Minutes before her brother had arrived in the parlor, Iolanthe had indeed been thinking over the past.  It was not the same tragedy that Terrence had been reliving though.  She knew that Terrence carried a scar from the murder of their mother, though she didn’t quite understand exactly what it was or how deep it cut.  She had her own, more recent scars—scars scarcely ten years old.

Iolanthe had continued to live in her father’s house near Shopton, long after her brothers had gone away to military school.  By her seventeenth year she had grown into a strikingly beautiful young lady.  Not one to stay in the brooding mansion, she spent her days happily riding across the countryside.  It was here that she met a young man named Jolon Bendrin.  At first, she found him attractive.  He certainly found her so.  They met several times and talked and she enjoyed his company.

Then one day, he changed.  They both attended a party at the Banner residence.  Afterwards they had walked in the garden.  Nothing seemed strange.  When he kissed her, she had let him.  But then he forced her down onto a stone bench and reached under her dress.  She only realized the danger of her situation when he put his hand over her mouth.  He raped her.  Then week after week, he did it again.  She tried to avoid him but she couldn’t.  He seemed to be everywhere.  What could she do?  She wasn’t strong enough to fight him off, and there was no male protector for her—her father was in a drunken stupor and her brothers were both away.  And who else could she tell, without disgracing herself?  When she turned eighteen, she left Mont Dechantagne, moving to Brech, and leaving her father to waste away by himself.

* * * * *

Iolanthe took another sip of iced tea and looked at her brother sitting across from her.  No, there was no point in living in the past.  One must look toward the future.  There was a great deal to do.  But there was always the possibility that Jolon Bendrin might come to Brech.  What would she do then?

Terrence had no idea what day it was.  At least he knew it was Pentuary.  Oh, yes.  He knew that.  It was starting to get hot and nobody wanted to spend their days indoors.  That was where he had spent most of the last week though—holed up in to the back part of the house “seeing.”  During that time he had very little food and almost no real sleep.  He looked at the collection of tiny bottles in the wooden case.  He had already finished one and all but finished another.  He tucked the box under the bed and left the room, carefully locking the door behind him.  The empty hallway and the stuffy air gave him a strange sense of déjà vu.

* * * * *

It had been Pentuary too when it happened, sixteen years before.  Iolanthe, Augie, Yuah, and Dorah were sitting in a circle on the floor around Master Akalos, who was making them recite the names of the books in the Modest Scriptures.  That two of them were the children of aristocrats and two were the children of servants made no difference to Master Akalos.  That three of them were Kafirites and one of them was a Zaeri did, and the tutor gained a perverse delight in drilling them on the set of scriptures that the Zaeri did not believe in.  Terrence, who was watching from beyond the door, could see the queer laughter hiding behind the man’s eyes.  Both twelve year olds, Terrence and Enoch, had finished their lessons for the day.  Enoch had hurried off to his chores in the stable, while Terrence had made himself a sandwich.

He leaned against the doorframe and took a bite.  From this location he could see both the other children at their studies through the door and the carriage sitting in front of the house through the open window.  His mother’s friend, Simon Mudgett, was visiting again.  His carriage was out front, the horses still harnessed.  He squeezed the last two or three bites together into his mouth.

“Julien, Wind, March, Magic, Raina, Egeria, Dallarians, Zaeri…” the four children recited, almost together.  Iolanthe missed Raina and went right from Magic to Egeria.  Yuah was determined to recite the loudest.  Augie was moving his mouth without actually saying anything at all.  All of them were casting envious glances at the scant breeze blowing in through the window.

Then Terrence saw a movement out of the corner of his eye.  It was his father down the hallway.  Quickly heading down the hall after him, Terrence saw the shotgun in his father’s hand.  This was a great opportunity.  Terrence liked shooting as much as any boy.  But his father was going the wrong way.  He was headed up the stairs.  Had he already been shooting?  Was he going to clean his shotgun now?

Terrence followed, now just a few feet behind his father, and as the elder Dechantagne opened the door to his wife’s bedroom, Terrence followed right on in.  Then it was as if everything was in slow motion.  Terrence’s mother was in bed, the bedclothes covering only the bottom half of her naked body.  Next to her was Simon Mudgett.

