She's the One Who Won't Behave Read online

  I looked at the pile of green lace leaves I’d spent the afternoon making. They oozed serenity. Could I put them all on a single dress?

  “I’m to be decked out in leaves and flowers?” I repeated aloud.

  He nodded, unsure of the etiquette in responding.

  I could cover the tatted leaves with green wood spurge blossoms so they’d look more natural. Maybe I’d made enough to keep everyone calm. I’d go, and I’d put all these leaves on my dress and hope for the best.

  Chapter 2. A Truth, a Disappearance, and a Plan

  I assumed Ryalgar’s decision to join the Velka came from some massive spat with my mother. After all, nothing would piss my mother off more. But no. The evening I arrived at the farm, my sisters told me of Ryalgar’s rejection by her lover, a genuine prince from Pilk.

  I had trouble believing Ryalgar would run away and live with a bunch of old women because a man dumped her. Prince or not, she had more sense than that. I confronted her the next morning when we met in the kitchen before the others woke.

  “The world is full of men,” I said as I stoked the fire, encouraging the little flames to warm the chilly room. “They make up half the population.” I stopped stoking and looked at her. “What gives?”

  She sat sipping breakfast wine, her face half-hidden beneath her uncombed thick dark hair. She smiled at the mention of him.

  “This one is special, Gypsum. He understands me. And, well, don’t tell anyone, but I’ll be able to see him once I’m a Velka.”

  I gave her a grin of appreciation.

  “Well, that’s better, at least. You’re sure he’s worth something this drastic?”

  “Yes, but I’m not doing this because of him. The Velka are going to train me. I’ll learn their ways.”

  “Wait. You want to be a witch?”

  “I want to be a person who lives on her own and does what she wants and knows a surprising number of things, some of which involve magic. Does that sound so bad?”

  No, it didn’t. But that kind of freedom didn’t exist …. not really …

  “What makes you think you can trust these women? What if once you’re there they, I don’t know, chain you up in their kitchen and make you scrub pots for the rest of your life?”

  She laughed, tossing all that dark curly hair out of her face. “I guess that could happen, but I don’t think it will. I’ve got someone on the inside looking out for me. Someone I didn’t even know existed.”

  Panic crossed her face as she finished the sentence. She’d spoken of something she’d meant to keep quiet about.

  “Who?”

  She exhaled, probably considering a lie and thinking the better of it.

  “I guess you’re entitled to know,” she said. “Perhaps more than anyone.” She took another sip of her citrusy breakfast wine as she chose her words. “Our grandmother, mine and yours, didn’t die years ago like we were told. She lives with the Velka.”

  I felt my insides get cold, the way they did when anyone mentioned the odd circumstances that had brought me into this family.

  “So my grandmother was alive when I was born?”

  “It looks like it,” Ryalgar said. “I’m told she joined the Velka a year earlier. Soon after her husband died.”

  “You’re saying that when my mother got pregnant by a man she refused to name, and tended to her needs with only the help of two well-meaning but useless brothers, her own mother wasn’t dead? Her mom could have been there helping her, if she hadn’t been off playing witch instead?”

  “I guess …”

  “So when my mother died and left me crying as an infant, I actually had a grandmother who could have raised me? One who didn’t bother?”

  I walked away from the fire and straddled a wooden bench, my legs stretched out long as I leaned back on my hands and studied the ceiling. This was too much to take in.

  “I don’t know,” Ryalgar said. “Please. No one gave me the details. Maybe no one talked to Grandmother. Maybe they couldn’t get word to her or maybe she couldn’t leave the Velka. Maybe Dad begged to take you in when his only sister died. Maybe Mom wanted to raise you with Iolite, like a second set of twins.”

  “We both know that wasn’t the case.”

