The Forgotten Sisters (24 page)

Was it possible that Katar had heard her all the way from Lesser Alva? One time Miri had managed to send quarry-speech from the princess academy all the way back to the village, a three hours' walk. But then she had been in a building full of linder and on Mount Eskel itself, which was scored with veins of linder where the quarry-speech could travel. Here Miri was surrounded by bricks and ordinary rock.

Miri plucked the stone hawk from her pocket and turned it over in her hands. Its edges were smooth, polished by her frequent touch. This was likely the only piece of linder between her and Peder.

Miri gripped her linder hawk and sent her quarry-speech into it, as if the small stone hawk could grip her silent words and take flight, out of the dungeon, toward the white stone palace. Perhaps distance did not matter so much, just as she did not need to be near Peder to love him.

With her breath alone, she sang a quarry song to focus her thoughts. “Hammer's clamor bares the bone. What's the matter? No one's home.” She tapped her foot, the rhythm of quarry work, the beat of her heart, the thumping need in her gut all tied to the hawk in her hands. And silently she sang.

The Storan army
.

The king and queen
.

The water tunnel
.

Image after image, she sang silently into the rock in her hands, repeating the memories that Peder might understand:
crawling through the tunnel, the king, the queen, Steffan. The tunnel, the tunnel …

In the monotony of the task, other words drifted through her mind. Peder saying, “You're never safe when
a king knows your name.” And Dogface saying, “Fix this.” And from Marda and Pa the months of silence and separation, like a great hole in the center of the floor where she might slip and fall in.

She quarry-spoke to Peder. She quarry-spoke to Katar. She hoped one might hear her—or both, and they might say, Yes, I hear her too. That means we're not imagining it. We need to get out.

And Miri clung to the linder hawk, an eye and beak making a perfect indentation in her palm.

Close up your ears, child

And shut up your sight

Knock upon your heart

To know what is right

Deep into the night, Miri lay on the floor quarry-speaking while the other girls slept, the linder hawk clutched in her hands, her fingers cold and stiff. In her exhaustion, the activity mingled with the memory of another night when she was held captive, desperate for Peder to hear her quarry-speech. So familiar, as if her self then—on the floor of the princess academy, surrounded by bandits—lay beside her now. Her former self like a ghostly younger sister, the two Miris quarry-speaking together, one on harmony, one on melody.

Then she'd been pleading,
Please, come get us
.

Now she was shouting,
Please, run away
.

Then, she had received a response—a distant call in quarry-speech from Peder letting her know he'd heard.
But now, there was nothing. Perhaps the hawk was too small a piece of linder to collect Peder's replying quarry-speech and echo it back to Miri. Or more likely he simply could not hear her at all.

He can't hear me
. The thought became louder than the memory she was singing into the linder. So she shouted at it to go away and kept trying. Fell asleep still trying, curled around the linder hawk, clutching it with both hands.

Miri expected to sit forgotten in the darkness for days, but it was only the afternoon of the next day when their cell door squeaked opened. A guard brought them water to drink and wash their faces and then politely asked them to accompany him upstairs, as if they were honored guests. Though unfed honored guests. Someone's stomach squeaked with hunger.

The morning sunlight stunned Miri's eyes, and she stumbled against the steps leading up to the castle's ground level.

“This was Queen Gertrud's castle,” Britta whispered. “You are her descendants. Remember, you are home.”

Astrid straightened her shoulders.

Britta took Miri's arm. Felissa, Astrid, and Sus took hands, and connected they entered an enormous room.

Formerly the castle's great hall, the university tutors had used it for group lectures. Now it housed the center
of operations for the Storan high commander, leader of the invasion.

High Commander Paldus sat stiffly in a carved wood chair at the head of a long, narrow table. In the morning light that rippled through the windows' thick, ancient glass, his nearly white hair looked silver. Several soldiers stood at attention around the room. Commander Mongus sat at the table, his back to them, but Miri recognized his long blond hair.

“Princess Britta,” High Commander Paldus said with a nod.

