We both looked to see Federo stepping through.
This day he was dressed as a gentleman-merchant of the city. Mistress Leonie had of late been training me to recognize the meaning of hats, feathers, scarves, and pins-how their array signified rank and station, and also how they changed over time so that no lesson remained true for long.
He had two peacock feathers sweeping crossed on the left from a violet felt snood. His suit was a matching violet cutaway in the same felt, over a cream-colored shirt buttoning on the left and a thin collar with three silver clasps. His trousers were a dark herringbone tweed seamed in the Altamian style with the tapered cuffs over dark purple leather half boots. A scarf so deeply blue that it was almost black had been thrown across his shoulder.
I thought he looked rather silly, for all that his attire spoke of his elevated station in the ranks of society.
“Hello, Girl.” Federo then nodded briskly to Mistress Tirelle. “How fares the candidate?”
“My report will be made when time comes, sir.” She shot me a glare for having the temerity to be present during this conversation.
Bowing my head, I waited to see what he wanted of me.
“I would speak to the girl a little while.” His voice was pointed.
“You may find me in the sitting room.” Mistress Tirelle waddled off with another expression that promised misfortune.
I clasped my hands as she clumped into the shadows of the porch. I had long understood that Federo and the Dancing Mistress must in some fashion be in league over me. I could not see what it came to-but then, so little of my life was clear.
He dropped to one knee. “You need to know that I will be gone awhile. Possibly a year or more.”
I nodded.
“Speak, Girl. I am not one of your horrid Mistresses with a mousetrap mind and cheese for brains.”
“Fare well,” I said. Though I had no desire to be rude to him, facing him down, all I could think of was the day he had bought me away from Papa. Was he off to purchase more girls from their cradles?
“I hear you are learning well.”
“The dancing is good.”
His answering smile told me I had struck correctly. “Excellent. I can do little to help you, except to watch over your progress. Others
… she… may do more.”
“I regret my rudeness before.”
His face grew long a moment, shadowed by memory. “Truth may be hard, but I do not call it rude.” His hand touched my chin, as if he wished to tilt it back and examine me once more. “We each pace against the bars that cage us.”
“Your cage is the world,” I said in frustration, though I did not mean to strike for his heart.
“Everyone’s cage is the world. Some worlds are smaller than others.”
With that, he went to speak to Mistress Tirelle. I was left with the fruit picker and the last pomegranates of the season.
My next run with the Dancing Mistress set the tone for the work we did through the winter. That night she took me over the wall for the first time, to venture inside one of the Factor’s empty houses. We slowly climbed dusty stairs, pausing every two or three to sweep behind us and spread the dust again. That was something of a revelation for me-under Mistress Tirelle, I had learned at great pain that dust was an enemy. Yet here it was a friend to conceal our trail.
Even at that pace, we gained the roof in less than ten minutes. Spread before me was a landscape of sloping tiles, chimney pots, small peaks with inset windows, pipes topped by little rain caps and vents. In short, terrain. Like the groves of home, except these trees were metal, wood, and brick.
“This is a rooftop,” the Dancing Mistress said. “When we run here, there are many ways to be unlucky.”
“Yes, Mistress.”
“Even on the ramparts of the Factor’s house, you are largely safe except from some accident of discovery. Here, a loose tile or a slick stone could easily send you to your death.”
“Yes, Mistress.”
She sighed. “At some point, when I judge you ready, we will begin jumping.”
“Thank you.” She seemed to be waiting for something, so I asked the question that hung in my mind. “If the danger is so great, why do we pursue this course?”
“So that you will be everything you can someday.”
“You do not dance so with your other students.”
“No, Girl. Almost never.”
Her smile was sad. I could see it even in the darkness.
We began to walk the roofs of that block with whispered warnings and brief lectures through the moonlit dark. How to stand or slide on a slope, the virtues of ridgepoles, which chimneys to avoid and what were the tells that warned one off. The street had been complex with faces and odors and dangers of a certain kind. This place higher up was complex with angles and textures and dangers of a different kind.
When the ice came, the rooftops were a whole new variety of danger. Even the street was hard to cross with snow betraying our steps. We worked the quiet darkness of the blocks around the Factor’s house all the winter, except for those weeks when the weather was too much to be out without catching some grippe that would betray me to Mistress Tirelle.
The duck woman noted the improvement in my spirits that season, though her response was to question me closely about whether one of the other Mistresses had been bringing in some forbidden material to my lessons. I would never tell the Dancing Mistress’ secret, so I led her to watch Mistress Leonie, Mistress Danae, and all the others with increasing suspicion. It amused me to see these mean and bitter women snipe at each other all the more. They sniped at me as well, but at least they were not conspiring at my humiliation.
True to his word, Federo did not come back for over a year. I continued to grow, unfolding into a coltishness that I was repeatedly told I would not lose until my womanhood came upon me. I became clumsy, which distressed both the Dancing Mistress and me at our daily lessons in the practice room, and far more so on those nights when we sought to climb and run the high air.
Mistress Ellera arrived to teach me the arts of paint and charcoal, and together we discovered a gift that none had suspected in me. Quite soon I was fit to draw a most pleasing portrait in blacks and grays on a pinned-up sheet of foolscap. I amused myself sketching each of my Mistresses, until Mistress Tirelle forced me to stop. She seemed to fear a descent into cartoonish mockery. Still, Mistress Ellera’s palette of colors and shades and brushes showed me a window into the world that I had never expected.
I nearly lost my privileges the week that all unthinking I produced a portrait of Endurance standing to his knees in a rice paddy. Mistress Tirelle somehow suspected the picture for what it was, but I lied convincingly enough to persuade her it was Prince Zahar’s divine cow from one of Mistress Danae’s storybooks.
Otherwise I endured the occasional beatings for forgotten lessons or talking out of turn. Life was as always.
Clumsy or not, the Dancing Mistress and I ran ever farther on the rooftops. We followed streets farther away from the Factor’s house before climbing a shadowed drainpipe or a vine-wrapped trellis. The presence of people no longer gave me such worry and distraction, but I still preferred the high silences.
We met a few others up there. They were fellow skulkers and travelers for whom silence seemed the best greeting and fondest farewell. All of us shared a secret under the stars, and I loved those nights in the open air.
My existence had settled into a rhythm that suited me when I did not think too hard about the terms of my confinement. I still kept my imaginary belled silk close every night, but my burning sense of injustice had faded beneath the combination of almost-comfortable habit and the continuing discovery my lessons had become.