signy1
in
tinman_fic
To Me A Kingdom, 13/?
Title: To Me A Kingdom
Author: Signy
Characters: All of ‘em, though Glitch and Az do most of the talking.
Pairing: None.
Warning: None
Summary: Glitch has a plan for himself that nobody much likes. Azkadellia turns out to be the best choice to argue him down.
Disclaimer: I own nothing, especially not these characters.
Notes: The embedded flashback gives my explanation for some of the odder aspects of the Eastern Guild.
Previous chapters:
One: http://community.livejournal.com/tinman_fic/108716.html
Two: http://community.livejournal.com/tinman_fic/124535.html
Three: http://community.livejournal.com/tinman_fic/134664.html
Four: http://community.livejournal.com/tinman_fic/154648.html
Five: http://community.livejournal.com/tinman_fic/164634.html
Six: http://community.livejournal.com/tinman_fic/172442.html
Seven: http://community.livejournal.com/tinman_fic/183698.html
Eight: http://community.livejournal.com/tinman_fic/210560.html
Nine: http://community.livejournal.com/tinman_fic/229832.html
Ten: http://community.livejournal.com/tinman_fic/242492.html
Eleven: http://community.livejournal.com/tinman_fic/272942.html
Twelve: http://community.livejournal.com/tinman_fic/327448.html
Chapter 13
Azkadellia opened the top drawer of the cabinet. Inside, in neat rows, lay a selection of glittering jewelry, and she looked them over, remembering each of them, as she reached behind to undo the clasp of a necklace.
That necklace was an heirloom. It had been given to her on her eighth birthday, when she had been formally named the heir, and she still remembered how heavy it had seemed, and how proud she had been. A pre-Witch memory, gods be thanked, and one that almost cancelled out the fact that she had worn it to her coronation. Each link of the necklace was shaped like a pumpkin seed, and each silver oval was set with an old-fashioned table-cut diamond. There was a hazy sort of family legend that claimed the necklace dated all the way back to the first Gale’s predecessor, the last queen of the House of Pastoria, and that it had been a birthday gift from one of her closest counselors, a man with the unlikely soubriquet of ‘Pumpkinhead.’ Since the Pastorian regime had ended with the Pumpkinhead’s monarch, whose death at the hands of a wicked witch had marked the end of a golden age, most scholars assumed that it was merely a slanderous nickname, a slur on his intelligence or lack thereof. Some few insisted that magic had been strong enough in those days that a pumpkinheaded magical construct really could be made to live.
For her part, Azkadellia doubted the legend’s veracity, but the necklace was certainly old, and indisputably pretty, and besides, she hadn’t been able to figure out a tactful way to offer it back to her parents-which gesture would, in essence, mean offering to formally renounce her position as heir in favor of her sister. It wasn’t that she wasn’t willing to do just that; she was. It was just that every scenario she had been able to envision ended up sounding petulant, or worse, self-pitying, and she had just enough self-respect left to want better.
A small smile spread across her face as she coiled the necklace in the correct compartment and shut the drawer. Gods bless Ambrose, she thought fondly. He’d spent a lifetime making things better for her, and this time was no exception.
“You can’t go alone,” the Queen had said, after a long time, and her voice cracked as she said it. He’d already won, and everyone knew it; he would be leaving with their blessing because he’d made it clear that otherwise, he was all too ready to leave without it. “I’ll assign a guard.”
DG was the first to look at Cain, but Glitch shook his head, saving him from having to answer. “Some of the places I’m going, having a tin man at my heels would be more trouble than anything else. Besides, I can take care of myself in a fight.”
From the look on the Queen’s face, she hadn’t even considered that he might need to defend himself with his fists, and Glitch had not helped his own case. He hurried on, cutting off DG midword.
“No, DG,” he said. “You have too much to do right here; there’re about a billion things you need to learn, Princess, and each and every one of those billion things are more important than a single headcase. Same for you, Cain. And you, too, Raw.” He looked around the room. “Between you all, you’re bringing the O.Z. back to life. And I know Ambrose helped, and maybe he’ll do more later on, and maybe he’ll be me, and maybe he won’t. But that ‘maybe’ isn’t worth dragging you away from your work here.”
