The Forgotten Sisters (2 page)

Miri choked. “Me? But I … I can't … I'm going …”

The king turned to his wife. “She can barely speak. Are you certain?”

“I am,” said the queen, her gaze on her spilled tea.

“Yes, of course, she is the best choice,” he said.

“I've completed only one year of study at the Queen's Castle,” said Miri. “It takes four years to become a tutor.”

“Make her one, Bjorn,” said the queen.

The king waved his napkin. “Chief, sign some paper that makes Miri a tutor.”

“Yes, Your Majesty,” said the chief delegate.

Miri looked at Britta, Steffan, the delegates, searching for someone who thought this idea was as ridiculous as she did. “But why me? There are lots of real tutors—”

“According to our traditions and the dictates of the priests, a tutor for a princess academy must be a princess academy graduate herself,” said the chief delegate.

“A more experienced tutor—” Miri started.

“I don't know anyone else,” said the queen. “I know you. Please.”

“You don't need to say ‘please,'” the king roared. “You tell her to go, and she will go.”

“
I
have no choice?” asked Miri.

The king shifted in his seat and glared at the chief delegate from under his thick eyebrows.

“She does have a choice,” the chief delegate said reluctantly.

Miri opened her mouth to decline so she could hurry and catch up with Peder, but she paused. Would the king be angry and forbid Steffan from escorting her to the camp? No other trader wagons would trek to Mount Eskel until next spring. How could she catch up without the king's permission?

Lesser Alva. She'd read about the outer territory, but at the moment all she could remember was one word: “swamp.” The queen and king were ordering her to a swamp to be a teacher to his cousins? She'd been in Asland for a year, and with every letter home, she'd promised Marda and Pa she would return in the fall.

She felt Britta step closer, her shoulder touching Miri's, a faint warmth of encouragement.

“I need to think about it,” Miri said.

The chief delegate took a breath to shout, but the king lifted his hand.

“Give her a little time,” he grumbled into his beard. “She deserves that much.”

The chief delegate pulled Steffan and the king into renewed talk about Stora.

Miri's breath felt tight, as if the walls were pressing in, squeezing. The king's voice begin to sound tinny and high-pitched, as far away as an echo. Miri opened the door and slipped out.

I spy a dull stone

Smartly hidden in scree

Now small and unknown

Soon polished you will be

Carved into a throne

In a castle by the sea

Miri's legs shook, and she imagined she would feel stronger if she just ran. She could run down the corridor, through the courtyard, and into the streets of Asland. Run somehow fast enough to catch up with the wagons. Maybe just run all the way home.

Before she even took a step, the breakfast chamber door opened. Miri expected to see Britta, but it was Katar, Mount Eskel's first delegate to the court in Asland. She was a little older than Miri and a lot taller, with hair so red it seemed angry.

“I don't want—” Miri broke off. She hid her quivering chin with a hand.

“Oh stop it,” said Katar. “They're not asking you to cut off your head.”

Miri nodded, staying silent to keep the sob in her chest from unsticking.

“Danland needs the stronger alliance a marriage with Stora's king would give us,” Katar said. “If Stora invades and defeats Danland's army, then all the changes we worked for—commoner delegates, justice and equality for all Danlanders—all of it will be just
undone
.”

Miri nodded again. Katar was right, and yet the loneliness that had pricked her heart when the wagons rolled away without her was spreading outward, chilling her legs and arms.

Katar rubbed her own arms. “It's important, Miri. It's really important. Go, and don't mess it up.”

Now Miri felt sick as well as sad.

“There's something else you should know.” Katar sighed. “Even though Mount Eskel was made a province, the king still owns all the land. Well, now the chief delegate is encouraging the king to sell his rights to the land to merchants in order to replenish the royal treasury.”

“Sell? He couldn't—”

“He could,” said Katar. “Merchants would pay the king well for the rights to mine and sell linder. They would move up to Mount Eskel and oversee the quarry.”

