Tapestries
Day 11, Month 6, 150 After Lo. Stormyear. Dusk.
Aurora
Aurora’s place at the dinner table set her with her back to the tapestries on the wall. The tapestries were portraits in black coal on white hemp paper. Portraits of dead royals—a lot of them femmes like Aurora, a lot of them portrayed in their puberty because they did not make it much further.
Bastard Mages was the unspoken title of that wall, and each and every one of these young, dead faces held reproach. You’re one of us, they seemed to say. You should be here with us, with the dead. Why are you still alive? Thinking about them made Aurora angry, and family dinners were no place for genuine emotion.
But the main source of tension at these dinners was her Aunt Josepha, wife to the Heir of Ithacan. In the end, it was Josepha who decided Aurora’s fate, who chose how the dinner would go. If Josepha detected even the lowest dose of anger in Aurora’s tone or demeanor, she would take it as an opportunity to escalate.
“Rora, darling, you want help cutting your food?” she asked in a sweet tone that ran into Aurora’s ears like acid. Josepha liked to comment on the way she ate, as if there was anything noteworthy or new about the way she mushed her granulated bar with a fork instead of cutting it into pieces with a knife and fork like everyone else. That was something that Gold, her oldest prosthesis, could not help her with.
“No, thank you. I’m fine,” Aurora answered in a voice she had honed over decades to sound genuinely thankful and neutral instead of hurt and angry. She needed to stay calm. Anything but calm would give her aunt opportunity.
“Are you sure? One of our service workers can do it for you, or I can do it, if it makes you more comfortable.”
Aurora took a deep breath, slowly so her nostrils would not flare, then turned to her aunt and faked a smile. Josepha would know it was fake, but that was not the point of it. Her aunt simply needed it as some kind of confirmation.
“Thank you, Aunt Josepha, you are very thoughtful, as always, but I am fine.”
Thankfully, this was the end of the ritual for tonight, and when her uncle, the Heir of Ithacan, put down his cutlery about thirty minutes later, Aurora did the same, got up from her seat, excused herself politely, and left.
Her uncle did not mind her, but he didn’t seem to care much for her, either. Maybe that was because her aunt intervened harshly every time someone tried to establish a connection with her. After a while, more and more people stopped trying. Most of Aurora’s cousins were annoying, but not particularly interested in her. She had considered Jonah, the eldest, a friend once. They were of one age and got along quite well before the attack.
For the longest time, family dinners were the daily bane of her life. At all other times, she could avoid her family, she’d become an expert at avoiding them over the years. But family dinner meant forty-five minutes of full exposure to her aunt and cousins and nowhere to go. As a teen, she would spend the dinners studying the tapestries that lined the far walls of the underground dining hall, thinking about the symbols and the different kinds of wielders they stood for, repeating the terms in her head, trying to hear her inner voice louder than whatever conversation was happening around her. Shield. Powerhouse. Healer. Siren. Lifestealer. Shield. Powerhouse. Healer. Siren. Lifestealer.
She made it back to her windswept hut on the western coast of Sika at nightfall and down to the beach from there after collecting her heavy backpack and changing prostheses. Exactly like Bishop had promised, the boat was already waiting for her. It was a fast boat with a motor, which meant she could operate it herself to cross the two-hour distance to Yorca, the nearest island in Anchorlands’ territory. There, around the corner of the small island’s only lovehouse, Bishop would be waiting for her. Or so she hoped.
By the time she reached the island’s small eastern coast, the mostly nocturnal settlement was alive with lights and sounds. The entrance to the schooling center stood open, and Aurora heard the choir from afar.
“Cancer, Canes Vena, Canis Major, Canis Minor, Capricorn, Carina, Cassiopeia—” Laughter interrupted the choir. The kids recounted the names of the constellations, like she had in her childhood. Only the kids here spoke in unison, turning the list of weird-sounding words into a rhythm. In her school, each pupil had to do it alone, which meant listening to the list and the anxiety in the children’s voices as they tried not to forget anything, over and over and over again.
Viv, who organized the schooling center, stood outside next to the entrance with a half-smoked, hash cigarette in one hand and moved her head in time with the children’s choir. She stopped when she spotted Aurora coming her way, and her large brown eyes lit up.
Viv wore a long dress of thick hemp wool and a coat, both dyed dark shades of green that went well with the olive shine of her sand-colored skin. Her honey-brown hair cascaded in soft waves onto her shoulders.
“Hey, you,” Viv greeted her, and Aurora smiled. They knew each other well from using the settlement’s lovehouse. Apart from that, Aurora brought especially fine hemp paper to Yorca whenever she could, a craft honed by the people of Ithacan over the last century. In exchange, Viv did Aurora small favors here and there, like receiving a package from Tataouanu and keeping it safe for her. The package would have been confiscated at the border for being an object of blood magic had Aurora had it delivered to Ithacan directly.
