“Who says it has to be grand?” Dhana retorted, also waving her hands around her head. It was a mocking gesture, but her hands were so ballet-like, they reminded me of butterflies.
Diana smiled at the trail in front of her. Faline looked away, and none of us could see her face.
I said, “But what if PJ or any of his klank-brained friends overhears?”
Faline whispered klank-brained! klunk-brained!, and then dissolved into snickering. Sherry also started to chortle.
“Then, what, a kind of code?” Clair said, frowning a little. “But wouldn’t that draw notice as well?”
“I do like the idea of a code, though,” Irene admitted, and this time there were no dramatic gestures. Dhana smiled faintly, then twirled around twice, and leaped lightly over a tree root.
They all looked at me.
“No,” I said. “The best place for a thief is under the sheriff’s bed. Every single adventure story says that. And I think it works here. See, you have to give it some kind of obvious name, or one that won’t make PJ want to be there.”
“Like?” Irene crossed her arms.
“Like Pigsty. Do you have pigs here?”
The girls nodded. “They eat the scraps of food you don’t want. And their leavings are left in gardens.”
“So nobody eats them?”
The girls looked shocked. “Oh, no. They have babies!“ Sherry exclaimed earnestly, and that’s how I found out they don’t eat any mammals in that world.
“Okay, well, back to names. Or Snake Pit. Or Root Cellar — no, that one hints at underground — ” I stopped when I heard a choking, wheezing sound, and there was Faline, purple-faced.
“Let’s eat in the Pigsty,” Faline crowed. “Let’s catch a nap in the Pigsty! Let’s have a m-m-m-asssss-quer-ade in th-the P-p-p-igsssty ...” She couldn’t finish, she was laughing so hard.
The others grinned.
“I see what you mean,” Clair admitted. “But I do confess I mislike Pigsty.”
“Ugh.” Irene shuddered. “I will not say that I live in a Pigsty. They make sweet pets, but they eat — ” She shuddered, rolling her eyes toward the sky.
“Well, something bland, but not too bland, but not interesting. Like backyard, but not something you actually have here, lest it be confusing. But something PJ thinks is disgusting — like Junkheap, or maybe Junkyard — ”
The term didn’t translate.
“Junk,” Irene repeated. “What a funny sound! What is junk?” She said it a little like Clair had once pronounced Jennet, with a soft ‘j’ — no ‘d’ sound at the front, the way I was used to.
And they all looked at me in question.
“It’s from my language,” I said. “Where do you put stuff that doesn’t work anymore? That is all broken, or that people don’t want any more?”
“You take it apart and make a new thing,” Seshe explained.
“Junk,” Faline repeated. “Klunk — ”
“Bunk.” Sherry spluttered with snickers.
“Junkyard,” Clair repeated. “It would never, ever occur to anyone to figure that out.”
Irene gave an emphatic nod. “And it’s short, and easy to remember.”
“Junkyard it is, then,” Seshe said. “Yes, I like it too — a place where exists things we don’t even have.” She smiled at the absurdity.
The sun had vanished behind clouds without our noticing. A low rumble of thunder triggered the plopping of fat drops of rain on the leaves overhead. One splashed my face, running into my mouth. It tasted sweet, not like rust, as rain did at home.
“Can you take us to the hide — the Junkyard — by magic?” Irene asked Clair. “My gown will be ruined.”
Clair shook her head. “Too many. I’m not capable of transfers with so many, yet.”
“Then let’s run,” Diana suggested, grinning. “Race you!” She poked Clair and then tore ahead, fast as a cheetah, and as graceful in her own way. Clair started running after her, a head-down, determined, straight-path sort of run. Dhana took off after her, but veering for reasons we couldn’t see, sometimes turning handsprings over rocks, before she vanished in the greeny shadows.
“Last one there is Prune Juice’s sister!” Faline yelled, starting to run, but she didn’t go very fast. She was wheezing too hard with laughter.
Sherry’s chortling laugh floated back as she pounded after, followed by Irene, who groaned with dramatic fervor.
