The Safe-Keeper's Secret

by Sharon Shinn

  “But if I leave, who will be Safe-Keeper in Tambleham?” she asked. “Who will live in our mother’s cottage?”

  He turned and leaned his back against the railing. “Allison and Ed will live in our mother’s house, I imagine, since she understands the garden so well. I will live in the house being built on Angeline’s land.”

  “You!” she exclaimed. “But I thought—won’t you be going to Lowford to live with Robert?”

  He nodded. “I’ll go for a while. But I won’t stay. I belong in Tambleham, and I have work to do here.”

  She looked down at him. “You’re going to be Safe-Keeper of the village.”

  He nodded. “Isn’t it funny? I knew that people were always telling me secrets. I knew how to keep them. But I thought it was because—because I had been raised in the house with a Safe-Keeper and her daughter. But it was because a Safe-Keeper was my mother, and I inherited her ability to keep silence.” He glanced at her. “I don’t know how you managed to learn such a difficult thing all on your own.”

  She smiled. “I was never as good at it as I wanted to be. Thomas was right about me. I’m more interested in truth than secrets.”

  “And we’ve had our share of both this past day,” he said.

  “Secrets revealed, truths proclaimed, and everyone’s dreams come true,” she said.

  He kept his eyes on the white vista before him. “Only one of mine,” he said quietly. “The chance to know my father. I told you another wish the other day.”

  She smiled a little. “We will work on that wish when you come home from Lowford,” she said. “I still have one of my own to fulfill, and it’s haunted me for longer.”

  He tilted his head up at her, squinting a little in the sun. “You want to find your mother,” he said.

  She nodded. “If she’s still alive. You make your own belonging—but you have so few chances at love. Seeing Robert’s face when he looks at you makes me want to see her face when she looks at me.”

  “But you’ll come back to me?”

  She put her hand on his shoulder. “As you’ve always come back to me.”

  Two days later, Robert’s carriage arrived at the door, and Robert, Reed, Angeline, and Thomas all piled in. “I’ll be gone a month, I expect,” Reed told Fiona as he hugged her good-bye. “When will you go to the royal city?”

  “I don’t know yet,” she said. “I might not be here when you get back. But soon.”

  “Soon,” he said, and kissed her cheek, and climbed in beside his father.

  Angeline hugged her next. “I am almost afraid to go,” her aunt said. “So much has happened in a few short days! What else will happen as soon as I turn my back?”

  Fiona laughed. “Oh, no! I’ve had my share of adventures. It’s somebody else’s turn to engage in surprises.”

  “I’m not sure yours are all done yet,” Thomas said.

  Fiona hugged him as well. “And your life?” she asked innocently. “It does not have a twist or two still in it?”

  Angeline smiled. “Oh, Thomas’s life is always full of excitement. He travels from town to town, spreading good news and bad, and he is often just one step ahead of an angry villager.”

  He shook his head. “No longer. I’m going to settle down and let people come to me with their questions and their disputes.”

  Angeline looked at him quickly. “Settle down! But where?”

  He took her elbow and helped her into the carriage. “In Lowford. On a street or in a house or in a room as near to you as I can get.”

  Angeline froze with one foot on the pulldown steps. “Thomas! What do you—what are you saying?”

  He laughed and urged her forward. “You’ll have to invite me in once we arrive in Lowford, and I can explain in more detail.”

  And so it was that Angeline’s wish came true.

  Fiona was smiling as she stood by the gate and waved, sad to see almost all of her best-loved friends and relatives driving away, but fixing part of her mind on all the chores that were still left to do. There was still her own last wish to be granted, and another one that she knew of—

  And another one that she’d heard rumors of, but it was somebody else’s dream, and she didn’t know if it might really come true.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Isadora stayed two more days, “too tired,” she told Fiona, “to even think about flagging down some chance traveler and asking to be taken to whatever remote, dream-forsaken village he happens to be traveling to next. Besides, I keep waiting—” She stopped.

  “Waiting for what?” Fiona asked.

  “Waiting for word from my daughter. She knows I come here for Wintermoon, and surely she will tell me—or not, if the news is so bad that she cannot bear to write it—”

  “You just rest while you can,” Fiona commanded. “When you feel strong enough, I’ll write your daughter for you, and good or ill, we’ll find out the story.”