“I’ll go with you,” someone said. It took Azkadellia a moment to realize that it had been herself. It took her another moment to realize that she meant it. It took the rest of her family a yet another moment to process what they had just heard.
It took Ambrose-protective, brotherly Ambrose-less than a fraction of that moment to seize control of Glitch’s mouth. “Like hell you will, Az,” he said. “Half the country still wants your head on a stick.”
Azkadellia didn’t flinch, though it was a close thing. She looked him straight in the eye…and a sardonic smile tugged slightly at the corner of her mouth. “Only half?” she asked. “Better than I’d thought.”
And it was only there for a second, but she saw it; the glint of real humor-granted, an ink-black, gallows humor she would not have been old enough to quite understand before the Witch had taught her to hate Ambrose-gleaming in his eyes, and she felt herself glint right back at him. In a lot of ways, everything was settled then and there.
Azkadellia studied herself in the mirror, and was pleased with what she saw. Her new frock was very grown-up-no ruffles, and the hem touched her ankles-and part of her hair had been braided with ribbons that matched the dress, then looped up into a delicate coronet that gave almost the impression of a crown. And, to add the last touch of elegance, the maid who usually attended to Mother had brushed a bit of rouge onto Azkadellia’s cheeks and reddened her lips. DG, who was currently having a nap in the nursery, would not be attending the Court reception for the Eastern Guild, because she was still a baby. Azkadellia wasn’t a baby, though-she was almost nine, and Mother said that she was old enough to start appearing in public.
In a burst of inspiration, she opened her jewelry box and clasped her silver necklace around her neck, the old, old diamonds gleaming against the silk of her dress. There. Perfect. No one who looked that princessly could possibly be nervous, she told herself. The butterflies in her stomach begged to differ.
Ambrose knocked on the open door. “Hey, there-oh, I’m sorry, my lady,” he said formally, a grin hiding on the very edge of his mouth. “I was looking for Azkadee; have you seen her anywhere? About yay high… the prettiest set of brown eyes in the Zone… grass stains on her knees?” He peered exaggeratedly into the corners of the room. “Gee, she was supposed to be here…”
She giggled. “Ambrose, you’re silly.”
“And you’re gorgeous. You’ll have the entire Eastern Guild at your feet, just you see. Come on, I’m supposed to escort you to the audience chamber, and-whoa! Az, you can not wear that.”
Azkadellia bridled. She didn’t take his flowery, exaggerated compliments all that seriously, but she didn’t much like the stern counselor-voice, either. “What’s wrong?” she asked, piqued.
“This,” Ambrose said, reaching to unfasten the necklace. “You can’t wear silver in front of the Guild; it’s rude. Even the word ‘silver’ is rude; it’s an awful insult. Let’s pick something else, okay?”
“Okay,” Azkadellia said, mostly mollified. “Why is it an insult?” she asked, when a modest gold locket was safely around her neck.
“I bet you can figure it out yourself if you think about it for a minute,” Ambrose said, taking her arm. “How do you talk to a Guildsman?”
“In rhyme,” Az said automatically. She had spent two solid weeks with her tutors learning to come up with at least a couplet at a moment’s notice, and memorizing a formal sonnet of welcome. “They talk in poems, and always rhyme everything. The more important something is, the more specific the rhyme scheme becomes.”
“Right,” Ambrose agreed. “Now tell me-what rhymes with ‘silver’?”
Azkadellia spun frantically through the alphabet. Bilver… milver… wilver… “Nothing rhymes with silver,” she realized.
“No, it doesn’t,” Ambrose said with a straight face, and it was years before she got the joke. “But do you see? Silver is unrhymable. About the closest you can come is ‘pilfer’ (which means ‘stealing,’ Az,) and that’s both a lousy rhyme and a rotten word. Unrhymable things are bad, far as the Guild is concerned. They don’t like oranges, either. For the same reason.”
