“It is being the taint of the Stone Coast in your blood,” she told me one day in the temple library as I sulked over a wide sheepskin parchment I’d been scratching on with colored inks. “Those northerners have the strange idea that authority should be invested in one man. What if he is being too much corrupted? Or his wits crack? As all stands on a single throne, so all falls on a single throne.”
“We have a Prince of the City.” I pointed to a sigil of a little crown at the top of my drawing.
“Your drafting hand is being most comely, dear,” Mother Vajpai said. She stroked the short ragged mess that was my hair, for I always kept it so nowadays. “But the Prince of the City rules no one and nothing. He is being there as face of Kalimpura for those foreigners who cannot believe we are not savages without they are seeing some crowned head.”
“Yet his name is on our trade treaties and guild charters.”
“The poor dear has to be doing something with his time.”
I ran my hands down the parchment. There were the courts, which were not so hard to understand. I saw them as little governments within the city, responsible for groups of people rather than tracts of land in the northern fashion. The guilds were more troublesome. The word was misleading, for it did not hold quite the same sense as the Petraean word used in translation. They controlled their trades, to be sure, but they held sway far more than that-for example, ruling over disputes that occurred on streets where their trading houses or factories were located. Castes were responsible for certain trades as well, and also ruled over individual families. One could be sponsored to join a guild, for example, but had to be born into a caste. The courts functioned much like a caste for the very wealthy and powerful, but one could be sponsored into them as well, which made them more like a guild.
“Everyone is doing something with their time.” I rolled up the parchment. “No one is idle in Kalimpura. Not even the smallest beggar child.”
“Nor the most contentious Aspirant to the Blades of the Lily.” Her hand pressed hard into my shoulder. “You will never truly be a Kalimpuri, Green. You are fitting better with time, though.”
“I am Selistani,” I told her quietly. “These are my people, even if I am not one in their eyes.”
“We are all daughters of the Goddess.”
The last Petal of the Blade came in my fourteenth summer. Jappa had recently sworn to the Blades and left our dormitory. Rainai was preparing to follow her. The next oldest girl was Chelai, who struggled with her head for heights and poor strength of arm, and so might never take the vows. Then me.
I was not the newest, either, for two little ones had come from the temple nursery. Ello and Small Rainai, aged four and five summers, were not much older than I had been when first taken to the Factor’s house. I spent time with them, trying to see the girl I had been in their little round faces. At first, they were frightened of my scars, but we became friends of a sort.
When one, or sometimes both, of them cried late in the night, it was my bed they came to. Samma would roll away from my shoulder with a grumpy sigh as the little girls squirmed in. Comforting them was more than anyone had ever done for me.
All I could learn of their history was that Ello had been a foundling at the Ivory Door. No one would speak to me of Small Rainai, but from scarce hints, I decided that she had been taken from a scene of violence. Our doing or someone else’s, I did not know, but I kept thinking of Mother Vishtha’s words about a father and his babe by candlelight.
We were ten for a while, until Rainai moved on. All I lacked was my last Petal, and the seasoning to follow it, before I could join her and Jappa in rooms kept by the Lily Blades-scenes of raucous riot and debauch, if the mealtime gossip from the Mothers of the other orders was to be believed.
Given how we passed our nights in our dormitory, I was become quite curious as to what it would be like to live among the full Blades.
One day Mother Vajpai called me out of a lecture on dockside rules and the etiquette of trading captains. This was the month of Shravana, which would be the beginning of August back in Copper Downs-even after two years here, I had to make a conscious effort to keep track of the Kalimpuri calendar. The day was brass-hot, much as I recalled from my earliest youth. Even within the Temple of the Silver Lily, where the architecture drew the warmest air upward, the air was beastly.
I’d spent more time aboard ships than everyone else in the lecture room combined, including ancient Mother Ashkar of the justiciars who was holding forth, but I knew that was not the same as bargaining with a captain. My experience lent me a sense of easy contempt for a subject that truly should have been interesting. That contempt, even in its wrongness, had mixed with the heat to make me irritated and distractible.
In short, I was glad enough to leave the little room and walk.
“Mother,” I said, folding my hands as initiates of the temple did to greet one another and honor the Goddess.
She returned the sign. “Green.”
Though some of the patience so carefully beaten into me by Mistress Tirelle had left me with my monthly flows, I still knew enough to follow Mother Vajpai and wait for her to speak.
To my surprise, she led me out a side door and onto Six Chariots Street. We moved into the currents of traffic. I contrasted what I perceived now with the mob I had seen on first arriving in Kalimpura. Then it had been all shouting tradesmen and lowing beasts and a great stream of people; now I understood them as threats, as powers, as problems and opportunities.
Here was a line of children from the Upper Sweeper caste, with their saltgrass brooms and brightly dyed sacks. Their caste had sole rights to the dung of certain animals, and these would not hesitate to shriek theft if some beggar made off with a handful of elephant scat. A trader from the Court of Herons passed, his silver bird clasp affixed to the crown of his hat to show his privileges in glass and food beyond three days fresh, with a brace of swaggering guards from the Street Guild following behind to protect the coin and papers on his person. Beyond him were a pair of fruit-sellers enmeshed in an argument concerning whose cart took precedence in the roadway.
In two years, I’d learned to read all these people, and almost everyone else around them. The foreign, the foolish, and the lost stood out to my eye like candles in a cistern. Much as I must have done to Little Kareen on my arrival, and to everyone who cared to look my way when I first passed the walls after he expelled me.
Perhaps this was what Mother Vajpai meant for me to see: that I belonged here among these people.
She led me by a wandering route down to the Avenue of Ships. That was the dockside leg of the route that otherwise circled inside Kalimpura’s walls. As always, it was lined on the seaward side with a thicket of masts and bowsprits and the occasional smokestack. The landward side was a mass of warehouses, office fronts, trading carts, booths, stalls, windows, and the everpresent throng of people.
“There is a ship in.” Mother Vajpai pitched her voice in that manner we trained for in the temple, which made us hard to overhear.
She had finally found the borders of my patience. “A hundred ships are in, Mother.”
“Then perhaps you can tell me which vessel is to be drawing my interest today?” she asked in her sweetest voice.
I looked carefully, letting my eyes rove quickly just as if I were picking a pomegranate from a tree in the moment of being unblinded. The secret to that had always been to let your sight do its own thinking, and judge afterward.