A Masquerade of Spiders

Chapter 4: Wilful And Lucky

Chapter 4: Wilful And Lucky

"Every person is a book, Yael. You just need to find the right way to read them."

Pyren taught me how to hold a knife.

I wasn't allowed to talk to him. He was grown and I was thirteen when I first realised there were things he could teach me. Shana, my mistress the mask-maker, had every reason to distrust him. But I knew of the sort of men she warned. Pyren didn't watch me like the hungry street dogs you saw in the market. He didn't scare me.

They said he came from Darmelifad beyond the Sarres sea, one of the unmasked lands where the spectres couldn't reach. But to me his accent didn't sound quite as foreign as everyone assumed.

"If you watch them long enough, eventually, they'll give themselves away," he said to me once when I snuck out of the workshop to his lonely cottage on the outskirts of Thalmina. "You let them talk, always let them talk. Not just with their words, but also with their body. With the little details in their clothes and how they wear their masks. They talk and you listen, and when you speak, always tell them what they want to hear."

"How can I know what they want to hear?" I asked, twirling the knife over the backs of my fingers. A game Pyren taught me.

"They'll tell you. They always tell you. If you watch and listen, you'll know."

"Did they teach you that in Kalmisia?" It was my guess. Kalmisia was the smallest territory of Vynam far in the south.

He froze and looked at me with newfound interest. Up until that day, he had only been bragging when he taught me his knife tricks and how to earn the trust of honest people. Now, though, he searched my face with something akin to respect.

And fear.

"How did you know?" he asked after a long moment.

"I saw your scar."

"My scar?"

"Just the one on your forearm which you hide with the blue band. The bite marks."

"That was just from a dog."

"It's too wide to be any normal dog. It's a Kalmihound bite, isn't it? Uncle Dedn had a bite like that."

"There're Kalmihounds in the north."

I nodded. "Sure there are. The scar was the first hint."

"And the next?"

"The band you use to cover it."

Pyren raised his arm, looking at the light blue band.

"That colour of dye," I said, eager to flaunt my knowledge. "The mask-maker calls it celeste, it comes from Ayeroot, which you can only find in Kalmisia. She used to be able to buy it in powders, but then the Ericace lords wanted to increase their export of wools and cotton, so she has to buy the cloth already dyed and the mask-maker says that she wouldn't even mask her enemies in Kalmisian cloth. No one in the north is masked in celeste anymore."

He looked at the band and laughed. "You know your dyes, mask-maker's apprentice. But that doesn't mean I couldn't have simply bought the cloth before coming north."

"When you're cross," I continued. "You put the emphasis on the second syllable of every word. Just like Duvert Sormental, the Kalmisian poet who read to us during the Autumn festival last year."

I defeated him. I saw how his eyes brightened when he looked at me. I sometimes—rarely—received the same look from the mask-maker. "You're a natural," Pyren said, a wide smile cutting into his cheeks.