I haven't got much to say on this part, actually, except that we get some insight on Cura's character and it's a bit more exciting. Do look at Part A first, though.
Again, I reiterate that if you read this, I'll be happy to return reviews on anything you request.
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“All right,” said Nendo, shrugging his assent. He didn’t understand why Cura seemed so embarrassed; it must be that whatever she was going to show him was something important to her. Nendo wouldn’t understand, since he’d never owned anything until now.
“Follow me,” said Cura, leading Nendo down the stairs. Nendo followed her wordlessly, striding after her down the gray-carpeted hall, occasionally glancing at the reflections in the mirrors. Cura stopped at a door on the far end of the hall, pulled out a key, and unlocked it.
Nendo blinked, surprised—none of the other doors seemed to have locks on them. “Is this your room?”
“Technically,” said Cura, “but I don’t stay here often. Usually I sleep in Lord Darian’s room…”
Sleep? thought Nendo, again thinking about why a nobleman would want a young girl as his personal servant. He felt guilty, though, thinking that way of Cura; she was nice enough, after all. Who cared if she happened to warm her lord’s bed?
He followed her into the room; like the other servants’ quarters, it was small but comfortable, and bore a faint air of disuse. Cura crossed the room quickly and knelt before the bed, tugging out a chest hidden under the bed.
It wasn’t a large chest, and was simply built, made of dark wood. Cura fished in her dress pockets for another key, which she stuck into the chest’s keyhole and turned. Nendo stood beside her, his hands in his pockets again, watching and wondering.
Cura began to lift objects from the chest, settling them with infinite care on the bed. A neatly-folded pale blue dress trimmed with lace, a sewing kit wrapped in ribbon, delicately-embroidered handkerchiefs. It was a marriage chest, Nendo realized, one that contained the objects that made up a young woman’s dowry.
“Is that…?” he said slowly.
“It’s my marriage chest,” said Cura with a nod. “I started keeping it after I came to Lord Darian’s service three years ago. Besides my regular payment, he rewards my service by giving me things for my marriage chest every now and then.”
“Who’re you going to marry?” said Nendo, trying to imagine small, childlike Cura being a wife. The image did not mesh well.
“A servant of Lord Kigo’s...he’s a friend of Lord Darian. Count of Sakir,” explained Cura, gently stroking the fine blue cloth of the dress. “I’ve never met him before, but I’m sure he’ll be a kind man. In three years, when my service bonds end, I’ll be married.”
“Uh-huh.” Nendo nodded, though again he was confused that Cura was sharing such personal information with him. Still, there was such happiness on her face that he didn’t dare ruin the moment by asking her why.
Cura had started packing the objects pack into the chest, settling them next to each other with utmost gentleness. “If it wasn’t for Lord Darian, I wouldn’t even have a dowry,” she said quietly, as she shut the chest and turned the key to lock it. “My parents barely had any money…they had to sell me to Lord Darian just so they could keep their house.”
If Cura felt any bitterness over being sold, she didn’t voice it. She straightened, brushing the front of her dress off. “I’m not going to lie—I was afraid when I first met Lord Darian. I thought he’d be a cruel master, a slave driver…” A laugh and a shake of her head. “But he’s nothing like that. He’s a kind lord. If it wasn’t for him, I’d probably be…I’d probably be on the streets.”
She met Nendo’s eye, her expression serious and meaningful. Something tightened in Nendo’s chest: he knew exactly what she meant.
“Why are you telling me this?” said Nendo, his words quiet.
“I…I don’t know, exactly,” admitted Cura, a pink flush rising in her cheeks again. “Just…just I thought that maybe you’d—you’d begrudge it. Being dragged here…I just—I just wanted to show that it’s not all so bad here, that…that you’ll come to like Lord Darian. I know you will.”
Nendo thought of the youth who’d been rubbing sleep from his eyes while trading vulgar insults with Masudo, who’d dismissed Nendo as one of Masudo’s pranks, who’d then lowered his head to Nendo in a deferent magician’s bow. He thought of Lord Darian, and thought of Cura’s words.
There was no way he could say he liked Lord Darian, but he had to admit there was something to the lord that intrigued him. Something that intrigued him enough to keep him here, in Miria Manor, instead of running off to find Tey again. Although, Nendo thought darkly, he doubted Darian—much less Masudo—would let him escape.
“Maybe. Who knows,” he said to Cura.
“You’ll like him” said Cura, a strange small smile to her face. “Now, come on, Nendo—it’s time for your first real day as a servant to start.”
