Folio Two, Page Thirty-Four (svegra mos bietkron tal-dros)
Instead of going home, I stopped about a block from our house at the large granite walls that separated the Fædeim family from the rest of the world. Through the front windows high above the low-hanging fruit trees, I saw the murkiest shadows through the sheer gold curtains and heard faintly-playing music from an operatic recording.
They hadn’t put up the granite walls to keep people out, but to keep themselves like water in a jar. The wrought iron gates stood open and gaping as they had done since my earliest memories of standing in front of the complex, wondering if I dared go in. All of us kids in the neighborhood avoided it, and mothers clutched their snugly-wrapped babies close to their chests, covering the infants’ eyes as though the blurry sight of those walls would take their breath away.
The Fædeim family had hundreds of patents in the synthetic mood drug industry. They had made a fortune exporting it to the High Wilds and around Ameisa. Their company name was Wild Vine Enterprises, a nod in the direction of recreational mood drugs’ humble beginnings in the temples of Yilrega where the milkvines dripped their elixir into vats for their followers. No one but the devotees had drunk from them until the Taritit restricted alcohol, but suddenly everyone had plants growing in their windows and courtyards.
The exterior of their house showed a certain opulence that my family had never wanted to convey. They employed at home-servants, including someone whose only job seemed to be dusting and opening the door for people wishing to enter. A robot would have been classier and more cost-effective.
“New money smells,” Anumë had said once at the table. I imagine that they were new money, even in 1903 — seventy-seven years after we kicked the Taritit out and they started that enterprise. But the animosity ran deeper than that.
Everyone hated the Fædeim family, even those who tipped vials of “melancholic with a hint of irony” for their lovers’ weddings or “bitterly happy” at closed family events to keep the sting fresh.
Their attendant answered the door almost immediately. “I want to see Akarsi tal Fædeim,” I said, just as Sukua had instructed. “We go to school together?”
I looked beyond him into the foyer. Several businessmen from the High Wilds waited there, casting suspicious glances my way and speaking a strange jumble of syllables that I couldn’t understand. One of them was so tall that his head almost touched the ceiling.
“May I have a name?”
“Eràsis from the Niksubvya family.”
He left me in the foyer with the foreigners. I tried not to look at them, but my gaze strayed to the strange patterns on their shirts and the unsightly hair on their faces.
Akarsi came just when I thought I could stand them no longer. She had dark skin like the rust-colored flowers on the vines along our road, the ones that snapped up insects and the small gelatinous critters that came out after dark, and wore the mark of Yilrega on her forehead in good henna dye. It looked like she’d done it herself in the mirror. As for height, she stood a few heads higher than me, which wasn’t hard by any stretch of the imagination — but of course Akarsi was already eleven or twelve at this point, old enough to get screened into the less intense Dream Gardens, old enough for the gyena.
She smiled and said, “Hello, Eràsis. You can come in if you like — just be quiet, Dad’s in a meeting.”
“Thank you.”
We walked along the corridor to the central garden. She never once glanced down at me. “I know you came here to see my cousin,” she said. “What do you know about him?”
“He gave me change for the funeral. I had to take the train. I was late. I — is he a dancer?”
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