Chapter Three

The King

I was at least glad to have my dress back. The other dresses they had given me were as crudely sewn as they were roughly woven, and even if I liked dark brown for dresses I did not like the suspicion that a thousand other girls my size must have worn something before I did. My dress was mine, and no one else's, and it felt nice to wear.

The angry grown-up had come back, which I was not glad about. She looked angrier than ever, and when she grabbed my arm to drag me wherever she wanted me to go, the bruises she had given me last time started hurting again. Furthermore she walked so quickly that I had to run to keep up.

I considered dropping to the floor and making her carry me, but that was very much something a baby would do. To that depth I would only descend under truly dire circumstances.

Eventually we got to a very large door and stopped. After an incomprehensible conversation between the door's guards and the angry grown-up, the guards opened the door and let us in.

Inside the room were quite a lot of people. The angry grown-up hissed something at me that I could not understand, dropping my arm only to grab my shoulder tighter than a wolf's bite.

Now I would have bruises there too. I would have shouted at her if so many people had not been watching.

A faint memory wormed its way out of my head. Don't look at them, I remembered somebody whispering. Eyes forward, head up, just keep walking.

Whoever had put that into my head, it was far better than nothing. I straightened out my back from the defensive curl that the angry grown-up always inspired, stretched out my neck as far as it would go, and looked down to the end of the room, directly into the eyes of—

The grown-up who thought he was the king.

I sighed through my nose.

The angry grown-up started walking. I spent a few steps stumbling, but eventually figured out the right way to walk to keep up with her— not quickly enough, though, to avoid everybody seeing how bad I seemed to be at walking.

Getting to the end seemed to take forever, but I did not even glance to the sides where at least two dozen people sat watching. The grown-up who thought he was the king was at the end, of course, sitting on a chair that was probably supposed to look like a throne. There was a lady there, too, on exactly the same kind of chair. Standing on the ground was a very nervous-looking fellow holding a book.

"Hello," I said, because none of them seemed like they were going to say anything.

"Hello," said the grown-up who thought he was the king; he still had the strange accent.

"Is there any particular reason," I asked, "why I have been brought here?"

"Fascinating!" said the nervous fellow. "Absolutely fascinating!" He turned around and talked at the couple in the chairs for a few moments.

"If something is fascinating I would like you to tell me about it," I said. "Now that you have told them I feel very left out."

"You speak it like a native!" he said. "No stumbling whatsoever over the stranger bits of grammar— quite a thing to see. Or hear, rather— or maybe behold, which works for both."

"Well!" I said. "I never heard anybody speak any other way before I had the misfortune of coming here. I should hope I do not stumble."

"Where do you come from, then?"

"Father and Mother and Grandmother and I live in a house with big walls a day's ride away from the city," I said. "And a few other people who do not like the city have built houses near ours, but none of them are as pretty, and none of them have stables as big as ours. Father and Mother have two horses each, you know, and Grandmother has sixteen, but she only rides two of them because she says she's keeping the rest for some people who took a long journey and are coming back any day now, and—"

"I suppose you like horses," said the nervous fellow. "But tell me, do you know the name of the city of which you spoke?"

"No!" I said. "Why would I want to? Of course it is a very pretty city from a distance, but once one gets up close the people are very unpleasant."

He looked very unhappy about this, and turned around to communicate with the people on the chairs again.

"What is that language that you are all speaking?" I asked. "If no one knows anything else I will either have to learn it or get out of here very quickly."

He seemed at this point to be existing in a constant state of unhappiness. "It is called Sindarin by most," he said. "I suppose you will have to learn it— unless you go to the places where Silvan is still used, but then you will have to learn that. Unless you know it already?"

"I hardly know what any of this means," I said. "But tell me, why will I have to learn your language? As soon as my parents know where I am they will come get me.

"I do not think they know where you are," he said.

"They are looking," I said. "And once they have found me I will be able to get out of here. Now will you please get to the point of why that person—" here I pointed at the angry grown-up— "has dragged me all the way down here?"

Now he looked rattled as well as unhappy. "Well," he said, "we have had people going to all the elven settlements asking if anyone has lost a child about your age, and—"

"My parents said yes, so I get to go home?"

"No," he said. "We could not find anybody. You will have to stay here."

I would not believe it. "I will not," I said, crossing my arms. "They must not have looked hard enough. Our town is not a very big one, of course."

"I am sure they looked very hard," he said. "In any case it is not up to you. You will stay here."

"I will leave," I said, "and you need not even think about me ever again. No doubt you will all be much happier."

This apparently shocked him back into his native language, and he chattered back and forth with the grown-ups on the chairs for a while before turning back to me. "Leave!" he said. "Small as you are! Absolutely not. A common wolf would bowl you over before the spiders even noticed you."

So this place was in the middle of a forest. Drat. "Hm," I said, in an attempt to save face. "I suppose I will stay a few years, then, if this place is so overrun with dangers."

"I surely hope you will!" said the translator— the king through him, technically, though the difference in their tones of voice made me think it was a loose kind of translation. "You should keep learning our language, and we will find someone for you to stay with in the meantime."

"After these past few weeks," I said, "I could be content with anything."

Fin