As I was, I was worth far too much for the Factor ever to let slip through his grasp. I could not throw away those years or the knowledge they had brought me. With this blade in my hand, however, I could throw away my beauty.
I will show them whose spirit will break first.
Endurance’s brown eyes glinted in the dark as I reached to slash my right cheek. The pain was sharp and terrible, but I had stood through a lifetime of beatings without crying out. Then my left, echoing and balancing the first hurt I had done myself. I reached back and cut a single deep notch in the curve of each of my ears.
“I am Green,” I shouted at the moon in the language of my birth. Blood coursed warm and sharp-scented down my neck to tickle at my shoulders. “Green!” I screamed again, then began sobbing into the night.
Mistress Tirelle came following the racket I had made and found me bleeding down the white cotton of my sleeping shift.
When she realized what I had done, she shrieked. I broke her neck with a kick the Dancing Mistress had taught me, a flowing spin that sent the duck woman’s chin hard to the right with a snap that I felt down in my bones. She gurgled once, then slumped to the ground.
That was my first killing, amid rage and grief and confusion.
In some ways, Mistress Tirelle is the death I will always remember best. Her constant presence was as close as I’d known to love in all my days since being taken from Papa. She had held me at the center of her life. I repaid her with murder. Not even a shred of dignity, either, though death is rarely dignified. The dying generally do let go of whatever is within their bodies. I sometimes think the gods mean us to leave the world in a filthy state to remind us that we are made of dust and water.
I told myself then that though I hated Mistress Tirelle, I had not meant to kill her. That was not true, of course. My Dancing Mistress had taught me to kick. I had accepted her lessons. The responsibility was mine.
Mistress Tirelle’s blank eyes were already fogged. I scrambled up the pomegranate tree to fetch my running blacks. I missed my footing twice, but found them where they should have been. Back down on the ground, I stripped out of my bloody shift and dropped it over the duck woman’s face. Swiftly I tugged on the dark clothes.
No time now, I told myself, except to keep moving. Cut or uncut, they would hunt me, but I was my own possession now. No one else’s. Rage sent me swarming up the posts of the balcony to the copper roof of my house. From there, I gained the walkway atop the bluestone walls. I could already hear shouting within the core of the Factor’s house.
Sprinting for the corner where I could make the climb down, I stumbled again-I had not eaten all day, and was ill in my stomach with shock and fear and all my bleeding. As I swung over the wall, I missed my grasp and fell hard to the cobbled streets below.
The landing was poor, but not fatally so. I collapsed onto my back, breath heaving in deep sobs as gongs sounded within the Factor’s house.
A silver-furred face leaned close. “Come with me now,” my Dancing Mistress said. “That way you might live to see the dawn.”
“No,” I said in my own words. “I will have no more of you.”
She grabbed my arm. “Don’t be a fool. You’ll throw away whatever you think you’ve gained, and your life besides.”
Still shocked from the murder I had just wrought, I rose and stumbled after her. I muttered maledictions in my own language as we walked quickly through the nighttime streets of Copper Downs. Both Endurance and my grandmother’s ghost would be ashamed of me.
I shivered as we climbed down a culvert to an entrance to Below. This was one we hadn’t used before. The night wasn’t so cold now, but I was.
The crack of Mistress Tirelle’s neck echoed repeatedly in my mind. I had kicked high. That wasn’t defense-I had not meant merely to knock her down or disable her.
Words, my victory was supposed to be in words. Yet I’d ended her life.
That was a theft that could never be restored. In taking her life, I’d taken my own, too. I had cast away everything I’d known in Copper Downs, almost everything I could ever remember.
I’d meant only to take myself away. That was why my cheeks and ears still stung like hot coals, their wounds a horrid itch that intruded on my thoughts. In spoiling myself for the Factor and his patron Duke, I had ruined their plans.
But a life.
It made no difference that she had been awful to me. I was slave and animal and work to her. Never a real girl. Never a person.
Then I’d killed her. That had made me real, at least for the span of her last moments.
We moved quickly for being Below. The passages were close-walled and low-ceilinged, slimed over as happened mostly near the surface. The Dancing Mistress held a snatch of coldfire in her hands, which was enough for me to follow. Beyond that, I paid no heed to anything but my own misery.
She stepped through a doorway into some larger gallery. I followed, only to have someone clutch at my arm. I shrieked as I was startled out of my reverie.
The Dancing Mistress whirled. Whatever had been on her lips died there.
Mother Iron held me pinched in a grip that seemed tight enough to shear pipes. I looked into her eyes. They gleamed with the orange white of the hottest coals.
“So it begins.” Mother Iron’s voice was rusty as a grate. Her breath gusted like a wind from a great distance, and reeked of stale air.
“We move swiftly,” the Dancing Mistress answered softly. “To stay ahead of the hunt that is even now being summoned.”
The old woman-thing-I was mindful of Septio’s sleeping gods-squeezed my arm again. “Be true and hold your edge,” she told me. Then Mother Iron was gone, vanished like mist before breaking sunlight.
The Dancing Mistress took my hand. “I had not expected that. Are you well?”
I tried to answer, but could only laugh.
Her eyes narrowed to gleaming slits as she shook me slightly. “Stay away from that clouded place in your mind, Girl.”
That sobered me quickly. “My name is Green,” I snapped. Hot, hard anger filled my voice.
“Green, then. I see that you are back.”
Our flight ended with a climb of a wooden ladder screwed to a brick well. The Dancing Mistress led. I followed, stewing in anger rather than lost in despair.
How dare they snatch everything away from me? I knew my thoughts held no logic at all, but I cherished the burning spark. Guilt and fear lay not far behind it. I would much rather have my path lit by fire than wrapped in gloom.
We emerged in a large half-empty building. A bit of moonlight leached in through wide windows set high on the walls to make solid, silvery shadows of stacks of crates. I glanced around the room, seeing as I had been trained to do. Eight of those windows on each side, some accessible by climbing the stacks before them. One end was swallowed in deep shadow where a dozen horsemen could have waited invisible. The other end gleamed with the cracks of a large doorway lit by gas lamps outside.
A warehouse, of course.
“What is in the shadows?” I asked, mindful of the Dancing Mistress’ earlier words about the hunt being called.
“What do your nose and ears tell you?”
I closed my eyes and sniffed. Dust, wood, oil, mold. The scent of the two of us. No horses. No sweat-stink of soldiers. Likewise the noises. A cart rumbled past the other side of the doorway, paced by the clip of hooves on cobbles. Within were only the sounds of an old building, wood settling and the whistling scurry of rats.
There might be a lone, quiet person in the darkness, but no more. I said as much.