Palace of Stone (2 page)

“It’s smoother,” she said.

“I’ve been polishing it.”

An unmistakable sound reached them from outside. They rushed to the window to see the first in the line of trader wagons, crunching rock debris under metal-rimmed wheels.

Miri was holding Peder’s warm, callused hand. She did not know who had reached out first.

They ran to meet the wagons, along with most of the village. Trading began, families selling cut blocks of linder and purchasing foodstuffs and supplies from the wagons. In the past, trading day had been an anxious occasion, each family bartering for just enough food to avoid starvation. But since the previous year, when the villagers were first able to sell their linder at fair value, trading days had become festivals.

Children danced in excitement over ribbons and cloth, shoes and tools, bags of dried peas still in their shucks, barrels of honey and onions and salt fish. Such items had always seemed magical to Miri, evidence of fabulous, faraway places. How often she’d daydreamed of cities, farmlands, and endless ocean. Now at last she would go. But she did not feel like joining in the dance.

Peder caught up with his mother to help in the trading, and Miri sold her family’s stone. Then she went in search of her sister.

“Please come, Marda,” she said, panic tightening her throat. Marda was not an academy graduate, but she knew Britta would not mind, and the other girls adored Miri’s gentle sister. “I thought I wanted to go, but I’m scared. I need you. Please.”

“You’re not scared,” Marda said quietly. “Or you won’t be for long.”

“Marda, I’m serious.”

“I’m not like you, Miri. Learning about all those places and past kings and wars, it makes me feel like … like I’m sleeping on a precipice. I don’t like that feeling. I want to stay home.”

“But—”

“Pa and I both know you’ll be fine. So fine, in fact, he worries you won’t come back.”

“He does?”

Marda nodded. “So do I.”

Miri shook her head. She could not imagine staying away forever by choice, but so much could happen in a year, so many obstacles to coming home. And what dangerous matters did Katar fear? Miri felt her chin start to quiver.

Marda rubbed Miri’s back and forced a confident smile. “A few blinks and you’ll be back. A year’s a small thing.”

Marda’s words reminded Miri of a line from a poem she’d read in one of the academy books, so she said, “
No small thing, a bee’s sting, when it enters the heart.
”

“A bee’s sting entered whose heart?” asked Marda.

“It’s just a poem. Never mind,” Miri said. She should have known Marda would not understand, and that made her feel as lonely as if she were already gone.

Marda put her arm around Miri, tucking her head against her own. Miri noticed her sister had grown taller in the past year. She was older than most Mount Eskel girls who accepted a betrothal, yet no one had spoken for her. Once all the village boys were betrothed, no others would come rushing up from the lowlands to take their place. And Marda was too shy to speak for herself.

As soon as she returned from Asland, Miri decided, she would be matchmaker for her sister. And she’d keep teaching in the village school till every villager could read, including her pa. She felt better making plans like ropes securing her to her mountain.

The trading hurried along, culminating in the trading-day feast. Now it was a farewell feast.

Not all the graduates of the princess academy would be going. Some were kept back at their parents’ wishes; others had accepted betrothals and did not want to leave. Miri would travel with five girls: Gerti, Esa, Frid, Liana, and Bena. Each carried a burlap sack filled with her few possessions. Miri clutched her own sack to her chest. The summer had seemed endless, but now that this moment was upon her, it felt sudden and sharp, a hawk in a hunting dive.

“I’ll write to you,” she told Marda. “Every week. And I’ll send the whole stack of letters with the spring traders. And the letters will all say the same thing—I miss you, and I’ll be home next fall. Home for good.”

Marda just nodded.

Her father approached, his hands behind his back, his eyes on the ground. Miri stepped forward to meet him.

“Don’t forget to butcher the rabbits come high winter, when the pelts are thickest,” she said. “It breaks Marda’s heart to do it, and if I’m gone …”

He glanced at her and then away again, frowning into the chain of mountains: brown, purple, blue, and beyond, ghostly gray summits seemingly afloat above the clouds.

“I will come back, Pa,” she said.

“I wonder,” he said in his low voice. “I wonder.”

“I promise.”

He picked her up, pressing her to his chest as easily as if she were still a baby. How could an embrace make her feel exquisitely loved and yet heartbroken too?

“I’ll always come home, Pa,” she said.

But a shiver of uncertainty had entered her.

Miri sat in the back of a wagon as it drove away, her eyes taking in every last image of home: her house built of gray rubble rock, the white gleam of linder shards marking the paths, the jagged cliffs of the quarry, and the magnificent, white-tipped head of Mount Eskel.

She felt night-blind and afraid, as if walking a path that might lead to sheer cliff and empty air. The lowlands were so far away, she could hardly believe they existed. Once she was in the lowlands, would home seem like a dream too?

She glimpsed Pa and Marda one last time before the road bent and, quick as a sigh, the village was gone from sight.

Chapter Two

The city of the river

The city of the bay

The people of the limestone

The people of the clay

Miri’s jaw ached from gaping. First, there were the lowlander trees, their enormous leafy crowns still so vibrantly green it hurt her eyes. Next, farmlands stretched so far they curved with the world, green and golden. Then the wagons rolled onto actual streets, past wooden houses winking with glass windows. The roofs were made of thatch or tile with the occasional one of beaten copper—some new and orange but most a weathered green.

Trying to keep her voice steady, Miri said, “So this is Asland.”

Enrik the trader rolled his eyes. “No, this is just a
town
.”

That night they camped outside the town. Miri looked up from her supper of bacon and potatoes and met eyes with a thin girl, chewing on a stick. The town girl did not speak, just watched Miri with wide eyes. Had she come to see the backward folk of Mount Eskel? Would she run home and make fun of the way Miri ate? Miri hunched her back and turned away.

