Senrid Read online

  Clair laughed. “If we have to be fast, best without your temper.”

  “Temper? Whom? I?” I exclaimed.

  Nobody looked convinced—not even Leander.

  Diana said, “I’m going with you,” and we zapped downstairs—leaving behind the sound of their laughter.

  Seshe was waiting anxiously.

  Trading off explanations and pocalubes (whenever Senrid’s name was mentioned) Diana and I told her.

  “This sounds bad,” she said, sighing. “And he seemed so friendly a sort.”

  By then the other girls had heard our voices—and the various insults—and had wandered in. At the end, after Seshe’s comment, we looked at one another in silence. Gwen grumbled under her breath; Sherry’s blue eyes were round with worry. The moody two, Irene and Dhana, both exclaimed and insulted and stamped, looking ready to go to Marloven Hess and try some kid-grabbing on their own.

  Despite what I said about planning, crazy ideas started sprouting in my head like a bunch of demented weeds. Before I could pick one and call for volunteers, I found myself on the receiving end of the signal-and-summons magic.

  “Uh oh—” I started. Then I blinked, staggered, and found myself back in the library, facing Clair and Leander.

  “CJ. “ Clair gave me a funny smile. “We have a plan. And only one person is able to pull it off. By going into Marloven Hess in disguise.”

  “I sure pity that poor slob,” I said feelingly.

  Clair’s grin widened into a silent laugh. “Then get a mirror and start pitying.”

  “What? Me? You nauseating…”

  She let me go for maybe two minutes; I was just warming up for some real insults to vent my pent-up feelings, when she said (past her snickers), “CJ—remember Faline. If you pocalube us until tomorrow, it might be too late.”

  “Me? Why me?” I whined.

  Clair continued as if I’d answered with cheery enthusiasm, “You know some magic, and it’s our only chance to act fast, since both Mearsies Heili and Vasande Leror happen to lack armies—”

  “And even if we had ‘em,” Leander put in, his face serious again. (During my pocalube he’d been so wooden-faced I suspected he was suspiciously close to snickers, but he didn’t know us well enough to give in.) “Marloven Hess is bigger than both our countries put together—at least twice over. And it is all army.”

  “And apparently it’s not an army of badly-trained, half-enchanted bumblers, like the Chwahir,” Clair added. “If Leander’s sources are true, they’re good at it.”

  I snorted. “That guard who blabbed their plans to Faline to kill time sounded like a bumbler, nice as he was.”

  “True,” Clair said, turning her attention to Leander.

  Leander shrugged. “A Marloven would be quick to point out that he was only a foot warrior, and the best all go into their cavalry, but still. There’s idiocy and corruption aplenty over there. But all of those warriors, rotten or not, train all the time. They like fighting. They don’t do anything else, Collet said—their holidays are mainly wargaming in the middle plains, and they take it seriously. And Senrid and Tdanerend have got plans for the entire Halian subcontinent, which they once ruled and so think they should again, so they’ll have lots and lots of war to look forward to, and it’ll make ‘em even better at it.”

  “Yeccch,” I said. “And you think I can go up against that? Alone? Remember how successful I was last time I was spackled into an army!” I thought back to that crack-brained snabloon Kessler Sonscarna, and shuddered.

  “But this time you’ll have your magic, because there’s no ward against you. And you won’t be sneaking in because you’ll be expected, you’ll have a place. Disguised as Ndand—”

  “Who’s that?”

  “Senrid’s shortsighted, enchanted cousin,” Leander said. “A year or so younger than you, but you’re about the same size, so you’ll pass. She’s got magic wards on her, so no one will detect the slight illusion magic to alter your features a bit—no full transformation necessary, which might cause tracer-alarms to warn them.”

  Clair said, “Anyway, we’ve got to get started. Lots to do because Senrid will expect her to escape at midnight from Leander’s. Midnight their time, which isn’t long from now.”

  “Midnight?” I repeated.

  Leander said, “She was part of the plot to grab Kyale—this was her very first time away from home—but she fumbled, and I believe Senrid must have expected she might fumble, but he wouldn’t be able to come right back and get her because I’d be raising the alarm. Which is exactly what happened.”

