“I thought you had border guards,” Liere said.
Senrid shrugged. “Well, South Army patrols all along there, but short of standing across the hills that make up the border, fingertip to fingertip, there’s no way to guard all the gullies and trickles, especially on moonless nights, the favored raiding time. Then there’s the problem with at least half the raiders having relatives on our side of the border, because Toth and Telyerhas both share ancestry with us. There are even some who make a good living being either Marloven or Toth as suits them.”
Liere took a chance. “You didn’t guard your thoughts, Senrid. I know you want to know who that jarl sent to shoot you.”
He grimaced. “The mind-shield isn’t quite habit yet. It needs to be, if Siamis comes back. That’s what worries me much more than that horseapple Torac, whom even my uncle despised.”
Liere couldn’t prevent herself from casting a worried glance at the door. She sensed Senrid observing it, and did her best to pass her apprehension off as a question. “What happened with that emissary from Enneh Rual?”
“Oh. He was lurking in the hall when I came out.” No need to mention how long Senrid’d had to hide until his stomach stopped twisting itself in knots. Liere had probably heard him, anyway. “As soon as he saw me he spoke his piece about how they didn’t want our exiles, and threat, threat, threat, and I said that Ndarga was surely going south, and when he started in again, I told him he and his government were welcome to capture Ndarga and hold an execution if they really wanted one. He stomped away, and I hope he’s on his way back home now, because I didn’t offer him any meals.”
Liere sat up, her gaze distant. “Yes. He’s going.”
“You could pick out his thoughts from everybody else’s?”
“I can pick out anybody’s if I know them,” Liere said. “I mean, I don’t know that man, but I met him, and so I can find his thoughts. He’s so afraid of you Marlovens, and hates you so much. But he’s going away.” She heaved a sigh. “If you want to know how to listen, just send out a tendril,” she said.
“Tendril,” he repeated. “You say that, but thoughts aren’t tendrils. They’re loud and jumbled and . . .” Senrid paused, reaching for the words to describe the violent babble intensified with emotional color, sometimes with a physical overlay that he found even more unsettling—even painful—and gave up. “Loud,” he finished.
Liere accepted the repeated word with a nod and shrug. She was used to failing to find words for Dena Yeresbeth, which nobody else in the world understood, and it wasn’t as if she had great control, herself. Far, far from it.
She picked up her book, then said, “I don’t see why you had to go through all that. You already knew what everyone was going to say. That Jarl of Methden, I mean, the man who used to be jarl, he’s really, really angry.”
“He would have been angry no matter what.” Senrid sat on his desk and swung his leg back and forth, his heel hitting the wood, tap, tap, tap. “Yep. Every jarl there knew what the reports would say. But everybody heard chain of command, according to law. Methden’s. Mine. Have to remember how important obeying orders is here . . .”
Liere nodded seriously, fighting the urge to gnaw her nails. She despised herself for being afraid of these Marlovens who had all these rules for raids, as if raiding were some kind of game.
But Senrid wouldn’t let anything happen to her. He wasn’t afraid. Why did she have to feel these stupid, useless emotions?
Senrid was still talking. “. . . Keriam thinks Torac won’t try any plots on his own. At least, not now. I hope he’s right. Here, let’s get something to eat. I just discovered I’m hungry, and I’m sure you are, too.”
He looked at the book in her hand, and though he couldn’t hear her thoughts, there was a quickness in the way that she said, “I’ve nearly finished it,” that served as a kind of signal.
It had become a kind of habit to limit her visits to the time it took for her to work her way through whatever books she brought.
* * *
Mearsies Heili
Spring rain roared on the ground overhead, a soothing muffled thud familiar to the Mearsiean girls. Ordinarily they saluted the first rains of spring with toasted bread and cheese, but the astonishing news that they were about to be visited by the Queen of Sartor had caused a flurry of excitement.
Now they stood around in the main chamber of their underground cave, staring at the mural that had hung on the back wall opposite the fireplace ever since they’d first made the hideout.
