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Chapter Fifteen: A Day in the Life

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T.M. 116

Tarai swept the cobblestones in front of the jewelry stall industriously, humming a cheerful nonsense tune. Kayamé had the position behind the table until mid-morning, and sat watching the passing street traffic with the air of an experienced salesgirl. Due to the street being a convenient shortcut between two major thoroughfares, they saw all sorts of passersby going about their business. In all likelihood, Kayamé was calculating probabilities of someone stopping to browse, buy, or attempt to steal. They had decent experience with all three scenarios.

They were lucky there were two of them, because if anyone unpleasant stopped by, one could retrieve Emmaline from the house while the other stalled the visitor. Tarai still wasn't sure how she did it, but the sight of Emmaline with a grim face and a large stick in hand was enough to deter even the more suspicious customers. For lack of a better description, it was as if the woman's aura changed, or a curtain of cheerful goodwill were pulled back to reveal something that could be extremely dangerous if unleashed. Tarai was only glad that Emmaline had never had cause to turn that face on her or Kayamé.

Regardless of any unpleasant possibilities, Tarai remained firmly ensconced in her good mood. According to her calculations, in three days she would be celebrating her tenth-year bornday. She and Kayamé hadn't known their borndays when Ghenn and Emmaline took them in, so the couple had let them choose a day to celebrate. Kayamé loved the spring and chose a day under the Rain Moon, while Tarai loved the weather and colors of fall, choosing a day under the Harvest Moon. As an added bonus, she had settled on her bornday as the day she and Kayamé first met their guardians three years ago. No matter how much time passed, it was something she never, ever, wanted to forget.

Approaching footsteps caused Tarai too look up. A young man in traveling clothes looked curiously at the pair of them, pausing on his way through the narrow street.

"What type of shop is this?"

"Good morning, sir," Kayamé responded politely. "These are the trinkets of craftsman Ghenn. If you would care to look, we have many kinds of jewelry and other small pieces of workmanship."

"Jewelry, eh?"

Tarai stepped out of the way, allowing him access to the displayed collection. He smiled and bent his much taller frame to accommodate the overhanging cloth, lifting a bracelet to examine the clear and colored glass. After several minutes of browsing under Kayamé's guidance, a pair of earrings caught his attention: small roses in full bloom, each glass petal tinted a shade of pale pink.

"These are exquisite," he remarked in a tone of voice approaching awe. "How does he make them?"

Tarai smiled slightly. Most new customers asked some variation of that question. At least it was Kay's turn to answer this time.

"It's a method of melting and connecting glass, sir. I don't rightly know how he adds color."

"Truly a rare art. I've never seen the like."

"Ghenn is the master of his craft," Kayamé agreed proudly. "No one else in the city can do half so well, and lots have tried."

"I'm sure they have. I have a little sister about your age," the man went on, "and she's been really looking forward to when she can pierce her ears in a few months. Do you think she'd like these?"

Tarai blinked. First-time customers rarely showed much respect for them, given their age and gender. Even repeat patrons tended to remain condescending in the infuriating way only adults knew how to cultivate, and few ever bothered to ask for advice.

"Um, yes," Kayamé answered. "I think she would. Perhaps you might also like to buy a gift for," she hesitated uncertainly for only a moment, "someone special to you, or perhaps your mother if she is blessed to be among the living?"

The man chuckled ruefully. "You're probably right. Mother would never let me hear the end of it if I gave Dyani something so elegant and left her out. What do you have fitting for a family matriarch?"

Kayamé couldn't resist interrupting her attempts at playing the dignified and respectful shopkeeper, and responded with an impish grin. "Perhaps a necklace, then. She'll be able to show it off anytime she likes, if the design is simple enough."

"Very perceptive of you, young miss. How much would these cost?" He picked out a pendant on a cord and placed it beside the earrings.

Kayamé inspected them, and looked up at the overhang blocking her view of the sky as she performed some mental calculations. She had picked up enough arithmetic to price their merchandise herself, a complement to Tarai's slowly growing assertiveness, so that either could work the shop alone if business was slow, or sell together if multiple customers happened to come by.

