But you can’t go back. Clothes were communication. You could pretend to be someone else, but people still looked at you and made judgments about what they saw.
Atan only knew that the Mearsiean girls had been on a surprising number of adventures, and that they lived in a tiny kingdom that the youths in the school for aristocrats up on Parleas Terrace called a honas, an outsider. Selas were kingdoms big enough for their names to be written inside their drawn borders. Honas were too small, their names written with arrows pointing to the correct tiny splotch on the world map; the words reflected the organization of social circles, words Atan (an outsider in just about all ways except birth) thoroughly loathed.
So, what to wear. She would be meeting a fellow queen, but one a couple years younger than she was. From a country that had no court. Atan didn’t want to look pompous, but neither did she want to appear condescending.
She worried at the question off and on all day. Most of what she had to do was listen—she was told what she thought, not asked—which caused her to escape inside herself.
When it came time to get ready, she shed her elaborate court gown in favor of an undertunic of plain, cream-colored linen, slit up the sides, with loose trousers of the same fabric, and over it a robe of spring green embroidered with tiny blossoms in cherry and gold. She picked out her plainest gold tiara, knowing it was loaded with protections in case any Norsundrians might be lurking about. She felt . . . bumptious, wearing crowns. But this was a compromise with herself for not telling anyone in the high council or mage guild what she planned to do.
She was ready before Hibern appeared on the first ring of the hour. She wore her usual long tunic over riding trousers under her sky blue robe, and Atan was glad she’d chosen the clothes she wore, which were more or less the same style as Hibern’s.
“How do you want me to introduce you?” Hibern asked.
“As Atan,” she said, suppressing the urge to wipe her damp palms down her skirt. “They know who I am. But I don’t want them seeing Yustnesveas Landis The Fifth of Sartor, I want them to see me.”
Hibern had misgivings about that, but she said nothing as she handed Atan the transfer token she’d prepared.
The Destination for Mearsies Heili’s capital had been set on the white stone terrace before the palace. Atan let the reaction die, and gazed up in astonishment.
The palace was definitely Ancient Sartoran in origin, or at least in design: no attention paid to symmetry. The design was more graceful than that, the complication of soaring arches, towers, and spires angled for exposure to the sun’s path at different times of the year.
The topmost spires glimmered against the clouds as Hibern recollected a fact she’d forgotten. “Clair said that they’ve tried to count all the rooms in the palace, and always come up with a different number.”
Atan said, “I believe it. Our tower can make you dizzy, because time isn’t always . . .” She reached, not finding the right word, and made a gesture with her hand, waggling it from side to side.
Hibern grinned. “I can’t imagine what that’s like.”
“Remind me some day, and I’ll ask the mages to schedule a tour.” Atan turned her back to the palace, expecting to see the rest of the cloud top city, and gazed at the little village zigzagging down the mountainside, the steep rooftops catching reddish highlights from the early morning sun rising over the line of the ocean to the east. “This was the cloud city mentioned in the records? This really isn’t a city, at least, the way I define city. Nor is it a cloud top, except perhaps in a figurative sense.”
“City or village, it was definitely on a cloud. I was there when it began to come down. I believe it took two days to settle. Took them most of a year to rebuild chimneys, reset windows, and redo the roads in these switchbacks you see leading down the mountain. See how young the trees are at the corners? All that is new.”
“Who brought down an entire town? For that matter, who put it up in the air in the first place?”
“No one knows on either account. I think that even includes the Chwahir who had come to invade, and that horrible Prince Kessler Sonscarna.”
“He was there?” Atan turned sharply.
“Oh yes. But only for a moment. It was a very strange day, still a mystery. Erai-Yanya thinks it was some spell made centuries ago, that ended suddenly.”
The palace’s arched doors stood open onto a vestibule bare of ornamentation, the light falling so perfectly that the space itself was an ornament, filled with the pearly light of early morning. Beyond that, another doorway opened into a magnificent vaulted throne room, empty except for the morning light.