“Really?” Az said, fascinated. Her language tutor hadn’t told her any of this.
“Really,” Ambrose assured her. “Pumpkins don’t seem to faze them too much, though; I don’t know why. But you remember the story of the first Gale, right?”
They were halfway to the throne room. Az was too interested to realize that her butterflies were gone. “Of course I do,” she said.
“And her magic shoes?”
She frowned at him, not sure where this was going. “Uh-huh.”
“Well, what color were they?”
“Red. Well, rubies, anyway. I think all rubies are red,” Az clarified, certain that it wasn’t the right answer. Ambrose had that look he got right before his checker jumped its way across the whole board.
“That’s what most versions of the story say,” he agreed. “The oldest versions, though, all agree that the shoes were made of silver. And they’re right.”
“How do you know, though?” Az argued. “They could have had rubies set into the silver. Or maybe the old stories were just written down wrong.”
“Hey, don’t believe me,” Ambrose said, with a king-me gleam in his eye. “Ask your tutor. Better yet-ask your mom to let you into the treasury and see for yourself.”
“The shoes are there?” Az asked, flabbergasted. “We have them?”
“What’s left of them, anyway. They’re pretty much a wreck, and the magic’s gone out of them. But they’re silver, all right.”
“Then why do people say they’re ruby?” Az asked, a little miffed at the dishonesty.
Ambrose quirked an eyebrow at her. “Figure it out yourself, Az. This is politics. Where did the Gale land?”
“On top of the Witch?”
He shook his head. “No. Good try, though. That’s political hyperbole-saying that the Gale’s house squashed the Witch when she landed is just a poetic way of saying that the House of Gale conquered her and freed the people from her evil reign. Geographically, Azkadee-where did she land?”
“In the Eastern Guild,” Az answered automatically. “Oh! You mean, they just said they were ruby so they wouldn’t have to say ‘silver’?”
“Bingo, Beautiful,” Ambrose said approvingly. “That’s politics. It was such a minor, unimportant detail-I mean, come on. The color of her shoes? Who cares, right?”
“So,” Az said carefully, “They changed one little thing to make the Eastern Guild happy, and they made it part of the story-the hype… the hype-bubbly…?”
“Hyperbole,” Ambrose corrected, nodding approval. “Go on.”
“The political hyperbole just meant that people liked the first Gale, and were happy that she had defeated the Witch? And then it just became a story, and the Guild could tell the story without saying bad words?”
“Exactly,” Ambrose said. “You’re going to be great at this diplomatic stuff, Az; you got it first try.”
“How come Tutor didn’t tell me any of that stuff?” she asked. She couldn’t help but feel that this was information far more valuable and certainly more interesting than the magical properties of various elements found in the Guild’s territory.
“Probably because your tutor is a droning windbag,” Ambrose said cheerfully, and grinned. The extremely mutual, usually cordial dislike between the young technologist and the old academic was a well-known standing joke around the castle. “And you can tell him I said so.” Stooping down a bit, he kissed her forehead, a good-luck gesture that had been ancient before the first Gale had arrived. “Knock ‘em dead, Az. You’re going to do fine.”
“Aren’t you coming?” she asked, the butterflies making an abrupt return.
“Not yet. I’ll be in later,” he said. “This part is for the high advisors and the family,” he explained, almost breezily enough.
Az frowned. “But you’re-”
“Nope,” he cut her off. “I’m neither, not really. Now, go on. I’ll be there for the important part later, all right?”
“All right,” she said slowly.
“That’s my brave girl,” he said approvingly, nodded to the herald who was waiting to announce her, and was gone.
Azkadellia had not learned until years later-until the Witch had learned it, in fact-that Ambrose had been deliberately excluded in order to allow him to gather intelligence-a phrase that sounded rather prettier than ‘spying.’ And that it had worked admirably.
