by S R Nulton
“What’s going on with you three? You look like she just told you dinner was ready when you thought she was going to scold you for bringing mud into the house.”
I blinked and looked at my sister-in-law. “That was an oddly accurate analogy. But to answer your question, they were worried that I’d ask about who we were running from and why they’re being chased.”
Jeshu choked on his breakfast. “Ach-h! What do you mean by that?”
“She means you three act like a squirrel trying to escape a pack of hounds whenever we bring up words like ‘who’ and ‘why’. Half the time just the words will set you off before you realize that we were asking something else.” Thyme was two-for-two on the similes and refusing to hold back. “I find it funny you think we don’t know that it makes you edgy.”
“Then why haven’t you asked?” Stone said.
Thyme smiled at him. “Because it doesn’t matter all that much. You either can’t tell us or won’t for some reason. Either way, we’ll know when we need to.”
Jeshu looked at me. “Is that how you feel as well?”
“No. Well, yes, technically, it is. But I already know part of it and it doesn’t matter much. We’ll be in Wrigestrin by the end of the week, at which point local gossips will fill in the gaps.” That seemed to stun them all. The silence and big eyes (except from Thyme who couldn’t have cared less) lasted for nearly two full minutes.
“B-but how? How could you possibly– it was your mother, wasn’t it?” Jeshu growled.
I laughed. “Are you kidding? No. You would have been enchanted and a puppet for her first thing if she’d known. No, it was a few clues I picked up in Stonesford. It doesn’t matter that much though. Right now we need to know the plan. So, what is it?”
The twins were decidedly unhappy with the turn of events, but Yew smirked at me from across the table. He, at least, found the humor in the situation.
Finally, Jeshu got himself under control and spoke up. “It’s a pretty simple plan. We basically have to stay in hiding until the winter solstice celebration. Right now the capital is the last place they would expect us to be and by the time they start to search, we’ll have already blended in.”
Thyme gaped at him. “That’s over five months away! How are we supposed to stay unseen that long?”
“We join the community. We open a shop or sell goods in the market. We can hide in plain sight and gather supplies and allies at the same time.” He seemed a bit uncomfortable as he said, “I’m not positive about what we should sell yet though.”
So we spent some time brainstorming. It wasn’t as easy as it should have been, what with Thyme and myself being the only ones who could do the crafting or actual selling.
“What about weaving? We could weave baskets. I’m really good at that!” Thyme piped up. Her hair was extra curly from the increased humidity and I kept getting distracted by it’s extra springy-ness. Every time she moved, it started bouncing around like a child who’d eaten too much sugar. I was a bit jealous of her hair’s energy. Nightmares don’t tend to give you energy.
I sighed. “You probably could, but that means that we’d be wandering the woods, carrying a bunch of branches while pregnant. And we’ll be pretty close to the end of our confinement by that point.”
She nodded as Stone vetoed that idea completely. And thoroughly. He was very protective of his wife and took my comment as the absolute truth.
“What about spinning?” Yew asked. “That wouldn’t be too hard on you two and would be sellable.”
Thyme was the one to disagree this time. “I can’t spin. Never could. Somehow I end up with bloody fingers and no one wants to buy that.”
“I’m horrible at it too. I always seem to break the strands,” I added. “Plus, we would have to purchase the wool from someone else who probably spins it already, meaning we would be selling ours for more than they did.”
The debate continued for quite a few days. Someone would throw out an idea and someone else would tear it down. We couldn’t be seamstresses, sell produce, deal in fabric, cobble shoes, make hats, sell fish, or any thing else out of the hundreds of options given.
I had decided to inventory my hold while we traveled when I hit upon the answer.
It wasn’t the first time I’d traveled in my ship, though never so long a distance. I wasn’t the only one who’d used it though. My friend Mallie had borrowed it a few years before when trying out some new spells and had gone quite a distance, bringing back a lot of interesting souvenirs. Among the things she’d purchased were a number of glazed clay crockpots. Truthfully, it was a rather absurd number of them. She’d had to add more space to my hold so everything would fit. When I asked, Mallie had admitted that she’d gone overboard when buying, but swore that they were the best pots on the two continents.
They were well made, I had to admit. We were used to orange clay being used, but these were an inky black with a slightly iridescent glaze and they did wonderful things for the food cooked inside them. As a bonus, they weren’t heavily decorated or embellished like most good cook pots out there; in fact, only a few had a pattern worked into the clay. They were pretty without being overly memorable. And we already owned them!
“Grace?” Jeshu called from above.
“Down here!” I waited until he walked in. “Look! We can sell these pots! There are plenty of them, so we won’t have to worry about spending any money on them. And if Yew does the whole ‘don’t remember me’ thing, he can carry them out for us everyday and take them back when the market shuts down.”
“You know about that?”
I snorted. “I was tired when we first met, but not tired enough to completely forget the silver-haired giant that married me to a salamander. He was too fuzzy in my memory for it to be anything other than intentional.”
Jeshu nodded and paused. “Are you mad?”
“About Yew? Not really. He probably forgets he’s doing it half the time and he hasn’t made me forget him since, so I have no grudge against him.”