Atan paused. “This palace doesn’t seem to be warded at all, at least against us.” She walked right up to a wall, and extended a finger.
Now that she was close, she made a discovery: the material wasn’t like marble, or even ice, at all. The silver component was much more present, causing that curious glisten. When she bent so close her eyes almost crossed, she perceived specks of all kinds of colors, just like the stone Tower of Knowledge was made from, except the Tower was more like bone, and this seemed . . . almost alive, somehow.
“We’d better go,” Hibern said, and Atan backed away hastily. “This is actually a shortcut,” Hibern said as they crossed this empty chamber, Atan hesitating long enough to take in the curved balconies above, and above those the arched windows.
“Where is Clair?”
“Probably in the kitchen, though she might be in her study upstairs. But we’ll check the kitchen first.”
“The kitchen?” Atan repeated. She’d never gone into her own kitchens, except on her first tour through the palace. The cook staff would be scandalized if she set foot there—not that she knew anyone there, or had any reason to go.
“The cook is also the steward, a woman named Janil. Erai-Yanya says she was like a mother to Clair, when her own mother died. Before that, too.”
“Was her mother killed by treachery?”
“Erai-Yanya was told by Murial, the queen’s sister, that it was a mixture of wine and sleep-herbs. She was reported to be dark in mood, and started early in the day with wine. Clair was about the age of your little cousin when it happened.”
How awful, Atan thought, and below that stirred an unsettling thought: Who would stop kings and queens from doing stupid things? Maybe the high council was not such a curse. Unless they did the stupid things.
Several people bustled about the roomy, airy kitchen. At first glance they all looked like servants. Atan’s eye was drawn to the one white-haired figure among the ordinary variations of light and dark brown hair. A morvende? No, the white hair, though pure blue-white, was not the drifty cobweb hair of morvende; it fell in waves down below the girl’s waist. The girl herself was ordinary, light brown skin, no talons at her fingers’ ends, and she wore slippers, which morvende never did. She was dressed in a plain gown reminiscent of Colendi shopkeepers a generation or two ago, the only decoration a ribbon tied around the upper part of the slightly belled sleeves, a round neck, sashed waist, plain skirt.
“Hibern! And . . . how do you wish to be called?” Clair asked, forestalling Hibern’s carefully thought-out introduction. “I’ve never met another queen before, outside of my own ancestor. Are we supposed to bow?”
A year ago, Atan would not have known how to answer that without getting tangled up in confusion. “Atan will do. We can skip bowing, if it’s not your custom.” When she saw the relief in Clair’s serious, squarish face, she added, “I haven’t met any other rulers either. Only emissaries, and two new ambassadors, for the old ones fled before the war.”
“A century ago, is that correct?” Clair asked.
“True.”
“Would you like to meet the other girls, or have the tour first? Um, we were putting together a nice breakfast, then I remembered that it’s not morning for you. Are you hungry?”
Atan did not want to waste any of her hour on a meal. “Not really,” she said. “Thank you.”
“Would you rather have the tour, then? And meet the others?”
Atan heard in Clair’s the tour that she’d made a plan. So she agreed. It was clear from the slightly self-conscious way that Clair conducted her through parts of the palace that indeed she’d thought it all out. Atan found it strange, to see such simple, relatively modern furniture inside the rooms whose lineaments were pure Ancient Sartor in a way that she’d only seen in archival drawings. But when they came to the library, and Atan saw from Clair’s attitude that this was her favorite room, Atan thought, we are a lot alike.
She did not comment on how small the library was, relative to that at Sartor’s palace, which had been added to and refined over thousands of years. Clair was proud of her library, and made reference to her studies of magic. Atan envied Clair her quiet life and the chance to study so much. So far, being queen here seemed to be largely symbolic, again like Atan’s own position, but Clair appeared to be blessedly free of the demands of symbolic presiding. “Do you see glimpses of the past when you walk about?”
