6

THE AIR HAD GROWN WARMER OUTSIDE, THE SUN OBSCURED BY thick gray clouds rolling in from the north. We’d have rain before night, I guessed, and I hoped Penny had remembered to close the workshop window. I pulled my hood over my head, grateful for soft wool against my chilly ears.

Kristos had nagged me for three days to come to one of the cafés he and his friends frequented—ostensibly because they had just cracked the casks of winter ale and he insisted I try it, but I knew better. His tactics were so thin a child could have seen through them—immerse me in so much talk that I finally woke up one morning clutching one of those ridiculous red caps and crying for reforms.

As I walked toward the dumpy tavern Kristos had selected, the Hazel Dell, I steeled myself. I could enjoy a mug of ale, ask after everyone’s families, and hope that someone started a round of songs before the talk grew too serious. A drink or two and then home to bed—or, if it wasn’t too late, to make a few preliminary sketches for Lady Viola’s gown. I smiled to myself. She wanted one of my pieces, for its own sake, for my skill in design and draping and sewing. That was the highest compliment I could be paid.

I passed through Fountain Square, moving quickly against the cold. The only soldiers out on the nearby green were sentries, looking cold and miserable as the wind rolled across the square. A few people were still out running their errands or hawking wares, peddlers hired by the owners of print shops and farms and butchers for a day at a time. One girl in a blue short cloak and a torn gown stood in the center of the square, singing. A ballad seller—the printer sent her out with broadsides of song lyrics, and she advertised them by singing the songs.

And charm casting.

I slowed and stopped. A faint glow bloomed around her as she sang, but very faint, and sporadic. Only a charm caster could see it, and only if she was trained, had learned to look for the light that slipped from the air and coalesced around a charm. The ballad singer had the same gift I did—but she didn’t know, I guessed, how to sustain or control it, or how to funnel it into objects, either. My mother had trained me heavily as soon as she knew I had the ability, and it took years of strict practice to develop the ease with which I could pull a charm into a stitched object.

Mother never trained me in how to craft charms from anything but needle and thread, and only talked about the physical charms in clay and herbs that Pellian casters traditionally used. I hadn’t realized until after she died that there might be other conduits for charms. I had seen a singer cast a charm once before, a fishwife on her family’s boat, untangling a net. I had rushed to ask her how she had learned, and she backed away from me as though she thought me possessed. It was only then I realized that, without training, one didn’t even recognize the ability. Galatines, so distrustful of charms, were rarely trained. The only other trained casters I knew in the city were Pellian, and all had been trained in the traditional clay-tablet and herb-sachet methods.

The ballad seller might have been Galatine or Pellian by birth, as her features were a clear intermarriage of the two. Her voice rose and swelled—she sang in a modern Galatine style, that was certain, not the folk song style of either Pellia or Galitha. She had a beautiful, clear tone, and the sad melody she sang floated and dipped like the undulations of a river. A dead soldier, his lover in search of him, vows never to rest or love again—the ballads from the print shops were full of such sentimental drivel. But for the first time hearing a song on the street like this, I felt moved, affected to the point that I stood rooted to the cobblestones and listened to the ballad seller. I couldn’t be sure that it wasn’t the wind, but tears formed in my eyes. All the while, the faint light glowed and wavered around her.

When she finished, the charm light faded away completely, and I shook myself. Had I been so affected because she had a beautiful voice, or because she was charming me? There was no way of knowing, and I was nearly sure she didn’t even know she could cast. I dug a copper coin from my pocket and bought a song. She smiled, shy and missing teeth, and mumbled her thanks.

No, I ascertained as she began another song and the glow didn’t reappear, she didn’t know how to control the gift. Perhaps it benefited her a little, accidentally charming people into listening and opening their pocketbooks, but she wasn’t intending it. All the same, I smiled for her as I hurried onward. Good for her, the shy ballad seller, finding a bit of an edge in this hard world.

The Hazel Dell stood on the corner of River and Cross Streets, a tall brick building whose façade was more refined than the clientele it served. Kristos waited inside at a long table already filled with his friends. I sighed. With so many people bound to talk politics, I was in for a long night of debates. Kristos made friends with everyone—everything, I amended, as I noticed a rangy-looking cat stropping his ankles. He waved, but didn’t stop his conversation as I joined him.

I slipped onto the bench next to him, quickly shucking my cloak and regretting the choice of wearing the same ostentatious silk I had worn to Lady Viola’s in a café like this. I stuck out like a bluebird among winter crows against all the linen and wool. Slowly, I inched my cloak back over my shoulders.

“Sophie! I already got you a pint of ale.” Kristos’s friend Jack shoved a large mug toward me, the froth sloshing over the sides. I moved back instinctively, covering my silk petticoat, then cringed. I looked like a snob, overdressed and fussy in a common tavern. Make an effort, I chided myself.