“Then the Eskelites would work for the merchants, not for ourselves,” said Miri.

“Exactly. And the merchants could bring up new workers and fire the villagers, set wages lower than what our people are making now, and really do whatever they please.”

“Mount Eskel wouldn't be a town anymore,” said Miri. “It would just be a mine. You can't let them.”

“I explained that there's no other means of survival on Mount Eskel besides quarrying, so if the merchants fired any Eskelites, we'd have to leave our homes. But the king imagines the Eskelites would be grateful for the chance to move to the lowlands, where
surely
they'd all be
much
happier.”

Miri felt tired. They'd fought so hard to improve life on the mountain, and then fought to get commoners in the delegation and improve life in the kingdom, but there was always another fight.

“Miri,” said Katar, “you need—”

“I know,” Miri said. “I
know
. But right now I need to be alone.”

She walked away.

First Miri went back to the chamber where she and the other Mount Eskel girls had slept for the past year. The wardrobes were empty, doors ajar. All her things
were packed and bouncing around in the back of a wagon on its way to Mount Eskel. All she had was the hawk Peder had carved for her out of linder stone, a familiar weight in her pocket.

Servants and guards knew Miri, and she wandered freely through the white stone palace as she had always done. The linder stone beneath her feet was as white as cream, with pale green veins, quarried from Mount Eskel generations before. Miri had grown up climbing on rough blocks of linder, breathing linder dust, and drinking from a stream white with it. But the beauty of polished linder still filled her with awe.

She climbed stairs until she reached the top floor and a balcony facing north. She could not see Mount Eskel all the way from Asland, just a hint of purple mountains far against the horizon. The wagons would be miles away by now and take days more to reach the mountain pass.

Dozens of times she had imagined her return—embracing Pa and Marda, giving them her carefully chosen gifts. If she agreed to accept the king's errand, Peder would deliver the gifts with the message that Miri was not coming yet. Despite the new boots and chocolates, there would be no joy beside their little hearth.

“I'm not going home.” She whispered the words aloud to convince herself they were true.

She sat down, stared north, and let the minutes ride away from her like Peder in the wagon.

Royals aren't the only ones with obligations
. She thought the words hard, as if they were stones she could throw at the chief delegate.

She was in the palace library reading about tutorships when she heard quarry-speech—not heard so much as felt, a vibration that entered her and created an idea in her mind. On Mount Eskel, quarry workers used quarry-speech to communicate warnings and instructions, when deafening mallet blows made it impossible to hear normal talk. Miri had discovered that quarry-speech traveled only through linder stone and communicated through memories. The quarry-speech entering her now had the sense of Katar about it and prompted a memory of playing hide-and-find-me as a child. With that memory, Katar was asking Miri,
Where are you?

Miri knocked on the linder in imitation of the quarry workers' mallet blows and sang a work song. “I spy a dull stone smartly hidden in scree.” Though it was not necessary, singing aloud helped her focus. Quarry-speech had a rhythm to it, and was more like a silent song than simple thoughts. By quarry-speaking a memory of an afternoon she and Katar had spent in the library, Miri was letting Katar know where to find her.

Katar must have reported to Britta where Miri was, because a few minutes later, Britta plopped down on the couch beside her.

“Not too great a day, is it?” Britta said.

“I don't know what you mean,” said Miri, her voice croaking after so much silence. “I'm having the best time ever. Let's do it again tomorrow.”

“I could arrange a mass public execution for your pleasure,” Britta said in a stiff, high voice, as if pretending to be an official.

“That would be lovely,” Miri replied in a warbling tone. “And perhaps the physician could entertain me by pulling out all my teeth.”

“I'll see to it at once, my lady.”

They leaned against each other, Miri's head on Britta's shoulder.

“I was too excited to eat breakfast and too sick to eat lunch,” said Miri. “I'd go find some dinner, but the way this day is going, I'm afraid the kitchen is serving something like mud and frogs.”

