“Or hide and watch, or creep around and see what’s happened,” said Xulai.
He looked at her face for a long moment before he nodded. “You’ve been taught.”
“Oh, yes,” she said. “I’ve been taught. I didn’t realize how much I’d been taught. Some of it I must have practiced alone, in the woods, without realizing what I was doing. At school they were quite surprised. In the personal attack class I was entered as a women’s level seven. Most students, of course, start as a one.”
“How many levels are there?”
“Nine. Bear is a nine. Men’s nine. Men are simply bigger and stronger than women, so women have to be quicker and cleverer than men. When I thought I was a child, I wasn’t nearly that good. About a three or four. Well, it wouldn’t have been appropriate for a seven-year-old to be any better than that, would it?”
The following morning she woke before dawn, not out of anticipation or excitement but because she was in discomfort. Perhaps she had the cramping feeling Precious Wind had told her to expect as part of this whole woman thing. If what they had told her was correct, she would have to do something about the resultant messiness also, but that idea was driven out of her head by a moment of really horrible, very intimate pain. She started to cry out to Oldwife, who snored gently in the other bed, but as suddenly as it had come, the pain passed, all the tension let go, and she relaxed, very peacefully, feeling as though she’d had several glasses of wine or some gentle, lovely euphoric.
She lay quietly, enjoying the feeling, until the first pale light lit the window. She threw back the covers and got out of bed, turning as she did so to inspect the sheets. They were stainless, white, except for a small spot of moisture on the bottom sheet. At its center lay something very familiar to her. It was spherical, mostly blue. Like a marble or . . . very like the thing her mother had told her to swallow.
“I’ve laid an egg,” she said to herself, fighting her sudden urge to giggle uncontrollably. Or scream, also uncontrollably.
The fisher was on her shoulder, as though he had materialized out of nothing. “Think of it as a . . . jewel. Hide it where it will be completely safe,” he said. “And be sure, wherever you are, you take it with you. Don’t speak of it. Don’t lose it, whatever you do.”
Gritting her teeth, shutting her lips tight together to prevent herself from saying anything, asking anything, she considered the problem. Jacket wouldn’t do. Clothes wouldn’t do; those changed every day and bumps would be noticeable. She could put it in an undershift. She would make a tiny pocket in an undershift. Even boys wore undershifts, though theirs were shorter than the knee-length ones girls wore. All her undershifts had wide hems, to allow for letting down as she grew taller, or so the legend would have had it! She’d put it in the hem, in back, where it would be between her legs when she sat down and wouldn’t make a noticeable bump. And she’d have to make a similar pocket in every undershift, so she could put the . . . jewel in whichever one she was wearing. And she had to do it now, while Oldwife slept.
The mending basket was on the shelf. It had scissors, thread, needles. A slit in the hem took only a moment; the strange little orb slid inside. Then four stitches on each side to hold it there, and the needle, already threaded, was thrust through the underside of her jacket collar with a long length of thread wound into a neat figure eight around it. Just in case she needed to do more sewing or for when she had to hide the thing somewhere else.
The fisher sighed, an almost human sound of relief. “If it happens to you again, hide that one, too. Always. Hide them. Always have them with you.”
“I think it would be considerate of you to tell me what they are,” she said almost angrily.
The fisher fidgeted, making little motions with his head and shoulders, like a bewildered person trying to remember something. “I don’t know,” he whispered in a sad, hurt voice. “I’ve been put here to guide you, when you need guiding, but I don’t know what to say about anything until something happens and then, suddenly, there are words there. I’ve told you all the words that came to me this morning. There isn’t anything else.”
Just as there had been a tiny child in the carriage, on the road. Just as there had been horse biscuits when conditions required them, or horses becoming deer.
“I feel like a chess piece,” she said angrily. “Move here, move there. Whose game are we playing, Fisher?”
He did the shrugging thing again, looking so sad, lost, and bewildered that she took him into her arms, sat on the edge of the bed, and petted him as she would have one of the cats. While he didn’t purr, the warmth of the contact seemed to comfort them both. He did not feel like a mere thing. He was alive, furry and breathing. His nose was leathery and warm. His eyes were bright. However he came to be, he was hers.
She went to find Precious Wind, who was still asleep. Xulai touched her lightly on the shoulder. “Wind?” she murmured.
“I’m here.”
Xulai beckoned, whispering, “I need to tell you something.”
Precious Wind put on a robe and they went out into the little courtyard, where dew hung heavy on the grasses and the dawn birds were complaining sleepily.
“It’s about Princess Xu-i-lok.”
“Your mother.”
“That’s still hard to think about and sometimes I can’t say it.”
“Let it go. What about her?”
“Before she died, she sent me out at night, alone, to get something for her.”
“And you did?” Precious Wind’s eyes were wide, her face eager.
Xulai had thought of telling the whole story and had decided against it. She did not want to mention Abasio or tell anyone just yet what they meant to one another. She wanted people to think of him as they already did: a wanderer, an innocuous stranger, harmless and unsuspected of anything. “Yes. I was afraid. Terribly afraid. It took three tries, but I found it for her. It was a ball of something, like a candy, and when I brought it back, she told me to swallow it. I did, and I think that’s when the changes started, I mean, in me.”
