Veevee laughed and gave him a tiny light punch on the arm. “Eat like a king!”
“I could eat a horse!” said Danny triumphantly.
“You really could, couldn’t you,” said Veevee in delight.
“We still haven’t made any progress toward closing and locking gates,” said Danny.
“I think we’ve made a lot of progress for only our first session, please remember,” said Veevee. “And now here in my kitchen I’ve got this public gate that goes nowhere and I still can’t get down to the beach.”
“The nice thing is, the public gate is still mine—I moved it using another gate, but I can just as easily put it back where I found it.”
“Except not starting from the balcony,” Veevee reminded him.
“Where, then?” asked Danny.
“My bedroom,” she said. “Look, right here—inside my underwear drawer.”
“What?” said Danny, following her into the bedroom.
“It’s not like I have to walk into the gate. I just find it with some body part and push my way through, right? So put it inside my dresser, so I can open the drawer, put my hand in, and have access to the gate. But nobody else can ever stumble into it accidentally.”
“Right,” said Danny. “And when you come back to your room, you end up inside your drawer and your dresser explodes around you.”
Veevee giggled. “Oops,” she said. “I forgot it went two ways.”
“Let’s not put it in your shower,” said Danny. “You don’t want to accidentally step through it and end up wet and starkers on the beach.”
“You prankster, you were tempted to do it, weren’t you!”
“I can’t fool somebody who can see the gates,” said Danny.
“Oh, well. It would have been a funny prank. It still might be, someday. To play on someone who isn’t me.”
Danny put the entrance to the gate right up against her linen closet shelves. Nobody was going to press their body into that space, and when she came back to the room, she’d simply appear in front of it, facing away. Veevee tried it out, both ways, several times. “Very convenient,” she said.
“Just remember to check your shower before you get in,” said Danny.
“I know how you think,” said Veevee. “You just told me to check the shower because you want to distract me so it doesn’t occur to me that you really placed a public gate just above my toilet seat.”
“Never crossed my mind,” said Danny. “But I wish it had.”
The grocery delivery arrived. Danny helped her put things away. Then she made him a couple of sandwiches—one cucumber and watercress on white bread, and one peanut butter and honey on whole wheat. They were really good. Why couldn’t any of the Aunts have been like Veevee?
He returned home through the gate to the Silvermans’ with half the peanut-butter-and-honey sandwich still in his hand. Leslie eyed it suspiciously.
“That’s what she’s feeding you?” she asked.
“I had to steal it,” said Danny. “She won’t let me eat or drink or use the bathroom or anything.”
“Ha ha,” said Leslie. Then, more seriously, “Do you think she’ll help you?”
“We’re making progress,” said Danny.
“Just keep safe. That’s all I care about,” said Leslie.
Danny realized that she was telling him the truth. It touched him, to think she actually cared about him—enough to let him go study with the woman she probably hated worst in the whole world.
Danny gave her a hug and kissed her cheek.
“You still have the stink of her deodorant on you,” said Leslie. But she hugged him back.
15
THE QUEEN’S SQUIRREL
It was in the kitchen that Wad first heard the rumors that Anonoei was plotting to kill Queen Bexoi. It began with Hull quite out of temper, though she wouldn’t tell anyone why. But she was storming and stomping around the kitchen, ready to snap at anyone who asked the most innocent question, and as for those who made mistakes, they were doomed. Hull was generally not a violent person, but brooms were laid against backs and an iron pot was thrown and dented against a stone wall.
Wad knew that it was time for him to intervene, for though the pot was badly aimed, it had been thrown hard and if it had struck the head of poor Gunnel, he’d have been dead or a halfwit, which Wad knew would consume poor Hull with grief.
“Pardon me,” said Wad softly.
“Speak up, you Wad of half-risen dough!” shouted Hull.
Wad spoke even more softly. “I think we have a fungus infestation in the shade garden.”
“Do you think I’m an idiot?” demanded Hull. “Do you think I don’t know you’re trying to get me out of the kitchen to calm me down?”
