Chapter 5

CHAPTER

5

Blackmail or no blackmail, employee or not, Luca sincerely wished he had insisted on holding these lessons in the evenings. The pin in the alarm clock he’d borrowed from the Tollivers was set to an hour of the morning that Luca had previously only seen from the other side, after the occasional giddy night of dancing and flirting and drinking until the sun’s first rays split the sky.

At least it was light. Luca shuddered to think how awful this would have been in the cold months with their longer nights.

“You get used to it,” Matti said, while he was removing his coat.

“I’d rather not, if it’s all the same to you.”

Luca bounced on his toes and circled his wrists and shoulders to begin limbering up, while Matti went through the process of choosing a sword and then came to stand in front of him. Luca didn’t know if he was envious of or annoyed by the way Matti held himself: calm and still, as though he were waiting with unconscious ease for the attention in the room to centre upon him, knowing he wouldn’t have to lift a finger. And he didn’t . They could have been in a packed Guildhall, or the busiest market in Glassport, and Luca wouldn’t have wanted to look at anything else.

“All right. Show me a ready stance,” Luca said.

Matti lifted his sword. It took him a few seconds of shifting his feet and consciously adjusting, but the position he ended up in was a lot better than anything he’d managed the previous day.

“That’s… actually, that’s not a complete disaster.”

“I practiced. Before bed.”

“I assumed you don’t own any swords.”

“I used my hairbrush.”

The image sprang helpfully into Luca’s head: solemn Matti, wearing nightclothes and brandishing a hairbrush in front of his dresser, like an indignant girl trying to defend herself from unwanted advances.

“Your hairbrush, ” he said, struggling not to laugh.

“Yes, all right, but I don’t have anything else. The handle’s about the right width,” Matti said weakly, relaxing out of the stance.

“No, hold it,” Luca commanded, and took a closer look at Matti’s grip this time. “That’ll do. Let’s try the basic forms. The first one is moving from ready stance to a guard in the winter quadrant. Don’t worry—I’ll fix everything as we go.”

A lot easier to say, it turned out, than to do. Luca’s optimism crashed to the ground like a dropped glass after ten minutes of trying to explain the concept of holding a soft guard position to allow for a middling parry.

“So if I come at your winter quadrant like this, ” he said, demonstrating a slow low strike directed upwards, “and you parry too shallowly, I’ll have time to adjust and get inside your guard. Parry too widely, and you’ll have too far to move the next time.”

“You’re… circling.” Matti was looking at Luca’s feet, instead of minding his guard.

“What?”

“In the duels I’ve seen, everything has happened in a straight line. More or less.”

“I’m teaching you informal style,” Luca said. “Because—well, I don’t know. That’s what’s used in wedding duels.”

“There’s more than one style?”

Luca had the strong urge to go and bash his head against the wall. “Thesperan duelling has three. The duels at most kinds of ceremonies are formal style, along a linear plane, because they’re for an audience. High formal has even showier movements, and it uses longer swords. If you’re trying to do what you’ve seen someone do at a ceremony, for fuck’s sake, don’t .” He demonstrated the form again. “It’s supposed to be small. Like this. You see?”

“I see.”

The skin of Luca’s throat warmed at the intent way Matti’s gaze travelled over his body. He knew what it was to be looked at, and he did know the difference between looks and looks. He felt his tongue flick out and wet his lips.

“Though,” Matti went on, “ seeing doesn’t seem to be helping me do anything properly.”

“No, it isn’t,” said Luca, too distracted by Matti’s hot eyes to be polite. “Aren’t you getting frustrated?”

Surely he must be, by now. Surely not even Matti’s still-waters act could be kept up indefinitely. But Matti just shrugged. The anger that Luca had seen on the day Matti hired him had clearly been tidied away into the same deep inner pocket that Matti used to hide… whatever it was he felt and thought when his eyes stayed too long on Luca’s thighs or Luca’s wrists.

“I’m supposed to be bad at it. I’m a beginner. And clearly I have no natural gift for it, if you think I should be picking things up more quickly.”

“Do you want to stop?”

Matti’s brow furrowed. “I didn’t say that.”

Luca furrowed right back at him. “As you pointed out when you asked for these lessons, Mr. Jay—”

“Matti,” said Matti immediately.

“—As you pointed out, Matti, the point isn’t to turn you into a duellist. You’re supposed to be enjoying yourself, unless you’re harbouring a passion for suffering that you have so far failed to tell me about.”

