The Charnel Prince - J. Gregory Keyes [10]
“Wherever do you find such servants?” her companion Casnara dat Ospellina asked sourly.
“But h-he—,” Anne stuttered.
“Be silent this instant, you little piece of foreign trash, or I will have Corhio the gardener beat you. And he will do quite more to you there than pinch it, I daresay. Forget not whom you serve, whose house you are in.”
“A proper lady would raise her brat to have better manners,” Anne snapped.
“And what would you know of that?” da Filialofia asked, crossing her arms. “What sort of manners do you imagine you were taught in whatever brothel or pigsty your mother abandoned you to? Certainly, you did not learn to mind your place.” Her chin tilted up. “Get out. Now.”
Anne picked herself up from her kneeling position. “Very well,” she said, facing them squarely. She held out her hand.
Da Filialofia laughed. “Surely you don’t think I’m going to pay you for insulting my house, do you? Leave, wretch. I’ve no idea why my husband hired you in the first place.” But then she cracked a faint smile that didn’t even hint at good humor. “Well, perhaps I do. He might have found you entertaining, in a barbaric sort of way. Were you?”
For a long moment Anne was simply speechless, and for a moment longer she was poised between slapping the woman—which she knew would earn her a beating—and simply walking away.
She didn’t quite do either. Instead she recalled something she had learned in her last week working at the triva.
“Oh, no, he has no time for me,” she said sweetly. “He’s been much too busy with Casnara dat Ospellina.”
And then she did walk away, smiling at the furious whispers that began behind her.
The great estates lay on the north side of z’Espino, most of them overlooking the azure water of the Lier Sea. As Anne passed through the gate of the house, she stood for a moment in the shade of chestnut trees and gazed out across those foam-crested waters. North across them lay Liery, where her mother’s family ruled. North and east was Crotheny, were her father sat as king and emperor, and where her love, Roderick, must be giving up hope by now.
Just a little water separating her from her rightful station and everything she loved, and yet that little bit of water was expensive to cross. Princess though she was, she was penniless. Nor could she tell anyone who she was, for she had come to z’Espino with terrible danger on her heels. She was safer as a washerwoman than as a princess.
“You.” A man on a horse rode up the lane and sat looking down at her. She recognized by his square cap and yellow tunic that he was an aidilo, charged with keeping order in the streets.
“Yes, casnar?”
“Move along. Don’t tarry here,” he said brusquely.
“I’ve just come from serving the casnara da Filialofia.”
“Yes, and now you’re done, so you must go.”
“I only wanted to look at the sea for a moment.”
“Then look at it from the fish market,” he snapped. “Must I escort you there?”
“No,” Anne said, “I’m going.”
As she trudged down a lane bounded by stone walls topped with shards of broken glass to prevent climbing, she wondered if the servants who worked on her father’s country estates were treated so shabbily. Surely not.
The lane debouched onto the Piato dachi Meddissos, a grand court of red brick bounded on one side by the three-story palace of the meddisso and his family. It wasn’t so grand as her father’s palace in Eslen, but it was quite striking, with its long colonnade and terrace gardens. On the other side of the piato stood the city temple, an elegant and very ancient-looking building of polished umber stone.
The piato itself was a riot of color and life. Vendors with wooden carts and red caps hawked grilled lamb, fried fish, steamed mussels, candied figs, and roasted chestnuts. Pale-eyed Sefry, hooded and wrapped against the sun, sold ribbons and trifles, stockings, holy relics, and love potions from beneath colorful awnings. A troop of actors had cleared a space and were performing