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Chapter 2

BY THE TIME I HAD MY PAPERS STAMPED AND MY LICENSE APPROVED for the following year, afternoon shadows were lengthening on the cobblestones outside the Lord of Coin’s offices. At least, I thought as I gathered my cloak more snugly around me, the rain had abated somewhat. The fine mist that replaced it still dampened my shoes, but it couldn’t penetrate the fine wool of my cloak. It was pointless to return to my shop now—I wouldn’t have time to get any work done, and Alice could lock up without me.

It wasn’t my habit to stay out after work, but after waiting in a line of strangers for hours, I had a hankering for a bowl of sausage coddle and knew where I could find it—and likely some company, too. Sure enough, my brother was already ensconced at one of the long tables by the window of the Rose and Fir tavern, with several of his comrades from the docks.

“Sophie!” Kristos grinned, half standing and waving me over. “What’s the occasion? Full moon? Lost your way home?”

“Very funny.” I tried not to smile. “You took the last of the onion pie I was saving for supper, that’s all.”

“So you came down here for some fine company.”

“I decided I could endure the company for the coddle.” I slid onto the bench next to him. Even a year ago I wouldn’t have been willing to part with a few copper coins for supper at a tavern; I hoarded anything left after rent and shop expenses in case of a bad season or an emergency and, as a result, ate meals cooked poorly over a stove designed to warm a house instead of cook or, sometimes, went without hot food at all. Kristos and his friends, and most day laborers, bought food from street stalls and taverns whose cheap wares catered to their long days and short wages. They spent little more than I did, in the end, and Kristos made fun of the penny-pinching that resulted in eating the occasional raw onion for lunch instead of a proper meal.

I still worried that a dissatisfied customer could leave me out of work for weeks, or that the whims of those with money to spend would shift away from me. I needed more security than I had. With patience and the finest quality of work, I hoped I could gain steady clients who kept returning for my draping, not solely the charms that were often onetime indulgences, and connections to the city’s elite who could give my shop more cachet. More income could mean another assistant, a larger storefront, perhaps moving closer to the square, where I could have more visibility.

“Saw the line for the licenses today,” Kristos said after a long swig of ale. “You in it?”

“Of course,” I said. Nice of him to notice—usually Kristos half forgot that I paid for our lodgings with my earnings, and all the work that my shop entailed.

“Damn long,” he added. “Don’t they grandfather you in it at some point? Make you stop performing their tricks and jumping through their hoops every year?”

I sighed—silly of me to think he might have just been interested in my day. I prepared myself for a repeat of the diatribes I’d heard in line. “No, they never do. The rules are very strict.”

“Strict for whom?” he grumbled. “No one restricts trade or enterprise for the nobility.”

“I’m well aware,” I replied. “Arguing about it doesn’t do any good, Kristos.”

Fortunately, the serving girl arrived with my stew before he could fire back, and I turned my attention to it instead of the swiftly building political debate.

As Kristos lifted his mug of ale, I noticed a thick white wrapping under his shirt cuff. I grabbed his arm, making him slosh a little ale onto the table. “What’s this?”

“Barely anything,” he said, shaking me off. “Wheelbarrow got away from me down at the docks, wrenched my wrist a little.”

“And?”

“And it will be fine in a day or two.” He ran a hand through his disheveled dark hair, further mussing waves that were in need of a good combing, clearly annoyed with me, and clearly avoiding discussing what an injury meant—lost wages.

I suppressed a sigh, not wanting to make Kristos feel bad, but a day or two for his wrist to heal likely meant a day or two he wouldn’t be working—at least. That, along with the canceled order and the start of the slow season, was not good news. I made more money than Kristos, of course, but we relied on both our incomes, especially as the additional burden of heating the house approached.

“Hey, Kristos!” My brother’s friend Jack swung a leg over the bench across from me. “You hear about what happened at the Lord of Coin’s this afternoon?”

I focused more intently on my stew.

“Porter the fishmonger—you know, he’s been trying to open a proper storefront?” There were assents murmured around me. “Went down to apply for his license and there was a bit of a row—anyway, he turned the whole thing into a protest.”

