A corner of my Lakti mind noticed that my father’s posture was poor. My mother’s forehead was smudged. Was she a slattern?
How much younger Lady Mother looked! How smooth her face was then. She’d been almost pretty.
When she stared down at me and picked me up, her expression softened.
The face of the girl who followed me out—Annet’s face—was stamped with sorrow and terror.
The vision followed Lady Mother to my nursery, where she dressed me in my Lakti finery and removed my tassel. When she left, Annet picked me up and held me stiffly.
The wall became itself again. My tears flowed, though I was hardly aware of them.
Halina patted my shoulder, with a touch that brought unwanted comfort. I twisted away, rushed to the opposite wall, and sobbed, however un-Lakti-like my tears were.
In the middle of my endless weeping, I wondered how much time had passed. Would Annet return soon? Would Lady Mother come with her? How could I behave cheerfully?
“You can invent anything and make it seem real.” I hiccuped.
“Think, Perry, and you’ll know everything happened as I revealed it.”
If what she’d shown me was true, no wonder Annet had always hated me. Two lines of poetry erupted in my mind:
Sisters expelled from home
Lived together yet alone.
The other Bamarre servants liked me. And I loved poetry, which felt as much a part of me as my need to run.
Whenever I accomplished something that pleased Lady Mother, she proclaimed it as Lakti. But if I were a Lakti by birth, why would she say anything?
Was she hard to please because I was a Bamarre?
She’d never revealed who my birth family was, even after so many years had passed and their grief must have subsided. But there could be other explanations for that.
Most of all, however, the proof was her distress over a fairy appearing to me. She’d known that Halina hadn’t broken the tradition of never visiting a Lakti.
Father hated the Bamarre! Would he hate me?
I pushed the idea away. “Are my”—I didn’t know what to call them—“my first parents well?”
The fairy’s eyes were soft with sympathy. “Very well. You have a younger brother.”
“Who else here knows?”
“Of the Lakti, just Lady Klausine and her maid. The guard who was there was sent away the next day.”
“Not Father?” But I knew the answer to that.
“No. All the castle Bamarre know. King Einar and his sons don’t. The castle Bamarre protect you and Annet.”
The weak protecting the strong. “Why don’t fairies visit Lakti people?”
“If the Lakti let the Bamarre live as equals, fairies would visit them. This fairy certainly would.”
I made the Lakti argument. “We’re kinder to our Bamarre than other conquerors would be.”
Halina said nothing.
“Why did you pick me to visit? Annet says fairies hardly ever appear to anyone.”
She shifted her weight to one hip, a resting pose. “This fairy is tired of the burden the Bamarre carry.”
I was supposed to change that?
“Yes, you are. I’ve been waiting for someone in your circumstances. You may disappoint me, but you’re particularly placed, as no one else is.”
My voice rose. “Why do I have to be a Bamarre?” Why did Lady Mother have to meddle in my life? Why did Halina?
“You are a Bamarre. Still, if you like, you can tell no one and live as a Lakti. But if you do, you won’t see me again.”
What would I lose? “What good have fairies done the Bamarre?”
“I’m doing good now.” She vanished.
A few minutes later, which passed while I stood in the middle of the chamber, barely thinking, Annet came in.
“What?” she said. My expression must have been strange.
I shook my head and sat at my dressing table for her to brush my hair. Should I tell her I knew?
She brushed roughly, as usual. If I told her, would she be gentler?
I wondered how it felt to wear the tassel.
Annet had watched over me, just as our parents told her to, if lovelessly. “Are you angry at me for tattling on Dahn? I’m sorry.” I realized I was. I’d caused the shaming.
In the mirror I saw her shake her head, the green tassel swaying. “No . . .” She met my eyes. “Prince Dahn is as stupid as a Lakti. He should want you to recite poetry.”
“I could be the Lakti who civilized her people.”
“Yes.” She stopped brushing and moved her stool so she could face me. “What happened to you?”