“High commander,” she said with a small curtsy. A very small curtsy.

“Where is the king?” he asked, returning his gaze to the papers on the table before him.

Miri blinked. This was not a question she'd been expecting.

“I have no idea,” said Britta. “We came here to meet with him, and then your Commander Mongus there draws his knife and tells us he's dead.”

“No, I did not mean our King Fader, rest his bones in the hall of warriors,” said High Commander Paldus. “
Your
King Bjorn. Where is he?”

Britta frowned at Miri. Miri shrugged.

“He's in the palace,” said Britta. “You know that. You have it surrounded—”

“We have been surrounding an
empty
palace!” said the high commander. “We cracked open its shell last night and found the meat picked clean.”

Miri laughed and then tried to cover it with a cough. She put her hand in her pocket and squeezed the linder hawk. Peder had heard. Last night. They'd just made it out in time then. Crawled through the filthy tunnel. Run through the dark streets. Huddled even now, perhaps, under the straw in Gus's shed.

The high commander stood and crossed the room to Britta. “Princess, it's in your best interest to tell me. Where is the king hiding?”

“Honestly, I thought he was in the palace,” she said.

“You will tell us where he is, or you will join him on the chopping block when we find him.”

“If he's no longer in the palace, then he escaped under your noses,” said Miri. “What will you do, burn down every building in Asland? Track down every boat that might have slipped past you in the channel? You may as well search an entire city for one particular rat.”

“The best way to catch a rat is with a trap,” Commander Mongus muttered, his back still to them.

High Commander Paldus examined Britta's face, scrutinized the other girls, and then leaned against the table to speak close to Commander Mongus. Miri overheard snatches of their urgent whispers.

“… just get rid of … no need of these …”

Fix this
, Miri thought.

“You start a war of honor,” she sputtered, “yet you have none.”

Commander Mongus finally turned to look at them. He stood, stalked forward, and slapped Miri with the back of his fist. She fell with the force.

“Do not question the honor of Stora!” Commander Mongus shouted.

“Commander …” High Commander Paldus spoke the word as a mild rebuke with no real threat behind it.

Britta helped Miri to her feet. Miri's jaw burned with pain but she kept talking. “You accept an honor challenge, and yet when our champion beats yours—”

“You held a champion match?” the high commander interrupted.

“Hardly, sir,” said Commander Mongus. “Sten fought one of the princess's ladies.”

“And lost,” said Miri. “You were honor-bound to let us speak to your king, but you—”

“No!” said Commander Mongus. “I agreed you could speak to King Fader, and I will happily deliver you to the grave where he resides.”

The high commander's eyes narrowed as if he was unhappy with that reasoning, but he did not speak.

“This is the honor of the north men?” Miri said to High Commander Paldus. “Lies and deception—”

“Do not sully our honor,” said Commander Mongus. “North men defend honor with iron.”

From the corner of her eye, Miri noticed an ornate wood panel in the wall crack open. Was that piece in this dangerous game still in play?

“And I will not have a war of honor sullied by your error,” the high commander was telling Mongus.

“It was not a genuine champion match,” said Captain Mongus. “The instigator was a girl, a swamp rat, and—”

Miri gasped. “A swamp rat?” These girls were dressed like fine courtiers, nothing to indicate a swamp about them. “You know who they are! But how do you know?”

The commander's expression stiffened, betraying discomfort.

“The soldiers in Lesser Alva didn't know,” said Miri, half talking to herself. “So how … the letters! You assigned some of your soldiers to travel with the Danlandian traders and get familiar with that part of Danland. They bribed the traders to steal our letters, sending them to you. Katar said she wrote to me about the sisters' real identity. You suspected the truth for some time, and now your suspicions are confirmed. So, why haven't you told the high commander?”

“What is she talking about, Mongus?” asked the high commander.

“Utter nonsense,” said Commander Mongus. “I urge you to toss them back in a cell till they're needed to bait our royal trap.”

“He kept the secret because the truth of our existence would have prevented the war,” said Sus. Her voice was soft and young, yet it cut through all the noise in the room, as sharply as truth. “He's a soldier. He wants war like a farmer wants rain.”

