Domesticated Magic

Chapter 1

Mateo was up well before the sun to dress in the formal robes for the morning ritual, and he was not happy about it. There was a reason it had become the morning ritual rather than the dawn ritual during his tenure as Soul of Kindred Taurasi, and a reason he’d refused the full regalia even before Anika had sold most of it off.

But it was the first ritual since the news had reached the Imperial port city of Anceral that Ysthera, the Sunlit Isle, had sunk to the bottom of the sea, forever lost. Sometimes sops had to be thrown to a frightened and grieving people, no matter how much they tried to pretend to him that they were not frightened and grieving.

Anika herself had brought the silk robes over from storage, and she stayed to help Mateo dress in the layers, and painted his face with the kohl and powders, and styled his hair into an elaborate coiffure that involved a good hour, a great deal of paste, and a fair number of pinned and looped braids.

Then he did the same for her, because if the Soul had to do it, so did the Heart, except her costuming was, unfairly, very much less extravagant.

By the time they crossed the misty street to the teahouse, Mateo’s bad hip was already aching from the unfamiliar stress of the dressing palaver and the unfamiliar weight that was this awful ritual costume and the unfamiliar chill of being awake and moving this wretchedly early.

It was fair to say Mattias Taurasi, Soul of Kindred Taurasi, was not in the best of moods.

Anika, on the other hand, was looking very fetching in her silks and cosmetics and was her usual buoyant self—or at least, that was the self she presented to her people, when her buoyancy was needed to keep some eighty refugees afloat.

Darius, Anika’s uncle, had left the teahouse shutters closed but lit the porch lamps, a golden glow against the light mist, and lit the interior lamps, and lit the fires in the big kitchen stove and in the small ceramic stove in the near corner, which was where Mateo went to stand, angling his hip to the radiating warmth.

He didn’t rub the hip. Too many of his people were already here, kneeling on their cushions, the woven fabrics making bright squares of patterned colour against the polished parquetry.

Penelope came in. She was a Taurasi elder, inky hair stranded with silver but spine ever straight. She had been Heart before Anika and before Charion, who had been lost on the day of the exile. Penelope was perfectly pleasant, a stickler for tradition, and had a way of reminding Anika and Mateo that they were both a good ten or fifteen or even twenty years too young for their roles.

‘Oh, don’t you look lovely,’ she said to Mateo when she saw him in the regalia. ‘Very ceremonial today, that makes a welcome change.’

This, of course, was to point out that he usually did not look ceremonial at all.

‘You could be wearing the status markers,’ she suggested, touching her throat and her earlobes to indicate the lack of jewellery in those places on Mateo.

He looked around at the others. ‘They…know my status, Penelope.’

‘Always in such a mood in the morning,’ she said, walking off to find her cushion.

‘Well, now I am,’ he muttered, unjustly, which merely proved her point and further annoyed him.

Anika had gone behind the counter into the small kitchen workspace and was reading the esoteric marks carved into the mossy-green wax of a tabula, picked from the top of a short stack. The little boxwood-framed tablets were used for sending messages throughout the city, in preference to the far more expensive innovation of paper.

As not only their Heart but one of the few literate Taurasi, Anika dealt with the Imperials, and the Imperials had learnt to be thorough administrators. A steady stream of tablets issued from the governor’s residence and its associated army of clerical scribes, as well as from friends, customers and associates of the Come-By-Chance Teahouse. Anika wielded an iron stylus to carve her own marks—acknowledgements, replies, counterpoints—and dutifully sent them back.

Shaking her head, Anika rubbed the wax clean with the flattened wedge end of the stylus and dropped the offending tabula close by the kitchen stove where she brewed her herbal teas. The wax would soften in the heat, melting away any last trace of whatever unpleasant message the surface had held. That message, it seemed, would not be receiving a response, dutiful or otherwise.

It was typical, thought Mateo in his morning gloom, that Imperials took something as beautiful as pure beeswax, golden and gently scented, and polluted it into mossy darkness with resins and soot just to make it more useful to their own narrow needs.

Eminently pragmatic, were Imperials, in language, in dress, in worship, in food, and in their longstanding overlordship across the entire landmass from Chalcadea in the west to the city-states here on the east coast.