“I like rain,” Seshe said to me. “And I hate running, if I don’t have to. You can’t look at pretty colors and things around you when you run.”
“I don’t mind running, but I love rain,” I said. “We never get much where I come from, and then the grownups make you stay inside, as if you’ll melt.”
Seshe accepted that without question, as she did most everything. She had tipped her head back to look at the sky, and now she gave a sigh of pleasure.
I looked up. A huge gray condor (though the name came out whitewing) glided overhead, slow and slow, the long, gracefully tipped white outer feathers not even moving. As we watched in silence there came another, and then a third.
“They live high on Mount Marcus,” Seshe said. “And I think they go to Seram Aru, where there are more of their kind.”
I said, very carefully, “Is it okay if I ask a question?”
She gave me a quick look, one of perplexity, and a little worry, quickly hidden. “I will answer if I can,” she returned.
“Don’t answer if, well, it’s nosy, or wild, or wrong, but how come there aren’t any grownups bossing you girls around? Not that I think there should be,” I added hastily. “Remember, you don’t have to answer — ”
She was shaking her head. “Of course I’ll answer. At least, as far as I think I ought to, right now. But first, I must confess, it disturbs me that you think that you cannot be permitted a question?”
All my care, my worries, my anguish, my love for the place and joy in visiting and terror at the prospective end seemed to fly out of the cloudy sky like a pack of ghosts and roar through my head. “I can’t,” I said — almost cried. “I don’t dare, because I might ruin it, coming here — Clair bringing me — just by being me.”
Seshe stopped, and even though the rain was stronger now, running down both our faces, she put out a hand. “Wait,” she said. “Wait. Do I understand you? You think you cannot be yourself?”
“No! I don’t dare! Clair is so calm, and so quiet, and at home I always get yelled at for being noisy, and wild, and nosy, and stupid, with my babyish games of imagination, and — ” I realized I was yelling and stopped.
We stood there. I shivered, but not from the rain.
Seshe said, “Have you told Clair these things?”
“Of course not! She might never have me back! I couldn’t stand that!”
“So you like it here?”
“More than anything,” I said — vowed — pledged. It was the truest thing I had ever said, in my whole life. “It’s better than a wish, or a dream. It’s like home.”
FIVE — I Find My True Self
I dreaded turning twelve, because it meant that my next birthday would bring the teen years, and all its nasty burdens. Would Clair ever come again? She would probably stop soon, and meanwhile I had spent so much of my brief time there being a hypocrite.
Hypocrisy on Earth didn’t matter. It seemed a part of adulthood there, but Clair mattered. I realized I’d been trying to be what I thought Clair wanted in a friend, and not myself. I realized, finally, that whatever happened, I had to be honest, for her sake as well as my own.
A couple weeks later I found out that we were to move. Oh, I knew that Clair had found me once and she could again, and we were only moving a few miles to a bigger house, as a new baby was expected in the family. But it felt like an end forced on me against my will.
But that very night the tap at the door came.
When I opened it, there she was. We were the same size now, I could see through the tears in my eyes.
She saw my tears and her face changed, her brow puckering. But she did not speak, only shook her head, then reached, and her square, capable hand closed round my fingers, and once again magic seized us. I welcomed it, right down to the teeth-burring, bone-vibrating, stomach-unsettling aftermath.
When my vision cleared, I found that we were sitting alone on a rocky ledge under a cloudy sky, overlooking white, foaming water. Waterfall — the Magic Lake!
I drew in a shuddering breath of clean air.
“Thank you for having me back,” I said — in English, because she hadn’t handed me a medallion. “But first I have to tell you something.”
She looked at me in silence.
“I’ve been trying ... trying to be what you’d like, so you’d not stop coming. I tried to be someone else, not me, in case you wouldn’t like me the way I really am: bossy and crazy-tempered and silly when I’m supposed to be working. And never properly lady-like.”
