Palace of Stone (23 page)

Britta.

Action without thought gave Miri speed, and she flung herself toward Britta, her arms out to push her away. But Peder was fast as well.

“Miri!” he said.

The crack of gunfire shattered the moment. Miri pushed Britta, and they slammed into the wall.

Peder was still standing. His expression showed utter shock. His hand was pressed to his middle, and through his fingers blood trickled. He sat down hard on the floor.

“Peder!”

On her first day in Asland, Miri had seen the king’s guards throw themselves in the path of danger, one taking a lead ball for his sovereign. Miri had marveled. What did they feel for the king that they would die for him?

Peder had put himself between Miri and the bullet.

A loud clatter tore her attention away. The assassin had tossed the spent pistol onto the stone floor. But he had plenty of others. He raised a second, aiming again at Britta.

Steffan was on his feet, running at the assassin. So was Frid, and perhaps others too. But no one was faster than a pistol ball. They would not stop him before he pulled the trigger. Nothing would stop him. He would shoot them all—Steffan, Frid, Esa, and Miri too, just as he had shot Peder. He would kill as many as he needed till he got to Britta.

Miri screamed. “No!”

Even as she screamed with her real voice, she screamed in quarry-speech.
No!
She did not quarry-speak a single memory but a lifetime of them, and not just her own. She filled that word with every story she’d heard of her father, of her grandparents, stories from Peder’s ma, Doter, and especially stories of
her
ma—the week she held baby Miri in her arms, the hazy memories Marda still kept, anecdotes the villagers told her alongside details Miri had just imagined. Stories true and made-up, songs and wishes and everything she knew of her family and Mount Eskel, the history of her home that no one had yet written down—all of it went into that one word.

At the same time, Miri became aware of the entire palace, as if it were her own body. She felt the weight of its stone, history running through the pink veins and silver, the green and the blue, the white stone embracing it all. The stone vibrated with her memories, her song, her scream. Her palace, her mountain, her body. She lifted her hands.

Her quarry-speech moved through the rock, and where it went, rock tore apart. A second fissure erupted from where she stood, traveling with the speed of one spoken word across the room, up the wall, tearing through the ceiling.

The assassin looked up.

The ceiling fell.

A puff of dust and debris filled the room. Miri rushed through it to Peder, placing her hand on his, getting wet with blood. His breathing was labored, his eyes wide open.

When she glanced back where the assassin had stood, all she saw was a pile of broken linder. A lifetime near a quarry made her certain that no one could survive the weight of that much stone.

Katar and Frid flung aside the door’s bars and fled the room, quarry-speaking as they ran that they would get help. The king locked the door behind them. Miri thought it wise. As much as she wanted to get Peder out of that room, there could be other rebels in the palace, others with muskets, waiting their turn. Though if someone wanted to get in, Miri thought, they could simply go upstairs and lower themselves through the carriagesize gap in the ceiling.

I made that
, Miri thought vaguely. But that massive hole felt a million times less important than the tiny one in Peder’s middle.

Esa went to her brother, gently pushing Miri aside. Miri sat on the floor. Her defiance was spent, her body tired of fighting, and she cried. But Esa was calm as she inspected Peder.

“The ball went clean through,” Esa said. “That’s good, Peder.”

“Ow! It doesn’t
feel
good,” he said.

Esa pressed a cloth to his wound, instructing others to wrap him and keep him warm.

“Don’t everybody fuss,” he whispered. “I’m all right.”

“You will be,” said Esa.

“It doesn’t even hurt that much.” He tried to sit up.

“Stop showing off for Miri,” said his sister. “You will let us take care of you, Peder Doterson, or I’ll tell Ma all about it, so lie still.”

He lay still.

They waited in the ruins of the room for the royal guard to rescue them. Everyone gathered in a circle around Peder, away from the fissures and the hole where white dust shifted like snowflakes. They sat on the smooth places between the cracked and jutting stone. They whispered questions that no one answered.

“Are we safe yet?”

“Is Peder all right?”

“What just happened?”

Miri was silent. She held Peder’s hand.

There was an old story of a princess who wept tears of pure love over her fallen prince, healing his injuries and letting him live again. It was just a story. Miri knew it was not true. But just then, she felt capable of a love so huge it would break the entire palace. Maybe outside of stories, holding Peder’s hand and loving him fit to crack her heart like a linder stone could not heal him. But then again, it could not hurt to try.

She scooted nearer. She leaned her head against his. She squeezed his hand.

Just in case feeling was not enough, just in case such a magic needed powerful words spoken, she whispered, “I love you.” And then she quarry-spoke memory after memory—the time he had carved a linder hawk for her; the night she was captured by the bandits and he heard her far-off quarry-speech; when they laughed and danced at the ball; that perfect afternoon in Asland when they kissed in the straw-dusty shed. And those memories also said
I love you, I love you.

She did not know what personal memories her own nudged in Esa, Gerti, and Bena, but Esa smiled, Gerti sighed, and Bena rested her chin on her knees. The queen sat beside the king and took his hand. He leaned against her and kissed the top of her head. Miri guessed they must feel what she was feeling, and perhaps they remembered loving each other too.

Britta sat behind Miri and touched her hair, as a friend would. Until that moment, Miri had not considered that she herself might need a little bit of healing.

