“Some things are hidden more deeply than others, but the important thing is the animals all came back. I wouldn’t worry about whatever the rest of it was.” She took a deep breath. “Are you prepared for other eventualities as well? Something we should know about?”
Xulai shook her head slowly, tiredly. “I don’t remember. It was all very strange and uncomfortable.” She stopped, holding her chest as though it hurt to breathe. “Though maybe it would be a good idea to put all those broken hobbles away in the wagon. If the horses were only loosely picketed, we can say we thought it was only a windstorm. I’d rather pretend it was a windstorm. We shouldn’t mention the thing, whatever it was. And, Precious Wind, please don’t tell Bear.”
“Whyever not? Don’t you think he needs to know?”
“Something tells me . . . something like that other telling, it says no, he shouldn’t know about me, about this thing that happens to me. Just you and me, Precious Wind. Nobody else should know anything about that.”
“And you think the duchess is going to drop in for a visit?”
Xulai reached for the reassurance of Precious Wind’s hand. “Wasn’t that what it was all about? Giving her an excuse to look at us.”
“Yes, but I don’t think we’ll wait for it to happen here, on her home ground.” Precious Wind moved toward the men to give them quick instructions, getting a brief argument from Bear.
Pecky filled in the privy. Xulai stamped down the disturbed earth and covered it with a few fallen branches while Precious Wind watched, wondering. Willum and Clive moved quickly to hide the broken hobbles and finish the harnessing. Black Mike rolled up the bedding and stowed it in the wagons. The kettle boiled; Nettie filled the tea mugs; Black Mike drowned the fire; Oldwife passed out bread, cheese, and fruit as everyone climbed upon or into the vehicles.
“You’re putting her in the open carriage?” Bear asked Precious Wind. “She looks very tired.”
“Oldwife will be with her. There’s going to be a confrontation; we both know it. She is far too tired to have it last longer than it must, so let’s get it over with. She will rest better once it’s done. And, Bear, I’m going to drive.”
He started to object, saw her face, changed his mind, and went to switch drivers about. Precious Wind leapt lightly into the driver’s seat of the hop-skip, Oldwife and Xulai behind her, in plain view of anyone who wanted to get a look.
They retraced their way to the crossroads and turned eastward. They had not gone far before Bartelmy, at the rear of the procession, heard the pounding of many hooves behind him. At once he began to whistle a lively air. Pecky joined in, then Black Mike. Precious Wind turned to look over her shoulder, saying, “Company arriving,” barely keeping herself from gaping in amazement. Behind her on the carriage seat a tiny child was playing with a kitten. Xulai was a child, yes, but . . . but she wasn’t this child. This one was a mere toddler, a child of three or four snuggled against Oldwife’s side, a rounded little face, deathly pale, a blot of dark jacket and flow of striped skirt, all perfectly solid and in keeping, except that bordering the little figure was an area of shattered vision, not a vacancy but a perfectly appropriate blotch of brown leather (the carriage seat), a fringy bit of rose color (Oldwife’s knitted shawl), and a spread of light brown cloth (Oldwife’s broad skirts), all correct, yet all subtly and worryingly wrong, as though the areas were reflected from somewhere else, the reflection bordering the child perhaps covering some larger being.
Oldwife looked ahead blindly, as though she did not see. Precious Wind faced forward quickly as the approaching horses came at a gallop. They broke into two groups, surged around the last carriage, and raced along the road on either side, sped by the first wagon, wheeled and blocked the road—some twenty of them, half with bows and half with lances, though their arms were at rest. Among them was one woman riding sidesaddle, her long, black skirts trailing almost to the ground, her pale, perfect face as still as though carved of stone, her lips angrily compressed, her eyes slitted, watchful, voracious. Beside her a tall, darkly bearded man on a huge black horse towered over them all.
Precious Wind pulled the team to a stop and adopted a posture of servility. It made her look fairly witless, which was often useful.
The woman rode forward, stopped beside the carriage, and leaned over.
“Well, pretty little one, where are you going?”
