They were to take a boat to Foulkrin the next day. Tadala learned this through a fog of exhaustion as they ate their evening meal from a basket, brought by another young man with a red coat. Ntembwa had asked about the coats and had been told that these marked Stewards of the City. Tadala felt equally confused and irritable after receiving this information. Nyoma started to ask where or what Foulkrin was, but Elabel interrupted her to ask the Steward to leave, then bowed awkwardly to the three of them and disappeared herself.
They stayed overnight in a rather cramped room filled with books, but in the morning, they didn't return to the canal beneath the city. Just after the light from the tubes shaded to yellow on the floor, Elabel woke the three of them. They followed her in a small procession, back to the great hall where they had watched her become Empress, straight out the massive doors, and away up the road.
The road curved away to the right, revealing the silvery rush of a river on the opposite side. Elabel's golden robes of state were decisively missing. The leggings she wore today were not patched at the knees, but the cuffs were frayed. She lunged up over the verge of the sunken road. Her enormous feet landed on a deer track that led down to the edge of the water. She looked back and waited for Tadala and the two girls to catch up.
“Now that you're Empress …” Tadala said slowly, clambering up to the deer track herself. She half-expected Elabel to correct her or try to explain away the ceremony that they had witnessed, but she only nodded. “Aren't you important? Don't you have—followers? People who stay with you and—and—watch what you're doing?”
Elabel blinked at her, her eyes slightly unfocused.
Tadala sighed. “I could have told you within a minute or two who the most important people in the city—the city where I lived with my father—were, just by how many people they had hanging about behind them.”
Still no look of understanding on Elabel's face. Tadala continued. “When I was very small—when I was still in my home,” she said. “My mother and aunties and uncles would tell stories sometimes—stories about great kings, and a few times queens. But they were never just—by themselves. They always had people about them. A court. Family. People to tell them what to do, or give opinions on what they were already doing. I've never heard of any kind of person who other people looked up to, even a headwoman in a village, who was perfectly alone. And you're—you're—you can do things. It's odd that no one is paying you any attention at all.”
Even here, she thought grimly, which must be the oddest place in the whole world.
Elabel laughed. It was a strange, small, sad sound. “I suppose I sent away my family, and they were the people who were supposed to follow me around,” she said.
“What?” Tadala demanded.
“What?” Nyoma and Ntembwa echoed at a higher pitch.
“The woman and the man I sent to the Isolate and the Penin,” Elabel continued. Her voice was bleak. “The Recorder is my sister. The Swordkeeper is my brother. It's supposed to be a government of three in every Node City.”
“You can do that?” Tadala asked, horrified. Then, as the details of the scene the day before fitted together in her brain, “You think your—you think your brother and your sister—you think they killed—”
“I don't know,” Elabel said abruptly.
“But—if you don't know—then you can—how can you—just send away the people who are supposed to be helping you? Who's to stop you—” She bit off the end of her sentence.
“You can send away your family?” Ntembwa said, at the same time that Nyoma whispered, “Your sister?”
Elabel looked at the ground. Tears were starting to shine on her cheeks, and she scrubbed the back of her hand across her nose. She looked down at the river, then back at her feet. “You need to go,” she said, swallowing a sob. “You all—there's a boat at the end of this path. It's tied up under the hedge.” She pointed to a green mass of leaves and branches to their left. “Olar is down there, and Javath. They'll take you to Foulkrin, and I'll—I'll come when I can.”
“Elabel—” Tadala tried to interrupt, not sure if she wanted to demand an explanation or offer some comfort.
“I sent word ahead to Foulkrin, so Astel or Istel or Estel will meet you there. Well, probably not Estel,” Elabel rushed on. She rubbed her eyes again, then pinched the bridge of her nose so hard between her clenched eyelids that her fingers went white. Tadala opened her mouth to ask who those people were, but she didn't pause. “They're friends. They'll take care of you. The river—the boat is very safe. I'll see you soon.” She gestured helplessly at the path behind her, then lunged away from them again, this time into the bushes. In a moment, they couldn't see her anymore.
