Читать книгу Tremontaine: The Complete Season 1 - Ellen Kushner - Страница 3

Ixkaab Balam, third of the name, first daughter of a first daughter of the greatest trading family of the Kinwiinik, had been fully trained in the ways of the Locals, the Xanamwiinik. She had learned their language, their dances, their uncomfortable manner of dress.

She had learned these things over the course of years in the Balam family compound in Binkiinha, in between her more important studies of the five major trading partners and her missions on behalf of her family. She had enjoyed their study, as the people across the sea to the north were profoundly different from those of the civilized world. But she had never expected to find herself actually stationed in this backwater, among the people with skin the color of ant eggs. What’s more, here, even the elders of the family watched her with suspicion and exchanged rumors of the disaster that had chased her here.

It had been seven months since it had happened (she avoided thinking about the specifics as she would avoid passing too close to a sleeping jaguar), but she still hadn’t accustomed herself to being in disgrace. She passed her nights embroidering ideas of how she could serve her family and regain their trust—but every morning, all such thoughts evaporated beneath the unblinking eye of reality, these people’s weak and pallid sun.

Here, in reality, there was to be a feast when the sun set tomorrow. Kaab had spent the last four hours stuffing dried maize husks and banana leaves with various preparations of maize dough and seasonings. It would not be a feast to dignify the family name without several thousand tamales. Her aunts and cousins and family servants had mostly kept their conversation among themselves. Or perhaps it was simply that Kaab, ignorant of the daily minutiae of their lives here, had no means of entering it. She wished that she had never gone on that mission to Tultenco. Or at least that soldiers of the Tullan hadn’t been searching the coast for a woman of her description. Wishing so fervently for impossible things made her clumsy: she lost track of her hands and dropped wet, warm dough on her bare foot instead of on the banana leaf.

“Oh-ho,” said one of the older women, a distant relation whose name Kaab hadn’t quite managed to learn. “Tired, little bee? Or are you daydreaming? Found a boy you like here in just five days, already?”

The other women, including her Aunt Ixsaabim, laughed and turned to Kaab, who went red-faced as she kicked the dollop of wasted dough to one of the hairless black dogs that lingered for scraps from the kitchen.

“Fast work, cousin!”

“From what I hear of our little bee, it’s more likely a girl than a boy that has her tamales looking like crooked snakes.”

Kaab looked down at the ones she had just finished. Her mother had trained her well: they looked even and plump, the same as the others. Perhaps she couldn’t quite manage the seashell and bean decorations of the old women trained from birth for the kitchen, but she was hardly a daydreaming amateur!

Kaab raised her just-wrapped tamale, an indignant protest on her lips. But it died when she saw the friendly, laughing faces of the women around her. They were her family, even if she still couldn’t tell her twin cousins apart or remember all of the elders’ names. Aunt Ixsaabim reached across the great basket stacked with tamales ready for the steaming pots, and rubbed Kaab’s shoulder.

“Perhaps I have been a little distracted,” Kaab said contritely. And then, with a flare of inspiration, she quoted, in Tullan-daan:

“The woman I desire is a maize-flower

The morning after rain.

Oh, giver of life! Giver of rain!”

The elder Aunt Ixnoom nodded in appreciation. “The great Tullan masters are good to know, child. Your mother, may she never be extinguished, may she never disappear, taught you well. I was married into the Nopalco court, you know. When my husband died I returned home. Long ago. But I do remember the poetry.”

The other women nodded, the older ones sadly. There had been a war with Nopalco just at the turn of the last century; they had rebelled against the demands of Tullan empire tribute, and the poems said the river Amaxac had run red with their blood for thirteen years. Judging by her age, Aunt Ixnoom must have escaped that great massacre. She must have endured hardships that made Kaab shiver to imagine. And yet she had survived to be an elder, far away from home, but still with family. Perhaps by enduring Kaab could redeem herself from the disaster that had made her father insist she leave home, without even a promise of return. Perhaps, even in this backwater, strategically important to family affairs but woefully lacking in any kind of refinement, she could find the means to honor her mother’s spirit. Was she not the daughter of Ixmoe, legendary in her own time for her exploits among the peoples of the southern seas? Was she not dedicated from birth to the sacred art of trade—which was to say, the sacred art of intelligence gathering—and exploiting it for profit?

One of the young boys poked his head inside the doorway to the kitchen.

“Auntie Saabim,” he said, “Uncle Chuleb asks to consult you about the Local dishes for the feast.”

Saabim sighed and rolled her eyes. “Tell my dearest morning star that I will attend to his entirely unnecessary concern momentarily.”

One of the younger women, a cousin by marriage, clucked loudly. “What husband tries to oversee his wife’s kitchen?”

Aunt Ixnoom smiled. “He’ll learn. You’re still new in this marriage, niece.”

“Well, you’re pregnant again, Saabim, so now is the time to tell your young husband to keep to his domain!”

At this, Kaab looked up sharply at her aunt. Saabim was pregnant? She was old to be having her first child with her second husband, but the embroidered blouse was loose enough to hide at least the first three months. Still, Kaab was disgusted with herself for not noticing. She had tried so hard not to let her observational skills unravel during her months on that tedious ship!

Saabim laughed and said, “You are all very kind to be concerned for me. But I’ll have him in hand, don’t you worry.” She stood, stretched her back, and then stepped nimbly past the baskets and clucking women and cooking pots and scurrying maids to reach the exit. Kaab excused herself a moment later, making as if to use the privy (located inside the houses here, in what she considered a dubious use of technology). But instead of turning north down the hallway, she stepped lightly south, into the courtyard, taking care to keep herself in the shadow of a tall, box-cut shrub. The afternoon sunlight shocked her—she had been up and stumbling to the kitchen at the very first light of the morning star, and a bundle of hours had passed without her noting them.

“Husband,” said Aunt Saabim, “I hope you have better matters to detain me with than my management of the kitchen?”

She wrapped her arms around Uncle Chuleb’s neck and nibbled his bottom lip. Kaab suddenly and fiercely regretted her impulse to test her rusted skills on her own family. A woman as experienced as she should not forget what went on in marriage—but the fact was, she often forgot to think of men that way. Unfortunately, the angle of the sun meant that her shadow would be immediately noticeable if she tried to return the way she came. The sounds from the courtyard—oh, how she wished she had stayed with the gossiping aunts in the steam-filled kitchen!—changed to cooing endearments, then wet smacking, and then, appallingly, soft grunting.

Kaab dared a glance past the shrub. Uncle Chuleb had one hand under Aunt Saabim’s blouse and the other down the back of her skirt. For a horrible moment, Kaab imagined doing the same to that beauty from Riverside, Tess. She had to find a prudent exit. Perhaps her father was not entirely wrong when he accused her of being overconfident.

“A good Trader,” he had always said, “knows when to hide as well as when to fight.”

Recent events had taught her that lesson, at least. But she couldn’t stand to hide here for another second. Why, they’d scare the dogs in a minute!

“Auntie!” she called, shuffling her feet pointedly on the flagstones and then emerging into the bright sunlight. Her aunt and uncle had managed to extricate themselves from each other, though Saabim’s blouse fell half outside her wide, multicolor belt.

“Why—Kaab—what is it?”

Kaab smiled brilliantly. Uncle Chuleb regarded her as if he had just bit into a very young lime. Uncle Chuleb was not easily charmed.

“Aunt Ixnoom thought you were delayed in coming back. She asked me to ask you . . . why, what instructions dear Uncle has as to the preparations of Xanamwiinik food. Do we have all of their barbaric ingredients?”

Saabim looked somewhat bemused as she turned to her husband. “Dear?”

He cleared his throat. “Well. Let me see. We had nearly decided against serving that ridiculous gilded stuffed hare. To be honest, I thought it was a joke: to these Xanamwiinik, a hare is humble fare, fit only for a woodsman’s pot. But apparently, if you stuff it with quince and walnut, and braise it with saffron, it becomes a dish fit for the Duchess Tremontaine’s table. She served it at her last soiree, my Land agent tells me. The saffron turned the braised skin orange as a sunset.” He turned to Kaab. “His words, Niece. I confess to being more interested in importing our own spices than trying a new one that costs nearly more than its weight in gold dust. But where the Duchess Tremontaine leads, the town follows, it seems. Those who can afford to. The omission on our part will be noted. And in any case, that lady has been . . .” He trailed off in a way that Kaab found distinctly curious and gave his wife a speaking glance. “Well. However events play out, it will do us no harm for the success of our feast to reach her ears.”