The child buried her head in Oldwife’s breast, peeking at the rider from behind the kitten.
“Pardon, m’lady,” said Oldwife without looking at Xulai. “She’s shy. Poor little thing.”
“You’re from Woldsgard,” said the woman. “And where are you headed?”
“To the abbey at Wilderbrook, m’lady. This little one will be schooled there ’til it’s safe to send her home to Tingawa, where her folks live.”
Xulai began to sob into Oldwife’s breast. Precious Wind shivered. The sobs were authentic. The child was frightened.
Oldwife murmured, “She’s sad to leave the castle. Poor little thing, she’s been there since she was only an infant.”
“Why?” demanded the rider, sneeringly insistent. “Why are Tingawans here at all?”
“Shush,” said Oldwife with some severity. “You’re frightening her.”
“I can explain, ma’am,” said Precious Wind, eager to draw the woman’s attention away from Oldwife and the child. “Among our people, when one of us dies far from home, we send somebody to be what we call a soul carrier, to bring the soul of the dead back to Tingawa. Some time ago, when Prince Lok-i-xan heard his daughter was so ill, he sent this child to be his daughter’s soul carrier. We’re just her caretakers; the old lady is her nursemaid. Now that the princess is dead, the war with the Sea People prevents our taking the child home by way of Wellsport, so Duke Woldsgard has arranged for her to be educated at the abbey until it’s safe for us to go by another route. If we have trespassed in any way, we deeply apologize.”
The rider smiled, a tight, one-sided smile of disbelief, and the tall man beside her said, “We did rather wonder at the number of wagons. Does one infant need all this?”
Oldwife answered with some asperity. “We do what the duke orders, sir, ma’am. And the duke does what he thinks Prince Lok-i-xan would wish. The duke says we may be a long time on the way, so we should be well provided for. That’s proper respect for the Tingawan ambassador to the court of King Gahls, and our master would not want to stint what’s proper.”
The man, with a sidelong glance at the woman beside him, spoke again. “I’m sure the Duchess of Altamont has no wish to impede whatever the duke thinks proper.”
The duchess’s mouth twisted, half-smile, half-jeer. “Quite right, Jenger. We will not stand in the way of the duke’s menials getting on with their journey, though the child seems scarcely worth the trouble.” She hauled on the reins, turning the horse as he reared. She looked at them over her shoulder, speaking to Precious Wind. “Were you at all distressed by the storm last night?”
“Oh, indeed we were, ma’am. It caught us unaware. We hadn’t tied the horses, so they bolted. If they hadn’t all gathered into a herd down by the stream, we’d have been all day rounding them up.”
“Into a herd? How unusual. I would have thought the wolves would have driven them a considerable distance.”
Precious Wind shook her head as though puzzled. “I didn’t hear any wolves, ma’am. I heard thunder, though, and that could have drowned out other sounds.”
The duchess shook her reins and rode away, her mouth pinched with dissatisfaction, the tall man close beside her.
When they were out of sight and hearing, Precious Wind breathed deeply and beckoned Bear to bring the closed carriage forward. “Let’s rearrange things a bit.” Seeming to see nothing out of the ordinary, he lifted Xulai into it while Nettie Lean took her place in the open carriage and Precious Wind took the seat beside Xulai. With his shoulders inside the closed carriage, Bear murmured, “Armed men? That was threatening.”
&n
bsp; “Intended so,” said Precious Wind, drawing Xulai close beside her. Xulai turned her white face away from Bear, too drained of energy to be able to talk. After a moment, he shut the carriage door, and the wagons began to move, at which point Xulai burst into tears.
“Now, now, now,” whispered Precious Wind. “What’s all this?”
“I don’t know,” Xulai cried. “I don’t know what I’m doing!”
“You’re doing very well, Xulai. You’re doing remarkably well . . .”
Xulai tried to speak sensibly, but the words came out as weary wailing: “How can I be doing well? I don’t understand anything! Nobody does. My cousin told me I’m going home. Doesn’t he understand Woldsgard is my home? How could he not understand that? And last night you and Bear were very strange to me about the horses. And just now, when you turned around in the wagon, you looked at me as though you didn’t even know me!”