With agonizing slowness, Lucius Dechantagne raised the shotgun to his shoulder and fired.  A red spray blossomed from the bare chest of Iphigenia Dechantagne, covering the bed in blood.  A second shotgun blast hit the bed just to her left, but Mudgett was already on the floor running for the window.  The snap of the shotgun being opened was drowned out by the crash as he broke the glass from the already open pane, crashing through and falling naked and bloodied from the sloped roof to the grounds below.   Terrence’s father snapped the weapon shut again, having replaced the two shells.  He walked to the window, only to find nothing to shoot at.  He turned around to find his wife, her mouth and eyes wide open as she gurgled a few last dying breaths and his twelve year old son, his face gone white, staring at each other.  He shot his wife once more in the chest, turned and gave the boy a long look, and then turned back and shot her in the head, leaving a corpse that no longer at all resembled a living human being.

* * * * *

Terrence walked into the parlor to find it surprisingly cool.  Iolanthe was there sipping an iced beverage.  The outside of the tall glass was covered with beads of condensation.  She looked up casually, but narrowed her eyes at his appearance.

“What have you been doing?” she asked.

“What are you drinking?”

“Iced tea.”

“Really?  Is it any good?”

“Very refreshing.  Would you like one?”

He nodded, taking a nearby chair, and she waved to a servant standing in the doorway, who then hurried off after the drink.

“What have you been doing, I ask again?”

“Reminiscing.”

“I have been as well.”  She gestured to the family scrapbook on the divan next to her.

“You should burn that.”

“We can’t do that.  But you are right, dear brother.  We should stop looking to the past.  Our future begins now.”

“If you say so, Iolanthe.”

Running Miss Dechantagne’s errands around the city was not something that Zeah Korlann minded.  It was his chance to get out of the house and get some fresh air.  It was his chance to be away from the ever-present expectations of others.  It was his chance to be anonymous.  Today he was headed to the millinery shop for his mistress and then to the employment office for the house.

Just down the street from the house was the trolley stop.  The massive brown mare, which pulled the trolley, turned one large brown eye toward him as he passed her and stepped up onto the running board and then into the car.  As he dug a pfennig out of his pocket to drop in the glass money container, the driver looked at him and gave him a friendly nod.  He took a seat near the middle of the carriage and folded his hands in his lap as he waited for the horse to start on its way.  There were only four other people on the trolley—two older women that Zeah vaguely recognized as servants from a house down the street, a young soldier with red hair, and an odd looking man in a brown bowler with a long nose and thick whiskers.

Zeah’s attention was immediately drawn to the newspaper being read by the soldier.  The young man was reading page two, leaving the headline staring the butler in the face.  The two inch high block letters proclaimed “Dragon Over Brechalon.”

“I didn’t think there were any dragons left in the world,” Zeah said to himself.  “At least not in Sumir.”

“There are a few,” said the odd looking man.

“They say it’s old Voindrazius,” said the soldier, peering over his paper.  “They used to see him all the time in Freedonia… in the old days.  A hundred years or so ago.”

“It’s not Voindrazius,” said the odd looking man.  “It says very clearly that the dragon seen over Brechalon had metallic scales—some said golden scales.  Voindrazius was a red dragon.”

Zeah didn’t see how the man could have read the soldier’s paper from his seat, and he didn’t have his own.  He must have read it earlier in the day.

“I hope it doesn’t cause any damage,” said Zeah.

“I’m sure it won’t.  Dragons once ruled this continent, but those few who are left just want to be left alone.  You’re Zaeri, are you not?”

Zeah shifted uncomfortably in his seat.  “Yes.”

“Then you should know from the scriptures—The Old Prophets chapter twenty six, verse three.”

“Fear neither dragon nor storm,” quoted Zeah.  “Well, I still fear storms too.”

“How about eclipses?”

“Eclipses?”

“Yes, there’s an eclipse the fourth of next month.”

“No, I guess I’m fine with eclipses.”