Saabim gave Kaab a funny, knowing smile and kissed her husband on the cheek. “Then the expense must be borne, of course, my little thrush.”

Chuleb reciprocated with nicknames that threatened to send the dogs scurrying for cover again, so Kaab intervened quickly. “Do we have the saffron? Would you like me to get it?”

He waved an impatient hand. “Oh, for the sake of the nine heavens, child, if it interests you so much! Try the Fenton compound first. They’re in the spice trade and should have some on hand. We’ll need—well, enough to braise forty hares. You might as well get the hares, as well. I leave it in your care, Niece. I trust you will do the family honor.”

This last was a formal phrase, meant to mark a charge given from an elder to an active family Trader. It had been seven months since someone had last said these words to Kaab, and her eyes pricked unexpectedly to hear them again, so far from home.

She touched her heart with her hand and bent her head. “As Ekchuah dives and Xamanek lights the way, this unworthy servant will give her precious water, her blood that our honor may grow its roots into the earth.”

Her reply was the ceremonial one, not generally given for common tasks. Her uncle blinked in surprise and then bowed his head briefly in reply. Aunt Saabim, who looked very much like Kaab’s mother in this strong light, bowed her head as well.

“I’ll be back soon!” Kaab said, before the tears that clogged the back of her throat came up any further. “Can I use the good Caana chocolate for the trade?”

Chuleb sighed. “If you promise to be prudent. It’s in the brown chest in—”

But Kaab was already heading to his offices, her bare feet sliding along the tiles of the peristyle. “I know,” she called over her shoulder.

“Remember to wear Local clothes!” her aunt called after her. “And some shoes!”

• • •

Kaab allowed the maid to help her into the simplest bodice and skirts that her aunt had left in her closet. She nearly ignored Aunt Saabim’s dictate about the shoes, but the maid reminded her about the appalling state of the streets in springtime (shit and mud was the least of it, apparently) and she reluctantly consented to the boots. Adopting Local customs was the Trader way, but her feet felt decidedly shackled in all but the simplest rubber-and-hide sandals. At home, women rarely went shod. But of course, at home the streets were swept meticulously clean every morning and night by phalanxes of war-captive slaves, and no one would dream of pissing in public. While living among the barbarians, Kaab reasoned, one had to make accommodations.

Once out on the street—a bag full of good chocolate on her arm and a modest amount of Local coin for any unforeseen circumstance—Kaab turned west, and walked for several streets beneath tall, bare trees that had just begun to put out closed green buds. Kaab recalled the redolent purple jacarandas and the sunset spray of brush-tree flowers, and felt her heart crack that much further. The walls were high in the merchants’ neighborhood, and traffic minimal. Men and women whose clothing and demeanor marked them as servants brushed past her with hardly a glance sideways. Interesting. In Riverside and the neighborhoods in between she had been a curiosity as a foreigner. But clearly the merchants had long since grown accustomed to the presence of the Traders. And tomorrow evening, many of the most prominent Local merchant families would be arriving at the Balam compound to feast on a hundred delicacies that she and the other women had spent the last three days preparing. Fetching saffron might seem like a trivial task, but Kaab was prideful, not ignorant. A brilliant feast had the ability to help a family rise very far—just as an inferior one could bring down the curse of the gods, under whose purview such things rested.

Her uncle’s directions to the Fenton compound had been mercifully clear—Kaab spoke two other languages which relied on the nonsensical left and right, but she had never been forced to live in the lands where they were common. She arrived a quarter hour after she had set out. The walls were an even-mortared limestone, solid, imposing and unpainted. They rose three times her height, and above them tall spikes of greening iron deterred acrobatic thieves. The trees had been removed for ten yards on either side of the enormous, iron-braced doors. A cord hung on the west side, and seeing no other option for gaining entry (aside from methods of which her uncle would surely not approve), she pulled it.

A small window in the door slid back and an older man’s face appeared. She explained that she was here on business of the Balam family. The man seemed dubious, but after a moment she heard several bolts sliding open. A small door eased back on deep hinges and a large, rough hand emerged from the shadows as though from the underworld to help her through. She had to duck and step quite high—the weight and length of the unfamiliar skirts nearly sent her sprawling.

She emerged blinking and stumbling into an open courtyard, dominated by an unadorned building which she assumed was a storehouse and a stately, ornamented house of new construction.

“You can await Master Fenton’s man of business inside the house, mistress,” said the guard. He motioned for her to follow the path through the open garden. She hesitated, wondering if she should surrender her obsidian dagger, heavy and reassuring in the other skirt pocket, as a gesture of goodwill. But the guard had turned back to a game of cards with his companion, and seemed entirely uninterested in her. The Xanamwiinik were worse than the Tullan, Kaab thought with hard amusement as she climbed the marble steps. They did not imagine women capable of killing a turkey, let alone a guard.

She repeated her request to the maid who answered the front door, and was led to a small antechamber decorated with dark woods and tanned leathers and art from the remotest parts of the Traded world. She spotted a cotton mantle embroidered and printed in the Bakhim style beside a small headdress of quetzal feathers, a kind only certain decorated warriors were allowed to wear at home. She wondered if her Uncle Chuleb had traded these to Master Fenton, and if so, if he had explained their true use and origins. Kaab felt distinctly odd, standing here in her meticulous Local clothes, as if she herself could have been displayed on the walls if she hadn’t bothered to change before she arrived.

She tensed at a sudden clamor of voices in the hallway outside, rapidly approaching.

“By God, he will see me now! If he had the nerve to summon me like some common accounting boy, he damned well can’t expect me to wait when I get here.”

“Master Rafe, I believe your father’s letter instructed you to arrive in the morning—”

“Well, that bit of high-handed authoritarianism would have been impossible for me to comply with, even if I were the dutiful sheep of a son he wishes me to be!”

The owner of that deep voice—attempting to be imperious, but a little too piqued to manage—burst into the antechamber at that moment, swept his gaze across, noted the closed doors to what Kaab had presumed were the offices of Master Fenton and his man of business, and uttered several words that Kaab did not understand. She assumed they were not fit for polite company, judging by the deep blush of the trailing maid and pained wince of an older man with a pen in his hand.

“Master Rafe, there are ladies present.”

The young man—Rafe—gave Kaab a cursory bow. “Apologies, madam. I did not see you standing there. Are you—goodness, you’re one of the Balam!”

He seemed so disconcerted that she had to smile. “I just arrived,” she replied. “I think that is why we never had the pleasure of meeting.”

She put particular emphasis on pleasure and was rewarded with a flashing grimace.

“Madam,” he said, and removed his hat and bowed. “My argument is with my father, not with you. And as my father isn’t here to listen, I’m afraid I have been rude to no purpose.”

“But you would be rude to a purpose?” she asked.

He blinked. “Well . . . of course. Even my enemies would grant me that.”

“Then I say we have that in common, Rafe Fenton. I am Ixkaab Balam, and I’m here to trade for . . . two ounces of saffron from your family. At least, that’s what I estimate. Any help you could give me on the matter of dressing forty hares I will appreciate.”

“What the devil would I know of dressing hares? I’m a philosopher, madam. An acolyte to the ancient pursuit of higher knowledge. We don’t generally concern ourselves with mundane affairs of the common man.” He turned to one of the closed doors—presumably his father’s—and hurled: “Particularly those related to trading and spices and feasts!”

Kaab muttered some choice words in her own language, and turned to the trembling chain of servants who had followed the Fenton scion into the room.

“Would you please tell his man of business about the saffron?” she asked in their general direction.

“He’ll be back soon, miss,” said the maid who had opened the door. “But I expect you’ll be needing at least four and a half or five ounces, for that many hares. If you’d like to do them in the Tremontaine style.”

Kaab bestowed the maid with her most brilliant smile. “That is perfect. I thank you very much for your helpful information. Now I will sit here and await the man of business.”

She selected the nearest leather chair and sat upon it. A very tiny embalmed head rested on a raised display cushion to her right. She did her best to ignore it.

Rafe sighed like a north wind, turned to her in a slouch, and regarded her under lowered lids.

“I expect this all-important feast is your fault.”

“You expect correctly.”

“You’re the long-lost daughter.”

“I’ve never been lost in my life!”

“It’s a colloquial expression. And really, never?”

