Elphie is promoted to the next station. Her fifth in as many months. She’s now a comet looping outside a star cluster of girls closer to her own age. At this classroom, no window, just a pair of double doors through which the girls come and go. So Elphie doesn’t draw near until after the other students are assembled at their chairs. Easier to avoid the shame of being ignored if she’s slipping in and out on her own timetable.
It’s an education separate from the approved academic curriculum, to study these girls. Their cunning laughter, the unintelligible jokes, the implied allegiances and outrages, the reluctance, from time to time, to tend to their lessons. Elphie can’t help eavesdropping upon the puzzle of conviviality. She’s as mystified by this as she is by whatever subject is at hand, though mostly she’d rather the students settle down and let the teacher get on with it. Society is tiring.
One day when she approaches her post, she’s surprised to find a small rattan tray on the floor next to the stool. She thinks for a searingly happy moment that someone has left her a present—perhaps a bit of snack, or some tool for learning that has previously been denied her. But when she looks at the tray more closely, and overhears some carping remarks among girls in the classroom, she figures out otherwise.
The item is a porcelain tea set. Elphie has rarely seen porcelain before. Food in the badlands is eaten raw, or prepared in iron pots and served in wooden bowls alongside bamboo splinters for forks, or balsa wood spoons. This is an object of idolatry, the whole ensemble of items on a tray.
Elphie picks up the clues. Some girl has gotten this exotic treasure for a birthday present and brought it to school for boasting privileges. But, finding it a distraction, the teacher has set it outside until lessons are over.
A round-headed pot with a curlicued fish for a knob—you could run your fingers over its scales, counting the imbrications by feel, and so Elphie does. The pot gleams an aqueous blue-grey, shot through with charcoal pink that means, perhaps, to suggest the glimpsed movements of fish. Then, four small teacups of unbearably cunning design. Each one set into its own socket of wires whose filaments twist into leaf-shaped fins on either side. Each teacup is a different color—corundum red, purple-brown, a viscous bile yellow, and the softest of greens, morning light through jungle mist. A pucker of miser’s gold is etched on the rims of the cups. Glazing makes the colors shine as if they’ve just been washed and set out to dry in the sun.
“Where on earth?” asks Nanny that evening, when she discovers the treasure under a scarf that Elphie has draped over it.
“A friend gave it to me. As a present. Friends give presents,” says Elphie.
“You have no friends,” says Nessa. “You wouldn’t know what to do with them.”
“Friends have tea parties. Pretending. With this set of stuff. We could do that.”
“I’m your sister, not your friend.” Nessa glances greedily at the trove. “Still, I suppose I could pretend to be your friend. I mean, if we’re pretending.”
Neither of the girls is good at pretending, but they’ve heard of it from Nanny when she tells tales of Melena’s wild youth, back when Melena pretended to be a harlot so earnestly that sometimes she forgot and behaved like one. Not knowing what a harlot is, the girls guess it is some kind of robber. They’ve never asked, though, because during any such commentary by Nanny, Father lowers those dark looks to cancel the topic.
After the supper of fishbone broth is done and the dishes wiped and put away, Lei and Frex wander off in the gloaming to exchange whatever tedious remarks they can think up. Nanny sits Shell down to drill him on the alphabet while Elphie arranges the tea party on a square of toweling in the middle of the floor. Like a picnic. The toweling is a better shape (a quadrilateral!) than the larger parabolic (parabolic!) table, because a towel’s proportions don’t dwarf the set so much. The four cups in their woven wire baskets wait, one to each side. Elphie uses the saucers as plates. “What is our imaginary food?” asks Nessa.
“Marsh plums? Sweet, with honey sauce? Or cheese temptos?”
“Are those other two places for me and Nanny?” asks Shell.
“We’re expecting two friends,” says Elphie. “You do your homework.”
“How quickly is born a snobby snob-snob,” snorts Nanny. “Shell, how do you do it. Look there at that middle letter, it’s both backwards and upside down.”
“You don’t have no friends, not even any made-up ones,” says Shell.
“Some of the Dwarf Bears might stop by. You never know.”
“Oh, they’re all dead,” says Shell, yawning. Elphie shoots him a look. “What?” he replies with mock surprise. “I’m only saying what the other boys say.”
Earlier than usual, Frex and Lei return. Lei looks smug and Frex fretful. “Why don’t I make some real tea for the teapot,” suggests Lei brightly, and hurries to get started. About some subjects Elphie is beginning to have a reputation for temper; while Shell’s remark about the Ski’ioti is probably a joke, it’s a risky one. Without having heard the exchange, Lei senses trouble and wants out of the room.
So does Nanny. She leads Shell out onto the narrow porch to finish up the lesson. Shell aims a kick at the teapot as he passes, but Elphie reaches out and grabs his ankle and nearly overturns him before he breaks free. From outside, he wails, which doesn’t set the right mood for a tea party. His sisters do their best to ignore him.
