Islands in the Sky

2.9

“Come in, girl,” Cassa’s grandmother said, when she saw Cassa in the doorway.

Cassa did. She walked into the room slowly, trying to decide if her grandmother sounded impatient. She didn’t think so, not especially, but she was still thinking about the impatient door.

“You asked to see me, mistress?” Cassa said. It was best to be polite, and not overly familiar, at least until they had actually begun to talk.

“This was my doing, not Konstantin’s,” her grandmother said. “Don’t blame him for my misdeeds.”

“Oh,” Cassa said, surprised. It was an odd way to start. “I’m not blaming anyone.”

“Yes you are, but don’t.”

Cassa thought for a moment, and then carefully didn’t answer.

“Don’t,” her grandmother said again. “It was my decision to make.”

Cassa stayed silent.

“Cassa,” her grandmother said, sharply. “No blaming Konstantin.”

Cassa sighed. “No, mistress. I won’t.”

“You may need him one day, and he is terribly loyal to you.”

“I know, mistress.”

“And you know why we have to be careful around you,” her grandmother said, faintly disapprovingly. “You’ve brought this on yourself.”

Cassa nodded and said, “Yes, I know.”

That, she had heard often enough to know by heart. Fighting was for other kinds of people, mostly low-born commoners and the duller of her cousins. Well-born women like Cassa were gifted with understanding and guile and could have their way without brute force. Cassa wasn’t supposed to need brute force. She ought to be able to manipulate others into doing her violence for her. Which was all very well, Cassa thought, except that being reliant on others was a weakness, no matter what she relied on them for, and being able to hit people as well as beguile them gave her options, and choices, which had to be a good thing.

That didn’t seem to occur to anyone else, though. They seemed determined to believe their little rules, and too stubborn to actually think about them, too. She had always been puzzled by that, by the way everyone, including even her grandmother, accepted such things blindly. She had spoken of it to Konstantin, now and then, trying to understand. He had said that every people who had ever been had believed one small kind of foolishness or another, the things which they held made them better or purer or stronger or politer than all others. Sometimes that foolishness was actually dangerous, and sometimes it was not, and this particular foolishness of their own people was harmless, so why should Cassa care? Because it wasn’t harmless, Cassa remembered saying, not for her, not if she believed it. “But you don’t believe it,” Konstantin had said, only other people did, which Cassa supposed was a point. It still seemed silly, she had said. “But every people,” Konstantin had repeated. “Ever. Even the ancients, which is probably why we all now live in the sky.”

Cassa had smiled, and said no more, but she had stayed on the look-out for silly, dangerous rules it was best to ignore. Weddings, she was starting to think, might just be one. Young ladies from good families knowing the ways of knife-fighting, that was definitely another.

Her skill with daggers was an old source of worry for her family, and one which had been talked about endlessly, and pointlessly, since it was far too late to change Cassa now. Her family were all a little afraid she might murder them in their own tower, she thought, and all of them, even her own mother, had the guards disarm her before she was let into their private chambers.