The Fecund's Melancholy Daughter - Brent Hayward [77]
Now the question Octavia asked of herself was: when to leave Jesthe?
If she chose to wait, what was she waiting for?
Inside the small room where she worked were other servants, all of whom had been polishing when Octavia came back, her clothes filthy, stinking, stained with grease and lard and the moisture of vegetable peelings, dripping with meat scraps. Her thighs trickled, possibly juices from the chatelaine herself. Octavia saw the other girls raise their eyebrows and exchange hushed comments as she entered.
She took her place next to Jovi, who was fat and sullen, and who worked on utensils, while another girl, who never spoke, whom the others just called Girly, polished saucers. A third girl rubbed half-heartedly at the larger plates. All of their hands were permanently blackened by tarnish. Octavia’s were well on their way. Black hands, black face. The room smelled strongly of lemons and metal and the pervasive tang of caustic tarnish.
“Look what the cobalis spit up,” said Diogene, rubbing at a plate as if in battle; Octavia had offered no explanation why she was late for her shift or why she was covered in garbage.
Staring down, Octavia tried her best to ignore the stares and comments. These girls, like most staff, had seen the chatelaine stop by on several occasions to talk to her; they had seen Octavia’s demure responses. Of course they harboured resentments. Struggling to comprehend the situation, this change in Jesthe and in their lives, they knew only that the girl was favoured by the chatelaine when she should have been cleaning outhouses, or on the streets, where she really belonged, peeling guts from the roadside. But worse than this, the girls also knew that, despite Octavia’s melancholy, and her tattoo and proper status in Nowy Solum, Octavia was far more attractive, inside and out, than they were or could ever be, and this knowledge would never be reconciled or forgiven.
For Octavia, attentions that her body and face had received since she was a girl had never added up to anything positive. She had been raped, groped by men, slapped by white-faced women for the crime of catching the straying eye of their husbands. She had been kicked and chased and had heard so many disparaging comments that she was numb to them now. So what if Octavia had used her looks to seduce and betray the chatelaine? So what?
As she watched her distorted reflection become clearer and clearer in the curved surfaces of the cup she cleaned, she thought again about the fecund’s warning. Big trouble, the monster had said. Could the fecund really know what would happen? Octavia wondered how best to return to the cell for a third time. Perhaps, she thought, she should visit the monster right now, to test the fecund to see what influence she might have over the beast’s actions and ramblings—
“Here comes your friend,” said Diogene under her breath. “Fucking garbage whore.”
Sure enough, when Octavia glanced up, she saw the chatelaine coming down the hall, dressed in outlandish clothes, her cheeks smeared with grease and her hair piled high. She was smiling, waving: Octavia looked swiftly down at the floor again.
Third visit be damned. The prudent thing to do was get out of Jesthe as soon as possible.
The second cobali to die that day died quietly, without yielding any secrets. The castellan had not managed to learn any new traits of the humours, nor splice anything of interest to the small body. He had only inserted splines into each femur, working them gently into the marrow, and was about to install a series of minute gears to form a tertiary joint when life eked from the beast, rising up slowly to the ceiling in a vague shape of sadness and resignation before dispersing. The castellan stared at the emptied corpse in disbelief. He had not even really cut the creature, had not gone near its liver or spleen. He swore. Cobali were almost useless. A few small incisions, even in areas such as the groin, legs, and the hump of meat where the arms met the