Aloren

  Before the pool a beach of shingle stretched in a silver crescent. Floy became a girl, limbs flashing with starlight. I looked beyond her and saw four boys, one crouching at the pool’s edge. He exclaimed in Gralde, “The water’s fresh.”

  “It’s from a freshet,” said a younger voice. “I saw it from above. Good thing the tide’s out, Arin. Can’t have you heaving brine all over the place on a lovely night like this.”

  “You see everything from above.” Arin jumped to his feet. “Like some bloody, great ghost––” He had caught sight of me. “Look, Leode. Another ghost. Hey, don’t come any nearer me––”

  I shot across the stones and knocked him over, and he wrestled me off, throwing me into the water.

  I accepted the reprisal as it provided an excuse for a wet face. Tem fished me out. I clung to him, wondering at how tall he had grown.

  “So, tell us––” said Mordan.

  “She doesn’t have to,” said Tem. But I wanted to do just that so I broke free and told them everything from Fillegal and the bandorescroll to Natty and the dung. But I didn’t mention how Andrei had exploited my skills. Nor did I mention what Floy had done, in the beginning.

  “Nilsa,” said Mordan. “Fancy it being old Nilsa. I always thought there was something funny about her.”

  Arin gave a loud snort. “It was Hal. He was given the boot, after all.”

  “Let’s be civil,” said Tem. “Could have been anyone.”

  I stepped back to better look at them. Their shoes and sandals were gone and their hair had overtaken mine. Limbs were white as the shingle, and the tunics still clean, but they clung tightly, hanging higher than they used to, and the seams broke at Tem’s shoulders.

  Mordan had climbed a couple of inches past Tem, but his clothes fit over him as well as ever. Arin had grown taller, too, and he carried himself more gracefully, giving his alternate form a shade of competition. He had so little freckles he seemed a different person. “Look at that thing she’s wearing,” he said. “Did you steal that off a troll?”

  Tem touched the wool. “It has the rosette on it.”

  “It would fit a human better than a troll, I think,” said Mordan. “It has no business being on you.”

  “She has little else to wear. Turn it inside-out,” Tem told me in not so much a command as a suggestion.

  “Speaking of tunics,” said Floy, tying back her hair with a string, “I’ve got to show you something. See, Reyna”––she held her skirts up and stepped into the water––“after all that whining you did last autumn––something about a million keys and wishing for wings––those birds took you seriously. But serious as they were, they needed a person’s brain, so I helped.”

  I splashed after her. “You are a conspirator.” I turned to the boys. “What’s she talking about?”

  “No idea.” Tem stepped in and Arin and Mordan followed. “But she told us very specifically this should be our meeting-place. Where are we going?”

  “Around a corner and through a door,” Floy said.

  “This place reminds me of a palace,” said Leode. “Like the ones in Omben after the oceans rose.”

  “Stay in the starlight.” Tem hauled his little brother up to his side.

  “Shh,” whispered Mordan behind me. “I hear saebeline.” Water lapped at our waists, casting shades across the walls, and I heard a humming through an arch at our left.

  Floy sighed. “It’s not saebeline. Only wings.” She told me to go through first. “But you’re probably not going to like it. Just more work.”

  I stumbled over to the door. The boys piled behind me and the current pushed us through, and I saw a spread of green before Mordan knocked me into the water. The rest tumbled after, and a wave swelled over my head.

  “Oh,” said Leode, the only one on his feet. “Our Marione.” I lifted my head above the water. Mordan, lost for words, pulled me up.

  A carpet of green and white stretched over a second pool enclosed again by cliff, except for a little niche where water cascaded over stone into the sea.

  Bits of stuff fell from the air, where birds circled. “No wonder I was ill last month,” said Leode. “These are mine, mostly.”

  Tem wiped his hair back from his eyes. “Floy, you never said a thing?”

  “I wasn’t sure it would work.” Her cheeks darkened. I moved to her side, feeling for her hand beneath the water. “Anyway, it isn’t enough,” she said simply, holding onto my fingers.

  “Not yet,” said Mordan.