  My voice had gone as cold as my insides. Mother’s resentment at having a seventh child forced upon her had never been a secret. Too many loud arguments between her and my father when we were young had seen to that. To her credit, though, she hadn’t mentioned her bitterness aloud for years. She’d chosen to express it in her thinly veiled lack of affection for me instead. Much more civil.

  “If what you say is true,” I said, my voice growing louder and higher in pitch, “I had another option beyond being raised in this miserable family. And. No. One. Told. Me.”

  “This family loves you.” Coral, the wanted child only a year younger than Ryalgar, spoke as she entered the room holding a finger to her lips. “Shh. Everyone is awake and can hear you talking. Your reaction is understandable, Gypsum, but don’t let facts from the past make you forget how much we all love you now.”

  “Right,” I said.

  Coral would have hugged another sister at that point and helped wipe away her tears. But I wasn’t crying. Rage boiled inside of me – a rage at being lied to, and raised with a myth used to cover up the actions of some despicable grandmother I’d never met.

  “And I hate all of you right back!”

  I didn’t mean it of course, and Ryalgar and Coral knew it as I stomped out of the room and out of the house. I didn’t know who had overheard what, so I walked far enough that no one would follow me. Then I kicked small rocks as hard as I could until I calmed down.

  When I made it back to the house, everyone had dressed for the big ceremony. Only my mother hadn’t changed her clothes. She didn’t feel up to the journey.

  I pulled on my outfit fast so as not to cause more trouble. I didn’t think I could handle a second ugly confrontation. I’d chosen the plainest thing I owned, a grey frock to tone down the ridiculous number of green wood spurge blossoms that covered up the uncanny number of calm-me-down green tatted leaves.

  Ryalgar looked regal in her deep burgundy gown sewn for the occasion. She didn’t even glance at me after I spoiled her special day. Well, I didn’t glance at her either. She shouldn’t have picked today to tell me that my whole life was based on a lie.

  My other sisters looked like they always looked, except for timid little Iolite. She emerged in a rich purple dress with exceptionally fine stitching. She never wore purple because it called attention to a disease of hers that gave her eyes a lavender hue. But today, she filled her silver hair with purple flowers, too. I found her choice daring, and it raised my spirits a little.

  During our uneventful ride, everyone else visited. Anyone who’d heard my outburst with Ryalgar pretended otherwise, except for Coral who kept making sympathetic eyes at me as we rode. I ignored her. Then my breath calmed and my heartbeat slowed as we traveled and as my stitchery did its job.

  Once we got to the forest’s edge, I learned that the pomp involved all of us waving at Ryalgar as she disappeared into the brush. That was it. A little anticlimactic if you asked me.

  When we returned, tired from the ride and sad from the goodbye, my mother gave each of us a warm wet cloth scented with dried rose petals. She saved me for last, waiting until the others had moved on from the cloakroom. The look she gave me as she handed me my cloth puzzled me. It wasn’t annoyed, for once.

  “Perhaps now you understand why I hate the Velka.”

  “Yes,” I said. I did understand. The Velka had foisted me upon her, one more hungry infant needing desperately to nuzzle at her breasts every time she finished feeding the one she bore. She must have felt like a milk cow, with two babies suckling all day and night and then with year-and-a-half-old twins not yet fully weaned and no doubt crying for their turn as well.

  No wonder she hated me. No wonder she hated the Velka.

  Well, for the first
time in my life, we had something in common. Now I hated the Velka too.

  After my history teacher told me of the possible invasion, I had to tell someone, so I told Sheep Scump. I figured it didn’t count because I told him everything.

  When I returned to school after Keva, I also returned to my worries about this information. I mean, some Ilarians thought we’d die in an unstoppable invasion and kept quiet about it lest they cause a panic. What kind of way was that to face annihilation? I wanted to go out screaming and fighting, not pretending like every tomorrow would be okay until it wasn’t.

  Added to that, my grandmother’s rejection of my birth mother, and of me, stung like nothing in my life had. I was used to feeling unwanted but this was worse, knowing that someone had existed who could have been there and chose not to be.

