Mearsies Heili Bounces Back (5 page)

At what? Kwenz and an army? Faline turned into a purple
squid? I whirled around, braced for anything, but only saw Dhana drifting along
the side of the room the way she does in light rain, or if I sing her favorite
song in one of the echo glades in the forest ... or now, when the orchestra
played this weird minor-key song with a lot of triplets.

When it changed to a melody I half knew, I began singing a counterpoint,
and Dhana lifted her head and arms and left the floor in an effortless leap,
drifting and light as a wind-whirled leaf. I heard a couple of gasps, but by
now Dhana was oblivious.

Dhana’s dances were never planned, no set series of moves,
much less trained technique. Just a series of impossibly complicated twirls and
leaps and sways, sometimes to the beat, sometimes against it in a tense
counterpoint, sometimes what we had called on Earth slow motion, her hands
drifting and shaping in ways that told their own story.

The entire ballroom went still, everyone from the oldest
grandpa to the smallest local kid.

Then, suddenly as she’d started, Dhana opened her eyes and
walked away. Some people started rushing toward her; to divert them, I still
sang, but I switched to one of our insult songs, and added in pocalubes—with
some teases at fellows who go a-courting. The cousins fumed, their friends
laughed, some of the older girls who wanted attention waited until I ran out of
breath and began a glee. The boys joined in singing counterpoint, and everyone
went back to having fun.

Next day, we prepared to leave. The family members crowded
around us to say a friendly good-bye. When one of them added, “Maybe someday
we’ll meet again,” and I said, “But not in courtship, right?” they agreed with obvious
relief.

As soon as we were walking down the long tree-lined
driveway, Seshe said wryly, “What did you tell ’em, CJ?”

“Whom? I?” I said, looking around.

“When you had your interview.” Irene made a google-eye face.
“They came out looking like ghosts.”

“Tell!” Sherry demanded.

“You threatened to turn ’em into toads!” Faline cackled.

“You did turn ’em into toads until they said uncle,” Gwen
said earnestly.

“Toads can say uncle?” Irene muttered, eyes turned skyward.

Before an argument could break out, I said, “I remembered
all that stuff about customs that Seshe said when we first came. And so I made
up a fine marriage custom for queens in MH.”

The girls looked at me expectantly.

“Any fellow who marries a Mearsiean queen has to work on a
farm for at least ten years. They acted like they’d sat on a cactus!”

We knew there was an enemy out there, someone more or less
our age. We also knew we’d meet, because if Kwenz picked an heir it would be
someone who 1) hated Mearsieans, 2) wanted more land for the Chwahir, and 3)
we’d hate, because Kwenz’s shopping list for an heir probably matched our
shopping list for Rotten Person.

Well, the time finally came.

We’d been playing hide and go seek in the White Palace.

It’s perfect for hide and seek, as it’s filled with a whole
lot of rooms. A
lot
. In fact, we still haven’t gotten a right count,
some think because we get bored before we can separate and make certain none
are being counted twice. Others think we can’t get a right count because some
rooms shift around in time. Yep, you read that, and no, I’m not drunk. (Nutso,
maybe, but no worse than usual.)

There’s nothing block-like about the White Palace.
Block-like as in more ordinary castles, which are made of regular stone, like
granite, and where you can see from inside and out that you get, say, four
rooms to a side, with a hall in between. The White Palace is made of some weird
white material that looks kind of like real deep-winter ice, but isn’t, and
there aren’t any joins or blocks. It’s smooth everywhere, even the curves of
the towers, which are connected by some straight lines, but none of the spire-topped
towers are quite the same size. About the only thing that’s consistent is that
some towers and rooms get lots of sun in the winter, and some get only indirect
sun in summer, but lots of moving air. So you get round rooms, square rooms,
and some weird-shaped rooms that are hard to describe. Crazy, that. I mean
because it’s designed to somehow make the most of air and light patterns, there
isn’t any magic forcing air around, or light.