Anika set aside the rest of the tabulae for later attention. She came around the counter to stand on the lowest step of the short flight of stairs that led up to the storage room and her own private quarters.

That lowest step acted as the metaphorical equivalent of the village dais back on Ysthera. Mateo paced over to join her. The layered robes made his walk slow and stately, which was, now he thought about it, probably half the point of the blighted things.

He looked about the young and old faces upturned attentively towards him. Almost all the adult Taurasi were here today, emerging from the traditionally prescribed three days of private mourning and the rituals that went along with that. It hardly seemed adequate to mark the passing of an entire island and its people; certainly, none of the sole surviving Ystheran Kindred could truly be finished mourning.

But they had mortgages, and children to feed. The teahouse had to re-open to customers. Kindred Taurasi had to find its strength and move on, as it had done before, Anika its steadfast guiding light and unfaltering bulwark both.

Most of the Taurasi were kneeling on their cushions now, in ragged rows. They stared silently up at Anika and Mateo, their Heart and Soul, the very last Heart and Soul in all the world. The air felt heavy, the moment too significant.

Timon wolf-whistled, then, and the anticipatory tension broke. Anika laughed and took Mateo’s hand, and they bowed together to their people, and their people, kneeling, made the genuflection in return. Most did it in the moderate way that Mateo preferred, if it had to happen at all, but Penelope and her faction lowered their foreheads all the way to the floor as per the oldest tradition.

Anika sighed, seeing that. She raised her voice into oration. ‘We have taken a heavy blow,’ she said, and the Taurasi murmured in return. ‘We have all lost family and friends, far more permanently than we ever expected. I think we all thought we would go home one day, didn’t we?’

Again came the murmur of agreement.

‘We suffered when we made the decision to leave the island, and we suffered on the day of the exile itself,’ she went on.

The Taurasi response was louder this time, and Andrea, Timon’s twin sister, called, ‘Aniketa the Unconquerable!’

‘Yes, yes, all right, settle down,’ Anika said, waving a hand. ‘We suffered then, and we suffer now. Our Sunlit Isle, gone beneath the waves well over a week ago, and none of us felt a thing.’

It felt pointed; it wasn’t, of course. But Mateo bowed his head, feeling the sting all the same. He was a Soul, blessed of their sleeping goddess. Shouldn’t he have felt something when Ysthera cracked and all the other Souls were lost, their web of interconnection sundered forever? Should not something in him have cried out as most of their people were crushed or drowned in cataclysm?

Anika lifted her voice now. ‘Yet we are Taurasi. We are strong, and we are brave, and we are resilient, and, most importantly, we are together. We will prevail.’ She raised a fist. ‘Kindred Taurasi!’

‘Kindred Taurasi!’ came the chorus, a throbbing echo that rang through the teahouse.

‘That said,’ she went on, quieter. ‘We suffer, but we need not suffer alone. If anyone finds themselves awake in the middle of the night, ruminating on these things, you are always welcome to talk to me. Or Mateo.’ She smiled at him. ‘Though not today. We all know how Teo copes with mornings.’

The grouchy face Mateo helpfully pulled, and the resultant ripple of laughter, effectively shifted the mood towards a more normal morning gathering.

‘Right.’ Anika clapped her hands, signalling the final switch from leader to administrator. ‘We were discussing sending our children to the temple school at the bottom of the hill. Do we have more to say or are we ready to vote?’

Penelope immediately rose. ‘We must vote no. Our children would be indoctrinated into Imperial customs and the Imperial language and the Imperial worship of a truly profligate number of gods.’

‘Yes, that’s why they strongly encourage us to send our children to the local school,’ Anika said patiently. ‘Please bear in mind, when I say they strongly encourage us, it is on the threshold of being a mandate. They are merely playing nice, for now.’

That was probably the waxen message she’d deliberately obliterated, then.

‘One of their mandates is no magic,’ Timon pointed out. ‘We defy that one.’

‘Not openly,’ Anika said, with a glance towards the door as if an Imperial spy might be eavesdropping. ‘Nevertheless, it will be our burden, to ensure we do not sacrifice our children’s heritage, if we decide in favour.’

