“Much cannot be,” she said, voice muffled.
“Much can never be,” I replied. The moment spun between us like a dropped wine glass. “This is not to despair.” I grasped her forearm with my left hand and squeezed it. If only she would turn me that we might hug or kiss! Still, I didn’t move for fear of upsetting the mood.
“I worry for your child.”
This feeling I understood. Ilona rarely showed me anything save practical strength, but I also knew how she regarded Corinthia Anastasia with a deep and helpless love. The same maternal aspects that drew me to Ilona were brought out in rare force by the prospect of her own daughter.
My own child… Well, a bastard at the least. Neither fully Selistani nor entirely Stone Coast; not with poor lost Septio’s seed long since quickened inside of me. If only I’d understood then what lay ahead.
Despite a lack of invitation, I summoned the nerve to squirm about in Ilona’s arms and take her in the embrace I’d been craving so long. She pressed her body against mine, and we leaned into the kiss, finally.
Then Corinthia Anastasia spilled out of my cupboard bed with a giggle. I broke away from Ilona, my breasts aching, to turn urgently to my bread. A blind man would have known my heat was up from the scent flooding the air.
My would-be lover stroked my hair a moment, before stepping away with a secret smile into her daughter’s needs.
Ilona frowned. “I think it important that you make an effort to speak with Mistress Danae.”
In truth, I would much rather have spoken with the Dancing Mistress, had she not vanished into the distant country of her kind. Teacher, trainer, friend, sometime lover-I missed her fiercely, especially when I ran through the woods, working my body hard. And I felt little guilt concerning the Dancing Mistress, for everything that had passed between us both good and ill had been wrought equally by the pair of us. Whereas Mistress Danae’s current, broken state was entirely my fault, if not my actual doing.
I had never much minded my dead. Which was fortunate, given their restless numbers. It was the living who had the power to haunt me.
“Yes,” I said, summoning a smile.
The little bundle I would take up onto Lady Ingard’s Hill was nearly complete. The butt of my garlic-rosemary loaf, still hot from the oven, steamed at the top of the pile within. Mistress Danae would quite possibly eat better than I today.
She had been just one of the Factor’s constellation of women, captive to whatever money or penalty or stranger currency of trust the old schemer had used to buy each of them off one by one. She had taught me my letters, and through them much of the history and philosophy of these people who had fathered my child.
I could not imagine spending a lifetime working at the training of unwilling children into pliant women. At my most mercenary, it was obvious to me that teaching anyone to read and think ran directly counter to an expectation of unquestioning obedience. Even beyond the brutal practicalities of educating a hostile student, what of the damage to each teacher’s own soul when they bent an unwilling child to their devices?
As I tied off my bundle, I wondered if I would manage any better with my own daughter. Surely her personality, her needs would run counter to my desires for her. That was the fashion of children everywhere. Whom was I to trust? Whom to believe?
“It must have been difficult, to be Mistress Danae,” said Ilona from behind me.
“Not so difficult as to be the girl under the lash,” I replied with more bitterness than I intended. Ilona had shared my early fate, though her path was different. How could she bear such sympathy for our tormentors?
“You have no idea where she began.” Ilona’s voice was soft but carried a strange edge.
I turned to her, bundle in my hand. “I used to wonder if the training mistresses were failed candidates themselves. But Mistress Tirelle always made such grave threats against me that I could not believe it.”
“You were surely a special case, Green.”
I forced another smile to my face. “Always. But now I must depart, if I wish to be home again prior to sundown. Then I will ready myself to return to Copper Downs before more of those men come finding you up here.”
Ilona leaned forward and kissed my forehead. “That is well enough, dear. You will always be welcome.”
“Save me some bread for tonight, then.”
“Perhaps not that welcome.” Laughing, she saw me off into the day’s weak light. I waved to Corinthia Anastasia, who was weeding in the little garden along the south wall of their cottage. She threw a clod at me by way of response, then bent again to her work.
I headed uphill through the orchards, careful as always not to take the same route twice to minimize any visible trackways.
Mistress Danae had moved up on to Lady Ingard’s Hill shortly after my arrival at the cottage in the late summer. Ilona reported that she’d been lurking down among the Adamantine Graves before then-all the ridges and upper slopes in this part of the High Hills were dotted with necropoleis-but my presence, even unseen, seemed to have disturbed her.
I’d since watched from a distance as Ilona took food and supplies up to Mistress Danae, and twice had stalked my old teacher for the practice, but the sheer cruelty of that was quickly apparent. She was wounded, frightened, and scarred so deeply that no words or deeds of mine could ever heal her. All I would do was reopen the injuries to her heart and mind. Now, perhaps, I might be wiser and so behave more kindly to my fallen teacher, but I was still very young then.
When I’d brought down the Duke of Copper Downs four years past, all of his powers had unraveled at once, like a storm cloud at dusk. This included the money and spells binding the guards he’d placed on the Factor’s house. I’d been safely away by then, sprinting toward a ship and flight from the erupting chaos in the city. The girls of the other courts and any of their Mistresses who happened to be within the Factor’s bluestone walls were slain by his guards in a rampaging orgy of rape and flame. Of them all, only Mistress Danae had escaped with her life.
The gods had granted her no favor in this.
I wondered if one of the Lily Goddess’ sisters had spared Mistress Danae for some future purpose. Desire, their mother-goddess, watched over women, it was said. Protected was too strong a word, though. Women were so obviously unprotected in this world, unless they stood very close indeed to a divine altar, or ran with the Lily Blades.
Mistress Danae had been protected from nothing, in the end. Not even the elements up here, that I could see, though Ilona said she’d passed the last four winters on these mountaintops. Somehow my former teacher survived. That required more than Ilona’s little packages.
All this on my mind, I climbed the shallow cliff that led to the slopes of Lady Ingard’s Hill. Once long ago a road had wound up this face. Its piers and footings were still somewhat in evidence, though most of the collapsed stonework had long since been hauled off for other purposes elsewhere.
Mistress Danae had climbed this as well. How, I wondered? She had the use of her arms and legs, but the few times I had seen her, the woman had been so visibly confused as to seem trapped senseless within her pain.
I slipped over the crumbling edge into the meadows above. I had no idea who Lady Ingard had been or why this was her hill; my extensive history lessons in the Factor’s house had not once concerned the ancient graves of the High Hills. The usual scattering of turved mounds and little stone death-houses covered this whole area. A squat tower rose near the ridge of the hill, half a mile’s walk upslope from me, like the king on a chessboard.