“Do you have milk goats?” Ekaterin asked instead, approaching the problem sideways. It was also true, one couldn’t just abruptly abandon milk goats. Nor remove radiation-riddled animals from the zone. This one might not be quite such a social lie as the one about white ghosts.
Jadwiga nodded again, and oh dear Ekaterin wished she wouldn’t. “I milk them,” the girl said proudly. “That’s my job.” She glanced in new concern at Ingi. “Where are they? Taking them out is his job,” she added to Ekaterin, with a jerk of her thumb at the white boy.
“They’re around front.” Ingi gave a vague wave of his hand toward the shack-on-stilts, beyond which they’d left the lightflyer. Ekaterin followed the gesture, and saw a shadowy brown goat-shape rattling the greener bushes—nibbling, no doubt. Concentrating contaminants up the food chain.
“You’re not suppos’d to let them eat the garden,” scolded Jadwiga, to which Ingi replied defensively, “They’re not!” but betrayed a more intimate knowledge of goats by adding, “Yet.”
Jadwiga tossed her head. “Anyway, Ma says she’ll never, ever leave. I heard her tell Vadim and Boris, once. They thought we were asleep. That when she dies, she wants to be burned in her hut. Which is ick, and anyway, then where would we live?”
“She told Vadim she had old Count Piotr’s own word she was to be left alone in the zone,” Ingi allowed, sounding a bit reluctant. “Vadim said, but if nobody else alive now remembers, how can she prove it? She didn’t say.” He added after a moment, “She cuffed him on the head, though, so I don’t think she liked him saying that.”
Ekaterin mustered her patience. Jadwiga was older, but Ingi seemed brighter; he might know more. “How did Ma Roga come to be living here in the zone in the first place?”
Jadwiga repeated, “Forever,” albeit with less conviction than before; then, apparently struck by the question—had she never considered it till now?—added, “Boris would know. He knows lots.”
Ingi added, “You’re just some kind of city tourists, anyway. You don’t belong here.” He turned to Jadwiga: “We don’t have to tell them anything.”
Before Ekaterin could decide on the best way to disabuse the boy of his misapprehensions, Jadwiga put in, “Don’t worry. When Boris comes back, he’ll make them go away. He made that bad hunter go away, that time!”
Ingi bit his lip. “Shut up about that!” he hissed to her. “Just… don’t.” Jadwiga rocked back, offended.
Now what’s this tale? Nothing good, Ekaterin suspected. She just managed not to rub her forehead with her gloved and contaminated hand. Her nose itched; she sniffed. “Does Vadim visit you often?” The children seemed to speak of him without fear, which restrained her provisional fury with the man. Somewhat.
Jadwiga nodded vigorously. “He comes on his day off, usually. Not every time. He taught Ingi to read. But he won’t take us a ride in his van!”
By the expression crossing Ingi’s face, this was a shared peeve. “You should ask him again for your next birthday, if…” He cut himself off abruptly.
If you are still alive? “So you’ve never flown? Never seen the zone or the district from the air?” A sneaky method of getting the pair of them to Hassadar General occurred to her, but she set the ploy aside. For now.
Ingi was drawn out again despite himself. “Is it amazing?”
“Like magic?” said Jadwiga.
Ekaterin blinked, suddenly made aware of how familiarity bred not so much contempt, as unmindfulness. Blindness, even. “Yes. Yes, it is. I quite enjoy flying.” She added rather at random, “My husband gave me my lightflyer for a Winterfair present.”
Both youths looked wildly impressed. “He must like you a lot,” said Jadwiga.
“Well… yes,” Ekaterin admitted.
“Is he rich? Like a prince?”
“There aren’t any real princes, Jaddie,” said Ingi, impatient again. Embarrassed? “That was on Old Earth.”
“That’s not so! Vadim said there was one born in Vorbarr Sultana, far away over nine and nine districts where the emperor lives in a golden palace.” This last was delivered in a fairy-tale sing-song. “Is that true?” she demanded of Ekaterin.
“Not… not exactly…”
Ingi gave a self-satisfied sniff.
Ekaterin took a breath. “The capital is only three districts to the north, the Imperial Residence is made out of gray stone blocks, mostly, and there are two little princes and a princess now, but she’s just a baby.”
Enrique raised his brows at her through his face mask—in amused approval at this unwonted precision, perhaps.
Silence, as they digested this. “Have you seen this, for real?” asked Ingi at last. Enrique’s glance swung to include the boy. Ingi, Ekaterin thought, should get to know Enrique. She suspected they might hit it off, once Enrique got over his stolen-radbug grudge, which, now that they looked to be recoverable, he likely would.
“Yes.”
Jadwiga sat back with a sigh of profound satisfaction. To know that she lived in a world where princesses were real? Ekaterin recalled the unselfconscious joy she’d witnessed in Gregor’s and Laisa’s faces, when they’d shown off their new daughter to her on her last visit to the Residence. How agonizingly different must have been the emotions of Jadwiga’s real parents, when they’d… thrown her away in the zone?
In the hard Dendarii Mountains not far to the south, it had been the stern Time-of-Isolation custom to cut the throats of mutie infants, an approach that had stretched secretly into modern times before being finally stamped out. There’s this place in the woods. In these softer lowlands, had a seeming-softer custom lingered on too long? What is this haunted place, this… dreadful orphanage? Ekaterin was growing frantic for facts. They could not be worse than her imaginings.
“Ingi!” cawed a hoarse voice, echoing through the trees. “Where is the brat? Ingi, you’ve let the goats loose again. I’ll tan your hide.” That last sounded too tired to be a credible peril, but the source of the call rounded the raised hut.
Be careful what you wish for…
Two people led another shaggy pony, burdened with sacks hanging over its round barrel. A man of middling height had a hand out balancing, of all things, a battered old upholstered armchair, threadbare with foam padding showing through, slung teetering atop the animal. As the white-garbed strangers came into his sight, his snub features set in a scowl, which somehow made him look beefier than he actually was.
The older woman stumping forward wore skirt and tunic and heavy boots. She was shorter and slighter than the fellow, but her frown was fiercer. The pony took advantage of the distraction to buck and dump its load, which the man caught at only enough to direct its groundward thump.
The responsible grownups. Finally.
Such as they were…
“Trespassers!” snapped the woman, coming at them.
The fellow grabbed a length of firewood from the pile by the house and raised it in uncertain threat. “Should I beat t’em, Ma?”
Enrique jolted, but Ekaterin flung out a hand to bar him from rising. She was intensely aware of her stunner, strapped unreachably beneath her rad suit. This confrontation teetered on a slope no one was going to be able to scramble back from, if it came to blows.