Page 40 of The House of the Red Balconies

She opened the door to the sitting room, and she and Pani stepped inside. The rest of the group held back to let Mistress Aula follow them. She stopped just inside the door and gasped.

“Who did this? Who did you get? It must have cost a fortune!”

“We did it ourselves,” Pani said. “Menthe and I.”

What they’d done, Zo saw when he finally got to look in through the doorway, was painted frescoes in the best winter sitting room, all over one wall and part of another. Frescoes of garden scenes with birds in the trees, a favourite decorative scheme of Mistress Aula’s, and domed buildings in the distance suggestive of Zash. It was breathtaking. You hardly noticed now that the cushions were threadbare and the floor needed waxing.

“Pani did all the drawing,” Menthe was explaining, “and I helped put in the colours. We’re not finished⁠—”

“But we thought the guests would like to watch us work,” Pani completed her sentence.

“We needed to do this much to perfect our technique before we showed it to you,” Menthe went on.

“But if you like it, we can do other rooms in the house, too.”

Mistress Aula had begun to cry. “It’s so perfect. No one in town has anything like this. It will—it will set us apart. And I thought none of you liked me!”

There was an awkward silence. Menthe was the one who broke it.

“We don’t want the Red Balconies to fail, Mistress. We … ”

“It’s our home,” said Pani. “We wanted to do what we can to help.”

“It was a triumph,” said Taris, hugging Menthe, after Mistress had gone.

“I didn’t know you could do frescoes,” said Chrestos. “I mean, I knew you draw, Pani, and you’re both good with colours in your weaving and that, but painting frescoes?”

“We had to learn some techniques. Do you remember that man Pamphilos who was our guest a bunch of times back in Eighth Month? He’s a fresco painter from Boukos who’s here for the winter, doing work at someone’s house on the mountain. He agreed to teach us for free drinks and food. It was very kind of him.”

“We’re hoping Mistress won’t make us go after garlands from men if we can do something else to help the house,” Pani explained. “We don’t want patrons.”

“Your hearts are already bestowed,” said Taris with a romantic sigh.

“What?” said Chrestos, looking around as though he’d missed something. “On who?”

“On each other, you giant dimwit.” Taris rolled her eyes.

That made sense, and Zo felt rather a giant dimwit himself for not having realized it. He couldn’t wait to tell Hylas and find out if he had.

As luck would have it, and much to Mistress Aula’s delight, they were able to show off the frescoes that afternoon, and without any expenditure on lamp oil. A group of guests arrived during tea hours, something that hadn’t been happening much recently.

They were a random assortment that worked surprisingly well together, a pleasing thing when it happened. There were a couple of regulars who had stopped coming some time ago, a pair of jurists who knew the Red Balconies only by reputation and said they had heard it talked about favourably the other night, and a young Zashian, bearded and trousered and looking fresh from Suna, a stranger to the Red Balconies and to Tykanos tea houses in general.

They were all enchanted by Pani and Menthe’s frescoes. The jurists and the regulars loved the idea of watching them prepare the next section of the composition. The Zashian gravitated rather shyly toward Zo and Taris.

“You must be from the Parkan,” he said to Zo, speaking in a tentative mixture of Zashian and Pseuchaian, as if unsure which language Zo would understand best.

“I am,” said Zo in Zashian. “My name is Temar.”

The Zashian beamed gratefully, his smile white in his dark beard.

“And you,” he addressed Taris even more shyly, “are from my mother’s homeland, I can tell by the way you wrap your headscarf.”

“Your mother is from Shavadi?” said Taris delightedly. “I so rarely meet anyone from there. I was not born in Shavadi, but my master moved there from Seleos when I was a little girl. I served in the household of a Shavad mountain lord for a while.”

“Truly? My mother told me stories of them when I was a boy! What are they really like?”

Zo, who had heard stories of the mountain lords of Shavadi when he was a boy too, listened with interest as Taris described her former life. Their Zashian guest already seemed perfectly at ease.