“The undersides of the basil leaves are white with it, like an upside-down snowfall,” Wad persisted, even more softly.
“Then pull them out and burn them, you fool! Don’t bother me with it.”
“You told me your grandfather once found a way to kill fungus,” said Wad.
“You scheming little squirrel,” said Hull. “As if you actually knew what was for my own good.” She stalked out of the kitchen and headed for the shade garden.
Wad loped after her, passed her, and had the door to the garden unlocked and open for her when she arrived. Hull came in and slammed the door shut behind her. “Well?” she said.
Wad just looked at her.
“I know you can talk, Wad. Don’t play dumb with me.”
Wad smiled slightly.
“I wasn’t really aiming at Gunnel’s head!” Hull said.
“What if you missed and hit him?” asked Wad softly.
“Then I’d feel worse than I do right now, which is hard to believe.”
Wad’s silence was another question.
“They tried to put poison in the Queen’s tea,” said Hull. “They thought because I’m fat and getting old that I wouldn’t see the movement behind my back. But I saw, and I turned and told him to drink the tea himself or I’d pour it down his throat. So he picked it up with trembling fingers and threw it on the floor.” She laughed. “It was a tin cup and it didn’t break, and a minute later I had that cup up to his lips and him pressed against the wall and he started to cry and begged me not to make him drink, that it wasn’t his idea, that he was only trying to serve the King.”
“How would it serve the King to kill his wife when she’s pregnant with his first legitimate heir?”
“They don’t want a legitimate heir!” said Hull.
“Who is ‘they’?” asked Wad.
“And what will you do about it if I say?” she retorted.
“I don’t know,” said Wad. “Who?”
“I don’t know either,” Hull confessed. “ ‘They’ll kill my family if I say,’ he says to me, and what can I do then? I’m too merciful, that’s what I am. But if the Queen dropped dead of poison, who would they blame? Me, who was carrying the tray myself! Who else? I could protest all I wanted, but there was two they intended to kill with that poison—the Queen and me. Not that anyone would care about me. I barely care about myself. But I’d never forgive them forcing me to die with a traitor’s and assassin’s shame on me, when I don’t deserve either name!”
Wad stepped right up to her and put his arms around her. She noticed that he was a little taller than he had been when he first came to Nassassa nearly two years ago. But still not as tall as he ought to be, after all this time. “Using my grandfather’s name to force me out of my own kitchen,” she murmured. “Shame on you.”
“I didn’t say his name,” whispered Wad. “Because I don’t know it.”
“You invoked his memory and made me stop ranting and throwing things, and I wanted to rant and throw things!”
Wad shook his head against her shoulder.
“I did so! I may not have wanted the consequences of ranting and throwing, but I certainly wanted things in that kitchen to hit other things, and hard!”
“Then next time throw at me,
” said Wad. “I won’t mind.”
“Oh, and what would you do, gate out of the way? Show everyone what you are? If you still are?”
“I wouldn’t gate away,” said Wad. “I’d let you hit me. Then you’d stop.”
“Why? Because you think I love you?”
Against her shoulder, Wad nodded.
“Presumptuous little squirrel. Nobody loves squirrels! They’re too clever, you can’t stop them from stealing!”
“I don’t steal,” murmured Wad.
“I don’t know who tried to kill the Queen,” said Hull. “Whoever it was had that weak-kneed coward’s family in their power and any man who has children, he’s no longer free, they can control him, and that’s the truth. And no, I won’t tell you who the weak-kneed coward was, either!”
“Are you afraid I’ll kill him?”
“I’m afraid that someone will find out that you know, and kill you for it.”
“And I’m afraid that someone will kill you for it, because by now they certainly know that you know.”
Hull pushed him away a little. “They wouldn’t dare,” she said.
“If they dare to try to kill the Queen…”
“Who would put blood in the King’s bread!” said Hull.
“Tell me,” said Wad. For in truth it surprised Wad that there could be any conspiracy that he didn’t already know about.