Viv stepped aside to let Aurora in and directed her past the singing classroom to an adjoining storage room. The walls of the room were lined with ceiling-high piles of paper, indicating another delivery of paper had come earlier today, and she and Viv had to shuffle around two of those paper columns to make space for the new pile. After unwrapping it from the multiple layers of hempic, a hydrophobic material made of hemp fibers that protected the paper from humidity, they placed the new pile next to the other ones. When they were done, they went outside again, where Viv lit a new cigarette and presented it to Aurora with a crooked grin.
“Work or play?” she asked.
Aurora grinned back, took the cigarette, and smoked. “Work today,” she answered, blowing out the smoke with a sigh. The last time she’d come by almost solely for recreational reasons, and she’d had a fantastic weekend at the local lovehouse that had involved Viv. Their obvious purpose meant that lovehouses placed highest value on discretion and privacy, which made them perfect for conspiratorial talk.
“In that case…” Viv pulled out a dozen cigarettes bound together by a piece of string and handed them to her.
“That’s really not necessary,” Aurora protested, but Viv waved it away.
“Don’t worry about it. I just got a new delivery.” Viv pressed the bundle into Aurora’s prosthetic hand with a smile, her eyes lighting up. One of Viv’s lovers, a cruoid that specialized in growing moonflower, provided her with the vital drug, and to hear Viv talk, it was the best hash this side of the Taw.
“Thanks,” Aurora said. She hugged Viv goodbye and went to the lovehouse.
Tonight. The word echoed through her mind. With it came a rush of anxiety. Tonight, she would meet Bishop, Head of the Investigative Department of the Anchorlands’ High Court. Bishop would bring the evidence they had collected for her over the last thirteen years. And tomorrow, Aurora would travel to Ingla, an island in the north. Ingla belonged to Ithacan and was the seat of the Ingla Council. The council’s duty was to hold court over civil matters. They have to see, she thought. I must connect the dots for them, and then they will see.
A tingling in her hair startled her. She fumbled for the braid tucked into her bun at the back of her head. It was the only communication fetish she wore and was easy to find. The connection established with the sensation of goosebumps. She focused.
“Aurora?” the older investigator said in her head.
“Bishop,” she replied, also in her head, and stopped in her tracks.
“I’m afraid I can’t make it tonight.”
A stone dropped into Aurora’s stomach, and for a second, her throat closed shut. “What? Why?”
Bishop sighed. “Long story short, I’m getting old. But I’ve sent a replacement, my colleague Sadr. He will be there tomorrow night.”
Aurora could not help but roll her eyes. Sadr was about the most common name in Ithacan. There were two Sadrs in her family alone, one was an uncle, and the other a second cousin from a different branch of the family. Bishop’s Sadr was probably not an Anchorlander by birth. The thought of meeting a fellow Ithacanian bugged her. She never knew how they’d react to her.
But the fact that Bishop would not be here tonight bugged her even more. It was not that she did not understand. Bishop was getting old, and on some level, Aurora could sympathize with the desire to leave all the drama behind. The investigator had loaded a lot upon themself when they’d decided to take her under their wing thirteen years ago. At the same time, it made her angry. It was her drama, but she had not asked for it either. The thought of continuing without Bishop’s support shook her more than she cared to admit. The simple, harsh truth was that Aurora had no friends. She had never learned to make them, and that she still had a friend in Bishop was Bishop’s doing, not hers.
“I don’t even know him. How am I supposed to trust him?” Aurora thought, unsure how much of her frustration was showing within this mental conversation.
“I trust Sadr. He is very capable and discreet.”
Aurora rolled her eyes again even though Bishop could not see it. “He better be. I neither have the nerve nor the time to tutor him.”
Bishop sighed, deeper this time. “Remember when I told you that you weren’t the only one with a sad story, and that someday I’d introduce you to someone?”
“I don’t need to meet another victim, Bishop.”
“Not a victim, Aurora. An asset. An ally. I am sure you’ll find his contribution useful.”
She snorted. “Why? Is he an assassin?”
“Don’t be thicker than you are!”
“Fine!” she spat and lowered her hand, then became aware of a passing couple staring at her as they walked by. She must have talked aloud without realizing. She turned on her heel and walked straight back to the pier to look at the black sea and at the point in the far distance where the water met the dark-blue, starless sky. This view always cleared her head. She halted and breathed deeply as salty wind tugged at her. A gathering storm would hit sometime tomorrow. She could feel it in her bones, a soft, sizzling sensation. She needed a plan to deal with this situation. Capable and discreet, Bishop had said. She touched her hand to the fetish again.
“Bishop?”
“Yes?” They sounded surprised at her call.
“Describe him to me.”
