Ozark Trilogy 1: Twelve Fair Kingdoms (11 page)

“Really!”

“Shame, shame, shame, you wicked chiiiiiuiiiiild!” they all said in chorus. Eighteen giant seagulls, four feet tall and a wingspread to match, standing round my bed flopping those wings and ordering me in perfect harmony to be ashamed of my wickedness.

If they’d been real I’d have turned all eighteen into fleas and deposited them neatly in the high collar of Michael Stepforth’s cape, perhaps, but I was far too miserable to waste my time working Transformations on fakes. I closed my eyes instead and let the pseudobirds do their chant while I tried hard not to breathe, and after ten, eleven repetitions their creator finally appeared in my doorway—not bothering to knock—and came striding in, walking through one of his birds to reach my side.

“Look up, please,” he said crisply.

“Why? To view your little flock? No, thank you. I don’t care for squawkers.”

“Seagulls.”

“They look like squawkers to me,” I said. “Might could be your Spells are faulty.”

(I
wished!
I tried to imagine a faulty Spell worked up by Crimson of Airy, and found the thought ridiculous.)

“You look up here or I’ll put all the gulls in bed with you,” he said placidly. “And you wouldn’t like that; they’re awfully dirty.”

It was a pain as bad as the pain in my ribs to have to put up with his sass; on the other hand, I wasn’t about to give in to the temptation to do magic beyond my permitted level under this one’s nose. Much as some old-fashioned staple along the lines of turning him into a reptile would have done me good, much as I longed for the tiny satisfaction of maybe just snapping one of his perfect fingerbones, I was not that foolish. Even if I could have managed something like that with all my supplies packed away in a wardrobe and three of my ribs broken, there was no sense to giving him any further smallest advantage. I lay still, and I looked up.

Hmmmmm. Structural Description ... Structural Change ... Coreferential Indexes. All properly formal and not a fingertip out of place. The double-barred arrow appeared in the air; glowing gold, quivering slightly, and the pain faded away as the arrow did. Perhaps ninety seconds total time. I was impressed. It always takes longer to undo things than to do them, and more formal operations are required. He was as good as my grandmother said he was. I grinned at him.

“Ask me no fool questions,” he said grimly, “and don’t offer me any more of your uncalled-for and unappreciated assessments of my person. Just thank me, please, and show you have
some
breeding.”

“Thank you kindly. Magician of Rank Michael Stepforth Guthrie the 11
^th
,” I said promptly. “You are certainly handy at your work, and I intend to mention it everywhere I go.” And I batted my lashes at him, and crossed my hands over my breasts.

“Your Attendant will be along soon,” he said, looking clear over my head and out the window, “and you are now in perfect condition. And leave off your spurs, you’ll mark up the stairs. We’re waiting for you—patiently—down in the small Hall.”

“And your bill? For services rendered, Michael Stepforth?”

“Courtesy of the house,” he said. “No charge.” He raised both his hands in the mock-magic gesture of the stage magician, fanning his fingers open and shut and open again. And then he turned on his heel and swept out of the room, the cape swirling about him. And the gulls made a soft little noise and disappeared.

I thanked the Attendant and walked into the Hall, where I had spent a number of reasonably pleasant Hallow Evens and Midsummer Days over the years. There had been children then, and costumes and candy, and cakes and beer and an atmosphere of frolic. There was none of that today.

They sat in high-backed chairs about a table at the far end of the room, filling a windowed corner through which I could see the sun going down. Myrrh of Guthrie. The previously absent James John, looking rumpled. Michael Stepforth Guthrie. Two unmarried sons in their late teens, whose names I did not remember. And one Granny, whose name I
did
know. Whatever else I might neglect, I did not neglect the Grannys; I had a file on every one of them, and I knew it by heart, and they didn’t gather an Ozark weed that I didn’t know it. This one was a harmless old soul, name of Granny Stillmeadow, that specialized in liniments and party Charms, and I chose the chair next to hers and let her pat my knee.

