The main thing is that by grim determination I learned to ride, for Hreealdar seemed to know what I needed. Round and round we trotted, and then cantered, and then jumped. And, last, he shifted to light form, which was breathtaking. I can’t even explain how that felt — like racing through space, only without a space ship. It was a fast transfer but without the horrible inner jolt. You just felt like you did after a super-fast roller coaster ride.
I didn’t tell anyone I was doing it, I just did it. Next time I had to ride in the presence of the others, no one was going to have an excuse to laugh at me. It was really laughing at Clair, who had picked me to be her second in command. I had to live up to that; to respect me was to respect Clair.
Bringing me to the business about my name.
But first I have to put in all the surrounding detail, before I can rightly get to that part of my story, and then on to our adventures!
I went on patrols with the girls, and began learning my way along the northern portion of the woodland.
And I also began spying on Glotulae’s land with a telescope that I ordered from a glazier on the cloudtop city, who traded with people at the harbor in Wesset North, where ships from other countries came in.
Clair didn’t spy on Glotulae’s land. It didn’t seem to be in her nature to spy, and I knew she didn’t want any army-type guys or adult spies clanking or lurking around, so that left just us girls. It made sense to me to watch that city, except one morning I was staring down through the scope and I saw some kind of procession. What did it mean? It could be an army getting ready to march somewhere, or else it could be a series of servants carrying food to a party. The scope, though good, still flattened everything out, the light twinkled and gleamed, all distorting the tiny figures. Maybe somebody trained in spying would know instantly what it all meant, but I sure didn’t.
It was then that I realized if we wanted to find out what Glotulae was up to, we couldn’t just wait around for her to do something nasty, and react to that as best we could, we had to go into her city and nose around ourselves.
I was about to leave when my gaze fell on Clair’s little silver crown, sitting on the desk. I thought of PJ riding so arrogantly into our forest with his stupid gold crown. I grabbed Clair’s circlet and jammed it onto my head. Its weight was somehow comforting. If I had to confront Glotulae, well, this would prove I was a princess, wouldn’t it?
o0o
“Girls. I have an idea.”
I’d transferred down to the Junky, which was my nickname for the Junkyard. They’d all adopted it, liking the short sound even more.
And they were all there — except for Clair, who was busy with interviews on the cloudtop.
“I think it’s a mistake to keep snackling back and forth here, waiting for them to attack us.”
“Snackling,” Faline repeated, and wheezed off into snickers.
“So, what, you think we ought to attack them?” Irene asked, looking askance.
“Attack, no. Spy, yes. Just today I saw a big procession in their main street outside the Squashed Wedding Cake Palace, but I couldn’t tell if it was a parade of killers or cooks.”
They looked at one another. Seshe’s face puckered into worry. “Is that safe, to go there alone? We know that Glotulae has a palace guard, and maybe even a city guard.”
“Yeah, nothing like guarding a place you stole from somebody else,” Irene put in sarcastically.
“What guard cares about kids?” I demanded. “If we were all grownups, slinking in with cloaks up over our noses, and dropping knives here and there, they might take notice, but some kids? Especially girls. I’ll bet you anything they totally ignore us.”
Dhana grinned. “Let’s.”
“We better tell Clair.” But if she was doing interviews, should I interrupt her? I was supposed to making decisions. So . . ? I smacked my hands. “I know. Let’s leave a note right here on the desk. If she wants us, she’ll come here first thing, and then see it!”
Everyone agreed that that was a good idea.
By then I’d easily mastered the Mearsiean alphabet. Their spelling was very close to phonetic. (It isn’t completely — it has some rules left over from old Sartoran influence, but the rules are consistent.)
Well, anyway, when we first departed, the girls were in tearing spirits. Faline kept making her stupid jokes, and this time everyone laughed, even Diana, though she almost never made any sound. Just grinned this laughing grin, her even white teeth showing in her brown face — she really did have a pretty smile — but no sound coming out.
