresh from the hills as the bartender I’d just helped. I could not say precisely why-the unaccustomed rough nap of her coat, from living outdoors, perhaps? Or the way she moved through the space around her as though filling it. Much as the Rectifier did, who deliberately cultivated a feral image, and so unlike her old mode of walking, where she slid between people and the gaps they made.
Not accommodating. Rather, asserting her control and power. Uncivilized, in the most literal sense.
“Mistress,” I replied warily. When we’d met in Kalimpura, we’d fought. She had not known it was me behind the mask. I was defeated by her, and I had been in better training then than I was now. “You are home from the mountains.”
Her tail flicked. A half-dozen more wild pardines spread out behind her. Pottery clicked nearby and I smelled a mouthwatering hot paneer. A weapon, of course-spinach in oily water near the boiling point.
“This is not home,” the Dancing Mistress said flatly.
I knew to listen to her tone, but I knew more to watch her claws. She was far too canny to signal her movements as most human adversaries would-even a well-trained woman requires iron self-control and fantastic muscle strength to lean in one direction and kick in another, but pardines are too alien to read in that same fashion.
The claw tips showing in her furred fingers were key to what would happen next. Flexed outward, but not fully distended. She would probably continue to speak with me. For now.
“It is my home.” I was quite surprised at my words.
The Dancing Mistress snorted. Her smallest laugh, escaping from her narrow nostrils. “I would never have thought to hear you say that, Green.” Her tail relaxed and the claws disappeared.
Without taking my eyes off her, I extended my hand behind me and grasped hold of my bowl of paneer. My mouth was watering, and while I could still throw it at need, I could also eat. The baby was hungry.
“I might say much the same.” With swift decision, I plunged on. “Why are you back in the city? I’d not figured to find you again in Copper Downs after you turned me away last summer.” Recovering from her wounds in an upper room of this tavern, the Dancing Mistress had refused to see me. She’d then slipped from the city without a farewell.
“The world is not about you, Green,” she said sadly. For this moment, we were only a student and her former teacher.
“The world was never about me.” My voice was hard; I touched my belly lightly with my right hand, still holding my spoon. “Until I made it listen. A skill you taught me.”
“Fair enough.” She ran a hand across her close-furred scalp, as if nervous. “Why are you here?”
“The usual,” I admitted.
“Gods and monsters and politics?”
“That, and I was hungry for some good Selistani cooking.”
She nodded, that human gesture again. “Your man here is becoming famous.”
“He’s not my man. If Chowdry belongs to anyone now, he belongs to Endurance.”
“You brought him helpless across the sea,” she replied. “He is yours.”
Anger stirred and my voice heated. “Then by your logic I belong to you as much as to myself.”
That brought me a feral glitter of teeth and quick flexing of the claws. “I should not be so foolish as to try to take you up like an old weapon.”
“I would not shatter in your hands,” I told her, “but you might not enjoy so very much the edges you find.”
“It is edges I search for now.” That was an admission of sorts. “Though not yours. I’d heard you were safely in the High Hills.”
And so I’d meant to be, but I did not say that thing to her. Instead I pursued her hint: “What edges?”
“Please,” she said. “Sit with me and we will talk.”
My paneer and I followed her to a table at the back of the room. As I walked, the earlier buzz of men and their games resumed. Whatever came next between us would not be at the center of all attention.
One of the big round tables was clear, near the back stairs. Her escort of wild pardines spread out along the wall where they could watch our table, the room, and each other. I found that a little strange. Such conspicuous display was never the Dancing Mistress’ way.
Nonetheless we sat. My bowl of bournewater was provided, and a larger one for her. A lotus flower floated in the deep stone bowl at the center of the table, symbolizing the feasts by which the Dancing Mistress’ people shared souls and bound the mourning of their dead to the communal memory.
The clack of tiles and the rattle of dice was the heartbeat of the room. We sat in the shadowed back like two actors waiting for our light.
She sipped at her drink and watched me for a while. Being raised as I had among the harshest teachers, I was quite accustomed to this. I amused myself by staring back. Nothing I saw altered my earlier assessment of her. The Dancing Mistress had the mountain way about her now. She didn’t seem to have been in any serious fights lately, for her muzzle and face bore no fresh scars.
We had been lovers, briefly, and I knew her body well enough. She’d lost weight. Become, if anything, more rangy.
Eventually, I outwaited her, for my old teacher spoke first. “I am come to Copper Downs once more in search of an edge. An old, old edge.”
“That brought you down out of your mountains?”
“Yes.” She toyed with her bowl of drink, an excuse not to meet my eye. “The search has something to do with you, though I did not expect the matter to pass directly through your hands.”
“Do you regret seeing me here?” I asked softly.
“We have not met since Federo’s death.” Now the mourning was clear in her voice.
But did she mourn the man? Surely not the god Choybalsan, who had made terrible war upon her people, themselves only a remnant of an earlier age of glory when men were not so strong. “His time was done,” I said, “and the power that was upon him needed to pass further onward.”
“It was never his power.” Her eyes met mine again. Something ancient and hard lay in her gaze now. “You took that stolen power and made another god of it.”
“You say that as if I were a carpenter who’d chosen to build one thing over another. Besides, I could hardly have returned the power.” Where to?
After a long moment, as if in consideration, the Dancing Mistress said, “I have spent time alongside a very wise woman of my people.”
To my left, one of her guardians-or wardens? I realized-murmured a name. Matte, it sounded like. “You yourself are a very wise woman of your people,” I told her.
“In certain, specific ways, perhaps,” she admitted, “but not about the wider concerns of life.”
I did not like where this conversation was heading, though I could not yet say why. “What did you learn from this wise woman?”
“That our people gave away our power too easily.” Her voice grew tense and fierce. “That in my turn I was part of that giving up. That there is much to be rectified.”
The Rectifier? Surely her choice of words could not be coincidence. “Every people with a long past could say such a thing,” I told her, keeping my own tone gentle and easy. “Surely that has been true since the morning of the world.”
Now the Dancing Mistress was very nearly growling, and her claws splintered into the tabletop as she spoke. “This is ours, the soulpath of my entire people. The decision to take it up or lay it down again should be ours alone.”