Mearsies Heili Bounces Back

  Everybody stared at her, and she turned red.

  “Wow, then I can do it after all,” I said.

  “Or me and Id,” Klutz said.

  “Let it be CJ, just in case, because there is that thing about sovereign meaning ruler.”

  “I think I can figure that out,” the little man said. “If I remember right, rulers were mages in the old world—which is how all this got started. Do you know magic?” He turned to me.

  “Some.”

  “I suspect it’s a matter of holding it, not knowing a lot of spells.” He sounded more practical than he had yet.

  “Let me try.” I tried to sound braver than I felt. “And if I turn into a statue, well, you guys remember where I am, so you can tell Clair what happened.”

  With that, the little man led us through new archways, out onto a lovely terrace, where there was a shallow pool and a fountain. At four corners of the pool, were four statues of girls.

  We went to the nearest, a girl with a round, calm face. She reminded me of Seshe, in fact, though she was smaller and maybe younger—more like my age. On her lap was a kitten, frozen in time, and the girl’s hand was cupped protectively over the little creature. Someone had made a plaque saying, Child of Spring.

  Next was Child of Summer. She looked a lot like Diana—the spell had caught her swinging around, her hair out, her bony face strong, her expression midway between a laugh and dismay.

  Id said, “Now she looks like she’d know how to play some good tricks on the Committee of Public Safety.”

  The little man blinked, and Klutz said comfortingly, “Never mind. He says stuff like that, but he doesn’t bite or howl at the moon.”

  “Hey.” Id elbowed her.

  We moved on around the pool. The third statue also laughed, but her head was tilted, and she gazed off as if through the world gate, and into other worlds. I can’t say why, but I liked the looks of her at once. She seemed about thirteen, her curly hair hung unkempt down her back, and she wore a summer tunic. Her feet were bare. Her plaque said, Child of Autumn.

  And last was the oldest—maybe sixteen—a tall girl with a calm, steady gaze. She wore a complicated robe with a train. This was Child of Winter.

  My fingers felt damp and my throat dry, but with everybody watching, I wasn’t going to turn chicken. I figured, better a statue than vanishing through that weird arch upstairs. Clair can undo statues.

  And with that, I went up to Child of Spring.

  At once I felt magic tingling all through me. As I neared her, the air between us wavered—as if we were suddenly underwater. But I concentrated on holding still in all the magi surrounding me, though it felt like a million bees humming closer and closer. My hand buzzed as I reached up and touched her eyelids, just like in Clair’s story.

  For a moment nothing happened, and then I realized that the air had cleared. The bee hum had faded. And the white statue slowly gained color. There was no amazing sound like ice crackling or anything, just one moment she was still, the next she took a deep breath, and looked up, head to one side, and smiled.

  The kitten sprang, all its fur spiked out. “Mew!” it complained angrily, and bounded away.

  “By cracky! You done it, CJ!” Klutz yelled, and did a handspring, wiggling her bare toes in the air as she turned.

  Child of Spring followed. I stood there, waiting to turn to stone, and when I didn’t, I waded through the magical air to Child of Summer, and touched her eyelids. She stretched, swing her arms, leaped from her perch and bounded to Spring, and whirled her around in her arms, laughing.

  Autumn smiled, yawned, said a word whose tone clearly implied “Thanks!” as she twirled off her perch.

  Winter gazed at me, said something in a language I didn’t understand, as she put her hands together and bowed over them. Then she moved into the palace—followed by a crowd of people who had suddenly appeared.

  “Hey, all the statues are live again,” Id said, thumbs over his shoulders.

  The former statues followed the four queens inside, their voices rising as everybody began talking. The queens walked to the inner chamber off the one with the pool, where the little mage was waiting. He grinned, hands out in welcome, a paintbrush clutched in one. “Here you are! I never thought I’d see it!”

  He led them to yet another door, which the four of them opened just by laying their hands against it. Some new spell was broken, and inside they went, into a room filled with color: silken wall hangings of pale peach, wine-red upholstery on old carved wood chairs and tables, forest-green hangings with golden embroidery. Portraits hanging on walls.

