Fearsome Dreamer (15 page)

Rue looked at Fernie, who was gazing steadily at the flagstone floor and wouldn't raise her eyes.

‘Fern?'

Fernie didn't blink.

‘Zelle Penhallow knows you have to make this decision on your own,' said Mussyer de Forde smoothly. ‘I would like you to think about it. I'll be here for another two days, I'd say. You have that long.'

‘If I say yes,' said Rue slowly, ‘you'd answer all my questions before we get to Capital?'

‘Yes, I would.'

Rue looked at him closely. His face was open.

‘And this testing … how long would it take?'

‘It's hard to say. Several months. Longer, perhaps.'

Rue's mouth fell open. That was long. That was a long time. No wonder Fernie looked unhappy.

‘Why would it take so long?'

‘I'm afraid I can't discuss it.'

‘But you think I have something special, something really rare.'

‘No. Your mistress does.'

Rue looked at the older woman and saw a stranger. She'd always seen someone round and wise, and kinder than she ought to be, and sometimes annoying, but there, always just there and real. Now she looked like an old woman Rue had never met before.

‘Fern?' she asked. ‘Why didn't you never say anything?'

Fernie shook her head. Her lips were thin and tight.

Mussyer de Forde stood up. ‘I'll leave you alone to discuss things. Zelle Penhallow knows what she can and cannot talk about. You may ask her anything you wish but she may not choose to answer. Don't think her being hard with you – I'm the cause. There are some things she is not allowed to say. She'll let you know where I'm staying, for your decision.'

Fernie tossed him a look of pure contempt. Rue felt momentarily scared seeing it. He had bowed his head and now turned to leave.

‘Good evening to you both.'

He closed the kitchen door gently.

Fernie sighed, massaged her cheeks.

‘Sit down, dear,' she said.

Rue sat.

Mussyer de Forde had been silent for some time.

Rue was not inclined to rouse him from his thoughts. The past day of travel through endless landscape and crowds of people had shown her how small she was, and she felt glad to be going towards a place where she might mean something again.

This coach was the final leg of their journey to Capital City. They had taken a public coach from her village to the train station, which was many miles up the coast and further than Rue had been since she was a child. The station was a short squat building on the outskirts of a provincial little city, long and low, and filled with dirt and sound and people, always so many people.

Then the train, which she had taken once as a girl and had vaguely frightened memories of, her recall clouded by painful levels of noise and steam. In the end, it had been quite ordinary, though she loved the way the landscape slid past and around her, as if she flowed through it, and sat within the natural order of things. Fernie had packed her a substantial lunch and she had offered some shyly to Mussyer de Forde, but he'd had none of it, professing himself too tired to eat.

After many hours, and several more stops at crowded platforms, they had left the last of the southern vegetable plains behind. The vista outside Rue's window shifted grad-ually, until the few scattered and huddled farm buildings had changed into a never-ending array of walls. And tall, how tall! There was nothing past a second-floor hay barn in the villages she knew.

The train station in Capital had been an airy, beautiful building with the highest ceiling Rue had ever seen, but she hadn't been able to pause much – the crowds had swept them along. Mussyer de Forde had hurried her through, stopping outside the station at another coach. This one was far grander than the one that had taken them from her village to the train, though, all that time ago. It was not a plain black but a gleaming blue, with an image of an eagle clutching a key painted in lovely detail on its side. In spite of the swathes of people milling about, there were only three or four getting onto this coach, and, noticing her confusion, Mussyer de Forde told her that it was a university coach, reserved for university teachers, students and staff only. He flashed a key he kept on a chain around his neck to the driver, and they boarded.

Fernie had told her a little about Capital City. Though claiming to never have been there, she had described it in some detail to Rue. They had sat at the kitchen table together, as they had done so many times before, eating, talking, working. Only this time would probably be the last time, and for who knew how long?

‘I know you'll go, so it's no good pretending you're still thinking about it,' Fernie had said.

‘Fern,' Rue protested.

‘No, it's fine. Look Rue. I know you … I ain't doing this right.' A sigh. A pause. Then: ‘You're young and headstrong, and you can do something that most people don't even know exists. I don't know how strong you are in it. I pray not very.'

‘You pray?' said Rue, unable to stop herself.

Fernie waved a hand irritably. ‘It's an expression. Stop interrupting, be a good girl for once.'

Rue fell silent.

