The boy etched a mark in the stone as similar to the contours of the footprint as he could—a sculpture, an equivalent.
Then he walked up and down the banks awhile, surveying the soil. When the vawn snorted impatiently, he returned and climbed back into his ornate saddle. The two-legged steed stomped off, happy to head away from the water and into the trees.
No one knew of the rider’s visit to the river. No one saw the record of his discovery, which he kept like a clue to a riddle. And he locked his questions up tight for fear of troubling the volatile storms within the heart of his father, the king.
2
THE CONCERT OF STITCHING
T he child became twigs and burnt autumn leaves, thin and fisty fingers clutching acorns and seeds as though they were stolen jewels. Her hair hung in tangles, silver and brown like the bark of apple trees. Her smile sealed off secrets. Each day she made a hurried journey to see as much of the world as she could bear and to harvest a small gallery of souvenirs.
The Gatherers saw her travels in her eyes, for wherever she went, they absorbed colors. She drank in the forest’s full spectrum—green pheasant feathers, wild purple lilacs, red fur of lurkdashers, and dandelions both sun yellow and wisp white. When she appeared among the grumbling, half-awake workers in the morning, her eyes glinted emerald, ringed with red, remnants of the sunrise. Sometimes they reflected that light late into the afternoon.
At day’s end, when all others were failing, she remained industrious, browsing through gifts the forest had bestowed, noting perfumes and patterns. With her fingertips, she traced the veins of autumn’s fiery fan leaves—her favorite trophies. Once she scattered before her, like pieces in a game of fortune, a menagerie of chalk white bones, one perfect purple plum, a beastman’s broken black tooth, and an abandoned nest full of rare glowing greenbird feathers.
“How do you know where to find all these things?” excitable orphans would ask.
She’d shrug and share their bafflement, saying she stumbled upon her surprises while following something she could never seem to catch.
Just as she collected souvenirs others would miss, she gathered into memory the details of all she experienced. A nest high in the crook of a coil-tree branch would catch her eager eye; fragments of eggshell glittering on the roots a few days later would provoke her to ponderous silence. On a canvas of stone, she could sketch a map of the trees that encroached on House Abascar from the north, west, and south—the magnificent Cragavar forest. Her map’s exquisite detail proved useful to the Gatherers, such that when Yawny the cook lost his spoon or Meddles the weaver misplaced a needle, they made sure to discuss it when she was close enough to hear.
Intimate knowledge of brush-tunnels, stone stairways, ivy tree-ladders, concealed creeks, and buried reservoirs helped her stay lost when she wearied of company. The Gatherers’ finest trackers eventually refused to search for her. She’d return laughing, dashing through the camps and discouraging their reprimands with simple surprises that made them marvel and covet her presence even more.
She was elusive and spontaneous like a bird, now chasing a crittercat cub up a tree, now clambering through a stranger’s window to bother him with a riddle, now rummaging through a pile of leaves in search of the best one, and now suddenly escaping through some gateway in the brambles only she could see. But a crackling fire and a story—that would convince her to stay for a while.
On rare occasions when she spoke—she had that rough-edged speech common among those Gatherers who spurned education and lacked the patience for eloquence—questions tumbled over one another, unguarded. Gatherers tried to satisfy each inquiry. But at night they rose from their blankets and paced, repeating her questions quietly, until they grew suspicious of her reasons for asking. “She doesn’t really want to learn anything,” they’d say. “She just wants to remind us of all we don’t know.”
Some questions she repeated often: “Where’d I come from before I got found?” “What’s up past the dark mountains in the North?” “That big, big shadow in my dreams…Why can’t I find it when I’m awake?” “Why do I call it the Keeper?” “How come other children dream of the Keeper too?” And “Why don’t grownups dream of the Keeper?”
As she puzzled in the Gatherers’ midst, one would glance at another and mutter, “Them’re the troublesome questions, girl. Nobody knows those answers.” When she asked again, as though hoping for a different answer, they would shoo her away. And as she trudged off to her next mischief, she’d murmur a different sort of question, something that anyone could answer but no one felt comfortable saying—“Why do the four houses have to have walls?” “Why don’t people from all the four houses visit each other?” “Why is House Abascar’s palace so beautiful while the rest of the house is dull?”
