All the girls were close, though, even outside those moonlit trysts. We tended each other’s hurts, mended each other’s robes, and sat turn by turn when someone took a fever or a flux or a grippe. What Little Kareen had said about me being a tiger from a cage weighed much on my mind, so I tried to laugh easily, take little offense, and ration my words until I knew the substance of whatever took place. These girls had lived together all their lives, after all, while I was still new to the company of anyone other than Mistress Tirelle.
In those hours, I found my anger had sought a level of its own. The fire within was never gone, but where it used to be a stream washing over me, now it was a deep pool. I knew where it was, and I knew it would find me again, but there was a sense of peace I hadn’t really known before, except for a few glimpses aboard Southern Escape when I had first fled Copper Downs.
Even the fear was mostly gone. The first night Samma’s kisses turned to me in earnest, that fear melted completely as our hands locked and my hips began to shiver.
For a while, at least, anger stayed away.
Mother Vishtha trained us in what she called “the black work.” She was quite pleased with my abilities at climbing, falling, and moving in nearly absolute darkness. “The Blades are doing many things,” she told me one night on the roof of an empty warehouse down by the waterfront after the two of us had scaled the outside wall. “Some of them are to be swaggering with bared steel. Many more are to be quiet.”
“Breaking into houses?”
“Well, more usually we are entering places of business. We are not thieves.” She sniffed. “You would be surprised how often people are finding it seemly to conceal certain records from us. So there is being a steady need for retrieving files, account books, and the like. It is generally considered very helpful if the Blade doing the work can understand the purpose of her job.”
“Cuts down on the mistakes, I’d imagine.”
“Oh, yes. And you are being a natural at buildings. With your, eh, facial features, you are soon to be doing the black work, I think. I will be showing you the small havens, so you know where to find help and safety if there is being trouble. You will stand out almost too much by daylight. Only in the night will you ever be moving secretly.”
“Or beneath a mask,” I said.
“Or beneath a mask. Though that challenges the dignity of our order.”
“Mmm.”
She stood close. “I am being told you are blooded.”
“Blooded?”
“That you have claimed a life,” she added.
“Two,” I said shortly. I had long since resolved never to discuss my role in the fall of the Duke of Copper Downs, not among these people, nor anywhere else.
“There are being times when the black work is claiming a life by stealth.”
“Murder by night.”
Mother Vishtha refused to be needled. “Only at need.”
“I… I killed once in desperation. And once in self-defense.” The Duke had been dead before I ever touched him.
“Green,” she said gently. “You are even now being a child of only thirteen summers. There are men grown and under arms who could not do those things.”
“I shamed myself and my teachers.” As I said those words, I realized that they were true. However false my upbringing, the Mistresses of the Factor’s house were my teachers, each true in her way.
“There is no shame in doing the Goddess’ work. Here in Kalimpura, it is being the Blades who extract payments for the Death Right. Her work. Our work.”
Anger gathered like clouds against the sun. “I am to climb in the window of some shopkeeper and stab him at his stool?”
“Perhaps. If that man killed his brother to take control of the family business, then refused to stand before his guild and court to answer for it.”
I could see the sense of what she said. In Kalimpuri terms, that was justice. Kill without honoring the Death Right, and you were called to account. Conceal the deed or try to dodge the consequences, in time your accounting would come for you with interest. At the point of a Lily Blade.
There was other work, too. Some of it stood outside the peculiar framework of justice in this city. People to be reminded of their obligations, heirlooms and treasures to be removed from one locked room and placed within another, fractious individuals to be brought back to their place in the order of things.
“A bad man in need of justice…”
“Listen,” she said. “The Blades do not decide. They only take action. You might not know that a man was bad, or why. You might see only a smiling father holding his babe by candlelight, and think, This is what I have lost. How can I take him from his child?
“The Lily Blades hold this responsibility before the courts of Kalimpura for a reason. Men are not able to set aside their hearts as women can do. If you follow this course, you will be the hand of the Goddess, and your heart will be Hers.”
At those words, I felt a swirl of air around me. My hair stirred as if fingers tugged through it. Words murmured just outside my hearing might have promised salvation or damnation or something else altogether.
Her mention of children awoke me to what might be. I had sworn childish oaths to stop the taking of babies from their families as had been done to me, yet I lived now in a city where half the children on the street were someone’s property-bondservants, apprentices, or outright slaves. My own people did not consider it an offense that a child be sold at need, or even a whim.
Goddess, I prayed with words inside my thoughts. I am the daughter of no house. Not even Yours. Even so, I will follow Your path awhile, if it will join with mine. I wish to strike at those who would take the youngest for toys and mules. If this is Your justice, so let it be mine.
The wind stilled. I received no other answer. I found my anger quenched, which might have been a reply. Mother Vishtha looked at me expectantly.
“I will choose this path,” I said dutifully.
She nodded. We climbed over the decorative parapet to descend to the alley below. I had not realized until then that my fists were tightly clenched. When I opened them, a crushed lily bud tumbled out of each to the tiles of the warehouse roof.
Mother Vishtha had already gone before me, and did not see the sending of the Goddess. I made no mention to her, but my heart was filled with a peculiar joy. Neither did I mention the matter of the flowers to Mother Vajpai.
The next year or so ran before me in this way. There were no more touches from the Goddess, but I knew She was there, just as I might know a bruise was present on my arm even if it did not ache. I caught up to my training within the Petals of the Blade, so that I was equal to or ahead of Samma. This was just, as I was a year her senior. Our affairs of the nighttime blossomed with our bodies, and Jappa called the two of us to her bed together for a while to be taught even more. We fought, too, as I had come to understand that girls will. The moon pulled at each of us in a different way, and the Goddess informed each of our hearts in our own manner.
Making up could be so very sweet.
I taught northern cooking in the temple kitchens to all who would listen. For a while, there was talk of opening a bakery for the breads and sweetmeats I showed them, but that came to little. I practiced weapons and violence, killing dogs for the practical experience of puncturing a body; learning to shoot with bow, crossbow, and spear-thrower. In this, I was becoming far more dangerous to others than I was to myself. I carried my pigsticker with me everywhere outside the dormitory, as the sworn Blades did.
On my free hours, I watched the children of the city, and learned what I could of the different forms of bonding and hiring and selling. Human traffic varied as widely as the practices of the courts and guilds and castes themselves. I despaired of ever reaching a true understanding of Kalimpura. I took to keeping a great set of lists, modeled after the heraldries of Copper Downs, in an effort to track this. Mother Vajpai found my obsession with authority very amusing.