The Safe-Keeper's Secret (9 page)

Miss Elmore was still talking. “Very well. I want you to solve the problems I've written on the board. No talking to each other, mind, and no cheating! Calbert,” she said, almost with no change in inflection and turning casually in his direction, “what was the crisis that kept you from our presence so long this morning?”

None of the ten-year-olds began work yet on their math problems, just held their pencils suspended above their papers. Everybody in the room wanted to hear the answer to this.

“Am I late?” Cal asked outrageously, drawling the words. “Stupid rooster. It doesn't seem to know morning from night anymore.”

“Blaming a farm animal. That doesn't seem right,” Miss Elmore replied. “I think you need to take a little more responsibility for your own actions.”

“Well, I'm responsible for feeding him. Maybe if I let him go hungry a few mornings he'll wake up a little faster.”

The boys sitting around him laughed. Fiona smiled. Miss Elmore was not amused.

“Maybe if I let you sit inside for a few lunch periods you'll learn how to get here a little faster,” she said.

Calbert scowled. “I'm not staying in at lunch.”

Miss Elmore shrugged. “Or you can stay an hour after class for three days. Your choice.”

Cal couldn't stay after class, and everyone knew it, since his father required him to be home in time to help with evening chores. Cal's father actually wasn't entirely sure an education was what his boy needed, and public opinion pretty much assumed that Cal stayed in school only to spite his father. At times like these, Fiona worried that Miss Elmore's strictness might make Cal decide that working full time on the farm was better than spending half his life in class.

But Cal was too imperturbable to let on if Miss Elmore had bested him. He shrugged and settled back more comfortably in his chair. “Fine. I'll sit in at lunch. Doesn't matter to me.”

“Good,” said Miss Elmore briskly. “Now. While the younger children work on math, I want the rest of you to sit and listen. I'm going to read you a story written by a royal scribe in Wodenderry.”

Fiona half listened to the story Miss Elmore read, but she wasn't too engaged by the tale. She put more of her attention on the arithmetic. She didn't think she had completed her addition correctly on at least three of the problems, and she wished Reed was sitting close enough so that she could surreptitiously show him her paper and he could indicate her success by a smile or a frown. But she was sitting near the back and Reed was in the front row. Miss Elmore had separated them three weeks ago for just such an infraction. So she sighed and looked over the problems again, trying to drown out the sound of Miss Elmore's voice.

Once the reading was over, the entire classroom turned to history and geography, and then they were all given writing assignments modulated by grade. Lunchtime couldn't come fast enough after that, and they all spilled out into the dirt clearing that served as their play area when they weren't trapped inside.

Fiona took her lunch with a couple of the girls in her class, eating the bread and cheese and apple that her mother had packed for her the night before. She would have preferred to eat with Reed, but he always gobbled everything down in five minutes and then ran off somewhere with his friends. She could always hear them thrashing about in the woods nearby, or yodeling out insults, or throwing things that might not have done much damage but always generated a great deal of noise.

Today she had just finished her meal when Reed materialized beside her, a long red scratch weeping blood along his forearm. “Reed! What did you do?”

“Caught it on a branch,” he said, not overly concerned. “Do you have something I can wrap it with?”

“No, but Miss Elmore probably does,” she said. “I'll go ask.”

“That doesn't look like a branch mark. That looks like you got caught on a thorn,” Fiona heard one of the other girls say.

“Do you think it's poisonous?” Reed asked. He said it as if that would please him.

Fiona didn't hear what the other girls replied because she was already inside the schoolhouse. A few steps down the hall and she was turning into the upper-grade room.

Where Miss Elmore was nowhere to be found, but Cal Seston was making his presence felt.

He was standing on a chair in front of the blackboard, drawing naughty pictures in chalk. He spun around when he heard the door open, and then relaxed when he saw it was only Fiona. He grinned at her.

“Thought you might be the old witch,” he said.

Fiona studied the illustrations, mostly crude images of naked women. The subject matter didn't offend her, but she wished he'd shown a little more artistic ability. This must be the first thing she'd come across that Cal wasn't good at. “She'll know you're the one who did it,” was all she said.

“Nah. I'll tell her I fell asleep and they were on the board when I woke up. Someone trying to make me look bad.”

“She won't believe you.”

He shrugged. “I don't care what she thinks.”

She admired that level of self-assurance; she tried not to care what people thought, but sometimes she still did. “Where did she go?”

He hopped down from the chair and was standing so close to her she could smell the soap and sweat on his body. “She didn't bother to tell me. What do you want her for?”

Reed's cut was not deep and he rarely bothered to stop for small wounds, anyway. Fiona doubted he was even still waiting for her to return to the playfield. “Oh—I had a question for her. But I'd rather talk to you,” she said in a rush.

He folded his arms and leaned back against the board. “Me! I'm not good at answering questions.”

She smiled at him. “Not a math question or a history question, silly. I just wanted to know if you'd ever—if you thought—if you realized—I think you and I were meant to be together.”

It took a moment for him to digest the words; she watched his face change as he understood and considered them. “What do you mean, together?” he asked presently. “Like, you want me to kiss you? Go to the festivals with you? Stuff like that?”

