by Shannon Hale
Miri missed home as if a rope strung from Mount Eskel were lashed to her heart, the distance pulling. She lifted her hand, pretending that Peder was there beside her, holding it. Her fingers closed over her empty palm, making a fist.
Miri crumpled the letter from the chief delegate and tossed it into the fire. She splayed her hand on a linder stone, aching to speak to someone who would understand. She quarry-spoke, praying her silent singing could find a chain of linder to carry it from Lesser Alva all the way up to Mount Eskel, to vibrate inside Peder and Marda and Pa.
She knew it was useless. Mount Eskel was farther away than even a hawk could see. And besides, the only stones in the swamp were in the house itself.
But she gripped the linder hawk in her pocket and kept quarry-speaking anyway, pouring memories out, trying to communicate her present with those who shared her past, who would understand, who loved her.
It was impossible. She gave up and lay her head on the stone.
The stone was cool and as smooth as water, as familiar as home. Instead of trying to speak, she listened. Not just with her ears. She listened inside, the way she quarry-spoke inside.
The idea of the redheaded twin girls playing with painted wood animals brightened in her thoughts. Miri startled. She was not asleep and so definitely not dreaming now. The image had seemed to come from the stone itself.
She pressed herself against the floor and listened harder, following the tail of that dream.
Thoughts zigged in her like a snake through the reeds. A first thought led to a second and a third. Quarry-speaking was never random. It had a purpose, something to say and in a hurry. So Miri thought, why not listen that way?
Quarry-listening, she thought.
Her head hurt as she concentrated. Not silently singing but creating a space inside herself for a song to fill. A new image burned in her mind: a younger Felissa and Astrid decorating their hair with purple swamp flowers.
She jolted upright. Where had that image come from? If someone had quarry-spoken a memory to Miri, it would nudge a similar memory in her own mind. Quarry-speaking never implanted someone else’s memory. And this was certainly not her own.
Miri exhaled and closed her eyes, re-created that space of silence, and listened again for Felissa and Astrid with the purple flowers.
The image returned. She followed it to another, and saw Astrid and Felissa, perhaps having a race, leaping through the window, running across the floor, and climbing out the far window.
Another memory? But again, not her own.
The stone stored memories. When she reached out, trying to examine them as she might flip through a book, the images fled. She calmed herself again inside that listening space and followed the image.
A woman. Elin, perhaps, dark-haired with a round face and a very wide smile. She sits on the bare floor, playing a game of stones with a young Astrid and Felissa. Sus toddles over, knocking the stones with her bare feet.
Miri flailed for a moment, stranded between memories, but refocused, relaxed, and found another image.
The woman she supposed was Elin, standing, a tiny child asleep on her shoulder, a younger Astrid and Felissa clinging to her skirt. Jeffers in the threshold. He hands Elin a bag of something and then carries out one of her chairs.
Miri’s mind swam forward and now witnessed baby Sus, face red from crying. Elin, her forehead wet with sweat. Astrid and Felissa standing outside, watching through the window.
Miri focused her listening to go earlier in time, deeper into the stone. Elin and one baby—Astrid perhaps—lying in a bed with a white mattress, attended by a serving woman, two armed guards at the door. Reed houses surround the linder house, perhaps the lodgings for the guards and servants. The room is full of furniture. A painting of a woman hangs on the wall. Miri almost recognizes the woman in the painting till something else distracts her—one of the guards is Jeffers.
Back. The house, empty but for a snake crawling leisurely across the stone, wasp nests in the high corners.
Back. The ground not so tilted, the linder stones tighter. Reed houses outside, an unfamiliar pale-haired girl inside, an older woman with a stern face.
Back and back. Glass in the windows, the wood door hanging straight in its frame. There again the redheaded twins, too big now to play with wood animals, sitting in chairs and cross-stitching like bored Aslandian ladies.
Back again. The stones being laid into the ground for the first time.
And then, Mount Eskel. The stones that will build the linder house cut from the mountain by people Miri did not recognize. Eskelites who lived long ago.
