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Kel tried to pay attention to the training master. She really did. Lord Wyldon had finished his welcoming speech, if it could be called that, and sponsors were being assigned. Merric of Hollyrose and Esmond of Nicoline had theirs already. This was important, and furthermore, she was beginning to worry no one would volunteer to sponsor the Girl. Ambivalence toward her presence had been too much to hope for, she knew, but the hostility behind the trashing of her room had shaken her.
And the ghosts weren’t helping. Or, currently, one specific ghost.
She’d been expecting more ghosts, really, and there were some, but far fewer than she’d grown used to in the Yamani Islands. Anywhere that had been occupied long enough tended to collect them—centuries of untimely, often violent deaths layered over one another—but Tortall’s capital, and the palace specifically, had faced relatively little unrest in the last few hundred years.
Still, some of the palace ghosts were more active than she’d expected. When they’d been dead long enough, they didn’t typically concern themselves much with the living, but there was one right now, standing next to Lord Wyldon with his hands on his hips as he inspected the new pages. A few others drifted at the hallway’s periphery, but they seemed disinclined to catch the bolder one’s attention.
He was short and thin, with hair that must have been fiery when he was alive and still looked red. His eyes were light-colored, sunken a little like he’d been ill before he died.
Ghosts looked like alive people, mostly. They were a bit faded and blurred around the edges, and they still showed whatever had killed them. Sometimes they had guts spilling out, or carried their heads around tucked under one arm. That seemed like an annoying way to spend eternity, but Kel had never heard any of them complain about it.
Those—the really violent, awful deaths—were obvious. Other times though, it was harder to tell. Poison didn’t always leave signs, for example. Kel had gotten into the habit of paying close attention to people in order to distinguish the living from the dead. Talking to someone no one else could see had been acceptable when she was young enough to have imaginary friends. It did less to endear her to others as she got older.
The ghost’s commentary on the pages’ appearances and parentage was making it difficult to focus, and he had nothing nice to say about the training master, either. “If you got any stiffer,” he said to Lord Wyldon, “they’d paint you and use you as a shield. You’d be about as useful that way as you are as a training master.”
Kel bit the inside of her cheek to keep from reacting.
“And you,” he said, rounding on Kel.
She suppressed a flinch with enough success that none of her fellow pages noticed. They were distracted by Crown Prince Roald offering to sponsor Seaver of Tasride. The ghost noticed, though.
“Now, that’s interesting. You can see me. You’re not Gifted—”
But then Lord Wyldon was addressing her. She wrenched her gaze from the ghost and told the training master her name and fief.
“We’ll talk later,” said the ghost. “Good luck. Mindelan, was it? You’re going to need it.”
He wiggled his fingers at her in an approximation of a wave, then faded away.
Kel stood uncomfortably, waiting for someone to volunteer to sponsor her and already missing the distraction the brash ghost had provided. Everyone was staring at her, and it was agonizing. She told herself she was stone, but no one would be paying this much attention to a rock.
Joren of Stone Mountain stepped forward, which was dire enough to distract her from her discomfort. Lord Wyldon’s skepticism and the stifled laughter of her fellow pages confirmed what Kel had thought upon meeting the blond boy’s eyes. He didn’t want her here, and he wasn’t being charitable by offering.
The training master didn’t immediately accept the offer, which she felt was a bad sign as well. Lord Wyldon didn’t want her here either, but he also didn’t seem interested in inflicting Joren on her. Had it been Joren who made such a mess of her room? She tried to imagine what his idea of sponsorship might look like if it had been him.
Someone else spoke up before she could build too catastrophic of an image in her mind. Lord Wyldon called him Nealan of Queenscove. Kel would have raised her eyebrows, if she’d been in the habit of doing so. Queenscove was in the Book of Gold. The family was an old one, and ducal. Its current head was Duke Baird, who was the chief of the palace healers.
Kel’s father was a baron, and Mindelan was so new it wasn’t even in the Book of Copper. Her great-grandparents on her father’s side had been merchants. She didn’t think her parents knew Duke Baird or his wife very well; this Nealan had no business offering to sponsor her. It didn’t seem malicious, though. Or if it was, that malice was directed at Lord Wyldon, with whom he was currently arguing.
