The Olive Conspiracy (15 page)

Rivka nodded. “You sure?”

Shulamit nodded back. “I want to be there
listening on the other side of the door if she says anything—me and
other witnesses. It’s just good sense, legally. I mean, you love
Isaac and I love Isaac, but… you know. Let’s play it
safe.”

Rivka smirked. “What, you’re not up for a night
of eavesdropping?”

Shulamit sighed wearily. “I seem to have picked
up the sniffles while we were out running around the countryside
these past few days. I need an early night in. Plus,” she added
shyly, “Aviva promised she’d tell me silly gossip from the
marketplace while I soak in the bath.”

“
I’m glad you’re looking after your
health, at least.” Rivka ate the last leaf roll in one bite, then
stood up to go find Isaac.

“
Thanks,” Shulamit called after
her. “Tell him we’ll pick it up in the morning. Tova won’t wake up
any nicer than she went to sleep, right?”

***

A thrash and a whimper roused Hadar from deep
sleep. “What’s the matter?”

“
Wha’? Wha’?” Halleli woke up
gasping.

It was still the middle of the night, and the
only light was a faintness from outside, slipping in through the
window high in the wall. Probably lanterns or torches for the
nighttime guards; the moon was still only a scrape. Hadar saw
Halleli in her mind more than with her eyes, and reached out for
her. “Were you having a nightmare?”

There was a pause, and then a plaintive
“Yes…”

“
You’re awake now, love. It’s all
gone.” Hadar pulled Halleli’s warmth against her, making sure each
curve felt cared for.

“
You burned up in the fire.”
Halleli’s mouth moved against Hadar’s collarbone as she talked,
leaving heated moisture from her breath. “Burned up with everything
else.”

“
Shh… of course I didn’t.” Hadar
felt tiny and enormous at the same time, too small to take away the
pain and big that she was
enough
anyway. She thought about
how Halleli was older, by three years, and how she still trusted
her enough to cry in her arms.

“
I know, but I
saw
it. I
knew it.”

“
Maybe I’m just hot,” Hadar
quipped, stroking her hair.

“
Heh.”

“
You’re shaking.”

“
I’m scared to go back to sleep,”
Halleli murmured. “Those images are waiting for me.”

“
Gotta put some new ones in your
head, then,” said Hadar. “Happy images.” She traced her fingers
down Halleli’s back gently. “We’ve got plenty of happy memories to
think about.”

“
I know… we’re very lucky. Even
after all this.” Halleli squirmed, unpinning her arms so she could
return the embrace. “Sometimes I almost can’t believe we’re the
same people we were when we were kids… that the cute girl at the
Lovely Valley general store who I used to flirt with is
you
.”

“
Every season you’d show up, for a
few days, with your parents,” said Hadar, massaging whichever tense
muscles were beneath her fingertips. “They’d bargain with my dad,
and you’d come find me.”

The year Hadar realized what Halleli’s
attentions were, she told her big sister, the one who was nice, the
one who
knew.
“That girl from the olive groves treats me
like a boy.” She knew the words were wrong, but she couldn’t
explain it any other way.

And her sister had smiled at her, and tucked
her hair behind one ear, and told her, “Then treat her like a
girl.”

Hadar did just that. The next time Halleli
appeared in the Valley with her parents, Hadar had asked if she’d
like to take a walk around the lake behind the general store. “Back
in a few minutes, Aba!” she called out, not listening for the
grumbling reply.

“
Do you remember those old stories
we used to tell each other?” Halleli’s mind ambled down the same
lakeside path. “Back during those walks we took.”

The two young women had amused each other by
making up new versions of familiar popular legends, new versions
with a simple but important change.

There was the story of the
Nobleman with
Eighteen Girlfriends
. His valet colluded with the most
lovestruck of all the ladies to bring his master to justice after
he murdered a different girl’s father. In Hadar and Halleli’s
version, the valet was a woman, and she and the lovestruck lady
held hands and pledged eternal love at the end.

Then there was the
Story of the Singing
Contest
, where a young man had to learn the rules of poetry
before the strict judges would accept his genius. The girls had
transformed him into a bright young woman instead, and she still
won the hand of one judge’s daughter along with the contest
prize.

Farming was hard work, and so was creating a
real life together, learning to weave their disparate personalities
and rough edges together into the real cloth of family. It had been
years since they’d made up stories like that. “Is that what you
need right now?” Hadar asked softly.

“
That would be perfect.”

“
Which one?” Hadar shifted,
brushing some of Halleli’s thick hair out of her own
face.

“
Eighteen girlfriends.”

The made-up versions were never the same twice.
Sometimes the lady valet was disguised as a man until the last
minute. Sometimes she was an ordinary lady in dresses. Sometimes it
wasn’t eighteen girlfriends but eighteen boyfriends, or a mix. The
nobleman in the story was a dreadful rascal, but sometimes he was
fun to watch until the inevitable downfall.

“
Once upon a time on the Sugar
Coast…” Hadar squeezed Halleli’s rear end, and Halleli responded by
opening her legs and clamping them around Hadar’s thigh. Thus
arranged, she listened quietly and eventually drifted back to
sleep.

Hadar was getting sticky from sweat, but she
didn’t want to unpeel her. Maybe, even in sleep, she still needed
to feel that Hadar was there.

Better to live and be a bit sweaty than die in
your sweetheart’s dreams, after all.

***

“
You cannot
possibly
imagine
how annoying it was.” Tova rolled her eyes and rested her hands in
her lap.

“
I understand,” Isaac lied, his
face kindly. “It sounds terrible.”

“
No, you don’t understand,” Tova
insisted.

“
May I refill your tea?”