This merely triggered the Ystheran tendency to be overdramatic. ‘This is how they destroy us,’ Penelope declaimed, to scattered applause. ‘Not with swords to our throats but with words forcibly inscribed into the impressionable clay of our children’s minds!’

It was Helena’s turn to stand up. She was a mother, with three children of her own and another two fostered under her care. She’d allied into Taurasi, to a man now lost, and was nervous to address the whole Kindred. She smoothed her sash as she cleared her throat. ‘I’m concerned… We’re concerned’—she waved her hand, indicating the people on the cushions around her, mostly other parents, blood and foster, a few with babes in arms—‘our children will not have the skills and knowledge they need to make their way in our new world, if they don’t attend a local school. If we try too hard to save our past, we may be sacrificing their future instead.’

‘Why can’t we teach them ourselves?’ someone demanded from the crowd.

‘It’s not enough,’ Anika said. ‘If we have to do it at all, better to send them down the hill and do it properly.’

Timon, absently scratching the welter of scars on his face, said, ‘We left Ysthera to preserve our way of life. This won’t help.’

His sister, herself wearing a scar through her left eyebrow, said, ‘There is no going back to Ysthera, Ti, not anymore, if there ever was. We must face reality.’

‘I know that,’ he snapped. Anika raised a soothing hand, and his hackles settled. ‘Ask the children what they want.’

Lucius rose. He was an adolescent, only recently old enough to attend the morning ritual. Ystherans didn’t tend towards facial or body hair but Lucius was making a try, somewhat patchy, at growing a moustache in one of the varied local fashions. Like Helena, he was uncertain about addressing the group.

Fidgeting, he said, ‘It’s been really difficult finding work down in the city, not having been to one of their schools. Not knowing the customs. Not being even basically literate. Numbers. We should at least know how to tell numbers.’

He sat down in a hurry, signalling the end of his contribution. Penelope, who had not sat down yet, said, ‘That is why we should be trying harder to be sure all of us can be gainfully employed within the enclave itself. You could apprentice to my workshop, dear. Learn the clay.’

‘Please don’t call us an enclave,’ Anika reminded her. ‘It makes the governor twitchy.’

Andrea said, sharply, ‘Some of us like working down in Anceral.’

Selia, who also worked down in the brewery, added, ‘Some of us are thinking of living down in Anceral.’

This got some audible gasps, and the discussion rapidly became acrimonious; someone again suggested hiring local tutors rather than consigning the children to a school out of Taurasi oversight, someone else snapped that that would bring strangers too intimately into their lives, whereupon there was a chorus of pointing out that the whole teahouse did that, every afternoon, and an answering outcry that Anika was managing that well enough and how else, exactly, were they to live if they did not cater to the Ancerans?

Anika pulled a slight face at Mateo but she let the rivulets of the argument run in their diverse directions; squabbles meant the Taurasi were moving beyond the first deep bite of grief. Eventually she clapped her hands again, calling for silence.

‘I am hearing that it is too soon to make the vote,’ she said serenely. ‘You have all made good points. I know this is contentious. I know the diverging path forwards feels momentous, given Ysthera’s fate and the precariousness of our own. There is no need to rush to a decision.’ She raised a finger. ‘But a decision must be made.’

She nodded once, signalling the end of the morning meeting, and the start of the morning ritual.

Every Ystheran held within themselves a sacred receptacle, the scaphosieros in the most archaic of terminology, to hold the magic that was the last gift of their shattered goddess, transmitted by their Soul during the ritualised daily libation.

The Taurasi who had been standing knelt again. Mateo moved among them, the silk hems of his robes brushing the swept wooden floor in a soft sibilance that echoed the gentle hum of the magic rising in him like water from a wellspring. He felt the tendrils of his kith’s call, a gentle tickle as if of thin roots growing through welcoming soil, seeking nourishment.

