Chapter 12

CHAPTER

12

The overwhelming smell on the carding floor was one that Luca had never encountered before. It was a thick, warm, unsettling scent with a dusty edge. Luca had never had cause to encounter livestock except when walking past a butcher’s shop, but in the last hour he’d firmly attached to this smell the mental label of sheep .

Luca inched his stool closer to Maya’s so that they could speak without being overheard. It was probably unnecessary; the air was busy with chatter beneath the harsh hum of carding combs moving against one another, a sound that was as unfamiliar as the smell but which Luca had already resigned himself to hearing in his sleep for the next three nights.

“I could have done this on my own,” he said.

He was lying, but he wanted to get a reaction out of Maya. What he got was a long, unimpressed glance. Better than nothing.

“And I’m sure you’d have been able to plausibly describe your previous experience in this industry,” she returned.

“I wouldn’t have bothered. I’d have come up with a tragic story about the sickness that claimed my parents, and my desperate need for work in a new place, and sworn up and down that I would take half pay until I learned what I was doing,” Luca said promptly. “There might even have been tears.”

Maya looked back down at her work before he could see if he’d won a smile. Her manner towards him was cooler than it had been yesterday. No amount of semiflirtatious, semicomical effort on Luca’s part, as they’d travelled out of the city, had managed to bring out the same fountain of smiles and energy that she’d displayed in the park, laughing over raskils. Today she was doing a good impression of her brother’s wary reserve, and Luca didn’t know what to make of it.

The Kesey House workshop was in a village in Glassport territory, the name of which kept slipping out of Luca’s mind. Some single-syllable dullness like Mud or Lud, with two inns and wide, potholed streets and the comfortable air of a place devoted to cottage industry. The workshop was a repurposed barn, high beamed, divided into sections with long rough tables. Lined along one wall were large sacks full of raw fleece. Floor walkers with clipboards directed the transfer of this wool to smaller sacks, set beside the stool of each carder so that they could pick up handfuls at a time and work it.

The carding combs were each the size of a book, a thatch of metal teeth set in leather pads with wooden handles. There was a dance to it, a rhythm of the top carder against the bottom one, a flick of the elbow to turn them so that the fibres were worked back and forth.

It’s just like a new form, Luca told himself. A new feint. Observe, and learn.

After a while he felt confident enough in the motion of his hands that he struck up conversation with the person seated on his other side, giving up on Maya for the moment. Yolente was a square-jawed woman who looked his mother’s age and who wore a hair wrap of green cotton with glass beads sewn along its edge. The beads winked in the sunbeams that slanted down from the high barn windows.

Yolente, Luca learned, lived the next town over, and she was an itinerant: a worker who moved from Guild to Guild, following the available jobs for which no experience was needed, swearing herself briefly into one patron’s service and then moving on. It sounded like an uncomfortable way to make a living, even though Luca knew that for the people who followed that path it was often the best of a series of bad options.

Luca wanted to ask her if she ever found it confusing, living under a patron’s auspices without having grown up with them. Keeping track of the relevant rituals and calendar days, and then entering the employ of a new Guild and doing it all over again. He wondered if she swore by a different god every time she stubbed her toe. But asking about it would betray too much about himself, so he contented himself with “Do you ever wish you’d stuck with a single Guild? Stayed in the employ of one House, or tried to build a business?”

Her shrug was eminently pragmatic. “Building’s for those with means. Must is must. I do what I can and the gods’ve never come down too hard on me.”

“How do you like working for the Keseys?” Luca asked. He nodded in Maya’s direction. “My girl and I wouldn’t mind finding somewhere to put down roots for a while.”

“They don’t pay as well as I’d like,” Yolente said, lowering her voice. “But at my age I’ve got to settle to something, hey? You have to put in five years solid under most Guilds before you qualify for even their most basic retirement pension. Last year I was working a market garden owned by Amberden House—the pay was better, and I liked the open air—but my back’s not what it was, and only getting worse. At least this is easy on the bones.”

