Radiance by Grace Draven

Author:Grace Draven [Draven, Grace]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Grace Draven
Published: 2015-01-11T07:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

If there was anything more odorous than an amaranthine dye house, Ildiko had yet to learn of it. She covered her nose with a handkerchief and followed the master dyer into the billowing clouds of choking steam that poured off the tops of open kettles suspended over fires. The smells of salt, soda ash, and shellfish combined to make her eyes water and her throat close.

Kai laborers worked in teams, taking turns at tending fires, dunking cloth in boiling vats of amaranthine, and setting the cloth to dry on wooden horses. The house’s muddy floor looked like an emptied battlefield before all the blood washed away in a rainstorm. Puddles of water in shades from palest pink to deep ruby splashed across her boots as she trudged through the muck. She was far too busy trying to keep her balance to pay much attention to the stares her presence drew.

Anhuset muttered under her breath as she followed Ildiko. “It would have been easier to have someone deliver samples of the cloth to the fortress.”

Ildiko chose not to answer her, preferring to keep her mouth closed and the odor of the dye off her palate as long as possible. It would indeed have been much easier to order samples brought to the fortress, but Ildiko wanted to see the dye houses and learn how the Kai made the valuable commodity that made the human kingdoms covet the vivid amaranthine.

She listened closely as the master dyer, a weathered Kai with hands permanently painted reddish-purple, described the process of extracting the dye from the freshwater bitter mollusk they fished from the nearby lake and dying the stacks of bleached linen, wool, and silk stored in another room. It was messy, smelly, sometimes dangerous work involving boiling the mollusks, racking the slime and impurities from the top, straining the dyes and boiling them again with salt and soda ash.

Fabric dyed in the jewel-toned magenta was stretched on the wooden horses in various states of drying. The master dyer had explained to her and Anhuset how the amaranthine didn’t fade after years in sunlight as other dyes did, but instead, grew more vibrant over time with the saturation of light. Ildiko thought it ironic how a people who shunned the daylight were known for creating something that grew more beautiful with exposure to it.

Mollusk slime racked from the top of the boiling dye was pushed into a noxious pile near one of the middens. The congealing heap glistened in the moonlight, glowing green from the thousands of buzzing flies that swarmed its surface. The smell sent Ildiko’s stomach into an endless tumble, and she turned away before she lost her breakfast.

Anhuset stood beside her, hand over her nose, a thunderhead of disapproval darkening her brow. “That bow-legged Beladine rooster isn’t worth this.”

Ildiko silently agreed, but she wasn’t here solely to handpick a gift of hospitality for Serovek’s visit. This was one of four principal dye houses in the Kai kingdom and under Brishen’s guardianship.

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