He did not need to touch them to pass on the gift, but today he did. They were tense, and fractious, and scared. Ysthera was lost, and their fate was yawning underneath them, a hungry mouth ready to swallow them into oblivion should they slip from the narrow bridge Anika led them over towards an unknown future. Mateo laid hands on bowed heads or shoulders, murmuring words that were not strictly necessary, but served a purpose nonetheless.

He was aglow with the magic, and as it flowed out to the others, the teahouse filled with delicate amber light, its hue slowly deepening, thickening, a bowl of the purest golden honey. It was a marvel that no one without Ystheran blood could perceive.

‘Let’s practice the shield, everyone,’ Anika called.

Traditionally, only the Coterie, those few chosen to gird the Soul, formed the defensive shield, but after the day of the exile, even Penelope and her fellow conservatists saw the sense of every Taurasi having some skill at interweaving into a larger communal working. There was precedent for it, after all, back when Penelope had been Heart.

Mateo returned to Anika’s side. She had already taken her fill of magic, as had the twins, the other members of the Coterie. Mateo had once supported four in his Coterie. It was taking a long time to identify a suitable Taurasi to take up the fourth place, and the fifth place that Mateo now felt able to support as well.

He pushed the magic out, the trickle becoming a gush. The Taurasi caught at it and let it flow through them. The honey aura rippled and a cascading thrum rose louder and louder as they lifted the magic shield overhead.

‘Modulate,’ Anika called. ‘Take more if you feel you can.’

The draw on Mateo increased as the kith obeyed, and the shield thickened. Anika looked at him, and he nodded reassurance; he was fine. He would have turned off the metaphorical tap if he wasn’t.

‘Remember when our Soul is flooding us like this, it is up to you to recognise when it is too much for you.’ She put a flat hand to her sternum and then squeezed it slowly closed. ‘Learn what too much feels like. Your heart will stop if you get this wrong, kith of my Kindred.’

She walked among the Taurasi, watching each face, looking for signs of strain. She also nudged a few into opening themselves further to take more of the flow. Sometimes Ystherans with small receptacles—pockets, somewhat derogatorily—assumed their access to the flow was correspondingly narrow, but that was not necessarily true. Nor did a Coterie-worthy receptacle mean immunity to the dangers of overflow. That was another thing hammered into Taurasi hearts on the day they’d made it off the island.

‘Look up, Kindred,’ Anika called. ‘Is our shield not a thing of beauty?’ It was, smooth as glass, thick as honey, translucent as purest amber. ‘Well done, everyone. Release.’

The shield dropped and the hum and glow of the magic faded as Mateo let it sink away, back into the endless reservoir pooled deep within him. The Taurasi were relaxed, chatting and laughing now, some already heaping up their cushions in the corner by the stove and rolling out the tables and chairs for the afternoon customers, others lingering over their bowls.

They’d be moving towards their chores or their projects or their jobs soon, soothed by the magic and by the familiar ritual that furnished it to them. Anika had been right about wearing the robes, of course. The Taurasi had begun the slow process of healing from yet another cataclysm.

Mateo had served his people well today; he had time for a burst of satisfaction about that as he offered Anika a bow and started for the door.

Then the door opened and an Imperial walked in.

Chapter 2

The stranger was what was known colloquially among the ever-blunt Imperials as an empire mongrel, one of those people with such mixed heritage it was impossible to tell which conquered nation their ancestors originally hailed from.

He was browner than both the Ystherans and the local Ancerans, and certainly the heartland Imperials, who were a very pale people from even more northern climes than this. He had light eyes, and dark hair in short curls, and an artful, if not outright vain, level of stubble that bespoke regular plucking at a barber. He wore a popular imported style of dyed long-sleeved shirt, but sported the calf-length breeches, oilskin cloak, short scabbard, and plaited leather cords about wrist and neck that Mateo associated with sailors.

That was all Mateo was capable of absorbing before his rising alarm swamped him. The man could be given some credit for hiding his double-take as he looked at Mateo and then about the teahouse, but he was still looking about the teahouse.

Imperial subjects were theoretically allowed to worship their own gods in private, but that was an unwritten leniency overlaid on a public law that said no foreign gods could be acknowledged within the endless bounds of the Vaeringan Empire.

