The Orphan's Secret

by R. J. Francis

  Taking full advantage of his gift, Jaimin closed his eyes, shifted his consciousness to his foot, and examined the repairs his fellow menders had helped him with the previous evening.

  He remembered the girl who had given up her cloak to keep him dry. She was so selfless, so genuine, so hauntingly pretty. Her skin was radiant and healthy, her eyes gentle. He remembered her breath, which smelled of—well, dinner, but it was a delicious smell.

  Where was the girl’s cloak? He couldn’t remember whether Arin had taken it along. He checked the wire basket beside his bed. The girl’s cloak was there, balled up with the rest of his soggy garments from last night.

  Just then, Jaimin’s mother entered the infirmary.

  Isabel darted over to update Queen Alethea on Jaimin’s condition. “Thank you,” said the queen, and the nurse scurried back to Cory’s side.

  Alethea had on a simple white gown. Her thin, jeweled crown was set unobtrusively in her brown hair, which was tied in a tight braid in the back. She wore a gossamer net-like necklace of rubies. The queen was known and loved for having the qualities of an experienced actress: eloquent speech, deliberate movements, and an unassuming charm that put everyone in the room at ease. She leaned against Jaimin’s bed and took his hand.

  “Good morning, my dear,” she said. “What a night you’ve had! Your horse is doing much better, although you won’t be riding him for some time.”

  “What’s father thinking?” asked Jaimin. “Is the army mobilizing for war?”

  “No. Not yet, at least. They are still trying to assess the threat.”

  “It was Radovan, wasn’t it?”

  The queen winced at the name. “Yes, I believe it was, but I’m not sure I understand his strategy. A full scale assault is more his style.”

  Alethea would know all about Radovan’s style. A Celmarean princess herself, Alethea had been rescued by Jaimin’s father, Julian, on the day Radovan destroyed her nation.

  “Was I the target?” asked Jaimin.

  “My feelings aren’t clear. Nevertheless, there doesn’t appear to be any reasonable explanation other than your party and the strangers just happening upon each other by coincidence.”

  “Father will expect a reasonable explanation. It doesn’t need to be correct, just reasonable.”

  “You know him well,” the queen said. “And until we evaluate the risk, he forbids you from leaving the castle. Saunder will meet you in your room in half an hour to go over new measures to assure your safety. I trust you will follow them to the letter.”

  “What are we going to do? We can’t survive an attack.”

  “I’ve been telling your father that for years. Perhaps now he’ll listen.”

  “Is there anything I can do?”

  Alethea thought for a moment. “Yes. Learn from what happened. Consider how you would proceed from here if you were king.”

  “That’s a challenge when I’m not invited to the briefings.”

  “Jaimin, you’ll have to find out what you need to know another way. Nastasha can help. Honestly, she is brilliant. I only hope she’s careful with what she knows.”

  “You know we don’t have to worry about her. She puts our interests above all else. Father should hire her as an advisor.”

  “She’s too young yet,” said the queen, but Jaimin had made the suggestion before, and he knew his mother had seriously considered it. “Well,” she said, “Isabel says you should be able to walk. Would you like me to help you collect your things?”

  “No,” he said. “I’ll take care of them. Thank you for coming down.”

  “Of course, my love.” She gave Jaimin a kiss, and went over to speak with Cory’s mother.

  Jaimin rubbed his palm against his forehead. He was beginning to get a headache, which he knew would only intensify as the day progressed. Bones he could mend without too much trouble; headaches were trickier. He sat up and eased himself off the bed, gradually putting weight on his injured foot to test its strength. There was no grinding, no cracking, no pain shooting up his leg, so he set the other foot down and endeavored to stand. When this was successful, he crouched down to retrieve his wet garments. Leaving his muddy boots there, he balled up the rest of the clothes, concealing the girl’s cloak in the cloth and leather mass. After making sure his infirmary gown wasn’t open in the back, he took a few shaky steps.

  Isabel hurried over, waving her hands in warning as if Jaimin were about to step off a cliff. “Your Highness,” she said. “Please, I shall call for an attendant to carry those.”

