She grabbed a hard roll and a boiled egg and didn't hang around the kitchen to see if anyone else would catch her unconsciously humming.
Derrick caught her elbow when she walked into the stable. “Grace, you got laid! Tell me everything.”
“What, did someone put up banners?” Grace glared at him. When this didn't seem to dent Derrick's smile, she glared some more.
“No,” he said at last. He didn’t quail under the onslaught of glaring as Grace had hoped: instead, he smirked. “But your tunic is on inside-out and has suspicious stains on it.”
Grace went pink and scrabbled at it.
“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” said Derrick as Grace went to pull it off to right it. “Keep your shirt on; I was teasing. You look fine. So was it that bad?”
Grace took several moments to inspect her clothing before answering. “It was fine.” She turned and quickly went up to the stablemaster to turn in the paperwork about the beasts she’d secured. It bought her enough time to even out her breathing and get a horse ready for the day’s work.
Derrick was still there when she’d completed the transaction. “If you ever want to talk, I’ll listen.”
Grace looked up from where she’d busied herself with readying her horse. She shook her head impatiently.
He shrugged. “As long as you know.”
She rode off on the errand with a bit of warmth in her heart. Even if everything was overwhelming and confusing, she’d always have her friends.
The trip proved irritating, and the only good thing that Grace could say about it was that this time she’d gotten home in time for dinner. She was heading back to her room for some much-needed solitude when Harold barreled into her.
A stack of papers he’d been carrying spilled all over the hallway floor. He dropped to the floor and scrabbled at them. “You were right,” he told the tiles.
Grace crouched to his level. “What?”
“You were right. Something happened to Jack and Nell.”
Grace started helping gather the papers, suddenly interested. “So what happened?”
“I don't know.”
“Some help you are.”
“No, no, but look! Look, I can prove it. See this map?” More papers scattered on the ground as Harold pulled a sheet of paper free from the stack he still held and brandished it at Grace.
Grace rocked back on her heels and looked at it. “It's a map of Coura.” It looked just like the ones she'd studied as a child, except there were red dots scattered through the mountains between Coura and Arrosa. “How does this prove anything?”
“Each dot is a family who used to come to the bazaar.” He pointed to the clusters in turn. The path of his finger nearly traced the border.
“Used to?”
“They haven't signed up for a booth this year.”
“Like Jack and Nell. Why is this different from last year?” She looked up and caught his gaze.
“Because it's significant. We've lost families for two years now, and the early registration suggests it will be worse this year.”
“Don't you keep track of this? Isn't this your whole job?”
Harold shrugged. “It looked like noise until I laid it out over time, looking specifically for this. This-- this I might not have noticed if someone hadn't told me to check on their families. Over 90% of the families from the first two years don't have any-- so there weren't many people to ask questions if they disappeared.”
“That's what Alex said about Geneana,” said Grace to herself, not thinking.
Harold sighed heavily. “So that's true?”
“What?” Grace ran a fingertip over the map, thinking of soot-streaked walls and abandoned toys.
“Alex is serious about you.”
Heat flared over Grace's face. She fidgeted with the corner of the map, and tried to force her hand still.
“I didn't know why else she'd come asking questions like that, but I couldn't believe it. You've never dated anyone else.”
Grace nodded, slowly. “Just-- don't mention it.”
“It won't stay a secret forever.”
“I don't mean it to!” Grace hissed. “I just-- I don't even know if this is a real thing.”
“Don't you?” asked Harold, very quiet.
Grace flushed as the image of Alex standing on her balcony, offering to go away again rose in her mind, the warmth she'd felt when Alex said “my girlfriend”. “Maybe,” she said, too rough, the admission snagging in her throat like a hedgehog trying to escape being swallowed. “I'll-- I'll talk to her when she gets back.”
Harold peered at her over his glasses, letting it slide.
“Will you come with me to find them?”
“Grace, this isn't like last time.”
“Of course it is.”
“For me it isn't. Grace, last time, I thought I was going on a camping trip with my best friend's paranoid idiot of a sister.” Harold pushed his glasses up his nose. “Now-- now I'm scared.”
“I'll go alone, then.”
“The mountains will kill you if you go now.”
Grace snarled. “Let them try.”
“You're such an idiot, Grace. You can't help anyone if you're dead.”
“I can't stay here.”
“If they're dead, they won't get any more dead. If-- if it's something else. It's already been months and months. They can stand it a while, and you'll have better chances of living long enough to actually help.” Harold hesitated.
Grace didn’t have the patience to make nice. “What is it?”
“Alex is back in another three weeks. She might go with you.”
Grace felt like Harold had punched all the breath from her lungs, which was a ridiculous thing to feel. Harold had probably never thrown a punch in his life.
“If you get her killed, I'll--” Harold stopped abruptly. “I don't know what I'll do, but I'll figure something out, and you won't like it.”
“She's not going to get killed.” Grace spat the words. “No one is going to get killed.”
Harold nodded, gathering his papers.
Grace handed him the stack she'd put together. A thought had occurred. “Actually, I have a better idea.”
