( I ENLIVEN A POT OF SOUP)
On the day the Queen came, Mordan and Arin locked me in the privy. It began with a rat. I discovered it––a large, handsome, but dead specimen––floating in a pail of whey in the pantry.
It was a while yet before supper. I held it well away from my gown so it dripped into a cauldron full of Nilsa's chicken stock. "Big sea rat like him," I said, "he'll be happier in brine." But what I really wanted was for Arin to pull a rat tail out of his bowl. Just yesterday he'd ground horseshit into my pillow.
I looked back at the pot girl. Floy was sidling nearer and glancing at the kitchen door every minute.
She gave a great, hopeless shrug. I dropped the rat into the cauldron.
"I'm not hungry, anyhow," I said.
"You're going to get me whipped," said Floy. "Not that you'd care a whit."
"Not so," I said, "not unless you tell. It'll look like chicken in three hours."
Floy looked into the cauldron. "She'll know. It'll taste bad."
"It'll taste better."
"Excellent, I'll warrant," said Nilsa. She'd crept up behind us while we were looking into the cauldron. Floy turned round, face tucked in, prepared for a slap. I hid my nose in my shoulder––Nilsa always smelled of fish. "But I wouldn't have to toss rats in my soup for excitement if ninny-hammer got her onions chopped when she's told."
Though Nilsa was old, she was built like an ox, and she picked poor Floy up by her collar.
Nilsa's face was redder than I'd ever seen it––it must be the heat, I thought. But she hooked Floy on the wall next to the cloaks and stripped a pot of its leather thong.
"Oh, ma'am." Floy hid her arms in a cloak: they were still bruised from her last beating. I felt a prick of guilt
"If you're going to belt Floy," I said to Nilsa, "you'll have to do me as well, and you can't belt me."
Nilsa bent so close to me I could see the boil under her left eye. "I'm sore tired of your voice, madam. Sore tired of you, in here, tramping and jawing about like the Queen of Quabberqetzle. I've had enough." She took hold of my arm, so tightly my eyes watered. "Given me grey hairs in my nose, armpits, and arse, but I won't have any more. "
She flung me away. I crashed into a cupboard, and bowls spun about me like tops. I got to my feet, gingerly touching my neck.
"Very brave of you," Floy said to me.
But she was spared the beating, because right as Nilsa raised the thong, a cat with a bird in her mouth wound through Nilsa's legs and knocked her over.
Close behind were my brothers Mordan and Arin, who both did their best to prevent Nilsa from rising by tripping over her, one right after the other.
I unhooked Floy from the wall, grabbed her wrist, and pulled her out the door.
We ran up the back stairs, and I thought worriedly about the punishment I would receive when Father arrived. It was the afternoon of Leode's seventh birthday. Father never missed birthdays, and I was ten: too old for pranks.
We reached the second landing, and Floy took a deep breath and said, "By the silver hair of all the sky saints that float between the seven hallowed arches on Mount Tigald and fly into the air with swan wings come winter the first, why did I let you do it? Why ever did I listen, by all the saebels that drink colts' blood in the autumn––"
"Shut it." I pulled her along the second-floor corridor and flung open a big chest. "In here."
"It smells like mushrooms," Floy said.
Her head was already inside, so I pushed the rest of her in and slammed the top down. "If you stay in there long enough, maybe she'll forget."
I heard the thunk of boots running along the corridor. The cat flew by, and then the boys, so fast that my skirts blew out. "Is Nilsa coming?" I asked them.
"We conked her out, I think." Mordan took big, wheezing breaths. "Pity Father's coming."
"Shit," said Arin, "we're gonna be thumped." He shook the hair from his eyes and followed the cat into the garderobe.
"She'll wake up," wailed Floy. "She'll lock me in the garret with the bats." I gave the chest a thump and walked after my brothers.
The door was flung wide. I invited myself in, and the cat set to clawing through my skirts. Arin grappled round us with his gangly arms, caught her, hoisted her over the latrine. She let the bird loose, and he let go the cat to shoo the bird away. The yowling cat plummeted down the latrine chute.
Arin looked down the hole.
"What've you done?" I breathed, and made toward the door to tell Biador or Tem. One of them was perhaps close enough to hear.
"Reyna––" said Mordan.
"Biador!" I called. Before I could progress further Arin, eager to avoid a bigger thumping, put his hand over my mouth. Mordan grabbed my flailing arms and twisted them behind my back.
They threw me into a corner, and in two blinks of an eye had shut the door and were bolting it from the outside. "Just calm down," said Mordan through the keyhole, "and we'll let you out."
"Mordan!" I pummeled my fists on the door. "You jackhole."
