House of Sand and Secrets by Cat Hellisen Page B

“So it is. I must admit to quite liking a bit of vulgarity myself.”
    I turn to face Carien, my surprise at seeing her here tucked carefully away. Has she been thinking of me the way I have of her and so our thoughts are pulling us together? I imagine the roots of a smothering fig, spreading out and down around a blackbark until it dies. Which one of us has taken root in the other, I wonder. “Vulgarity?” I murmur.
    “As long as it’s real.” She smiles. “There’s nothing as ugly as the mundane dressed up in finery it shouldn’t have.”
    “And who decides what is mundane and what is fine?”
    Carien claps her hands and laughs, clearly not caring that the low-Lammers around us are staring. “Who indeed, and what made you decide to come out here, down from your precious tower?”
    I ignore the jibe. While it’s true I spend much of my time in the Pelim apartments, it’s hardly because I don’t want to mingle with people I think lower than myself. I don’t think so, anyway. “The review,” I say.
    “Scathing, isn’t it?” Carien has a wicked smile, and there again is that wildness I recognize, that makes me want to reach out and touch her mouth, to feel how warm her breath would be against my cold fingertips. “Would you like to meet the artist?”
    “You know him?” I raise one brow.
    “Naturally.” Her smile grows wickeder and wilder – it is not done for House Lammers to count painters and crakes as friends and acquaintances. “I’ve heard you’re not a bad artist yourself.”
    “I’m passable.” Painting is something I was taught to do regardless of skill or desire; all girls in the Houses have their artistic temperament encouraged. We are pretty things, destined to make pretty things. I am marginally competent. My real interest lies less with the art than with how I am able to use that art to record those things that interest me. “My paintings bring me more pleasure than they would others, I’m afraid.”
    “Nonsense, I’m sure.” Carien takes my arm. “Come, perhaps our artist will deign to give you lessons.”
    “I don’t think-”
    “Oh hush,” she says, and pulls me along with her. “Live a little.”
    And how long have I wanted to do just that – to forget about death and betrayal? And perhaps I was wrong about Carien. After all, House parties are hardly the place where you show others your true face. Guyin is bitter, and his view of all the other Houses is twisted by his self-imprisonment.
    Carien sends my driver home while I stand there gaping. “Calm yourself,” she says. “I shan’t leave you stranded.”
    I clamber as elegantly as I can into her coach, which is done in shades of russet and copper, with the windswept leaves that mark House Eline picked out in gold paint along the carriage doors. The two cantankerous unicorns pulling it are matched chestnuts, their single horns massive and gnarled, sweeping back over their high, rugged shoulders.
    Carien doesn’t tell me where we’re going and I am not yet ready to ask. This close, inside the small carriage, I can smell the faint winter-pear and honey of her perfume. Underneath that is a wild note, like the mossy boles of forests. Jannik would be able to tell the different scents apart, could name them. Perhaps his own family made this one.
    The one thing I don’t smell is scriv. She won’t be Reading me. I relax my back against the leather seat, secure that she will not be using the drug to pick her way through my emotions, to trick my secrets out of me by knowing when to say the right words. “You know his haunts?”
    “Indeed. You could call me something of a patron of the arts.”
    We turn into an area where I have never set foot. A white-washed pub called the Greenfinch stands on the corner of a long road of narrow houses huddled together, their grey stones overlapping, their tiles mingling. We pass the pub, into another street. This one is full of barrows and handcarts. It is too much like going back