THE THESSALY AFFAIR - CHAPTER THREE - EFAN MARDONIOS
VIII.
I didn’t know much else about what Thessaly might be doing, but she was watchful, or her girl was, because she appeared on the stairs as we began lugging everything in. She looked at Narvi as though I had managed to find the lowest possible creature in Aulis to help me. Irodiada help me, I pretty much had, but Narvi’s genius is that he moves like a worm in the dirt, chewing it everything he hears and digesting it into useful news for me, and I don’t miss a chance to pay him, as often as I can.
Narvi is another of those Aulis folk who treated me decently early on. To be frank, he’s saved my life more than once, and I could hardly afford any sort of a bonus, even as little as my neck was worth, so if Efan left me blue for moving, Narvi was getting his cut.
Of course, I did make sure to keep an eye on things. He also picks pockets and steals things, and I’m not a complete idiot.
“Nice,” he said, for the third time, as he lugged a basket of Efan’s boots up to the men’s quarters with me. “Coming up in the world, Miss Fenek.”
“I lived like this before.”
“Aye, with your Miss beating you every day. Weren’t living.”
“I guess not.” We dropped the basket in Efan’s bedroom. I gave the bed a hard look. “I’m going to miss that flat.”
“This ain’t better?”
“I’m going to miss it.”
This is going to be more crowded, I wanted to say, but if she was nearby listening, I didn’t want my tongue to utter such things.
I had taken everything from the shrine in the flat—the pottery and bronze household fatas, the pretty green glass cup with nymphs, the brass burner, each wrapped in silk and in an ebony box with rosewood inlay. Narvi was gone, the cart gone, and I stood in the second-floor hall, there the zebra-skin rug lay rolled, looking at it. A small piece of silk was caught in the lid, sticking out.
Thessaly’s handmaid came up the stairs, bare feet silent on the wooden treads, and she studied me for half a tock, before giving me a not very elaborate curtsey.
“Miss,” she said.
“I don’t know what you’re called.”
“I am called Vera, if it please Miss.”
“I’m pleased enough.” I looked at her folded hands, the slender brass collar with its red terminals, just like Barsina’s—just like mine had been—the ostensibly vacant doe eyes, the slightly parted lips, but I also saw the subtle scrutiny from those eyes, and the perfect braiding of her cornsilk-colored hair. Her eyes were a paler blue than Barsina’s. She was a sharp one and had already come to her own conclusions about me.
“What crèche did you come from?” I guessed.
“Thyatira State Labor Facility, Miss.”
Never was a citizen. “How old are you?”
“I was devesseled twenty-four years ago, Miss.”
“Been with Miss Thessaly long?”
“Ever since I left crèche, Miss.”
I looked at the box. “Here’s the score,” I said. “And I expect you’ll tell your Miss every word. I was a runaway, and I was living on the streets. Everything I’ve got in my life I got through my hard work and my choices. I have a reputation in this city for my talents. Despite that, I’ve seen things, and I’ve been through things, I hope you don’t have to, because I’m just like you. I wish your Miss well, and I want to share this house with her. I have enough enemies. I don’t want to live with one. I’m obliged to the Ensign-Captain, so whatever he wishes of me I will give. I’m done running.”
The eyes sharpened and her careful form slackened slightly. “What was Miss called, before?”
“I was an Io. I was a personal girl for an aristoi, and that woman was a total bint.”
She nodded gravely. “And Barsina?”
“Housemaid to an older lady, then when she passed, Barsnjo was sold into a brothel. She and I…met…and I got her out.” I touched the back of my neck. “That’s when I had gotten all that off.”
The gesture seemed to release her completely, and she moved behind me, her fingers searching under my hair. “Your barcode is gone, but there is the scar.”
“Acid.”
She made a noise. “That hurt.”
“Like vilhem-oh, my dear,” I said briskly. “Not as much as some things have hurt.”
“The Sir does not mind?”
“I think he admires me for it. He gets a good look at it often enough.”
She made our little laugh, and I felt like one of the girls again. Then she was looking in my eyes, serious. “I am not your enemy, sister. But I do not know what my Miss will decide, and I serve her wishes.”
“I wouldn’t ask anything else.”
“She sent me to look for you.”
I offered the box of fatas. “I wanted to see her.”
“This way.”
Barsina was happily putting things away in Efan’s room, and I followed the servant downstairs. Thessaly sat on a couch in the music room, her tablet in her lap as she turned her stylus in her fingers.
“Has he convoed you?” she asked,
“No.”
She put out her hand, and, reluctant, I pulled out my rugged little tablet and let her into it. Her fingers drifted through some of the messages, but she was impassive. No more than she expected, I guess.
“He has not.” She returned it.
“Nor you.”
“Not yet,” she said.
“I have his fatas. You should enshrine them, not me.”
She looked at the box, and nodded. “That is…good of you.”
“You’ll be the wife, you’ll be responsible for them. Not me.”
She took the box, gave orders for yellow wine, and placed them neatly in the empty family shrine. She gave them drink and incense, and we curtseyed gravely, each saying her prayers. Family fatas aren’t often kind to servant girls, but Efan’s always were good to me, so I hoped they didn’t forget me.
At least she didn’t expect me to kneel like Vera did.
“You will stay here tonight,” Thessaly said after.
“All right. But I have affairs,” I said, “that I have to take care of, eh? Cases, what have you.” Or I would, if I found some fresh work.
“Of course.” She gave me a small smile, the first I’d gotten since she was at Sarangarel’s. “But we will share the house, and dine together.”
I dropped my curtsey I’d invented for her. “He didn’t share with you when he thought he’d be back?”
“He said maybe a week.”
Efan, Efan, I thought. Didn’t imagine she could do anything with that information, but I would, eh?
But what did he think I’d do with it?
Well, we slept seven times in that house and dined seven times, and I did get a small case and tidied it up with minimal personal risk, though it gave Barsina a scare. But at the end of the seventh day, we had not heard one convo, to she or to me, nor anything else from anyone, from or about Efan Mardonios.