“If you like,” he replied in a subdued voice. “If you don’t think the lady will mind.”
She led the way, too tired to comment at Abasio’s muttered curses as he struggled with the uneven stairs. “What in the name of artistry was this leg trap built for?”
“A way for the workmen to get things into parts of the castle that are hard to reach,” she murmured. “So my cousin says.”
“Your cousin?”
“The duke.” She took a deep breath. Perhaps it was time for explanations. “He says I am to call him cousin. I am of his wife’s family. Everyone speaks of ‘the Woman Upstairs,’ but she is really Princess Xu-i-lok, wife to His Grace the Duke of Wold, seventh daughter of Prince Lok-i-xan, Tingawan ambassador to the court of King Gahls and head of Clan Do-Lok. Though she merits both great respect and watchful people to serve her day and night, just you watch! The footman will be asleep outside her door, slumped in his chair and snoring like an overfed dog. It is a good thing Wold is at peace. Once His Grace the duke goes up to the bird towers at night, even the watchmen on the outer walls sleep more than they watch.”
Abasio smiled to himself. She sounded like a fully mature and offended mistress of the castle, but she was proven right, for the footman still slept. They crept past him into the lady’s room. Xulai dropped to her knees in the somber shade of the hangings, near one of the braziers, its charcoal glowing red beneath the smoke hood, its suspended chimney leading up into the darkness where it found a vent to let the smoke out. The heat was welcome against Xulai’s face. She leaned against the high mattress and searched the still face before her. No change. Never any change. Not anymore.
Abasio soundlessly closed the door behind them and came to join her where she knelt beside the great bed. She whispered, “It has been a long time since the princess has been able to speak aloud, but I remember everything she ever said to me, no matter how long ago it was.” She took the woman’s hand in her own and leaned forward to put her lips close to the woman’s ear. “Princess. I have it. I will hide it and keep it safe as you have asked.”
She waited for a moment. There was no motion in the face or behind the closed lids of the eyes, but the hand she held moved to squeeze her own, so slightly the movement would have been invisible to anyone watching.
Suddenly, his eyes wide, Abasio stirred. He heard . . .
“Xulai,” the woman spoke in her mind. “There is no time left to hide it. Open it now.”
Wonderingly, Xulai stared at his face. “You heard her!”
He nodded, putting a finger before his lips. She pulled the box from her pocket and set it on the bed, prying up the close-fitting lid. Inside, cushioned in lamb’s wool, was an orb the size of a large grape, delicately patterned in blues and greens. It might have been made of glass, perhaps? Or perhaps it actually was a kind of fruit? And yet . . . it seemed large. In her sight it expanded, becoming huge, as though she looked at the world from a great distance. Surely those blue areas were seas, and the green ones were forests. Surely those white things were clouds . . .
The chipmunk came from her pocket, sat on her shoulder, and peered. Xulai reached for the orb, then drew back as the voice of the Woman Upstairs spoke in her mind: “Take it. Put it in your mouth, child. Don’t be afraid! Quickly!”
Xulai froze in place. She had heard the words, actually heard them, as though they had been called loudly but from an infinite distance. Abasio put his hand on her shoulder and shook her, very slightly. She stared at the orb, measuring it with her eyes. The chipmunk crept toward the orb, sniffing at it.
“It’s too big,” she whispered, to the walls, to herself, perhaps to the chipmunk.
“It isn’t really,” Abasio said firmly.
“Yes, it is,” Xulai asserted angrily. Not for someone grown-up, perhaps, but for her, it was too big.
“Just put it in your mouth for a moment,” the chipmunk told her. “To warm it. Poor thing’s cold!”
Xulai stared at it.
Abasio said lightly, teasingly, “Pretend it’s a sugar drop. You’ve eaten sugarplums bigger than that. Chipmunk is right. Warm it up.”
He watched as her lips closed around it.
The thing in her mouth came alive in an instant. It was like a squirming tadpole, a slippery fish, and she gagged, trying to spit it out. Abasio put his hands across her lips, hugged her tightly, for she was a good deal stronger than she looked. She squirmed as she felt the thing dive down her throat, vanishing like a frog into a pond.