Numbly, Tadala followed that last toss of the arm down to the riverside. As promised, a long boat of curving wooden planks had been pulled close against the rocky edge of the bank, a punting pole fixed in a harness at the stern. A set of worn steps led down to the surface of the water.
Olar and the man Javath sat across from each other on two plank seats. Javath was one of the men who had brought the horses for the Recorder and the Swordkeeper. Tadala was not sure of this identification—he could have just been an arbitrary tall man with long orange hair—but his abrupt, rigid carriage seemed familiar from that dramatic tableau. Now he wore a somewhat faded mustard tunic rather than the stiff, ankle-length coat of brilliant yellow.
His head jerked up when Tadala set her foot on the first step. He looked at Olar, who nodded. Tadala, her throat tight, noticed that his hand had jumped to a long blade sheathed at his waist.
Nyoma and Ntembwa each took one of Tadala's hands, almost at the same time. “Hello,” they said in Elabel's language down to the boat.
Javath closed his eyes, laid his palms flat on his knees, and leaned his long white face forward, his back perfectly straight. “Hail, little ones.”
It was on the tip of Tadala's tongue to say that she wasn't little, but then Nyoma and Ntembwa were climbing into the boat and pulling off their bags, which Olar helped them push under the seats.
Olar looked at her and said, slowly, “It will take two days to reach the city of Foulkrin, where you will be welcomed by the hospitality of the Threadanchor.”
Elabel must have told everyone that she wasn't getting on with the language, Tadala thought sourly.
Javath rose from his seat, unknotted the ropes that held them against the bank, and stepped past them into the stern to take hold of the punting-pole. Tadala watched him with interest, pleased to note that he was neither so powerful nor so graceful as her Ababa was in maneuvering a boat. There was no need to paddle once he had untied the boat; the current was so strong it sent the boat arrowing downstream. The breeze lifted the scarf tied around Tadala's head. This land around the city on the other side of the well-room (she needed a better way to think about that; every time her mind tried to think about where they were, it got stuck and stuttered over the same few images over and over again: passing through the portal underwater with Elabel's bony hand clutching hers; the sandy horizon she saw from the rampart above her garden; the person sleeping in the boat bobbing in the water of the canal) was greener and cooler than the landscape she remembered near her village, though the trees and fields sent a stabbing pain of longing through her gut.
The boat had barely gotten underway when Nyoma and Ntembwa began launching volley after volley of questions at Olar. Tadala wished there was a subtle way to deliver a couple of vicious pinches. They spoke so quickly that she couldn't follow, and she didn't know if they were saying anything that would cause problems later.
So Tadala sat between the two of the them, arms folded, chewing the inside of her cheek.
Elabel had said that she was the only one who went through the well. Was she the only one with the ability—the magic—to go through, or was it a secret from the rest of the city? If it was a secret, was there a reason why she hadn't told anyone else about the well? Did the people here—the people in this country—have a reason to fear the other side? Their side? Were she and the twins allowed to be here? And—though this made her nearly physically ill to think of—where was here? Had they somehow—jumped, to a place far away, that they could have eventually walked to, with enough time and food? Or had they left the world of humans entirely? (Where were there humans who were born violet?)
They effectively had the protection of the Empress—who, she reminded herself, was still Elabel, confused, awkward Elabel—but the protection of a regular sort of Empress in this country didn't seem to be worth that much. She didn't know exactly what had happened with the Recorder and the Swordkeeper—she didn't know if Elabel had done the right thing to banish them—but it seemed undeniable that Elabel's mother, the Empress before her, was dead. All of her power—as ruler, as magic worker—had not protected her from death. And what if her children had murdered her?
It would explain a lot, she thought, if Elabel genuinely believed that her siblings were dangerous. Even with all the explaining that would have to be done, she couldn't quite understand why she hadn't brought them through earlier. If she was the Empress—or about to be the Empress—surely she could have had someone else look after three strays that had wandered in out of the desert, rather than doing it herself? She wouldn't have had to swim through the well, sometimes a half-dozen times in two weeks, to bring them supplies and gifts.
