12. Turning the Tabletop

 

Rivka’s hair rippled behind her like a flag as Isaac flew through the morning sky. She gripped him tightly with her thighs to keep her hands free in case Hadar needed any help feeling safe on her first dragon ride.

She needn’t have worried; the young woman was handling it like a pro. All that practice climbing up and down coconut trees in her youth, Rivka figured. “This is great!” Hadar shouted into the wind.

“And I get to do it whenever I want,” bragged Rivka.

“I can’t even see Home City anymore. How far are we going? I thought you just meant this, when you said adventure.”

“Nah, I thought I’d take you on a little tracking mission,” Rivka said. “Plus, it’s your home turf.”

“Hmm?”

“Lovely Valley. I need to find a traitor.”

“What? Wow! Really?” Hadar faced forward, away from Rivka, but her back and shoulders looked tense.

“You got sold out. All of you olive growers got sold out,” said Rivka. “By a chicken farmer.”

“A chicken farmer? Gosh… I don’t… from Lovely Valley?”

“A woman.”

“What do you mean, ‘sold out’?”

“A woman shedding chicken feathers sold a man from Imbrio a map of the olive groves leading down into the Valley,” Rivka explained. “They planted the bugs and spread the infection on purpose.”

“What?” Every muscle in Hadar’s body tensed as if she’d been stretched and pulled by unseen hands. “Someone. Did. That. On. Purpose? I will find them. I will—”

“Yes, yes, that’s the idea,” Isaac piped up soothingly, his great, rumbly dragon voice sounding like it echoed inside a great hall. “Only, let the captain do the hard part. The queen needs her in custody so she can tell us what she knows.”

“She hurt my Halleli. She ruined everything we were working toward.”

“She’s hurting everyone,” Rivka reminded her.

Hadar nodded slowly. “I promise. I’ll obey your orders. I’m a guard now, right?”

“That’s right.”

“How come you took me along, anyway? I mean, I know I’m from there and all, but aren’t you worried I’ll be a liability if there’s violence?”

“I saw how you fight yesterday,” Rivka reminded her. “You can handle yourself pretty well. Besides, today might only be hunting, information, tracking. Sniffing out the scent. And we’ll have the local police to help us if we get as far as an arrest.”

“Thanks!” Hadar took a deep breath. “Wow. I’m—I’m glad I didn’t know any of this yesterday.”

“Can you think of anyone it might be?” Rivka inquired. “The witness seemed to think she was older.”

“Chickens… older… not really.” Hadar was silent for a moment. “I mean, there are some men I can think of… and I can definitely think of women who have chickens too, but they’re not… none of them could be… This is all just so fucked up.”

“I know,” said Rivka.

“Are you sure it was chickens? Not, like, limes? Lime juice?”

“Not unless limes shed chicken feathers,” Rivka quipped. “Why?”

“Nothing.” Hadar stared off into space.

“You gonna want to see your family for a few minutes while we’re there?” asked Rivka. “I think we’re making good time.”

“Maybe my sister, if she won’t tell my parents I was there,” said Hadar. “I don’t need my father making up this week’s reason why I’m a big disappointment.”

“If that’s how he feels, he doesn’t know anything,” said Rivka. “If it helps, Halleli’s very proud of you.”

“Yeah, it does.” Hadar didn’t look all that concerned about what she’d just said, but Rivka couldn’t tell whether she was looking at a healed scar or a pain buried too deep to discuss.

Given that she had grown up with the uncle who’d filled in for her absent father treating her like she couldn’t do anything right, she sympathized either way.

 

***

 

The built-up part of the Lovely Valley consisted of a single long street that snaked between the endless mango groves and avocado plantations. Numerous side streets ran out in both directions to more remote farms, growing a wide variety of crops Rivka had never dreamed of during her childhood in the colder north. Even the names had once been completely unfamiliar to her—litchi, sapodilla, canistel, jackfruit.

Now they were as ordinary to her as apples once were. Litchis were Queen Shulamit’s favorite food, so there were always some around in the palace; sapodilla were satisfying and sweet. Canistel was soft and mild, and Princess Naomi had been enjoying it lately, and jackfruit—Rivka would have loved jackfruit even if it didn’t have such a wonderful taste, simply because of its ridiculous size. If someone had told her as a teenager that fruit came in a twenty-pound variety, she’d have laughed them out of her uncle’s castle.