And at first the weather was just right: not too hot, because there were clouds overhead, and a cool breeze. The walk was long, much longer than I had expected it to be. The others were still in good moods, but after a time the jokes got fewer. So to pass the time I began to sing an old marching song from Earth whose tune I’d always liked, even if the song was kind of stupid: “The Ants Go Marching One by One.”
They all turned to look, and so I sang louder, and as I did, I realized how nice voices sounded echoing off trees. I also made a discovery: that my outer voice (I’d always sang in my mind, but my singing voice had been weak and spindly and horribly embarrassing) now matched my inner voice.
And so, with intense pleasure, I started the song again, but this time I made up new verses: “The clods go klunking one by one…PJ stops to snarfle a bun” and other silly stuff about PJ and Kwenz that made the others laugh.
We all sang it, as, gradually and unnoticed, the wind kicked up harder, going from cool to cold. The clouds thickened. We were just finishing our third rendition — having gotten the new rhymes satisfactorily matched — when big cold raindrops smacked into our faces and splatted on the dusty road before us.
Now, I’d experienced rain since I’d come. And I loved watching it from windows, or listening to it thrum on the ground from the Junky. But I still didn’t really realize how different the weather was. At home, a sunny day meant heat, and maybe no clouds for days. If it rained, more often than not it was only for a few minutes, then out came the sun again, and more heat. Here, the sun could be gone in hours — and stay that way.
As it was now.
I looked around. We’d pretty much passed out of the woods into the meadowland north, for the trees were sparse except in clumps along fingering streams below gentle hills. There was nowhere to get out of the rain, if it did begin to rain hard, and anyway time was passing steadily.
“Let’s run,” I suggested.
And so we did. What a stupid idea! Pretty soon we were all tired and out of breath, except for Diana, who could run for a day if she had to, and Dhana, who adored rain. She ran with her eyes closed and face turned up, her whole body so graceful she was better than a whole troupe of ballet dancers to watch, her step so light she scarcely left prints.
I was distracted by her partly because I couldn’t believe — didn’t want to believe — that over the next hill were just more grassy hills, and not Glotulae’s city. We were soon thoroughly soaked, and no one talked any more. (Dhana was smiling, though. She obviously loved being soaked.) No one looked at me, either.
It was about then that the gloom began to darken into sunset. We slogged up another rise — and no city in sight. But then Diana pointed to the west, and I caught the faint gleam of golden light: firelight in windows.
“An inn!” Irene exclaimed in a dramatic voice, as though she’d just been rescued from death.
“No,” Dhana snapped, instantly irritated by Irene’s drama. “It’s Kwenz’s dungeon.”
No one said anything. We turned our steps that way as the rain thrummed down on our streaming heads, our clammy clothing, and in the muddy road around us. We splorched through tall trees to a long, low building. My spirits began to rise at the thought of light and warmth — and then I wondered if you were supposed to pay at these places.
I mean, did the inn people think they were Mearsieans, or not? And if they were Mearsieans, was it right to say I was the princ
ess, and Clair would pay, like on the cloud top? I hung back, realizing that my plan had been stupid in too many ways to count. What to do, what to do?
Then I heard the wet slap of fabric, and Seshe stepped next to me, her skirts heavy with rain. She pushed something into my hand.
My cold fingers closed around a little cloth bag containing something heavy that clinked.
“I thought we might need these,” Seshe said softly.
Coins.
Well, with them we soon got a big room all to ourselves. (On this world, no one thought twice about a bunch of girls traveling by themselves.) There was a nice fireplace to sit at, and hot food, and the girls’ spirits rose again, but mine stayed low. I sat near the window, gazing northwards into the rainy darkness where Glotulae’s city should have been. It didn’t look all that far from the mountaintop with the scope. And on Earth I’d been used to getting in the car, and being taken over great distances in a couple hours or so.