  Why had she not cared about me? Most Ilarians took an unwed pregnancy in stride. Any woman could obtain the herbs to end it early on, and those who wanted the child either planned to raise it with the father or, if he wasn’t an option, then with another loving male. No one cared.

  But a woman who chose motherhood alone, refusing to explain how or why, earned a certain amount of suspicious contempt. I’d been told my birth mother’s silence had yielded such, yet she’d refused to waver and had borne me leaving me no clue who my sire was. Did this explain my Grandmother’s cold heart?

  As I agonized over my situation and Ilari’s, my studies suffered. Heli, my attention to everything plummeted. I entered a hole so dark that I never noticed Sheep Scump’s despondency, but I should have.

  “Stop calling me that stupid name. My name is Galen.”

  “Sorry, Galen. I didn’t know it offended you.” I took another long swig of ale. My ale consumption had risen dramatically after the Keva holiday. He rolled his eyes in disbelief.

  “You can go ahead and call me Duck Piss,” I offered. “It won’t bother me at all.”

  “How about I don’t call you anything,” he said. “Ever.” The next thing I knew, he’d walked out my door. I sat and finished my ale, thinking he’d be back later.

  By the next morning he hadn’t returned, and I decided the problem might be bigger than I thought. So I got really drunk, the way I seldom did, and I stayed that way until two of my teachers sent messengers to my place of lodging to inform me that I would receive no credit for their classes unless I took drastic measures.

  It shocked me into better behavior. I got sober, washed up, put on clean clothes, and met with them to learn what needed to be done. I checked in with my other teachers, too, but I was too late for some. They’d already removed me from their rosters.

  Then I borrowed a horse and rode to Sheep Scump’s quarters. I’d never gone there alone, but I had to fix this. Sheep Scump was the best thing about my life.

  Three young men sat playing a card game in their common room and looked up at me when I walked in. I thought I’d met one of them before.

  “Galen? He didn’t tell you? He went back to Eds.”

  “To visit his family?” That didn’t sound like Sheep Scump.

  They exchanged surprised looks over their playing cards.

  “No,” one said. “He told us school wasn’t for him. That classes were useless, Pilk was filled with rantillions and pruskas, sorry no offense, and he might as well go be a prucking goat herder because that would make everyone happy, and it was better than staying here another day.”

  “He left angry?”

  The young man laughed. “You could say that. We thought you probably went with him. You two have a fight?”

  “Not that I recall. Uh, maybe.”

  I had no idea what to do.

  I sent a letter to my parents telling them I would finish my classes in a few days and to please send the hired carriage for me. Then I did my best to finish my remaining studies and took my ride home with the emptiest feeling in the pit of my stomach.

  One prucking thing in my life had brought me joy, and I’d gone and made a mess of it.

  I got home a few days before Tirga and avoided conversation with everyone. Lucky for me, neither my mother nor father wanted to talk with me after the big revelation about my grandmother. Coral discovered she was with child and began plans to marry the father, some bigwig in the Svadlu. The news kept everyone else’s focus on her, though it did nothing to keep me from dwelling on the stinging information about my own birth.

  Sulphur, Olivine, and Celestine all came and went, occupied with their interests and activities while Iolite and I stayed close to home. We were raised like twins, but we’d never shared the bond Olivine and Celestine did and that summer we seldom spoke. Only once did she say something I remember.

  As the late summer sun set, she approached me with the sky’s purple reflected in her eyes.

  “I was always glad you were there. Growing up. I wanted you to know that.”

  “Me? Come on, Iolite. I was a pain in the arse when I was little and even I know it. You’d have gotten a lot more attention without me.”

  She smiled her calm smile. “Exactly.”

  “Huh?”

  “Guess someone would have to be a poor delicate frundle to understand why I wouldn’t have wanted more attention.”

  “My shenanigans bought you some freedom?”

