Kushiel's Dart - Jacqueline Carey [252]
I pieced the story together later, for it was at this point that I lost the ability to follow what was being said. It seemed that the nephew Manoj had summoned-Csavin, his name was-had run afoul of a Bryony House adept the one and only time the kumpania of Manoj had entered the City of Elua.
Bryony is the wealthiest of the Thirteen Houses, for wealth is their specialty, in all its forms, and there are those to whom nothing is more titillating than money. If one stripped the staff of the Royal Treasury, one would find a full half of them bear Bryony's marque, for her adepts' acumen is legend.
Bryony is also the only House whose adepts are willing to wager for their favors.
And they almost never lose. Not even to Tsingani.
I had believed-as Hyacinthe had-that his mother had fallen enamoured of a D'Angeline, for that was the story she had told him. It was out of love, to protect him from a more sordid truth; she had lost her virtue, her laxta, because her cousin Csavin had laid it as a wager upon the table with a Bryony adept, believing he could not lose. Tsingani know a thousand ways to cheat the gadje.
He had lost.
Not only had he lost, but in the face of the Dowayne's Guard of Bryony House, he had paid his debt with coin that was not his, deceiving his cousin-Manoj's daughter, who was young and desiring of adventure-into meeting with a patron who paid good coin to Bryony House for the pleasure of seducing a Tsingani virgin.
It appalled me as much as almost anything I have ever heard, for it hit close to home for me. If she had been D'Angeline and not Tsingani, it would have been a violation of Guild-laws; but the Guild covers only D'Angelines, leaving Tsingani and other noncitizens to their own law. It was a violation of Tsingani law, and Csavin had forfeited all his possessions and rights to Manoj, living as a pariah among them. Still, I think Bryony House is liable for heresy, for what was done to Hyacinthe's mother violates the precept of Blessed Elua, which applies to everyone, D'Angeline or no. Naamah's service is entered willingly, or not at all.
As for Hyacinthe's mother, she was Tsingani, and bound by their law. She was vrajna and outcast, in sorrow and tears, never to be redeemed.
But now there was a son, Hyacinthe, and even if he was a Didihani half-breed, he had been raised as a true Tsingano, and he was the son of Anasztaizia, whose loss Manoj had never ceased to mourn, his only daughter, his only child, his precious pearl in the swarming mass of children his brothers and sisters had begotten, whose mulo had beseeched him on the winds since her death a month gone and more.
Prince of the Tsingani. Prince of Travellers.
The remainder of the day passed in a whirlwind as our campsite was struck and our things brought to join with Manoj's kumpania, where trade and celebration blurred into one. Joscelin and I trailed in its wake, bewildered and half-forgotten as Hyacinthe was drawn into an extended reunion with cousins and great-aunts and uncles he'd never known existed.
Manoj kept Hyacinthe close by him, drawing out the tale of his childhood and youth in Night's Doorstep, eking out the details of his mother's life. He was proud to hear of her fame as a fortuneteller, pounding his chest, proclaiming that no one had ever had the gift of the dromonde as Anasztaizia had had it, among all the women of her line.
I understood enough of this to raise my eyebrows at Hyacinthe, who shot me a fierce warning glance, shaking his head. It was true, what Delaunay had said: The dromonde was the province of women only. For a man to practice it was vrajna, forbidden.
When night fell, the fires blazed, and the Tsingani drank and played, their music rising in wild skirling abandonment. Hyacinthe joined them, playing his timbales, dancing with the unwed women; there must have been a dozen of them vying for his attention. I sat on the outskirts and watched his white grin flash in the firelight.
So I sat, when an old crone hobbled over to me, wizened as one of last winter's