Supper appeared the minute I took my place, and by the time I’d been introduced to the two boys it had been served and we were well into it. And if Myrrh of Guthrie was serious about the Reception and Dance scheduled for that same evening there was surely no time to fool about. I didn’t recognize the beast that I was eating, but I recognized it for a beast, and I knew both the vegetables. And I was sure they wouldn’t poison me in front of the servants, so I fell to. And I listened.

Castle Parson, it appeared, had been sending bands of traders across the Wilderness to the Guthrie docks, and offering higher bids for supplies than those authorized to the Guthrie personnel. The Guthries were willing to allow that that might have been due to an unfortunate incident in which a charge set by a Guthrie mining crew had caved in a gem mine on the very edge of Kingdom Parson. However it seemed that although the mine was in Wilderness Lands and therefore technically common property, the Parsons felt that the Guthries were demanding more than their share of the profits from the mine, which meant their miners might just conceivably have been harassing the Guthrie miners who
set
the charge. (What the Purdys had been doing through all this, and whether they’d been getting any of
their
legitimate share of the profits, was not mentioned.) But it did come up that a Purdy had managed to get himself killed—according to both the Guthries and the Parsons, it was deliberate, which I found it hard to believe, even for the Purdys—in a spectacularly disgusting way. (Granny Stillmeadow was of the opinion that only a Magician of Rank could of arranged it, considering the curious shape the body had assumed before it was found.) And this getting killed had happened in the Parson Castle Hall, while the Guthries were there protesting the latest iniquity perpetrated by the Parsons, and a Parson Granny had cried “Privilege!” and they’d had to call a three-Kingdom hearing, which by law had to be held on common ground in the Wilderness, and was still going on, and that was costing an arm and a leg and another arm. And a Purdy spy had hacked her ridiculous way through the Wilderness to tell the Guthries that the Parsons were stealing them all blind by working another gem mine on the Purdy’s southern border; tunneling from its Wilderness entrance clear under the Guthrie lands—which was something the Guthries already knew—
but
, since the poor thing had ruined herself for life scrabbling around on foot through the underbrush and whatnot and getting lost over and over to bring information that she had thought would prove the Purdy loyalty to the Guthries, and since she claimed to have been assaulted by a farmer in a ditch along the way (which the farmer denied, but the Granny was of the opinion he was at least bending the truth, if not breaking it), it made it a debt of honor for Castle Guthrie to avenge when the fool woman fell into a well and drowned herself—

That did it. That
did
it! To think that
these
were three of the Kingdoms staunchly claiming that they should be left to manage their own affairs! It beat all, and some left over!

“Wait!” I shouted. “Just
stop!
”

They all put down their silverware and stared at me, and the Granny clucked her tongue.

“You interrupted, child,” she said. “Ill-bred of you.
Ill-
bred!”

I whistled long and low, and pushed my plate away from me.

“What
was
that?” I asked. “The roast, I mean.”

“Stibble,” said James John Guthrie, whose absence was now well explained. He would be very busy indeed with all
this
going on.

“Stibble?”

“Something like a pig and something like an Old Earth rabbit.”

“I don’t believe it.”

“Nevertheless. Granny there named it for us.”

“How big?”

He made a measure in the air. Two feet, roughly, and about so high.

“Did you like it?” he asked.

“Yes, I did,” I said. “I just wanted a name for it.”

“It’s new,” said James John. “Our Ecologist developed it ... oh, about a year and a half ago. A little bit of this, a little bit of that.”

“And made no mention of it?”

He raised his eyebrows and speared another bite of stibble roast.

“You folks going hungry on Brightwater?” he asked me innocently. “Famine on Marktwain, is there? Starving populations on Oklahomah?”

He knew very well that the law said we all shared. If the Guthrie Geologist had found a reliable new foodsource, the announcement—and all details—was supposed to go out to all the Twelve Castles, share and share alike. But I let it pass.

“There is no way,” I said, “that I can remember all of this hoohah about you Outlines and Parsons and Purdys.”

“Poor things,” said Granny Stillmeadow. “The Purdys, I mean.”