Atan had meant the age of the furnishings, but Clair answered matter-of-factly, “Only upstairs in the towers. There are rooms that we sometimes see, and sometimes don’t. We can’t always find them again when we go looking—but it’s great fun for playing hide-and-seek.”
Atan shivered, realizing Clair meant it literally. But . . . hide-and-seek?
The mages did not permit Atan to go alone into the Tower of Knowledge, lest she make an error and slip inexplicably into some fold in time, yet these girls played hide-and-seek in this building that seemed to be made of the same mysterious not-quite-stone. They had time to play hide-and-seek. “May I ask about your ancestral background?” Atan asked.
Clair shrugged, her smile fleeting. “I believe we were weavers, from somewhere way, way up north.”
“The Shaer?”
“That’s the place. Shaer Wood. Mearsieanne had a grandfather with white hair, but nobody else in the family did. The rest pretty much looked like my cousin Puddlenose.”
“Puddlenose?”
“We don’t know what name he was born with, only the insults Wan-Edhe called my cousin during the time he was a hostage in Chwahirsland,” Clair explained as they walked out into a chilly spring wind, and stopped on the Destination.
From there they transferred down to the base of the mountain. For a short time Atan could do nothing but gaze in amazement at the bubbles rising slowly from the waterfall filling the rock-framed pool. The bubbles spun in the air, each flickering with what looked like facets, before thinning and vanishing.
Clair said, “We used to swim in it, though it made us feel drunk. We stopped when Dhana, who wasn’t born human, told us we were thrashing through her people. See those wriggling lines, like facets in a gemstone? Those are the people. Dhana said our swimming doesn’t harm them in the least, but we hated the idea of swimming through someone.” She shrugged.
“The Selenseh Redian,” Hibern exclaimed, having kept quiet all this time. But mention of one of the weirdest and most powerful and least understood magical phenomena in the world broke her determination to stay in the background. “Erai-Yanya said to me once that you have one here. Is that true?”
“Oh! The jewel cave. Yes. Right up there,” Clair pointed up the craggy cliff above the waterfall. “The jewels have the same lines in them. You can go in, and ask questions, even, and sometimes they kind of put answers into your head . . . but again, it makes you feel drunk.”
It was the Toaran Selenseh Redian! Atan stared upward, thrilled at the idea of its proximity. To live near one! Tsauderei had taken her via long, wrenching magic transfer to see one once, and Atan recollected the glowing gems inside, facets coruscating like sunlight sparkling on water, though no light source could be seen. The air had been warm, and breathing it somehow made her feel heady, as if the space was much larger than what she saw.
As far as the mages knew, there were only seven such caves in the world, and none—except, apparently, this one—located anywhere near human civilizations. And they could vanish abruptly, if they were disturbed. The archives maintained that Norsunder once expended tremendous effort to invade the caves and dig out the gems, which some believed were living beings, but in any case somehow gave access to tremendous magical power.
But the caves no longer were open to Norsundrians; it was said that dark mages who entered deep within never came out again. When the stones nearer the entrance were threatened, the caves would close somehow, and reappear somewhere nearby, always in mountains.
These Mearsieans don’t understand what they have here, Atan thought as Clair said, “If you don’t mind another transfer—it’s short—it will give us time to visit the others. They wanted to show you our underground hideout.”
Atan heard the pride in her voice, and began to imagine a grand, abandoned morvende geliath, full of ancient carvings. In fact, it wouldn’t be surprising, because Atan now was certain she understood the purpose behind that palace being built here: its presence had to be connected to the Selenseh Redian directly below it. Maybe even to that lake full of beings, so rare in the south, much more common in the north.
But all three together? As far as Atan knew, there was no such combination in all the world.
Did Clair—who had to have morvende ancestors—have an ancient morvende geliath nearby, that the Mearsieans called an underground hideout?
