The plush robe currently folded in a neat square on her lap was the softest, most elegant item of clothing Araithia Shokta, the Rat, had ever been anywhere near. She couldn’t stop petting and stroking it, as if she half expected the thing to start purring.
Rat was sitting in a preposterously cushy armchair across from a decidedly relaxed Mistress Kaya, who had emerged from her shower, ensconced in a duplicate robe. She sat upon her long, folded legs in another armchair, and stretched languidly. Rat thought she was one of the most beautiful women she’d ever seen.
They were in a tower of Orzhova, the Cathedral Opulent, inside the salon of the Orzhov guildmaster’s suite of rooms, which were sumptuous to the point of decadence, to the point of Rat spontaneously giggling every couple minutes or so over having found herself amid such lavishness.
“Pretty sweet digs for a Rat,” she murmured.
“Hm?” Mistress Kaya murmured back, still languid.
“Thanks for letting me—us—stay the night.”
“Of course. You can stay as long as you like.”
Hearing that, Rat tried not to let her smile fade—for her friend’s sake.
Presently, a grinning Teyo emerged from the lavatory, coming down the hall toward them, wrapped in yet another robe, with a towel around his shoulders. His hair was soaking wet and dripping, and he carried a neatly folded pile of his battle-filthy clothes.
Pointing back at the room from where he’d emerged, Teyo gasped out: “That. Lavatory. Is. Amazing!”
“I’m glad you like it,” Mistress Kaya said with a smile.
“No, you have to understand. That…‘shower’ is a thing of pure genius. We don’t have that on Gobakhan. Baths, yes. But showers? Do you know how much sand gets in your…in your…in your everything after a diamondstorm, or even just a small sandstorm, or even just a walk across a dune? Showers would change lives. And the, um, toilet. The big towns, like Oasis, have those, but they’re still so…so…I mean, this indoor plumbing is still the greatest magic I’ve ever encountered. Ever!”
His enthusiasm was kinda adorable.
An amused Mistress Kaya turned to Rat and said, “Your turn.”
Teyo said, “There are clean towels on the shelf for when you’re done. A whole pile of them. They’re very white and very large and very soft.”
“Best towels ever?” Rat teased.
“I know you’re making fun of me,” he said. “But yes. Best towels ever.”
She giggled again and walked past him down the long hallway to the lavatory.
She went in and closed the door. The ridiculously large bathroom was still steamy from Kaya and Teyo’s turns. Carefully placing her robe on the closed toilet seat, Rat quickly stripped off her clothes and turned on the water. Teyo was easy to tease, coming as he did from a seemingly backwater plane, but honestly a shower like this was a rare luxury for this child of the Gruul Clans, as well. She reached a cautious hand in under the faucet and found the water was already hot. She was about to step inside when she glanced down at her own unwashed garments strewn as they were across the floor. She glanced over at the neatly folded robe and thought about the neatly folded clothes in Acolyte Teyo’s arms and was suddenly embarrassed.
As she quickly folded her things and stuck them on a shelf, she mused over how she’d felt embarrassed more times in this one day than she had in all the rest of her years combined. She was rarely embarrassed in front of her mother or godfather and had never felt embarrassed with Hekara.
And who else or what else can embarrass the Rat?
But around Mistress Kaya and especially around Teyo, she was quickly learning that uncomfortable emotion. Yet it felt so…normal, she relished it. Araithia had missed out on a lot of normal in her short, odd life and didn’t mind taking the bad with the good. And Mistress Kaya and especially Teyo made her feel very good.
She stepped into the shower and let the water flow over her face and hair. She closed her eyes and soaked in the sensations. She hadn’t thought about it until now, but she was sore from all the fighting, and the hot water streaming onto her various muscle groups felt very, very good.
She was nervous, however, about taking too long. So she opened her eyes to look for the soap.
There are multiple kinds of soap!
All right, yes, she completely understood why this room had so excited Teyo.
Despite her best mental efforts, she found her thoughts drifting to the coming separation. Teyo would return to Gobakhan, and Mistress Kaya would depart on her mission to kill Miss Vess, which was a depressing notion on all sorts of levels. Rat wasn’t thoroughly convinced that Miss Raven-Hair deserved death. On the other hand, Rat wasn’t thoroughly convinced—as Teyo seemed to be—that she didn’t, either. In any case, her unformed opinion was decidedly moot, since she couldn’t exactly follow Mistress Kaya to wherever Miss Vess was hiding. She couldn’t follow Mistress Kaya or Teyo anywhere. All she could do was let them go.
Let them go without making a fuss.
Suddenly a hand reached in, turned the spigot and shut the water off.
“What is wrong with that boy?” grumbled a woman’s voice from just outside the shower stall. “Was he raised in a barn? Who just walks out and leaves the water running like this?”
