by Pam Uphoff
The meeting was already over. Orobona looked irritated. "Let's go." He handed his briefcase to Jaime and stalked after Soeder.
Jaime glanced behind, no sign of Gastov. Surely they didn't call a brief meeting to see if I'd show up? I'm not important enough . . . am I?
All the officers looked a little put out. One of the new officers, walking beside Orobona shrugged. "I was hoping for something new, not the same old 'we've looked at you, so we can say we've met the officers on the ground now go away while we go ahead with the strategy we developed with zero data' runaround."
"I'd almost forgotten the joys of High Command." Orobona shrugged. "Are we going to get examined by analysts and scientists and experts on Native societies next?"
"No, sir. They have assembled General Soeder's wish list and we'll be gated back as soon as we get there."
Captain Orobona climbed into the car, brow furrowing. "Two gates this close together?"
"Yeah, Comet Fall has pretty high priority."
Jaime stayed quiet all the way . . . home.
Chapter Twelve
Early Spring 1395
Ash, Kingdom of the West
"Honestly Crimson, you just sit and whine and never do anything to take control of your life."
"What am I supposed to do?" Crimson glared. I'm not whining.
Sapphire rolled her eyes. "Move out of your mother's house. Escape from your sisters. Work harder. Get pregnant yourself. There are a hundred ways to improve yourself."
Easy for you to say. Your mother was never so deeply entangled with the witch families that you got trapped into a role. "I can't move out. They won't let me. Where would I go?"
"You should sit down and make a list. You might be surprised at the options you actually have. Besides whining, and eating." Sapphire shrugged dismissively and strode ahead.
Crimson glared after her. I don't just sit around and whine. It's just that no one notices when I do anything. And that's enough to make anyone whine! And I'm not fat. I should have enlisted in the Army. It's not my fault that Inre escaped. They told me to pretend to be taken with him, and let him fool me. They thought he'd talk, not escape. Ha! I told them he was clever! But did they listen? No, of course not. They just blamed me. And now look where following their orders has left me!
She walked the rest of the way alone, and sank quietly into the middle pool.
"There are twenty of you here today." Likely was doing the lecturing today. "So we don't have even triads. Several of you will be advancing this year, so we will re-sort you into groups that will either advance or remain."
Dusty got matched with Kohl and Madder. Bad enough Crimson was stuck with Sanda, but Nighthawk was added to "fill out the triad that won't be advancing anytime soon."
She tried to open her mouth, to say that she was advancing . . . the older witch was already turning away.
Advancing is the only way to escape. At least Jade is gone. Poor Mother, stuck raising the baby she abandoned. I'll have one of my own soon enough, but I won't be miserable, like Mother.
Crimson smoldered through the exercises. She worked well enough with Sanda at first, but Nighthawk seemed to go from instruction to expert with just a single trial in between. Crimson was twenty-two, Nighthawk was just fourteen. And Crimson could see the girl controlling her power, choking it down to match Sanda's output. Crimson tried to do the same, but she was so barely above Sanda's it didn't match and she couldn't hold to anything. Sanda was sixteen, but an outsider. She hadn’t grown up around witches, learning about magic.
"Try matching the speed Sanda does stuff at. I think that will work better." The girl had the nerve to order her around. The nerve! Xen's daughter. I was on the team, too. Why don't I get to be famous by association? And Xen was badly injured, being heroic. Or so Quicksilver claims. Like I didn't hear all the other team members growling about him jeopardizing the whole mission, buffing his ego with a high society job and . . . They'd been back two months and Xen was still supposed to be sleep-healing. Probably faking it to get out of Army work. Crimson's part in it had ended five months ago. Almost as planned. The Army didn't seem eager to hire her again.
By the end of the day she was tense and stressed, getting nowhere. Likely sent her home early, with instructions to work on meditation and focus.
"I learned all that six years ago when I grasped power." She kicked a tuft of grass and glared down at the little village. In the evening the brightly lit windows glowed happily. Crimson turned her back on them and stalked off to have her fit of pique in private.
