Chapter 19

Tristan had never been the sort to find mindless labor soothing. He had seen too many people break their bodies stacking stones and scraping canals to believe there was anything noble about work, no matter the talk about the dignity in sweating for one’s wage.

Horses were patted and fed carrots, but when they got old they were still made into glue.

Still, the thief was not afraid of work when it had good reasons and there were plenty to weed the garden. For one he had seen Song laying out the beginnings of a chore sheet, so it would be best to get ahead of the tide and position himself as the designated gardener to avoid being volunteered for something worse.

The sheer quantity of soap the Tianxi had bought promised an unfortunate amount of mopping lay in someone’s near future.

“Oh, this one’s red,” Fortuna enthusiastically said. “Do you think it’s poisonous?”

Tristan eyed the weed in question, whose stem was pinkish and bore oval red leaves covered with thin white strands that were somewhat hair-like. It was not even the most suspicious plant he’d come across in the remains Sakkas’ ancient garden, which had him glad he had bought leather gloves.

“If this is the prelude to the usual suggestion I try to make tea out of it, I refuse,” he told the goddess.

“Coward,” the Lady of Long Odds accused, slumping down by his side.

Her red dress impossibly fluttered as she sat, her fingers sweeping back her golden hair to expose the choker on her neck – a riot of rubies and pearls he could only grieve not being able to pawn in the material. Eyes on the weed, Tristan carefully caught it and ripped it out with an eye to getting all the roots. Once satisfied he had, he tossed it onto the pile behind him.

“You don’t listen to me anymore,” Fortuna continued, tone growing whining.

“I’ve never listened to you,” Tristan absent-mindedly replied, ripping out another weed.

“You could let me test Song, at least,” she pressed. “You know you’d planned to, before Maryam chewed you-”

His gloved hand ceased short of another weed as he turned to glare at her, which only had her grinning.

“We had a disagreement, that’s all,” Tristan said.

Fortuna answered with a strange, poorly executed gesture that only the accompanying sound of ‘wu-paah’ let him understand was meant to be a whip being cracked.

“Come on,” the goddesses wheedled. “It doesn’t have to be in the middle of dinner, I can wait until it’s just the three of us in the room and make like I’m punching her in the-”

He ripped out the weed and threw it at her face, sailing right through.

“Rude,” Fortuna glared.

“We will test her, that hasn’t changed,” Tristan said. “But she gets a few more days of reprieve.”

The goddess, already grinning again, opened her mouth but he raised a hand to silence her preemptively.

“And no, Maryam is not why,” the thief said, then frowned. “Also that’s not what a whip sounds like, you’re doing it wrong.”

Fortuna spluttered in genuine offense, beginning a diatribe about how she’d once had whips of pure gold dedicated to her honor and no one in Vesper better knew what the crack of a whip might sound like. He rolled his eyes and returned to weeding.

Getting cornered by Maryam had not been pleasant, and there was perhaps some truth to her claim he had pushed too far with Song, but Tristan had not been convinced then and he was not now. A reminder that if Song turned on him he had the means to ruin her was not a threat, it was evening the score. Considering how rattled she had been that night he could have gotten much more out of her, so as far as he was concerned he had shown a great deal of restraint.

Maryam was evidently of a different opinion – ‘kicking her when she’s down’ had come up a few times – but he had given ground largely to end the conversation. Which she had caught on to, and been twice as angry about, but truth be told nothing she had said since moved the needle. Song Ren was not his friend, she was someone Tristan occasionally traded with. To keep the Thirteenth functional he was willing to throw her the occasional bone but he owed her nothing.

That Maryam evidently did count her a friend would weigh on the scales going forward, but that was all.

“I don’t understand why I should wait,” Fortuna pouted. “You want confirmation she really sees me, and since you insist your lady friend is not enough to stop then there should be nothing holding us back.”

Tristan sighed. He had been going to wait only a day or two, originally, so she was not being a pest entirely without reason.

“Teratology, this morning,” he said.

“The man with the skinny mustache who likes to hear himself talk,” Fortuna said, then cocked her head to the side. “Oh, he did pick on her some I suppose. Why do we care?”

Sometimes it was easy to forget that the Lady of Long Odds was not human, for all that she wore one’s guise. ‘Pick on her some’ was an interesting way to describe the public humiliation of Song Ren before a hundred of her peers, neatly destroying her reputation and marking her as poison to the touch for everyone in the room – and then most of Scholomance by day’s end, no doubt. Professor Yun Kang had known precisely what he was doing with that speech.

But Fortuna was a goddess, so neither humiliation nor being made a pariah weighed all that much on the scales of her mind. She would not be harmed by such a thing, so she could not truly see it as the attack it was.

“About Song? We don’t,” he replied.

