“Good morning, all,” Bergold said, stumping down the slope toward them. He’d added a short beard to his ensemble this morning, saving himself the trouble of having to shave under primitive conditions. “I’m last, eh?”
“Not quite,” Misha said. “Her Highness is still getting ready.”
“What a night! My fingers are still cramped from writing my notes.”
“So are mine,” Felan said, shaking out his wrist. “I’m just about ready to send my report.” He felt in his pouch, and came up with a book of stamps. He took one, licked the reverse side, and stuck it firmly to the corner of his folded parchment.
At once, the stamp expanded, took on bulk and feathers, and became a bald eagle. The white-headed bird crushed the envelope in its talons, and, with a fierce look at the humans, opened its great wings and took off. Above them, it wheeled and made northward. In just moments, it was out of sight.
“Nothing like airmail,” Bergold said. “We must be under a popular route. I saw another airmail fly overhead only a little while ago.”
“Wouldn’t it be nice if we could just stick stamps on ourselves and mail us to Brom?” Lum asked wistfully.
Felan gave him a rueful grin. “I didn’t bring enough postage.”
Roan glanced uphill but caught no glimpse of the princess yet. While waiting for Leonora to finish getting ready, they had a light breakfast and broke camp. The guards disassembled the invisible defensive wall, taking down each section with great care and exaggerated movements. Captain Spar had explained the danger of accidentally wandering into the wall during the night, and had carefully marked the exits for the others to see. Roan wondered briefly what would happen if a soldier dropped one of the invisible blocks. There’d probably be an explosion like they’d never seen. But since the bricks were invisible, would the blast be, too?
He rolled up his sleeping gear and mess supplies, folding them small so they would fit into his saddlebags. Bergold helpfully shook out the campfire, and folded it up in a rustle of red and silver foil. He tossed it to the soldier who was loading the pack animals.
Colenna had the most interesting outdoor gear. In her pack, she had one of everything that could be used as a base to transform into anything she might conceivably need on the road. Roan had seen the handsome pottery cup she was now putting away used as a bowl, a cooking pot, and a footbath. The item Roan envied most was a clever little stove that could be used in turn as a nightlight, torch, fire-starter, or bedwarmer. Some very clever craftsman must have fashioned it for her. Its base shape had to have been fire in its purest form.
When Roan went around the small stand of trees to stow his property in Cruiser’s saddlebags, he saw that the wash area had been transformed for the princess’s use. The curtain which had served as a privacy barrier for the others had become a solid and impenetrable wall with the cloak clasp reformed into the handle of a narrow but serviceable door. Roan heard Leonora humming over the sound of trickling water.
He went over to tap on the door. Before he could reach it, the nurse headed him off.
“Where do you think you’re going?” she demanded, staring up at him defiantly. She had a bundle of clothes over her arm, and hastily tucked some fine, filmy garments out of sight among the others when she noticed Roan looking.
“I wanted to tell Her Highness that the rest of us will be ready to depart at her pleasure,” Roan said, pleasantly.
Drea looked mortified. “My lady hasn’t had her breakfast yet,” the old woman said. She tipped a hand to show Roan where a small table and chair had been set up. “This may be an emergency venture, but some things do take priority! You can’t ask her to take to horse without a decent meal inside her.”
“Well, no,” Roan began, uneasily. He glanced back at the others, aware of their impatience to be off, and his own. “Will it be . . . may we expect her soon?”
“One can’t just bolt down food and expect it to sit,” Drea said, with a touch of the old nursery manner. Roan felt chastised, but he noticed then that the humming had stopped. Leonora had fallen silent inside the washroom to listen to their conversation.
“Will you ask Her Highness to let us know when she is ready to depart?” Roan asked, keeping all traces of annoyance out of his voice.
“It’s already ten o’clock,” Hutchings muttered behind him. “She’s taking an amazing long time to get cleaned up.”
Roan turned and glared a warning, but it was too late. They heard a rustle from the washroom.
“How dare you talk about my lady like that?” Drea demanded, rounding on the guard. Instead of a dumpling, she looked like a dragon. Hutchings backed up a hasty pace.
