When the riddle answered itself, I wondered at how slow I had been. As I was brewing a blackbark tea for Mistress Tirelle, I realized that I knew when to meet the Dancing Mistress. I crumbled some of the passionflower leaves into the infusion, to encourage the duck woman to sleep more heavily-we had once more been discussing the difference between savor, flavor, medicine, and poison. Then I drank a great quantity of spring water, so that the needs of my bladder would force me awake an hour or two after we retired.
That evening I received neither a beating nor a lecture. I lay in my bed until I could hear Mistress Tirelle’s snoring-her breathing was loudest when she slept soundly. Too much danced in my head for sleep, and as planned, my need for the chamber pot caught up with me before my elusive dreams ever did.
Getting up, I did what was needed. I then slipped out onto the balcony and padded very quietly past Mistress Tirelle’s door. She had set a line of bells at the head of the stairs, but I slipped over the rail and slid down the outside with my palms upon the banister.
Once on the porch below, I walked to the pomegranate tree and climbed. The bundles were where I had left them, of course. No one here besides me possessed the will or the means to climb the tree except for the Dancing Mistress herself. I gathered the cloth and slid back down to stand on the side of the trunk away from the Pomegranate Court.
Unfolding the bundles, I found leggings, a jacket, and a small bag that after a brief time I realized was a hood. They were cotton dyed black.
I pulled on the leggings, tucked my tunic in, and tugged the jacket on. The hood felt odd, but I pulled it over my head. I half expected the Dancing Mistress to step out of the shadows, but she did not. I waited a moment, feeling foolish, then began to run the circuit of the courtyard. Silence was my goal, and I moved quietly as I could. At each cornering, I took my tumble. I ran and ran under the starlight, for the moon was a dark coin already spent, though my legs and back ached.
When I rolled out of the tumble at the third corner, between the gate and the tackle box, the Dancing Mistress fell into step next to me. Her fur was dark in the starlight, and her face was deadly serious.
“Mistress,” I said, speaking within my breaths. “You were right. I knew when to meet you.”
The Dancing Mistress nodded. “Let me show you something new.”
I followed her as she climbed the post at the west end of the porch. We gained the copper roof, then swarmed the bluestone wall beyond to the wide, flat rampart I’d seen from the top of the pomegranate tree.
The street was open below us. Very quiet even during the daylight, at this time of night, it was empty. A row of buildings stared back at me, windows like vacant eyes beneath the irregular peaks of their roofs, though a few glowed with the light of reason within. The great structures of the city lifted beyond, some gleaming copper, some dull tiles, some with turrets and other features I could not name, for I had not yet had a Mistress who would discuss with me architecture and the life of cities.
The path to freedom lay before me.
“May I go now?” I asked.
“You are too young,” she said quietly. “Though your mind is sharp as any I’ve ever seen, and your beauty unmarred, you cannot make your way alone. Bide here, learn at our expense, but know that someday you will have a road if you need it. There may be different choices you will come to make.”
“No, I do not think so. I will never choose to be grasped within the hand of another.”
“Even birds build their nests together.” She gathered me close for a long time; then we went below to put away the tools of my newfound stealth.
As the spring warmed, the exercises grew more strenuous. All of them. Mistress Leonie’s textile arts were showing me things of which I’d never considered the possibility, such as the weaving of secret messages into the warp and weft of a courtier’s cloak. Likewise Mistress Tirelle in the kitchen. Sometime during a month spent with the making of sauces, we reached a nearly amicable truce around the rhythms of the cooking-she still raged and threatened and beat me away from the fires, but we found a calm before them.
I was permitted to mount a horse, and taught the ways ladies rode, and something of the styles of men that I might judge the quality and training of a horseman. A new woman, Mistress Roxanne, brought boxes of rocks and gems and colored cards to begin my lessons in jewelry. She was thin, sly, and chattering.
As my reading improved, the selection of my books broadened. At the time, it seemed to me that the whole subject of books was haphazard, though later I understood the pattern Mistress Danae was applying to my reading. No recent history, nothing of the city of Copper Downs, and nothing whatsoever concerning the Duke, of whose name and very existence I had then heard only bare rumor.
The greatest effort was expended with the Dancing Mistress. She did not slack with me during the day-we walked through movements, poise, and balance. She brought a clockwork box on a little stand that marked the measures of a rhythm and trained me to its timing. Padded benches and hanging bars arrived for the practice room. We talked about the way my muscles and bones would grow over the next few years, and how making them strong now would help keep them strong later.
After that first period of evening runs, she never again came back early when Mistress Tirelle would know of her visit. Rather, on days before we were to make a late-night run, the Dancing Mistress would leave a scrap of dark cloth on the plain bench in the practice hall. Once Mistress Tirelle was sleeping soundly, I would slip outside in my gray wool wrap and climb the pomegranate tree to dress in my blacks. Without fail, when I descended she awaited me at the bottom. I handed the Dancing Mistress the scrap of cloth, and we would begin our work against the stones.
There was a great deal of running. I climbed, tumbled, fell, spun, leapt. We used the walkway capping the outer wall, measuring distances for me to cross without touching the stone. Before long, I became accustomed to my view of the city beyond, and wondered when and how I would see more.
“Why do we run atop the wall?” I asked her one night in the late spring, as the northern summer was beginning to unfold. The air even at that hour still remembered the warm hand of the sun. “Does the Factor not have guards?”
We spoke as we climbed, practicing finding the cracks in the sheathing stone of the courtyard walls.
“No one would dare breach the Factor’s walls. Not even the most desperate, drunken petty thief.”
“Still, we are visible from the street.”
“No one without looks within. Even if they see us there, who are we? Who would they tell?”
“The Mistresses come and go.”
“Have you ever seen a Mistress come or go at night? Besides me?”
I thought about that. “No-no, I have not.”
“Consider that there might be great and terrible wards on these gates.”
“So they cannot be passed, even by the Factor’s friends?”
The Dancing Mistress laughed. “To be sure. Such a thing makes the guards lazy. As they are not permitted to gaze within the courts on pain of blindness followed by death, they do not watch what we do.”
As Federo had said, except for him, I would know only women.
One night our run was different.
I dropped out of the tree freshly clad. My thighs ached from time spent on a strange horse that day. I was still too small to sit properly astride with any comfort. The Dancing Mistress stood there, her tail twitching as it emerged from a slit in her own blacks.
“Mistress,” I said, bowing my head as I clasped my hands for permission to speak.