“And no reason why you should remember,” said Myrrh of Guthrie like a scythe falling. “I don’t recall asking you for help. I don’t recall sending any dispatches demanding rescue, and we can handle it ourselves, thank you very much. If
you’ll
just stay home.”

“The
wickedness
of those Parsons,” bellowed James John Guthrie, “and the
ineptitude
, I might say the stupidity, of those Purdys, defies belief, and brings a decent man to—”

“Talk too much,” pronounced Granny Stillmeadow. “Shut your face, James John Guthrie, the young woman’s been told it’s not her concern.”

Well! So she could granny when it was needful after all! I patted
her
knee.

“Granny Stillmeadow,” he said doggedly, “you have not heard what those people did today. I am here to tell you—”

Granny Stillmeadow, and Myrrh of Guthrie, and I myself fixed him with chilly stares, and Michael Stepforth cleared his throat ominously, and both the sons looked down at their plates, and the man gave it up, his voice trailing off while the servingmaids came forward and took away all evidence of the stibble roast, and the two vegetables, and the bread and butter and gravy and salt and coffee.

“No dessert,” said Myrrh of Guthrie, “because of the Reception and the Dance.”

One of the young women looked up at that and offered that there was a bread pudding ready in the Castle kitchen if her lady wanted it, and no trouble atall, but Myrrh waved her away.

“You do
see
,” she said to me, “why I told you we hadn’t time right now to play games with you?”

No, as a matter of actual fact, I did not see. I’d never heard such a tangle of nonsensical tales in all my life, and I couldn’t imagine how any group of supposedly competent grown-up people had allowed things to reach such a pass. However I now had a certain feeling of conviction about one thing— whatever was going on here on Arkansaw, it was keeping the Guthries so busy they had little time to even think about the Jubilee, much less plot against it. That didn’t mean I didn’t have my guard up, not with that canny Magician of Rank sitting there to remind me. The Guthries could of put all this together as one gigantic distraction, in the hope that I’d feel obliged to stay on and try to settle it, for instance; that would of been perfectly plausible. I didn’t
think
so. It all had the ring of truth, however ridiculous; but I wasn’t putting it entirely out of my mind. But I was reassured a good deal by the number of lies I’d been told in the space of one brief hour ... well, call them distortions, lies may be too strong a word ... and the lack of craft behind them. The Parsons were feuding with the Guthries; and the Guthries were feuding with the Parsons; and the Purdys were caught in the middle trying to play both sides. That much was obvious. The rest of it I wouldn’t give two cents for.

It might be I’d have to do some serious digging before I left Arkansaw, and for sure I’d have to keep a wary eye and ear from here on out on Michael Stepforth Guthrie, but I needn’t waste time at Castle Guthrie. Reception. Dance. A little breakfast. And on to Parson.

It wasn’t going to be a pleasant night, of course; the Magician of Rank would see to that, hoping to provoke me to some indiscretion he could use later on, and wanting his own back for my shaming him before the Missus of the Castle that afternoon. I could count on lizards in my bed, and sheets that
felt
like bread pudding, and bangs and thumps and clanks, and mysterious names dancing in the corners, and probably—no, for
sure
—the whole room rocking and swaying all night like a small boat in a high wind. I might sleep through some of it, and then I might not. Depending on how ingenious he was. And how spiteful.

I looked at him, and he looked back at me slow and steady, that beautiful mouth curling and the lashes half-lowered over the seagreen eyes. I felt my own traitor lips part, and I firmed them tight, and I saw the devil dance behind those lashes.

I was learning; my sympathy for my mother’s victims increased.

“RESPONSIBLE OF BRIGHTWATER,” said the Attendant, in that dead voice that seemed to have been droning on for hours and hours. I gripped my glass, leaned on the table, and shook this latest hand; it belonged, said the Attendant, to one Marycharlotte of Wommack, wife of Jordan Sanderleigh Farson the 23
^rd
. I didn’t even bother to add up the letters and see what number “marychariotte” came to, which was some index of my exhaustion; she could be any number she chose, including the horrible four; she could be a one like Crimson of Airy and a threat to my life and the Kingdom of Brightwater ... I no longer cared.