“As long as your bones are intact,” said the young woman on Yolente’s other side. She’d clearly been listening, and now nudged a fall of light brown hair over her shoulder and sent a glance towards the workshop supervisors. She introduced herself as Susanna, and added in a low tone, “Kesey House is mean as cats when it comes to worker safety. They cut corners. I carded for the Jays for a while. They pay physician fees if you’re injured on the job, and even give out a quarter wage if you’re too sick to work, as long as you’re expected to improve and come back.”

“You lost your job?” Luca asked.

“The workshop closed.” Her shrug was as fatalistic as Yolente’s had been. “It happens. Wasn’t happy about it, but I’d rather be let go plain and simple than be squeezed slowly for my juice by working longer hours for fewer coins and fewer rights.” Her mouth thinned. “You and your girl should try elsewhere, if you’ve the option to. I’m staying because my parents need me here, but I’ve told my sister to go to the city. Beg a weaving apprenticeship if she can, under a different House of Huna’s.”

An approving nod from Yolente. “That’s sense. And it’s a pity the Jays aren’t doing so well. He’s not bad for a House man, that Tomas Jay.”

Luca swallowed a sudden bubble of alertness and managed not to look at Maya. She’d knotted and wrapped her own hair, and sworn up and down that she hardly ever left the city and that most of her own work for her House was with those people they contracted to do the dyeing. Even so, Luca figured there was still a possibility that a prior employee might recognise her.

“Jay?” Luca managed, with nothing more than mild enquiry.

“The Glassport Guildmaster. I voted for him,” Susanna added, with the air of a proud parent watching their child perform on the piano. “And I’ll keep right on voting for him, as long as he keeps on giving a pube of the goddess about those of us who aren’t living with a House stitched to the back of our names.”

Luca swallowed a burst of laughter, bent his head, and applied himself to his work. He watched the practiced way Yolente transferred a hank of carded wool to the leather back of the comb, then rolled it between the flat surfaces until it was a pale tube like a piece of drainpipe or an oversized cigar. Each tube was flicked into a basket at her feet, and periodically these baskets were emptied into a fresh set of sacks, which were carried out of the workshop. Yolente told Luca, noticing his gaze, that the spinners had their own workshop nearby.

“We don’t do the dyeing or the weaving, here,” she said. “The wool goes elsewhere for that.”

Luca would have liked to try his orphan story out on Yolente, but he stuck with Maya’s cover story instead: that the two of them were roaming itinerants making their way south. Luca embroidered a little when conveying this to Yolente. He implied that they were all but betrothed, fleeing some vague shadow of family disapproval.

“The cobbler here in Nud’s got some of that northern blood,” said Yolente. “He’s not as dark as your girl, though, and he’s not got her way of speaking.”

Maya’s accent yesterday had been pure Glassport. Today, begging them work, she’d spoken in an accent Luca hadn’t heard before, a musical variant on Naraman with off-kilter rhythms. Now that they were ensconced among the other workers, that accent had mellowed, but it was still present.

Currently Maya was listening, with a lot more smiles and nodding than she’d displayed since Luca met her at the coach station in Glassport that morning, to the woman seated on her other side. When that woman left her seat to empty her basket, Luca turned back to Maya, angling his body intimately.

“We’re friends, aren’t we?” he said softly. “Smile.”

Maya’s smile was toothy but insincere. “Do you have friends, Luca Piere, or only marks?”

Luca pressed the side of his thumb against a sharp spike of his comb. He had friends, and he missed them. Under normal circumstances he was sure he’d have made plenty more of them here in Glassport by now, but the combination of keeping his head down and his cheerful self-embroilment in Matti’s affairs had meant he’d not taken up the opportunities to socialise with people like Ilse, beyond where employment brought them into contact. Part of why he’d enjoyed Maya’s company so much, the previous day, was how much he liked meeting new people and feeling that happy crackle of potential that had nothing to do with sex. It made her actions today sting all the more.

