“Your father was Zoltev, Captain, but who was your mother?” Sasha asked, her shock as evident as Padrig’s.
“My mother was a servant woman in my father’s castle. She died at my birth.”
“And where was she from?” Padrig asked, reasserting himself as interrogator.
“Nowhere. No one. I know nothing of her but her name.”
“And what was her name?” Padrig pressed.
Kjell regarded the Spinner in exasperation. The man knew too much and thought he was entitled to know more.
“Her name is not your concern,” Kjell answered.
“And you are certain she was not of Caarn?” Padrig pressed.
“I know only what I was told.” Kjell barked, impatient and uncomfortable. The trees were gone, but the roots left huge holes in the road, and Kjell turned to the men listening attentively to the exchange.
“The way is open, but the wagons still cannot pass. Let’s fill the holes and replace the rocks,” Kjell commanded, changing the subject from his mother and her origins.
A man named Jedah stepped forward and touched his shoulder. He’d signed on for the journey to Dendar claiming he was Gifted, but Kjell had yet to see what he could do beyond catching chickens with Isak.
“Let me be of use, Captain,” he offered. With fluttering fingers and the palms of his hands, he scooped the air as if scooping the ground, and the displaced dirt obeyed his summons, rushing to return to mother earth, the sound like pounding rain against the sand. “I can’t command the rocks,” he apologized. “But the holes are filled.”
“Well done, Earth Mover. That is not a gift I’ve seen before,” Kjell marveled.
“It is not a gift that has proven especially valuable.” Jedah shrugged.
“In a land of growers, such a gift will be greatly appreciated,” Sasha said. “It is a form of Telling. Don’t command the rocks, tell the dirt to move them,” she suggested.
Jedah looked doubtful, but scooped his hands through the air again, his brow furrowed, his gaze narrowed on one of the displaced cobbles. It rattled and flipped, and he smiled in triumph.
“Keep practicing, Jedah,” Kjell said, but began to move the stones into place. There would be time for practice later. They worked quickly, replacing the rocks and leveling the way so the wagons could pass.
Once they’d crossed through the opening in the wall, the earth groaned, the roots crawled, the branches snapped, and the hedge of trees resumed their positions, blocking the road and displacing the dirt and rocks all over again.
Kjell’s men eyed each other nervously, and the travelers began to murmur among themselves. Now they couldn’t leave if they wanted to. Kjell couldn’t decide if he was comforted by the barrier or unnerved by it. If the Changer followed, she need only become a bird to breech the trees. But if the trees had created a wall, there was something worth protecting in Caarn.
They kept moving forward, unable to do anything else, but more than a few glances were tossed back toward the barrier and up into the canopy that lined the road. The wind whispered through the leaves, but there was no bird-song or animal chatter. In Jeru City, the chickens cackled in the courtyard and the bullfrogs sang a chorus in the castle moat each night. Kjell had cursed the cacophony on more than one occasion, but he found he missed the reassurance that came with sound. Absolute silence could not be equated with peace. More often than not, it portended terrible things. He found himself checking the skies, expecting a Volgar swarm. But none came, and the silence persisted.
Then, just around the next bend, the castle came into view, nestled in a sea of green so intense the white rock of the walls glowed in comparison. It didn’t sit on a hill like the palace in Jeru, but in the center of the valley, the hub of a wheel, just as Padrig had described. The village huddled around it, hundreds of pale toadstools on the forest floor, and the ribbon of the road they traveled angled down toward it, pointing to the end of their journey.
Kjell remembered the way the trumpets had sounded the day he returned to Jeru City, Sasha seated in front of him on Lucian, his heart ebullient. No trumpets sounded or flags waved welcoming them to Caarn. Maybe they hadn’t been seen. Maybe they simply needed to draw closer. Or maybe no one was expecting the triumphant return of a long-absent queen. As they descended toward the village, no people rushed out into the street to greet—or gawk at—the wary parade of foreigners who peered through the trees at the quiet cottages, the empty gardens, and the untended orchards. It was the Bay of Dendar all over again, but as they neared the castle, the trees became so thick they could no longer see anything but the palace gate and a looming guard tower.
The drawbridge was down, the portcullis raised, and unlike the trees at the border that had made them ask for entry, no watchman at the gate demanded they identify themselves. The travelers walked into the palace courtyard, unabated and undeterred, and stood, searching for life and further instruction.
***
“Where is everyone, Padrig?” Sasha asked, her eyes trained on the piles of leafy debris and the detritus of neglect in the castle courtyard. She began to walk, calling out a greeting that would never be answered.
“Where is everyone?” she repeated, her voice more strident, her horror evident.
“I’m not entirely . . . sure,” Padrig answered, his face stricken, his brow drawn. But his gaze shifted the way it had when he’d promised Sasha she would lose nothing when he restored her memories. He was telling half-truths again.
Sasha began striding toward the wide castle doors, and Kjell rushed to pursue her, throwing instructions over his shoulder to his guard.
“Search the keep, but do so in groups, just like we did in the bay. And Jerick and Isak, stay with the Spinner.”
The doors were not barred or barricaded. Kjell and Sasha raised the looped iron knockers and pulled them wide, walking inside as if they belonged, as if the silence longed to be filled. Sasha did belong, Kjell reminded himself. He could picture her there, walking down the corridors, sewing in the light of the huge glass windows, her tongue caught between her teeth, looking out at the trees and the hills, seeing a future she couldn’t have dreamed.
She belonged at Caarn.
She had reigned in the Great Room hung with lacy cobwebs and walked the endless marble floors that now coated the hem of her gown with a pale powder, the color of the white rock that formed the castle walls. The table in the king’s dining hall was set for a feast that had never happened, and Sasha approached it, fingering the coated silver and the pewter goblets. Sasha’s chair would have been at the far end, the one inset with a tree, supported by dainty legs and carved with more feminine lines.