But if her sister and brother were the sort of people who could and would make inconvenient strays disappear, then perhaps bringing them through to the other side of the city before she was the Empress would not have gone well for any of them.
Tadala uncrossed her arms and rubbed her forehead. The twins both looked at her. Olar looked at her. She was fairly certain Javath was looking at the back of her head.
“My head is not good,” Tadala said slowly and carefully in Elabel's language. Nyoma made a rude remark about this not being a new state of affairs, Ntembwa sniggered, Tadala poked both of them, and Olar snorted.
When the sun started to get low, Javath steered the boat to the shore. Olar produced a long pole with a hook on it, which she used to snag a heavy, rusted ring that protruded from the tumble of gray slate.
Javath disappeared into the wood while Olar unloaded supplies and dug a firepit in a brisk fashion. By the time he reappeared, carrying an assortment of plant material for padding and fuel, she had started the fire and was pulling items for their dinner out of a pack she had taken from the boat.
Tadala cast a nervous eye into the darkness of the trees around them. She poked Ntembwa again.
“Ouch,” the girl snapped. “Why'd you do that?”
“Ask them if it's safe to camp here, or if there are people in the wood,” Tadala hissed.
“Why should I?” Ntembwa asked sullenly.
Tadala jabbed her particularly hard with her thumb. “Because if there are robbers or monsters in this forest, they won't take me and leave you.”
After another resentful silence, Ntembwa looked up at Javath and started speaking. Tadala understood enough of what she was saying to feel reasonably sure that she was translating properly, but the man's face became more and more incredulous as she continued.
Ntembwa noticed this as well, and re-started her explanation—at least that was what Tadala thought she was doing—but Javath raised a hand and interrupted her. Tadala caught a few words in his first sentence—”safe” or “safety,” “Empress,” and “forest”—but he ended with a question.
The girl knitted her brows and said something she didn't sound very sure of.
Javath looked directly in Tadala's eyes and repeated the same phrase. His eyes were very dark and at this moment were narrowed in a most skeptical fashion.
“What is he saying?” she said, feeling a bit boneless.
“He said that no one would dare to trespass on the safety of the forest of the Empress. But then he wanted to know what part of the Empire we're from,” Ntembwa said. “I'm not sure what he means.”
“Did you tell him we're not from the Empire?” Tadala asked very quietly.
“I said we were from the south. Are we from the Empire?”
“Tell him we're from very far away.”
Olar woke them when the sky had gone gray and misty. “We'll reach Foulkrin by mid-afternoon if we can get through the locks early,” she said.
“What are locks?” Nyoma asked Tadala.
“I don't know,” she said. “But don't—”
Nyoma immediately repeated the question to Olar, who laughed and said, “You'll see.” Her hooded eyes narrowed when she smiled, making her look rather like a cat.
“When I was twelve, I obeyed my elders,” Tadala muttered. Both of the twins pretended not to hear.
Indeed, they were no more on the river than they were peppering Olar with questions again. This time, Nyoma twisted in her seat and tried to get the mostly-silent Javath to talk, as well. He seemed to take this in good stride, smiling and shaking his head in response to most things, occasionally volunteering a word or two.
And Tadala stewed.
She had understood enough of what had been said yesterday to be fairly certain that Foulkrin was a city, sort of a capital, like the maze city from which they had just come. What was that city's name? But there was no mention of who or what might await them in Foulkrin. Elabel had said somebody named Istel or Astel might meet them, but who were they? Could they be trusted? Had Elabel explained about the three of them—sent a message somehow—or would they need to keep hiding the truth until the new Empress could arrive and offer some sort of plausible nonsense for them being there?
Because, she thought numbly, as the boat lanced past spectacularly arching and leaping formations of silvery rock on either shore, what she increasingly suspected to be the truth—that they, three normal, rather small humans, had crossed into another world, that of witches, or fairies, or gods—was barely something she could say to herself, let alone try to explain.
