While the other girl had looked nothing like her, and was met with a ferocious roar by the soldiers under her command, Loren stomached the trifling insult of her doppleganger's poor likeness with a groan, pretended to sink into a sullen, melancholic funk the better to keep her mouth shut and her opinions to herself, and minutes after hunkering into the cabin grudgingly allotted by the queen,
hurtled herself onto the bed with a flumping crash, loosed a frustrated shriek for the benefit of her door guards, and slipped into Berangere's room.
Not that she used the door.
While there was only one door, locked from the outside, and Berangere's door was right beside hers, so that they were lodged inches away from each other as promised by the saccharinely hypocritical king, it was locked and guarded by the corridor guards. No, Loren slipped in Berangere's room by an act of will, having drummed up a real tantrum along with the one she staged, so that she rolled on the bed, sparking not only with hot anger but eldritch fumes streaming from her fingertips,
which tapped together, venting a darkly bright portal, cleaving a neat, silent rift through the hardwood wall, through which Berangere gaped back only for a moment, then scooted over on her bed, which Loren immediately dimpled with an angry plunk and thrash of the sheets.
"I'm sorry, Bear."
"What for?" hissed Berangere. "You didn't do anything."
"I know I didn't," sobbed Loren. "I should have done something."
"What could you have done?"
"You forget, Bear. I saved us from Havala. My powers are growing."
"Yes." Berangere crossed her arms to clasp her shivering shoulders. "I can see that. It isn't exactly safe, is it, if there's an oven and a cinder world in there."
"Why would I take us back to Havala?"
"How could you be sure?"
"I just came here, didn't I?"
"That was only a few feet."
"I brought us all the way to the others, Bear."
"I'm not a bear, Loren." Seeming to squeeze herself as her shiver ramped to a frustrated shake, and her hair came undone and frowzy, she touched the bridge of her nose and closed her eyes. Loren had never noticed before, but her best friend had never spared her the condescension with which she treated the world. Bear had only hid her scorn skin deep, and it had always been just a blink away. "So you can take us back to Earth? anytime?"
Loren couldn't help cringing inside, as Berangere's question had left her no wiggle room. "I don't know, Bear. Maybe."
"So, maybe you could take us back to Earth. Or maybe we would burn in the ashes of Havala. Or maybe just smolder in your personal, magical cookie oven. One in three aren't very good odds."
"One in four, Bear. I just came here. And then there's the park. Remember my dreams in the Mansion? I think I used to go there."
"You probably did, Loren. And I might trust that dream fox with my rescue, but not my wide-awake friend who has only used her gift to make spite cookies, or a panicked, lucky rip from a runaway train on one burning world to a speeding steampunk car on another."
"You know what I think, Bear?" Loren's eyes slashed toward Bear in foxlike anger. "You don't want to go."
Berangere looked away, and perhaps to cover up this flinch, seized a pillow to crunch down on her lap. "You don't mean that, Loren."
"You used to dream too, Bear. Dreams for our future. But since the Mansion, we've done nothing but running, so that even when we fight back, we're running wherever you lead us. When did you stop fighting for our future, Bear?"
"You don't mean that, Loren." They were the same words, but hollow. "You're my best friend." As Berangere looked down at the crunched pillow, she flumped it back in shape with the ball of her hand. "You've thought this out, haven't you?"
"Is this as good as it gets for us, Bear?" If the words hurt to say, and her maddening accusations wrecked her whole world, it was such a soothing relief to let it out, like peeling away a scab.
"If you really care for me Loren, don't say another word."
"I don't care for anything else, Bear." As Loren clutched the sheets, her apprehension of grief welled up in her throat, and her hands shifted into nailed paws, tearing the linen. "Not even myself. If I cared for myself, I would deny these fears, which loom too large to leave room for myself."