“Good on him!” A chorus of enthusiastic voices made me look up. My brother beamed. “That will show them!” he crowed. “He’s one of the cornerstones of our Laborers’ League—I’m not surprised he voiced his thoughts.”

“Show them what?” I muttered, chasing a piece of sausage with my spoon. The Laborers’ League—the ragtag coalition of day laborers Kristos met with to talk politics, as though it did any good. Kristos wasn’t content, and he made it clear to me through his participation in the League. He never had been satisfied with working unskilled, manual jobs, and I could never find it in myself to blame him. Bright, quick with a pen, and conversationally competent in Fenian and Pellian as well as Galatine, he would have been a fine university scholar had he been born to the nobility—or been my younger sibling instead of older, able to wait until I had made enough money to pay tuition.

“They had to shut the whole place down to clear out the protesters,” Jack bragged.

“You were there today, Sophie. Why didn’t you say anything?” Kristos scooted closer to me. “Seems like it would have been something to see.”

I bit my lip. “I was there for my papers. Not to cause a ruckus.”

“So you were in ahead of them? Left before it happened?” He shrugged. “Must have, or you wouldn’t have gotten your license today.”

I found I couldn’t admit I’d accepted help from the city soldier, help I earned with my silk gown and leather portfolio. “That’s right.”

Kristos sighed. “I just don’t see how you can’t care about how they treat us,” he said. “After everything you went through to open your shop. How can you see it as fair?”

“It’s not fair, exactly. It’s just… it’s how things are. And I did open my shop. Don’t forget that, Kristos. You’re railing as though it’s impossible, and it clearly isn’t.”

“And you’re forgetting the years where you barely scraped by working day-contract jobs and sweeping floors.”

“I’m not forgetting anything.” After our mother died of one of the consumptive fevers that swept the densely populated city every few years, I worked as a day laborer. As she had done and as my brother still did, I spent years finding a day’s work at a time, sewing hems for a day’s wages in one shop and sweeping floors in another the next day.

I wasn’t forgetting our slim list of orders or the onset of winter’s slow season, either. I wasn’t forgetting the fear that I would have to fire one of my assistants, or that we wouldn’t be able to afford enough coal to adequately heat our drafty workroom. Owning a shop came with responsibility that Kristos couldn’t even fathom, and it was weighing on me tonight. “What, you think everyone in the city should own a shop? How would that work?”

“It wouldn’t, and I never said—damn, Sophie. I just don’t think you should have to wait in line every year to prove you have a decent shop, or that you should have had to fight so hard to build a dossier in the first place.”

“The system isn’t perfect, but it works,” I argued lamely. “And it works for us.”

“It works for you,” Kristos replied, more bitter than I anticipated. “But—hey, Jack—there’s some good news, too.” He grabbed a thin Pellian by the elbow and dragged him toward us. “This is Niko Otni—he’s one of the river sailors who’s been coming to our meetings—”

“I remember,” said Jack, shaking his hand with earnest fervor.

“He says the barge workers and the farmhands are ready to join with the Laborers’ League,” Kristos said with a grin.

Jack did some quick calculations, his thick fingers tapping his thumb. “That could double our numbers. And the barge sailors are already pretty organized; that helps.”

Numbers—for what purpose? I didn’t want to argue, so I feigned a smile. “That sounds promising,” I said, even though the promise wasn’t one I was fond of. More late nights yelling over drinks in the café. More days wasted earning signatures on petitions instead of wages. Though Kristos assured me again and again that the aims of the League were petitions and talks and education alone, plenty of people in it had ties to the violent riots that had consumed the city in the summer. I edged away from it like a horse shies from a snake—perhaps harmless, but perhaps capable of striking and killing.

“It is. Oh, Sophie, you have no idea. If we’re going to topple the old system, we have to have the entire bottom rise up together.” He leaned heavily on the table. It creaked under his weight. “Change requires these kinds of numbers.”