She was here to protect all this. The richness and prosperity of Perach was bound up in her agriculture; nowhere was that more obvious than here in the midst of a living fruit salad.

“Why aren’t we sneaking in?” Hadar asked. “Word’s gonna get around the Royal Guard’s here. I was still here when you first came to Perach, and I remember people running from farm to farm, saying, ‘Everyone, go watch the sky to see the dragon!’”

“What makes you think they can see us?” Rivka grinned and patted Isaac’s scales affectionately.

“Wait, what?”

“It’s my new trick. We look like a cloud,” Isaac explained. “I can only keep it up for a few seconds though.”

“Land here,” said Rivka. “We’ll walk.”

Isaac landed slowly, carefully having to maneuver his wings and his other magic at the same time. Rivka jumped off and helped Hadar down, then let Isaac place his great clawed paw in her hand. Within seconds, he’d dwindled down into his lizard form and crawled up her arm to sit on her shoulder.

“Wow, that’s… wow.” Hadar nodded, impressed. “He’s something else. Where’d you find him?”

“He taught me to use a sword.”

“Oh yeah?”

Rivka threw a hooded cloak over her head and arms so her noticeably light skin and blonde hair wouldn’t alert anyone they passed that Captain Riv was in town, and then the two women set out for the main drag.

They passed block after block of one-story buildings, modest but shining clean and white in the bright sunlight, before reaching the more formally built ones belonging to the local government. There was a man outside, a guard from his uniform, but he was leaning against the wall eating what looked like a pita stuffed with raw vegetables instead of standing at attention.

When he saw the travelers approaching, he held up his free hand. Without moving his butt from the wall, he called out to them, “Hey! This is official headquarters. What’s your business here?”

Rivka flipped back her hood. “It’s me. That looks like a good sandwich.”

The guard scrambled to attention, straightening as if a rat had crawled up his pants and nearly dropping his sandwich. “Captain! Oh. Sorry. Wow.” Then he squinted. “Is that—is that Hadar? You look so different with short hair!”

“Yeah, it’s me.” Hadar looked pleased with herself. “I joined the guard!”

“What?”

“Just yesterday,” she added.

“The Royal Guard?”

“We need to come inside and talk business,” Rivka interrupted.

“Oh, right, sure. Just in there.”

“Business and national security,” added a voice from Rivka’s shoulder.

“Oh, you brought the dragon man?” The guard peered around.

“When do I not bring Isaac?”

The guard shrugged. “I have to stay out here and keep watch, but the Sheriff’s in there with his deputy. Go on in.”

The Sheriff of Lovely Valley was sitting at his desk trying to scratch dirt off a dagger. He looked up at the sound of footsteps, then stood to greet the newcomers. “Captain Riv! Down here checking on us?”

“I’m actually here about something serious,” said Rivka.

“Here, sit down,” said the deputy, pulling over a chair. To Hadar, he added, “Do you want my seat?”

“I can sit on the floor,” said Hadar brightly, folding herself into a pretzel.

“Hadar?”

“Yup!”

“You cut your hair!”

“Nope, my wife did.”

“Your—”

Rivka clapped her hands together. “Mr. Sheriff. Deputy.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Sorry, sir.”

“You’ve heard of the insects and the blight up north in the mountains.” Rivka noticed Isaac scampering down her arm as she talked.

“Yes,” said the Sheriff, suddenly looking more sober.

“The insects and the blight they carry were spread deliberately by foreign agents.” Rivka watched the two men’s faces freeze in shock at her words. Out of the corner of her eye, she noticed Isaac spring up from the ground in human form and lean against the wall, his arms folded across his chest.

The Sheriff lifted one hand in greeting to Isaac as he replied to Rivka. “Foreign agents? Like—spies? Saboteurs?”

Rivka nodded. “’Fraid so.”

“Someone would want to hurt Perach that badly?” said the deputy in disbelief.

“It may not even be about Perach, really,” said Isaac from the back of the room. “Just greedy people wanting their own crops to do better on the international market.”

“Or back home,” Rivka added.

The Sheriff and the deputy looked at each other. “So, what can we do?” said the Sheriff.

“Right now there’s a barrier of burned earth between the infestation and Lovely Valley,” said Rivka. “That buys us a few weeks. This morning, the queen sent a man on horseback to the City of Red Clay. Their queen is a witch who spent half her life managing a vineyard, so we hope she’ll have a good plan.”