Witches, or fairies, or gods—something about that phrase shook her from her reverie. The river had been getting steadily faster and faster over the past hour, and the stone walls on either side rising higher and higher, until they were racing through what amounted to a gorge, fringed by the foliage of great trees at the rim. The stones wavered and curved with many thousands of years of current whipping them away, particle by particle, until they had been transformed into shapes of lace-like delicacy.
With shock, Tadala realized that the passage of their boat was being watched by dozens, if not hundreds, of eyes. People of all ages and genders perched in the caves overhead, resting against pillars and windows of stone. Some of the smaller apertures worn into the rock looked to be covered by glass or wax-paper, and she caught sight of a few round, peculiar doors set deep into the front entrances of the caves. Narrow, torturous staircases made their ways up the face of the cliffs at regular junctures.
“Who are they?” Tadala demanded, her hands unthinkingly clenched in the fabric of her dress over her knees. She had caught a few glimpses of faces and hair as they slipped by, and they looked—they looked like her people, like the twins' people, with wide noses and dark brown skin and hair so curly it spread out like a cloud.
She glanced back to see Olar was looking at her with a great deal of curiosity. “We are in the hinterlands of Foulkrin,” she said slowly. “These are the subjects of that Threadanchor, and they seek justice first in her court.” Then, hesitantly, as though she were not sure it was appropriate to call attention to the fact, “I was surprised when the Empress told me you were not from Foulkrin.”
Javath called sharply from the back of the boat, and Olar jerked. “The diversion into the locks is coming,” she said. She had to raise her voice almost to a shout to be heard over the rushing of the water. The river had suddenly widened, and the cliff walls diminished from almost making a tunnel overhead to merely steep banks on either side of the water again. She bent forward, rummaging among the objects on the floor of the boat before surfacing with a short paddle and clambering into the prow.
Ahead of them, a strange structure loomed over the water, like a dozen massive wooden forks jabbed into the riverbed and left standing with their tines half-submerged in the water. As the boat rushed toward it, Tadala realized that each fork was the height of two men.
“Javath says that's a fence to keep us from going over the falls,” Nyoma said, her eyes wide and scared.
Tadala closed her eyes and tried to get a full breath. When she opened them, Olar was savagely shoving her paddle against a wooden set of floats arrayed in front of the fork-fence, turning the boat to the left. Beyond the fence, a sharp edge was visible among a tangle of rocks and branches, and beyond that, a mess of green and blue far, far below. Tadala shut her eyes again.
Next when she opened them, the boat had been turned and caught in another, much smaller current, which pulled them away from the fence into a sort of inlet that had been hidden among the trees. The boat lurched downward before splashing into a flooded stone room, the walls defined by huge vertical pieces of slate set upright on three sides. Tadala glanced over the edge of the boat and immediately wished she hadn't; the “room” was a pool of clear water almost too deep to see the bottom.
The current pushed the boat against the third wall, and Tadala only saw the ladder carved into the stone when Javath swung himself easily up its rungs. He walked around the top edge of the room to where the room opened to the inlet and knelt, fumbling with some sort of mechanism on the ground. The air filled with the sound of grating and splashing, and a pair of doors, hidden against the stone walls of the room, slowly swung closed.
Javath shouted something to Olar, who nodded, and disappeared around the edge of the room.
“This is the first lock,” that woman said hastily. “The water's going to drop shortly.”
“What?” Tadala asked, but the boat jerked downward, leaving her stomach somewhere around the level of her nose. Nyoma and Ntembwa both yelled and grabbed her, pinning her arms to her side. Olar was fully occupied with her short paddle, slamming it against the front wall of the stone room to keep the boat from bashing in its wooden sides against the rough surface.
It was over in maybe a couple of minutes, and when Tadala peeked over the edge, they were so close to the bottom of the pool that she could have stepped out of the boat and had water lapping at her knees. She looked up and felt a twinge of vertigo; the rectangular walls of the room rose steeply on all sides.
Olar was breathing very hard and said something in a fast blur of words.
