I folded my silk close, letting the bells wash over me. We did not know the true number, and so we had settled on four thousand four hundred-twelve years. They jingled like the pouring of water on a metal roof. My past held me close in that moment.
“Show me what I must know.”
The Dancing Mistress drew certain words in the dust of the floor. I studied them as my bells shivered in time to my breathing. In their way, the words were simple enough. A conversation with the powers of the land. I did not know if their might stemmed from the intention of the speaker, or if there was something inherent in the arrangement of sound and meaning. In any case, these words were-or should be-the ravel that would unweave the spells binding the Duke to his life and his throne.
Federo looked at them with me, then nodded. The Dancing Mistress erased the words. “Do you have any questions?”
I looked at him. “ ‘Shared’?” I asked. “I do not know that word, nor the term for ‘hoarded’ in my tongue. Otherwise, I can say this easily enough.”
“Share,” he said in the Selistani language. Seliu, I had learned that it was called. “It carries the sense of something freely given, without taking.”
“That will do,” said the Dancing Mistress.
“As for hoarded…” He thought for a while, then suggested a word in Selin. “It means gathering too much. As in, well, overharvesting. More foolish than greedy, I think.”
“The sense seems good to me,” I said seriously.
The Dancing Mistress nodded. “You have the words in your head?”
“I do.”
“Good.” Federo’s voice quavered. He looked nervous to the point of being ill.
I knew how he felt. My anger would carry me through, when I found it once more. Right now, I mostly felt sick myself. “I am ready,” I lied.
I needed to attend to one last bit of business before we set out. My fears and worries had stalked me all through the night and into the early morning hours as we prepared ourselves. Most of them were beyond my reach. One was not.
“Federo,” I said as he packed away the last of our supplies.
“Mmm?”
“I want to mark Mistress Tirelle’s passing. Do you have any notion what she might have believed about her soul? Is there some prayer or sacrifice I can offer her?”
He gave me one of those long looks. In the shadows beyond him, I saw the Dancing Mistress nod almost imperceptibly. She had done the same when I had performed well in a difficult exercise but we were not free to communicate.
“I don’t know, Green,” Federo said after a little while. “Not many people in Copper Downs are openly observant. Especially not the locally born.”
“Deaths must be marked in some manner. The passing of a soul is not simple.” We did not have oxen, bells, or sky burials here; that much I knew. I was uneasy at the duck woman’s fate-I had sent her from this life, after all. That fear and guilt belonged to me. My hope was to ease her passing.
“There is a common offering for the dead,” he said. “Two candles are lit. One is black for their sins and sorrows. The other is white, for their hopes and dreams. Sometimes a picture of the dead is burned, if such a thing is to be had. Otherwise, a folded prayer or a banknote. That usually depends on the intentions of the person making the offering. You speak a kindness, spread the ash to the wind, and let them go.”
“Then when we set out, I will have two candles, and some of that paper you just packed away.”
We departed just before dawn, prior to the warehouse opening for the day. My belled silk was stuffed away in a sack along with the last of our tools and equipment from the attic. We couldn’t really hide the fact that someone had been there for a while, but we could certainly take our evidence with us.
The cobbles were slick with morning dewfall. A three-quarter moon was veiled by dripping clouds. This sort of wet would burn off with the rising sun, but the east was still barely a glower. The Dancing Mistress led us to a mercantile at the end of a row of warehouses, which, judging by its stock, catered to the laboring trades. Nonetheless, among the spools of rope and chain, the racks of iron tools and heavy canvas coveralls, and all the other gear pertaining to those who build and repair the stuff of cities, we found candles.
The black was a narrow cylinder, while the white was a fat little votive barrel. I was not bothered that they were dissimilar. Mistress Tirelle and I surely had not been similar in life. Federo purchased the candles, and he bought a new packet of lucifer matches as well, before we stepped back out into the damp.
“A park will have to serve.” Federo was grumpy. The risk of extra movement bothered him.
“I am sorry,” I told him. “I must do this last thing. Then we can shake out my bells and I will find the Ducal Palace and whatever follows from that.” The Dancing Mistress’ words were firm enough in my head.
“Federo,” she said. Her voice caught at him, and his nervous fear subsided into a muttering calm.
A bit later, we slipped between two marble gateposts. Winding paths led through lindens and birches beyond. Dew dripped from their branches as the eastern sky continued to lighten. The musty scent of night was infused with the opening of the earliest flowers, though something also rotted nearby. We trotted along a weed-infested gravel path following direction from the Dancing Mistress, until she brought us to a little folly.
Like the gateposts, this was marble as well. Six pillars in the classical Smagadine style mounted by architraves with carvings I could not quite make out in the early blooming light. This was topped by a pointed dome curved much like a breast. A little statue of an armed woman stood at the tip.
That seemed fitting to me.
Within, the floor was tiled in a mosaic of birds circling a stylized sun. The Dancing Mistress and Federo hung back. I knelt, though the cold tile hurt my knees even through the sweep of Federo’s borrowed cloak. I set the black candle down against the sun’s lidded left eye, and the white candle against his wide-open right, which seemed to be on the verge of surprise.
I truly did not know what was needful here. What I did know was that this part of my life had begun with a funeral-my grandmother’s-and ended with a death-Mistress Tirelle’s. I sought a balance, and a show of respect.
As I’d already realized, in her strange way, this harshest of my Mistresses had in fact loved me.
The match struck on the first try in a spitting flare of sulfur. That seemed lucky. Lighting the black candle, I rocked back and forth as I hugged myself against the cold.
“You treated me with a harder hand than I would raise against a cur from the streets,” I told the flame-and her soul if somehow she yet listened to me. “Your sin was to hew too close to the word of the Factor. But who are we, if we cannot tell wrong from right no matter what mouth it comes out of?”
I put the second match into the flame of the black candle. The flare made me blink away bright spots. I then set it to the wick of the white candle.
“You fed me, and clothed me, and taught me more than most people ever learn,” I told her. “You gave my life a direction, whether I wished it or no.”
Unfolding the paper I’d taken from Federo back in the attic, I smoothed it flat as I could against the mosaic floor. With the burnt stubs of my two matches, I drew an ox. Endurance, though no one but me would ever have seen that in the picture. The image was simple enough: the tilted horns of the aleph glyph, humped shoulders, a sweep of the hocks, and the forelegs to balance the composition.
Rolling the paper up, I set it to the white candle’s flame. Let the offering burn in the light of hopes and dreams. “May Endurance bear you onward as he once did my grandmother. His patience abides more deeply than mine.” With a shuddering breath, I added, “I am sorry that I took from you that which was not for me to claim.”
When the burning paper grew so short that my fingers began to sting, I dropped it to the tiles. It curled a moment longer, wisping to ash, before the dawn breeze hurried through the folly to snuff both my candles and carry the charred paper away.