After a short silence she named a sum that caused the young man to raise a skeptical eyebrow. "Do you want to make me penniless?"

Kayamé's smile was only halfway apologetic. "Ghenn is the best there is, sir."

"Such is my hope." He appeared to perform some estimations of his own, then nodded. "I'll take them. I'll just have to rely on my marksmanship for dinner for the next few days," he added with a grin, and handed over the necessary coins.

"Creator's blessing on your bow and eye, then," Tarai interjected politely, feeling obliged to say something. He was too pleasant to allow him to disappear with so much as speaking to him; kind people remained a rare commodity in the streets of Moire.

"My thanks. May he watch over you as well, and should I come this way again I'll be certain to come and visit. So you don't forget me, my name is Saidi." He gave them a kind of half-bow, and vanished down the street with his purchases.

Tarai perched on the second stool behind the table and stared thoughtfully in the direction he had gone. "He seemed nice enough. I hope his sister likes her present."

"He was decent." Kayamé indicated a younger, scruffier youth sidling down the street with a subtle gesture of her chin. "That one could be trouble."

"Mm." Tarai became quietly alert, waiting to see if anything would need to be done. He looked oddly familiar, but there were countless boys in the city with black hair and blue eyes set in a narrow face. Smudges of dirt adorned one cheek and the bridge of his nose. His clothes were of unexpectedly high quality and cleanliness for a Streets child, though faded and worn from constant wear.

The boy stopped beside the stall, sizing them up briefly. "I heard the old man here does jobs for rich folk. Does he need a delivery boy right now?"

The girls exchanged glances. "I'll go ask," Tarai murmured, and vanished into the house.

Kayamé put her chin in her hand and leaned against the table, unabashedly staring at the strange boy. He met her gaze firmly. They commenced a silent battle of the wills, neither willing to give in and look away, until Tarai returned with Ghenn in tow. The boy seemed to smirk at Kayamé in acknowledgment of similarly dominant personalities, and she nodded slightly.

"Tarai tells me you are looking for work?" Ghenn inquired.

"If you've got any." The boy shrugged, tucking his hands into his pockets. "Time is money. I've got the time, you've got the money."

"What's your name, young man?"

After some hesitation, he grudgingly admitted to answering to Mal.

"Well, Master Mal, I have two recently completed pieces which my customers have not collected yet. You will need to clean yourself up a bit to be accepted even by the tradesman's entrance, but we can work with those variables. I can give you a kona for each piece, provided you return with a signed paper from each house that verifies they received the figures. Should you try to abscond with my works, young sir," Ghenn's benign smile gained a diamond-hard edge, "rest assured that I will find you. If you make it back by sunset, however, you are welcome to join us for evening meal."

Wary interest sparked in Mal's eyes. "I'll think about it. You give me the stuff and I'll get you your papers."

"Agreed. Come inside and wash your face while I prepare the pieces for transportation. Girls," Ghenn acknowledged, then ushered the surprised boy into the house.

By the time Mal finally emerged with a travel bag slung over one shoulder, a pair of potential customers had Tarai and Kayamé busy. He trotted down the steps and ducked around the side of the stall, head down to avoid being noticed by the higher-class pedestrians. When they had finally gone (without buying anything, to the girls' disappointment), Kayamé turned a questioning look to Tarai.

"How would Ghenn expect to find that boy if he decided to disappear with the glassworks?"

Tarai shrugged. "Don't know. Maybe he knows people who could track him down?"

"I know Ghenn helps any Streets kid that turns up needing something, but I still think he could be trouble. What did you think of him, Ta?" Kayamé added thoughtfully.

Countless tiny cues from people that Kayamé couldn't see and Tarai couldn't articulate coalesced within Tarai's subconscious, and expressed themselves as an odd empathic sense. Kayamé judged by a combination of keen observation and guesswork; Tarai simply looked at people and more often than not felt an echo of the hidden intentions they didn't realize she could perceive.

