That night I recited to myself:
“Sneeze?” asked the three-legged fox who had climbed through my casement window. “He’s not the one allergic to straw, Gordie. Remember?”
“Sebastian!” I scrambled up from my escritoire. “How do you do?—you’ve learned to skinslip!—no more iron bracelet?—what a handsome fox!—your poor hand!”
Next a vixen slid through the aperture, shuddering off her russet fur as she leapt to the floor to stand bright in her own bare skin. Her hair flamed loose about her shoulders. The only thing she wore was a heavy gray signet ring on her index finger. I’d seen it once before on the Archabbot’s own hand. There was a smear of rust upon it that I knew to be blood. Had she taken it off his dead body? Had she bitten it off his living one? Either thought made me grin.
“Candia!”
She made a warding gesture. “Candy, Candy, call me Candy! Sweet as syrup, twice as randy. Hallo, Gordie. We’ve come to warn you.”
“Warn me? Of what?” Even before they began to answer, I folded my maps, buckled my boots, and fetched my quilted jacket with the deep red hood.
“Jadio is but a day’s march behind us,” Sebastian said. “But he’s sent a deathly rumor running before him. Claims you were a Gentry witch all along, who’d fuddled the Archabbot into thinking you were holy and glammed his own gray eyes the same. That you tricksied him into wedding and bedding you.”
“An honor I’d have sold my left ear to live without,” I growled.
Candy had strolled across the room to examine the empty cradle. She said over her shoulder, “Jadio claims you killed the babe you bore him, and mean to replace it with a changeling that will bring ruin to Leressa.”
“Really?” I looked from one twin to the other. “Wouldn’t that be a shame?”
Grins all around.
“Jadio claims,” Sebastian finished, “that he will see you hang ere the week’s out. That he will wed Princess Lissa of Lirhu by the light of your funeral pyre.”
This stayed my hands where they’d been strapping on my pack.
“Old Ironshod’s daughter?” I asked. “But she sleeps, doesn’t she? A hundred-year sleep. Poisoned by Gentry magic, same as what changed her brother to a bear. How did he manage to wake her?”
“He did not,” Candy said. Her blade-thin nose serrated at the bridge, as though she had smelled something foul. Her yellow eyes glowed in the dark. “But an heir of her blood will strengthen his claim to the crown.”
“Who will wake her?” I asked wildly. “We can’t let him— We must wake her!”
“Not you!” laughed Sebastian. “That’s for other folk to do, milksop, in some other tale. Don’t you know anything? As if you didn’t have the hardest part of your own ahead of you.” He paused and looked at me, yellow-eyed and mischievous. “Do you remember what I told you before I left?”
I clutched the ashwood locket at my chest and rattled off through a suddenly dry throat: “‘The One-Eyed Witch lives where?’”
“That’s it. You ain’t milky as all that, if I say so my own self, Your Majesty.”
“Am too!” I ruffled his hair before he jerked away, baring his teeth not so much out of displeasure as habit.
Sebastian waved his one good arm like a conjurer. It had been the right hand, I’d noticed, that he’d managed to chew off, or chop off, or what. The left was still skinny as a branch, wiry as whipcord. He let me admire the brutal unevenness before explaining.
“Candy did it for me. With an ax. Good and clean. Licked it once to seal it. Then we escaped.” So proud he sounded, so nonchalant.
“Brave children. How many died chasing you?”
“Oh, one or two,” said Sebastian.
“Dozen!” coughed his twin.
“You should not be here,” I scolded. “Jadio will surely punish you if he finds you.”
“We’re fast, Your Majesty, and double sly,” returned Sebastian. “It is you who should escape, who have no real witchy ways to save you.”
Candy looked up from my escritoire, at my lists of names in long columns labeled: common, diminutive, pet, famous mortal, infamous gentry. She started snickering at something she saw written there.
I hesitated before asking, “I don’t suppose you know his name?”
“Whose?” both said at once, wary.
“Are you not his friends? Born liars, his two young foxfaces, his ‘regular but reliably suspicious informants.’ You have spied for him and lied for him and led him to my many cells. Will you not help me find him now?”
“We’ll never tell,” the twins said together. They puddled down in copper fur and clicking claws, black muzzles, twining tails, and rubbed against my legs, barking:
They leapt out the window. I stopped just long enough to add those names to my list, then left Jadio House myself, under cover of night.
The old skip-rope chant called The One-Eyed Witch Lives Where? goes like this:
In other words, if I were interpreting the riddle aright, and if Sebastian hadn’t been flaunting his tail and canting my path astray, I had four days to get to the drowned city of Lirhu, find a one-eyed witch, and make her tell me the crooked man’s name.
The road was long. I was not as bold as I once had been.
Had not the squalling semblance left to replace my daughter dried my milk and the little crooked man stopped my bleeding after the birth, I’d never have lasted the first day. As it was, the worst I felt were twinges. And a nagging clench that nine months meant nothing if I failed now.
If mortal roads were not safe for Gentry in these dark days of civil strife, they were no more safe for a youngish woman on her own, be she ever so plainly dressed. On the first day I encountered soldiers. Jadio’s men—possibly sent ahead to the House to prepare it.
“Ain’t she a pearl?” one asked.
“Cute hood,” said another, flipping it off my hair.
“Where’s your basket of goodies for Gramamma?”
A year ago, I’d’ve clouted them with a dishrag, or sniffed and stuck my nose in the air, or showed them the sharp side of my tongue. A year ago, this kind of behavior had got me clapped in chains and dragged to the Holy See at Winterbane. Instead I made my eyes wide and mild, slightly popped, with the whites showing all around. All gentleness, all complacency, all bovine. With the mightiest will in the world, I pretended I was my cow Annat.
“Moo?”
The first soldier laughed. “Is that your name? Little Miss Moo?” and tried to tickle me. I backed away and pawed the dirt of the road with the scuff of my toe, and then galloped forward and rammed his stomach with the hardest part of my head. He went down with an oof and an oath. All his comrades laughed.