“Drea!” the princess called. The claws and wings subsided at once. Drea hurried over and slipped in the door with the armload of clothes. It closed firmly behind her. Roan signed to the others to be about their business of loading the horses. To their credit, they looked abashed, particularly Hutchings, who went about his tasks with downcast gaze.
Within a few moments, Leonora emerged, fastening the blue cloak around her shoulders. The others tried not to stare, but she was aware they were aware of her. She met all their eyes in turn, wearing a fixed little smile, but her cheeks were red.
“My chicken, they can’t treat you this way. You’re a princess, beyond reproach. They ought to know that,” Drea said, trailing behind the princess bearing her night things.
“Be quiet,” Leonora snapped. “Please.”
“Oh, all right, my lady, but you know it’s true.”
Roan smiled and held out a hand to Leonora, but surprise at her abrupt appearance had made him pause, and he knew she had noticed the hesitation. She was near tears from shame. She held her head up proudly, chin out and shoulders back.
“It won’t happen again,” she said, and stalked past Roan without touching him.
“Here, someone, take this,” Bergold said, irritably, the tangle of accordion-pleated paper in his hands festooning him and his horse. “I can’t do a thing with it.” He pushed the map away. Lum took it. The young guard flipped it open, and folded it over and over again into a neat bundle. He beamed as Bergold snatched it back from him. “By the Seven, I hope that’s not your only talent,” the historian said. Roan, watching this byplay over his shoulder, hid a smile from his old friend. “Are we lost?”
“We’re on the right path,” Lum said, pulling his steed to the side of the dirt road to point northward. His horse danced and curvetted at yet another break in the pace. “It’s still a ways that direction, sir.”
“We came a long way in the dark,” Roan said, trying to make peace. “Don’t blame Lum for it. It was my fault.”
“Well, we’re going in circles,” Spar snapped, from the front of the file, where he was riding beside Colenna.
“No, we’re not, sir,” Lum insisted.
But, indeed, they seemed to be. Roan was certain he had seen that handful of blue-green spruce trees off to the left before, several times. There was a ring of toadstools on the bank of the stream to his right, and a broad field of daisies with rabbits running through it, just like one they had left miles behind them. Yet, they had ridden north for an hour with the sun on their right. It was now straight overhead in the clear blue sky, and the heat was making everyone irritable.
“Now, stop it, everyone,” Colenna said, holding out her hands. “We’ve run into a spot of Déjà Vu, that’s all.”
“No, we haven’t,” Spar said. “This young fool’s just lost.”
“I’m not lost, sir. It’s right here on the map.”
“It’s Déjà Vu,” Colenna said. “You’ll see.”
Roan rubbed his eyes. “We’ll get out of it. Just keep on.”
Beside him, Golden Schwinn’s hoof pecked at a stone, and the horse shied off the path into a patch of marshy grass. The princess, an excellent horsewoman, managed to control her mount, and steered it back onto the road. Schwinn trod on a toadstool. Roan was sure it was the same one the steed had crushed thre
e times before. The road curved to the left and went uphill, away from the stream.
The group rode in silence. In spite of the dangers, Roan would almost have been willing to take the risk of traveling alone to get away from all the bickering. Colenna’s back was hurting her. It was a long time since the senior historian had been on so long a journey. Drea kept breaking out of line to go forward and fuss over her mistress. Leonora, who felt delicate about being coddled after her embarrassment of the morning, kept shooing the nurse away, which made the old woman cross.
The princess herself shot furtive glances toward Roan, but every time he tried to meet her eyes, she would jerk her head forward and stare haughtily ahead of her. Today, she looked like the image in a centuries-old church missal: slim and almost sexless. Her face was long, narrow, and pale, with a high, bald forehead, thin eyebrows, heavily lidded eyes, and a small, folded mouth. There was hardly any color in her face, except her eyes, which were brown and watchful. To Roan, who had known her from childhood, this was the mark of an intensely bad mood. She’d had to bolt her breakfast, her mount was misbehaving, and she had been shamed in front of the whole party, whom she knew didn’t want her along. She had also curtly refused Colenna’s offer of a muscle-ache remedy, though she rode as if she needed one. Roan didn’t dare approach her to offer small talk.