When Zeah stepped off the trolley, he found himself on Avenue Peacock.  Like Avenue Phoenix, both sides of the street were lined with stores.  But unlike Avenue Phoenix, here none of the stores looked like stores.  There were no large windows showing off the wares that each establishment sold.  They looked more like banks or discreet gentlemen’s clubs.  That made sense, because like those places, these stores were for people with a great deal of money.  The stores were labeled, but they were labeled with small letters just to the right of the doorways, rather than large signs above them.  Zeah headed for one of the closer buildings, one marked Admeta March, milliner.

There was no bell above the door, like any store that Zeah would have shopped in.  Inside, it didn’t look like a store at all.  There was a couch and there were several chairs, a coffee table and two end tables with lamps—all made of very dark wood and a material of the most horrendous shade of pink.  Zeah had been here before and knew just what to do.  He sat down.  After a few minutes, a thin pinch-faced woman wearing a dress the same horrendous shade of pink came in through a closed door of the same very dark wood.

“May I help you?”

“I’m here to pick up a hat for Miss Dechantagne.”

The woman nodded and left.  Zeah sat back down and waited for what seemed an inordinate amount of time to get a hat, but at last she returned.  She had a box, a hat box naturally, but it had not yet been tied shut with the usual bow.

“Would you care to see it?” the woman asked, opening the lid.

“Um, no.”  Zeah turned and stared at the horrendous pink wallpaper.

The woman shrugged and went back out through the door.  Zeah had never looked at any article of clothing that he had picked up for Miss Dechantagne, and he wasn’t about to start looking now.  It wasn’t that there would be any impropriety.  It was simply that, as Zeah’s luck ran, there would be something wrong with the hat.  Not having much in the way of fashion sense of course, Zeah would have no idea that there was anything wrong, and even if he did, he wouldn’t know what that something was.  When Miss Dechantagne found the flaw in the apparel, she would ask Zeah if he knew anything about it, and he wouldn’t be able to say that there was no way that he could know anything about it because he had never seen the article in question before.  He had seen it.  All in all, it was better if he didn’t.

Taking another trolley, one that had many passengers though none of them soldiers and none of them odd looking men in brown bowlers, Zeah arrived at Avenue Boar near the banking district.  The Prescott Agency was here, occupying the same columned, white building that they had occupied for more than fifty years.  It was the job of the Prescott Agency to place top quality servants in the wealthiest and most important of Greater Brechalon’s homes.  Zeah was at least as well versed in the protocol here as he was in the millinery shop.  He walked up to the second floor to Mrs. Villers’ desk and told her what he needed.

“I’m afraid that won’t be possible,” said Mrs. Villers.

“Wha… what?”

“I’m afraid that won’t be possible.”

“Wha…why not?  You don’t have anyone to place?”

“Oh, no.  It’s not that.  We have people to place, but you want someone with experience.”

“Yes.”

“Well, how can I put this?  None of the experienced people want to work for her.  They’ve all heard the stories.”

“The stories are, um… well, not exaggerated exactly… but still.”

“I understand,” said Mrs. Villers.  “You are the head butler and I would be shocked if you spoke ill of your house.  I certainly wouldn’t want you to.  But you see my dilemma.  I have several very promising looking newcomers.”

“Um.”  Zeah stopped and examined the ceiling for a moment.  “Yes.  Send them around.”

He looked back at Mrs. Villers.

“Mr. Korlann?”

“Yes?”

“Was there anything else?”

“Um… no.”  Zeah turned and headed for the stairs that led him down to the first floor and out onto Avenue Peacock.  All in all, he thought it might have been better if there had been a flaw in the hat.

Senta didn’t mind working at Café Carlo in the Great Plaza.  For the most part it was great fun watching people.  Horse drawn trolleys, loaded with passengers, passed every three minutes.  Most of the men wore suits, though a few of them were dressed as laborers.  The ladies were dressed nicely, and wore huge bustles that made their rear ends stick out two feet behind them.  Some people rode by in horse drawn carriages.  There were also many, many pedestrians.  The most interesting travelers though, were those riding in steam-powered carriages, which spewed smoke and hissed steam.