“Does Matti have friends?” he asked instead.

He was looking to sting in return. Sure enough, Maya’s mouth thinned. “What do you mean?”

“I mean he doesn’t have anything in his life but his House. Doesn’t that bother you?”

“I’m not going to feed you information on my brother.”

“I think you will, Mayanesh,” said Luca. “Because I think you care about him.”

“Just like you do?” She was quick. She’d snatched the unsaid part of Luca’s sentence from the air and turned it into a challenge.

“Yes,” Luca said, defiant. “I do.”

Maya lifted her combs and gestured with them. Luca had let his hands pause in their discussion. He cast a glance around to see if any of the clipboard wielders had noticed, then picked up a new handful of wool and began to work it. Yolente and Susanna had moved on to exchanging local gossip, woven through with bursts of laughter.

“He takes so much pride in his work,” Maya said finally, just as Luca was wondering if he’d misjudged and prodded her too far. “He’s so proud that he can handle Jay House’s business.”

“Yes, but at… wait. How old is he?”

Maya gave him an odd look. “He’s twenty-four.”

He looks older was going to be rude no matter what. “At twenty-four, being the senior House member surely only happens when you’ve lost a lot of older relatives. I know your mother’s from a long way north and your father is Guildmaster, but… what about their parents? Their siblings?”

“Mama’s parents are dead,” said Maya, like a well-aimed lunge. “She was the youngest of eight. None of the others live outside Manisi, and none of them are of our Guild in any case. And Granddad saw Jay House through some good times in his day, but now he’s… not very well.” She gave the wool in her hands a few savage blows with the combs. “He forgets things. Grandmama looks after him well enough, but it’s easier for them, in the country. They don’t come to town much.”

“They don’t know? About your House’s fortunes?”

Another violent series of back-and-forth motions. “Dad doesn’t want to worry them.”

“Imagine that,” said Luca. “I can’t think where Matti gets it from.”

Maya’s dark eyes held his. Her mouth moved, a tremor in its firmness. “He’s not alone. Matti. He’s never been alone. We all do our bit.”

“And what’s your bit ?” His tone was bordering on rude, but he was increasingly angry on Matti’s behalf.

“Dad calls it rose-oiling,” said Maya. “It was a joke, but I do it deliberately. I don’t know if he knows that. Keeping things peaceful and smooth. Like the oil on wool.” Maya sniffed a handful of the wool she was working with and made a face. “Only this oil’s been cut with goose grease,” she said, disapproving. “Cheap habit.”

Luca, who’d initially had to overcome the urge to shudder at the unexpected greasiness of it—he’d thought wool was dry, clean stuff—raised his eyebrows in query. Maya explained: in one corner of the workshop, workers were dribbling oil onto the handfuls of wool torn from teased fleeces, pressing and massaging the oil through the wool before putting it in sacks for the carders. It made the carding process easier. “Just like hair oil. It’s easier to straighten the fibres when they’re greased.”

“Rose-oiling,” said Luca. “I see.”

“It’s a talent. And I’ve learned to do it better. Mama has a different style to me. She asks questions—she pretends to be ignorant. And then she just keeps asking and keeps asking until the needle of the conversation is pointing the way she wants it to point.”

“My mother,” Luca said, and stopped. He could feel it, especially in contrast to her earlier coolness: the easy smoothness of Maya’s manner. He’d nearly let something true slide out. He filtered that truth in a way that felt safe. “She’s not that kind of person at all. She’s got no patience for fools, and if she doesn’t approve of what you’re doing, you’ll know it.”

Maya rolled some wool and flicked it expertly into her basket. “Is that why you left Cienne?”

“No,” said Luca. He didn’t realise until the word had escaped that it was, in an oblique but very real way, a lie. He tried the same flicking motion. The roll of wool fell forlornly onto his knee. “She’s not like that with me.”

“I’d do more,” Maya said abruptly. “I’d like to. I know every step of the business.”