Kaab allowed herself a direct look. “I am a first daughter of a first daughter of the Balam. I have been trained from birth to the service. I do not get lost.” For very long, she amended internally, for honesty’s sake. Confusing left and north didn’t count. Nor did a few dizzy, ill-fated nights in the company of the brilliant Citlali.

“Lucky you,” he said.

Kaab hadn’t felt lucky for seven months, but she couldn’t very well contradict him. And perhaps he was right—she was alive, which was more than she could say for the relatives who had accompanied her on the mission.

“Why do you say so?”

He gave the shut door another moody glance, and then cracked a bitter, self-deprecating smile. “Because you wish to do that which you have been born into. I am the first son of a trading family, and I wish to dedicate my life to science. My family is . . . merely tolerant. As if the movements of the very stars in the heavens are a delirium, a fever that will pass if they spoil me enough.”

“I’m sure they have spoiled you sufficiently,” she said dryly.

Rafe didn’t catch the sarcasm. “They don’t bother to understand a damned thing about my world! Take today. Father summons me home to attend your blasted feast—no offense intended—and this week of all weeks is when we must protest the Board of Governors before they vote to ruin the very institutions of higher learning! There are rumors that they’ll meet at least once this week, and if I’m not on hand for the protests, I will never forgive myself.”

Kaab knew that she should ask him about these protests and learn more of the local political situation, but the unquestioning arrogance of his manner made her itch to bait him, just a little.

“You’re very important, then?”

Now Rafe noticed. “I’m—” He frowned at her. “Aren’t you the little princess.”

Kaab widened her eyes. “Do princesses here carry two pounds of Caana chocolate to make trades with the spoiled sons of spice merchants?”

Rafe’s bottom lip trembled even as the rest of his face struggled with outrage. His lip got the better of him and he let out a sweet, rueful chuckle. “Well, you’re interesting, at least. What was that you said about two pounds of chocolate?”

Kaab lifted her bag to her lap and loosened the drawstring enough for the rich, bitter aroma of processed cocoa to drift in his direction. He swallowed.

“Five ounces of saffron, you said?”

She nodded. “And the hares.”

“We’re spice merchants, not butchers!”

“I’m sure you can manage it. Are you not a merchant’s son?”

He looked at her sourly. “A scholar. As I said.”

“I can,” she said delicately, “of course, wait for his man of business . . .”

He looked again at the bag, with its very valuable chocolate. Even more valuable, she gathered, to a scholar looking for status and leverage over his colleagues, than to an established merchant who regularly bought from her family.

Rafe Fenton nodded with sudden determination. “I’ll help you. This business might be significantly beneath me, but”—he cocked his head and gave her a little grin—“I can certainly get you forty goddamned hares. Do we have a deal?”

Kaab automatically put her hand over her heart. He did the same and they exchanged bows. Only when she met his eyes again did she remember that these people clasped hands to make agreements. He tilted his head in that way he had, as if to say don’t underestimate me. She laughed.

“I could come to like you, Rafe Fenton. I don’t like everyone.”

“Well neither do I, Princess Balam. Indeed, I’d lay good odds that I’m even more accomplished in the art of making enemies than you are.”

Kaab quite believed him.

• • •

Visits home generally never netted Rafe more than a throat raw from arguing (not yelling, as his father loved to put it in that infuriatingly soft way of his) and a strong desire for strong wine, a strong man, and a bed sturdy enough to enjoy them. Depending on how impossible the visit, he had been known to forgo the latter in favor of whatever hard surface lay handy and tolerate Joshua—his best friend and long-suffering roommate—pulling the splinters from his chest the following morning. After receiving his father’s summons to the bosom of the Fenton merchant empire, he’d spent the morning in the pub with Joshua, alternating complaints about the Board of Governors’ proposed bylaw change with even more vociferous condemnations of the petty concerns of the so-aptly-termed petty merchant class.

“Thank the gods they won’t actually vote until next month. Imagine, letting the professors dictate which students’ committees they’ll sit on! Choosing one’s own committee has been the sacred right of examining students for . . . centuries, surely! How are we supposed to progress? Have new ideas? Break the goddamned status quo? I ask you! But still, I’m sure to get my slot in the next two weeks. They came too late to touch me.”

Joshua, having heard this many times before, had patted his knee and looked decidedly bored. Micah had been playing cards for minnows and paid him no attention whatsoever. The boy did, however, look up when Rafe gathered his belongings to leave. Micah had handed him a letter, rather ingeniously folded, and addressed to Cousin Reuben The Second Stall Past The Chicken Seller Fanoo The One With The Purple Cock.

Rafe had nearly choked on his beer. Micah took this to mean that perhaps he should come with him to the market and Rafe had wasted five minutes assuring the boy (and walking gold mine) that it wouldn’t be at all necessary.

But to his surprise, his visit home had yielded an unexpected opportunity: the new Balam girl, striding forcefully beside him in the inevitable ankle-deep muck of late spring. And as an added bonus, her presence had momentarily postponed the inevitable paternal confrontation. He had raided what stores of saffron he knew of in the house, which weren’t quite enough to satisfy the order. So they were now headed to the market, where both hares and the rest of the saffron could be procured, and he could also deliver Micah’s letter safely into the hands of the Cousin Who Must Not Take Him Away.

In the meantime, he had many reasons to be intrigued by the Balam girl’s conversation. Provided that he could channel it to the proper theme. He had long suspected the Kinwiinik of having a much more enlightened grasp on celestial mechanics than those doddering Rastinites who liked to fancy themselves natural philosophers at the University. But the trouble with believing something truly radical—for instance, that the earth revolves around the sun—was that one needed to gather evidence. And where better to look than with those who regularly use the stars to guide them unimaginable distances across the sea?

“I expect that you arrived on the boat that put in just last week. The long-awaited chocolate shipment?”

“Oh,” said the girl, with a sharp little smile, “I wasn’t told what it was carrying. But if it’s from home, it surely carried cacao. And other food, for the feast.”

“Those peppers that could curl the hair of a sheepdog?”

“Many,” she said. “The sun here isn’t very strong, is it? You people, with your ant-egg skin, don’t grow with much head-spirit.”

Rafe had not the slightest idea what ant eggs looked like, nor what that had to do with his skin (or his head-spirit!), but he could tell from her eyes that she was challenging him. He straightened. “The consumption of peppers hot enough to constitute a form of torture is hardly an indication of strength!”

She looked at him steadily. “You would say so.”

Rafe bit his lip on a nasty retort and took a deep, calming breath. He had a point here, and he would not let himself be diverted. He could subdue even his notorious temper in the pursuit of the sacrament of knowledge (as Nereau so eloquently put it).

“So what made you come here?” he asked with all the forced placidity of a tight curl beneath a hot iron.

“Saffron,” she said.

Rafe grit his teeth. “I mean, what made you leave your home? Why travel here? Is your family looking for a husband for you?”

A vague shot, which landed very satisfyingly home. She stopped in the middle of the street and rounded on him. “I am dedicated to the service,” she snarled, “and I may never marry if I do not choose. And I do not choose.”

“Ah,” said Rafe.

“What is that?” She resumed walking.

“What is what?”

“What you are thinking.”

Rafe took his time to consider this. He smoothed down his ink-stained cuffs. “I think,” he said, “that a Balam dedicated to service would know the contents of the hold in the ship that had carried her from home.”

She scowled at him, but the quivering right corner of her mouth ruined the effect. “I grant,” she said, “that I might have been curious.”

“And it did carry cacao?”

“Aren’t you a merchant’s son? You know well it did. Several very good varieties, including the most excellent Caana I have given your family in exchange for this saffron. Perhaps your father will be interested in discussing a larger purchase.”

Rafe hadn’t thought to leave his father any. But he supposed that the continued prosperity of the Fenton empire was in his most general interests. He could spare a few ounces. “How long was the journey?” he asked, casually.

“Oh, three months, the way your people calculate them.”

“So many! Is that normal?”

“If we sail straight through the North Sea. Sometimes the boats spend much time on the coast, and then on the islands of stonecutters and basket-makers.”

“Is that part of your service, then? Sailing those great boats?” He took care not to appear too wide-eyed, merely curious. “Watch your step,” He took her arm to keep her from slipping into a hole in the road. From the smell of it, the bums playing jacks nearby had used it for a latrine.

She shook him off gently. “Some are specialized for that service,” she said. “And others . . . for other things.”

