spirit Focalor, but there was time. We had the long winter months ahead of us before the Dauphin’s expedition returned in the spring, and the matter of the Montrèvan Oath was more pressing.
One of Eglantine House’s young attendants was waiting for us at the foot of the stair.
“Lady Moirin, Messire Bao.” She curtsied. “Messire Antoine asks if you would like to watch the tumblers at practice.”
“I suspect we would,” I said, glancing at Bao.
“We would,” he confirmed.
She escorted us through the halls of Eglantine House. It seemed a joyful establishment, filled with music and laughter. We passed a salon where a group of patrons and adepts were engaged in a game of poetic word-play, each seeking to outdo the other in extending a clever metaphor.
“This is a… a place of whores, is it not?” Bao asked me in a low voice.
Not so low that the attendant did not hear him. “Oh yes, Messire Bao!” She glanced over her shoulder. “Like all of the Houses of the Night Court, Eglantine House is dedicated to Naamah’s Service. But we celebrate all the arts, not only the arts of pleasure.”
“Forgive me,” he said to her. “I did not mean to use an impolite term. I am still learning your tongue.”
“You speak it very well, messire,” she assured him.
Bao switched to the scholar’s tongue of Shuntian. “Do they begin so young, Moirin? That one cannot be more than twelve.”
“No.” I replied in the same language. “Only as attendants. They are not allowed to take their vows until they are sixteen.”
He looked relieved. “I am pleased to hear it.”
“Were you thinking of the past?” I asked.
Bao nodded. “It has been a long time since I have seen tumblers perform. Just the thought stirs memories.”
I touched his arm. “We don’t have to do this.”
“No.” He shook his head. “It has been too long. And I am curious. I was very good once, you know.”
“I know.” I smiled. “I’ve seen it.”
Bao scoffed. “You’ve seen me perform tricks to amuse children, Moirin. Not art.”
“It is not the art you chose to pursue, my magpie,” I said mildly.
“True,” he admitted. “But I was good at it.”
I did not doubt it, having never known Bao to boast in vain. At the age of three, his family had sold him to a travelling circus, where he trained and performed as an acrobat. At the age of thirteen, he decided he wanted to learn the art of stick-fighting instead. It was a matter of desire and pride—and there was a girl involved, too.
He had asked Brother Thunder, the troupe’s best stick-fighter, to teach him. And Brother Thunder had agreed… for a price.
I remembered Bao telling me about it on the greatship to Ch’in, naked in the bed we had just shared, his arms folded behind his head.
So I ask and he say, you be my peach-bottom boy, I teach you.
Bao had agreed.
He’d spent two years as Brother Thunder’s reluctant catamite, learning to fight. At the end of two years, he defeated his mentor. The fellow’s daughter, the girl in question, was angry at him for besting her father. She refused to honor her promise to run away with Bao.
So he ran away alone, all the way to Shuntian, where he fought his way to becoming the leader of an unscrupulous group of thugs—until a young lad came asking to be taught.
Bao had offered him the same bargain.
The boy had agreed.
And Bao had walked away from the bargain he had struck, walked away from the life he had built for himself. He had accepted an offer he had mocked only days before, and became Master Lo Feng’s magpie, setting him on the wandering course across the world that had brought us together.
“Here we are!” our little attendant said cheerfully, opening the door onto the rear entrance of a theater. Beyond the door, one could hear the thuds and grunts and shouted comments of tumblers at practice.
“You’re sure?” I asked.
“Yes, Moirin.” Bao gave me an affectionate look. “I am sure, and I am grateful for your concern.”
It was a vast space, filled with the various apparatuses of the tumblers’ art. There were trapezes hung from the rafters, and a high rope stretched across the vaulted ceiling. The floor was covered with mats of coarse fabric stuffed with chaff, dotted here and there with springboards.
“Messire Bao!” Antoine nó Eglantine dropped from a hanging trapeze with a flip and a flourish. He bowed, his face flushed. “Lady Moirin! Congratulations. We heard the news.”