I WAS IN THE Drowning for the rice festival. It was raining, a fine, misting rain refreshing on the skin. The river was swollen up around the makeshift paddy fields where the green sprouts broke through the wet mirror reflecting a purple sky and the girls smeared with the saffron-colored powder paint as they danced for the harvest. Rahvey was there, happy as I almost never saw her, swaying from her neck to her hips in time with the shrill, wild music. And Vestris, radiant at the head of the dance in a fire-red sari.
I was holding Papa’s hand and wishing I was old enough to join in, but when I asked my father if I could, he looked warily at the sky.
“Rain’s getting harder, little one,” he said.
And it was. The steady drizzle had become a downpour, and suddenly the music had stopped while everyone ran for cover, looking for their sandals amidst the piles of flowers on the ground. We made for higher ground, but a policeman in white gloves said we couldn’t go that way. At first everyone was laughing in the chaos, but then the mood shifted and I was overcome with a strange and powerful dread.
Something awful had happened.
It was the river. It had burst its banks, and now we were awash in flowers, chasing our sandals as they floated away. I reached for mine, and in that instant I let go of Papa’s hand. I turned, frantic, but he was lost in the crowd of flailing, crying people. I saw Rahvey splashing through the water, screaming the names of her daughters, her face a mask of horror and fear.
The waters rose still higher, around our knees, our waists, our necks. We were all washing away, and now the colorful Lani crowd were mainly black, half-naked people I did not know, their eyes wide and desperate. I was lifted on a great brown wave. The river rolled like an ocean. Among the crocodiles and hippos, sharks circled, their dorsal fins knifing through what had been rice paddies, flower petals shredding in their wake. I was overcome by a desperate desire to find Mnenga amidst the black faces, but they did not understand me when I asked for him, and were too afraid of the sharks.
I took refuge on a shrinking island, scrambling up its shore as the tide rose, and climbing onto a rock only a couple of yards across, suddenly alone in a vast mud-colored sea. There was a terrible silence. All the people who had been there—family, friends, Lani, and the nameless black people I did not know, had vanished inexplicably. There were only the sharks and the blank, surging waters of what had been the river. And then I looked down and found that the slope I had climbed was not rock at all, but bone: a pile of human skulls that was sinking into the water, eye sockets filling with brown murk as the ground beneath me crumbled. I cried out, but my scream turned into the dawn shriek of a go-away bird, and I woke with a start, unsure of where I was and how I had gotten there.
I sat on the bed, sweating, waiting for my heart to slow, then plunged my face—after only a moment’s dreadful hesitation—into a basin of water, to wash the dream away. Taking a series of ritual breaths such as I would before performing my Kathahry exercises, I blew the air from my lungs like smoke.
Just a dream. It doesn’t mean anything.
I decided to believe that. I had real dangers enough without wasting energy on others that only existed in my head. And there were things I had to do today.
Another deliberate splash of water, and the dream was gone.
* * *
FOR ALL ITS STOLID opulence, the estate was sparsely furnished and drafty, but I slept in a vast, quilted bed so comfortable that, if not for my unsettling dream, I might have forgotten my anger at Madame Nahreem’s test. I had feared the chamber would be stuffy, since—remembering what Willinghouse had said about mirrors in the air shafts—I had thrown clothes and rugs over every vent I could see, but it was quite pleasant. The room was in a corner of the house, and the shuttered windows looked out upon a range of hills, some fenced and sprouting orderly crops, but most wild and untended brush. I had woken several times in the night to the sound of animal calls, one of which was surely the repeated grunting roar of a lion, and morning had come with a cacophony of screaming birds and chattering monkeys. Before going downstairs, I sat at the window scouring the countryside for elephants or one-horns. Apart from a solitary, browsing giraffe, I saw nothing, but given that I knew to expect hyenas inside the house, that wasn’t much consolation.
My shoulder felt better than it had, but it was still tight and ached when I rolled it. Whatever training I had coming today, I hoped it would not be unduly taxing on my already bruised and battered body.
For someone used, until very recently, to snatching a roll of bread from a bowl before the rest of the gang took it all, breakfast was bizarre. A white maid greeted me on the landing with a bobbing curtsy and an apparently unsarcastic “good morning, miss,” then led me down to a formal dining room where a long table draped in a starched white cloth was laid with plates and assorted cutlery. The others—Willinghouse, Dahria, and their grandmother, Madame Nahreem—were already there, eating in silence as a second maid, this one black, ministered to them under the watchful gaze of the young Lani butler I had seen the night before. They looked up from their food, and Willinghouse nodded me into a chair opposite Dahria, who was smirking at the way I refused to look her in the eye.
