O
ver the next few days, Rin saw little of Razo and Dasha, and had the extraordinarily odd experience of spending most of her days under a roof. Waiting women served the queen, but Rin only glimpsed Queen Anidori coming and going, while she had her fill of the other women.
They seemed competent, though they spent a tremendous amount of time talking before performing any duty, asking another’s opinion how to do this or that, or ought they do this instead? And did anyone else catch a gander of that new chamber minister with the broad shoulders? And wouldn’t another night of music in the grand chamber be just the thing?
Rin watched and listened, and found ways to be useful.
“Look at that spot! She’ll never complain, but I know this is Her Majesty’s favorite dress.”
Rin took the dress back to the laundry-mistress.
“Tomorrow’s the queen’s riding day, and that stable-master hasn’t replaced the left stirrup yet, I’ll wager.”
Rin went to the stables and watched the stablehands at work, and when no one noticed her, she fixed the stirrup herself.
“Where’s that button? I swear I had it right here. Look at that, just about to sew on a new button and it up and walks away.”
In Rin’s vast experience as an aunt, no object ever walked away but it had help from a child. She slipped into the adjoining nursery, where the queen’s son, Tusken, played with pale wooden blocks. He had a mass of wavy fair hair tumbling around his face, and cheeks so round and kissable they seemed like peaches ripe for plucking.
“Hello, Tusken,” she whispered, kneeling beside the prince and kissing his cheeks a few times because she could not help it. He was nearly two years old but still wonderfully chubby, and her heart strained for her little ones back in the Forest.
She held up both of her hands. “How many hands do I have? Let’s count. One, two. Now let’s count yours.”
He held up his hands and no button fell out, but he kept his mouth curiously shut.
“Good boy. Now let’s count teeth.”
She opened wide her mouth, and he did the same. Inside his cheek, something gleamed. She scooped it out with her finger.
“Oh dear, you could choke on that. Buttons aren’t food, lamby. We only put food in our mouths.”
She helped him stack his blocks and cheered when he knocked them down. Then she returned to the other ladies, placing the button on the table.
“Hello, there it is! Where’d you find it, Rin? Eww . . . why is it wet?”
Rin decided she’d keep a closer eye on Tusken.
Summer was lingering out of doors, the days long and sweet as if sucking on a honey stick. Rin watched it through a glass pane. She was continually flinging open windows, leaning out, smelling the air that tingled her nose with scents of flowers and horses. She longed to be the one to escort Tusken on his daily romps in the garden, but she was being especially cautious.
Don’t ask for anything, make no demands,
keep the hard words inside.
Finally one of the others suggested it, a pale girl named Janissa who sported scratches and an angry welt across her cheek from chasing Tusken through shrubbery.
Although Rin had taken charge of a dozen children at a time, this one little boy felt as important as a hundred. She took Tusken’s hand and led him past staring servants and observant sentries with an apprehension that made her squeeze her eyes shut.
It was a relief to be in the gardens, crawling through bushes, making “soup” in a castoff helmet with water, flowers, dirt, and leaves. The few trees were squat and ornamental, but where the gardens merged into the stable yard, a massive elm held court, looking as out of place as a roughly clad giant would in the palace’s throne room.
Stablehands came and went, soldiers and pages, and no one slowed to touch the tree or even look up to admire its lush crown.
They must not need trees
, she thought.
They must not feel any
more from a tree than from dead wood.
She’d wondered the same about her own family in the Forest, but now it seemed true. People would not be willing to live in a city if they needed trees as Rin did. As she had.
Rin accompanied Tusken outside all week, and on the seventh day at last she dared. She brought Tusken to the elm, where he sat in its twisted roots, breaking sticks into tiny pieces.
Rin stepped closer.
Maybe it’s only the trees of home, maybe
they’re what’s wrong and I’m all right . . .
She pressed her cheek to the ropy bark and closed her eyes. Trembling, she opened herself inside, as if she were listening hard, though not with her ears.
Please
, she thought, hoping for a trickle of that familiar peace to work inside her.
Please.
She gasped and flung herself away, filled with a creeping nausea that pressed against her throat and made her forehead sweat.
Tusken hopped to her, and she pulled him close.