“I don’t know,” said Hull, “but I do know this: Whoever it is wants the Queen dead so that her baby will never be born, so that Anonoei’s little halfway bastard boys can take the place of the rightful heir who died unborn.”
“And why would they do that?”
“Because the Queen is from Gray,” said Hull. “Don’t pretend you don’t know the politics of this house, I know you go a-spying whenever I don’t have you at a job, and sometimes even when I do.”
“Then why don’t you want to see Anonoei’s Icewegian sons inherit?”
“I’m old enough to know how things work in this world,” said Hull. “If both those boys are heirs, then they’ll fight between each other and we’ll have a civil war. Or one of them will kill the other, and then we’ll have a fratricide on the throne—always a proud day for a kingdom. Old Oviak made war on Gray and lost it, and he swore to the bargain that brought peace. Queen Bexoi and that baby in her belly are the price of it, and no Icewegian with honor can go back on the word of the old King, even if he is dead.”
“So it’s not because you love the Queen,” said Wad.
“I don’t even know her. When I bring her breakfast—with my own hands, mind you, because Her Fancyship demanded it—she hardly looks at me and never says a word, not even thanks.”
“Why do you think she demanded that you bring her breakfast?”
Hull thought for a moment. “Well, I’m glad to know that I’m trusted even by those I don’t much like.”
“You saved her life today.”
“I can’t throw myself on her protection, though, can I?”
“Try the King’s protection,” said Wad.
“How do I know he isn’t part of the conspiracy?”
Wad did not believe the King would do such a thing, but he couldn’t be sure of it.
“So now you’ve calmed me down and I won’t kill any of the idiots who work in the kitchen. I won’t tell on the conspirators and that should satisfy them, too.”
“Should it?”
“I’m busy.” She turned for the door, then stopped. “Was there any fungus?”
Wad shook his head.
“The King doesn’t want this baby,” said Hull, “because everyone knows the Queen is a drekka, or nearly so. She can call finches! How useful! Her children will have no greatness in them. But that’s the promise old King Oviak made to Bexoi’s brother, and King Prayard is bound by it, and by his own marriage oath! I hate it that I don’t trust him, but how can I trust anyone? Except you, Wad. You’re the only faithful man or boy in Nassassa.” And with that she went back to the house.
Faithful man or boy? Wad laughed bitterly inside himself. Faithful to my Queen, and to the boy or girl, half mine, growing inside her womb. Faithful to you, Hull. But to none else, especially if they threaten any of my beloveds.
Behind this fierce loyalty, though, there was another Wad, an older one, who knew secrets he wouldn’t tell this tree-born reborn squirrel. And that Wad was laughing—at the word beloved. There is no love, said that ancient Wad. There is only hunger and possession. You huddle like a starving man over his food, you fool, saying, “Touch not what is mine, I’ll kill you if you touch it.”
Well, I will, Wad told that ancient self. See if I don’t.
Just another killer, no different from any other, said the cynical worm that dwelt in his ancient heart. You love, and so your greed is noble and your hate is righteous. You desire, and so you plan to kill whoever wants to take away from you the things you have no right to have because they belong to someone else. You are the lover-by-stealth, the thief of the King’s throne, for you want to put your cuckoo’s egg upon it, denying the King’s own sons. Do you speak of nobility? Those who would kill the Queen would only avenge your crime—your treason and betrayal of a man, Prayard, who has done you only kindness.
Wad sank down upon the ground in the shade garden. Why did I come to this place? he asked himself. I needed no one till I came here, and now I love three, and they will make a killer out of me in the effort to protect them.
