“Oh, so you’re stopping here, are you?” said Elphie.
“Yes,” he said, “with you.”
“With the crows, with the monkey, with the bees, with the dog, and with the Witch?” she said. “With me?”
“Where else can I go?” he asked.
“I’m sure I don’t know,” she answered.
“I can take care of the dog,” he said calmly. “I can collect the honey for you.”
“It makes no difference to me,” she said.
“All right,” he said, and so Liir prepared to enter his father’s house.
The Jasper
Gates of
Kiamo Ko
I
Sarima,” said her youngest sister, “wake up. Naptime’s over. We have a houseguest at supper, and I need to know if we have to kill a hen. There are so few left, and what we give the traveler we miss all winter in eggs . . . What do you think?”
The Dowager Princess of the Arjikis groaned. “Details, details,” she said, “can’t I train you to figure out anything for yourself?”
“Very well,” snapped the sister, “I shall decide, and then you can go without your morning egg when we’re one short.”
“Oh Six, don’t mind me,” said Sarima, “it’s just that I’m scarcely awake. Who is it? Some patriarch with bad breath, who plans to bore us with tales of the hunting he did fifty years ago? Why do we allow it?”
“It’s a woman—more or less,” said Six.
“Now that’s uncalled for,” said Sarima, sitting up. “We are none of us the blushing nymphs we once were, Six.” From across the room she saw herself reflected in the wardrobe glass: pale as milk pudding, her still pretty face nestled in the puddles of fat that fell according to the laws of gravity. “Just because you’re the youngest, Six, and can still locate your waist, there’s no need to be unkind.”
Six pouted. “Well, it’s just a woman, then: so chicken or no? Tell me now so Four can hack off its head and get to plucking, or we won’t eat before midnight.”
“We’ll have fruit and cheese and bread and fish. Is there fish in the fishwell, I suppose?” Yes, there was. Six turned to go, but remembered to say, “I brought you a glass of sweet tea, it’s there on your vanity.”
“Bless you. Now tell me, without sarcasm if you please, what’s our guest like, really?”
“Green as sin, thin and crooked, older than any of us. Dressed in black like an old maunt—but not all that old. I’d guess about, oh, thirty, thirty-two? She won’t give her name.”
“Green? How divine,” said Sarima.
“Divine isn’t the word that comes to mind,” said Six.
“You don’t mean green with jealousy—you mean actually green?”
“Maybe it’s from jealousy, I could not say, but she is surely green. Genuine grass green.”
“Oh la. Well, I’ll wear white tonight so as not to clash. Is she alone?”
“She came in with the caravan we saw down in the valley yesterday. She stopped here with a little company of beasts—a wolfdog, a hive of bees, a youth, some crows, and a baby monkey.”
“What’ll she do with all of them in the mountains in winter?”
“Ask her yourself.” Six wrinkled her nose. “She made me shudder.”