The Sheriff snorted. “I hope so too!”

“The reason I’m here,” Rivka continued, “is that we have evidence that a traitor from Lovely Valley sold a map of the farms to the Imbrians.”

The Sheriff’s eyes narrowed and he rubbed his beard. “Great,” he muttered. “Well, what have you got?”

“We’re looking for a woman, at least thirty-five but probably older,” answered Rivka. “who owns a chicken farm or works with chickens.”

The two men’s reaction was utterly unexpected. It was almost comical the way they looked at each other with dropped jaws, as if on cue.

Rivka leaned in. “What?”

“Tabletop Tova,” said the deputy at the same time the Sheriff was saying, “My God, what’s Tova gone and done now?”

Hadar scrambled to her feet. “Tova? Seriously? Wait, since when does she have chickens? What happened to the lime trees?”

“They all died, and she turned into a mean old cuss,” said the deputy.

“No,” the Sheriff interjected, “she was a mean old cuss before that. When her son moved away to marry that Sugar Coast woman.”

“Well, I mean—” The deputy scratched his head. “Maybe even before that. She got kinda difficult after her husband died.”

“Captain Riv, Tova was the woman I was thinking of on the way here.” Hadar was practically jumping up and down with nervous energy. “She can be really hateful.”

“She’s gotten worse,” said the deputy. “And you’ve been gone for a few years—you haven’t even heard the tabletop story.”

“That’s where she got that silly name,” said the Sheriff.

“Yeah,” said the deputy. “Everyone calls her Tabletop Tova now.”

Rivka sat back as the story poured out, both men competing for the gold medal in the interruption prizefight thanks to their morbid glee.

Apparently, this Tova had bought a new kitchen table from a respected Lovely Valley carpenter. The next day, she came hauling the table back into the shop, claiming that he’d sold it to her with a scratched top. Now, he knew the table had been pristine when she bought it, and so did a couple of other customers who’d been in the shop at the time. It was obvious to everyone that the scratches had come from her chickens, which she was ill-equipped to control because she was so new to the chicken game.

However, Tova was the type who could never be persuaded that she was wrong, or that anything could be her fault. She’d started an argument with the carpenter that escalated into a scene witnessed by at least four or five other people—other customers, and farmers in the street who were just passing by—and ultimately ended with her scratching the top again, herself. She grabbed the heavy key to her own house off her belt loop and left violent furrows in the brand-new top, spat on it, then left the furniture shop in a huff.

“And this is why nobody wants to buy eggs from her,” the deputy concluded.

“She didn’t used to be like this,” said the Sheriff sadly. “Back in the day, when her husband was alive, she was a lot of fun—even funny!”

“She always did have a temper though,” the deputy reminded him.

“It’s a shame she turned into what she turned into.” The Sheriff sighed.

“To me it sounds like she pushes people away to keep them from leaving first,” Isaac commented laconically, “since it all started when she lost her husband and her son.”

“She didn’t have to lose her son,” groused the deputy. “He just moved away! She could have even gone to join him when the lime trees failed.”

“She probably thought she was gonna show him, or something.” Hadar picked at her shoe.

Rivka clapped her hands down on her knees, then stood up. “If you don’t have other suggestions, then let’s get down to Tova’s farm as soon as we can. I want to know who in Imbrio paid for this insult.”

 

***

 

The grove that had once made Tova and her husband rich on limes now lay overgrown and half-neglected around the farmhouse. The stench of chickens was in the air; they ran around everywhere within the fence, leaving a trail of feathers and droppings. The one bit of ground that still looked well-loved was a plot of vegetables. Rivka noticed that the vines sprawling across the ground were covered with a healthy amount of zucchini. If nobody bought her eggs, maybe she was living on her own plantings.

“Sergeant, you lead,” Rivka ordered. “Don’t want her to know what we know, and if I’m first at the door—”

The sergeant nodded. With his deputy close at his heels, he rapped his knuckles on Tova’s front door.

“Just a minute, hang on!” called a voice from inside. Rivka heard footsteps, and then the door swung open to reveal a scrawny older woman with her hair in a knot at the base of her neck. She peered around at all the visitors, clearly surprised to see so many people on her threshold. “Oh, it’s you, Sergeant. Thank you so much for coming. Don’t know what took you so long,” she added sourly. “Guess they’re keeping you busy, huh?”

“Well, I, er,” the sergeant stammered.