"Mind you take extra care to hold your bladder," said Arin. "Puss doesn't like the wet."
I remained so loud I missed Biador shouting up the stairwell.
The boys got up and rushed off, exchanging whoops of excitement––Father must be here.
I kept on yelling, and Floy's voice came through the keyhole: "Reyna?"
"Let me out."
"You sound like a goose with a head cold."
"Help me."
"Give it a minute."
I heard her rustling around. "Hurry up," I said. "It reeks something awful."
"They tied something round the door handle. Knot's slippery as a fish." She got a better idea. "I'll go tell your father."
She ran off after Mordan and Arin, leaving me alone.
Later, when I was wet with sewer water and Floy was a sparrow, she told me everything.
Floy had gone out the pantry door after Mordan and Arin, and raced them all the way to the place where my eldest brother, Temmaec, was teaching my littlest, Leode, how to thrust and parry with staves.
Mordan and Arin knocked past Floy, pointing towards the rider on the south road. Tem, fourteen, threw down his pole. "He can't be here yet, it's too early."
The other boys refused to listen.
"Look at them run," Tem said to Floy. "The dogs haven't even come out." The wind whipped his words about, and he blocked the sun with a hand.
The rider was a woman. A tall woman with black hair unbound and falling over her grey mantle. She crossed the rickety bridge of pine masts, sitting sidesaddle on a brown palfrey. The bells on the halter sang like stars.
She reined in the horse sharply. Leode gawked at her. The rest caught up, and Floy saw that the woman was human––her eyes shone gold in her white face.
"You're not Father," said Leode.
"No," she said. "But I know him well, I think. Are you the Lauriad children?"
Tem gave a tiny shake of his head.
"Yes," said Arin, flattening his hair. "Who are you?"
"Faiorsa. Your father sent me. How funny you shouldn't know my face at all."
Arin tilted his head, scratched it. "You're supposed to look something eviler than you do."
"Arin," whispered Mordan. The lady gave a gay laugh
"We should start anew on our impressions." She demounted in a fluid motion, and the palfrey shook her head and snorted. "I have a gift for each of you." She took a bundle of satin from her mantle. "From the south."
"The real south?" Leode swept hair from his brow to better see. "Across the oceans?"
"Yes. Where the sun is so bright it fills every shadow and never sets."
"That's impossible." But Mordan's grey eyes widened in his thin face. She had unwrapped the fabric. It held five thorny flowers, colored the deep warning red of poppies. They shimmered slightly, giving off a faint heat.
"Stand back a bit." Tem took Arin by the arm. Arin jerked out of his grip.
"Do you want to fly?" She bent over them so that the gown hung loose on her chest and hair slipped over her shoulders.
"No," said Tem.
She ignored him. The rest of them did, too. "Do you want to fly to the top of the sky, where you can dip your toes through the last circle of earth and make ripples in the sea of lights? Where you can cup the sunlight in your hands like water?"
"Arin," said Tem, "take Leode and go home."
"I want to stay," said Leode. Arin never turned his head.
"The blooms of Cam Belnech will lift your feet from the ground." Her voice swelled, her eyes widened, and Leode was first to reach for a flower. Made foolish by his bravery the others, except for Tem, moved closer.
The woman's teeth pulled blood from her lip, the grass dried under Tem's feet, and still they reached.
"She means us harm." Tem plucked at Floy's dress. "Don't touch them." Floy took a flower, and the others, too. The woman caught Tem by the wrist. She drew him into her chest, and ground a bloom into his palm with the kerchief.
The juice ran down his arm. The rest dropped the flowers, palms stained red.
She laughed. "Take to the air all of you," she said. "Forget the ground and fade away."
She turned to her palfrey and mounted, astride this time. The stain sank into Floy's hands. Inside Floy a deep desire grew: a desire to stop her heart, to draw back into nothing, and melt into the air. But something was off; her flesh stayed solid.
The boys gave the woman's command no such resistance. Lauriad feet turned to ash, and Lauriad hands melted away.
Never turning round, never seeing Floy's stubborn, solid body, the woman leaned into her saddle and fled. Dust blew around Floy, and she threw her arms over her face.
Then the miracle happened. Pain teased through Floy's arms, and the boys stopped crumbling. A strange thing, a divine hand, hollowed bones and pinched fingers to pinions. The ground flew up and Floy crouched over toes gone hard and horny.
A solid sparrow rose first, then four black birds made of dust. They beat wings north, too thin against the blue to catch the eye of the lady rider.
She mistook my brothers and me for dead. And how she could have mistaken a pot girl for the only daughter of Daonac Lauriad was incomprehensible. But she did.
