I FAINTED. When I awoke, I was still alone. I rammed my shoulder against the door. Again. Again.
Didn’t Lady Mother know how I was suffering?
If only I didn’t mind being in a small space. If only I could be calm. If only I could stop throwing myself against the door.
Didn’t anyone love me enough to rescue me?
An hour later, Lady Mother found me, exhausted, pacing the periphery of the chamber. Blood stained both shoulders of my kirtle, and my forehead was sorely scraped. I would bear bruises for weeks.
I hugged her, as I couldn’t remember doing before, and sobbed. “I’m sorry!”
She held me, which I also couldn’t remember ever happening. “Never mind. Your oratory will improve.” After a minute she let me go and left the chamber.
My heart rose to my throat, but she didn’t close the door behind her.
I didn’t dare dash away again, so I waited a few dutiful minutes to see if Annet would come and considered where I might go if I were really on my own.
I knelt on the window seat to look outside. The castle dominated the tallest hill in the region, and the tower room rose high enough for me to see beyond the inner and outer ward walls. The town crowned the next hill.
In eastern Lakti the terrain was flat and grassy; in the west, where Father fought, flat and stony. The Eskern Mountains in the south diminished to high hills in the center of the kingdom and gentled further in our northland.
A blue sky turned the moat water into a pretty ribbon. Tiny April leaves dotted the bushes beyond the castle. The gray stone walls and rust-red slate roofs of the town guildhalls enticed me, as distant objects always did.
Closing my eyes, I leaned my forehead against the mullioned glass and wished for Lady Mother to approve of me no matter what I did and for me to want to do nothing but what she would approve of.
I caught a whiff of peonies, which wouldn’t bloom for months. Behind me, I heard crackling, as if fat had been thrown on a fire—but the fireplace was empty. We Lakti lit no home fires after winter ended.
I jumped off the window seat. A twirl of rainbow-colored light sparkled from the floor to the ceiling, between me and the table. I pressed back against the window and shaded my eyes. My heart pounded in my ears. A fairy? Or something else?
Couldn’t be a fairy.
Within the swirl I saw a figure, shaped like a person, the size of a grown-up.
The light faded around the figure, and there she was, even taller than Lady Mother, very slender, with white hair caught up in a silver net and the papery skin of the old. Her face calmed me. Maybe it was the smile lines around her mouth, although she wasn’t smiling. She just watched me, appraising me, as Lady Mother did, her copper-brown eyes intent.
I gathered my courage. “Are you a fairy, or something terrible?” Perhaps a monster from Old Lakti, where we Lakti had lived before the creatures appeared there.
“I am the fairy Halina.” Her ringing voice echoed off the stones. Lina lina lina.
“But fairies don’t appear to the Lakti.” They’d stopped when we conquered the Bamarre, who had taken us in after we’d fled our kingdom.
“This fairy is appearing to you.”
“Why?”
Now she did smile. “Do you always have a reason for speaking?”
My bones thrummed with excitement. I grinned. A fairy!
Her smile widened.
I remembered she’d asked a question. I nodded. “But I don’t always have anything to say.” Sometimes I just told Father—not Lady Mother—whatever came into my mind. I had a reason, though: because he listened and thought about every word.
“This fairy has a reason today.” She bent down so her face was inches from mine, and I noticed her long gray eyelashes. “It is to warn you against wishing to change yourself from what you most are, a person who despises a cage.”
I found myself arguing. With a fairy! “It would be easier if I felt cozy in a cage.”
She straightened again. “Nonetheless, that is your nature.”
“If I have to stay the same, can you cast a spell and make Lady Mother always think well of me?”
She raised a hand, palm up. “Even fairies bungle that sort of thing . . . and no one else can do it in the slightest.”
Too bad. A polite child, I said, “It’s nice to meet you anyway.” I added, “Can you hear my thoughts?” I formed a clear one, the wish to be able to turn into a blur of light, too.
“This fairy can hear—so long as I’m listening.” She frowned. “Only we are creatures of light.”
Had I offended her? “Sorry!” Might she turn me into a toad? “Did you make yourself look the way you do to talk to me?”
“I did.”
“Do you often listen to my thoughts?” What had she heard?
“This fairy has other matters to attend to.”
Whew!
“I know when to listen.”
When? Which thoughts would catch her attention?
She went on. “For the most part, your thoughts are your own. You enjoy poetry, don’t you?”
I hesitated. I’d learned that most of the Bamarre loved poems and most of the Lakti sneered at them. “Yes.”
She placed her hand on my head, her touch so light I barely felt it through my blanket of hair. “Good. Fairies love poetry.”
“Is that why you visited me?”
“It’s one reason. And to tell you that you are marvelous as you are.”
Not even Father had ever called me marvelous. I bounced on my toes in excitement. A fairy approved of me, even though I couldn’t orate, even though I didn’t always measure up.
She began to shimmer and glow again, but her voice remained round and ringing. “Look at the south wall.”
The wall hanging vanished, and the stones behind it lit up as if the sun were shining on them. A mountainscape appeared. I saw snowy summits above forested slopes. The air smelled fresh and sharp. My hair streamed behind me in a blowing wind, as if I stood on a summit, too. A bird, black against the bright sky, rose from behind a peak.
Not a bird! A dragon, belching fire!