Chapter Text
The riches of heaven’s pavement, trodden gold
The final night of a waxing gibbous is a fluster of activity in the Nadasamahl’an. The kitchen embers will smoulder at rest no more than the deft hands of the apprentice food keeper who smokes blood lotus seeds over them, a kerchief secured around her mouth and nose to ensure that the smoke will not draw her mind too far from her flesh. She will pass the smoked seed, now burst open to reveal their rubineous inner flesh, in a covered dish to the section’s pastry chef who casts a quick, watery eye over them to ensure there is no flaw in this batch. A partially opened pod means they must all be discarded; they cannot risk burning, or that the smokey-sweet pounded paste they will now transform the pods into will be uneven in texture; the Lady shall have only perfection to nourish her body.
With a nod her work is approved, and she is free now to make her way out of the kitchen. Her feet move nimbly and without hesitation though the great kitchens, with its three-hundred strong staff. Past the oven, where the fire-stoker is whipping flames up with a glare and a gesture to ensure the pie crust blind bakes evenly, through the door to the doorway and along the row of soup cauldrons, each with its own junior cook standing vigil. Past the meat larder, where if she turned her head she would see four butchers working in tandem to spatchcock a drake. Past the small stone fountains built into the wall at arterial doorways in the stylized figure of a dragon with bowed head, which pour forth cool water infused with canavaris to soothe burnt hands and aching throats, proof of the Lady’s motherly care for even her lowest. She is a worker bee in a hive, moving within an instinctual rhythm played by their heartbeats.
She makes her way to the slave yard, a small enclosed court which is no less a hive than the chokingly hot kitchens, but with a drowsy quality in the moonlight, like she has carried the blood lotus smoke on her skin and now comes to snatch a precious honeycomb from sleeping bees. Five orderly lines have formed, although it will be several hours before she reaches the front of the column she now joins. Her voice joins the low hum of a beginning hymn.
The hands of the hairdressers are deft with the sharpened blades, moving in rapid strokes across the short new growth of the current scalp. Even the youngest, a fresh apprentice of 35 years knows her task well. The water barrels next to each station are grown murky by the hairs rinsed into the water to keep the blade keen. A slip with the blade will cut, and a scar upon the head is a terrible shame for all involved. The bearer cannot serve anywhere where such an unsightly thing may be seen and cause distress, and so they are banished to the outfields, or the scullery, or somewhere else they can be kept out of sight. A visible scar keeps your prospects slim, even for a slave. The Lady shall have only perfection to please her eyes.
She smoothes an oil of canavaris on the freshly cleared scalp to soothe razor burn, and washes her hands carefully in the second basin with a sliver of plain soap her Ladyship generously donated. Adaine, her assistant plucks the straight razor from the cloth she left it on to inspect the edge of the blade; if they find it wanting then they wipe the whetstone across it until it can cut breath itself. The next in line, a stablehand naked to the waist, sits and the team begins again.
Hours pass like this, and the moon is high overhead by the time Ellana can see the end of the line. A pang of relief shoots up through her; her hands are aching and her eyes tired. The scullery boy who sits before her has a deep, chesty voice that rumbles through him enough to make the shaving process a more intense round than was strictly needful. She wishes she had the nerve to tap him with the flat of the blade, get him to muffle his crooning a little, the way the more experienced hairdressers do with the little ones as they squirm, but that small blasphemy would never be tolerated.
Soon she will be able to slump back to her dormitory to steal a few hours of rest before the Full Moon banquet demands her attention. She’s been assigned to a minor dignitary from the court of Sylaise, who has requested his hair be coiled atop his head and set alight like a taper, but without the wretched smell. She’ll be working with a scented wax for hours, and if she isn’t alert enough the stink or the wax burns will be paid for with a caning that will leave her unable to walk for a week.
Ralaferin, Master of the Household and assistant to the Steward comes careening around the corner and nearly smashes into the pillar opposite in his haste. The hymn, always low but now carried only by a handful, stutters to a stop.
