Chapter 15
Sebastiano watched the servant bring in another breakfast dish. Pancakes, fragrant with orange and cinnamon, a syrup pitcher gleaming beside them. He gave his mother Letha a grateful look.
Letha Silvercloth sat mending a piece of gilded harness, tools scattered on the table before her. She wore her silvery hair in a braided crown that glinted like the leather’s luster.
Unfortunately, the pancakes could not be piled high enough to block out the sight of Corrado Silvercloth, Sebastiano’s father. The old man sat with every feature bristling, as though his infamous temper could not help but manifest even in silence. Morning sunlight from the high-paned window behind him picked out every detail, from the curl of Corrado’s waxed gray moustache to his brass buttons’ intemperate shine.
The Silvercloth morning meal was a generous one, and Sebastiano tried to drop in and fill his belly on days when his father would not be around. Today he had miscalculated and the old man’s frown faced him across the table. The mound of pancakes was scant consolation.
“Don’t they feed you at the College?” Corrado snarled.
Sebastiano smiled, knowing it the expression most likely to irritate his father, and piled pancakes onto his plate. “Of course they do. But you and Mother set such a fine table in the mornings that it seems insulting to forego it entirely.”
“Thank you, Sebastiano,” Letha said, pleased. “Come, I will show you a recent purchase.”
At the table, Corrado frowned deeply, but said nothing. Sebastiano wondered at that. Letha had a keen eye for art and knew what might appreciate in value, and Corrado had, in the past, taken pride in his wife’s unexpectedly keen eye for such things.
Sebastiano trailed after Letha down the corridor, wishing that it were not Winter. Even the thick rug underfoot, blue wool worked with tumbling silver rounds along the borders, failed to keep the surroundings anywhere close to warm.
Letha’s sitting room resembled a tack room more than anything else, but also one full of small animals and Beasts that required a specialized or particular degree of care, like the birdcage full of dwarf Piskies or the tank of flesh-eating snails. (The latter were contained with a special slide of glass that the terrified child Sebastiano had always been afraid to touch. Despite their slowness, the snails were a good two inches around and capable of a ferocious and mildly venomous bite that worked to paralyze their prey.)
A fire roared in the hearth, kept tended even when she was not here for the sake of the hatching boxes. They were usually filled with baby animals—right now a clutch of dragonfoxes, which began to yip in high-pitched demanding voices as soon as she entered. The air smelled of liniment and animals and smoke from the coal fire, for Letha would not tolerate burning wood, saying she disliked its smell.
The picture, hung over the fireplace, drew the eye immediately, demanding attention. A Centaur, but wearing armor as though Human. A deliberate violation, designed to shock and outrage. He considered it, head tilted.
“I thought these paintings were outlawed,” he said. “More and more, the Peacekeepers chase down Abolitionists.”
Letha shook her head. “I suspect that the Duke tracked who bought them,” she said drily, “but my eccentricities have ever been apparent.”
What had possibly drawn her to this painting? He eyed the Centaur’s skin, rendered in velvety detail, muscles rippling under the shoulders, and felt a trace of unease at the thought that maybe the picture’s blatant sensuality appealed to his mother.
Some students at the College coupled with Beasts, but it was a foolish practice for a Mage to engage in. Magical ailments were far harder to cure than the more mundane, and just being around the natural magic of a Beast could upset one’s balance unless one took the time and practice to cleanse oneself, a practice that Letha had trained him in, so she knew that as well as he did.
I cannot imagine her having some romance with a Beast, he thought. Surely not. Surely any relationship was a matter of fantasy if anything.
But her next comment, accompanied by a hand waved at the canvas, was, “I knew him, you know.”
“Knew?”
“Dead now. Slain for sedition.”
Sebastiano frowned. “How did you come to know him?”
“I tended his father, a long time ago.”
The wealth of new details about his mother astonished Sebastiano, like looking at something, a flower perhaps, that turned out to be something else entirely: a Fairy, or some other creature capable of so much more.
