“Oh, good,” said Sethennai. “If you’ve learned to put up with that kind of nonsense, the battle is almost won. Well, come and sit by me. We’ll begin with the Tlaanthothei alphabet and go from there.”
* * *
After a time, a letter arrived for Sethennai, written in cipher and containing a note of credit.
“So I do still have friends in the world,” he said, and winked at Csorwe.
They left the boardinghouse and rented rooms above a wineshop. Ciphered letters arrived for Sethennai once or twice a month, as his friends in Tlaanthothe kept him informed of the activities of his enemy.
Csorwe discovered that the enemy’s name was Olthaaros Charossa, though Sethennai almost never spoke it out loud, and even then in a low voice, all six syllables infused with distaste. This was the usurper wizard who had brought about Sethennai’s exile.
While Sethennai schemed, Csorwe studied. Three days a week they spoke nothing but Tlaanthothei at home, and it came to her more easily than she had expected. It was good to be able to speak Sethennai’s own language to him, although she still didn’t understand his jokes.
At Sethennai’s prompting she spent some of her saved wages on clothes. Her existing wardrobe was a pile of mismatched tunics and leggings, acquired secondhand and threadbare from the Grey Hook market. The dress she had worn up the stairs to the Shrine was folded neatly away in a drawer that she never opened.
Sethennai had offered no guidance, so she had to guess. All Sethennai’s clothes were brightly patterned, though ancient and much mended. Csorwe considered dressing to match, and rejected the idea. She would look like a housecat trailing after a tiger.
She had never chosen her own clothes, and didn’t want to make a spectacle of herself. It had been so much easier to be the Chosen Bride and just have Angwennad bring her the right habit for every day of the calendar. In the end, to escape from the tailor’s shop, she chose some plain tunics and a lamb’s-leather coat.
Sethennai was in a good mood when she got back to the apartment. “I’ve bought myself a present, too,” he said, beckoning her inside. “Come and admire yourself.”
The present turned out to be a mirror of real silvered glass, hanging on the wall of their sitting room. Csorwe had never seen such a thing. The Prioress of the House of Silence had strong views about personal vanity, so the novices and acolytes had been confined to small mirrors of polished copper.
She tried not to appear too fascinated by the new mirror, or by the weird spectre of her own clear, true-colour reflection. Grey skin, grey freckles, and yolk-yellow eyes were obscured by an overgrown mop of black hair. It turned out that her nose was slightly hooked, which she liked. The points of her milk-tusks poked out at the corners of her mouth.
With a jolt she realised that she might now live long enough to get her adult tusks. They didn’t come in until you were fifteen or sixteen, so she had never imagined what they might look like. She stared at herself for another second, then folded up the feeling and put it away, like the dress, in a safe place where she didn’t have to look at it.
She had chosen the new clothes well. She looked smart, but more to the point she looked like anyone you might see going about their business in the streets of Grey Hook, any one of a thousand couriers and apprentices. There was no way anyone could detect that she had ever been over the threshold of the House of Silence.
“Well?” said Sethennai. She realised she had been staring, and stepped back, shoving her hands into the pockets of her new coat.
“Think I need a haircut,” she said.
* * *
On her fifteenth birthday, to mark the end of the first stolen year, Sethennai gave her a dictionary called The Various Tongues of the Echo Maze, for the Traveller.
Around this time she lost her milk-tusks and gained a Qarsazhi tutor named Parza. He was an exile, full of sorrow for his homeland and even more irritable with Csorwe than Oranna had ever been.
“The Qarsazhi are difficult people,” said Sethennai. Csorwe had grasped this much. Qarsazh was an empire spread across many worlds, ancient and rich and huge enough that they had heard of it even in the House of Silence.
“Parza is particularly difficult,” Sethennai went on. “But don’t worry about him. You need to learn their ways but you don’t need him to like you.”
Csorwe had only ever heard of Qarsazh as a place of cruelty and corruption, but Parza was a sleek, small, affected person, with copper-brown skin, a neatly pointed beard, and very smooth grey hair, which he wore in a single coiled braid. His other traits were coffee drinking, homesickness, a delicate stomach, and religious devotion, although it was hard to tell which of these were the ways of Qarsazh and which the ways of Parza.
Csorwe made slow progress with Qarsazhi. The words were difficult—half-jagged and half-elusive—and Parza was openly disdainful of her clumsy pronunciation. But Sethennai needed her to learn, and she owed him her best efforts.
Alongside Parza there came a whole programme of study, and a whole succession of tutors—most of them eccentric, some certainly criminals. Csorwe had more than languages to learn. She learned to navigate the city. She learned to cook eggs the proper Grey Hook way, with hot pepper and pickled cucumber. She learned to fly a cutter, and to fight: first unarmed, then with knives, and finally with the sword.
Grey Hook was a strange place. One day she saw two people kissing on the Bridge of Flies, in public, where anyone might see them. One afternoon she fell asleep in the courtyard and got a sunburn the colour of basalt. She learned to understand the city at night, its voices, its cries, its distant music. She learned how to eat mealworms, how to speak her mother tongue with the Grey Hook accent, how to run and climb and creep through the battered streets, and how to wrap her hands for a fistfight.
From the old crooks and soldiers who were her tutors, she learned about the hungers that live in the heart of every city, and she was educated in the threat, the promise, and the scientific accomplishment of violence.
* * *
There were a few other expatriate Tlaanthothei in Grey Hook, mostly tall and dark as Sethennai was, all with long tapered ears. But their neighbourhood was on the other side of the city, and Sethennai was not interested in associating with his countrymen.
Instead, he had adopted the pseudonym “Dr. Pelthari,” and taken a job as a medic with the Blue Boars, a mercenary company whose barracks were just across the square from the apartment.
Csorwe wondered at times whether he missed Tlaanthothei food and habits, the way she occasionally missed cabbage soup and plainchant, but if he did he never showed any sign of it. He hadn’t explained much to Csorwe, but she understood that he had been thrown out of Tlaanthothe, that his enemies had lied and conspired and whipped up public feeling against him. He still had his friends, who sent him their coded letters from time to time, but any Tlaanthothei stranger could be an informant for Olthaaros Charossa.
When Csorwe turned sixteen, Sethennai gave her a sword of folded Torosadni steel, and requested that she be allowed to join the Blue Boars’ newest recruits for sparring practice.
She had dreaded this. It had been so long since she’d had to deal with a class of her peers. She imagined the Blue Boars would all know each other. They would have their own team jokes and they would not be happy to meet an interloper.