“All of–,” and here he breaks off in a choked gasp as he struggles to regain his breath, “you! An unexpected and highly regarded guest of her Ladyship has arrived, and is to be established in the Painted Chambers!”
There is a moment of stunned silence. The Painted Chambers, as they are known to the slaves of Nadasamahl’an, are one of perhaps three chambers reserved for the use by Firstborn guests. It has sat disused for nigh on six hundred years, and shuttered completely for most of that. Their Lady hadn’t even permitted entry for the centennial cleaning. Leave it long enough and it will take itself out! The state of the rooms beggars the imagination, and now a Firstborn is to reside there?
Ralaferin breaks the silence. “Call your cohorts! We have five hours until dawn!”
Chaos erupts.
The scullery boy knocks Ellana’s handbasin clamorously to the ground as he shifts from sitting to sprinting in the blink of an eye, the low wooden stool clattering in his wake. He still has a tuft of hair above his right ear that now looks nothing so much as mould on a fruit as he rounds the corner, but he’s still not the first in the crowd. She’s glad for an instant that she lifted the blade away from his skin when she first turned to see Ralaferin or else she could now be standing here holding a shred of his scalp.
Adaine turns to her askance, clutching the whetstone even as he rights the handbasin. His eyes ask the question that right now his hands can’t. What are we supposed to do?
She shrugs a little. “I can’t see how anyone’s coming back to finish their Shearing until tomorrow, now. Maybe we go to the dormitory and call some more of the maids?”
Adaine twists his lip at that, and she’s sure she understands despite the fact he’s now not even looking up at her, instead inspecting the rim of the copper basin for damage. The journey back to the dormitory would seem a cruel mockery of itself and the until-now promised sleep that awaited them at the end of their toils. And, she adds to herself, it’s not as if someone else isn’t already on their way there, about to create a stir like a fox in a henhouse.
She quirks her eyebrow at him.
His answering sigh is not nearly as delightful as the response he signs out to her. You go ahead. I’ll clean up your mess.
Her bright laugh bounces strangely in the empty courtyard and she thrusts the hand towel and folded straight razor into his hands with a hasty hug of thanks, then takes off after the vanishing crowd.
She’s equal parts alarmed at the sudden arrival of such a pre-eminent guest, and desperately curious. No one has so much as lit the lock on the Painted Suite in so long that it becomes a mystery in and of itself. “Painted” implies that the walls are bare, so does that mean it was decorated during a time before the magnificent mosaic tiles were set into the walls? Or were the tiles ripped out, piece by piece to expose the plaster and stone underneath?
More than anything she burns to know who deserves to be placed in these rooms. Is this some grave insult, only the barest step above refusing hospitality altogether, or is it fondness; a cherished place preserved like a droplet of water in amber?
The crystal lock above the doorway glows a watery blue as she reaches the end of the slave path and emerges into the public Small Gallery that connects the three apartments used by Firstborn; the Chamber of the Moon Embracing the Sun, more commonly known as the Lady’s Chamber (although the Lord has been known to make use of it on the rarified occasion of his visits), the Chamber of the Welcoming Earth, more often known as the Firstborn chamber by virtue of being the only apartments available for such a guest, and the Painted Chamber, which has no other name in memory.
The swarm of activity has none of the surety of rhythm of the kitchens, not the humming ease of the Shearing yard. It is pandemonium inside, with ancient drapes being ripped down and flung wholecloth out of creaking windows on antique hinges rather than waste the time of removing them carefully from curtain railings. The maelstrom of dust stirred up is immense.
Ellana sets herself to work with stripping motheaten coverlets from the solid furnishings, ripping a strip of cloth from one to knot over her face. A head maid stumbles in, a robe knotted over her sleeping shift and with bleary eyes begins to summon water into the air. She’s working on a knife’s edge, careful not to call enough that it would soak, but enough to dampen down the swirling dust.
The dust is swept, the carpets beaten by teams of fatigued stableboys, the librarian and her assistants rattling through inventory lists to find books that may fill the bookshelves currently being polished and oiled by a gaggle of gardeners. A spirit of fastidiousness is working in tandem with a laundry girl to remake the wide bed with a damask coverlet of sky blue-and-gold, in between criticising harshly enough the tired girl begins to cry into her sleeve while she works.