The Ystherans didn’t worship a god, as such—their deity was, more-or-less, lost to them, though not quite as unquestionably as their island now was—but Mateo well knew how the morning ritual would appear to Imperial eyes, especially today, he and Anika bearing their elaborate regalia and half of Kindred Taurasi caught still kneeling.

‘The teahouse is closed,’ he said, reflexively and with a good deal of sharpness to it, a spit in the face of an amiable smile and upheld, spread-fingered hand, the local gesture of peace.

‘Door unlatched, porch lamps lit?’ The man didn’t say it rudely; he merely raised his eyebrows in an exaggeratedly puzzled way.

Mateo, on the other hand, was dramatically snide in reply. ‘An Imperial informs us we’re open, I suppose we better be, then.’

He tried to exit past the other man, who languidly put out an arm to barricade the doorway, still smiling but also watching Mateo intently. Though shorter than him, he was much broader, and the arm that blocked the doorway looked thickly muscled under the weave of the shirt, as if it regularly swung a fist, if not a sword.

Mateo experienced another spike of anxiety and simultaneously produced a bloody-minded scowl, defying not so much the stranger as the what-if worries that were ever-ready to swarm him.

‘I wasn’t insisting you must be open, friend,’ the visitor said, as conspicuously patient as he had been conspicuously puzzled. He was speaking the local dialect, Imperial with a generous sprinkling of Anceran loan words; Imperial itself was a simplified, if not bastardised, version of the pure Vaer spoken in the northern heartland. ‘I was just wondering how I could tell you’re closed, so I know for future visits.’

‘Because I told you we are,’ Mateo said through gritted teeth, since the man had actually made a good point regarding the external clues.

‘Understood,’ the man said, to his surprise. ‘But since I’m here, and it’s a long way up a particularly steep hill to get here, could I perhaps speak to someone regarding a business matter?’ After a moment, he added, flashing a rueful smile, ‘Someone reasonable would be preferable. I can wait.’

Unable to decide whether he had justification to be huffy at this blatant slander or not, Mateo availed himself of his usual recourse, which was to call Anika, who was, of course, already coming to him, and Darius was, of course, trailing along with her, all narrowed eyes and glowering aspect and conspicuous hilt.

Anika firmly dismissed her uncle with a glance, and turned to the newcomer, repeating the gesture of the upheld open palm. ‘Heilsa,’ she said, the slangy local greeting that would never not sound strange to Mateo in the mouth of an Ystheran. ‘Welcome to the Come-by-Chance Teahouse. I am Aniketa Taurasi. How may I assist you?’

The stranger had still been leaning casually in the doorway, blocking the way either by design or accident. He straightened to greet Anika, and Mateo slipped past, back into his sandals while the man was introducing himself as one Jonas Nebrija, and over to the lodging house.

In his small apartment, Mateo unlaced and wriggled out of the silk robes, hanging them on the back of the door for one of the younger Ystherans to collect and brush down and put back into storage. Already calmer out of the smothering robes, he changed into the Ystherans’ usual working clothes, a knotweed-blue cotton tunic worn over a long-sleeved undershirt, and matching loose trousers.

He expected the Imperial to be gone by the time he’d secured the wrap-around tunic firmly closed with his favourite emerald-green sash, scrubbed his face clean of kohl and powder, tugged his braided hair out of its elaborate formal styling and bound it, still braided, into its usual bun low at his nape, and shrugged into his quilted jacket for the walk back over to the teahouse.

He toed off his sandals again by the door and went in, and stopped on the threshold.

Jonas Nebrija was not gone. Jonas Nebrija, cloak comfortably discarded because he was well and truly and horrifyingly settled in, sat at the small, high table set by the little ceramic stove—the table where Mateo always ate his morning meal because that allowed the stove’s radiating warmth to sink into his hip before he began his daily round of chores.

Anika stood beside him, her hand on his shoulder, her face sympathetic, bending to murmur some quiet reassurance or compassionate sentiment into his ear. Even as Mateo stared in surprise, she gave him one last sympathetic squeeze and crossed towards the kitchen.

‘Sit and be nice to Jonas,’ she murmured as Mateo hovered, assessing exactly how alarmed he should be by this fresh turn of events.