  “And I remain thankful for every bit of it.”

  Well, good to know I’d done somebody in the family some good.

  I tatted a lot that summer. I mended all the family’s clothes, forcing myself to put joyful busy thoughts into every stitch. I figured the more my family went out and did things they liked, the less they’d bother me.

  I got to know my horse again. I hadn’t brought her to school because I didn’t need her in Pilk. Most things were so close I could walk. But I needed her now because she and I were going to take a long ride together.

  And I spent time on geography. That’s right. I’d never been curious about the distant edges of the realm, places where the river flooded in Faroo, or where the mountains made passage difficult in Tolo. Who cared? But now, they helped disguise my interest in another nichna, one I’d never asked questions about before.

  How many people lived in Eds? Did they all know each other? Were most of them on one side of the nichna or were they scattered about? How difficult would it be to find one particular Edser?

  After the Heli holiday passed and the days cooled, I intended to ride to Eds and find out.

  Chapter 3. Eds

  I left a note for my family, promising them I’d be back before school began and assuring them I wasn’t doing anything dangerous. I knew they’d be various shades of horrified to learn I’d gone chasing after a man, but this man needed chasing after. I’d driven him away with my selfish moodiness, and I had to fix this.

  My horse whinnied when I tiptoed into the barn at dawn, dressed in my riding clothes and carrying full saddlebags. She loved long rides, and the smart thing knew we were leaving. I hushed her.

  We started at a slow trot to put some distance between us and my waking family, then we headed north to the corner of Vinx where it touched the desolate nichna of Scrud. I kept on the main road through that barren land, only slowing down as I passed the pitiful hovels the Scrudites called home. I kept an eye out for the wolves famed for their boldness but saw none.

  Before noon I passed into the equally desolate nichna of K’ba. No marker welcomed me, but I knew my location by the tents of the reczavy in the distance to my left. Everyone loved to gossip about the reczavy but few knew much about them. Their rumored fondness for nudity and suspected promiscuity made them a subject of embarrassment for many. Some wouldn’t even say their name aloud, which I found stupid. I’d always guessed they were misunderstood.

  Of all the spots on my route, the one near their tents seemed the safest, so I stopped there for a brief rest before riding on.

  Once their tents vanished in the distance, I knew I’d entered Eds. Now I had to make a choice. I could go right, circling Mt. Eds on a path that would take m
e out to the Canyon River where I could follow the lip of the canyon to the northern border of Ilari and stare out at lands beyond my realm. The idea excited me but I knew this more desolate route reached fewer people. Odds were Sheep Scump and his family didn’t live in that direction.

  Or I could hug the forest and make my way along its edge to the Little River where I’d been told most Edsers lived. A different sort of danger lurked along this path. Back in the gentle plains of Vinx, Velka inhabited the forest. I now loathed this group, but my hatred didn’t mean they were dangerous. I’d never heard of a Velka harming anyone.

  Inside the forest next to Eds, however, was Zur. Zurians tried to grab more land at the forest’s edge, and the capture of an occasional neighbor could make that happen. I’d keep on the road and not stop until I left the forest behind me and reached the river.

  Then, I’d see if I could find anyone who knew of a Rokva family with a son named Galen. If I could find no such people, I had no idea what to do next. If I got the information I sought, I’d ride to wherever the place was. Then, I had no idea what to do next.

  Clearly, my plan still had a few gaps.

  My dad guessed about three thousand people lived in Eds so I doubted they all knew each other, but I had to start asking questions somewhere. I tethered my tired horse, fetched water for her from the public well, and walked into the first tavern I saw.

  “You’re a young one to be so far from home,” said the barkeep as I sat down. A stout woman with non-descript brown hair, she set an ale and a plate of stew in front of me without my asking. Then she took a look at how skinny I was and added a slice of bread.

  “Eat. Does your family know you’re here?”

  “Oh yes. I, I have a matter to discuss with a friend from school.”