To Ralaferin’s great relief the enchantments have held up admirably without maintenance. None of the furnishings need to be disposed of, nor have the small wrought silver inkpots tarnished in the writing desk, nor any other item that might be noticeable in its replacement or absence. They might just pull this off.
Ellana is clambering up some old scaffolding in the attached valet quarters with instructions to remove the nails so it can be taken down silently when she sees something that stops her in her tracks. A sparrow’s nest has settled in the well of a mortar and pestle. Strange enough that it should be here at all, but in addition to stuffing torn from the forlorn pillow the nest appears to be made of fine, slender bristled paint brushes. The terrified birds themselves fled out the window with the great commotion of her unexpected visit, but inside are four fragile eggs, still intact.
There’s really no reason to go out of your way for what are basically edible pebbles, she tells herself sternly. Why don’t you just stick them in your pocket and hope they don’t get smashed until you have a chance to snack on them? And then she calls down below.
“Think I’ve found a memento of some kind, from an old occupant. Give me a moment!” and she lifts the mortar to her chest and crawls out of the adjacent window in pursuit of the parents.
Climbing a roof one-handed is really not all it’s cracked up to be as a thrill, even if it is a shallow one. “Don’t see why I’m doing this to myself, actually.” she mutters to herself, “Maybe this is what happens if you go without sleep for too long, your dreams slip out of the sky and hunt you down for being tardy.” The breeze, gently lifting the scent of embrium and wisteria in the low courtyards turns far more fierce when it encounters an invader on its rooftops.
The birds themselves are nowhere to be found. A wisp floats out through the window after her, white as a star.
“Do you happen to know where those terrible parents ran off to? Please.” She adds lamely at the end, remembering her good manners.
The wisp titters to itself, as if amused by her predicament. It hums, twirls around the nest to consider, and then with a chirp far too cheerful to the ear of a woman who hasn’t slept for 17 hours and is currently standing on a roof, sails off down the ridge of the vault and off the edge towards the orangery.
Ellana spends the better part of ten minutes gingerly lowering herself and her cargo down the trellis, alternating between holding the mortar close to her body so she can balance and then reminding herself that the smell of sweaty elf is hardly likely to endear the returned nest to its absconded owners. It’s comforting at least that no one can see her making a fool of herself in the pre-dawn hours. The orangery is still and heady with the smell of hibiscus and plumeria.
She finds the wisp circling a distressed sparrow on a pomegranate shrub, flapping its wings desperately to warn it off every time it spirals too close. She’s convinced the sparkling thing is laughing again.
She sets the stone mortar down with a hefty thump on the broad corner of a planter full of seedlings and sets to work on extricating the nest without jostling the eggs too much. It feels like disarming a trap, especially when a second sparrow, the male, begins circling above her making clear his indignation at her theft of his home.
“Just be grateful I don’t want the paintbrushes back.” she snarls after her right ear is divebombed by the impatient father. The wisp is of course, no help at all. It’s decided that the best way to contribute is to harry the mother the lengths the ceiling in what could be called a game of tag if only it weren’t the only willing participant.
The nest comes free eventually. Ellana feels obliged to apologise for her comrade’s behaviour, so she finds a clump of dry straw in the corner of the seedling planter, and tucks it in a gap that her thumb had depressed in the twigs. And then to salve her own stupid conscience for taking so long she shreds the cloth scrap that was still knotted around her neck into the nest. There. Now her debt is paid to these delinquent parents. Who abandoned the nest in the first place. And who she helped by returning their damn children.
In all this escapade has taken her more than an hour, and she still needs to wash out the mortar and climb back up the trellis. Next time she’ll just eat the damn eggs.
