City of a Thousand Dolls Read online

  Nisha darted for the gates.

  Devan was already waiting, his brown-and-gold courier’s tunic glowing against the darkness of the woods. Nisha felt her own smile widen as she ran into his arms. His eager mouth found hers in a kiss. Here was one of the few places where she felt like she belonged, one of the few places she could forget about her work, the City, and the entire world.

  And she did, until she heard the first scream.

  2

  THE SCREAM WAS so faint, it might almost have been mistaken for the cry of a bird.

  Nisha slid her face away from Devan’s and turned her head, scraping her ear against the stone of the city wall.

  “What was that?”

  “What was what?” Devan’s hands slipped her overrobe off her shoulders, letting it fall to the ground.

  Nisha listened, but she didn’t hear anything else. “Nothing. It’s probably nothing.”

  “Mmm-hmm.” Devan’s fingers moved to Nisha’s jaw and brought her mouth back within reach. The tension ran out of her in a long sigh. She melted against the wall, giving herself up to Devan’s kiss—

  Another scream. Louder.

  Nisha pushed hard against Devan’s chest, giving herself just enough room to slide away from him. She scanned the silent teak forest, the high mossy wall that surrounded the estate, the flat gray sky. “Did you hear that?”

  Devan smoothed his tunic, then his black hair. “I heard something,” he said, after a moment. “But it might have come from the forest. I’ve heard a band of Kildi has moved into the area. I’m sure they make quite a lot of noise.”

  “It came from inside the walls,” Nisha said, frowning at Devan’s mention of the nomadic people who traveled the Empire. The City was so far from any other settlement. Why would the Kildi camp here? “At least I thought it did....”

  Devan lightly stroked Nisha’s arm. His sleeve slipped back, exposing the tattoo that marked the smooth skin of his inner wrist. A kanak blossom, the mark of Flower caste. All noble children except for those from the Imperial family were marked with the sign of the golden flower at birth. The Imperial family’s sign was a white lotus.

  “Tell me about the Redeeming,” he said unexpectedly. “I know it’s a big annual party, and girls are bought as wives and things, but how does it work?”

  “Not bought,” Nisha corrected, pushing down the flutter in her stomach. “You can express your intention to claim a girl by Speaking for her. There’s a redeeming fee to pay, but it doesn’t mean you actually own the girl afterward.”

  “So can you reserve a girl? If you want a specific one?”

  Nisha had to swallow before she could answer. She tried to sound casual. “Matron likes to say there are as many ways to be Redeemed as there are girls in the City. You can pay in advance and have a girl trained to meet your specifications. Or you can come to the Redeeming and pick from the girls available. Why do you ask?”

  Devan shrugged and gave her a smile that seemed full of possibilities. “I’m just wondering. What happens to a girl if no one speaks for her?”

  “Most of the girls go to their first Redeeming at sixteen,” Nisha explained, trying to ignore the way Devan was playing with the hair at the back of her neck. “If a girl doesn’t find someone to speak for her by the time she’s eighteen, the City gives her a small amount of money and a Wind caste mark and sets her free to earn her own living.”

  “I see,” Devan said, pausing to brush his thumb along her jaw. “You know, that asar you’re wearing suits you. I don’t think you’ve ever looked so lovely. Or so elegant.”

  Nisha ran her hands over her borrowed asar. The silk felt like ripples of water under her fingers and made her feel reckless and exotic. Smiling, she stepped into Devan’s arms.

  Nisha! Jerrit came streaking along the wall. You need to come in now.

  This isn’t a good time, Jerrit. Nisha very carefully did not look at the cat. Go away. She lifted her face to Devan’s kiss.

  I wish I could, Jerrit sent in a disgusted tone. But it’s an emergency, He wove himself between Devan’s and Nisha’s legs, meowing loudly.

  Nisha sighed and stepped away from Devan, who scowled. “I don’t understand why this place has so many cats,” he said. “Or why you spend so much time with them. They’re just animals.”

  “You only say that because you’re allergic,” Nisha said, picking up the long-bodied cat. She knew from long experience that no one else heard the cat’s voices, and she didn’t expect him to understand. “You know the stories say that spotted cats are good luck. It’s good fortune to have a tribe here in the City.”