  “What’s this about midnight?” I asked. “It sounds suspicious.”

  “Not if you know Senrid, and meet Ndand. His alternate plan required her to sneak along and hide in my library until we’d finished searching and running around and so forth. Midnight. By then he’d also be done with his end of the tasks his uncle had set for him.”

  I nodded, still uneasy.

  “When you meet her,” Leander said, “you’ll understand. I found her lurking around in the hall outside Kitty’s room, looking terrified. Mad as we were, we soon saw it would be a waste of time to blame her for anything. So I remembered what Faline had told us last summer, and got the idea of coming here, figuring that the midnight spell might actually work in our favor. It gave me a little time.”

  Clair nodded, sneezed thrice, and wiped her eyes. She waved a hand at Leander. “Bring her?” she asked hoarsely, then coughed.

  Leander did the transfer magic and vanished.

  I sighed. “For Faline. Only for Faline.”

  “Of course only for Faline,” Clair said with a wry smile. Her eyes looked tired, and her lips were cracked. “If I weren’t sick I’d be going, because I know more magic than you, but I don’t think I’d last out the day.”

  “No,” I said quickly. “Better send me. I’ll manage.”

  Clair looked around, and because Leander wasn’t there—we were alone—she said, “Don’t give me the ‘You stay here because you’re queen’ argument, because I don’t believe in it. Mearsies Heili would survive if I never came back, but Faline won’t if we don’t act. If I weren’t sick I’d be the best for this plan, because it needs a short girl who knows lots of magic. But I am sick. You’re next best, because you don’t know as much as I do, yet, but you know some. Don’t you see?”

  “I see” I groaned. “I’m scared.”

  “Me too.” She sighed, and sat up straight. “Leander says that Senrid seems to like his cousin. So if you’re quick—and you’re the quickest of us all—and careful, no one gets hurt on either side.”

  “I’m not the carefullest of us all,” I moaned.

  “But you know how to be,” Clair said. She was smiling but her eyes were serious, and a little worried. Seeing that, I knew it was time for me to quit jellying and buckle down to business.

  “Right,” I chirped, faking confidence. “I’m hoping that if I whine a lot now, then all the bad luck will go away and I’ll not mess up.”

  Clair grinned. She loved exotic Earth superstitions like ‘bad luck’.

  Before either of us could speak, transfer-dazzle warned us of arrival, and air puffed our faces as two people appeared. Leander stood before us with a girl. She was short, though not as scrawny as I am, and her eyes were blue and long-lashed behind spectacles. Honest-to-Earth spectacles! White magic has long been able to heal eye problems, but I guessed black magicians were too tough for that. Her face was shaped differently from mine, and her long hair was a thicker texture and colored dark reddish-brown, but Clair and Leander were right. Since I have blue eyes and long black hair, it would only require a minor illusion spell to make me resemble her.

  “Hi, Ndand,” I said awkwardly, wondering how she was feeling about being a prisoner of kids. Not that we’d stick her in any dungeon (even if we had one) or give her rotten food. Just the opposite. But we were supposed to be her enemies.

  Ndand blinked, looking numb and very unhappy.
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  “Please sit down, Ndand,” Clair said as kindly as she could in her croaky voice.

  Ndand plumped onto a chair, with no change in expression. Her instant obedience made me edgy.

  “Okay, CJ, on a chair next to her.”

  I splatted down, but not without a grimace and a roll of the eyes.

  Clair had a very old book at hand. She studied us both, then performed the spell—an illusion spell meant to last through a full day. I felt my vision blur slightly when I looked down, then it snapped into clarity. My hair now looked wavy and thick-stranded and reddish-brown, but when I touched it, I felt the familiar ruler-straight fine black locks. A very well-made illusion.