Clair sighed. “I thought that might be it. But you don’t have to apologize. I, too, have made the same mistake, though in a different way. I only brought you in spring, when the weather was fine. And not when there was danger from the Chwahir, or when the Yxubarecs threatened, and they have been here an amazing number of times as late.”
“Yxubarecs?” I asked.
“People — once they were people. Now I don’t know what to call them. Long, long ago, before they came to this world, they had the ability to shapechange human forms. They settled in — well, another part of the world, and ended up turning toward evil. Later some mage forced them up into the sky in their own kind of flying prison, but that was a mistake, because they found a way to move about. And so they amuse themselves copying faces and forms of unsuspecting people down below, and as often as not pushing the originals off the cloud, and taking their place. For a short time, or a long one.”
“Ugh,” I said. “That’s horrible!”
“I don’t know why they keep returning here, but I didn’t dare have you visit. They did it to my first friend, you see. When I was little. Jennet.” Clair looked sick. “When you and I first met, you reminded me a little of her. Not in looks, but in things you liked, in humor, in the wish for adventure. She saw images with words, and made jokes like you do. We used to have so many adventures together, before — ” She shook her head hard. “It doesn’t matter now.”
“Sure it does,” I said. “You lost a best friend? What could matter more?”
“That I didn’t tell you who I was. I never told any of the girls, at first, because I was so afraid of what might happen, and then I realized that you don’t care about titles or rank or any of that, but I was afraid you’d be mad that I hadn’t told you right off.”
“Mad about what?” I asked.
She pointed up at the cloud obscuring the top of the mountain, and from this angle, half the sky. Her face was solemn, her gaze painful. “That palace. It’s mine. So is the kingdom.”
“You’re a princess?” I asked in amazement.
She shook her head. “Queen.”
“You? A kid?” Then I remembered what she’d told me the very first day, but I’d assumed that the ‘new queen’ was a grownup. I grimaced. “Princessing always sounded like fun. Parties, and pretty dresses, and you always get your own way. But a queen sounds, kind of, you know, like work.”
“It is work,” Clair said, drawing her knees up and hugging them against her so hard her knuckles were white against her skin. “And I’m not good at it. I know I’m not, though I try hard. But I don’t want any grownups telling me what to do. They certainly are stronger, but they might not be any better. My poor mother wasn’t. Rotten as I am, I’m already better than she was. Glotulae expanded the ill-gotten Auknuge lands while my mother was alive, and she didn’t even notice. I have to learn, as fast as I can, despite Glotulae, and Kwenz, and Fudalklaeb, who is Glotulae’s older brother. He rules Elchnudaeb to the north. She wants to rule as big a land as her brother has, and that means taking more from us. All those adults are ambitious. They think they can get a kingdom away from a stupid kid.” Her face had blanched almost as pale as her hair, her words coming so fast she was breathless.
“What happened? Was your mother old?” I asked, no longer worrying about what she’d think of my questions.
She shook her head. “Oh, she seemed that way, when I was little, but she wasn’t really that old at all. She had me by magic — you can do that, here, though the Spell doesn’t always work — as fast as she could, I think, and she started training me as soon as I could talk and walk. All I can remember is studying. I didn’t know how to play, though my cousin tried to teach me when he was here, but he was here so seldom, and he was so much older. Then I met Jennet, when we were both about five. From her I learned how to play, at least a little, because she thought up all our games. I followed her lead because it was so much fun.”
She paused to silently wipe the corners of her eyes on her sleeve. Deep breath. Another.
“We even had some adventures of a sort. We got grabbed by this old fellow we thought a horrible villain, only now I don’t really think he was, because we always managed to escape, and every time we did, I learned something. Only Rosey — we called him Rosey — lives in Chwahirsland, I believe. I still can’t figure out how he knew about me. I suspect it might have been because he knew of my cousin, but I haven’t seen him for some years, so I can’t ask. Anyway we learned how to be wary of the Chwahir. But we weren’t watching for the Yxubarecs. Which is how Jennet got killed — my cousin thought they were trying for me. Jennet was the leader, I was the follower, so they grabbed the wrong girl.”