“
Thank you.” Tova handed him her
cup, and he accepted it with his left hand. With his right, he
gestured at the teapot until it lifted itself off the table and
topped her off. “That’s a neat trick.”

Isaac smiled amiably. “Have to.” After
replacing the teapot on the table, he showed her what he
meant.

“
Ooh, that’s a nasty scar!” she
exclaimed. “You know, sometimes those doctors, they really have no
idea what they’re doing, any more than anyone else. There’s a man
down in Lovely Valley—”

Isaac was not used to meeting people who didn’t
ask about the scar and instead rushed headlong into their own
monologue, but since the whole point of this morning’s torturous
exercise was to get Tova to talk, talk too much, talk about
anything
until a confession came out—he knew his ego could
take the bruise.

He looked at her intently with his best
imitation of a compassionate stare, and half listened, all the
while worrying at her words as if they were food stuck in his
teeth. He was looking for weaknesses, for likely places to
introduce the Imbrians into the conversation, or perhaps the map
itself. To steer her there delicately was the object of the
game.

“
Then there was that awful animal
doctor who came and saw me when one of the cats was sick,” Tova
continued. “Can you believe he told me I had too many cats? He said
that’s
why she was doing so poorly. Judgmental assbag. I
told him as much. Shouted him into the street. Other people might
want to know about his lack of qualifications. Course, he had to
get up an attitude about our little difference of opinion. Took it
personal and badmouthed me, and now none of his clients will buy my
eggs.”

Only Rivka would have noticed the small blue
fire that now flared from Isaac’s eyes. He knew his ‘in.’ Inside,
he was running around the room high-fiving himself. Outwardly, he
took a sip of his own tea, swallowed, then inhaled its grassy,
green flavor for a moment as he aimed his tongue. “That must feel
awful. That’s your livelihood! Don’t they remember that your crop
failed?”

“
They remember—they just don’t
care.” Tova set her teacup down and rubbed a nervous finger around
the lip.

“
Wait ’til it happens to them,”
Isaac said calmly. The dragon retreated farther into the cave, his
glinting eyes leaving the illusion of gold coins deep
within.

Tova’s face brightened. “Right? I mean, it
really hurts. It’s not just those folks, but also my
neighbors”—every one of which she’d already told Isaac some story
about having antagonized—“and the farmers from the far side of the
lake, and the traders’ families too. Not that you can really trust
those traders. One of them had a pretty little jug she’d picked up
in City of Lakes, and she was holding it for me, but I didn’t have
the money right when she wanted it, so it went to somebody else.
Told
her
which way the sky was up! Told other people, too,
so they’d know what kind of deals she made.”

Back to the topic…
Isaac’s nostrils
flared, and he swallowed more tea. “It wasn’t your fault that you
didn’t have the money, because of what happened to your
crop.”

“
Ex
actly
.” Tova punctuated
the syllables with her finger. “She should have understood. They
all
should have understood.” She sat back in her seat and
folded her arms across her chest.

“
Someone should make them
understand.” He said it as a flippant aside.

Tova smirked. “Well, that’s coming.”

Isaac’s pinky finger twitched, the slightest of
movements. Outside the door somewhere, the queen, who was listening
in with Rivka and Tivon as witnesses, would feel her earlobe tugged
slightly as his magic moved her earring. He wanted to make sure she
was listening. “Someday, of course, yes,” he said out
loud.

“
Oh, I don’t mean someday,” said
Tova. “I mean this season. You’ll see. And then we’ll all be equal
again.”

Yes, except they would have helped you like
they help everyone else if you weren’t so full of meanness.
“Why? What happens this season?”

“
Bugs.” Tova waved her fingers in
the air. “Put us
all
back to point zero,
and
show
them what it feels like.”

Isaac put on his best skeptical face, slightly
condescending. “What, you have, you have chicken eggs that out of
hatch these bugs?” He made a motion with his left hand like an egg
cracking open, and smiled so that his words sounded like he liked
her but didn’t believe her.

“
Of course not, silly! No, I just
wound up on the good side of a deal. Got money out of it too,” said
Tova. “The bugs are coming down from the olive groves. I just had
to show ’em how to get there.”

“
Oh, was that what the map was,
then?” asked Isaac. “We didn’t know.”

Tova nodded. “Can’t wait to see the looks on
their faces.”

“
Indeed. It’s good to hear you
still had people who would do right by you, after so many in the
Valley,” said Isaac.

“
They seemed nice enough, I
guess.”

“
Local boys? Boys from the Valley?”
Isaac loved getting facts by contradicting the answer he thought
likely.

Tova shook her head. “No, not even Perachi.
Hey—why do you want to know all this? Am I in trouble?”

Shit.
“Just making conversation,” he
answered, but it was too late. The frantic fear response in his
subject had taken over.

“
Knew you’d find something to pick
apart,” Tova said in a puff of dismissal. “Can’t just let a woman
be. Bet you think I have too many cats too.”

“
I didn’t say—”

“
Let me tell you, Mr. Too Tall, I’m
not saying another word about that map or those bugs. I’m being
held here against my will. You brought me here under false
pretenses—”

“
Well, yes,” Isaac admitted, “but
you’re a threat to the national economy, and I don’t even think you
realize what you did.” He stood up. “Mighty One!
Malkeleh!
”

The door opened, and Shulamit appeared in the
doorway with Rivka and Tivon behind her.

Said Isaac to them, “I got as far as I got.
She’s all yours.”

14. A Royal Pain in the
Throat

The sunlight of the next morning streamed
through Shulamit’s throne room from the open door at the far end.
She perched in the ornately carved wooden chair, sitting against
more cushions than usual, her hands holding what was already her
second cup of herbal tea with honey and lemon of the day.
Yesterday, she’d gone through about twenty.