Plum Duff Page 3

  “I had not heard their names correctly, so I was most surprised to discover them there to meet me. Nevertheless, we made our arrangements to meet the next morning after they had completed their other commissions and I finished my preparations. I was … discomposed to discover that Lord St-Noire here was wanted by the Governor-Prince of Orio City and that we were all four of us arrested and thrown into the prison as a result.”

  My father dug his fingers into my shoulder despite the incontrovertible evidence that we were not stuck in the infamous prison.

  “I wasn’t there,” Hope said tremulously, raising her hand. “I … encountered them later.”

  “Hal was instead,” I explained.

  “Hal—the Imperial Duke?” Sir Hamish frowned and looked meaningfully at my father. “They arrested you and an Imperial Duke?”

  “They had hostages from half of Northwest Oriole. Or rather Lark did.” I discovered I had not progressed quite so far in forgiveness and divine charity as all that: I was still rather angry at my erstwhile lover.

  “Lark being …”

  “Jemis’s sweetheart from Morrowlea,” Hope said.

  “The bride of the governor-prince,” Jullanar Maebh said.

  “A dark witch,” said Mr. Dart.

  I shrugged when everyone looked at me. “The successor to The Indrilline.”

  My father swore with such pungency I didn’t know any of the words. We all regarded his prowess with amazement. It was clear he was much quicker to figure out the political ramifications of the situation than I’d been.

  “Sorry,” he concluded weakly, nodding apologetically at the ladies.

  Hope’s eyes were shining with admiration, and she merely shook her head and said, “Please, don’t worry about it.”

  Jullanar Maebh shrugged. “My mother is an Outer Reaches spákona. She can scale fish with her tongue when she gets going.”

  Sir Hamish laughed abruptly. “I’d forgotten that—do you remember, Torquin, when Ingrid brought that moonshine from home for us to try, and then insisted she could drink everyone under the table …?”

  “Which she did,” the Squire said.

  “It’s true,” Sir Hamish nodded.

  The Squire scoffed. “Like you remember any of that evening.”

  “I remember that evening,” my father put in. “I was on leave and we all ended up swimming naked in the fountain in Kinglode—“

  The Squire harrumphed and hastily said, “So, you were thrown into the infamous prison of Orio City. Did they let you out when they realized who you all were?”

  “No, we escaped,” I said proudly. “Everyone made fun of my final paper at Morrowlea, but I was right, you know. Ariadne nev Lingarel’s poem is a cipher describing the architecture and how to get out.”

  My father started to laugh again. “You successfully escaped the Orio City prison by means of a poem interpretation? Oh Jemis, Jemis!”

  “Unfortunately there was some messy business with wireweed again,” I explained. “Lark forced me to take some … which was probably good because that was how I’d understood the poem in the first place … but it meant that when we came to the last part of the riddle—it was a complicated magical riddle, you see—I had to sacrifice something … and I sacrificed my magic … but with the wireweed overdose, I … died.”

  “And yet,” my father said slowly, “you are here now.”

  “That was Mr. Dart,” I said, turning to smile brilliantly at him as my gratitude suddenly surged forth again. Mr. Dart himself stared fixedly at the floor, his cheeks and the tips of his ears scarlet.

  “He’s the champion of the Lady,” I said, “and in a house in Lind he found a unicorn.”

  Ballory was brought forth from the kitchen, where she had undoubtedly converted the cook and scullery maids and footmen to the meet and right adoration of her being, and promptly won over the hearts of Master Dart, Sir Hamish, and my father alike.

  Once that marvel had settled into—not normalcy, but a kind of more homely wonder—I felt an increasing urgency to pass on the messages with which I had been entrusted, and begged their leave to tell them.

  Sir Hamish bravely agreed to go first, and so we went to the small study on the main floor which they usually used for the business of the estate. I told him whatever I had been charged to say, the words coming clear and clean out of my mind, received by him with astonished, astonishing gratitude. At the end he looked at me with a shattering kind of grace.