“Then do it,” said Luca.

Maya’s look was wry. “You have met my brother, haven’t you? You know him, at least a little. What do you think happens when someone offers to take part of his duties out of his hands?”

Luca thought about it. Winced.

“Exactly,” said Maya. “Believe me, I’ve offered. But I can’t oil my way past the fact that Matti sees his job as keeping the rest of us as happy as possible. Not to mention that asking Matti if I can help, in his mind, is a suggestion that I don’t think he can do it. And he can. ” She gave a vicious swipe of the carders. “No matter what he thinks of himself. Nobody could have done more.”

“Just because he can,” said Luca, “doesn’t mean he should.”

He wondered for a moment if Maya was going to look stricken, but though her face flickered with too many expressions to count, Luca didn’t see guilt among them. She did glance around, and Luca shifted his stool even closer to hers, a silent encouragement. They were keeping their voices soft, and everyone around them was still engrossed in their own chatter; Luca didn’t want Maya to clam up again, not when she was providing him with so many edge pieces to the puzzle of Mattinesh Jay.

“You don’t know us,” she said, low and deliberate. “You’re a con artist and a serviceman. You don’t have a clue what it’s been like.”

“I know Matti, ” Luca said. “A little. Just like you said.”

Maya took a long breath. She let it out as she rolled her wool and let it drop into her basket. “It’s complicated. Perhaps Dad—but look, the Guildmaster position is important. It’s bigger than just our House. Dad thinks that the divisions that have formed in the last few decades between workers and House members have made the Guild lopsided, left it open for corruption, made it harder for us to work towards the same goals. The previous Guildmaster made things worse. He barely acknowledged that people like—well, like this,” she said, nodding around the workshop, “should have a voice in the Guildband, let alone the governance of Glassport and its territories.”

“Susanna over there voted for your father.”

“He’s popular,” Maya said. “Well… not among some of the other Houses. But every member of a Guild has a vote.” And no matter the power wielded by the Houses, they were always going to be outnumbered in their own Guild by those without, as Susanna had put it, a House name stitched to their own.

“He’s making himself unpopular on the council as well, from what Matti’s said.”

The side of Maya’s mouth tucked itself into something fond. “Oh, yes. He spends most of his days irritating people. I imagine the two of you would get along well.”

Luca decided to let that one go. “He’s blocking some kind of canal project?”

“Blocking a proposed waste of money just because Martens House doesn’t like how long it takes them to transport red marble overland before they can load it onto barges on the Rozen. So, Mr. Piere,” Maya said, a flash of unexpected steel entering her voice, “do you think Dad should have been selfish? Refused reelection? Stepped back from the council and let people like Lysbette Martens fill their pockets with city money that could go to fixing water pipes in the Ash Quarter? Focused on our personal fortunes, and let all of that slide?”

Luca was thinking that this whole damn family could have done with being a bit more selfish. He thought again about Matti, who’d quietly shouldered all his House’s failures and who thought it was up to him to keep trouble off his parents’ desks so that they could—be happy. Be idealists. Be a voice for people like Susanna, who were trying to do their best for their families in turn.

Gods, if only this was as simple as swords. There was a raw, gnawing feeling in Luca’s chest that he recognised by now as the guilt of being held up to someone else’s example and found desperately wanting. Even if the only person doing the comparison was him.

“Maybe he should have, yes,” he said. “If your personal fortunes were failing so badly.”

“Huna throws her coins—”

“And sometimes they land in the dust,” finished Luca. “Matti gave me that one as well, when he was telling me about the lost ship.”

“The Isadonna ?” Maya sighed. “Nobody’s ever pretended the crossing from Fataf is a smooth one, but only five ships have ever been lost in the Straits with all hands. Five .”

At the name, something stirred, a sluggish niggle in the back of Luca’s mind. It was like trying to see an after-flash of light in the corner of his eye; when he tried to bring it into focus, it dissolved.

He said slowly, “Ships can be crippled.”

