He’s opened one up to swallow me down, and will I sleep now a hundred years the way they do in stories when mortals fall through grass-traps into the Valwode, and will a ring of mushrooms sprout up all around me, followed by a ring of fire, and will he be there to pull me out when at last I wake…
My rhymes were improving. With no one to talk to in this vast, dusty room but myself, all standard imprecations swiftly palled.
I stomped around Jadio’s warehouse. Slogged, more like. Not an inch of floor to be seen under all that straw, and I was knee-deep in it, not to mention hampered by satin skirts. I’d lost one pearl-studded slipper already while pretending one of those straw heaps was a recumbent Jadio (sleeping peacefully and off his guard), and subsequently kicking him to death. I did not mind the slipper’s loss, but I think I pulled a muscle in my enthusiasm.
It had been an eventful month. The Kingless Armies finally had their king. With the golden skeins he had found piled high in the silo the morning after he’d set me to spinning, General Jadio had bought himself Leressa’s crown and the Archabbot’s blessing with it. (Or the appearance of a blessing. Remembering the Archabbot’s sweating red pate, his furious grip on my elbow, I was not convinced.)
King Jadio decided not to take up residence where old King Lorez’s palace lay in ruins. Lirhu is a city of ghosts, a drowned city. They say one of the Deep Lords of the ocean destroyed it with a great wave after the First Invasion, when the Crown Prince was enchanted into bear-shape and his sister sent into a hundred-year sleep, and King Lorez lured by a Will-o’-Wispy off his road, bogged in a marsh, and drowned dead.
Whether the Deep Lord had sent the wave out of solidarity with his landed Gentry-kin or out of pique because Lorez, being dead, did not tithe to the tides at the usual time and place, no one knew.
No, Jadio was too canny to repeat Old Ironshod’s mistakes. He had built his grand house inland, in a very settled city, far from any wilderness, where even the river ran tame. There he brought me, across the wide waters and away from the island where I had been born, under full guard and in chains, but dressed up in such gowns and choked with such jewels that I was the envy of all who looked on me. Plenty did. Jadio liked a good parade.
I’d glared back at every crowd he set me against. My face froze into an expression of bitter unfriendliness. Before the Pricksters had invaded my cottage, I was perhaps a bit brusque by temperament, but I’d harbored goodwill to my neighbors, and smiled, and sang, proud of being Mam’s daughter and wishing to do well by her name.
Now my name might have been Stonehewn, my heart was that cold. I wished that instead of eyes, I looked with mounted cannons on the world, to blast all gawping bystanders to the other side of the Veil.
But I wasn’t quite alone. They say beggars can’t be choosy, and as Jadio’s slave, I was less than a beggar. But even they (whoever they are) would’ve blinked at my choice for a friend. Indeed, he was the only friend I had at Jadio House—if a milkmaid might call a fox “friend” and keep her throat untorn.
Jadio’s young page Sebastian, twin to the Archabbot’s novice, sometimes came to my cell to slip me news of the outside. If he felt generous, he’d bring a bit of fruit, or bread and cheese, along with his gossip. Jadio insisted I sup on the rarest steaks and richest wines, but I had no stomach for these victuals.
“His Majesty’ll soon have you spin again,” Sebastian had told me at his last visit.
I’d been startled. “By rights last batch should’ve lasted him three lifetimes!”
Sebastian enjoyed riling me, friend or not. He grinned, sharp-toothed. He tapped out a tattoo with his strangely jointed fingers on the bars of my door. “I’ve met some ignorant peasants in my life, but you sure do take the dunce cap, my milksop maid. Don’t you know anything? His Majesty’s been selling off yon goldie skeins like he’s afeared they’ll fall to ash.”
My eyebrows sprang high. “If the Gentry ore were going to go bad, would it not have done so overnight? I thought those were the rules.”
Sebastian shrugged. He had bony elbows and skin so clear it was like looking into a pail of skimmed milk. His rusty hair smudged his forehead like a fringe of embers.
“Depends on your enchanter. Some Gentry tricks don’t last an hour. Some last a year. Some last the life of the enchanter. Hard to say.” His forehead scrunched. In so many ways he was still a child, but creased up like that, his expression went deep and devious.
“What’s that look for?” I asked. “Is there something else?”
He nodded. “Gossip goes you must be Gentry, no matter how loudly the Archabbot proclaims you gods-gifted. Folks want you quartered in the square and all your witchy bits exposed on the Four Tors. I never did see a dead witch in pieces. Promise I can watch while they kill you?”
“Bloody-brained child!” said I, approaching the bars and prying his tapping fingers free. “You’ve lived among soldiers too long. Even your sister Candia insists I’m mortal.”
He tweaked a lock of my ash-brown hair, but I pulled away before he could kip a strand.
When young Sebastian grinned, the fox flashed out in his face. Oh, in a couple of years, give this page boy a velvet suit and silver swordstick and let him loose upon the town. Won’t be a maid within miles not pining for those sharp white teeth to bite the plumpness of her thigh.
“What Candy says and Candy thinks are as different as cat’s purr from catamount’s hunting cough. She lies all the time, for spite or jest, and ’specially when the Archabbot tugs her hair. She hates that, always has. Might even have lied for the sheer wanton pleasure of it. Never can tell. Not even me.”
“Do you lie as well as your sister, Sebastian?”
“His Majesty does not let me lie.” The foxboy showed me a thin ring of iron welded about his left wrist. I had one like it, but of gold. A braid of the gold thread I had ostensibly spun for him, to remind me of my place.
“Nor may I change my shape, nor pierce the Veil between worlds with my Gentry sight. He’ll have his cub to heel, he says.”
Sebastian’s yellow eyes with their thin, vertical pupils warned me not to put my trust in him. That though he may like and pity me, he was treacherous by nature. And had been a prisoner longer.
“What do you think I am?” I asked him.
“I know what you are,” the foxboy answered with a gods-may-care shrug. “Fair warning, Gordie. You’ll be put to spinning soon.”
He’d been right. Not three days after that conversation, here I was. A warehouse stuffed with straw and my ears stuffed with dire death threats if I didn’t do something about it. Gold was wanted. Mounds of gold. Pounds of gold. Gold to rival a field of daffodils on a sunny day.
My lot hadn’t notably improved since the last time I’d been locked up with enough straw to make a giant’s mattress tick, though I was perhaps cleaner as I paced and sneezed, lavished with lavender soap as I was, my hair braided with ropes of pearls, half a pair of useless slippers on my feet. This time, the spinning wheel squatting in the middle of the warehouse was made of solid silver. None of it helped me. I was still going to die at dawn.