I wondered what would happen if I shoved him over.
“Bring him in,” he called to an unseen servant, perhaps to the footman who had been riding beside the coachman.
Aunt tried again. “I am sure she would like to bring a few chosen items with her, if you would just let her go up to her chamber and choose—”
He turned back. “She will not leave my sight. You will supervise the packing of a small trunk, as I have indicated, and she will remain on the landing with me until the trunk is packed. That way she can’t vanish.”
I am not a Cat for nothing. I’m really very friendly, but there comes a time when people cross a line and must be put in their place.
“You are being rude, Magister. What gives you the right to speak to my—”
“Catherine! That is enough.”
I flinched. Aunt’s tone was just as proud and snappish as his, only hers hurt, for she never spoke to me that way.
“Catherine, you’ll mind your manners and remain silent while I’m gone. Shiffa, come with me.”
Head lowered, Shiffa followed Aunt up the stairs. I clenched my hands and breathed in and breathed out and said nothing, for so Aunt had commanded. Silence I would keep if I was held over a fire and my toes roasted. Nothing would make me talk now.
“Catherine,” he said. “Catherine Hassi Barahal.”
I slanted a withering glare at him, but he wasn’t looking at me or trying to speak to me. He was only trying out the name, as the schoolmaster at the beginning of term repeats the names of new pupils in order to remember who he has in his class. If I knew what was going on, it would be so much easier to keep my mouth shut, but I had to trust Aunt and Uncle and do what they told me. They had never treated me differently from their own three girls, not even considering how my uncle and father had fought before my parents’ untimely death. I knew my duty. I knew they loved me.
He measured the scalloped wallpaper, the spindly legged sofa in the Galatian style set against the wall, the gilt ornament painted on the lintels over the doors, and the parquet flooring, with its mosaic pattern meant to echo the mazelike stone mosaic of the ground floor, where visitors were supposed to stay, blocked by the pattern of the stones from ascending to the upper private floors where the family resided. He fingered the dwarf orange, and the green leaf at once frosted as if caught in winter’s grip. It cracked into dust against his skin. With a grunt of disgust, he rubbed his fingers, then blew on them. White flakes drifted to the floor. He sighed as though to say that every passing breath endured in this plebeian house was more than he could take.
In the flecked depths of the huge first-floor-landing mirror, I studied him. His height, his dark brown complexion and symmetrical features, his hands and that part of his throat revealed above the embroidered collar of his jacket: all matched in the mirror the way he looked on the landing. His magic was hard for me to see, although faint tendrils snaked out from him. Either he was so powerful that magic exhaled from him, as misty breath is expelled from the lips on a winter day, or he was actually using his magic to search the house, as if he sought to uncover our secrets. How could he just march into this house as if he owned it? I wanted to claw that disdainful expression off his face. But I did not. Because he looked into the mirror and saw I was watching him.
“What do you see in there?” he demanded.
“Your boots are scuffed.”
Men who stand in that arrogant way with their backs straight, their shoulders tight, and their chins lifted the better to sneer at those lower than them can be neither comfortable nor happy. But that doesn’t mean they know it. His gaze flicked down to his polished, perfect boots, then up again.
He said, “You have no idea of the privilege and honor being shown to you this day. You are ill prepared and ill mannered and ill suited. But a contract is a contract, sealed, bound, final. I will do my duty, and you will do yours.”
He rapped his cane twice on the floor. A chill wind gushed in from outside. Another presence entered the house, one that wheezed as it mounted the grand staircase step by effortful step until an old gray man climbed into view, leaning heavily on the balustrade. He wore gold earrings, the mark of his profession as either a bard or a djeli, although in these days the two were often indistinguishable. He was otherwise dressed in a threadbare dashiki in the old style, loose and ankle length; he had thrown over it a humble clerk’s long wool coat. No fashionable flares added dash or mystery to its lines, and it was patched at the elbows. Snow dusted his shoulders and the silver coils of his hair. When had it begun snowing again?