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  For my sister-in-law, Astrid, who volunteers to sit up all night with newborn puppies so I can get some sleep. Thanks!

  CHAPTER 1

  In a city of gray stone and mist, between the steep rain-swept mountains and the sea, there lived a merchant with his eight daughters. The merchant’s wife had died bearing the eighth daughter and so the girls had raised one another, the elder ones looking after the younger. The merchant was not wealthy, having eight daughters to support, but neither was he poor. He had a tall narrow house at the edge of the city, near his stone yard where he dealt in the blue slate and hard granite of the mountains and in imported white limestone and marble. His house had glass windows, tile floors, and a long gallery along the back where there was room for eight beds for his daughters.

  The eldest of his daughters was named Ananda. Ananda was nineteen years old, with chestnut hair and pretty manners. She was not precisely engaged, but it was generally accepted that the second son of a merchant who dealt in fine cloth meant to offer for her soon, and it was also generally understood that she would assent. The youngest daughter, Liaska, was nine and as bright and impish as a puppy; she romped through her days and made her sisters and her father laugh with her mischief. In between were Karah and Enelle and Nemienne and Tana and Miande and Jehenne.

  Gentle Karah, loveliest of all the sisters, mothered the younger girls. They adored her, and only Karah could calm Liaska on her more rambunctious days. Practical Enelle, with their father’s broad cheekbones and their lost mother’s gray eyes, kept the accounts for both the household and their father’s business. Tana, serious and grave even as a child, made sure the house was always neat. Lighthearted Miande sang as she went about the kitchen tasks, and made delicate pastries filled with cream and smooth sauces that never had lumps. Jehenne learned her letters early and found, even when quite young, that she had a feel for both graceful lettering and graceful phrases.

  Nemienne, neither one of the eldest nor one of the youngest, neither the most beautiful nor the plainest of the daughters, drifted through her days. Her attention was likely to be caught at any moment by the sudden glancing of light across slate rooftops, or by the tangled whisper of the breeze that slid through the maze of city streets on its way to or from the sea. Though Nemienne baffled her father and puzzled her sisters, her quiet created a stillness otherwise rare in their crowded house.

  For her part, Nemienne could not understand how her sisters did not see the strange slant into which light sometimes fell, as though it were falling into the world from a place not quite congruent. She didn’t understand how they could fail to hear the way every drop of falling rain sometimes struck the cobbles with the pure ringing sound of a little bell, or the odd tones that sometimes echoed behind the sound of the wind to create a breathy, half-heard music pitched to the loneliness at the heart of the bustling city.

  Even at home, Nemienne couldn’t seem to keep her mind on letters of account or business—but then Enelle was the one who was interested in the prices of stone. Nor could Nemienne be trusted to take bread out of the oven before it burned—and anyway, Miande made much better bread. And when Nemienne went to the market, she seldom came back with what she had been asked to buy, returning instead with a flowering sprig she’d found growing out of a crumbling wall, or humming over and over three notes of a song she’d heard a street musician play. When sent to even the nearest noodle shop, just down the street and around the corner from the house, Nemienne sometimes got lost. She would find herself inexplicably walking down a street with no idea where she might be, so she had to ask strangers for the way home. But then, Tana always struck the best bargains in the market and the shops, so there was seldom a need for Nemienne to go on such errands.

  The merchant looked proudly at Ananda, who would surely be happily wed by the turning of the year. He treasured Karah and would not look for a possible match for her even though she was nearly seventeen, for she was his favorite daughter—but then Karah was so sweet and good that she was everyone’s favorite, so no one minded that she was their father’s favorite, too. Practical Enelle was his greatest help in his business affairs; he called her his little business manager and joked that he should make his stone yard over into a partnership with her.

  The merchant depended on Tana and Miande when he had his business associates to his home for a dinner, and always the dinners ran smoothly and comfortably, so that even the wealthiest merchants, who had wives and keimiso and children of their own, said they wished they had such a houseful of pretty and accomplished daughters. The merchant beamed smugly. He never told them that the invitations that brought them to his house had usually been written by Jehenne, whose hand was smoother than his. And on quiet family evenings, Liaska set her father and all her sisters laughing with her clever puppets, which she used in wickedly accurate mimicry of her father’s associates.

  Nemienne laughed at the puppets, too. But sometimes, especially on those evenings, she felt her father’s puzzled gaze resting on her, as though he understood how each of his other daughters fit into his household but did not quite understand where Nemienne might exactly fit. Sometimes Nemienne herself wondered what kind of puzzle it might be, that had a Nemienne-shaped piece missing out of its middle.

  Then one spring the merchant died, collapsing suddenly in the midst of his work and leaving his eight daughters alone in a city they suddenly found far from friendly.

  There were business assets, but these were tied up in the stone yard and could not easily be freed. The assets could be sold in their entirety to the merchant’s associates, but all of these men, whom the girls had thought were their father’s friends, they now found had been his rivals. All the offers were very low. There were funeral expenses, and then there were the day-to-day expenses and the ordinary debts of business investments that ought to have yielded eventual profits if only the merchant had lived, but promised nothing but losses after his death.

