I sip again. “Where are we?”
“Not far from where you fell. There was a boulder field down the slope a little way.”
I hadn’t even seen it. Tunnel vision, I guess.
“You carried me?”
“Dragged you. Your arm’s probably going to hurt later. I did try to use the one you weren’t favoring before.”
“Two hurt shoulders, then.”
“Dammit, Lark, what was I supposed to do?” He sits back, the empty medallion clutched in his fist. “You were tearing away across the flats, and then you just went down . . . I didn’t know what to do. I’m usually the one that other people have to revive—I’ve never done it my damned self! People make it sound like it’s no big deal, the books lay it out as so straightforward, but that was scary, Lark, not exciting or easy at all—are you laughing?”
I’m surprised he can tell, because it sounds more like choking. Nothing seems to be working right—certainly not my brain. Everything feels giddy and funny. Funny to think of him dragging me like a sack of corn. I flutter a hand at the indignant look on his face. “Not at you.”
“At what then?”
“Okay, at you. Only you would think dealing with an unconscious person was supposed to be fun and exciting.”
“People always seem so calm!” he exclaims, decidedly not calm. His curls are stiffened with sweat and dirt and flung back from his face, and his eyebrows are thrown sky high.
“People are probably trying not to freak you out, you know that, right? Poor Veran.” I laugh again, but it’s sticky, gritty, like it doesn’t belong in my mouth.
He stares at me for a second, then pivots around on his knees. Silently he reaches down and collects another bead of water. As my vision clears a little more, I see the mud caking his arms and flecking his face—he had to dig the hole by hand. Bits of fringe from his boot are scattered over the ground.
My giddiness muddles into shaky exhaustion. A line of fire races up my back, collecting in my right shoulder. That same image of him hauling me down the slope, step by step, returns, only now it’s not funny.
It wasn’t ever funny.
My neck twinges; my lower back stings from scraping over a rock, a stick, a thorny shrub. Veran turns slowly with the medallion, his gaze on the water. His fingernails are cracked, and several of his knuckles are bloody. His knees are coated with dirt from his awkward shuffle back and forth between me and the seep. How many times has he made the two-step trip?
He leans forward with the medallion, and from this close I see the scrunch in his nose, his lips, his one-scar eyebrows.
The last traces of nonsensical humor slip away.
Fire and dust, have I always been this mean?
“Veran,” I say.
“Here.” He hands me the medallion. I’m not ready for it—my hands shake, and half the water jumps out to fleck my trousers.
He gives a frustrated growl. “Be careful.”
I sip the few droplets, and he takes the medallion back without looking at me. He turns for the seep, dashing his muddy hand under his nose.
“Veran,” I say again. “I’m sorry. I . . . I shouldn’t have laughed. I didn’t mean to laugh. And earlier, I shouldn’t have . . . I was being stupid, and selfish. I shouldn’t have taken off like that. I didn’t mean to scare you.”
“Like that matters.” He shakes his head and swipes at his eyes. “What if you had died?”
“I’m not going to lie, that would have made things a lot simpler for me.”
“Don’t joke, Lark, don’t do it.”
It wasn’t a joke, but I fall silent as he dips his arm into the hole again. My head is still throbbing, but the cramping is getting less sharp, leaving me trembly and weak. I try to shift, to shake some feeling into my legs, but moving leaves me lightheaded.
He turns on his knees again and holds the silver flower out.
“Why don’t you drink some?” I say.
“I did, in between a few of yours,” he says shortly. “Besides, it tastes nasty.”
“Then just sit for a minute. I’m okay for a little bit. Come here into some of this shade.”
He sighs, lifts the medallion to his own lips, and tosses it back like a shot of whiskey. Pulling a face, he edges as far away as he can get from me and still be out of the sun. He rubs his face, leaving grime over his bruised forehead.
We sink into a bleary silence. The hot breeze slinks through the grass, rattling the dry stalks.
“Sorry about your boots,” I say.
He grunts. “I can get more.”
