haven’t caught them at anything. Just a matter of time.”
Ren felt like she had been struck. If the Whistlers swapped brothers with their neighbors, and the Brindles were then arrested for smuggling, the weight of the law would fall on Jerin. Since men were considered property, they could be taken as part of the heavy fines against smuggling. Such men usually went to cribs belonging to the Order of the Sword, which serviced the army, or were sold to private cribs. Her Jerin in a crib?
Her Jerin, indeed! She scoffed at herself. As if she could marry mere landed gentry.
Yet-yet-was he not the grandson of royalty? And was she not to be the Queen Mother Elder?
She found herself smiling. Her Jerin, indeed.
The Bright River lazed through the rolling hills of upland country, down to the great falls at Hera’s Step.
Each bend was the same as the last-high banks scoured by the winter ice and spring flooding, a fringe of trees lacing the uncertain flood zone, and, beyond, fields and sprawling farmhouses. Women and children in the fields would unbend from their work to wave at the passing paddle wheel. The pilot followed river traditions and blasted the great, ear-deafening steam whistle to each group of wavers.
Rennsellaer paced the decks, watching fields, workers, and countless little towns appear before them and slip along their sides to vanish behind the ship. It grated that someone had killed her people, taken her weapons, attacked her sister, and vanished without a trace. She wanted to hound the thieves to their lair and see them punished. Leave the tilling of the fields to the farmer’s mule, as her Mother Elder would say. As future Queen Mother Elder, she should be dealing with the entire army and not just eight missing cannons. Stopping at every town to personally conduct the search would be pointless. Raven had already sent orders to every garrison downriver, and the Queens Justice was scouring the countryside for the cannons.
The plain truth would be easier to cope with if she weren’t stuck with nothing to do but watch changeless scenery glide past.
Besides, she and Odelia needed to attend Summer Court. If Halley did not reappear, only Trini and Lylia remained at Mayfair. Ren had no fears that Trini could act as Elder Judge; her sister was quietly stubborn-no one would be able to bully Trini into a decision. Lylia? Lylia had turned sixteen at the beginning of the year and was eager to speak her mind. Unfortunately, her mind was filled with odd notions and sweeping reforms, some of them far from practical. It would be best if Ren and Odelia were on hand to dilute Lylia’s presence.
Denied the release of seeking out the cannons, Ren struggled instead with the perfect set of arguments to convince her mothers to allow a marriage with the Whistlers. She well remembered the declaration of undying love her older sisters gave for their first husband, Keifer. As disappointing as that marriage was, no passionate pleas would work for her. Her only hope, it seemed, lay with establishing that the Whistlers’ grandmothers had, beyond a doubt, kidnapped and married Prince Alannon after they had been knighted. The date of their knighting would be a simple matter of checking the Book of Knights.
Hopefully they had properly recorded the marriage, although she couldn’t see how they had managed to keep it quiet when the prince’s disappearance had been so widely publicized. Then again, if their claim was valid, they had managed to spirit him out of a castle under siege by the entire royal army, through half of Tastledae, and then across the channel.
Their success at secrecy could be the undoing of her hopes.
Still, if she could show they had reasonable access to the castle on the date of the prince’s disappearance, it would be a start. Wellsbury’s memoir recorded the war in minute detail, so getting a copy of her book would be the place to begin.
At Hera’s Step, a queue formed of boats waiting to pass through the lock, bypassing the massive waterfalls. The royal stern-wheeler docked to wait their turn through the locks and take on coal.
Normally Ren would ride out to perform devotions at the temple wreathed by the omnipresent spray, overlooking the mile-wide curve of the falls. This time Odelia, with a contingent of their guard, would have to uphold the family obligations. Ren went with her own guard to a small bookstore located at the heart of town. If she found a copy of Wellsbury’s memoir, she could use the rest of the trip scanning it for references to the Whistlers.
Raven accompanied neither princess, going instead with their pilot to the lock offices. She wanted to check the logbooks. Careful records were kept on the lockage fees; not even a rowboat could bypass the waterfalls unrecorded.
Raven later found Ren at the bookstore, gathering startled looks and curious stares from the regular patrons. Between the “royal red” of Ren’s hair and the royal guards, everyone knew she was one of the five adult princesses. From their whispers, it was clear the patrons were mistaking her for Halley.
“I’ve got a list of ships that passed through the locks since the barge ran aground.” Raven said, pulling out a small tablet that she carried, the sharpened nub of a teeth-worried pencil tucked between the pages. Ren noted the pencil with chagrin; recent events were crack-ing Raven’s legendary poise. “There are approximately a dozen ships a day of the tonnage needed to haul the cannons.”
Ren glanced over the list and shook her head. “The haystack is growing quickly.”
“Did you see this?”
“This” being a newspaper folded and tucked under Raven’s arm. When Ren shook her head, Raven unfolded it to reveal the front page.
It was the Mayfair daily newspaper, the Herald. Dated only two days before, its headline exclaimed in huge dark print, PRINCESS
ODELIA STRUCK DOWN!
“Oh, damn.” Ren snatched the paper out of Raven’s hand, FATE OF PRINCESS UNKNOWN, read the second headline in only slightly smaller print. The article took up the entire front page but contained very little real information. Rumors gleaned from crews of ships passing through Heron Landing made up the bones of the story. Snippets of reports from the Queens Justice fleshed it out. It accurately recorded that Odelia had been attacked, left for dead in a stream, and found by local, thankfully unnamed gentry.
Odelia’s condition, however, was speculated on wildly, putting her at death’s door. Worse, the article raised concerns about Rennsellaer’s safety, and went on to repeat rumors about Halley’s dropping out of the public eye. The article finished with an unsubtle reminder that Trini, at age twenty, and Lylia, who recently turned sixteen, were the only other adult princesses; Ren’s other five sisters were clustered around age eight.
Had her report via Queens Justice reached her mothers before this hysteria? The article noted that no information was forthcoming from the palace.
“Is there a more recent paper?” Ren asked.
“Not yet. They say it normally takes two days for it to travel up from Mayfair.”
Ren swore, spotting at last a copy of Wellsbury’s memoirs and plucking it up. “See if our ship can be moved to the head of the lock queue. I want to get to
Mayfair as quickly as possible. The noble houses are probably up in arms about this. We need to get home.“ The paper was two days old. and it would be another two days, at safe speeds, before they reached Mayfair, meaning the nobles would have four days to panic. Hopefully her mothers would have received her report and released some kind of calming news. Still, she and Odelia would both have to make public appearances as soon as possible.
Chapter 5
Mayfair first appeared in the distance as a haze on what had been a perfect summer morning sky. Great billowing plumes coughed up from the smokestacks of a score of steamboats joined with hundreds of smaller smudges from the kitchen chimneys and businesses ranging from bakeries to wheelwrights. Later in the summer, when the heat would trap in what the winter winds scoured away, the smoke would hang like a permanent fog over the city.
Ren’s ancestors built their summer palace on fairgrounds located at the confluence of rivers. For a hundred
