“I know.” He fidgeted. “Willy…?”
“What, Jos? Don’t fidget.”
“When I go away, will you wait for me until I come back?”
“Unless they send me somewhere else. Of course.”
“I don’t mean that. I mean, will you not get too friendly with any other boy until I come back.”
I felt myself turning red. “You mean wait for you…that way.”
He sighed deeply, running his fingers through his dark, curly hair. “You’re really too young to make a promise like that. You’re probably about thirteen, developmentally speaking, and I’m probably about sixteen. I know I have to go to this school, but I don’t want us to be separated. That sounds soppy, but I don’t want us to forget one another…”
I took his hand. “Jos, I’ll wait for you forever. My stomach won’t let me forget. No one else in the world can make a fried garlwog sandwich the way you can.”
He aimed a blow at me. I blocked it and aimed one at him. I didn’t dare let him go on talking that way, or I’d start to cry, and I didn’t want to cry. We tumbled into the hay and came to rest, me with arms pinned at my sides, him above me, nose to nose.
“Promise!” he demanded. “Or I’ll leave you here for the big wild garlwogs to make dinner of.”
“They don’t eat meat.” I tried to laugh.
“You,” he said, fixing me with his eyes. “You, they’d eat. Now promise.”
“I promise Prince Joziré, heir to the throne of the Ghoss, that I, Wilvia, will not…get friendly with any male person until said prince returns.”
He let me go suddenly and turned away to hide his face before he got up to gather the remnants of our picnic lunch into the basket. I had promised, but I could see it hadn’t helped much.
“Jos,” I whispered from behind him. “I really mean it. I will wait.”
He forced himself to grin. “I know you will.”
We walked back along the farm road, each of us thinking of all the wrong things we could say and do. At least I was. I was having other thoughts, too. Old ones. As we came near the town, we saw Lady Badness sitting on a waystone.
“There you are,” she cackled. “I’d about given up on you. If you don’t mind, Highness, I must speak with Wilvia.”
He was Highness instead of Majesty because he hadn’t been crowned king, yet. And he did mind, but he gritted his teeth and plodded on.
“He told you he’s going away,” said Lady Badness, after he had gone halfway to the town. “You’ve promised to wait for him, but…”
I felt the words leave me like a gush of water. “I’ve promised. But is it because I really want to wait for him, or is it because I’m supposed to be a queen, and the only way I’ll ever be a queen is if I marry Jos.” I put my hands to my face, which was burning, wishing to call the words back. They had been true, the words, but I hadn’t meant to speak them out loud.
“Ah,” said Lady Badness in a satisfied tone, “that’s the true question, isn’t it. One you have to answer, Wilvia. Do you want to be queen?”
I stared at my feet, unable to answer.
“You see yourself with a crown. I know you do. You see yourself being gracious and wise. Isn’t that true.”
“Yes,” I said grudgingly.
“Are you gracious and wise?”
I desperately wanted to lie, knowing it would do no good. “I…I don’t…No. I’m not.”
“Well, no matter how much Joziré loves you, he will not marry you unless you are gracious and wise, for the Queen of the Ghoss must be both. Becoming a queen is extremely hard work, and why would you want to do it? To be queen? Or to be with Joziré? Or because it is a worthy thing to be? If Joziré were gone, dead, would you go to all that work, just to be queen?”
We went up the hill together with the questions unanswered. I couldn’t answer them. Not then. Not for a very long time.
I Am Gretamara/on Chottem
The Gardener told me that Swylet had been founded by several wagonloads of malcontents who, tired of being told what they might and might not do by the Lords of Manland, had set off westward in search of a place where they might do as they pleased. They left the coastal cities of Manland, Chottem’s only human-occupied continent, and turned west, through the surrounding orchards and vegetable plantations, the dairy farms, the estancias with their horses and herds of cattle and haylands and grain-fields, then left settled people behind as they moved into endless plains, where flocks of purple-feathered jibbernek bruised the sky at midday and whole villages of skritchers pranced on their rock-mounds, screaming alarm in the voices of old women. They climbed slowly into rolling hills, thence to a high tableland from which people could see for the first time retreating ranges of mist-valleyed mountains: indigo on azure on sapphire on ice.
Moving into those mountains they had arrived at last—and purely by fortune, so they thought—at a well-watered valley, hidden and protected by ramparts of immemorial stone. There at the end of nowhere they found an area fenced off, grown up in shrubberies and trees, and occupied by the Gardener. She welcomed them and told them to build beside the flowing river and to name their hamlet for the small, swift birds that nested there, the swylets.
Every now and then, a man or two from the village might backtrack into the world on an urgent errand, to obtain breeding stock, or seed, or certain tools the settlers could not make for themselves. Sometimes they brought new settlers with them when they returned, though, as time went on, such additions became extremely rare. No one ever found the place by accident, though Swylet-born folk who went adventuring could always find
