Ozark Trilogy 1: Twelve Fair Kingdoms (24 page)

“That’s enough,” said Suzannah of Parson at last, long after I’d decided they intended to keep it up all night.

“Granny?” said Jeremiah Thomas.

“Been enough a long while,” said Granny Leeward, “and you’ve made your point. I’ve heard nothing that made my ears stand up, and you’ll not wear
that
one out just prattling at her—your sons are showing off, and they begin to irritate me some. You forget your own position on moderation, Jeremiah Thomas?”

He flushed, and the sons looked whiter and grimmer than ever; but he didn’t cross her. He just pointed at the mushrooms, now, I’m happy to say, a really stinking mess of putrid black on their tabletop, and said, “What about those?”

“I’ll see to them,” said me Granny. “Never you mind.”

“You wouldn’t dare touch them,” I said coldly.

“You think not, missy?”

“I
know
not!” As I did, I’d have handled them with a great deal of care my own self.

“I’ll have them seen to, then,” she told her son. “Comes to me same thing.”

Jeremiah Thomas Traveller stood up, then, and adjourned the Council, took his lady on his arm and led us all out of there, and sent me on to my room with another of his silent Attendants.

I was right about the Magicians of Rank. When I woke that night and felt the heat of my skin, I cursed myself bitterly for not taking precautions sooner before I’d had my hands tied by my own oaths. I could take the search for the source of the epidemic at Castle Wommack off my long list of postponed duties—I’d found it. And anybody that could bring themselves to lay innocent women and children low with Anderson’s Disease, just for display, was unlikely to scruple at providing someone like me with the same unpleasant experience. And knowing that, I’d surely ought to of taken some steps to prevent it; like a lot of other things, it hadn’t entered my mind. I sent word to Granny Leeward by way of the guardmaid outside my door, and the Granny sent back a full crew. Four of them, all in Traveller black, though two of them had no right to wear it. They stood around my bed and smiled down on me, hands behind their backs.

“Twenty-four hours from now, Responsible of Brightwater,” said one, “you’ll be fit as a fiddle.”

I felt the terrible need to twist and writhe, and my breath bumed in my chest as I drew it, but I’d encountered pain before that matched this and surpassed it. And I’d had some practice in dealing with the stuff. I’d not give them the satisfaction of seeing one of my smallest toes move while they watched; and I lay still as a pond while the spasms moved over my muscles like live snakes, and I smiled back.

“I didn’t know you were all still in training,” I said, forcing the words through a throat that threatened to shut tight on me. “A competent Magician of Rank could stop this in twenty-four seconds.”

They went right on smiling, and allowed as how Granny Leeward had said that it would do my soul good to have the deathdance fever for twenty-four hours.

“The Granny gives you orders, does she? You don’t mind that?”

I was looking for a weak spot, but they knew what I was up to, of course, and they ignored me. A smugger quartet of elegant males I’d never laid eyes on, and they reminded me of my mushrooms—before the rot set in, of course. There I lay, forbidden to so much as wish on a star till I left Tinaseeh; and there they stood, able to add a notch or two to their accounts with Responsible of Brightwater; in perfect safety. It would have been too much not to expect them to enjoy it.

NOW IT’S TRUE that when I proposed a Quest as the way to demonstrate Brightwater’s status, symbol returned in kind for symbol given, I was completely serious about the idea. I don’t want that misunderstood. No Ozarker takes any formal construct of magic—and a Quest is one of the most rigorous of those—lightly. Like I said, you go tampering and tinkering with an equilibrium as delicate as the system of magic, you’re going to cause radical distortions in places you never even considered would be touched. I was
absolutely
serious in my choice. And the choice I made had had solid motivations back of it.

