Mearsies Heili Bounces Back (12 page)

The window only had two bars in it. A grownup would have a
tough time getting through, but I squeezed by, though the bars scraped my ears
when I turned my head sideways.

When I popped out, I found myself on a ledge.

The sun had gone down by then, and darkness was falling.
Afraid that my white shirt would catch attention I spread my black hair around
me as best I could, then eased along the ledge.

I was on a tower, I discovered. It was round, and the top
part was narrower, the wall less thick than below, which created the ledge.
When I felt my way along, I found another window and peeked in. This window had
been built at the same level as the other one on the outside, but the room
inside was much higher: the window looked in at floor level, revealing a lit
chamber with no people.

I was going to spring to the door when I realized I’d
fumbled into a mage’s magic chamber! I recognized that weird kind of
lightning-feel to the air and some of the smells of a room where magic’s been
done. There were books, but a quick glance at spines, and at the words on the
open one, revealed some lingo I didn’t know.

Next to the open book sat vials and some faintly glimmering
stones.

The stones gave off a greenish light that gave me the
creeps, so I didn’t touch them.

But a clear glass vial full of blue liquid caught my eye,
and I reached out a tentative finger to touch it. Nothing happened. I
unstoppered the vial—and a smell I will never forget wafted out.

Shrinking fluid!

I looked at the door, wondering if I could sneak out and
find the others. But as I neared, I spied a faint orangish glimmer on the
latch: a magic ward. A nasty one, judging from the strength of the glitter.

So I returned to the table. I didn’t touch the other
vials—didn’t trust them—but the two blues ones got put into the pocket of my
skirt, then back I went again into the same room where they had put me.

I pulled down my vest-rope and tied it around my waist, then
lay down on the stone floor, since there was nothing else to do.

Not long after that, the door clanked open. In clomped a
tough-looking, jowly older guy. He looked like a mean school principal or one
of those guys who thinks he can boss everyone else around. He said in very
accented Mearsiean, “There are too many suspicious circumstances attached to
you and your group. You will be sent to the capital, where they will decide
what to do with you.”

“Me?” I said, because in Mearsiean, ‘you’ singular is not
the same as ‘you’ plural—at least, in our Mearsiean.

“Yes. The rest of them will remain here, and if we cannot
put them to use, they will be ...” I didn’t understand the word, sounded like
‘dispelled’—that means, killed.

I didn’t want to wait around to find out.

“When?” I asked, trying not to let him see how scared I was.

“Morning, we will have an escort assigned, since we have no
transfer tokens left, and the mage is away.”

He slammed the door, and locked it from the outside.

Since it was dark, now was the time to act.

I took out the vial, and dropped some on my head.

The feeling of shrinking was horrible. What happens is, your
essence rearranges, and the air and water that makes us what we are kind of
goes away. So it feels like a giant hand squooshing you into a doll-sized shape.
The last dose was difficult because the vial had become the size of a barrel. I
scooped out the sludge and smeared it over my head, but at least it vanished,
kind of like that dry ice stuff.

This mage was better than Kwenz, or had better books,
because my clothes shrank as well. I kept shrinking until I knew I could fit
under the door.

Then the problem was, how to get the vials out?

Roll ’em.

So I got the vials and myself under the door, and then came
the fun of bumping them down the stone steps. Blech, that seemed to take
forever before I reached the landing outside the next room down. But when I got
under the door, I made out vague kid-sized shapes.

“Gwen?” I screeched the name of the most familiar one. “GWEN!”

“Say, Dhana, did you hear something?”

“I think it sounded like—is that you, CJ?”

“By cracky! She’s gone and shrunk!” Klutz cackled.

Reunion—and pretty soon the gang was carefully measuring
drops on one another until everyone was shrunk. It used up most of the stuff in
the bottle, but it worked.

Then came the long toil to get out of the tower. Now,
suddenly, the place was as big as a kingdom. But at least the stable was right
next to the room in which they’d questioned Autumn. Puddlenose said that if we
could get into the dispatch bag of whoever was taking messages, since they
didn’t have transfer tokens, then that would be our way out.