Oh. Highly alarmed, then. Excessively, even.

Anika knew him. Without pausing, she called over her shoulder, ‘Your tea is steeping, melimou, go sit down and I’ll bring it over.’

This, unlike her first suggestion, was in the local dialect, and loud, and accompanied by a point towards the table, so he was blockaded from arguing, or about-turning and walking out of his violated sanctuary, and thus obliged to obey his Heart.

He eased onto the bench opposite Jonas Nebrija, absently pushing on his hip as he did so. Anceran-style seating was easier than getting up and down from the cushions, which was the entire purpose of his high table near the stove, but the transition from standing to sitting was still fraught.

‘Oh, so you’re Mattias,’ Jonas said, in tones friendly and yet not entirely pleased.

Mateo took a moment to refuse to be impressed that the man had managed to recognise him despite the transformation out of the formal, and ridiculously dramatic, ritual attire—which made most locals decide that all Ystherans were strange and exotic—and into the workaday routine attire—which let most locals decide that all Ystherans looked alike. Mateo was taller and leaner than the other petitely rounded Ystherans, and that was an easy enough cue to mark even through the frippery.

‘I’m not happy about this either,’ he pointed out.

Jonas snorted a short laugh, teeth flashing square and white as he grinned, a hint of wolf to it. The teahouse lamplight gleamed off the earrings Mateo was now calm enough to notice—jet teardrops, in both lobes, properly pierced. Mateo associated that not just with sailors but with the bold privateering traders who had taken Kindred Taurasi off Ysthera.

His Soul cup was already on the table, its small gilt elegance contrasted with the larger cup—one of their locally produced efforts—sitting in front of Jonas. In lieu of anything else to fidget with, Mateo picked up his cup and turned it around and around in his fingers.

Penelope and a few other Taurasi lingering on cushions on the far side of the teahouse were beginning to glare at him over their morning bowls of millet porridge. This particular cup was over one hundred years old. There was no replacing it once it broke, not anymore. He did not particularly want to be the Soul who broke it, though it would be an apt sort of metaphor if he happened to.

Mateo put it back down, very carefully.

Jonas, appallingly, picked it up. ‘Why butterflies?’ he asked, holding it up to the light so that the colours glowed.

Mateo knew exactly what Jonas was asking. He braved the pang in his hip, half-stood, leaned over the table, and retrieved the cup from the man’s hand, Jonas obligingly opening his fingers and allowing it to be plucked free.

Smiling, he rested his forearms on the table. ‘Why butterflies, when you’re Taurasi?’

He nodded to Mateo’s rescued cup, and then across the room to where the last few Taurasi sipped from their own brightly decorated cups. More Kindred cups were already washed and dried and set within the niches of the pale honeycomb shelving behind the counter. A section of the hexagonal wooden alcoves was devoted to the cups of kith lost on the day of the exile, as well as older ancestors; they’d each be preserved in their discreet shrine until it came time to be ritually presented to a Taurasi child when they came of age. Lucius had just received his with shy pride.

Every cup was different, in colour and design and shape, except they all featured oxen or cows or the horns of such or abstract suggestions of the same. The very door of the Come-By-Chance was painted with a horned bull’s head, though Timon had transformed its traditional simple lines into botanically-influenced curves, a nod to both the floral and herbal tisanes the teahouse purveyed, and to the feminine composition of their regular customers.

Mateo’s cup, however, was festooned, quite beautifully, with butterflies of bright green, the same colour as his sash, touched with gilt on their wings and all around the rim of the cup itself, so that it glittered in the low light of the cosy teahouse.

‘Very pretty,’ Jonas added encouragingly.

‘You are trying to imply I am effeminate for drinking from a cup ornamented with something pretty,’ Mateo said, ‘yet you cannot insult me, for this is my Kindred cup and therefore it is a tradition to drink from it and makes me no less of a man regardless of the social constructs of your own people.’

Jonas missed a beat and then said, ‘I’m an Imperial, I don’t imply things, I just say them.’ He smiled at Mateo and returned to his point, puzzlingly persistent. ‘Are you not Taurasi, then?’