And take out the potion and study it. A spell she wasn't strong enough, advanced enough, to unravel.
Crimson gathered her courage and tasted the potion. Honey sweet, milky. She swallowed it all. It chilled her all the way down as it settled in. Now I've done it. And I'll never tell a soul I wasn't born this way. Assuming anyone would notice. I'm twenty-two, and practically invisible.
Too late to change her mind, she wondered if she ought to have trusted her sister. The Black Widow. Jade had fled Ash, leaving only her baby and a few little bottles hidden in her room. Some with notes. Crimson had found them, and kept them.
"But she does know her magical transformations."
Wizardry. A spell to add the wizard power gene to her one normal X chromosome. The scribbled notes left with the bottle had claimed that it wouldn't change the Witch gene, that it would just target "ordinary" X chromosomes.
Crimson raised her shields, squared her shoulders and walked down to face her mother. It was time for a talk.
"Oh, there you are. Don't forget it's your night to do the dishes."
Her mother turned away, leaving Crimson scowling. Right. She didn't even ask how the training went. How I'm feeling. I'll never get so beat down. Never.
"Mother."
"In a minute, dear. Aunt Happy is having a bad night."
Never. I will never be the servant of a bunch of old women.
A plaintive call from Ultra's room. Jade's son. Nor will I be made to feel responsible for other women's babies. But early training still had her drifting in to pat the boy and reassure him. Almost three years old. I wonder what Jade's up to now? But whatever she does, it's not his fault, and he's a good little boy. But Mother really should have let Quicksilver keep him, she's a double cousin, not some stranger. Mother does this to herself.
Witches kept late hours, but shortly after midnight, Crimson was sent to bed like a child. Without any sort of conversation. No problem. I'm five months pregnant, no doubt in another four months someone will notice.
Walnut, her eighteen year old sister, was plucking petals off wilting flowers in a bundle she must have picked on the way home from school. She was singing love spells under her breath, rubbing a ring on her finger. Three boy-crazed eighteen year olds in a triad. Is Likely insane? Although Walnut's better off than me with stuck up city girl Sanda and the insufferable Nighthawk brat. But in three months I'll be a Half Moon. Leave those two behind.
Macaw was thrashing around in bed; the girl always took forever to settle down and go to sleep. Crimson folded her clothes carefully, pulled on her short sleeping shift and climbed into bed.
Walnut hadn't even looked up. Now she was whispering boy's names as she pulled petals.
What can I do to make a living? Enough to live in my own house? It was so much fun, relaying messages for the Army. Maybe I should join the Army. Of course they blamed me for "letting" Inre escape earlier than they'd planned. They probably wouldn't want me. She rubbed her abdomen. Pregnancy, not fat. She wasn't all that powerful, as witches went. She glared at her sisters. Not that it was their fault, and they were just as cramped as she was. Three of them stuffed into one room. Three of them . . .
"Pity Macaw hasn't grasped power. We could circle up and really put some serious power into those love spells."
That got Walnut's attention.
"Although what you'd do with that many suitors is beyond me."
Macaw bounced in her bed. "C
an we practice? Can we pretend to be a triad? I've memorized those love spells too, but no one ever notices me."
Walnut rolled the little ring in her hand. "Me neither, and Crimp is practically invisible. What can we do?"
Macaw grinned. "We can go anywhere we want to. And nobody will think a thing of it."
Could I actually be that unnoticeable?
They made a lumpy triad, but more power went into Walnut's love talisman than Crimson could have raised alone. It was the first major spell Crimson had made without some older witch carping at her since she'd learned how to channel last Fall. I might have gone overboard in the power I put behind it. There was a definite gleam in Walnut's eye, and only Crimson and Macaw noticed that she was missing for the better part of the next day.
She was pretty smug that evening. "I took a potion so I won't catch—Grandmother would throw a fit—but I can channel now." She pulled out a scrap of paper and drew a line through the top name. "Xen is next on my list."