Those that wanted to undermine the Confederation could have gone about
their
task in the most mundane way, you see. They could of simply boycotted meetings, straight out and without concern for who joined them at it. They could of started banging heads in the straightforward physical sense, though the public outrage at that would of backfired on them by the third blow landed—still, they could have. More reasonably, they could of used economic strategies of one kind or another though for those on the wilder continents where self-sufficiency was a long way off yet that might of earned heavy penalties for their populations. But they had not chosen any of those measures, nor yet anything like them. They had made their decision to go at it on the level of magic—and the principle of fighting fire with fire is sufficiently venerable to make the idea of going back at them the same way look perfectly sound. Fighting magic with science has never been handy.

But let’s grant it now and be done with it, the Quest was not all I had available to
me
, by a long shot. True, they’d flung a gauntlet and made a planetary display of a very special kind; not so much what they actually did—as had been made plain at that first Brightwater Council—but their clear notice as to what they thought they
could
do if they took the notion. We couldn’t of just let that pass, not and kept our place among the Families as the informal—but only actual—seat of central government for Ozark, It was a dare they’d made, and a contemptuous dare at that, right up to the baby-snatching; and I’d figured that last move was made not so much because they weren’t sure how far they should go, but because I kept dawdling around and not responding, and time was a-wasting. They’d meant to shake me loose from my dawdling, and hanging the baby up in the cedar tree did accomplish that.

But looking back ... looking back and feeling a lot more than the six, seven weeks older I actually was when I at last left Castle Traveller behind me, I could see that I had gone butting my head where it was not necessarily called for. Now that it was all over but the dirty work I began with, and the dirty work I’d piled up along the way, I could see all the other alternatives I had censored right out of my head at the time.

I could have assembled the Magicians, from all three levels, by a full call-up at Brightwater, and made some kind of spectacular display of my competence there; and then sent them all back home to think about that awhile. I could of delegated the whole process to the Magicians of Rank from Marktwain, Oklahomah, and Mizzurah, and let
them
demonstrate our magical strength to the others, with whatever judicious behind-the-scenes string-pulling that might of required on my part. I could, for the Twelve Corners’ sakes, just of used the comset for a display of our abilities, planet-wide. Or I could of seen to it that one highborn baby in every Kingdom popped into a tree during a Solemn Service at the same identical instant—my Magicians of Rank could have managed that easily, and it would of put the rest on adequate notice that they’d best pull back.

I hadn’t considered, hadn’t even brought up, any of those things.

It was clear to me, as I headed away from Tinaseeh with my ego as bruised as my body, that what I had really wanted had in far too many ways been just what the Grannys were claiming it was as I made my rounds. I had, I guess, wanted to show off, and to do it personally and get full credit; and I had been champing at the bit for an excuse to get away from Brightwater and all the dull routine of my duties there, not to mention the preparations for the Jubilee that others had had to carry on with while I took my vacation. The speed with which I’d gotten underway was the speed of guilt—I had just grabbed at the Quest concept, all loaded with tradition and symbolic significance like it was, for an excuse.

If there’d been any of the Marktwain Grannys present at that meeting in February, they might well have found a way to stop me; I wished mightily now that someone had. But neither my mother nor my grandmother had had a chance against my willfulness, and it was not the way of Patience of Clark to step in and take action unasked.

No, I’d had a dandy idea for getting away from it all for a while, and had gone about it pigheaded as you please, and how it was all to be managed now or at the Jubilee. I surely did not know.

“Sterling,” I said, looking down on the Ocean of Remembrances just before we SNAPPED over all that boring endless water, “I’ve been a blamed fool. And I only hope I’ve learned enough from it to pay me back.”

She brayed at me twice, and slid sideways in a truly spectacular wobble that set me grabbing the straps and fighting for control of my stomach. They were still at it ... and I smacked her hard on the shoulder, and held fast, and swallowed bile, and got out of there.

I had a better understanding now of the lay of things, Castle to Castle, there was that. I had a picture of sorts, thanks to the Gentle, of the trouble brewing on Arkansaw and where that might yet lead. I’d had a first look at my own personal nemesis, foretold these nine years, and had gotten away from
him
intact but for my pride, this time. And every one of the Families, excepting the Smiths, had had a chance to deal with me directly on its own turf. I suppose that would do for a short list.