‘Now,' said Fernie. ‘You know I'm sorry about the whole thing. You don't know how much. I should've told you what I long suspected. But I didn't want you to have it, Rue. The Talent. It brings nothing but trouble. But it's no good telling you that either, as you don't care right now, and why should you? You've been given an adventure, and you'll never be right in your life if you don't go to Capital and let Mussyer de Forde poke around inside your head and do his stupid tests. It's all right. I'll get a prentice in training to help me out once in a while. I'll get Mewan's girl from the Flats to come over once or twice a week, something like that.'

‘Deer? She's messy in her prep work and she don't know any of the local herbs,' said Rue. She wanted to protest to let Fern know she cared, but not enough so that Fern would see sense and make her stay.

‘Deer's more advanced in her training than you are and knows what she's about, and don't think I don't know what you're doing,' said Fernie. ‘I'll be fine, and you'll be fine, and Deer'll do, and you'll be back before you know it.'

Come back to this? thought Rue. Only if I fail.

She was determined not to fail.

It wasn't in Rue's nature to lie and say she didn't want to go, and Fern saw it plain as day, written all across her body. But still, she felt awfully guilty about being so eager to leave and do something Fernie clearly disapproved of.

But then again, Fern had kept the truth from her, hadn't she? Rue could be angry about that, if she wanted to be. She wondered when the old witch had first known what it was she had.

So Rue went to Mussyer de Forde by herself, to the small cottage where he was renting a room over in the next village, and he smiled when she said she wanted to go with him and told her to call him Frith.

They left a week later. Her last image of Fernie had been of her stood on her doorstep, framed by the rounded weight of her cottage, looking at Rue sitting in the coach. The coach had started to move and Fernie had gone inside almost immediately, firmly closing her front door. Rue had felt a small rush of sickness then. Fernie was her weight. Fernie looked after her and told her when she made mistakes and tutted when she said something wrong and guided her. She was deliberately discarding her only protection, leaving behind the only person who cared about her.

But Rue was determined not to be the sort of girl that was cowed by adventure, now that it had finally come and found her. She would prove herself.

The university coach was getting busy. The last stop they had halted at had taken on several new passengers, and some of their clothes had been so outlandish, Rue had had to force herself not to stare. Frith had caught her open-mouthed gaze, nevertheless. She'd expected him to be angry but he'd smiled secretively at her.

No one was talking to anyone else, and so there they all sat in utter silence. The outside world began to intrude over the creaking and rumbling of the coach, and Rue listened keenly. There was a lot of shouting, words she tried to catch as they went past. There were brief snatches of smells she half recognised. It had begun to rain, and she watched people totter past with enormous shades held over their heads, jostling each other for space. Sometimes they even walked in the streets, and more than once she'd seen someone dance hurriedly out of the way when a coach had come rumbling up behind them. There was a lot of joyous swearing and shaking of fists. At first it had made her nervous, but as it seemed so much to be the way strangers interacted here, she presumed it normal and began to enjoy each short drama when it happened. Frith had apparently gone to sleep. Rue supposed that he found all this completely regular, even wearisome. But how could you sleep with such a racket going on?

There was a busy shuffling of people for the next hour or so, alighting from the coach and heading off determinedly into the rain. Rue wondered if she should wake Frith – they were almost the only people left. But in the strange manner he'd displayed over the last few hours, almost as if he could read her mind, he beat her to it and spoke without opening his eyes.

‘Nearly there, Rue. Look out of the window and you'll see a yellowish tower poking up from the general mess of buildings we're heading towards. That is the university tower, and those buildings will be your home for the next few months.'

Rue peered out, trying to dredge up the required expression of excitement at what she would see. In truth, now it came to it, she felt a little nerve-sick. What if it all went wrong? What if it turned out she had less Talent than a cat?

No, she told herself. You're special, you know it. Stop this.

The yellow tower was obvious right away. It rose up magnificently from a sprawling nest of low buildings that surrounded it like a garden. All in all, it didn't look how she'd imagined. She'd thought of a series of grand monuments, pristine white, mysterious. Apart from the tower, the university appeared to be a clustered collection of mismatched buildings on a hill, albeit surrounded by an impressive wall. She would have been more awestruck if this had been the first thing she'd seen on leaving the countryside, but a day of travelling had rapidly hardened her.

The entrance gates were standing open and their coach rattled on through. Rue looked about as they went past – there were two small posts on either side with two plump, bored-looking guards stationed there. They moved on from the sprawling front driveway and started to roll down the side of the main layout.