  “Must we sell father’s business?” Ananda asked Enelle, after the cold edge of necessity had worn through the first dreadful shock of their father’s death.

  Enelle glanced down at the papers between her hands. They were all seated along both sides of the long supper table. None of the girls had taken their father’s place at the head. Enelle, who had always taken the place at their father’s left hand, sat there still. She was pale. But her voice was as calm and precise as ever. “We can’t run it ourselves. We can’t even legally own it,” she said. “Petris could. Legally, I mean.” Petris was the cloth merchant’s son who had been expected to marry Ananda. “And we could run it with his name on the papers. But that is supposing he would be willing to marry a pauper. The business could be an asset to build on, but it isn’t a… a fortune to marry into.” Even her steady voice failed a little.

  “We aren’t paupers!” Jehenne exclaimed, offended at the very idea.

  Enelle looked down, then lifted her gaze again. “It’s strange about business. While father was alive, we operated at a profit. But now that he is… gone… we own a net loss. We are, in fact, paupers. Unless one of us can very quickly find a man to marry, some
one sensible who will let me run the stone yard. Ananda?”

  Ananda, across from Enelle, had her fingers laced tightly together on the polished wood of the table. She looked at her hands, not at her sisters. “Petris would still marry me. But his father won’t permit the match if I don’t have a dowry. A dowry up front, nothing tied up in future profit.”

  “We can’t get you a dowry right now, without the stone yard,” said Enelle. Her voice fell flatly into the room and there was a silence after it.

  “But what shall we do, then?” Tana asked, and looked at Enelle, who seemed, uncharacteristically, at a loss for words.

  “We must all think together,” said Ananda.

  “You already have an idea,” observed Karah, studying Enelle. Faint lines of concern appeared on Karah’s forehead—not worry about the difficulties they faced, but concern because she saw Enelle was distressed. “What is it? Is it so terrible?”

  “It can’t be that terrible,” declared Miande, always optimistic. But even she sounded like she didn’t have much confidence in this statement. They all understood now that sometimes things could be that terrible.

  Enelle drew a breath without lifting her gaze, started to speak, and stopped.

  “Enelle, no,” said Ananda, firmly.

  “We could sell parts of father’s business?” suggested practical Jehenne, but doubtfully. “Or the house?”

  Enelle glanced up. “The business would be worth ten times less broken up than it is intact. And if we sold the house to get a dowry for Ananda, we would have nowhere to live until the business begins to yield a profit, which will take years now, no matter what we do. None of our creditors will set favorable terms for us right now. Everyone expects trouble in the spring, you know. Because of the treaty.”

  She meant, as even the little girls knew, the Treaty of Brenedde. Its term would run out in the spring, and everyone knew that when it did, Kalches would immediately repudiate the peace and resume its war with Lirionne. Nemienne hadn’t thought of how this would affect business in Lonne, but once Enelle pointed it out, she saw that her sister was right: Nobody could afford to be kind if the war was going to start again.

  “They expect the business to fail quickly now that father is… is gone,” said Enelle. “Before spring, they think. I… I would not like to live in the sort of house we would be able to afford if we sold this house.”

  “But…” said Jehenne, her voice trailing off as she found nothing else to suggest.

  Nemienne drew a triangle absently on the polished surface of the table with the tip of her finger and fitted a smaller triangle inside it, and then another inside that. Then she looked up and said, since Enelle clearly could not bring herself to say it even if Ananda would let her, “Some of us will have to be sold.”

  The silence this time was fraught, but it did not last long. It was broken by Liaska, who leaped to her feet and cried, “No!”

  “Or have you thought of another way?” Nemienne asked Enelle. She might be wrong. Nobody else seemed to think this was obvious except her. Perhaps Enelle was thinking of something else. But, surely, if Enelle had thought of some other way, she wouldn’t be so hesitant to explain it.

  Enelle looked up, and then down again. She was only sixteen, just a year older than Nemienne herself. It was a horrible decision for her to have to make. But it was not, of course, her decision to make. Not really. It was only her responsibility to tell them all that it was going to have to be made. Nemienne could see she had talked about this idea only with Ananda, and it was obvious Ananda had forbidden her to suggest it. Poor Enelle.

  “How many of us?” Nemienne asked.

  “No,” said Ananda sharply.

  Enelle didn’t look at Ananda. She didn’t look at any of them. She said to her tight-laced fingers, “At least two. Maybe three. It depends on the price we’d get, you see.”

  “Who would we—who would—who would be sold?” asked Karah.

  “No one will be sold!” Ananda exclaimed. “We’ll think of another way.”

  “I don’t think there’s another way,” said Enelle, still looking at her hands, which had now closed into fists on the table. “And there’s not much time to think of one.”

  “There is another way!” Ananda said fiercely. “There must be!”

  “Me,” said Nemienne, since that was obvious. “But who else?” She looked around the table. Not the little girls. Not Enelle, who was needed to run the stone yard and keep track of household expenses.