Clair paused, looking out over the Lake in an intense, blind way. I think she didn’t see the mellow light over the woodland, or the rainbows in the waterfall spray, and the distant bubbles, because she stared straight into her own past. And a lonely one it had been. I was to find out, by degrees, just how lonely and how dangerous, even, it had been.
“Well, anyway, my mother slept all the time. I thought it was just how much we Sherwoods like to sleep, but I know now that she was drinking not just wine, but wine mixed with sleepweed, and it finally killed her. And I was left with a kingdom to rule, and I wasn’t ready. My cousin told me to take off, find friends, and let the kingdom take care of itself, just like it had before our great-grandmother took it over. She was a seamstress, and walked right in, for in those days, nasty things were happening to rulers, and nobody wanted that empty throne.” Clair smiled briefly. “So don’t be thinking that we Sherwoods are any kind of ancient family of royal worth. We aren’t.”
“Everybody comes from an ancient family,” I tried a joke, lame as it was. Anything to ease that hurt so visible in her eyes. “We just might not know their names.”
Clair nodded. “And if I’d told you the truth, you could have reminded me of that three years ago. But what’s done is done. And I did have another reason, I didn’t want you worrying, in case I — well.” She drew another deep breath. “The thing is, Mearsies Heili does have its own dangers, though those are different from your world. Kwenz and Glotulae are a part. On our side, I have two very good grown-up regional governors who give me good advice, and don’t interfere beyond that. I have Janil, who watches over the palace, and makes everything run homelike there, just as she did for my mother. We have the girls, a kind of family, and I know the magic to make a person stop aging. Our ancestors used to do it naturally, you see, so it seems to be built into us, kind of.” She opened her hands. “I just know that I don’t want to be like my mother, falling in love with some stupid man, and then killing myself, and almost losing a kingdom, because he picked my aunt instead. I’ll never grow up,” she said, her voice low and fervent. “Never.”
“Well I don’t want to either,” I exclaimed. “Here I’ve been worrying about it for years. Well, the last year or so. I kept getting taller, and the girls seemed the same, and — well, I was afraid I’d turn into a teenager and you’d say I couldn’t com
e here anymore.”
She gazed at me with unblinking intensity. “Do you want to stay?”
My breath stopped. My head buzzed. “Oh,” I breathed. “Oh. Please don’t tell me that was a joke.”
“I am serious. I have the way. It was why I waited so long, because this magic — it is something I do not even understand now, though I’ve spent almost three weeks studying it, since I found it in the library.”
“Yes,” I squeaked. “I want to stay here, forever and ever.”
Both of us were crying now, but even though she snuffled, she still grabbed my hand and did the transfer spell.
This time it was quick. We appeared in a room with glistening white walls, more like smooth ice than stone, and a high ceiling. The lines were rounded, arched, really, the shadows bluish. In shelves all around me were books, individually bound and hand-lettered. I loved the place at once.
She dashed to a table and picked up a slim book bound in gold. “I don’t know where my mother could possibly have gotten it, unless it’s been here far longer, and I just hadn’t seen it when I first looked through all the shelves. But there is no mention of it in any record.” She held the slim book in both hands. “If I do this spell — um. Actually it’s an enchantment, a lot of spells all nested together, very long spells, but I have practiced them. Anyway, you will change to who you would have been had you been born here.”
“What?”
She jerked her chin up. “It is so. You are connected to my family some way in the past. Ancient families, like you said. Back and back and back, through the world gate and back again. That’s how I first found you.” A brief smile.
My brain was full of darting thoughts, like bees in a hive that has just been turned upside down. “Will my parents back on Earth end up going to jail when I disappear? Or do I leave them a note?”
Clair shook her head. “No. You see, someone will take your place there, someone from the possible worlds like yours, except in her version of your world there was — will be, very soon — a quaking of the earth, and her house will fall down, and she didn’t live. Now she’ll get a chance at a life, if I make this spell, for the time is nigh.”