“Mangy little brat yaps all hours of the day, nips at my heels when I get outside the fence…” Tova leaned on her doorframe. “Makes me feel like a prisoner in my own home, I tell you.”

“You complained about the… neighbor’s dog,” the deputy suddenly remembered.

“That’s right, I did.” Tova puffed herself up like one of her chickens. “Wouldn’t be surprised if I wasn’t the only one either. One of these days, it’s gonna leap my fence and steal a chicken. If it hasn’t already.”

“Why don’t we come inside, and you can tell us all about it,” Isaac piped up in a voice so low and fluid that Rivka was glad her mask hid the grin on her face.

His charm clearly worked on Tova, and she swung the door wide open. “Come on in. Don’t mind the mess.”

Rivka blanched at how badly the place smelled. She thought the chicken odor of the farmyard was bad, but inside was something else… some kind of animal urine—cat, perhaps?—and the stuffiness of mold, and things she couldn’t even identify. She sent a pitying look at Isaac, knowing it must be worse for him, because at least she had a mask to shield her partially.

He lifted his eyelids slightly in response, and surreptitiously snapped his left fingers beneath his nose. Rivka rolled her eyes, realizing that he was now smelling roses or raspberry rugelach or something entirely unrelated to cat piss.

“Don’t you ever get tired of being you?” she murmured to him in their guttural native language.

He just smirked.

“Wish I had some honey-sesame bites to offer you all,” said Tova, “but nobody usually comes to visit me, so I don’t have anything like that in the house. You think my son would come back and visit one of these years.”

“I thought he came back for Passo—” the deputy started to say.

With a quick, furtive tap to the hip, Isaac shushed him, interrupting with a comment to Tova. “It’s so difficult not to be able to see your loved ones.”

“I know!” she agreed. “And my nephew lives only a few orchards down, growing papayas and avocados, but well, he called me a piece of shit, so—”

“My dear woman, that’s terrible.”

“You bet it is,” said Tova. “Where’d they find you, anyway? You’re not from here, not with that coloring.”

“I come from the north, but I live in the capital,” said Isaac.

“Now him I’ve seen before.” Tova pointed to Rivka.

“The captain and his entourage were down here for a routine visit.” Oh, good, the sergeant knew how to make shit up too. Rivka was beginning to wonder. “So, about this dog…?”

While Isaac and the other men got Tova talking about her neighbor’s dog, Rivka fell into the back of the group, trying to drop out of sight. Moving only her eyes, she scanned the room for clues. Anything at all might link Tova to the Imbrian conspirators—Imbrian coins, men’s clothing or accessories, perhaps documents with the foreign alphabet—

Something caught Rivka’s eye on a nearby table covered in papers. A cat rested across the mess, and sticking out from its gray fur she spotted a familiar shape.

Moving slowly so her migration wouldn’t attract attention, she floated sideways and peered down at the cat.

It was sleeping on a copy of the map.

Lifting her mask slightly, Rivka pursed her lips and blew breath at the cat.

It blinked and winked, then twitched its head. She blew again, and it stood and stretched. As soon as it hopped off the table, Rivka scanned the paper carefully to be sure of herself.

It was definitely the map, the same map that Shulamit had found in Ezra’s pile of blackmail fodder. Perhaps this was a practice copy.

Rivka spoke. “Isaac. Sergeant.”

Both men looked up, and Tova with them.

“Go retrieve that paper on the top of the pile,” she continued. “No, not that one—the one with the coffee stain on the corner.”

Tova froze.

“Is this—” The sergeant began.

“You’re all my witnesses that this was found here and not planted?” Rivka looked around the room. The deputy and Hadar nodded.

“Mistress Tova,” Isaac interjected, “you’ve made a valuable discovery that will help the crown with some very troubling matters.”

“Huh?” Tova blinked at him.

“This map is part of an international plot,” said Isaac, “and we’ll need your help to get us out of it.”

“Yes, we need you to make the journey back to Home City with us,” Rivka added. Good work, Isaac! Now she doesn’t know she’s a suspect, and maybe we can actually get her to talk.

“To Home City?” Tova looked around her at all the officers. “Well, I—”

“The queen will be pleased to hear of your arrival,” said Isaac. “Maybe you can tell her about the dog too!”

Tova grinned bitterly. “Ha! Won’t my neighbors like to hear about that! We’ll see who’s who around here.”

And she tossed her head and glared out an open window at the world.