  Leaning over the flowers, Arin commenced, as usual, with pointing out the problems. “Saxifrage shouldn’t have thorns.” He grabbed a handful and screwed up his mouth at them.

  Mordan lifted one from the water. His face blanched. Below the tiny white flowers the stems were thick with spines. “What happened?” he said.

  “Maybe it’s part of growing up,” said Arin.

  “Is it hate?” Mordan glanced at me.

  “I don’t feel so good.” Leode doubled over and held his mouth.

  “Put them down,” said Tem.

  “Is it protection, maybe?” Mordan dipped his palm in the water and gently shed them. “Something they go through so beasts won’t dig them up and eat them?”

  “Weaving these is going to be horrible.” Arin didn’t look at me.

  “They’ll become softer by soaking,” said Tem. “But she’ll have to––I don’t know––break them some, to weave into tunics.”

  I felt the old pain, the fist that crumpled my gut and squeezed the air from my lungs. I thought of Leode, ill with only a touch. “Break them?” I squeezed Floy’s hand, making her wince. “Over and over again?”

  Arin backed away from the green and white.

  “We’ll have to agree on a time. When we’re all on the ground, just in case,” said Tem.

  The hour after sunrise, we decided. An hour a day, and with two years left I brooded on my time constraints.

  The sun came up, pouring through holes in the cliffs, and the boys flew away. Tem insisted that Leode and Mordan be far out of my hearing during the weaving of their flowers. So with Floy for company I sat in the water and plotted out a design. Leode’s tunic was first on my list as most of the flowers were his, but the saxifrage could only provide a sort of framework, because the other Marione had to be added in their seasons.

  The plants were small and I felt queasy as I knotted a first chain, and a second, and a third. I twisted them together. After I’d made enough of these I laid them over a rock to weave with. The tips of my fingers glowed and I collected tallies of scratches up my arms as I worked, but I scarcely noticed.

  When I lifted my head, the sun had climbed a thumb’s height above the sea and Floy reminded me to stop.

  The pool seemed safe enough, stowed away at the bottom of the eastern cliffs, and I left the work there.

  Twenty

  A month passed. I wove Leode’s shirt steadily and tired too quickly to do much dancing, and Wille Illinla caught me stealing plums.

  Without bothering to look at my face he snatched my hand away and instructed I steal a whole basket to make a profit instead of taking just enough to fill my stomach. I began laughing. His face turned white, purple and red.

  “First you consort with humans,” he said, “then you disappear, and now you show up in a gale of laughs. Least I wasn’t the one nicking like a crippled sparrow.”

  “Have your nicks graduated to new heights?”

  “To be honest,” he said, still shaken up, “I ain’t nicking much.”

  “Because of Sal? Are you polishing shoes and giving the proceeds to the poor?”

  “Something like that, being as I’m the poorest.” Then he said, “Where ye been? Abducted by roving folk and dancing all over Eastern Estralony, was you? Did you dance up to another dimension where the people laugh at poor boys tryin to give advice to young rogues? While you was up there did the emperor crown you as his queen, so now you feel you got to bring them awful foreign habits her
e?”

  “A vein’s like to pop in your forehead.” I took a bite of my plum.

  “Ain’t going to tell me?”

  He was wearing a shirt I hadn’t seen before, brown and clean. “What’s this shiny thing?” I gave it a tug.

  “Georrch!”

  “What?”

  “Nothin.” He kept his back well away from my hands.

  I moved behind him and saw the dark bleeding through the cloth. I reached up to press it––it was wet. “Have you just been flogged?”

  “It didn’t hurt, until you poked around with your fishhooks.”

  “Have you even bothered to clean it?”

  “I didn’t want Sal to see,” he said stupidly.

  I stole a soapy rag from a window-washer, pushed him into a recess, and took off his stained shirt.

  His back was a cobweb of welts. Every time I touched them he tensed in pain. My hands trembled until I couldn’t steady them, and I dropped the bloody rag on the stone. “What did you do, Wille?”

