The Office of Shadow (32 page)

In mounted combat, it is preferable to shoot the rider
out of the saddle. Sometimes, however, it is easier to put
your arrow in the horse, and just as effective.

-CmdrTae Filarete, Observations on Battle

.la had her maid Ecara dress her in a simple gown; today she fancied herself a free-spirited girl, waiting-maid to a Duchess, perhaps, or a
guildsman's daughter. Regardless of how she felt about Lord Tanen, he had
certainly taught her many things, and one of them was how to fit in just
about anywhere. It didn't matter if she didn't know a thing about the kind
of woman she was pretending to be. It all came to her as she went along. She
watched the dance of the colored threads that spread among those around her
and simply danced among them.

Life in Lord Everess's household was both more and less pleasant than she
might have imagined. Everess was rarely at home, and that was fine with
Sela; she found the man's company ever less pleasant the more she knew him.
But she was lonely. For so long she'd been used to her fellow residents at Copperine House. They were strange and damaged, but they were known. Her
only regular company was Ecara, and Ecara wanted only to please her, and so
had begun to grate on Sela's nerves.

After that first night at Blackstone House, she'd assumed that her new
life was starting, finally. The air smelled of possibility as she rode in the open
carriage back to Lord Everess's apartments. But that had been days ago. And
in the interim, she'd heard nothing except for Everess's assurances that she
ought to enjoy the peace and quiet because it wouldn't last.

To occupy herself, she thought about the ways in which she could kill Lord
Everess using only the objects readily to hand in the apartments. He was so fat
and soft that there were a plenitude of options. The quickest way: silver filigree
letter-opener plunged deep into the eye socket. Instantaneous. The most painful:
tie him down in the parlor, start a nice fire, heat the poker just the perfect shade
of red. Eyeballs, then tongue, then anus. She had learned that one when she was
thirteen. And then there was the way that she'd killed Milla. And the doctor.

Oh, Milla. But she wasn't real. No, Milla wasn't real. The doctor wasn't
real. It was all pretend. All pretend.

Take a deep breath. Don't think. Good girls don't think: They respond.

Anyway. She much preferred Paet to Everess, and wished that she could
live with him instead; he was simple and straightforward. He had known
pain, deep pain, and that connected them by a thin black thread, even if Paet
didn't realize it. She'd asked Everess whether she could move in with Paet,
and Everess had laughed as though she'd told a funny joke.

It was all so confusing sometimes.

And Silverdun. Oh, my.

At Copperine House there had been a very wealthy actress named
Starlight, who'd been the recipient of a bad Ageless treatment. She never
aged, true, but her mind was lost in time, and she never seemed to know
what day it was. In one of her more lucid moments, she'd talked to Sela about
love. Love was what made everything else worthwhile, she said. Passion,
romance. To hold and to be held by a strong, handsome man, to be enveloped
in him: That was the best thing in life.

Sela hadn't had the faintest idea what Starlight had been talking about.
She knew about love, of course. She saw the threads of love spun between
others; those threads were bright, bright colors: red and orange and gold,
sometimes fiery, sometimes only glowing. But Sela had never experienced
that sort of love herself. The only person she'd ever loved had been Milla. And
that had been something different altogether.

When she came downstairs, Paet was waiting for her in the parlor. Lord
Everess was nowhere to be seen.

"I have a task for you," he said.

"Oh, thank you," said Sela.

Lord Tanen has a gift for Sela. She is ten years old and cannot remember ever
having received one. It is small, wrapped in cotton paper, tied with a real silk
ribbon. He sits her down in her bedroom and puts the box on her dressing
table.

"Open it," he says. "Today is a special day."

But she doesn't want to open it. The wrapping is so beautiful and the
suspense so exquisite. She looks at Tanen, but his expression is, as always,
impossible to read. He simply stares at her until her fingers reach for the bow.

"Is it my birthday?" she asks.

"No. You do not have a birthday."

Inside, her heart is swelling. Is this how it feels to be cared for? She
remembers her parents, but she's been warned many times never to think of
them, so she puts them out of her mind. She pulls delicately on the bow, and
it comes undone with a soft slipping noise, barely audible.

The paper is smooth, its folds perfectly straight. Once the ribbon comes
off, the paper unfolds itself and lies flat on the table, revealing a silver box.

"Open it," says Tanen. With trembling hands, she does.

Inside is a tiny figure of a swan, made of tin, painted blue. There's an
even smaller tin key. She picks up the swan, holding it gingerly in both
hands, turning it over.

"Oh, it's lovely," she whispers. Should she give him a kiss on the cheek?
In books, when a father brings a daughter a lovely gift, she kisses his cheek.
But Tanen is not her father and has told her so many times.

There's an opening in the swan's back. Tanen points to it. "Put the key
in there and turn it. Hold the wings down while you do so."

