“Call the village,” the middle one whispered—probably Felissa.
“She doesn’t look like a bandit,” said the shortest. Susanna.
Miri worked her tongue in her mouth, but it was so dry. They would notice how young she was, and her short stature made her seem even younger. They would see she was a fraud and not a real tutor at all. She had to be strong, speak firmly, demand respect. Be imposing.
“I am your tutor. You may call me Tutor Miri.”
“Who?” asked Astrid.
“You should raise your hand if you … when you want to talk … or ask something. Though I may not answer. Immediately.”
The girls looked at one another, baffled. Miri’s head felt funny, her legs kind of tingly, but if she sat, she would seem weak.
Astrid raised her hand and said, “You’re in our house.”
Miri looked around. “There aren’t any books. I don’t see a single book.”
“I don’t see a single snake in here either,” said Astrid. “I don’t see a single lot of things. Who are you?”
“I only brought three books because I thought …” Her head felt as tilty as the floor. “There’s no furniture either. Why do you live here? You’re the king’s cousins. You’re royalty.”
“So we’ve heard,” Astrid said and stepped in front of her younger sisters, still gripping her long, sharpened stick.
“I’m feeling a little … muddled. There was a long walk and so hot and the ground’s still leaning as if it wants to be water—” Miri giggled. “I sound crazy, don’t I? I don’t mean to. I’m just … thirsty …”
Miri watched the floor swell like a white ocean, leisurely, pleasantly. Her limbs felt wonderfully light, and she sighed right before the floor rose up to meet her.
It was dark out when Miri woke, coughing. Her face was wet, and water was dripping down her neck.
Felissa was crouching nearby, a cup in her hands, apparently having tried to give Miri a drink. Felissa offered the cup. Miri took it and gulped down the water, grateful despite its weedy flavor.
“You walked from Greater Alva without drinking enough water, didn’t you?” Felissa asked, smiling.
Miri nodded.
“Why did you do a dumb thing like that?” asked Astrid.
“Well, I’ve never walked from Greater Alva to Lesser Alva before,” said Miri. She felt she had to speak loudly in order to push her words past her headache. “You should post signs: ‘Danger: this place is hotter than you expect.’”
“City folk,” Astrid whispered to Felissa. Felissa smiled.
Miri was not sure of their ages. Susanna looked about ten but Astrid was likely a few years older than Miri. The chief delegate had not mentioned Miri would have to teach a girl older than she was.
Imposing?
She sat up and patted her head, feeling how her hair was springing loose from her braid. She straightened her shoulders.
“I’m Miri Larendaughter of Mount Eskel. His Majesty King Bjorn sent me here to be your tutor.”
Susanna did not blink. Her face was as quiet and serious as Felissa’s was constantly amused. “You said that word before. Tutor. What is a tutor?”
Felissa giggled. “Sounds like something you do after eating too much pig grass.”
“A tutor is a teacher,” Miri said quickly. “I can teach you Reading and Arithmetic and History, all kinds of subjects, even Poise.”
“Why would we ever need to do those things?” Astrid asked. She was still standing by the window, the sharpened stick in her hand.
“Because … because …” Miri’s head felt pressed between stones. Suddenly in that dark, strange little house, nothing that had happened in Asland made any sense at all. “Can we talk about this in the morning?”
“After breaking into our house, you’re expecting us to let you stay?” said Astrid.
Miri blinked and had a hard time opening her eyes again. “Please,” she whispered.
Felissa offered her a reed mat. Miri curled up on her side, using her pack of clothing as a pillow. She was too tired and dizzy to change out of her mud-splattered clothing. She barely managed to kick off her boots.
Imposing, Miri thought. She closed her eyes, and sleep came up to meet her, as hard as the floor.
Chapter Four
Mouth curved and smiling
Head sleek and rounded
Its bite just a bee’s sting
Your screams are unfounded
Head like an arrow
Body striped or stippled
Run from this slinker
Or it will leave you crippled
Morning buzzed and cawed and croaked. Miri swatted a fly from her face and sat up, groaning. The three girls were rolling up their reed mats, so Miri did the same.