He said, feeling the words halting and lame, “It’s certainly an interesting piece.”
“You don’t approve.” She tilted her head, examining him as though he had disappointed her.
He said, “Beasts are always true to their natures, no matter what. To treat them as though they were more than that, as though they were, like Humans, capable of choice and change, is to question the reality of the world.”
She blinked as though taken aback by the vehemence of his words, considering him. Then a smile slid onto her face like a pleasant, social mask, and her voice took on a bantering tone. “So I shall not commission a portrait of you and Fewk from Leonoa Kanto, playing side by side like brothers?”
He could have accepted the offer in the same tone, but he stuck to the subject. “What will people think, if they see it there?”
“No visitor comes to my study,” she said.
“Beasts do.”
Her head tilted back the other way, though the smile was still painted there. “And now you are saying that they matter, and in a way that seems at odds with your earlier words.”
He searched for the right way to phrase it, some piece of logic that did not work against itself or the other things he’d put forth. He said, “It will encourage them towards bad behavior, teach them something that, once they learn it, will infect them forever with bad behavior. The idea of equality—impossible as it is—given to a Beast will always be misused by them. It is their nature.” He stressed that last word yet again. He wondered, How can she not see all of this? How can she not see that they must be kept in their place?
She moved to the fireplace. Its shelf was chin-high on her, and he thought to himself that age had stooped her. Would it keep on doing that, keep on shrinking her down until at some point his mother would vanish, become imperceptible, unknowable?
The painting pressed impatiently on his vision, gleaming greasily in the firelight.
Wasn’t she already proven unknowable by all of this?
He looked at her.
This time her smile was genuine. It was as though the real Letha, the one who loved him, the ever-constant ally of his childhood, reappeared, swam back into sight. His shoulders loosened and the unhappy thing that had coiled tightly in the pit of his stomach relaxed.
He said, proffering the words in apology, “It’s your study.”
“It is,” she said, but acceptance of his apology lurked in the corners of her tone. She stepped to him, slid her hand through the crook of his arm. “Come, we will go back to your father before he grows unduly lonely or irritated with our absence.”
She led him back into the breakfast. “Would you like to take some with you when you go? I’ll have Tiggy make up a basket. And remember that Winter’s battle is coming soon, and that one of us must appear there to fulfill Ihobvioki’s burden. It is your turn.”
“Ugh.” Sebastiano grimaced. “In that case,I will definitely require a basket, for your table is ten times more savory than the College’s.”
Corrado Silvercloth’s eyes flicked towards her. “When your mother’s not spending all of her time tending to her Beasts and animals, she does well enough,” he said grudgingly. He directed his stare at Sebastiano. “But she’d do better keeping entirely to business. As would you. I’ve had just about enough of this Merchant Mage silliness.”
“Alas,” Sebastiano said. “I lacked the skills to become a full Mage.” He considered a new serving of pancakes. “There’s always hope, though,” he added. He stared at the wall behind Corrado’s head, an embossed depiction of flying hawks, wing tips interlaced, like shadows on the white surface. The Silvercloth estate was among the oldest in Tabat, made of granite quarried from the same ridge that had fed the Ducal castle, centuries ago.
Corrado’s indignant sputter, once he had fully taken in the words, was the reaction Sebastiano had hoped for.
“Over my dead body! Bad enough that you neglect your duties, acting like a Stable Keeper there! And paying for the privilege no less!”
“Much more than a Stable Keeper!” Sebastiano said. How was it that his father could move him from amused to annoyed so swiftly? “They value my knowledge. Much of it gathered from mother, I might add. In exchange for that and some monies to defray expenses, they continue to train me in magic.”
Which he wasn’t particularly good at, but he refrained from adding that. Let the old man continue to worry Sebastiano might forsake his Merchant House entirely and become a Mage.
It wasn’t as though Sebastiano had lived up to the Merchant part of his title for the last six years, renewing his leave of absence every red moon. Doing no work for the House meant no income from it, but so far he’d managed on just his allowance and frequent presents from the generous Letha.