  “Stole a handful of fruit from that boy you was after,” he said, inching away from me. “I spat grape pips at two soldiers. You saw them, probably––fat ones at the corner didn’t look like they was having much fun. So I gave them a bit of fun, but they ain’t accustomed to it, I guess. Foreigners. Yellow, nasty and big, and more and more’re come up from Omben-beyond-the-Sea. I’ve been told the humans are horrible in Omben-beyond-the-Sea.”

  “They did it?” I said. “The maggots.”

  “Sort of. One of them got me by the neck and I grabbed his wallet––don’t tell Sal––and I tucked it up me sleeve. But he still had a-hold of me neck so I belted him in the gob, and the three of us got in a pretty knot, until this other human walks by and tells them they’ve no business knocking around a Noreme, as Noremes ain’t subject to Ombenelvan humans. Now I says to this misinformed booby that Noremes ain’t subject to any humans. And I called him an imposter and a whoreson and a gooch, and he got unreasonably angry. Two more soldiers came and the owl tied me up and wished me well. Didn’t stick around to watch. The bigger owl was happy to take charge.”

  I grew uneasy. “What’d he look like, Wille?”

  “Round and fat with a pasty face and a nasty grin. Won’t be grinning when he finds his wallet missing, though.”

  “No––the one you called a gooch.”

  “He had great big golden eyes.”

  “Helpful, that.”

  “Tall. Young. Big hands and feet.”

  “And?” My stomach sank.

  “Skinny face, brown hair, charming smile.” I began walking away. “Where’re you going? Don’t leave the rest of these for Sal!”

  ***

  I didn’t expect to accomplish much, but I was eager for an argument. Eager enough to climb the wall that very evening and have a talk with Andrei’s horse.

  After I gathered loose bricks from the path to stand on, I stuck my head through the stall window and clicked my tongue. Sandal looked at me with a brown eye.

  “Is your master cruel?”

  What master? the horse said, and farted. I rolled my eyes and went to look for Trid

  I knew where his room was. I’d seen him climb through his window and slither down the roof––and where there was Trid there was usually Andrei.

  I climbed up a lattice and over a steep roof, then stepped onto a string line where the mouths of copper serpents poured rainwater from a gutter. I shimmied up between the gutter and the wall, and pulled myself over a cornice.

  I walked toward Trid’s casement, flung wide to the cool night air.

  His desk was pushed up against the sill, and he was sitting at it, putting together a set of tiny bones that looked like the skeleton of a bat. He looked up, scattered the bones with his forearm, and swore. “Works that well, does it?” He pointed to my leg.

  “Where’s Andrei?” I didn’t move to climb through.

  “Why? You’re well shut of him.” Trid picked bones off the rug. “He’s grown cross since the Ombenelva showed up, and the mere thought of you two squabbling gives me a headache.”

  “Go get him.”

  “I’m not moving.” But he turned his back to me and shrieked Andrei’s name a few times.

  Andrei poked his head round the door. He was wearing a nightshirt, and his hair was mussed. “Is someone murdering you?”

  “She wants a lovers’ spat. Not in here, though––I’m working.”

  Andrei saw me and tugged his shirt down. Then he climbed out the window and bumped his head on the lintel, and I started right off: “Wille’s got thirty scores on his back because he called you an imposter?”

  “I can hear you,” called Trid.

  Andrei picked a route down to the ledge with the copper serpents.

  “That tall Gireldine?” he said, looking over his shoulder. “Called me more than that. A whoreson, and other things too coarse for your feminine ears, and you want to know what he made with his fingers? Why’ve you turned my tunic inside-out?”

  “You left.” I sat on the ledge a good five feet away from him. “Like you were shamed, or something.” I took a breath and said quickly, “You’re not that bad, you’re not so cruel as you’d like people to believe.”

  He stared at me as though I were about to run him over with a cart.

  “What’s the act for?” I said.

  “What act?”

  “Why d’ye act so cruel?” I looked at the ground, which was a very long way down, and grabbed hold of a copper serpent.

  “I don’t know. Self preservation?”

  “What d’ye mean?”