“It’s not the trees,” she whispered, though he would not understand. “It’s me, Tusken. What can I do about that?”
“Tick,” he said, waving a stick near her face. “Tick. See tick?”
“It is a beautiful stick.”
Tusken nodded.
Rin did not sleep well that night. Early, before the waiting women awoke, Rin crept out into the dark blue morning and ran as if from death itself. The air tore out of her lungs, her feet hammered on the ground. There was no running away here, with a wall enclosing the gardens and stables, and sentries by the gates. No illusion that she could keep on going until she ceased to be. But at least while she moved, the piercing disquiet did not undo her.
Rin washed her face and arms in a bird bath and sneaked in just as the others began to stretch and awaken.
That afternoon, Cilie, the fifth waiting woman, returned from her visit home and declared she was nearly expiring from eagerness to have some time alone with Tusken.
“I’m happy to keep taking him out myself,” Rin said.
Cilie sat before a mirror, redoing the complicated coil of her hair, which was long and brown and lush, the most striking feature of her otherwise plain appearance.
“Let her do it, Cilie,” said Janissa. “He seems to like her. She’s had more success than the rest of us.”
“That won’t last,” said Cilie. Her eyes were small and a little close together, reminding Rin of a pig. “There’s no pleasing the little prince, spoiled to the bones he is.”
Rin very much wanted to say, “There’s something in you I don’t like. Not a bit. You have the look of a dog who’s eaten its master’s meal and is ready to bolt. And you have pig eyes. So don’t you complain about Tusken in my hearing.” But she stuffed the words inside and did not argue, taking Tusken by the hand without waiting for permission.
In the gardens that day, Rin and Tusken discovered fat snails, a rainwater-filled hollow teeming with water insects, and once, Cilie crouching behind a shrub.
Rin strode right up, her fist on her hip, a mannerism that was all Ma. Cilie startled and ran off. Some time later, she spotted Cilie by the stables, arguing with a man Rin did not know.
“Something there I don’t like . . . ,” Rin muttered.
The next day Cilie was waiting for Rin beyond the arch that led to the flower garden, a spot hidden both from the nearest sentries and the gardeners working beyond in the sun. She smoothed her glossy brown hair away from her forehead, making sure every hair was in place.
“It is my turn to watch Tusken. I love him and miss him desperately after so much time away.”
Cilie did want to be with Tusken, but not because she loved him. There was some other purpose in those pig eyes that Rin could not read. Rin tried to walk around her.
Cilie grabbed her arm. “You’re not clever enough to care for this boy. The queen doesn’t trust you. She wants me to take him from now on.”
Rin was afraid to speak with all the hot anger rising to her throat. She pulled her arm free, gripped Tusken’s hand, and started away, saying, “Well, Tusk, shall we hunt frogs today?”
Cilie darted in front of Rin and shoved her hard in the chest. Rin fell back, hitting the flagstones. Cilie tried to pick up Tusken, but he spun away in an oblivious dance. Rin scrambled to her feet, putting herself between Cilie and the boy. She held up her hands in fists and glared. Razo had taught her how to throw a punch. He’d let her practice on his flattened palms, and she’d laughed so hard she’d gotten the hiccups. But she had never actually hit anyone. Now, facing Cilie, her fists trembled with eagerness. Even more insistent were the words building inside her like a mouthful of stones.
“Leave him alone.” Rin was as startled by her words as Cilie seemed. Telling others what to do was her ma’s business. Shame burned in Rin’s cheeks, but she did not apologize or turn away.
Cilie took a step back. “How dare—”
“I see you.” The passion in her words made Rin feel warm and bright as the sun. “No one else does, but I do. I see you’re hiding something. And if you hurt Tusken, I’ll kill you.”
Cilie stumbled a few more steps back. Rin could see she believed the threat but still did not flee, her own intent greater than her fear. So what was Cilie’s intent? Could she truly mean Tusken harm?
Yes.
Now that Rin looked, she could see that clearly in Cilie’s face. Secrets, dark designs, murderous thoughts, and desperation. And all of it focused on Tusken.
Rin’s anger washed away as quickly as it had flamed to life, replaced by clammy fear. She swooped at the boy, flinging him into her arms, and hurried into the garden. Footsteps slapped behind her, and Rin ran faster, casting her gaze around for safety.