  Devan’s eyes began to water. “If you say so,” he said, sniffling.

  Nisha, I’m serious. The cat struggled in her arms. Something’s happened, something terrible. Matron might send someone to look for you. If you’re caught out here, with—

  All right, Jerrit. Nisha set the cat down and straightened the folds of her embroidered silk.

  “Do you think there’ll be any letters tomorrow?”

  “Probably,” Devan said. He picked up the bag of scrolls Nisha had given him and rattled it. “I know the Emperor is waiting for these letters from Matron. I don’t think there has ever been so much correspondence between the City of a Thousand Dolls and the Imperial Court before. Normally the Emperor is the calmest person in the court, but now …”

  Devan shook his head. “With the appointment of a new Council Head, and Prince Sudev marrying a girl from the City, there’s a lot of political jostling. Even the Emperor’s getting snappish, and that’s not like him. I might have to invent an errand just to get away. And to see you.”

  Devan’s smile creased the corners of his mouth and lit up his liquid, dark eyes. The warmth in those eyes flowed over Nisha like heated honey and melted her stomach into her sandals.

  “See you tomorrow then, same time?”

  Nisha! Jerrit ran a few steps toward the gates and looked back expectantly, the tip of his tail twitching. Come on!

  With a last smile at Devan, Nisha turned and ran after the cat. The thick stone walls reached out and embraced her as she raced through the tunnel of the main gate. As she ran farther back into the City, Nisha heard another scream—then another, clanging and jangling like a box of high-pitched bells.

  “What’s happened?” she asked, her thin rope sandals slapping the dirt path to the hedge labyrinth at the City’s center.

  Jerrit ran beside her, the hair on his back raised. I don’t know. Whatever it is … it smells of death.

  Nisha’s heart began to pound with more than exertion. Once, when she was young, she had tried to run away from the City, only to stumble over the body of a dead outlaw. The sight—the smell—still haunted her nightmares and had left her with a fear of the forest that she’d never been able to shake. The thought of seeing another dead body made her hands cold. But she kept running. Matron might need her help, and it couldn’t be worse than the pictures her imagination was painting for her.

  The hedge maze was a tangle of dim, narrow alleys. Nisha tripped, barely keeping her footing. Court asars were not designed for running.

  Turn right, Jerrit sent. They broke out of the maze at a south corner and kept going. Flowering bushes grew in neat rows along this path. In one of the side gardens they passed, a fig tree dropped leaves into a shallow pool. Nisha followed the running cat past the figs and onto the private grounds of the House of Pleasure.

  A flat-roofed building of weathered red brick, several stories high with copper-framed doors and windows, rose in front of her. Girls in black robes with their hoods pulled over their heads milled about like a flock of crows.

  Nisha and Jerrit pushed through the small crowd. Nisha cursed herself for forgetting her overrobe as she tried to ignore the stares at her back. Without the black-hooded overcloak that novices were instructed to wear between Houses, Nisha’s pink asar stood out like a candle flame at Darkfall.

  Nisha wove her way to the clear area near the base of the
building. She ignored the stricken faces around her, the whispers with undertones of fear. If she thought too hard about what might be in front of her, she would turn around. And Nisha wanted to see for herself.

  A very still girl in red silk lay sprawled on her back next to the wall. Her asar was finer than Nisha had seen on anyone aside from Tanaya—a thin, fluttering fabric woven with gold that wrapped several times around the girl’s broken body. Her eyes had the glassy stare of a painted figurine, and her head was tilted at an extreme angle, her limbs flung around her. If it hadn’t been for the dark blood matting her light hair, she could have looked like a doll thrown by an angry child.

  Nisha swallowed the bile that suddenly burned in her throat. Jerrit’s mind voice sounded shaky. Who is she? he sent.

  “I didn’t know her,” Nisha whispered.

  The girl next to Nisha pushed back her hood, revealing an attentive face and thick glass lenses held by twisted wire. “I think her name was Atiy.”

  “Jina,” Nisha said, surprised. “What are you doing here?”

  The girl didn’t take her eyes off the body. “I’ve been researching love poetry in the Empire, something I can present at the Redeeming to show my skills as a scholar. I just conducted an interview with the House Mistress and some of her girls.”