  “I don’t know.” He sounded frustrated. “Right, here’s what I think––” He scratched both sides of his head, and his hair stuck up everywhere. “Humans have to repress their feelings.” He spoke like it was a lesson he’d memorized. “You let them out they’re likely to kill you. Kindness, compassion, empathy: Good as poison.”

  “God and the Lady.”

  “People are nasty,” he said. “And they don’t change. You’ve got to be cruel to live past childhood.”

  “Deep wisdom,” I said. “Did yer nurse tell you that, or’d you pull it from her breast with the milk?”

  “You’re disgusting.”

  “Nobody’s here to be nasty,” I said, and then remembered something our old nurse had told us. “Humans are supposed to make doors.”

  “Doors? Why Doors?”

  “That’s what you’re supposed to know. Simargh say mores, Elde build shores, humans make doors.”

  “A nursery rhyme?”

  I slid back and put both hands on the serpent, and he eyed them and said, “Do you think I’m going to push you off the roof?”

  I shrugged. “You enjoy watchin it, don’t you? All them floggings?”

  “Yes, very nice, a flogging.”

  “Is it?” I was growing warm, and I let go the serpent to roll up my sleeves. “D’you get a rush when the skin gets so ripe with blood it can’t hold no more, and the stuff spills down the back in red ribbons, when the bone shines through––”

  “Shut up.” He stared at my arms.

  “Or you’ll have a poor girl trussed up and whipped?”

  “Who did that?”

  I’d forgotten about the welts crisscrossed up and down my arms. I rolled my sleeves back down. “You’re supposed to be repressing that feeling.”

  The concern left his face. “Duly noted.”

  “Your argument’s a goner.”

  “How, exactly?”

  “It’s broken its knees, Andrei. Your argument’s a sour, sick old man.”

  “My argument’s made my life as uncomplicated as humanly possible.”

  I laughed. “Got it down to a couple rules?”

  “One. With no one to stop me I’ll do as I please.” He grabbed the gutter above his head and swung himself to his feet. He walked along the edge and disappeared around a corner.

  “He forgot the other half,” I said quietly to the ser
pent. “Folk’ll react however they please to whatever he does. And if people don’t change, how the hell did I change from the King’s daughter to this?”

  The stars glinted around a thumbnail moon. I made to leave and checked myself. I walked up the roof to talk to Trid, thinking he would leave me less sick to my stomach.

  The slates were still warm under my feet. But a chill went through me when I saw Trid sitting on his windowsill, feet on the slate, eyes staring at the copper trough of a gutter. I knew at once. He’d heard me. My voice had sounded up through the gutter.

  “You were the old King’s daughter?” he said. “I heard he had a bunch of sons.”

  I dropped to my knees and fled. My legs tangled, and suddenly I could find no grip with my hands, and I started rolling; and Trid sprang up, ran in a crouch, and leapt over my body just as it was about to slide over the cornice.

  He blew the air from my lungs, bruising my elbows. “Were you wanting to fall to your death?” he said, and I struggled, pummeling and scratching at him. He pulled me away from the edge. “What’ve you been doing to your hands?” He pinned them down. “I don’t know if you’re crazy or telling the truth, Aloren, but I suppose it would explain the tapestry, wouldn’t it?” I freed a hand and slapped him over the mouth. “And if it were false you wouldn’t be clawing like this.”

  “This in’t good,” I said. “Let go. This in’t good.” He released me, and watched as I crawled three feet from him and sat down again.

  “You needn’t act so frightened,” he said, and I put another foot between us. “I won’t repeat what I heard, if you don’t want me to.”

  “Yes you will.” I pressed my palms against my eyeballs. “How could you keep something like that to yourself, and watch the dancing, or the––”

  “I won’t. You can trust me. When have I ever lied to you?”

  I kneaded my feet and snorted. “You were just eavesdropping.”

  “By accident. Look where my desk is. And why should I tell? No one would believe me.”

  “A human couldn’t do that. A human would”––I rocked and choked back sobs––“try to pull as much misery, as much torture, out of a situation, because he don’t hold with something as dangerous as goodness.”