Painted devils, p.36
Painted Devils, page 36
“For what?”
“You actually fixed it,” she says, leaning back in her chair. “More than fixed it. This should be Baba’s last trade circuit before Fatatuma takes over, so … I don’t know how often I’m going to see him after this. But if we can leave this early, I might be able to go all the way to Sahali with him and maybe even stay until Fatatuma’s baby comes. I haven’t been back in…” Her voice scratches. “Too long. I owe you.”
I’m getting dangerously emotional myself, so I just say, “How did you put it? ‘I don’t keep your name in my ledger’?”
Joniza coughs a laugh at that, crooking a bittersweet smile. “I suppose I should come clean about that. Sahalian doesn’t have a word like family, exactly. We have one word for blood kin, and another for people who share a home, and another for the people who care for you, and so on. To say someone isn’t in your ledger means you don’t have to track what they owe you, because you trust them to make it right. You can depend on them whether or not you share blood. That’s what I meant in Sovabin. That’s what you are.”
“Well,” I say soggily, “same.”
Joniza passes me a hankie and pushes her chair back. “I’m going to go tell Baba. Don’t leave town without saying goodbye, or I will put your name in my ledger. How much do I owe you for lunch?”
“Don’t worry, I think the government pays for my meals now if they’re business-related,” I sniffle.
Joniza gives me a long look. “Get an accountant,” she advises before heading out.
I keep sipping my cider, turning over a troublesome little pebble of thought that’s stuck in my emotional boot. This past week has proven something terribly inconvenient and just as terribly undeniable.
I like solving problems. Or rather, I like solving problems for good people by causing problems for bad people. A saint asked me to steal for him. I helped people here in Rammelbeck thanks to a lot of ill-begotten cash and a flagrant disregard for a veritable cornucopia of laws.
The empire needs people like Emeric, people who are willing to hold the powerful to account and to the same laws everyone else follows. But justice can’t just be an axe; it can’t just be about punishment.
Someone has to close the distance between the letter of the law and its execution. Someone has to find where people are falling through the cracks and mend the gaps.
And someone has a rucksack full of rubies, a knack for causing problems, and, at best, a mutual disdain for the law.
I just … know Emeric’s life is his work with the prefects. I don’t know how this will work for us, if I’ll always have to hide the one thing I’m actually good at.
But that’s a problem for Future Vanja, one contingent on my getting us out of ScarMad’s clutches first. I don’t have time to dwell. I settle my tab and am about to head upstairs when I hear familiar voices in the courtyard—voices raised in anger.
“… not worried about this?” Vikram is demanding. He and Emeric are standing near the tavern’s entrance, under a ledge, to keep out of the rain. “How much longer are you going to have to protect her?”
“It’s—” Emeric cuts himself off, running a hand through his hair as I pop out into the open. There’s a weary resignation to him that alarms me. “It’s fine.”
“Is it?” I have a fairly solid hunch that I’m the “her” Vikram’s talking about.
“Proctor Kirkling figured out the Scarlet Maiden isn’t a real god,” Emeric says, “and—”
“She came to the prefect outpost today,” Vikram fumes, “to get materials to submit an amicus finding.”
I squint, confused. “I thought you do math on those.”
“Amicus, not abacus,” Emeric sighs. “When two prefects work the same case but reach different conclusions, the one who isn’t presenting to the Godly Court may submit an amicus finding for Justice’s and Truth’s consideration.”
My stomach drops at the implication, and Vikram confirms it: “Which means Kirkling is going to try to get them to convict you, Vanja, even if it blows up Emeric’s own Finding.”
“But,” Emeric says, steely, “she hasn’t been an active prefect for years. I doubt she’ll be allowed to submit it, and even if she is, we all know it won’t have the same standing. Proctor Kirkling is just trying to intimidate us. I won’t give her the satisfaction. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going upstairs to pack. Thank you for the walk, Vikram, and I’ll see you at dinner tonight.”
