The Fecund's Melancholy Daughter - Brent Hayward [22]
The chatelaine could trust none of her staff. Not one of them. They were all backstabbers, harpies vying for attentions and favours and—
The kholic.
This time, thoughts of the girl stopped the chatelaine in her tracks. Even her pets fell suddenly silent. The first kholic ever to be in these parts of Jesthe and the chatelaine didn’t even know where she was or where she had been. Could the kholic have taken the cherub?
Surely the girl was as innocent as her pets?
But what did the chatelaine really know about kholics? They were taken away from their mothers at birth, raised in the ostracon. Everyone knew that much. They had black fluids in their hearts and could get no pleasure, save from cleaning up the refuse of hemos—
If Erricus and his officers were allowed up here again, on this level of the palace, what would become of the melancholic girl? They would encounter each other at some point. What then?
If the kholic was still around.
The chatelaine dressed quickly in a long chemise and threw open the doors to her room, standing at the threshold to the Great Hall. Crooked Greta, the candlemender, was, by a misfortune of timing, passing by at that precise moment.
“Fetch the new girl,” demanded the chatelaine.
Greta frowned, twisting her entire upper body to make eye contact. “What?”
The chatelaine did not yet even know the kholic’s name. But today she would. She promised herself. Today. Today was a new day, a new start. “Fetch me the kholic.”
Scowling, mumbling, Greta shuffled away.
Recalling then, as she waited for the girl to arrive, the pretty, tattooed face, and the fabulous body hinted at under the shift that the kholic now wore, the chatelaine had to admit that there were elements of spite in the attraction and lust she felt, a distant but gnawing jealously of the kholic’s youth and beauty. She tried to tell herself this was a foolish thought: she was the chatelaine of Nowy Solum, after all, and the girl was just a kholic from the streets outside, but the chatelaine knew all too well on this morning of truths that her own youth had dwindled, her vitality faded. Exposed here, in her new skin, she also understood that beauty and youth were the reasons she had solicited the girl in the first place. Beauty, youth, and novelty.
“You are a fool,” the chatelaine said to herself under her breath, almost smiling. No, she did not suspect the kholic of misdeed: she needed the girl, more than anything, to be with her now, to make her pain go away.
A second later, miraculously, the chatelaine found herself staring down at the kholic’s face, a face even more beautiful than she recalled; the girl had appeared in the broad doorway to her chamber like a seraph.
Without hesitating, the chatelaine reached out and touched the kholic’s hair, which was brown and matted and greasy. The girl’s blue eyes did not quite meet the chatelaine’s own, but were nonetheless a startling colour against the black tattoo. The chatelaine wanted to embrace and be embraced in return. She cleared her throat. “Thank you for coming.” The girl was truly disarming up close. The chatelaine’s heart raced. “I would like you to call me, er, Terra Bella. That’s the name that the castellan—my father—gave me when I was born. Though no one is really allowed to call me that. I want to tell you, I’ve been robbed, and I need you to do me a favour.”
Those averted eyes, set off so gorgeously by the tattoo, did not appear to react in the least.
“Last night,” continued the chatelaine, quietly, reluctant to invite the girl in, for she did not trust herself at this point and felt, somehow, that if she did let the girl come in, the servant might get put in as much jeopardy as the pets (which were making a ruckus yet again): the chatelaine’s environment, and maybe even her own touch, were unsafe around any innocence. “A cherub, my beloved cherub, was taken from my chambers.”
“Winged baby?”
The kholic’s voice, too, was exquisite.
“Exactly. Yes. A winged baby.