Precious Wind hugged her close, murmuring, “What were you thinking, Xulai? When I did that?”
“I was thinking about . . .” She had been going to say she had been thinking about what the chipmunk said, about timidity, about hiding. She didn’t want to speak of that. She would speak of something else, someone else. The children, yes! “I was thinking about the children at Woldsgard. How sure they were when they played at being other people, how easily they did it. No hesitation at all. No worry about it being real or not. While they were playing, they just believed they were other people.”
Precious Wind held her, rocked her. “Was that all?”
That hadn’t been all. It had been one little nothing awaiting another little nothing. Duxa devo duxa. “There was something the duke, my cousin, said. He thought it would be better if I seemed as young as possible. So I thought of playing at being a very little one, someone like Bartelmy’s littlest sister . . .”
“That’s wonderful, really. You imagined it so well that everyone who saw you believed that’s what size you were, and it took me very much by surprise, that’s all.”
Xulai tried to dry her eyes. “I was surprised, too, and I really don’t like being surprised. I’m tired of surprises! I wouldn’t have done it if I hadn’t been so tired. Now I just want things to be quiet for a while.”
Precious Wind held her, stroking her back, rocking her gently with the motion of the carriage. After a time, Xulai’s eyes closed and she sighed her way into sleep.
In the foremost carriage, Oldwife struggled to get a reluctant black and white cat back into the basket with his brother, meanwhile remarking to Bear, “Poor little thing. I don’t know how she managed to face up to that awful woman, but it seemed to take all the child’s strength, whatever it was.”
Bear stared between the horses’ ears at the long road ahead of them, hiding his annoyed, almost angry expression. “I’m sure it takes strength, Oldwife. Someone’s.”
Chapter 3
Pursued by a Witch
When they had fallen behind the travelers from Woldsgard, the duchess sent her men back to Altamont while she and Jenger followed more slowly. It had long been his business to be attentive to his mistress’s moods. Though he did not know why the recent encounter had set her off, he knew very well she was in a temper.
“Now that you’ve seen the soul carrier,” he said soothingly, “you should be satisfied and relieved.”
The duchess snarled. “I’ve seen her, yes, but not where she should have been, which was where they camped! What was that nonsense about not hearing wolves? They should have heard wolves!”
“You’ve told me that the sendings from the machine don’t always arrive in the form you intended.” His mouth was dry, as it often was when his mistress was upset, for her anger could turn on any convenient target. He concentrated on keeping his voice calm and soothing. “You’ve told me it can happen without any purposeful intervention at all, simply because the moon was in the wrong quarter or because the machine is very old. You even described it to me as being like a card game. You said even a skilled player cannot win every hand. So, since it’s obvious no one in that witless group we just looked at would have any idea about the matter, your wolves must have been hunted down by one of those unexpected fluctuations or malfunctions you’ve told me about.”
The duchess shook her head angrily. “The child can’t be more than four or five. What would she have been doing alone in the forest?”
He rubbed the back of his neck, the only evidence of frustration he allowed himself. “As I remarked at the time, your spy may have been mistaken. The castle swarms with children, and perhaps she saw one of them up to some mischief, but what does it matter? The Duchess of Wold is dead; long live the new Duchess of Wold.” He forced a smile. “Your way into his heart is open if it should be his heart that interests you. Why obsess about a child?”
“I care nothing for his heart, Jenger, as you know well. And it isn’t so much the child I worry about as the place she comes from: Tingawa.” The duchess raised one nostril as though scenting something foul. “While Mirami and I were at the court of King Gahls, the court seer cast the bones. He warned me of a shadow in the direction of Tingawa.”
“The court seer? My lady, oh, consider him. A man so old he cannot see his own face in the mirror? So feeble he needs two attendants to get him out of bed in the morning! And so, he has seen a shadow! I’ll wager that he sees little but shadows! He usually delivers them in assortments: half a dozen dismemberments, a fire, a flood, perhaps an invasion of vampires or kraken.” He relaxed slightly as he saw her smile.