“The kitchen served mud and frogs yesterday,” Britta said. “Tonight we're dining on your teeth.”

Miri tightened her belly to encourage a laugh, but she could not quite muster it.

“I want to go home,” she whispered.

“I know,” Britta whispered back. “Selfishly I want you
in Asland with me. But this—Lesser Alva, cousins, a princess academy?”

A servant came to fetch them, and they followed him to the king's personal dining chamber.

“I thought we'd be more comfortable in here,” said the king.

Miri took in the gilded chairs and porcelain dishes in a room that could hold three village houses and suddenly found it easy to laugh.

The king raised an eyebrow.

“Sorry, I wasn't laughing at you, sire,” she said.

“Of course you weren't,” he said, his attention returning to his food. “And that is why you are still standing before me and not dragged away to the dungeon.”

“Oh Bjorn,” the queen whispered. “Please don't upset her now.”

The queen especially seemed to want Miri and no other tutor. Miri had learned during her own time at a princess academy that when people desire something that is in short supply, it is worth more.

She cleared her throat. “I will go to Lesser Alva if, instead of giving me a tutor's wages, you sign over the land of Mount Eskel.”

For the first time that day, the chief delegate looked directly at Miri.

“When I and the other girls graduated from the
princess academy on Mount Eskel, we were made ladies of the princess, a noble title,” said Miri. “I read that when commoners are granted noble titles, they are traditionally given lands tied to their titles—”

The chief delegate interrupted, “It's been a hundred years or more since—”

“When we were made ladies of the princess, we became the only nobility in the entire kingdom who don't own land,” Miri continued, her voice louder. “I'm not asking much, just that the ladies of the princess become the owners and caretakers of the village and quarry.”

The chief delegate laughed. “She doesn't ask much?”

“These are my terms,” Miri said, her voice weakening.

“Give it to her,” said the queen.

“Not the quarry,” said the king.

“Give it to her,” the queen repeated.

The king harrumphed. “If she completes her tutorship, the land under her village is theirs. If she completes her tutorship
well
and King Fader marries one of the girls in an alliance of peace, then the quarry is theirs.”

Miri did not feel any better. The idea of home, so vibrant just that morning, as large and hot as the sun, had dimmed, pulling back into a faint prick of a star.

“Very well,” Miri said. “I'll go.”

The queen sighed as if she'd been holding her breath.

Miri asked for parchment and ink to write a letter to Peder explaining about the king's cousins and the swamp princess academy, as well as the king's plan to sell Mount Eskel, so Peder would understand Miri did not take up this duty thoughtlessly.

The king commanded one of the royal guards to take the letter to the camp, and he left at once. Miri hooked her ankles around her chair legs to keep from running after him.

The chief delegate talked at her through all seven courses of the meal.

“It is not your place to tell the girls about their future,” he said. “Prepare them to behave like princesses. Enrich their minds, polish their behavior. When we bring them to Asland next spring, King Bjorn himself will inform his cousins about their possible marriage to King Fader. Do you understand?”

Miri had a mouthful of buttered squash, but she nodded.

“You will remain in Lesser Alva through the winter at least,” said the chief delegate. “We do not want them seen in Asland until you have polished them. We cannot afford the chance some nosy courtier might witness their uncivilized behavior. Gossip can travel all the way to Stora.”

The moment the king finished the cheese and cherries course, the chief delegate arose.

“A ship sails west at midnight,” said the chief delegate. “You will be on it.”

Since Miri's things were long gone, Britta packed some of her own clothing for Miri. The kitchen provided a hamper of food. Steffan pressed a small bag of coins into her hand.

“Thanks,” said Miri. She hugged him impulsively and felt for a moment how life might be different with an older brother.

“My father was king because his older brother died,” said Steffan. “I will be king because I am the only child of my father. Some matters happen by chance. But you, Miri, are not a tutor by chance.”