“No,” he said with a smile. “Not Yew’s ability. I meant are you mad about us not telling you the whole truth about it? For making you figure it out on your own?”
That made me pause. Biting my lip, I shook my head. “No, I think… it’s fine. I know that there are things you can’t tell us. Just remember, that as soon as you can, I’m here to listen.”
He studied me carefully, searching my eyes. “You’re still upset about something. You have been for a few weeks. Since before Perim. What is it?”
That stunned me. I’d thought I’d kept it hidden, but apparently not. “How did you–?”
“Grace, we may have been married for a bit under two months, but I feel I know you fairly well. You’ve been distant. You still talk to me, still interact, but… I don’t know how to describe it. It’s like you’re looking at us from the outside, not as a part of the group. You lose that when you’re with Thyme or Stone, but when Yew or I show up, you start backing off. You don’t talk about anything that might be deep or personal.” He growled and ran his hand through his hair. “Like with your mother.”
That made me frown. “What about my mother?”
“At the beginning of our trip, you would have talked to me immediately about what happened. If not that night, it would have been first thing in the morning. Besides needing a hug and giving us the absolute facts, you haven’t spoken about it with anyone, including me. So what happened?”
I hung my head and moved to sit against the stairs. He sat down beside me, careful not to touch, just to let me think.
“Why did you lie?”
“About what?” he asked with a frown.
“About the letter you sent Eric. You lied about when you wrote it and when you decided to send it. I mean, not directly, but it definitely wasn’t the full story. You even got Yew to lie as well. Why?”
I waited patiently as he worked through what to say. I knew in my head that it wasn’t that big a deal, but I had given him my
trust and only ever asked that he not lie to me. Then he had. It was hard to take after being raised by a woman who liked to twist how you saw things, to make people believe the truth was a lie and her lie was the absolute truth.
“Because I forgot that I’m not alone in this anymore. Old habits die hard.” Jeshu drew in a big breath and let it go slowly. “For a long time, I only had Stone and my parents. Then Yew was brought in to be our bodyguard. Then my parents were gone and I had to be stronger than I thought I could be. I got burned a few times by people informing on me and ever since, I’ve been… overly cautious about who gets to know what.”
“Paranoid. Don’t lie to yourself. It wasn’t caution that had you lie to me.”
He laughed, mostly at himself. “You’re right, as usual. I let my ingrained paranoia turn me against you. I worried who you were meeting while you were out alone. I worried about you, but also what you might accidentally say. I knew Eric would be able to help us, but I was worried you’d be followed and the letter intercepted. Yew told me I was an idiot not to trust you to be safe and smart, but I just…” He buried his head in his hands. “I kept remembering all the others I thought I could trust who betrayed me.”
Jeshu sighed. “The fact is I was an idiot, and the only reason Yew left the ship without Stone or I was that he trusts the protections you placed on this oversized row boat with our lives. He never trusts anyone with our lives. Including us. For him to leave us alone on your ship shows just how impressed he is by you and your abilities.”
“Stone told me you were just being stupid and to ignore you. It was hard though. You don’t tell me much about yourself.”
“What’s important I have told you. Nothing else is imperative.” He watched me carefully, thinking something over. Then he nodded to himself. “How about this, everyday we trade a question. I get one and you get one. It can be more than one, but we have to answer the first one and everyone after that must be matched. Sound good?”
I nodded. “And since you answered mine, I’ll tell you about my mother’s visit and what has me worried. She’s checking up on me and that means she’s probably going to check on my sister and nieces soon. I don’t want her to look too closely at their lives. They put on a good front, but when I was in Stonesford, I heard that the Crown Prince of Alenia just chose my step-niece as his new bride. If mother gets too involved… it won’t be a good thing for anyone.”
Jeshu hugged me close and kissed me gently. “We’ll keep them safe. I promise, we’ll do anything that needs doing to keep them safe from her, love.”
“Thank you.”
“Oh, and love? Stop worrying that you’ll become just like your mother when the baby comes.”
“How did you-?”
He laughed. “I pay attention. Remember, you helped raise your nieces without any issue. I doubt it will crop up now, and even if it did, I’ll be there to help you through it all.”
And for the first time in weeks, I let myself relax into his embrace and stop thinking about the future. I just enjoyed the now.
~
We arrived in Wrigestrin in the midst of a storm and just before sunset. It was nothing like the ones we’d face in the Barrier Sea, thank goodness, just enough to make everyone wet and miserable. The steady showers had been going all day, making the view look a lot like a wash of greys and greens. I thought it quite pretty, but Thyme was not impressed. It was too warm for her, too humid. Stone informed us that the rain actually made it less humid and we both looked grim.
“My hair is going to be completely ridiculous to deal with,” she whispered to me as we docked. I agreed. Her curls were manageable and pretty in dry weather, but with how thick her hair was, it was turning into one giant, frizzy tangle very quickly. The farther downriver we’d traveled, the worse it had gotten.
“We won’t have to deal with dry skin,” I offered. She just grunted in response, so I turned back to the city, trying to remember everything I’d learned about it, but it wasn’t much.