Miri clawed her way out of the memory and sat upright. She was wet with sweat.
She ran to the rain barrel and dipped in a cup, her hand shaking badly. She drank and breathed, concentrated on the feel of the ground beneath her feet, the sound of a bird shrieking across the water. The here and now.
Bricks of peat were stacked by the door. The girls must have come home and, thinking Miri was napping, left again. She felt more like she’d run up a mountain than taken a nap.
She found the girls out fishing and sat beside Astrid. A hummingbird buzzed from flower to flower, dipping its beak into the yellow, blue, and orange blooms. Suddenly one of the flowers seemed to reach out, grab the hummingbird, and pull it in.
“Whoa!” said Miri.
“Sly spiders,” said Astrid. “They’re big and the same color as the flowers they live in. The bird doesn’t notice anything’s wrong till it’s dead.”
Miri shuddered. She did not have a net or spear, so she picked some reeds and tried to weave them together. “Um, did any of the villagers help your mother when she gave birth?” Miri asked, thinking of Elin holding a newborn baby. In the linder memories, she had not seen a man who could have been their father—just Jeffers and another guard, always standing outside the house.
“I was young when Sus was born,” said Felissa. “I don’t remember.”
Astrid did not answer.
After a few minutes Felissa went to see what Sus was grinning about in her book. Astrid kept looking determinedly down.
“Astrid, do you remember when Sus was born?” Miri asked.
“It happened in the night, I think,” Astrid said quickly. “Felissa and I woke up in the morning and we had a baby sister.”
Miri waited, offering silence.
Astrid sighed. “Ma went to bed one night with a flat tummy and the next morning she had a baby. I was not too young to realize that’s not how things work.”
Miri nodded. The linder house remembered. Sus was not Elin’s daughter.
“And Felissa?”
Astrid shook her head, meaning she did not remember.
“You must be cousins at least,” Miri said. “You’re all cousins to the king even if you don’t have the same mother.”
“Maybe.” Astrid bent lower over her net. “Or maybe we’re castoffs. We’re girls no one wanted.”
“No,” said Miri. She had seen the cast-off children in Asland—no parents, no home, begging on the streets. Orphan children were not sent to a linder house in a swamp. Only royalty could live inside linder.
And yet … the chief delegate called the king’s cousins “princesses,” but through the genealogy charts, Miri could not figure out how Elin was related to the king. He had no siblings, his only brother dying before he’d had children. Elin must have been a second or third cousin, but that still did not explain who the girls’ father was. According to the stone’s memory and Astrid’s as well, Elin and the girls had lived alone in the linder house for the girls’ whole lives.
A terrible possibility entered Miri. The chief delegate hiring Elin to be a mother, setting her up in the faraway house, giving her orphaned babies from Asland. In the absence of true princesses, perhaps he tried to create some, stolen from Aslandian streets and put away in the linder house of Lesser Alva like winter apples in a cellar, kept in storage in case they were wanted later. That keen-eyed, pointy-beard
ed chief delegate might do such a thing, but not King Bjorn—or at least not Queen Sabet. Surely the queen at least was innocent of the planned deception.
Would one of the stone house sisters be asked not only to marry an aged king but to lie about her birth as well? What if King Fader married a “princess” but discovered later that she was a fraud? Far away in Stora, what protection would she have from his wrath?
“Do you remember furniture in the house?” Miri asked. “Chairs, a table, a bed?”
Astrid looked up into the palatial clouds that had covered the sun. “I remember a bed, sharing it with my ma.”
“Do you remember Jeffers being your guard?”
“No. There were others who lived in reed houses outside ours. But they left long ago. I don’t know who they were.”
“Servants. Guards. Perhaps they abandoned their duty and Lesser Alva. Jeffers stayed. He probably always collected your allowance from the traders and gave it over to Elin. Once the others deserted, there was no one to notice that he was stealing it instead. He joined the village, built his own house, and kept pocketing your allowance, a month here, a month there, eventually keeping all of it. Your mother didn’t know what to do when the money and food ran out, so she agreed to trade Jeffers food for furniture.”