Even the usually cheerful Bergold was in a pet; the map the Geographer had given them resisted being folded the same way by the same person twice. He was lost again behind a mass of accordion-pleated paper, while his horse wandered back and forth across the trail, occasionally bumping into Lum’s patient mount.
“Well, we’re going in circles,” Spar said, pointing ahead. “Look, there’s those trees again.”
“It’s perfectly possible that a feature of the landscape repeats itself,” Bergold said, without coming out from behind the map. “Such things have not been unknown in history. Why, remember the Building Booms fifty years ago?”
“These children are all too young,” Colenna said peevishly, shifting her hip to look behind her at Roan. “After the Second Mud Battles, the Dreamland started to fill up with plots and plots of identical houses. Even mine fell into the scheme, right there in Mnemosyne. Any night, you didn’t know if you were coming home or housebreaking. I was glad when that ended, and we went back to some individuality of construction.”
“Yes, but who’d make identical rings of toadstools?” Alette asked, as Golden Schwinn backed over the same one for the fourth or fifth time.
“This isn’t just alike. This is the same,” Spar insisted.
“Just wait it out,” Colenna said.
“Where exactly are we?” Roan asked, reining in to ride beside Bergold. The historian poked his head out from under the map folds, and pointed at a middle panel of the document that was inside the tent over his head.
“We are here. If I could get this dratted thing folded . . .” Roan took it away from him, and by dint of fate, the map obediently collapsed into a neat pleat.
“Cheek!” Bergold exclaimed. “Wait until I see Romney!”
Roan smiled, and studied the map. If he could believe the geographical features he saw around him, they had come only ten miles from where they had camped. He traced the line of the stream that ran parallel to the road, and found the place where it almost touched.
“Is this Déjà Vu a surprise Brom planted for us to walk into?” Roan asked, handing the map back to Bergold. “A booby trap?”
“Not at all,” the historian said. “This has the feel of a natural phenomenon.” Bergold pulled a small volume from his saddlebag and thumbed through it. “Yes. Déjà Vu. Yes, Colenna’s right. Hmm. Could be tricky.”
“Yes, indeed. We’re winding ourselves up in reality,” Colenna commented, her chin on her shoulder. “As we keep heading north—and we are—we build up a tremendous forward energy that’s trapped like the potential in a stretched bowstring. Physically, we are riding through the same terrain, but in linear time, we’re quite far from here. Prepare yourselves. When it lets go, the reaction might be powerful.”
“Ah!” Misha said, at the back of the line. “So the collateral force is building up around us. How do we release it?”
“We won’t have to. The Dreamland itself will trigger it, or a nuisance, or an influence, or one of the Sleepers changing his or her mind. You don’t know. Just be prepared.”
“The tension’s appalling,” Felan said, in his bored voice. “Look, we’re a lot of strong, influential minds. Let’s break the bond ourselves.”
“Young man! And you call yourself a historian?” Colenna was outraged. She turned full around in her saddle and glared until her eyes became fire red. “This is the Sleepers’ will! You must take what comes, when it comes.”
Unmoved, Felan clicked his tongue. “Tsk, tsk, tsk. All this heat over nothing.” Colenna glared at him. Roan believed Felan enjoyed baiting her. It was his way of passing the time.
They rode by the stream, and Golden Schwinn crushed another toadstool, or the same one. As the road curved and turned uphill, the horses turned into bicycles.
“And at the most inconvenient moment, too!” Felan said, irritably, standing up on his pedals to ride up the slope.
“That was a fundamental change,” Colenna said, sitting up taller on her saddle. Roan felt forces brush past his cheeks like warm wind.
“There’s a strong influence around here,” Roan said, alarmed. “A very strange one. Do you sense that?” he asked.
“Yes! We’re coming to the edge of it,” Colenna said, as they crested the hill. “Hold tight to your handlebars, and try not to fall oo-off!”