“As he did, yes.” She gestured fretfully. “Perhaps it’s simply that this soul-carrying business seems unbelievable, outlandish to me. The very word ‘Tingawa’ sets me on edge for some reason. Is it really their custom?”
He adopted a ponderous and thoughtful expression, weighty with assurance. “Ma’am, it seems unbelievable only because it is outlandish. Tingawa is far away and many of its customs seems strange to us, though I believe we have adopted the habit of bathing in the winter, which seemed equally outlandish when we first heard of it.” He smiled sweetly at her, willing her to return his smile. “I assure you it is a true custom, frequently spoken of, particularly among the noble houses. Tingawans of dynastic families have a fanatical attachment to their ancestral lands, their temples, their ancestral ghosts. They feel a continuity that is longer than their lifetimes. Part of it is merely historic but the larger part might be called spiritual.”
“Spiritual,” she spat. “Nonsense.”
“I merely use their word. They would say spiritual. The spirits of the people who have kept the land are considered to be integral parts of that land, the very essence of the land, and if they die in some distant place, it is imperative that they be brought back to their own place, their own people. Why, even their diplomats have people attached to their legations to serve as soul carriers if that role becomes necessary.”
Her Grace the duchess chewed her lip, her twisted mouth changing her face into a gargoyle’s mask, harsh and unlovely. “They may say spiritual, but I say nonsense. Land is merely land; trees are trees; rivers are rivers, all of them ours to do with as we will! We have taken the world and subdued it, it belongs to us, not we to it, and custom or not, I will deal with this so-called carrier, she and those who brought her here.”
He shook his head, speaking softly but urgently. “Your family and your powerful friends have undertaken an ambitious project, very ambitious. Very important. Perhaps it is so important it should not be interrupted by a child? Even a Tingawan child?” He flushed, his nostrils narrowed. “The queen, your mother, has remarked that this is a time for concentration. In my presence, she recalled a time in her forefathers’ land when his people found that ridding themselves of a minor annoyance stirred up the hunters, and she has been plagued by them ever since. The hunters are still there, my lady. Be careful. It would take very little to turn a sweet-faced nothing of a child into a blessed martyr.”
She turned a look of such hostility on him that he f
elt the cold inwardly. He barely kept himself from cringing.
“You would do well, Jenger, not to speak of my mother. Matters between my mother and me are our business, not even remotely yours.”
Then, suddenly, she smiled at him, herself sweet faced and charming. “My mother would no doubt disapprove. She disapproves of most of the things I enjoy. Nonetheless, I will dispose of the soul carrier, her guardians, and any other Tingawans who may be so arrogant as to alight on Norland’s side of the sea because they have no right to offend me by being here in the first place!”
The curve of her lips had almost drawn his eyes away from the frozen, empty depths of her eyes. He pretended not to see them, smiling in return. Sometimes looking into Alicia’s eyes was like looking death in the face, and no easy death at that!
“Surely you are too powerful to be offended by a child! I don’t understand why it would be worthwhile!” he cried, shaking his head in frustration, knowing even as he spoke that he would have done far better simply to stay silent.
She tilted her head, making a pretty face as she considered this. “The woman I cursed took her own sweet time dying, Jenger. She should have been dead years ago, the day after I put the cloud on her. Oh, I know, I forgot two of the steps in the process and got another two out of order, but it still should have been lethal enough. At least I had sense enough to have the machine make copies, many, many copies. She fought me. How many times have we camped near Woldsgard, you and I, or ridden by, so I could release a new copy of the cloud? And before you joined me, I went, season after season. I don’t know how she did it, I don’t know who her confederates may have been, but however and whoever, no one opposes me. No person, no child, no creature! I repay opposition with defeat. I repay delay with death. She thwarted me; now I will thwart her. You’ve said she really wanted her soul carried to Tingawa; I will repay her by seeing it does not happen. It will amuse me.”