Chapter 8
Once inside her castle, the Fern Queen led the way. Janna saw Petten glance rapidly around, but there was no chance of escape. The queen was in front of them; fernpeople behind them. Reluctantly, the three captives walked down an elegant hallway into the throne room.
The spacious room was carpeted with moss-green rugs that felt soft even beneath shoes. Ferns were everywhere. There were magnificent large ones and small perfectly shaped ones. Each was planted in a dark green pot that had its own basket with chartreuse ribbons woven between the strips of wood. The throne itself was draped in an emerald satin that swung in heavy folds to the floor. Shimmery curtains of the same hue billowed out into the room at the slightest breath of wind.
The queen seated herself and smiled, showing a glimpse of white teeth. The cruelty in her smile was more evident than ever. “Here you are, my dears, and here you will stay. I do hope you enjoy your visit.”
With that, she laughed and called her guards.
“Take them to an attic room. Make them useful in house or garden work. I do not care what they do, but be sure they are taken care of—watched over, as it were.”
She laughed again and then pointed to Janna as they moved off. “I want that one to attend me. Goodbye, dears.”
It was a relief to get away from the woman. Her very presence was oppressive. Despite the situation, Janna, Alissa, and Petten straightened slightly as they followed the guards to a small room on the top floor.
A narrow rectangle of light came through a slit in the wall and revealed a mattress hanging over a rickety bed frame. There was nothing else in the room, although a guard soon brought a bundle of hay and threw it into a corner.
Petten walked to the window and put his hands on either side of it.
“I’m sorry. I should have moved us out of that meadow sooner. We might have gotten away.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. It’s my fault as much as yours. More really. If I hadn’t fallen and hurt my head, we’d have been long gone,” said Janna.
“The Fern Queen must have been close by. She might have found us no matter what we did,” Alissa offered.
“It did seem as if she was searching for us,” Petten said, spinning about to face them again. “I don’t see how she could have known Janna was there, but she might have been tracking me, and it was probably her people who attacked your group, Alissa.”
“I do not understand. Why would they attack a harmless group of travelers?” the golden princess asked in bewilderment.
“They could have been after your horses or other plunder,” Petten explained grimly, “but more than likely you were the target. She’d want the Kingdom of Green Waters. It would be a perfect place for her precious fern gardens.”
Alissa shook her head as if she couldn’t make the connection, and Petten continued, “Who does she now have safely imprisoned in her castle?”
“Two princesses and a prince,” answered Janna reluctantly. She didn’t like what Petten was implying. She didn’t like it at all.
“Yes, and she knows exactly who we are and where we’re from. Our stories told her everything.”
“We don’t know when she arrived,” Janna pointed out, hoping to find a weak point in his argument.
“She was too happy,” Petten said in gloomy conviction. “Didn’t you see how she gloated over us? And she said she would let our families know where we were.”
Janna nodded unhappily. “What will she do?”
Petten clenched his fists. “Offer to trade us for a portion of land, I would think, though she’ll wait first, long enough for our parents to get frantic with worry. She’s a proven liar. They can’t trust any promises she makes, but neither can they attack her in open battle. She wouldn’t hesitate to kill us, and they know it. We have to escape.”
The three stood together in the little room at the top of the castle. Alissa was the first to move. She sank, trembling, onto the floor and raised her face.
“We need you,” she whispered.
Footsteps sounded in the hall outside their room. Fernpeople were coming to put them to work. Alissa sprang to her feet, trembling worse than before.
“The odds aren’t—” Petten began to say, but Janna interrupted him.
“We’re going to get out of here,” the twelve-and-a-half-year-old said with such ferocity that the older two were smiling when the door opened.
****
Three weeks later, Petten woke a little before dawn. He stretched on his mound of hay and yawned. A song sparrow sang a few liquid notes from the garden, and he quit stretching to listen. He had learned to appreciate the birds’ songs over the past few weeks. There had been little else to enjoy.
Someone stirred on the other side of the room. That would be Janna. She was an early riser too. Often she was up before Petten, and he’d wake to find her gazing out their slit of a window. Sure enough, Janna slipped to the floor and walked over to the window.
“Good morning,” Alissa said pleasantly from the far side of the bed.
Alissa was the most beautiful young woman Petten had ever seen. She was also invariably nice with a genuineness that kept the trait from becoming annoying. He and Janna had a tendency to be grumpy first thing in the morning or, at best, silent, and Petten valued Alissa’s good-natured greetings. If someone didn’t speak pleasantly to him then, it would be all day before he heard a friendly voice.
“Good morning,” he answered, trying to match her warmth.
Janna couldn’t quite manage it this morning.
“Mormph,” she mumbled.
Heavy footsteps clumped down the hall. The chains on the door outside their room rattled; the lock turned. The fernman who locked them in at night, also unlocked them when he brought their breakfast. This morning, he tossed the basket with its meager portion of bread to the floor and left.
Janna picked the basket up and carried it to the window to examine its contents.
“Don’t they know three people need to eat from this?” she said, banging it against the wall. “There are only two hunks of bread today. How do they expect us to work if they don’t feed us enough?”
No one had an answer for her. Alissa swung her legs to the floor and stood. Petten came to see how big the hunks of bread were. The three of them were constantly hungry. The fernpeople threw a few leftovers from the Fern Queen’s supper into two baskets. They brought one of the baskets at night and the other in the morning. It was never enough.
“I’ll break a third off each piece of bread. It’ll be fairly even,” said Petten.
The girls both nodded, and Janna added resignedly, “OK, but give me whatever’s smallest.”
Petten shook his head. “Janna, you shouldn’t diet now. We’re on starvation rations as it is.”
“I know, but I get more to eat than you two. I told you that sometimes …”
“She gives you leftover pastries,” Petten finished for her.