As Gatherer women explained how crucial it was for the River Girl to “find her feet,” draw a man’s attention, and make her worth clear to those watching, she thrust out her chin. “Why’s it that way, and who made it so?”
When the men explained the Rites of the Privilege, the ritual testing through which an orphan or a Gatherer might be granted a new life inside Abascar’s mighty walls, she asked, “How come it’s that way, and who made it so?”
“Why’s it that way?” she sulked when they described the rules that would govern her once she passed those ceremonial tests. When they recommended she lavish her gifts on favored Gatherers to buy their affections and earn mention to the guards, she would reply, “Why’s it gotta be that way, and who made it so?” She scowled at the answers that failed to please her, but she heard them all the same. If her elders answered with a humph or sharp retort, they’d soon find pebbles in their soup, thorny twigs tucked under their blankets, or snail shells in their stewpots.
Still, the River Girl learned from closely observing the Gatherers. She developed new skills quickly, from weaving to building to catching birds and fish, just by watching from the boughs above or from the edge of a clearing. Sometimes she shadowed them down forest paths, mimicked them like a tiny clown, and seemed to be searching for a sign to show her the role she should play.
That search continued as she listened to daily lessons from women with opinions as abrasive as their chapped and weathered faces, with theories as varied as the crimes that had cost them.
They spoke to her of the elements. Of the animals. Of the myriad hills, valleys, streams. And especially of the woods and their colorful trees, some safe and some fraught with danger. Of the peoples that populated the great Expanse. Of the wide River Throanscall that poured summer’s mountain meltings southward from the Forbidding Wall, down, down into the Cragavar forest. Of the forest’s broken heart—the ruins of the poisoned House Cent Regus.
Did she know that water from the Throanscall’s source was said to make a mind go mad? That in winter, weighty drifts of ice would coast along its currents like fog-robed ships? That flowers grew in the deep woods that, if consumed, could paint nightmares into one’s vision? That there were underground rivers, rushing and roaring through night black tunnels where dark creatures groaned and hid from the light?
They told her of the four houses. House Bel Amica on the western coast, where the Throanscall spilled into an inlet and the sea, where the people lived in opulence and strange ways, with ceremonies honoring moon-spirits. House Cent Regus, once a sophisticated culture in a sprawling, hivelike labyrinth made of clay and stone, where respectable people had meddled with magic and devolved into ravenous beastmen that preyed upon anything that moved. House Jenta of the hot and barren lands to the south, where quiet cave dwellings hid the simple rituals of robed and hooded inhabitants.
And their own House Abascar, its history of mining and harvesting, its brave kings and formidable queens. Abascar, they told her, gave strength and safety to those who obeyed King Cal-marcus’s laws and lived within its stone walls. House Abascar, the finest house in all the land, they said. House Abascar, from which they had been cast for their crimes, cursed to work in per
il and hard weather in hopes of earning their privileges again.
In return, the River Girl told them fantastic dreams—most often the dream of that shadow, the Keeper, who stalked her through the trees.
“Beware of shadows, River Girl!” they warned her. “Beastmen are hunting you, with claws out and ready!”
“No, no, no, I never dream of monsters,” she insisted. “The creature is gentle and keeps me safe down beside the River Throanscall or at the edge of Deep Lake.”
They patted her silverbrown head and explained that all children dream of such a creature. That she would outgrow foolish nightmares someday, just as they had. That all this nonsense about the Keeper would fade.
But the River Girl denied that her dreams were nightmares or foolish. “How can I see somethin’ in my sleep I’ve never seen awake?” she asked. “And how come others have seen it there too?”
When their backs were turned, she drew outlines of the Keeper on their walls.
Through these first few years, the child had been called River Girl, thanks to Krawg and Warney, who doted on her like proud grandfathers. But one evening Old Lady Wenjee, whose talk was as rough as her temper, decided to announce a proper name for the Gatherers’ most unusual orphan.
