Shatterglass - By Tamora Pierce Page 0,1

shoes. “As simple as the way is if you just follow that long beak of yours. And I’ll give you some information for nothing, since you’re obviously too ignorant to live. You don’t talk to prathmun, and prathmun don’t talk to you. Prathmun don’t exist.”

“What are prathmun?,” demanded Tris. She chose not to take offence at the remark about her nose. It was not her best feature and never had been.

“I am a prathmun,” retorted the girl. “My mother, my sisters and my brothers are prathmun. We’re untouchable, degraded, invisible. Am I getting through that thick northern skull yet?”

“Why?” asked Tris, curious now. This was far more interesting than a simple answer to her question. “Why should prathmun be those things?”

The girl sighed, and rubbed her face with her hands, smearing more dirt into it. “We handle the bodies of the dead,” she told Tris wearily. “We skin and tan animal hides. We make shoes. We take out the night soil. But mostly, we handle the dead, which means we defile whatever we touch. If you don’t move along and a giladha — ”

“What?” asked Tris.

“One of the visible people,” replied the girl. “If they see you talking to me, they’ll demand you get yourself ritually cleansed before you go anywhere or do anything. Now will you go away?” demanded the prathmun, impatient. “You’ll get cleansed, shenos, but I’ll be whipped.”

She said it so flatly that Tris believed her. She walked two steps away, then asked without turning around, “What’s shenos? And how do you tell who’s a prathmuri?,”

“A foreigner is shenos,” retorted the prathmun, dumping the rest of her rubbish barrel in the cart. “And we all have the same haircut and the same kind of clothes, and straw sandals. Now go.”

Tris followed the road that lay straight before her, the direction the prathmun had indicated with such flattery. “Niko said I’d find some of the customs here barbaric,” she informed Little Bear when she was out of earshot of the prathmun. “I’ll bet you a chop for supper this is one of the ones he meant. Whoever heard of people not being just because they deal with the dead?”

Once she reached Achaya Square, Tris found the Street of Glass easily enough. Reading about Tharios on the way here, she had formulated a plan of exploration with her usual care to detail. She would start at the foot of the street where most of the city’s glassmakers kept their shops, beginning with the smaller, humbler establishments near the Piraki Gate, and work her way back to Achaya Square until her feet hurt. She meant to spend a number of days at the shops that caught her interest, but first she wanted an overview. Tris was the kind of girl who appreciated a solid plan of action, perhaps because often her life, and her magic, was in too much of an uproar to be organized.

As she walked, she looked on the sights and people of Tharios with interest. Buildings here were of two kinds, stucco roofed with tiles — like those in her home on the Pebbled Sea — or public buildings built of white marble, fronted with graceful colours and flat-roofed, with corners and column heads cut into graceful lines. The Street of Glass and Achaya Square fountains were marble or a pretty pink granite. Statues carved from marble and painted to look life-like stood on either side of the paved stones of the road. It was all very lavish and expensive. Tris might not have approved, but her view of people who spent so much on decoration was leavened when closer inspection showed her soft edges on statues and public buildings, and fountain carvings worn almost unrecognizable by long years of weather. Tharios was an old city, and its treasures were built to last.

The Tharians themselves were a feast for her eyes. The natives ranged in skin colour from pale brown to black, and while their hair was usually black or brown, many women used henna to redden it. Men cropped their hair very short or even shaved their heads altogether. Ladies bundled their hair into masses of curls that tilted their heads to the appropriate, sophisticated, Tharian angle. The prathmun, male and female, sported the same rough, one-length cut Tris had seen on the girl she spoke to. All prathmun wore a ragged, dirty version of the knee-length tunic worn by Tharite men. Tharian women dressed in an ankle-length, drape-sleeved version called a kyten. In summer these