  “With Atiy?”

  “No.” Jina scratched her forehead. “I wasn’t allowed to see Atiy, since she wasn’t being trained with the others. But they talked about her. Pale complexion, hair like lamplight. There aren’t many girls of that description in the City, or in the Empire. The House of Jade has none.”

  Nisha nodded. Just as the House of Flowers trained girls as wives for noble families, the House of Jade trained apprentices as disciplined healers and scholars. Fair coloring was so rare in the Empire that any light-haired girls in the City were already spoken for, and the Council would never waste those girls in a House where looks were unimportant. Not when they could train her in another House and fetch a far higher price for her. That was the point of the City of a Thousand Dolls in the end. You could get any kind of girl here as long as you had the money to pay for her.

  How much had someone been willing to pay for Atiy?

  Nisha looked down at the body. A red, angry-looking welt encircled the girl’s throat, as if she had yanked something from her neck, and there was a tear along the side of her asar.

  “What do you think happened there?” Nisha asked, waving her hand at the tear.

  Jina tapped her charcoal writing stick against her lips. Her hands were smudged with the charcoal, as black as her hair, and more streaks marked her green cotton asar.

  “It looks like she jumped from the roof.” Jina peered over her glasses, as if Atiy was a beetle in a jar. She made a note on a small piece of rice paper. “Maybe she didn’t like the man who had spoken for her. Or she didn’t like what she was being trained to do … or maybe the Shadow-walkers got her.”

  Nisha frowned. That Shadow-walkers lived in the City of a Thousand Dolls was the rumor that bothered her the most. Lethal assassins who could blend in anywhere and become invisible were the stuff of children’s tales. “The Shadow-walkers are a legend, Jina.”

  “Not according to the archives,” Jina said, still taking her notes. “Apparently, there’s a whole family of assassins in Kamal. If the capital city has them, then why not us?”

  “How on earth do you know that?” Nisha asked, amazed.

  Then Jina did look up, a hint of rare mischief in her unusual sand-colored eyes. “I can’t tell you how I know,” she whispered. “But did you know that there’s a shelf of restricted scrolls in our Mistress’s private study? They’re not off-limits exactly, but we are … discouraged from looking at them. One of them is about the Shadow-walkers. That they have a training House here, on the estate.” She paused. “Some girls do vanish, you know. No one knows where they go.”

  “So someone came and redeemed them early,” Nisha said. “That does happen.”

  “But very rarely. And it’s never a secret. These girls don’t say good-bye or tell anyone where they’re going. And there’s no record of them being redeemed. Besides, you know that most of us begin going to the Redeeming after our sixteenth birthday. The girls who vanish are usually younger.”

  Nisha shrugged. If there were anything like that happening in the City, Matron would have told her. “I’ve known girls who were redeemed earlier than sixteen. You just have to get special permission and pay a little more. There are craftsmen and Jade scholars and healers who prefer to do advanced training themselves. And I’m sure it’s written down somewhere. There’s probably a special scroll for that sort of thing that we haven’t seen.”

  She would have said more to make her case and to convince herself there was nothing to Jina’s wild idea, but Jerrit interrupted.

  Nisha, this girl smells like fear. His black-tipped ears swiveled forward as he sniffed at the corpse.

  Nisha crouched by the body but couldn’t smell anything. We’ve never seen anything like this on the grounds. It would be only natural if some of these girls were scared.

  Jerrit’s tail twitched. No, it’s clinging to her. This girl died frantic, terrified.

  Nisha stood up. “Maybe this was an accident,” she murmured, thinking out loud.

  Jina looked up. “An accident would explain why her clothes are torn and the body is lying on its back. She slipped, tried to catch herself or pull herself back up, and fell. Interesting.”

  Interesting? Jerrit echoed.

  Nisha shook her head at him. It’s not her fault. You know how the House of Jade is.

  I suppose I can’t blame her for her training, but…

  “An accident is more plausible than the assassin theory,” Jina said, twirling the writing stick in her fingers. She sounded almost disappointed. Despite the gravity of a corpse before her, and what Jina had suggested, Nisha couldn’t hold back a snort.