Nendo tried to share her enthusiasm as he followed her out of the door, but found he didn’t feel anything but apprehension. How would he fare in such sumptuous surroundings? Not just the surroundings, too, but the fellow servants who laughed and called him street boy and insulted their own lord…and such a haughty and arrogant lord, too, who kept company with time mages.
Life at Miria Manor was going to be many things, thought Nendo grimly, but it sure wouldn’t be easy.
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A week later
The burdenbeast ran its long, sticky tongue down Nendo’s neck, causing him to jump and drop the brush he’d been running down the beast’s feathery flank. “Hey, stop that!” he cried, annoyed.
“He likes you,” said Trevas, the old stable hand, patting the burdenbeast on the neck. “Don’cha, buddy? You like Nendo?”
The burdenbeast lowed in response. Nendo sighed and bent down to pick up the brush again, wiping slobber from his shoulder. “Ha ha…but don’t do that without warning, all right?” he said, addressing the burdenbeast sternly.
The burdenbeast fixed warm, doe-like eyes on him and stuck out the tip of its tongue in response. Nendo laughed and patted the burdenbeast’s flank.
“You’ve got a good hand with the beasts,” said Trevas, stepping back as he watched Nendo gently brush the burdenbeast’s silvery feathers. “I could see you as a stable hand, boy.”
“Really?” said Nendo somewhat absently, focusing on straightening a particularly ruffled portion of the beast’s feathers. He had to say he liked the idea, though—already, after his week in Miria Manor, Nendo found himself feeling most at home in the stables. Certainly, more at home than in the kitchens…he grimaced as he beheld the multiple bandages on his fingers from his disastrous effort to slice vegetables.
“You’ll be a fine stable hand, boy,” said Trevas, ruffling the burdenbeast’s feathers. The burdenbeast lowed again, seemingly in delight. Nendo laughed.
He didn’t want to admit it, but he was beginning to adjust to his life in Miria Manor. Sure, the other servants still teased him for being a street boy, and were overly fond of gossip, but they were friendly enough, and eager enough to help, Cura especially. And sure, he almost never saw Lord Darian, who tended to stay within his studies or libraries and other places Nendo wasn’t allowed to visit, but he found his lord’s hands-off approached allowed him greater freedom. Nendo especially enjoyed spending his days in the burdenbeast stalls, tending to the manor’s four beasts under Trevas’ instruction.
Not to mention, he had to admit he liked having a warm bed to sleep in, and three square meals a day. Already, the sharp bones that had stood out in such clarity before were fading; his body was filling out, his features softening. Sometimes, when he caught a glimpse of himself in one of the castle’s many mirrors, he didn’t even recognize the boy staring back.
He was no longer Tey’s Nendo, Nendo of Theratolia, the street boy. He was now Nendo, servant to Lord Darian.
After he was finished with his business in the stables, Nendo bid good day to Trevas, patted the burdenbeasts one last time, and headed out on the walkway to the mansion proper, his hands in his pockets. He found he quite liked sticking his hands in his pockets when he had nothing to do with them—not to mention he’d slipped the piece of wood from the marketplace into one of his pockets. Being able to feel its rough surface, small as it was, reminded him of his life on the streets.
Of Tey…
“Hey! Street boy!” Nendo sighed and turned around; it was the gardener, Stron, waving him over. Already a week and Stron refused to call Nendo anything other than “street boy”.
“Yeah? Anything you need?” said Nendo, approaching Stron, who like always was knelt over a flowerbed, his face smeared with dirt.
“Street boy,” said Stron, pointing towards the imposing white edifice of the manor, “see that row of satud flowers, in the planter beneath the third floor window?”
Nendo looked and saw. Many of the windows of the manor had planters lining their sills, which overflowed with a brilliant array of flowers. The window Stron was indicating was particularly overgrown, and was a floor beneath an ajar window from which high, resounding notes of music were flowing. Darian’s music room, Nendo realized; on their tour Cura had explained it was one of the rooms off-limits to most servants, and was apparently where Darian kept his “harpsichord”, an ancient Coalition instrument.
“It’s pretty high up…” said Nendo.
“What, you afraid of heights, street boy?” said Stron, a challenge in his voice. Nendo shot a sidelong glare at the gardener.
“No,” he said.
“Then get going,” said Stron, tossing Nendo a pair of gardening shears. Nendo caught them easily, with catching skills honed from years of being lobbed stolen food by Tey so he could make a quick getaway. He strode away from the gardener, heading over to the rather rickety-looking ladder leaning against the mansion wall.
