We did a few things more I can’t quite remember—we were still giddy—but after the stuff wore off, the wind bit at our faces and the surf froze our feet. We walked close together down a steep path until we reached the hall and the horses, and finally, my old tunic.
The acid canister lacked a stopper but Nefer had wanted me to return it.
It was snowing outside the smithy: the wind blew the white through the door in giant feathers. Wille, whose little girl had come into the world sometime last month, wasn’t there, but Paddy was, and Nefer, who flicked his hammer and shattered a clay mould. The silver tumbled from the shards and rang on the counter.
I walked over and stared at it. “Where’d ye get that?” I remembered the weight in my palm and the invisible light that had stricken Andrei with blindness.
“I made it,” he said. “It’s the bit missing from the middle.” He tossed it into a tub of acid with four other pieces: two dragonfly wings and the hollow parts of an abdomen. “The whole thing’s guesswork. Won’t have no diamonds to sparkle it up, nor magic. But we’ll fold it together anyways, won’t we Paddy?”
“Nefer.” I was flabbergasted, hanging onto the counter. “How long did it take? You even got the circles in the wings?”
“So a Simargh could understand em,” said Padlimaird, looking up from his billet.
“Why,” I said, “did you become a brigand?”
“Was piracy, first.” Nefer dipped a rag in powdered rottenstone and polished a doorknob. “Around Noldecelah and the Gulf.”
“Couldn’t take his master’s knocks.” Padlimaird tapped the metal with his hammer. “Fellow doin the knocking must’ve had some right big old arms.”
***
I stumbled out the door, sat on a slagheap, and wondered about Nefer. And Andrei. Was he the boy Calragen was looking for, the lost prince? But he had a sister. But perhaps she wasn’t, really. And God help Lorila.
Just then Mordan and Floy flew down to me, stark against the white.
“We have a year left, come this spring,” said Mordan. I knew what he meant—we had spoken about it before. Tears froze on my lashes.
“Must you go?” I said. “Couldn’t one of you stay?”
“Floy’s staying––she’s the best for spy work. We need those asters. Our hearts are growing brittle. We can feel the end. We need those asters.” This wasn’t the Mordan of three years ago. This Mordan flickered like a small, cold flame. “There’s a letter we want you to write, after we’ve gone searching,” he said more briskly. “Floy can give you the details. She’ll meet us a year from today at the usual tower. And give yourself time enough to fly there,” he told her as they huddled into my cloak against the wind.
I met my brothers at the pool to wish them well. They flew away, and I paced and pulled at my hair, feeling so miserable that I asked Floy to distract me. She told me about the letter.
“It was kept quiet,” she said, “but about a year back an Elde went to Lorlen, where the Simargh are, to ask for help. Remember Ackerly? Was him. Hasn’t come back yet, and you know how the Simargh are about clay people’s business. So Tem said a letter written about help that mayn’t come is best sent when all other help has failed. To stay a rebellion, he said.”
“Stay a rebellion?” I said. “With a letter?”
“You did it once before,” said Floy. “Remember the hanging?”
“No wonder they didn’t want to tell me in person.” And then I stared at the ground in sudden thought. “Do you suppose,” I said, “if I wrote a letter to Calragen he’d come across the sea with an army?” She laughed at me. “He’s forgotten us,” I said.
***
Andrei went missing. All winter I did not see him, and when the thaw came with a new crop of saxifrage, I decided to ask Trid and Max about him. But Max was no help at all, and Trid proved as hard to find as Andrei. He might have been on some sort of probation––Lorila and Norembry were still head to head, Caveira and Herist still pulling the strings behind it for all I could tell, and then there was the matter of the Queen.
Faiorsa was dead, poisoned, it was rumored. The authorities had hidden it from the country for half a year. I couldn’t believe it, almost didn’t want to. What I wanted was for her to be tortured horribly, in public. But if she wasn’t dead, she had vanished. The tension didn’t ease; Herist just took her place.
It was mid-spring when I finally found Trid on the old Llenad Bridge.
“He’s in Even-Alehn, maybe,” he said. “There was an emissary from Benmarum, and they both left. Didn’t speak a word to me.”
“Max said he went on a hunt.”
“Someone else’s doing the hunting, then. Andrei’s the fox.”
“Has it something to do with the Queen disappearing?”