Puddlenose and Seshe, the tallest, rolled the vials after
us.

Thank goodness they took the saddle down and stuck it over a
wooden thingie while they got the horse readied with its blanket and belly band
and so forth. During that time, we scrambled up the wood, using nicks and
gouges as handholds, and by pushing and pulling, got ourselves and the vials
into the big bag—alongside a delicious-smelling lunch wrapped in some kind of
waxy cloth.

Sherry burrowed into that cloth and brought out some
sandwich and cheese. The sandwich was kind of pretzely, and very coarse as we
were so small, but all was tasty, and very welcome to our empty guts.

Then the rider showed up, and I won’t describe the next bit.
I’ve always hated roller coasters.

We flattened ourselves against the canvas of the bag when
the rider got his lunch. Then the fellow stopped to change horses, and we
managed to get out in the confusion.

After a mile-long trek across the stable, we made our way
into the yard of the castle where he’d stopped. It was early morning, and the
smell of fresh baking biscuits just about made us go nuts! But Klutz and Id,
old hands at sneaking, figured out how to pinch us some eats. So we ended up
under a table in some store room, and after we ate, we curled up and slept.

I woke when my body started feeling that kind of itch when
you just have to stretch. The spell was wearing off! I discovered my arms and
legs all tangled with those of the other kids, just like when we first got
transferred.

We crawled out from under the table, all of us incredibly
thirsty, but there was a barrel of rain water just under the window, with a
spout worked from the roof to inside, and the reassuring glow of a cleaning
spell round the rim. We each drank a couple dippers full. The storeroom was lit
by a tiny window. There was fruit in baskets, and nuts, along with all kinds of
other foods.

We helped ourselves to some fruit and nuts, and half of a
drying cake someone had set on a shelf.

When we were done, we eased out through the window, having
to boost and pull each other. Then away.

o0o

After a couple of rides on a hay wagon and another wagon
transporting barrels that sloshed a little, we ended up in a good sized trade
town. Again we went from inn to inn, and at one, Autumn hit what she thought
was gold: someone had seen a pair of kids somewhat like her description, who
sang as they traveled.

It would turn out to be a wild goose chase, but that was way
later. The thing is, Autumn said she was heading south, but first she got us
work waiting tables so we could earn a meal.

“It’s strawberry season,” she explained to us, after a talk
with a local. “And the growers here usually hire kids for the picking. You can
earn good money that way—just be out in front right after dawn, when they come
by with the hiring wagons.”

So that was what we did. It was boring work, and your back
ached in a short time, but we blabbed and sang as we worked. Since none of the
other kids understood us, we talked over everything we’d done. Everything we
learned. Which I summed up when we broke for the lunch they brought us.

“Okay, from now on, we don’t say who we are, especially if
clods in uniforms bumble around and grab us. No off-world, no princesses!” I
took my crown off, realized I had nowhere to put it, so I replaced it, and
spread some of my hair over it as much as I could.

“And no Mearsiean,” Seshe said. “I wonder if that might be
part of the problem: Mearsies Heili.”

“Hoo yeah.” Puddlenose whistled.

“Got it. So, my name from now on is Klodilla.”

“Clompetta,” Sherry said promptly.

“Splatnik,” Gwen said.

“By cracky! I think I’ll be Byekrakee,” Klutz said,
laughing.

“I already got an insult name,” Puddlenose mourned.

“Then you can be Montmorency,” I suggested. “Or Ignatz, or
Theodophilus.”

“Those are worse than insults.”

“I’ll be Grunch,” Id finally said, with an air of tasting a
new soup.

“Then I want to be Grackle,” Sherry said.

“Splatoon!”

“Footleodion!”

The names kept us busy until our arms were about to fall
off—then the wagon came to pick us up, at last.

The person to whom we’d brought our baskets had kept track,
and everyone got paid according to how many they got, and how good the berries
were. We pooled our earnings, then followed a lot of the other kids away.
Turned out that there was a kind of kid way station on the outskirts of town,
in an old barn. Leftover dinner from the local inn was brought out, and since
there was plenty for everyone, we saved our cash.