"Stop talking like this! I'm not going anywhere, and neither are you." But Bear did not look so certain, her strong fingers still contorted around the pillow, and her face twisted into apparent agony, as if Loren's simple words and simpler feelings had inflicted physical pain. She muttered hotly, "so long as you don't bunny hop into your pocket oven." Grabbing Loren by the shoulders, Berangere shook her once, and stared imploringly into her eyes. "Do you hear me, Loren? Don't go. And if you do fall into the fire, take me with you."
Loren's hackles rose, and as this feral shiver rippled up her spine, her hair grew, her nose lengthened, and her paws flattened, until she dropped to all fours on the bed then scampered around the room, yipping and yelping. How could she feel sad and happy all at once? Like the mournful, joyous hymns that wafted from Draden churches.
"Loren, stop! Stop it! What if they hear? Control yourself."
This is myself. Loren scurried around once more for good measure, leaped onto the bed, and ripped the pillow from Bear's tight grip with such force that the case tore, spilling soft, sweet-smelling dust. As the powder exploded, they sneezed and sneezed, until Bear crushed her watering eyes to the magnificent velvet comforter, and Loren rolled around and around in the folds, burying her snout in the plush fabric, both wiping their sneezes, tears, and hisses of laughter away.
Fox-Loren shuddered in the blanketed mattress, closed her eyes, and saw Girl-Loren sitting, cross-legged and still as a statue, as if her eyelids were a curtain drawn between the fox and the girl. As she looked on her human self with amazement, the girl's eyes flickered open on the bed, flounced next to Berangere. Was it that easy? Had she grasped the secret of remaining Loren? Need she no longer fear the fox? While she disliked being a fox, she knew, deep down, that it was unhealthy to fear her true self. If there was more to her personhood than this selfish fox nature, and she was happiest living as this full, human person, she must not let the girl Loren be only a skin-deep thing, a thing of surfaces, only for show. To live, yhe girl must know her fox heart, even if it was all for Berangere. The feelings overwhelmed her like intense hunger, so that she fell face first into Bear, her head finding the nook of Bear's shoulder, and her arms clasping her best friend so savagely that her own chest tightened. "Thank you, Bear," she whispered.
"You don't need to thank me, Loren. We're best friends, and that will never change."
"Then why am I so lonely, Bear?" she wailed softly.
"Maybe you want more than I give." While Bear's voice was no longer hollow, Loren could not bear the lightness of it.
"You have everything, Bear." Loren hadn't realized the depth of her resentment until the words passed her lips. "Your parents are a king and a queen, and mine is a monster."
"Loren--you're not jealous?"
"Of course I am."
"Your parents couldn't disappoint me as much as mine have. At least yours didn't dress up her lies in furs and jewels. If your mother is a monster, my parents are more greedy and power-hungry than the evilest dragons. Not only did they disappoint me, but they don't deserve their wonderful people."
"I love Ephremia too, Bear!"
"I know! Look at Kiera! She's awesome! She can do anything, and thinks nothing of it."
"But she can't do everything, Bear. And she brought us here. "
"The King and Queen made her do it. Loyalty is powerful, Loren. Once you have someone's commitment, you can con them into anything. Don't blame Kiera. If she's doing as she thinks best, it's only her thinking that's to blame. You can't say that about everybody, but we definitely can for Kiera, who is brave and kind."
"She was torn, Bear. I saw it in her face when they dismissed her after dinner."
"You saw that too? I wonder, Loren." Berangere stood up and paced the small bedroom. "When we first came to Alsantia, Kiera was the first friendly face I met. While a talking cat was instrumental in my rescue, I wouldn't call his smug face friendly. It was Kiera who was not only friendly, but pleased to see me. She already knew me, you know."
"How could she already know you? I'm your oldest friend, and I don't remember her at all."
"She was five when I was born. That's too young to be anything on Earth, but not in Ephremia,
where Kiera was the novice warrior appointed to me on my anointing day--a rite to purify infant royalty in their gods' eyes--and destined to be my shadowguard." A weary frown settled on Bear's face.
"Had the Zalgyne not crashed, our homecoming might have been completely different; with their crown heir restored, my parents might have not come to Teriana's defense, and we might be in the tallest tower's princess suite, with our own minstrels and servants, like a Disney movie."