“You can’t be serious, Az,” Glitch persisted. “Putting yourself in danger, traipsing all over creation, just to hold my hand? That’s ridiculous.”
“First of all, I’m not in much more danger than you are. My face isn’t that widely recognizable, and it’ll be less so with a small glamour,” Azkadellia countered. “Between that and an alias, I’ll be fine.” Her ‘so there’ was unvoiced; that didn’t stop Glitch from hearing it, and he conceded the point with a minute twitch of an eyebrow.
The Queen made a noise that would probably have become an objection if either of the arguers had let her get that far. Neither of them so much as glanced her way.
“Even assuming that you could keep the glamour up twenty-four/seven,” Glitch said, “and assuming that nobody recognizes me and puts two and two together, and assuming that I don’t forget the alias at some inconvenient time-and we all know the old saw about what happens when we assume, right?-even assuming all of that, I’ll be living rough. You’ve never done that, Az. You’ve never slept under a tree, gone hungry for two days, or sat out in the rain because it was the only bath you’d get that week, and I can’t imagine that you really want to start now.”
Ahamo tried to interject. He didn’t get even as far as had his wife.
“No. I don’t. And we don’t need to,” Az said. If Glitch was going to start lobbing her softball objections, she didn’t see any reason not to bat then straight out of the park. “You’re not a hunted fugitive anymore, you know. We’ll take money enough to rent lodgings anywhere we care to overnight, and we’ll carry a pocketful of square meal tablets, just like everyone else in the country.”
“You’re forgetting the three day rule,” Glitch told her. “I have to live by that.”
“Three day rule? What’s that?” DG asked. Loudly enough to drown out whatever retort had leapt to her sister’s lips.
Glitch tore his gaze away from Azkadellia’s; he sounded tired as he answered. “Headcases. We’re criminals, DG, remember? No one likes it if we stay anywhere for too long. First day you can usually beg something to eat and maybe sleep in someone’s barn. Second day they might look the other way if you steal something from a trash heap and camp out in the village commons. Third day, if you’re not on the road by noon you can just about count on a good kicking to speed you on your way. You never know when one of us might remember how to do whatever it was we did to warrant the zipper in the first place, right?”
DG swallowed hard, sorry she’d asked. She snuck a glance at Cain, eyes full of questions-was that really how it worked?
Cain’s eyes gave her all the answer she needed, even before his almost-imperceptible nod.
“So what?” Azkadellia said, after a short pause. “The point is traveling, isn’t it? Not sightseeing, and certainly not settling down. Truth be told, three days to rest and restock here and there is probably more than we’d need. The faster we move, the sooner we get there.”
“All right, then,” Glitch conceded, his dark eyes intent. It wasn’t quite the king- me look, but it was close; chess, not checkers. The endgame had begun. “Leaving practicalities out of it, the real question is why you’d want to shepherd me across the country when you can’t even stand to be in the same room with me.”
Az took a sharp breath; for the first time since they’d begun this dance, she missed a step. “That… that’s not true,” she said unevenly.
“Of course it is,” Glitch continued, ruthless. “You avoid me. Avert your eyes. This is by far the longest conversation we’ve had in months, and it’s the only one you’ve ever initiated.” He paused, shrugged. “I understand, of course; how not? You walk around with a hundred pounds of guilt and fear on your shoulders as it is; seeing me only adds another straw to the camel’s load. Too much to bear sometimes, I’m sure. And no real reason why you should want to.”
“You’re merciless,” Az almost whispered.
“I always was,” he agreed.
“Glitch, maybe this isn’t-” DG started, and trailed off as Glitch held up a commanding hand for silence. His eyes never left Azkadellia’s.
“And so,” he said. “Here we are. For the sake of my own self-preservation I have to go. For the sake of yours you should be glad to see the back of me. Why would you want to risk a trek to nowhere with the one who hurts you the most just by existing? Why, Az?”
“Because I’m not whole, either.” For the second time that day, the words exploded out of Azkadellia’s mouth before her brain had registered their existence. And for the second time that day, she didn’t realize that they were true until she heard them aloud.