I helped myself to a dish of curried rice with smoked fish and hard-boiled eggs, and tried not to eat like it was the last meal I might get. That such plates of delicious food were mine for the taking still struck me as strange, and though I reveled in it all, I could not quite escape a lingering sense of guilt when I thought of Tanish, my erstwhile apprentice, and what he might be eating this morning.
“Miss Sutonga,” said Willinghouse brightly, “I trust you slept well. Your training will begin in one hour. I hope to return later today with an update from Inspector Andrews on the theft from the war department.”
His manner was businesslike, and as he spoke, he laid down the newspaper, checked his pocket watch, and got to his feet. He kissed Dahria lightly on the top of her head as she spread marmalade on her toast, nodded to Madame Nahreem with a polite “Grandmamma,” dithered in front of me, and left the room.
There was an awkward silence while Dahria swallowed.
“Just us girls together, then,” she deadpanned. “What japes we shall have.”
Madame Nahreem checked the clock on the mantel and turned to me.
“Meet me here in … thirty-seven minutes,” she said. Dahria rolled her eyes and went on eating as her grandmother left, the servants following in her wake.
“I haven’t forgiven you,” I said to Dahria, as soon as the door was closed and we were alone.
“However will I live with myself?” she remarked. “Oh, come off it. It was only a joke. You weren’t in any true danger.”
“It was cruel,” I said. “And humiliating.”
“Ah,” said Dahria, sitting back and smiling. “Your pride is wounded. Understandable, if a little surprising in one such as…”
I glared at her over the rim of my teacup, and she grinned wider than ever.
“Another joke,” she said.
“You should be a low comic in the music halls,” I remarked. “You clearly belong onstage.”
“You wound me, my dear steeplejack,” she said. “You wound me.”
I finished my food in silence, palmed a dusk peach on my way out, and left her sitting at the table looking sardonically amused. When I got back to my room, I found that clothes had been laid out for me: a tea gown in pale lustrous green with white lace trim. It wasn’t perhaps as fine as what Dahria wore, but it outstripped anything I had ever owned by a considerable distance, and I felt a peculiar confluence of powerful feelings at the prospect of putting it on. At first I was angry, resentful at the impertinence, but then I reminded myself that I was being trained to pass as a society lady—albeit one from far away—and this was doubtless a part of that. That hurdle past, I allowed myself the prospect of enjoying the dress, the softness of its material, the way it seemed to shift in the light, and finally the way it made me look when I put it on and stood in front of the mirror that had been set up for the purpose.
I looked … different. Like someone I had never seen before. Delighted, fearful. Pretty.
It was a strange feeling. Too strange. I hurriedly took the dress off, flung it over the back of a chair feeling increasingly foolish, and put my old things back on.
I was almost ten minutes late getting back downstairs, and Madame Nahreem was waiting for me. She stared as the butler showed me in and shot a pointed look at the clock.
“I know,” I said. “I’m sorry. I’ve just been—”
“I don’t care,” she said. “Follow me. We will begin immediately.”
She led me through the door behind the desk, and down the carpeted hallway where I had run the night before, but at the foot of the stairs, instead of going through to the kitchen and servants’ quarters, we took the other corridor past polished doors and out into a sunlit courtyard with a stone fountain, where one of the hyenas sprawled like a housecat. I gave it a wary look, and Willinghouse’s grandmother shot me a brittle smile.
On the far side of the courtyard, we entered another wing of the house entirely. The place was huge, far larger than I had realized. This portion was, however, less luxuriant, the floor matted with woven grass, the walls simple wood and plaster. We arrived at what seemed to be a kind of locker room with a sunken alabaster bath, a pair of benches, and an array of shelves and cupboards on the walls.
“You may leave your … clothes here,” said Madame Nahreem. The hesitation, and the critique it implied, suggested she knew about the green dress that had been left for me. I flushed and looked away. “Put these on.”
She nodded to a shirt and trousers made of what felt like heavy raw silk, smooth and pliable and gray. I frowned all the same. Why was everyone suddenly so concerned with what I wore?
“No jewelry,” she said.
I had Berrit’s sun disk around my throat with Papa’s coin.
“And take your boots off,” said Madame Nahreem. “You will perform this first exercise barefoot.”
I did as I was told, tottering as I plucked the first foot free so that she gave me a withering look, as if I was proving to be as incompetent as she had expected. I scowled, and when she did not look away as I prepared to undress, turned my back on her. When I finished dressing and looked at her again, she was giving me a disdainful smile.
“Modesty intact, I see,” she said.