  So Isadora dozed away the next two days while Fiona made preparations for travel. She visited with Elminstra to exclaim over the events of the last few days and to discuss with Allison the idea of renting Damiana’s cottage to the newlyweds. Soon, everything was ready; there were only a few more pieces to put in place. Fiona knew that, like Isadora, she was waiting, simply waiting, but she didn’t know what else to do.

  Late in that second afternoon, she returned to her own house to find her guest weeping on the sofa. “Isadora! What’s wrong? Did you hear from your daughter?” Fiona exclaimed, running across the room and flinging her arms around the Dream-Maker. “I’m so sorry—”

  But Isadora, when she turned to face Fiona, was smiling through her tears. “She had—she bore—it’s a baby boy, and he’s healthy! She wants me to come see him, come as soon as I can. She’s not—the curse will not pass to her; she is safe from this misery. I am so happy that I cannot stop crying.”

  Fiona laughed, and then she cried too, and she read the letter, and she joined Isadora in speculating on who among the Tambleham townspeople might be persuaded to head for Thrush Hollow in the next few days. Not till they were eating dinner a few hours later did Isadora tilt her head and seem to listen to a soundless interior voice. She put her fork down and stared at Fiona across the table.

  “Fiona. It’s gone,” she said, her voice a mix of regret and wonder.

  “What’s gone?”

  “The power. I don’t feel it anymore,” Isadora said simply. “It’s not just that my daughter will not inherit the ability to make dreams come true—I don’t have the talent anymore either.”

  “Then where did it go? Or did it? Is the world without a Dream-Maker now?” Fiona asked.

  Isadora shook her head. “I don’t know. I don’t know. I hope not, though. What a sad place this would be if we could never put our trust in dreams. But, oh, I am so happy that the power has passed away from me!”

  And so it was that Isadora’s wish came true.

  Isadora left with Ned the blacksmith on the following day, neither Isadora nor Fiona bothering to mention that, with her powers gone, Isadora would not be able to grant him any special wishes in return for this favor. But Ned was a kind enough man; Fiona was sure he would have taken Isadora as a passenger anyway, though he might have charged her for the privilege. Fiona smiled as she waved good-bye and blew kisses to the happy old woman on her way to meet her grandson.

  She passed the day quietly, cleaning up behind all her recent guests and checking to see how low her stores of food were. She wrote a letter to Reed, and one to Angeline, and thought about writing her half-sister but decided she would rather wait till they were better acquainted. Early winter dark came, and she put on the tea to boil, then later she made a very good dinner out of bread and cheese and leftover pie.

  It was fairly late when she heard the sound of a solitary horse approaching her gate and coming to a halt. She lifted her head when the hoofbeats slowed and did not pass by, and she was at the door just as the knocker sounded. She opened the door to find a heavily v
eiled woman standing on the front stairs.

  “Is this the house of the Safe-Keeper of Tambleham?” the visitor asked in an attractive voice that had the soft accent of the southern gentlewoman.

  “Indeed it is. Do you have a secret you wish to confide?” Fiona said. “Please come in out of the cold.”

  The lady stepped inside and appeared to be looking around through her veil, assessing the hominess of the furnishings and the comfortable warmth of the room. “A secret, perhaps—a question, perhaps—there are many things I have to say,” the woman said. “If you have a few moments to spare me.”

  “As many moments as you like. Take off your coat. I will put more water on to boil.”

  Soon enough, they were both sitting at the kitchen table sipping tea. The visitor still felt the need for secrecy; she did not remove her veil, but lifted the bottom edge so she could take a dainty drink. Through the tight black mesh, Fiona could catch a hint of fine, fair hair and eyes that appeared to be a faded blue. It was very difficult to tell much else, though Fiona thought the woman might be about Angeline’s age—somewhere in her mid-forties. Not old, but starting to feel the accumulation of years.

  Just now, the woman was glancing around the kitchen as if looking for someone who was missing. “I was told,” she said, blowing on her tea through her veil, “that the Dream-Maker of this kingdom often stays at this house.”

  “She does. She left just this morning. Did you have something you wanted to ask her?”

  The woman took a sip from her cup. “Or something to tell her. I—I saw her when she was in Wodenderry a few weeks ago. I came to her to ask her about a dream. And I think—I’m not sure—but I feel so strange—”

  “Ah,” Fiona breathed. “That was you.”

  Though it was impossible to read the woman’s expression through her veil, her confusion was evident in her voice. “What was me? What do you know? I went to the Dream-Maker to ask—to say—to beg her to give my life some meaning. My whole life has been nothing but tragedies and mistakes. Hurts I have dealt to other people, wounds that have been inflicted on me. I wanted—I asked her—is there not some way to reverse all that? To confer on my life some grace and beauty?”

