Queen of All

by Anya Josephs

  We’re dragged out of bed with the dawn. As promised, there is no sympathy for us weary nighttime adventurers. As soon as we stumble down the ladder, bleary-eyed and half-awake, Aunt Mae puts Sisi to work kneading dough and has me run down to the well for the day’s full supply of water, a particularly arduous task.

  We’re sent off to our separate chores so early that I don’t get a chance to talk to Sisi at all. I find myself wondering if that’s a deliberate maneuver, if Aunt Mae is trying to keep me from having a chance to ask Sisi about the contents of the letter. That seems silly, since Sisi and I sleep in the same bed. If she wanted to tell me anything, she’d have plenty of opportunity to do so.

  But Sisi is clearly still determined to avoid me. During the morning meal, Sisi sits straight across the table from me, between Uncle Willem and her brother Jorj, picking at her portion of breakfast. I tear my slim slice of dark bread into crumbs, watching Sisi’s face as she carefully avoids my glances. Once we’ve eaten—slowly to make the meager portions last a little longer—Sisi remains inside, helping Aunt Mae clear the plates, as I follow Uncle Willem, the boys, my father, and Jorj out to the orchard to begin our day’s work.

  As we cross the garden, I see the pahyat-house that Sisi and I built when we were children, rotting peacefully under the shade of a blackberry bramble. The tiny house was meant to look like our own, though made from twisted branches and bits of grass. I remember how we used to steal bits of food from the kitchen and even some of the offerings Aunt Mae leaves out for the Goddess to put in the house. Milk, when we could get it, in a thimble because some of the smallest tribes of the pahyat people supposedly loved to drink it along with bits of sweets. We’d check every day to see if the food had been taken, though it never was.

  “Jeni!” Jorj snaps at me. “You’re walking right through the peppers.”

  I realize he’s right. Lost in my thoughts, I’ve dragged my feet right through the tender seedlings, uprooting a few. I stop to try to fix the damage I’ve done, conscious that we can hardly afford the waste of good food, and then hurry to catch up with the men.

  My father has set us to work in the furthest corner of the orchard today. I climb up the first of the trees. It used to be Merri’s job, before she was with child, and her slim frame seemed better suited for the task. No matter how scanty our meals get, I’ll never be slender like most Third Quarter folk. I’m built more like Sisi and Jorj, but without Sisi’s appealing curves. As Aunt Mae sometimes laughingly puts it—much to my dismay—I have the body of an apple: round in the middle… and in all the other parts too. In spite of my size, though, I’ve always been the best at climbing to the top of the trees, whether to pick fruit from the branches in autumn or to check how they’re growing and to prune the extra branches in summer.

  Uncle Willem and Jorj do the bulk of today’s work, tying off the thick, heavy branches further down on the tree. My father inspects each trunk to see which parts are healthy and which need to be removed then sends each of them where we’re needed most. I’m left on my own to take care of the small, dry twigs at the top branches—less important, perhaps, but still a danger to the growing fruit as they can block the sunlight if allowed to remain throughout the season. I sit on a branch and pull out my small belt-knife, trimming away whatever feels brittle or dry to the touch.

  As I work, I let my mind wander. I love my task, not just because I’m good at it but also because of what I can see from here. I move from branch to branch throughout the long morning, getting glimpses of every corner of the farm. Over the course of the day, I see the sky changing, from the orange and pink of dawn to the bright shining blue of the late summer’s midday sky. I can see the rolling hills that surround our farm, and the long dirt road that goes from our front door out through those hills, and onwards, to the rest of the Kingdom.

  That road leads to the center of Leasane, our town, where the market is. It leads to the other small houses owned by the other small farmers with small lives like my own. It leads to the forest surrounding the town, and, just a little off the road, all the secrets that lie there: Kariana’s abandoned cottage, the old stone circle that must have been made centuries ago by the adirim, the huge bones in the wood that Jorj used to say belonged to a ziz, those mythical birds with wings big enough to blot out the sun. It’s the road Merri walked down to find work with Jorj’s parents, and the road Jorj followed her back here on, carrying the baby Sisi in his arms as they fled the ruin of their childhood home. It’s the road my mother walked down when she came to live with us, and, I assume, the one that carried her away again on the day she abandoned my father and me.

