774 PQ
At the moment, Tair has exactly four legal rights.
Right to life, right to food and water, right to shelter, right to education. One right more than a serva, and even then the quality of that education has always been up for debate. Most vernae get the required elementary reading and writing and maybe some basic math, and after that their paterfamilias never even tries to find them an apprenticeship. She’s lucky. Lucky to have been a loudmouth know-it-all by age six, even if it meant her perpetually bruised knuckles were a favorite target for the Mothers at the Servile Children’s Asylum. Lucky that Gil picked her out from all the other vernae to be his apprentice. Lucky they got on so extremely well. Lucky that even if they hadn’t, he isn’t the type to have sent her back.
So, yeah, four rights.
In two weeks, on the day she turns eighteen and Alexander Kleios commutes her contract of service, making her a citizen of the Imperium, she’ll have forty-seven. The same as that gang of boys they encountered on the beach two weeks ago. Only sixteen fewer than Selah. She’s memorized them all.
“Tair Alexander,” she hums into the empty spare bedroom of Gil’s old tenant house, feeling something like she’s stealing the name even when it’s only a matter of days before it’s hers. Part of her wishes it were going to be Delena—not for Selah’s grandmother’s sake, neither of them ever met the woman, but because Gil is the closest thing she has to family. It would be nice to share a name.
But sharing one with Arran isn’t the worst second choice. They’ve shared enough as it is to make a certain kind of sense, and they shared this makeshift classroom for nearly ten years. Research projects and lively debates turning to shouting matches and surprising Gil on his birthday and pranking him on Terranalia. Converting it back into an empty, unused bedroom feels like sacrilege, erasing all that history. Like none of it ever mattered.
“Very slowly,” Tair grumbles, loud enough to carry. She dumps the last of the chalkboard erasers into the box and sticks her head out into the little wooden hallway, the one she helped him paint palest blue. “Can’t we get some staff in here to do this?”
Gil’s laugh echoes from the kitchen somewhere below. “Careful you don’t get too high and mighty up there, my lady. Servae don’t clean my house, and they won’t clean yours either.”
Her house. Her house. This is the thing about getting closer to the day—things that existed in the abstract are suddenly becoming real with an alarming clarity. Somewhere in the back of her mind she always knew, of course, what becoming the newest client of the Kleios familia entails. Citizenship. Legal protections. A job. A house. A name. But now she can see it. Not just a bedroom to call her own, but a living room and a kitchen and a hallway all to herself, filled with all the things she will buy with her own hard-earned ceres. She wonders which one it’ll be. She wonders if she’ll be allowed to pick it out for herself. Out of the three tenant homes sitting empty at the bottom of Breakwater’s winding gravel road, there’s one that stands just next door.
Wooden stairs bypass creaks into outright groaning, announcing Gil’s arrival long before he enters the room, two steaming clay mugs of spiced tazine held in each hand. Tazine first, always. Pleb families, she knows, each have their own private recipe. Patricians may have the security of familia name, but everyone else loses that each time someone cycles back down to the bottom. Tazine is all that most plebeians have in the way of lineage, and even that’s a far cry from foolproof. Tair herself had been a foundling, named and raised from infancy by the Mothers at the Servile Children’s Asylum before her contract was bought by the Kleios familia. She has no idea who her parents were, or if they had a recipe of their own. Gil’s tazine—vanilla and black pepper, hints of sassafras—is the closest thing she has.
He stops short, taking in the haphazard stacks of books, the desks pushed crooked against the wall, the fine layer of chalk dust settled across surfaces and sparkling in lazy motes through the air. Tair’s been up here all day, ostensibly converting schoolroom back to spare bedroom. She should be further along than this, and they both know it.
“Well,” he says after a moment, “I don’t know why I expected anything different.”
“There is a system to—”
“I know, I know.” He sets one of the mugs down before taking a long sip from his own, a furrow of concern growing in the divot between his brows. “Makes me wonder, though. You’ll have to be organized where Selah’s not. That’s important . . . might have been an oversight on my end. Maybe it’s best if we delay all this by a few more months—”
“You wouldn’t.”
He’s joking. He is joking. He has to be. Alexander Kleios may be her paterfamilias but Gil Delena is her supervisor, and without his sign-off that her apprenticeship under him is at an end, citizenship will always be out of reach. He shrugs over his tazine, noncommittal, but there’s an unmistakable spark of mischief in the slight twitch of his lips. Tair wants to hit him.
“You’re the worst,” she says, and takes her mug.
“Only because I know you. And I know what this is really about.”
“Oh yeah?”
“Oh yeah. You’re dragging your feet to get out of kitchen rotation.”
That is, actually, exactly what this is about. It’s not that she minds washing dishes, normally. But with two weeks left in service, Tair fails to see why she should be forced to put up with Imarry and her horrible moods. The majordomo’s a terror on a good day but, apparently in mourning for loss of status over one of her underlings, she’s been absolutely savage for the past few weeks. Tair had to sleep ass-to-the-air last night thanks to the welts Imarry dealt her for badly folded napkins, and she has a feeling she’ll be doing the same for a few more nights to come.
“Can’t you just tell her you need me instead?” she groans over her tazine. “I’ll do his RSVP backlog for you, or—”
But Gil shakes his tawny head. “I’d never dream of crossing Imarry. If you’re on the grounds after six, she gets you. You know that.”
He crosses his arms and leans against the crooked desk, looking to all the world like the stern taskmaster she’d assumed him to be the first time she’d lain eyes on him, a Mother hissing in her ear to behave—do you have any idea who his patron is? That was before she knew better.
“But,” he continues, tapping a slender finger to his jaw and ah, there it is, “maybe there’s a way you’re not on the grounds.”
