I was but a small child when such words first crossed my ears. They only strengthened my resolve to master everything before me. Someday I would walk free.
My bed was a great square so soft that I sometimes slept on the floor beside it. At night, when Mistress Tirelle had retired huffing and grumbling to her sleeping room, I would lie awake and tell myself stories in the language of my birth. I quickly came to realize how little I knew of my own tongue, compared with my increasing mastery of the rough, burred Petraean of these Stone Coast people. I could speak of fruits and spices and tailoring and the finer points of dogs only in the language of my captivity.
In my own language, I did not even have a word for dog. Endurance had been our only animal, besides a few scrawny jungle fowl scratching about Papa’s hut. I could chatter of turtles and snakes and biting flies, but still the world those words encompassed was small enough to crack my heart.
One day I had pieced together another few lines of Seventeen Lives of the Megatherians. Mistress Danae believed that a lady should always reach beyond herself. The words were gigantic, speaking of ideas I did not understand at that time. What does a small child know of transmigration and condonation? Still, the sounds were present in their tricksy, shifting letters. She guided me through them one slow, patient step at a time.
I rose from my lesson. My bladder was full, and it was not quite the hour for me to assist Mistress Tirelle in the upper kitchen. With her keen sense of cruelty in full flower, she had decreed we would work with soups for a while.
To my surprise, she waited just outside the door of the common room. Mistress Tirelle was not in the habit of standing about in the cold. Not without great need.
“Girl,” she said, then paused a moment. Such a lack of assurance was also unlike the duck woman. “A new Mistress is here for you to meet. She is… is not on my schedule, but Federo has sent her.” Eyes narrowing, Mistress Tirelle went on. “Be warned. This is not someone you should warm to as you have your other Mistresses.”
It was all I could do not to burst out laughing. Who had Mistress Tirelle thought I might have warmed to? That she should imagine such an idiotic thing was beyond credibility. I nodded instead, then looked down at my feet to hide the light undoubtedly dancing in my eyes.
“You believe that I jest.” She grabbed my ear, then thought the better of it even as I braced for the shock of pain. “This is something else, Girl. None of your little rebellions-no foreign talk, no thieving, no nothing. You get the urge to earn a beating, you just come tell me and I’ll knock the pores right off your skin. But do not play the monkey with this new Mistress.”
I nodded, still not meeting her eyes. Was this new Mistress a fearsome queen of arms? Or some mighty priestess with a hex in her milky eyes? Mistress Danae’s stories were full of such women, strange beyond measure and powerful in quiet ways that escaped the notice of most men.
Mistress Tirelle led me downstairs, through the receiving room and to the practice room. I followed with my head still bowed, my face hidden, until I was looking at my feet, streaked with dirt, standing on the straw padding of that place.
“Girl,” the duck woman said in a voice overloud with the pitch of fear, “this is the Dancing Mistress. Mistress-ma’am. This here’s our Girl. The candidate of the Pomegranate Court.”
“Thank you, Mistress Tirelle.” The Dancing Mistress’ voice was deeper and rougher than I had heard before among women. I raised my eyes and looked up at someone too tall, too thin, covered with fine fur, a tail whicking behind her. The tips of claws peeked through her oddly blunt, wide fingers.
Dangerous, monstrous even.
A shriek rose up within me. The Dancing Mistress touched her mouth with her finger in the simplest of shushing motions. Her gesture was so unexpected that it distracted my panic, as she must have known it would.
Not a monster, I realized, but someone who was far more different from me than these pale maggot people of the Stone Coast. Her ears were high on her skull, set back with small round flaps above them almost like a mouse. Her forehead was high, over water-pale violet eyes in a pointed face descending with a mouth split wide as mine or anyone else’s, rather than the fanged triangle of a beast. Her nose was flat, but also human rather than animal.
What had startled me most was the silver fur that covered all of her that I could see. People could look like anything, be many colors and sizes, but no person I had ever seen or heard of was covered with such fine and beautiful fur. Nor did people have tails that swept to the floor, as the Dancing Mistress most certainly did. At the same time she was clearly a person, clad in a wrap of blue cotton printed with a subtle flowered pattern. The clothing covered her bodice and hips, just as any lady would take care to do.
“I am a woman of my people,” she said quietly. “Your kind refer to us as pardines. I am come to live among the humans of Copper Downs and work for my own living. I teach girls and women, and a very few men, to dance, to walk with grace and balance. Sometimes they learn to move so fast and fall so far that they can avoid the sorts of pointed dangers that come driving out of the shadows of great houses.”
I stared. No one had ever before surprised me so much that they stole all the words from my mouth.
She stepped away from me and sat on the little wooden bench of the practice room. Mistress Tirelle had departed without me taking any note of her movements. “We shall require mirrors here, I am afraid.” The Dancing Mistress seemed regretful. “Now tell me of yourself, Girl.”
“I am to speak?” I almost choked on the words.
“Yes,” the Dancing Mistress answered. “You are to speak.”
“I… I am a girl of my people.” I took a deep breath. For the first time since being brought here, I would risk the truth. “Stolen away to live among the enslavers of Copper Downs and work toward my own freedom.”
Blows did not fall. Nor shouting, slaps, shoving. Instead a deep wave of melancholy passed through the Dancing Mistress’ angled violet eyes. She opened her arms, and I stepped into them-to be clasped by friendly hands for the first time in my recent memory.
I did not sob into her fur, though I mightily wished to do so. I just let her hold me a moment while my breathing steadied.
“Girl,” she finally said. “Your thoughts are your own. I do not blame you for a syllable of what you said. But if you value your life, and any power you may ever hope to grasp hold of, keep those words within you and never let them out again among these walls.”
Her words were a scrap of hope fed to a starving girl. “Yes, Mistress,” I muttered, then pulled away from the fur and cotton of her shoulder. “What is it you are here to teach me, please?”
She looked surprised. “Why, dancing, of course.”
We danced awhile.
I could not see how to make another belled silk and keep it a secret. Instead I began sewing one in my imagination. Each night before I slept, I would count the bells of my life to date. First there were the simple tin bells of my time with Papa. Then there were the scrap iron bits of my voyage with Federo. Then there were the pomegranate seeds of my months in this house.
In my mind they all rang, even the wood and iron bits. Each night after I had counted them all to the best of my recollection-some spans of days I had to guess at-I would make a game of sewing another one on. Because it was only in my head, I could use needles of bone or ivory, steel or wood; likewise the thread was as I decided it was.
The important thing was to keep the count. In the Pomegranate Court, weeks were marked by the pattern of daily lessons, and by the delivery of certain foodstuffs. We kept no calendars. The count of my bells was the count of my days, and how else would my spirit know the way home when I was done with my life?
I never breathed a word, said nothing to anyone, even the Dancing Mistress. I could not do this thing without punishment falling so hard upon my shoulders that I would bleed rivers.