Wiping the soap from her eyes, Rat peeked out and saw Madame Blaise, chief servitor to the Orzhov guildmaster, picking up her pile of clothes and griping, “And whose are these? They’re all twisted with vines. How am I supposed to clean this?” She sighed heavily and walked out with Rat’s things, leaving the door to the bathroom wide open.
Rat never even thought about saying anything to the servitor. She heaved her own heavy sigh, waited until she heard Madame Blaise’s footsteps tread far enough down the hall and then turned the water back on briefly to quickly rinse all the soap from herself.
The fact that the door was wide open wouldn’t have bothered her normally, but Teyo was loose in the suite, so she quickly grabbed the robe, which was thankfully still on the toilet seat, and threw it on soaking wet. Only afterward did she close and lock the door, take the robe off again and towel herself dry.
She emerged a couple minutes later, dressed in the now damp robe and not feeling quite as enthralled by the lavatory as Teyo was—or as she had been previously. Going down the hallway, she could hear Mistress Kaya and Teyo attempting to explain things to Madame Blaise.
“I promise you, madame, I did not leave the water running. That was Rat.”
“I promise you, young master, we have no rats in the Cathedral Opulent, and certainly none that can turn on a faucet.”
“No, no, see—”
Rat padded into the salon as Mistress Kaya said, “Madame Blaise, our friend Rat—our human friend Rat—was taking a shower.”
“There was no one in the shower, mistress. I checked.”
For fun, Rat walked right in front of Madame Blaise and offered up a little wave, which of course the woman couldn’t see.
Rat looked over at Mistress Kaya, and the two shared a grin. Then she glanced over at Teyo, who was staring at her and swallowing and pulling his robe more tightly around himself. He was blushing, and Rat’s face felt hot, too. She pulled her robe tightly around herself, as he had done. She felt a little better, but he was struggling with some difficulty to look at absolutely anything in the room except Rat. It got her thinking…
Does he think I’m…pretty? Me, with my big teeth and my Rat face and my stupid, crazy hair that I have to cut myself? No, that can’t be right. He’s just kind enough to be embarrassed for me.
Mistress Kaya was saying, “Rat lives with a unique condition that renders her invisible.”
Madame Blaise eyed her mistress with a little suspicion. “Mistress is entitled to her whimsies, but there’s no need to weave tales or play tricks on a faithful servant in order to make her look foolish.”
Kaya laughed. “I swear to you, Blaise. I’m perfectly sincere, perfectly serious. Our Rat has lived her entire life under an admittedly bizarre…”
“Curse of Insignificance,” Rat prompted.
“Curse of Insignificance, yes. Thank you, Rat. This curse makes her invisible, even unhearable, to nearly everyone. Teyo and I are two of only four people who can see her naturally.”
Madame Blaise looked appalled. “Why, that’s, that’s…awful. The poor, um, girl?” she asked, unsure.
“Yes, Rat is a girl or young woman. About…”
“Sixteen summers,” Rat said. “Or sixteen winters. Sixteen springs or autumns, too, I guess.”
“She’s sixteen,” Mistress Kaya said.
“And she’s been this way since birth?” the kindhearted servitor said, wiping a tear from her eye.
“Yes,” Kaya said, her tone falling to match madame’s.
“It’s not that bad,” Rat said. “It’s just my life. We’ve all got whatever whats we deal with. This is mine. Oh, please, mistress, don’t cry!”
Kaya sniffed and wiped away a couple of tears of her own, murmuring, “I’m not; I’m not.” But she kinda was.
Teyo, sounding desperate to help, said, “We’ve found that a few people can learn to see Rat if they’re told exactly where she is, and they concentrate on the spot.”
Madame Blaise straightened up, even straightened her uniform, before stating, “Then I will be one of those people. Where is the dear?”
Mistress Kaya put an arm around Rat’s shoulder and said, “She’s right here under my arm.”
The servitor leaned forward and stared. Squinted. Strained. Finally, with a sigh, she stepped back and shook her head. “I’m sorry. I just don’t see her.”
“It can take practice,” Rat said, shrugging.
“Rat says it can take practice,” Mistress Kaya repeated for Madame Blaise’s benefit.
“Well, then I will practice. But for the time being—now that I know the poor thing exists—I will make allowances. To begin with…” She held up the neat pile of Rat’s clothes. “…I will clean her clothes. I have a perfect spell for that, they’ll be done in less than a minute. Once I extract all this foliage.”
Rat quickly spoke to Kaya: “Please tell her not to remove my vine belt. It was a gift from my godfather. He knows I get hungry sometimes, and I like to nibble on the berries that grow on it.”
Mistress Kaya relayed the message. Madame Blaise raised the folded clothes up very close to her face to examine the belt. “I see,” she said. “Selesnyan magic. How clever. Well, I still wouldn’t have her eat these berries without giving them a good washing first, but I can manage that without harming them, I believe. Give me just a few minutes. I’ll bring these clothes right back, and all three of you can change for dinner. Oh, and I will set an extra plate in the dining room for Mistress…Rat?”