  A quick trade of clothes, a trip through a cleaning frame, and Ndand wore one of Clair’s best gowns. I now wore Ndand’s: a heavy brushed linen gown with a fitted waist and long flared skirt. The dress was plain, which I liked, its only ornament being a sash, which pulled the loose waist snug. At least, I thought in resignation as I smoothed my skirts across my knees, this wasn’t Colend, where the court people wear ribbons and lace and gems on everything. Of course in Colend—though its king was about the strangest person I’d ever met for someone supposedly on the white side—there weren’t executions.

  “All right,” Clair said, recalling my attention. “Time to study. Ndand, what can you tell us about your father?”

  Ndand said in a high, flat voice, “His name is Tdanerend Montredaun-An, and he was younger brother to the former king, and is regent to the present one, my cousin Senrid…”

  And so began what seemed a long, horrible stretch, but was probably no more than an hour. Pure misery for me as I tried desperately to master a lot of facts utterly new to me, exasperation for Clair and Leander as they questioned Ndand and repeated things for me. Only Ndand sat patiently throughout the whole, answering every question put to her, and never making any comment or even showing any curiosity.

  She never reacted to the idea of Kyale or Faline being abducted for execution—or to our plans to save them.

  She seemed so apathetic it was like she’d been turned into some kind of mechanical doll, except as time wore on one emotion became increasingly clear: she was terrified of her father. She didn’t have any friends at all. That (like everything else that seemed a part of normal life) was “white weakness”. But she didn’t seem to care. Senrid was her only companion, and about him she gave no reaction—no liking or disliking either. He seemed part of the furniture of her life. Her only comment, when asked what he talked about when they were alone was, “He talks too fast. I don’t always understand him.”

  “Does he get angry with you?” I asked.

  “No.” She shook her head. “He just talks and talks.”

  Surprisingly, (at least she believed) he didn’t get her into trouble with her father, but protected her.

  It seemed a horrible life—her only “help” being a rotten black magic creep of a kid—and I was going to be living it.

  THREE

  Faline flopped down on the stone floor, groaning. How to get out of this one?

  A voice echoed hollowly: “Faline?”

  Faline looked up, wondering if it was, as CJ called ‘em, the harp brigade (or pitchfork platoon) lining up for recruitment.

  The voice came again, stronger. “Faline! Put your ear to the wall! It’s’3!”

  Faline popped to her feet and pressed her ear to the stone wall.

  ‘”3?” she called. She remembered her guard from Latvian’s—713!

  “Ah, there you are. Best we don’t yell. This way we can talk. Heard everything the king told you. I guess we’re in for it together tomorrow.”

  Faline grimaced. “Yah. Fun. Can hardly wait,” she said with 100% lack of enthusiasm. “So what happened to you?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, you tell me what happened to you and I’ll tell you what happened to me. We can pass the time that way. It’s nice to hear your voice again, though not like this.”

  “In spite of everything,” the warrior agreed.

  Faline said, “I hope you’re not too mad at me. For escaping and telling Leander what you’d told me, in order to save them in Vasande Leror.”

  “No.”

  “It was my duty, y’see. And I didn’t lie, not really, because—”

  “I know,” he said. “Everyone’s doing their duty as they see it. Everyone except me. I shouldn’t’a been blabbing.”

  “I was glad you did,” Faline said. “I met the leaders over in Vasande Leror, and I liked ‘em a lot.”

  “They have dungeons?”

  “Huh?”

  Faline looked around. This dungeon she was in could have been a Chwahir one, either in the Shadow or the Land. Stone, damp, dark, except for the faint glow of torchlight from the hallway outlining the little barred window in the door, shining on stone of a warm peachy color, not the gray granite of Chwahirsland. But the horrible sense of weight, of tons and tons of heavy stone, all squared off and silent to imprison people away from light and air and greenery and normal life, that was just the same.

  “I don’t think so,” she said. “Least, when I first got there’n tried to get in through a window, they didn’t threaten me with any dungeons or death squads or any of that nastarooni.”

  “Do you have dungeons in your country?”

  “Now, that I can answer! No. Not a one.”

  “Prisons?”

  “Yup. But they’re above ground, and people stay in ‘em while they do restitution. They sleep there at night and work during the day.”