“Not too big?” queried the chipmunk, cocking its head to one side. “Not at all.”
She glared at it, forgetting the woman, forgetting herself in sudden anger, snarling, “It wasn’t your mouth it was squirming around in!” She put her hands to her sides, thrust them under her dress, felt her stomach. Not a flutter, nothing there to say she had swallowed some lively thing. Except a kind of creeping warmth, a feeling of . . . well, the way she felt sometimes when Precious Wind let her have a few sips of wine. Soft inside. Warm. Really wonderful.
Abasio heard words, fleetingly, a whisper. “Friend. We hoped you would come in time. Thanks.”
Stunned, but conscious of the girl’s anger, he managed to whisper, “Xulai, it was what she wanted, what she needed.” He put his hand on her shoulder and shook her. “Look at her, Xulai. Look at her!”
Before her on the bed the woman lay unchanged, except . . . except that her lips were very, very slightly curved upward in the ghost of a smile. Xulai took the lax hand in her own, waited for words in her mind, looking at the curved lips, definitely a smile. No words came. She leaned forward to feel the woman’s breaths upon her cheek, softly, barely, a long, long time between. As she knelt there, a quiet wind came into the room. The fire blazed up. The wind circled, as though it were searching for something, then gathered itself from all corners of the room and gusted into the fireplace, the flames leaping up behind it as it fled up the chimney and away from Woldsgard toward some other, more suitable place.
“Ah,” whispered Abasio. “Look, sweetheart. The pain is gone. Look at her.”
And it was true. The pain was gone. The face was peaceful. The hand she held had relaxed; the lines were gone from her face; the room was changed. All the strain, the hurt was gone. The room, too, was at peace.
“Tranquil,” said Abasio in a strange, choked voice. “She is full of quiet. We can let her sleep.”
After a silent time Xulai rose, the chipmunk still on her shoulder, and they left the silent room. They passed the footman where he slept snoring in his chair and went down the wicked stairs and out into the kitchen garden.
Abasio held out his hand. “I’ve taken shelter in the courtyard with the other travelers. I can find my way there. Give me the awl you borrowed from the shoemaker . . .”
“How did you know I did?”
“I saw you take it. I followed you here when you left. I’ll return it. Sleep well.”
As he turned away, she saw tears on his face. He felt pity for the princess, no doubt, for he was a kind man. “Abasio,” she called. He turned, leaned down toward her. She reached up and kissed his cheek. “You were kind, and she called you friend. Thank you.”
She turned back toward the stairs as he, moving as though under some compulsion of quiet and necessity, found his way through the interior gates leading to the courtyard, where he pushed the shoemaker’s awl through a gap in the shutters of the stall. He managed to exchange casual greetings with a sergeant who moved slowly across the paved area from wall to wall, checking on the guards. There were other wagons and several peddlers bedded down in the area near the stable, and he wended his way among them to the paddock where Blue, who was spending the night among other horses and mules, came to push his head over the railing and whisper, “Is the woman all right?”
“I think . . . the princess was helped,” whispered Abasio.
“I meant the . . . little one,” said Blue, gazing at Abasio’s face, which held a strange expression, something with trace
s of amazement and fear and gratification. People had such trouble with their faces. They often said too little or too much.
Abasio took a deep breath. “She has done what she had to do, just in time.”
“We came as fast as we could.”
“I know. I think this was the night we needed to be here. It’s just . . . I didn’t realize the person they spoke of was a child.”
Blue did not reply for a moment. “Perhaps so. People don’t always tell everything, you know. Mostly they don’t. Who was the person who told you to come here, anyhow?”
“You saw him. He was also Tingawan, I think. That part fits.”
“I thought he was rather ordinary looking, but you said he was strangely compelling.”
“We would hardly have made this journey had he not been.”
“You said she did whatever it was just in time?”
“Yes,” said Abasio, wiping tears from his face. “I’m sure it was.”