Precious Wind shut her eyes and breathed deeply as though deciding how to react. “It’s possible you were staying in childlike form through some method that needed an antidote to reverse itself.”
“I suppose, but that’s not the important part. While I was out there, in the woods, the duchess and that man, Jenger, came. A spy had told them that a child was going out into the woods at night. I was hidden. They didn’t see me. They stood there in the woods and talked together. She wanted to find something that Princess Xu-i-lok had hidden, or the thing that Huold had carried, and she said the Sea King had offered her a reward for either one of those things.”
Precious Wind frowned. “The Sea King? You’re sure she said exactly that?”
Xulai put her hands across her eyes and concentrated on remembering. “Not exactly, no. She said the Sea King’s ambassador offered a reward. The Sea People had found a vault full of machines under the library at the Edgeworld Isles. The duchess was to receive the machines as a reward, and Jenger said he thought she already had machines.”
Precious Wind exhaled suddenly. “Ah! What did she say?”
“She said she only had a few. She had a little machine that made . . . clouds of tiny things that could seek out any one person and kill them—if she had the pattern for that person.”
“Pattern?”
Again she struggled to remember. “Code. Maybe that’s the word she used. Code. She had taken my mother’s code from the rim of a wineglass at the court, and she’d sent the cloud to eat that pattern, cell by cell.”
Precious Wind scowled fiercely. “Yes. That’s what Xu-i-lok thought. Your mother knew what had happened. We had no defenses ready because until that moment, we didn’t know anyone had rediscovered that power! We decided to call it a curse because most people find it easier to believe in magic than to believe in reality. If they’re religious, they get used to magical thinking as children and go through life believing in fanta
sy instead of facts. Ah, well, poor things, they have to cope somehow. Besides, we didn’t want the duchess or her mother to know we had any information about them.”
“We?”
“We, the clan Do-Lok of Tingawa, who appointed me to guard you.”
“Not Bear?”
“No, not Bear. He guards you, too, but he doesn’t have the information I have. Bear is only a warrior, not a technician.”
“And a technician is . . . ?”
“Someone who has some understanding of machines and science and what they can do. Is that all you wanted to tell me?”
Xulai had wanted Precious Wind to tell her something! About Bear. She could not bring herself to ask. She shrugged, saying, “No. The most important part is, while she was standing there, a little gust of wind blew a branch and caught some of her hair. And when we—I left—”
Precious Wind pounced: “We, Xulai?”
We? Well, yes. She didn’t want to talk about Abasio’s having been there. “A tiny chipmunk had taken refuge in my pocket. There were predators about so I left the little thing in my pocket. When we left, I saw that the branch had pulled out some of her hairs. I wrapped them in a handkerchief and brought them back with me. I thought I should tell you about them.”
“You’re sure they were hers, not Jenger’s?”
“They were hers. I saw her brush away the branch, the same branch I took them from, and Jenger was standing some distance away the whole time.”
Precious Wind seemed to be looking into a great distance. “Will you give them to me?”
“Gladly.” Xulai fetched the box from her pack, took out the handkerchief-wrapped bundle of hairs, and put it into Precious Wind’s hands.
“Tell me again what she was to be rewarded for.”
“If she found whatever it was that Huold carried. Or if she found something that the princess . . . my mother had hidden. I think what she had hidden was already in my pocket. My mother had told me where to find it.”
“Did I ever talk to you about the mirror defense?” asked Precious Wind in a faraway voice, as though she was speaking from some other place.
“You and Bear both did. It’s when you reflect an opponent’s strength or tactics back against him so that he beats himself. It sounded complicated.”
“Sometimes it is,” said Precious Wind, yawning. “I’m going back to bed. You?”
“Breakfast. Then I’m going riding with Abasio.”
Precious Wind did not go back to sleep. She went as quickly as she could to find Abasio. She told him one thing and another that he had not known, that no one else had known. “If I am not here, not available, do as you see fit with this information,” she said.
He bowed, agreeing, and she left him to handle his astonishment as well as he might. Then she returned to her room and went back to sleep.
When Xulai finished breakfast she took Flaxen out onto the meadow, where she and Abasio and the two horses, Blue with studied insouciance and Flaxen with as much astonishment as any ordinary horse could manage, went through their paces quite long enough to let everyone on the walls or on the road see them at it. They moved in and out of the corner of the pasture that was hidden from the ramparts. Meantime, they observed what Abasio had observed before: no one in armor went through the anytime gate.
“It’d be good to check the abbot, if you can figure out how,” he said to her softly as they rode back to the abbey gate nearest the stables. “Have you had a chance to talk about the houses at the school?”
“I have,” she said. “I should have told you last night. None of the people I talked to knew anything about them, though one girl said her uncle used to live in one of them. I asked Sister Solace, too. She said the houses were built all at one time by a group of people who had been living in Ghastain before Mirami arrived and weren’t happy there after she came. It made sense to me, for they all look rather alike, not like houses built years and years apart. Sister Solace said some of the people who lived in those houses moved on, farther south where the winters are warmer, and some of them eventually went back to Ghastain because they had family there. She didn’t know if they were still there. The thing that’s interesting is that no one stayed there very long and no one else has ever used them.”
