Part Three
Tailiki’s heart pounded as she stepped down from the train. Nobody was there to meet her; maybe she should have sprung for a telegram to let Ftangu know when her train would be arriving. But it was probably fine. She’d find a cheap hotel and then make her way to the university, and find the address on Ftangu’s letters. Maybe she should mail him a note once she checked into her hotel, and wait for a reply before going to see him? She thought that mail in some League cities was picked up and delivered multiple times a day, but she wasn’t sure.
“Can you direct me to a cheap hotel?” she asked the first porter she saw, momentarily terrified that her accent was incomprehensible, that she’d been studying with no feedback from a native speaker for long enough that she’d built up terrible habits.
“Of course, Miss,” he said, seeming to have no trouble understanding her. Oh, thank goodness. “Down Tufka Street to the right, there, and around the corner to your left on Monument Street,” he went on. “There are several decent cheap hotels there around mid-block.”
“Thank you so much,” she said, and continued on.
There were more cars on the street in Sderamyn than there were in Zintu, although not, she thought, any more than in Tuebak City or Suinat. The buildings around the train station were fairly tall, maybe fifteen or twenty stories. The one right next to the train station seemed to be an expensive hotel, and then there was the Neshineri consulate and another expensive hotel, followed by some buildings whose purpose wasn’t immediately apparent from the signage.
It was a long walk down Tufka Street before she reached Monument Street. Or at least it seemed long, when she was tired after a long train journey where she hadn’t slept well due to the unfamiliar clack-clack of the train tracks and the whistles as it passed through towns, whether it stopped in them or not. She hadn’t passed any hotels for a while. She didn’t want to take out her map and check whether she’d passed the turn already, as she was sure that would mark her for a tourist, or at least a foreign traveler, and that in turn might make her a more attractive mark for con artists and thieves. So she kept going, keeping an eye on the street signs, and breathed a sigh of relief when she saw Monument Street.
Once she turned the corner, she saw the hotels easily enough. Three of them, around five to eight stories and narrow. The porter hadn’t recommended a particular one, and her feet were getting tired – they were accustomed lately to walking on sand, not pavement. So she stopped at the first one, the Archon’s Rest Hotel.
“A room for the night,” she said to the desk clerk, “and then as long as it takes to find an apartment, I suppose.”
“One drachma a night,” he said. “Or six drachmas a week if you pay in advance. If you’re looking for a place to stay long-term, it goes down to twenty-two drachmas a month once you’ve been here a month.”
That was about the same as the cheap apartments that Ftangu had searched out for her. Not bad! But perhaps she’d better see the rooms, and compare them to apartments in the neighborhood Ftangu had recommended, before deciding. She decided to pay for a week; although it might take less than a week to find an apartment, it probably wouldn’t be much less, and it would make her feel less haste to take the first acceptable apartment she saw.
“Here you go,” she said, sliding six drachmas across the desk. “And do you have some stamps?”
After writing a short note to Ftangu and dropping it off at the desk to be put in the mail (the clerk said the postman would come by again in half an hour), she went up to her room for a nap. Awake again and refreshed, she unpacked her bags and then studied the map she’d bought at the train station, which she hadn’t dared do in the street.
From here, she should walk down Monument Street to the corner of Kyrir Avenue and catch the tram there, which would take her most of the way to the university. She’d have to change trams at Beaverdam Station, and then get off a couple of stops later at the university. From Ftangu’s letters, she knew the faculty housing was on the east side of campus; her map didn’t show the interior of the university campus in any great detail, only the site of the university and a couple of notable buildings. But surely once she got in the right area, someone could direct her to the address on Ftangu’s letters.
It was getting on toward afternoon. Maybe she should wait and go to see him tomorrow?
No, she decided, there was time for a little visit now. So she brushed her hair and, studying the map one more time, set out.
Less than an hour later, she stepped down from the tram at the edge of the university campus. She checked her watch; still two hours until sunset. Maybe she should have waited until the next day, but… oh well. She was already here. Better to visit for an hour or so and then hurry back to her hotel before it got dark. Or maybe Ftangu would escort her back to her hotel, and she could stay later?
There weren’t a lot of people around, since classes had ended for the summer a few days earlier, but there were a few. “Excuse me,” she said to the first person she met. Probably a grad student; he didn’t look much older than her. “Can you direct me to the faculty housing? Particularly Building D?”
“Uh, I’m not sure,” he said. “I think it’s over that way, maybe? Only one of my professors has ever invited me to his place, and he doesn’t live in the faculty housing.”
“Thank you,” she said, and followed his vague gesture. Indeed, it wasn’t long before she found the right building, and then a couple minutes later, she was knocking on his door, her heart pounding as hard as when she’d stepped down from the train.
“Just a minute,” she heard, and a few moments later, the door swung open.
He looked a lot like he had when she’d seen him last; a little older, of course, but it looked good on him. He looked a little surprised, though. He must not have gotten her note, saying she was in town. And… he wasn’t alone. Glancing past him, she saw a woman on the sofa, wearing comfortable clothes, a book in her hand.
“Tailiki,” he said. “I, uh, didn’t expect you for a while yet.”
“Didn’t you get my letter of a few days ago?”
“No, the last letter I got from you was around the middle of last month? But I haven’t checked my mailbox in a couple of days… sorry.” He glanced over his shoulder at the woman on the sofa. “So you’re not mad at me? You still want to be friends?”
“What do you mean?” Tailiki asked, confused.