Author: Signy
Characters: All of ‘em, though Glitch and Az do most of the talking.
Pairing: None.
Warning: None
Summary: Glitch has a plan for himself that nobody much likes. Azkadellia turns out to be the best choice to argue him down.
Disclaimer: I own nothing, especially not these characters.
Notes: The embedded flashback gives my explanation for some of the odder aspects of the Eastern Guild.
Previous chapters:
One: http://community.livejournal.com/tinman_fic/108716.html
Two: http://community.livejournal.com/tinman_fic/124535.html
Three: http://community.livejournal.com/tinman_fic/134664.html
Four: http://community.livejournal.com/tinman_fic/154648.html
Five: http://community.livejournal.com/tinman_fic/164634.html
Six: http://community.livejournal.com/tinman_fic/172442.html
Seven: http://community.livejournal.com/tinman_fic/183698.html
Eight: http://community.livejournal.com/tinman_fic/210560.html
Nine: http://community.livejournal.com/tinman_fic/229832.html
Ten: http://community.livejournal.com/tinman_fic/242492.html
Eleven: http://community.livejournal.com/tinman_fic/272942.html
Twelve: http://community.livejournal.com/tinman_fic/327448.html
Chapter 13
Azkadellia opened the top drawer of the cabinet. Inside, in neat rows, lay a selection of glittering jewelry, and she looked them over, remembering each of them, as she reached behind to undo the clasp of a necklace.
That necklace was an heirloom. It had been given to her on her eighth birthday, when she had been formally named the heir, and she still remembered how heavy it had seemed, and how proud she had been. A pre-Witch memory, gods be thanked, and one that almost cancelled out the fact that she had worn it to her coronation. Each link of the necklace was shaped like a pumpkin seed, and each silver oval was set with an old-fashioned table-cut diamond. There was a hazy sort of family legend that claimed the necklace dated all the way back to the first Gale’s predecessor, the last queen of the House of Pastoria, and that it had been a birthday gift from one of her closest counselors, a man with the unlikely soubriquet of ‘Pumpkinhead.’ Since the Pastorian regime had ended with the Pumpkinhead’s monarch, whose death at the hands of a wicked witch had marked the end of a golden age, most scholars assumed that it was merely a slanderous nickname, a slur on his intelligence or lack thereof. Some few insisted that magic had been strong enough in those days that a pumpkinheaded magical construct really could be made to live.
For her part, Azkadellia doubted the legend’s veracity, but the necklace was certainly old, and indisputably pretty, and besides, she hadn’t been able to figure out a tactful way to offer it back to her parents-which gesture would, in essence, mean offering to formally renounce her position as heir in favor of her sister. It wasn’t that she wasn’t willing to do just that; she was. It was just that every scenario she had been able to envision ended up sounding petulant, or worse, self-pitying, and she had just enough self-respect left to want better.
A small smile spread across her face as she coiled the necklace in the correct compartment and shut the drawer. Gods bless Ambrose, she thought fondly. He’d spent a lifetime making things better for her, and this time was no exception.
“You can’t go alone,” the Queen had said, after a long time, and her voice cracked as she said it. He’d already won, and everyone knew it; he would be leaving with their blessing because he’d made it clear that otherwise, he was all too ready to leave without it. “I’ll assign a guard.”
DG was the first to look at Cain, but Glitch shook his head, saving him from having to answer. “Some of the places I’m going, having a tin man at my heels would be more trouble than anything else. Besides, I can take care of myself in a fight.”
From the look on the Queen’s face, she hadn’t even considered that he might need to defend himself with his fists, and Glitch had not helped his own case. He hurried on, cutting off DG midword.
“No, DG,” he said. “You have too much to do right here; there’re about a billion things you need to learn, Princess, and each and every one of those billion things are more important than a single headcase. Same for you, Cain. And you, too, Raw.” He looked around the room. “Between you all, you’re bringing the O.Z. back to life. And I know Ambrose helped, and maybe he’ll do more later on, and maybe he’ll be me, and maybe he won’t. But that ‘maybe’ isn’t worth dragging you away from your work here.”