"If they hadn't thought you were in Teriana, our friends would be dead."
"You can't know that." Berangere sighed and closed her eyes. "Just as we can't know that my parents don't have good things in store for us."
"Good things?" As Loren's eyes widened, what she had come to think of as her innate shapelessness accommodated this impulse, and her stare broadened to an absurd degree.
"Loren, your eyes are huge." Bear's eyes crossed trying to take in her expanding eyes. "You're losing your grip on your shape."
"I'm trying to take it all in!"
"Take what in?'
"Your changes! I'm not the only one who's changing." As Loren huffed, an uncomfortable twist coiled in her stomach, for she had never liked raising her voice to Bear. "What do you mean good things?" Now that she believed herself an amorphous monster, Berangere seemed fragile in comparison, and this only heightened her dread that her anger would not only have a destructive impact on their friendship, but a devastating effect on her friend. Even as she prepared to hiss a sarcastic retort, instead she drew her feet up on the bed and under her chin, and wrapped her arms around her knees. By a great effort, she bottled the hiss and allowed only a hollow monotone to escape. "You mean sending our friends to the battlefield?"
"To be fair, they also sent Conrad."
This sardonic rebuttal only amplified the shaking tenor of Loren's anger. "While I don't mind making fun of Conrad, we've known him as long as we've known each other, and he is our friend."
"You're too forgiving, Loren. And you're a fool if you think he likes you at all."
"His feelings are beside the point, Bear! That's what you learn when there's a monster inside, and everyone around you is watching, waiting for it to break out. If I didn't decide to be a friend to those I liked, I wouldn't have any friends."
"I pity him too, Loren, but he's not our friend. He'd never do anything to help either of us."
"Yes he would, Bear. And putting Conrad aside, what of Chiyo, Aito, Lucien, Isola, Akachi, or Adzia?"
"I don't know Isola...but she seems to have put herself in the thick of our troubles for no good reason."
"She doesn't have troubles of her own? Suvani killed half of her family!" Loren's hiss had now heightened to a shriek, leading to a thump on the door.
"Your highness?"
"Sorry," Bear roared back. "Bad dream." Keep quiet, she mouthed silently. Her cheeks had pinked, and her brow was pinched, as her face had wrinkled into a frustrated anger to match Loren's.
"You'd like that! All this time, and you haven't asked, not once, how I'm feeling." As Loren seethed, the shadow seemed to clump to her, gathering a roughly fox-like dark cloud.
"I've been keeping it together for both of us!" Berangere hissed back, her hot outrage pushing back against the shadow-fox forming before her, a frightfulness apparition coming to the surface of her friend which Berangere faced down bravely by planting her fists on the bed, and leaning toward Loren angrily, despite that Loren's swollen shadow-jowls could now swallow Bear head-first up to her waist. "For all of us, for that matter! As for not asking, you never asked what my parents said! Would it surprise you to hear they didn't approve of you, Loren? I fought long and hard for you to have this room! In fact, they didn't approve of any of you! They read me this awful letter from Vemulus, who offered them the Northern Pass and re-opened trade with Teriana and Daiko, not to mention complete forgiveness for Ephremia's participation in the war, in exchange for our friends. As my mother was this close to persuading my father to do it, they might have turned them over if not for me!"
"Vemulus asked for me?" Loren was startled for a moment. "How does he know who I am?"
"You weren't named." Bear's scowl hardened, then softened, as if warring with her own feelings. "He knows only those who assaulted him, and kidnapped him from Ghulmarque. There's no reason you couldn't disappear from this war."
Loren felt herself shrink, both her shadow-shell, and the furious darkness within. As diplomatically as possible, Bear had just said Loren wasn't that important. "Is that how you feel? Do you want me to go, Bear?"
"Right now, yes!"
As Loren diminished, Berangere's lividness lessened, until she loosed a cool sigh. "But five minutes from now, and forever? Of course not, Loren. Who but my best friend could make me so mad!" Drawing an imaginary line down the bed, Berangere flopped down on her half, and rolled away from Loren. "Stick to your side! Five minutes." After another moment, she grumbled, "maybe ten."
