Amaya’s eyes narrow as she works through her options.
“You can wheedle Father, Amiable,” I add, “but you can’t wheedle me.”
She grunts out a huff of displeasure. “Very well. But you owe me, Jes.”
“Agreed!”
I tap my chest twice, which is the command Father has always used when he wants his soldiers, his servants, or his daughters to obey without question. And when he lets us know we have fulfilled his orders to his exacting specifications.
She straightens into the stance of a soldier at attention and taps her own chest twice in answer. Then she ruins the martial posture by jumping up and down with her arms raised.
“Thank you, Jes. Thank you! Wait until Denya finds out we get to watch the trials together and practice flirting.”
She scrawls out a note to her friend and calls for a servant. A boy hurries out from the kitchen wing. His mouth is smeared with honey from a sweet bun he has sneaked off Cook’s table. He’s a scamp of a boy, maybe ten years old, one of Mother’s rescues off the street. My father gave him the name Monkey because Father names all our Efean servants after plants or animals. But when Father is not home Mother calls him by his Efean name, Montu-en.
“Run this over to Captain Osfiyos’s house at once, Monkey,” declaims Amaya in her best Patron voice, all condescension and clipped-short words. “Give it into the hands of the personal maidservant of Doma Denya, no one else.”
“Yes, Doma.” The boy takes the folded paper and dashes off. I envy his freedom to race through the streets of an evening and loiter on his way back.
Amaya seals away all her writing things, then pauses to look at Maraya, who has gone back to reading. “Merry, I don’t think your foot is cursed and Mother doesn’t either. I’m sorry. That was mean of me.” She grins, mischief lighting her face to its prettiest. “Not that I mind being mean, but I like to save it for times when it will improve my social standing.”
Maraya laughs, and so do I. All my pent-up frustration spills into a river of expectation, a rush carrying me into this new scheme.
The maidservant assigned to serve us girls appears at the curtain, looking curiously toward us as if wondering what we have to laugh about, the daughters of heroic Captain Esladas and the beautiful woman he can never marry.
Maraya closes her book and signals that the maidservant, whom Father named Coriander, may approach and speak.
“Doma Maraya.” Coriander uses the formal term even though we can’t actually claim the right to be addressed as Doma, for it is a term properly used only for women born into the Patron class. It is not meant for girls whose father is a Patron but whose Mother is emphatically a Commoner. Yet inside our house Father insists the servants call us by the title. “Doma Jessamy. Doma Amaya. Your supper is ready for you in your rooms. Will Doma Bettany be joining you?”
Maraya glances toward the sky. “Only the oracles know.”
As we leave the courtyard with its bright lamps, I smile, eager for tomorrow.
3
When he was twenty, my father left his homeland of Saro-Urok and came to the land of Efea to make his fortune. The very day he arrived on the wharfs he saw a sixteen-year-old Commoner girl in the market and fell in love with her beauty. This is not a remarkable story. As foreigners say, there are more women in Efea than stars in the sky. The foreign men who come here to make careers in the royal service are generally young and unmarried and thus quick to fall into and out of love.
What is remarkable is that my father has stayed loyal to my mother for twenty years.
Even though he is only a baker’s son, he is still considered Patron-born. Patrons are people either born in the old empire of Saro or descended from ancestors who emigrated from Saro to Efea any time in the last hundred years. The law forbids people of Saroese ancestry from marrying the native people of Efea, who are called Commoners.
As Father moved up the military ranks he could have contracted a marriage with a Patron woman to help advance his army career. It is the usual path for ambitious and successful Patron men. Commoner girls are for youthful liaisons. Patron wives are for status and sons.
That all he has to show for the relationship with our mother is four daughters, two stillborn sons, and several miscarriages makes his loyalty all the more unusual. Most Patron men would have abandoned one Commoner concubine and taken another, hoping for a son. Most Patron men would have smothered Maraya at birth and handed unlucky twin girls like Bettany and me over to the temple.
Father did none of those things.
But I’m certain he will kill me if he finds out I’ve been running the Fives during the months and years he is away from home at the wars.