  “Thank you, Isabel. That won’t be necessary. They help me balance.” He teetered to demonstrate.

  “The pills I sent up to your room should control your pain.” She helped Jaimin over to the door. “And I shall send up a fresh flask of elixir. Just dump out the one from last night.”

  But instead of going to his room, Jaimin marched straight to his father’s study.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Elaina awoke to the smell of smoke. She rushed out of her room. Smoke was accumulating near the ceiling, and it was thickening, sagging, and spreading its curly feelers in all directions.

  “Tran!” shouted Lairen, bursting in through the back door. “The bread, dang it!”

  Atop the wood-burning stove, half a loaf of bread was smoldering amid charred fringes of fried egg. Tran, Lairen’s son, was nowhere in sight.

  “Let me get that,” Elaina offered. She slid on mitts and lifted the crispy mass off the hot steel slab. “I don’t think we can save it,” she said, examining the black cube from all sides.

  “Sorry about that,” said Lairen. “Put it in the compost pile.”

  She leaned out the back door and set the loaf atop the wheelbarrow for the moment.

  As she tightened the laces on her torn leather shoes, her head was foggy, heavy, and full of questions. Why hadn’t Lairen roused her at the usual time to make breakfast? Why had he and Tran tried to make it themselves? Why had they let her sleep so late? They knew her day was packed with chores. The brightness of the sky suggested it was nearing noon.

  There was something else—something she was supposed to forget… What was it?

  Outside, the ground was damp, the air chilly and clean. She stomped the loaf and swept the bits into the compost heap with the side of her shoe.

  She came back inside just in time to see Lairen smack Tran on the head with a rag.

  “But I’m still hungry,” Tran whimpered. “All we had was eggs. Now that what’s-her-name is up, maybe she can make us some toast.”

  Elaina tolerated Tran because she didn’t have to see him most of the day, and she felt she owed it to Lairen to be respectful. Tran was four years younger than she was. The boy was overweight, clumsy, rude, and shamelessly lazy. He had recently been expelled from technical school after causing far too much trouble. Lairen had long since abandoned his efforts to get the idle lad to help out around the farm. Tran went off after breakfast each day to hang around the flour mill, getting paid a few coins now and then for doing odd chores. Meanwhile, Lairen took care of the family’s crops, and Elaina tended to the animals.

  Lairen and his wife Shelly had taken Elaina in as an orphan when she was a year old, after having tried for over a decade to have a child of their own. Tran’s conception years later came as a total surprise to everyone, as did Shelly’s death just minutes after Tran was born. Elaina knew nothing of her birth parents. Lairen always said she’d learn about them in time.

  Flashing Tran a scornful look, Lairen stepped back outside. Fortunately, Elaina had baked three loaves of chewy walnut wheat the day before, and there was still one left over. She flung pats of maple butter onto the stove to melt. Then, she nimbly sliced her bread into thin sheets, which she draped over the patches of bubbling fat. Tran sat down at the table, held his utensils erect, and eyed Elaina as if he were an eagle and she, or at least what she was cooking, were a tasty rabbit.

  When it was time, she flipped the slices and powdered them on their don
e sides with her renowned mixture of cocoa, sugar and chili powder. That’s when she remembered the “something” she was supposed to forget.

  She resisted the urge to run off, fearing another fire.

  When the toast had attained a passable crispness, she slid a small plate of it across the table to Tran, and hurried back to her room to consult her diary.

  Her heart thumping, she followed her own shaky handwriting, and soon she was recalling the previous evening’s events faster than she could read about them. She forced herself to read to the end so she didn’t miss a detail: the storm, the young patient, the attack by the two-faced man by the bridge, the searing pain in her neck…

  Lairen was right outside in the yard, fixing a shovel. She opened the window and asked him, “Did you have a hard time waking me this morning?”

  “Well,” he replied, “you’ve been working so hard lately, Tran and I figured we could fend for ourselves. We let you sleep.”