“Until the furniture was gone,” said Astrid.
“If she wrote to the king to ask about the missing allowances, Jeffers likely stole the letters. No one in Asland ever heard, and Elin must have believed that they’d just stopped sending it, that they no longer cared about her and her children.”
No one from Asland ever came to check on them. The king’s general disinterest in his cousins—or whoever they were—had made them vulnerable to a predator like Jeffers.
“Ma taught us how to hunt and trap,” said Astrid.
“Perhaps she had to learn on her own first, since the villagers didn’t seem eager to help. What a remarkable woman she must have been.”
Astrid flashed a rare, sincere smile. Her chin lifted, her eyes brightened, even her freckles seemed to lighten.
Miri felt a surge of warmth in her gut, a surety for the first time since coming to Lesser Alva. Her mission became as clear as the swamp under a sunrise. She would not school and polish the girls into princesses for the likes of the chief delegate and King Fader. But she could offer them an education for their own sakes, knowledge that might give them armor against whatever would come.
Chapter Thirteen
Meat on the spit, and don’t you know
Your lips are sweet, your voice is low
Meat on the spit, and don’t you know
I’d swim a sea to be your beau
But meat’s on the spit and don’t I know
It’s salted quick, cooked tender slow
Love in your eyes gives me a thirst
But the meat’s ready so I’ll eat first
Miri came in to find the three girls fighting. Not shouting or name-calling, but actually in a pile on the floor, throwing one another around, kicking and punching.
“Stop it! You’ll hurt yourselves. What’s the matter with you!”
From the pile of bodies, Felissa’s face looked up. She was smiling. Of course that did not mean much.
Then Miri saw Astrid’s face. She was also smiling.
“Get her!” said Sus.
The sisters launched themselves at Miri, throwing her to the ground. The hit knocked the breath from her lungs. Her arms and legs were pinned, and she stared up at them in hurt confusion.
“Come on, don’t just lie there,” said Sus. “Get free.”
“I don’t know how,” Miri whispered.
Bored, Sus threw herself at Astrid, and the two began to wrestle, each trying to push the other’s back to the floor.
“We’ve got to stay nimble,” Felissa said, sitting up. “You never know when you’ll run into a caiman … or a bandit!”
Miri tried to keep her expression still so as not to give Felissa warning before she sprang, but she quickly discovered that she was terrible at wrestling. Felissa pinned her over and over, and Miri could not stop laughing long enough to catch her breath. She crawled off to collapse in a heap of bruises, yet feeling good, bubbles of mirth and energy expanding inside her chest.
“I had something to show you,” she said when she could breathe again. “Look! Your allowance! The traders gave the mail to Fat Hofer, he gave it to me, and I paid him for his service. No more Jeffers, no more banditry. We won!”
Along with the small leather sack of coins was a letter addressed to Miri Larendaughter.
“May I read it to you?” Astrid asked.
“Certainly!”
Miri had assumed it was the same bland note from a king’s official that had accompanied their monthly allowances in the past. But as Astrid read, Miri felt her stomach shrink to a small, hard knot.
“ ‘Miri, things are not good here.’” Astrid read slowly, her voice catching over some words. “ ‘I cannot im … imagine you have had enough time yet, but it will have to be enough. There are—’”
“Wait,” Miri said, standing.
“‘… fur … fur … furious meetings and shouting and warnings,’” Astrid kept reading. “ ‘I cannot go into details in a letter. But expect someone to come for you. Those girls better be ready, and just you pray to the creator god that the king likes one of them—’”
Miri snatched the letter from Astrid’s hand and glanced at the signature: Katar, Mount Eskel’s delegate to the court in Asland. Miri cursed herself. She should have checked first.
The three girls stared at her in surprise.
“Wasn’t I reading it right?” Astrid asked.