Fortuna frowned.

“Then why?”

“Because we do not,” Tristan evenly said, “side with landlords.”

And that was what Professor Kang was, when you stripped him of the black cloak and title. Just another petty king sitting atop his land and rationing your right to have a roof above your head. A landlord of knowledge instead of houses, this one, but Tristan well knew the likes of that tone and that little smile. Yun Kang was the worst of the breed, those that promised they would delay your rent if you sold out the other tenants. No, you never sided with the landlord even when it cost you to hold back.

It was only a matter of time until it was you they came to bleed dry: there could be no peace with a leech, only truce until it grew hungry again.

Professor Kang had marked Song publicly in the hopes that the rest of them would turn on her, and no doubt he would toss little favors to those that went out of their way to trip her. But Tristan knew that game and he would have no fucking part of it, so Song Ren had from him a reprieve – she would be tested only when she had found her footing again, because he refused to let his own actions help the plans of the likes that man.

“So we dislike the professor more, that’s fair,” Fortuna mused. “I could punch him instead, if you’d like.”

He glanced at her, brow rising.

“What is it with you and throwing hands lately?”

“You said I can’t take revenge on Hage,” she said.

“I told you to apologize to Hage,” Tristan corrected.

She dismissed his words with a wave, then made a moue.

“And I have been feeling restless,” the Lady of Long Odds admitted. “Something about the air here is invigorating.”

Fortuna with greater vigor? Now there was the stuff of nightmares. She was pest enough while lazy.

“Is it because Tolomontera is an aether well?” he ventured.

Gods were like fish swimming in the aether, so perhaps the metaphorical change of water had been good for her.

“Maybe,” Fortuna muttered.

Much as he would have been inclined to keep pursuing that, the goddess rose to her feet in an indication she was so disinclined. Best not to push, he decided, or she’d get contrary about that subject in the future. Instead Tristan returned to the business of weeding until he had finished the whole rectangular field he had earlier outlined. It would take days more to clean up the full garden, at this rate, but he would begin sowing before that. They had already bought seeds with brigade funds and he was itching to use them.

It was a few trips moving the piled of ripped weeds to a corner of the garden where he would let them dry for a day before burning them, careful never to let anything touch his bare skin. He doubted that any plant that’d so long survived near the cottage of an archbishop of the Sunless House was entirely harmless.

Though he was done with the work he’d decided on for the day, the thief elected to scope out the boundaries of the garden one more time. Tredegar clearly intended on using some of the space for her exercises, which he supposed was fair enough, and he suspected that soon there would be a push for a shooting range as well. Best to delineate those areas now so the arrangements were not haphazard later. He had already put numbers to the dimensions with a measuring rope, but accounting for where the bushes and the-

“Huh,” Tristan said, stopping.

Fortuna leaned over his shoulder.

“You didn’t dig that, did you?” she asked.

“No,” he said. “I did not.”

So why was there recently dug earth in a corner of the garden, tucked away behind bushes? He was curious enough to go fetch the shovel and find out. He found nothing, and begun to think someone had dug as simple exercise – sounded like something Tredegar might get up to – until around a foot and a half deep he hit something solid. He loosened the earth around it then finished digging up by hand, revealing what appeared to be… stripes of chicken starting to rot. Frowning, Tristan examined the pieces and found some of them were lightly charred on the bottom.

Who had cooked these was not in question, but why she would have buried them was.

“Bait for animals?” Fortuna suggested.

No, they did not seem to find their way through the protections Sakkas had left. Tristan had not seen so much as a rat around, though there were insects so the filtering was demonstrably not universal. He put the stripe back into the hole.

“We wait until next week to test Song,” he finally said.

“Come on! If anything, ruining a chicken should lose her a day,” Fortuna protested.

“Only an idiot jostles for position with someone standing on the edge of a cliff,” the thief grunted back. “Maryam was right.”

Not for the reasons she had given him, but merit where it was due. He reburied the chicken and smoothed out the ground before scattering some twigs and dead leaves atop it. Tucking his gloves into his belt after he was done, he stretched out and sighed. Enough work for the day. He put away the shovel and went around the increasingly visible garden path to head back inside, finding that another had arrived while he was distracted.

Angharad Tredegar was seated at the low table by the windows, uniform loosened and a cup of wine in hand. They’d bought and brought new chairs yesterday so she could have sat at the kitchen table instead of on the ground in the drawing room, but he supposed the view was nicer where she sat. They were still missing furniture around the low table, though. Tristan had been disappointed to find out that the very comfortable armchairs he’d sat on in the Witching Hour were rotten through, though there would not have been enough for all of them anyhow.

“Evening, Tristan,” Tredegar said, turning to face him, and he froze.