I eyed him. He’d talked about change before, but never in words that sounded so much like sedition. I dreaded the wasted hours and tavern bills his League brought us, but this sounded more serious. “You’re being careful, aren’t you? You’re not wrapped up in anything… anything illegal?” He and his friends talked about elected systems of government and economics based on free enterprise instead of noble control, but that was talk. Hypotheticals fueled by the lectures some of the professors at the university had begun offering, overviews of theory and philosophy, but hardly pragmatic. Talk over pints and bottles of cheap wine. At least, I hoped it was talk—not something that Kristos could get himself arrested over. After the near riot at the Lord of Coin’s offices, I was less sure.

“Speech and press are still open in Galitha,” Kristos retorted, “even if the minds of nobles aren’t. So no, nothing illegal. Stop worrying like an old hen, Sophie.” Jack laughed at my wrinkled brow, and Niko smirked at Kristos’s joke.

I smacked his arm as though he were only teasing, but I didn’t feel playful. As Kristos resumed speaking in low tones to the men sitting on the other side of the bench, I listened more attentively than usual, fearing that their talk had turned from theoretical to intentional, from conversations and lectures to more riots and arson like the summer’s unrest.

“Porter had the right idea,” one of the other men said. I didn’t know his name, only that he was like the other day laborers, fresh from the docks or the warehouses. Perhaps he’d spent the day looking for work and coming home without a wage, as the bricklaying and building slowed in the winter.

Jack hedged his reply with a glance at me. “Maybe the right motive, but it didn’t do much good except get a bunch of folks thrown out for the day.”

“No, it sent a message,” said Kristos. “We’ve been passive so long that the nobility can forget we even exist, let alone that we are at odds with their governance.”

We? I pressed my lips together, biting back the retort that Kristos couldn’t assume everyone without a noble title automatically agreed with him and his Laborers’ League.

“They’ll need a stronger message,” Kristos continued. “What happened at the Lord of Coin today was small, spontaneous. Imagine the sentiment, but organized and bringing our numbers together.” That sounded, to me, more like a dangerous riot than a message. I couldn’t hide my dismay, and Kristos clammed up at my shocked face. “We’ve upset Mother Hen.” He laughed, but I felt the jagged frustration in his voice.

I quietly stood and stepped outside. I had learned long ago that my brother’s temper tended to flare and fade quickly, like sparks set to black powder. To my surprise, Jack followed me.

Jack wasn’t poor company, I reasoned. He was kind, and gentle despite his broad shoulders earned hauling crates at the docks. More often than not, I had seen him brokering peace when Kristos’s discussions grew too heated. “Sophie, you’re acting kind of off. Is everything all right?”

I stared down the street, letting the cold wind cool my burning cheeks. “I’m fine.”

“No, you’re not. You’re angry about Kristos riling everyone up.”

Despite myself, I laughed. “You’re right. I don’t like all this talk—I’m not against discussing theories, if you think it’s fun, or speculating on the best reforms, but this is all… it’s getting a bit serious, don’t you think?”

“It is serious, Sophie.” Jack stepped into my line of vision, his face earnest. “Change is serious. The nobles—they have to start listening to reason. We’re educated. At least, some of us—your brother is smarter than most of the lords, I’d wager. We’re not mindless rubble.” I resisted correcting him. “And things need to change.”

“That’s all I hear from Kristos, too,” I dismissed him. “Change. He can barely remember to change his linens.” Jack smiled at my joke, but I sensed that something had shifted, and the time for levity was over. My brother wasn’t the lanky man-child I still imagined him to be, but a leader of a movement that was only gaining in numbers and momentum and, it seemed, aspirations.

“I guess I just don’t understand, Sophie—why don’t you want to help us? You’re one of us.”

I swallowed. I wasn’t noble, certainly, and in the stark tiers of Galitha, that made me a common person alongside Jack. Yet, at the same time, I wasn’t quite one of them—I owned a business. Even their revolutionary talk put me at risk. “You all are going to have to change without my help. I have a business, Jack. A business I built.” No one—not my brother, not his friends—seemed to appreciate this. “My clients will stop buying charms from an active revolutionary. And for another”—I smiled at the impossibility—“if you succeed, what do I have left?”

