Banner of the Damned by Sherwood Smith Page B

Any ten-year-old can do that, once you’ve got the knack of measuring off your page. But to design each page so that it is a work of art…”
    She described how they were always on the watch for a book that might become popular—but they had to determine whether it would appeal to people who collected fine books or just to those who liked reading parties. Most people, she explained, liked hearing a book, especially when read by a Reader, but rarely wanted to own it or even hear it a second time.
    Gradually her voice and mood lightened, leaving me wondering why it is that so many of us humans may love a thing, but we still test its value against others’ opinions: She was happy here, but she still wanted me to envy her, because she envied me being employed by a princess, even if she had scant interest in the actual work.
    “… and so I’m hoping to find an illustrator to pair with me. Nali says you get promoted faster if you can create a style together. Nali also told me, in the first week, that everyone wants illustrated books, at least the capital letters, these days.”
    That was the fourth “Nali says.” I wondered if Nali had replaced Sheris in the way that Sheris had replaced me.
    “How about Thumb?” I asked. “He was one of us—he was easy to get on with—and I never saw anyone draw as well as he did. Remember that sketch he made of Scribe Aulumbe when she stuck the quill behind her ear when it was still full of ink? Three lines, it seemed, and he had her very expression.”
    “Thumb’s already been promoted to inker, and they say next year he’ll be an illuminator, youngest in thirty years. Way beyond me fromthe start. He’s at Laurel House, doing erotica, so I couldn’t get him as my illustrator even if he wasn’t so far ahead of us all.”
    “Erotica,” I exclaimed, trying to imagine absent-minded Thumb illustrating people cavorting in sensory abandon.
    Tif grinned, clasping her hands around her knees—the princess now forgotten, I hoped. “Did you know that most men arouse seeing drawings, the more detailed the better, but most women prefer poetry and text? But it all changes when they give one another pillow gifts.” She shook her head. “I don’t quite get it yet, though Nali insisted I go to the pleasure house with her a year ago winter, for my first time. And it was fun, but…” Tif wrinkled her upper lip. “Here I am, already eighteen, but it still takes forever to warm up. I like practicing on myself, and at the House of the Thistle, I play cards. I am deemed quite good, especially at Riddle.” She turned her head cantwise as she regarded me. “Have you and Birdy twistled yet?”
    “Birdy!” I exclaimed. “We never—”
    “Em, you’re not a baby anymore.” She threw up her hands in
don’t cross my shadow
. “The way he used to stick to you, we thought he was sweet on you.”
    “Only as a study partner. And he recently left for Chwahirsland.”
    “Poor thing! What an ending for the fellow who thought himself the smartest of us. So you two never trysted?”
    “Never even thought about it.” I was about to say I hadn’t had time, but I was afraid she’d think me bragging about how important my time was. “As for pleasure houses, Mama offered to take me for my first time, last home visit. When I didn’t particularly want to, she told me she didn’t warm until she was twenty.”
    Tif snickered. “Maybe you’ll warm if you hear her highness groaning away—she’s sure to be better at it than everyone, like we hear about everything else she does. How close are her rooms to where you sleep? Does she really have rosebud carpets on her bed as well as all her floors?”
    The princess hadn’t been forgotten. Tif’s voice was casual, but the way she leaned forward, her breath caught as she waited for my answer—this is why I was invited.
It wasn’t family, it wasn’t our old friendship. It’s ambition
.
    Betrayed, even affronted as I was, enough of the old bond