Mateo silently tilted his cup so that Jonas could see the stylised horns painted on the bottom. ‘How is it that we can assist you, honoured guest?’

Jonas raised his eyebrows at that extremely formal salutation, which Mateo had fairly laden with acid. ‘I’m looking to tour your pottery workshop.’

Mateo looked over at the kitchen workspace. Anika was not in evidence; she’d be upstairs, changing out of her own ritual outfit, or outside, snipping herbs. He looked back at Jonas.

‘I’m a merchant, friend,’ Jonas said, eyes bright with amusement. ‘As I told your wife, I’m here on behalf of a consortium interested in Ystheran artisanal products.’

Raising a firm finger in negation, Mateo said sternly, ‘Anika is not my wife, and you, friend, are not a merchant.’

The man not only lost his battle to not smirk, he openly grinned. ‘I would like a tour of the pottery workshop. I was making small talk about the ceramics on display in here first, because I was under the impression Ystherans like a bit of dancing about the bush before they get down to business. Am I wrong?’

‘Am I wrong? You are not a merchant.’

‘Why am I not a merchant?’

At which point Mateo realised that if he wanted to justify his own dudgeon, he would have to provide commentary regarding wicked smiles and strong, well-shaped bodies with swordfighter muscles, and their unlikely relation to the mercantile notables he’d encountered in Low village, the little harbour enclave—literally, the lowest point on Ysthera—where foreigners had been permitted to stay. But he could hardly tell the man he looked… Ah, that he looked like he belonged swinging a sword in the fighting pits.

He said, ‘You’re just not.’

‘That is true,’ Jonas conceded at last. ‘I’m doing a favour for a family friend before I take up my new calling as a laeknir. A physician.’

‘You are not,’ Mateo said, fully indignant.

The creaking old doctors of his passing acquaintance—Anika had brought in a veritable raft of them in the first weeks of their arrival in Anceral before deciding she could do well enough by Mateo on her own—were even further from the striking figure across the table than the big-bellied merchants at the old market.

Jonas burst into atrociously loud and unrestrained laughter that briefly stopped the quiet clatter among the Taurasi still finishing their meals. ‘I’ve undertaken training as a physician so I can work with my father,’ he insisted, wiping his eyes.

‘Then why do you look like you murder people for a living?’ Mateo blurted.

‘Honey, you are hilarious,’ Jonas said. ‘I didn’t say I was a particularly good physician, did I? Maybe I do murder people for a living.’ He held up his hand. ‘But I was once a merchant. Or trader, actually, I think Ystherans would translate it. I followed in my mother’s footsteps in my younger days and crewed a trading ship. Low was on our route, before it closed.’

Trader, not merchant. That made more sense. The sea traders who made it to Low were of the more piratical sort; they had to be, to run the Imperial blockade. Mateo had even recognised that the man’s earrings reminded him of the dauntless crew of Steadfast, and yet he’d still failed to make the connection in time to stop himself being rude.

Timon came over to set a plate in front of him, its contents laid out just so: sliced figs in a fan, drizzled with honey and sprinkled with soft crumbled cheese made from the milk of their own cows.

Mateo silently gave his thanks, head dipped over folded hands. Timon mischievously patted his head and headed out, followed by a cluster of his renovation team.

Andrea was next, bringing over pucks of barley cake still warm from the ovens of the stone bakehouse. She put this plate before Mateo, but then nudged it towards the centre of the table as a nod to their guest.

Mateo gave another small seated bow. Andrea squeezed his shoulder. She and Selia, and some of the other city workers, went out the door, Andrea carrying a stack of Anika’s tabulae to drop off at the local messenger office on her way to the brewery.

Jonas was swallowing another smile. ‘Your people like to serve you, don’t they?’

Mateo would have very much liked to deny this, but since Anika was currently carrying a tray over with his tea, not even he could bring himself to do so. Instead he repeated, flatly, ‘You people.’

‘I did say your people,’ Jonas corrected him with nary a flicker of impatience nor annoyance.