"Xen? He's kind of weird. And I think he's doing that healing sleep thing, still. Isn't he?" Crimson dredged through the recent gossip.
Walnut smiled. "So? That will make him easier to catch. He's moved to Harry's, so I won't have to dodge Rustle."
It was three days before they had the free time for an expedition to the Crossroads. Macaw wanted to see how the charm worked, and Crimson wanted to see if normal people really wouldn't notice them.
They walked through the Corridor to the Crossroads, and around to the front entrance of the Tavern. Crimson studied the glowing gates on the hills around them. Two to the south, more to the north. A few of them were guarded. "We could test our unnoticeability on the gate guards."
"First, the diners and witches here." Walnut marched straight through the front door. A couple of diners glanced toward the door, then back to their dinners. No more interest in us than if the wind blew the door open.
Xen walked out of the kitchen, yawning. He headed up the stairs and Walnut closed in fast. Crimson grabbed Macaw's sleeve. "Oh no you don't. You're only fourteen."
"I'm fifteen." Macaw scowled back. "Almost. I just want to see how the charm works. It's the first thing I ever made." She twitched out of Crimson's grasp and headed for the stairs. Crimson followed. No one even looked toward them. Once she would have been irritated. Tonight she was spooked. And even more so by Xen's dreamy focus on the ring charm as Walnut pulled it out of her pocket and slipped it on. And how he reached out and scooped Walnut right into his bed. Crimson nudged Macaw out. Nudged hard and glared. The girl got a last eyeful and allowed herself to be herded away.
The gate furthest to the south was going to be turned into a prison for people they were never going to release, but the government didn't want to kill. The King's son, Prince Mirk, who murdered Crown Heir Rebo. And Lord Iron, the former President of the Council, who attempted to murder Princess Amilie. All the wizards and witches that were in Ricardo's gang.
What a nice world to waste on a couple dozen well connected criminals!
The next gate let them through to a very pretty world, with snow capped mountains behind them and the smoke columns of a settlement coming from somewhere beyond the ridge to the south. A bit weird, because it was day, during their night. A rather odd day, with the sun so low . . . and there was the crescent Moon, that way was south . . . "I think we must be at a very high latitude. It's mid-day here, and this early in spring the sun is still not getting very high in the sky."
"I guess there's no ice age, here." Macaw turned and looked north. "Maybe there's no icecap at all."
Crimson sighed. "Maybe we could explore. Sometime." They walked back through the gate.
To the north of the Tavern, the first gate led to a small town. The second to a howling prairie dust storm. The third opened up inside an big empty building. They peeked out the windows at fast moving . . . carriages without horses. Two women strolled by. Their skirts were so tight and so short they looked like they were just wrapped in towels. They strutted on weird shoes, like short stilts under their heels, and flirted and called to the men in the carriages.
"Well, they may be weird, but they still have whores." They retreated and headed for the next gate.
They explored all night, until Walnut got tired of her half asleep lover.
They took her to see the World with the glowing rings in the sky.
Then they discussed which world they ought to explore, to make theirs, in a small way.
The next day the elders decided it was time to clean house, so they were kept busy for a week. Crimson covered for Macaw one morning when she was missing from bed. She's only fourteen, how much trouble can she get into?
No. Today is her fifteenth birthday, isn't it? I wonder what she's giving herself?
Crimson was afraid to ask Walnut where the ring was. But she baked a cake.
Finally, with the house scrubbed, repainted, rugs beaten (it somehow helped the magical cleaning if they got hit at the same time) and furniture back in place, Answer gave them the next day off.
Crimson scowled at her sisters. "What I want to do is make tons of money. And get away from my hideous family."
Walnut scowled back. "Including us? What I want is to see people from another world."
Crimson sniffed. "You two aren't so bad. You stand on your own two feet and don't let people treat you like their personal servant. Let's borrow some horses, and go exploring. We can have a picnic somewhere." They corridored to the Crossroads and "borrowed" some horses grazing the hills behind the Tavern.