“Yes, and this war was supposed to be a war of honor,” Miri said, slowly walking closer to the cracked panel in the wall. “But it's based on a lie. King Bjorn offered one of his daughters as a bride to King Fader, and he accepted. After he died, you found out that, at least according to common belief, King Bjorn had no daughters. That was his crime, the reason you justified this invasion—to punish King Bjorn for offering a false princess to a king of Stora. But Commander Mongus found out the princesses were real after all and hidden away in the west, didn't you, commander?”

“Enough,” he said.

“Tell your high commander, Mongus,” said Miri. “Tell him what the letters said. Who are these girls?”

“I will not be insulted,” Commander Mongus said. “I
could have taken you away, had you killed! But I brought you here. I
am
a man of honor, and if you accuse me otherwise again—”

“King Bjorn does have daughters,” Miri shouted to the high commander. “Three. And here they are before you. There was no lie—”

This time when Commander Mongus backhanded Miri, he struck her shoulder and sent her slamming into the wall. She heard her collarbone crunch. The colors in the room seemed to vibrate with black and silver, the floor listless, pitching.

Hands were on her—Felissa, Britta, Astrid—but Miri kept perfectly still. Even taking a deep breath sharpened the pain to a dizzying intensity.

Kaspar stepped out of the swinging wall panel, no sword today, his gray wool jacket dusty.

“What is going on?” he said.

“Kaspar! Where are you coming from?” said the high commander.

“That girl said that you would lock her away or kill her, but I said, ‘Storan men are honorable all' and now you are hurting her!”

“You should not be talking with the enemy,” said the high commander. “Go back to your apartment—”

“No! I promised to protect them.”

“I'll get rid of them myself,” said Mongus, reaching for Miri.

She whimpered and huddled lower, afraid of his touch. Britta and the sisters stepped between her and Mongus. Miri's heartbeat felt like mallet blows against her breast, finding every crack in every bone and threatening to shake her loose. But she had to keep speaking. She had to fix this. With a groan, she tried to stand.

“Stay down, tutor,” Astrid said through clenched teeth.

Felissa faced the commander. “Stop! In the name of the creator god and my buried mother's bones, do not touch her again!”

Commander Mongus flinched.

“You will listen,” said Felissa. She smiled, and the smile was kind. “You will do us that much courtesy, won't you? You will stop trying to resolve a problem by beating up a young girl? We just want a conversation. What harm could words do?”

I am their tutor
, Miri thought, and though pain shredded her chest, a warmth flowed from her toes up to her crown that felt something like pride and a lot like hope. The warmth cleared her mind, and she whispered to Sus, “I think you're right about Kaspar.”

“That's enough, commander,” High Commander Paldus said to Mongus. “And Kaspar, you should go at
once.” He gestured to two soldiers, who took Kaspar's arms.

“I didn't tattle, I swear,” Kaspar said to Sus over his shoulder as the soldiers walked him to the door. “I went to get a book and my tutor found me and I couldn't escape again until—”

“Oh!” Sus spoke rapidly, spilling the words out. “King Fader had a lot of daughters but only one son, Unker, who was older than Kaspar. Unker must have died since the book was printed. He had children, but Stora's law is the king's eldest son inherits, so when Fader died, the crown skipped over the daughters and the grandchildren and landed on Kaspar. You are the king of Stora!”

“I told you I was.” Kaspar stopped walking, and the soldiers escorting him glanced back at the high commander, hesitant, perhaps, to drag their king.

“They don't treat you like a king,” said Sus. “Probably because you're little.”

“I am not little!”

“Because you're
young
then. It's not your fault. They're a bunch of dishonorable bullies.”

Commander Mongus moved swiftly toward Sus, but Astrid stuck out her foot, tripping the commander. He landed knees-first on the wood floor. The violence jolted the other soldiers, who grabbed Astrid, Felissa, Britta,
and Sus, as if afraid they would attack. They left Miri slumped on the floor.