“Thank you, Jack.” I forced a smile. “How is the winter ale this year?”

“Not bad at all, not bad at all.” He sipped it, feigning a connoisseur’s air. “Hoppy, just a little bit of—maybe pine?”

I tasted it. It tasted like ale. “Not bad,” I said, though I wasn’t sure what “good” would taste like.

“What do you think, Sophie?” Kristos said, interrupting Jack’s next question.

“About what?” I set the ale down. “I couldn’t hear—”

Kristos rolled his eyes. “You never pay attention to these conversations, do you?”

“Kristos, I just got here, and Jack—”

“Damn it, Jack, distracting Sophie from vital conversation with your flirting!” Kristos laughed, but I shot him a look. Flirting? Is that what Jack was trying to do? I thought I’d been perfectly clear with him the last time we spoke. “We were just discussing the finer points of a hypothetical Commerce Council replacing the Lord of Coin’s sole control over economics in Galitha. You have personal experience running a shop.”

“What about it?” I’d been here two minutes and already Kristos was going to rope me into a political debate. He stared at me, prodding me silently to say more. To offer more evidence supporting his side, to prove yet again why the Laborers’ League had the obligation to demand reform. To defend the protests the League organized. Thinking of the pamphlet Viola had shown me, I wondered—to justify violent action, too?

“Sophie.” Kristos drummed the table with his fingers.

“Yes?” I lifted my eyebrows, innocent.

“What’s that?” Jack interrupted, pointing to the ballad broadside I’d set on the table.

“It’s just a song I bought,” I answered.

Jack picked it up and started to read it, but Kristos wasn’t done yet. “Sophie. I hoped you might actually enjoy, you know, talking about your shop,” he cajoled. “Most people here don’t have the experience you do.”

I glanced around the table. All day laborers and League members, like Kristos. Most went to the university lectures with him. I could take a quick guess that they didn’t much care about my unique experience beyond what they could glean for their own arguments.

“You’ll be glad to know that the Council of Nobles is already entertaining a proposal for reform,” I replied coolly.

Kristos snorted. “I already know. I read the published minutes of the council every week. It’s too little, too late.”

His scoffing stung—for once I thought I knew something about the workings of Galatine politics that he didn’t.

“Perhaps you could consider accepting what the Council of Nobles is willing to give,” I said.

“What they give us is only in their own interests.” He dug into the interior pocket of his coat and produced a folded wad of paper. “Here—the minutes. Do you see this? They spent most of their meeting discussing appointing an overseer of curriculum for the public schools and expanding the schools’ reach in the southern provinces.”

“What’s so terrible about that?” I almost laughed—the Galatine schools, available to any resident and providing education through age twelve, were generally regarded as a great advancement.

“You do realize why they even care about educating young Galatines, don’t you?” Kristos snorted. “Their army—twenty years ago the provincial dialect was so different from the dialect the nobility speaks that the soldiers couldn’t even understand their officers.”

“So we’ve linguistically indoctrinated the populace.” I recognized Niko Otni, the barge worker my brother had been so excited to pull into the fold of the Laborers’ League. The academic vocabulary suited him awkwardly; he must have picked up the phrasing at one of the university lectures he attended with my brother.

I rolled my eyes. Even if they were right, the system had benefits beyond the martial. “Well, I know quite a few Pellian girls who are grateful to have had the opportunity to learn to speak—and write—standard Galatine.”

Kristos ignored my argument. “You’ll notice that these reforms—the ones the nobility has discussed—don’t address conscription, which is one of our major complaints.”

“Or the actual process of getting permits for new commerce,” the man I recognized from the near riot in the queue at the Lord of Coin’s office added. His name was Porter, I recalled.

“Not to mention representation,” Niko said.

I scanned the minutes that Kristos had left on the table. Increased ratios of granted petitions—that wasn’t a bad thing. Caps on marketplace taxes. Not the extreme measures of governmental reordering that the League wanted, but certainly beneficial to the common people they claimed to want to serve. “These all seem like decent concepts,” I said, handing the paper back to Kristos.

Kristos wavered between pressing further, yelling, and ignoring me. He hadn’t had too much to drink, I surmised, because he chose to ignore me and changed the subject. “Pyord Venko is confident that the demands will get the council’s attention,” he continued, speaking with the group gathered around him.

“And if it doesn’t?” A heavyset man with an unusually red-blond beard replied. “I don’t know that I’ve got much confidence in what some stuffy academic says about how the world works outside his library.”

Niko raised an eyebrow. “Then we raise the stakes,” he said. I clenched my jaw—Niko couldn’t mean what he seemed to be saying.

Kristos glanced at him with a cool, steadying look. “We have our plans,” he said. “Increased pamphlets and demonstrations. We’ll get their attention.”

