The Waters Rising (18 page)

“While we were at a disadvantage,” Precious Wind offered.

Yes, that was it! “Exactly. Well, if we were to be put at a disadvantage, something would have to happen to us while we were traveling . . .”

“Something?” Precious wind cocked her head.

“Something going wrong. So I asked Wainwright and Horsemaster what kinds of things go wrong when people travel. Horsemaster said aside from people behaving like jackasses, it’s usually a matter of horses running away; Wainwright said it was usually axles and wheels. So I suggested that the duke just knew he’d look at the wheels and axles very carefully right before we left. It seemed . . . appropriate.”

“Appropriate,” said Precious Wind, her eyebrows rising slowly into her hair. “And?”

Xulai murmured, “Wainwright found two wheels that had been trifled with, not very expertly, he said, but enough to cause us trouble. The spy is only a kitchen maid, and she probably didn’t have the tools to do much damage, and he had time to fix the wheels and to put spare parts for each in the dray.”

“And the horses?” Precious Wind demanded.

“People say Horsemaster has all his stock enchanted. He doesn’t really. He’s just trained all his stock to come to him because he regularly feeds them biscuits which they like very, very much. They are fed only at Woldsgard, or by him personally, so anywhere else they happen to be is non-biscuit country, and if they are away, they hurry home to biscuit country as soon as they can. So, Cook and I baked a great many Horsemaster biscuits for them. I’ve been feeding them some along the way whenever we stop. That made whatever place I am biscuit country. We must continue doing it, of course. They have to understand that biscuit country travels with us, and only us.”

“You have more of the biscuits?”

“Enough for a few days, and enough ingredients to make more. I know how to make them, even over a campfire. We should see that they get biscuits from us, no one else. All the horses and mules ate them last night, and once they calmed down when the thing quit chasing them, they came back to us.”

“What thing was that?” asked Precious Wind.

Xulai staggered slightly, as though she had encountered something unpleasant. “I don’t know. I couldn’t . . .
I couldn’t see it!
” She shivered. “Maybe something happened to it? Maybe it ran into a . . . protection, or something.”

Precious Wind put her hand on Xulai’s shoulder, squeezed it gently, and swallowed, trying to moisten her very dry mouth. “It bothers you that you couldn’t see it?”

“I should have been able to see it, don’t you think? I saw most of the rest of it!”

“Some things are hidden more deeply than others, but the important thing is the animals all came back. I wouldn’t worry about whatever the
rest of it
was.” She took a deep breath. “Are you prepared for other eventualities as well? Something we should know about?”

Xulai shook her head slowly, tiredly. “I don’t remember. It was all very strange and uncomfortable.” She stopped, holding her chest as though it hurt to breathe. “Though maybe it would be a good idea to put all those broken hobbles away in the wagon. If the horses were only loosely picketed, we can say we thought it was only a windstorm. I’d rather pretend it was a windstorm. We shouldn’t mention the thing, whatever it was. And, Precious Wind, please don’t tell Bear.”

“Whyever not? Don’t you think he needs to know?”

“Something tells me . . . something like that other telling, it says no, he shouldn’t know about me, about this thing that happens to me. Just you and me, Precious Wind. Nobody else should know anything about that.”

“And you think the duchess is going to drop in for a visit?”

Xulai reached for the reassurance of Precious Wind’s hand. “Wasn’t that what it was all about? Giving her an excuse to look at us.”

“Yes, but I don’t think we’ll wait for it to happen here, on her home ground.” Precious Wind moved toward the men to give them quick instructions, getting a brief argument from Bear.

Pecky filled in the privy. Xulai stamped down the disturbed earth and covered it with a few fallen branches while Precious Wind watched, wondering. Willum and Clive moved quickly to hide the broken hobbles and finish the harnessing. Black Mike rolled up the bedding and stowed it in the wagons. The kettle boiled; Nettie filled the tea mugs; Black Mike drowned the fire; Oldwife passed out bread, cheese, and fruit as everyone climbed upon or into the vehicles.

“You’re putting her in the open carriage?” Bear asked Precious Wind. “She looks very tired.”

