Think about it. Elphie is responsible for entering into two contracts.
The first is the trading of her mother’s steal-away frocks and gowns in exchange for Unger’s looking into the identity of Turtle Heart and the location of his survivors, eleven years later. If they are even findable, if they are still alive. Unger is taking the job seriously, or seriously enough. Some days he goes out for an hour to make enquiries at some lodge or lobby somewhere. “Such an effort, delegating people to ask other people, and then waiting for the replies to cycle back through the chain of chat,” he explains. “You can’t rush these things. Watch what you’re doing; this is supposed to be cut on the bias and you’ve lined it up all wrong. You keep wasting cloth and you’ll be my indentured servant till the next jackal moon.”
The second contract is Elphie’s working as Unger’s assistant to pay for replacing the broken window, even if the breakage wasn’t Elphie’s fault. She just happened to be standing there when some bird carrying a stone in its beak flew into the window. Or some kid playing a game became an accidental vandal and ran away before he could be spotted. But Elphie has stopped pointing this out to Unger. She’s accepted the terms. It’s not so much that she enjoys working for him—though she does—it’s that she likes having something to do that doesn’t involve her family.
One morning when Unger is out making a delivery for a house-bound client, the young fellow who made a snarky comment about Elphie’s complexion early on, that first day, comes back to pay an installment on a bill. He’s slight, like most Quadlings, but has a brittle quality, too—something about the way he puts his foot down on the floor, nearly soundlessly. Now that she’s conversant with the secrets of bookkeeping, Elphie takes his coins and notes and gives him a receipt, and she writes down a note about the cash taken in, though doesn’t know to whom to ascribe the payment, and she can’t bring herself to ask. All the while she imagines his eyes drilling into her—she keeps her own eyes lowered—as if to see if her scalp beneath her hair is green like the rest of her. “Have you any questions, sir?” she asks. She is parroting what she thinks Unger might say at this point, though she can’t imitate her boss’s manner, which manages to be both unctuous and sincere. She can only be brisk.
“I just wonder where you came from, and how long you’re staying,” he replies, in an indefinite tone she can’t read, but she doesn’t much like whatever slant it is taking.
“Do you now,” she replies. “And I wonder how long you’re staying. I have other chores to attend to.” There, she has made him sound like a chore. Unintended cleverness on her part, but she’s glad of it. She hands the receipt over and gives a half bow from the elbows, a gesture of dismissal.
He’s unfazed. “You’re certainly not from here.”
“And you are not off in the lagoons of vegetable pearl, though you look young enough to be wet behind the ears. I wonder why you’re excused that task.”
“Do you wonder that, now,” he says, mocking her a little. “If one is born to the chieftain’s clan, there are certain allowances.”
“If one is a shopgirl, one gets no allowance.” She turns her back to him, opening a ledger on the other desk, and studying the pages for no good reason except to show him she’s done with him.
She doesn’t like him, not how he behaves nor even how he looks. But he is wearing a vegetable pearl in one ear, and she likes that—that alone. She’s too inept to work out the algebra of aesthetics, but she can and does notice the paradox of it.
He thinks he can outwait her, so to toy with her the more, but he can’t, and eventually he pads away. As soon as he’s descended the steps she rushes to the porch and begins to sweep with ferocity. The morning’s harvest of fallen leaves showers upon him in a golden flurry. He pretends not to notice, and she laughs out loud. She can’t remember laughing at anyone other than a family member before. It feels full, and it feels mean. Both of these sensations are gratifying.
When Unger returns, she wants to find a nonchalant way to ask about the client, but Unger brings news. He tells her, “I’ve had a spot of luck at the home of my morning client, of all things. Wait till you hear. I’ve learned that there was indeed a Turtle Heart, someone distantly related to a family in the glassblowing guild. As I need to have this window replaced, I’ll send you there to place the order. After the holiday, when I can spare you from the shop. You can make your enquiries at last. So we’ll kill two birds with one stone.”
“One stone broke your window. Let’s not throw any more. Um, especially not to kill birds.”
“It’s a saying.” He looks at her, alert.
“Someone stopped by to pay a bill, a nervy young man, I’ve seen him before. Older than me but not that much.”