So. We still had to get back home, of course, and we had no
idea where we were—and even if the people told us, we still wouldn’t know where
it was. I mean, if you find yourself in Timbucktoo and they tell you the next
town is Glockenspiel, so what? That’s two unknown places. The only thing we
were sure of, we had to go north to reach the sea.

We hoped we’d gotten away from those bad guys, but if we saw
them, we’d take another direction.

Who wants to read a description of slogging along, and
looking at scenery? We did see a couple of castles in the distance, but on this
world, there were pretty much always castles of some sort to be found. The
countryside gradually got more hilly, with patches of woods, which made Dhana
smile, because that meant water. The weather was hot and clear, which was fine
for traveling, but you got sweaty and thirsty fast.

We sang all the songs we knew, and made up more, and I
(being me) kept stewing about that totally flubbed contest, until one time,
when Puddlenose, Klutz, and Id were ahead, gabbling about something or other, I
grinched, “Is it just me, or is that really, really
mean
? When that girl
said if we were half as funny as we thought we were.”

Seshe said, “
I
thought we were funny. And people
seemed to be listening, so I thought they liked it, too.”

“Maybe they were listening because they wanted to make fun,”
Gwen said. “Used to happen to me a lot, back you-know-where.”

“Earth or here, you humans are a lot alike,” Dhana said. “You’re
interested in each other, but more interested in yourself. I am too, which is
why I like being human,” she added, her candor so matter-of-fact that none of
us could get mad. (Though Irene might have, but she was not there.)

“Aren’t your underwater people interested in each other?”
Gwen asked.

“It’s different,” Dhana said.

Where have we heard that before?
I thought, but
didn’t say it.

Her graceful fingers flickered through the air, she looked
up at the swirls of feathery clouds overhead, then shrugged. “We’re all
together, kind of, and kind of not.”

Gwen was frowning. “So what you’re saying is, we sound like
those girls who have secret codes, and want you to ask what they are, just so
they can tell you it’s secret?”

Dhana started to shake her head, tipped it, then said, “I
don’t think I’ve seen that.”

Seshe said, “I have. It’s one way courtiers shut out people
they think beneath them.”

“We have all kinds of codes,” I said, uneasy. “I was all
ready to tell them what it all meant, though. Well, I wanted to tell them, but
I thought they were interested. Well, I wanted them to be interested. Ecccch!”

Sherry shrugged. She liked it when people showed off.

“We just have to make sure we don’t make people feel like
they’re pushed out,” Gwen said, her brow puckered when she said ‘we’.

And I wondered how long she’d felt like the rest of us girls
had been a
we
and she a
her
.

Ugh!

Don’t let anybody ever tell you that bad guys don’t gossip.

Hah.

Okay, what we didn’t know was, this whole area was made up
of three different kingdoms that had been inventing themselves, conquering
their neighbors, and being reconquered a bunch over the past few years, plus
some smaller bits like duchies and principalities trying to split off from the
three main messes.

In later records, there’s more about that, so I’m not going
to dump a load of political talk into this part of my adventures. Snore!
Especially since it all changed practically as fast as the sun rose and set.

Here’s what mattered to us. We crossed one of those duchies,
a really beautiful mountainside place where the people grow leddas, that gets
turned into weave, out of which is made boots and shoes and belts and harnesses
and so forth. Leddas grows alongside rivers and streams. The really fine stuff
out of which they make these satiny-looking shoes grows high up beside streams.
It costs a lot because it’s rare.

Okay, enough of that. We earned our way by helping pull this
stuff, so we learned a little about it, but we weren’t allowed to see how they
made it nice and flexible and rainproof, or how they wove it. That part was all
secret.

But the people were nice, and they liked visitors. In fact
they liked visitors a lot because they almost never got any. So when word went
down the mountain that kids had come through, one a princess, one who danced,
and one freckle-faced redhead, (etc) well, you get the idea.