Lan, sitting on the floor wrapped in a blanket, watched as they arranged all this on the vanity and wordlessly left again. The guard closed the door without ever even looking directly at her.
Was she still his dolly? After last night and everything? Or was he just feeding her before he sent her away?
Pointless, asking questions she knew she couldn’t answer. If he was turning her out, she’d learn soon enough. If she was still his dolly, she’d learn that too. She wasn’t terribly eager either way.
But she was hungry, so she ate. She drank the coffee pot dry one half-cup at a time, trying out various combinations until she found out just what she liked. The idea of having a ‘favorite’ coffee still struck her as absurd and possibly sinful, but she supposed Mayor Fairchild’s wife had a favorite fine dress and Elvie Peters had a favorite necklace, so why not favorite coffee?
She worked her way through the breakfast slowly, eating the porridge while it was hot and wrapping the sausages and scones in the napkin for later. There was a little dish of fruit, too—grapes and apples, no peaches—which she hid under the pillow of her bed, just in case the servants came back to clear the trays. And because she was bored and full of coffee, she decided to make their job easier by stacking everything together so one person could carry it all. It was as she was shifting plates around, catching odd crumbs and stray drops of honey and licking them off her fingers, that Lan found the paper.
It was a smallish paper, a hand’s width on all sides, folded over and mostly hidden under that flowerpot. Very white, that was the first thing she noticed. There was paper in Norwood, of course, they weren’t that far-gone country, but it was of the rough, reddish sort they milled in Torrey Green. This was different in every way, so much that she wasn’t even sure she could call it paper. She could neither see nor feel the bits of rag and flax fibers that it was made of, nor could she smell the retting or the ammonia they must have used to get it so perfectly white.
There were letters written on one side, well more than it took to spell her name. The handwriting was neat and level, with a broad stroke and looping flourishes at the ends. Lan traced them over with her fingertip curiously, then unfolded the paper and had a look at the letters inside. She had a thought it might be the menu, but it didn’t look like a list. Instructions to the servants? The ticklish idea that it might be a note to Lan herself did occur, but what a silly place to put it, if so…under a plate, with only the corner sticking out, easily overlooked.
Lan tossed it back on the tray and wandered over to the window, looking out over the roofs of Haven at the unnatural stillness of the city. Looked like rain on the horizon, but it wasn’t here yet. No way to shut the window. Her bed was going to get soaked. With any luck, she wouldn’t be in it tonight.
She was still there, cloud-watching and restless, when she heard footsteps once more on the stair. Lan straightened up, tucking her coverlet more securely around her body, and waited expectantly in the middle of the room for the door to open. Just the guard and one servant this time. She gave Lan an irritated sort of glance as she took everything off the trays and stacked them on again, all but the teapot which was still full and which she must have thought Lan still wanted, but paused when she spied the paper. Careful not to touch it or to look again at Lan, the dead woman took her tray and left.
Once more alone, Lan sat down on the bed, but she had hardly begun to fume when the door opened again and the servant stuck her head in.
“Are you sure you want to be rid of this?” she asked, holding up the paper between two fingers with an odd sort of look on her face.
Lan shrugged and nodded.
The dead woman stared at her.
“Why? What’s it say?”
Now the servant looked back at the guard, who deliberately turned his back on the both of them and pretended the head of his pike needed inspecting. The servant came all the way inside, set down the dishes, and closed the door. Holding the paper between the very tips of her fingers so as to have as little to do with it as possible, she read, “To my blameless Beauty in her tower,” and looked at Lan.
“Okay?” said Lan after a puzzled moment.
The servant unfolded the paper, making a point to appear uncomfortable, but with that same gossiping gleam in her eye that Lan supposed all people, living or dead, must feel with poking their fingers into other people’s pies. “How inconstant I must seem. I have made claim of simple desires, given you rein without direction, only to cast you out for daring to anticipate the one whim I do not possess. You confessed early enough and often enough that you are innocent—” The servant paused to give Lan a dubious look from under the shadow of her hair. “—of the courtesan’s coy trade, and for all your skill at barter, I see it is true and surely the most forgivable of offenses. By my accounting, you have paid a precious coin and I would not see you so misspent. If you are content to remain, I am content to have you.”
“Okay?” Lan said again, even more baffled than before.
“Do you have an answer?” the servant asked, pinching the paper shut again.
“Was that a question?”
In the doorway, the guard shook his head and sighed.
The servant put the paper down on the vanity and gave it a pat. She picked up her tray again. “Like reading to a pig,” she muttered and the guard replied, “Not at all. Pigs are actually quite intelligent.” The door banged shut on their shared laughter, leaving Lan blushing on the bed, unsure of just why she was embarrassed, but embarrassed all the same.
After a few minutes, she jumped up, snatched the paper and half-tore, half-crumpled it into a wad, then threw it out the window. She felt better.
The day passed with nothing to do. Lan stood. She sat. She lay down. The rain finally came and the bed got wet, exactly as expected. There was nothing to be done about it, so Lan merely scooted around as far from the window as she could and lay down again so that only her feet got wet. She put her wet feet on the wall and amused herself stamping footprints as far up it as she could go. She counted lightning flashes (seventeen) and rolls of thunder (twenty-two). She draped herself in Azrael’s coverlet as many different ways as she could imagine (not many). She ate the rest of her breakfast when she got hungry and drank her cold tea just to get rid of it. She got up and walked, trying to step on every single floorboard in turn, mincing back and forth with her arms out like wings. Once in a while, she opened the door and looked down the dark stairs, but never went further than her own landing. There was a lock on the other side of the door; she wasn’t about to give anyone a reason to start using it.
At last, the light behind the storm went out and soon after, Lan heard the expected sound of boots in the stairwell. Again, she stood, hurriedly redraping her coverlet.
It was a not a guard looking down his perfect nose at her this time, but one of the dead servants, albeit one dressed a bit better than the dead women earlier. He did not have a tray with him, but he did have a frothy bit of cloth draped over one arm which he looked at as one looks at something for the last time before tossing it at her. “My lord commands you to join him for dinner.”
“What?”
He did not repeat himself, just left.
Lan shook the thin fabric out and discovered another dress, pretty and flimsy, too tight and too cold. ‘Dollies don’t get to complain,’ she reminded herself, but gave the coverlet a yearning stare as she put it on. It left her arms bare, not to mention too much of her chest, and the skirts were so light, both in color and in weight, that she could see the shadow of her legs right through them. The breeze that blew through the window flattened the cloth to her body, outlining everything that was not already full on display, so that she might as well be naked and just painted blue with a few fluttery kerchiefs tied around her waist.