“Is that a problem?” I responded. Her critical stare was getting on my nerves.
“Not if you are trying to spare my blushes,” she said, “though there is no need to do so. If it is a matter of your own embarrassment, however, then yes, it’s a problem.”
“How can my not wanting to parade around naked be a problem?” I scoffed.
“No one asked you to parade,” she said, her voice low and even, in pointed contrast to mine.
“If you had lived only a thin partition from a dozen teenage boys, you’d understand,” I retorted.
“Quite,” she said. “But you no longer live like that and need to put it out of your mind if you are to learn the deportment of a lady.”
“That’s just playacting,” I said. “Just tell me what to do.”
“No,” she said. “This is about being a lady. Being, not playing. You are used to being judged by your appearance as a Lani steeplejack—condemned for it even—and the result is that you don’t care what you look like, since nothing you do will counterbalance the assumptions made about you because of your skin. Believe me, I know.”
I stared at her, taken off guard by this moment of apparent solidarity, but her look of wry understanding slid away like a pit viper, and her face was as it always seemed, implacably hard and laden with scorn.
“So you have given up,” she said. “Your body rebels against civilization because civilization is for white people. The way you slouch, the way you roll your eyes when you are feeling superior, the curl of your lip when you are feeling resentful, the way you hang your head when you feel abashed—all of which you have done in the last thirty seconds—are beyond your conscious mind. They are not things you choose to do, so to stop doing them you must learn to think differently. To be different. So first I want you to be a body without a self,” she said, turning to a cabinet and opening it. On a shelf inside was a wooden box about a foot square. “Look here.”
She took the box down, unsnapped the clasp, and opened it.
Inside, sitting on velvet gray as my training clothes, was a mask.
It was an elegant thing, finely worked from some plain, almost grainless wood, smooth to the touch and remarkably light. It had eye, ear, and nostril holes, but the mouth was closed, and the face—the color of which matched my own skin almost perfectly—was blank. Two black ribbons were attached at the ears.
Disguise, I thought, unexpectedly pleased.
“I am going through this door,” said Madame Nahreem, nodding to a panel on the wall beside her. “When you are ready, you will follow me, and you will be the mask.”
I blinked at her.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“I mean what I said,” she answered. “You will study the mask. You will wear the mask. You will be the mask.”
“I don’t understand,” I said. “How can I be the mask? If it had a jackal or a vulture face or something, I could be the mask, but this is … nothing.”
“It is not nothing,” said Madame Nahreem, irritation flashing in her eyes. “It is neutral. That is what you must be. When you are ready, tie the mask so it sits on top of your head—that is the mask off position—when I give you the command, you lower it over your face—mask on position. From that moment on, everything you do must fit the mask.”
And without another word, she opened the almost invisible door, stepped through it, and closed it behind her.
I stared after her, then sat on the bench and considered the mask, weighing it vaguely in my hands.
Stupid, I thought. And a waste of time. How will this help me in Elitus?
I sighed my exasperation, then—realizing that the old bat could probably hear me through the walls—snatched up the mask, laced the ribbons around the back of my head, and tied it in place. It felt odd. I had expected to smell the wood or the oil it had been treated with, but I smelled nothing. My vision contracted a little, and my jaw felt constrained by the mask’s chin, but it wasn’t too bad. I pushed it up onto my forehead—what Madame Nahreem had called the mask off position—and stepped through the door.
I had expected a climbing apparatus or exercise equipment, but the room was quite empty, save for its matted floor and Madame Nahreem sitting on a solitary chair at the far end. I took a step inside.
“Stop there,” said Madame Nahreem. “Turn to face the door.”
I did so, feeling ridiculous and annoyed.
“Mask on,” the old woman barked.
I pulled the mask down over my nose and waited.
“Breathe,” said Madame Nahreem—as if I might have forgotten to—“and, when you are ready, turn to face me, as the mask.”
I waited for a dutiful second, then began to turn.
“No,” she interrupted. “Stop. Do it again. Be the mask.”
I paused, then did it again.
“No!” she shouted. “Again.”
I returned to my starting position with mounting anger, but I had barely even begun to move when she shouted at me again.
“No! Mask off.”
I snatched it from my face and stared her down.
“Did you study the mask?” she demanded.
“Yes,” I said.
“So why aren’t you being the mask?” she returned.
“What does that even mean?”
“Look at it!”
I forced my eyes onto the wooden face in my hands, its empty eyes and blank expression.
“Is that how you feel?” she demanded, still sitting haughtily twenty feet away.
“What?”
“Look at the expression on the mask,” she said, her voice rising now. “Does its expression match your feelings?”
“Of course not!”
