The Dancing Mistress and I had little enough chance to talk as our new, temporary home was hugging the coast. Chittachai ’s deck was open, except for a small space under the poop and an even smaller space under a little foredeck, which the crew used as an equipment locker.
After a day aboard in my right mind, it was clear enough to me that she either had a hidden, shallow hold, or truly vast bilges. These men were smugglers, moving goods past whatever taxmen or customs officials might be working the port towns of this coast.
Now we were their cargo.
Other than being out from under the threat of imminent harm, we were little better off than we had been back at Arvani’s Pier. Warm, dry, fed, but still much shorter on prospects than on intentions. In the evenings, I missed my belled silk. That was more of a habit these days than anything serious. Keeping count in my mind all anew, and sewing those many bells yet again, seemed more than I could bear.
How had the women of my home kept theirs? By never moving far from where they started, of course. Like Shar, a woman there was born in one hut, living in a second with whatever man would take her in, and perhaps a third with one of her children after another son’s wife did not want her around. All of them within a few furlongs’ distance.
Girls who strode across oceans as I did could not expect to maintain tradition. I mourned my loss. Perhaps the Blades had kept the silk against my return, though more likely Samma had burned it.
Every step I’d ever taken toward home had only led me farther away. Just as I myself had been taken away.
“I killed a man, back in Kalimpura,” I told the Dancing Mistress the first evening of our coastwise voyage.
“When did you become a killer?” Her voice was heavy with sadness.
I never did, I told myself. I thought of Michael Curry, sitting in surprise as the light vanished from his eyes. “You taught me to stand against the ill in the world.” The excuse sounded horridly weak, even to me.
“This man you killed? Was he responsible for the ills of the world?”
“No.” I picked at a splinter on the rail. Monkeys screamed in the dark trees a few hundred yards to the north, where the jungle came down into the water behind a great bar of sand. The evening brought a shift of the breeze, which caused the boat’s heading to change. The smells changed as well, to rot and the sickly sweet odor of fruit going bad. No wonder the monkeys were screaming. They were drunk on ferment. “It was in the service of what I was told was justice. I have found a great interest in such things since returning to where I was sold.”
A long silence followed. Eventually the Dancing Mistress spoke. “Federo does… did… does many things I do not understand. The buying of children was one part of his duties in the old days, when he carried the Factor’s seal and purse. As I heard the tale, he bought you from your father at the gate of your farm.”
“Trade,” I muttered. “That wasn’t-”
She interrupted me, still soft and careful. “Trade is not like a snake. You can cut the head, even gut the body, burn all the ships and warehouses. Someone will come along on the next quiet day and begin it anew. You cannot kill trade. Not at the point of a blade, not with all the fire in your heart.”
Spitting over the rail, I said, “I am not trade. I am a person.”
“People are traded everywhere. Apprenticeships, betrothals, the swearing of soldiers and hiring of sailors.”
“They chose their fates.”
“Green.” Her tone grew pitying. “How many brides select the man they marry? How many apprentices looked across the trades of their city and decided which they would pursue? Most people never choose anything. They are chosen for, or they follow what is left to them after their choices have been eaten away by time, by ill fortune, by their own actions or the deeds of others.”
I wanted to slap her, to restart our fight and give the Dancing Mistress the beating of her life. She didn’t know; she didn’t understand. She didn’t care.
“Green.”
Turning my back to her, I stared at the stern. The man at the tiller-I did not yet know his name-waved and smiled. He seemed impervious to the thunder that must have hung in my eyes. Or the last, failing light of day had cloaked my face too much for him to see.
“Green.” She touched my shoulder.
I swung around with a hard block, then pulled my blow before it landed. “What!?”
“You are not wrong. It is just never so simple as we would like. Children should be free to grow and prosper and choose. So should adults. All persons, of any race or kind. That you would keep more children in their homes is a noble ambition. Do not forsake it. Just learn what it will mean. Should the prettiest girl in a family that starves stay home and starve with them? What if her price will bring her to a comfortable house, and feed her brothers through the next failed harvest?”
My tears continued to flow. “That cannot be right.”
“Many things are not right. You can dedicate yourself to repairing some wrongs, but not even the titanics could have repaired all the ills of the world. In their time, they sundered, and from them have splintered all the folk of the world. We each carry a measure of grace, and we each carry a measure of evil. There is never enough grace to banish the evil, and there is never enough evil to smother the grace.”
“So no one does anything.” My heart was leaden. My throat had closed. The very words were bitter in my mouth.
“People do what they can.” Her hand on my shoulder squeezed tight. “When you strode into the Ducal Palace, you threw down more evil than a generation of child-sellers could possibly wreak.”
“That was not my evil.” I felt very small in my shame and anger. “It belonged to your people, and to Copper Downs.”
“No, it was not your evil, yet you fixed what you were able to.” Her smile was tender by the rising moon.
“Then why have you come to call me back?”
“I have already told you. More evil is afoot. Many of us believe your place in the breaking of the old order gives you power in the new.”
“It isn’t power I want.”
She knelt. “You could still leave this ship and take foot back to your temple. When their anger has banked to coals, they might even take you in once more. That choice is yours. But I beg you to come and help, for my sake. For the city’s sake.”
“Get up, get up.” I flushed with embarrassment now. Goddess only knew what the tillerman thought. “The Goddess has sent me. I am going.”
“When you released the spells upon the Duke,” the Dancing Mistress said late the next afternoon as a pot of fish soup bubbled between us, “what did you see and feel? Where did this take place?”
“W-we were in a counting room.” The memory was intense and difficult to frame into words, for then I had not yet taken up this habit of writing my story behind me. “There was no throne-it was not an audience chamber, but rather a place where men would meet to talk over numbers until their arguments turned to agreement. He toyed with me awhile, then I jumped at him and spoke the words you gave me.” I paused for a deep breath of air, which despite the baking sun tasted almost chill for a moment. “Then he was gone.”
“I know he is gone. His power is not.”
“It must be. That might swirled around me like a storm of dust and air, and plucked at me with a thousand small fingers. Then his power wailed away, taking him with it.”
“We did not study our war so well.” The Dancing Mistress’ voice was sad and slow. “People came as claimants to a vacant throne. What they sought was not his Ducal coronet, but the power that hung like a pall over Copper Downs. I was forced to deal with one of these shamans myself.” Her eyes were haunted a moment. “At great cost.”
“I am sorry,” I said.
“No, no. It must be done. In the Duke’s absence since, the gods have stirred from their long silence. At least one has been slain out of hand-”
“Slain!?” I paused. “I am sorry for the interruption, Mistress, but gods are not meant to be killed.”