I was also tired, and ten pounds thinner; and had been mauled about pretty extensively, and had maybe ignored a Skerry sighting because I hadn’t wanted to bother with it. I had allowed myself to be trapped by a passel of Travellers, like a child, and had no way of knowing what action they might take against me at the Jubilee with the new knowledge they had, and their determination to make good use of it. And my original task, the Goal of my Quest—bringing home the
exact
name of the traitor or traitors—that still had to be done.

I’ve mentioned pride before; I have it in abundance. It was one thing to admit to myself that Granny Golightly had had the right of it and I’d just taken off because I wanted to gallivant. It was one thing to admit that my fancy triumphant symbolic Quest had been more a series of accidents and misfires than anything else, when it hadn’t been plain boring. Lying to your own self is a sure way to go to hell in a handbasket, and the time had come to ‘fess up. But that was to my
own
self. I was not about to go back to Castle Brightwater; march into me halls and say—to Jubal and Emmalyn’s great satisfaction, and my mother’s—”Well, youall were right. It was a silly thing to do in the first place, and I’m worse off than I was before I left. Begging your pardon.” Oh no! Bruised ego, bruised spirit, bruised body, all the blacks-and-blues of me notwithstanding, I would arrive home with an appearance of having won this one, come what may. Come what
may
.

And that was why I was now coming in over Castle Airy, instead of heading for home. Airy was a Castle of women, used to cosseting women and always willing to cosset one more, and I intended to take full advantage of that. I was going to let Charity of Guthrie and her daughters and nieces and cousins, and her three resident Grannys, feed me up and make over me and listen to my troubles and spoil me generally until I had accomplished what I’d set out to accomplish and could go on home in a state of sufficient dignity to at least fool Emmalyn of Clark and Thom of Guthrie.

It was possible, if you were traveling by Mule, to fly into Castle Airy through a great arch cut in its front wall over the sea for that express purpose. I slowed Sterling and we moved in through the opening and down onto the easy-arced ramp at its base, me with a wary hand on the Mule’s bridle against another of those wobbles, and straight into the sidecourt of the Castle where the stables were.

A stableman came forward to see to the Mule and greet me, and I slid gratefully down from Sterling’s back onto the flagstones of me court, and stood there a minute to brace myself.

. “You weren’t expected, Miss Responsible,” said the stableman. “and you arrived a bit sudden. I sent a servingmaid as soon as I saw you coming in over the water; to tell the ladies; somebody should be here directly to take you to the Missus.”

“Thank you,” I said. “I appreciate your courtesy.”

“You took tired, miss,” he said, and I admitted that I was tired—but not how tired.

“It’s been a long trip,” I told him. “A lot of flying and a lot of company behavior, which is worse. A day or two’ll right me. You take my Mule on, if you will, and see to her; I’ll wait right here.”

He gave me a long considering look, and stood his ground.

“Believe I’ll wait until somebody comes for you,” he said. “I don’t care that much for the look of your eyes, nor your peakedy face, and Charity of Guthrie’d put me back to peeling roots in the kitchen if I went on off and you fainted or some such trick. Your Mule’ll keep awhile.”

I didn’t argue with him—he meant well—and we stood there in silence, me not being up to polite conversation and him not seeming to mind, until a young woman came hurrying toward us from a side coridor with Charity of Guthrie herself right behind her.

Charity took one look at me, wrapped her arms round me, and rocked me like a baby.

“Poor child,” she said, “you’re worn clear out. You’re the color of spoiled goat-cheese and not much more appealing- looking. What in the world have you been
doing
to yourself?”

“I should of sent you a message I was coming,” I said, all muffled against the burgundy front of her dress. (And I would have, too, if I hadn’t known I could shave a bit off my traveling time by not letting people know precisely when I was taking off and landing.)