Yet that was a risk you signed for. But Ravna didn’t say it aloud. Perhaps Greenstalk did: her fronds rustled, and Blueshell scrinched even more. Greenstalk was silent for a second, then she did something funny with her axles, bumping free of the stickem. Her wheels spun on nothing as she floated through a slow arc, till she was upside down, her fronds reaching down to brush Blueshell’s. They rattled back and forth for almost five minutes. Blueshell slowly untwisted, the fronds relaxing and patting back at his mate.
Finally he said. “Very well… One quest. But mark you! Never another.”
PART II
CHAPTER 17
Spring came wet and cold, and excruciatingly slow. It had been raining the last eight days. How Johanna wished for something else, even the dark of winter back again.
She slogged across mud that had been moss. It was midday; the gloomy light would last another three hours. Scarbutt claimed that without the overcast, they would be seeing a bit of direct sunlight nowadays. Sometimes she wondered if she would ever see the sun again.
The castle’s great yard was on a hillside. Mud and sullen snow spread down the hill, piled against the wooden buildings. Last summer there had been a glorious view from here. And in the winter, the aurora had spilled green and blue across the snow, glinted on the frozen harbor, and outlined the far hills against the sky. Now: The rain was a close mist; she couldn’t even see the city beyond the walls. The clouds were a low and ragged ceiling above her head. She knew there were guards on the stone walls of the castle curtain, but today they must be huddled behind watch slits. Not a single animal, not a single pack was visible. The Tines’ world was an empty place compared to Straum—but not like the High Lab either. High Lab was a airless rock orbiting a red dwarf. The Tines’ world was alive, moving; sometimes it looked as beautiful and friendly as a holiday resort on Straum. Indeed, Johanna realized that it was kindlier than most worlds the human race had settled—certainly a gentler world than Nyjora, and perhaps as nice as Old Earth.
Johanna had reached her bungalow. She paused for a second under its outcurving walls and looked across the courtyard. Yes, it looked a little like medieval Nyjora. But the stories from the Age of Princesses hadn’t conveyed the implacable power in such a world: The rain went on for as far as she could see. Without decent technology, even a cold rain could be a deadly thing. So could the wind. And the sea was not something for an afternoon’s fun sailing; she thought of surging hillocks of coldness, puckered with rain… going on and on. Even the forests around the town were threatening. It was easy to wander into them, but there were no radio finders, no refresh stalls disguised as tree trunks. Once lost, you would simply die. Nyjoran fairy tales had a special meaning for her now: no great imagination was needed to invent the elementals of wind and rain and sea. This was the pretech experience, that even if you had no enemies the world itself could kill you.
And she did have plenty of enemies. Johanna pulled open the tiny door and went inside.
A pack of Tines was sitting around the fire. It scrambled to its feet and helped Johanna out of her rainjacket. She didn’t shrink from the fine-toothed muzzles anymore. This was one of her usual helpers; she could almost think of the jaws as hands, deftly pulling the oilskin jacket down her arms and hanging it near the fire.
Johanna chucked her boots and pants, and accepted the quilted wrap that the pack “handed” her.
“Dinner. Now,” she said to the pack.
“Okay.”
Johanna settled on a pillow by the fire pit. In fact the Tines were more primitive than the humans on Nyjora: The Tines’ world was not a fallen colony. They didn’t even have legend to guide them. Sanitation was a sometime thing. Before Woodcarver, Tinish doctors bled their patients/victims… She knew now that she was living in the Tines’ equivalent of a luxury apartment. The deep-polished wood was not a normal thing. The designs painted on the pillars and walls were the result of many hours’ labor.
Johanna rested her chin on her hands and stared into the flames. She was vaguely aware of the pack prancing around the pit, hanging pots over the fire. This one spoke very little Samnorsk; it wasn’t in on Woodcarver’s dataset project. Many weeks ago, Scarbutt had asked to move in here—what better way to speed the learning process? Johanna shivered at the memory. She knew the scarred one was just a single member, that the pack that killed Dad had itself died. Johanna understood, but every time she saw “Peregrine', she saw her father’s murderer sitting fat and happy, thinking to hide itself behind its three smaller fellows. Johanna smiled into the flames, remembering the whack she had landed on Scarbutt when he made the suggestion. She’d lost control, but it had been worth it. No one else suggested that “friends” should share this house with her. Most evenings they left her alone. And some nights… Dad and Mom seemed so near, maybe just outside, waiting for her to notice. Even though she had seen them die, something inside her refused to let them go.
Cooking smells slipped past the familiar daydream. Tonight it was meat and beans, with something like onions. Surprise. The stuff smelled good; if there had been any variety, she would have enjoyed it. But Johanna hadn’t seen fresh fruit in sixty days. Salted meat and veggies were the only winter fare. If Jefri were here, he’d throw a fit. It was months past since the word came from Woodcarver’s spies up north: Jefri had died in the ambush… Johanna was getting over it, she really was. And in some ways, being all alone made things… simpler.
The pack put a plate of meat and beans before her, along with a kind of knife. Oh, well. Johanna grabbed the crooked hilt (bent sideways to be held by Tinish jaws) and dug in.
She was almost finished when there was a polite scratching at the door. Her servant gobbled something. The visitor replied, then said in rather good Samnorsk (and a voice that was eerily like her own), “Hello there, my name is Scriber. I would like a small talk, okay?”
One of the servant’s turned to look at her; the rest were watching the door. Scriber was the one she thought of as Pompous Clown. He’d been with Scarbutt at the ambush, but he was such a fool that she scarcely felt threatened by him.
“Okay,” she said, starting toward the door. Her servant (guard) grabbed crossbows in its jaws, and all five members snaked up the staircase to the loft; there wasn’t space for more than one pack down here.
The cold and wet blew into the room along with her visitor. Johanna retreated to the other side of the fire while Scriber took off his rain slickers. The pack members shook themselves the way dogs do, a noisy, amusing sight—and you didn’t want to be near when it happened.
Finally Scriber sauntered over to the fire pit. Under the slickers he wore jackets with the usual stirrups and the open spaces behind the shoulders and at the haunches. But Scriber’s appeared to be padded above the shoulders to make his members look heavier than they really were. One of him sniffed at her plate, while the other heads looked this way and that… but never directly at her.
Johanna looked down at the pack. She still had trouble talking to more than one face; usually she picked on whichever was looking back at her. “Well? What did you come to talk about?”
One of the heads finally looked at her. It licked its lips. “Okay. Yes. I thought to see how do you do? I mean…” gobble. Her servant answered from upstairs, probably reporting what kind of mood she was in. Scriber straightened up. Four of his six heads looked at Johanna. His other two members paced back and forth, as if contemplating something important. “Look here. You are the only human I know, but I have always been a big student of character. I know you are not happy here—”
Pompous Clown was also master of the obvious.
“— and I understand. But we do the best to help you. We are not the bad people who killed your parents and brother.”
Johanna put a hand on the low ceiling and leaned forward. You’re all thugs; you just happen to have the same enemies I do. “I know that, and I am cooperating. You’d still be playing the dataset’s kindermode if it weren’t