Colenna’s last words were drawn out into a wail as her steed was yanked forward by an invisible hand. It vanished down the road at incredible speed.
“Well, will you look at thaaa . . .” Spar began, when he, too, was captured by the influence. The others looked at one another in alarm, watching the captain disappear after Colenna.
“Help, it’s got meee,” Leonora cried, alarmed. She clutched Golden Schwinn’s handlebars as she was swept away. Roan grabbed for her and missed.
“Just hold ti—” was all he had time to say before the breath he was exhaling was knocked back into him by the wind in his face. He planted his hands on the handlebars, and squeezed the brake levers with all his might.
The landscape streamed past him in a smeared, ribbonlike tapestry. He had brief impressions of trees, hills, rivers, and animals. Small mud and thatch huts in the distance seemed elongated into whole terraces of houses. Roan ordered his hat brim to descend over his eyes to protect them, because he didn’t dare lift his hands. He hurtled forward faster and faster, until the landscape around him was a thousand-color jumble with no identifiable features. Then everything went dark green, and the air filled with a heady fragrance that made him gasp. Just when he thought he might pass out from the force, he felt the brake levers close under the pressure of his hands, and he slowed to an abrupt halt. His hat dropped forward over his eyes. He pushed it back.
He found himself in the middle of an evergreen wood, which explained the color of the landscape. His feet and tires rested on a thick bed of yellowed pine needles yielding their deep, resiny odor. The riders who had been carried away before him were waiting for him, safe and well, except that the princess’s hair was blown into a wild aureole about her head, and Spar looked even more disapproving than usual.
Drea came screaming towards them. As soon as she stopped, her mouth snapped shut. She jumped off her steed and hurried over to fuss over the princess. Though her own hair was windblown into a fluffy bird’s nest, she tidied Leonora’s hair and patted her veil back into place.
“Leave me alone, Drea,” Leonora said, impatiently.
“You can’t go along looking a sight, Your Highness,” the nurse said. Roan saw Leonora glance at the others, who quickly turned their eyes away so they wouldn’t be staring at her, and her cheeks turned even pinker than the wind had made them.
&n
bsp; “Wooo-hoo-hooo!” Bergold hurtled into view, his face flattened by the g-forces. “What a ride!” He was followed closely by Lum and the other guards, their knuckles white on their brake handles. Felan appeared a few moments later, more sour-faced than ever.
“There,” Colenna said, with satisfaction, smoothing her long gray queue. “We’ve snapped out of it. And there’s the trail.”
“All that for nothing,” Spar said.
“No,” Bergold explained, smiling literally from ear to ear. He produced the map and opened it to the appropriate panel. “This is where we would have been if we had kept riding straight.” He indicated a place on the map along the main southern road out of the capital. “And this, unless I’ve lost all my skills with this wretched atlas, is where we are now.” He put his finger on a spot much farther north.
“Remarkable,” Roan said. “I’ve traveled all over the Dreamland, and I’ve never been propelled in that manner before.”
“You’re usually on your own,” Misha pointed out. “Collective mass equals more energy. The more of us there are, the greater the power of a Déjà Vu.”
Roan raised his eyebrows, interested. “Can you duplicate the effect artificially?”
“Ask Brom when you see him next,” Felan said, with a leer. “That’s clean out of either of our departments, isn’t it, Colenna?”
“You are disrespectful, you wretched youngster,” the older woman said. “If I get big enough at any time on this journey, I’m putting you over my knee.”
“We must make a note of the event,” Bergold said. “Micah will be very interested in a Déjà Vu. Felan, you ought to put it into your next report home.”
“I certainly will,” the younger man said, pulling his sleeve cuff out over the back of his hand until there was enough surface to write on. He reached behind his ear for a pencil, and made a few jottings.
“We’re past the place where we turned off,” Lum said, after leaning over Bergold’s shoulder for a moment’s inspection of the map.
“We have to turn back? Into that—that effect?” Leonora asked, her eyes huge. She had forgotten her temper in her curiosity.
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