She could have had an entire conversation with that ghost, right here in front of everyone, and she still would have seemed less mad than he was, Kel thought. He had accrued three weeks of scrubbing pots before Kel decided she had to say something, lest Nealan be doing kitchen work well into knighthood.
“I could find my own way around.”
And she could. Ghosts were generally helpful, when it came to giving directions. Most were lost deeply in their thoughts, but could be bothered into pointing the way, and the ones who weren’t three-quarters dreaming just wanted someone new to talk to, after decades or centuries with the same companions. Some of the really new ones wanted favors—usually a piece of lost jewelry or hidden coin returned to living relatives, or a message passed on. The older ones, or the bookworms from any era, could generally be persuaded into giving up any information Kel wanted if she offered to turn the pages in a book for them.
This had garnered her a reputation at the Imperial Court in the Yamani Islands for being strange, and a little fey, but she was a foreigner there. Foreigners could not be expected to make sense, and she was otherwise a quiet, unobjectionable child.
She’d be able to get away with it here, too, she was pretty sure. Girls who wanted to be knights couldn’t be expected to make sense either, and she’d gone and made herself so objectionable by wanting to earn her shield that the king had gone back on his word and put her on probation instead of letting her prove herself like one of the boys, which was all she’d wanted. Strange would be the nicest thing anyone called her.
Lord Wyldon did not appreciate her offer, but he also did not assign her any pot-scrubbing. And he seemed to have given up on arguing with Nealan as well, because he accepted the older boy as her sponsor. Possibly he was simply hungry and ready to go to dinner.
Either way, she’d half-expected him to give her to Joren anyway, hesitant or not. This was an unexpected bit of kindness from the training master. She turned her attention to Nealan.
-----
Neal examined his new charge with a critical eye. He had volunteered to sponsor her impulsively, but for the good of the realm. If Joren and his cronies drove her out while the Stump looked on and did nothing, and it came to light that she’d left due to the bullying and unfair treatment, he was fairly sure the queen would never speak to the king again, and the Lioness might actually kill someone. Possibly the king.
The would bad. He couldn’t in good conscience let that happen. He gave Keladry of Mindelan an impassioned speech on feminism and female warriors. She sassed him. He decided that they’d get on alright.
She wasn’t what he’d been expecting, that was for sure, although in retrospect, he wasn’t sure why he’d had expectations in the first place. He knew one lady knight and one ten year-old girl: the Lioness and his sister Jessamine, respectively. Sample sizes of one were almost meaningless, but they’d led him to expect someone short and loud, and here was Keladry, who was neither of those things.
Keladry was tall, quiet, and a little odd, although Neal wouldn’t hold that against her. He was quite peculiar himself, just...maybe not as peculiar as she was. Her eyes kept focusing on empty space like it was fascinating, and he had been ignored often enough to know she was only listening to him with one ear. Well, fine. That was more attention than he usually got from his peers, and he could respect a daydreamer.
He showed her around, aware he was talking and walking quickly, but too excited to stop himself. Arguing with the Stump always energized him, no matter how back-breaking the punishment work he ended up with was, and he—him! Neal! He was sponsoring the first openly female page in over a century. He was, if not making history, then certainly adjacent to it.
They ran into Tkaa in the portrait gallery. She’d clearly never seen a basilisk before, and Tkaa seemed equally interested in her, which interested Neal. Tkaa liked the pages alright, in an abstract sort of way, and he learned their names dutifully, but he’d never seen him study one of them with quite the level of intensity he was displaying. Was it her gender? Tkaa would have been in the Divine Realms the last time lady knights roamed Tortall, so Keladry might be a novelty to him.
Something to ponder. Neal returned Keladry to her room, and went to bed himself. He still had a day before page training resumed, and he planned to enjoy it as much as possible.
-----
Kel locked her door. She took a moment to breathe. Nealan, or Neal, given that she wasn’t his least favorite aunt, talked a mile a minute and walked almost as fast. His enthusiasm was contagious though—he seemed to love the palace, and knew it well. And he’d given up a lot to start page training as late as he had, making him almost as strange a page as she was.
Calmer, Kel turned around to find the ghost from before waiting for her. He was lounging on her bed, his edges bleeding indolently into her patchwork red quilt.