  I had felt the same on speaking with Ariadne nev Lingarel, my mother, my stepfather, in that Wood.

  “Thank you,” Sir Hamish said hoarsely when I had finished.

  I had explained I would not remember the words, and did not; only the taste of them, of snow and sweet honey, still on my lips.

  “Thank the Lady,” I replied seriously. “And thank Mr. Dart—Perry—Peregrine—for guarding my way home. I know the Lady would not have left me forever in the wastes between this life and the next, but I had no desire to linger there.”

  Sir Hamish regarded me once again with his painterly eye.

  “May I paint you, Jemis?”

  This fell so hard on my own thought that I flushed and looked down. “If you’d like.”

  “I know it’s not your light, Jemis,” he said, and surprised me by taking me by both shoulders and then giving me a swift, close embrace. “Thank you.”

  Master Dart was next; the Squire said very little when I had finished, but his eyes were bright.

  “This daughter of mine,” he said tentatively.

  “A woman of great character,” I replied instantly, having already decided what I would say to this obvious line of questioning. “Game despite all the mad adventures we fell into. And brilliant.”

  The Squire harrumphed, but he was visibly pleased.

  “Perry has been cunningly finding out her Winterturn traditions,” I added, “so you can surprise her with them.”

  The Squire harrumphed again. “He’s not too upset at being done out of the entail?”

  I could only shake my head, for Mr. Dart had never wanted it in the first place.

  “I suppose not, eh,” the Squire muttered, and patted me awkwardly on the shoulder. “You’re a good friend to him. Glad you didn’t die, what?”

  “Indeed,” I said, grinning and knowing that a month ago I would not have been able to see that for the gentle, loving tease it was. How had I ever feared that Sir Hamish and the Squire would reject me even if Mr. Dart didn’t?

  How had I ever thought Mr. Dart would disdain my friendship because I thought I had lost all the promise of my family and my education? I had sworn fealty to him, for that action at the dark crossroads between life and death; but he had long since been a loyal friend to me.

  I knew my father’s messages were from my mother and my stepfather, but nothing more.

  When I had finished, he gestured for me to sit down in one of the chairs in the room, and took the other. He clasped his hands, elbows on his knees, and rested his chin on them.

  “I haven’t been able to tell you how I came to survive Loe.”

  I shook my head, my heart suddenly leaping into my throat.

  “Sometimes,” he said, “I think my whole life led up to that point, and I am still waiting there, at the Gates of the Morning, waiting for the enemy to climb the hill.”

  I could only look at him. I had not known to imagine that scene, not until Hal had come to Ragnor Bella earlier this autumn. I had been told that my father had died ignominiously, running away from a court-martial for treason; and that he had died honourably, lost over the Border on a scouting mission. I had held those two contradictory notifications in my mind and my heart, unable to believe the one and unable to prove the other.

  “You will never be quite the same,” he said, regarding me intently. “No one I know who has died and returned ever was.”

  “You’ve known it to happen before?”

  He smiled crookedly. “Not quite so dramatically or miraculously. Perhaps it is always a miracle. A lot of things happen in a battle, Jemis, and there are many forms of dying.”

  He had died himself and come back to life, in all the ways that mattered: socially, spiritually, emotionally; perhaps even physically, if my dream of the pirate ship being captured was true.

  “Jemis,” my father said softly, “thank you for coming home.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  I spent the night at Dart Hall, and the next morning prepared to head in to Ragnor Bella and my own little flat over the bookstore.

  Hope and my father were the only two to join me for breakfast, which was at the unsociable hour of dawn—all of eight o’clock, this time of the year.

  “Good morning,” I said brightly.

  “Good morning, Jemis,” Hope replied, then sighed. “Lord St-Noire—“

  “Mr. Greenwing if you must,” I interrupted. “Please.”

  My father laughed. “Good morning, Jemis, Miss Stornaway. Are you off to town this morning, Jemis?’

