High Brunka Marya lit their way with a series of rainbows. When they reached the end of one, it faded, and she sent forth another. Snow still fell, but lazily. Beyond the rainbow glow the night was black and seemed eternal, although to the east, on the other side of the mountain, the horizon might already be smudged with gray. Elodie and High Brunka Marya crossed a wide ledge through deep snow.
“There’s a stairway ahead. Hold my hand, lamb.”
Their gloved hands met easily, since the two were equally tall. High Brunka Marya’s grip was firm.
“Here. Up.” She tugged Elodie.
Although Elodie sought footing, her boot just crashed through snow. Then she had it. She’d been feeling for something higher, but these steps had been made for short legs. They climbed together, struggling in the snow. Once, Elodie had to hold the high brunka to save her from falling. Luckily the steps were wide enough for the two to climb side by side.
A closeness comes when two do something difficult together. Elodie felt she could rely on the high brunka for steadiness, and she hoped the high brunka was beginning to trust her.
It occurred to Elodie that after the high brunka showed her the Replica’s hiding place, they might not be alone together again. She tried to think of questions that a penetrating mind would ask.
Nothing came for two more steps. Then she huffed, “High Brunka, why did your worry grow when you found out I’m from Dair Mountain?”
She heard a smile in High Brunka Marya’s voice. “That was before your masteress explained matters to me.”
An evasion.
Two more difficult steps to another ledge. They lumbered through snow and then were out of it, under the eaves of the Oase. The high brunka let Elodie’s hand go and strained to raise a heavy wooden bar, finally succeeding.
“Help me. Push!”
The big door moved by inches. Elodie doubted it would be wide enough to admit Masteress Meenore, although Count Jonty Um, whose size was mostly in height, probably could squeeze through.
They slipped in as soon as the opening let them and then had to work to close the door again. Darkness was broken only by embers glowing in three distant fireplaces, one far to the right, one far to the left, and the last far, far ahead. The space felt vast and empty and hardly warmer than the cold outside.
The high brunka took her hand again. “Come.”
Elodie’s feet shushed across the floor rushes.
“Quietly!” High Brunka Marya whispered. Her steps were noiseless.
Elodie lifted her feet but couldn’t help making a small whisking sound with each footfall.
Around the fireplace in the right wall, cocooned in blankets, people, probably bees, slept on pallets, as the servants did in His Lordship’s castle. One slumberer rolled over. Another flung out an arm. An old man slept sitting up on a bench next to the fire. His snore rumbled and whistled to a regular beat.
They passed the fireplace and eventually reached a smaller door, much too low and narrow for Elodie’s masteress or His Lordship.
“Don’t gasp,” High Brunka Marya whispered.
What was there to gasp about? Elodie braced herself for a shock. The high brunka opened the door.
The air smelled metallic. Near the ceiling of a narrow corridor that had been carved out of the mountain, wee lights twinkled.
“Lambs and calves!”
“Shh!” But the whisper sounded proud. “Oase glowworms. Brighter than my rainbow.”
“Flying worms?”
“They hang.”
The worms emitted a green light. Each one was as tiny as the tip of a blade of grass, and they were as crowded together as grass in a meadow.
“They hiss,” the high brunka added. “But you probably can’t hear them.”
She couldn’t. She followed High Brunka Marya straight ahead, looking up as she walked. The glowworms continued into the distance. “Are they magic? Did Brunka Harald make them?”
“They were here before him. They’re just worms.”
They weren’t just anything. “Why don’t they light up the great hall?”
“They prefer smaller places.” She turned right into another corridor. The worms shone here, too.
The passageway was warmer than the great hall had been, as warm as spring. Elodie let her cloak hang loose.
“Lamb . . .” The high brunka stopped. “If you want to stay here, no matter what happens with the Replica, we’ll give you asylum. You don’t have to continue to serve the dragon. You’ll be as safe as the glowworms here.”
Oh no! “Did something happen to my parents?”
“No. I believe they’re fine. I didn’t mean to frighten you.”
“Then why would I need asylum?”
“Your parents sent you away, a twelve-year-old lamb—I mean, child.”
“My parents love me!”
“You could be a bee if you like.”
Elodie shrugged this off. Bees didn’t mansion or deduce or induce. “High Brunka, I’m old enough to apprentice, and my family thought I could do it for free.”
Her parents, with the encouragement of Albin, who knew she wouldn’t live a happy life on the farm, had sent her, less than six weeks ago (although it seemed like an age) across the strait to apprentice in Two Castles town. They hadn’t known what she’d learned only on her way over, that free apprenticeships had been abolished. If Masteress Meenore hadn’t taken her in, she might have starved. If Count Jonty Um hadn’t hired them, he’d still be just a frightening figure to her.
So much had happened, so many wonders, so much terror, but also great happiness.
“Few live the life they thought they wanted, lamb.” The high brunka started walking again.
They passed six closed doors on each side.
“What rooms are these?”
“They’re for guests, but they’re empty now.”
The Replica could be in one of them, Elodie supposed.