“That would be fun,” she agreed. “But I meant—forever. We were meant to get married and live together and have children and spend our lives with each other.”

There was a moment of blank silence, and then he hooted with laughter. “I'm not going to marry you!” he exclaimed.

“Not now, of course,” she said patiently. “But you—”

“Not ever!” he broke in. “You're a bastard child! No one is going to marry you! And you're ugly, too, with that pale face and those funny eyes. I'd give you a kiss or two if you really wanted, but I wouldn't court you for real. Nobody will. You don't have a father or a name. Or enough of a face to make up for it.”

Fiona stared at him and could not speak.

He stared back at her a moment and then laughed again. “Damn,” he said. “This day's getting crazier all the time.” He pushed past her and walked back toward his seat.

Fiona stared at the place on the blackboard where his body had just been. It seemed to shimmer and be on the point of dissolving. Her ears seemed to be expanding and contracting, allowing sound in and then shutting it off in an uncertain rhythm. She thought there might be the sound of footsteps crossing the room, but with the unreliability of her hearing she could not be sure.

“She thought I might want to
marry
her,” Cal said from behind her. So someone else must have entered the room. Fiona closed her eyes in mortification. She had thought it could not get worse, but if Calbert was going to repeat every word she said—

“I heard her,” said a quiet voice.

Fiona opened her eyes. Reed. She did not turn around.

“You're a brat and a nuisance, but at least you've got royal blood in you. A man doesn't mind talking to
you
,” Cal said. “But she's loony. And she's never going to get a husband, let alone me.”

Reed's voice was soft, easy, the voice he used when he was fishing in earnest and didn't want to startle away his prospects. “My mom's friends with the witch down the road,” he said. “Elminstra? You know her?”

“She's loony, too,” Cal said.

“If I asked her to, she'd give me a potion for warts and hives. She'd give me a potion that would make your skin itch and flake off and turn bloody when you scratched it. She'd give me a potion that would make your hair fall out and never grow back. Or worse,” Reed said.

There was a moment's silence.

“I didn't do anything,” Cal said sullenly.

“If you ever say another word about my sister—to her, or to anybody else—I'll get every single one of those potions from Elminstra, and more besides,” said Reed. “I'll put one in your milk one day, and spread one on your chair another day. I'll spill one on your head when you're walking home from school and I'm sitting up in a tree hanging over the road. If you ever say a word about my sister, or to my sister, you'll be sorry I didn't find the potion that would make you curl up on your daddy's farm and die.”

This second silence was even more profound.

“I wasn't going to say anything,” Cal said at last.

“Good,” Reed said and walked the remaining few feet across the room till he was at Fiona's side. “Did you find something to tie up my arm?” he asked.

Still staring at the blackboard, she shook her head. Reed added, “Well, let's look for Miss Elmore, then. It's still bleeding.” And he put his hand on her shoulder, turned her toward the door, and walked between her and the sight of Cal Seston until they were out of the room.

She was crying by the time they got to the hallway, and so blinded with tears that she couldn't blunder her way out the door to the dirt clearing. Reed led her in the other direction anyway, out the front door to the narrow porch overlooking the road that led away from school, back to home and safety. All of the other children were out back, so they sat together on the porch, Reed with his arm around Fiona, Fiona sobbing wretchedly.

“He said—he said—” she choked out and his arm tightened.

“I heard him,” Reed replied.

“Why would anybody be so
mean?
” she wailed.

“Cal Seston's a rat and a bully. Everybody knows it. Everybody but all the girls,” he added somewhat bitterly.

“But why would he
say
those things?”

“Because he likes to hurt people. Because he thinks it's funny.”

“I'm so embarrassed,” she moaned.

“He won't tell anybody.”

“He will.”

“He won't. Or I'll give him a rash in places where he didn't know he could itch.”

Fiona giggled through a sob. “What if he didn't believe you?”

“Well, then, he'll find out, won't he?”

Fiona lifted her head, which she had burrowed into Reed's shoulder. “Don't you,” she begged, “don't you tell anyone how stupid I was.”

He kissed her on the cheek. “I won't,” he said. “Not a word.”

And he never did.

Chapter Six

T
hey were all together again for Wintermoon, Angeline arriving in company with Thomas, and Isadora brought to the Safe-Keeper's cottage by a Cranfield merchant who had been only too happy to do a favor for the Dream-Maker. It was the most joyous holiday of the year, though it took place on the coldest, darkest day, and Fiona and her mother had been baking for days in preparation.

There were pies made from dried summer apples, and sweet hard cookies. There were three kinds of bread and two varieties of cake. They had made blackberry tarts and blueberry tarts, and Fiona had suggested they make kirrenberry tarts as well.

“Ugh. No. They have a very bitter taste,” her mother had said.

“I thought we could give one to Thomas. And maybe it would turn him silent for a day,” Fiona said.

Damiana choked and started laughing. “Make him some kirrenberry tea and see if he drinks it,” she said through her laughter. “It would have the same effect.”