“Zirri, she’s new, even if she doesn’t look it!” She shook her head. “Be nice!”
“She’s ungrateful, is what she is,” Zirri said. “Looking like that already. You won’t keep it, you know, if you’re not properly grateful. They could send you back, and you’ll be just the same as you were.”
“Zirri!” Minna said, shocked.
The girl’s open hostility caught Nell off guard. She’d expected Zirri to keep playing the game of pretending not to mean the snide things she said. But Zirri’s anger had come into her face now and been spoken, and the other girls shifted in discomfort. The words hung there a moment, sharp and heavy, before Wista cleared her throat.
“Zirri,” she said, “Nell doesn’t know. There were plenty of things we didn’t know when we came.”
With a venomous look Nell’s way, Zirri said, “I knew enough not to talk like the Genius.”
Nell felt bewildered. “What do you think I’m doing? Making speeches?”
Zirri laughed and tossed her head. Clearly she felt she’d gotten in the last word. Nell squinted up at the willow tree. The branches moved in an early-evening breeze, throwing yellow bars of sunlight onto the grass. Each time the wind blew, it was as if the sun and the tree played a game of pickup sticks, full of shadows and light. She tried to adopt an air of carelessness, as if Zirri and her meanness were nothing, or less than nothing. As fleeting as the shadows beneath the tree, as unimportant as the moths that fluttered among the leaves. But it didn’t feel like nothing.
Wista sighed. “Ingratitude’s not rebellion,” she said.
They let the subject drop after that, but Nell was full of questions. She wondered if these were the kind they answered at school.
That night, as promised, Max’s first letter arrived, addressed to Jean and delivered at dinner by a shaggy-haired boy who carried messages around to the various diners seated in the high-ceilinged room on the other side of the library. The windows here looked over the first garden, just like the ones in the schoolroom, and Nell had been sitting glumly watching a group of older men in vigorous conversation on a bench outside when she heard Jean squeal and rip open the envelope she’d been given.
“Let us all see!” Kate said, getting up to stand behind Jean’s chair. But Jean held the letter up like a prize and then hugged it to her chest. “After me,” she said. “If it’s not private.”
Nell wondered what secret Jean thought Max would share with a second-grader, but she didn’t say it. She just drummed her fingers as Jean took her time unfolding the letter with ridiculous care. There was Max’s familiar, cramped handwriting, flowing unevenly across the page. Nell had the urge to grab it. Had he found anything out or not? She stifled the impulse and watched her sister frown over the page.
“Susan, what are these words?” Jean pointed, and Susan, whose attention had been briefly recaptured by the letter, leaned over.
“Tur Kaysh,” she said. “That’s what they call the old man.”
Jean nodded and bent back to her reading.
“How about this one?”
“Physicist.”
Nell felt her ears heating up. She wondered if steam might actually pour out of them, like it did in cartoons, or if that was just pretend.
Jean pointed again.
“Interested,” Susan said.
“No, I meant that one.”
“Impatient,” Susan told her.
Nell couldn’t take it anymore.
“Why don’t you just let Susan read it out loud?”
Jean gave her a supercilious look.
“I’m almost done,” she said. “Just wait a minute.”
Before Nell could decide whether knocking her over was a good strategy for getting her to share the letter, Jean handed it to Susan.
“Okay,” she said. “It’s not private.”
Nell rolled her eyes.
“Maybe we ought to read it in our room anyway,” Susan told her. “Just in case.”
So they adjourned to their room, hurrying past the tapestried walls into the library and then across to the other side, and at last, Susan unfolded the letter.
“‘Dear Jean,’” she began. Jean grinned widely at the mention of her name, as if she’d only just discovered the letter was hers.
Nell rolled her eyes again. “We know who it’s addressed to. Just get into the letter, will you?”
Susan raised an eyebrow at her but continued:
“Remember I said we were going to be home soon? I really think soon is getting sooner now. The Master Watcher says Tur Kaysh knows everything, that is, he didn’t say it in those words, but he did give that idea off. And I can tell that the man is very smart. He’s not like the other people we’ve met here so far. That is to say, he knows a lot more of what’s going on. I think he’s kind of like a physicist, but here. You saw that room upstairs, with all its books! When he saw I was interested in them, he said I could ask any question, and he would try to answer. I have plenty of questions, and one of them is going to be the one that shows us how to get that window back. Try not to get too impatient waiting, but this is exciting, you’ll see!
Your brother,
Max”
Jean was still beaming, but Nell suppressed a snort. So much for figuring things out! She wondered why Max didn’t just ask the question straight out. That’s what I would do, if it were me, she thought.
Max was definitively not her, however, and for a second she told herself that if the Guide was so smart, he would have known to invite the rest of them to stay up in that sunny room of his.
It was the kind of thing her father would have said, but somehow it didn’t help. The old man did seem smart. Better than smart. And that room had looked wonderful. And Max was there, so he was the one who got to ask the questions. As many as he wanted. All she could do was grumble about it, which she did,
