The Adorned (25 page)

Arderi did not start at Tallisk’s name, but his eyelids flickered, and his catlike smile seemed to freeze.

“Lord Loren,” I said with a bow. “My pleasure is the greater.”

“May I have a dance with you?” He inclined his head to Count Karan. “If, of course, our host does not object.”

The Count smiled, but there was a chill something in it; I was to be
his
treat this night, after all. “Of course not, dear Haqan.”

With a nod to the Count, he grabbed at me; I was spun onto the dance floor. A few others were dancing already, Adorned and guests. The Count followed us with Arderi on his arm. The music quickened to a trill of bells and drums.

Lord Loren danced like it was a game, or a battle. His smile was ornamental. His eyes slid between me and the Count. He pressed close to me and leaned to whisper in my ear. “Is it true His Grace has you on a retainer, until his wedding?”

I nodded.

He sucked at his teeth. “There’ll be no way around that, will there? Ah, well. I suppose I can wait a little.”

I blinked at him, mouth half opened in an unstated question, but he said nothing further. We finished the dance, and Lord Loren released me.

“My lord,” I said, a little breathless.

“Yes.” He curled his lip in something like a smile. All of a sudden he looked twice as lupine as any of the Blooded; he looked dangerous. A memory rose to the surface: I saw him sitting in his tent on the way to Fevrewood, like a field commander before a battle, and I wondered what I was to him...an ornament, or a weapon.

I bowed awkwardly and excused myself from the dance floor. I found a balcony to take some fresh air. My skin felt too hot. I leaned over the balustrade, closing my eyes, feeling the cool wind on my skin.

A cough behind me made me turn back. It was Arderi Finn. He held the hem of his skirt, to protect it from the rain-slick balcony floor. “May I join you, Etan writ-Tallisk?”

I bit my lip. “Of course.”

He stepped over a puddle and joined me at the balustrade. I looked at his hands. One small ribbon, black in the moonlight, coiled around his finger like a ring. “So,” he said. “You are one of my old master’s, then.”

It was not a question. Still, I nodded.

“I saw you looking at me.” He tilted his head, almost smiling. “Is it a professional curiosity?”

“Yes, something like that.” My voice sounded far away.

“How do you find him?”

“Pardon?”

“Your master, Tallisk. How do you find him?”

I forced a shrug. “He treats me well enough.”

“As he should. You are beautiful; a great investment.” He stepped closer to me; lightly, he touched my shoulder, brushing a furled ivy leaf. “I see his skill has not waned.” He sounded, almost, as if he wished it had.

I pulled away from his touch. “How long were you with him?”

“Two years. After that, he sold the remainder of my bond.”

I struggled to voice the next word. “
Why?
”

He laughed. “Tallisk may be a brilliant artist, but he understands nothing of what being an Adorned entails. He thinks that we should care only for his ink, his art. Not the Blood that makes us
Adorned
instead of merely tattooed. Not the displays that make our coin.” Arderi shook his head. “I made a mistake. I thought his passion a fine distraction, a compliment;
he
thought he should have me all to himself. He’d have had me ruin my career, for his sake.”

I looked away. I thought of Tallisk’s rage, when he’d thought I was making to catch the Count’s attentions as a consort.

“He was not as cruel as he could have been.” He leaned over, looking at the gardens below. “He deprived me of his mark, which cost me, but he sold my bond to a woman who knew my value. I served out my three years with her; now I am free to set my own price, and there are those for whom a lack of writ-name does not detract from the art.”

“But you’re unfinished.” It was out of my mouth before I could help it.

To my surprise, he laughed. “You see it? Not many do. You’ve an eye for it.” He gave me a searching look. “Has he other Adorned, at the moment?”

“One; her name is Isadel.”

He nodded. “I’ve heard of her. She’ll do well enough.” His eyes half closed there, looking inward. “Take a care with him. Don’t make my mistake, if it’s not too late.”

“Your mistake?” I winced at my own voice; I sounded hoarse and strangled.

“He can make you feel the loveliest creature in the world, but he’ll crush you given half a chance. Like a boy catching butterflies.”

I did not know what to say in response. After a moment, Arderi left me, again raising his skirt and moving with a dancer’s elegance back into the ballroom.