While Wad was bitterly condemning himself, Hull went into the kitchen, where no one dared to look up from their work, and stalked off to her own room, to meditate upon the kind of foolish old woman who takes out her anger on the innocent. That was what was on her mind when she stepped into the darkness of her room, holding no candle because she knew the place by heart. She only heard one breath, one step, and then the dagger was in the top of her spine, just under the neck. Whick whack, back and forth, and she felt no pain as she dropped to the floor until her head struck stone. Even then, she was only dazed. She felt her brain fading because of lack of air. Breathe, she told herself. Breathe. But her body obeyed nothing. The door closed behind her. Alone in the dark, her brain starved from lack of air, and without pain or even fear, Hull died.
It was Wad who found her, an hour later, when the kitchen servants came to him and begged him to make sure she was all right. “She hasn’t told us that we’re done. We dare not leave the kitchen till we have her leave.” Everyone knew that Wad could approach her no matter how angry she was.
He found her door locked, but that was no barrier to Wad. He gated inside, found her body, and wept. Where was I when they did this? I knew they would try to kill her, but did I watch over her? No, I pitied and condemned myself as a killer, as being no better than any other. But who did I kill today? No one. If I had killed the right man, Hull would be alive.
Yet he could not unthink all that he had thought. The very fact that he longed to add to the blood already on his hands from handling and weeping over that good woman only sickened him and grieved him more. Kill kill kill, that’s all we do, despite our powers. For magery didn’t change the fact that ultimately the only way to stop a man was to threaten to kill him, if he was weak or fearful, or to kill him outright, if he was strong and brave and dangerous. Murder is the only power that we know. Am I better than they are? Hull was better than any of us, because she never killed, because she kept on trusting even when she had the proof that she was dealing with assassins. And she is dead. Does that mean that only the murderers can live? What world is that to live in?
Hull, why did you take me in, if not to be your protector? And since you have no son, who but me is your avenger?
But would you, even now, want vengeance for your death? Or simply peace?
Wad laid her back down on the floor, his tears still on her face. He gave no alarm. Let someone else discover her and raise the cry of murder. Wad had work to do.
He gated to a place he knew by a brook in a narrow canyon many miles from Nas
sassa. There he washed himself in the cold snowmelt mountain water of early summer. Hull’s blood was sent back into the world through that stream, to be part of the sea again one day. As for his clothing, he burned it, lest the blood be seen and anyone accuse him of the murder of the well-loved night cook.
Naked as the hour he came out of the tree two summers ago, he gated back into the castle and closed the gates that he had made to Hull’s room and to the brook where he washed. Then he made a viewport into Anonoei’s room.
She was supposed to be preparing to leave Nassassa. At the Queen’s request—and the demand of the agents of Gray who surrounded her—King Prayard had commanded that Anonoei and her two sons be sent away. A ship was going to take her to a place of exile, where she would be guarded so that neither she nor her sons could endanger Queen Bexoi’s child when it was born. The ship was supposed to leave the next day, but Wad saw no sign of preparation for a move. Oh, there were three open trunks in her antechamber, but there was nothing in them, not even a pile of clothes waiting to be sorted.
She knows, thought Wad. Whether she is part of the plot or not, someone told her that she need not pack, because she would not leave. She knows they mean to kill my Bexoi and my baby, and she is content.
But angry as he was, and grieving, and wracked with guilt for not having protected Hull, he still did not reach through a gate into her heart and squeeze it into stillness, or pull it out and throw it in the King’s face. Instead, he made sure that her two sons, six-year-old Eluik and four-year-old Enopp, were in her chambers, too.
Wad knew a place that dated from the ancient days, two thousand years before, when the first portion of Nassassa Castle was built. As the stonemages hollowed out the crag to make the chambers, halls, and corridors of the inmost keep of Nassassa, they created three tunnels down which they poured the rock they fluidized. These tunnels opened out three hundred feet above the deep volcanic lake that formed a part of the perimeter of the castle. From there the slag had fallen and been lost in the lake. Then the tunnels were filled with seamless stone. But at the mouth of each tunnel, a shallow cave remained, where the last hot slag had poured away when all the stone behind it had begun to harden. They all sloped sharply upward, the floor more steeply than the roof, so there was scarcely any level ground inside.
The Lost Gate Page 27