"What if we fall asleep? It's better if I go back to my room, Bear."
"Do as you like." Bear flounced a fist into her pillow.
Loren waved her hand without thinking, and the shadow-rift yawned instantaneously, as if Loren erased that part of reality between their rooms. She trembled, thinking of the possibilities.
What if someone had been listening at the door? Was that spy erased from existence? As she strode back in her room, she controlled her breath, and brought both her temper and temperature back to cooler regions. It wouldn't work, she told herself, having only ever created portals in nonliving surfaces, or from thin air.
When Loren flung herself backward on her bed, her imprint made kind of a snow angel in the white fabric of the frilly comforter.
Berangere was not the same. Not to her, not anymore. As her nose wrinkled and her hand fell on her brow, the tears she wanted to suppress watered her cheeks anyway, leaving, she was sure, the pink, splotchy flowers crying splattered on her pale complexion. Not that she couldn't change her skin now. She could be even paler, until as wan and blonde as Isola or Michel, or as dark as Akachi. As she would no doubt get the details wrong, and set her friends laughing or running in horror from her experiments with pigment, she had better stay pink and splotchy. Even if she didn't stay here.
It would be better to be gone than be looked at the way Bear looked at Loren now. She had never looked that furious with her before!
As she sniffled silently into the rumpled comforter, Loren began to breathe easier, so free and easy that the grief crouching on her chest vanished, as if an invisible goblin had been feeding on her self-pity, and when she visualized this ridiculous monster, she snorted in laughter. While it wasn't that funny, this rip-snort felt so good that she kept sawing out snorts of laughter until they became snores,
and she didn't know when she fell asleep.
She was slipping into the undertow of a violet light, like the playground lamps in Draden.
While she had only walked the park the night she fled The Mansion of the Shining Prince, she knew its grounds well, having often padded the cool grass in her dream body. Or had she been dreaming? That part was never clear. Bear had once suggested Loren not only traveled there in her dreams, but walked there on real fox feet, a suggestion that now seemed more certain, her true form revealed by her evil mother, the fox Vieno.
When these lights colored the rusty skeleton of a gigantic swingset, she realized it wasn't just that the lights reminded her of Draden, but that she now stood there, not clothed in her sleeping gown,
but cloaked in warm shadow. When her hand was clasped and pulled cruelly into the violet illumination, she pulled back, but seemed to have no strength against the inexorable power of this firm grip. Doubling up her other hand into a fist, then a nailed paw, her shadowy punch raked the tall visitor,
whose emerald cape shimmered, fell to the grass, then dissolved where it lay.
While it changed moment to moment, there was no doubt it was the monster, an amorphous wreckage of shapes flowing from monster to monster. On looking into her eyes, the chimerical thing chuckled, sneered, then swelled up and up, and having doubled its size, bent its vestments at the waist and smiled a soul-curdling smile. Vieno. Before she could think, her claws tore through her mother's scornful smile, but it was too late, she felt the disintegration wrought by Vieno's deriding mirth. Eat the dove. Dead doesn't mind. As the shadow-thing circled the swingset in a diminishing spiral, ending as a pitiful spurt of dust, she saw her own familiar shadows, which of late had become so demanding, adding and subtracting from her self, her soul, as they willed.
In the shadow, a white flow stirred, which she exhaled in one clean breath. She swayed, feeling like she lost the most important and essential part of her very being. When she looked down to steady herself, she saw pooled in her hand the broken white bird she and her mother had torn to pieces, and while its beak, eyes, talons, and wings were immaculate, its breast was a stripped skeleton, revealing words fused and joined like bones: soul, myself, innocence, and death.
