Islands in the Sky

2.15

When Cassa got back to her chambers, there were a dozen servants cluttering her dayroom. It seemed like every person in the tower with nothing else to do was in here waiting for her.

She sighed, and chased the household servants out, and only let her own maids stay. Then she opened the door, and told the guards outside in the hall, the guards her grandmother had assigned to watch her, not to let anyone else in until she was ready, or she would remember them, all four of them, and when she inherited the tower all four would pay a terrible price.

“Yes my lady,” the sergeant said.

“I mean it,” Cassa told him.

“I know, my lady. The door will stay closed.”

“On your life,” she said, and he nodded.

The door stayed closed. One of the maids, who Cassa sent to fetch breakfast shortly afterwards, never actually came back. The guards may have been being a little overzealous, but Cassa didn’t mind. She was glad someone still appreciated that she was a daughter of her family.

She put on socks, because her feet were cold after wandering around all morning, and then went and sat in a chair to think. Almost immediately, the servants began pestering her to start getting ready. She snapped at them, saying she would dress when it suited her, but they kept on at her all the same. Even though there was still an hour until the ceremony, and Cassa needed only three minutes to make ready, and the maids all knew how quick she would be. Her grandmother had probably warned them of dire consequences if there was a delay in the wedding starting, Cassa thought, and had got them all scared.

In the end, seeing their anxiousness and feeling sorry for them, and also not actually wanting them punished, Cassa got up and began to prepare.

The maids wanted her to bathe. To wash. To perfume herself. Which wasn’t unreasonable, Cassa supposed, since she smelled of sweat, even to herself, and her hair was damp and greasy, and she had dirt smeared on her feet. The maids wanted her to bathe, and Cassa knew she probably ought to, but she snapped at them anyway that no, she wouldn’t, and that was the end of it, thank you. Then they wanted her to wash, at the least, and in the end she agreed to, but only for her own comfort, she said, not for that of anyone who happened to be standing next to her today.

Cassa’s chambers had a private bathroom, through a door in the bedchamber. It had a tub, and also a shower and sink and toilet with running water fed from pipes which led to tanks on the roof. Everyone in the tower had sun-warmed water, which would be at least luke-warm by this time of day. The family, and the guardsmen’s barracks, and the guest quarters, those had water heated by wood-burning boilers too. Those boilers were also on the roof, and ran all day and all night, and wood was lifted to the roof by a crane to burn, because the Middletower was civilised, unlike some of the other towers.

Cassa had no idea what her new husband’s family was like. She couldn’t remember, and right now didn’t care enough to bother trying.

She went into the bathroom. She went alone, as she always did, and stripped, and wiped herself down so she didn’t smell. There was hot water ready, and there was the tub as well, either of which Cassa could have used. She could have had anything she wanted, on a day like today, but instead she simply wiped herself clean with a rag dunked under a tap. She didn’t want this wedding, and she was going ahead with it only reluctantly, so she wasn’t going to change a lifetime’s bathing habits just for some skinny fool who she’d probably never feel the slightest affection for.

She wiped herself quickly, then dabbed at her feet until they were mostly clean, and then she decided she was done. Her hair was still sticky, but she was ready. That was all she was going to do.

She opened the bathroom door, and sent another maid for food, and this time said, “And as you leave make sure to tell those men at the door to let you back in. Be very clear to them that I wish you to come back.”

The maid nodded, and must have done, because she was back in a few minutes.

Cassa ate dry bread, because eating it dry was good for both her character and her figure, her mother had always said. It was probably the only piece of wisdom her mother had acquired in her entire lifetime. Cassa ate, then sipped water slowly, while her maids hovered nearby on the brink of actual panic, asking if she was ready to dress yet, and pestering her to let them arrange her hair.

“No,” she said. “Absolutely not. Not my hair. I do not want this man, and I am taking no trouble for him at all.”

She insisted on a plait, and nothing more. She let the servants dress her, but in a plain shift, not the dress her grandmother had selected, but which she wouldn’t actually expect Cassa to wear. Cassa also refused to wear shoes. The tower was her home, and she didn’t wear shoes inside her home, and she wasn’t going to go to any trouble, either, since this wasn’t a wedding as much as an unwanted imposition.

“You’re acting like a child,” one of the maids told her.

“I know,” Cassa said. “And?”

“You’re not a child any more. Put on some shoes.”

“No,” Cassa said. “And I’ll have the next person who mentions it flogged.”

They all laughed, which wasn’t what she’d hoped for. Perhaps one day she should actually carry out such a threat, she thought, just so they all knew she was serious. She ought to do it today, she thought, idly. A conversation about murdering her grandmother, and then brutalising a servant, that would make her reputation.

She should, but she wasn’t actually going to.

She was going to end up married, very soon, simply because she couldn’t be as callous as any of her cousins would be, and for some reason, right then, that particularly irritated her.

She stood up, with fifteen minutes to spare, deciding she ought to just get on with it. She banged her chambers door open, and snapped at the guards outside, “Come on.”

They hurried to catch up. Behind her a flock of her maids came too. She let herself be walked down to the great hall in an irritated, awful mood.