“I’ll go with you,” someone said. It took Azkadellia a moment to realize that it had been herself. It took her another moment to realize that she meant it. It took the rest of her family a yet another moment to process what they had just heard.
It took Ambrose-protective, brotherly Ambrose-less than a fraction of that moment to seize control of Glitch’s mouth. “Like hell you will, Az,” he said. “Half the country still wants your head on a stick.”
Azkadellia didn’t flinch, though it was a close thing. She looked him straight in the eye…and a sardonic smile tugged slightly at the corner of her mouth. “Only half?” she asked. “Better than I’d thought.”
And it was only there for a second, but she saw it; the glint of real humor-granted, an ink-black, gallows humor she would not have been old enough to quite understand before the Witch had taught her to hate Ambrose-gleaming in his eyes, and she felt herself glint right back at him. In a lot of ways, everything was settled then and there.
Azkadellia studied herself in the mirror, and was pleased with what she saw. Her new frock was very grown-up-no ruffles, and the hem touched her ankles-and part of her hair had been braided with ribbons that matched the dress, then looped up into a delicate coronet that gave almost the impression of a crown. And, to add the last touch of elegance, the maid who usually attended to Mother had brushed a bit of rouge onto Azkadellia’s cheeks and reddened her lips. DG, who was currently having a nap in the nursery, would not be attending the Court reception for the Eastern Guild, because she was still a baby. Azkadellia wasn’t a baby, though-she was almost nine, and Mother said that she was old enough to start appearing in public.
In a burst of inspiration, she opened her jewelry box and clasped her silver necklace around her neck, the old, old diamonds gleaming against the silk of her dress. There. Perfect. No one who looked that princessly could possibly be nervous, she told herself. The butterflies in her stomach begged to differ.
Ambrose knocked on the open door. “Hey, there-oh, I’m sorry, my lady,” he said formally, a grin hiding on the very edge of his mouth. “I was looking for Azkadee; have you seen her anywhere? About yay high… the prettiest set of brown eyes in the Zone… grass stains on her knees?” He peered exaggeratedly into the corners of the room. “Gee, she was supposed to be here…”
She giggled. “Ambrose, you’re silly.”
“And you’re gorgeous. You’ll have the entire Eastern Guild at your feet, just you see. Come on, I’m supposed to escort you to the audience chamber, and-whoa! Az, you can not wear that.”
Azkadellia bridled. She didn’t take his flowery, exaggerated compliments all that seriously, but she didn’t much like the stern counselor-voice, either. “What’s wrong?” she asked, piqued.
“This,” Ambrose said, reaching to unfasten the necklace. “You can’t wear silver in front of the Guild; it’s rude. Even the word ‘silver’ is rude; it’s an awful insult. Let’s pick something else, okay?”
“Okay,” Azkadellia said, mostly mollified. “Why is it an insult?” she asked, when a modest gold locket was safely around her neck.
“I bet you can figure it out yourself if you think about it for a minute,” Ambrose said, taking her arm. “How do you talk to a Guildsman?”
“In rhyme,” Az said automatically. She had spent two solid weeks with her tutors learning to come up with at least a couplet at a moment’s notice, and memorizing a formal sonnet of welcome. “They talk in poems, and always rhyme everything. The more important something is, the more specific the rhyme scheme becomes.”
“Right,” Ambrose agreed. “Now tell me-what rhymes with ‘silver’?”
Azkadellia spun frantically through the alphabet. Bilver… milver… wilver… “Nothing rhymes with silver,” she realized.
“No, it doesn’t,” Ambrose said with a straight face, and it was years before she got the joke. “But do you see? Silver is unrhymable. About the closest you can come is ‘pilfer’ (which means ‘stealing,’ Az,) and that’s both a lousy rhyme and a rotten word. Unrhymable things are bad, far as the Guild is concerned. They don’t like oranges, either. For the same reason.”
