The fisher sighed, an almost human sound of relief. “If it happens to you again, hide that one, too. Always. Hide them. Always have them with you.”
“I think it would be considerate of you to tell me what they are,” she said almost angrily.
The fisher fidgeted, making little motions with his head and shoulders, like a bewildered person trying to remember something. “I don’t know,” he whispered in a sad, hurt voice. “I’ve been put here to guide you, when you need guiding, but I don’t know what to say about anything until something happens and then, suddenly, there are words there. I’ve told you all the words that came to me this morning. There isn’t anything else.”
Just as there had been a tiny child in the carriage, on the road. Just as there had been horse biscuits when conditions required them, or horses becoming deer.
“I feel like a chess piece,” she said angrily. “Move here, move there. Whose game are we playing, Fisher?”
He did the shrugging thing again, looking so sad, lost, and bewildered that she took him into her arms, sat on the edge of the bed, and petted him as she would have one of the cats. While he didn’t purr, the warmth of the contact seemed to comfort them both. He did not feel like a mere thing. He was alive, furry and breathing. His nose was leathery and warm. His eyes were bright. However he came to be, he was hers.
She went to find Precious Wind, who was still asleep. Xulai touched her lightly on the shoulder. “Wind?” she murmured.
“I’m here.”
Xulai beckoned, whispering, “I need to tell you something.”
Precious Wind put on a robe and they went out into the little courtyard, where dew hung heavy on the grasses and the dawn birds were complaining sleepily.
“It’s about Princess Xu-i-lok.”
“Your mother.”
“That’s still hard to think about and sometimes I can’t say it.”
“Let it go. What about her?”
“Before she died, she sent me out at night, alone, to get something for her.”
“And you did?” Precious Wind’s eyes were wide, her face eager.
Xulai had thought of telling the whole story and had decided against it. She did not want to mention Abasio or tell anyone just yet what they meant to one another. She wanted people to think of him as they already did: a wanderer, an innocuous stranger, harmless and unsuspected of anything. “Yes. I was afraid. Terribly afraid. It took three tries, but I found it for her. It was a ball of something, like a candy, and when I brought it back, she told me to swallow it. I did, and I think that’s when the changes started, I mean, in me.”
Precious Wind shut her eyes and breathed deeply as though deciding how to react. “It’s possible you were staying in childlike form through some method that needed an antidote to reverse itself.”
“I suppose, but that’s not the important part. While I was out there, in the woods, the duchess and that man, Jenger, came. A spy had told them that a child was going out into the woods at night. I was hidden. They didn’t see me. They stood there in the woods and talked together. She wanted to find something that Princess Xu-i-lok had hidden, or the thing that Huold had carried, and she said the Sea King had offered her a reward for either one of those things.”
Precious Wind frowned. “The Sea King? You’re sure she said exactly that?”
Xulai put her hands across her eyes and concentrated on remembering. “Not exactly, no. She said the Sea King’s ambassador offered a reward. The Sea People had found a vault full of machines under the library at the Edgeworld Isles. The duchess was to receive the machines as a reward, and Jenger said he thought she already had machines.”
Precious Wind exhaled suddenly. “Ah! What did she say?”
“She said she only had a few. She had a little machine that made . . . clouds of tiny things that could seek out any one person and kill them—if she had the pattern for that person.”
“Pattern?”
Again she struggled to remember. “Code. Maybe that’s the word she used. Code. She had taken my mother’s code from the rim of a wineglass at the court, and she’d sent the cloud to eat that pattern, cell by cell.”
Precious Wind scowled fiercely. “Yes. That’s what Xu-i-lok thought. Your mother knew what had happened. We had no defenses ready because until that moment, we didn’t know anyone had rediscovered that power! We decided to call it a curse because most people find it easier to believe in magic than to believe in reality. If they’re religious, they get used to magical thinking as children and go through life believing in fantasy instead of facts. Ah, well, poor things, they have to cope somehow. Besides, we didn’t want the duchess or her mother to know we had any information about them.”
“We?”
“We, the clan Do-Lok of Tingawa, who appointed me to guard you.”
“Not Bear?”
“No, not Bear. He guards you, too, but he doesn’t have the information I have. Bear is only a warrior, not a technician.”
“And a technician is . . . ?”
“Someone who has some understanding of machines and science and what they can do. Is that all you wanted to tell me?”
Xulai had wanted Precious Wind to tell her something! About Bear. She could not bring herself to ask. She shrugged, saying, “No. The most important part is, while she was standing there, a little gust of wind blew a branch and caught some of her hair. And when
