Whispered Magics (6 page)

Kimet shook her head.
Leave
that for the wizard
, was what the King actually shouted, after a jovial
laugh. Kimet remembered hearing that many times, when she had throne room duty.
Whether it was a famine in River Valley, or a squabble between the fishers
guild and the boatwrights, the King genially called for the Wizard to fix it,
and he’d go back to his games or his hunting. Kimet had been right there when
the official news came from the returning escort that King Olivan’s son wished
to break the marriage alliance. The King had laughed before calling out to the
Master Wizard,
Go find Olivan and turn
his royal court into frogs.

He’d been joking. But the Queen had added in a sharp, cruel
voice,
And send the army to burn their
border towns. That’ll teach them to insult our daughter!
She’d laughed, the
King had shrugged and laughed, as he always did after the Queen’s words, and
the court also laughed. And that’s how the war declaration came to be.

“Ruling,” Zarja said, her eyes narrowed as thin as her lips.
“So you think Master Elcan wanted to be King all along?”

Kimet shook her head again. “I don’t know what he wanted, or
wants now. I didn’t know about that.” She pointed at the window. “But it seemed
to me, when I had duty, well, he was doing the real ruling. Then came this
order to go to war.”

Zarja flushed again. “I wonder what this conversation would be
like if you were the Princess and I the page.”

Kimet was silent.

“Or,” sardonically, “the Master Cook’s son.”

“I don’t know,” Kimet said slowly.

“Sure you do,” Zarja retorted, though her voice still
trembled, and tears gleamed along her lower eyelids. “You are a page-princess
now. For you can get me killed in a heartbeat, by just giving a single shout
out that window.
Zarja’s here!
What
kind of reward do you think you’ll get? Rank? Gold? You say you’re kin to the
Wizard; maybe he’ll crown you as Princess.”

Kimet said in a low voice, “Don’t want to be any princess.”

Zarja gave her bitter, angry laugh. “Because I’m eeeee-vil?”

Kimet was on sure ground now. “Because it’s boring,” she said.
“I’d like the fancy clothes, but I wouldn’t like sitting around all day with
those false-faced noble girls who smile when you can see them, but as soon as
your back is turned they start the whispering.”

Zarja jerked upright. “They whispered about me?”

“All the time.”

“What did they say?”

Kimet got that prickly feeling when you know you are in
trouble, and she wished she hadn’t spoken. This conversation would have been
easier with the angry, arrogant Zarja, but this tearstained face, puckered in
confusion, was harder to address. “That you’re mean,” she said finally, leaving
out all the rest about her looks, taste, and lack of success with Prince Emik.
“Mean and . . . not very smart, despite all those tutors.”

“Stupid,” Princess Zarja stated wryly. “Stupid and what else?
Ugly, of course.”

To avoid having to answer, Kimet returned to the original
subject. “Second reason I don’t want to be a princess, or a queen, is that it’s
dangerous. You wake up with a bellyache or you get angry with someone, throw
out an order, and people die.”

Zarja was silent.

Kimet said, “Here’s another reason why I wouldn’t want to
become the Princess. The Master Wizard once said that, just like the rest of
us, kings and queens come and go. If they aren’t respected, they’re forgotten,
except when children have to recite long strings of rulers for their tutors.
What I want to do—restore tapestries—well, look.” She turned to the table, and
carefully lifted a corner of the tapestry, where an embroidered patch, long
faded, could just be made out. “A thousand years ago this was woven by the
hands of Ulda Nim. Her name is right there on the old writing, her work, right
here. And if I get my way and can repair this one, a thousand years from today,
if someone lifts this corner, there will be another patch above that one,
saying ‘This tapestry was restored by the hands of Kimet Darjabee.’ Ulda Nim
will be remembered for two thousand years, and I for one.”

Below the tower a man hollered, “The Princess is still
missing! Search the grounds! A reward for whoever finds her and brings her to
the Wizard!”

Zarja lifted her gaze to meet Kimet’s. “My mother always told
me I was ugly,” the Princess whispered. “She said I had to make myself feared.
If you are beautiful, people love you, but then you have to give them gifts to
keep their love as you age, and jolly them, and eventually give in. If they
fear you, no one ever dares to demand gifts, or place. They obey you and
respect you.”