“Strange weather we’re having,” says Nessa. “Listen to that wind howl.”
“I do like a good strong wind,” says Elphie, as adrift at the practice of party blandishments as her sister. She adds, “It strengthens the spine, somehow.”
“Doesn’t it just,” says Nessa, and here they run out of fuel for the social fire.
When Lei returns with some mint tea in a tin scoop, she pours it delicately into the pot and then stands expectantly, as if she hopes to be asked to join them. The Thropp sisters extend no such invitation, so Lei repairs to her room and slams the door. Their father, meanwhile, has disappeared into his mumbling again. The household is out of tune with itself, unhappy.
“Well,” says Elphie, trying to imagine how this is done. “I guess I’ll pour out the tea. You want some, I suppose?”
“Well, it is a tea party. What’s supposed to be on these plates?”
“Lemon temptos, I think. Or cheese.”
Nessa says, “Pretend ones.”
“That’s all we’ve got.”
“Well, I’ll take two cheese temptos, then.”
“Sorry, I ate the cheese ones. Only lemon temptos left. Yum, this tea is good.” It is, too; hot and spicy; Lei has splurged and added a few drops of rash of gingerroot. The clever metal basketry allows Elphie to pick up the cup with both hands and put it down again without burning her fingertips. She has the green one, Nessa the yellow.
“It’s quite simply the best tea in the world. Don’t you agree.” Bored tones of stating the obvious.
Nessa stares at her portion. “As you know, I can’t pick mine up,” she says at last, somewhat breaking the mood of the game.
“This is a pretend tea party with pretend lemon temptos. So pretend.” Elphie takes another sip. “Oh, I just can’t get enough of this.”
“Elphie.”
“Why don’t you just hex the cup to your lips?” Elphie is in a scarier mode now. “You know you have some power. It’s given you as a compensation, I think. Or just pretend you have the power to hex. See what happens. Go on. I dare you.”
“I’ll play some games but not that one. For one thing, Papa doesn’t approve. He says sorcery is a, a gimmick of public relations, and where it does exist, it’s risky. It goes up against the rules of the Unnamed God. I won’t do it.”
They look at each other over the grotty little square of toweling. They are little girls at their first play tea party and they are growing, growing up, at the same moment, and both of them feel it, and can’t go so far as to admit it out loud. Heady, and dangerous; collaborative and antagonistic. So much at stake at a tea party.
“Oh, all right.” Elphie serves her sister tea, sloshing a generous portion between Nessa’s lips in the hopes it might burn her tongue. Just a little.
In the morning they find that some other malevolent sprite has climbed up to the high shelf where the tea set was stored for safety, and has thrown every piece—four plates, four cups, four metal holders, the pot and the lid—down to the ground. All the porcelain lies in colored shards. The metal holders are bent but unbroken. Still, there is nothing left to hold.
When word gets around that the tea set has gone missing without permission, and been destroyed, the family of the spoiled brat child follows the clues and presses for damages. Elphie’s privileges for auditing at school are revoked. Frex is required to stump up for a replacement tea set. That child’s precious toy had come all the way from the Emerald City and it had cost a month’s wages. Nessa is allowed to remain at school, as she clearly can’t have been responsible for hauling away a treasure like a porcelain tea set in nacreous tones of envy, venom, despair, and fury, all rimmed in gold.
“I never did,” says Shell, and then with an innocence too wide-eyed to be convincing, “Maybe it was those Dwarf Bears, come for revenge. Don’t you think?”
“I thought you said they were dead,” says Elphie in a voice like drollery, but menacingly low.
“I went up to that hill place looking for them and I bet I saw them growling in the bushes and stuff, but they wouldn’t come out. So I think they’re dead but maybe not.”
“You never went up there. You’re five years old, you can’t even go to the outhouse by yourself.”
“I went with my big boys who wanted to—wanted to find them. Nanny falls asleep every morning after you go to mission, so you don’t know nothing.”
Elphie is too despondent to beat him up. She can’t bring herself even to keep the broken pieces of the tea set. Everything has broken, everything. She falls into a funk of silence, reviewing what school lessons she’s learned so far, and wondering why they haven’t been enough to stop her from being tempted by the artificiality of a toy. Wondering what she might do next.
To blame the victim, that weepy student, is a sore temptation. Such a pampered brat shouldn’t have brought her stupid tea party set to school in the first place. It’s all her stupid fault. Still.
To flush out the Ski’ioti, if they’re there, would heal something, somehow.
Though banned from school, Elphie isn’t relieved from her duties as the cantor of anthems at the morning meeting. The lodge still takes rent from Frex’s mission, and Elphie is needed to keep the congregation showing up. She’s caged into that chore. Exiled from the world of lessons bubbling just over there. Without her. Her singing strengthens as her mood darkens.
The wound represents itself as “No one ever gave us toys. How could we learn to be sisters when we had nothing to play with together?” Perhaps an irrational conclusion to draw, but hurt can distend rationality.