  “So if someone betrays a state secret?”

  “Well, we don’t have any state secrets. At least, if Clair has ‘em, she only tells CJ, ‘cause it’s her job. But say CJ did up and blab one, by mistake, well, Clair would change the plans. Not that she’d ever plan to take over another country. I mean, in all the time I’ve lived in Mearsies Heili, we’ve never had an execution. If people break the law they make restitution, and Clair tries to figure out why it happened in the first place, if it’s a big enough problem. But the grownup governors help with that—like ol’ Kanos, who’s lived a long time, and he knows a lot about people.”

  “I wondered about that,” 713 said.

  Faline didn’t claim to be any kind of mind reader, but it seemed to her that ol ‘3 had been going through some serious change of heart.

  She said, “So after I got away from Latvian’s, what happened?”

  “Fellow on tower duty was demoted temporarily, until Latvian figured you’d used some kind of magic to escape. Fellows at the gate, same thing. That was it, until the king’s plan was thwarted so neatly. I knew you’d managed that, and I spent the summer waiting for them to come for me, and I did some thinkin’. You didn’t know anyone in Vasande Leror—you hadn’t even known where it was.”

  “I found out real quick.” Faline chortled. “So someone blabbed on you, I take it?”

  “Don’t know. The king himself found out. Took great pains, I was told. I knew I’d get stood up against the wall, but I didn’t think you would.”

  “So you confessed?”

  “Soon’s the king asked. Why lie? I’d done wrong. Knew it. He knew it.”

  Faline thought about Senrid, who’d seemed so friendly. “Was he mad at you?”

  “Not at all. I think…”

  “What?” Faline prompted, when 713 fell silent, and all she could hear for an unmeasured time was a slow drip somewhere.

  “I think that’s why the two days of recreation, with the Regent watching. Regent said it was to make an example of me for any warrior in future who fraternized with prisoners, but it was actually a kind o’ threat to the king, I think.”

  “‘Recreation’? Oh. You don’t mean, like, yecch, torture and junk?”

  “That’s what I mean,” 713 said with a kind of wheezy laugh.

  “So Senrid got to watch, is that it?”

  “Had to. Not the whole two days. Regent came often. Enjoyed it. Kin
g didn’t, I don’t think. No expression.”

  Now Faline knew why 713 was rambling so much, he was probably feverish. She was glad she couldn’t see him—but she knew what she ought to do.

  “What the heck and would you believe,” she groaned, hating the whole situation more than ever.

  “What?”

  “I’m disgusted!” Faline said, thinking: I’m squeamish!

  “With who?” 713 asked.

  “All these uniformed clod-hopping pickle-spleens—ooh, reminds me of a very fine joke!”

  “I miss your jokes,” 713 said wistfully.

  Now Faline knew he was sick! But she said in a rallying tone, “Well then we simply have to live, so’s you can tell the rest o’ my gang. They’ll NEVER believe ANYONE could miss my jokes! You got water in there?”

  “No. Nothing.”

  “Are you by any chance tied up and all that junk?”

  “No chance.” 713’s laugh was sad. “Truth.”

  “Argh! I’ll come over and help you out. Only neighborly.”

  “You won’t want to see what I look like.”

  “You’ll look better when I’m done,” Faline promised, hoping it was true. Then she scanned around the bare cell, now that her eyes had grown accustomed to the darkness. In the faint light from the grill in the cell door she saw notches all along the top of the stone wall she’d been leaning against. She discovered that she hadn’t been hearing through the wall—which seemed impossible—she’d been hearing through shared air holes.

  And who’d put her in this cell?

  Faline shook her head. It did seem weird, all right, but she wasn’t going to complain. Instead, she said, “This place is pretty old, isn’t it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, then. Lock’ll be a cinch. Diana’s the only one who can do new locks, but she taught us all how to pick these old ones, and we all carry something—me, it’s on my belt buckle thingie—that works on locks. In case, you know, we meet up with your villain who likes slinging people into dungeons without letting you go home and pack first. Anyhoo,” she said as she pulled her belt free, “Diana understands locks.”