  Three of the queens led the people in. Over the hubbub girls’ voices rose, angry and shrill: Well,*I* am the next heir to the throne! And *I* am the second princess of ... They sounded like hens when a thunderstorm is coming.

  Autumn went over to the little mage and asked him something. He opened his hands, looking apologetic.

  Then she came to us. “You’re the travelers who set us free, are you not?” Her voice was accented, but she spoke our language—or she spoke a language we understood.

  “Yes,” I said. “Why?”

  “May I travel with you a while? I’ll have to come back for a time each year, it seems, but the rest of the year I can keep looking.”

  “For?”

  “For my cousins, who were enchanted by that fellow’s grandfather. I need to go find them, so they can be free of their enchantment.”

  “Your cousins?”

  “Laurel and Lael. I can’t bear to think of them walking the world, silent and unable to make music or dance or laugh.”

  “Okay.” I sighed. So much for the—

  Klutz said cheerily, “How about our reward?”

  By then I had a pretty good idea that any reward would be an Attagirl and Hearty Thanks, and I was right. We stood around until Winter had dispersed the worst of the crowd (a cluster of princesses still arguing angrily at the far end of the pool about who had first dibs on the servants, once somebody produced some servants), then Autumn danced up and kissed Winter. “I am off to find Laurel and Lael.”

  “May the wind stay warm and sweet,” Winter said, and turned to us, hands out. “What can I give you? As you can see, the city is empty except for stone.”

  I would have loved a bag of enough gold to buy ship passage with, but it didn’t look like they had any, and I wasn’t even sure they ate real food. So I said, “We’ll just footle along—glad everyone is okay.”

  Winter smiled. “If ever I may help you the way you helped us, you’ve only to ask.”

  We all said thank you, and out we bucketed.

  “What’s gonna happen to all those princesses?” Sherry asked, with her blue-eyed worried look.

  “They go home,” Puddlenose said, shrugging.

  “But if they were princesses from eighty years ago? Even twenty?” Gwen asked, walking backward. “Will they be welcomed?”

  Puddlenose snorted, and Seshe looked downward.

  “Probably not, if their family is as grabby as royal families usually are,” Puddlenose said.

  By then we’d reached the top of a hill, where we could at last see a sliver of ocean in the distance.

  “So they find something else to do.” Seshe smiled. “It’s not impossible.”

  SIX

  “Halfway: Adventure Bounces Back”

  Autumn was at once ordinary and different. Her skin was one of the bazillion variations of brown seen all over the word except in the Morvende, who have sort of bleached out after a gazillion years underground. She was kind of honey-colored, with rose in her cheeks, and a scattering of freckles. Her hair was curly, reddish brown, her eyes the kind of hazel that changes a lot.

  Just when we figured she was pretty ordinary, she swooped along a bunch of wildflowers growing along the path, plucked them, and worked them into a garland. None of those flowers wilted, and when she was tired of the garland, she took it off, poked her fingers into a stretch of barren ground, put the
flowers in—and they stood right up as if they’d grown there.

  She and Seshe hit it off at once, talking happily about flowers, birds, and animals, as we bucketed along.

  We soon reached the harbor at the mouth of the river. Already the news had traveled ahead of us, and there was a lot of activity—people packing up, taking apart the shanty-houses, and so forth.

  Puddlenose knew what to do. “If all else fails, you can just about always get a job wanding,” he said.

  Like I explained in the first notebook, magic has mostly been used to make life better. There are spells to make water pure, there are cleaning frames in most homes. You walk through the frame, and magic zaps all the dirt from your skin, hair, clothes, even your teeth. And there are no toilets, because by age two everybody learns the Waste Spell, which zaps human waste from you straight into the ground.

  But animals don’t learn the Waste Spell. Most cities have a Wanders’ Guild. In other cities, wanding animal droppings from the streets is done by people who got into trouble, and have to put in time doing service. Sometimes they even have to live in jails while they do it. If you don’t want to do service, worse thing happen—from being kicked out of the country to being grabbed and stuck in mines, and in some countries, on galleys. Yuk! I guess this is why a lot of people run away and become robbers and the like.