By her boot lay a shard of linder. It had recognized her voice; it had responded to the quarry-shout. Hundreds of years it lay as a floor stone in a palace, far from the mountain, yet it was
still
of Mount Eskel. How could just a few months in the city transform
her
entirely?

She clutched the shard in her fist. They had been in need, and the stone had remembered, the mountain had heard. Britta might have been felled beside Peder, and perhaps Esa and Frid, Steffan and Miri too. It was hard to feel anything but anxiety for Peder, but once she opened herself to a tiny bit of gratitude, it swelled till her chest ached with it. She started to sing the song Gerti had begun, an anthem to Mount Eskel, a love song. Esa and Gerti picked it up. Britta and Steffan joined in the second time around. They sang it for the stone, for their mountain and home, and for Peder. The stone chamber held all the voices, bouncing them back again till it seemed hundreds of unseen singers joined in. The room sang.

Chapter Twenty

Sweet girls are sighing

Young boys are pining

Eskel is skying

Hammer is beating

Daylight is fleeting

Eskel sends greeting

It did not take the royal guardsmen long to realize they had been tricked away from their posts. A traitorous chief guard had sent groups to points all over the city, supposedly to quell protests that never occurred. Within the hour they’d returned, driven all intruders from the palace, and freed the party from the refuge room. The plan to assassinate Britta and spark the revolution had failed. Miri imagined the mood was gray in political Salons across the city. She wondered how many of those passionate scholars and talkers, facing Britta, could have pulled the trigger themselves.

Miri spent the night beside Peder’s bed in the palace infirmary. The physician stitched up his wound and said it looked clean, but as morning drew near Peder’s skin fevered.

“Infection,” said the physician. “This kind will heal on its own or it won’t.”

He sent everyone away except Esa, who, as Peder’s sister and a physician’s assistant, had a right to stay.

Miri was too tired to sleep. She walked outside, her mind so full of prayers that for a moment she fancied they had turned into white birds that flapped on the breeze. Leaflets, not birds, covered posts and windows, shuffled loose on the ground, and lifted on the wind. Miri caught them like butterflies and read parts. Nearly all retold Britta’s actions in the courtyard.

How a Pure Heart Saved Danland

The princess lifted her fair hand, her tear-filled eyes beseeching the heavens on behalf of the young innocent. Although she was clad in the finest garments of the land, her feet knew her heart and would not abide slippers, for Princess Britta’s heart was ever with the shoeless.

The Princess and the Mob

Those of us in the crowd did not even notice the boy until she had pulled him away from the carriage. After she returned him to his mother, she stood before us. No guards. No words. She had saved him. But she did not know if we would save her.

What I Saw

Someone put a musket in my hand. The girl came running at us. I was angry. I do not have enough coin to buy bread. I thought about shooting her. She saved that boy. I did not want to shoot her anymore.

Most mentioned that the “Mountain Girl” herself had voiced support of the shoeless princess. One was even titled “The Mountain Girl Laments No More.”

A warmth pulsed through Miri, and she forgot her exhaustion. She found a cobbler she’d heard about, whose secret press had printed many a Salon’s leaflet. Miri asked him if he’d print hers as well.

“For coin I will,” he said, his browned skin as smooth as the leather he was working over a knob. “Where is your leaflet?”

Miri bit her lip. “Um, can I borrow quill and paper?”

A rule of Rhetoric suggested offering stories, not lectures. Miri sat on his floor and wrote.

The Robber Princess

Theirs was a love forbidden by tradition. A childhood friendship deepened until neither could bear to live without the other. Though heir to castle and crown, Steffan was helpless to choose his true love as his bride. He could not seek her, so she must seek him, all the way to the princess academy.

Britta climbed the highest mountain in the land. She threw off her silks and slippers and donned rough woolens. She spurned the name of her cruel and noble father, labored in a quarry, became a mountain girl. She risked everything. And if Steffan rejected her, she determined she would stay on Mount Eskel forever. She was Lady Britta no more.

Britta awaited Steffan’s arrival with a fearful heart. After a year and a half’s separation, perhaps his love had dimmed. Would he scorn her? Would he have her thrown in prison?

Miri watched the cobbler place the tiny metal letters in the press with a speed and deftness that reminded her of a blackbird building a nest. He brushed them with ink, lowered the press, and her few hundred words stained the white paper.

Britta does not care about being a princess. She loves Steffan, not the prince heir, and is perhaps the only one in the world who sees him truly.

This is how their story begins. The people will decide how it ends. I, Miri of Mount Eskel, do not like tragedies. I am hoping for a wedding.

The cobbler gave her a wedge of wax to rub on the corners of the papers so she could stick them to posts. The last of her allowance purchased only a slim stack, and a few dozen windows and lampposts later, she had just one left.

She’d arrived at the Green, the ruins of the bridal edifice strewn across the grass. The fever of energy still burned in her. She discovered a hammer in the wreckage and tried nailing two pieces of wood together. They stuck at an odd angle, not quite square. She scavenged some more wood about the same size.

By the time the sun was high enough to heat the part in her hair, Miri had a rough square frame as high as her knee, several splinters, and one bruised thumb.

If I work all day
, she thought,
I won’t be able to remake the stairs let alone the platform and the rest. It’s useless.

She picked up another piece of wood.

She was nearly finished with a second square frame when she realized she was not alone.

There was a man, tall and lean, wearing a featherless cap. He stood with hands in pockets, the blue band around his arm clearly visible.