“Yes,” Matti agreed.

“Yes to the suffering thing? If that’s the case, I can start whacking you from time to time with the flat of the blade. All part of the service.”

That won him the feinting flicker of a smile. “Yes to the enjoyment.”

Luca looked at him dubiously. “Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

Luca bit down on the urge to apologise. He wasn’t sure what he would have been apologising for. “All right.”

Matti sighed. “I could be focusing more carefully. My mind’s on other things. I’m sorry.”

That at least was something Luca might be able to fix. Master Carriere had a simple technique for those days when Luca brought anything more than himself into the practice room and let his preoccupations and temper intrude on the lesson.

“Tell me about those things,” he said.

“What?”

“Talk. Get it out, whatever it is, and pretend that it’s all piling up on the floor and can’t climb back into your head. Then kick it aside and we’ll try again.”

It was no more rational than the piece of string between the shoulders, but there was something about these ridiculous images that stuck in the mind and made them effective.

“It’s a business problem.” Matti gave one of his brief, humourless smiles. “They’re all business problems. But this one woke me up at midnight and wouldn’t let me sleep again. Do you know anything about locality laws when it comes to product supply? Legislation that says, for example, that only wool farmed and processed in Barlow territories can be sold in Barlow city.”

“It doesn’t matter what I know.” Luca pointed at the floor. “There.”

“For months now, the Guild of Spinners and Weavers in Barlow has been dancing around the idea of loosening their locality laws and letting the Houses in Glassport into the market. Their winters are colder than ours, and a lot of their land that used to support sheep was bought up in the canola boom. Their suppliers can’t keep up with demand from the tailoring houses in the cold months. But they’re afraid once they let us into the market we’ll crowd them out, and it’s pointless to limit legislation by dates because winter fashions start appearing in the shops at the start of autumn, and we’re producing and selling even earlier, and—” Matti took an audible breath. He was staring at the floor, at least, as though he could see the whole mess of it piling up there. “Collins, the Guildmaster, is dragging his heels. Partly because he doesn’t like something my father’s doing on the Glassport city council.”

Luca nodded, encouraging, when Matti glanced up at him as if to check that he was still in the room. “Your father the Guildmaster.”

“It’s a long story.” Matti rubbed at the back of his own neck. It looked like an unconscious motion, one that leached a small fraction of the tension from his shoulders. “Lysbette Martens is the Mason Guildmaster, and her House has a share in a red marble quarry up near the border with Barlow territory. She’s pushing for the council to approve the construction of a new canal in that direction. It would save Martens House weeks of transport time. Dad’s blocking the vote on its approval.”

The pieces were sliding into place, even for someone with a mental map of Thesper as hazy as Luca’s. “And I suppose half the Houses with headquarters in Barlow love that idea,” Luca said. “Including this Collins.”

Matti nodded. “A direct channel to a major port, and one that they’d barely have to pay a bronze for, given how much of it would be within Glassport’s borders? Yes. But Dad’s not going to change his vote. I think Collins does know that, but he’s irritated, so he’s holding out on this deal. He wants a sweetener. Some kind of guarantee that the demand in the Barlow wool market year-round will support Jay House increasing the supply, and—we haven’t got anything to offer.”

Master Carriere had always stayed silent and uncaring when he made Luca do this. The audience wasn’t supposed to participate. The point wasn’t to find a solution.

“You need a third party in this deal,” Luca said, unable to help himself. “Demand doesn’t just appear from nowhere.”

“I know that,” Matti said, impatient. “But there’s only so much you can do with summer fashions in a city where—”

“Forget fashion.” Luca hesitated. Once again he had that twin urge: to be truthful and to avoid the truth. He found a truth that wasn’t the example he’d been thinking of, but which would do in its place. “I ran a con, in another city,” he said. “I bought cheap feathers and lavender in bulk, got a friend to make useless dangling ornaments from them, and then sent around copies of a fake decree from the Hearthkeeper Guildband that said it was a new part of celebrating the month of Osta’s Dance. Every inn and hotel and boardinghouse in the city bought them at a ludicrous price from my friend’s stall, and hung them from their doorframes.”

He didn’t mention that he’d donated all his profits as a gift to the Hearthkeeper Guildhall. He hadn’t wanted to offend Osta, and hadn’t needed the money. He’d just been—bored, and trying to prove something to himself.

