“Where’s Max?”
Nell wasn’t grinning anymore.
The door had closed behind Jean. And Jean’s eyes were red. Kate’s rising laughter turned abruptly into a stomachache. She saw Susan flush.
“He didn’t come with you?” Nell asked. “He stayed there?”
Susan started talking too fast.
“He doesn’t know! They wouldn’t let us tell him. We went again today, and they stopped us. And we had to come out to look for you and Kate!”
All Susan’s happy relief had soured, and she scowled down at Kate. “You should have waited for me! Why didn’t you wait?”
Kate cringed and glanced at Laysia, who had gone to sit in the chair by the fireplace. The woman looked from one to the other of them, a little bewildered. Couldn’t she tell Susan how bad it had been? But Laysia said nothing, and Kate couldn’t find the words, not in front of Nell, who looked now like she might hit somebody.
Jean burst into tears, and Nell reddened.
“How could he not know?” Nell said. “He’d know if he wanted to! He’s too in love with his new teacher to know.”
Laysia cleared her throat uncomfortably, and Susan shot a warning look at Nell. At home, they knew better than to fight in front of strangers. Nell glared at Susan and swung around.
“Teach us what he’s learning,” she said to Laysia. “Teach us everything.”
But the fight wasn’t over. Kate knew that much.
The thundercloud had been hovering from the second Susan and Jean shut the door behind them without Max. It burst the moment Laysia went to bed and the four of them were finally alone together.
“You’re nuts if you think he doesn’t know,” Nell said, turning on Susan. “How could he not know? Didn’t he hear the gong?”
Susan grimaced. “It wasn’t like before! They didn’t sound it. Zirri came and told us and Mistress Meva. He’s probably thinking we’re still there, all okay.”
Nell snorted. “Okay? We haven’t been okay since we got there. He saw you! He saw all of it! Or he should have! Don’t tell me he didn’t know. He should have known!”
Susan looked pained. Kate slipped between them.
“He doesn’t know,” she said to Nell. “Otherwise he’d have come, like last time.”
Jean made it worse by crying.
“Shh! You’ll wake her! Max’ll come looking for us when he sees we’ve gone!” Susan said. “I know he will!”
“If he even notices we’re gone!” Nell cut in. “When was the last time he visited? Two days? Three? Maybe he’ll find out next month. Where will we be then?”
“Don’t exaggerate!” Susan snapped. “He’ll come. I left him a note.”
Nell rolled her eyes. “A note. Great.”
Kate listened to them with mounting desperation.
“A note’s good,” she said. “Maybe they’ll give it to him, like he sends those letters! He’ll come!”
She looked over at Susan and saw the lines rumpling her forehead again. “Don’t worry, Susan.”
But Susan looked back in surprise, wincing a little.
And then Jean wailed, “You said he’d come!”
“He will!” Susan said in a frantic whisper. “I said it because he will!”
The fight went on like that, Susan repeating things, and Nell glaring, and Kate trying to stand between them until they were both angry at her, too, and told her to get into bed next to Jean, to keep quiet, to let them think.
So Kate lay beside Jean, who even in sleep shuddered from all the crying she’d done, and thought she’d never heard such loud thinking in her life.
We had dreams at home, before we came,” Susan said the next morning.
The previous evening, in the temporary truce that had followed Laysia’s promise to teach them, Nell had showed her sister the passage of the orchard vision. Susan blanched when she read it, then sat brooding over it until Laysia had gone to bed.
“At least Kate did,” Susan went on now. “Max, too, I think. Maybe someone was calling us. I didn’t know that could happen.”
Laysia saw Kate and Jean exchange a glance, and Kate looked worried. At mention of their missing brother, the dark-haired girl, Jean, blinked and drew the back of her hand across her eyes.
None of them looked steel edged. They seemed too soft to come from the world of iron Tur Nurayim had described.
“What’s it like, the place you come from?” Laysia asked Susan. She tried to imagine a world of hard lines, of iron-skinned people fenced off one from the next. So many walls! She wondered how one moved in a place like that. And yet the window had opened.
“It’s different,” the child said. “It’s so hard to describe how, when we use the same words and don’t mean the same things with them. Nobody there can make water from nothing, or peaches, or move the wind. We have tools — machines — to do things for us.”
It did sound like a leaden place when the girl said that. On the other side of that window, could one could stand on a mountain and see the breadth of things, as she liked to do standing in the sea clearing? Were there seas there?
The greatest of the sages were the seers who had walked the orchard and seen, perhaps, more than this world alone. To learn to take the clay of life and reshape it, one must see. But Tur Nurayim had also spoken of the heartbeat of the world, and the scholar’s ear to hear it. Laysia wondered if in that other place, there were those with such eyes and ears.
Laysia had said she would teach them, but in the light of day, with the noise of the mist threatening and four faces out of dreams turned expectantly her way, she nearly lost her nerve, and so decided to lead them as far from the valley