“I think it needs to come down.”
“No it doesn’t! It’s funny!”
“It’s mean,” tall, quiet Seshe said.
The others looked her way.
“What?”
“What?”
“No!” Irenne crossed her arms in a flounce. “Mean would be if Fobo and PJ ever saw it.”
“But we had such fun making it,” blue-eyed Sherry, one of Clair’s first friends, said wistfully.
This mural had been painted on sailcloth, the only type of canvas that was large enough and sturdy enough. The wrinkled, battered sailcloth was thick with paint, having been corrected and added to by various hands.
The girls stared at the mural, each seeing a different picture. CJ glowered, aware of her inner conflict between pride and the old, old feelings of not being good enough, left over from her terrible early childhood on Earth. Clair had discovered how to go through the world-gate without any idea how very dangerous it was, and offered CJ a better life. CJ had followed her through the world-gate without a backward glance, determined to leave the horrible memories behind, but she’d discovered that even when one is happy, memory can’t be snipped and tossed away like toenails and split ends.
She’d come desperate to please Clair’s other adopted and rescued friends, offering what she regarded as her only talent: drawing. It was her idea to satirize these ridiculous people who had made Clair’s early reign miserable. She’d sketched it out and the girls had worked together to paint it, laughing and adding their own inventive touches. And it had cheered them all up during the awful days when Kwenz of the Shadowland had aided the grasping princess from Elchnudaebb in her efforts to annex Mearsies Heili.
So here was this mural depicting the snooty, ill-tempered princess the girls had nicknamed Fobo, wearing one of her typical court gowns loaded with lace and ribbons, festoons and flosses, bangles and spangles. Beside her sulked her son, Prince Jonnicake—he really was named Jonnicake—decked out in extra jewels, lace, ribbons, and whatnot, as if to hide his scrawny body and pimply face. Around them passers-by fainted at the sight, and above, birds and insects were falling out of the sky.
Seshe shook her head, her long river of ash-blonde hair rippling down her back. “It’s mean,” she said again, her voice apologetic.
Irenne sighed loudly. “You loved it as much as any of us did. I remember.”
Seshe said, “It was funny when Fobo was acting so horrible. But now that we know that her brother has exiled her from Elchnudaebb’s court, I just don’t think it’s funny anymore. I especially don’t think PJ’s part is funny. You know how much I felt sorry for him, how horrible it must have been, living with such an awful mother. She bullied him into doing the Child Spell, just so she wouldn’t look old. I find that so cruel.”
CJ stared in disbelief. To her, the Child Spell was the best thing in a world she loved passionately. “It’s not like the Child Spell hurts anybody.”
“But nobody should be forced, should they?”
Silence fell.
Seshe said, “Anyway, now that we know that PJ ran away, well, when I see the mural, I can’t help but think that it’s mean. People change.”
CJ was thinking: not us. But she didn’t say it, because it wasn’t really true. Dhana wasn’t actually human, and Falinneh, who had run away from the last remnants of a justly feared
magic race, did her best to pretend she wasn’t a shape changer—she wouldn’t even say if she’d been born a boy or a girl, insisting she didn’t remember. That might even be the case.
CJ knew she wasn’t the only one with bad memories of her old life. She knew Diana had them as well. Same with some of the other girls. You could say they hadn’t changed since they had formed the gang . . . Except, in a way, they had. You had to, if villains kept trying to do villainous things. The girls were good at patrols now, and some were even pretty good at defending themselves long enough to run away. And they were all very fast runners now.
Dark-haired Diana—the only one with weapons training—looked sober, as usual. She said, “Queen of Sartor won’t know what it is. So it won’t look mean to her.”
Everybody listened, because Diana so seldom spoke.
Clair stood at the far end of the circle, her head a little bent so that her waving locks of white hair curtained her face from view. The girls shifted their attention from Diana to Clair to see what she thought.