“You have some of these other skills, I take it? I won’t dare ask you what they are.”

“Clever of you.”

Rafe had to strangle a grin. “And those great journeys,” he said, as the market came into view. “You are guided by . . . maps? Charts? It must have taken your people many, many generations to find the way.”

“Not so many,” she said absently. “We follow the way of the Four Hundred Sibling Gods, who are the stars in the sky. The priests interpret their signs and give us the routes.”

“And how long have your people known the earth is shaped as a sphere?”

She frowned. “It is—is it?”

“That’s what we believe now. But moving across it is—”

She bared her teeth. “A complete mystery to me.”

Oh, damn. Perhaps he hadn’t sounded as casually uninterested as he had thought.

“I just meant—”

“So where do we find the hares? Or should we look for saffron first?”

Their glance felt like a brief clash of blades—one which he summarily lost. He had always suspected that to navigate those great distances the Kinwiinik must have some knowledge of mathematics and natural philosophy which those at the University lacked. Given the proposed bylaw change, he had to sit his master’s exams within the month if he didn’t want to find himself at the mercy of a handful of hidebound doctors who despised him (for entirely trivial reasons). If he could do so with some actual mathematics for his theories about the sun and the stars and the earth’s place in the universe—if these could be bolstered by the truth of why navigators from the Land either foundered on unexpected shores or drowned in their attempts to traverse the large ocean distances that the Traders from the chocolate lands did as a matter of routine—

Well, even old hidebound curmudgeons like de Bertel couldn’t fail to acknowledge the justice of his evidentiary methods.

But first he had to gain the Balam girl’s confidence. So he elbowed his way through the milling crowd of bourgeois dowagers and scullery maids and potboys sniffing and cawing and bargaining for the winter’s last root vegetables and the spring’s first asparagus and peas. He had been going to this market since he was younger than those potboys, and while his merchant background was often a source of shame to him in the University, he could not help but hear the energetic clatter of a market day as a hum that warmed his veins and told him that here, too, was a home.

It is no longer, he told himself viciously. He could exploit his experience and contacts without quibbling over the implications. Knowing the fair price of sea bass on a spring morning after a storm did not make him a closeted merchant. It made him a young intellectual with layers. He sighed; he could practically see Joshua rolling his eyes.

The hares were duly selected and sent along to the Balam compound with the saffron via a boy. That only left the letter in his pocket.

“If you wouldn’t mind,” he told the Balam girl, “I have one last errand to attend to before we head back.”

She inclined her head. Quite regally. Damned princess, he thought, more savagely than necessary. He was nervous about meeting Micah’s cousin.

Cousin Reuben was unmistakable (and Micah’s directions precise—Rafe did indeed note the purple cockerel). He had the family nose (flat) and the family jawline (square) and the family hair, precisely the shade of wheat before a harvest. He wore muddy breeches, fingerless gloves, and a well-kept leather hat with a large white feather that practically gleamed above the late-season rutabagas.

“What can I get for you today, son?”

Rafe scowled, realized this might not put the cousin entirely at ease, and forced a smile. “I have a letter,” he said. “From your cousin Micah.”

Cousin Reuben frowned. “I’ll be damned. Another one? With another excuse, I’ll bet. Well, let’s have it.”

He took the letter, looked over the folds, and took his time unpacking it. He read with his finger beneath the evenly spaced lines, pronouncing the words in a low voice.

“Cousin Reuben this is Micah I have found many friends here especially Rafe Fenton who is showing me many things especially math. You remember how I like math—Oh, don’t I!—and it turns out that here there is plenty of it so I think I’ll stay another week. I’m very sorry for neglecting the garden I know it is time for asparagus because I had some soup last night and also because the rains have come. I promise I’ll come back next week as soon as I solve these ek—eek— What the hell word is this?”

“Equations, sir,” Rafe said.

“. . . as soon as I solve these equations they’re very interesting. I’ll tell you all about them next week. Love, Micah.”

He peered over the letter. Rafe tried not to fidget. “You’re the one who’s taken our Micah, then?”

“Now hold on, I haven’t taken him . . . he’s a genius! He deserves to have his intellect planted in fertile soil! Not left out to rot in the country!”

Cousin Reuben looked a little worried. “Is he, now? Does he? And what if he isn’t all you University types hope?”

“He absolutely is, sir.” Rafe was very sincere. The Balam girl gave him a searching look.

Cousin Reuben sighed. “The kid does sound happy. Math.” He shook his head. “I trust you to take care of our Micah, son. Fenton, eh? I’ve met your father.”

Rafe couldn’t tell if this was a threat or a statement of confidence, but he felt a momentary urge to take a potshot at the gleaming feather with one of the sandy turnips. Instead he made vaguely reassuring sounds and hurried away.

“What was that about?” the girl asked. She easily kept pace with his large strides; in fact, she seemed to glide beside him. His scowl deepened.

“I have his cousin in my rooms. A boy wonder. A mathematical genius. The key to all of my financial and academic worries! I just need to keep him.”

“The cousin of the root vegetable vendor?”

“I could hardly believe it myself.”

“And why is he a key? Academically?”

Rafe turned to her. “Because he can put into practice my evidentiary theories! Our best theories demonstrate that the earth is round. But how does it move in the heavens? Rastin tells us that it doesn’t move at all, merely anchors hooping planetary motions. But that makes no sense, and no one has the balls to say so. There are equations that no one has been able to solve—some don’t even think they’re worth solving! But this boy—Micah . . .”

“You think he can solve them?”

Had he said too much? But the girl only seemed mildly interested. He wanted to know how the Kinwiinik managed to travel such great distances without the help of any landmarks, but he had no idea if his equations (if Micah’s equations) were related to their navigational techniques. And she was probably telling the truth about her unfamiliarity with that side of her family business. Who had ever heard of a woman mathematician?

“I do,” Rafe said, after a moment. “I’m betting my career on it.”

The girl considered this. “Do you know . . . I have been curious about your fine University ever since I arrived. Could you show me? And can I meet this remarkable boy?”

Rafe felt his smile spread like morning sunshine. “I would be delighted, my dear . . . er . . . what’s your name again?”

“Kaab,” said the Balam princess. “You may call me Kaab.”

• • •

Micah sat at the same table in the Blackbird’s Nest as she had the first time that Rafe brought her—in back, near the kitchens. It was a good table: away from the crowd by the bar and the rowdier gamblers. During an early afternoon on a market day, the low-roofed, tallow-lit room was full, but Micah could still think around the beer smells and kitchen noises and gamblers’ patter. All she had to do was keep her eyes on the worn cards in her hand, and the fascinating pattern of the ancient wood grain beneath them.

“Call,” said the long-haired student sitting across from her. He tossed the last of his minnows casually on the pile at the center of the table. Micah calculated that the pot now held enough for two and a half tomato pies and two ginger beers. Or two tomato pies and three ginger beers. Micah frowned, trying to decide which she would prefer, and decided that it would depend on how hungry Rafe was. She had come here on her own today because all the money was gone from the chest in their rooms and she had wanted something more than a roasted potato. And now she could buy tomato pies for herself and Rafe, to thank him for the place to sleep. And the equations. The equations were very nice.

Micah didn’t have a good hand—just a pair of Suns—but the long-haired student couldn’t have any card higher than a Beast and the older man in a dockworker’s clothes had held a three-of-a-kind that would have beat either of their hands, but he had folded for reasons that still escaped Micah, though she had learned to accept them, like the weather.

“All right,” Micah said, and held his gaze. Joshua had told her that this unnerved the other players, and so she had learned to do it for a few seconds at a time. She didn’t much like it either, but they almost always looked away first.

The other players put down their cards. The student scowled at his hand while Micah busily arranged her winnings in stacks ordered by the size and value of the coins.

“Another hand,” said the student, with a funny sort of lift in his voice. Micah decided that she should ask Joshua what it meant when their voices got tight like that, and their eyebrows started wandering up their foreheads like caterpillars. Joshua was better at that sort of thing than Rafe. Rafe was better at talking.

She was trying to decide if it was worth waiting out her next good hand when a crowd of students pushed in through the narrow front door.

“They’re meeting now, the bastards!”

“Who’s meeting, Dickson?”

“The governors! Word is they could even take the vote!”