I frowned, confused. What had I said?
Oh. I’m sorry. Had I never said that to her before?
I half wanted to tell her about the fairy. But the instant the words came out of my mouth—I know I’m a Bamarre—I wouldn’t be able to take them back.
“Nothing happened. I should say ‘I’m sorry’ more often.”
Her eyes widened.
I’d made it worse. Now I had to come up with an explanation. “Maybe I’m growing up.”
Weak, but she seemed satisfied. Half an hour later, I was in bed, staring up at the shadows while Annet slept.
When Lady Mother made me promise to tell no one about the fairy’s visit, was she protecting me? Or herself, because of the deception she’d carried out? What would happen to her if I told?
And Father! Would he really hate me?
If my first parents met me now, would they still feel affection, or would I be a Lakti, to be feared and hated?
What about Willem? I’d never met a Lakti who admired the cowardly and endlessly polite Bamarre.
Though the night was almost over before I fell asleep, I had decided only one thing: I wouldn’t announce the truth about my birth until after I’d returned from the battlefield. If I confessed now, the campaign might be called off. The Lakti could even lose the campaign as a result, and the fault would lie with a Bamarre girl.
Father would be disappointed if there were no trip. He’d been looking forward to taking me along—because he loved me. Loved me. Loved me.
CHAPTER NINE
AT DAWN LADY Mother came to my chamber with her maid, who carried breakfast on a tray, although usually we broke our fast in the great hall. When they came in, I was standing in the middle of the room, tying my belt around my surcoat.
Lady Mother held a burlap sack and wore her usual stern expression. Somehow I had expected her to be different, though only I had changed. She put the satchel on the floor by my bed.
What would I say if I told her I knew? You ripped me from my life! Or, You saved me from my life!
The maid put the tray on my dressing table. Not enough food for Annet, who was facing the window, pinning up her hair—and who was probably as hungry as I was.
Lady Mother frowned. “Didn’t you sleep?”
I shrugged. “Not much.”
“I hope thoughts of that absurd prince didn’t keep you awake.”
I shook my head.
“Excitement, I suppose. Here. This is for you.” From the purse at her waist she removed a small velvet sack and shook out the contents in her hand.
“Oh!”
In her palm was a silver chain from which dangled a pendant—a circle of worked gold crossed by a tiny silver sword. Along the center of the sword’s blade ran a line of diamond chips.
I’d never had jewelry before. The Lakti didn’t adorn their children at all and didn’t adorn themselves very much. “Thank you.” Tired as I was, I barely held back tears.
“Don’t touch the sword.” She gave me the pendant. “I used to take this into battle.”
Careful to avoid the sword, I slipped the chain over my head. The pendant hung just below the neckline of my surcoat.
“Annet,” Lady Mother said, “look at Perry’s pendant.”
Annet turned. “It’s pretty, Lady Klausine.” She took a step toward me.
“Don’t come closer, but keep watching. Perry, run a finger quickly and softly over the sword.”
I did. A light blazed. I cried out in surprise and stopped rubbing.
“I can’t see!” Annet covered her eyes and bent double.
I gasped. Had I blinded my sister? “Will she see again?”
“Of course.”
The pendant light dimmed after about half a minute.
Lady Mother should have warned Annet, who was still bent over. We watched her. She moaned.
Lady Mother shouldn’t have done it at all. Didn’t she remember who Annet was?
She shouldn’t have done it to any Bamarre.
Annet straightened.
“Can you see?” I cried.
“Everything is blurred.”
“It lasts several minutes,” Lady Mother said. “Soon her sight will be as keen as ever.”
It had been casual cruelty. Had I failed to notice a thousand similar examples? Had I committed many myself?
Lady Mother added, “Keep the pendant safe, Perry. It’s for use in battle, not as an ornament. In battle, don’t touch it unless you must. Victory in a fair fight is best, but use it to save your life. Your fellow Lakti warriors need you.”
