She had watched ships shear away across the water, sails beating in the wind like wings lightened by magic. A handsome sailor, one of the far-traveling Aivur with their skin the color of pale spring leaves, had winked at her. He’d smiled when he was sure he had her attention and told her half the crew of the ship he sailed with were women, that a strong girl like her could take a chance on adventure.
Adventure!
But her father had already told her she needed to marry to benefit the family so her younger brothers could have a better life than his own. So her mother, weak from so much childbearing, would never be forced into the long walk if her father died before his wife did.
Three days later, she’d been wed to Meklos, and her father had a foothold in the wool trade. On the strength of his new alliance, Meklos had been allowed to move back upriver to his inland birthplace. Her second son, Vesterilos, lived now in Farport with a foreign-born wife and a growing family, tending his share of the wool trade. He and his father had never gotten along, so he never visited, only wrote terse reports, appended with long descriptions of the grandchildren for her, along with occasional gifts of spices from overseas.
The murmuring voices of women standing by the side table jerked her attention back to the parlor. They were tasting the cakes with appraising bites.
“These aren’t as succulent as I’d expect in this household,” one sniffed with a snide look toward Danis, half the room away.
“Are they from the shop? Young people these days have no respect for hard work.”
“She can afford to get everything done for her, can’t she? I pity Meklos’s widow. Such a drab creature. She’ll never see the inside of this parlor again.”
“Have you ever tried to speak to her? That hills accent!”
“She won’t have the backbone to stand up to a council member’s daughter, even one who is so much of a frippery she might as well be a tart. If you know what I mean.”
They laughed together, as if their shared disapproval tasted sweeter to them than the cakes did.
A flash of comprehension swept through Asvi like a blast of wind off the heights. If she walked out of the room with its crowded, busy, chattering, important people, no one would stop her, because they would not notice her leaving. The gathering would proceed in exactly the same manner. She could set a stick in her place and it would do.
She stood.
For one breath in and one breath out she did not move. She ought to stay. Her mind knew her duty. But her body was restless.
Like the merest touch of a breeze, she wove her way through gaps between clusters of people, all the way to the door. Stepping past the threshold took no effort at all. No one called after her. A constant swell and ebb of conversation floated out of the parlor to push her like a current along the path her feet remembered best: down the main corridor toward the back of the house.
As the noise grew muted, her steps slowed. A strange reluctance wrapped around her like invisible vines as she approached the door to the kitchen, the place she had always taken refuge. She would live in the downstairs room and come here every morning from now until the day she was too weak to manage the work. After that she would lie abed until she died in a room with no view of the sky.
Through the partly open door she heard Feloa giving directions to Bavira. They did not need her. Danis would send out for more cakes from the shop. Anyway, a widow did not cook for the crossing ceremony of her dead husband. That would be like a ghost serving food to the living: nothing but trouble. Once Meklos’s soul had crossed, and with the tithe paid, all would go back to what it had been, except it would never again be what it was. Her marriage to Meklos had obliged her to serve him. But he was dead, and that meant she was legally dead and therefore only able to remain among the living if her male relatives paid a tithe to the temple.
But what if she did not want to remain among the living if living meant trudging onward as a shadow within the life she’d led? She hadn’t been unhappy, precisely. Her father had told her often enough that her dutiful obedience had brought good fortune to the family. But her brothers were secure, her sons were grown, and her father was dead, his gentle gaze no longer leashing her to the earth.
Bars of light and shadow in the passage ahead warned her that a few more steps would bring her to the door that led out into the garden. She did not precisely move with volition but rather more as if drawn on a thread she hadn’t the will to untangle from her limbs. A plain hip-length cape with a hood hung from a hook on the wall. She slung it over her shoulders as she often did in the mornings. The outside door was ajar wide enough to allow her to slip through without touching the latch, so it wasn’t as if she actively opened it. Three steps took her down onto the garden walk and to the neat beds of herbs and flowers she’d planted over the years.
She paused at the bench where she often sat outside in solitude, beside four bricks she’d planted upright in a bed of lilies and chrysanthemums. The three daughters and one son who’d not lived past infancy hadn’t been old enough to earn a temple burial, so she had secretly rescued the bodies before they could be tossed into the night soil wagon and had buried them in the garden. Bending, she kissed her fingers and touched each brick with the same tender grief with which she’d given each infant their farewell before she cast dirt over their faces. But she did not linger.
The thread tugged onward. The elderly gardener was working beyond a latticework screen that set apart the audience garden where visitors could take tea and conversation amid plants chosen for their appealing fragrance and attractive appearance. The old man did not look up. For all she knew, he’d not been told he had a new master. The change would make little difference to his routine, after all. Men were not sent on the long walk. They were never a burden, and anyway the dragons did not want them.
The big bar and thick lock on the garden gate had been set aside. She heard the wheels of a cart. A young man appeared carrying a large covered tray.
“Is this the way to the kitchens?” he asked her without preamble, mistaking her drab clothing for that of a servant.
Her voice had failed her some time ago. She pointed down the walk and stepped aside to let him pass. A second young man followed with another tray, then a third and a fourth, striding with the vigor of youth and destination. When they had passed, she found the gate into the rear courtyard, where deliveries were made, standing quite open as it usually never did.
There was no one else in the courtyard. The back gate into the alley gaped wide. It was easy to keep walking, to leave the compound and continue down an alley that ran along the back of households that belonged to other prosperous trading clans.
The alley split at an intersection. She paused, imagining the layout of the compound of their clan, and the neighboring houses, and the nearby streets as if seen from above as a dragon would see, if dragons ever flew over the city. Where did a person go, when they went out with no obligation tying their hands? Because it was the most familiar place she could think of, she headed toward the market.
Fruits, vegetables, grains, spices: each had their own lane under the arches of the east market that lay close to her home. The movement and color of the morning’s business swirling around her made her feel like the wind, unseen but present. It wasn’t until she reached the spice lane that a voice caught her in its hook and reeled her to a halt.