Micah, putting the last five-minnow in its stack, had been trying to ignore the noisy intruders. But then the student with the wandering eyebrows stood abruptly and smacked his fist on the table, toppling her careful piles. The shouting grew very loud. In a sudden panic, Micah shoved the coins into the inside pocket of her jerkin. Losing the coins would be worse than jumbling them up, and she could put them in good order later. She was still very hungry. She should certainly leave. But when she looked up, all she saw was a smear, noise and high emotion blurring the angry faces before her into a mob.

Take a deep breath. That was what her grandfather had always told her to do when she was little and overwhelmed by the noises of the city on market day. She tried, but someone knocked into her and someone else held her up by her elbow so that she didn’t fall and then the chanting grew louder, like a chisel between her ears. Her eyes watered. She didn’t even have time to wipe them—the crowd swept her up like a saint on a feast day and she was carried away.

“Freedom of the intellect!” was the chant, but they might as well have been speaking the language of the chocolate traders for all Micah understood them. She closed her eyes. An image of Cousin Reuben in his favorite feathered cap appeared behind her lids.

“What have you done now, kid?” said the Cousin Reuben of her conscience.

Micah had been very excited about the cards and money and equations. But stumbling in the midst of a press of marching students, she began to think she would have been much better off keeping to her turnips.

• • •

Rafe’s luck held: he and Kaab got there just as the students were flooding the University streets, tumbling from the pubs and classes and chocolate houses in all directions. They all gathered in front of the Governors’ Hall, where the board had hoped to keep their meeting secret, and at the earliest possible opportunity Rafe climbed the base of the bronze statue of old Rastin and began a modest, stirring oratory he had composed while pushing through the crowd ahead of Kaab, who looked up at him now with amusement.

“If we let this gaggle of barely educated nobles dictate, for political ends, the course of our intellectual pursuits,” called Rafe, aware that his black curls had fallen out of the leather tie, lending him a pleasingly raffish air in the current circumstances, “we might as well return to thinking that the stars have been painted on the cloth of the sky. We might as well tear down the lecture halls and burn the books. Because they will come for those next, if we say something that does not agree with the political aspirations of those lordlings on the Hill.”

This got a satisfying cheer, and another chant. He was just thinking of whether he should follow with a rather fine poem of Joshua’s composition or something more traditional, when he heard his name called in a strangled voice, followed immediately by the somewhat sticky embrace of a young lad with a bowl cut and the family chin.

Rafe slid down the pedestal and only remained upright by the dint of Micah’s surprising strength.

“I didn’t think I’d ever see you again!” said the boy.

“Goodness, no need to get apocalyptic . . . did you fall asleep in a beer keg? You smell like a bad amber wheat five days flat.”

Micah sniffed. “I fell.”

Some smart aleck from the crowd shouted, “Who’s the sweetheart, Rafe?” and at least five others laughed. He glowered, but Kaab distracted him from identifying the culprits.

“Is this Micah?” she asked, peering at them both with that curious intensity of hers.

“Yes,” he said shortly. “Talk amongst yourselves. I want to see the faces of those cowards when they walk out and have to face us.”

The crowd that had gathered to hear him speak was now drifting toward the closed doors of the hall. The rumor was that the governors could even vote today, but after a few panicked moments Rafe had decided to discount it. The Board of Governors was, above all, a conservative body. The vote had been set for next month. Even student unrest was unlikely to make them move it up. Rafe did not want them to pass the bylaw change at all, of course, but provided that they did so safely after he sat his Master’s exams, the outrage would give plenty of opportunity to intelligent men dedicated to the new modes of investigation. Once he had been accepted as a Doctor, he would be able to open a school that would revolutionize the way a generation of scholars would think about natural philosophy. When he died, they might erect a statue of him beside natty old Rastin here in Governors’ Square. Not that he had mentioned that last ambition to anyone, even Joshua.

Despite the general air of expectation in the square, the doors remained stubbornly closed and barred. A few daring students attempted to rush them, but they had been built to withstand the dangers of a more volatile age. The aged oak and thumb-thick iron hasps would take more than a few students drunk on outrage to force open.

The meeting had been going on for hours, according to the latest rumors. They should have finished by now. Was the board actually voting? Rafe felt jittery, his throat full of fire or bile, his skin vibrating with the desire to do something, not just wait here like sheep in a defile. Was there another way out of the hall? Could those cowards be attempting an escape through the delivery entrance? Rafe elbowed his way back toward old Rastin, simultaneously pleased and worried that the crowd had grown so thick so quickly. Some kind of band blocked the most direct path to where he had left Micah and Kaab. The sound of pipe and tambour had never so offended him—what was this, a festival or a protest? If they didn’t take themselves seriously, how could they expect the board to?

He was composing a few choice paragraphs on the subject when he reached the southern edge of the square. Here the crowd had thinned enough to finally let him beat his way back to Rastin’s shitstained shoulders. He shuddered to think of what he would tell Cousin Reuben if he managed to lose the boy. Micah did not do well in crowds. But, Rafe reasoned, he was with Kaab, who—for all that she was a woman and a foreigner new to the city—seemed like the sort who could keep her head at anything short of a chopping block.

A towheaded man, half a hand taller than most of those around him, composed as though by an artist of lean and elegant lines, rested against the retaining wall and looked nervously at the students still pouring in through the side streets and alleyways. Their eyes met and locked. The jittery feeling that had propelled Rafe away from his vigil by the entrance returned. Only now, that vague static seemed to align and gather force and move his feet and tongue as though of their own accord, so that he heard himself saying: “You look lost. Are you?”

The towheaded man looked down at him, and shook his head with a twisted half-smile that revealed a deep dimple in his left cheek.

“Am I so out of place, then?”

A voice as graceful as his carriage. Rafe did not like aristocratic men. He did not like men who towered over him. If they had to be fair, he preferred a bit of dirt to darken the blond. Rafe felt somewhat breathless.

“Oh, not at all,” Rafe drawled. “You blend in like a vulture among crows. What are you looking for?”

The man raised his eyebrows. His eyes were blue as the poet’s cornflowers. They crinkled in the corners, as though they were used to smiling. “I was hoping to hire a chair. I don’t suppose it’s possible in this mess.”

“You’d have to walk the few turns to Chambers Street. Hire a chair, you say?” A terrible suspicion clawed its way through Rafe’s consciousness. “Why, you’re not here by chance at all! Are you one of their lackeys, attempting to help those dogs escape without facing the victims of their actions?”

The man did smile at this, with infuriating kindness. “You make it sound very dramatic. I was given to understand they were just reviewing a proposed change to the bylaws. Mundane stuff.”

“The free pursuit of knowledge could never be mundane, and only someone whose livelihood depends on those spoiled wretches on the Hill could say such a thing!”

The lackey blinked. “Spoiled wretches on the Hill, you say?”

“What do they know of the intellectual life? Of dedication to knowledge? Why, hardly any of them even so much as take classes here.”

“That doesn’t preclude their having some knowledge of your activities, does it? They could read monographs and attend lectures. They could carry on correspondence. They could even, in a modest way, of course, contribute their own findings! Knowledge, surely, does not limit itself to one’s physical presence in the pubs and chocolate houses on Chambers Street.” He paused artfully, looked down, and seemed to notice for the first time a—quite small!—stain on Rafe’s cravat. He rubbed it between thumb and forefinger. “Though no doubt you claim an extensive familiarity with those institutions of higher learning. At the very least.”

Rafe felt dizzy. The lackey smelled of a light perfume: apricots and some darker spice—cloves or myrrh. His fingers were long and blunt at the ends, the nails meticulously clipped but not manicured. Blue ink lingered in the soft folds beneath the second and third joint of his index finger.

Rafe took a step forward. They stood only a hand apart, now. “Just whose man are you?” His voice trembled.

Those fingers reached out again. They brushed back a long, dark curl, which had fallen slantwise across Rafe’s face. The man’s expression was unreadable, but the lips smiled. Rafe felt a sigh come through him like a summer storm.

“I am in the service of the Tremontaine family,” he said, quite softly.

Rafe knew. As he had known he would be a scholar from the moment he first listened to de Bertel’s lectures on the ascendance of man. As he had known he would follow evidentiary science when he had first read of the observations that proved the curvature of the earth.

This man, as beautiful as heartbreak, was the Duke Tremontaine himself. One of the most meddlesome members of the Board of Governors.

Rafe wiped his hands on his pants. “Oh, hell’s bells,” he said. “Get the devil away from here before they hang you.”