“Oh?”
He plucks a book from the top of the nearest stack. “Mm. Syntax and Semiotics, Volume Eight. Extremely important text. And, you know, now that I think about it, I believe our paterfamilias needs it at the Archives right away, actually. And as you can see—” he takes a long, leisurely sip of tazine “—I’m entirely too busy right now to do it myself. You’ll have to go immediately.”
Tair grins and takes the book. “Immediately?”
“Immediately,” he answers, utterly grave. “Can’t keep the Imperial Historian waiting.”
She could hug him. She doesn’t, of course. It’s just not what they do. Not that it really matters. Gil was the one who knelt down on overlong legs with a kind word for a frightened six-year-old he’d been told was intelligent, who might fit his needs. The one who sat at her bedside as fever burned through her body at age eleven, fingers sunk deep in her short, damp curls. The one who met her wry observations of the world with laughter instead of the strap. It doesn’t matter that she’d like nothing more than to wrap her arms around his wiry frame, feel his scratchy sweater warm against her. She has enough of him as it is.
Tair is halfway down the groaning stairs when she hears him call her name. She looks up, half expecting him to have changed his mind. Instead, he’s leaning against the rickety banister, a rare smile playing out across his pale face, and the perpetual dark circles beneath his eyes seem to somehow disappear in its wake.
“I’m proud of you,” he says, and her heart could burst from the light.
It carries her down the gravel road, out onto the Arborem’s main limestone thoroughfare, where she doesn’t stop to worry about the scandalized looks she attracts on her cruiseboard, skating past stately coaches and promenading patricians. If they don’t look too close in the gathering dark, she could be anyone at all. If they look too close, she’s in for far worse from Imarry than what she’s currently avoiding.
She’s not doing anything wrong, mind you. Serviles just aren’t supposed to be noticed.
If this is to be a long enough errand to justify getting out of kitchen rotation, she might as well do the thing right and take the long way round through the Boardwalk. Iron-curling gates and draping elms of the Arborem district give way to broad avenues of cobblestone, high-end hotels and lively string music spilling from bright-colored restaurants awash in the salt sea air. This is the domain of the merchant plebs and their hard-built fortunes, the well-to-do tourists out to dinner, the bored homemakers come to the sea for their health and the Universitas District museos. And on a late summer evening like this, Tair takes refuge from the growing crowds in the dark-lit glow of the Boardwalk’s residential backstreets.
This, it will not take long for her to realize, is a mistake.
The mistake isn’t conscious, and neither is it moral—turning left down the street when she could have just as easily turned right. Of course she’ll find ways to blame herself for what happens, later on. She should have gone straight to the Imperial Archives. Shouldn’t have tricked Gil into letting her skip out on chores. Shouldn’t have let Selah bully her into sneaking out to the Festival of Sol and Luna two weeks ago. Should have stopped her before she barged into a situation she didn’t understand and put a target on her back—a target that shifted over to Tair the moment it became clear that Selah herself was untouchable. She’ll finds ways to make it her own fault, later on.
Right now, she’s staring down the barrel of an empty backstreet at six boys, six horribly familiar boys lounging like a pack of satisfied cats across a white, paraffin lamp–lit porch. If she’d been walking, maybe, they might not have heard her. If she’d been slower, maybe, she might have crept by. But cruiseboard wheels have a habit of announcing themselves on cobblestone, and she isn’t paying enough attention to see them in time to backtrack. As it is, she can already make out the fine-stitched detail of the nearest boy’s linen duskra by the time she realizes where she’s seen them before. Their leader, straw-headed and holding court amongst the empty bottles of hops, sets down his latest as his own recognition sets in.
“Hey, boys,” he calls. “Look what’s come to give us a hello.”
Gleeful delight can barely mask the hard edge beneath. Selah made him look weak in front of his gang. Selah threatened his power over them, forced him to tuck his tail between his legs and slink away. But Selah is untouchable, and Selah isn’t here.
The same can’t be said for Tair.
The hairs at the back of her neck begin to rise, dormant animal instincts doing battle for a half-second too long. Flight kicks in first, and she could run. She could run, and she might even make it. But it’s a long way back the way she came, and the way ahead is blocked now six boys across, edging closer.
“Couldn’t stay away, gorgeous?” says one.
“Been thinking about us, have you?” says another.
“She’s not bad for a crim,” says their leader, bare inches away. “I’ve had worse.”
Fight, then. That’s the only other option.
But she can’t. She very literally can’t. Fighting them means attacking them, and attacking a citizen when she isn’t one yet herself means breaking the law. And breaking the law isn’t an option. Not when she’s so close to having everything she’s worked for.
That’s what Tair would remind herself, anyway, were she not so utterly terrified. As it is, she can barely move, but for the sudden awareness of her cruiseboard, hard and sturdy and unyielding, solid beneath her fingertips.
They have her circled, now, and the straw-haired boy grabs her by the chin.
She lets him.
There’s a place that Tair goes sometimes. It’s small, and quiet, and lives in the deepest recesses of her conscious mind. It’s where she goes when the world asks for too much. Where she can pull the physical bounds of her body in around herself like a secret, because what’s secret can never be taken from you. She just has to keep calm and go there now for a little while. Just has to keep calm. Keep calm and . . . let this happen. Let them do what they want, and let Alexander Kleios sue for damages to his investment later on. Let justice be done the proper way. There’s a cold and comforting logic to it, but then a large, heavy hand wraps around her upper arm and something snaps.
No.
It’s a heady word.
A complete sentence.
Tair has said it out loud maybe a dozen times total.
No.
No.
No.
The fingers around her cruiseboard tighten in their splintering grip, and for the first time in her life, Tair fights back.