Had she forgotten I was ever a Bamarre? Or did she think of it constantly?
“Can it blind more than one person at once?” I asked.
“Two, if their heads are close together.”
“Where did it come from?”
“From sorcerers!” Lady Mother sounded triumphant. “In Old Lakti an apprentice sorcerer always lived at court. But they stayed behind when we left. I don’t suppose any survived.” She sat on my bed and lifted the sack onto her lap, where she worked at the strings.
I had an impulse to shine the sword light on her and run from the room. I could blind my pursuers, race to the stable, gallop across the drawbridge, and never come back.
But I didn’t move, held by feeling for Lady Mother and Annet, no matter what being a Bamarre might mean.
“Old Lakti had elves and dwarfs too, who never troubled us. There.” Lady Mother pulled out two shabby black boots. “These were a fairy gift many generations ago.” She held a boot out to me. “Don’t put it on.”
I took it. It looked big enough to accommodate both feet.
“One step in these will take you seven leagues.”
“Really?” I hugged the boot to my chest, dirty as it was. Seven leagues—twenty-one miles—in a single step! She was giving me the means of escape.
Her face softened. “They may satisfy even your desire to peregrinate.”
“Do I have to do anything to make them go? Say a spell?”
“Just step, but, like the pendant, don’t use them unless you must. And be sure of your direction and distance or you may come to mischief.”
“What mischief?”
She shrugged. “I’ve never used them. I don’t know if they’d tunnel through a mountain or scale it. They might stop with you encased in stone or drowned at the bottom of a lake.”
Oh!
She took back the boot. “Now, eat your breakfast.”
A Lakti breakfast did not coddle: coarse brown bread, hard cheese, lumpy pottage, and lukewarm almond milk. Lady Mother stood over me and watched. I ate as I’d been taught, taking small bites, chewing carefully but quickly, sipping, not slurping.
Halfway through, I swallowed and asked, “Can Annet go to her breakfast?”
Lady Mother’s eyebrows rose above their usual arch. “Annet, you have my permission to leave.”
She went, glancing worriedly at me on her way out, which reassured me that she could see.
“Ragna, would you ask my lord when he needs Perry?”
Lady Mother’s maid nodded and left, too.
“Is there something you want to say?”
I opened my mouth to say I just thought Annet would be hungry—and closed it. Lady Mother would find that suspicious. How much I had changed already!
What could I say instead? “Er . . . Is it safe to have Annet or any Bamarre with us at the camp?”
“Ah.” She nodded.
I felt the usual happiness—and felt unusually odd about it.
“We believe so. Our Bamarre servants allow more of us to fight, and we don’t let them near the battle. Any more questions?”
Taking myself by surprise, I asked, “Will you miss me?”
No nod. “What a question!” She went to my dressing table and opened the drawer where Annet kept the shears. “Your hair may get in your way. Sit.” She gestured at my dressing table.
I did, reluctantly. My hair was my one beauty. As Lady Mother had once said, I was pretty enough: square face; large, square teeth; dark eyes under level eyebrows; small, squarish nose; clear complexion; lips that could have been fuller. It was a blunt Lakti face regardless of my birth, softened by my extravagant hair.
Lady Mother had once speculated about how long my hair would grow if left uncut. “You could sleep on a mound of hair and have enough left over for a blanket.” With unusual humor, she added, “You’d be the ideal of Lakti economy.”
But when it reached my waist, she always told Annet to cut it to shoulder length, which I didn’t mind. Shoulder length was still long.
Now, however, Lady Mother lopped off a hank of hair level with my cheekbones.
I put my hand over the spot. “Do you have to?”
In the mirror I saw her look down at the hair in her hand. “I won’t have your hair endanger you.” She added softly, “I wish I were going with you, but you’ll be back in two months.” Her voice strengthened. “If you need to come home—whatever the reason—use the boots.”
I almost blurted out the truth then. Only caution held me back, but I had my answer. She’d miss me.