Okay, that’s boring, I know. The thing is, people do ask
about the White Palace, and there’s even somebody—you’ll meet him later in
another notebook if you haven’t fallen asleep, that is—who seems to know
something of its history. We think this somebody hinted that the White Palace
is actually one of the few remaining buildings left over from Old Sartor, which
is the mysterious past when humans first came to this world and had all these
powers and so forth. But they got themselves into trouble, and when I say that
their kingdom fell apart more than four thousand years ago, you can see that
Old Sartor is
really old
.

So anyway, if they’d left behind a bunch of buildings like
the White Palace, these got knocked down over the centuries, either by the
owners or their enemies. But this area was deserted until the Mearsiean colony
came along almost 800 years ago. Or, so we thought.

But if it’s true that this building goes all the way back to
those very old days, it would explain that biznai about sliding in and out of
time.

It may even explain why some people come here and insist the
place is haunted.

Okay, I’m getting back to us! We were playing hide and seek
until Gwen showed up, so excited about what she’d found that she forgot the
game.

“Look here!” she said to those of us who had sneaked to
‘home’ past Dhana, who was It.

She held out a carved box. The box was a fine dark wood, the
carving like knotted ribbons all around it. Little white stalks were crossed in
each knot.

We all bent over it as she lifted the lid. A faint smell of
wood and an unfamiliar flower scent wafted out, then vanished. Left was the
dust of what must have been a bouquet. On the top lay a rose, with a thin
ribbon around its stem, but when Gwen a tentative finger to it, it too crumbled
to dust.

She looked up, dismayed.

“It’s okay,” Clair said from just behind us. “It’s probably
been there for ages. Where did you find it?”

“In a room with all these built-in drawers and things. I
opened this one chest, thinking to hide in it, but it had all these boxes and
drawers fitted into it. So I started looking at them, and I found this. I don’t
know, I just had to bring it out for some reason.”

Clair frowned, then looked surprised. “There’s something
under the flower dust and the ribbon.”

She reached in, felt around with her finger, and pulled out
a thin little ring. She drew in her breath. “There’s magic on it.”

Dhana had shown up, and she nodded—she could probably see
it. The magic, I mean. We all saw the ring. I could almost see a kind of
sparkle, though it might have been the light.

“I have to study this,” Clair said, laying the ring on her
palm. “And the box.”

She loved puzzles like that. She pokes at magical and
historical puzzles the way I like to draw.

Faline looked around, making a face. “Game over? Nook! Let’s
play!”

“But we didn’t finish,” Diana said.

“I don’t want to be It again.” Dhana looked around, the
light making her eyes change color—gray, greenish, blue, honey-brown. “This
place is too big. It’s too easy for you to win, and I always want to do what
Gwen did, nose around in the rooms.”

“I’ll be It.” Faline thumped her chest.

“You cheat!” four voices exclaimed at once.

“That’s not cheating! That’s
strategy
,” Faline announced.

“Acting crazy and talking funny so we crack up and get found
is strategy?” I asked, making a bigger prune face than hers.

Faline turned to Irene. “That’s what you said.”

“That’s what the kids on the Tornacios said,” Irene
protested.

Dhana snorted. “I never knew that strategy was walking like
a crab and searching with your butt waving around like Fobo in one of her big
dresses all poonched out in the back. I’ll have to remember that.”

“Why do her dresses poonch out in back, is what I want to
know.” Sherry reached behind her, fluffing her hands like a turkey tail. “Remember
when we were in that wardrobe of hers? She had a bunch of those dresses. What
is pretty about having a giant butt part sticking out?”

“So everybody has to walk way behind you, so you look more
important?” Gwen shrugged.

“Fobo’s dresses have trains longer than this room, and
people to carry them,” Irene reminded us. “And a lot of guards with nothing to
do but make sure people bow and so forth.” Irene waved her hand like Fobo did.
It was probably supposed to look queenly, but it just looked bossy. “The trains
and the guards do that job.”

Faline grinned. “Maybe she’s got a giant spring under those
bustles, and when she’s mad, she bends over, poinks a person, and kablooie!
People get sproinged back a few days’ travel.” She windmilled her arms and
staggered backwards, as Sherry and Gwen cracked up.

That would make a great anti-villain aid, I thought. I’d
seen some magic spells that might, with a ton of work, be adapted ...