When they alighted a few minutes later, it was in front of a squat set of houses made of red stone. Frith had confirmed that everything they had passed was part of the university. Rue couldn't imagine a place so big. The red stone buildings, she was told, exclusively housed all those students who had specifically been recruited to study the Talent.

Despite his promises to the contrary, Frith had in fact told her very little of what exactly the Talent was on their long journey to the city. He'd evaded her ten thousand questions with an easy manner that should have provoked her but hadn't.

What Rue had managed to ascertain was this: the Talent surfaced in people at a young age, and to varying degrees. It was rare, and very hard to spot. In most of those with Talent, the ability was surface only. In a tiny handful of people it manifested more strongly, but it was almost impossible to test. In fact, Frith had said, there was only one man in all of Angle Tar qualified enough to decide how much Talent an individual had, and his name was Mussyer White. It would be he whom Rue and others like her would be having lessons with in order to test her.

What was the Talent, and how could you tell who had it? Frith had smiled at her awkward attempts to ask this in different ways and merely said that he couldn't speak of it because he didn't know; but that she would, soon enough.

They got out of the coach together and he took her up to the front door, which was opened before he had knocked. A woman with flickering, blinking mouse eyes peered at them both.

‘Mussyer Frith!' she said. ‘We weren't expecting you 'til tomorrow.'

‘I'm a constant surprise,' said Frith. ‘This young lady is special; I collected her myself.'

The mouse woman looked Rue up and down. ‘I'm sure. Room fourteen, is it?'

‘If it's vacant,' said Frith easily. ‘Now I shall have to leave you, Rue. This is Zelle Penafers Hannah. She runs Red House, your new home. She'll look after you while you're here, and give you your itinerary and map. Everything you need.'

Rue felt a little abandoned but was determined not to show it. She smiled and bowed to the mouse woman, who did not acknowledge it.

‘Until we meet again,' said Frith.

‘When will that be?'

‘Not for a few days, I'm afraid. Work we must. You'll be fine.'

He climbed back into the coach, and she watched it rattle away. As she turned back to the open doorway, she found the mouse woman had disappeared.

Good beginning, she thought, bending to pick up her battered luggage bags. She lurched into the hallway and thought better about kicking the door shut, bumping it with her side to swing it closed.

‘Zelle …' She thought back. ‘Penafers?'

Silence. It was a long hallway lined with doors, all of which were shut. She stood for a moment.

Fourteen, wasn't it.

She walked carefully along, looking at each door as she passed. Four. Six. Eight.

The lighting in here was terrible. Half the lamps weren't even lit.

Twelve. Fourteen. This was it. She grappled with the handle, hoping it wasn't locked. It swung open easily.

The first thing she noticed was that it was quite small. The second thing she noticed was that, compared to the hallway, it was quite bright. The third thing she noticed was that there was a girl with a very minimalist attitude towards clothing reclining on the narrow bed.

Rue dropped her bags. They made a series of thumping sounds as they hit the floor.

‘Oh,' said the girl. ‘You must be a new one.'

‘I'm sorry, I've the wrong room.'

‘No, I don't think so. It's been empty for ages, and it's the smallest one, so no one wanted it.'

Rue tried not to stare. The girl was wearing a dress made of very thin material, so thin that it looked like she wore nothing at all. It clung to every cave and corner of her flesh and stopped short of her knees. Her hair was very fair and frizzy, so that it stuck out in wispy waves from her head, and she was knobbly slim.

‘You're quite pretty, aren't you?' she said. ‘Allow me to enquire after your family name.'

And she was aristocratic. Only aristocrats spoke like that.

‘It's Vela. My familiar's Rue. What's yours?'

The girl broke into a short stream of giggles. ‘Oh my,' she said. ‘You're from the country, aren't you? I wasn't sure at first but your dress, and that accent. Oh my.'

Rue stared at her in irritation. ‘Why are you in this room, then, if it's not yours?'

‘It's quieter in here. I come to read.' She did have her hand on a book.

‘Why do you read with hardly no clothes on?'

The girl giggled again. It was starting to grate. ‘Well, what do
you
wear to bed? Woollen pyjamas?'

They watched each other. The girl broke first. Rue felt triumphant.

‘You don't look Talented, but I suppose that's a good thing.'

‘You don't look Talented either,' said Rue.

‘No one does, that's the point. Did you really just get here?'

‘Yes.'

‘You'll have History with us tomorrow, then. You've missed half the autumn term already. That will be a lot of catching up.'

Rue shifted on her feet, aching for the girl to leave. ‘I shall cope, I'm sure.'