My asha sister Altaecia was a lot like my sister Rose. She was round and quiet and keen on gardening. She was also Ankyo’s foremost expert on herbs and medicine and was a consultant to many apothecaries operating in Ankyo. She made the best dizi I had ever tasted, and her ghormeh sabzi could silence even Polaire. Unsurprisingly, her ingredients were always fresh, and she was in the know with most of the vendors in the marketplace, so that her roasted lamb, seasoned and cooked for three hours to perfection, went unbelievably well with her sautéd kale, chickpeas, and parsley stew, along with anything else she chose to cook.
Every other week, I would accompany her on what was a typical morning for my sister-asha. Most people visit the marketplace at dawn to find the choicest seafood and cuts of meat, but much of the preparations took place long before the sun rose. Altaecia was hard on vendors who sold rotten food, and it was an easy way to go out of business. Meek and mild mannered for the most part, she changed into a no-nonsense, uncompromising taskmaster when it came to food standards.
We didn’t always visit the Ankyon market. When she brought me to a tall, white building at the edge of the city for the first time, the smell of dirty linen assailed my nose the moment we entered. People dressed in gray frocks rushed past us, carrying an armful of sheets or complicated-looking metal instruments. Patients lay on pallets on the floor, as many as a dozen in every room we passed.
“There is one skill people often overlook in an asha,” she said as she stooped over an old man swaddled in blankets, fast asleep. “And that is the precision by which we can perceive color. Tell me the color of his heartsglass.”
“Green.”
“No. It is octarine.”
“But isn’t octarine just another shade of green?”
“And therein lies all the difference. Ailments give very specific tints, Tea. Green only tells me that the illness is a physical one. Hues, heart rhythms, brightness—they show me the specifics of a disease. I will teach you how to observe and keep track of these differences. You there, Cecely!” She snapped at a woman built like a broomstick. “Didn’t I tell you to change the patients’ bedsheets every day?”
“But, Lady Altaecia, Mistress Mal made it clear that we could only—”
“I don’t care what that khar has made clear!” Althy raged, a veiled tigress. “Tell her that Lady Altaecia demands clean sheets and linen for every patient, and if that happens to cut into her profit, then so be it! Perhaps she needs to be reminded one more time of the cow?”
The woman paled. “I will see to it, Lady Altaecia.”
Many also came to Althy for ailments that normal physicians and apothecaries could not heal, and they were as complex as they were varied. She taught me to prepare ointments and medicine. I pounded pescilla seeds and groundroot for smallworm antidotes or mixed dragon fruit pulp and stingberry juice for high fevers. The variations among the heartsglass colors were difficult to distinguish, and I made many mistakes. But each day I improved.
Two months after we began, Althy regretfully informed me in the middle of our cooking lesson that she would be leaving. We were preparing chicken fesenjan with yellow rice, which also happened to be Polaire’s favorite meal. As was common during these lessons, Altaecia would grill me about the kinds of herbs we used. “You must learn to make this by the end of the day,” she explained, “for I will have very little time to teach you when the week is out. Now, do you remember what nuts we top the stew with?”
“Ground walnuts,” I replied, “paired with pomegranate sauce. What do you mean, ‘you have very little time’?”
“I will be returning to my duties as Princess Inessa’s bodyguard in five days’ time, and so ends my stay in the Willows. What other sicknesses do walnuts treat?”
“Canker sores and bright fever. Unless the patient is allergic to nuts, which means we substitute saffron and twisted barley. You’re to be Princess Inessa’s bodyguard?” It was hard to imagine her as anyone’s bodyguard, with her broad face and glasses and the circle motifs in her hua that only emphasized her roundness. It also occurred to me that I have never once seen her fight.
Althy smiled at me. “I have always been her bodyguard; I merely asked for leave to care for Mykkie and oversee your education. I will still be in the city. The castle is a stone’s throw away, and the princess has always been accommodating when other asha come to visit. Besides, you’ll have your other sisters here to take care of you.”
“But none who cook as well as you do.” I was crestfallen. As much as I was fond of her cooking, I was even more fond of Altaecia herself.
The redhead laughed. “I am sure there will be more than enough to do here to occupy your time. Now—what are the three illnesses that ingesting applecrut and figberry syrup will help alleviate?”
“Stone fevers, diarrhea, and indigestion. Althy, when we visited that charity house a while back, you threatened the mistress with a cow.”
“Mistress Mal owns that charity house, and she once told me she would pay more for her clean linen when cows fly.”
Althy went back to chopping more onions, and I had to prompt her again. “But you eventually came to an agreement?”
“Only after I punched a new hole in her house, using one of two wooden cows I had commissioned at the carpenter’s. It went through her wall like a plunger through churned butter. I built it to size, so I expected such results.” Althy continued to chop serenely, paying no attention to my shock. “I paid for the wall, of course, but I also paid to have the second cow erected on the field across from her place. Mistress Mal has been getting on in years, but I’ve found it to be a most effective way to jog her memory. Now, what color would gingivitis look on someone’s heartsglass?”