She looked left and right. No one would witness her devour the life she had disgorged, this innocent, speaking soul. She could redo her despicable act, and this time, take satisfaction in it. So what if she became like Vieno? As girls become mothers, and motherhood is unending creative consumption, an outwelling of deep self, was it any wonder if she became the vile fox? Loren salivated. As the hunger leaped inside her, she struggled to tamp it down, until the hunger threatened to vomit forth violence, and pounce on this reappearing innocence. She could not stop herself; her mind stood on sharp diagonals, shouting in italics to the base of her being. She must descend into the bones until the words fragmented, until her innocence flowered into evil--a perfectly natural awakening, given her mother's cruel and clever fox promises, and the invisible evil she concealed in a girl that had never truly existed.
The tap was slow, scornfully slow, a forefinger so harsh, callused, and grimy that she felt its coarse, slimy trace on her cheek after it lifted, the prolonged moment when she struggled to awake,
feeling herself so paralyzed that her sheets and comforter seemed to clasp her to the bed, until her interior shriek upwelled so shockingly loud that it spilled into thrashing limbs and a hot, hyperventilating breath, rolling up on all fours to kick out in the direction of the ignominious tap. As the hand grasped her calf and flipped her on her back, she kicked again, sending the scowling soldier stumbling to the door, where he crashed into the post. Loren was surprised by her own strength, but felt a righteousness in the animal power massing in her shadows.
He was not the only one. As her bleary vision shivered to a finer focus, she counted one, two, three surly heads.
"This door wasn't here." One traced his hand along the dark rift Loren had slashed in the wall. Where his fingers ran, sparks shot out, and as he cradled his hand to his chest like a broken wing, Loren was reminded of the dove. As her gorge rose, she mastered it by telling herself her bedroom invader was not so innocent as the dead dove.
"Yes it was." Bear's achy, weary grumble trickled through the rift.
Loren pushed herself up on her elbows. Bear sat at the foot of her bed, rubbing red eyes.
"I could swear..." started the soldier.
"I'm sure you could," snapped Berangere. "You can curse all you want, but not on my time. What are you doing?"
"Your highness." The soldier seemed not only unwilling to speak, but afraid to answer.
"Let me clarify: what are you doing here, which is to say there, in my best friend's bedroom."
"We thought not to wake you."
"That's obvious," snorted Berangere. "I no longer care to know why you're here. Clear off."
"Forgive me, your highness." He bowed. "One day I will be proud to follow and fulfill your orders. Until that day, I do as my King and Queen bid."
"My mother and father ordered this?"
The guard's discomfort increased, as if Bear had held up a giant microscope to magnify the dim bedroom light into a probing, bug-burning laser. "It was your mother, the Queen."
"I know who my mother is." Bear stood, crossed to Loren's side of the bed, and sat there, grasping Loren's hand, though it was still caught mid-dream: part fox, part shadow, and only the trace of the girl Loren fought to retain and restore. "Why does she want Loren."
"Forgive me, your highness. Not only do I not know the Queen's purposes, but at my rank, I ought not to know."
"Fine. Take us."
"Forgive me, your highness..."
"I've already forgiven you. In fact, have my blanket forgiveness, won't you? Consider yourself forgiven from here and now until the end of my reign, should we be so lucky to live in those days, just so I never have to hear you say 'forgive me' again." To see Berangere so lividly angry at someone else on her behalf made Loren incredibly happy. When Bear sneered, Loren winced inside, for Berangere was not scornful by nature, and the sneer was so weak and poorly acted that Loren feared her friend, in acting the part of a spoiled princess, might lose whatever hold she had on these soldiers. "Did the Queen forbid me from accompanying you?"
"Not as such, your highness. But she did expressly forbid us from awaking you."
"Well, you've completely screwed that part up. Your only hope is that I say I couldn't sleep. I was at my desk, leafing through my books."
"Please, your highness, you needn't lie on our behalf."
"Lie? As Queen of Ephremia, I'll be incapable of lying, since anything I say will be law. I only ask you to extend the courtesy of believing in your future monarch now."
"In truth..." He flashed an ingratiating smile. "...it was so dark in here, and we were so surprised to find your rooms joined, that I couldn't say how you were occupied on our arrival. I am sure the Queen will be pleased to see her highness. Also, as it is your only chance to get some fresh air, I am sure I would have soon doubled back to fetch your highness."