“What?” Maya stared at him.

“Was Corus Vane involved in the arrangements for this—black wool?”

“Black libelza. I don’t know.” Maya’s carders were at rest in her lap now. “It’s possible. We trust him with a lot. But that’s—that’s a lot more than sabotaging contract bids and overpaying for mordant. That’s killing people just to deny us a shipment.”

“An important shipment,” Luca said, but she had a point. The niggle threw up one more tiny, dissatisfied signal and then disappeared. “Maybe Kesey House got impatient enough to consider it worthwhile.”

“If they were ruthless enough to be capable of that, I suppose fraudulent production of poor quality wool would seem like nothing at all.”

Yes. They were here for a purpose beyond arguing the relative merits of letting Matti Jay throw himself onto the pyre of his House. Luca applied himself to the carding job with vigour.

“Would those be a good place to start?” He nodded at the huge sacks full of uncarded fleece.

“Start?” said Maya. “Didn’t I tell you? We’re nearly done.”

Luca stared at her. She might have been quick, but she couldn’t hold a deception; the side of her wide mouth was curling like a leaf on flames, betraying the smug expression that was trying to crack through her calm.

“All right,” Luca said, when she refused to say anything further. “If I admit that you could have done this whole thing without me, will you tell me what the fuck it is you’ve discovered?”

The calm cracked; she let out a soft huff of a laugh. “I’m sure you were an important part of my disguise,” said Maya. She tipped a roll of carded wool into her basket, then leaned down and, with a quick glance around that Luca could have told her was detrimental to that disguise, pulled her small sack of fleece into her lap. She dug in it quickly and pulled out two pieces of wool, which she handed to Luca.

“It’s already been mixed in,” Maya said. “You’re right, they’re probably doing it over there.” She looked towards the large sacks, and the people with clipboards. “They could have had it carded separately and spun together, but there’d be a more obvious difference in the fibre lengths that way.”

“Are you saying the workers aren’t noticing? I certainly didn’t.”

“This is the first time you’ve touched unprocessed wool. You can’t tell your elbow from your arsecheek,” said Maya, and Luca felt himself smile. “These are from two different breeds. They’re both shorn fleeces, not pulled, but see how this one has longer fibres? A finer crimp?”

Luca rubbed the two samples between his fingers. There was a difference, not only in the feel but in the look of them, with one of them undeniably shaggier and the other with the kind of tight, curling wiriness similar to what you saw in the hair of some of the people native to northern Draka. One of Luca’s friends back home had hair like that, and so did Dinah Vaunt.

“If you say so.”

“I asked Carlin if this workshop usually does blends, and she said they only started in the last year.” A quick nod of Maya’s head towards the woman on her other side. Luca’s estimation of Maya’s worth as a partner in crime leapt another few points. “It’s not the job of the carders to keep track of labelling for quality control. But they know what they’re working with, even if they don’t know what it’s being passed off as once it’s made it to the fabric stage.”

Luca saw the missing piece in their corroboration mission at once. “But you need to know that what’s leaving this workshop is being passed off as… pure? Unmixed?”

“The labelling system across Thesper was standardised when the mandatory labelling laws for fabric were passed,” Maya said. “Give me two minutes.” She reached down to Luca’s pathetically half-filled basket of carded tubes and tipped it into her own—rendering it close to overflowing—and then stood, basket tucked under one arm, and made her way over to the sacks destined for the spinning workshop. Luca kept one eye on her and tried to look industrious at the same time, wincing as he managed to graze the side of his hand with the carding teeth.

Maya emptied her basket into one of the sacks and lingered there exchanging words with a woman standing officiously near the sacks. After a short while she turned and made her way back to her stool. On the way she caught Luca’s eye and nodded, once and firmly.

“Well, look,” said Luca, once she was seated next to him again. “Now I’ve got nothing in my basket to show for all my hard work. It looks like I’ve done nothing at all. Are you trying to get me fired from this very important fake job which I will never show up to again, Mayanesh?”

