Springtime

  Wearing a mask did wonders for Taylor's daily life. He tried several designs and settled on the simplest: a slightly curved piece of lightweight wood with slits for eyes, nose, and mouth. Blake took it upon himself to paint the mask deep green, with white wyverns where his cheekbones should be. Now, his staff could be in the same room with him for a full half-hour before taking their leave, and they didn't have to stare at their shoes. If strangers saw him, like the man who visited to measure Taylor for clothes, they didn't run away or attack him.

  Ophelia had always been able to stand him for longer than the others, but now she could look directly at him. Her eyes were green. Not like grass or moss or trees, but hard and clear like emeralds. She looked at him frequently when they conversed in Arcaic, so that was the only language he used with her.

  Spring was a complicated time for Taylor. His Bilius brain was dealing with the loss of Mother, a woman he'd never met but always assumed would come back for him. But there was no loving mother out there trying to come home to her son. There was a chance he'd never know any of the people in the grand portrait hanging over the mansion's entrance hall. Mother's death had spoiled Mourne for the rest of the family, driving them beyond the empire's borders to earn a new domain, probably a larger one, and live there for the rest of their lives. It was anybody's guess if they would return or not.

  The mansion felt different, too. With Spring blowing promises through the window and his parents' faces laying blame on him, the house felt more confining than it had in winter. He was also more aware of his servants' situation. The staff had lost their proper masters and been abandoned with the cursed, thrown-away child. They kept the house together but had done little else for nearly a decade. It was a sullen house.

  So Taylor, as the putative master of the house, made changes.

  He started by moving the portrait out of the entrance hall. He assembled his staff of three and told them it was no use waiting for people who might never come back to Mourne. "If they decide to return, then I'll be happy to put the portrait back up. But we can't keep waiting for them."

  For a replacement, he chose an older work he found in the attic. It was the imperial capital seen from a distance, a city of towering stone buildings and red tile roofs settled on a hill and surrounded by green landscapes. The artist had streamed gold sunlight onto the city as if the heavens were blessing it. According to Ophelia, it was painted in the late phases of the Middle Empire but depicted an earlier, almost mythical age. Before it was an empire, Gordia was a kingdom. In the year 426, depicted in the painting, King Gordia IV was just beginning to forge the alliances that would ultimately merge many states into one.

  Figuring large changes were best done all at once, Taylor moved into the master suite. There wasn't much to move, aside from a stack of new-ish clothes from Mourne, but it was wrenching for Chambers. The maid had to put away all of Mother's dresses Karla hadn't stolen. She was not on board with the changes and petitioned Curator Jane to halt "that runaway child". The curator said the same thing Taylor had: the old family wasn't likely to come back, and it was time to stop pretending they would. Even if the governor assigned a new legate, the family estate would pass to the son they abandoned there. The rest of the family didn't want it.

  The attic was a gift that kept on giving. It held so many generations of furniture that Taylor exchanged everything in the master suite with pieces he liked better. He was thankful not to sleep in the same bed where he was possibly conceived, born, cursed, and where Mother died.

  For mana practice, he leaned on Blake. Not that Blake lacked work, but Taylor had the handyman hide the eels' mana stones so he could search for them. At first, the game's boundaries were a few rooms in the mansion. Then all of the mansion, followed by progressively larger areas of the estate. Blake buried them, hid them in the rafters, stacked wood and iron scraps on top of them, or anything else he could think of. Blake hid them, Taylor found them all by the end of the day, and the game started over the next morning.

  When he could detect the stones over the entire property while standing still, Taylor drew the mana out of some of them to make the game more difficult, and he taught Blake that hiding a weak stone near a strong one made it much harder to find. They started the game all over again.

  The gods did not forget about the soul they pulled from another world. Far from it. Making divine figures was the best way to drain his mana, and the gods didn't seem to mind his visits to their void to get a better feel for the ones he was interested in. The gods didn't answer questions about the mortal realm, but they would talk about themselves to a limited degree, especially how they related to their various domains.

  Strife, for example, wasn't just a god of war or chaos. He was the god of change, struggle, and protection. Commerce was a subordinate god to Strife, while Contract was subordinate to Order. Commerce and Contract seemed to get along well, while Commerce and Lightning had little to do with each other. Aarden's pantheon wasn't the dysfunctional horror family of the ancient Greeks, but they liked to argue their points of view. Argument was their favorite sport.