The dark-skinned woman had what appeared to be a swelling black eye on the right and some bruising on the opposite cheek. Gods, what had she been attacked by to actually be hit – Lucifer’s own retinue? Only she seemed in a fine mood, not fuming, so she must not see herself as being defeated.

“Evening,” he slowly replied, then cocked an eyebrow. “Did you get that cleaned up properly?”

“Water is enough for bruises,” she began, “surely-”

He sighed and went to fetch the physician’s kit he had acquired from the Watch depot for a desultory sum – though the officers there had noted his name and brigade, so he could not buy them by the dozen and sell them to others at a markup. He touched a soft rag with alcohol and sat down by her side, gesturing for her to face him properly. Though Tredegar seemed faintly embarrassed and muttered something about fussing, she let him clean her face. Some of the cheek bruises had broken skin so the touch of the rag must have stung, but her face did not even twitch.

“What happened?” he asked. “I was under the impression you did not have Skiritai class today.”

“It was not obligatory,” Tredegar said. “The Marshal arranged rounds of sparring with each other to assess of our capacity with steel, powder and fists so we might best pick our companions for the fight on fifthday.”

Tristan’s expectations of what might be asked of Skiritai students had been high, but somehow he still had been surprised that ‘open a mystery box full of maneating monster’ had turned out to be their introductory lecture and the marginally improved situation of being allowed to pick the next enemy with foreknowledge was going to be a weekly occurrence. He cocked an eyebrow at her.

“I take it the fisticuffs turned on you?” Tristan asked.

The noblewoman grimaced.

“Muchen He is a devil up close, which I should have inferred when he sought me out for the fight,” she said. “Mind you, I trounced him with a blade. He pulls left and his footing is weak on the retreat.”

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“Did you get him to use his contract?” he curiously asked.

Simultaneously he made to clean an already clean cheek as a distraction while his hand subtly crept towards the side of her coat. It should still be in the pocket.

“Marshal de la Teverin forbade their use,” Tredegar informed him. “He insists that-”

He barely felt her fingers catch his wrist before she slammed it into the table. He yelped, snatching back his hand when she released it, and sighed as he stopped falsely cleaning her cheek.

“What gave it away this time?” he asked.

The noblewoman smugly smiled.

“You always try with your right hand,” she said. “I have begun keeping track of when you obscure my line of sight with your left.”

He hummed. That was a bad habit, he would need to work on it. Tredegar’s own hand went into her pocket, producing the iron coin with a copper border he had been trying to steal.

“Do you need it back?” she asked.

He shook his head.

“Keep it,” Tristan said. “I need to keep practicing. Hage says that in two weeks regardless of my progress he will have me begin to practice the opposite.”

“Planting coins?” Tredegar asked, amused. “How charitable.”

Best that she did not consider what else he would be able to plant, once he knew the tricks. Still, it was somewhat amusing to him that in Sacromonte he had considered himself too fine a thief to practice something as risky as pickpocketing but that as a Mask he was being trained in it.

“Thanks for the help,” he honestly said. “Maryam never notices, so it is little help.”

And Song had declined to participate, which he was starting to believe might be for the best.

“It helps keep me on my toes,” Tredegar happily said. “It is good training for me as well.”

Tristan rose to his feet, putting away his physician’s kit, and stretched out one last time. In other circumstances he might have been tempted to take a nap before getting started on the readings assigned by Professor Sasan, but he found his gaze straying to garden.

“I will be cooking tonight,” he decided.

Tredegar perked up, interested.

“Oh?”

“Something my mother taught me,” Tristan said, rolling his shoulder. “Sopa de colcha.”

“Quilt soup,” the Pereduri translated. “A strange name. What is it made of?”

“Whatever’s left,” he drily replied. “Come on, you can help me make it.”

Her main contribution ended up fetching water from the well, but at least she tried.

—

Considering how often Tristan had to go digging for secrets, it was a pleasant turn when answers were dropped right onto his lap.

He had expected Theology class to be of only accessory use to him, and little of what he first saw disabused him of the notion. They sat in the same hall used for Mandate, even settling at the same table – Song had sat there, and since yesterday everyone was treating her like glass even though she remained outwardly calm no one dared suggest another spot. This time the professor began at precisely the announced time rather than studying them through the eyehole as Professor Iyengar had. Professor Malba Artigas was tall, fair-haired and prone to frowning rather ferociously at the smallest of distractions. The thief was also fairly certain she was corregida – that is, a woman once believed a man.

Professor Artigas introduced herself as a signifier from the Akelarre Guild, speaking naught else of her qualifications or even her rank, and when a student muttered something in the back of the class she traced a Sign and swelled his tongue to the size of a sausage for half an hour. It hung out of his mouth, tar-black like some sort of leathery slug..