“Better than getting people killed?” Harold straightened up with the stack of papers.
Grace grinned. “I’ll go to Arrosa.”
Harold’s eyes bulged. He pointed at the dots: most of them bordered Arrosa.
“Exactly,” said Grace.
“You’ll need this, then.” Harold handed Grace the map. “I’ll tell her where you’ve gone. Just-- remember she's not a fighter. Take care of her.”
Grace nodded, once, and went back to her room buried in thought.
Grace regretted the choice almost as soon as they’d set out.
The trip through the pass was boring and slow. The weather had caught up with them, and it grew colder day after day as they went north. The oxen smelled bad, and the river shrank smaller and smaller the farther they went. Grace had been this way before to Arrosa, but she'd been part of a group of two or three people, and they'd taken horses.
Then, the journey had been swift and thrilling: racing to see who could go the fastest in the narrows of the valley.
Loaded down with barges full of fabrics, food, and goods from the market, the journey seemed interminable. They stopped every evening and cooked dinner on fires for the entire blasted company. They had to sit around and make polite conversation with animal bleating for background music. There was nowhere Grace could go to get away from the people.
Dylan was there, always there, always fawning over Petra. Grace hated that the most: the way Petra laughed whenever Dylan said something to her. The way Dylan talked as if Petra wasn't the best arbiter Coura had, as if she was just another woman to flirt with.
Grace tried to get a moment with Petra to ask what was going on and also if she'd lost her mind, but the journey had swept everyone up into a cacophonous tangle of excited humanity. Half of them probably hadn
’t actually been this way before, Grace reminded herself, which would go some way to explain why they were acting like children who'd been unexpectedly let out of lessons early on the first day in a new academy and had a whole new play space to explore.
She hoped that by the time the journey had reached the halfway part, the festival atmosphere would have begun to fade, and she would get a moment to ask Petra what she thought she was doing with Dylan.
That night after supper, though, as Grace was on her way over to try again to catch Petra for a moment of private conversation, Dylan stood up from his own meal and extended his hand. Petra smiled up at him, stood up herself, and let him lead her into the thicket of rocks that sprouted on the steep valley walls.
Grace hoped they didn't cause an avalanche, and then she hoped they did, and then she pulled the blanket harder around herself and thought about the stench of the oxen, the whisper of the wind, the way she'd deflect boring conversations on the next day's trudge, anything at all so she wouldn't think about that.
The next day, she abandoned all pretense of conviviality and cut in to one of Petra's conversations to pull her aside.
“Petra--” Grace began.
“I don't want to hear a word!” hissed Petra, wrenching her arm away from Grace's touch. “You disappear for half the summer, you come back for barely two weeks and sleep with probably a criminal, not that you bothered to talk to me a bit when you were home, and now you're going to tell me about how you don't like my boyfriend?”
“Your boyfriend?”
“My boyfriend, Grace, as you would very well know if you'd paid five minutes of attention to me at any point after Midsummer!”
Grace could feel the prickle of Petra's anger low in her mind, which meant Petra was projecting on purpose.
“I'm sorry,” she said, throat dry and at a loss for words. “But--”
“I don't want your buts, your worries, or your concerns! I want you to be happy for me, Grace, and if you can't do that, then I want you to leave me alone. Do you think I want to feel you hovering over me, worrying all the time?” Petra whirled back into the crowd and smiled broadly at the first person to cross her path. The pulse of her displeasure lingered in the back of Grace's mind like a bite of bad fruit in the back of the mouth, still rotten even after you'd spat it out, and Grace realized she was doing it on purpose to keep her away. Very well, then, Grace thought to herself. Two could play at that game.
Petra kept spending time with Dylan and refusing to speak to Grace as the canyon walls changed from warm Couran browns and reds to Arrosan greys. They said you could see the strains of Arrosa's mineral wealth sparkle in veins as you got closer. To Grace, it mostly looked like clouds, the kind that showed up on an otherwise perfectly lovely day to play outside to dump a load of rain right on top of her.
The distant peaks had begun getting shorter and shorter as they faded into the lofted horizon, and Grace felt grouchier and tried not to show it.
Winter
Chapter 9
She didn't know how to feel about arriving in Arrosa's capital city: it was far away from home, but familiar to her from the trips she'd made before. Best of all, she could slip away from the happiness of the rest of the exchange group and steal some time alone.
The path that they’d traveled on had grown broader and broader until it was wide enough to allow four carriages to pass abreast. It led directly to the state building in a display of calculated grandeur, featuring jutting metal-plated gargoyles and a grey stone façade visible from a full mile down the ramrod-straight street. Arrosan guides had led the entire party from Coura down that main street, pointing out the attractions amidst a chorus of impressed noises from newcomers. They ended up at a slightly smaller building just over a block away, where they’d been sorted into queues based on country and name to receive schedules and maps.