By the third day, Miri was accustomed to the rhythm of the journey: woods, farms, town, repeated again and again, the shuddering lope of the wagon constant beneath her. She rarely gaped anymore and almost forgot to be afraid until the day they entered Asland.

The rain began as a mist and thickened into annoying pecks on their faces and hands. Soon it was an onslaught, and the girls huddled together under an oiled cloth in the back of Enrik’s lurching wagon. Miri’s stomach squelched.

When Bena made sick noises over the side of the wagon, Miri scrambled forward and out from under the cloth, into the rainstorm.

“Death would be better than riding under there,” she announced. “Death or rain.”

Peder and Enrik shared the driver’s bench, huddled under smaller cloths.

“You’ll get soaked,” said Enrik. With his long nose and thin, stooped shoulders, he reminded Miri of a grumpy vulture.

“Already am.” At least the air was warmer in the lowlands.

Peder scooted over, and Miri squeezed beside him. He pulled half of his oiled cloth around her. Their legs touched.

The rain teased her hair, slithered through her clothes, and lay against her skin. But in the fresh air her stomach settled, so she hugged her arms and was glad at least to be looking out at the gray-blue world. She’d fantasized many times about her first glimpse of the capital. Her imagination had not planned on rain.

“I’m so nervous,” she whispered to Peder, her teeth chattering.

“You sound it,” Peder said.

“No, my jaw’s pounding because it misses the sound of quarry hammers.”

“Or else you’re cold and should get back under the larger cloth.”

“And deprive you of my company? I’m not so cruel.”

Until that year, no mountain villager had journeyed to the lowlands. But so much had changed since the priests divined that Mount Eskel was the home of the future princess. The court-appointed tutor had established a princess academy there to teach the rough mountain girls to read and to introduce them to other subjects each should know in case the prince chose her as his bride. But from the academy books, Miri and the other girls had learned much more, including how the village could sell linder for better prices.

Because of the higher profits, every daylight moment no longer needed to be spent working in the quarry, and Miri had started a village school for anyone who cared to learn. Mount Eskel had been elevated from a territory to a province of Danland, the graduates of the princess academy were named ladies of the princess, and suddenly the world beyond the mountain view was no longer a frightening mystery but a place Miri could visit or even inhabit.

The rain was softening into a fine drizzle. The low clouds lifted, sunlight melted the mist, and Miri saw that they were already in the middle of a city larger than any from her imagination.

Street after street, gardens and fountains, buildings like giants. The bench beneath Miri seemed to drop away, and she felt as if she were falling through the whole, huge world.

Peder pressed his shoulder against hers and opened his eyes wide. She widened her eyes at him and nodded back.

They crossed a bridge over a river. Houses six stories high crammed the banks, so tight they presented one great wall. Each house was painted a different color—blue, yellow, red, brown, green, rust, turquoise.

“Why is that farmland gray?” Miri asked. Downriver, the buildings stopped abruptly, bordering a huge empty plain.

Enrik laughed. “That’s the ocean.”

“The
ocean
?” The lowlander traders always went on as if the ocean were the most wondrous thing in the world and the Eskelites were fools for living so far from its glory. But it was just a flat, lifeless sky.

Poor Asland, with no mountains
, she thought.
They have to paint their houses to have something pretty to look at. They have to marvel over a boring ocean.

The bridge ended, and the wagon veered away from the river toward the center of town and a white stone palace in a sea of green park.

“Linder,” Miri whispered. “It must have taken a hundred years to quarry all that.”

The other girls were sitting up on their knees and watching the approach.

“It’s so big,” said Frid.

“So are you,” said Miri. It was true—Frid was dwarfed only by her mother and six big brothers. “And if it came to a fight, I’d pick you over the palace.”

Frid laughed. “What’s it going to do, fall on me?”

“It’s like a huge piece of Mount Eskel,” said Esa, Peder’s sister.

“Then we should feel right at home,” said Miri, trying to give herself courage.

The wagons entered the palace grounds around the side through a gate that opened into a large courtyard.

“The entire village and quarry could fit inside here,” said Peder.

“Indeed,” said Enrik. “Perhaps next the king will make this courtyard a province.”

“Very funny,” Miri said, reaching out to knock Enrik’s hat over his eyes.

An orange-haired girl left a crowd of people and ran at their wagons. Katar stood taller than Miri remembered, regal even. Miri recalled the “dangerous” matter of Katar’s letter and looked for a sign that they were not too late.

“Did you bring a gift for the king?” Katar said, skipping over greetings. Peder hopped into the wagon that contained the mantelpiece and removed the cloth.

Katar nodded. “It’s something at least.”

“It’s
beautiful
,” Miri said, nudging Katar with her tone of voice.

Katar blinked, looking at Miri, then Peder. “Oh. Right. It’s beautiful.”

“How has it been for you here, Katar?” Peder asked.

“They all hate us, of course. What would you expect?” Then she whispered in Miri’s ear. “I need to talk to you alone, as soon as we can.”

Miri nodded. The sun had steamed much of the rain from her clothes, but she shivered with new cold.

“I would have liked you here yesterday but at least it’s not tomorrow,” Katar said. “You’ll have to get settled later. It’s time for the gift giving. Mount Eskel goes first, since we’re the newest province.”

The king had come out of the palace and was standing on a dais built in the courtyard. Around him stood what Miri assumed were his guards and family. She recognized Prince Steffan alongside yellow-haired, redcheeked Britta. Miri jumped up and down, waving, and Britta happily waved back. Katar glared at Miri to behave. She directed the wagon driver to follow her across the courtyard.