Now he’s trying to be mean, but it only feels like a reflection. A mirror turned on myself.
“You can get more,” I say. “Back home, in the Silverwood Mountains. Where your pa’s the king and your ma is the queen and a . . . forest walker.”
He makes a disgusted sound at my bad guess, sets his chin in his hand, and stares away across the flats.
“Why’s it a flower?” I ask.
He turns the medallion carelessly in his free hand without looking at me. “Mountain laurel is the traditional symbol of the Silverwood monarchy.”
“But you’ve got a bug on your seal ring.”
“Fireflies are the symbol of the country, not the monarchy.”
“I see.”
Silence passes.
A long silence.
“What’s the symbol for Lumen Lake?” I ask.
It seems to take a moment for my question to sink in. The idle, angry fidgeting with the medallion stops, and he goes unnaturally still.
“The bulrush,” he says. “Two crossed bulrushes surrounded by twelve pearls.”
“Bulrush.”
“Cattail,” he says.
A flood of memory comes back to me—Cook sending Rose and me to the river time after time to gather cattail pollen or cobs or stalks or fluff or new shoots. Biscuits, tinder, soups, reeds for roofing, filling for bandages. Cattail has seen me through every season. One of the few things I could count on.
My gaze blurs on the horizon. My stomach cramps. Sweat prickles my upper lip—another sign my body is slowly rehydrating. I should drink more.
“How old am I?” I ask.
I half-expect him to snark or jibe. It’s nothing less than I’d deserve. But he sighs and runs his fingers through his ruffled curls.
“Nineteen,” he says.
“That’s it?” Rose and I had thought I was well into my twenties, like her.
“Not for long.”
“Why?”
“Because your birthday is next month. September twenty-sixth.”
The breeze rustles the grass. From somewhere close by comes that jumble of fluty notes that Veran told me was a meadowlark.
“And . . . ,” I begin. I close my eyes against the glare of the sky—maybe I can ask these things in a void, hear their answers, and then wake up and leave them behind.
“I have a sister,” I say.
“Eloise. Your twin.”
“We don’t look anything alike.”
“Actually, you kind of do.” He sounds tired. “Her skin is paler than yours—it’s not as sunny at the lake as it is out here, and she spends a lot more time inside. You’re skinnier than she is. And her hair is probably what yours would look like if it wasn’t locked. But your eyes are the same. Your noses are the same. You both have freckles. I expect your smiles are the same.”
“You expect?”
“I don’t think I’ve seen you smile. At least, not without your bandanna.”
I open my eyes. That doesn’t seem right, but in the next moment, I can’t help but concede it. There was precious little to smile about in my life before, and almost nothing after the wagon disaster that killed Pickle and ultimately Rose. But it seems strange, because there were moments when Veran and I were traveling to Utzibor that seemed . . . less terrible than others.
I resist the urge to reach up and prod my face, afraid I’m going to hit stone.
Still woozy. Still borderli
ne delusional.
“I’m going to pull up some more water,” Veran says, rolling forward onto his knees. “Do you want some?”
“I guess. Yes. Please.”
He crawls forward and reaches down into the hole. He takes a few sips from the medallion and then props onto his side to hand it over to me. I take it and drink. Given a little time to collect in the seep, the water is less cloudy than before. Veran holds out his palm, but I pause, clutching the flower.
“And that man,” I say. “In the posthouse.”
“Rou?”
I nod. I remember the way he came at me, the way I first thought he was ready for a brawl, arms out, face wild. How instead his palms clamped flat on either side of my face, his eyes inches from mine.
Veran props his head on his fist. “That was Rou Alastaire, Lumeni ambassador.”
“He’s not Lumeni.”
“No. He’s from southern Cyprien. He married Queen Mona the same year my oldest sister was born.”
“So why isn’t he the king?”
“He didn’t want to be,” he says. “He was more comfortable being an ambassador. You know Cyprien has no monarchy?”
I rack my painful brain for this knowledge. I’ve never had to think much about the makeup of governments beyond whatever local sheriff is in charge of the town I’m robbing.