  “No!” said Ananda. “No one will be sold.”

  “I am the most beautiful,” Karah said simply, putting into plain words a truth they all knew. “A keiso House might be willing to give a large gift for me. That—that is an honorable life.”

  It wasn’t that simple, of course. First Ananda and Miande and Jehenne had to argue bitterly that there had to be some other way. Enelle obviously couldn’t bear to argue back, but her figures spoke for her. She had a whole long scroll of figures. She’d plainly tried very hard to find another way. It was equally plain that there wasn’t another way to be found.

  Jehenne looked at Enelle’s figures and then ran out of the room in tears, because she knew Enelle was right but couldn’t bring herself to argue for selling anybody. Liaska, who idolized the glamorous keiso and collected painted miniatures of all the most famous ones, was nevertheless outraged into a tantrum at the idea of losing Karah—and a little bit because she at least half wanted to be a keiso herself and knew none of her older sisters would consider selling her. In the end, Miande took the little girls away and the older ones looked at Enelle’s papers.

  Karah didn’t examine Enelle’s figures. She only believed them. She absolutely rejected any plan that involved selling the house. Nemienne saw that Karah’s stubbornness surprised Ananda, though surely it should have been obvious that Karah would never agree to see the little girls forced to live in a violent, filthy part of the city.

  Not that Karah argued. She simply continued to insist that she would do very well as a keiso, that it wasn’t as if she was suggesting she might become an actress or an aika or anything disreputable. Then she announced that she would sell herself without Ananda’s approval if she had to, and from this position she would not be budged. Ananda declared wildly that she herself could as well be sold as anybody, but of course that wasn’t true. Nobody else had a merchant’s son ready for a quick wedding and for the struggle that would follow to get the stone yard back into profitability.

  Nemienne didn’t argue either. She just waited for all the arguments to come to their inevitable conclusion. Two days later, she and Karah and Enelle took their father’s small open carriage and drove to Cloisonné House, which all their cautious inquiries indicated was the very best keiso House in the candlelight district. Karah drove the carriage, with Enelle and Nemienne crowded close to either side of her on the high bench. None of them had wanted Tebbe, their father’s driver, to accompany them on this particular errand.

  Karah had cried. Then she had fixed her face and her hair very carefully. She was not crying now. Enelle was: Nemienne could see the sheen across her gray eyes. Enelle was gazing out at the city streets, one hand gripping the seat against the jouncing from uneven cobblestones, but Nemienne doubted her sister saw the city through which they drove or noticed the roughness of the cobbled streets.

  Nemienne had not cried, though she felt a low, tight sensation in her stomach. She knew very well that Karah would make a wonderful keiso, but when Nemienne tried to picture herself learning to be charming and glamorous so that she might win honor and acclaim and eventually become a rich nobleman’s flower wife… nothing about that future fit.

  Lonne spread itself out around them, loud and busy. To Nemienne, she and her sisters seemed like ghosts, not nearly as solid and real as the cobbled streets through which they traveled, nor the mountains that loomed over the city. Nemienne stared up at the mountains, watching the low clouds that coiled and uncoiled in sinuous dragon shapes around their j
agged peaks. The Laodd loomed among the cliffs, its sheer white walls and thousand glass windows glittering in the light, seeming from this distance no more a thing of men than were the mountains.

  Yet keiso mingled freely with the powerful lords of the Laodd. Many girls dreamed of becoming a famous keiso and being chosen as a flower wife by an important courtier. But Nemienne had never collected painted miniatures nor dreamed of glamour and fame. Now that the prospect lay before her, she found it… disturbing. She trusted Enelle’s figures, and she also knew she was right to have argued that she herself should be one of those sold. But she wanted desperately to have the actual moment still ahead of her, waiting in some other day, not arriving in this one.

  They came to the candlelight district and then to Cloisonné House far too quickly. The House proved to be an angular brick building, four stories tall, with wide balconies overlooking the street. Pink flowers and silver-variegated ivy poured down from the balconies despite the chill. The ivy did not exactly soften the look of the brick, but it made Cloisonné House look old and respectable and deserving of its good reputation.

  At the same time, Nemienne thought that the shadow of the house and the edges of the bricks seemed to possess a strange, faint echo that she did not recognize. Then she blinked and looked again, and the house seemed perfectly normal. Servants quickly arrived to take the carriage away and welcome the sisters into the House, so there wasn’t time to wonder about what she might have seen. But, as they passed under the lintel, a faint reverberation seemed to echo through the brick and the wood of the door. Nemienne tried to pause in the doorway, but Enelle was in front of her and Karah behind, and she went in after all without saying anything. Once within the house, the strange echo vanished, and as a tall woman approached them, she forgot about it.

  The woman wore a gray overrobe, with a white and blue under-robe showing at throat and hemline. She took their names and their request to see the Mother of Cloisonné House. From her assured manner, Nemienne had thought this woman might herself be the Mother, but she only acknowledged their request, her eyes lingering thoughtfully on Karah. She left them in the hands of a servant girl and went away, carrying news of their arrival into the interior of the House.