“Why not?”
“Because I’m angry!” I shouted back at her.
“Exactly. You are supposed to be the mask, but your feelings won’t let you. The mask is neutral. You must be neutral.”
“I am being.”
“No, you are not. You are behind the mask. You must be the mask.”
“This is absurd.”
“No, it is not. You merely cannot do it. The two are not the same.”
The barb struck home like a scorpion’s tail, and I winced, then flung the mask at her, as hard as I could. It arced oddly, half floating, missing her, and bouncing comically against the wall.
I stood stock-still, my anger boiling, and she watched as if she had been waiting for just such a moment.
“It seems,” she said, “that we need to work on your throwing.” When I said nothing, she added, “Your temper will get you killed, Miss Sutonga.”
I stared at her, fists balled, for a long moment, then I took a breath, held it, and blew it slowly out.
“Fine,” I said. “Show me how to be neutral in the stupid mask.”
It was more challenge than request. She said nothing, but got up from her chair, crossed the room in a series of brisk strides, and stooped to the spot where the mask lay. She picked it up, her back to me, and bowed her head, as if in prayer, though I think she was merely looking at the mask in her hands.
She raised it to her face, belting the ribbons around the back, and paused.
The room was utterly silent, redolent of the slight aroma of the dry grass matting, light filtering in through high, shaded windows. I watched her irritably, her back to me, and then she changed.
It happened before she turned, and I could not say exactly how it happened, but it did, and she became something different. Her posture shifted, straightening and softening at the same time, she became somehow balanced, and the anger I had seen only moments before leached out of her even though I could not see her face. When she turned, it was with a fluid grace, and there was no trace of her own personality in the person standing in front of me. She turned her head to one side, then the other, the blank face of the mask showing nothing but its own neutral equilibrium, and then she took two steps, a fractional hop, and moved into three poses from the Kathahry: weancat, river rock, and pine. Each motion was like wind or air or water moving her body from within. I gaped. Madame Nahreem had vanished. She had become the mask.
She moved toward me, close enough to touch, stood for a silent moment, then with the same uncanny ease, lifted the mask from her face. Her eyes, which had been so full of fire before she began the exercise, were empty, unreadable.
“Now you,” she said, offering me the mask.
I could not do it. I knew that. But I at least understood what I was trying to achieve, even if its purpose was still dark to me. So I did it, and when she stopped me, corrected me, I started again. Over and over. She pointed out the tension in my shoulders, the way I twisted my neck before I turned, the stiffness of my arms, and with each adjustment, I tried again. She told me I was too self-conscious, too deliberate, that I was thinking too hard, and at one point she made me step back into the locker room and consider the mask in silence, before trying again.
For two hours, we worked like this. She did not say I had improved. She offered no encouragement or support. But she criticized with less irritation, and that, I supposed, was as much as I could hope for.
“Why are we doing this?” I asked. I didn’t speak caustically or even skeptically, but I wanted to know.
“To be a lady, you must unlearn seventeen years of thinking yourself an underling. That is a difficult thing to do, perhaps an impossible one. So for now I want you to turn off your mind. But this is not merely about being a princess so you can fit into some ridiculous private club. This is also about survival.”
“How so?” I asked.
“My grandson said you were unsure of your combat skills.”
I flushed and looked down.
“And there it is again,” she said, reading my look. “The collapse of poise, of self in the face of powerful feeling. You must learn not to be a victim to your emotions, your little rages and embarrassments, and not only because an aristocratic lady would not suffer such self-doubt. They put your life in peril.”
She saw the doubt in my face and came close.
“Some of what you are going to do will require you to think, to process, to analyze. Some of it won’t. In fact, some of it will demand the opposite, that you do not think or feel or even simply react. It will require you to be in your body. To act without thought, to move in the most efficient and fluid manner possible, and in ways that will not reveal your intentions to your enemies.”
“Enemies?” I cut in, uncertainly.
She ignored me, continuing as if I had not spoken at all.
“It will require balance. It will require the elimination of passion and personality. It will require you to do what your body alone requires, what it needs, what it demands.”
“You want me to have no personality?” I said, not liking the sound of this. “My feelings make me strong.”
“No,” she said. “They make you feel strong because you are caught up in them. But that does not mean you are strong. They do not give you control, or poise, and when you rely on your body for your work, your life, these are essential. You must strive to be neutral.”
“I’m not sure I want to be,” I said.
“What you want is irrelevant,” she answered flatly.
“Are you going to be like this all the time?” I said, tipping my chin up and glaring down my nose at her.
“If it helps to keep you alive,” she replied, “yes. Mask on.”