"What do you mean?"
"Within the hour, we will land. We don't spend much time on land, but must do so periodically to rotate staff and load provisions for the royal feasts."
When Berangere's eyes flashed to her, Loren realized what the Queen had intended. As her daughter slept, she had thought to eject Loren from the air galley, then return to the skies, perhaps fleeing all the way back to Ephremia, given that the soldiers continued to fall back before The Stranger and the Alsantians.
"Come, your highness. Your grace." His smile was cold but kind. He had no doubt smiled the same smile a thousand times before.
As Berangere rose to her feet, she kept her hold on Loren's hand, dragging her from the bed, and as they followed the soldiers' crisp march down the galley hall, their fingers nestled tighter. Her friend's grasp was so tight it was almost cruel, but when Loren tugged, to extricate her hand, Bear hissed, "don't, Loren. We must show my mother we're united."
"You're hurting me, Bear! When did your hands become so strong?"
When Bear's grasp relented, Loren let her fingers hang there as feeling worked through the numbness, and wondered if Bear's heart grasped her so tightly, for while Bear was often so calm and composed as to seem cold, of late her heart seemed locked tight on the spark they once shared, and when Loren strove to warm her own light, she was numbed by this blurring cold instead. Where heart once ruled, will now governed.
"I'm not losing you, Loren," Bear murmured.
"As if I would let your mother keep us apart."
Having been led past the staterooms and up the steps, they were then briskly marched across the feast hall. The wooden planks were hot and bright; hot from the enchanted heaters humming to either side, and bright from the pendant globe chandeliers shining on the floor.
To calm her pounding heart, set throbbing by two anxieties, her precarious situation on the galley and not knowing what her best friend thought of her, Loren focused on the strangely crisp slice of her gown as it rubbed between her short, half-running legs. The snap of the gown joined the squeak of her sandals on the swabbed deck, harsh, rude noises that reminded her how tenuous the connection was between friends. Until now, she would say they were joined by a bond stronger than blood, but now she feared that was a delusion wrought by affection, as their lingering feelings shrank to a numb afterimage, having so contracted in Berangere to align with her steel will.
What would happen when the war was over?
When Bear wanted something else? Someone else?
Bear might think she still needed Loren, but what she really wanted now, under her parents' domineering rule, was a show of strength. Loren was no longer the prize, but the battleground.
"Bear, it isn't worth it," she whispered.
As the soldiers dropped to one knee, Berangere scowled at Loren. "If I don't fear queens and kings, don't think I fear a girl who's forgotten who she is and who her friends are." Pushing through the kneeling soldiers, Bear walked to the throne. She did not bow, but only inclined her head, then lifted it to regard her parents with a cold stare.
Extending a hand heavy with bracelets and studded with rings set with turquoise and emerald, the queen beckoned to Berangere. "What an unintended surprise. You may approach the throne."
"To kiss your hand?" Bear wrinkled her nose. "I'm not in a kissing mood."
"Your majesty." The king lifted his eyes to the ceiling and crossed his hands on his lap.
"Forgive the rude girl, dear." The queen tittered. "Though we gave her the best teachers, that barbaric, unmannered world rubbed off on our daughter."
"At least I still speak my mind." Berangere's voice rose to a hot, harsh pitch as she turned her face sharply toward her father. "Better an unmannered truth than an unmanned king."
A shocked hush filled the long hall. "A thousand years ago, you would have been slain on the spot for such impertinence, my daughter. While we are no longer those savages, my father would have exiled me for saying such things."
"Then exile me!" Berangere shouted. "Send me where you were going to send Loren." While to Loren's eyes, the king and queen did not seem guilty, and, in fact, the queen's cheeks dimpled in a satisfied smile, neither denied it in the growing silence, in which scuffling guard boots and spear butts squeaked shrilly in the long, airy hall. "We're a set you see, so ship us off together. Your majesties."