“About… I guess you didn’t get my last letter before you left, either. Oh, this is bad. I should have told you a lot sooner, but…”
“Yes, you should have,” the woman on the sofa said, getting up and coming toward the door. “Why don’t you come in, Tailiki?”
“Thank you,” Tailiki said, coming in and taking off her hat. “I guess you know me, but I don’t know you?”
“Tailiki, this is Dipredra – I’ve mentioned her in some of my letters. She’s, uh…”
“His fiancée,” she said gently. “Which I told him he should have told you right after he asked me to marry him,” she added at seeing the look on Tailiki’s face. “Come on, sit down.”
“I shouldn’t stay,” Tailiki said numbly. Of course he’d never seen her as his betrothed… all those letters signed “your friend,” and he’d never said anything romantic in any of his letters, which she thought was just Kosyan epistolary custom, but… He should have said, not just hinted and let her figure it out. Oh, she’d been so stupid.
She was only semi-aware as Dipredra guided her to a chair and sat her down. Dipredra asked two or three times before she got through Tailiki’s haze. “Do you want some tea?”
“Oh, yes, please, I haven’t had anything since morning.”
“I’ll make you a sandwich, then, too. Ftangu… tell her.”
Ftangu sat down on the sofa, facing her, and they stared at each other awkwardly. This wasn’t going at all how she’d imagined it.
“So,” Ftangu said, after a pause, “you know I’m bad about putting off awkward and unpleasant tasks… how I procrastinated several days about telling you that I used to be a woman, for instance, and put off choosing a topic for my thesis until my final year of grad school. And this is probably the worst: four years!” He laughed bitterly. “I tried to tell you, but you didn’t get the hint, and I didn’t want to hurt your feelings when you were so young and so new to the modern world and all… and then once I’d put it off for a few months, it became harder to do it at all; I sort of built it up in my mind as a huge task that would exhaust me and wreck you.”
“Wait, you can’t have been betrothed to Dipredra for four years or more?” Tailiki said. “You told me you only met her after you started teaching here –”
“Oh, no, I’m sorry. I should have written to you about that the day after I proposed, not months later, but what I’m talking about goes back well before I met Dipredra. It was this whole assumption by you and your parents that I would marry you because I broke your curse. When we were in the palace, outnumbered by your father’s courtiers and guards, I wanted to humor him, and then when we left the palace, I didn’t want to hurt your feelings and kept trying to find a kind and gentle way of telling you I didn’t consider myself betrothed to you, that such a betrothal depended on the customs of a country that no longer existed, and I didn’t want to marry someone so much younger than I was, it would feel so wrong. And then I got deported before I figured it out, and…” He threw up his hands helplessly.
Tailiki could only stare at him in bewilderment. “You never intended to marry me. I should have known, but I fooled myself, I told myself that ‘your friend’ was just a Kosyan custom that I wasn’t familiar with. I almost signed my next letter ‘your friend’ too, but Mother advised me not to…” She sighed. “What did I even come to Sderamyn for?”
“Well, you do have that spot of political trouble, and the League is safer for you than anywhere else on the continent… and you’ve been studying Kosyan for years, you’re very fluent although you’ve got a definite accent. But if you’re furious at me and don’t want to live in the same city, maybe take the train to Kosyndar and look up Sgensar and Dripota? They can help you get a job at the university museum. And get you a scholarship to the University of Kosyndar. Or if you want to stay here, and… and maybe still be friends, I’ll pull strings for you and get you a scholarship to the University of Sderamyn. You can take the entrance exams and start in the sixth month, and there are multiple sections of the basic history courses, you don’t have to take mine if you don’t want to.”
“I… I need to think about it,” Tailiki said, finally noticing the sandwich and tea that Dipredra had set on the little table beside her while Ftangu was talking. She picked up the cup and took a sip mechanically, then listlessly stared at the sandwich for a few moments before picking it up and taking a bite. It was ham, with a leafy vegetable and some kind of mildly spicy condiment she wasn’t familiar with.
“Do you… do you want me and Dipredra to leave the room while you eat?” Ftangu asked.
Tailiki didn’t know. He wasn’t her betrothed… he never had been. Was he in fact her friend, as he’d signed himself in all his letters? Or a betrayer, letting her think that her future, or a big part of it, was all figured out already and she didn’t have to sort that out for herself like modern girls? She’d enjoyed their correspondence so much; it had been the main thing keeping her sane during the lonely months in Suinat and the first months in Zintu. And she knew nobody else in the League, really; she’d known Sgensar and Dripota for a couple of months four years ago, but hadn’t corresponded with them since then, like she had with Ftangu.
“You can stay,” she said after she finished another mouthful of sandwich.
Ftangu sat down on the sofa next to Dipredra – very close, Tailiki noticed. They were silent as Tailiki ate. Dipredra picked up her book again and started reading, and after a few moments of helplessly looking anywhere but at Tailiki, Ftangu picked up another book from the heap piled on the table next to the sofa and did the same, putting the arm that wasn’t holding the book around Dipredra’s shoulders.
When Tailiki finished the sandwich and tea, still no more sure whether she wanted to stay friends with Ftangu than before, she looked at her watch and said, “I should go… if I leave now, I’ll be at my hotel before dark.”
“Let me know what you decide,” Ftangu said. “I promise I’ll check my mail frequently for the next few days. You don’t have to tell me in person if you don’t want to see me; I can pull strings for you with the university without seeing you, if that’s what you want.”
Tailiki absentmindedly nodded and got up, retrieving her hat and walking toward the door. “Good night,” she said. “I… I’ll let you know.”
poor girl, it may be for the best, but that doesn't make it easier on her