“We really need to know whose idea it was to house us back there,” Abasio said. “How about Solo Winger, the birdman? Did you get a list of his signs?”
“I know what they are and where they go, all but two of them. I’ve written them out for you.” She burrowed in a pocket for a much folded list. “I memorized the two new ones. Brother Winger said they were the abbot’s private signs, so he wouldn’t know where they went or to whom. One is a sign like a house, you know, a square with three lines making a door, and a triangle for a roof. The other one was two curved lines, hunched, like a vulture’s wings, with another curved line at the top making a head. My father didn’t use either of those two signs at Woldsgard, though he used many of the others that Brother Winger has. There isn’t one for anyplace between here and Merhaven, but if we need to, and if we’re in a place that has pigeons from those places, we can send a message to Hallad, Prince Orez, in Etershore, or to whomever he has in command at Wold.”
“Are we quite sure Woldsgard is securely in Orez’s keeping?”
“Oh, yes. The loft man told me messages have come from Woldsgard sent by Hallad to the abbot, asking about us, wanting to know if we’re well. And the abbot has sent answers. I know that’s true, because the abbot asked me if I’d like to add a message, and I did.”
“What about Bear’s claim about the troops supposedly outside that wall?”
“As for asking the abbot to verify what Bear said, I’ll just ask him. I’ll tell him I was thoroughly convinced until Bear got upset with my being late that night we were out there, so I want to be very sure it’s safe, not to worry my people.”
All of which she managed to do, almost by accident, by meeting the abbot and his librarian Wordswell on his way to lunch. She greeted him pleasantly, then asked him the question, just as she had phrased it to Abasio.
“Oh, you’d be quite safe, my dear. Well guarded. Yes. All manner of troops around here and there. Tell your people not to worry in the least.” And he scurried off, leaving Wordswell behind.
“Word to the wise,” said the librarian, who had laid his hand lightly upon her shoulder as the abbot disappeared into the crowd. “The abbot really doesn’t know where the troops are. If I drew him a map, he wouldn’t be able to show me where they were, or how many. He’s a good domestic organizer, and he manages people quite well because he’s kindly and fair, but strategic matters are not his interest or his strength. He feels safe because his commanders tell him he is. I feel safe here at the abbey because I know the commander of the abbey home force. He’s the one who commands the men on the walls that protect me. If I left the abbey, however, I’d want a word with the other commanders, just to know where I could get help if I needed it.”
“So the abbot may either have been lying, though I think he’s incapable of lying,” said Xulai to Abasio, “or he may have been telling me what he has been told is the truth.”
The rest of the day Xulai spent taking her things, a few at a time, to Abasio’s wagon. Underwear. Shoes. Boots. She had two cloaks, undifferentiated as to gender. Books, three or four. She couldn’t take the cats, obviously, and this caused some pain that she sat down and cried over for a time, even though she knew they would be perfectly all right. Oldwife, Nettie Lean, and Precious Wind would look after them. All of them were fond of cats. There was the little box from the forest. She would keep that in the deep pocket of her cloak to remember her mother by. It was remarkable, considering all the freight they’d brought, that she was taking away so little.
During her last visit to Abasio’s wagon, Fisher told her he’d brought the blue thing that had been hidden under the wain. “I may have snagged something inside that crate, because I had to burrow around to find something beside
s cloth, and it’s all gold embroidery and whatnot in there. The only thing that wasn’t cloth was a package, just a tiny one. I wasn’t sure it was blue until I got here and Abasio said it was. Fishers don’t see color.”
Abasio said, “I’ve made a little space under the wagon floor and hidden it there, right behind an axle.” He showed her where it was and how to get up the board that covered it. “Have you brought everything?”
“All I could think of,” she said. “See you in the morning.”
“You’re crying.”
“Am I?” Her face was wet, but she hadn’t known it.
“What is it, Xu?”
“It started when I knew I couldn’t take the cats . . .”
“Perhaps I’ll be an acceptable substitute. I’ll practice my purr.”
She shook her head. “Then it’s Oldwife and Precious Wind and Nettie. They’ll worry so. I hate doing this to them.”
He held her close, thinking. “Who here is completely trustworthy?”
There was only one name she could think of. “The librarian. Wordswell.”
“I’ve made a sort of friend out of Brother Solo Winger. I’ll ask him to lend me a few of the abbey birds and a little cage to carry them in. I’ll tell him it’s so I can send a message to Oldwife and the rest of you telling you about my trip. I’ll tell him if I send a message he shouldn’t give it to anybody unless Bear has already left the abbey . . .”
“Tell him it’s because you and Bear don’t get along!”
“Right. We don’t get along and I’d just as soon he didn’t know where I’m going. Then, when we’re well on our way, we’ll send a note to Wordswell to deliver to Precious Wind, telling her . . . something. It can’t be the truth because someone might get it out of her.”
“We’ll say I’ve learned there’s a threat against my life and I’ve gone into hiding.”