  I wonder if Sisi will find herself back on it one day, walking away from us, and where it will lead her.

  Her brother Jorj has been able to fit himself into life here. He’s respected—even my father sometimes defers to him, and the men in town treat him well, not so much for his high birth as for his friendly ways in spite of it. Besides, he’s so entirely in love with Merri that nothing else seems to matter much to him.

  Sisi, on the other hand, has never quite found her place. It’s hard to imagine her settling down as a farmer’s wife in a little house like the one my grandfather built for our family, having children, growing old, and dying here in Leasane. She knows too much, thinks too much, argues too much. She doesn’t fit into the pattern that is set out for girls like us.

  I wonder what I’ll do with myself if she goes.

  Then again, I may have little choice but to accept that things are changing—even the farm, the land itself, is different than it was when I was young. My father tries to hide it from us, but it’s plain to see. The heavy lines on his face, the hours Sisi spends with Aunt Mae poring over the account books, trying to figure out where the money is going, and the state of the trees themselves all tell the story of our struggle to get by.

  So, too, does my daily work here on the farm. There are a few early-season fruits on the branches already. Though still green, not ready to eat or press for cider, most are already shot through with the dark mushy patches that indicate worms. I slice into one with my knife and cringe as I see the white squirming masses slide out of it.

  Five years ago was the first time that the rotting disease affected our crops. That season, we lost a tenth of the growth to rot and the bugs that follow it. The year after, despite my father’s careful efforts to remove fruit at the first signs of disease and to bring in fresh water often, just as many again were lost. Three years ago, one in four had to be carted out to the woods so they wouldn’t infect the rest. Two years ago, it was nearly half, and last year, most. This harvest it seems like few healthy fruit will grow at all.

  When I was a small girl, it was different. For leagues around, people said that Gaia blessed my father’s farm. In the summertime, on the longest day of the year, he would invite the witch-woman Kariana to come from her little cottage in the woods. Aunt Mae would make a special feast for us all, and afterward we would go out into the orchard and hold hands and dance as Kariana sang something in the Old Tongue. Ours wasn’t the only house she came to, but she’d always whisper to me before she left that we were her favorite—probably because of Aunt Mae’s famous apple pie, for which she’d carefully preserve the finest fruits of the previous harvest to be enjoyed on the holiday.

  Within a few weeks of Kariana’s visits, the trees would bloom white and lovely, and in autumn they’d be so heavy with fruit that even the thickest branches bowed low to the ground. We couldn’t harvest it all, leaving some in the fields for the poor to take if they were hungry, or to fatten the birds. Out for the go’im, Aunt Mae used to say. I was never sure if she believed it or not, but in those golden childhood days it seemed possible to reach into a bedtime story, to believe that peoples other than humans might still walk the land in secret, that the old tales were faded histories, not fantasies.

  Now many of the trees’ limbs are bare, and still more of them hold nothing but a few shriveled fruits, or sickly green ones that
will never ripen. In recent years, we can afford to leave nothing for those less fortunate—we are poor ourselves, and everyone we know is poor. And the magic, I hear people whisper, has all gone out of the Kingdom as though it were never there.

  Times are hard, and only getting harder. There are too many mouths to feed. I suspect Jorj and Merri put off having children on purpose. The child they’re expecting now is only their first, even though they’ve been married fourteen years. Perhaps they hoped that things would improve, but they haven’t. Or perhaps barrenness curses more than just the land, and they weren’t able to have this child they both want so badly until now.

  Aunt Mae is stretching what food her garden grows as far as she can, and I think my father has taken out a loan out from one of the larger farms to get by. They try to hide all this from us children, but from my vantage point in the trees, I see everything. Up here, hidden by the leaves, I’m easy to forget about.

  Not that I need to be up in the sky for people to forget that I exist.