Anika set down the tray and its two pots of tea. She had indeed taken the opportunity to change out of her ceremonial robes and wash her face. Her sash was dark blue, embroidered with paler blue flowers that matched the sky shade of the threads of her quilted jacket. She placed Mateo’s brewpot in front of him. He bowed his thanks, ignoring Jonas’s grin.

‘It’ll taste different today,’ she told him. ‘I’m trying crushed holly leaves.’

‘Make this foreigner go away now, please,’ he said in Ystheran, pouring himself a cup before she could further amuse Jonas by pouring it for him.

‘He’s not a foreigner,’ Anika said, also in Ystheran, setting the second pot in front of Jonas and carefully tweaking its positioning to best show off the pattern of Ystheran wildflowers adorning its rounded sides. ‘We’re the foreigners, and he might say he’s merely a trader but he presented some very impressive-looking credentials from a large merchant conglomerate. We need to ingratiate with the locals and we have accounts to pay, so stop trying to antagonise the man, be the good little refugee you’re expected to be, and take him for his tour. Charm the pants off him, my sweet.’

Mateo was appalled, both by the Imperial colloquialism creeping into their language, and by the very idea. ‘We both know I couldn’t charm the pants off anyone. He could already be naked and I still wouldn’t be able to charm the pants off him. He’d put his pants back on, Aniketa.’

They both looked at Jonas, who smiled at them, apparently unoffended by the unintelligible chatter. ‘What’ve you got for me, then?’

Mateo had a moment of sheer horror before the man added, ‘Is this the famous Ystheran spice tea?’ with a nod to the brewpot Anika had placed on the table before him.

‘No,’ Mateo said. ‘You may not have that. It is only for afternoons.’

Anika did not quite slap her forehead but she did set the heel of her hand against the centre of her brow, pressing between her eyes in silent exasperation.

‘Well, it is,’ he said. ‘And it takes one hour to serve. A proper hour.’

This last was because Ancerans let their hours wax and wane with the natural length of the day, recalibrating their sundials across seasons accordingly. The Taurasi, however, had brought their own time technology with them. An Ystheran water-clock, traditional in design if not in material, both tapped and simultaneously decorated the twisted copper waterpipes along the back of the kitchen workspace beside the Kindred cup alcoves.

Daylight hours measured by sundials, and the points of each hour measured by rushlights, and night bells counted out by the slow burn of candles or incense sticks in the temples, the cinnamon hour preceding the hour of sage and succeeding the clove hour: the Imperials, Mateo thought, could have saved themselves an awful lot of the time they were so intent on measuring if they’d borrowed the design of the water-clock.

Presuming Taurasi would deign to give it to them.

‘An hour? You harvest and mill those spices yourselves, do you?’ Jonas asked, straight-faced.

‘In fact, we do,’ Anika said, in the bright tones of one trying very hard to keep the conversation from devolving into disaster. She widened her eyes meaningfully at Mateo.

He folded his arms and dug in. ‘There is a ritual. The ritual takes one Ystheran hour.’ The Anceran women who came for the spice tea enjoyed the wait, as far as Mateo could tell. ‘In the afternoon.’

‘Hey, Mattias,’ Jonas said, ‘do you happen to know the word obstreperous?’

Mateo did happen to know the word obstreperous. ‘I don’t know what you are implying,’ he said stiffly.

‘Oh, I’m certainly not implying it,’ Jonas said.

Nikiti flung the door open and bounced in while Mateo was still scowling and Anika was still swallowing her laugh. Thirteen years old or so, Niki was dressed as the adults, in the soft blue-grey working tunic, wrapped closed with a saffron-patterned scarlet sash, but without undershirt or quilted jacket. The young ones were adapting faster to the northern climate than the older Taurasi. Niki’s hair was styled into a single thin plait hanging between their shoulder blades, and the sash was tied asymmetrically somewhere between the treble-wrap and the fold-and-twist.

This was a fairly new development, and briefly unsettling, like Mateo’s eyes had had trouble focussing for a moment. His own adults had most likely gone through the same short period of adjustment when he, at about Niki’s age, had emerged from his home one morning having abruptly switched suffix, hairstyle and sash fastening.

Niki collected a slice of fig and a cup of herbal tea and came to where Anika still