  Anyway, wandering kids can just about always be assured of wanding work in any place with a lot of streets and animals coming and going, if there aren’t any more interesting jobs. Sure enough, after we went to the harbor master’s building, we were given the wands and sent out in pairs to go over the harbor roads, zapping away droppings from various animals drawing wagons back and forth.

  Klutz and Sherry just had to make up a game, counting the different types of animal poo, and Id got silly about comparing colors and like that. It sounds grosser than it was, since you wave the wand over the mess, the air glitters, and the mess vanishes underground, just like the Waste Spell.

  Puddlenose said they send someone around on inspection to see if you’re actually doing the job, but if they did, we never saw the inspector, because we all made sure our assigned streets stayed spic and span. The day vanished, and we got a hearty dinner at the Streets Guild.

  A good sized crowd of kids had packed into the place. Toward the end of the dinner, the voices got louder and higher. There were a bunch of languages spoken, but we finally found someone who talked in that accented Mearsiean, who said, “Night time is the contest!”

  It seemed that everybody pooled a little bit of money, then held a competition for entertainers. Anybody could enter. You got out on stage (a part of the room set off from the rest) and did some kind of act, there was a general vote, and the winner got the cash.

  I rubbed my hands. “Let’s do it!”

  Most of us turned toward Dhana. “You dance. Easy win.” I pointed to her.

  She made a face, kind of shrugged all over, then said, “Too noisy, and too dry.”

  “Just a little dance,” I begged, looking forward to the room full of awe. Nobody could be anywhere near as good.

  “Don’t want to.”

  “But we’ll win. Look at ’em—a bunch of clods, just like us.”

  “Hey!” Klutz twirled around on her toes with as much grace as fence slats falling off a roof.

  “Dhana,” I exclaimed, exasperated. She couldn’t possibly think anyone was better!

  Dhana sidled a step, another step, and vanished out the door.

  I started after, but Klutz stuck a freckled paw in front of me. “We can do a play instead! Then we all get to be in it!”

  “Okay.” I fumed for a few minutes, though, while they discussed play options. I was annoyed with Dhana, and I knew I shouldn’t be. When I looked Seshe’s way, she studiously spooned up the last of her pepper-and-potato stew, so I said, “What.”

  “Nothing.”

  “Seshe, you’re thinking something, I can smell it a mile away.”

  She gave me a weird sort of look. Pained. Then shook her head. “She’s not a puppet.”

  I clamped my mouth down on a retort. After all, I did ask. But I was thinking, Obviously!

  Puppet! I groaned inside. If anyone ever thought my dancing good, I would love to be asked. My singing was okay, but nothing great—I didn’t take lessons or anything, and in the first three or four acts, there were a couple of singers who did much more interesting music than I could offer.

  But ... I sensed I hadn’t done right, though arguing inside my head usually led to me talking myself into thinking I was in the right.

  Puppet. That meant something on strings, that you made dance—

  Oh. I grinched my way past wanting to be the best in a group until I found the uncomfortable discovery: pushing Dhana to show off might make her feel like that’s what she was there for. Euw.

  “... PJ and the goat!” Sherry said, her spoon in the air. “If only we had Faline!”

  “Well, we’ve seen her making new versions of that play for the past month,” I said, glad to get rid of my horrible thoughts. “We can put in the best of her jokes.”

  “Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!”

  That decided, we got up and joined the people heading to the store room behind the dining room, where those who were performing were warming up, or doing a quick rehearsal as they waited for their turn.

  While the others were deciding who was going to be what, I slipped out the side door, into the cool night air. Not that it was all that cool—there was a hot, dry wind from the direction of the hills behind us, but it was cooler than inside the ramshackle harbor buildings, with all those noisy people.

  I found Dhana on a wharf, leaning down, looking into the dark water.

  “Dhana.”

  Her blond head lifted, barely outlined by the distant glow of lanterns on a parked river raft.

  “Sorry,” I said. “I wanted to show you off. I forgot to ask if you actually want to be shown off.” And when she leaped to her feet, “We’re doing PJ meets the Goat.”

