The Only Good Man in Tiliard #2
“And you shouldn’t smoke with yours, but here we are.
Besides, I barely nudged him. It was that intersection on Bast, by the butcher shop, where everyone hits everyone.
Oh, thank you.” Elspeth takes a wheel of sugared cucumber from a seamstress’s plate.
She eats as a crab pinches: thinly, with her lips pulled back to not compromise her gloss.
Today it is emerald, like her hair. “Anyway, he was so good-natured about it. And a beautiful catch, once you get a good look at him. So we get to talking, one thing leads to another, and before I know it I’m taking him to The Lilies Wretched next week. ”
“Lilies is next week?”
“Closing night, dear. You should come. Ludovico will meet his match this season. According to Mallory, at least.” She bends to peel off her gown. “I’d expect you to know all the production schedules, what with your patron’s habits.”
Aster holds back a smile. The moon has turned in her favor: a bounty of excellent dancers to bid on, and with plenty of time before Acid Moon. “I might come,” she says.
“You’d better. I’ll be so bored otherwise—I’m just so tired of all these Aufhocker productions. Besides, I need you to meet this man.”
Aster knows this is her opening, her chance to execute her small revenge.
She knows she should spill the details of her public fit, of being gifted a gentleman’s handkerchief, and laugh at the coincidence that it had come from the same handsome stranger Elspeth had nearly killed earlier that day.
She should start her story not with a man dying, but failing to.
Elspeth has already moved on, struggling into her next gown with a frustrated sigh.
“How does that one feel, vralen?” a seamstress asks.
“Better.” Elspeth turns, rattling a skirt woven with lacy eggshells. “Very pretty. But it’s too … expected. Don’t you think so? Like a waiter bringing just what you ordered.”
“It seems fine to me,” Aster says.
“No, no—help me out of this. This won’t look good onstage.
” She shimmies out of the eggshells, groping for Aster’s free hand.
As always, her heart inverts at the cold touch of the sapphires and rubies embedded in Elspeth’s wrists, each a testament to her skill with a brush.
Brightest of all are the engagement diamonds drilled into her thumb.
It’s been three turns of the moon since they’ve healed, but Aster still can’t quite look at them.
The day those jewels were set marked a day of mourning among Tiliard’s bachelors.
An epidemic of tears swept through every quarter of the city, even from the private chambers of the Palas’s heir.
Seventeen and na?ve enough to hope to win the affections of a woman five years his senior, Florian still tries to catch any hairpins she condescends to toss his way, desperate for a visit in his dreams. He’s quick, a prodigy with a saber, but Elspeth is far better at sabotaging a throw than he is at responding to it.
While Florian had fallen for Elspeth in the manner of most powerless men, hopelessly and from afar, the Laurel Chancellor had fallen for her in the manner of the most powerful: sitting perfectly still, sweating under her studio lights like a roach in the sun.
By that time, she already had a long line of subjects and suitors, tycoons and high priests who paid her in apartments and surgeries and cars, even as she handed over work that from any other painter would be considered unfinished.
It was her masterful dedication to incompletion, to infinite potential, that brought her to the Laurel Chancellor’s attention.
Only she could capture the green light in his eyes, the blinding constellations of his jewels, the majesty of his ivy crown.
And he could not stand to think that her brush would immortalize anyone else.
“Aster?” Elspeth paws through rows of silk and lace. “Are you there? Come help me pick. I can’t even look at half this trash.”
“I’m here.”
“I hate white,” Elspeth says. “It screams ingénue. Don’t you think green would be better? Oh, God.” She gestures to a hanging strip of silk. “What dreck. Do you see this? You must.”
“Perhaps something from the back, vralen?” asks one of the girls, whose name Aster can’t recall but who is recognizable by the bizarre geometry of her bangs. “If you can’t find anything.”
“The back!” Elspeth laughs. “Yes, perfect—a custom gown is too pedestrian. Get me something old, something really dusty.”
The girl hesitates.
“Well, go.” She scurries away, and Elspeth collapses onto the marble dais.
“God, why is this so difficult? If I wanted to put hard work into anything I wouldn’t be marrying a rich man.
” She plucks a stiff bridal cap from a nearby mannequin and fans herself with it, unaware of the ugly punctations carousal lice have left in the felt.
“I’m not an ambitious girl, Aster. I don’t ask much.
All I want is to be gainfully unemployed. ”
“There are better men,” Aster says for the hundredth time. But none so gainful, she doesn’t add.
“Please. You think I haven’t heard that before? What’s the line? ‘There’s only one good man in Tiliard and he’s my dad.’”
“I think it goes that he’s my brother.”
“Whatever. There’s only one good man and he’s my dog. Can we drop it? Oh, yes, this is it. This is my green.”