  Sisi, at least, has every reason not to fit in here. She burns too brightly for our little town and I’ve always known that, known that she would one day find her way out. It might be because of this letter, it might be something else still to come, but she’ll have a different path through life than the one that’s set out for me.

  Unlike Sisi, I have no special secret past. Other than having no mother, I’m an ordinary girl. I was born on this farm and, in all likelihood, I’ll die here or in some other spot half a league away. My days will be filled with work like this. I’ll pick apples when I’m young, and then by the time I’m Sisi’s age, I’ll marry one of the boys she doesn’t want, and I’ll have children and a room of my own in the house. Or I’ll stay unmarried like Aunt Mae, and I’ll nurse my aunts and my uncle and my father when they get old. Either way I’ll die and be buried in the back garden like my grandparents are, and perhaps if I’m very lucky, someone might think to tell my nieces and nephews stories about me. Otherwise, I’ll be forgotten.

  I don’t like the thought, but it’s the truth, and I may as well accept it.

  I hear Merri’s voice in the distance, calling us all in for supper. After we eat, it’s straight up to bed, to face Sisi’s cold silence. I try to press her to tell me the contents of the letter, but I’m faced with nothing but her stern and stony face. She claims to be tired, but, though she lies wordlessly and motionlessly in our shared bed, it’s hours before either of us fall asleep. Still, the message is clear: if I press her about the letter, we won’t talk at all. Given the small space we share, and my otherwise limited social life, her silence is an effective punishment.

  This becomes our new routine, not so different from the old one. The days are filled with hunger, hard work, and anxiety about what will come of our little farm, of our futures. The only difference is that now, I don’t have Sisi to laugh with at the end of a hard day. At mealtimes, she sits as far away from me as she can manage, and at night she pulls the covers over her head and pretends to be asleep as soon as her head hits the pillow. It’s as though we haven’t shared a bed for nearly all our lives. I know she tends to toss and turn for hours—she’s just faking sleep to avoid talking to me, and she’ll do it for as long as I insist on trying to get her to tell me what was in that mysterious letter.

  Curiosity plagues me but not as much as knowing that my best, and only, friend is vexed with me. The mystery of the letter starts to seem less pressing than earning Sisi’s forgiveness.

  So, as I always do when Sisi is concerned. I give in, letting her fill the evenings with third-hand gossip from the aunts and updates on how the boys are growing and how Merri is coming along. I stop asking about the letter, but I don’t stop hoping. Maybe that’s why she decides to trust me, on the fifth evening after it arrived, with the secret it held.

  It’s only been a few days since our fateful nighttime trip, but it seems like much longer, the monotonous mornings and silent evenings fading into one another. After I return from the orchard for supper, as plates emptied of too-small portions of hashed vegetables are being cleared away, Aunt Sarie hands Sisi a basket filled with dust-stained work clothes.

  “Take this down to the stream,” and then, with a glance outside at the oncoming evening, “and take your cousin with you.”

  It had begun to seem as though the adults were conspiring to help Sisi keep her distance from me. Perhaps that was mere paranoia on my part—or perhaps they had been, and in the busy rush after supper, Aunt Sarie had simply forgotten. Like as not, I’ll never know. But it doesn’t matter as long as Sisi and I are back on the same side.

  The two of us walk out together in the cool, pleasant air of the late summer evening. The sun is low in the sky but still just visible above the treetops. We head into the woods together, where the trees cast long, dim shadows, nearly blocking out the sun’s lingering light. The route to the stream is familiar, though—after a lifetime of taking a weekly turn at laundry, I’m sure that I could find the way even in total darkness.

  At first, our walk is entirely silent, as so much has been between us lately. A half hour passes before Sisi stops suddenly, pointing into a clearing just off the road. Through the trees, I can see where the setting sun turns the bare ground golden. “Do you remember that?” Sisi asks.

  I squint, trying to think what she could be referring to. There’s nothing there, just the featureless and dusty ground, not even a single small flower poking through. Then I realize where we must be, the only spot in the woods where nothing will grow: “That was Kariana’s house.”