A piece of the bridge fell from beneath his foot into the canal, and he looked nervously down at the rushing water. “I’m not telling you what I think.” And then he blushed, and another board swung loose and splashed beneath us. “We’d better get off this bridge.”
I stepped in his way. “Scared Herist’ll see you in one spot for a long time?”
His mouth drew as close to a sneer as I’d ever seen it. “Keeps getting worse. He controls the Ombenelva, and nobody sees but us. All the rest just let him get on with it, slip him the reins. Because we’re keeping the letter about him and Caveira hidden so Andrei needn’t worry.”
“About what?”
“The other story getting out. About the King’s children. Like some sort of sick stalemate.”
“You’re not making any sense, Trid.”
Trid shoved past me and began walking away. “When Andrei comes back,” he said in an irritable voice, “You should probably stay away, princess.”
I ran after him off the bridge and whacked him hard over the back. He was so much bigger than me it made no difference.
“Fine,” I said, “go on back to your hiding hole.” We left each other alone after that.
Summer came early. When Herist the merchant made an ally of Herist the commander and blockaded the harbor against competing ships, levied a tax on the goods from his own vessels for the maintenance of the bloated military, and fed most of these goods to his soldiers, I contemplated writing the letter. But the riots swelled with little planning and were quelled with little injury. I ripped up a signpost and took part in a couple myself, until Sal caught me during my third and threw me in the river.
I watched nervously as the Noremes became gaunt and the foreigners grew fat, as close-cloaked Max, encouraged by Padlimaird, joined the unrest, as Herist grew bolder.
Autumn came late. No one was shocked when Herist ordered a citywide weapon confiscation and a weekly inspection of the city’s smithies. Bequen called for active measures, the Elde responded with fervor, and I wrote the letter. I added to the bottom that they ought to send a message to Calragen Eligarda of Evenalehn, hoping to stop certain insurgency. I was fifteen.
***
I wanted Floy’s leg for the letter. She was foraging for seeds along the riverbank. As I rustled through the dead weeds, I found Andrei first, asleep beneath a yellow willow.
I slipped the letter into my pocket and roughed up his hair with a willow wand. He leapt up, tripped over his own feet, and fell back down.
“Friendly thing to do.” He put his knife away.
“You deserved it.”
“Learned my lesson, then.” His voice was rough and dark, like walnut bark. I had missed it. “I about had a conniption.”
“Trid said you were taken away by an emissary.”
“Gagged and chained.”
“Really?” I sat beside him and wrapped a willow branch around and around my arm, wondering how to broach the question. So Andrei, about that pendant...
“I went over the sea to Even-Alehn and talked to a firebird.”
“Did she give you a wish?”
“No, a choice. But it was a my-heart-or-yours choice, like in the song.”
“Not much of a choice.”
“No. I think I chose wrong, but I would have left a big mess, and been unhappy, and it made little sense.”
He wasn’t bantering anymore. “What was it? The choice?”
His eyes were shaded and looked brown. “Either I use the thing now, or hide it away for a thousand years, where it can wait until it’s ready.”
“What?”
“And I asked where I’d hide it for a thousand years.” Had he gone mad while he was away? “Not in this world, she said. I’d have to find a guide to take me to another world.”
“You got yerself a mad firebird.”
He nodded. “So I asked her where I’d find this guide. She laughed, and said I was running backwards like the Pirnon Mireir.”
I took a breath. The air went down and didn’t come back up.
“What is it?”
“What?” I shook my head. Floy hopped from a branch to my shoulder. “Did she know what it was?”
“Said something about his––”
“The Pirnon Mireir. What’s the Pirnon Mireir?”
Andrei laughed. I saw nothing funny about it.
“Your river. In Simargh. Not like you Girelden are the only ones in love with it.”
I rubbed the back of my head. The boy was an ass, no question, but he was also some sort of genius.
“Andrei,” called a girl. Natty peered beneath the willow, and Floy and I went over it: the brow of the Pirnon Mireir; the headwaters of the Cheldony; Avila; the northeast.
“You’re with her?” said Natty. “I’m to remind you you’ve a letter needs writing. And your horse is eating the zinnias up the road.” I stood up, ready to set out in search of the ice asters that minute, when she rounded on me. “You silly girl. If he were seen just once in your company what do you suppose the mercenaries would think? Don’t you know it’s essential that they listen to him instead of Herist?”