Clair rarely gave orders to the gang. She liked it when they found a way to agree. “Do we want the Queen of Sartor seeing the mural?” she asked.
Falinneh grinned. “Why not? I’d love to tell the story of Fobo and PJ versus us!”
CJ shifted from foot to foot, digging her toes into the bright rug. “We don’t have to change things just to impress her, do we?”
Clair rubbed a knuckle against her lip. “I don’t know how to answer that,” she admitted. “I know I want her to see Mearsies Heili at its best. I also hope she’ll join our alliance. I mean really join. I know Hibern said she would, but since we never heard another word, maybe that was some kind of courtly politeness.”
“The alliance is dust anyway,” Falinneh said, flapping her hands. “How many people have asked for our help in galoomphing villains? Not one!”
“Jilo came.”
“But he didn’t really want our help. He went straight to Boneribs in Marloven Hess,” someone else put in.
Seshe pointed at the mural. “This picture doesn’t really show us the way we are. That is, we’re no longer defending Mearsies Heili against Fobo and PJ.”
“It’s our past, but it’s a funny past,” Falinneh protested.
Sherry’s big blue eyes rounded, and she pointed to the far end of the mural. “But we’ve already folded over that corner where we’d painted in Jilo.”
Everybody stared. They had woken up the morning after Jilo left and found it that way. Nobody had said anything, but they all suspected that Seshe had done it.
CJ glared resentfully at the mural. She hated change, but she didn’t want to go back to the bad old days of the Shadowland. She had not minded seeing the Jilo part of the mural folded, even though she had been the one to paint him in, making him look extra stupid and gawky, with a gloppy pie about to fall on his head. But it was kind of nice not seeing those all-black eyes staring out at you, like empty pits. And now that Jilo had removed Wan-Edhe’s horrible eye-spell that had characterized the Shadowland Chwahir, the picture was no longer even right. Jilo turned out to have ordinary light brown eyes, not much different from Sartora’s color.
Clair said, “How many want the mural to stay?”
Three hands shot up. Irenne crossed her arms, and seeing that, another girl curled her lip and put her hand up.
Diana remembered the exhilaration of belonging to a group for the first time in a very hard life. She lifted her hand.
CJ hesitated. She would feel better if Clair put her hand up. Then she could raise hers as well, because the whole mural had been her idea and she had planned most of it. She sighed, thinking it was more honest to stick with her real feelings, but Clair forestalled her.
“That’s a majority, so it’s decided.” She looked around. “I guess that’s it. Maybe we should have an early night, because Hibern and the Queen of Sartor will be here at dawn. It’s the only free time the queen has.”
CJ grimaced at the rug. The underground hideout was already clean. The girls had swept it earlier that day. CJ couldn’t scorn anyone for primping because she’d stood in her own room, looking at the pictures she’d made and trying to decide if she should keep them or make a new one, just to impress this unknown girl because she happened to have been born queen of the oldest country in the world. CJ could tell herself that she merely wanted the gang, and Mearsies Heili, to look their best, but really, showing off was showing off.
Clair said, “If we’re done here, I’ll go upstairs.”
Upstairs was the white palace on the mountain. Clair had made only one request: that she be the first to meet the Queen of Sartor, show her whatever she wanted to see, and then bring her to the underground hideout to meet the girls. “Throwing an entire group at a newcomer might not be the best introduction,” she’d said, and everybody agreed.
CJ said, “I’m coming with you.”
Clair had layered transfer magic into the medallions all the girls wore. She and CJ each touched their medallions, said the transfer word, and felt themselves snatched out of the world and thrust into the white palace on the mountain.
They went to Clair’s room, where CJ flopped on the bed, and Clair stood at the window, gazing out at the rain.
CJ sighed. “You wanted us to take down the mural, didn’t you?”