“But you’re troubled. Why?”
“Blue, I don’t know. She went to find something, she found it, brought it back, was told to swallow it. None of my business, but there I was, urging her on to swallow it because I heard this voice . . . tortured, it was. But so . . . determined, needful, imperious! As though the fate of the world hung on it.” He laughed, shaking his head.
“The younger one swallowed it?”
“Yes. And once she had done it, there was a kind of peace that came, exalted, ecstatic, whatever. All I can compare it to . . . think how one feels at the end of a dreadful day. You know: fighting bandits, maybe wounded, bleeding, stung by flies, everything happening in a half-frozen marsh where you can’t sit or stand or lie down, and every time you dispose of one enemy, two others pop up, and you’re soaking wet, and shaking with cold, and then somehow at the end of the day you’re brought to a warm room with a place to wash, with food and a jug of something soothing to drink, and you can lie down on a comfortable bed and it’s safe to sleep. You know that feeling.”
“Except for the jug, yes. Substitute oats, add a groom with a curry comb, and I know exactly.”
“Well, that’s how she felt, and I knew it, and it made me incredibly sad.”
“Sad? Why?”
“We’ll probably know by morning.”
Xulai had gone up the stairs, two floors above the place where the Woman Upstairs slept, and there she examined the box that the strange thing had come in. It was tiny, beautifully carved all over with designs of fish and shells and seaweed and waves. The hinges were invisible and the handle was carved in the shape of a leaping dolphin. Now it was empty. After a moment’s thought, she took her handkerchief from her pocket and unfolded it to disclose the long, black hairs within. There were a dozen of them, perhaps more; the duchess’s hair, with little bulbs of tissue at the roots. She placed the handkerchief in the box, wrapped the box in a scrap of linen from her quilt bag, and thrust it into a niche behind a tapestry where she kept her private treasures.
“Now I can quit being afraid,” she said firmly as she sat upon her bed and unlaced her shoes. “It’s done. There’s nothing else I’m afraid of. She won’t ask me to do anything else, and now it’s done, she’s feeling better.”
“Many things you’ll be afraid of,” said the chipmunk, who was now sitting on the foot of her bed. “But, as you proved tonight, with thought, with concentration, fear can be overcome.”
Though the creature had spoken several times, she thought the words were only in her mind. Little animals did not speak. They were too timid, perhaps, as she was, but she was too tired to worry about it. She struggled to keep her eyes open long enough to take off her cloak and lay it across the bed. If chipmunk wanted to wander, let chipmunk wander. The cats slept in the kitchen where it was warmer. The covered jar on her table still had one nut cake in it. She put a piece of it into the cloak pocket, somewhat reluctantly. If chipmunk was hungry, let chipmunk eat, though it hardly deserved such generosity. Why did it have to tell her she was going to be afraid all over again when she’d just conquered a present fear! It wasn’t her fault she was timid! Everyone, all the time, told her to be timid!
“What does that mean?” the chipmunk asked from her pillow. “Timid? As timid as a chipmunk perhaps?”
“I suppose,” she said, so near to sleep that she could as well have dreamed the conversation.
“Really? When those people came toward us in the woods, I took refuge under your hand. Would you say that was timid? Or would you agree that it was a sensible reaction to a very real threat? Would you have preferred me to be brave? I might have challenged that big man to battle, chittered at him in my most threatening tones, and kicked pebbles at him with both back feet! Oh yes, one knows very well how that would have come out!”
Xulai dreamed that she giggled, very slightly.
“Timidity has its place,” said the chipmunk in a didactic tone. “Hiding in a hole in a rock or tree, staying in darkness and shadows, hiding behind or under things is an excellent tactic, particularly good for small and inoffensive creatures. Step number one in survival training is always hiding. More active tactics come later.”
“Like what?”
“Fading into the background. Protective coloration. Misleading the eye. Oh, many, many other things. Believe me, there are more ways than one to fool a cat.”