Vikram makes a noise like a particularly aggravated iron stove as Emeric ducks inside. “You’re also invited,” he says grumpily. “We would love to have you. Mathilde can only stay until sunset, but she wants to hear all about how you ruined Madame Treasury’s life.”
“I didn’t, the law did,” I say with a straight face. “I’ll be there.”
Vikram is still scowling at the doorway Emeric went through. “In case I don’t get a chance to say this later … I’ve known Conrad since he was ten. I can count on three fingers how many people I’ve seen him moon over. And I’ve never seen him with anyone the way I’ve seen him with you.”
I push a nonexistent hair strand behind my ear, bashful. “Thanks.”
“I’m not telling you this to be nice,” Vikram says with a startling bluntness. “I like you, and I can tell you care—really care—about him. Despite that smug know-it-all act, he’s not nearly as invincible as he’d like us all to think.” Vikram’s gaze pins me dead-on. “And he looks at you like an addiction.”
That knocks any cheeky retort off my tongue.
“So take care with him.” Vikram steps back, toward the courtyard’s exit. “Please.”
* * *
The rain is still coming down by the time we leave for Kerzenthal the next morning, pouring hard enough to strip the petals from flowers in every window box up and down the street. They float down the gutters as we load the carriages: a stream of daisy, daffodil, crocus, cornflower, all a vivid forced red against the dismal gray.
It’s carriages, plural, because our party has grown to six—seven if you count Lady Ambroszia. Ragne’s using the impending new moon as an excuse to join us, but I can tell she’s worried how things will play out. And when Henrik mentioned he was going to ride to Kerzenthal for the wedding on his own, it was all the excuse I needed to lobby for an additional carriage. At this point, cramming Helga, Emeric, Ragne, Henrik, Kirkling, Ambroszia, and me all in a single carriage for a four-day ride is a recipe for a personal hell.
The first day is fine. Emeric opts to give Helga, Henrik, and me some privacy, and Ragne spends most of the day napping on the carriage seat as a squirrel. After adding his drop of blood to the cambric, Henrik and I get to catch up. He and Helga fill me in a little more about our family: Udo and Jakob are actually two of three triplets, and their—our—sister Luisa is married and living near Eida, just north of Welkenrode. Sånnik is third youngest and the final brother I haven’t met, and our eldest sibling, Katrin “Little,” is training him to help manage his bride-to-be’s farm. (Katrin was named for our aunt Katrin “Elder,” who took over when our parents passed away.) Even though Katrin’s married with children, everyone still calls her Little. Jörgi, my second-eldest sibling, has been content to stay and help on the farm as well.
They all know who I am. They all remember me.
They’re all waiting to meet me in Kerzenthal.
Excitement transmutes to anxiety over the next few days. It doesn’t help that the rain only pours harder and harder, until the lowland fields look like mirrors with stubble. Or that each successive sunset dyes the sky a deeper scarlet, even though Kerzenthal is but halfway to Hagendorn. Or that the roads flood badly enough that, more than once, Ragne has to get out, turn into a bear, and jolt the carriages free of the muck.
Even with her help, it takes us longer than it should to reach Kerzenthal. We finally arrive on Wednesday, the day before Sånnik’s wedding, in the late afternoon. It drizzled occasionally in the weeks before now, but there’s no doubt that this downpour is also the Scarlet Maiden’s doing. If anything, it’s just further proof that I was never meant to collect the blood drops in time. She’s wanted Emeric all along.
Rolling into Kerzenthal, even in the rain, is a very unsettling experience. The town is bigger than Hagendorn, smaller than Dänwik, and halfway between a memory and a discovery. It feels like—like looking at my siblings’ faces, seeing echoes of myself and the others, even as every one is strange and new to me. I don’t know the tannery near the town square’s entrance, or the apothecary next to the inn. But I do recognize the inn, even though the paint on the plaster’s the wrong color and the oak tree beside it is too big. I know the little chapel down the lane because I remember sitting on someone’s lap as we passed by in a wagon; I know the bakery not by sight but by smell, because no one else bakes their rolls with a pinch of cardamom.