The bad part about working at Café Carlo was that Carlo himself, the chubby proprietor of the establishment, treated her like an idiot.  She was young, but she wasn’t stupid.  He handed her a huge push broom and told her “sweep,” as if she didn’t know what a broom was for.  Senta swept the walkway all around the café, starting on the far right and sweeping left one day and then on the next day, starting left and working her way right.  It usually took her an hour and a half to sweep along the entire breadth of the café.  Then she took the enormous broom around the building to the janitorial closet in back—the one that could only be reached from the outside, and she would put it away.  Then Carlo would hand her a bucket of warm soapy water and a bristle brush and say “clean,” as if she didn’t know what a bucket of warm soapy water and a bristle brush were for.

The wrought iron railing that encircled the café was covered with soot.  Everything in the entire city was covered in soot.  The soot came from the smoke stacks of the factories that lined the waterfront.  It came from the trains that rolled through the city to the great station four blocks north of the plaza.  It came from almost all of the steam-powered carriages that drove about the wide streets of the city.  It was a good thing too.  Now Senta and other children would be able to earn enough money cleaning that soot to pay their keep.

Senta started scrubbing the wrought iron railing, starting on the side opposite that on which she had started sweeping, so that if she swept from left to right, then she cleaned soot from right to left.  Soon it was cleaned and she took the bucket of warm soapy water and bristle brush back to the janitorial closet.  Then Carlo would hand her a clean cloth and a jar of polish.  Next she would polish the brass dragon at the entrance to Café Carlo.  It was about three feet long, including its serpentine tail, and about four feet wide, its wings outstretched.  It sat on a stone plinth, so that it could just about look Senta in the face.  She took great care to polish the entire body.  While she did, she talked to the little statue.

“It’s all quite funny when you think about it,” she told the dragon.  “I live in the city of Brech, so I’m a Brech aren’t I?  But if I lived in the Kingdom of Greater Brechalon, but not in the city of Brech, I’d still be a Brech.  That’s just odd, that is.”

The dragon, completely unmoving, professed no opinion.

“What do you think about the steam carriages,” she asked it.  “I bet you could breathe enough fire to make one of them go, couldn’t you?”

Once she had finished polishing the brass dragon she hurried home.  The fact that a six year old crossed the length of the city, through busy traffic and alone, raised no eyebrows.  She was just one more of the endless supply of ragamuffins that was one of Brech’s greatest resources.  Though tired, she managed her way up the twelve flights of stairs to Granny’s apartment without too much difficulty.

When Senta entered her home, she didn’t find the warm, pleasant atmosphere that she was used to.  Fifteen-year-old Bertice, who was usually at work this time of day, was home, and she and Granny stood in the front room holding each other.  They both had faces red from crying.  Ten-year-old Geert sat on the beat up old couch, and though he hadn’t been crying, he looked as though he wanted to.

“What’s the matter?” asked Senta.

Granny raised a hand, silently inviting Senta to her side, and then pulled her close.

“There has been an accident at the print shop.  Maro was hurt.”

“Where is he?”

“He’s in on Granny’s bed, dear.  Why don’t you go in?  I know he’d love to see you.”

Senta walked into the only other room in the apartment, the kitchen and living room being for all practical purposes a single one.  Propped up in the center of the bed was Maro.  Though his eyes were closed, it was obvious that he was awake.  He was gritting his teeth and tears were squeezing out from the corners of his eyes.  His right hand was wrapped up in bandages so completely that it looked to be three times its size.  On a crate next to the right side of the bed was a large brown bottle of laudanum.  Stepping over near it, Senta reached out and touched the boy’s left arm.

Maro started and opened his eyes.  They were red from crying.

“My fingers got cut off,” he said.

“All of ‘em?”

“No, just two.”

“One of them wasn’t your thumb, was it?”

“No.  It was the end two.”

Senta nodded.  Then she climbed up into the bed beside her cousin and wrapped her long skinny arms around him.

“I bet it hurts.”

“Yup.”  He snuggled closer and leaned his head on her shoulder.

“Maybe you won’t have to work at the print shop anymore now,” Senta offered.

“The print shop is ace.  It’s my fault I stuck my fingers in the press.  I hope they don’t give the job away…”  Anything else Maro had to say was lost as he was finally carried away by drug induced slumber.