1
To bleed is to be.
-Vanessa, First Bloodmaid of the House of Hunger
Before
she was first bled, when she still had the name her parents gave her,
Marion Shaw was a maid at a townhouse in the South of Prane. On that
morning-the morning she would later come to identify as the beginning of
her second life-she knelt on the hard wood floor of the parlor, sleeves
rolled up to her bony elbows, a scrub brush in her hand.
Across
the room, in an upholstered armchair, Lady Gertrude sat, watching her
work. She was a shrewd woman, blue-eyed with silver hair and a pinched
aristocratic nose, spattered with age spots and freckles. While other
nobles preferred to leave their maids to their labor, Lady Gertrude
preferred instead to preside over them, watching with a falcon's eye as
if to ensure that her help earned every penny she paid them.
"You missed a spot," she sneered, seizing her cane to point at a minuscule stain on the floorboards.
Marion batted a dark curl out of her eye. She did what little she could to mind her tone. "I'll be more careful, milady."
"You
ought to be. There's girls more handsome and less sluggish than you
who'd be happy to have your position," she said, and she bit down on a
brittle tea cookie, spitting crumbs when she spoke again. "You've grown
slow . . . and lazy. I can see it in your eyes. The little light there
was in them has long gone out, and now you expect to drag yourself
through my halls on your hands and knees like a common drunk. With your
hair unkempt and your apron stained-"
"Rest assured this floor
will be spotless by the time I'm through with it," said Marion, cutting
her short. She could feel the rage pooling in the pit of her belly like
bile. "You have my word."
At this, Lady Gertrude merely frowned,
the slack skin of her brow wrinkling like fabric. Marion couldn't help
but think that she was rather lonely. Long widowed, without children of
her own, or companions or family to speak of, she had no means of social
stimulation apart from Sunday mass. Thus, every day she followed Marion
from room to room, watching her scrub the floors and polish the silver,
sometimes (if her health allowed it) going so far as to trail after her
into the kitchens, where she'd remain until her aching knees drove her
back to the comfort of her parlor.
Marion polished the floor
until she could see her own reflection in it-wide-set eyes gaping back
at her, a firm nose and full lips slightly parted, tongue tucked behind
her teeth, skin a deep tawny, hair a mess of curls. She frowned at
herself just as the church bells rang twelve. With a ragged sigh, Marion
peeled her gaze from her own reflection, dropped her scrub brush into
the bucket with a splash, and pressed slowly to her feet.
In
accordance with the new labor laws, all workers were promised an hour's
rest at the top of their seventh hour of work, a precautionary measure
enacted after no fewer than six girls worked themselves to death after
twenty-hour shifts in a cotton mill. And while Lady Gertrude was not a
particularly kind woman, she was a great adherent to order and strict
regulation, regardless of whether it was a benefit to her. Thus, when
the clock struck noon, she was quick to dismiss Marion.
Unlike
many of her set, Lady Gertrude couldn't afford to buy herself a townhome
more than a spitting distance from the more . . . unsightly corners of
Prane, and it took Marion only a few minutes to reach the cusp of the
slums. Here, Marion's pace quickened and she felt her spirits lift, if
only slightly.
Gradually, the fine brick townhomes gave way to
shanties and warehouses, cast in a pall of smog. Marion shouldered down
the crowded streets of the stockyards and adjoining meat market,
trudging through half-frozen manure and past the racks of cattle corpses
that hung, swinging, by the hooves. Instinctively, she rounded her
shoulders against the blast of the coming cold. Fall had only just
begun, but it was unseasonably chilly that day and the streets were
thick with snow and slush.
Outside, the crowds spread through the
stockyards, rounding the corrals where the cattle huddled-shuddering
from the cold or the fear of the coming butchery or both. Marion trained
her eyes on her boots as she passed them by. Almost ten years of
walking every day through the stockyards and she still couldn't bring
herself to look those beasts in the eye.
Marion kept walking. The
seething smog was low-slung, and so thick that the sun could barely
shine through it. The streets were thronged, as they always were at
midday. Crowds gathered around the vendor stalls, and if Marion had coin
to spare on a bit of roast eel or herring, she might have joined them.