Veran jumps at my hesitation. “Sorry, I shouldn’t have assumed. Cyprien has never had a monarchy. They have an Assembly. A group of senators who are elected to office. Rou was a representative for them before he and Queen Mona met.”
Slowly I hand him the medallion. “The Assembly—that’s like Alcoro, right?”
“Right.” He dips the flower into the seep and hands it back. “Queen Gemma dissolved Alcoro’s monarchy and transitioned them into an elected government, after Cyprien’s model, before I was born.”
I take another sip. I turn my head and spit out the sand that’s crunching between my teeth. I stay looking that way, into the wisps of sedge growing under the rock. This was a smart place to dig a seep—he knew to look for a low, shaded spot where plants were growing. Guess those books of his weren’t totally useless.
“But Lumen Lake is a monarchy,” I say, my stomach wobbling.
“Yes. And your mother is the queen.”
“And . . . they all live there. At the lake.”
“Yeah. Your pa travels some, mostly to and from Cyprien, but yes—they all live at the lake.”
“I—we, me and . . . the other girl—we were born there?”
“Yeah.”
I draw a breath. “I have been dreaming of water since I can remember what dreaming is.”
Water that never seemed big enough, deep enough, clear enough. Water that rushed and foamed, that sprayed and misted. Cold water, silver with fish and sky. The kind of torrent I had tattooed on my arm in stages, cascade after cascade, until it was a flood from shoulder to wrist.
Veran lets out a long, deep sigh. Out of the corner of my eye, I see him droop a little, as if the last of his justifiable anger is puddling on the ground. “Lark . . .”
But I’m not ready for his sympathy yet—I was doing better under his frustration. I hand the medallion back without looking at him.
“The name,” I say.
“Which name?”
“The name. My name.”
He takes the medallion. “Moira Alastaire. You’re the oldest—you got the matrilineal name. Morigen, Myrgen, Myrna, Mona, Moira. Eloise is named after one of Rou’s brothers who died when they were kids.”
“Him—that man, the ambassador,” I say, stumbling for words. I can’t say the word father yet. “What’s he like?”
“He’s really friendly, Lark. The kind of person everybody likes. He tells bad jokes. He can play the mandolin, and he spins poi, those chains with fire on the end. He taught me how to play spoons.”
“He seemed unhinged.” I don’t know why I say it—I guess it’s not so easy to just quit being mean on the spot.
“Well, he sort of was, at that moment. You have to understand what they went through. I was kept from the worst of it, as a kid, but I’ve learned more since then. He had some kind of breakdown when they called off the search for you. And then he got really protective of Eloise.”
“You said something about her being deathly ill.”
“Rainshed fever—that sickness that’s on the rise in Moquoia, carried by mosquitoes.” He sighs and runs a hand through his grimy hair, and I realize that while I’ve been mourning Rose at every turn, he’s probably been thinking of his friend making the grueling trek across the Ferinno. “She’s friendly like Rou, and smart like him, too,” he says. “Good with people, big-hearted, that kind of thing.”
My meanness twists inside me again. The opposite of me, then. That’s something that can’t be chalked up to too much sun and bad food.
I reach for the only thread left, the only possibility that there might be something tangible to link me to this pretty, pleasant family.
This royal family.
“And—the queen?”
He doesn’t answer at first. He dips the medallion and hands it to me. I drink and hand it back, and he dips it again, all without speaking.
“Well?” I ask.
“I . . . I don’t know. I don’t know how to describe Queen Mona as a mother. She’s . . . powerful. She’s a legend. She took the throne in Lumen Lake as a child and staved off civil war just a few years later. She was ousted from power by Alcoro and then fought her way back out of exile, alongside my ma. She won back the lake, and helped make peace with Alcoro and unite the East.”
Nothing, then. No realistic connection. A soft-hearted princess, a friendly ambassador, and a legendary queen. If all this is to be believed, I slipped through the cracks and have now emerged a run-down, mean-spirited outlaw, with a price on my head, an unsealed slave brand, and a bad reputation that’s bled past the borders of the Ferinno.