The key fits perfectly in the swan's back and she turns it, the wrong way
at first, then properly. As it goes around it clicks, the way the clock in the
hall does when the maid turns it. She is not allowed to wind the clock, and
she has always wondered how the clicking must feel. It's even better than she
imagined; the mechanism inside the swan offers the perfect amount of resistance to her touch.

"Don't overwind it," scolds Tanen. "You'll break it." She stops, nearly
letting go.

"Now place it on the table and watch."

When she lets go, the swan begins to flutter its wings. It bounces on the
table, once, twice. Then it takes flight, shaky at first, then more certain,
turning in wide, lazy circles near the ceiling.

Sela laughs and claps her hands. She watches, rapt, as the swan dips and
sways and finally comes to rest on the dressing table, just where it started. Its
wings flutter a few times more and then stop.

"May I do it again?" she says, reaching for the key.

Tanen places his hand on hers. His touch is cool, his skin dry. He takes
the swan and drops it on the floor, crushing it under his boot. He points.
"Pick up the pieces," he says.

Sela wants to cry, but knows that if she does then one of the crones will
punish her. So she kneels and picks up the swan's remains: impossibly small
gears and springs and a spiral of metal that burns to the touch.

She places the pieces gently on the table before her. She should have
known. She should never have let herself believe that there would be kindness. Only Oca was kind, and then only when no one else was around.

"Some people," says Tanen, "are like this swan. They are not real. Not
elves, but machines. Carefully crafted, they appear to be just like us. They
speak and cry and bleed, and their insides are not gears and springs but flesh
and bone, ingeniously created by our enemies."

"How will I know which is which?" asks Sela, breathless.

"I will tell you. I will point them out to you."

"And then what?" Do not cry. Do not cry.

"And then you will stop them, just as I have stopped your swan. The
swan feels nothing. It is nothing. It is only a clever machine."

"Some people are clever machines," says Sela.

"Yes," says Tanen. "And nothing more."

"You said today was a special day," say Sela, remembering.

"Yes, indeed I did. The crones tell me that today is very important."

The crones have told her about this. They have told her that it is the
beginning of a great change, that she will have to be ready. They feel her fore head several times a day. They place strange instruments on her belly and
back and listen intently to them. This morning, she remembers, one of them
lifted her head and said, "It's time."

"Stand up and come with me," says Tanen. "I want to have the crones
examine you again."

She stands and realizes that it is warm and wet between her legs. Something
thick is running down the inside of her thigh. She steps back, nearly tripping over
the leg of her chair. On the floor are three drops of blood in a perfect triangle.

She feels dizzy. "What's happening?" she asks. "Am I dying?"

Tanen smiles, the first time she has ever seen him do so. His smile makes
her more nervous, not less. "Quite the contrary, Sela."

He takes her face in his hands and looks hungrily at her. "Today your life
has finally begun."

The city at night, after a rainstorm, was a glittering wonderland. Kerosene
lamps and witchlights twinkled on rain-glazed cobblestones. Distant
thunder from the retreating storm rattled beneath the tip-tip dripping from
eaves and the muted slap of boots on wet stone. Here in the alley, earthy
smells and human smells and dank smells and chimney smells mingled into
an aroma different from all of the others, the after-rain smell.

The dress Paet had given her was constricting and uncomfortable. He'd
given her scented powders for her skin and hair, and painted red circles on
her cheeks. She hated it.

She knocked on the door at the end of the alley. "What do you want?"
came a muffled voice from inside."

"Bryla sent me, she did," said Sela. She was talking in Ecara's accent, the
way common city Fae talked.

The door was opened by a sullen stump of a man with thick arms and
legs and silver tips on the points of his ears.

"Didn't send for anyone tonight," said the man.

She smiled a helpless smile and shrugged. "Bryla said to me go to Enni's
place, and so that's what I done," she said.

She smiled a lopsided smile and waited, waited. The man looked at her.
Wait. She felt the click and a thread sprung up, seething, bloodred.

There were two kinds of male lust, Sela knew. One was a desire to possess, to grab, to take something away. The other was an opening up, an exquisite longing for communion. This was decidedly the former.

Sela stepped forward a bit and the thread deepened. Sometimes when it
was this thick she found herself knowing things. "You're ... Obin, right?"
She reached out and touched his collar.

"All right, come in," said Obin. "But don't get your hopes up. It's dead
in here tonight."

"The rain," she tried. Yes, that was right. Rain was bad for business.

The door opened onto a narrow hallway. Obin led her through it and into
a small parlor where three women sat, all heavily perfumed and tightly
corseted, as Sela was. They all looked tired and bored. When they saw Sela,
a tension sprung up in the room. A green-brown web of suspicion and contempt formed among the women.