“No, you were. Sorry,” said Miri. “It’s just … I …”
“You’re feeling anxious,” Felissa said. “You’re sorry we heard that. You’re very, very sorry, but—”
“Time enough for what?” Astrid asked softly. “What did you need time enough for?”
Miri exhaled slowly. When Astrid reached for the letter, Miri did not pull it away. Astrid finished reading.
“‘… pray to the creator god that the king likes one of them enough to marry her, or all our work is undone. Be ready.’” Astrid scanned the letter as if reading it for a second time. “Ready for what?”
Sus frowned. “The ‘king’ refers to King Fader of Stora. Clearly we’re being groomed as potential brides for him in order to secure an alliance and stop an invasion.”
Miri gaped. “How did you—”
“I’ve read your books over and over,” said Sus. “And I keep wondering, if you could bring only three books, why were two of them about history? The History of Stora and The History of Danland. Now it makes sense. You’re arranging a marriage between Stora and Danland. Queen Sabet didn’t have any daughters. We must be the next nearest unmarried female royalty, so we’re being offered up to the king of Stora. If he likes one of us, then our countries are allies and maybe their huge army won’t march in and grind us into the mud.”
Sus spoke with no emotion, as if she were simply delivering an answer to one of Miri’s teacherly questions. But Felissa and Astrid seemed too shocked to even speak. Miri took their hands.
“Sit with me? Please?” She led them out front, where they sat on weeds and leaned against the house, the breeze off the water smooth and cool. And Miri told them all she knew.
“What’s the king of Stora like?” asked Felissa after a time.
“He’s a widower, but that’s all I know,” said Miri. “This is why I shouldn’t be the one to tell you all this! I’m sure the chief delegate could explain better—”
“You must know something,” said Astrid.
“He’s been married at least three times,” said Sus. “The genealogical charts in The History of Stora show that. The first wife died a year after they were married. Childbirth, probably. The second died ten years into their marriage. The book was printed eight years ago, and at that time his third wife was still alive, and he
had a total of sixteen children. Probably has even more now, if his third wife lasted long. And according to the year of his birth …” Sus looked up, calculating in her head. “He is seventy-two years old.”
Felissa sucked in a breath.
Astrid stood. “We’ll just say no. We’ll refuse!”
Miri spoke quietly. “Yes, you could, I think. But the chief delegate has already written to King Fader and offered one of you to him. If you did refuse, he might be so insulted he wouldn’t hesitate to invade and claim Danland.”
“So what?” said Astrid. “Let them take over the cities, I don’t care. We’ll just stay here and keep hunting like always.”
“Maybe,” said Miri. A dragonfly had landed on a leaf right by her foot. Its purple body had an iridescent green sheen like a precious jewel.
“Miri,” Felissa said. “All those delegates and royals and such in Asland who are in furious, shouty meetings, will they let us refuse and stay here?”
“I don’t know,” Miri whispered.
Sus began working it out, touching a finger as she made each point. “Danland offers us, Stora accepts, we refuse, King Fader gets angry, Stora invades Danland, we’re in Danland … so, what does he do to us?”
For a while, no one spoke. Miri had not believed it possible for Felissa to look angry.
A call came from the village: “Meat! We’ve got meat!”
Felissa stood up, brushed off her clothes, and started walking toward the village.
“I could use some meat right about now,” she said without looking back. “I could definitely use some meat.”
Sus grabbed a couple of knives and a bag of turnips, and she and Miri hurried after Felissa.
“Astrid?” Sus asked.
“Go on,” said Astrid, entering the house.
Miri hesitated.
“She likes to be alone sometimes,” Sus said, following Felissa.
The village gathered around the house of a woman named Hanna, sawing off chunks of the white caiman flesh and sticking them on long green reeds. Several fire pits of large, flat stones lay on the reed island, the fire burning atop them, a barrier between the dry reeds and the flames. Children dumped buckets of water on the surrounding reeds to protect them from flying sparks, running to the island’s edge to scoop up more.