“Oldwife will be with her. There’s going to be a confrontation; we both know it. She is far too tired to have it last longer than it must, so let’s get it over with. She will rest better once it’s done. And, Bear, I’m going to drive.”

He started to object, saw her face, changed his mind, and went to switch drivers about. Precious Wind leapt lightly into the driver’s seat of the hop-skip, Oldwife and Xulai behind her, in plain view of anyone who wanted to get a look.

They retraced their way to the crossroads and turned eastward. They had not gone far before Bartelmy, at the rear of the procession, heard the pounding of many hooves behind him. At once he began to whistle a lively air. Pecky joined in, then Black Mike. Precious Wind turned to look over her shoulder, saying, “Company arriving,” barely keeping herself from gaping in amazement. Behind her on the carriage seat a tiny child was playing with a kitten. Xulai was a child, yes, but . . . but she wasn’t this child. This one was a mere toddler, a child of three or four snuggled against Oldwife’s side, a rounded little face, deathly pale, a blot of dark jacket and flow of striped skirt, all perfectly solid and in keeping, except that bordering the little figure was an area of shattered vision, not a vacancy but a perfectly appropriate blotch of brown leather (the carriage seat), a fringy bit of rose color (Oldwife’s knitted shawl), and a spread of light brown cloth (Oldwife’s broad skirts), all correct, yet all subtly and worryingly wrong, as though the areas were reflected from somewhere else, the reflection bordering the child perhaps covering some larger being.

Oldwife looked ahead blindly, as though she did not see. Precious Wind faced forward quickly as the approaching horses came at a gallop. They broke into two groups, surged around the last carriage, and raced along the road on either side, sped by the first wagon, wheeled and blocked the road—some twenty of them, half with bows and half with lances, though their arms were at rest. Among them was one woman riding sidesaddle, her long, black skirts trailing almost to the ground, her pale, perfect face as still as though carved of stone, her lips angrily compressed, her eyes slitted, watchful, voracious. Beside her a tall, darkly bearded man on a huge black horse towered over them all.

Precious Wind pulled the team to a stop and adopted a posture of servility. It made her look fairly witless, which was often useful.

The woman rode forward, stopped beside the carriage, and leaned over.

“Well, pretty little one, where are you going?”

The child buried her head in Oldwife’s breast, peeking at the rider from behind the kitten.

“Pardon, m’lady,” said Oldwife without looking at Xulai. “She’s shy. Poor little thing.”

“You’re from Woldsgard,” said the woman. “And where are you headed?”

“To the abbey at Wilderbrook, m’lady. This little one will be schooled there ’til it’s safe to send her home to Tingawa, where her folks live.”

Xulai began to sob into Oldwife’s breast. Precious Wind shivered. The sobs were authentic. The child was frightened.

Oldwife murmured, “She’s sad to leave the castle. Poor little thing, she’s been there since she was only an infant.”

“Why?” demanded the rider, sneeringly insistent. “Why are Tingawans here at all?”

“Shush,” said Oldwife with some severity. “You’re frightening her.”

“I can explain, ma’am,” said Precious Wind, eager to draw the woman’s attention away from Oldwife and the child. “Among our people, when one of us dies far from home, we send somebody to be what we call a soul carrier, to bring the soul of the dead back to Tingawa. Some time ago, when Prince Lok-i-xan heard his daughter was so ill, he sent this child to be his daughter’s soul carrier. We’re just her caretakers; the old lady is her nursemaid. Now that the princess is dead, the war with the Sea People prevents our taking the child home by way of Wellsport, so Duke Woldsgard has arranged for her to be educated at the abbey until it’s safe for us to go by another route. If we have trespassed in any way, we deeply apologize.”

The rider smiled, a tight, one-sided smile of disbelief, and the tall man beside her said, “We did rather wonder at the number of wagons. Does one infant need all this?”

Oldwife answered with some asperity. “We do what the duke orders, sir, ma’am. And the duke does what he thinks Prince Lok-i-xan would wish. The duke says we may be a long time on the way, so we should be well provided for. That’s proper respect for the Tingawan ambassador to the court of King Gahls, and our master would not want to stint what’s proper.”