The cornflower eyes snapped up to scan the crowd behind Rafe again. “But you won’t?”

“My name is Rafe Fenton, and I disagree with you in all the ways that matter. I expect you’ll be hearing my name more often, if you insist on dictating the path of our intellectual pursuits. Because I will oppose you with everything I have in me. But I do not,” Rafe wiped his hands again, “approve of physical violence. So get out before you meet someone who does.” His voice rasped. It was hard to hear over the running beat of his heart.

“Thank you, Rafe,” said the duke. “I honor your passion and commitment. And I hope you’ll see that we share the same goal, in the end.”

Rafe felt bleak, looking up at that earnest face that honestly believed what it was telling him. He was sure the conservative deans and department chairs, so eager to squash the new philosophies, had presented their terms in quite the flattering light.

“Go,” Rafe said. “Redrun Alley will take you straight to Chambers Street. I don’t know if anyone else might recognize you, but keep your head down just in case.”

He turned to walk away, but the duke reached out and caught him by the shoulder. The fissure spreading through his middle split wider. He could have cried.

“Perhaps you might be persuaded to see the other side of the argument? By the time we meet again?” said the Duke Tremontaine.

“The sun is more likely to rise in the north than anyone succeed in persuading me of that. I doubt we shall see each other again, dearest Tremontaine.”

An endearment wielded as an insult cuts sharpest of all. Rafe had made himself an expert in the technique. And yet, with this man, even sarcasm seemed to have turned on him. He felt sick.

The duke winced. “I suppose not. I . . .” He shook his head. “Goodbye, Rafe.”

Rafe stared as the tall man threaded his way carefully through the crowd. He could follow his progress longer than he should have been able to: a head as bright as a new-minted coin—and a mind, and a heart.

• • •

Rafe had been gone for nearly half an hour before Kaab decided to look for him. The girl, Micah (she had asked her directly and Micah had seemed quite sure she was a girl, which made Rafe’s confusion distinctly odd), seemed happy to climb the tall base of the statue of an old man with a broad cape and a fist in the air. He was three times human size, and more than high enough to give them a good view of the main University square.

“I like it up here,” Micah said, when they had settled beside each other on the statue’s shoulder and cape. “I can breathe better. There’s lots of things in the city, but it doesn’t smell good.”

“No,” Kaab agreed, still scanning the people surging below for a young man with a broad forehead and a mane of curling, ink-black hair. The students were still waiting by the closed wood-and-iron doors of the hall, but Kaab doubted they would get any satisfaction. If she were any judge, the guilty parties had long since escaped through one of several back entrances.

“How does it smell where you come from?” Micah asked.

“Like jacaranda flowers and cool springs and wet stone. Like tortillas on a comal.”

“What are those?”

“A kind of pancake and a kind of stove. We eat tortillas at every meal.”

“Does it taste good?”

“It’s the food of the gods,” Kaab said simply.

“And you’re from very far away? I’m also from far away . . . well, a day’s driving in the cart, but Rhubarb isn’t a very fast horse. But you’re from farther away than that.” She sounded very sure.

Kaab thought she glimpsed Rafe, at the far edge of the square, near a retaining wall that backed onto some kind of garden.

“Much farther,” she said absently. He was talking to a man now. Tall, with hair the color of golden maize. “Look.” She pointed. “There’s Rafe.”

“Ah!” said Micah, smiling. “Yes, there he is. Rafe is very kind, I think. He’s probably helping that man.”

Kaab turned sharply to Micah, but there was nothing except innocent delight in her expression. “Do you . . . like him?” Kaab asked, wishing that her Xanamwiinik tutor had been more explicit in the nuances of such terms.

Micah nodded energetically. “Of course! He’s like my cousins, only he doesn’t care about gardens. He loves equations. And distances! I think you should talk to him about your home, and how far away it is. If it takes me a day from the farm, and the farm is twenty miles away . . . how long did it take to travel here?”

“Ninety days,” Kaab said.

Micah’s eyes widened. “Then you’re at least 1,800 miles away! If you were traveling by horse. But no, you came from the sea. I must ask Rafe how fast boats go. But you are from very far away! How did you travel so far? I’m sure he’d like to know.”

“I’m sure he would,” Kaab said dryly, thinking back to his clumsy interrogation earlier. This Rafe was very interested in things she was quite sure her family did not want him to know. Which made him a good person to stick close to. The Balam couldn’t afford to have their monopoly on chocolate trade with the Land threatened. Not with things as they were back home, with the Tullan army just waiting for an excuse to attack.

“Who is he still helping over there?” she asked Micah, just for something to say.

Micah frowned. “I don’t know. I think they’re arguing now. But he is rubbing his hands on his thighs. Our friend Joshua says that he only does that when he wants to kiss someone.”

Kaab laughed, but she felt an odd lurch. Even from this distance she could sense an intensity between the two men. Perhaps Micah was right.

“But why,” Micah said, “does he want to kiss someone he’s arguing with?” She sighed. “I like Rafe,” she repeated. “But I don’t think he makes very much sense sometimes.”

Kaab thought of how many long months had passed since she had kissed anyone. Of the games she had played with Citlali, thinking that nothing too serious could come of them. She had seen quite a few pretty girls since she’d arrived (though she had to admit the University seemed remarkably devoid of that particular enticement). “He ought to kiss him,” she said.

Micah wrinkled her nose. “Cousin Daniel tried to kiss me once. I hit him on the head with a turnip and he never tried again.”

Kaab laughed until she had to wipe her eyes. “I think that was very wise,” she said.

• • •

Uncle Chuleb was waiting for Kaab when she returned home, kneeling with a brush and open codex upon a reed mat he had laid out in the courtyard garden. The gum trees, brought at great expense from home by the previous generation, were lit in the late evening chill by a series of oil lamps in sconces that hung from the trees on long ropes of finely braided henequen. A natural spring—almost certainly why her ancestors had bought the land here—fed a series of man-made streams and waterfalls that made the house feel like an oasis of home in a wide desert. Muscovy ducks and other waterfowl kept to the ponds and beneath overhanging rocks. Her uncle had arranged himself beside the largest waterfall, beside which grew the squat bread nut trees they kept wrapped in gauze throughout the long winter. He looked a picture of refined nobility, with his hair arranged in two loops beneath a stiff jade-beaded head cloth, and a mantle printed with the family pattern draped over his chest and left arm. She imagined he was reviewing the records of the recent shipment, but when she approached she saw that he was in fact composing in the family book, the formal record of the history of the Balam.

“Niece,” he said, when she had come close enough to acknowledge. “You took your time returning. Did you learn anything interesting?”

“Much, Uncle,” she said, and knelt across from him. “What are you recording in red and black?”

Uncle Chuleb did not buy a note of her innocent tone, but it amused him. “Your arrival, dearest niece. For it comes to me that I might have cause to write more about you before long. And what did you learn?”

“That saffron costs a great deal, but in abundance smells of smelted copper and annatto.”

Her uncle smiled. “You intrigue me. I look forward to the gilded hares at tomorrow’s feast. And what else?”

“That there are great conflicts between the nobility and their intellectuals, who are not the same here. That some of their intellectuals are very interested in the mysteries of the Four Hundred Siblings and the secrets of moving great distances across the seas. I very much doubt that any of them have found it. But it seemed to me that if they do, there is a chance that their merchants might use such knowledge to take their own ships to our ports.”

She did not spell out the rest of the implications. Chuleb, a minor Kinwiinik noble who had married into the family very young, understood them as well as she. With the monopoly broken by the Locals themselves, the other trading families might use that to invalidate the Balam mandate to the port. And some of these Trading families had lived for generations with the Tullan, whose insatiable political ambitions now threatened even the southern coastal cities of the Kinwiinik. Formally, all Traders owed their first loyalty to other Traders of all families. Practically, their relationships were more complex. Local ships in trading waters had the potential to break the delicate political balance in the lands of the gods. It could bring a war that would destroy Balam power—and possibly the autonomy of the Kinwiinik themselves. She remembered the stories of Nopalco, the river that ran red for thirteen rotations of the great calendar wheel. And she thought—of course she did—of her role in bringing on this crisis. If her irresponsible actions contributed to the destruction of her people, her home . . .

She shook her head, a violent negation.

“It is good that you brought this to me, Niece. I take it that you met one of the students interested in this subject?”

“He’s Fenton’s son.”

Chuleb did not look unduly surprised. “And perhaps you can continue to cultivate his acquaintance?”