CHAPTER TEN
THE JOURNEY TO Father’s headquarters lasted a week, starting with four days of easy riding on our widest road across meadows and over forested hills, which grew steeper the farther south we went. On the fifth morning we met the east-west road and turned west. The terrain began to flatten and the ground become stony. We had entered the New Lakti barrens. Woods of Maze cypress trees grew here, dense with the entwined branches that gave the tree its name.
I relate this geography from books, because I saw little. On the first day, I rode half-asleep. For the rest of the trip, I was more awake but barely alert to what passed around me.
Often, Willem maneuvered his horse to my side. Before Halina’s visit, I would have been delighted. Now I had to make myself smile. Always alert to feelings, he rarely spoke, but once he tilted his head at me in a silent question. I just shrugged.
My only comforts were the memory of Lady Mother’s good-bye and thoughts of her gifts. I wondered if Father knew she’d given them to me, because he never mentioned them.
The Lakti in our company numbered fifty, including my fellow students and Mistress Clarra. They made merry, joking and calling to one another and often singing. If I knew the words, I made myself sing along. This chorus penetrated my haze:
“Brash, strong heroes on milky-white steeds,
Fearless soldiers forging great deeds,
Sure of fighting well, sure of being bold,
Sure of striking hard, sure of killing foes,
Laughing, roaring, pounding in the saddle,
Castle-bred folk with minds on battle.”
“Father,” I asked when the song ended, “do you think the long-ago Lakti sang this when they rode against the Bamarre?”
“We may have. These verses are very old, although the Bamarre never merited a lay.”
I made myself not look back to where Annet rode with a dozen more Bamarre servants. Behind them, teams of oxen pulled carts loaded with food, blankets, and bandages. We traveled in order of rank, with the Bamarre between the exalted and the beasts. Why would I become a Bamarre?
My only other memory of the journey is of an oddity. By the end of the second day, my hair had grown long enough to graze my shou
lders. Four days later, it reached my shoulder blades.
Bugles woke me from my reveries, blown by soldiers when we approached camp. It was November 2, late afternoon, chilly, no wind, lowering clouds, the camp wreathed in smoke from many bonfires. I formed an impression of a warren of brown leather tents, living quarters for Father’s troops, a thousand strong, who had continued fighting in his absence.
Two towers rose above the barrens’ flatness, one only a few yards to the north of the camp, the other a smudge on the horizon, perhaps half a mile to the south.
I guessed that lookouts were stationed in the near tower. Cypress stumps dotted the camp. A wood had been cleared for us.
We dismounted at the southeastern edge of the tents, about four miles from the battlefield, as I learned later. I lifted down my satchels, which held, along with a change of clothes, my precious pendant and seven-league boots, and the book of poems. Mistress Clarra led her charges, including me, to the tent that would house us all.
The tent hung too low for me to stand upright inside. The distance from flap to back was no more than fifteen feet—for the eight of us. I set my things down near the opening, because I still feared confinement.
Willem set his satchels next to mine. Mistress Clarra told us to follow her to the big mess table for our supper. We filed out, zigging and zagging between tents, Willem at my side when there was room. We hadn’t gone far before I felt a tap on my shoulder.
A Bamarre kitchen maid from the castle smiled at me and tapped Willem, too. “Your fathers want you. You’re to sup with them.”
We followed her, a dark shape in deepening dusk.
Father’s tent stood entirely across the camp. If the tents themselves were to march to battle, his would have led. A gap separated it from the others, providing room for horses and dashing messengers.
Smoke eddied out and curled around our knees. Inside, we came first to a coal brazier, which radiated welcome warmth. A scuttle of fresh coals and a pot of tapers stood next to the brazier.
Our fathers smiled at us, Sir Noll’s smile as easy as his son’s, Father’s more brilliant, a natural leader’s smile. A soldier would keep that smile in mind as she rode at a wall of foes.