She explains she didn’t know his name, so she couldn’t record his payment on the right page in the book. But she remembers it was for an order of striped turquoise morgandy. “Oh, yes, the Pari’isii crowd,” replies Unger. “They run the city council, sometimes a bit too much for their own benefit. But they’re good people, mostly. I forget the young one’s name. Are you smitten?”
“Smitten?” She doesn’t know the concept. Unger tries to explain, and she flushes some different shade of green. “I have no intention of being smitten, though I would consider smiting,” she barks at him. “He is rude and forward.”
“Oh, and you, you’re the very soul of manners, docile and decorative. Aren’t you. I know. I’ve picked up on that.” He looks at the note she took and then at the ledger. “Well, their bill is now all paid, so unless you’re still here when the festival of Se’enth comes around again next year, and people need to redo their salons and freshen up their holiday wings, you won’t be seeing much of him. I wouldn’t worry about it.”
“He should worry if he crosses my path when I’m not at work. I’m not as docile and, um, decorative as I look.”
Unger raises an eyebrow at this but stops himself from further comment. He goes into the back room. Elphie doesn’t concern herself with what he might think about in there. Enmired in the narcissism of youth, she has largely lost the capacity of empathetic fungibility that quietly characterizes the younger child. She does think about the Pari’isi boy, that is, until she is taking her midday bite on the veranda. She’s distracted by the view over the water gardens and the lagoon, and before she realizes it, her boss is pushing through the cords of the doorway with a curious expression on his face.
He is brushing dots of rice from his combed chin-hairs. “This is the hour of rest, all of Ovvels takes its quiet time now. Why are you shrieking an alarm? Is there a fire someplace? Are you trying to annoy my neighbors?”
She has raised her voice in a soprano register, throwing it some distance; she hasn’t thought this through.
Unger mutters, “You’re caterwauling to attract that young snoot? The Pari’isi boy? Is that it? Is he lurking around for your approval and notice?”
“You’re deranged.” Elphie sounds too much like Nanny—it’s sort of chilling. But Unger is on to her. She’s been trying to send out a note for attention—not to some wasted rich kid, but to the Ski’ioti, whom she’s spotted at the far end of the floating gardens. Lollo-lollo and Neri-neri, humping along on all fours, making a smorgasbord for themselves. She’s at least realized that if her voice is heard, people would turn toward its source and away from the lagoon, so she isn’t endangering the Dwarf Bears. But the Bears might hear, too, and lift their snouts, and remember that they had accepted her as a—what is the word? Not friend, that hopeless concept. As a—a—a fellow outcast? A resident of the margins? She’s here, she’s here, she’s here: That’s what her one-note carol has tried to remind them.
She hopes they won’t scarper off before she can question them again. She’s been lining up questions—every night another one occurs to her. If there really are lots of talking Animals—do they all speak the language of humans? Are there other tongues besides the human ones? What about when Animals come across nonspeaking animals of their own species—or any other? Can a preverbal animal be taught to speak? Where is the dotted line between Soul and soul—and is that even the question?
Likely she doesn’t form these thoughts as rational phrases, likely her mind is really just going: Animals? Animals or animals? Huh?
The Dwarf Bears have heard her, for sure; they stop their foraging and lift their heads. But she doesn’t dare not wave at them. Anyone craning to look at her for her sung bell-tone would turn to see whom she was signaling. She doesn’t want to lead eyes to them.
The silence after her sonata has a presence of its own, a meaning.
Unger is still looking at her, with something of a raised eyebrow, waiting. She isn’t a skilled liar, an unusual deficit and a liability in someone her age. So she just stands there. She doesn’t offer any explanation for her sweet taran-tara.
But he’s still looking, still looking. She gets nervous.
“You just can’t help it, can you,” he says at last, “drawing attention to yourself?”
“I’m a nobody, I’ve a right to be a loud nobody if I need to be.”
“Ozma help us all.”
When he’s gone back to his rice and basil leaves, she steals a glance at the lagoon. It is serene and empty, nothing but the breeze pulling a rippled skin on the surface of the water. Those sly Ski’ioti have vanished. A trick she wishes she could learn.