Nyoma, who had not released her death-grip on Tadala's waist, looked up at her. “She says she's going to hit Javath between the eyes with her paddle for putting us through the lock that fast,” she translated, sounding a great deal more cheerful.
“Tell her that I'd like to borrow her paddle after she's done,” Tadala said. She was a little thankful that the twins were pressed so tightly against her, because otherwise she would be shaking so hard she doubted she could stay upright.
Ntembwa parroted her, and before Tadala could feel properly embarrassed, Olar had burst out laughing.
“There is another set of locks,” she said clearly, as lines of light appeared in the stone at the base of the rooms wall, and two more doors perforated themselves from the smooth surface. As they swung outward, the boat jumped forward again, sliding down a short channel before stopping in another square stone pool. Javath was crouched by the edge of the pool, immersed in the process of throwing various levers. “They are much larger, and much less sudden, but much slower.”
She shot a look at Javath that, on a less reserved face, would have been a glare.
They were now deep in a crevasse carved in the rock. Tadala had a horrible sensation of the stone overhead collapsing inward as the gates of the second water-room closed behind them. The water rushed out a little more sedately this time.
There were six locks in total, and by the third one, the twins weren't clinging to Tadala anymore, but hanging over the edge of the boat to watch the bottom of the lock rush up at them with squeals of glee. Tadala oozed off the seat and into the bottom of the boat, feeling like she might either vomit or faint.
At the top of the fifth lock, Olar pulled insistently on her arm. “You should see this,” she said. “Here is Foulkrin.”
Tadala poked her head over the prow. The crevasse had opened toward the face of the cliff they were descending and to a vast panorama of the plain below. She felt dizzy, but as much from a strange sort of recognition as the great height. It had been four years, she thought, since she had sat on a dry, windy terrace in the desert, a massive book over her lap, inspecting an illumination of a city where men and women who looked like her piloted boats through stone canals, houses rising behind them. Across from the pictures had been a strange pictogram, like a series of concentric squares in blue with irregular lines connecting each subsequent layer. She realized now, abruptly, stupidly, that this had been a map. Foulkrin was set in a great square of low walls which separated it from the surrounding marshland. Wide, straight canals formed great avenues between stately stone buildings, while hundreds or thousands of tinier, twistier channels of water crossed and re-crossed the built-up islands between. Barges, sailing ships, and more tiny, paddle-driven craft than she had imagined existed in the whole world moved through the waterways at a great clip, making a flow of traffic as dense and messy as camels, horses, and wagons.
The boat dropped again, and the city vanished from sight.
The last lock opened into a pool that was dense with cattails and reeds on all sides. Javath pounded down the last set of stone steps and leaped into the boat, causing it to rock and splash. The twins complained loudly; he actually grinned before taking up the punting-pole again.
Olar rolled her eyes. “We'll be at the Threadanchor's palace within an hour,” she said evenly. “We will be welcomed by either the Swordkeeper or the Recorder of Foulkrin.”
Tadala focused on the rapidly-approaching long stone wall, punctured by a massive gate of blue-painted wood. There seemed to be at least a dozen people wearing green jackets and holding spears and crossbows standing on the wall over the gate.
“They are the siblings of the Threadanchor?” she asked, distracted.
“Her sons.”
They were passed through a smaller door next to the great gate with little bother. Olar stood and showed a piece of paper to a guard who jumbled down the stairs to meet them; he nodded and vanished into an unseen passage in the wall; the door in the water swung open.
This piece of paper apparently entitled them to bypass the traffic. They were directed by a series of people on the bank, some wearing green coats and some not, to take the boat (which seemed very small in comparison to the barges slowly moving down the widest canals) through a series of gated channels and shallow streams. These passed under arches, between buildings, beneath buildings, and, once, through a shallow trough tiled in images of flowers, which passed through a walled garden filled with wisteria and olive trees. Tadala drew in a deep breath and held it for a minute, letting the scents curl up her nose and sinuses. She wished she could just climb out here.