Maya’s mouth leaf-curled again, then sprang fully alight with her smile.

“There, you do like me.” Luca threw a grin at her in return. “Admit it.”

The smile faded off Maya’s face. The stirrings of satisfaction and good spirits in Luca disappeared with much the same abruptness.

“Oh, shitting gods, what ?” he demanded. “What’s your problem with me?”

“Beyond the fact that you nearly ruined my brother, and all of us, with some stupid trick with a pocket watch?”

That sounded like a distraction. “Yes. Beyond that.”

Maya exhaled. The tightness of her posture relaxed in a way that looked very deliberate and very much like Matti when Luca reminded him, for the fifth time during a lesson, not to hold his shoulders so rigidly.

“I don’t know if you’re good for him.”

Luca felt his lip curl back. “Because I’m giving him a chance to have fun, and not—”

“No.” Her voice snipped at him. “Listen to me. Matti’s betrothed is a beautiful, clever woman, and he talks about her like he’s glad the teacher assigned him a deskmate who isn’t going to maliciously drip ink on his worksheets.”

“I thought this was a business match.” The word betrothed felt like dry grass on Luca’s skin. “Finer feelings irrelevant. Are you actually annoyed because he’s not pretending to be head over heels in love with her?”

“Nobody expects them to be in love going into it.” Maya was looking at her wrist now, flicking and fiddling with the pearly button at her shirt cuff. “But I know he could learn to love her, if he let himself try. They’d be happier that way. Both of them.”

“And how, by all the gods, is any of this my fault?”

Maya looked up. Luca was already conditioned to crave fierceness in those dark, thick-lashed eyes; it was entirely unfair that Matti’s sister was able to wield a weapon that Matti himself was so hesitant to use, and which Luca would have welcomed.

“Because when he talks about you, he looks like he’s found a luckstone on the street, and he doesn’t know whether to keep it in his pocket or have it set in a ring.”

For a long moment, Luca didn’t know what he was doing with his face.

“Because I think perhaps you could still ruin us,” Maya said. “That’s my problem with you.”

“You can’t tell me this is the first time Matti’s wanted something he thinks he’s not supposed to have.”

“Huna wept,” Maya said, soft and tight. “No. I—I don’t think so. But he’s never let it show before.”

Luca looked down at his feet, which were in motion, drumming lightly on the wooden floor. He hadn’t noticed. He felt the restive sensation in them build until his skin was stuffed with the urge to run out of the door and out of this stupid village and all the way back to Glassport, where he could find Matti and stand in front of him and—what? Search his face for a luckstone expression?

Say, I’d live in your pocket for as long as you wanted ?

Say, Betray everything you’ve worked for and everyone you love. Go on. It’ll be fun ?

“This is an alarming silence,” said Maya. She might have been trying for dryness, but her voice still sounded like a thread pulled taut.

“You’re asking something of me,” Luca said. “Spell it out.”

“Don’t distract him more than you have already,” Maya said. “I thought I knew my brother better than anyone else in the world, and now I’m seeing pieces of him that are unfamiliar, and we can’t afford that. We can’t afford the unexpected. Not now.”

“I know you can’t.” This was torture. The gods and the Jays were in alliance to make it very clear to Luca that he couldn’t have the one thing he wanted, and it was just making him want it more . “No matter what else is happening, I’ve been formally contracted to make sure this wedding goes ahead. A duellist’s reputation is all the currency they have. I’ll do my best to win.”

“And that means something to you?”

“What?”

“Your reputation.”

“I—”

Maya gestured around the workshop with a carder. “Duelling’s not just another very important fake job?”

That buried itself in Luca’s stomach like a grass-burr. His cheeks felt tight. “No. It’s important.” It’s all I have left.

Maya looked at him closely for another few moments. She nodded. “All right. Do your best. Win this for us.”

“I will,” Luca said, and he’d never told a truth that felt so much like lying.