“I think it’s to make your waist look smaller,” Seshe said.

“What’s pretty about having your waist look smaller?” Sherry
promptly asked. “Does ‘pretty’ mean having a giant butt, too?”

Dhana groaned. “What’s pretty about long eyelashes? They
just catch more dust, but people say they’re
pretty
. What’s pretty? No,
who
cares
what pretty is? Let’s think of a game!”

Silence, everyone was looking at one another—except for
Clair, who’d taken the box off to her magic chamber.

“We’ve played all our games a gabillion times.” Irene sighed
loudly.

Diana grinned. “I got me such a good idea. But I’ve been
saving it since winter. Until we got tired of our old games.”

Everyone turned her way.

“It’s team chase.” She held up her hand just as everyone was
going to say we’d played it twice that week. “But. In the trees. No one can
touch the ground once.”

“Wow!” Gasps of excitement—smiles—rubbing hands.

We discovered on going outside that a storm was moving in,
which meant the game wouldn’t happen immediately. That gave us time to think
about the stakes. When we played team games, we just had to have the winners
get something, even if it was only the others cleaning up the mugs after we had
hot chocolate.

I was trying to think of something good—and that night, when
it was my turn to patrol, I decided my stake would be that the losers take a
few rain patrols for the winners.

Not that I ever complained, except to whoever I was
patrolling with. But it was weird. I love watching rain. When it was warm, I
love running around in it. But I really hated doing patrol while wet and cold.

Next day, at lunch, we sat up in the White Palace, everybody
present but Clair, who’d run out earlier, after getting a message from someone.

The storm had turned into a thunderboomer, which meant it
was probably on its way out at last. The clouds made a corrugated dark gray
blanket just below the white castle, with light flashes here and there. It was
weird to watch.

“So what’s the stakes?” Irene asked.

Faline raised her spoon—and three people automatically
ducked, so they wouldn’t get splattered with tomato-and-rice soup. “The losers
have to paint themselves in stripes for a week!”

All thumbs turned down, except for Faline’s and Sherry’s.

“Losers have to do rain patrol for a week of rains,” I put
in.

All thumbs turned up except for those belonging to Dhana,
Faline, and Sherry.

“It has to be funny,” Faline said.

Irene raised a forefinger skyward. “Funny mine is.” Dhana
rolled her eyes at the finger, but stayed quiet, and Irene said, “The losers
have to dress like PJ and Fobo for a week.”

“Better.” Diana lunged forward, eyes wide. “They have to
steal the clothes from them.”

A roar of approval greeted her suggestion.

I groaned. I would have loved that one, but was really
hoping to get in my rain patrol idea. So were Gwen and Seshe, I saw, because their
thumbs didn’t go up.

“Tie vote—we have to have a—” Irene started, then halted
when Clair came in, grinning.

Behind her was a tall fellow with a swinging walk. We gave a
shout of welcome when we recognized Clair’s cousin Puddlenose. That made his
brown face flush all over as he grinned—a twin grin to Clair’s. He pulled out a
chair, grabbed a plate, and piled it with about half the melted-cheese crispy
potatoes on the serving platter.

“Haven’t eaten for a while, eh?” Irene commented.

“Two days,” Puddlenose said, between chomps. “So, what’re
you all doing?”

Irene explained quickly, not even trying to be fair about
the choice of stakes. But Gwen spoke up feelingly for ours (she’d been on
patrol with me the night before) and I stayed silent, thinking and watching.
I’d noticed Diana’s eyes narrow so all you saw was the dark fringe of her
eyelashes. What was it about eyelashes, anyhow? Hers were the prettiest in the
gang, but of all of us, she cared least about anything pretty.

What she did care about was
winning
. It wasn’t the
prize so much as that great feeling you get after a game when you won. So that
meant she had her best team in mind, same as I did. Only here was Clair, with
her cousin, which would mean we couldn’t leave him out. But I didn’t want him
on my team. I liked Puddlenose, and he was a good runner, but that long body of
his just had to be cloddish in trees. And I knew Diana was thinking the same
thing.

There was one way out. When we had an odd number, we played
without teams, first or last counted as loser.