Or it could be outside, in a tree hole or buried under earth and snow, and then how would anyone find it?
Only by luck or cleverness.
The doors ended. Other corridors branched off to the right and left, here and there, but this one continued for at least a quarter of a mile. Elodie felt the weight of the mountain press down on her. How much time had passed since she’d left her masteress? Was Zertrum’s volcano already spewing?
“When I get this far, I can no longer hear a sound from the great hall, not even a shout.”
“How did you hear my masteress?”
“We’ve been walking south, not far from the face of the mountain. I can hear the world outside. And ITs voice carries.”
“How far can you hear ordinary conversation?”
“Eavesdropping is as rude as picking one’s teeth!”
Elodie’s smoke would have turned red if she’d had smoke. If the high brunka had been willing to be impolite, she might have heard something and prevented the theft. “If you did listen, how far could you hear?”
“About two hundred yards.”
“A whisper?”
“I don’t know, lamb. A hundred yards, perhaps.”
“High Brunka, begging your pardon, you’ll listen until the Replica is found, won’t you?”
“I hadn’t thought . . . It’s a habit not to . . . Yes, lamb, I’ll listen.”
Doors began again on the left.
“We put guests in here only in summer when all the other rooms are full,” the high brunka said.
“Why do you wait till then?”
“So I can sleep. My room is nearby. When these chambers are occupied, the people keep me awake, just by rolling over in their sleep. I feel like I’m in the middle of a flock of noisy pigeons.”
A single door broke the right-hand wall, and it alone had a lock.
“What room is this?”
“It’s a storage area.”
“When the Replica was stolen before, did that high brunka keep it in the same place as you do?”
“No. Then it was on a table in the middle of the great hall. I was just a brunkle, a lamb like you. No one gave a thought to theft. It had never happened.”
Another right and they reached a series of doors on either side of the corridor.
The high brunka said, “These chambers hold just relics and curiosities.”
More hiding places for the Replica.
Ahead, a man and a woman sat side by side on stools. The woman kicked the man in the shins. “Get up, Johan, lazy lump.” Her sharp voice seemed to strike the rock walls and bounce down the corridor.
The man stood awkwardly, without complaining. His cloak, which had been draped over his stool, slid to the ground. Grunting, he picked it up and held it bunched in his arms. Upright, he rocked back and forth on his heels, a tall, stout, ruddy-faced young man whose left cheek bulged with what was probably a toothache remedy.
Elodie expected the high brunka to tell the woman she shouldn’t be kicking people, but she just said, “Why are you guarding, Ludda?”
Ludda-bee rose in one fluid motion for all she was middle-aged, and her cloak remained on the stool. “Deeter begged a few more minutes of sleep. Now breakfast needs starting, and where is he?” She turned to Elodie. “Everyone imposes on my good nature.”
Elodie bobbed a curtsy. Do not show your penetrating mind, she thought. Do not show you think this woman has no good nature.
Wicked enough to steal the Replica?
Ludda-bee was thin with a fat face and small features—small mouth, small nose, and small eyes—crowded together in the middle of a big, round face, like a raisin roll in which all the raisins had collected in one spot. Her smile would have to be small, too, hemmed in as it was by lots of cheek. Yes, it was small, and the smile did nothing to banish her peevish expression. “I’m Ludda-bee.”
The cook, Elodie remembered, had been there when the high brunka returned to Master Robbie without the Replica.
Ludda-bee continued. “And this shy, hulking thing is my friend Johan-bee, Johan-of-the-privy, as we bees call him.”
They were friends? Elodie looked at his face—large nose, thin lips, that bulging cheek, owlish round eyes, expression blank. He doesn’t consider her a friend, she concluded.
“Two nights in a row of guarding, Johan,” the high brunka said. “Thank you.”
His face relaxed. “You’re welcome.” The second word sounded like welka, likely because he found it hard to close his lips on the m.
Ludda-bee seemed to resent the compliment. “If you can call it guarding. He left me thrice to visit the garderobe, and was, as ever, slow to return.”
Elodie blushed.
“It’s my stomach, Ludda.”
It couldn’t matter for the theft that Ludda-bee was horrible and that Johan-bee didn’t like her. But it might matter that Johan-bee deserted his post sometimes.
“When someone tells me her name, young mistress, I always tell her mine, unless I’m a rude lout.”
“Pardon!” She dropped another curtsy while hoping Ludda-bee would turn out to be the thief. “I’m Elodie.”
“Come, lamb.” The high brunka took her hand again. “I promised you a gift. You may have a painted rainbow.”
Elodie expected to go into the room closest to the bees, which they had been guarding. But instead they turned right into an intersection after that door and entered a short corridor.
A few steps took them to a door on which words were painted in neat blue letters: Hart Room. Below the words, for those who hadn’t learned to read, a representation of a stag in red paint. The painter was a master artist to capture the antlers, the delicate stance, the curves of back and belly, in only a few brushstrokes.
The high brunka opened the door, which had no lock, and closed it behind them. “This is my chamber. Folks see guards by the Goat Room and believe the Replica is there, but I kept it here. Anyone who plotted to steal it would be planning to take it from the wrong room.”