Obeyed and hated,
Kimet thought. She didn’t say the words aloud. But she saw Zarja’s acute gaze,
and suspected the Princess knew it anyway.

Zarja gave her a crooked almost-smile. “It’s beginning to sound
like your Master Cook’s son was listening to my mother and father, isn’t it?”

Kimet shrugged, feeling very awkward.

Zarja rose up and paced about the room. Kimet watched, her gut
growling, her head aching. But she waited, though right then she could not have
said why.

Finally Zarja looked up. “What do
you
think . . . Kimet? Are you going to shout out that window?”

Kimet sighed, wishing she’d walked out of this chamber and
left the Princess behind. Of course she could leave now. There was no one to
stop her. She knew the back ways. She could turn her back on the Princess,
slink down the servant halls, and pretend nothing had ever happened. Act
surprised when she saw the other pages and someone mentioned the statues. Let
life return to normal.

Except it wasn’t going to return to normal. For bad or good,
everything had changed. She still did not know how. The Master Wizard could be
busy making statues of all the nobles, or all the stewards. It was even
conceivable he would make a statue of a page who had dared to hide a Princess.

Meanwhile right in front of her were those eyes, not angry or
arrogant. The Princess had asked her a question, because she wanted, perhaps
for the first time, to hear what a page might say.

Not just a page. She had used her name.

“No,” she said. “I won’t.”

Silence. Zarja said slowly, “I was going to ask what you were
going to demand, but it doesn’t look like I have anything to give you. Does
it?”

Kimet touched the tapestry. “This is what I want. What I
always wanted.”

Another long silence. From outside a faint cry, “She’s not in
the wood!”

“Queens,” Zarja said in a low voice, “in all our royal records
are expected to risk others’ lives. But not in the songs, the Master Wizard
said once, and I laughed at him about peasant songs.”

Kimet waited, her fingers smoothing the tapestry. Whatever
else was going on, at least it seemed she would be safe. She would get what she
wanted.

Zarja jumped up, and gazed down at the figures in the tapestry
in their old-fashioned clothes. “Lives. I never thought it might be my own. But
it should be, shouldn’t it, if I am the Queen, even for one day?”

She got to her feet, marched to the door, and yanked it open,
then glanced over her shoulder.

For the last time the two stared at one another. Princess
Zarja shook out her skirts, smoothed her hair with trembling fingers, then gave
an odd, crackling laugh that betrayed far more pain than humor. The sun in the
window shone full on her red nose, her puffy eyes, her dust-spattered dressing
gown, and disarrayed hair. “I believe—if he gives me the chance to speak—I’ll
ask him to put me in the stable with the Master Cook’s son. Maybe I’ll learn
what I wouldn’t learn in the royal rooms.”

Kimet had always admired the Princess’s clothes, her
possessions, the ease of her life. Now for the first time, she admired the girl
inside them.

Yes, things had changed. For bad or good Kimet did not know,
nor could she predict. The Wizard might turn them both into statues, or he
might listen, but Kimet had decided her own first step in this new life, and it
seemed right and true.

“If he does, I’ll come and help you,” she promised.

And she held out her hand.

Zarja took it.

Together they walked down the stairs.

“Here comes the nerd!”

“This ought to be
really
cool . . .
Not!”

The whispers were just loud enough for every kid in the class
to hear.

I fumed, my ears burning as my little brother walked up the
row, his skinny shoulders hunched and his glasses sliding down his nose.

The teacher beamed at him. “I’ve been looking forward to your
report, Fredric.” Of course she had. The teachers always did, ever since they
skipped him two years into my grade. But they never seemed to realize that the
more they talked about Fred’s brains, the more some of the other kids picked on
him.

Fred gave the teacher a pained look, then cleared his throat.
“My research report,” he said, “is on UFOs.”

“Yeah, because he’s an alien!” Jason M. snickered.

“Class,” the teacher said, frowning around. “Each one of us
deserves the same consideration.”

Watching Jason for approval, Ashley G. made snoring noises,
and of course her best pals giggled obediently. Fred’s shoulders hitched up
another notch, and I was so mad my ears not only burned, they itched.

