Chapter 8
Thoughts of Teo bedeviled Eloquence all night, biting at him like worrisome gnats. The boy was straight from the country. City complications had done him in, sure as sunrise. He’d fallen afoul of criminals or slavenappers, or one of the many other predators that made Tabat their home.
He opened his eyes as sunlight glimmered at the edges of the shutters. Mamma was up and making breakfast already.
He wanted to stay in bed himself. All through the long days of the steamboat journey, he’d dreamed of clean sheets, a mattress a thousand times softer than the narrow plank in the Pilot’s cabin that was his bed throughout the journey, a spot to half-sleep while monitoring the sound of the engines, listening for a shudder or falter indicating some problem: fatigued metal giving way or a spell designed to coax them into shore and waiting bandits.
It wasn’t until that last bump of landing that he’d relaxed, and even then he worried about the temporary Pilot that would take the Swan to the moorage where she’d be cleaned and refitted for journeying. He’d sailed aboard seven different steamboats in the dozen years he’d spent making his living on the river, but the Swan was one of the best, clean and well-kept.
He turned over and buried his nose against the pillow. It smelled of pressed cotton, with the faintest scent of … elderflower, he thought. It had been a long time since he’d spent a morning in a bed in his grandmother’s household, but the smell was the same. He tried to will himself back to sleep, but the sunlight pouring in through the east-facing window, the cooing of pigeons on the windowsill, and those thoughts of Teo all took it in turn to keep him awake.
Whenever he was away on the river, it seemed like all Eloquence dreamed about was being back in Tabat, in the narrow little room that his age and gender allotted him alone, with his writing desk set beneath the window, looking out over green and purple tiled roofs and then the great factories that produced those tiles, the Slumpers, and then the sea’s distant smolder.
But here and now, he couldn’t enjoy it with all those thoughts about what the Temples would say about the boy’s loss.
And even more than that, he’d have to figure out what to do about what had been happening while he was gone. He’d told Mamma to rely on the Temples, but she’d been doing more than that, he could tell, by the well-stocked wood basket and the furniture, much newer than when he’d been here last. It didn’t show in the girls’ dress, but it did in the skin stretched over a layer of fat rather than bone.
He couldn’t blame her for taking up with those that lined their pockets illegally. Half the neighborhood around here lived the same way. But she jeopardized their position with the Temples, and it was through those that he’d gotten good apprenticeships for them all so far, starting with himself, back the first year after Da had died.
But Canumbra and Legio—he and they’d been in prime school together and they were a bad lot. Rumor held them responsible for all sorts of crimes, from press-ganging workers for the Southern Isles to smuggling sorcerous goods from the Old Continent. They did whatever they liked, that pair, as long as it brought them money.
Footsteps approached and retreated outside his doorway, leaving behind a clatter that smelled appetizing enough to coax him out of bed. The tray discovered when he opened the door held breakfast: hot fish tea, and fried bread stuffed with a mushroom and salt-fish paste, his favorite, and the sort of thing you could never get on the boat, which had no access to the caverns where Ellora’s fruit grew. Mamma didn’t want the confrontation any more than he did, and so he accepted the tacit peace and ate the fruits of it at his desk before he set it aside and tried to write.
All his words were hollow and wrong, and the more he tried to force them, the worse they seemed, a muddle, a meander on the page, random words thrown down like dice, devoid of meaning.
He tossed the pen on the desk, not caring how it spattered, and ran his hands through the thickness of his hair as he moved to the window, tugging as though he could pull his thoughts into alignment and set his mind back in the order that he craved.
He had written so well on the river, when the distraction of his family and life’s daily rituals were gone. He’d composed passages in his head while he piloted, examining the banks and thinking hard on how to exactly, precisely, perfectly describe the brown bristle of the cattails or the sinewy curve of retreating tail that was one’s usual glimpse of a river dragon. The way the paddles roared behind him, chopping the water to bits and foam as the boat shuddered forward. You could tell in an instant whether you were going upstream or down by that roar.
Ice crystals formed a silvery glaze around the edges of the window. It would be warmer downstairs, and perhaps there was no point in pretending he was writing. He would go down to the corner for more fish tea, and then, having sustained himself with that, he would return to his desk and write at least five good pages, solid ones.
But downstairs everything was girls and chaos and quarrels. Obedience was there, and Grace finishing out her off-day while Compassion started her own. They were fighting over the little bracelets he had spent time knotting for them on the journey, and upon questioning, none of them wanted the one he had made them but preferred someone else’s. He proposed swapping, feeling wise as a Judge with the suggestion, only to find that none of them wanted the one he had first made, which had a clumsy knot for its fastening.
He took all the bracelets back in the end. He could pass them onto the Temple to be sold, and they would give him a little of the money, and the rest would go to the Temples to support the poor, rather than his ingrate siblings. This action made them all cry or scream, depending on their temperaments. He looked to his mother to impose order but she silently wilted back into her bedroom, leaving him behind amid the sea of them.
He shouted, “Enough! Unless you are quiet, you’ll all go without dinner.”
He was pleased to see that they took that seriously enough, squelching words and tears.
He’d go to the Temple of the Moons first, tell them what had happened. He’d shade the story a bit, make it sound as though the boy had been confused and scared off. Maybe blame the Mage—everyone knew Mages were given to madness and a simple boy, confronted with one, might have thought himself in some sort of danger and run straight into whatever circumstances had killed him. Yes, that was the tack to take.
It seemed a good enough story, but it faltered under the eye of the Priest he found himself talking to when he reached the Temple. He’d been ushered into a small chamber, windowless and lit by a sputtering oil lamp. The Priest had come with tablet in hand, ready to record the details. Eloquence took a dislike to him right away: something about the officious slant of his nose, or the way he looked down it at Eloquence as though measuring his soul and finding it wanting.
He said, not for the first time, “I entrusted him to the Mage, who’d have thought the man would spook the boy so? There was no way of telling such a thing!”
“Indeed,” the Priest said with a little cough as dry as paper.
Indeed, Eloquence thought, you do not believe me at all.
“How long do you intend to be in Tabat?” the Priest asked.
“I do not know,” Eloquence said. “Long enough to visit my family and find another job on a steamboat. The one I came in on will be at least a few weeks getting re-fitted.”
“There are some,” the Priest said, voice thin and flat as a purple reed, “who would hold you accountable for the boy’s escape or even worse, his death.”
“Indeed, and there are many who would say nothing of the sort,” Eloquence said, nettled. “Shall we summon a Duke’s agent and see who is counted in the right?”
The Priest’s eyes were blue as Summer sky, and around his neck hung a coin marked with the fat-bellied crimson moon. He smelled of cinnamon and musk. “No need of that,” he said, voice gone greasy. “But if the Mage proves wrong and you find any word or sight of the boy, send word to me immediately. My name is Hyphe.”
What did the Priest think he’d done with the boy, Eloquence thought, still irritated by the implications in the Priest’s tone at their parting. That Eloquence had secreted him in a chamber to be raped and then tossed out? Or sacrificed to some God or another? The boy had eaten aboard the boat as though he’d never been allowed to eat his entire fill at a meal before. He would have been prohibitively expensive to house.
Although, what was one more mouth if you already had plenty to feed, he thought. He realized he’d forgotten to tell the Priest the Merchant Mage still had the boy’s coin. Well, surely the man could be trusted to take care of that, at least. Eloquence was done worrying about it.
He fished a scrap of paper out of his pocket and studied it. “Spinner Press,” he said aloud, and started on his way.