I had not even noticed the puddle on the floor, and the hem of my dress was sodden.

Chapter Thirty-Nine

The Count had me stay the night. I was not too surprised; I had felt his eyes on me through the feast, most keenly when Lord Loren took the liberty of a dance.

A few of the other Adorned discreetly disappeared with the Count’s guests. The manor had many rooms, hidden from view. I did not see Arderi Finn again, though, either in company or alone.

The Count was slow and deliberate with me, prolonging his pleasure; there was no recklessness in him, not now. He worked on me with a surgeon’s precision. At the end of it I was wrung out and panting, dark patterns pulsing behind my eyes, and the Count called in a body servant to bathe him. His firefly-bright eyes gleamed grey-green in the gloom of his bedroom; they passed over me and looked pleased.

They didn’t linger long in my mind’s eye. I had other things occupying me. I turned away from him and closed my eyes.

I must have slept. One of his servants woke me, just before sunrise. The Count had gone already, or else had never stayed. The last, I thought, was more likely. His servants eased me out of my rumpled dress and bathed me with brisk care. New clothes, soft and comfortable, had been laid out for me, and a light breakfast of bread and honey. I was being dismissed, though gently so.

The city was bathed in rose-golden light as I was ferried home. I rode in the same carriage, I thought, with the same driver, gone bleary overnight. Artor Lukan, on the other hand, was nowhere to be seen. I supposed he’d been given a more important duty than my chaperoning.

Doiran let me into the house at Nightwell Street. Without preamble, I crawled into bed. The Count had kept me up deep into the night, and I’d not had long to rest. Before I bedded down, though, I opened the curtains, and the window—I wanted to feel the sunlight on my skin.

A few hours later, with the sun noon-high, I woke. There was a bustle in the house—footsteps and raised voices. Isadel had arrived home at last; it seemed the women had outlasted the men in their feasting.

I rose and dressed, going to look for Isadel. I found her in the library. She wore a new black dress, the same color as her hair. There was a languor in her movements, her smile quick and secret. She looked at me with wide unblinking eyes.

“Well,” she said.

I smiled. “Well.”

She giggled, suddenly: a sweet, untutored sound. I was startled enough to gape at her. I had barely heard her laugh before, let alone giggle.

“How was the women’s feast, then?”

Her expression closed a little; she was back to a more familiar smile, thin and ironic. “It went well, I suppose.”

“And Lady Vasan? How is she?”

Her hand went to her hair, half conscious, drawing it back from her face. There was the mark of a kiss on her neck, under the curve of her earlobe. It looked almost like one of her tattooed rose petals, a single scale shed from a writhing snake.

“Isadel?”

“Hmm?” She released her hair. “She is...not what I expected.” Her voice went bright now, closing the topic. “So, how was the men’s feast?”

I tilted my head. “Well enough.” After a moment, I coughed. “I met Arderi Finn.”

“Oh?” This caught her attention.

“We spoke. A little.”

“And what did you think of him?”

I shrugged. “What is there to think? I know his side of the story now.”

“Which I don’t suppose you’ll tell me.”

“Why not? You had it right enough.” I sat down, looking past her. “But there is one thing you were wrong about.”

“Was I?”

“Tallisk was in love with him. With Finn.”

“Did he tell you this?”

I laughed; I tried to keep my voice steady. “He did not have to. It was plain enough in his story. So there is a difference.”

“Is there?”

A sudden ache bloomed in me like a poison flower. I felt tears starting to crowd my eyes, and I turned away. I didn’t want her to see either the tears or what lurked behind them: all the useless shadows that added up to a knowledge I could no longer deny. “Don’t,” I said. “
Don’t
, Isadel.”

She crouched beside me. “He isn’t worth your heartache, in my opinion.” She laid a hand on my knee. “But then who can command a heart, hmm? Not me. Just know that you’re a fool, Etan, in more ways than one.”

“I know that,” I said, savagely.

“Do you?” She rose and smiled. “I wonder.”

“Maybe I
should
try for consortship, with one lord or other. Then at least I’ll know where I stand.”

“I don’t think that you would, somehow.”

