From the top of the bell tower they could see the whole extent of the city. It rose in a haphazard way from the grey hills, sprouting and tumbling over its ancient walls like a patch of lichen growing on a stone. It was monstrous, but at least now she could see the beginning and end of it.
“Are you afraid?” said Sethennai.
She swallowed. She couldn’t bring herself to nod.
“Nothing in this world has earned the power to frighten you, Csorwe,” he said. “You have looked your foretold death in the face and turned from it in defiance. Nothing in this world or any other deserves your fear.”
“Yes, sir,” she said. At that moment she was too sick and stunned to really hear the words, although she returned to them later, many times.
“Do you see the Gate?” said Sethennai.
It hovered above the docks in the far distance. The haze dimmed its colour, turning it yellowish, like a sickly moon swimming among the fumes.
“We won’t be here forever,” he said. “We’ll be safe from my enemies for a time, so we can rest and you can learn without having to look over your shoulder. But this isn’t home. Tlaanthothe lies through the Gate, and it’s waiting for us.”
* * *
The city was called Grey Hook. Sethennai explained early on that he had chosen it for their shelter because its people spoke Csorwe’s mother tongue as a lingua franca, and because they were very nice, discreet minders of their own business.
Sethennai never explained to her exactly how life was going to work from now on. He seemed to trust that she would figure it out, and for the most part she did.
He still talked to her as though she interested him. She accompanied him on many of his errands around the city, and they ate their meals together. Most of these were lentil curries from the vendor in the square below the boardinghouse, because he couldn’t cook.
It turned out that Sethennai seriously intended to pay her a wage. For what services, she wasn’t sure, and the idea of asking was distantly frightening. What if she asked him why he’d brought her here, and he admitted he’d made a mistake?
After deductions for room and board the wage wasn’t very much, Sethennai said, but it was still money, something Csorwe had hardly seen before, and never owned.
She hated the money, in fact, because it seemed to have been got for nothing. The little stack of copper coins, all for her pains in sitting around in the boardinghouse, terrified of the outside world and everything in it. It could not go on. Sooner or later Sethennai would realise he was paying her to be afraid. By that time she would have to get her act together.
The first time she steeled herself to leave the boardinghouse on her own was to resolve the serious matter of breakfast. Sethennai didn’t like getting up in the morning, and there was nothing to eat in the boardinghouse. It would be so good to get breakfast ready before he woke up. She knew where to buy food. The market in the square started trading at dawn. It really couldn’t be so difficult. They spoke her language here, so she could make herself understood. She was fourteen years old. Most people her age were already working for a living.
Nothing in this world or any other deserved her fear. That was all very well, but there was a great difference between climbing the steps to the Shrine of the Unspoken and going out to buy groceries. Csorwe had spent a lifetime readying herself to die, not to talk to strangers.
The market was full of gorgeous things Csorwe had never eaten and hardly knew the words for—tomatoes, hot peppers, baskets of fruit like huge, soft gems—but eggs, bread, and onions were cheap and easy to recognise.
“Six eggs, please,” she said, stopping at the chicken-man’s stall. She couldn’t face asking how much the eggs cost, so she just held out a fistful of coins and hoped he wouldn’t cheat her.
The chicken-man was Oshaaru, which could have helped a bit, but at the sound of Csorwe’s accent—purest, deepest old country—he squinted down at her, as though she might be mocking him. Then he decided that, no, in fact, he was mocking her.
“How many eggs, milady?”
She repeated herself. The anger bubbled up faster than she expected, taking her by surprise. If he knew what she really was he wouldn’t talk like that.
She suppressed her rage. She wasn’t what she really was, not anymore. She wasn’t the Chosen Bride. Nobody was going to come to her for prophecy. She was just another anonymous customer and the chicken-man would have forgotten all about her by the end of the day. And that was good.
The chicken-man seemed faintly disappointed that she didn’t want to play along, but he didn’t mind taking her money.
“Here without your boss today?” he said, handing over a box of eggs.
“That’s right,” said Csorwe, with an unbidden swell of pride. “I’m picking up breakfast.”
Back at the boardinghouse, she fried the onions in a pan over the fire, and scrambled the eggs in with them. The result was not perfectly beautiful but perfectly delicious: creamy eggs jewelled with golden onion. She ate her portion from the pan. Sethennai appeared as she was mopping up the scraps with a crust.
“I didn’t know you could cook,” he said. He was still in his nightshirt, with a silk scarf wrapped around his head.
“You ought to eat yours or it won’t be good,” she said, holding out his plate.
He blinked at it and rubbed sleep out of one eye, as if unable to comprehend the form the morning had taken.
Csorwe was pleased that he didn’t ask questions. She didn’t want to explain that she had done kitchen duties in the House of Silence. She would rather Sethennai think this was just a natural talent. He ate all of it, anyway, and seemed to like it.
After breakfast, he was much revived, and asked Csorwe all about her conversation with the chicken-man.
“Oshaarun will serve you well here in town,” he said. “But of course when we get home it will be necessary for you to speak the language of my city as a native. I happen to think Tlaanthothei is a beautiful language, so I was thinking I would teach it to you myself. Have you ever learned any other language?”
“Oranna the librarian tried to teach me,” she said, uncertainly. “So I could read the old books.”
“Ah,” said Sethennai. His eyes narrowed in private amusement. Until that moment, Csorwe had all but forgotten that he too had met Oranna, that she’d spied them working on some scheme in the library after hours.
She watched him carefully, wondering whether he’d say anything more. With each day that passed in Grey Hook, the House of Silence felt less substantial, as if the first fourteen years of her life had been a lotus hallucination. She didn’t know how it might feel to talk to Sethennai about everyone she had left behind, whether it would make them real in her head again, whether that might be a good or a bad thing.
“The Unspoken One has been worshipped in many tongues over the centuries,” Sethennai went on. “Although it prefers to see them plucked out. Ironic, really. Did you make progress with your lessons?”
Oranna had not had much patience with her as a pupil. It wasn’t that Csorwe hadn’t tried, but the warmth of the library had made her sleepy, and her mind had wandered.
“I can do verbs in the present tense,” she said. If Sethennai thought it was worth trying to teach her something, she wasn’t about to admit how useless she had been. “The queen sleeps in the castle, the servants bring the message to the master.”