Princess Academy (8 page)

n

Chapter Eleven

I’ll raise the ladle to your lips,

Drip water on your fingertips,

And stay although my heart says flee.

Will you look up and smile at me?

n

T
hat afternoon, the sounds of song greeted them at the outskirts of the village. Dozens of voices carried the melody, and slapping drums and clapping hands thrummed the beat. The girls recognized the tune and rhythm of the empty barrel dance, the first dance of spring holiday.

“Hurry up,” said Esa. “They’ll need us, or most of the boys will be dancing alone.”

The girls broke into a run, and the noise of their boots on the roadway sounded like a night rockfall.

“We’re here, we’re back!” some shouted, and when they came into view of the village center, a cheer went up. The clapping broke from its dance rhythm into applause for their entrance, and parents and siblings shouted and leaped forward to embrace them. Miri looked for Marda and her father and was about to despair when they rushed her from behind.

Her pa lifted her in the air and spun her around as if she were still a little girl. Marda was there as well, kissing her cheeks and warming her cold hands. Miri’s eyes felt watery, and she put her face against her pa’s chest.

“Are you all right?” asked Marda.

She nodded, still hiding her face. “I just missed you all. I guess I missed you a lot.”

The holiday was the best in Miri’s memory. Frid beamed so proudly when she took first place the stone-hurling contest, she seemed to forget that she had won every year since she was twelve. The food was better than Miri could ever have described to Britta, and the cheering never really died out. Everything seemed worthy of applause.

Frid’s pa announced the ribbon dances with a strum of his three-stringed yipper, and Doter handed out the tattered red strips of cloth that were older than any grandparent. Jans, a pale, serious boy, trailed Britta around like a thistleweed stuck to her bootlace. He begged her for one more dance, and then one more, so for an hour she shared her ribbon with Jans, high stepping and twisting and smiling wider than Miri had ever seen.

Miri herself danced so hard that she could scarcely breathe. She saw Peder dancing with Bena and then Liana and had given up hoping when a new song began and she found him on the other end of her ribbon. She would have talked and teased and laughed with him, but his sudden appearance had startled her, and she did not know if she could keep up her carefree façade. Her gaze fell on the ground, her heart beating faster than the drums.

After a time, she did not see Peder anymore among the dancers, and she nestled close to her father and watched the toddlers twirl and hop. When night fell the story shouts began. The grandfathers told the somber story of the creator god first speaking to people; then the mothers recited the one that began, “One lifetime ago bandits came to Mount Eskel.”

After the bandit story, Os said, “Let’s hear a tale from our girls come home.”

Bena, as the oldest, stood and chose her story, a silly romp of a tale where each line was invented as it was told. “The girl with no hair left home to wander hills where she was not known,” she shouted, then pointed to Liana, who sat at another fire.

“An eagle mistook her for her fallen egg and carried her up to its nest,” shouted Liana, pointing to Frid.

“A quarrier plucked her from the eagle’s nest, thinking her a good stone to break.” Frid pointed to Gerti.

The story continued, each academy girl selecting another to continue the tale. Miri inched up to sit on her heels, hoping to be seen. No one looked her way. Bena had three turns, and even Britta was chosen once, inventing a clever line about a bear mistaking her for a mushroom cap. Then Esa shouted, “Last line!” and pointed to Miri.

Miri stood, her smile impossible to hide. “With her bald head shining like a gold crown, a wandering prince mistook her for an academy princess and carried her away to his palace.”

The crowd burst into cheers and laughter.

The festivities slowed and families clustered around fires, drinking tea, with honey if they were lucky, and singing sleepy tunes. Miri’s gaze wandered over the faces lit by the bonfires until she discovered Peder just beyond the ring of orange light.

Miri had not spoken a word to him since returning, and she realized now that she might have seemed unfriendly while they danced. She should have run to him at once and told him all her news. Instead she had held back, embarrassed. She stood to go to him, then hesitated.

Don’t hesitate if you know it’s right
, Miri reminded herself.
Just swing.

Her palms were hot, and she clenched her fists and tried to think of what she would say. In her distress, her mind clung to the Conversation lessons.
Repeat his name. Ask questions. Make observations, not judgments. Return the conversation to him.
And something Britta had added:
If you want to impress someone, act as though they are your better.

“Hi, Peder,” said Miri, approaching where he sat alone. “How have you been?”

“All right, thanks.” His voice was short, as if he did not want to speak with her. She almost ran away then. Being near him made her insides feel like twisted vines, choking and blooming at the same time, and her only clear thought was that his smile was worth trudging for.

“May I sit with you?”

“Sure.”

She sat beside him on a cut linder block, careful not to let her leg touch his. “I’d like to hear about . . . how things have been . . . lately.”

“Fine enough. A little quieter than usual without Esa in the house.”

She continued to pose questions, using his name, making eye contact, making sure her mannerisms showed she was wholly focused on him. After a time, his responses got longer. Soon she had him talking freely about how that winter had been the bleakest he had known.

“Never thought I’d miss my little sister,” he said playfully. “Esa . . . and all the girls.”

Miri wondered,
Is he thinking of Bena or Liana?

He glanced at Miri, then back at his hands. “I never thought that every day of working the quarry could get any worse.”

“What do you mean, worse? Don’t you like the mountain? You wouldn’t rather be a lowlander.”

“No, of course not.” He picked up a linder shard from beside her boot. “I don’t mind quarry work, really, but sometimes my head gets tired of it, and I want to . . . I’d like to make things, not just cut stone. I want to do work that I’m really good at, that feels just right.”