Xulai wondered if that were true. She had never really tried to fool a cat, though she thought it might be amusing to try. Perhaps Bothercat could be convinced there was something malignant in her left sleeve, something that he should stay away from. Sometimes he was with her in the stable and they fell asleep in the loft with him often curled up on top of her left arm. She woke with a useless appendage, all full of pins and needles. Could she teach him to leave her arm alone? Trying might be more difficult or troublesome or frightening than it was worth.
“Frightening!” exclaimed the chipmunk, who seemed quite capable of reading her mind. “Well, let me tell you, the world can be thoroughly frightening in most of its parts, all of which can be dealt with! When you have thoroughly mastered the art of being unnoticed, perhaps we will take up the study of misdirection . . .”
Though Xulai tried to listen, the warm feeling that had come after swallowing the . . . what? Egg? Seed? Whatever it was, the warm feeling had lasted and a gentle tide of sleep came all at once. Soothed by chipmunk chatter, she floated away on it without a thought.
The couple who had trespassed in the woods of Woldsgard returned to their camp. Though it was placed in a quiet glen with ready access to water, though it was well enough hidden that she feared no interlopers, Alicia, Duchess of Altamont, could not fall asleep. It had been a long day, a tiring day, but her mind would not shut itself off and let her go. Instead she lay in a strange half-drowsing state, her mind drifting among half-remembered things that had happened long ago when she was a child. Tonight, she smelled tar, and sun on timber. She heard a huge chain creaking and the slosh of water. She was in a favorite place of her childhood, in Kamfels, well hidden under the pier, directly across the narrow fjord from Krakenholm.
The sloping ground under the end of the pier was dry and warm. Stout wooden posts made walls on two sides, the massive timbers of the pier made a roof over her head—even when rain fell, this secluded place usually stayed dry—and at the far end there was room between the posts for her to sneak out without getting her feet wet. Once beneath the pier, she could stand up without bumping her head, but grown-ups couldn’t. She had gathered some old crates and baskets and piled them toward the back, with room behind them to hide in, so if anyone even started to come under, they wouldn’t see her at all.
She liked it because she could hear everything people said and did: the guardsmen shuffling their feet, talking, sometimes calling out to their replacements at the end of their duty. Across the water she could see Krakenholm, where the ferry was moored. When people needed to cross from the Kamfels side, they took the hammer chained to the post and rang the bronze bell that hung abo
ve, on the pier itself. The bell was large, with a sonorous tone that echoed between the walls of the mountains on the far side. When people wanted to cross from Woldsgard to Kamfels, they hammered on the door of the ferryman’s house. His house had two holes in the wall with a long loop of chain going in one hole and coming out the other. The bottom floor of his house held a treadmill that pulled the chain in an endless circle. When the ferry was loaded with men or horses, the donkeys on the treadmill made the wheel go around; the wheel pulled the chain; the chain moved the ferry across the fjord. When people needed to go back, the donkeys faced the other direction and made it come back again. Alicia had seen the inside of the house, so she knew how it worked. When the ferry was being used, she could hear the people getting on and off, their conversations, all kinds of things. Usually it was not very interesting, but sometimes the things they said were strange and mysterious. Those were things she would talk to her mother, Mirami, about. Sometimes Mirami laughed at the things she heard.
Today, one of the guardsmen was new, some farmer’s son who was full of questions about Kamfels.
“So the ruler here is Duke Falyrion, is it? I thought that was the son.”
“The duke is Falyrion, the boy’s Falredi.”
“The boy, he’ll inherit the dukedom, right?”
“Right. He’s the child of the duke’s first wife, Naila. The duke’s second wife is Mirami, and she has children, too: a girl and a boy. Boy’s named Hulix. The girl’s called Alicia.”
“So Hulix’d be duke if anything happened to Falyrion and Falredi, right?”
“Right. Boy’s younger than the girl, but sons inherit in Kamfels. Leastways . . .”
“Leastways what?”
“Hulix would inherit unless somebody decides he’s not really Falyrion’s son.”
There was a silence, then the young one said, “You mean . . .”