  I nodded and poured them each coffee. Hope, I knew from Morrowlea, took hers the way Mr. Dart did, with lashings of honey and cream. Perhaps it was the Charese manner. My father tended to black. I liked something in between the two.

  “If you can stand not running, I’ll walk in with you.”

  It was so much easier than it had been to simply smile at him, acknowledge the small tendril of joy unfurling in my heart, that after all the doubts and loss—we still could have this. The simple, homely interactions of a man and his son.

  “Do you run around the barony here?” Hope asked. When I cocked my eyebrow at her she smiled, dimples appearing suddenly, and I knew what she was about to ask.

  “There are some interesting rock formations, yes.”

  “I’ve heard there were standing stones,” she asked tentatively.

  I glanced at my father, who said, “The False Witnesses. They’re a stone circle—nine stones—up above the Darts’ land. The edge of the mountains.”

  I nodded. “There are the ones sacred to the Lady—the Dragon Stone, and … the Ellery Stone …”

  My father looked sharply at me, then picked up the conversation smoothly and told Hope about the Giants’ Castle. She replied with questions, and I sat back with my coffee, trying not to shiver at the thought of how the cultists had marred the Ellery Stone.

  I had not realized the stones were such a specifically local feature, but apparently only Fiellan and northern Ronderell, particularly up by Fillering pool, had any, and it was rare for them to still be in use as were those in Ragnor barony.

  “We have sacred wells and caves mostly, my part of Chare,” Hope said. “People still leave offerings at some of them.”

  Hal had shown me a grotto up on the coast by his castle, which was nearly carpeted in sea-polished amber.

  (“It’s low in value,” he’d said; but gorgeous when the sun hit the wet stones.)

  I said, “I will see if I can find a map for you. Miss Dart might be interested in the waterways.”

  “Don’t go to the Magarran Strid on your own,” my father interjected seriously.

  I shuddered at the visceral memory of being on the rocky islet as the water fell away from the surface and revealed a hideous deep gorge laying beneath what had seemed a shallow surface. “Yes, let’s avoid that.”

  “I’ve heard of the Strid,” Hope said. “It’s supposed to be the most dangerous stretch of water in Northwest Oriole, apart from the Maelstrom between the Gháth and the Iarlaich in the Northern Sea.”

  “I’ve sailed that,” my father said grimly. “It’s not as dangerous as the Magarran Strid, for all that there’s a hole in the world at the bottom of it.”

  I blinked at this unexpected tidbit. “I beg your pardon?”

  My father laughed, the shadow lifting from his face as I undoubtedly looked deeply puzzled.

  “You know how there are passages between the worlds,” he said.

  “Of course, but I thought they’d … broken … in the Fall?”

  “The ones that were bound into the structure of the Empire, yes. But they were never all of the passages, nor even the majority of them. Many only open on specific occasions or for specific people … wild magic can have a will of its own, they say. And at the bottom of the Maelstrom is a window to another world. The Sea-Lord’s Eye, they call it up there. No one knows where it leads. Even if the passage goes both ways there’s no way to come up through the Maelstrom … you’d have to be an extremely powerful and skilled mage to even think about trying.”

  “I wonder if Jullanar Maebh has ever seen it,” Hope said thoughtfully, and then one of the servants came in with a tray full of toast and porridge and the conversation shifted to other interesting rocks of the barony, of which it turned out my father and I both had some distinct opinions.

  I had been informed the night before that Mr. Fancy had continued on to Ragnor Bella to deliver my purchases before returning to St-Noire himself. This meant that I had nothing but what I was carrying to take back myself.

  I changed into the outfit I’d left at Dart Hall, which was rather too lightweight for the weather. I’d been intending to run and thought it would be fine for that purpose, but since I was walking I added the coat I’d been given by the eccentric Master Boring.

  My father regarded the long quilted garment with amusement. It was cut closely around the torso and waist before swinging out to just above my knees. It was made of quilted wool in a fine deep teal—apparently a favourite colour, as there had been numerous outfits in variations of that shade—with embroidery in black and silver. The long line of small silver buttons were, I admit, both deeply fussy and greatly appealing.

