Books and cooking carried me through the winter, but the following spring, the Dancing Mistress found a much better way to occupy my time. Our nighttime runs around the courtyard had long since grown sure-footed and stretched sometimes into hours. She also had me climbing the pomegranate tree for time, to see how fast I could go and how much I could better my previous records. We danced along a low wooden bar she had brought into the practice room, along lines of cobbles in the courtyard, up and down the stairs until Mistress Tirelle shouted for us to stop ruining her house.
All of that was great fun, and took energy from me almost as fast as it gave back more. But one night she came with a leather satchel over her shoulder.
“Here,” she said as we stood behind the tree, away from the sight of the Pomegranate Court itself.
I opened the satchel. Inside were several bundles of dark cloth.
“Climb the tree and place these within the branches. Hide them so no one looking from the ground or the balcony will easily spy them.”
“From Mistress Tirelle?” I hid nothing, not even my bowel movements, from the duck woman. Only my thoughts were my own. Sometimes I doubted even that.
“Hide them from no one at all,” said the Dancing Mistress. “No one and everyone.”
I climbed. I hid them, for by now I knew this tree as well as I knew my own bedclothes. I paused and thought, then climbed down. “Whatever it is you intend, it cannot be for the evening when Mistress Tirelle looks out and awaits my return.”
“No.” Her teeth gleamed with a small smile.
“When, then?”
“You will know.”
Then we ran awhile, with me tumbling through a roll just after I took every corner of the courtyard.
We ran every night that week, pushing me hard until my feet faltered and my breath burned. I fell into bed every evening wondering how I would know when to meet the Dancing Mistress and her mysterious dark cloths. I was smart enough not to fetch her bundles down during the day, when climbing the tree would earn me a beating. Our evening work outside was watched often enough that I did not even try to bring up the sense of the thing then.