The day after, I stepped out of the sleeping room to a hard blow from the flat of Mistress Tirelle’s hand. “Strip your shift,” she demanded, slapping the sand-filled silk tube against her forearm.
Whatever had passed between us in the kitchen two days before was long gone, vanished within the bullying hatred that always intruded. She finally stopped the beating, breathing so heavily, it might have been a sob. “Your little baking experiment nearly got your tongue slit and you sold away,” Mistress Tirelle growled in my ear. I smelled wine on her breath, and the stink of fear. “Only that idiot fop Federo spoke for you, and saved you.”
I understood then that in saving me, Federo had saved her.
There was nothing to say, nothing to ask. I gripped the rail tight and let my legs shiver. Silence was my only armor as she resumed.
When she was finished, she slumped away, before leaning close again. Her hand gripped my shoulder so tightly that I knew I would have fingertip bruises there later. “One of the Factor’s household became very sick from your almonds. Her lips burned and she could not breathe. They called it poisoning at first, until a maid spoke up that the woman had always taken ill from certain nuts. Federo said you could not have known, and calmed the Factor’s anger. You are a very lucky girl, Girl.”
After Mistress Tirelle left, I gathered my shift and slowly pulled it back over my head. The greatest, strangest marvel of these people in the Factor’s employ was how they seemed to believe it was my luck to be beaten and abased by them. As if they had longed to be stolen away and treated without mercy all the days of their childhood.
Later that day, enduring my silent passes with the Dancing Mistress, I gave her back her dark strip of cloth. She said nothing, made no sign she took my meaning, but I knew. My muscles ached, and my legs shook. Still, I resolved to stand firm.
That night I waited for Mistress Tirelle to go to sleep, thinking on how I might strangle her in her bed, or smother her with a bolt of belled silk so that her death cries chipped her teeth against the metal. A good thought, but the Dancing Mistress had held the right of it when she told me to abide and gather what power might come to me.
Eventually I rose and plucked the seams from my pillow. The blacks were as I had left them, smelling of tree bark and my old sweat. I shook them out and slid into them there in my sleeping room, heedless of whether I might be caught. As I stepped onto the balcony, Mistress Tirelle groaned and stirred.
Freezing a moment, I stood silent as the mist that had once more risen outside. I heard a creaking, then the unmistakable ring of water being passed into the night pot. Even my breath was noiseless, held close and shallow.
She groaned again, then fell heavily back into her bed. With one last, regretful thought for the blanket I could wrap around her face, I took hold of the balcony rail and dropped to the stones below. No sense in risking the stairs.
I had miscalculated the effect of the muscle pains from the morning beating. The fall went bad, and I wound up flat on the cobbles, breathing heavily. A moment later, the Dancing Mistress stood close above me, her small rounded ears outlined against the sullen silver glow of the night sky.
She extended a hand. I brushed it away, still angry at her, at Mistress Tirelle, at everyone. Most angry at myself, truly, but I did not want to examine that thought too closely.
I found my feet and stood swaying. We eyed each other in the dark.
“First,” I whispered, “you will show me how you threw me down on our last night run. Then, when you are satisfied that I know how to see to my own safety, we will cross the wall and you will take me out into the world.”
“I do not accept orders from you.” Her voice was quiet and calm, but I could see her tail standing out almost straight.
“I, too, am done accepting orders.” Even as I said the words, they surprised me. “I will stay because I choose to. I will beat these Mistresses at their own game, better them and all the girls of the other courts, and eventually best the Factor himself. When I choose to, I will walk free of this place.”
Her silence answered me, though her tail flicked now instead of standing brush-straight.
“And you…”Even in the dark, I could feel myself blush. Surely my face was a beacon. “Will you teach me what I need to know to choose my path?” I stared down a moment. “P-please?”
“Hmm.” Her tail curled. Then she extended her hand again. I took it in mine, clasping my other across it as if I were asking permission to hold her close. “Let us talk of throws and falls.” She led me across the courtyard, over by the horse box, where we began to work on my center of mass.
Things were different after that. Mistress Tirelle remained angry, but also nervous in a strange way. Some edge had shifted with the little competition of foods. It was as if I had won a point, even while passing perilously close to a forfeit of the entire game.
I did not become reckless, but I became bolder. I was quicker to ask permission to speak. My questions were pointed, challenged my instructresses more. I tried to think several steps beyond what was being shown. Food was for eating, but it was also a weapon, a display, a competition, a threat, and a challenge. Dogs were servants and also in their strange way masters-their shallow, sharp-edged minds seeing the world through the brittle lens of scent and pack loyalty to bring news of old happenings to the ears of their handlers. The language of cloth and fold and pattern was focused tight as any logical discourse of Mennoes the Great or the Saffron Masters.
So I asked, and challenged, and turned, and was turned on in my time. My mind unfolded at this. Strangely, the beatings became more infrequent. I had found my stride and was running the course. As Mistress Balnea would say, the rider had laid free of the whip.
The Dancing Mistress showed me steps and falls a night each week for the entire turn of the moon. “This is the most basic of the work,” she said. “To keep your center and find your feet and not be broken by the throw.” I learned to see and step around the blows she launched, though she demurred from teaching me the strikes. “Another time. Later. We have years yet.”
I had asked to be made safe for the streets. She was making me safe for the streets, no more than that. They would have nothing to fear from me.
Finally, on the turning of the next moon, we met again at the base of the pomegranate tree. Mist was in the air to bring the chill that would banish summer once again. I slid down in my blacks to find the Dancing Mistress waiting as always. We had not regained the comfort of our prior friendship, but reason and compassion had been restored between us. Though I hungered for more, that was enough for now.
She set a hand loosely on my shoulders. “Are you ready?”
“Yes.” I grinned.
“No,” she said with a much smaller smile. “You are not. But you are never ready-you merely go forward when the time comes.”
“Then we should go forward.”
“You have a ten count to top the wall.”
I raced as though my legs were afire.
Later that night, I took out my imaginary silk and set another bell in place. Then I spent a long time telling myself a story in the words of my birth, of a girl who swam in ditches and was watched over by an ox named Endurance. Only he, with his great brown eyes and his endless patience, had not betrayed me by dying or sending me away. That my words were few and difficult pained me. I knew that the poverty of my own language was more to do with my age when Federo took me away than with any lack of the tongue itself, but still this was distressing.
I cried at that. The pillow swallowed my tears and eventually the racing of my mind as well.
A few days later, I was out in the courtyard with Mistress Tirelle, whipping off a blindfold to spot fruits on the moment. What had begun as a simple cruelty was almost a game between us now. As I moved to replace the blind after a good pick, the little man-gate inside our greater gate was opened from the other side.