note: written for the Emelan SFF, over at The Dancing Dove forum. Spoilers for Street Magic straight on through The Will of the Empress.
Rosemary, Circular
It was all Rosethorn's doing and none of his own, or at least that's what Briar claimed whenever the subject came up within her hearing. If she was close enough, she'd pretend to box his ears -- playacting only; she rarely touched him and had never once in eight years struck him in anger -- though if she was not in a good humor she would stop labeling medicines and blister his ears raw with her opinion on the matter.
"That's hardly the sort of house I remember raising you in," Lark would say, with a reproving smile, once Rosethorn paused for breath. And Briar would grin and change the subject. The lies that came most easily had a layer of truth spread over them, like good fertilizer. Besides, if he would rather speak of the sort of flesh that was not part of a garbage heap of the dead and the dying, what of it? He thought to himself that he had earned that right.
-
He hauled his other leg up on the windowsill. Waited for a fraction of a second before dropping down, lightly, into the room of the inn. It was another few minutes before he allowed himself to smile, the way he had to the girl he had just left, but more crookedly. There was a satisfaction curled into the corners of Briar's mouth that could not have existed before.
"I don't pay for rooms so you can sneak in and out of them." Rosethorn's voice made him jerk around.
Denial would only make things worse; Rosethorn tolerated liars even less than weeds -- at least the latter could not be instantly condemned simply for existing. Briar shrugged. "I thought I'd be considerate and let you and Evvy sleep, 'stead of slamming the door at all hours." Briefly he wondered how she knew and then discarded the question in the next instant. The vines that overshadowed the inn would have insured she knew, the way that nothing had escaped her notice once she had entered one of Chammur's hanging gardens. Green magic gathered and strung together like a net. He had never minded the safety of it before, but that was -- before. "I can pay for my own rooms if you're in the mood to get all snippy."
She hoisted herself out of her chair and held out a steaming cup of something that smelled like spoiled meat and peppermint. "Drink this. Not another word," she added, when Briar opened his mouth to protest.
He drank down the tisane of droughtwort. Rosethorn waited until he grimaced at the taste before shuffling out of the room.
-
When they rested at an oasis the next day, Rosethorn took him by the elbow and spoke, sparingly; at the end of it he understood that she was nearly as uncomfortable as he was. When one of Evvy's cats escaped its basket, it was a welcome distraction. That was the extent that anyone ever spoke to him about sex. He'd been about fifteen then, he figured.
There is beauty in every woman, his teacher had begun, but her slurred speech made almost everything she said sound dulled with insincerity, and the downward twist to her mouth made him unsure that she believed it at all. He had been much more sure of where things stood when she told him that respect for a woman was something he'd always remember or else she'd personally hang him by his thumbs in the nearest well.
-
Briar still remembered her words four years later, and could never dispute the truth of it. Better a warm and willing body next to his than recalling the chill of Yanjing -- and it was easy to be gallant in the dark. Even to Sandry's new maid. Or especially; he was never quite sure which.
Gudruny put the adage to the test, but not overly so. She had been lovely once and could be again. Once she stopped being skittish at the idea of her new mistress and her foster-siblings being mages, she was as solidly sensible as Rosethorn, and had a knack for brewing cups of tea the way that Lark did. Aside from the commotion her husband had made that one morning, Briar's first clear memory of her was seeing Gudruny in the kitchens, one of her children clinging to her plain skirts while she kneaded bread under Wenoura's watchful eye. Gudruny's skin was speckled with flour up to the wrists; she left white fingerprints on the teacup that she served to Briar.
He tried to explain, uncomfortable. "I just meant to get some breakfast for Zhegorz."
"A boy never stops being hungry for something," Wenoura informed him, putting another roll into his hand. "Better another meal." Gudruny nodded. When she bent to serve him more tea, he caught the scent of bread and rose perfume, cheaply made. He was glad for the distraction of too-hot tea. For a moment his nose had detected the smell of animal-fat lamps and Hajran tavern food, the kind he had not smelled since he was four.
-
He expected Gudruny to protest. He had not expected her to surprise him.
With Caidy the rules of the game had demanded slow seduction, snares disguised as gifts, looks that promised more than they gave. It had excited him precisely because it was so pointless, so frivolous.
With Gudruny, it was not a game at all. She said nothing of his age or the impropriety of it; she said very little, but her skin was warm and yielding, and the fine lines around her mouth and the loose skin of her belly were invisible in the dark of his room. Her coarse hair between her fingers could have been any color at all -- dull black or chestnut-red -- and it was that thought more than anything that pushed him over the edge.
-
There is beauty in every woman, his teacher had said -- not as a fact but a warning.
7 June 2006