“I’m sorry I didn’t start with an introduction,” she said. “I’d love to learn your names properly.”
“See? I told you she’d ask eventually,” Felissa said to Astrid.
“We weren’t sure you had learned manners,” said Susanna. “Folk from Asland can be bossy rude.”
Miri felt her face burn. “Imposing” had been a bad idea.
At her princess academy, she’d studied the rules of Conversation, including finding common ground with others.
“I’m not from Asland, though I’ve been living there recently. I’m from a place called Mount Eskel. In fact, linder—these stones of your house—they were actually cut out of Mount Eskel itself!”
The girls stared back. Astrid, seeming to realize Miri expected a reaction to that news, said, “Oh.”
Miri felt her shoulders slump. She cleared her throat. “So, what are your names?”
She’d guessed correctly, the tallest was also the oldest. Astrid was very thin, her brown hair loose and matted. Her nose was sharp, but her gaze was even sharper.
Next was Felissa. She had dark eyes like Astrid but paler hair, shiny as honey. Though she was thin like her sister, her cheeks were full, making her seem a healthy plump. She was almost always smiling, which put dimples in those cheeks.
The youngest, Susanna, introduced herself as just Sus. She was the same height as Miri, though she appeared to be only about ten years old. Whereas Felissa rarely stopped smiling, Sus did not seem to know how to start. She had dark hair, kinky with natural curls, and a gaze that was lazy without being dull.
“Where is everyone else?” Miri asked. “Servants? Guards? Your parents?”
Astrid stiffened. “It’s just us,” she said.
Miri shut her eyes. The royal guards were sailing back toward Asland by now. Asland, where a king and his ministers believed the royal cousins were outfitted with guards and servants and wealth. But whatever had happened to change that, Astrid clearly did not want to talk about it.
“Just so you know,” said Felissa, her smile a little timid now, “in Lesser Alva one never, ever enters someone else’s house without being invited.”
“Never,” Sus said, unblinking.
“Never ever,” said Felissa, nodding.
“In fact, we could have killed you on the spot and cut you up for meat,” Astrid said, casually cleaning out her fingernails.
“No one’s ever really done that,” said Sus.
“As far as we know,” said Astrid. “But we could be the first and no one would stop us.”
“I see.” So as her very first act as their tutor, Miri had trampled on some sacred swamp custom. “I’m sorry. The king ordered me to stay with you. Does that count?”
Astrid leaned forward, her stare hardening. “Do you see him living here?”
“Oh! Well, no. I mean, my duty is to stay with you for a while,” said Miri, searching through her pack. “The king sent a letter.”
She offered Astrid the king’s signed and sealed letter, only slightly crumpled. Astrid opened it and looked it over, nodding. She was holding it upside down.
“Did you bring us things?” Sus asked, crouching beside Miri’s pack. “City food?”
“Sus
,” said Felissa.
“I … um …” Miri rummaged through her things. She had three books, a stack of parchment, quills and ink, her sewing kit, and several of Britta’s dresses. She found half of a sea biscuit and offered it to Sus.
The young girl held it between two fingers and licked a corner. “It tastes like dirt.”
“And how would you know?” Felissa said, putting her fists on her hips. “You eat dirt often, do you? Snacking on mud pies when our backs are turned?”
“It tastes how dirt smells,” Sus said.
“You smell,” Felissa said, which would have seemed rude if she had not still been smiling.
Miri glanced over the house, white and empty as an eggshell. “I’m sorry I didn’t bring more. I thought you’d have plenty.”
“We do all right,” Astrid said, standing up straighter.
“I’m sure you do,” Miri said. There she went again, offending them. “Um … can I help you get breakfast ready?”
Astrid shrugged. “I guess.”
The girls started for the door, so Miri did not change clothes, just brushed at the dried mud on her skirt and shoved on her boots.
Felissa pointed at Miri’s feet. “What are those for?”
“My boots? Well, boots are like shoes but, um, taller.”
Felissa laughed, her honey-yellow hair swaying. “I know what boots are, you muskrat! I meant, why in all creation did you put them on right before—”
“Just let her wear them,” said Astrid.