“Finn!” she called to a large soldier with dark, longish hair, one of Razo’s closest friends and a fellow Forest born.
Finn left his group of soldiers, his eyes darting to Tusken’s face, then around for signs of an enemy. His steps quickened into a run. “What’s happened?”
Rin glanced back—Cilie was already gone. She took a breath and discovered she was trembling so hard she could no longer hold Tusken and handed him over to Finn. What had that woman been up to? Perhaps nothing serious, perhaps Rin had overreacted. But she still itched with fear.
And it was not just the altercation that set her feeling like a bag of chattering bones—it was speaking those words. She could feel them in her head still, rolling around, clanging into her thoughts.
Leave him alone. I’ll kill you.
In truth, Rin could not bear to finish off a pigeon she’d downed with her sling, but the threat had felt so real.
And she felt bad. Wrong. Sick with herself. Certain that if her ma had heard her speak those words, she would have turned her back. Rin had sworn to herself that she would never speak like that again, not as she had to Nordra all those years ago. Living in the city was dangerous—so many people, so many chances to slip up.
After a few moments in patient silence, Finn asked, “Do you want me to stay with you?”
Rin nodded, got on her knees and hugged Tusken, whispering to him of all the spectacular insects they were going to find today. Tusken patted the top of her head and said, “Win,” finding the
w
sound in her name. Then, “Finn. Win, Finn, Win, Finn,” marching around to the beat of his rhyme.
Finn stayed by them all afternoon. She’d always felt a certain kinship with the large soldier, who wasted no words, and once her trembling subsided, she found it easy to reflect Finn’s quiet nature.
When they were ready to go in to dinner, Finn escorted them to the queen’s antechamber.
“Do you want me to stay?” he asked.
Rin shook her head. “No, I’ll be all right. Thanks, Finn. Thank you.”
Cilie was inside, whispering angrily with two of the waiting women. Rin overhead a few words: “. . . completely crazy . . . attacked me . . . Tusken shouldn’t . . .”
Rin passed them without a second glance, taking Tusken into the nursery.
She was teaching Tusken a song when the queen appeared in the doorway, tall and slender, her yellow hair braided and hanging in a simple loop.
“Mama!” Tusken yelled and waddled to her. She picked him up and swung him around.
“Hello, my most precious. Oh, it’s good to see you. I was so busy this week, but our visitors left today and now I’m all yours.”
“Mama busy.”
“That’s true, but no more. Were you playing with Rin?”
“Pway Win,” Tusken said, tugging on the blue stone necklace at his mother’s throat.
Rin closed the door between the nursery and the antechamber. In the four weeks since she’d come to the palace, she had never spoken to the queen, and it took a few moments to muster the courage. She kept her eyes on Tusken’s dangling bare feet so she would not lose her nerve.
“I don’t trust Cilie,” Rin said in a small, shaky voice.
There was a pause before the queen replied. “And you think I shouldn’t trust her either?”
Rin was still anxious from her words of demand that morning, quaking inside like aspen leaves in a windstorm.
Be careful
, she shouted at herself.
She took another breath. “I don’t trust Cilie with Tusken.”
The queen’s arms tightened around her son. “Do you know anything specific? Has she made threats or hurt him?”
“No, I don’t know anything. She’s . . . I’m sorry.” Rin almost turned and left then, sure she was behaving as no waiting woman should. But she remembered the look in Cilie’s close eyes and summoned more courage. “She was acting oddly, insisting she be with Tusken. And something in her . . . expression . . . made me not trust her.”
“Do you think she plans to hurt him?”
Rin shrugged helplessly. “I don’t know anything, but I feel afraid for him.”
The queen studied Rin’s face. “Thank you, Rin. I’ll take your warning very seriously. If you discover or even suspect anything else, please come to me.”
Rin believed her. Everything in this woman, every part of her face, every movement of her hands, spoke of truth. Rin watched the queen as she spoke to Tusken, instinctively positioning her own body in a similar attitude, feeling how much more confident she felt with her shoulders pressed down and back like that, how naturally her left arm hung at her side, how pleasant her lips felt in the attitude of almost smiling.