Shessat was a country full of water, but not like Lettelach. Instead of lakes, Shessat had swamps, rivers, and streams. Lots of green. From what I could tell, a good portion of the capital was actually built on docks. We’d tied our boat in a very small area on the outside of a large open platform. It was the size of a city block and connected by large bridges to at least three other square platforms as well as the actual street. Each of the platforms was surrounded by ships of all shapes and sizes. Some seemed to be temporary but most looked like they were both housing and transport for those aboard.
“This is the main market,” Jeshu said from my shoulder. “We had so many people bringing goods by boat that one of the old kings decided to just build platforms over the river to allow boats to sell directly. It saves on housing for those living here. It also means we don’t have to rent both a dock and a seat at the market. We can just set up a tent in front of the boat and pull the wares in and out as needed.”
I nodded but wasn’t paying too much attention. Instead, I watched a man slowly, stumble his way down towards our boat, singing a ribald tune. He looked like a soldier. A very drunk, very wet, very off-tune soldier.
Jeshu followed my gaze and froze. “Yew,” he all but shouted. “Did you put the yellow scarf on the end of our line?”
Yew nodded and Jeshu relaxed.
“Why?” I asked while we watched the soldier move closer and closer.
“Because we know him.”
Then the soldier spotted the scarf and tripped onto our boat while looking at it. Or at least that’s what it looked like to an outsider.
“If I weren’t so sober, I’d swear I was drunk,” he whispered as he looked around my ship.
Stone croaked out a laugh. “You always try that excuse and it never works Collins.”
Collins looked down at the frog in front of him and grinned. “Sorry, highness, but it seemed to fit the situation.” And with that, he scrambled to his feet.
Meanwhile, Thyme looked down at her husband and shook her head. “Royalty. I should have known.” And then she was gone, back to the warm, dry galley.
Stone leapt after her, calling out her name, a bit of desperation in his voice. I just laughed.
“How long do you think it will take for him to realize she really doesn’t care?” I asked my husband.
“Part of the information you gleaned in Stonesford?” When I nodded, he laughed. “Figures. He might be a while, though. He isn’t named ‘Stone’ just because my parents thought it sounded nice.” The sun dropped below the horizon, turning my husband human again. Jeshu turned to a slightly stunned looking Collins and spoke again. “Come inside. We’ll get you sorted and talk about what’s been going on.”
Collins saluted and followed me through the door while slicking back his disheveled sandy brown hair. His earlier surprise only grew when we got to the galley. “How does this all fit on such a little boat?”
“Magic, of course. How else?” I replied, sitting down as Thyme served dinner. “Now, Collins was it?”
“Yes miss.”
“Ma’am,” Jeshu interjected.
Collins eyes bugged out. “Skies! You married, highness?”
“Both of us did.”
“Good. That should cause some right trouble with the Regent. Been telling everyone that you have to marry with certain customs and only a specific priest can do it.”
“He wasn’t lying, for once. Unfortunately for him, our parents were much smarter than he gave them credit for. They trained Yew to complete the ceremony years ago. We just didn’t tell anyone. And neither will you, correct?” Smoke blew out of his nostrils while he stared at the soldier.
“Course not! So you got here safe, with plenty of time and now you’re lying low, is it? Good. People will want to come talk and this is the best spot to do it.”
I cleared my throat. “So, why is the Prince Regent after you two?”
“He wants them dead so that he can take the throne completely. As their uncle, he’s nex
t in line.”
Jeshu smiled slightly. “Ah, good old Uncle Fred. Sorry, Fredrinsh. He always hated us shortening his name. Almost as much as he hated my father and mother. We think he was the reason that they died so early. Our family tends to live long lives.”
I pondered that for a moment. “What does his name mean?”
“Storm winds.”
“Ah,” I replied thoughtfully. Once more, the name fit the situation. Their uncle was an agent of chaos and destruction in their lives. Good thing I had practice clearing up storms. I turned to the soldier and said, “Forgive me if I’m wrong, but there are spies out and about, correct?” Collins nodded. “Then they can’t come here to talk. It’s too dangerous. We can be used as a contact for the princes, but no one can know the absolute truth.”
He cleared his throat and watched me cautiously. “Beggin’ your pardon, lady, but what do you mean?”
The sun set just then. Suddenly, Stone and Jeshu sat at the table and Collins looked about ready to swallow his own tongue.
“We can use rumors to throw things off,” I continued like my husband hadn’t just turned human after being a salamander. “If you use your people to spread multiple stories, then no one will ever know what’s really going on. Staying quiet is all fine and dandy, but misdirecting the opponent is a better practice.”
Jeshu put his arms around me and kissed my temple. “What’s your plan, love?”
“No one can know that you’re really here. They can suspect. They can meet with you in back rooms of inns and on lonely roads outside of the city, but never on our boat. They can come here to let us know they want to meet, but only if they stop by a few other shops in random order first. And, this is the most important part, Stone and Jeshu, you must never confirm who you are. Human or animal, you are just another cog in the wheel. Body doubles waiting for the real men to arrive.”
Jeshu grinned. “I knew I married you for your brains.”