Was that a form of love?
The question made me cry all over again, this time in shuddering silence.
Over time, we began to meet people on the underground runs. Where the rooftop wanderers remained silent and separate as the distant stars, a different etiquette prevailed beneath the stones. When you crossed a path down Below, you paused a moment to let the other examine you.
“This is how we mark foes,” the Dancing Mistress explained after one such passage. “Someone who does not pause is as good as raising a blade to you. The beasts and those lost to reason will not stop, and so you know them dangerous.”
“What of friends?”
“There are no friends beneath the stones.”
“Not even us?”
“That is for you to decide, Girl. I am who I am to you.”
That remark I turned over in my head a long while.
Some months thereafter, the Dancing Mistress began to speak at certain of these meetings. “Mother Iron,” she whispered one night.
The other nodded. She was a short woman, only a silhouette to my view, though her eyes gleamed with the faintest reflection of the coldfire in my hand. She had a misshaping about her, though I could not say if it was clothing, armor, or a strangeness of her body.
“This is my student,” the Dancing Mistress said.
Mother Iron answered in words I did not understand. Her voice came from a deep place, as if she were much taller than she looked, with a chest the size of a horse-I had just then been studying more of the science of sounds and had acquired some sense of how they were made.
The Dancing Mistress answered in the same words. They both nodded, and Mother Iron stepped around us. She did not smell right at all, more like the bottom of the horse box beneath the leather and metal of the bits than any person I had met.
I knew better than to question there, but later I asked, “Who was that?”
“Mother Iron.”
We were crouched behind the pomegranate tree as I took off my blacks.
“But what manner of person is she? What does she do there?”
“She is her own, and pursues her own affairs.”
A spirit then, or some small god perhaps. “You will not answer me in this.”
“No, Girl.” The Dancing Mistress smiled in the moonlight. “But I will tell you this: Anyone you meet Below whose name I give you is not an enemy.”
“No one is my friend.”
“Yes. But should you find trouble, Mother Iron might attend. If it suits her. She is unlikely to further your woes with purpose.”
“Thank you. I think.”
“You are welcome,” she said gravely.
There was one Below who was far more than a name heard once or twice a season. We first encountered him under the warmest night of the year, in the middle of the passage of the weak northern summer.
The Dancing Mistress had me doing falls in the dark those months. She would bid me stand in someplace fairly safe, then slip away with my coldfire in her hand. A minute or two later, I would hear her click her tongue, one click for each yard-length of the drop. I needed to summon the courage to step forward, find the edge, and jump blind.
The first time we tried that, with a fall of less than three feet, I was terrified. With practice, though it never became easy, the discipline grew reasonable. I learned how to trust a partner, and I learned how to fall in the dark.
“You can already find walls by listening for echoes,” she told me. “We will work on you judging the depths the same way, once you know how to drop in safety.”
A strange exercise, but I’d long since realized her greatest purpose lay in pushing me past my own limits, time after time.
I stood on a balcony, a low rail a foot before me, though I knew that only from experience. The Dancing Mistress clicked four times. A fall of about twelve feet. That would require a forward tuck with a full roll, before I landed four points down. No need for the bone shock of striking on two feet when hands could ease the blow. The shoes and gloves spared my skin on these exercises, but I could twist a joint or jam a forearm or leg easily enough. My size would help avoid this, while I was still young.
As I was bending for my leap, someone touched my shoulder. I yelped and dropped. The stone balustrade trapped me immediately. My attacker bent close.
I caught him in a wide-handed slap. He backed away with a sharply indrawn breath. I could hear the soft noises of the Dancing Mistress hurrying to my aid. A moment later, the gleam of coldfire appeared.
“Ho,” she said softly.
“Unnh…” The stranger’s voice was muffled. I realized he had a hand on his face, and that he was in fact male. “You boke my node!”
“This is the girl, Septio. Girl, this is Septio.”
“Sir,” I said cautiously. My tongue was tied with a strange fear. I found my feet, but kept the drop behind me close in mind. If they came to blows, or even sharp argument, I’d go over into the twelve feet of darkness to be out of his reach and away from whatever violence this newcomer and my Dancing Mistress might commit together.
“I didn’t bead to scare you.” His voice was still strange. I scented a new metal-salty tang. So that’s how it sounds when a man’s nose fills with blood, I thought.
The Dancing Mistress chuckled. “Septio is a Keeper of the Ways.”
I heard it as a title. Titles had been much discussed lately in the Pomegranate Court. I wanted to ask for whom, and of what ways, but I chose silence. In my experience, others often would fill it.
“Do you know of the Ways, girl?” Septio asked, his voice clearing. I realized then from his tone that he was little older than I. A boy, down here in the dark alone.
The Dancing Mistress touched my shoulder. “She is from across the Storm Sea. What she has been taught is extensive, but very… focused. The Ways are distant from the agenda of her keepers.”
I had never heard so much said directly about the purpose of my time at the Pomegranate Court
She squeezed my shoulder harder. “You may answer for yourself.”
To speak to a stranger! “The sun is just as hot for every man,” I told him in my own words, my old words. By then that was one of the few things I could remember Papa saying. Then in Petraean: “I do not know, sir. The Ways are hidden from me.”
“The Ways are hidden from most people.” He took his hand from his face and drew a deep, snuffling breath. “You have good reflexes.”
He and the Dancing Mistress exchanged pleasantries; then Septio moved on into the quiet depths.
“That was a priest,” I finally said.
“They are not generally so young.”
I awoke one day to the sound of voices. A crowd of women had gathered in the courtyard. They were placing chairs and sorting themselves into positions in the dawn light. I had never seen so many people at once in the Pomegranate Court-four at the most before this morning. If not for the Dancing Mistress’ night runs, I would not have seen more than four people at once in the years since Federo drove me here from Fortune’s Flight.
Each one of the women wore a straight-backed gown in black satin, with ribbon cross-lacing bodices that were slashed to show gray silk beneath. A uniform of sorts, shared by the two dozen of them.
I dressed myself as well as my unprepared wardrobe allowed, then stepped outside to find Mistress Tirelle and Mistress Maglia awaiting me. Mistress Maglia was clothed to match the women below, while Mistress Tirelle was swathed as always.
“Come, Girl,” Mistress Maglia said. That was unnecessary. I could see what was wanted. Besides, it had been years since I’d let my rebellious nature overcome my curiosity.
I followed the Mistress until she set me in a chair upon a small riser. That placed me high up overlooking the uniformed women. Instruments emerged from cases, carriers, and sacks. Polished brass gleamed in the morning sun. Mellow brown woods shone in the shape of a woman’s curves. Narrow silver pipes trilled as their warming-up began.