• • •
When Altaecia finally left to take up her duties in the castle, my time was claimed by Polaire. Because of my lessons and my training, the evenings were one of the few times I had for myself. Polaire soon usurped even that.
There were two sides to Polaire as well. She scrutinized me as I entered the small tearoom at the Gentle Oak, her lips pursed. “That’s a horrible outfit,” she said.
“What?” I was wearing the prettiest hua I had. It was a deep maroon, with golden butterflies fluttering halfway up its skirt, and a waist wrap of soft beige with outlines of brown leaves embroidered along its edges.
“We’re meeting the envoy to Drycht, you dummy. He’s an old and cranky stick-in-the-mud, and he wouldn’t approve of women wearing such bold colors.” She gestured at herself, at her lavender hua with tiny lilies painted in large clumps along the bottom of her gown. She shook her veil at me. “Didn’t I tell you to do your research? It’s a little too late to go back and change—he chafes at delays. Let’s see what we can salvage.”
She was right; the envoy was a yellow-faced old man with cheeks pulled down like a bulldog’s, and he drew back a little when he saw my hua. “Do asha-ka take in courtesans now?” he sputtered, scandalized. “Women were not so bold in my day, least of all asha apprentices!” His heartsglass actually bristled, the colors palpitating between turgid yellow and green.
“Forgive us, Envoy Mu’awwan.” I never knew Polaire could gush so. “I told Tea here to come in her most outrageous hua, so you can point out all that is wrong with it, to teach her. Who is the authority on all manners of propriety and custom, I asked myself, and thought of you.”
“Well.” The man relaxed, mollified. “Quite, quite clever of you. Unlike some of my countrymen, I am not one to deny progress and women’s rights—my views are known to be liberal.” I stared at him in consternation. “But with all these indecent girls nowadays showing off legs and ankles without so much as family to accompany them, they wind up in all sorts of trouble. It’s important to cover up, to prevent men from indecent thoughts. Why, the stories I could tell you—if you knew the shamelessness of such women!”
We didn’t want to know, but he regaled us with them anyway. Afterward, he told me the fifty-seven things wrong with my hua, and my dislike for him grew with every justification.
“We’re wearing practically the same thing!” I hissed at Polaire when Envoy Mu’awwan excused himself to go to the bathroom. “How can he find fifty-seven things wrong with mine but not with yours?”
“The Drychta are a conservative people. Most would consider us terribly underdressed, and they avoid the Willows altogether. Envoy Mu’awwan is a diplomat and a progressive man in comparison, but what you consider similar is to him a world of difference. Red on a female implies that she flouts tradition and is therefore a loose woman. You wear the color on your clothes and in the jewels in your hair. Drychta men prefer that their women dress simply, without any ostentatious gems. Your hua has a slit on your side and exposes a part of your leg, while mine has none.”
“Maybe he just doesn’t like the color red.”
“That is no excuse, Tea.” Polaire was stern. “Know the people you entertain. If they are offended, you not only bring dishonor to the Valerian but also to the tearoom you stay at and me by association as your sister. Our opinions do not matter, and if you have to swallow your pride to keep them happy, then so be it. Now, stop slouching. I can hear him coming back.”
We attended a larger party the next night, with a group of wealthy merchants from both the kingdom of Arhen-Kosho and the Yadosha city-states. This time, Polaire was dressed like a princess, in silver and gold, and it brought out the gray in her eyes. The style of her hua was bolder, more brazen; her hair was skillfully piled up on top of her head and kept in place by half a dozen hairpins, where bright diamonds dangled, and long ringlets of brown hair framed her face. I had done my research and had once again donned my maroon hua but had not made myself up to the extent that she did.
The group of men greeted our arrival with cheers and guffaws, the noise loud in the usually quiet tearoom of the Golden Bough. It was early in the evening, and most were already drunk or at least well on their way to being drunk.
“Ah, Polaire! We were wondering where you were! And who is this pretty little thing?” One of the men bounded over, the tallest I’ve ever met. His hair and beard were golden, his face a healthy pink and white, but the hand that enveloped both of mine in a hearty handshake was brown and weather-beaten and twice my size.
“Don’t be so free with my little sister, Aden!” Polaire scolded, slapping his hand away. “Didn’t I tell you to behave this time around or will I have to stick your head into the pond outside again?”
Rather than be outraged, the men laughed harder. “She got you there, Aden!” one called out, shorter and wirier than the bearded merchant, with a thicker accent. “The last time you shook a flannin with Lady Polaire, she sent you headfirst into the fountain!”
“I remember her chasing Balfour around with that pole they clean the garden’s fishponds with. Mad as hops she was—”
“I was tipsy!” the red-haired man with darker skin protested.
“You were tipsy all right—tipped right into the stream!”