But she didn't, so she went about her way, navigating the crowds and icy
streets, snow slush leaking into her boots as she walked.
A
vicious wind circled down the alleys and ripped at her coat as she
neared her favorite place to sit, a dark doorstep at the back of an
abandoned warehouse, on the cusp of Prane, overlooking the trenches and
the long scar of the northern railroad beyond them.
It began to
rain, and Marion retreated into the shadow of the awning, fishing a pack
of matches and her last cigarette from the back pocket of her coat. She
lit the smoke and nursed it, cupping her hand to shield it from the
wind. Between draws she wheezed and shivered, blowing smoke through her
fingers to warm them.
The cigarettes did wonders to calm her
hunger pangs, and at a halfpenny a pack they were far cheaper than the
offerings of the roadside food vendors, who, as far as Marion was
concerned, always overcharged.
"If it ain't the jewel of Prane."
Marion
turned to see Agnes wading toward her through the thick of the crowds.
She raised a hand and Marion greeted her with two raised middle fingers
in turn. Agnes was a gaunt, jaundiced matchstick girl with pale brown
eyes and thinning hair that she wore in a braid that hung, like a rat's
tail, down her back. Like Marion, Agnes had spent the early years of her
childhood pickpocketing on busy street corners. In fact, that was how
they'd met, and they soon learned that thievery was a trade better
suited to two. Agnes would act as the distraction-chatting nonsense with
their targets, keeping them occupied-while Marion crept up from behind
to nab a coin purse or slip a silk handkerchief from the breast coat of a
passing lord. But at age ten, when the legal repercussions of thievery
became too steep, Agnes had taken up honest work on the factory line
where she made matches-dipping wooden sticks into sulfur-from dawn until
dusk. Soon after, Marion secured a position as the scullery maid of
Lady Gertrude.
Still, despite their new occupations, every day at
noon the two girls made a point to converge at the same street corner
where they'd first met. But Marion and Agnes weren't friends, because
Marion didn't have friends. The way she saw it, friends were a luxury
reserved for people who had the spare time to spend with them-like the
girls who wandered Main Street with their parasols and bone-white
gloves, retiring to their parlors in the afternoon to take a bit of tea
and talk. No. Girls like Marion and Agnes had no use or time for
companions. They were simply fixtures in each other's lives, a part of
Prane's habitat, like the reeking miasma and the crows and the rats that
roamed the streets in packs at night.
Marion passed Agnes the
nub of her cigarette and slipped both hands into her skirt pockets,
doing what little she could to keep herself warm. She had another five
hours of work ahead of her, and it was hard to scrub floors with
cold-stiff fingers.
Agnes pulled on her cigarette in silence, the
smoke leaking through the gaps of her missing teeth. She looked haggard
from the time she'd spent slaving away on the line, breathing the toxic
phosphorous fumes day in and day out until the chemical stench filled
her up like a second spirit. That was something Marion's mother used to
say. That folks in Prane had two souls-one made of the stuff of the
heavens, the other from miasma.
Agnes took a final pull on her cigarette and flicked the butt into the trenches. "Ugly day, isn't it?"
Marion shrugged. "No worse than the others."
"But
it is. The days are shorter than they ever were before, the nights are
longer. And the sun, it doesn't rise as high as it used to. I swear it.
The summers aren't as warm. Fall is shorter. The winters are colder."
Agnes shook her head. "I can feel the change."
"Prane doesn't
change," said Marion, and it was true. Prane was the northernmost city
of the South. It existed in the rift between the worlds-the arctic North
and the punishing heat of the industrial South. And so, Prane was never
one thing or another. In the night, the light of the city was such that
it seemed the sun never fully set; in the day, the gray pall of smog
made it seem like it never fully rose. Thus, the slums of Prane felt
much like a realm caught between, in perpetual indecision, as if the
skies couldn't decide what they wanted to be.
Never fully day. Never fully night.
Never anything at all.