“Natty,” said Andrei, “shut up and leave.”
“Not until you do.”
“All right, I’m going,” he said. “Come on.” He crept out from under the tree, but Natty stayed put.
“Aloren,” she said to me, “you’ve got to keep away from him. He won’t listen to me, but maybe you will. There’s a lot at stake––”
“If you mean your family’s reputation,” I told her, still thinking of the river, “it’s already fresh as a turd, and he didn’t need any help with that.”
“What about my family?” Natty drew herself up. “I still have my maidenhead.”
The old suspicion grew in my mind. “He’s not your brother.”
“Course not––” Her eyes widened. She looked into my face. “You still don’t know? What a nasty, dirty trick.”
My ears grew hot. I immediately thought the worst. “He’d have to be younger than Leode,” I said to Floy.
“He acts younger than Leode.”
“Floy––”
“Don’t be ridiculous, Reyna.”
“That broach, Floy. And the pendant––”
In any case, one thing was made clear.
“Aloren,” said Natty, “he’s told you lie after lie, and I don’t care what he says about it, he’s the late Queen’s son, and he’s got all that pile of her trouble on his head.”
Somewhere in the back of my head I resolved to never let Floy forget this. Natty, ducking beneath the branches, said, “You haven’t given back my old gown, did you know?”
“It sold for twenty-three silvers,” I said. She noted my murderous tone and walked away without saying more.
“Floy,” I said, and sat back down.
“He’s not her son,” Floy said stubbornly. “They looked nothing alike.”
But I didn’t want to argue over the finer points of Andrei’s multiple identities––I’d thought of something worse. “That pendant, the little bottle Daifen hid down the well. How’d I not see it? It’s the Aebelavadar.” My body went numb.
“The what?” said Floy.
“It was.” I closed my eyes, and thought it through straight to the bottom. “Andrei’s mother? Daifen stole it off the sick Queen––right off her neck, and Andrei’s desperate to get it back, and then he sees a light that I can’t, then goes across the sea to a council, and talks to––God knows what a firebird is––about some thing he can use now. And I just gave it into his hands.”
I squeezed my temples between my palms, and stood up. I was so angry I was shaking.
I walked to where he sat on the wall next to the zinnias, scratching away at his letter. Sandal was still chewing on the flowers, and I thought of Max.
“The prince gets in the way of Andy’s fun?” I said.
He stood up, yawning. “What?”
“Slipped yer mind, did it?” I said. “Who you was.”
He stared, suddenly awake. “I’m a bastard.” He put down the parchment and got ink all over his fingers. “Not a prince. And I suppose you told me a whole lot more?”
I wanted to take his stupid, long neck, and throttle it. “Why’d you hide it? Why’d you lie?”
“Natty told you?”
“What are you going to do? Throw her into the sea chained to a rock?”
“Is that what princes do?”
“You couldn’t have kept it hidden. Why’d ye even try?”
He wiped the ink on his trousers. “Why do you think? Any other girl as clever could figure it out.”
“Go on,” I said.
“It was such a pleasure,” he said sarcastically, “being insulted, told-off, slapped and kicked––”
“There weren’t Gralde enough?”
“Most of them are too craven to do it to my face.”
“That in’t it,” I said. “Any other girl as clever would figure you’d been hiding your pile of horseshit. That’s what she’d figure. But you’ll always be standin up to your neck in shit, Andrei, no matter whose head you decide to screw onto your neck in the morning.”
“Lord of Light, you are a hot-head. Calm down, think a little––your life could be a lot easier.”
“It in’t so easy,” I said, “when you think about it.”
“Oh.” I couldn’t look at him. “Is that why you’ve stopped thinking?” I began walking away. “Did I say you could leave?” It was the old, sour Andrei behind me, and I ran. My legs were no match for his, and he caught me by the arm.
I shook him off. “Don’t dirty yerself.”
“Aly––”
“You oughtn’t be touching a filthy Eldine rat.”
He stopped, and I didn’t look behind, but I knew he stood there without moving because Sandal’s halter rang when the horse jostled his shoulder.
***
His thin face, the eyes––I walked and walked, faster and faster, but still they burned before me. Though he wouldn’t go, I struck the Aebelavadar from my thoughts––after all, what could I do about it?––and tried to think only of the ice asters.