  “I never found that boy last night.”

  “And what boy were you looking for?”

  “The one who fell off his horse.”

  “A boy fell off his horse? Had I already gone to bed?”

  “You got out the medical satchel and I drew some water, and when we came back out, he was gone. That boy. Remember?”

  The scruffy farmer scratched his beard. “I didn’t have anything to drink last night, and even if I had, I’m sure I would have remembered a boy falling off his horse.”

  Elaina bolted for the hall closet where the emergency supplies were kept. Her Type D civilian first-aid satchel, the one she’d abandoned by the river, was back in its place, dry and fully stocked.

  “What are you up to?” muttered Tran through a mouthful of crumbs.

  “Did anyone come by this morning?” she asked him.

  “Colin came for the eggs.”

  She ran to her dresser. The clothes she’d worn the night before were neatly folded, clean and dry. She knew she’d left them in the hamper! It was pointless to ask the men if they’d done the washing—neither of them knew how.

  Wait a minute! My cloak! she thought, and she made for the pegs by the door. Lairen came back in, puzzled. The cloak he’d lent her—the one that had been drenched and mud-splotched twelve hours earlier—was clean and dry and on its peg, but Elaina’s own cloak was missing.

  “Have you seen my cloak?” she asked her housemates.

  “No,” Lairen said. “Do you remember when you last had it on?”

  Yes, she said to herself. Right before I covered the injured boy with it.

  “What’s wrong with you?” Tran barked at her. “Dad, you let her sleep a few hours longer than normal and she goes crazy. Doesn’t even cook the toast all the way through.”

  Elaina closed her eyes and took a deep breath. She came up with a theory: Maybe that two-faced man followed me back to the house, and then came in and altered Lairen’s mind to get him to forget what he’d seen. Ah! Then, he put everything that might trigger my memory back in its normal place!

  Too far-fetched? No, it made perfect sense. The villain had slipped up. He couldn’t have replaced her cloak, since the boy had it. And he’d missed the diary, too, which she kept under the dresser. She felt disgusted he’d violated her home—her sanctuary. But at least he didn’t kill her in her sleep.

  And what of the wounded boy? Was he still in danger? He’d come from the southern woods, and he’d been taken straight into the northern forest by someone else—and they didn’t stop in the city for help? Should she have reported this to the authorities? Was she in trouble now for not reporting it?

  Too much time had gone by, and in the comfort of her familiar surroundings it was tempting to bury these thoughts and pretend nothing was wrong.

  She decided not to waste her time convincing her host family. “It must have been a dream,” she told them. She sat down and had a bite of toast.

  “You’re the weirdest girl I know,” Tran huffed.

  I’m probably the only girl you know, she thought.

  Elaina knew a few slices of toast wouldn’t be enough to get her through the morning. She added some soft-boiled eggs, braised kale with shallots, and tea to her menu, but afterward she still felt sleepy and sick to her stomach. The rain, sweat, and the tears of the night before, even the man’s grip on her shoulder—she still felt it all. And, still, the thought that she should have done something more… She wondered whether cleaning herself up—washing her hair—could cleanse her of her worries, or at least help her sort them out.

  But her chores! The poor cows—she had to get out there soon to milk them.

  They can wait a little longer, she decided. She got her towels, tools, and ingredients together, and began her hair ritual at the kitchen counter. She cracked two eggs, scooped the yolks into a wooden bowl, stirred in a few spoons of carnation-scented oil, and generously applied the rich mixture from her roots to her ends, fixing a piece of fabric over her head when she was done. While this treatment was soaking in, she poured steaming water from the kettle over a soaped cloth and scrubbed her face. After enough eggy dribbles had crept down onto her face, she grabbed a clean towel and ran outside to the pump for an invigorating head rinse. The process concluded in her bedroom, where she brushed out her hair before her mirror, making sure there were no flecks of egg left.

  She took a few extra minutes to study herself in the mirror—to really reflect on herself, which she too seldom did. How might she have looked to the attractive young gentleman who had dropped by her yard?