Veran shakes his head. “I don’t know what else to tell you. To be honest, Queen Mona has always scared me a little. But she and my ma are about as close as you can get as friends, so don’t feel like you have to trust my judgment. Obviously Eloise could tell you more. Or Colm or Arlen.”
Oh, blazing Light—Colm.
“Colm’s my—?”
“Uncle, yeah, congratulations. You crashed and robbed your uncle’s stagecoach.”
I groan and drag my legs up to my chest. I bury my aching head on my knees. Crashed and robbed was the least of it. I hit him and stole the shoes off his feet.
“Who was the other name?”
“Arlen? Your other uncle. Queen Mona’s youngest brother. His wife is your aunt Sorcha, and their daughter Brigid is your cousin. Shall I get into your lineage, as well? I can probably recall a few generations on both the Alastaire and Roubideaux sides, though I always get my Lumeni kings mixed up.”
“No, stop.” Having an immediate family—a blood family—is overwhelming enough; I don’t know that I can take hearing about a string of foreign nobility all related to me. I let out a breath. “Fire and dust.”
“Since we’re on the subject, maybe you should know you swear like a Cypri.”
I pick up my head an inch. “What?”
“Hot damn, blazes, fire and whatever—those are all typical Cypri expressions. Alcorans use sky terms, not fire terms, and Moquoians swear by the ophoko colors. But you swear like Rou.”
I set my head back down. I grind my forehead into my kneecaps, trying to counteract the pulsing in my temples.
“More water?”
I flick my fingers without looking up. “You drink some. I’ll have more in a minute. Has Rat had any?”
“He dug around under some of those catclaws and came up with his nose wet, so I think he got a little.”
“Okay.”
Yes. Okay.
I latch on to the lie.
Okay.
Okay, I nearly blew it. I let myself fall apart. I let the past few days do the worst thing
possible—distract. We’re in one of the worst places to be unprepared, and I let myself get completely sidetracked from simply surviving.
Okay, I’ve made mistakes.
Mistakes I’ve made before, that should have killed me but didn’t, because I was dragged away from death, first by Rose and now by Veran.
Okay.
“Thanks.”
“What?” he asks.
I turn my head away, toward the flats, my temple on my knee. “You heard me.”
“I don’t know, I might be hallucinating.”
“I said thank you.”
“You’re not angry at me anymore?”
I let out my breath.
“Because if you are—” he begins.
“I don’t know what I’m feeling, Veran.” I look back at him. He’s on his back now, his head by the seep, gaze on me. “None of it seems real. None of it seems right. I don’t want to believe it, because what if you’re wrong? Nothing good has ever come from me getting my hopes up. But then, all these little things—things you keep saying . . . I remember those nursery rhymes. I remember some of the names. Arlen . . . does he have only one eye?”
“Well, he has two,” Veran says. “One’s just blind. He wears an eye patch.”
“And was there a waterfall?”
“At Lumen Lake? Lots.”
My eyes drift closed, still burned by the bright, hazy sky. “I can’t recall ever seeing a waterfall. But I remember them.”
“It’s you, Lark, I’m telling you. It’s all real. You’re Moira Alastaire. And if you don’t believe me, believe Rou and Eloise. Believe Tamsin. They all recognized you before I did.”
They did. Without my bandanna and hat and eyeblack, they recognized me right away.
I rub my eyes. My head muddles with a stream of names and places. Colm Rou Eloise Arlen Mona Lumen Lake Cyprien bulrush hot damn Moira.
“Can I . . . set some rules?” I ask.
“Be my guest.”
“Don’t call me Moira,” I say.
He closes his eyes, his face turned up toward the sky. “Okay.”
“Okay.”
I go quiet. He waits. I’d thought I’d have a million specifications, conditions, boundaries to wrap tight around me to keep all this at bay. But now I can’t think of a single thing besides the name.
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