He said, “The point is, you can legislate demand. Legitimately. Use this Guildmaster’s voice on Barlow’s city council. You just have to find a group that—”

“Lawyers,” said Matti suddenly.

Luca, his rhythm thrown off, stared at Matti’s newly lit eyes for a moment before the meaning fell into place. “Courtroom gowns?”

“Yes. They’ve got to wear them anyway, they buy new hoods and trim year-round because the colour depends on Katu’s religious calendar, and if there’s a mandate on wool percentage in the fabric—and that wool coming from Barlow territories, to protect the local industry—I think it’s worth trying. The Lawyer Guildmaster in Barlow is—Joan Murtagh, I think? She certainly won’t mind being owed a favour by a trade Guild.”

“There,” Luca said. Satisfaction hummed through him. “Better?”

“I… thank you.” Matti smiled at him: a real one, this time. “You know, perhaps you’re wasted on this sort of thing,” he added, gesturing with his sword.

Luca’s hungry enjoyment of Matti’s smile stuttered to a halt. The words struck as if on a bruise, far too close to the imaginary version of Perse that Luca kept hearing when he made the mistake of slowing down, of letting his thoughts settle. Matti had managed to land a blow within his guard because Luca had forgotten that he wasn’t supposed to be himself. Because Matti made him forget to lie.

He said, waspish, “By all means. Let me toss my sword out the window right now —”

“I didn’t—”

“—and get a job staring at numbers in an office somewhere, shall I? And you can bloody well be your own best man. Best of luck with that.”

There was a long pause. A knotted rope had tightened in Luca’s throat, and he had to breathe deeply to loosen it. Matti touched his own mouth with a thumb, not moving his careful gaze from Luca’s.

“I meant it as a compliment,” Matti said. “I’m sorry. If it’s any consolation, you’ll most likely get to whack me with the flat of your blade sooner or later, given how bad I am at this.”

Damn it. Luca was terrible at staying angry at the best of times, and the knot in his throat was dissolving under the unexpected warmth of Matti’s teasing. He felt his mouth twitch. “I’m counting on it.”

“Now. Winter guard,” Matti said firmly, and lifted his sword. “I’ll try it again.”

It wasn’t as though the hairbrush solution was ideal.

But even if Matti could afford to buy a cheap, dulled sword to practice with, his chances of getting it into the house without someone noticing and asking questions was approximately nil. So he practiced with the brush, every night before bed. Despite his exhaustion it never felt like work. It wasn’t staring at numbers, or forcing his mind to the ends of various options, or writing letter after letter to debtors, to buyers, to the tailors and fashion houses who were placing orders that would not be able to be filled this season. Next year, Matti wrote, over and over again. They were having temporary issues with the supply. No call for concern. Next year, Jay House would be back on its feet.

Matti couldn’t spit all of that onto the floor and forget it. Instead, he didn’t allow himself into bed until he felt like he’d managed to recreate at least a flimsy echo of what Luca had shown him that day.

Now, after fifteen lessons and fifteen nights, he had a tentative hope that he might be starting to improve.

Luca never stopped complaining about the early hour, but every day he seemed more awake when he unlocked the door. And he was obviously trying to keep a handle on his temper; not that he was always successful. The dwindling of Luca’s patience could be measured in the restlessness of his feet, and the amount he fiddled with his hair and clothes when he was watching Matti.

And Luca did watch. A lot. Nobody in Matti’s life had ever paid him this much single-minded attention, for any reason. It was often uncomfortable, and sometimes downright unnerving. Not least because if Matti had managed to work out the unconscious cues of Luca’s body, he wondered what Luca had managed to read in his.

Because Matti had never paid anyone else this much attention either. When he closed his eyes in bed, prepared either for swift sleep or for awful, grimy hours of insomnia—rarely did he manage a middle ground—he saw the tendons of Luca’s wrist shifting as he demonstrated a parry. Luca’s hair catching merry hold of the sun as it rose, or the colour of a tarnished coin when the day was overcast.

Today, Luca was trying to teach Matti another of the basic forms: a simple exchange of blows that would apparently press the memory of the action into Matti’s muscles like a seal into wax. Matti already knew that this would take a lot more repetition than he had time for, but he was happy to see how far he could get.

If he could just understand how to do it in the first place.