  “Trust me, Jina, if there were a House training assassins, I would have noticed.”

  Jina shrugged and wrote something else down. “Well, you are Matron’s shadow.” Jina’s words were bland, but Nisha heard a knowing amusement underneath them that startled her.

  There was reason for Nisha to know the City of a Thousand Dolls and everything that happened within it. Besides her expected tasks as Matron’s assistant—delivering messages between the Council House and the other Houses, keeping Matron’s living and working areas tidy, running errands for the Council—Matron always instructed Nisha to record the gossip, in case anything unusual arose, and to report any serious problems she heard about. Such as anyone dissatisfied or deeply unhappy with her training, with her life in the City.

  In return, Matron granted Nisha an unusual privilege for a servant: learning dancing at the House of Music and practicing staff skills at the House of Combat along with permission to wear the colors of both Houses. Matron had even given her a small workspace in the greenhouse at the House of Jade when Nisha expressed an interest in herbs.

  Not many people knew about Nisha’s secret role as Matron’s informant, and Nisha liked it that way. Things had been hard enough when she was younger, the other girls teasing her about her unruly hair, her plain clothes, her uncertain status. If it became widely known that Nisha was Matron’s spy, the snubs would only get worse.

  Jina’s attention had returned to her piece of rice paper, her face intent on the notes she’d scribbled down. Nisha studied her for a moment and then decided not to worry. Jina liked to know things, not so she could act on her knowledge or to change anything, but to simply know. She collected knowledge like other girls collected bird feathers or pretty stones. Even if she suspected something, Jina wouldn’t tell anyone.

  Matron’s here. Jerrit’s voice broke into her thoughts. He lifted his head, ears alert, and his eyes flashed gold.

  Nisha looked up in time to see the Matron of the Houses walking toward them, her silver asar parting the black like the gleam of a fish in dark water. The silver
was a symbol of Matron’s authority under the Emperor, the higher color to the sky-gray asar that Nisha wore as her assistant. The asar she was supposed to be wearing right now.

  3

  PANIC ROSE IN Nisha’s throat, and she slid behind Jina, out of sight. It would be bad enough to be caught wearing an Imperial Court asar, but if Matron figured out why she was wearing it—

  “Jina, can I borrow your cloak? Please?”

  “What?” For the first time, Jina looked fully at Nisha, who was nearly crouching on the ground. Her eyes followed Nisha’s to Matron, who was speaking softly to the girls around her.

  “Oh,” she said. “I see.” Without hesitating, she slipped out of the black overrobe and handed it to Nisha, who clutched it in gratitude.

  “Thank you,” she whispered.

  Jina smiled wide, and it struck Nisha that this was not the peaceful, calm smile she was used to seeing from the girls of the House of Jade. Jina’s smile lit up her clear eyes and made her unexpectedly beautiful. “Don’t worry about it. We all have secrets.” Then she slipped away through the crowd.

  That was interesting, Nisha sent to Jerrit as she pulled the black robe tight around herself.

  You’re always startled when people are kind to you, Jerrit sent back.

  Nisha turned to make sure that no glimpse of colored silk hung below the black of Jina’s overrobe. That’s because most people aren’t kind. I wouldn’t have expected Jina to be so friendly. Maybe I should get to know her better....

  Matron spotted Nisha before she could finish her thought. “Nisha! What’s happened here?” Silver threaded the heavy, dark hair that framed Matron’s oval face. Her eyes were the smooth brown of river rock, and Nisha felt like those eyes were seeing straight through her cloak to the borrowed asar underneath.

  She resisted the urge to rub her ear, still stinging from its scrape against the wall outside the gates. Fidgeting would make her look as if she had something to hide. Matron didn’t know yet that their old courier, Yerek, had recently been replaced with a nobleman’s son, and a very young and attractive one. It wasn’t that Nisha was hiding Devan, not exactly. But if Matron suspected that her assistant was flirting with nobility, or that she had caught the eye of a noble, she would never let Nisha retrieve the mail again. Although her courtship—if it was even a courtship—with Devan was only a few weeks old, it had come to feel like her strongest connection to the world outside. And it had become her biggest hope of reaching that world one day.