“If you want to stay there, you’ll need to dance to my tune, I’ve decided,” the old man snarled around a mouthful of oat porridge. “I’ll settle for a damned baby, since you’ve been such a washout. You’d be worthless enough even if you did come back.”
“I beg your pardon, sir,” he said. This sort of declaration was exactly why he avoided his father. He resolved, sadly, that even pancakes were not worth the risk. Then the first sentence eeled its way out of memory and he said, “A baby?”
“Raise it right this time,” his father grumbled. “Train it from the start, without all this mollycoddling and flimflammery. No toys.” His brows knit. He blamed Sebastiano’s childhood entertainments for his wandering from the family path, in particular, the toy wand, more ornate than any real magical implement Sebastiano had ever met with, that his mother had given him at the age of eight.
He directed another glance over at Sebastiano’s mother, who sat stroking the ferret in her lap. Letha Silvercloth lived for her animals and Beasts, and let her family revolve around her in abstracted orbits, occasionally making contact with one to perform some unanticipated, maternal act (the gift of the wand had been one such) and then disappear back into the pens to watch over a birthing Unicorn for days. She was the product of her Merchant mother’s liaison with a western trader, and Sebastiano owed his own unfashionable paleness to her whiter skin.
Sebastiano thought his father’s future for his potential offspring bleak. “I’m not giving you a child as though it was a pet,” he said, obscurely annoyed on its nonexistent behalf. He had no intention of marrying, let alone starting a family. That would be work, time, and energy stolen from his studies.
The elder Silvercloth glared at him from under beetled brows. It was a wonder the teapot didn’t freeze solid, caught in the crossfire of that wintry look, but it continued steaming as pleasantly as though they were discussing the latest Gladiator match. “If you want to stay at that College, you will! Because if you don’t do it, I will cut off your allowance, and you will have no more money to fritter away there.”
That was that. Sebastiano knew that tone of voice, that determined angle of eyebrow jut. The point where the old man would never back down, would have gone down with the ship like the Naval Captain Sebastiano suspected his father would have preferred as role. Instead of anchors and cannon though, Corrado Silvercloth’s life was printed cottons from the Southern Isles, western silks and linens, northern wools, and Tabat’s own weave of patterned velvets, and the Bank fed by the flow of cloth into and through Tabat.
“Do you have any particular candidates in mind?” he said sarcastically.
His father’s swift nod made him gape. How long had the old man been contemplating this? A while, it would seem. He’d probably had an aide research it and present him with a list of possibilities …
“I’ve prepared a list.”
Sebastiano groaned inwardly. This wouldn’t be easy to slough off.
Silvercloth Senior counted them off on his fingers. “Lilia Della Rose.”
The inner groan intensified. Lilia was dark and beautiful and could have her pick of Merchant sons. Might as well tell him to wrestle a Phoenix or out-riddle a Sphinx. If all of the women were equally unattainable, he didn’t stand a chance.
“Marta Coinblossom.”
Marta might be more amenable. The Coinblossom House was newly risen to trade and old blood might tempt them. She was an almost-pretty girl who would, Sebastiano thought sardonically, breed well if one could get her into a good enough mood to do so.
“Adelina Nettlepurse.”
Adelina Nettlepurse. Sebastiano remembered her from childhood play: a shy, contemplative girl who wore her dark hair in two long braids twisted together into a tail. He wondered what she looked like now. She was a Merchant Scholar, he had heard, but his own studies had kept him immersed in the College, only rarely venturing out to socialize. Hadn’t there been gossip about her and that Gladiator, Bella Kanto? Come to think of it, he’d heard the same of Marta.
He snorted. Was his father proposing he compete with the likes of a glamorous Gladiator?
“You and she got along well as children,” his mother observed. The ferret nuzzled against her fingers. “Do you remember then, you planned to get married and start your own Merchant House?”
That was because we were both dying to get out of our parents’ clutches, he thought but did not vocalize.