Dinner came, fried fishcakes with garlic potatoes and spring peas, but I couldn’t eat. I sat there staring out, feeling sick with disgust. When I saw my reflection in the dark, rain-streaked window, and there was the gleam of Clair’s silver crown, I yanked it off my head.
“Aren’t you hungry?”
I looked up. Seshe — of course. The others were all at the fire talking.
“You should be the princess,” I said, the words wrung out of me as I held the crown out to her. “I’m too stupid.”
Seshe winced. “It’s not true.”
“Yes it is. Shall I command you not to argue with me?” I added sourly.
She smiled. “If you like. But you aren’t stupid, you just don’t have certain kinds of experience. I’ll wager you won’t make similar mistakes again. Meanwhile, your idea is a good one — one I couldn’t have thought up. I can’t be a leader.”
I sighed. “I wish it was true. I mean, not about you, about me.” Mindful of what Irene had told me, I did not ask her why she couldn’t be a leader. And she did not volunteer any information.
“You’ll be fine. You’ll see,” was all she said, but she was smiling.
NINE — The Squashed Wedding Cake
We reached the city late the next day. “City” MH-style, not Earth. The city I was used to took an hour to drive across, in lots of traffic. This city was built kind of like a square within a square. The Squashed Wedding Cake was in the middle, a big parade square before it. Behind the palace was a thin line of garden that nobody ever went into, though it was kept nicely trimmed. But the trees blocked off the palace guard’s living area, and the stables, and the kitchen gardens and all that stuff, from the view of the palace.
On the other three sides of the parade square were streets of houses and shops, with a lot of trade-related shops. This had been the main trade town for Mearsies Heili before Glotulae and her palace guard marched in and took over.
Overall, maybe it would’ve been a couple hours of travel time in a car, but walking, especially around rain puddles, had taken a couple of days. Remember that, I told myself.
When we came to the city’s edge we were all quiet, busy looking around. The people dressed more or less like people in MH, and they seemed ordinary enough, going about their business pretty much the way they did on the cloudtop, though the people on the cloud top looked happier — that is, on the cloud top you don’t have to watch all the time to make sure you aren’t getting in the way of someone with higher rank.
The buildings were much like those elsewhere in Mearsies Heili — made mostly of stone, with steep roofs and lots of windows that could be shuttered in winter. But where the other Mearsiean houses always had window boxes and the walls whitewashed or painted other colors, these were plain and bare on the outside. I soon found out that was because the Auknuges actually had laws against decoration. They liked all the difference of rank preserved, and nothing made Glotulae angrier than “inferiors” trying to look nice, or pretty up a house, or forgetting to bow and get out of the way when their “betters” sashayed along.
We kept going past people, all of them busy until a beribboned aristocrat walked or rode by and then everyone got hastily out of the way, while bowing or curtseying to various degrees. Even kids!
We saw the Squashed Wedding Cake in the middle of the town — and there was all the decoration that everyone else in the city ought to have had. And I mean all. Fake spires attached to towers, statues and curlicues and tiles and every other kind of fancy thing people have dreamed up to make buildings look more imposing were festooned, plastered, glittered, and piled onto every surface of the palace. On one side there was scaffolding indicating more building going on — golden statues of crowned heads being placed on some of the spires. (We found out that these were replicas of PJ and his mother.)
We stood in the big square before it, through which people moved in various directions toward the streets connecting the other three sides. All the streets opened onto it, but there were no ugly shops to offend the royal eyes. The houses at the ends of each street were large in a modest way — that was where Glotulae’s court lived. The shops were farther down each street, and of course all along the outskirts of the city.
So this was the building I’d seen from my window — and I turned, lifting my eyes above the rooftops to see the mountain all purply from haze, its top hidden by fleecy white cloud. From this angle, all of the white castle that was visible were the topmost towers, glistening like pearl against the sky.
Just seeing it made my heart fazoom with joy. Home!
“Look out, you fool!”