“There you are!” he said. “Finally.”
“You’re dead,” said Kel. “It isn’t as if I’m wasting your time.”
This made him laugh, which she supposed was a good thing. If she’d offended him, he could have sulked forever. “Oh, it’s good to talk to a fresh face. We haven’t had one in ages, you know. I’m Thom. I’d shake your hand, but I’m afraid you’d just pass through me.”
He’d be chilly when he did so, too, so Kel didn’t object.
“I’m Kel.”
“Yes, I know. The Girl. You’ve been quite the topic of conversation in the palace since you applied for admittance to the page training program.”
“Have I?”
Kel started unpacking, starting with her lucky cats. She placed them on her mantelpiece, thinking she would need all the luck they could bring her and then some.
“Oh, yes. Thayet’s still not speaking to Jon, you know, and Alanna’s gone to sulk in the desert.”
“What? The queen and the Lioness? Why?”
“Well, you’re on probation, aren’t you? That wasn’t in the original terms of the decree. Blah, blah, politics, Jon’s always got a reason for the things he does, but that doesn’t mean anyone likes it. Have you ever noticed that compromises don’t make anyone happy? I’ve always found that funny. And all of that after refusing to let Princess Kalasin try for her shield, too. No one would have dared write rude messages on her walls.”
“The princess wanted to be a knight?”
“Oh, yes. More than anything. But Jon thinks she’d be more useful married off to some foreign ruler, and that no one would want a knight for a wife.”
“I was told the same thing, but I’m a baron’s ninth child, not a princess,” Kel said, contemplating how best to organize her clothing.
“Goodness, nine children? Your poor mother.”
“She says we’re why her hair went white when she was young.”
“I’d believe it. Can all of you commune with the dead, or are you special?”
“None of my siblings have mentioned it, if they can,” Kel said doubtfully. “But it’s not something I go around telling people either.”
“Have you always been able to, or did something trigger it?”
Thom must have been a scholar when he was alive, Kel decided. He was too nosy to have been anything else.
“I almost died when I was small. One of my older brothers held me off the edge of a balcony and dropped me, except I didn’t fall. After that, I could see ghosts. I was about four.”
Kel had no compunction about telling him any of this. Dead men told no tales, except to other dead men, and if she didn’t tell him what he wanted to know, he could simply pester her until he got bored, which could take a while. He was dead. He had nothing but time.
“Interesting, interesting,” murmured Thom. He’d sat up. “Not Gifted, then, but god-touched?”
Kel shrugged. “I don’t know what god would bother with me.”
“Did you hear hounds? Bells? Smell anything unusual?”
“Nothing like that. I just felt...at peace, I guess.”
“Not the Goddess, then. She lacks that subtlety. But you’re the first girl to openly try for her shield in a century...”
“Are you allowed to talk like that?” Kel wouldn’t have dared talk about one of the Great Gods like that, particularly one who was said to be quite active in Tortall.
“What’s she going to do, smite me? I’m already dead. Did you want to be a knight before your accident?”
“No, I always thought I’d be a priestess, actually.” At Thom’s questioning look, she added, “I have four older sisters for my parents to provide dowries for. And three brothers that are knights. Not a lot of money left over.”
“Why a priestess, then?”
“I’ve seen every awful thing that can happen to a person, and how that misery doesn’t stop when someone’s dead, not always. I want to be able to protect people, and I could do that as a priestess. The real deciding factor between that and trying for my shield was being tall, though. Easier to use my brothers’ things secondhand, that way.”
“What’s your other sibling do?”
“What?”
“Four sisters to marry off, three knights, and you. That’s eight. You said there were nine of you.”
“Avinar is studying something in the City of the Gods. I don’t know what.”
“Hmm,” said Thom. “Well, I’ll let you rest, but I’ll be back. This warrants further investigation. And I want you to earn your shield, of course.”
“Of course?”
But he was gone. Ghosts were like that. Being dead removed a lot of the pressure to bow to things like social conventions, although Thom seemed like he might not have cared when he was alive, either.
Shrugging to herself, Kel finished her unpacking and got ready for bed. She wanted to be well-rested when training started properly.