They passed through a particularly ornate, narrow gate of pierced white stone, and suddenly Olar was jumping from the boat and landing on a quay paved in white stones, bowing, and saying something. A tall man dressed in a number of colorful layers—a long blue coat open to show a green jacket and white shirt, and pantaloons of darker blue tied at the knee—stood on the quay. Flamboyant as a kingfisher, Tadala thought disapprovingly. He dipped his head in acknowledgment of Olar, speaking quickly in a low voice. Javath caught a ring protruding from the wall and looped the rope tied to the stern through it.
“What are they saying?” Tadala whispered to the twins, but Nyoma and Ntembwa exchanged anxious looks before looking at her blankly.
“I don't know,” Nyoma whispered back. “They're not speaking the same language Elabel does.
Then Javath was tossing their bags onto the quay, and lifting the twins one by one up onto the stones. Grimacing, Tadala waved him away, placing her palms on the edge and levering herself up onto her knees. The near-constant tension of bracing herself against the rapid current and the tumultuous drops of the locks had apparently exhausted her legs, though, and she stumbled when she tried to rise to her feet.
Suddenly two very large, brown hands caught her outstretched arms, before rapidly moving to her waist, picking her up for a half-second before setting her very firmly on her feet. The owner of the large hands—the man in the blue coat—did not let go immediately but waited, looking at her face, apparently to see if she was able to stay upright by herself.
Nor did Tadala pull away from him immediately but waited, looking at his face.
She suddenly felt enormously, almost painfully aware of having a body: the soles of her feet pressing to the stone on the quay; the weight of the fabric hanging from her shoulders; the pull of each of her braids along her scalp and her hairline; and—as strange as the language she could not begin to know—the weight of those large hands, one with its fingers spread over the small of her back, the heel of the other resting just above her navel.
He was very handsome and probably knew that he was very handsome. His hair was shaved tight to his head, the first tiny curls just allowed to close, each one no wider across than the pupils of his eyes. He was a shade or two lighter than she, though splotches of pale skin patterned the backs of his hands, his throat, his chin, and his right cheek. A perfect teardrop of pink bisected his wide lower lip, and a comma of white skin echoed a deep dimple that never quite disappeared from the side of his perpetual half-smile.
Tadala was not smiling. She remembered the picture of the man who could have been her uncle in Elabel's book of cities. She remembered her uncle, his silhouette as he danced and his laughing mouth as he took huge bites of soup-drenched corn meal. She remembered a boy she had chased along the riverbank when she was eleven, then been chased by, taking turns tickling and being tickled. (Her mother had scolded her for the basket of beans left unshelled and unsorted.) She remembered her mother holding her father's elbow, her chin pressed into the curve between his neck and his shoulder, his eyes down and her eyes up, both of them somehow very far away from her.
She looked at the blue-coated man, in the face that was looking warmly back at her. Like she was someone he had been waiting to see. Like she was someone lovely. She looked at him, with his liquid deer eyes and beautiful full lips and proud jaw, and wanted, from an aching place deep in her belly.
“She's all right,” Ntembwa said crossly, pulling on the blue sleeve. “You can let go of her now. She's just being stupid because she didn't like the locks.”
This provoked a huge, full laugh from the man, though not an immediate release of Tadala. “You followed the small locks, I take it,” he said in Elabel's language, his voice a surprising tenor. “You'd have been another day if you'd taken the barge way.” He spoke slowly and clearly, his eyes watching her face.
“Indeed, your Grace the Recorder,” Olar said gravely. This address, for some reason, brought him back to the situation at hand, and the man dropped his hands to his sides.
“Are you going to take us to Astel or Istel?” Nyoma burst out. “We're supposed to meet Istel or Astel—”
He grinned, showing very white teeth. “I am Astel. Commonly known as, anyway.”
“You're the person Elabel trusted to take care of us?” Tadala blurted out, her tone much sharper than she intended. She could not imagine this man having anything to do with her awkward, shy, clumsy friend. That is, if Empresses had friends. Her stomach twisted.
This question actually surprised a serious expression out of Astel. He raised his eyebrows very high.
“Follow me,” he said, and turned to lead them into the palace.