Matti winced as the sword’s handle jerked against his gloved fingers, jarring them, and his blade scraped Luca’s with a pathetic ching as it wobbled off in the wrong direction. Luca’s sword touched the side of his neck and lifted again, insultingly fast, then lowered.

“What is so fucking difficult about elbow out, blade across ?” Luca demanded.

Matti rubbed sweat from his forehead with his cuff. “Show me again.”

“I’ve shown you ten times, you just aren’t doing it right.”

“Then show me another way!” Matti said, needled. “If I’m not learning, whose fault is that? Haven’t you ever taught anyone anything before?”

Luca opened his mouth. Closed it. It sounded like it cost him something to say, “No.”

Matti thought about everything he’d ever taught Maya, from making spice biscuits to reading an auction-house report. He thought about how much he treasured the light of Merri’s smile, the crack of Marko’s laughter, when he could spare the time to teach them anything at all.

How did you get through life without passing anything on, but only absorbing for yourself?

Only stealing, Matti thought, remembering the pocket watch.

He said, “Well, you need to try harder.”

Luca’s voice rose. “You think I’m not trying?”

Matti liked to think that he was a levelheaded man. But if there was one thing he lacked patience for, it was people who tried to wriggle out from beneath their responsibilities, and suddenly he found Luca’s dramatics more tiresome than entertaining. “I didn’t say that.”

Something ugly flashed in Luca’s expression. “I’m good at this,” he said, low. “I’m very good at it. And two weeks ago you could barely tell one end of a sword from the other. So what the fuck do you know?”

The unfairness of that crystallised. Matti’s voice hardened. “I know that when a lesson is going this badly, you can blame me or blame the hour of day all you want, but at some point you have to admit that some of the problem is you .”

A bark of laughter escaped Luca. He snatched the sword from Matti’s hands and returned it to the rack. “All right. This has officially stopped being fun. I’ll think of something else for you to work on tomorrow, but we’re done for today.”

An unfamiliar tide of anger rose in Matti. He didn’t manage to swallow as much of it as he wanted, before he opened his mouth. Somewhat to his shock, what came out was: “No. I’ve bought your time, and that means I decide when we’re done.”

Luca pivoted with a predatory grace that seemed to make a mockery of Matti’s own efforts. It made Matti angrier.

“Really, Mr. Jay,” Luca said, an acid bite to his tone.

“I’m not paying you to have fun. I’m paying you to be here.”

“Even if we both agree that we’re not getting anywhere?”

“Yes,” said Matti. “Even if I tell you to stand there and do nothing .”

“That would be wasteful.” The acid was sliding into sarcasm now. “Like I’m wasted as a duellist? You don’t strike me as someone who’s fond of waste, Mr. Jay. If it’s your precious time, are you sure you don’t want to demand something else?”

“Stop calling me that.”

“I am but your humble servant, Mr. Jay, ” Luca said, silky and obnoxious.

“Luca.”

“You told your family you’re taking dance lessons in the mornings, is that right? We could turn that lie on its head. Turn it into truth.”

Matti’s breath caught as Luca slid into his space. One of Luca’s hands landed on Matti’s shoulder and the other took hold of Matti’s fingers. Matti felt both points of contact like splashes of warm water, and couldn’t help the sway of his body towards Luca’s.

He felt the reaction, the sudden tightening of Luca’s hand, as Luca noticed.

“You’ve bought me?” Luca said. His eyes were close and insolent. “You own me? Will you tell me to show you a dance?”

Matti said, “No,” even as his own free hand burned with the need to put it at Luca’s waist. It would be easy. Luca’s chest was rising unsteadily and his gaze kept falling to Matti’s mouth.

“You could tell me to do all sorts of things,” said Luca. The mocking anger was by now a mere shell around his words, turning them into something that hovered between question and promise.

Into Matti’s mind, vivid and explicit, crashed a host of impossible possibilities. Luca’s talented hands beneath Matti’s clothing. Luca going to his knees. Luca in his arms, Luca’s skin against his; Luca writhing and restless and demanding. Matti barely repressed a full-body shudder. He could feel Luca’s breath on the underside of his own jaw. Luca’s thumb shifted minutely against the side of Matti’s finger, and Matti wanted to beg him to continue. He bit down on his tongue.

“But no,” Luca said. “You’d rather I did nothing.”

Matti didn’t trust himself. He held Luca’s gaze through a tiny gap of air that seemed dry and dangerous: high-summer grass awaiting a burn. Finally he managed to say, “Yes.”

