Grego answered the voice. “She was partly hooked to the dreamlock magnets when the EMP hit. There would have been feedback, so there may be . . . damage.”
I saw Elián shake his head to deny it, moving so fast that ghost images trailed him like antlers. The chamo cloth seemed to erase his body. Damage. I closed my eyes, trying to cope with the pulsing color, pulsing pain.
“Princess Greta,” said the unknown woman’s voice. “Your Highness?”
The sharp edges of my title cut the inside of my throat like nutshells. I could feel Da-Xia’s arm around my back, the warmth of her side against my side. She took a sharp breath in.
“Look at me, please, Your Highness.” Despite the “please” and the honorific, it was a command. The kind of command a doctor might give. Had they brought a doctor? I thought I might need a doctor.
I opened my eyes. Yes, there was Xie holding me, there was Elián in fatigues, there was Grego with an engineer’s multipencil twinkling in his hands. A bookcase had toppled, spilling books like guts. The school’s proctors were there too, piled in a heap of legs and joints.
Xie shifted and pushed, and I sat up fully. A figure, a bulky shadowy thing, took a step toward me. I squinted. It seemed to be human, something human, though my mind was full of animals. A shamble like a bear, but a controlled precision like a warhorse. A hawk nose in a soft face. Grey hair cut short, coarse as a mane. “Crown Princess Greta Gustafsen Stuart,” the bear-woman said. “On behalf of the Cumberland Alliance, I offer the Pan Polar Confederacy a formal declaration of war. Will you accept it?”
“Of course,” I said, politely.
Then I threw up on the legendary shoes of Wilma Armenteros.
General Wilma Armenteros, secretary of strategic decisions for the Cumberland Alliance, legendary scion of a legendary line, and disgruntled grandmother of the Precepture’s most troubled hostage, looked down at her shoes and blinked.
Then she looked up. Her eyes, like the Abbot’s, were pixel-grey.
“Major Buckle,” she said crisply to someone standing behind me. “Why don’t you take these young people outside? I’m sure the fresh air will do Her Highness good.”
I turned in time to see the woman behind me salute. “Yes, sir.”
“And Major—send someone to find me some socks.”
Xie and Grego hoisted me by the armpits. I stood shaking. Cubes of gold glass fell from my clothes and hair as if I were some fairy-tale thing, shedding radiance. Elián hesitated. He seemed unsure which category he fell in, the sock-finders or the fresh-air-getters. He looked to Armenteros. I’m not sure what he saw there, but it did not seem to clarify matters for him. For a moment he was as frozen as if the spiders were still on him. But when we moved, he followed us.
“Children.” The Abbot’s voice trailed us. “I’m afraid there is bad news.”
“And fetch me Burr,” I heard Armenteros say as the door closed. “I need this thing to talk.”
It was beautiful outside, one of those first days when summer rounds the corner and can see fall. It was not cold or even cool, but the air held the promise that the suffocating heat would not return. It was a day like a newly sharpened pencil, full of possibilities. There was, for instance, a whacking great spaceship parked at the top of the hill.
There were also, for some reason I could not quite grasp, a lot of soldiers about, standing like a line of scarecrows along the top of the uppermost terrace. In the flat space between the soldiers and the Precepture hall, the Children of Peace were huddled, still and watchful, like egrets.
Gregori and Da-Xia took me the other way, around to the back of the Precepture, up past the toolshed and the trellis crops, toward the line of whirligig wind generators and the induction spire. We did not go up there, though. The ship was there, and more soldiers, who did not look very civilized.
Soldiers. . . . We were at war. Now, right now, we were at war. The Rider would come. She would say my name, and Elián’s, and—
I wobbled, my headache rising. Elián dashed toward the toolshed and upended an empty water trough to make a seat. Grego and Xie sat me down.
Damaged—the gardens were damaged. The goats were loose, and the pumpkin trellis was splayed flat against the ground. The rows of corn were flattened as if by a monstrous hand.
“They’ve knocked down the pumpkins,” I said.
“Greta . . .” Xie looked at me, sidelong. “Greta, the Precepture’s been taken. Captured.”
“Oh,” I said. “Do you think we’ll be able to save the corn?”
“Let’s take her to her cell,” said Elián. “Maybe she can sleep it off.”
“No.” Horror froze me. “No sleep.”
“All right.” Elián touched my hair. “No sleep.”
He was brave and he thought I was strong. I leaned into his hand, into his leg. Something hard caught the soft part of my cheek: there was a pistol on his hip. “Elián . . . You’re armed.”