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  Wi?uri and Abnoda, the gods of Growth and Martial Skill, were Taylor's next subjects. He installed them by the flagstone courtyard where he practiced calisthenics and weapons, and gave them due respect before each session. Soon, the nine-inch-tall figures multiplied. Blake asked for Feythlonda, the goddess of Fertility, to put in a little shrine near the garden. Cook asked for Omoyon, the god of cooking, and put him on a little shrine shelf in the kitchen, where he was soon joined by the gods of Cleaning, Pride, and Small Repairs. Taylor added Scholarship and Libraries to his library shrine.

  Taylor may have lost a mother, but he gained a guardian. Curator Jane was not a tender presence in his life, but she was nurturing in her own way. They met once a week in his office on the ground floor to talk about his assignments from the previous week and what he should study next. For Taylor, who had once run major organizations, this "study" amounted to putting new terms onto old ideas. The more interesting bits were the specifics of Township Mourne. Receiving the monthly report was the best part of his new curriculum, and it generated the most questions. He had neither the authority nor fiduciary power to make changes in the town, but he understood it better with every week of remote study.

  Jane also demanded Taylor account for most of his time during the week, to ensure he wasn't simply lounging about. Although she steadfastly refused to be impressed with anything he did, she allowed two afternoons per week to explore the hills and fish by the spring. She even let him try his luck in the big river near town, so long as he positioned himself away from thoroughfares where he wouldn't stumble onto anybody by accident. The townsfolk knew to keep their distance, and Taylor always remembered to wear his mask and give people a friendly wave. They never waved back. But, they didn't attack, and that was progress.

  While his other studies advanced as expected, Arcaic remained stubbornly difficult. Over a dozen lives and deaths, Taylor had absorbed a lot of languages. He was insanely good at it. But three months with Arcaic was only enough to make him conversational by his tutor's standards.

  To practice, Ophelia had him read aloud from his Arcaic texts. Most of what he had was history, with a few about magic thrown in for good measure. They were mostly very old works, legacies of the earliest d'Mournes, who approved of knowing things but didn't care much for fiction. However, she grew dissatisfied with the histories and started bringing different texts with her, folklore and poetry. She explained they were works with considerable emotional range and therefore a better exercise.

  What Bilius' little heart heard was that a girl he liked wanted him to read poetry to her. Naturally, Taylor gave the lessons everything he had, plumbing meter and metaphor with all the wisdom and experience of his many years for the sake of Bilius' abject infatuation.

  He tried to be very cool about it, as if he hadn't stayed up half the night practicing. One small nod of those red curls, a twitch at the corner of her lips, or a crease at the corner of her emerald eyes, and he considered the time well spent. His desire for her approval was mortifying, yet it felt so, so good. He could float for hours on the power of one gentle smile.

  "There is someone I want you to meet," she said one day, "an elder Beastkin. It's a chance for you to practice your Arcaic on someone new."

  "What kind of beastkin? How old?"

  "He's Tanuit, which means he's one of the last of a dying breed. He's old enough to remember the Middle Empire," she said invitingly. "You can get first-hand answers to some of your questions. But don't ask him about his people. Either he won't talk about the Tanuit, or he will, and it'll bring the whole night to a tearful end."

  "I have to make a list!"

  "Prioritize," she laughed at him. "He'll shut you down when he's had enough. It should be interesting for both of you. Consider it your final exam."

  "Wait." His heart seized. "You aren't leaving, are you?"

  "I was hired for a season. Didn't the curator explain? It's time for me to move on." Her Arcaic tones mixed pity and apology into her words. "I've given you about all I can. It was a wonderful way to spend a few months, and now our time is nearly over."

  His chest beat in a wild panic. "But why? If it's about money, I can get some. I'm sure of it. Just stay!"

  "Oh, Billy. It's not about the money. You know those stories about arcs who can't stay in one place, who won't rest until we return to our homeland? I'm one of them. It's hard to explain to anyone who can't feel what we feel."

  "Then I'll take your home back! I'll sail across the Middle Sea, pierce the Komodo Jungle, climb over Shik Karan, and take it back from the monsters. Just stay! Wait for me to get stronger! I swear I can do it!" Even as he made the promise, he knew they were the stupid words of a small child run amok. But the first person to ever spend real time with him was leaving, and his little Bilius heart was breaking.

  "I'm so sorry, Billy."

  Maybe she had more to say, but he couldn't hear it. He ran crying from the room into the hills behind the house and didn't return until long after dark.