Clair turned around. “I don’t know.” She made a face. “I have such mixed feelings. I like everything you girls make, and it was such fun when we made it. Also, if they were here, I suspect Puddlenose would have voted to keep it. Christoph, too,” Clair named Puddlenose’s most frequent traveling companion, a boy who’d come from Earth from a time centuries before CJ’s time, nobody knew how or why. “Puddlenose always says he loves coming back and finding things just the same. I don’t quite get what he means, because things change every single day, don’t they? A tiny bit? Or we’d be like statues in a garden.”
“I know exactly what he means,” CJ said.
Clair turned around. “Do you?”
CJ sat up cross-legged, her green skirt spread around her. “No icky changes, but most of all, no icky surprises.”
Clair walked to the window and back. “Maybe it’s just as fake as courtly behavior to want this girl queen to see us at our best. I’ve been thinking I ought to wear my interview dress,” she confessed.
“Why not? It’s pretty. Everybody likes wearing something nice, as long as we don’t have to every day. As for the rest . . .” CJ snorted loudly. “Falinneh’s right. We already are our best. Mearsies Heili isn’t the largest, or the richest, and it’s not famous for anything, but it’s still the best. Anybody who doesn’t like it, even if she’s queen of the universe, is a windbag.”
Clair heard the utter conviction in CJ’s voice, the loyalty. She smiled. “When you say it like that, I’m a windbag to be worrying about it.”
“Never,” CJ said, with equal conviction. “Okay. I feel a bit better. See ya.” She made the sign and transferred back to the Junky, where she stood in her room, tried to see her artwork as the Queen of Sartor would . . . then laughed at herself and got ready for bed.
Chapter Four
Sartor
IN the heart of Sartor’s royal palace, Atan was at that moment lying awake, staring through the east windows at the distant line of mountains, barely discernible as darkness began to lift over the capital city.
She still hadn’t decided which room she wanted to be her private space: she couldn’t bear to let anyone touch her parents’ things in the old royal suite, flung aside so carelessly as war overtook them, though she knew that the Norsundrians had rifled through everything before casting the enchantment. Detlev himself had sat down at Father’s desk and penned a threatening message that Atan had found ninety-seven years later, after breaking the enchantment he had cast over the kingdom—she still did not know why that enchantment had been cast. No one di
d.
Maybe it was that, and not her parents’ memory, that kept her out of their rooms.
She had also bypassed the nursery where she’d been an infant for so short a time, next to the larger, airy nursery where her siblings had played together. She had offered the entire nursery to Julian, who had stood there, arms crossed, face sulky, and said, “This is for princesses. I hate it!”
Atan had chosen her mother’s winter morning room for her bedroom through the dark months, because the curved bank of windows gave the best view of the dim northern sun in its arc, but now that spring was here, Atan found herself back again in the eastmost room in the royal wing, with its windows that only caught the morning sun. She’d looked in records, discovering that this room had been a bedroom before, as well as a study, a third-circle receiving room, and an antechamber when the big nursery had been a bridal suite.
Sometimes she liked to imagine those ancestors moving through these very rooms. What were they like? What did they talk about when they looked out this window? Which one put the beautiful marble carving of the heron in flight in that little wall alcove, made by a sculptor from Tser Mearsies up north . . .
Her meandering thoughts jolted to a halt when she remembered Mearsies Heili. That’s why she’d woken so early! She was going to meet Rel’s friends. Not that Atan had gleaned many details. Rel wasn’t talkative about other people, or even things he’d done, only things he’d seen.
She bathed, still loving to watch the marble tub fill with steaming water. She plunged into it while the water was still churning from its transfer from the hot spring veining the city far below ground. When she was done, she stepped into the adjoining room where her staff waited to dry her, order her hair, and dress her in a morning outfit chosen for the interviews that awaited.
As she moved through the tightly scheduled day, she was thinking, what to wear to her secret visit? In the wonderful days when she lived hidden in the hermit’s hut in Tsauderei’s Delfina Valley, she’d had three old shirts, two sturdy sets of trousers, and a dress she’d made herself.
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