Each one is a little blister of memory, bursting at first touch, pained relief surging every time.
Kirkling is surprisingly helpful when we disembark. She offers to get a room at the inn and wait with Lady Ambroszia while the rest of us continue on foot to the Ros family farm. While we’re off-loading the luggage, the innkeeper comes out to merrily berate Helga and Henrik for staying away so long, only to spot me and plunge into furious whispers.
I don’t realize my hands are in fists until Emeric takes one and carefully unfolds it enough to twine our fingers, shifting to stand between the innkeeper and me. “Are you doing all right?”
I nod, but I can feel my breath shaking, so I just tip forward to lean on his sternum and mumble, “I’m glad you’re here.”
The innkeeper insists on sending us out with ribbed oilcloth rain canopies, which I appreciate, even if she does keep eyeballing me uncomfortably. “I take it she remembers me,” I say once we’ve cleared her earshot.
“She said you still have braids like the ones you used to wear,” Ragne supplies. She’s trotting along as a hound with a coat so thick, the rain rolls right off. Henrik and Helga both look at her, startled, and she yips a laugh. “My ears are very good like this.”
“Incredible,” Henrik breathes.
“Isn’t it?” Emeric has gotten along with Henrik perhaps the best of all my siblings. I even suspect Henrik got to see a poem or two in one of the intervals when they shared a carriage.
We round a bend in the dirt road, avoiding ruts and puddles as best we can. I’m figuring out how to both juggle the oilcloth canopy and hoist my skirt out of the way when Helga says, “There’s the gate.”
I look up. Far down the road, there’s a fenced paddock around grazing horses. A tall arched gateway crowns a smaller dirt lane that leads to a barn and a sprawling farmhouse. An anvil is ringing from a little roadside half shack to the left of the gate. A garland of horseshoes swings from the gate’s top beam, and in the middle is a flat iron horsehead with ROS punched out.
It’s another little blister of a moment but even more dizzying, almost like holding a tracing up to the light and aligning it with a drawing beneath. The barn is in the same place, but the build is different, and it’s sprouted a stable I’ve never seen. The heart of the farmhouse is as small as I remember, but the walls have grown outward, the roof’s been raised to a second story, and I even spot chimneys for outdoor ovens around a back corner.
My father wasn’t a smith. He was a farrier, shoeing horses for locals and passing travelers. My aunt helped breed and train horses. My family runs a horse farm.
I start laughing, albeit with no small degree of hysteria. Then Emeric sees it and starts laughing in disbelief, too, just saying, over and over again, “Of course it is. Of course.”
“The Emeric does not like horses at all,” I hear Ragne explain to an utterly flummoxed Henrik, “unless the horse is me.”
“Oh dear. Well, yes, Ros comes from the old Deep North word for ‘steed,’ hros. Our family’s been in the business…” Henrik dives into what would be a fascinating family history if his voice weren’t being slowly drowned out by the riot of my own heartbeat.
This is the rest of my family. What if—
What if they think I’m just a good-for-nothing thief? What if I’m a disappointment? All these years lighting candles for a memory of me … What if they don’t want the girl I’ve become?
What if they don’t want me?
If not for the anchor of Emeric’s hand, I would run all the way to Hagendorn now and not look back.
Then we reach the gate, and the anvil goes quiet. I can hear laughter, murmurs drifting from inside the farmhouse.
A soot-smudged person in a blacksmith’s apron ducks out from the roadside stand, tongs in hand, wiping their brow. They have Udo’s and Jakob’s deep brown hair pulled into a serviceable bun, black eyes like Eida’s—like mine. Those eyes widen when they land on me.
I remember sitting on a stool in a corner of that stand, counting riders that passed by while our father taught Jörgi the proper way to hold the hammer. I remember this dirt road, the smell of the rain and the mud.
I see my mother, my father, my siblings. I see the Ros family. I see me.
“Vanja?” Jörgi asks unsteadily, and I have no words, I can only nod. The tongs fall to the ground as they race to the gate, shouting, “VANJA!”