The girl returns with a folded gown in hand. It’s all ruffles and snail shells, a design that resembles a frilly moss more than an article of clothing. Aster is unsure how Elspeth can process the sight of it, how she doesn’t see only a pair of pretty white arms presenting nothing but air.
“It’s wonderful,” Elspeth says.
A hot, sinking feeling curls behind Aster’s sternum. She turns away, covers her mouth and hunches over, slipping Mallory’s handkerchief from her pocket.
“Is she all right?” asks the bridesmaid.
“She’s fine,” Elspeth says, laying a gentle hand on Aster’s back.
She always softens her edge when it comes to their condition, though her manifestation is much easier to hide.
One has to look deep into her eyes, often with the aid of a fundoscope, to see the toxic deposits that proliferate across her retinas, blinding her to everything but beauty.
“Really, my dear,” Elspeth says. “You must see someone about this. Go to the Surgeon General.”
“Rather just—die,” Aster wheezes.
“Well, you ought to see someone. I’ve got a few qualified friends. You know I did the promotional portrait for what’s his name—that baritone with the scar. Played Dr. Gortt in What God Forgot, so he ought to know a thing about medicine.”
Aster doesn’t remind her he also played Sigmund the Torturer in The Price of Beauty. “He won’t—”
“Oh, he will see you. Once I’m Laurel Dame, I can have him exiled if he doesn’t. Don’t give me that look. What’s the position for if not to be abused?”
Something stickier than a laugh travels up Aster’s throat. “Excuse me,” she rasps, stumbling out the door and into the street.
When she is sure she’s out of sight of the dressmaker’s, she lets her fit overtake her.
A familiar heat expands behind her sternum, crawling along her ribs, up her trachea.
It grows up her throat, crowding out her breath.
Choking, she stumbles into the alley and sinks to a pained squat.
Hot fluid fills her mouth, and with the dizzied panic of an air-starved brain, she brings Mallory’s handkerchief to her lips.
Her breath cools a little. As she gulps the threads of his scent, her throat loosens, relaxes, and a whistle of air passes between the walls of her windpipe and the mass blocking it.
She closes her eyes, heaves one last cough, and spits into the handkerchief.
Between the dark streaks of mucus lies a clump of soft, undulating tissue, branched like her airways.
Bodiless but alive, it flutters its cilia, toxic nodules shimmering along its length like faceted eyes.
It is, the Surgeon General would say, a work of art.
Aster watches the tissue curl between Mallory’s initials, then dumps it in a sewer grate.
Before she folds the handkerchief again, she takes a moment to examine his defiled embroidery.
Fantastical and haphazard, the stitching seems more intuition than intention.
It’s refreshing, compared to the florid extravagance of Revivalist needlepoint.
It’s a long-standing tradition for young men to record their journeys in fancywork, and there is every part of the Catoptric River Valley sewn into the batiste.
Around the edge, diagonal stitches mark the razor peaks of the Sawteeth, capped with toxic fumes.
In the center lies Tiliard, the heart of the living world, a giant’s garden blooming in iridescent crewel.
Here is the prison-castle of Mongfestun with its black towers, there is a flying horse sewn in Ostlerfell Blue.
Liquid silver runs down the center of the vale, a long dragon of a river sprouting eight legs and a pair of slender wings.
A tiny figure rides its tail—Saint Guylag, she guesses, with his green banner.
Mallory is evidently a well-traveled man, at least through Aufhocker’s body of work.
She wipes her mouth on the south end of the river valley and straightens.
The circle of Fifth is relatively quiet this evening, empty but for a gaggle of university students kneeling between streetcar lanes.
They’re from the department of dendrochronology, judging by the drills and corers they lay over the street, sampling the city’s rings for excerpts of its history.
As they uncork a thigh-sized plug of the intersection, a trolley screams by, shaving a few threads from their ruffled coats.
They are indifferent to the danger. They know a good student is more easily replaced than a good sample.
Aster is abruptly struck by how strange the ground of Mallory’s hometown must be, cold and solid and unmoving.
She shudders to imagine a life on the fringes of the dead world, without the swarming purr of the city, the limitless human and nonhuman bodies devouring, growing, joining and dividing, an infestation that spreads from the grand maples of Hart Park to the toxic depths where even the bravest exterminators never tread.
A few blocks down, a roar rises from the Rue Petunia (a celebratory riot, Aster will learn from the next day’s Arbuscle, as the Marshal Revenant concludes the most moving speech he has ever given).
She turns back to the dressmaker’s, folds the handkerchief into her pocket, and suddenly, the line from that old Porrain comedy returns to her.
“There’s only one good man in Tiliard,” she mutters, “and he’s been dead for years.”