But Fred adjusted his glasses, then started. “My observations
were made over a period of three weeks,” he said. “I made three sightings, each
time at about eleven p.m. The first one was an accident. I got up at eleven to
get a drink of water, and when I looked out my window, I saw was a roundish
disk of light moving in the eastern part of the sky—”

“Yeah, just like a frisbee,” Jason whispered behind his hand.

Of course several boys laughed like maniacs.

“Class,” the teacher said. “Continue, Fred. This is most
interesting.”

“So I’ve stayed up until eleven every night since. My second
observation was made exactly one week later. This time I didn’t turn on my
bedroom light, and I had my camera ready. The UFO dropped through the clouds.
It must have been about a hundred feet wide, maybe bigger, and it had green
running lights—”

“Just like a blimp,” Ashley muttered, and again came some
laughs, though I could tell some of the kids were interested in spite of
themselves.

“I snapped a picture, but the flash might have alerted it, and
the UFO rose into the clouds and vanished before I could get another shot,”
Fred said. “It’s smeared because the flash holds the aperture open longer, and
my hand jiggled,” he added apologetically, and held up a blown-up photo. “I
cleaned it up best I could.”

Not much of anything could be seen in it, which caused the
class to laugh again.

“I think I see what might be your running lights in this
corner,” the teacher said kindly, touching the photo.

Unfortunately, that part of the photo looked just like the
street lamps around the corner from our apartment, and the class obviously
thought so, too, because there were more snickers this time.

I bunched my hair over my ears, feeling like they’d be
steaming any minute.

“And my last sighting was a week ago,” Fred said. “It was too
foggy to get a photo, but I saw the outline of the ship, and the lights. It
stayed in the sky exactly two minutes and fourteen seconds, then moved up and
to the east. “

“And you were mysteriously hypnotized so you couldn’t call
911,” Kyler P. sneered.

This time the class roared.

Fred dropped his report on his desk, and shoved his glasses
back up his nose. “Why would I call 911?” he retorted. “All they’d do is make
noise with their sirens and loudspeakers—”

“And arrest you for prank calls,” Demi F. said prissily.

“That will do, class,” the teacher said. “Thank you, Fredric.
That was quite interesting. Now, let’s hear from Jason M.”

Jason got up and bored on about basketball statistics, and
most of the boys ooohed like it was a Presidential report straight from the
White House.

Then it was time for recess. Fred followed the boys out.

Marissa and Kelly, my two best friends, were waiting at the
door for me. “Want to grab a volleyball court?” Kelly asked.

“Not just yet,” I said. “I want to make sure Fred is okay.”

Marissa squinted toward the field as we walked down the hall.
“I don’t see the boys,” she said. “Anyway, I thought Fred’s report was kind of
cute. Did he make all that up?”

“Not Fred,” I said. “Whatever he saw, he believes it was the
real deal.”

“Did you see it, too?” Marissa asked.

I shook my head. “None of us knew what he was working on. He
told Uncle David and Aunt Pearl that it was a surprise, that he was conducting
an investigation completely on his own.”

Kelly nodded. “Your aunt would like that, her nephew following
in her footsteps. But why UFOs?”

“Uh oh,” Marissa breathed, and I swung around to look.

Jason and three of his buds, plus Ashley and two girls known
for being mean, had backed Fred up against the fence. I went straight over.

“ . . . teacher’s pet,” Jason was saying.
“You didn’t even do a real report. Just made it up.”

“I did not!” Fred yelled, his voice squeaking.

“You did too, geek. Go on, admit it,” Jason said, shoving Fred
in the arm.

Since Jason is six inches taller than anyone in the class and
a lot heavier as well, it didn’t take much to make Fred stagger back. Jason’s
friends laughed nastily, and then Jason saw me.

“So, here comes big sister to protect the little creep,” he
whined. “I suppose you saw Freddie-frog-eyes’ alien spaceships, Lisa?”

“If he says he saw ’em, he saw ’em,” I said. “Now back off.”

“Oooh, she’s sooo-ooo tough,” Jason said, hands on hips.
“Gonna get some leather boots and a motorcycle?”