And
though she knew nothing else, Marion had come to hate that
indistinction . . . and most everything else about Prane too. She
sometimes wondered if there was a single person in the slums who found
something, anything, to love about the place. Agnes, for her part,
seemed resigned, even content. But begrudging contentment was not the
same as happiness. At best it was familiarity, and at worst defeat. It
certainly wasn't the same as true fondness.
Marion lowered
herself to the stoop beside Agnes, wincing a little as the snowmelt
seeped through her skirts. Her gaze drifted north. In the distance, she
could just make out the night train's station on the cusp of Prane-a
beautiful structure of glass and iron with its own clock tower that only
ever called the hours of the night. Marion had visited the station only
once, on her eighth birthday. She had begged her mother to let her see
it, in lieu of a proper birthday gift. And so, that evening, they had
ventured down to the station.
Marion's mother had lifted her up
onto her hip to peer into the night train's windows, and she had caught
the briefest glimpse of its cabin-its seats upholstered with red velvet,
its windows draped with brocade and dyed silks. Each cabin was lit by
the shimmering chandeliers that dangled from the ceilings. They didn't
care that the men in the three-piece suits scowled at their presence, or
that the women clutched their skirts and coin-fat purses closer at
their approach.
Marion and her mother had merely laughed and
smiled and watched in awe as the northerners (you could tell them apart
from the touring southerners based on their fine clothes and the way
they tilted their chins, just so) boarded the train and settled
themselves for the journey north. There was a bloodmaid among them, a
black-haired girl with a fine mink muff who smiled at Marion through the
window. At seven past twelve, Marion and her mother watched from the
platform as that great, black-iron beast roared to life and charged into
the dark of the night.
Every time she heard the keen peal of the
night train's horn, she felt the same stirring in the marrow of her
bones that she had as a child, standing on the platform alongside her
mother. She loved the sound and the feeling of the train's approach.
Sometimes she imagined herself onboard-sitting among the northern nobles
and men of Parliament-a gilded, one-way ticket in her pocket that cost
more than ten times what a maid like Marion earned in a year.
Agnes eyed her through a cloud of cigarette smoke. "Still looking north?"
"Nothing else to look at."
"Then
I suppose you won't be wanting this." Agnes reached into the shadows of
her coat and withdrew a folded newspaper. She stole one every day, in a
kind of unspoken agreement, an important part of their ritual. Agnes
brought the stolen paper, and Marion the cigarettes, and together they
made the most of what little time they had to spare.
The wind
tore at the edges of the newspaper as Agnes opened it and spread it flat
across their thighs. They didn't bother with the headline stories-long
articles about taxes and tariff wars and cholera outbreaks in the slums.
Instead, they skipped to their favorite section, the matrimonial
advertisements at the back of the paper.
It was the top of the
week, so there was a large selection of adverts to comb through. One for
a respectable physician seeking a maiden wife. Another for a widowed
cleric with a parish in the country in want of a wife of "impeccable
morals" and a mother for his nine children (he requested that the lucky
woman be no older than two and twenty). At the bottom corner of the
page, an advert for a self-described spinster, aged thirty-eight,
seeking a bachelor of fortune to receive with "kindness and affection."
Marion
and Agnes read each of these adverts in their best mockery of a posh
accent, illustrating the postings with wild imaginings about the
appearances of the subjects, their homes and lives and favorite
proclivities.
"He might be a fit for you," said Agnes, with a sly
smile. She tapped an ad for a navy officer in want of a "wholesome"
maiden, and Marion laughed aloud. She was many things, but wholesome she
was not. Virtue, in the conventional sense, had never become her. At
twenty, she'd shared beds with several women, and she enjoyed indulging
readily in the delights of the flesh. She and Agnes had had a brief
tryst one summer, but there was no real feeling between them, and things
had ended badly. They'd since decided they were better smoking
companions than lovers.
Agnes squinted down at the paper. "At a salary of four hundred a year maybe he'd be a fit for me too. I could be a maiden."
"Somehow
I have a hard time picturing that," said Marion, turning the
newspaper's page. And it was then that she saw it, an advertisement in
the midst of the matrimony column. Unlike the other postings, it was
printed in the most peculiar shade of scarlet. And the letters were
different, larger and filigreed, the dips and curves of each one
sweeping into the next like cursive.
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