But when the short transfer jolt dissipated, Atan found herself in a cramped, stuffy room dug out of soil. The Mearsieans had made an effort to domesticate it with a clumsily made colored rug, rough wooden furnishings, and a lot of very badly drawn pictures affixed to barren dirt walls that at least had been smoothed by magic.
A host of girls appeared from two side tunnels, smiling with pride, and Atan was stunned at the thought that this was their home. Why didn’t they live in that astonishingly beautiful palace on the mountain?
Clair stepped forward and introduced each of the girls to Atan. At first there seemed to be too many to count, all talking over each other, but CJ named them one by one, finishing, “. . . here’s Gwen, another escapee from Earth, and over there is Falinneh. That’s all nine of us.”
Hibern had told Atan a little about Falinneh, whom she’d met shortly before Senrid became king. Falinneh was the most colorful as well as the dominant talker: a short, sturdy girl with bright, wiry red hair and thousands of freckles, who wore crimson satin knee pants and a shirt of green and yellow stripes under a blue vest edged with little crimson pompons. “Fal-IN-neh,” Falinneh declared, wiggling her red eyebrows. “My name is Fal-IN-neh—everybody always leaves out the AL, and I get stuck with Flinna, which I hate!”
“Oh, don’t talk to ME about ‘Renna,’” a prissy girl in a very old-fashioned Colendi morning court gown declared, swanning about the room, her long light-brown ponytail swinging. “My name is EAR-ren-neh, please.”
Odd, how Falinneh made Atan want to laugh, but Irenne was instantly irritating.
Falinneh said, “Now, about that alliance. We can also show you how to go about defeating villains. We’ve become such experts that I’ve decided to write a book, once I finish learning how to write.” She hooked her fingers in the armholes of her vest and twiddled her fingers absurdly.
Atan said, “You have instructions? Besides assembling armies of mages and warriors?”
Falinneh waved a freckled hand. “Who needs all that nasty stuff if you can defeat ’em without? Not that wig-lifting or pie-beds will defeat them all,” she added. “I suspect Siamis would only laugh if he put his foot through a sheet, or fell out of bed, and he didn’t wear a wig, and I wouldn’t have dared do anything to that horrible Kessler—”
“Kessler,” Atan repeated. “The renegade Prince Kessler Sonscarna of the Chwahir? Hibern sa
id he was here when your city came down.”
The girls’ smiles vanished at the repeat of the young man’s name, and Atan remembered that the Mearsieans had also been mixed up in Rel’s bad experiences with Prince Kessler.
“He was sent against us when we were trying to free Sartor from the enchantment,” Atan said. “Rel the Traveler, the outlander who helped us, said he had encountered him before.”
At the mention of Rel, CJ groaned. “Here we are again, back at the Great Hero. Rel, schmel.”
“CJ, Rel’s not a villain,” Sherry exclaimed.
Atan stared. “Is this another Rel? I understand it’s a common enough name on both coasts of the Elgar Strait in particular—”
CJ sighed, her thin black brows a scowl-line above vivid blue eyes. “Taller than a house? A face like a sour lemon, only sourer? Thinks he’s the greatest thing ever?” CJ shifted her gaze to Clair, who studied her bare toes, and CJ flushed. “All right, I know that’s not fair. It’s just that I thought, just once, we could get through a single conversation without the Perfect Rel.”
CJ was so busy watching Clair that she did not notice Atan’s expression of extreme reserve.
“Rel the Traveler is a friend to Sartor,” Atan said in her most polite voice. “He’s my friend.”
CJ sighed, struggling against the old, familiar, hot pit of jealousy. “He’s everybody’s friend, he’s just so perfect,” she said in a sprightly voice, trying to sound polite, but she could hear how false her own voice sounded.
And so could everyone else. “Is anybody hungry?” Sherry asked a little too brightly. “I made some berry muffins.”
“Did you show Atan the Magic Lake?” Falinneh asked.
“Yes,” Atan said.
She knew her answer was short. She felt the pause afterward as a silence, and saw that the others did, too.
A Sword Named Truth Page 27
