Mistress Tirelle muttered and cursed as she worked to ready me for the Factor’s inspection. I submitted to her attentions. The soft touches and momentary efforts at arranging this and that were as close as she ever came to treating me with tenderness. In some strange way, we were family to one another. She had been as much a prisoner of the Pomegranate Court as I, locked within these stone walls just as I had been all these years. I’d never asked if she’d loved a man or borne a child or found a life somewhere else. I’d just accepted all the days she had given me, along with the lectures, the punishments, and the odd bits of joy.
What else was there to do?
I tried to imagine Mistress Tirelle wrapped in bells, atop Endurance’s back for the slow, hot trip to the temple platforms and the union of her soul with the wide world. I could not envision this terrible old woman following the ways of my grandmother.
Here in this city of silent gods with a stranger on the throne, who was there for her to follow? The Factor, perhaps. He was certainly the focus of her fear. Perhaps he was the focus of Mistress Tirelle’s faith as well.
Seeing her under the brassy sun of my birth was too much to contemplate. I could not bring the image full-formed to mind, but a smile slipped unbidden upon my lips.
“Do not smirk at the Factor,” Mistress Tirelle said with a growl. She stood me and turned me, checking me in the light of my candles and lanterns. “You will not shame us,” she added. “Your life has no greater moment than this.”
I could make no answer that would not provoke far greater conflict, so I held my tongue yet again. She propelled me out the door of my sleeping chamber to the porch. I walked ahead of Mistress Tirelle down the stairs. She followed, and retreated to the deeper shadows of the downstairs sitting room. “You will await him by the tree,” she whispered from her hiding place.
The pomegranate sheltered me in the dawn’s pallid light. The sky above glowed pearlescent, some combination of mist and cloud leaching the heavens of their color in favor of a generic, glossy beauty. It had not dawned cold, but still the air had enough of a chill to raise bumps along my arm. The tree was heavy with fruit. I had already spotted enough to fill both a good basket and a beggar’s basket from the pickings on the branch.
A solitary fruit lay windfall on the cobbles, out of Mistress Tirelle’s view, about where the Dancing Mistress would usually stand to meet me for our night runs. I looked at the sad deflation of its curve, deformed in striking the ground.
That was me, fallen away from my roots. Except I hadn’t been left to lie on the cobbles. I’d come across the sea as smartly as any fruit carried to the kitchen, and been dressed here for the pleasure of a great man.
Here I had come nearly the full circle round. Perhaps the Factor would take me to the harbor and we would board Fortune’s Flight for a trip across the sea to the hot land of my birth. Clad in white, picking up bells as I walked along the road that ran over the highlands from that small fishing port, I would return to my father on the arm of the Factor as he smiled and reported my great progress.
Even in the momentary fantasy, though I could remember the brown eyes of the ox as clearly as if Endurance stood before me even now, the only image I could bring to mind of my father was a dark-haired man with skin the color of my own hurrying away through the rice paddies as Federo tugged at my hand.
He had never looked back at me. I had never stopped looking back at him.
The past yawned behind me like one of the pits underground, threatening to swallow my sense of myself, my purpose so carefully crafted in this imprisoned life.
Then my thoughts were torn away by the screeching of the gate. Both great doors were thrown open, as was done only for delivery wagons or the very rare carriage. Horses stamped and snorted as they raced into the courtyard in a jingle of harness under the small-voiced yips and calls of their riders: soldiers in tall leather boots that gleamed like roach’s wings, their uniforms rough with wear but still elegant and carefully straight. Each rider was blindfolded that he not see me, but they carried swords and spears aplenty despite that handicap.
A coach followed the soldiers, rattling toward me to creak to a stop beneath the pomegranate tree. Its glossy black body swayed slightly on the leather and iron straps of its suspension. No sigil or heraldry was blazoned upon the door. The coachmen were blindfolded, too, and seemed less at ease than their escort.
Nothing happened for a time. No motion, no voice or sound from the darkened windows of the carriage. The door did not open.
The man within owned me, owned my life. By his will, Federo had first taken me from the hot lands of the sun and brought me here to the miserable precincts of the Stone Coast. My hands tensed in patterns the Dancing Mistress had taught me, but I forced them to loosen.
Patience was always the greatest lesson of the Pomegranate Court, the same patience that the sky taught to the very stones of the soil. I waited, wondering.
Surely I deserved a word from this man. The entire flow of my life had been directed toward this moment, toward his hands.
Then the door handle of the carriage turned. It creaked. For a long second, I would have given everything that was mine to give to be anywhere else.
The door swung open.
When the Factor stepped from his coach, my first thought was surprise that he appeared so ordinary. He was a man of middling height dressed in a dark morning suit of a classic cut, velvet lapels over a coarser cloth, with low quarter boots folded over at the ankle. His hair was brown, his skin had the sun-seared summer ruddiness of so many of his Stone Coast countrymen, his eyes were a strange gray flecked with gold. He’d run to fat in the middle and on his cheeks. Pipeleaf spilled down his ruffled silk shirt. He came so close to me, I could smell the oils in his hair, the ambergris-and-attar of his perfume. There was no scent of sweat at all.
He possessed a presence such as I had never really believed a person could have. Like a dark prince in the stories I’d read, the Factor filled all the space in front of me and around me as if he owned the world and I were some small intrusion. The breeze stilled at his appearance. The grackles and jays at their morning chatter on the rooftops stilled and froze, until one fled. The rest followed in a panicked rush of wings.
For a moment, the sun seemed to stutter in its passage through the sky.
He studied me. His face was impassive. I wondered if I should have curtsied, or otherwise presented myself.
The calculation in his eyes told me that I was no more of a person to him than the carriage behind his back.
This man is reviewing his investment. He is not meeting a woman. But he will someday.
Here was the true architect of all my troubles in this life. This man’s hand had tugged Federo’s strings and pushed at the invisible stick that penetrated Mistress Tirelle from arse to scalp.
Then he took my chin in his hand and tilted my head back and forth. He viewed the angles and planes of my face a moment. Releasing me without pain, he swept my hair away from my ears and inspected them. Taking first one hand then the other, he spread my fingers, checked their length, then examined each nail in turn. He walked around me twice before stopping behind me.
A horse nickered. Two dozen men breathed loud, though I looked at none of them. Never had our eyes met. I continued to be nothing to him. I began to wonder what the Factor was about back there when he tore my green shift away.
Cold plucked at my skin, raising pimples all along my back. Shivering, my joints ached in the chill, and tears rose sudden and unexpected in my eyes. To the Factor I wasn’t even an investment. I was livestock.
After a miserable time naked in the wind, I felt his fingers test the softness of my waist, then the firmness of my buttocks. He walked around me once more to gaze at the buds of my breasts and down to where my legs met my body.