Nendo scaled the ladder somewhat nervously, gripping its wooden sides so tightly his knuckles turned white. It didn’t seem very safe, as it swayed beneath him with his every motion and emitted ominous creaking sounds whenever he placed too much pressure on a wrung. He told himself that he could deal with heights, though, and kept his eyes focused on the overgrown planter instead of on the ground beneath.
Once he reached the planter, Nendo balanced on the ladder, gripping the edge of the planter tightly with one hand and holding the shears with the other. The clusters of red and yellow flowers were barely visible beneath dense tangles of spicy-smelling green leaves; Nendo clipped at the leaves, letting them fall like green rain from the planter to the distant ground. The ladder felt dangerously wobbly: Nendo hoped no sudden breezes started, for fear that the ladder would fall over completely.
It wasn’t so bad, though; he was falling into the rhythm of the work, of decisively clipping each bundle of long green leaves so that they tumbled out of the planter and revealed the brilliant flowers. The spicy leaves smelled nice, though they did make him feel rather lightheaded. He could almost—almost—forget that he was three stories above ground; the ladder wasn’t as unstable as Nendo thought, and held his weight nicely.
He shifted to prune more leaves to the right—but as he moved the ladder lurched from beneath him. Nendo felt one moment of astonishing weightlessness, before his stomach plummeted and he was falling backwards, with the ladder, his hands helplessly scrabbling at the air, releasing the shears and sending them tumbling to the ground below—
And him too. Nendo was falling, with nothing between him and the ground but the air whistling past his ears. He tried to shout but no sound escaped his throat. In a vague, dream-like way, he was aware of the continuing music, and the ladder slamming against the brick walkway with a resounding crash and splintering wood; and in an even vaguer way he realized that the same would happen to him. He’d fall, and break his every bone, and then…
No.
A ferocious defiance flared through his every vein. No, he wasn’t going to die, not here, not now. Not after only a week of living here, not for such a stupid reason—Nendo hadn’t imagined dying often, but he’d always thought he would go out in a slightly more dramatic manner than falling to his death while pruning flowers. He wasn’t going to die.
Not before he found Tey again.
The defiance turned into confidence, electrifying his insides—and then he knew what to do. He reached a hand out, in front of him, and gathering the energy, the confidence, the electricity, blazing within him, called forth a burst of blue fire to surround him in a protective circle.
The circle wasn’t enough, though, thought Nendo not with logic but something deeper inside him, burning bright as a flame. He began drawing more lines with rapid swings of his arm, the tips of his fingers burning as blue fire burst from them to form sturdy straight lines that would surround him like a cage and protect him from the shattering impact against the walkway.
Nendo was aware of the wind whistling in his ears, surprisingly loud now that the harpsichord music had ceased. But the wind was slowing, and his body was slowing too, no longer falling, instead coming to a gentle rest in the center of a circle of blue fire that didn’t burn him, but caressed him, warm as a mother’s arms. He lay in the circle for a moment, floating only inches above the walkway, whole and unruffled, breathing hard.
The weariness that always came after performing magic rushed through his veins, displacing the exhilarating blue fire. He suddenly just wanted to sink somewhere soft, close his heavy eyelids, fold his stinging fingers across his chest, and let sleep carry him away…he should start by releasing the shield still cushioning him; he didn’t need that anymore…
But before Nendo could dispel the magic the fourth-floor window flew open with a clatter, and Lord Darian leaned out of the window, staring white-faced and wide-eyed at the boy lying in the magic circle below. The lord’s pale throat convulsed, and he seemed to be struggling for words.
Nendo stared back at Lord Darian, dimly registering his surprise, but of course he’d be surprised—Nendo doubted Darian had ever seen a former street boy perform magic before. I didn’t mean to do it, a part of Nendo sleepily thought. It just came out. I didn’t want to die.
At length, Darian found his voice. His words sharp and clipped, he said with the force of an order: “Get cleaned up, have Cura check on your injuries…then come to my magic room. Cura will tell you where it is. Immediately.”
He then slammed the window shut. Nendo was left lying on the red brick of the walkway, the magic shield having dissipated, his heart thumping violently.
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I'm wondering how dramatic the revelation of Nendo's magic skills is, given how strongly I'd hinted at it previously. Should it come more out of the left field or should it not be such a huge surprise?
I feel the story finally starts to get a little more interesting with the next chapter. We get more insight into Lord Darian's character, and we also return to Tey in Presulis. All in all, this chapter isn't spectacular; it was written more because it was necessary than because it contains anything exciting. Something that I had to get out of the way, so to speak, before the interesting events could begin. Hence why it probably falls flat compared to the previous chapters.
Any and all critiques (the more nitpicky the better) I appreciate.