Miri glanced at the girls’ bare and filthy feet. Perhaps they’d never had boots of their own.
“Felissa, would you like to wear my boots?” Miri asked, starting to unlace them.
Felissa’s laughter broke even higher. So Miri shrugged, laced them back up, and followed the girls out.
Apparently breakfast was not waiting for them in some kitchen hut out back. Breakfast had to be hunted. They tromped away from the house and into a reed forest—thick, sturdy grass reaching well above Miri’s head. Two herons flapped away on flat wings, long legs trailing. Astrid swung a pole at them but missed. Underfoot Miri crushed mint and pondweed, and then suddenly, ground that had looked solid swallowed Miri to her knees. Water and mud filled her boots, and her feet felt as heavy as boulders.
As soon as they reached a rare dry spot, Miri pulled off the sopping boots and, tying them by the laces, hung them around her neck, where they dripped muddy water on her clothes.
Sus whispered something, and Felissa giggled.
“Why do you live here?” Miri asked, trying to tiptoe through a muddy area without slipping.
“We were born here,” Astrid said in her are-you-brainless voice.
“But you’re royalty,” said Miri. “Did you know that only royalty can live in a linder house? How did you end up here?”
“I think someone was naughty,” Sus said, watching Miri with her intense, pale-eyed stare. “Maybe our ma’s parents or grandparents made a king mad and the family was sent far away.”
“Or maybe they chose to live here,” said Astrid. A mosquito lit on her cheek. She slapped it, leaving a tiny splatter of blood.
The girls checked traps. Some were knots of tough reeds woven together around a brace of thin branches, others were simple but clever snares. All were empty.
“Toad toots,” Astrid said under her breath.
Miri supposed it was a local curse. She learned several more that morning: peat head, grouse kin, soggy bottom bellows, and stones.
As they approached a pond’s edge, a trio of floating birds dived headfirst into the water. Miri watched but they did not come back up. In a swamp, the whole world seemed upside down. Next would fish take to the sky?
Felissa clambered thigh-deep in the stagnant water and began dragging a coarse net through its depths. Occasionally she snagged a few thumb-size fish and tossed them back to Sus.
“Got something!” Astrid shouted from nearby. A fat, brown swamp rat flailed, its neck caught in a trap. Astrid pulled a small knife out of her belt and stabbed it through the back of its head. She tucked the limp rat under her belt and set the trap back up.
Miri shivered and tried to hide it by joining Felissa in the pond.
“Here, I can try that,” she offered.
The chill water crept up to her legs, her skirt spread out on top of the water like a lily pad. Suddenly her skirt jumped and twitched as if something was caught beneath it. Miri lifted it, looking.
A strike of pain hit like a knife in her leg. Her hands went to her thigh, and she felt something hard and slick. It quivered away, skimming atop the water’s surface. It was long and thin and shiny, thick as her wrist, built of dark brown scales. A snake.
Miri screamed. Her bare feet slipped on the pond bottom and she went under.
Felissa pulled her back up by her hair. Miri gasped and thrashed, fighting her way up the slimy bank and onto the muddy ground. She lay down, coughing and clutching at her leg. Her whole body vibrated, and she seemed to feel venom streak like heat from the wound through her veins. She was dying in a swamp. She’d never see home again.
“Let me see,” Felissa said, prying Miri’s hands away from her leg.
Felissa wiped the blood with her skirt and exposed a mark made of many small pricks in the shape of a horseshoe.
“Oh good,” said Felissa.
Good? Were these girls insane? She’d been bitten by a swamp snake!
“You’ll be fine,” said Astrid. “If it’d been poisonous, you’d have just two teeth marks.”
Astrid put her pointer fingers beside her mouth to mimic fangs.
Miri’s panicked breathing still racked her chest, and blood oozed from her thigh, but the burn of venom she’d felt certain was coursing through her seemed to dim and fade.
“I guess you better go change,” said Astrid. “Think you can find your way back?”
The white stone house was visible on the rise, clear as the sun.
