The other people of the village kept their distance, except for Qiao, who seemed to like her. Ling was different. Freddy didn’t think she was afraid of anything. I can’t be Three, Freddy thought more than once. Not if it’s all about the courage. Bragi was brave, too. It couldn’t have been all about the courage. There had to be something besides just bravery or the vague designation of “creativity” binding the Threes together, but Freddy didn’t yet have enough information to puzzle out what it was.
Somehow, Ling had single-handedly stopped the villagers from going after the brothers for revenge. She was just a widow with three kids, one of them barely old enough to walk, but people listened to her. Josiah said she had needed all her persuasive powers, as the brothers had violated every conceivable law of protocol and hospitality and had, at any rate, started the whole business by picking the fight with Qiao. As it turned out, however, the brothers had stopped being a problem. The entire family had vanished. Ji had been inclined to blame Qi until one of the villagers, gone to check, reported that it looked as if the brothers had simply packed up and fled. Nothing of value had been left in their village.
“It’s still her fault,” Josiah said.
Freddy thought he was right. She was also a little suspicious of the thought. Qi was dangerous, but Freddy wasn’t convinced she should take Josiah’s view of Cuerva Lachance and her various incarnations at face value. She expected that “biased” was just about the mildest word that could be used to describe Josiah’s approach to Cuerva Lachance.
Luckily, Josiah was a lot less subtle than he thought he was, and she was beginning to be able to read him. Just for instance, she had known for the past twenty-six days that Josiah remembered exactly how long they would be spending here. She had known because he had been going off with Ji or the male villagers every day, leaving her with Ling and the women. He hadn’t even been living in the same hut as Freddy; Ji had his own, and Josiah was staying there with him. He remembered them spending a certain amount of time here, so he wasn’t going to worry about them being sucked away to another place until that time was up. She was sure that if he had been uncertain how long they would spend here, he would have been sticking to both Ling and Freddy religiously. She didn’t think they had to be that close to Three for the sympathetic resonance to work, but it was possible it might not apply if one of them got too far away.
On the morning of the twenty-sixth day, Josiah sauntered into Ling’s hut unannounced and said with forced nonchalance, “I’m bored with hunting. I’ll help with the crops today.”
“What time are we leaving?” said Freddy, picking up the pouch in which she now kept her keys and the little sewing kit Ling had given her and slinging it over her shoulder.
Josiah spent what he may not have realised was a bit too long standing in the doorway, glaring at her. He said, “I never said we were going anywhere. There is no conceivable way you can claim I did.”
Freddy shrugged. She found she was hiding a smile. It was funny how twenty-six days in prehistoric China had made her feel better about, well, spending twenty-six days in prehistoric China, plus who knew how many days to come jumping semi-randomly all over space-time.
“I liked you better when you were in shock,” said Josiah. “Don’t think you know what we’re in for just because you’re good at harvesting rice. Congratulations on gaining a useless new skill, by the way.”
“You’re just jealous because you don’t like skinning deer,” said Freddy, who had spent several gruesome but instructive hours watching the men prepare the meat. No one stopped her from going where she wanted here.
Josiah shuddered. “No one in his right mind likes skinning deer.”
“Well, then,” said Freddy.
He moved farther into the hut. Ling handed him a bowl of rice and gave Freddy another. They had been living primarily on rice for weeks now. Ling said something to Josiah.
The carriage missed Freddy by about two inches. “Imbecile,” cried somebody somewhere, and a hand yanked her backwards by the collar. The bowl of rice, steaming, tumbled onto the cobblestones and smashed.
Freddy blinked up at a large, angry man in a frock coat and enormous curled wig. He was shouting at her in a language that, to her bewilderment, she more or less understood. “Excusez-moi, s’il vous pla?t,” she said, only just stopping herself from bowing. The angry man drew himself up to a great height and poured a torrent of indignant French down upon her.
“Allons-y, idiote,” said Josiah, who hadn’t missed a beat. He was even still holding his rice. He took her hand and dragged her away into what seemed to Freddy to be a huge throng of people.
“When?” she managed at last, shouting above the noise of the crowd. It was a very French noise. She recognised words here and there, though the accent was different from her Québécois dad’s.
“Seventeenth century. Paris,” said Josiah. “Come on … you’ll want to see this.”
The streets were narrow and dark and grimy. Buildings towered above them on either side, seeming to lean inward. Freddy thought they were moving into a grittier neighbourhood. There were no more gentlemen in wigs. The crowd smelled … well, like hundreds of people who hadn’t washed in some time, and that was before you took the odours of rotting food and waste into account. Freddy found herself flinching away from everything. After weeks in a village in Stone Age China, this was all just a bit much. She thought of Ling, then had to force herself not to grope for her key. She had liked Ling. Ling had been dead for thousands of years.
Josiah handed his bowl of rice to a filthy, bearded man with no legs who huddled beside a doorway. Freddy looked away from him quickly.
“Here.” Josiah tugged her into an alleyway.
It was occupied, though it looked as if it shouldn’t have been. There were windows and doors in the walls, all of them boarded up. Freddy saw a girl of about Mel’s age, dressed very badly in a ragged frock. Her feet were bare. She was spitting angry French at the other two people in the alley, a middle-aged man and a boy wearing worn but neat clothes. The boy was Josiah. Freddy glanced at the Josiah beside her, who shrugged. “He’s called Josiah, too. The other one is Jean-Claude Lachance this time, and the girl is Claire Girard … Three.”
French Josiah had noticed them; he favoured them with an irritated nod. Freddy saw Claire follow his gaze, pause for a fraction of an instant, and start her tirade again, even more passionately.
“What’s she saying?” Freddy whispered.
Josiah raised an eyebrow at her. “Your last name is Duchamp.”
“It’s some kind of dialect,” said Freddy, though she could feel herself going pink. She had vague memories of speaking to her father in French. It had been a long time ago. All she had left now was a knack for the language that came in handy in French class. A lot of the vocabulary and most of the grammar had gone.