Grace waited without comment and accepted the thick welcome packet with some trepidation. The cover was printed on thick paper and emblazoned with the legend “First Annual Arrosan Winter Symposium of Unity and Sharing”. Cocking a hip against a wall, she began to thumb through it. They'd reserved the entire building for the visiting dignitaries and experts, she learned, and it had been constructed for the purpose. There must have been an army of people involved in planning the symposium, and Grace began to wonder how long the plans had been in the works. One thing was certain, whoever had planned this had been very certain of the outcome, and was equally confident of its future success.
She turned the page and found a complicated multi-page listing of room assignments. After a minute of perusal, though, the logic behind it made sudden sense, and Grace had another moment of being impressed at the people behind the scenes. She found her own name listed in a section full of Courans who had clearly been chosen more for their position than their technical expertise.
The line of people had begun to die down, replaced by clumps of milling people. The overall volume began to rise as people began discussing the contents of the packets. With no remorse, Grace scanned the room for the stairs and fled. The directions in the packet brought her to a door, and she shoved it open and went in with relief.
The small room was aggressively grey, a pale neutral shade that didn’t compete with the darker gray bedspread. It had a single narrow window and fixtures set directly into the ceiling bathed the room in blue light. Though it was barely three paces from the end of the bed to the closet, it was a private room and even had a private bath.
The directions had indicated that the Petra’s room was next door. Silence stretched on and on, when Petra’s laughter should have spilled out around the door. Petra was clearly not there. She was busy, Grace assumed sourly, and not going to stop in to see her. In Petra’s absence, Grace accepted privacy as a consolation prize. At least she had the room, and the evening, to herself.
She took a shower, running her hands over the shiny silver fixtures, missing the warm tans of her bathroom at home, and then focused on scrubbing three weeks' worth of travel dust off her skin. It ran together in rivulets of brown and grey, and she ignored it and raised white lather as if building a new city on her skin.
The towels in the bathroom were small and thin. Since she had no alternative, she tried one out and found it both very efficient at absorbing water and extremely unsatisfying. Dry and naked, she sprawled out on the bed and went over the packet more thoroughly.
Now that she had the hang of how the packet committee’s collective brain functioned, it wasn’t hard to make sense of the schedule of tours, workshops, and classes.
The first several weeks were more heavily scheduled, with more and more free time for participant-led workshops as the schedule went on. Some of it even looked interesting.
She riffled through the pages again, glanced out the window at the growing dark.
It was still annoyingly early, and Grace was surprised to find that she was lonely.
Were she responsible and perfect like Petra, she'd go to bed early in preparation for the start of the program tomorrow. Petra herself, however, was out the earth knew where, and Grace felt no compunction about pulling on something just dressy enough to meet the highfalutin dress codes they set in Arrosa so she could go out. Besides, bartenders always had the best gossip.
The moment she stepped foot in the door, she felt out of place. She knew she was short, but she wasn’t used to wading through a sea of eye-level shoulders, either. She had to push her way through to the bar.
A live band played percussive background music that involved an unfamiliar chime that jangled Grace’s nerves. Drinks scraped along the metal counter in copper cups. The harsh electric lighting cast deep shadows and made Grace’s eyes hurt. She squinted to decipher the menu.
As always, the Couran wine was outrageously overpriced in the Arrosan club. Grace ordered the local drink, some sort of liquor that burned like ash. There was, Grace recalled, a tour one could take if one arrived early and wished to pretend they were there for the culture first and the
drinks second, and not the other way around.
She watched dancers clad in dizzyingly bright pinks, oranges, and yellows gyrate in rhythm with the drums. There was plenty of culture right here without playing the tourist. Ordering another drink, Grace scoped out the quietest corner of the bar and settled in to watch the crowd.
Three drinks later, her stomach lurched. She put her glass back down on the bar. The Arrosan liquor was getting to her, but she wasn’t ready to head home. “What kind of wine do you have?” she asked the bartender.
The bartender barely bothered to glance over at Grace. “Sure, we have wine. You want red or white?”
“What kinds of red?” asked Grace.
This caught his attention. Leveling a glare across the counter, he said, “The kind that’s not white. There’s only one.”
Grace blinked.
“Look, we were lucky to get any. Do you want it or not? You’re wasting my time.”
“The red’s fine,” said Grace.
She didn’t comment when he poured it into the wrong kind of glass and slid it across to to her.
“Thank you,” she said instead, and took a sip.
Even three steps from sober, Grace could tell it was terrible. She tried not to grimace as she drained the glass.
The bartender cocked his head and glanced over her face. “Lousy, isn’t it?”
Grace sputtered. Torn between loyalty to her country and the dregs of sour wine in her cup, she settled for, “I’ve had better.”
“You’re the one who wanted it.” He nodded with satisfaction, eying her outfit with a sneer. “Maybe if you lazy Courans would step up and do work for a change, there would be some better choices on the market.”
The glass rang as Grace put it down hard. It screeched along the metal loudly enough that the couple sitting next to her turned to give her a dirty look. She could feel frustration gnawing at her gut.
Warming to his topic, he leaned on his elbows, encroached on her space. “You’re one of them, come for the event? Maybe, if you’re so particular, you could have brought your own wine.”
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