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A grave mistake is a lesson well understood, was an old saying in my village, and so there was no other way than to follow Selene’s and Rainthorn’s plan. It took us a fortnight to build a woman who did not exist, and the first surprise of it was how little of her had to be invented.
Selene began the way she began everything, with a sheet of paper and a stick of charcoal and a plan. She and Rainthorn sat at the table the morning after I went to the gate, the brew freshly drunk so I could speak, and they set about the problem of who I would be, and I sat to the side with my tea and watched two clever women talk themselves in circles, trying to make sense of what was happening.
“It has to be a house,” Selene said, “with a rank in the annals, or she never gets past the inner gate. But not a house anyone knows, or the first dowager she meets will ask after a third cousin and the whole thing comes down.”
“But every house worth the name is known,” Rainthorn said. “That is rather the point of a house.”
“A foreign line, then. Something from beyond the empire?” Selene thought, and absentmindedly went to tuck the stick of charcoal behind her ear, but Tsuki dropped down from the nearest bookshelf and plucked the charcoal from her hand before she could blacken her skin. She looked befuddled and thanked him, while Rainthorn dismantled the new plan.
“And have her unable to name a single custom of a country she was born in? No. It must be ours, and obscure, and those two things do not often keep company.”
They went on like that for a while, and each name Selene wrote down she crossed out a moment later, too grand, too near, too easily checked, and I listened, and somewhere in the middle of it I realized I knew the answer, because I had read it years ago in a book very much like the one on Selene’s shelf that Tsuki had been sitting on a moment before.
“House Marenne,” I said.
They both looked at me.
“In the river country, south of where I grew up. An old line. They gave their lands to the temples three generations back, all of it, the whole holding, and dedicated their blood to the service of the gods.” The pieces fit as I spoke them. “But I’m fairly sure they kept their name in the annals, and their rank, on purpose, so the neighbour houses could not swallow what they had given away and call it a lapsed estate. So the rank should still be there, written down, real, and there has not been a Marenne at court in living memory, because they do not come to court. They train the priests and the temple maids. They take in anyone who comes to the gods, but they never leave the region. Everyone who passes through their temples is counted, in a way, as one of theirs.”
Selene had gone very still. “And you know this how?”
“Because I was trained in one of their temples.” I rose and went to her shelf and found the book I wanted by its spine, the great annotated roll of the noble families, and I turned to the back where the small withdrawn houses were kept in the subnotes, and sure enough, there it was: House Marenne, the rank recorded, the dedication of the lands noted, the family preserved on paper but absent from the world. I set it open on the table in front of them. “A daughter of a temple-dedicated line, come to the capital to study the rituals of the great temples and carry them home to her own. That is a true thing such daughters do. I would barely have to lie at all, because I am a temple girl. I do know these people. They did in fact take me in after my mother died. I would only be moving the truth a little to one side.”
The silence went on a beat too long.
Rainthorn was the one who broke it, and she ignored the book and looked at me with an amused smile. “A village herbalist’s child,” she said, “who reads the subnotes of the noble annals for pleasure, and remembers them years on, and solves in a breath the thing that has had the two of us in knots since dawn.” She glanced at Selene and started to cackle like a magpie. “There is a great deal about you, child, that the word village does not begin to cover.”
The comment made me blush, because it felt like a hidden compliment and I was not used to praise from the elder, and since I had nothing else to say I looked bashfully at my fingers, as though to make sure they were all still in their place. Selene closed the book and tapped it once with her charcoal.
“Marenne. Gods help me, it’s perfect.”
And the woman who did not exist had her name.
* * *
After that, Selene set out to teach me, and kept finding there was little to teach. I had thought there were leagues between what I knew and what I ought to know, but much to everyone’s surprise, most of all my own, there was far less to learn than I would have guessed.
She would begin on something, the order of precedence among the great houses, the proper forms of address from a lady to a minister to a prince of the blood, the history of the present dynasty and the wars that made it, and she would get a sentence or two in before she saw my face and stopped.
“You know this.”
“I read the Aurelian histories at the temple. All nine volumes. The ninth was mostly genealogies.” I hesitated. “And Drystan told me things. About the court. About what to expect, when I came. He was preparing me.”
She twitched whenever I said his first name, but she went on, and she continued to test me, and the testing became a kind of game that neither of us admitted was a game. She would name a house and I would give its seat, its sigil, its standing, its old quarrels. She would describe a tangle of precedence, a princess married down, a minister raised up, and ask who bowed to whom, and I would reason it from the rules. She had spent her life learning this court from the inside, painfully, slight by slight, and I had read it in books in a temple a province away, in a village that had little else to offer for entertainment, and across those long brew-lit nights the strange truth grew plain to both of us that I had come to her already half-made.
What she could not account for was the rest of it. Not the knowledge itself, but the way I carried it.
“Stand up,” she said one night. “Walk to the window and back.”
I did.
“Again.”
I did it again, and she watched me the way Rainthorn had watched my pendant.
“Tell me, Liora, where does a temple girl learn to walk like that.” It was not unkind and it was not flattery. It was a question she could not answer. “I have taught merchants’ daughters to carry themselves like that and it took a year, and they dropped it the moment they were tired. You came in off the road as a half-drowned fox, and you move through a room as though it was built for you to parade in. I have known many temple girls. None were as graceful as you. There is something else in those bones.”
I laughed it off, because I had no answer, and the truth, that there was something in my blood neither of us could see, was further from my mind in those days than the moon. She let it go at last, but she did not forget it. I would learn, much later, that Selene forgot nothing.