I walked all the way to the weaving pool. I had one tunic to complete: my own. So I gathered armfuls of the flowers from the pool, and stuffed the flowers and shirts into my saddlebag for weaving during my journey north. But before I could begin this I had a last errand to run. I decided to deliver the letter to the tavern myself to ensure that it was opened by Hal. The other insurgents were too hysterical to respond with sense.
***
I hid the saddlebag in the hollow log on the beach––it could wait there until I was ready to go north––and I came to the tavern around midday.
The sun poured into the boathouse when I opened the door, and the lamps guttered. No one noticed. There was no sign of Hal or his fiddle, but Wille, Padlimaird, Sal, Bequen, and at least twenty others I knew among the throng, were deep in argument.
“We starve this coming winter or we raise hell,” said a small man with a blue cap. Wille stole the cap.
“What sort of hell?” He held the cap over a candle and smiled as a hole burned through. He was in his cups. “Fiery or rainy, Gwat? How about both––if we torch their ships they’ll have no place to run when we corner them with our brollies.”
Gwat slugged him in the stomach and took back his cap. “Have a care, Illinla, or yer lass’ll get etted by the Ombens.” Wille made to rise, but Sal forced him down.
“Are you all so hard by?” Bequen said. I inched into a corner and looked around for Hal.
“The same hambone can yield up lots of meals,” said a man philosophically.
“My hambone’s white as a pickled haddock,” said Sal. “Good for clobbering noggins. And Daira’s at Goody’s house, screaming for food––we came to do something, not talk of waiting.”
“Let’s raid a storehouse,” said Wille.
“Not you, clobber-face,” said Padlimaird.
“How do we get rid of em?” called a boy from the back.
“I don’t know,” said Bequen. “No one likes them here, not even the court. Except for Herist.”
“As he’s got the thing they want,” said Gwat.
“No, he doesn’t,” said Bequen, “and thank Machenan for it. Herist would get the whole black horde to go to war with.”
“Oh,” said Gwat, grinning, biting on his pipe stem, “is Snakey letting you in on his war councils?”
“She’s right.” I felt compelled to say it, hidden in my corner.
“A puppet!” said Gwat.
“It’s the bastard’s pet Gralde,” someone said.
Chairs clattered, and Gwat stood up, and about five others, too.
“Eager to dance off with news about us,” he said.
“He’ll put a ribbon in her hair for it, I’ll warrant,” said someone else.
“Or a coronet.”
This was all too much. “That’s right,” I said. “You can all bow and go hang.” Wille studied me as he would’ve an old ewer, newly buffed.
“Don’t wind yourself in a trawl,” said Bequen to me. “You’re no nark, we’re not stupid. But he chases after you the same. And as I was saying––if any of you would listen––now his mother’s gone the Aebelavadar’s his to give, not Herist’s.”
Folk started squawking at this, and she yelled over them, “He’s reached his majority. I can hardly see him giving Herist control over the troops, they hate each other so. Maybe––”
“If he wasn’t to give it to them?” said an old sailor named Gabe.
“They want it real bad,” said Gwat sourly, “so they’ll stay, and take it by force, and take Norembry too, to shit on, as they like it so much here.”
“Aye,” said another man. “They like it so much here, there’s nothing left for us to like.”
“It’s lose-lose.”
“Listen,” said Padlimaird. No one did, but he must have thought it important, because he began shouting. “Listen! If the weapon left––on a ship, say––the Ombens might follow it.”
Gwat laughed. “Like women after Laerty Lace-Pants?”
“Get it out of the country?” said Bequen.
“And they’ll follow like a swarm of bees,” said Wille. He nodded at me. “Sweeten the bastard’s bed, Lally, or sting him if he likes, and maybe he’ll ship the thing to Noldecelah, or Miachamel, or Evenalehn.”
I clutched a stool, preparing to throw it at him, and Gabe said, “It’s true, he’s smitten with her. It’s a running joke at Old Stolker’s.”
“Aloren,” said Bequen in a voice both firm and fraught, “you’re in a rare position to help. He’ll listen to you. Tell him to send the Aebelavadar someplace else, or sell it to the Ombenelva, even, so long as he makes them leave the country. We need for you to at least try. Otherwise we’ll have to shed blood to survive the winter.”
I kicked over a tool bench on my way out the door.