“Of course, Uncle.”

“Good. Just as a precaution, Niece. I have been aware of the current climate in the University, but the men in charge are conservative and easily threatened. They would rather eat stones than learn something new. As long as we encourage them, the few revolutionaries like young Fenton won’t have enough support to make their new discoveries.”

“Ah,” Kaab said, and felt a little ill. It was best for her family, of course, to support the Board of Governors against the students. But she had felt Rafe and Micah’s enthusiasm. Rafe, at least, would understand some of the implications of his discovery. Micah clearly lived for her equations and the joy of solving them. But what was necessary was not always just. Had her parents not struggled to make her understand that? Even sick with the illness that would kill her, Ixmoe had spoken to her daughter with the lessons of the elders: Passion in excess is as much of a vice as passivity, my little bee. You must not recklessly waste the heat of your head-spirit, or you will attract the punishment of the gods for powers not held in sacred moderation.

Her uncle noticed her preoccupation. “Are you well, Kaab?”

She smiled, with an effort. “I was recalling my mother.”

“May she always walk the earth, may you always carry her.” He paused thoughtfully, his eyes on the lights beyond her. “Before you go, I wonder what you make of this letter? It arrived the other day.”

He took an object from behind the family book and held it across the mat. The paper was fine and thick, creamy. She turned it over and started to read. Diane, Duchess Tremontaine was the signature. Why did that name sound familiar? Ah, yes. The lady who had first served the saffron hares. Rafe had been positively irascible on the way back home, and on his lips the name of the duke—this lady’s husband, apparently—had nearly dripped poison. The duke sat on the Board of Governors.

The letter was short. It requested a meeting with Kaab’s uncle to discuss matters of trade that would be beneficial to them both. It gently stressed her political connections through her husband, and her place in polite society.

“I thought the nobility here did not interest themselves in trade?”

“As did I, Niece. This letter is . . . quite unusual.”

“Well, there can be no harm in seeing what she wants, can there? What does Aunt say?”

“She is inclined to agree with you.”

“But?”

Uncle Chuleb looked out at the lamp-lit garden, accurate as a drawing of home by a Trader too long away. “The lady is not to be underestimated. Her husband is very influential, but I suspect that she personally exercises more political power than her peers believe. Her hand in anything is a reason to be cautious.”

“How will you answer her?”

He shrugged. “I have petitioned Xamanek for guidance. May his star always guide us. And of course, I’ll speak to your aunt. We will decide after the feast.”

• • •

The doors to the courtyard thrown open, the arcaded peristyle draped in multicolored garlands of flowers sweet enough to coat the throat, the drums and flutes playing a song of welcome to the entering guests, a song of farewell to the flaming sun. The servants in mantles and draped loincloths of henequen carrying trays of wooden cups, filled with frothy chocolate prepared in the traditional style: cold, scented with honey and vanilla and blossoms of trees so exotic their names have yet to be made palatable to the Local tongue. The women of the house, as precious as flowers, as precious as jade in their skirts and blouses and wide belts stiff with precious jewels, multicolored embroidery whose meaning escapes the ant-egg skin guests and sings its own song to the Traders far from home. The altars to Xamanek and Chaacmul on the north and west sides of the portico are laden with offerings of burning copal resin, wafting pleasantly among the guests, and with figurines of amaranth dough mixed with the blood, ritually let, of the girl called Ixkaab and her family.

The Balam family greets their guests in the courtyard, smiling broadly as the Locals cast wide eyes at the pleasing extravagance of the flowers bought for the occasion, and of the formal attire of the hosts.

“By god, that man has a rock the size of my thumb up his nose!”

“It’s jade, dear. Inlaid with gold, if I’m not mistaken. A fine piece.”

“How does he breathe around that thing?”

“How do you talk around yours?”

The guests move on, gently steered by discreet servants. Chocolate is held to be intoxicating among the Kinwiinik. Only certain classes are allowed to taste its refined, prized flavor, which even the gods are said to hold in esteem. The Traders are willing to sell the processed beans to the Locals to do with as they please, but not even the most plebeian of country squires would dare ask one of those smooth-faced servants for cream to cut the bitterness of the frothy brew being served tonight. And if he did, they would just as impassively pretend not to understand him.

Ixkaab is resplendent in shades of red and green. She embroidered the blouse herself on the long boat journey. Her thick hair has been bound in two braids, wrapped around the back of her head and gathered into two small points in front, at the height of her fine brown eyes. This is a sign of respect: only married women and those dedicated to the service may bind their hair in this way. She is young, and so her jewels are modest, but Aunt Ixsaabim is a master of the art of personal adornment and they are brilliantly deployed. Her headdress is small, anchored to the back and shimmering with quetzal feathers that move in the brisk evening breeze like the river beneath the forest canopy: always green, but never quite the same shade. Her wide belt has been beaten with gold and layered with tiny jade beads in the motif of her father’s family. Her brown skin glows a shimmering yellow, tinted with the cream of axin brought especially from home. Her Uncle Chuleb and the male heads of the lesser Kinwiinik trading families who also live and trade in this city wear more elaborate headdresses of hardened cloth that support their expertly layered feathers, the pure jade of the quetzal, the flaming ruby of the spoonbill, the opalescent clarity of the bottom feathers of a Muscovy duck and tail feathers of a white heron. Their mantles are the product of a hundred hours of hard labor with loom and needle, and advertise their status as much as their jewels. At home, they could not chance such a public display of wealth. At home, Traders must engage in the fiction that they are not as wealthy as the nobles they serve. Here in the Land, money and power have a more open relationship.

The bustle in the courtyard flows through an open passageway, lit warmly by torches burning fragrant pine, and into a large banquet hall. The ceiling is arched, and the high windows have all been thrown open. The servants lead the Local guests, somewhat stiff and hampered by stays and petticoats and starched linen, to the long table high enough to fit several dozen chairs. The Fenton patriarch notes that the table at the front of the hall is low to the ground and surrounded by woven reed mats, and two squat chairs. The Kinwiinik guests who have been honored with invitations tonight remain standing near this low table. They appear content to wait. In their home, the Balam might occasionally be forced to prove their dominance over an upstart Trading family. In the land of the north, the great family maintains a careful, but unquestioned dominance.

Fenton’s wife, among the stiffest of the Local women present—her stays have been pulled so tightly against the fat of her stomach that a nervous laugh escapes her every time she breathes too deeply—agrees with her husband about the odd stature of the table. She is the sort of woman who generally finds it prudent to agree with her husband. Rafe Fenton, who loves his mother very much, despises this about her.

“Do you suppose they eat standing up?” Mistress Fenton ventures.

“I suppose they eat squatting on the floor. Odd folk.”

“They wear very fine cloth. And jewels. Rafe, dear, how do you think your sister would look with a few of those aquamarine feathers in her riding cap?”

“Like a ninny,” Rafe says. “So, entirely appropriate.”

“Oh, Rafe,” sighs the Fenton matriarch. The words have the melody of a song she has sung many times before. Rafe, with the look of a man with other things on his mind, mumbles an apology.

The Balams enter once their Local guests have been seated. They and their Kinwiinik guests indeed kneel at the low table, though the graceful way they fold their legs beneath the rich fabric of their skirts and mantles make the Fenton patriarch’s characterization of it as squatting seem satisfactorily churlish. To Rafe, at least. The lord and lady of the house occupy the two low stools and offer words of greeting to their assembled guests. The words, whatever they are, are lost on most listeners: the food has, at last, begun to arrive.

First comes a series of sauces studded with slices of meat only intermittently identifiable. Salamander, come some shocked whispers down the long Local table. Newt and crickets and dog! But also venison and some kind of rich nut and mushrooms the color of ashes in the grate and a flavor at once sharp and earthy.

“Like a good Erlander cheese,” says the head of the Greenglass family, one of the richest and most influential in the city. He asks the servants for more, and mops it up with one of the two dozen kinds of maize pancakes in baskets placed at regular intervals along the table.

“Papa has a very fine palate,” whispers a young lady to her dining companion, a broad-shouldered young man from a smaller trading family. “He’s quite the gourmand.” The young lady’s whisper is not so soft as she imagines it to be. A wag replies: “He’s quite the glutton!” and a few guests laugh more freely than strictly politic.