"He felt split," Tarai pronounced, confusion creeping into her voice. "Like he's trying to do two things at the same time, and one is fine but the other could be bad." Tarai shivered. "I don't know if letting him back into the house is a good idea."

Kayamé nodded. "I don't know if it will change Ghenn's mind, especially since he already offered evenmeal, but I'll tell him when we're done out here."

"Mm'kay."

The rest of the morning passed quickly, and soon the girls returned to the house for midday and learning. Kayamé voiced their concerns to Ghenn, but while he seemed to take them seriously, he refused to go back upon his word of a promised evenmeal should the boy choose to accept the offer.

To the girls' dismay, though not to their surprise, Mal showed up punctually at sundown. Kayamé would have been more surprised had Mal turned down the opportunity of a free meal. Any Streets kid that survived soon learned that you treated any chance of a meal like it was your last.

During evenmeal Mal's behavior presented a mass of contradictions — his speech remained rough, but as he focused more on the food and less on his company, his table manners became unexpectedly polite. While he ate quickly, trying to satisfy his stomach, he refrained from tearing into his food like a miniature barbarian, and waited to be offered more food before filling his plate again.

Ghenn and Emmaline kept conversation directed away from Mal during dinner, accurately reading body language that promised stolid silence in response to any personal questions. He silently observed their usual dinner exchange, Kayamé and Tarai telling Ghenn what they had learned and done that day. One of the only moments of dialogue to include him came when Ghenn offered him the same job to do in three weeks time. Mal, did, however, manage to leave the girls feeling more than a little disturbed from some of his comments — nothing good could be expected from a boy who asks: "If you have such popular glassworks, how do you protect them?"

After Mal vanished into the deepening twilight, the house was put in order, and their regular nighttime ritual of reading aloud together — currently an anthology of master poets — was completed, the four settled down to sleep. Ghenn soothed the girls' unease with a promise of more than adequate protective precautions, but Kayamé drifted off with one ear cocked to wake up at any unfamiliar sounds.

Almost to her disappointment, nothing happened that night, or during the entire week. Routine continued as normal, with perhaps the most exciting event being the fact that Tarai and Kayamé learned a new way to cook fish, and had a long argument over what the old poet Rumi meant in his poem The Waterwheel. (They got into lots of arguments over the poets, finally adjusted to having topics of conversation they could afford to disagree about. Rumi held no bearing over whether or not they were fed. It was strangely liberating, the license to engage in friendly disputes.)

Not until two weeks later, long after midnight, did Kayamé's eyes fly open at the sound of a faint scraping. Disentangling from the knot of blankets and Tarai's limbs, she tiptoed out of the bedroom towards the back of the house, pausing in the entry room just before the kitchen area.

There was too much light spilling into the entryway from the large main room. Curtains heavy enough to obstruct the city's nighttime brightness covered all the windows around the dining table, clearing of play space, and Ghenn's indoor work area. The entryway should have been brighter than the kitchen, but now it was the other way around. Cautiously, Kayamé crept towards the pale glow, determined to discover the source of the inappropriate light.

So intent was she on moving soundlessly, Kayamé didn't notice the person behind her until a firm grip clamped over her nose and mouth, preventing all sound from escaping.

TBC…

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AN: I know. I'm evil. I'm also struggling under massive amounts of school, and had to fight my muse for every single sentence in this chapter. It is, almost sadly, twice the length beyond my original stopping point, which means you got more story in exchange for the cliffie. :hides anyway:

But, I'm not dead yet! Next chapter should bring quite a few things to light in Moire. Nor do I own Rumi or The Waterwheel, but it's currently a favorite poem of mine, so I thought I'd share it. :smiles:

Last chapters cameos: Tieg, Fiche, Haku – the Amazon Trio; Mau – Luna; Fleur – Fiore.

A good way to translate the current time of year is to look up the birthdays, of which those Naoko assigned have been transliterated directly from canon into this universe's calendar (13 months of 28 days, the first day of the year being the Winter Solstice). Nephrite's translates to Feb. 19; Jadeite's, April 5; Zoisite's, May 22; and Kunzite's, October 16.

'Til next time…

Ocianne

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