  We stand there in silence for a moment, looking through the trees at the emptiness left behind. I was only eight years old when Kariana’s cottage was burned to the ground with her inside, but I still remember what the little house looked like. She was the only person I knew who lived alone. She was also the only person in Leasane who knew anything about the mysterious power she used to call ruak, and that, in the Common Tongue, we called magic.

  To look at her, you would think she was an ordinary woman, with a square, lined face and brown hair shot through by a long white streak. She always had a smile for the children and a special word or two for me. That might just have been because I was always interested in what she had to say. One night, my cousin, the younger Willem in the family, had had a bad fever, and she’d come to help him. As she laid out strips of willow bark and pressed cool water-dampened cloths to his sweaty brow, she’d carefully explained to me what she was doing and why, all while I watched, wide-eyed.

  I hadn’t been there the day the soldiers came for her. Other children in the village got to go, to see the spectacle. The soldiers even encouraged it. A proclamation went up the week before: that magic was to be done only by the konim, sacred mages trained in the Royal School, and that a witch practicing experimental ruak was a danger to us all. I remember a whisper, those words that finally condemned her—blood magic. The worst accusation of all, a crime I didn’t even understand. After that, Kariana was confined to her house. I saw the soldiers guarding her there, those purple-and-gold uniforms standing out brightly against the dark trees while I was up working in the orchard one day. I didn’t see what happened when they burned it down. Aunt Mae ushered us all inside and kept us there, out of sight, so we couldn’t see or hear anything.

  Still, looking at it now, I can imagine what it must have been like: purple-and-gold uniforms, red and gold leaves on the trees, yellow and gold flames leaping from the soldiers’ torches to the top of the hut. I imagine Kariana shut away in her little house, the small, peaceful place that had been her refuge, her domain. So many times I’d walked down this path—Aunt Mae always sent me on any errand to Kariana’s that came up, perhaps because she knew the witch-woman’s fondness for me. We’d sit in that house and enjoy a cup of tea and she’d have a few words or an old riddle for me. Strange that such a lovely home could become no more than a prison. And then a pyre.

  My mind flashes back to the fire. I shiver, as if I can al
most feel the hot wind blowing in my face, making me jump. I was far too weak to stop them or save her. I was only a child, and I still am. An ordinary, powerless girl.

  “He did this,” Sisi says softly. “Lord Ricard, the Second in the Kingdom. Everyone knows that he commands the Golden Soldiers. He’s the one who ordered them to do this. And I’m supposed to—” She cuts herself off with what I realize is a sob.

  I want to ask, but I don’t. Instead, I reach out my hand toward hers, lacing our fingers together and gently squeezing our hands palm to palm while she starts to cry.

  “This is what he does. Here and all over the Kingdom. He burns, he destroys—so what does he want from me?” Her voice is trembling, strained. “What does it mean?”

  I don’t know, since I don’t know what the letter said. I consider it wisest not to point this out, however. I just stand there at her side, trying to imagine what’s going on inside her mind, until the sky grows dark and the crescent moon rises, and I know we must get on with the washing-up or risk the wrath of our aunt.

  “We should go,” I say, but she shakes her head again.

  “Wait. Jena, I…” She turns, looking me clear in the face for the first time in what must be days. “I need to know what you think. That you think I did the right thing.”

  “All right.” I’m taken aback at her words. It isn’t like Sisi to doubt herself, not ever, and certainly not to turn to me for reassurance. She usually plows ahead with whatever she thinks is right, and I follow—that’s always been the way for us.

  Nonetheless, now, she seems almost stunned into silence, like she can’t find the words to say what’s on her mind.

  I prompt her gently. “Just tell me what the letter said, Sisi. Maybe then I can help.”

  She squeezes my hand affectionately. “How like you, my dear. You needn’t always be worrying about me, you know.”

  If I weren’t worrying about Sisi, I don’t know what I’d do with myself. But I don’t say that. Instead, I just give her a moment while she gathers her thoughts.