The group roared again. A tearoom attendant hurried in briefly, setting large tankards of a foamy golden drink on the table, and hurried out. I was ushered into a place among the cushions between Polaire and a dark-skinned man who was younger than his silver hair suggested.
“Your younger sister, you say?” Aden continued. “What’s your name?”
“It’s Tea, milord.”
“Milord?” Another one of the men guffawed. “No need for formalities. We’re all friends here. Tey-uh? What an odd name.”
“It’s spelled like the drink, Isamu,” Polaire explained.
“How strange to name someone after a drink! Where are you from, Tey-uh? Kion?”
“Her skin’s too dark for Kion, Isamu,” someone said. “She looks Odalian if anything. Or perhaps even Drychta.”
“I’m Odalian, milo—I mean, sir.”
“I’m Jolyon.” The man bowed. Unlike Aden, his beard was black, carefully trimmed and shaped so they were thin lines that crisscrossed his face.
“It’s hard to tell who the locals are in Ankyo,” Isamu protested. “Look at Knox here. He’s as black as night, but he comes from Yadosha like the rest of you.”
“Yadosha is also a melting pot,” Jolyon observed. “Not like you people in Arhen-Kosho. You all look the same.”
“That is not true!” One of Isamu’s countrymen extended his arm out, palms facing upward. “See? My skin is darker than Isamu’s!”
“I can’t tell the difference!” Aden complained. “Isamu, hold out your arm alongside Eito’s.”
Fairly soon, all the men in the room—all respected merchants, all rough-and-tumble men of influential standing—had their arms out, comparing skin tones. I had no idea what was going on.
“Aden’s arm is much darker than his face, see? He doesn’t even have the same color on himself!”
“I work outside! My face isn’t covered the way my arms are!”
“Polaire, what about you?”
“I think I will go and dunk myself in the spring outside if the lady asha is darker than mine—”
“Maybe only in the places that count,” Eito said slyly. That was enough to set the men off again.
“We apologize,” Knox said to me. “We have known each other for years.”
“I remember now,” Aden said. “Isn’t Tea the Dark asha who nearly obliterated the Falling Leaf tearoom?”
I winced. “I’m sorry.”
“Now, now,” Jolyon said. “That wasn’t her fault. And no one blames you, little miss. In fact, people have been asking for you, wanting to know if asha novices can be invited to the cha-khana regularly. I’d say you’ll have mistresses of the other tearooms knocking at your door, demanding that you wreck theirs too!” He laughed when I turned red. “Ah, don’t mind me. I say these things just to make the pretty girls blush. Here, have some alut.”
“I’m afraid Tea is still too young for your horrible drinks, gentlemen,” Polaire said primly. To my horror, she went and smacked the man lightly on the nose when he tried to hand me a glass, anyway. “You Yadoshans! Always looking for any excuse to get drunk!”
“But that’s why you like us, Polaire,” Aden said childishly. “Jolyon is offering to pay for all our meals, so let’s grub up some cants that the ladies might like—would that be apology enough, Lady Polaire?”
Polaire’s response was to tap him playfully on the cheek, and the men laughed again.
“Yadoshans like to fight and argue,” she explained to me after the party ended and we were walking back home. “Arhen-Kosho tend to be more reserved as a people—until they get drunk. You cannot treat everyone in the same way when you entertain them, Tea. Yadoshans sulk and get bored easily when you do not share in their revelry. Treseans are superstitious and like to get straight to the point in discussions but drink even harder than the Yadoshans. Drychta are—well, I’m sure you can already imagine what the Drychta are. There will be a few exceptions, but this is the general rule. What can you say about your own fellow Odalians?”
I thought. “Hardworking for the most part but very concerned with money. They’re suspicious of outsiders and of magic. No—they’re only suspicious of magic that other people use but not when they do.”
“Exactly. Would you say that your family too or your friends in Knightscross can be described in this manner?”
“But my family are nothing like that at all! The people in Knightscross aren’t—” and then I paused. I thought about their distrust of bone witches, their hostility toward me. Were they any different, after all, than the cold treatment Lady Mykaela and I received from strangers in Kneave?
She nodded at my growing understanding. “That’s right. Over the course of your life, you will meet many, many people. The trick an asha must learn is to read people accurately. So if a Tresean comes in and consumes a stupid amount of kolscheya and grunts at everyone in the room, then he is a typical Tresean to whom small talk will have no effect, and if you understand Treseans, you will wait patiently until he finally chooses to speak. But if he is a Tresean who is fond of chatter and has an eye for fashion, then you must ask Rahim what he is doing at such a party.”
I giggled. Polaire flicked her dark hair over one shoulder, the diamonds in it twinkling in the twilight. “Everyone is a puzzle, Tea, made of interlocking tiles you must piece together to form a picture of their souls. But to successfully build them, you must have an idea of their strengths as well as their weaknesses. We all have them,” she said, adding almost as an afterthought, “even me.”