  “And do you think you have found that way?” Fiona asked.

  “I don’t know. It’s very strange. I woke up yesterday and felt so odd, as if my toes and fingers were tingling, but I wasn’t cold, and I wasn’t sick, and the sensation has since gone away. But I feel altered somehow. And then my maid came to me, overjoyed. Her mother, who had been so sick, sat up in bed and was well. And the man who lives in the house next door—a man who needs money for so many reasons I cannot begin to list them all—he came laughing to my gate. His uncle had just left him an inheritance. It seemed everywhere I turned that day, good fortune had befallen someone I knew. Someone I had spoken to just the day before. And I thought—I wondered—but can it be? Can the power of the Dream-Maker have passed into me?”

  Fiona put her hands to her cheeks, for this was the dream she had hoped for, the one dream besides her own that she most wanted to see come true. “I think it has,” she said, her voice very rapid. “For when Isadora left this place, she knew the power had fled from her. But we did not know if it had settled in anyone else’s hands.”

  “Then I am—I am the Dream-Maker? I am—where I go—I will bring happiness to others? All this tragedy, all these woes—they did some good after all? For I know the Dream-Maker’s life is not an easy one. I know it is only at the cost of my own happiness that I bring joy to others. But I have paid that cost, over and over again. I have given up so much.”

  “And what is the first thing you gave up?” Fiona asked in a low voice.

  The woman looked around the room, and the despair in her voice made her words shake. “My child, my daughter, for her own safety, I sent her away so many years ago. I thought—I had heard—this might be the very cottage where she was given refuge.” The woman turned her face toward Fiona’s. “You might be the very girl,” she whispered. “You look so much as I had imagined.”

  “I am that girl,” Fiona said, stretching her hand out across the table to take hold of her mother’s fingers. “I am your daughter. Tell me your name, and then tell me my story, and we will learn each other’s dreams and secrets.”

  “I am Melinda,” the woman said.

  “I am Fiona. For so long I have wanted to look on my mother’s face.”

  Melinda reached up to pull aside her veil. And then it was that the Dream-Maker made Fiona’s last wish come true.

  Turn the page for a taste of

  The

  Truth-Teller’s

  TALE

  CHAPTER ONE

  What would you say if I told you there was a time a Safe-Keeper told a secret, a Truth-Teller told a lie, and a Dream-Maker did everything in her power to make sure a wish went astray? Believe what I tell you, for I am a Truth-Teller, and every word I say is true.

  No sisters could ever have been less alike than my twin and I. To the casual observer, we looked exactly the same, for we both had wheat blonde hair and exceptionally pale skin, and the bones of our faces had an identical structure. But Adele was right-handed; she parted her hair on the right; her right eye was blue and her left eye was green. I was left-handed; I parted my hair on the left; my left eye was blue and my right eye was green. We each saw in the other the very same face, the very same figure, we saw in the mirror every morning.

  You could not blame people for getting us mixed up—until they knew our personalities, and then it should have been easy to tell us apart. For Adele was devious and secretive. She would listen to whispered conversations between strangers and learn all manner of interesting revelations, but never repeat a word. From the time we were quite little, she could lie with utter sincerity, so that you never knew if she was making up a story or concealing a dreadful fact. I, on the other hand, tattled on everyone. If a boy pushed a girl into a puddle, I told his mother about it that very afternoon. If your bow was crooked, your shoes didn’t match, or your hair was a mess, I would be sure to let you know. At school, when the teacher asked a question, I could hardly wait to be called on before I would blurt out the answer. Words wouldn’t stay inside me, whereas Adele could go days without bothering to make conversation at all. If such a thing were possible, I would have said that I was as transparent as a window—that light and color and information passed through me as if I was not even there—whereas Adele was as opaque and mysterious as a dark curtain motionless before that window on a starless winter night.

  She was, in many respects, the most irritating person I knew. If you were ready to leave the house and you called her, sometimes she would not answer. If you wanted her opinion about a dress you were wearing or a boy you liked, she would merely look at you and give you that enigmatic smile. She never told you if she had fallen down and hurt herself or if a girl in school had been mean to her or if she had found out what your parents had bought you as a Wintermoon gift. She could be difficult, obstructive, confusing, and maddening, all without saying a word.

  I would not trade her for all the gold in Wodenderry.