“I know, if there’s no more nobles or rich folk in the city, you don’t have clients,” Jack supplied. “You know, I’ve thought about that.” He cleared his throat. “And, I mean, if you had—that is, if you wanted to—you could maybe not need the shop?” He reached for my hand.

I folded my hands under my cloak. “I don’t know what you’re getting at.”

“I mean that you need the shop to support yourself. And Kristos. But if you—if Kristos had his own business or a job with tenure—that means a job with a contract that keeps you—”

“I know what it means.”

“Then he could support himself. And if you had a husband who had a job like that, too…” Jack’s ears reddened so deeply that I could see it in the dim candlelight seeping through the tavern’s grimy windows.

I wanted to melt into the cobblestones. “I don’t keep my shop only because I have to. I like working. Sewing and charm casting—those are my life. What I do well. How I—how I feel happiest.” I swallowed. “I wouldn’t want to give up the shop just because I was married.”

I had never admitted so much to anyone before, even Kristos, and I hoped my honesty would end the conversation. Jack rolled his shoulders, as though trying to shrug off my rejection. I bit my lip, feeling guilty, but relieved he didn’t press the issue.

“I’m going back inside,” I said softly. Jack nodded, but paced down the street instead of following me.

I slumped on the bench next to Kristos. Of course I had considered marriage, but I loved my work. If I married, the laws of coverture would transfer my property to shared property—and shared property was controlled by the husband. I couldn’t risk my shop for marriage. I hadn’t entertained, seriously, the attentions of a man in… years, I realized as I stared into the froth that still swirled on top of my mug of ale. Coverture laws risked my business, but a dalliance that resulted in rumors or, worse, pregnancy could be devastating, too. Romance was a dangerous game, its stakes too high. So I didn’t play. I had a responsibility not only for myself, but for Kristos as well. For my family, small as it might have been.

Plenty of women worked throughout Galitha City, as day and contract laborers in laundries, workshops, and stores all across the city, and certainly shared the concerns Kristos and the League discussed about their low pay and uncertain employment. They shared concerns with me, as well, I realized, that the League didn’t seem to sympathize with. I felt the same intense responsibility to keep our family safe that my mother had; women with children no doubt felt it even more strongly. Stability meant work, work meant enough money, enough money meant no one would go hungry this winter. The young, unmarried men Kristos surrounded himself with had a luxury that most women didn’t, even unmarried women, who, I knew from my assistants, saw their aging parents and younger siblings as their charges.

Perhaps this was why few women joined the long tables alongside the Laborers’ League gathered in the Rose and Fir. One ruddy blonde with thick arms like a dockworker’s was deep in earnest conversation with Niko Otni; a tall girl with pockmarked, Pellian-bronze skin read a pamphlet.

The girl returned the pamphlet to Kristos with a shy smile. “It’s even better than the last one,” she said.

“This one focuses more closely on the economic instability that the nobility-controlled system creates,” Kristos answered. She nodded, apparently more familiar with Kristos’s technical jargon than I was.

While they pored over a passage together, I overheard the ruddy blonde arguing with Niko. “No, it’s exactly like that in the laundry. Just because we don’t haul crates at the dock don’t mean we can’t get hurt.” I glanced as unobtrusively as possible at her as she flashed a bare arm, crisscrossed with sinewy dark scars. “These are from the irons—and you should see the girls who take a face full of steam. No compensation for it, just no work for days on end.”

“This is why you should get more of the girls down at the laundry to join the League,” Niko replied, slapping the table. “When it comes to the rights of the working class, it doesn’t matter what kind of work, men’s or women’s!”

I raised a silent eyebrow. It didn’t matter that a laborer was a woman—until it did. The limits that marriage and children would place on me were plain, and were plain to any woman.

The conversation shifted to finding work this winter, but the tone was tainted with the conversation that preceded it. They no longer spoke merely about job leads and which warehouses would have slower business over winter, but made implicit arguments for their discontent. I had nothing to add to their discussion and my coddle had gone cold, so I went home, but the echoes of the conversation followed me like a shifting shadow, deepening the cold dusk of the late autumn evening.

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