It chilled Miri to hear him speak so openly, and thoughts so like her own. Instead of shouting,
“Me too! That’s how I feel!
” she remembered the rules of Conversation and stayed focused on him. “If you could do anything in the world, what would it be?”

He thought a moment, opened his mouth, then shrugged and tossed the shard away. “Never mind, it’s nothing.”

“Peder Doterson, you had best tell me now. I’ll hold my breath until I know.”

He picked up a new linder shard and examined its color. Miri waited for him to speak.

“It doesn’t really matter, but I’ve always . . . You know the carvings on the chapel doors? I’ve stared and stared at them the way I see you sometimes watch the sky.” He looked over her face as if he were studying the carvings. His look stilled her. “As long as I can remember, I’ve wanted to make things like that, something more than blocks of stone. I sometimes . . . You promise not to laugh at me?”

Miri nodded earnestly.

“You know how I carve little things from thrown-off linder?”

“Yes,” she said, “you made me a goat once. I still have it.”

He smiled. “You do? I remember that goat. He had a crooked smile.”

“A perfect smile,” said Miri. It had always reminded her of Peder’s.

“It’s probably childish, but I like making things like that. Linder shapes really well, better than rubble rock. I’d like to make designs in the blocks, things rich lowlanders might buy to have over doorways or above their hearth.”

The idea caught Miri’s breath, it was so perfect. “Why don’t you?”

“If Pa ever found me making stone pictures, he’d whip me for wasting time. We barely cut enough linder each year to trade for food, and it doesn’t seem likely that anything will ever change.”

“It might.” She meant for the comment to slip unnoticed, but something in her tone must have intrigued him.

“How?” he asked.

Miri shrugged off the question. It was going too well to give up on the rules of Conversation now. He pressed again, wanting to hear about what she had been doing at the academy all winter, and again she tried to keep talking about him.

Peder sighed in frustration. “Why are you being so evasive? Tell me, I really want to know.”

Miri hesitated, but his attention was irresistible, and she had a thousand stories trembling on her tongue. Then he smiled in his way, the right side of his mouth curving higher. She rubbed his tawny curls as she might her favorite nanny goat after a milking.

“You may be sorry you asked,” she said, and drowned him with the account of the last few months, telling all from getting her palms lashed and the first snowfall to their escape from the school earlier that day. She spoke quickly, her tongue feeling like a hummingbird’s wing; she was so afraid of boring him if she took too long. Then she described how she had been experimenting with quarry-speech, how she could share a memory, not just deliver a warning, and how it sometimes worked outside the quarry.

“Though it sometimes doesn’t.” She lifted her hand to say she did not know why.

“Try it right now.”

Miri swallowed. Quarry-speaking with Esa and Frid had felt like a game, but with Peder it became something intimate, like reaching for his hand, like looking into his eyes even when she had nothing to say. Hoping she was not blushing, she rapped her knuckles on the linder block and sang about a girl who carried drinking water in the quarry. She let the song guide her and began to match her thoughts to its rhythm, searching for a good memory to use, when Peder stopped her with a smile.

“What are you doing?”

Now she did blush, cursing herself for choosing a song about a love-struck girl. “I’m . . . I thought you said to try to quarry-speak.”

“Yes, but you know you don’t have to pound and sing, right?” Peder waited for her to agree, but she just stared. “You know that in the quarry we happen to be pounding and singing while we work, but that we can use quarry-speech without doing all that.”

“Yes, of course,” she said, smiling. “Of course I knew that. Only an idiot would think you have to pound the stone to make quarry-speech after all.”

“Yes, of course.” He laughed, and she laughed back, bumping him with her shoulder. Peder had always been good about letting her mistakes slide.

“So you don’t have to pound, and the only singing happens inside.” She splayed her hand on the stone and without a song quarry-spoke to Peder. It felt like whispering something right to his heart. When her vision shuddered, she shivered as well.

“That was strange.” Peder looked at her. “Is that what you mean by memories? It felt like quarry-speech, but I’m used to hearing the warnings we use as we work. This time, I was just thinking about the afternoon when I made that linder goat.” His eyes widened as his thoughts seemed to race forward. “Is it because you spoke a memory? One that I knew, one that I lived, so it was so clear to me . . . Miri, that’s amazing.”

“I wonder why it worked now. . . .” Miri smoothed her hand over the stone. The linder was chipped and irregular and pocked with chisel marks, not smooth like the polished floorstones of the academy. She lifted her fingers to her mouth and pressed them against her growing smile. A new idea sent her spinning. “Peder, I think I understand. I think it’s the linder.”

“What’s the linder? What do you mean?”

She stood up, feeling as though the idea were too big to crouch inside her and needed room to stretch. “The academy floor is made of linder, so is this stone, and the whole quarry . . . you see? Those other times when it didn’t work, I must have been outside or on rubble rock. Maybe quarry-speech works best around linder.”

“Sit back down and let me try.” He yanked her arm and she sat beside him. This time she was a little closer, the sides of their legs touching.

He closed his eyes, the muscles of his forehead tense. Miri held her breath. For a time nothing happened. Then she found her thoughts flash to that afternoon on the grazing hill, the scrape of Peder’s knife on a shard of linder, a plaited miri chain dangling from her fingers. It was her own memory, but stronger, vivid, pulled forward to the front of her thoughts, and full of color. And she knew it was Peder speaking that memory, the way she knew the smell of baking bread—it had the sense of him.

“I couldn’t figure it out at first,” he said. “I’m so used to repeating the quarry warnings we always use.”

“You told me once that quarry-speech was like singing inside, and that’s how I knew what to do.”

“Huh,” he said, shaking his head. “A lot has happened while you were away.”

“I’d tell you more if I thought I could do it before sunup.”