“Really?” Az said, fascinated. Her language tutor hadn’t told her any of this.
“Really,” Ambrose assured her. “Pumpkins don’t seem to faze them too much, though; I don’t know why. But you remember the story of the first Gale, right?”
They were halfway to the throne room. Az was too interested to realize that her butterflies were gone. “Of course I do,” she said.
“And her magic shoes?”
She frowned at him, not sure where this was going. “Uh-huh.”
“Well, what color were they?”
“Red. Well, rubies, anyway. I think all rubies are red,” Az clarified, certain that it wasn’t the right answer. Ambrose had that look he got right before his checker jumped its way across the whole board.
“That’s what most versions of the story say,” he agreed. “The oldest versions, though, all agree that the shoes were made of silver. And they’re right.”
“How do you know, though?” Az argued. “They could have had rubies set into the silver. Or maybe the old stories were just written down wrong.”
“Hey, don’t believe me,” Ambrose said, with a king-me gleam in his eye. “Ask your tutor. Better yet-ask your mom to let you into the treasury and see for yourself.”
“The shoes are there?” Az asked, flabbergasted. “We have them?”
“What’s left of them, anyway. They’re pretty much a wreck, and the magic’s gone out of them. But they’re silver, all right.”
“Then why do people say they’re ruby?” Az asked, a little miffed at the dishonesty.
Ambrose quirked an eyebrow at her. “Figure it out yourself, Az. This is politics. Where did the Gale land?”
“On top of the Witch?”
He shook his head. “No. Good try, though. That’s political hyperbole-saying that the Gale’s house squashed the Witch when she landed is just a poetic way of saying that the House of Gale conquered her and freed the people from her evil reign. Geographically, Azkadee-where did she land?”
“In the Eastern Guild,” Az answered automatically. “Oh! You mean, they just said they were ruby so they wouldn’t have to say ‘silver’?”
“Bingo, Beautiful,” Ambrose said approvingly. “That’s politics. It was such a minor, unimportant detail-I mean, come on. The color of her shoes? Who cares, right?”
“So,” Az said carefully, “They changed one little thing to make the Eastern Guild happy, and they made it part of the story-the hype… the hype-bubbly…?”
“Hyperbole,” Ambrose corrected, nodding approval. “Go on.”
“The political hyperbole just meant that people liked the first Gale, and were happy that she had defeated the Witch? And then it just became a story, and the Guild could tell the story without saying bad words?”
“Exactly,” Ambrose said. “You’re going to be great at this diplomatic stuff, Az; you got it first try.”
“How come Tutor didn’t tell me any of that stuff?” she asked. She couldn’t help but feel that this was information far more valuable and certainly more interesting than the magical properties of various elements found in the Guild’s territory.
“Probably because your tutor is a droning windbag,” Ambrose said cheerfully, and grinned. The extremely mutual, usually cordial dislike between the young technologist and the old academic was a well-known standing joke around the castle. “And you can tell him I said so.” Stooping down a bit, he kissed her forehead, a good-luck gesture that had been ancient before the first Gale had arrived. “Knock ‘em dead, Az. You’re going to do fine.”
“Aren’t you coming?” she asked, the butterflies making an abrupt return.
“Not yet. I’ll be in later,” he said. “This part is for the high advisors and the family,” he explained, almost breezily enough.
Az frowned. “But you’re-”
“Nope,” he cut her off. “I’m neither, not really. Now, go on. I’ll be there for the important part later, all right?”
“All right,” she said slowly.
“That’s my brave girl,” he said approvingly, nodded to the herald who was waiting to announce her, and was gone.
Azkadellia had not learned until years later-until the Witch had learned it, in fact-that Ambrose had been deliberately excluded in order to allow him to gather intelligence-a phrase that sounded rather prettier than ‘spying.’ And that it had worked admirably.
“You can’t be serious, Az,” Glitch persisted. “Putting yourself in danger, traipsing all over creation, just to hold my hand? That’s ridiculous.”