  “Is that the new fashion in Orio City?” My father asked, his lips twitching.

  “Not yet,” I replied, not quite embarrassed, but grinning to cover the hint of it. The coat had last been fashionable in the early years of the Emperor Artorin’s reign. My father was in a new coat in a sober blue with brass buttons. Its cut was solidly fashionable in Ragnor Bella, which was always a step behind everyone else.

  “Is this part of the story that went off-course last night?”

  “It might be,” I allowed.

  We left Dart Hall by the front door. It was a splendid morning, bright and crisp. The snow had ended in the night, and the lawns before the Hall presented a smooth white sward marred only by the tracks of rabbits and other small creatures. The rougher grass of the sheep meadows on the other side of the ha-ha showed above the snow; the sheep themselves seemed almost yellow in comparison.

  “A fine morning,” my father announced, and set off with his hands jammed into his pockets.

  I wondered if the rival brother haberdashers of Ragnor Bella had neglected to make any of our ordered gloves, or whether he’d just forgotten them somewhere.

  We walked silently at a steady, brisk pace. I fell into it fairly easily, remembering the long day spent traversing the Arguty Forest with him and General Ben, all of a month ago and before I’d realized he was my father, come back from the reputed dead a second time.

  “Your mother and I used to go for these lovely long walks,” he said as we turned off the drive onto the road leading to Dartington and eventually to Ragnor Bella. “We often walked half the night through, when the moon was out. She loved the twilight, Olive did.”

  I let that new piece of knowledge settle into my heart. My mother, so happy, so healthy, so herself in the Wood of Spiritual Refreshment. So much of my sojourn there was hazy in my mind, impression and emotion; but her face was clear. Now there was a gift from the Lady.

  The road was soft underfoot, as the ground had not frozen before the snow fell. I enjoyed kicking up little lumps of snow as we walked, little conical hats on the toes of my boots building up and then falling off in a tumble of pellets.

  “My chatterbox son, so quiet,” my father teased.

  It was so much easier to say these things now, to myself, to him, with a few of the knots in my heart unloosed. “I am so glad you came home, Papa. It must have been hard, when you didn’t know what you would find.”

  “That is why Ben and I came incognito,” he replied, smiling crookedly. (I knew that smile; that was my own smile in the mirror, when I could not help but laugh at myself.) “But you know, Jemis, I don’t think I would have wanted to come any other way. It was so wonderful to meet you without knowing quite who you were at first.”

  We fell silent as we passed a cottage along the road. The housewife was in her front yard, gathering kale from a little patch of vegetables. We nodded politely at her; she bobbed a curtsey back, then said, “Well, look at the two of you! Master Jack, you’re looking better. Very proud of your boy, I expect?”

  “Very,” my father said. “How are you, Mrs. Finch?”

  “Can’t complain, Master Jack, can’t complain. Mr. Finch has the arthritis sore bad, but the Squire sees us right.”

  “He’s a good man.”

  “Aye, couldn’t ask for a better landlord.” Then she laughed, her eyes crinkling until she looked like an old apple, all cheerful and rosy-cheeked and wrinkled. “At least not for us as are Dartington folks. Your people will be glad to see you home, Master Jack, what’s left of them, and your son to come after you.”

  “Aye,” my father said, and tipped his hat to her. “Good day, Mrs. Finch.”

  I didn’t have a hat, so I gave her one of my most extravagant bows, all heel-clicks and curlicue hand gestures. Mrs. Finch laughed again and made a shooing gesture with her handful of curly green leaves.

  We kept on, following the tracks of a pony-cart down the road until it turned off for the Old Arrow. We went over the bridge, a hard left to get onto the river-road.

  “Not the Greenway this morning?” I enquired.

  “Did you want to go that way? I thought it might be a trifle wet.”

  I would probably have run that way, as I still tended to avoid the White Cross even though I now knew my father had not been buried there as a traitor and suicide. It was hard to lose the fear and disgust the place had so long engendered.