No. Of course I would not. The Count’s attentions, Lord Loren’s dances, the eyes of the Blooded on me, bright and greedy...that was all secondary. What mattered to me was the art on my skin...the art, and the artist who put it there.

Would I give up all display, the whole glittering future of it, in trade for Tallisk’s mark and name—an opposite bargain to Arderi Finn’s—no matter what it cost me? No matter, even, that I might never have what
he
had once had from Tallisk, before he’d turned his back on it? Given the choice baldly, I thought that I might; I wondered what sort of fool
that
made me.

* * *

Banned, for now, from touching needle to flesh, Tallisk still found ways to work. He’d completed his record of me, and of Isadel as well, and he spent long afternoons in his atelier, the scritch of his pencil sketching across paper and parchment.

He called me up one afternoon. I had not spoken to him, not truly, since we’d been sent to the engagement feast, and I felt a strange apprehension in climbing the stairs to him. I took deep breaths, stilling myself. There was nothing I had done wrong, I told myself, nothing I needed to worry about.

“There you are,” he said when I’d arrived. “Come here.”

There was no censure in his tone, only a kind of anticipation. I licked my lips and went to him. He stood beside his desk; it was papered top to bottom with sketches.

They were all of me.

“I know you cannot be tattooed,” he said, sounding none too pleased about it. “But that is no reason you cannot be...” His voice tapered to silence.

I looked up, unwillingly, from the tangle of sketches and found he was watching me. “Sir?”

“You know, sometimes I think—” he shook his head. “Ah, never mind.” Again, he went quiet. It was not much like him.

“What is it, sir?”

“Don’t call me that,” he said suddenly. “Call me by my name.”

It took me aback, that request. “I’m sorry?”

“Etiquette is a poor substitute for respect.”

I straightened. “A poor substitute, perhaps. But in my mind, sir, they complement each other well.”

He looked at me with a curious expression. I could not quite tell if he was disappointed. “Very well. As long as you know I don’t require it of you.” With that, he seemed satisfied, and he turned back to his sketches. “These are designs I have in mind for you. Before I commit to any, I wish to try them on, with paints.”

“Shall I undress?”

He paused a moment, frowning. “Yes. Yes, you had better.”

As I did, he bustled around, rummaging for his brushes and paints, adjusting his sleeves, coughing and murmuring under his breath. He was discomfited by something; I could see it in his every motion.

I waited for his instruction.

He nodded to me. “On the chair.”

I took my place on the tattooing chair, settling into it with a sigh. He pulled his chair close to me and set out his brushes. He licked his lips, dipped the brush in green. Then he paused.

“Sit up.”

I did, frowning.

“Here.” He pushed the brush into my grip. “You try it.”

I stared at the brush in my hand for a moment, my heartbeat hot in my fingertips, half wondering if this was some sort of test. Was he actually allowing me to try my hand at his art? I swallowed, unsure of my voice. “You mean—”

“Try it. On yourself.”

“Shall I follow your design?”

He shook his head and grabbed the papers away, turning them over. “No. Show me how you would do it, were you the artist.”

My heart was still beating palpably fast, but behind that nervous drumbeat there was a new stir of eagerness. I wanted to wield that brush he had shoved into my fingers—to show Tallisk not only
how
I might do it, but that I
could.

There was not much of me accessible to my own hand—my chest, my legs, my other arm. I could not reach my back or shoulders, certainly, and I’d have to twist a little to reach my hips. Lips pursed in concentration, I bent over my leg. There was a bare patch, between two curls of vine, where I thought a flower would fit nicely. I paused. “I—I would not use this color, there.”

He nodded. “What color, then?”

“Blue. Light blue, sir.”

His eyebrows raised. “Very well.” A new brush was selected, and he allowed me to use his paints. I chose a blue like a morning sky, bright and clear. I painted the rough outlines of the flower. It was not one found in nature, but a fanciful bloom, with spade-shaped leaves. Tallisk watched me; I felt his regard, a prickle on the back of my neck. I was not adept with the brush, but thought the doodle brought the idea across. I liked the luminous blue between the green, like the iris of a garden’s eye.

I paused and leaned back. Tallisk took the brush from me and looked at the flower. “It’s not bad,” he said at last.