The farmhouse goes quiet. Then the doors burst open. Eida is first out, then a woman I don’t know—no, I do, it’s Katrin, she used to sing me a song about strietzel to stop my crying—Jörgi’s reaching for me, Katrin is flying down the road—everything is streaked with tears—
And I stumble through the gate, into their embrace.
My name is being called like a victory cry, and there are so many arms wrapped around me—around one another—I barely feel the rain. I can barely understand what they’re saying through their own tears and over each other, can hear only the joy, the joy, the joy.
But Katrin’s voice I piece together word by word. She’s saying the same thing again and again, like a prayer that is finally answered:
“I knew, I knew, I knew someday you would find us,” she’s weeping. “I knew if I lit the candle, you would find your way back home.”
THE SECOND LIE
TRUST
Once upon a time, there was a very little girl who ruined everything she touched.
That was what her mother said, at least, and all good little children trust their mothers.
(Her mother said that too.)
One cold morning, the little girl was eating breakfast with her siblings when she tried to pick up the milk pitcher. It was much too heavy for her, and so—crash! It spilled all over the table. Her mother shouted, “Now look what you’ve done! You’ve wasted our milk!”
“It was an accident, Mama,” one of her sisters said softly.
Their mother huffed and puffed as she fetched a rag. “Trust me,” she said, bitter, “she did it to be a problem.”
Later that morning, the little girl was helping comb flax for her mother’s weaving. Since it was so cold that winter day, she sat by the fireplace. But a lonely spark flew out and into her basket of floss, and—crackle! All the flax vanished in a puff of flame.
Her mother threw the still-burning basket out into the snow. “You’ve done it again! All that flax, gone!”
One of her brothers looked up from his book, rolling his eyes. “She can’t control fire, Mother.”
“Trust me,” their mother said, “she sat near the hearth on purpose.”
The little girl played quietly in a corner the rest of the morning; even her rag doll made barely a sound. There was no crash nor crackle; she was sure to stay out of her mother’s way and not make noise, not make trouble.
Still, her mother’s thread tangled on the spindle again and again, knotting itself into a mess.
“You were distracting me,” her mother accused. “I can always tell.”
The little girl had nothing to say, because she had done her best to be good.
At noon her father came in from the cold, though the fire of the forge had kept him warm. The little girl’s family ate lunch all together, smiling and laughing, and she thought perhaps she hadn’t ruined that much, at least.
Then, before her father went back out, the little girl heard him speaking with her mother.
“No more, Marthe,” he was saying. “I’m going to take the midwife’s draught until you’re past bearing age.”
“Please,” her mother wheedled. “You need more hands to help the farm. We’re barely scraping by as it is.”
“And another mouth to feed, that would help?” her father said, not unkindly. “Even if it would … I was there, I saw how you bled. The midwife told you what will happen if you try to carry another babe. Vanja’s our last. I won’t let myself be your death.”
The front door closed.
The little girl did not know what it was, exactly, but she knew she had ruined that too.
* * *
When I look back on that night, I know Marthe waited until after dinner for a reason. My older siblings were out with my father, making sure the horses and pigs and goats were all shut up and warm in the barn. The only children left inside were the ones too little to stop her.
She bundled me up in no more than she had to, and still, my siblings noticed. When they asked where she was taking me, she answered, “To seek her fortune.”
“Her hands will get cold,” Dieter said. “She doesn’t have any mittens.”
My mother grudgingly shoved my hands into the oldest, most-threadbare mittens we had.
“Doesn’t she need boots?” Ozkar asked skeptically. “Those slippers are too thin.”
Marthe’s frown only darkened as she yanked boots onto my feet.
“She’s too little to go,” Helga said. Our mother had no answer for that. “She’s too little! Please don’t take her away!”
My siblings crowded Marthe, begging and pleading. I didn’t understand. She had promised that, where I was going, I would be warm and safe and happy, that we would see each other whenever we wished.