“Adelina Nettlepurse is past age to be married. She’s had her nose in her books all her years, much like you. Emiliana Nettlepurse has suggested you pay court to her. She’s quick-witted and reasonably easy on the eye, and we’ve been looking for a way to tie ourselves to the Nettlepurses for years,” his father said. He poked the platter towards Sebastiano, looking pleased. “But talk to them all, see who catches your fancy. The families will be expecting to hear from you.”
He nodded but had no plan on calling on any of them. Easy enough to disappear into the College for a couple of weeks, longer if needed, before reappearing to take a little shouting from his father. Once that was over, things would be normal.
When he made his way out to leave, Letha met him at the door and pressed a paper-wrapped package in his hand. It was warm and smelled of pancakes.
“I may be scarce until Father abandons this idea,” he whispered.
“That may not be as soon as you think,” Letha warned him, holding up a hand, its skin pale as milk. He wondered, as always, how much of his alienation and estrangements at the College were his own inadequacy and how much the result of his fellow Mages’ opinions regarding his upstart ancestry. Corrado claimed he’d married for the dowry she brought, but Sebastiano knew the amount of scandal it must have caused at the time. Had it really been a love match that his father felt obliged to disguise lest his son follow in those footsteps?
Letha’s kiss landed moth-wing light on his cheek. “Be well, Sebastiano.” He flinched from the touch, light as it was, and she said, “That is why I followed you. What accident befell you?”
“It’s nothing. A Dryad’s scratch, acquired while she was trying to escape.”
“Come now and I will dress it.”
“There is no need. I am going to the Doctor at the College.” He smiled at her, despite the stab of it on his cheek. “You have not grown so proud of your cures that you would claim them more efficacious than a Doctor’s, surely?”
She huffed and rolled her eyes. He changed the subject. “Were you at Bernarda’s gallery when it caught fire? That painting … surely that was one of Leonoa Kanto’s paintings.”
“Aye, but I left before the trouble started, soon after the Duke left.” Her tone was evasive, and that rekindled his smile. The protective Corrado did not approve of Letha leaving the house, insisting she have things brought to her instead.
He kissed her cheek in turn. “I won’t tell your secret,” he whispered in her ear, despite her irritated stiffening.
She frowned at him. “Be well,” she repeated. And then added, “And come back when the Doctor fails you. I’ll be waiting.”
Leaving, Sebastiano paused to finger the colored tiles set in the doorway. Glazed in a rainbow of colors, each tiny rectangle bore the name of a notable who had spent the night there.
Some Houses had entertained so much over the centuries their tiles were layered, sometimes as much as four or six layers deep, each tile two inches long, a thumb’s width wide, glazed in unfading dyes that had in fact faded in some cases till a famous essayist might be confused with a notable ecdysiast. The Silvercloth entrance was no exception. The family had lived in this house for two centuries now, and some of their visitors had been among Tabat’s most distinguished.
Philosophers had slept here, and Duke after Duke. Two notable Surgeons, a host of distinguished Doctors, and an Explorer. A rare, ivory tile signified that the being that had settled Tabat, the Shadow Twin of Giuseppe Verranzo, had sheltered here at least once, although that was cheating a bit, since the house had not been built at the time.
Sebastiano had always thought that someday he’d be someone so eminent that tiles would be set for him: the deep purple of the College’s Magister, perhaps, or the silver starburst on a purple background that signified some great work of mind, like the Duke’s Waterfall or the furnaces beneath Tabat.
Now he did not think it would come to that, and the sadness of that made him understand his father’s disappointment in him better. Few are ever happy with where they end in life, and many of those console themselves with the notion that their children will walk the paths they map out for them, consoling echoes of those earlier ambitions.
He fingered his cuffs and the embroidery there. Am I truly a Mage? he wondered. Will I ever escape being a Merchant? And now to be linked to another Merchant … That was surely making his fate inescapable.
He took a breath and squared his shoulders before facing the street. All I can do is go forward and find what the Trade Gods want of me, he told himself, and then winced at the thought that even there, in his heart, he was Merchant.