The climb back up is faster now that she doesn’t have to be considerate of passengers, and it only takes a minute or two to duck back through the window, brushing off the wisp when it flies directly at her forehead and–
She’s not sure why she’s surprised that the scaffold she climbed out on isn’t there to receive her. Perhaps it’s a blind faith in her fellow elves that has never been disappointed before now. Perhaps a sleep-deprived hairdresser shouldn’t be climbing in and out of windows in the darkest hours of the night when a glowing wisp has destroyed your night vision. Or maybe it’s just that a seven-foot drop would surprise anybody who wasn’t expecting it.
Despite her shock, enough instinct had taken over to twist her body such that none of her limbs break; her shoulder may be bruised, but that’s easy enough to work through. She allows herself the luxury of laying on the floor berating herself for a minute or two, then she gingerly sits up. The wisp slowly swims down through the air, a gentle coo ringing out as it hovers by her left shoulder.
“Did you try to warn me just then?” she asks, taking the spirit in the eyes that are a little unfocused. The wisp is abashed by its failure, its silver light dimmed to the strength of an ember. “It’s all right. I’m not hurt.” she reassures it, holding her arm out so it can examine her. It rotates around her, pausing here and there where it can tell she impacted harder. At last, satisfied there will be no lasting damage, it nuzzles against her palm like a kitten and emits a more generous, silver-gold glow.
Now she has to get out of here; it seems that the Master of the House was satisfied with the work done by the menagerie of staff he summoned from any task minor enough to be spared.The apartment is deserted, without even a lit candle standing vigil for the exalted guest that kept so many from even the briefest snatch of rest.
The silence of the apartment seems to require she match it with her steps, so she walks softly through the interior corridor. She can’t resist peering around corners to see what exactly the painted chambers look like; she might have to describe this to some curious da’len sat upon her knee in 800 years time, and what other stories is she going to have? The Tale of the Stupid Bird That Tried To Peck My Ear Off?
Across from the servant’s quarters are two doors. The bathroom, with a deep set bathing pool that in another palace would be called a large ornamental pond, ringed with tiles configured into warming runes; and the dressing room, which has an entire wall of drawers running down one side, a full length looking glass wide enough for two to stand abreast, a table with small silver pots clustered like berries in a corner glints in the light her wisp lets off, and a single trunk laid in the centre of the room, quite clearly the traveller’s clothing. Well, details make a story she tells herself. She sniffs at a silver pot as she passes, wrinkling her nose at the rancid smell of jasmine oil left out for far too long.
The latch on the trunk is unbound but either physical lock or enchantment. Possibly someone has already removed such things so that the porters can unpack, or maybe they just assumed nobody would be audacious or stupid enough to snoop in the underthings of a Firstborn. Ellana unlatches the lid.
Its….well. It’s all lovely, a fine dark robe picked though with gold thread, a white shirt meticulously folded, the pelt of a grey wolf. But it’s also nothing special. The finery is…fine. Someone went to all the trouble to pack this with dried lavender and wrap it neatly in bolts of silk, but she’s supposed to be turning a minor diplomat into a candle in a few hours. By comparison this all seems so lacking she can’t help but feel a flutter of disappointment. Her wisp bumps her soothingly on the cheek.
Thinking of that stupid candle hair and that stupid dignitary from Sylaise snaps her out of her self-indulgent curiosity. She has to get back before she’s found where she shouldn’t be. She repacks the trunk as best she can, and heads out. She decides to skip the bedroom, and cuts directly through the study towards the antechamber. Her wisp rises up to the ceiling and flares out its light as best it can to give her enough to see by as she picks her way through, and that’s when she sees it.
Under the layers of dust and time she couldn’t see the walls properly before. The frescos cover every wall of the room down to the tiniest cranny. She can see shapes of dragons flying behind the bookcases, a rainbow where each colour becomes a lover twisting together like a braid until all are white light, and a wolf howling at the moon painted out of liquid silver. A memory of music she has never heard rises in her ears and it morphs into melodic laughter tinkling like the keys of a piano.
Except that laugh wasn't a memory. The door opens. Her wisp gutters out. She glimpses a lady, silhouetted by warm candlelight, and a man perhaps a step behind her, and then she is on her knees.