“I stuff them in, but then I can’t handle how rich they are, so I throw them up,” Janna said unhappily. “I’m so hungry, I do it every time, even though she always laughs at me and comments about my weight the rest of the day. I hate being laughed at.”
Alissa put an arm around her shoulders, while Petten finished dividing the bread. They munched their breakfast quietly. It didn’t take long to finish.
“What’ll you do today?” Janna asked Alissa.
“I do not know, but surely I will not wash curtains again. I did them five times last week and then again two days ago. I have never done housework, but curtains do not need to be washed that often, do they?”
“No, they don’t!” Janna announced as if she were the mountain world’s authority on the subject.
Petten scratched his nose to hide a grin. His guess was that the younger girl had never washed a curtain in her life.
“The fernwomen don’t know what else to do with you,” Janna finished, peering suspiciously in his direction.
“I should finish fertilizing the garden in front of the castle this morning,” he told her quickly. “They’ll have to assign me something else then.”
The diversion worked.
“I hope you don’t work with dried manure again,” Janna said.
“I wash off. You wouldn’t believe how much worse the smell would be if I didn’t.”
“Wet manure smells worse than dry manure,” Janna countered, and Alissa, ever the peacemaker, changed the subject.
“Maybe you’ll see Golden Chestnut today.”
“I would like that, though it hurts not to respond to his neighs.”
“Chestnut’s a lot better off than we are,” Janna reminded him and he nodded.
The castle horses were sleek and well fed. The Fern Queen wanted their coats to shine in the sun.
Footsteps clumped down the hall. Alissa stood resignedly, Janna glowered at the door, and Petten kicked his straw into a tighter clump. As soon as they arrived at the doorway, the fernpeople beckoned impatiently toward their particular charges.
Petten followed a gardener down the hall to a door that opened onto the narrow staircase used by inferior servants. The big fernman stomped down three flights of stairs and pushed open a small, outside door.
The early morning sky was pale blue. Wisps of clouds drifted high overhead. Petten took a deep breath of the fresh air and was glad he had been assigned to work in the gardens. Hard as the labor was, he preferred it to staying indoors.
The fernman led the way to the front garden Petten had been fertilizing for a week.
“Finish here, then do that one,” he said curtly.
He pointed to an oblong-shaped garden on the left that was filled with a variety of small ferns. The garden’s borders were edged by a feathery flower that alternated pink, purple, and white. Miniature willow trees stood on either side of a bench.
“Do I fertilize the trees too?” asked Petten.
Horse manure from the stalls was always piled behind the stable, where it dried into fertilizer. Petten had been working steadily away at the mound for the last three weeks. He didn’t believe there was enough dried manure left to do another garden.
“Yes,” said the fernman angrily. “Spread it out.”
He stomped off, and Petten headed behind the stables. His wheelbarrow was where he’d left it the day before, a dirty shovel leaning against it. By midmorning, he’d finished the front garden and started on the new one.
Two fernmen snickered as they passed. Petten ignored them, even when they slowed down.
“Work hard,” one of them ordered. “When you finish here, we’ll think of something else for you to do.”
“Yeah, that new garden near the wall needs work. The soil’s never been turned and it’s full of rocks and roots, but that won’t bother you,” said the other.
Petten plunged his shovel into the wheelbarrow’s dwindling pile of fertilizer.
“I think he likes manure,” the first one said and laughed as if he’d said something very witty.
They walked on, and Petten paused to wipe his sweaty forehead. I hate being laughed at, he told the Maker tersely. I hide it better than Janna does, but the truth is, I wanted to throw this shovelful of manure in their faces. You don’t know how it feels.
Face tight, he scattered the manure on a wide swath of the small ferns. It wasn’t until he’d scooped up another heavy shovelful that he realized something. Actually, you do, don’t you? They laughed at you too.
A sense of companionship enveloped him and the feeling of being understood was like an arm slung around his shoulder. Then another thought struck him, and he almost whooped out loud. One of those fernmen had said that Petten’s next assignment might be near the wall. I hope he knew what he was talking about.
The Fern Queen marked the borders of her forested estate with a low stone wall. Since the estate was large, the wall had a big circumference. If they put him to work near a wall, he would have the opportunity to see what lay on the other side.
Petten went back to work, encouraged. He didn’t care how rocky or root-bound the new garden was. If he could learn the lay of the land outside the Fern Queen’s estate, he could plan where to go if they escaped.
When we escape, he corrected himself.
The hours passed. When the sun was directly overhead, he got a long drink of water at the water trough, though he knew what to expect from anyone who saw him.
“We have ourselves another horse,” shouted a burly fernman heading into a corral.
“That is too gross,” said a giggling ferngirl on her way to the vegetable garden.
Laughter burst from a small group of fernmen walking toward the castle.
“Let’s find a saddle and bridle to fit him,” one of them said, and the whole group laughed again.
Petten continued drinking from the water that poured out of the pump. He didn’t bother to point out that the horses drank from the trough itself, not the stream of water flowing from the pump into the trough. It wouldn’t have made any difference. They would have laughed at him anyway, but this time it didn’t bother him as much. They didn’t have the Maker’s arm around their shoulders.
Besides, he didn’t mind drinking like a horse; he only wished he could eat like one. Hay and grass were readily available.
Later in the afternoon, the smell of meat roasting in the kitchen drifted into the garden. It made the big hunting dogs bark and snarl hungrily from their pens behind the castle. Petten worked doggedly on. By the end of the day, he was weak and dizzy, but he had fertilized half of the side garden. He should be able to do the other half the next day.
The evening light faded as he pushed the wheelbarrow back behind the barn, and a familiar bellow sounded. “Enough!”