The River Girl sat in a circle with women inside a thatched hut. As a modest fire warmed their stitches, needles, balls of string, and gossip, she set about to patching two grey, threadbare stockings that Wenjee had bestowed upon her as if they were some precious inheritance. Walls of tightly woven toughstalk held in the sound of their whispers.
But Wenjee knew nothing of whispers. Her voice was suited to her voluminous mass.
“You know, child,” said Wenjee, squeezing the River Girl’s round face between her chubby hands, “you must get tired of hearin’ a hundred different nicknames. It’s time you were given a name proper. So, since you love me best, I’m the nearest thing to your mama.” She grinned a collection of teeth gone wrong and declared, “So I’m gonna call ya…Prinny!”
The River Girl’s eyes drained of color. Her jaw might have dropped open if Wenjee hadn’t held it fast in a crushing grip.
“Why, y’ask? Because my mama called me ‘Princess’ when I was little.”
“Little?” another voice scoffed. “Wenjee was never actually little, in truth.”
“This was back in the days when Har-baron, Cal-marcus’s one-armed father, was king. Mama figured I’d grow up and meet the prince and get married into the palace real good. Same smarts as a sheep’s bottom, Mama had. If there wasn’t six layers of dirt between me ’n’ her today, I’d smack her for her yakkin’. Because young Prince Cal-marcus never chose me. Nope. He took somebody else.”
“He found somebody else!” sneered Lezeeka from the corner, sitting outside the circle because she liked to sulk. “Prince Cal-marcus found Jaralaine, that waresellers’ daughter. Only survivor of a beastman attack, she was. Father and mother hacked to pieces. Brother and sisters shot full of arrows. An angry child Jaralaine became. A wicked orphan!”
“Shh!” came a sharp whisper from Mulla Gee, who stripped strands of dry grass into narrower threads. “It’s Wenjee’s story for the tellin’.”
“Anyways,” bellowed the barrel-shaped storyteller, “Prince Cal-marcus ker Har-baron was all anxious to pick his bride.”
The women began stitching faster, staring dazedly into the flames.
“What a day when Cal-marcus rode through on his vawn in all his splendid colors, surrounded by his handsome young busters. He went right up…He went right up…to…” Wenjee’s voice faltered to a squeak. Her eyes leaked. She sagged back slowly, and her grip loosened. The River Girl pried her head free of the woman’s hand, opened and closed her mouth to make sure its hinges still held. “Cal-marcus went up to this orphan rascal. A girl with hair like fire ’n’ gold. A girl who’d never said a word to me, good ’r bad!”
“We all knew Jaralaine had been chasing Cal-marcus,” muttered Lezeeka. “Muck-headed beast, that girl! Never trust a wareseller. Maybe it wasn’t beastmen that killed her family. Maybe she grew so ashamed of mum and pappy that one dark day she let ’em have it.”
The River Girl mouthed the name Jaralaine, absorbing the narrative cautiously. It was always a puzzle, discerning true history in the mess of tangled, tainted Gatherer memories. This story caught her attention. She recognized it, somehow, as true. “Hair like fire ’n’ gold,” she whispered, twisting a strand of her own hair between thumb and forefinger, wondering why it was both brown as earth and silver as the hair of an old woman.
“Yes, yes, Jaralaine,” Mulla Gee muttered through the grass strands she held between clenched teeth. “Jaralaine wanted to be queen from the day she was found. Found in the wild, like Prinny here.”
The River Girl scowled at the name, turned her eyes back to the flames. She picked up the stockings and knotted them together.
“Her mum and pappy never sold much,” Lezeeka murmured from her dark corner. “Half-starved and wretched people they were, dealin’ Abascar wares to folk from other houses and bringin’ their purchases back to the king.”
Wenjee seemed unaware of all those who joined in the telling. While they believed it was a chorus, she was in a solo performance, reliving the scenes of the story somewhere in the vacuous core of her colossal head. “Cal-marcus took Jaralaine’s hand. He breathed somethin’ in her ear, and I…” Now her voice had forgotten itself and was swaying and soaring like wind through a pinched space. “If it ever turned out she was still livin’, I’d seek her out, and I’d…”
“You’d smack her?” asked Mulla Gee.