“I think I can guess the general direction,” Miri muttered.
“Then you have permission to enter our house.”
Miri sloshed to her feet and stumbled away. Her wet skirt clung to her legs, sticky as a spider’s web. Behind her, she could hear Astrid mutter, “City folk.”
A rain barrel outside the house was nearly full. Miri stripped down to nothing, the house between her and the island village. She ladled some water over herself, scrubbing furiously at the mud and hesitantly at her leg wound. She tore a length from her shirt, pulled up some dry-ish moss, pressed it over the snake’s bite, and wrapped her leg with the fabric to hold it there. The bleeding slowed.
She went inside and opened her pack, sorting for the first time through the clothes Britta had sent. And then she slumped to the floor, her face in her hands. Britta had packed her own wardrobe for Miri. A princess’s wardrobe.
When the girls returned, Miri was wearing a yellow silk dress, belted and pulled to keep from dragging on the floor. Astrid snorted.
“How’s your leg?” Felissa asked, pretending not to notice her ridiculous attire.
Miri shrugged as if she were not bothered a bit, but she could not help shuddering.
“If you jump into the water in a skirt, flailing and backing up every which way, you’re going to get bit,” said Astrid.
Felissa crouched by Miri, pulled back the wrapping and then replaced it. “No swelling or redness. Definitely not poisonous.”
“I didn’t even see the snake,” said Miri.
“Maybe we’re just used to watching,” said Felissa. “Soon you’ll learn to notice movement that doesn’t belong.”
Miri doubted that. In a swamp, everything was moving all the time.
“I mean, if you stay,” Felissa added. Though she said it with a smile, her tone seemed to imply she was certain that Miri would not be staying.
A stubbornness coursed through Miri, hot as imagined venom. But she just asked, “Were you successful this morning?”
“Not bad.” Astrid had a se
cond rodent beside the rat in her belt, and Sus’s basket held a couple of handfuls of tiny fish, some reed roots, and a green plant, still wet. Astrid tossed the rat at Miri’s feet. “Think you can be useful?”
“Astrid, she’s a city girl and a lady,” Felissa said under her breath. Apparently despite Miri’s disclosure about her mountain home, she had been so inept in the swamp they just could not believe she was anything but a pampered noble.
Miri picked up the rat, turned it over, grabbed a knife from a pot, and started to skin it. Really, it was not much different than skinning a rabbit.
On Mount Eskel, the villagers slaughtered their rabbits in high winter, when food was scarce and rabbit fur thickest. When Miri had been eight years old, she’d seen her sister, Marda, holding a rabbit over a stone, the knife in her hand trembling, her tears coming fast.
“Wait!” Miri had run out into the knee-deep snow. “I’ll do it, Marda, I’ll do it.”
Miri had sweated over the task, her hands clumsy in the attempt to be swift. But new fur meant she could patch her old and useless winter cap into something that actually kept her ears warm. And for the first time, Marda did not cry when eating rabbit stew.
This rat was already dead, and Miri peeled off its skin even and quick. She cleaned it, pushed a wooden skewer through the body, and tidied up the limbs with pieces of green swamp grass so they wouldn’t dangle.
Astrid’s mouth hung open.
“Isn’t it amazing,” Miri said slyly, “what a person can learn from a book?”
Though the little house was mostly empty, it had a fine hearth with hooks for skewers and an iron pot. The water was already hot, and Sus added the small fish and chopped-up plant. They ate the soup, washed their clothes and the floor of the house, and by lunch hour the rodents were roasted and ready.
Miri watched King Fader’s potential brides sit cross-legged on the floor, eating rat meat with their fingers, breaking off tiny ribs to pick it out of their teeth. These were the girls who could help Miri win Mount Eskel away from the king and merchants. These were the girls who might prevent a war.
Sus sucked the rat’s roasted eyeballs out of its skull. Astrid burped.
Miri looked out the window toward Mount Eskel. No mountains in view. All she could see was land so wet it was indistinguishable from water. A flock of geese crossed the sky, their honks as brash and abrupt as an alarm of warning.