Even so, she was a hidden friend to me through the darkest days of my second winter and the wet, gloomy opening of the spring that followed. The one hour of any day where I could speak even the least portion of my mind was in the practice room with her. We worked on steps, balance, how I walked, my sense of my body and the space it filled. Sometimes it was truly dance, but more often it was just movement.
“Most people think of their bodies as being flat, like a drawing of themselves,” she told me. “Imagine that you made a paper poppet, and moved it about on a little stage. Except it’s not at all true. You have depth. Your heels and elbows swing back. When you turn, there is a curve your body fills in the space around you.”
While the words made sense to me, it was hard to understand the idea that lay beneath. She set me to skipping rope-a pastime of which I had never heard-first forward, then backwards. To hop as the rope came down behind me required that I know without looking where both the rope and my feet were.
This was much like Mistress Tirelle making me pick fruit with a single glance, or Mistress Leonie’s endless tutelage on the niceties of seams. I had to see beyond what lay before my most casual gaze, to what was really there, as invisible to the eye as my own back was.
These lessons were strange, and quiet, but soon enough I could feel the grace they lent me. I could catch a dropped knife in the kitchen before it struck the tile, leap down the stairs from the balcony to the lower porch. I found I was strong, too. Very strong, the Dancing Mistress told me-more even than most boys. How was I to know? She helped me learn to use that advantage as well. Once the weather cleared a bit, I was able to climb the pomegranate tree speedily and without fear.
For that feat I was beaten so hard, I could not walk for two days. Mistress Tirelle and the Dancing Mistress had an argument, the only one I ever heard between them. Then the duck woman came waddling into my sleeping room. “This is your place,” she said quietly. “Do not look over the walls, do not peek out the gate.”
I forgot myself again and blurted out, “What is beyond, that I should fear it so?”
Mistress Tirelle pretended not to notice my infraction. “A world you will see when it is your time. Girl, you are being made ready for greatness. Let that making unfold in the way your teachers know best.”
Like Federo, she believed my being here was for the good of all. How could they think such a thing?
Spring became summer, the rhythms of the seasons continuing to mark my time in the Pomegranate Court. All I remembered from my earliest days was the endless heat and the sun pouring like a golden hammer upon the land. Here the heavens were a clock, a slow march of the long now following the course of plowing, planting, harvest, and fallow.
Not that I’d seen agriculture. Only my one pomegranate tree carrying its hidden burden of seeds, now lost like my bells, but far more likely to return. Once the art of reading had settled into my head, Mistress Danae showed me ever more books. Among them was a treatise on farming, The New Horse-Houghing Husbandry. This was the first truly old text I’d read. The book took me weeks on end to puzzle through, and I understood perhaps only one part in five.
Still, I had been born into the practice of farming. Papa and Endurance worked the paddies, brought in the rice, trod the husks. I recognized some of what Tullius, the author of this book, was describing. My interest was born of that-an echo of the familiar, mixed with stories of princes and battles and demigods and the colors of the world.
The other thing I learned from Husbandry was that the very speech of people could change over time. There were seasons to language, just as there were seasons to the years or to the lives of women. I went about for a while muttering in archaic Petraean, though I never had the nerve to answer Mistress Tirelle or my other instructresses in that form.
My lessons moved downstairs as well. We began cooking in the great kitchen more often. The selection of vessels, utensils, spices, and cooking methods was much more varied than upstairs. Mistress Tirelle and I broke our fasts there almost all the time. Some days we also took quick, simple midday or evening meals there. More to the point, downstairs was where I explored what could be done with food. The lessons were simple at first, but it was already clear to me that there might be no end to them if someone had the means to spend their lives in a glorious kitchen.
One day we were washing earth pears-small wrinkled lumps with purplish skins and hair-fine roots branching off them.
“This root must be cooked over a hot fire or on a high boil for at least ten minutes,” Mistress Tirelle said.
Nothing was ever written down. I was simply expected to remember. The array of details in the kitchen was staggering.
I clasped my hands briefly. This was how I indicated I wished to ask a question regarding whatever lesson was under way.
“You may speak, Girl.”
“What will happen if it is eaten raw, or poorly cooked?”
She gave me a long look. “A person could become quite ill, or even perish.”
It had never occurred to me that food could be a weapon. “So the earth pear is harmful?”
Mistress Tirelle put down her root and dried her hands. “Girl, your question runs ahead of your learning, but I will answer it nonetheless. Everything can do harm. The oils we use for frying would ruin your digestion if drunk down like wine. If I made you eat salt until you gorged, you would die of thirst soon after. Some herbs, or things that resemble herbs, can kill even as a small pinch of powder.”
“Then this art is like all the others I study.” I waved the earth pear in my hand to point around the great kitchen. “It is not that I should cook. It is that I should know cooking so well that I can see when someone is trying to poison me with salt or bad oils or the powder of killing herbs.”
Mistress Tirelle’s ghost of a smile briefly returned. “Federo chose you well, Girl.”
I looked down at my earth pear and wondered how I might feed it to her. Words, I reminded myself. You will triumph with words.
The lesson was clear: Anything could harm, if used in a certain way. Food. Words. A length of silk sewn into a tube and filled with sand. Even a person.
Are they training me to live well? Or to know different ways to kill and to die?
My lessons changed as the seasons did, along with the lengthening of my legs. Mistress Balnea brought the promised horse into the courtyard one day, and we began the study of the living animal instead of the illustrated scrolls and parchments. Our example was an old brown mare with a white blaze on her head who stared at me with empty eyes and suffered herself to be touched and poked and prodded. I was given to understand that in time I would be permitted to mount and ride, as if this were some great treat. At times she brought a dog instead, different breeds on different days, and pointed up their skills and purposes, what their requirements were, and the conformation of their bodies. The dogs had more spirit than the broken old mare, but they also seemed easily cowed.
So, too, other teachings changed. A great loom was delivered and set up overnight beneath the pomegranate tree, with a dyed canvas sheet for shelter from the rain. Mistress Leonie began to teach me the more commercial aspects of weaving. A whole pig carcass arrived, which Mistress Tirelle and I spent three days butchering so I could see where on the animal’s body each cut of meat came from. Some we cured; some we cooked. Much went to waste.
Whatever they truly meant to make of me, I became increasingly aware of the substantial investment of time and resources the Factor was lavishing on my education.
The best change in lessons came, as I might have hoped, from the Dancing Mistress. She arrived one evening after dinner, not her usual schedule. Mistress Tirelle’s habit at that time was to have me read or practice my calligraphy in the last hours. She would then retire early. Thus I was surprised to see any of my instructresses at such an hour-especially the silver-furred woman.