“To the mountains and back! She was a witch, I tell ya! Always runnin’ off in secret, always hidin’ things. Plotting how she’d outshine us all. You should’ve heard the outrage inside the walls. Prince Cal-marcus had claimed a wild forest orphan for a bride! Not a maid of the Housefolk. Not a courtgirl. Not a daughter of Sir This or Officer That. But a daughter of dead waresellers. And a mischief-maker, at that.” Wenjee took in a great breath that drew the fire’s smoke toward her, and then a sigh declaring immeasurable grief sent it streaming against the far wall. “But he chose her. That was that. And into the castle Jaralaine went. Never spoke to me again.”
“Wenjee, now,” said Mulla Gee, “you just said Jaralaine never spoke to you at all.”
The storyteller moved on without pause. “Now, this was long before Cal-marcus became our king and went all sour on Jaralaine. First she bewitched him into making her wishes into law. Then she disappeared. And well, that was it. The king got smart and claimed he’d made a whoppin’ mistake. He put his ring on the table—that’s what kings do, Prinny, when they make a proclamation—and he decreed that all mothers and fathers in House Abascar would choose brides for their sons, because the sons just don’t rightly know what they’re gettin’ into, and they can’t choose any good for themselves. If y’ask me, old Cal-marcus got what he deserved, that old cock-a-doodle marryin’ a huff-bucket like her.”
“It was her hair,” sighed Hildy the Sad One. “All fire ’n’ gold.”
“No, that figure of hers. She starved herself, she did,” snarled Lezeeka.
“Ballyworms,” muttered Mulla Gee. “Secrets were Jaralaine’s bargaining tools. She bewitched him, I say. He never did seem quite the same person after he took her from the forest.”
The talk—“cracker-squawking” it was called by the Gatherer men—had begun. Every old woman yammered at once while nobody listened to a word. Except the River Girl.
“House Bel Amica, out west. That’s where Jaralaine wandered from. Them’s weird folk, Bel Amicans.”
“Some say that Northchildren dragged the bodies of Jaralaine’s parents away to the North. And when they did, they took her heart along with them and left her half-mad in the woods.”
“There’s no such thing as Northchildren! It’s all just lies and stories!”
“True stories! Northchildren have been howlin’ in the dark since our grandmothers
’ grandmothers first lost their baby teeth.”
“That’s not my point!” shouted Wenjee, panicking as she felt their attention slip from her grasp. “Quit talkin’ ’bout rumors and whatnot. This is history! I’m tryin’ to explain somethin’ to Prinny here.”
The cracker-squawking stopped, but the feverish stitching continued.
After her raging glare made its full round of reprimand, Wenjee turned back to the girl and sharpened her grief to steely intent. “Little Prinny, I want you to meet the son of King Cal-marcus ker Har-baron—the one they call Prince Cal-raven ker Cal-marcus—and get married just like Mama wanted for me. If the son follows the father, Cal-raven will take a liking to a wild forest girl. But when you catch the prince’s eye, remember who named you. Remember who predicted you would be queen. Then perhaps I’ll get my room in the palace after all. Everybody knows I deserve it.”
The River Girl bowed her head to avoid Wenjee’s gaze. Her fists tightened around the stockings.
“You’re young, but you got a spark, you do, and spirit. I want you to earn your way inside the walls. When you’re old enough for the Rites of the Privilege, pass those tests. Learn to be like obedient Housefolk. And impress King Cal-marcus’s scouts. I want you to grow up good ’n’ useful. Not like those orphans who spoil their chances. And surely not like those of us who were foolish in our younger days and now have to work to pay it all back. You’re better than to be just a babymaker for some rogue or ruffian. So I named ya Prinny, cuz a princess is what you’re gonna be, or I’ll spit in the drink!”
Wenjee was so proud of her nearly unintelligible speech, she swelled a little larger, which frightened the women close by.
The stitchers quieted for a while, each one imagining things from the dark land of rumor, dreaming of days beyond reach. The stitching concert was over.
The River Girl stood up, brushed scraps of thread from her skirt, and opened her hands. The stockings fell to the floor, and those who noticed were stunned by how they had changed.