Glowworms lit this space, too. The bedsheets and blanket were rumpled. A high brunka who didn’t make her bed might like such chores as little as Elodie did. The chamber had a fireplace, which was empty, since the air was warm. A rack, hung with spare hose and a spare shift, stood to the side of the fireplace. Elodie looked away, embarrassed to see the exalted brunka’s undergarments. “Why is there a fireplace when you don’t need it?”
“The early brunkas didn’t know the temperature would stay warm all year. Only the great hall gets cold.”
The other furnishings were a padlocked chest, a shelf above it that held a pile of small wooden arches painted in rainbow colors, a low stool, hooks on the wall, and a hanging that depicted a female brunka standing before a cottage on the Lahnt plateau. Another door, without a lock, provided a second exit.
“Where does that lead to?”
“The storage room we passed before.” High Brunka Marya straightened her sheets.
Embarrassed at being caught with an untidy bed?
“The lock on the storage room door was made on the mainland. I was assured it cannot be picked. Safe as the heart in your chest, they said.”
“Is the door locked on the inside, too?”
“No, lamb, only on the corridor side. If you’re inside the storage room, you just lift the latch.”
“Who has a key?”
The high brunka showed Elodie a large silver key among a ringful of keys fastened to her belt. “No one else has it. But if the thief was in here, picking wouldn’t have been needed. My bees will search the storage area first.”
Elodie felt a bubble of hope. It might be that simple. “Was the Replica in there?” She pointed at the chest.
“No, lamb. You see, my fireplace needs more daub.”
Daub made of dried mud and straw cemented the stones together in a fireplace or in walls. Elodie didn’t see what missing daub had to do with the Replica.
High Brunka Marya brought the stool to the fireplace and stood on it. “I don’t know why I closed it up again.” She began to pull out loose stones from the chimney about a foot above the mantel to reveal a hole.
Lambs and calves! If Elodie had managed to get in to this chamber and had known the Replica was here somewhere, she wouldn’t have more than glanced at the chimney.
The high brunka stepped down to let Elodie see, and she climbed up, too.
There, immured in the chimney wall behind the facade of stones, was the pedestal, cloud gray marble shot through with lines of white and patches of gray and black.
“How tall is it?”
“Two and a half feet.”
Elodie stuck her hand in and explored the top with her fingers: square, perhaps ten inches on a side with a three-inch groove in the middle. “Is there a ridge in the Replica that fits the slit?”
“Exactly, lamb.”
“Is the magic in the pedestal?”
“I don’t know, lamb. I always supposed it was in the Replica. Perhaps it’s in both.”
Elodie nodded, then pivoted carefully on the stool, memorizing the room for her masteress. No trapdoor in the rock floor, none in the rock ceiling. She prayed she hadn’t missed anything.
High Brunka Marya’s face had a listening look.
“Excuse me. Can you hear what Ludda-bee and Johan-bee are saying?” Elodie couldn’t hear even a murmur. Maybe one of them had divulged something useful. “Can you hear them as clearly as you can hear me?”
The high brunka nodded. “Ludda-bee said I was kind to give you a wooden rainbow. She told Johan-bee that he was too lost in his own concerns to be as kind.”
“What did he say?”
“Nothing. The tooth remedy makes speech difficult. The bees all tease him about it and other matters, although Ludda is the worst. They mean no harm. He has to learn to command respect. You know that.”
Elodie nodded. Bees sometimes had to tell farmers what to do and make them do it. But the teasing still seemed cruel. Johan-bee might learn better from kindness.
The high brunka took a rainbow from the shelf. “Ludda-bee may ask to see it.”
The rainbow was small enough to fit in Elodie’s purse. Her thoughts returned to the Replica. What else should she ask? She felt the usual pressure on her brain, and IT wasn’t even here. “Er . . . do all brunkas know where the Replica was kept?” Probably a silly question. A brunka would never take it.
“We all know. We decided together where to put it after the first theft. Lamb, a brunka could no more harm Lahnt than a rabbit could kill a deer.”
But, Elodie thought, a brunka might tell someone who could. “Are any other brunkas here now?”
“I’m the only one. My bees are all the help I need. Have you seen enough for your masteress?”
“Was anything out of place when you came in to get the Replica?”
“Nothing. The room was as it always is.”
“Have you opened the chest?”
“I did. It’s not there.”
“I guess I’ve seen enough.” Elodie hoped IT would know what to make of it all.
Instead of leaving, High Brunka Marya sat on the bed. A rainbow drooped from her hand. “I half convinced myself that when I came back, the Replica would be here, that I’d imagined the theft. Come, lamb.” But she didn’t rise. “Brunkas are kind, but we’re blamers.”
Elodie had to strain to hear.
“If anyone is hurt . . . if anyone . . .”—she left the word dies unspoken—“I’ll blame myself, and the others will blame me, too.”
“You didn’t steal the Replica.”
“I failed to keep Lahnt safe.” She stood. “And now I must confess.”