“First of all, I’m not in much more danger than you are. My face isn’t that widely recognizable, and it’ll be less so with a small glamour,” Azkadellia countered. “Between that and an alias, I’ll be fine.” Her ‘so there’ was unvoiced; that didn’t stop Glitch from hearing it, and he conceded the point with a minute twitch of an eyebrow.
The Queen made a noise that would probably have become an objection if either of the arguers had let her get that far. Neither of them so much as glanced her way.
“Even assuming that you could keep the glamour up twenty-four/seven,” Glitch said, “and assuming that nobody recognizes me and puts two and two together, and assuming that I don’t forget the alias at some inconvenient time-and we all know the old saw about what happens when we assume, right?-even assuming all of that, I’ll be living rough. You’ve never done that, Az. You’ve never slept under a tree, gone hungry for two days, or sat out in the rain because it was the only bath you’d get that week, and I can’t imagine that you really want to start now.”
Ahamo tried to interject. He didn’t get even as far as had his wife.
“No. I don’t. And we don’t need to,” Az said. If Glitch was going to start lobbing her softball objections, she didn’t see any reason not to bat then straight out of the park. “You’re not a hunted fugitive anymore, you know. We’ll take money enough to rent lodgings anywhere we care to overnight, and we’ll carry a pocketful of square meal tablets, just like everyone else in the country.”
“You’re forgetting the three day rule,” Glitch told her. “I have to live by that.”
“Three day rule? What’s that?” DG asked. Loudly enough to drown out whatever retort had leapt to her sister’s lips.
Glitch tore his gaze away from Azkadellia’s; he sounded tired as he answered. “Headcases. We’re criminals, DG, remember? No one likes it if we stay anywhere for too long. First day you can usually beg something to eat and maybe sleep in someone’s barn. Second day they might look the other way if you steal something from a trash heap and camp out in the village commons. Third day, if you’re not on the road by noon you can just about count on a good kicking to speed you on your way. You never know when one of us might remember how to do whatever it was we did to warrant the zipper in the first place, right?”
DG swallowed hard, sorry she’d asked. She snuck a glance at Cain, eyes full of questions-was that really how it worked?
Cain’s eyes gave her all the answer she needed, even before his almost-imperceptible nod.
“So what?” Azkadellia said, after a short pause. “The point is traveling, isn’t it? Not sightseeing, and certainly not settling down. Truth be told, three days to rest and restock here and there is probably more than we’d need. The faster we move, the sooner we get there.”
“All right, then,” Glitch conceded, his dark eyes intent. It wasn’t quite the king- me look, but it was close; chess, not checkers. The endgame had begun. “Leaving practicalities out of it, the real question is why you’d want to shepherd me across the country when you can’t even stand to be in the same room with me.”
Az took a sharp breath; for the first time since they’d begun this dance, she missed a step. “That… that’s not true,” she said unevenly.
“Of course it is,” Glitch continued, ruthless. “You avoid me. Avert your eyes. This is by far the longest conversation we’ve had in months, and it’s the only one you’ve ever initiated.” He paused, shrugged. “I understand, of course; how not? You walk around with a hundred pounds of guilt and fear on your shoulders as it is; seeing me only adds another straw to the camel’s load. Too much to bear sometimes, I’m sure. And no real reason why you should want to.”
“You’re merciless,” Az almost whispered.
“I always was,” he agreed.
“Glitch, maybe this isn’t-” DG started, and trailed off as Glitch held up a commanding hand for silence. His eyes never left Azkadellia’s.
“And so,” he said. “Here we are. For the sake of my own self-preservation I have to go. For the sake of yours you should be glad to see the back of me. Why would you want to risk a trek to nowhere with the one who hurts you the most just by existing? Why, Az?”
“Because I’m not whole, either.” For the second time that day, the words exploded out of Azkadellia’s mouth before her brain had registered their existence. And for the second time that day, she didn’t realize that they were true until she heard them aloud.