  “I’ll be the goat,” she offered.

  “When I left, Puddlenose and Gwen were arguing over who could do a better goat.”

  “I know all Faline’s best jokes.” She took off ahead of me.

  Inside, a small crowd of kids watched as Puddlenose and Id and Gwen traded off butting Seshe and Sherry, to see which of the two made the best snobby PJ. Seshe won hands down—she turned up her nose, turned down her mouth. She was as good as Irene, who was usually PJ. (Later she told me she copied Irene.)

  Aware of people watching, I got that show off feeling again. But I knew I was okay this time, because weren’t we all performers? So I said to those looking at us, “This is a play about somebody really stupid where we live.”

  “Help me with the farmer,” Gwen said to me, her eyes wide. “I forgot all Faline’s stuff.”

  “Just pile on the pocalubes.” I pretended to be shoveling. “The very best pocalubes.”

  “Pocalubes?” one of the boys asked, in Mearsiean. “Is this a word from the other Mearsiean land?”

  “It’s our word,” Sherry said proudly.

  “Seven adjectives and an insult,” I explained. “And they have to be interesting words.”

  We began zinging our best ones back and forth cracking up so much that we almost forgot why we were there, until suddenly it was our turn. So we turned away, still laughing, and Puddlenose said, “I’ll be the goat.”

  “I’m PJ!” Sherry insisted.

  “Seshe’s funnier as PJ,” Dhana said. “She doesn’t laugh.”

  “I’ll be the farmer’s pig, then.” Sherry shrugged. She never argued. “That’ll be extra funny, PJ trying to make a pig bow as well as a goat.”

  We were waved to somewhat impatiently by the man in charge, and so we hustled out to the space cleared for the acts. Kids sat on the tables as well as the benches and the floor around the stage area. Glowglobes marked off the stage, beyond which the crowd talked, whispered, looked at us exp
ectantly.

  When Seshe drew up, nose high, at one end, and Puddlenose bent over and acted goatish at the other, there were some snickers and giggles at Puddlenose, but when they came together and Seshe started, “You! Why are you not bowing?” nobody laughed. They waited for the joke.

  So I stepped out and said, “This is about a prince who thinks he’s better than anyone else. His first rule is, whenever he meets someone, they have to bow. Or they go to jail.”

  A few snickered, some murmured.

  “This includes animals,” I added. I laughed—I mean I thought it was funny, but I was kind of laughing like a stupid laugh track on the earth TV show I Love Lucy, to hint that funny stuff was coming. As soon as I heard my stupid titter, and the silence after as the kids all waited for something to happen, I began to get that distinctly nasty feeling that we were about to lay an egg. A two week old one.

  ‘PJ’ marched forward a couple steps, nose in the air. Some kids snickered.

  The farmer hastened up from the other end, pig in tow, but Sherry was giggling more than she snorted, so she seemed more like a girl with a sneeze problem than a pig.

  ‘PJ’ pointed a regal finger. “Bow! Then let me cross!”

  “Pow? Getcher hoss?”

  The farmer was supposed to be deaf, turning all PJ’s words into pocalubes. But Gwen suddenly had stage fright—she just stood there, staring at Seshe like she was the Evil Mage of Doom.

  “Me-eh-eh-eh!” Puddlenose said from behind. We’d never had a pig before, so he just crawled out behind Sherry, looked around and made goat noises.

  Some kids laughed at the goat noises—but when Puddlenose tried to get by, Sherry was right in the way, giggling helplessly, which started Gwen off. She bent her head and raised a hand to hide her face.

  “You must bow to me, then let me pass first. For I am Prince Jonnicake the Magnificent!” Seshe proclaimed, too loud—she was trying to drown out the giggles.

  I whispered to Gwen, “Stinkout smackdoodle, give me some gas.”

  Gwen yanked her hand down. She said too fast, “Stinka stinka, uh, gas!”

  A couple more laughs, but more rustles, and some whispers in Mearsiean from the back, “What are they saying? What’s going on?” made me mutter a little louder to Gwen, “Stinkorama smackadoodle—”