The chocolate poured from tall ceramic jugs has grown thicker and a little sour, not unpleasantly so. The addition of fermented agave nectar has begun to take its effect. At the Balam table, some of the men have switched out entirely for glasses of octli, dusted with a powder of chocolate. Kaab looks longingly at the jugs, but there is no time for the women to enjoy it.

“Come, Niece,” says her aunt, at a signal from one of the servants. “It’s time.”

The women of the family hasten to the kitchen. In honor of the Local guests, they have decided to modify the traditional serving of tamales. Kaab finds herself holding a copper tray on her shoulder and a basket heaped with ant-egg tamales in the crook of her other elbow.

“What if I drop it, Aunt?” Kaab asks, very innocently.

“What if you—” Ixsaabim goes a little pale, peers at her niece, and laughs abruptly. “You little minx! You nearly had me! The great Ixkaab, dropping her food.” She laughs again and gently touches the cotton ribbons woven into Kaab’s braids. “How much you remind me of your mother, dear.”

Kaab bites back sudden tears. She ducks her head. “Thank you, Aunt Saabim.”

There’s no time for any more. The flutes have begun to play in the hall and now the drums will start and the song begins at the front of the line of women, where Kaab takes the place of honor. This feast is—nominally, and, in some small way, actually—a celebration of her arrival.

“We bring tamales,” she sings in the language of her childhood. They don’t mention the hares, because there is no word in Kindaan for saffron and the Locals wouldn’t understand in any case.

“Good God,” blurts Master Greenglass when they dance into the room, smiling and spinning. “Are those saffron hares?”

“Won’t the Duchess Tremontaine turn green when she hears of this!”

“Gracious, they’re as orange as a sunset!”

“How poetic, darling. But I expect they’ve used some kind of dye. It’ll be all turmeric, and bitter as an old radish.”

“My sister had the good fortune to attend the Duchess Tremontaine’s little soiree,” says the young lady of the indiscreet whisper. “She married a noble, you know.”

Her companion—indeed, the whole long table—knows.

“But did she truly use saffron?” asks Mistress Fenton, more tipsy than she realizes. “For it seems to me a very great expense for a house that has just suffered such a blow. Why, there were Tremontaine funds sunk into the Everfair, weren’t there? The ship that foundered in the open seas and lost all hands in a storm?”

The doomed expedition to the Garay port, whose overconfident navigators had assured their own demise nearly a year previous, had been promoted and backed by Greenglass Imports. Master Greenglass, a prudent epicure, had invested in sufficient insurance to cover his losses. So he does not allow the implication that he convinced a noble family to participate in his ill-conceived scheme to spoil his dinner.

The golden hares are set before them, carved by the servants with a flourish and served on fresh ceramic plates.

“It is saffron!” proclaims Master Greenglass, over the sound of Fenton encouraging Mistress Fenton to speak more quietly. “I’ll bet my cellar on it! God’s horns, this must be enough saffron to dye the hair of twenty noblewomen. All over, if you know what I mean.”

Kaab, passing behind him, does not know what he means. Rafe chokes on his chocolate.

“Well, taste that, dear. That isn’t turmeric.”

“I suppose not. And did you try those dumplings? What is that inside? Some kind of cheese?”

“I can’t say that I know . . . and I’m afraid to find out, quite honestly!”

At the other end of the table, Mistress Fenton stares dreamily down at the remains of her ant-egg tamale.

“I dare say the whole Hill will be jealous when they hear of this. A true banquet from the chocolate lands! Oh, how happy I am that you brought me, Fenton. And that you sold them all that saffron! Will it be very hard to get more?”

“Yes, it was quite clever of me,” says Fenton, with a pointed look at his son. “But I had a good man on hand to handle the negotiations.”

The young Fenton raises his eyes to the ceiling, as if to pray for divine intervention.

The glow of success has finally descended upon the Balams, watching the contented jostling among their Local guests. No hares have been dropped, and quite a few have been picked clean. Ixsaabim turns to her young and handsome husband.

“Dearest, I think we should see what that woman wants.”

She does not have to specify which woman.

Chuleb rubs his chin. “Fenton tells me there are rumors. You remember the ship last year? The Everfair?”

“The one their navigators took so far off course it sunk within miles of the Garay coast and they didn’t even realize it?”

“Many families lost their fortunes. And Fenton suggested Tremontaine might be one of them.”

Saabim looks thoughtful. “That might be true, but the nobles here aren’t like those at home. They can’t be stripped of their positions for dishonorable actions. They all have debts, but so long as they keep their land no one seems to care. She’ll have influence, my morning star. And influence is always valuable.”

“She is very clever,” he says. “And she likes to pretend that she isn’t. It is a combination that worries me.”

“Well, so am I clever, and so are you. So is Kaab for that matter, though she’s impetuous enough that you can’t always notice. I understand that this saffron woman might wish to use us for some political end, my precious flower, but we have our own tools at our disposal.”

“True,” says her husband. Kaab has vanished from the table—probably gone back to the kitchens.

“And the situation at home is too unstable. If the Tullan . . .” She can’t finish. He puts a discreet hand on her stomach, where the baby has just started to show.

“I’ll write her,” he says. “I’ll tell her to come here to us. She won’t like it, but if she’s serious she will. I’ll tell her to call three days hence.”

Saabim squeezes her husband’s hand beneath the table and gives him a quick, hard kiss. She looks around to see if anyone noticed, and smiles, satisfied.

Someone in a modest headdress of shimmering feathers standing in the shadow of the kitchen hallway, within hearing distance of the head of the Balam table, did notice. And she smiles.

“Three days hence,” says the spy under her breath, and walks back for more chocolate.

• • •

The spring storm spat rain like a drunk at a spittoon—wet and heavy and none too accurate. The river had swamped Riverside’s inadequate levee again. Tess could hear the water gurgling through the streets two blocks over, the drunks cursing, the drunks laughing. It was nearly morning. This weather might have held Ben up. She wouldn’t imagine anything worse happening to him, not until she had to.

She hadn’t been able to sleep. She had tried, but it was cold and the rain was a nasty bedfellow. Tess and Ben kept a nice little place, the second floor above a washerwoman. Clean enough to discourage most of the roaches, shutters tight enough to keep out most of the wind and rain. On summer days she liked it enough to feel grateful. Her folks, rest them, had lived worse.

She held the fat tallow candle closer to the page, careful not to drip any wax and ruin the job. Routine stuff—a letter of recommendation for a Riverside girl, a former housebreaker, now getting old for the business, who wanted work as a chambermaid in the Middle City. The family seal at the bottom was real enough, though obscure. The girl’s two years of loyal service, not so much. Tess sometimes had bigger jobs—credentials from foreign universities, arrest records—but this paid the bills. At least, it did with Ben’s help. He had regular customers, the kind of men who paid him well for his time, and could be counted on when there wasn’t such a demand for good forgeries.

She wouldn’t worry. Damn it, but she wouldn’t.

Heavy steps up the stairs. Maybe his, if he were drunk, the bastard. The sound of a key fumbling in the lock. Definitely drunk. Or hurt? She ran to the door, had it open before she’d taken a full breath. If someone had wanted to kill her, she’d have been on the floor taking a bath in her own blood. You had to think about things like that in Riverside. But it was just Ben. He was drunk and grinning like clown. She frowned.

“What’s the matter, sweet Tessie? You ain’t happy to see me?”

“What happened? Did your father recover?”

Ben frowned and shrugged. “Naw. The old man’s rotting six feet—well, three feet, at least—under.”

Ben hadn’t exactly been a dutiful son (and his bastard of a father hadn’t deserved it), but this still seemed too callous for a man just returned from his father’s graveside.

“What the hell’s the smile for, then?”

Ben stepped into the room and locked the door behind them.

“Here,” he said, and pulled from his waistcoat an oval locket on a long chain of linked gold. It was of an antiquated style, a master’s workmanship. At a glance, not a forgery. At least, not a forgery that was passing off gilt for silver. She took the locket and opened it. She frowned.

“What is this, Ben?”

He was grinning again, leaning against the wall. “Our ticket out of here. The only good turn that son of a bitch ever did for me. We’re going to be rich, Tessie.”

Tess looked up at him, that baby face just a bit too beautiful to do him any good. He was grinning and humming to himself, an old song about going to the country. She looked back down at the locket, at the contents that meant nothing to her, and shivered. Ben’s father had been a murdering lowlife. He wouldn’t rest easy in his grave. And any gift he gave his son would be heavy with sin—the kind that came due.