Jack chimed in. “We’re able to print far more now that Venko has secured us funding. Not everyone with money supports the nobility.”

“And as we print more, it becomes harder to keep the people under the illusion that this is the only way to live,” Kristos added. “We have money now for printing and for any other expenses, thanks to Venko.”

“Who are you getting money from?” I whispered to Jack as my brother and Niko continued talking.

“This Venko—the professor?”

“He’s not providing you much on a lecturer’s salary.”

“Not him—he’s helped us learn how to raise our own money. Donations from merchants who aren’t happy with the nobility. Plenty of the most successful trade vessels are owned by common people who have dug their way up—they want to see the common folks like them helped. Some foreign people, too—a Kvys banker, I think? And Fenian shipbuilders? Then—investing that money, too. Somewhere.” It was clear Jack was on the periphery of this development, but what he told me was enough. I was shaken—this sounded more serious than the money needed to print on cheap pulp and buy red wool for caps.

“What is this money for?” I asked.

Jack shifted uncomfortably. “For now, just printing.” I didn’t press further, but the scheme didn’t sit well with me. I thought of how money could purchase force in the form of weapons and even bribe soldiers.

The door slammed behind me, but the chill I felt wasn’t from the cold draft that blew inside. This sounded like the groundwork for far more than pamphleteering and demonstrations. They couldn’t be considering purchasing weapons, I chided myself. Could they? In the short months since summer, their focus had gone from talk to action, to organizing their numbers and securing funding. The inclusion of this Pyord Venko unsettled me—his influence seemed to provide a bridge between ideas and the potential for action.

“I’m stepping out for a moment,” I said.

Jack followed me.

I sighed. “I’m all right, Jack. I don’t need an escort.”

“I know, Sophie. But look at this.” He pressed a broadside into my hand. The print at the bottom was tight and almost difficult to read, as though they had condensed an entire pamphlet onto a single broadside sheet. But the top—the top was clear and printed in large letters. “We finished it. A formal copy sent to the council, and these distributed throughout the city.”

“Ten Demands of the Laborers’ League.” I traced the thick black letters with my fingertip. The heavy printing press tiles had left indentations in the thick paper. “Representation alongside the nobles. Abolition of the Lords of Coin, Keys, and Stones, to be replaced with Committees of Commerce, Safety, and Building, to be made up of common people.” I scanned further. “No taxes levied without a vote in favor by the populace.” I laughed out loud. “These are impossible!”

Jack glowered. “It’s not impossible if enough people fight for it.”

I stopped, my face falling. “How are you going to force the nobility to grant these requests, Jack? Admit it—you can’t.”

“The nobility has had a stranglehold on the country long enough. We’ll end the hold. We’ll do what we have to do. Even … even if it comes to force.”

I stared at Jack. “No, Jack. I know you all too well—you wouldn’t. Too many people could be hurt, killed—”

“Too many people are living in enforced poverty not to act, even if it means bloodshed.”

I looked back at the broadside—the words spooling out of Jack’s mouth weren’t his, I knew. He didn’t speak that way. My brother did. The writers of these pamphlets did. Pretty words let people forget what bloodshed really looked like. I saw the printer’s crest at the bottom of the broadside. It was the same as the seditious pamphlet Viola had shown me.

My hands shook as I handed the paper back. “I want nothing to do with that, Jack.”

“I know you’re worried about how you’d survive without the money from your shop. I—we’d be sure you were taken care of. You don’t have to worry.” His eyes widened, earnestly pleading without words.

Frustration boiled, catalyzed by fear. “I like my shop, Jack. I like my work, my life. It isn’t only the money. I wouldn’t want to lose what I’ve built.” I would lose who I am, I thought, but I couldn’t say it out loud.

“Well, I think that’s—you’re being selfish,” Jack said, finally angry. “There are people who care about you, and you don’t seem to care at all about them and what would make their lives better.” I didn’t know if he meant my brother and his thwarted goals, or if he meant himself and some half-baked idea of marriage. It didn’t matter—he went back inside before I could reply, the door rattling behind him.

I slipped back inside and sat next to my brother, annoyed and angry with myself even though it was hardly my fault that Jack had continued to press me. Kristos chose that moment to glance at my face and the empty seat Jack had left. He raised an eyebrow to match mine. “You want another drink, Sophie?”

I considered telling him what I was thinking, that I had sacrificed any prospect of marriage or children in favor of my shop, that this decision supported our small family, that the actions of the League threatened my livelihood and could render that sacrifice for naught, that marrying one of his League friends would never change that. I didn’t. “I don’t care for ale,” I said instead.

“Hey! Barkeep!” A blond barmaid hustled over. “Bring my sister a glass of red wine,” he said.

“You remember I like it?”

“Of course. Hey.” He hugged me around the shoulders. “Chin up. We’re going to have a good night, all right?”