It was partly a lie. He would rather give in to the joke that wasn’t a joke, pull Luca fully against him and kiss the cleverness from that mouth until nothing came from it but gasps.

Partly, it was the truth. Matti didn’t know swords, but he knew how to hold a bluff until it wasn’t a bluff any longer. He was not going to budge, and he wanted to see if the shifting currents of Luca would part around him.

Luca pulled both of his hands away. He took two steps back and then dropped to the floor like a child awaiting a story, cross-legged, casual. He stretched one leg out. He folded it in again. He drummed his fingers on the floor. His gaze was level and annoyed. “If you’re done being ridiculous—”

“We’re not done,” said Matti.

He didn’t say, You’re the one who sat down. I didn’t tell you to do that.

“All you’re doing is—frustrating us both. For nothing.”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

Because you don’t want to.

“You took my money. Today, this is what I want.”

Luca scratched the back of his neck. Plucked at a dusty fold of his trousers. Rolled his shoulders, clasped his hands.

Matti’s arousal was settling, but it refused to vanish altogether. He watched the taut twitch of Luca’s body and felt nearly as taut himself. This was ridiculous. But this was Matti’s time and he was going to do nothing, nothing, he was allowed . The pleasure of that was almost as sharp and shameful as the pleasure of enforcing idleness in someone as restless as Luca.

And it wasn’t a complete waste. Matti knew it; Luca knew it. Something was being brought into balance.

When Luca settled, it was like the hand of a wound-down clock finally coming to rest. He gave a shuddering breath, dropped his shoulders a few inches, and—stopped. His head didn’t bow, but his chin lowered a little as the muscles of his throat relaxed.

Matti had to breathe through a sudden, absurd impulse to reach out and touch Luca’s hair. He didn’t even know what the motion would indicate. Gratitude? Praise? Apology?

Or was it just that he’d wanted to do it since the instant he first laid eyes on the man, and this was the first moment it had seemed anything other than unsafe?

Luca’s hands rested on his knees. He had delicate fingers, dry knuckles.

I did that, Matti thought, and it was like an ember rising from his feet through his stomach and chest. That is mine. His pulse picked up and there was a hot taste in his mouth: fear, Matti thought then, the realisation coming right on the bright heels of the possessiveness. I’m afraid.

When Matti was no more than the twins’ age, he and his mother had travelled north so that Matti could meet his grandmother, Nessanesh’s mother. Lailanesh had been unwell, though Matti had not realised this at the time, and she had died not long after.

They had travelled by sea for part of the journey. Matti remembered someone lifting him, hands firm at his waist, so that Matti could sit at the very front of the ship where the bowsprit jutted out over the parting waves. Matti had felt the wind tossing spray into his eyes, and his small terrified heart had deafened him and shaken him and delighted him all at once. A clean fear, an exciting one. Very different to the grubby, bone-weary fears that had dragged at Matti since the day he learned to read his father’s worries in the furrow of Tomas’s brow; the same day those worries first whispered into Matti’s ear and began to steal his sleep.

Now only Luca’s gaze was twitching, side to side. And then it too settled, until Luca was gazing steadily into an unknown distance at the level of Matti’s knees.

Most of Matti shivered and shrank from the way he felt, watching Luca Piere go still. But part of him blinked open eyes that had been shut, it seemed, for a very long time, and that part insisted: No, cling to it.

It hurts, but it might wipe you clean.

Matti walked to where his coat was slung across a table, and checked the time on his watch where it was in the pocket. It was an excuse. It was something to do while he conquered his heart rate and made sure his face was composed. His ears were pricked for the slightest sound from Luca, but none came.

He slid the watch back into the coat pocket, turned, and went to offer Luca a hand up. He’d braced himself, but he still wasn’t prepared for the echo that slammed into him, shook his bones, when Luca looked unblinking and unsmiling up at him from the floor. They were in an empty practice room, not a crowded drinking house, and Matti hadn’t been tricked into stepping on anything. But he felt some of that same disorientation, that same sense of being hurtled into the unknown.

Luca put his hand in Matti’s and pulled himself to his feet. He cleared his throat.

“Show me the third form,” Luca said. “You’ve done that before, and it takes you through the same position that you were struggling with. I didn’t realise. Do it slowly and I’ll show you where to pause.”

Matti didn’t trust himself to smile without laughing.

He said, “All right,” and the moment moved on.