I hadn’t been paying attention to anyone around me. The voice shrieking — a voice that somehow managed to be both whiny and arrogant — and the clatter of horse hooves, then a huge crash, all took me by surprise. I whirled around. Not twenty-five steps away a wagon filled with crockery had just overturned, the two horses plunging and panicking in their traces. An older man, his face white and eyes stark, stared up at a beribboned figure on the back of another horse.
PJ!
“Oh, no.” Seshe looked shocked.
“You dolt!” PJ shouted at the man. “Do you think a year in prison might make you quicker?”
“What happened?” I murmured.
“That loaded cart didn’t get out of His Pimpleship’s way fast enough,” Irene said grimly.
I realized that we stood there alone, like trees amid a field of wind-bent wheat: all the people nearby had stopped walking, talking, riding, carrying, and bowed low. The cart driver was trying to bow and to control his panicking horses at the same time. Diana flickered a dark-eyed look my way, and then sprang to help. At her touch, the nearer one stopped plunging quite so hard. Seshe also moved to help, murmuring in a low voice to the nervous animals.
PJ glared around, then saw us. “Bend your knee!” he shouted.
I looked at that ruined crockery, the frightened man and his spooked horses, and anger burned through me. Crossing my arms, I snarled, “Not to a knucklehead like you!”
PJ gaped. Had anyone ever defied him before?
“Look at that mess you caused.” I pointed at the spilled cart. “Anyone but a sniffle-brained crabwit would see that the cart couldn’t turn aside as fast as you were galloping.”
I couldn’t see any faces because everyone was still bowing, but over the sound of the horses and the disjointed apologies of the carter driver, I distinctly heard a snicker from someone in the crowd.
No doubt PJ did as well.
“Guard!” PJ shrieked, a shaking finger (with two rings on it) pointing at me.
Some tall fellows in yellow, pink, and orange livery came running up, all of them toting halberds.
“Arrest her for insolence!”
“And arrest him for stupidity while you’re at it,” I yelled, too mad to think. “Also for wearing the silliest clothes ever seen!”
Hands clamped on my arms. The other girls looked at one another, Faline covering her crimson face, Dhana with her lip curled. When a great b
ig red-haired guard (the rest were looking at one another for clues pretty much like the girls were doing) reached sort of tentatively for Irene, she backed up, nose in the air, and shouted, “Leave me be! I am with the princess!”
She pointed at me. All the faces swung my way — the bowing ones looking sidewise.
The two holding me let go as if their fingers had burned, and I thought crazily, Oh yeah, that’s me! “I,” I announced, “am Princess Cherene Jennet Sherwood of Mearsies Heili!”
PJ gawked. Then he sneered. “I don’t believe it. That stupid white-haired girl doesn’t have any sisters.”
“I don’t care what you believe,” I snarled back, feeling more strongly by the moment that I’d managed to cause what would end up being a nasty disaster. “It’s true, and if you like we can go right to the cloudtop and you can ask Clair yourself.”
At the word cloudtop furtive whispers went through the crowd, though no one said anything loud enough to hear.
PJ looked around, his face pruning up. “We’ll go talk to my mother. She is the queen.”
“Not of Mearsies Heili, she’s not,” I said. “If you call an interloper queen of a small town, well, then so it is — ”
“You can’t say that!” PJ bellowed.
“I just did! Furthermore — ”
“We will conduct these persons to her majesty.”
This was a new voice. Everyone turned to see a short, fat man dressed in gray except for a heavy beaten gold chain of office round his shoulders. He bowed most unctuously to PJ, and gestured for more of those tall fellows with the halberds. All of a sudden there were quite a few of them. They loomed around PJ and us girls, forcing the crowd back.
“The rest of you, unless you wish an interview with the queen, I suggest you disperse,” he invited.
And almost as quickly as the guards had come the crowd sort of milled about and then was gone. Paying no attention to any of them, the man in gray walked toward the Squashed Wedding Cake, and perforce the rest of us had to go as well.