There were guards riding the rounds of the gates. They hadn't been there before.
So, have they started this recently, or do they just check them occasionally?
Crimson steered her borrowed horse off the road. The patrol horses raised their heads and sniffed. The men sort of frowned, as if they could almost notice them.
They waited until the guards had ridden past. "We won't be able to take much more than three horses through at a time." Crimson kicked her horse into a trot.
Macaw frowned. "Why would we want to?"
"For trading. I wonder what they'd like?"
"Depends on what they have."
They popped through the gate, and argued up and down a few ridges, aiming for the thin streams of smoke.
They stopped abruptly as the stench hit them. Human wastes, rotting garbage. The village was about half mudbrick and half thatched lean-tos. The people staring at them were pale. Thin. One boy was shirtless, his ribs showed and his belly was distended. A few men were staring at the horses; the knives in their hands looked like stone.
Crimson gulped. "I think they will be open to trading food for almost anything." she fumbled at her saddlebags and tossed the picnic sack gently in the village's direction, then turned the horse and left. Walnut and Macaw followed. The men bolted forward, snatching up spears. Crimson kicked the horse into a run and threw up a shield behind them.
"They were starving. Desperate for food. We need to figure out how to tell them what we want in trade." Crimson eyed her sisters. Double glows, both of them. Answer is going to throw a fit.
If she notices.
"What do we have to trade with?" Macaw tapped her toes looking anxious. "They looked like they wanted to eat our horses—and maybe us as well."
Crimson smiled. "I checked the basement. It's stuffed."
"Crimson!" Walnut's eyes were huge. "You're going to steal from Grandmother!"
Crimson crossed her arms and lifted her nose. "I worked in the fields, I worked at canning, I dug, planted, weeded and harvested vegetables. I raked and stacked grain." She spread her arms. "Somehow, someone failed to pay me for the work, so I figure some part of the harvest must be mine."
The other two nodded. Still wide-eyed.
"I figure we need to leave some little samples of what we want in trade, so we don't have to take the risk of getting killed, to get some trade going."
Their second trip, four days, or rather, nights, later, they set up a
table. The Guards were a problem, again. Even with all three of them thinking invisible thoughts, as Crimson balanced the narrow little table across her lap, the soldiers prowled, certain something had disturbed them.
They left a sack of wheat, a nice big ham, and a polished shiny steel knife on the half of the table toward the village. The half in their direction, they left empty but for a tiny scrap of gold and a small garnet.
"Men. Lucky if they take the hint." Crimson sniffed. "And we need our own horses. If we're going to do this regularly. Smugglers horses, black, or dark at any rate, with no markings, no white anywhere." The two dun mares were rather hard to spot, but the palomino with the big blaze and stockings drew the eye.
"And they should be fast." Walnut added, Macaw nodding eagerly.
"First we need to see if those people have anything valuable to trade. Then we can start making grandiose plans."
Walnut balked at digging too deep into Answer's supplies, so they started working regularly at the Twin Inn. Crimson worked at the Tavern, but the other two balked.
"What if we see Xen?" Macaw chewed a fingernail.
Crimson eyed her. "Did you . . . oh. Of course you did. And how are you going to learn to channel, now?" Double glow. When someone notices, there's going to be flames and explosions.
"I did, then. I caught him out on the hills with the horses, so I was on the ground. I think I grasped power before. I just, Mother and Answer just never let me talk to them about it."
Crimson sighed. "Yeah. I know all about that."
"I finally decided I'd wait until the Solstice. They'll notice, up on the mountain."
"Old Gods! I hope so. Just, gather power and glow, and shove your way up into the Crescent Moon." Crimson exchanged glances with Walnut. "We'll notice, and make them give you room."
Walnut nodded. "Six weeks until we leave. I hate the walk up."
Chapter Thirteen
5 May 3512
Spring 1395