  Her face looked great—healthy, blemish free, very pleasing—but her hair was far too short for an encounter like last night’s, she concluded. She’d start growing it out at once. She’d kept it shorter because it was easier to keep clean around the animals. Her time at the farm, though, was nearing an end. Soon she’d be living in the city, where she’d be around people all day, every day. There, with clean clothes, spare time, and a better selection of candidates, she planned to at last open up her life to boys.

  Listen to me, I sound like Alessa, she thought. Vanity! Indulgence! She’d been attacked, an injured stranger and his horse had vanished into a toxic wood, someone had secretly visited her house and rearranged her stuff—and she was dwelling on the length of her hair!

  She went outside. The day’s coolness reminded her she not only needed new shoes, but also a replacement cloak. That is, unless her elusive visitor decided to return hers. This raised an exciting possibility: if he’d survived, her patient might actually come back, and she might get to learn more about him. She might even learn his name, where he lived, and what he did for work and for fun…

  Of course the other extreme possibility was that the boy was dead because she didn’t get him help. No! She refused to believe that her caller was suffering or dead, or even that he’d been the victim of a crime. Maybe he was a junior officer in the army, and he and his fellow soldiers had been engaged in some target practice. Using a live horse as a target? Well, perhaps after a few drinks…

  Alessa would have all the answers for sure.

  Elaina slid open the barn door. Her charge included thirty hens, sixteen butter-colored chicks, five speckled roosters, eight chocolate brown dairy cows, two black dairy goats, one magnificent black Arran mare, and a male calico cat who patrolled the farm day and night, keeping the property rodent-free.

  Only half of the enormous barn was home to livestock; the other half, sealed off for hygiene and locked to keep out Tran, was Elaina’s factory. She proudly maintained her equipment, which she’d procured and assembled herself, in top condition. Working alone for long hours, Elaina transformed the farm’s milk into a vast array of products: cream, sour cream, butter, cheeses, yogurt, ice cream, and a sweet cultured delicacy called krenna.

  Her dairy products sold out quickly at market, for double the average price, thanks to the exceptional flavors Elaina was able to coerce from them, as well as her knack for adding fruits, herbs, spices and other ingredients that appe
aled to the upper class palate. She surely would have become a celebrity, had she not convinced Lairen to keep her true role a secret. On market days, she cheerfully sold her creations to customers who had no idea she was the culinary artist who kept them coming back for more. And she was frugal with her share of the profit.

  Refrigeration had also been essential to the farm’s success. In Arra, dry ice was used for cooling. Lairen bought the farm’s ice from a factory next to the flour mill where Tran “worked,” so the task fell to Tran each day to lug home ten blocks of solid carbon dioxide in his wagon. Elaina had constructed a system of hatches and chutes so the lad could drop off his ice without contaminating her factory with his grubbiness.

  Lairen, having seen early on it was to be a sunny day, had turned the cows, goats, and horse out to pasture. A few of the cows saw her go into the barn and followed her inside to get milked. The other girls, all grumpy from the delay, she milked out in the sunshine.

  She strained the milk, set a few bottles aside to drink raw, and poured the rest into a pipe that led through the wall into the warming machine.

  It was Fourth-day, the day when standing orders were lowest. She brought her orders out to the cooler by the fence, where customers could pick them up before supper. With the rest of the milk, she’d make cheese tomorrow—if she could get up early enough.

  Lairen had let the chickens out of the run so they could scratch around in the yard. Elaina collected the eggs and topped off the feed. One of the chicks was dead; she buried it in the compost pile—deep, so the cat wouldn’t dig it out.

  After that, she went back outside to visit her horse. The horse used to belong to Tran, who’d named it “Nightmare.” The name was cruel and undeserved, but Elaina had been afraid she’d confuse the animal by changing it. Each afternoon, Elaina rode her horse on the trails that wound through the southern forest and across the grassy clearings near Alessa’s house. She was in a hurry today, though, so she just brushed Nightmare and rode her bareback around the pasture a few times.