The man, with a sidelong glance at the woman beside him, spoke again. “I’m sure the Duchess of Altamont has no wish to impede whatever the duke thinks proper.”

The duchess’s mouth twisted, half-smile, half-jeer. “Quite right, Jenger. We will not stand in the way of the duke’s menials getting on with their journey, though the child seems scarcely worth the trouble.” She hauled on the reins, turning the horse as he reared. She looked at them over her shoulder, speaking to Precious Wind. “Were you at all distressed by the storm last night?”

“Oh, indeed we were, ma’am. It caught us unaware. We hadn’t tied the horses, so they bolted. If they hadn’t all gathered into a herd down by the stream, we’d have been all day rounding them up.”

“Into a herd? How unusual. I would have thought the wolves would have driven them a considerable distance.”

Precious Wind shook her head as though puzzled. “I didn’t hear any wolves, ma’am. I heard thunder, though, and that could have drowned out other sounds.”

The duchess shook her reins and rode away, her mouth pinched with dissatisfaction, the tall man close beside her.

When they were out of sight and hearing, Precious Wind breathed deeply and beckoned Bear to bring the closed carriage forward. “Let’s rearrange things a bit.” Seeming to see nothing out of the ordinary, he lifted Xulai into it while Nettie Lean took her place in the open carriage and Precious Wind took the seat beside Xulai. With his shoulders inside the closed carriage, Bear murmured, “Armed men? That was threatening.”

“Intended so,” said Precious Wind, drawing Xulai close beside her. Xulai turned her white face away from Bear, too drained of energy to be able to talk. After a moment, he shut the carriage door, and the wagons began to move, at which point Xulai burst into tears.

“Now, now, now,” whispered Precious Wind. “What’s all this?”

“I don’t know,” Xulai cried. “I don’t know what I’m doing!”

“You’re doing very well, Xulai. You’re doing remarkably well . . .”

Xulai tried to speak sensibly, but the words came out as weary wailing: “How can I be doing well? I don’t understand anything! Nobody does. My cousin told me I’m going home. Doesn’t he understand Woldsgard
is
my home? How could he not understand that? And last night you and Bear were very strange to me about the horses. And just now, when you turned around in the wagon, you looked at me as though you didn’t even know me!”

Precious Wind hugged her close, murmuring, “What were you thinking, Xulai? When I did that?”

“I was thinking about . . .” She had been going to say she had been thinking about what the chipmunk said, about timidity, about hiding. She didn’t want to speak of that. She would speak of something else, someone else. The children, yes! “I was thinking about the children at Woldsgard. How sure they were when they played at being other people, how easily they did it. No hesitation at all. No worry about it being real or not. While they were playing, they just believed they were other people.”

Precious Wind held her, rocked her. “Was that all?”

That hadn’t been all. It had been one little nothing awaiting another little nothing.
Duxa devo duxa.
“There was something the duke, my cousin, said. He thought it would be better if I seemed as young as possible. So I thought of playing at being a very little one, someone like Bartelmy’s littlest sister . . .”

“That’s wonderful, really. You imagined it so well that everyone who saw you believed that’s what size you were, and it took me very much by surprise, that’s all.”

Xulai tried to dry her eyes. “I was surprised, too, and I really don’t like being surprised. I’m tired of surprises! I wouldn’t have done it if I hadn’t been so tired. Now I just want things to be quiet for a while.”

Precious Wind held her, stroking her back, rocking her gently with the motion of the carriage. After a time, Xulai’s eyes closed and she sighed her way into sleep.

In the foremost carriage, Oldwife struggled to get a reluctant black and white cat back into the basket with his brother, meanwhile remarking to Bear, “Poor little thing. I don’t know how she managed to face up to that awful woman, but it seemed to take all the child’s strength, whatever it was.”

Bear stared between the horses’ ears at the long road ahead of them, hiding his annoyed, almost angry expression. “I’m sure it takes strength, Oldwife. Someone’s.”