"Nonsense," said the queen. "You must both do your duty. Yours is to serve your people, and hers is to serve your best interests." For the first time, her eyes flashed to Loren, her nose wrinkled, as if it was repugnant for the royal eyes and nose to fall so low, and her mouth pursed as she spoke. "You do care for my daughter, don't you?"
"Don't answer her!" As Berangere glared at her mother, she seethed. "And don't talk to her! She's not your daughter."
"So long as she is in our realm, she is our subject." The king's smug but disinterested tones said that he was, at best, on the fringe of their heated dsicussion.
"This isn't Ephremia!"
"Don't be so naive," sneered the queen. "Even if this wasn't a wartime flagship, those aboard a diplomatic vessel stand on Ephremian soil."
"Soil?" Having blurted it out before she could stop herself, Loren felt her cheeks color, no doubt the apple pink that splashed across her cheeks not only in awkward social situations, but when she caught herself wishing in a mirror to be taller, prettier, or smarter, with better wishes.
The queen's dark look raked Loren with such acid, shriveling disdain that Loren shrank back against Berangere.
When the floor shuddered, and Loren snatched Berangere's hand, her friend held fast and glowered darkly at her parents. Had Bear not felt the tremors? Were they only the palpitations of Loren's anxious heart? As the planks shivered so fiercely that it tingled in Loren's feet, Bear's eyes darted around the room.
On the verge another catty remark, the queen's hands trembled on the arms of her locust throne, and she pulled them back to her chest.
As if unswayed by the quivering room, the king turned this perfect aplomb on the guard flanking his throne. "See what that is, and be quick about it."
The guard bowed. "Would it not be more prudent to depart now, your majesty?"
When the king nodded, and raised his hand as if to issue an order, the queen shook her head. "Why rush? We leave in five minutes anyway, and our staff need every one of those minutes."
"Nonetheless..." The king's tones were crisp, nearly brittle. "...I'll trust your judgment, Alturio."
"Fine." The queen sighed. "But only after he's had a look."
"Your majesties." Alturio dipped hastily into a deep bow, cleared the hall in a half-run, and barged through the double doors at such a clip that he was gone before they closed.
Just when the doors nestled in the jam, the ship was set atremble by another roaring shudder, and they bounced back with a clatter before another guard leaped to close them with a click. When the doors were yanked back, he stumbled, yelped, and splayed forward on all fours, as Alturio charged back in, Kiera and Jezera hot on his heels.
They were armed for bear. In armor even more resplendent, fashioned from gleaming steel plates, Kiera gripped spear and shield, while Jezera bunched up a karik-saddle in one fist for a kind of buckler-shield, and had the other gauntleted in a stoved-in Ephremian helmet, making her entire arm a most deadly mace, with which she swung wildly in her forward advance.
"Captain Kiera!" the King bellowed as he heaved his bulk from the wooden ram. "What do you mean by this?"
"For you, I mean nothing, just as I mean nothing to you, and you mean nothing to me." Kiera's hot cheeks hot were fanned even redder by the ogress's hooting and thumping applause of her mace-hand with the saddled-hand. "Not any more."
"This is treason!"
Kiera shouted, "having made my entire purpose in life to serve the Princess, you dismissed me from that lifelong office! After I had waited years for my fulfillment, you promoted me from that mission! Which did you think to raise me above--loyalty, or my life's meaning?"
"Stop them!" shouted the Queen.
"You're all going to die," Jezera snorted with a scornful sneer, "so do as you will."
"Look again." If Alturio's courage was renewed by the guards falling in from the walls into a phalanx at his back, this strident bravery did not steady his knees, or his hands, trying to keep a spear level over the shivering floor. "We outnumber you."
"Oh, it's not me that's going to do the killing, though you definitely will be doing the dying." The rest of Jezera's jocular roar was drowned out as an onslaught of chaotic noise descended on the air galley. Through the walls Loren heard karik hooves, the shouts of fighting, the screams of the dying, and the shriek of steel crossing steel.
"Captain Alturio, raise the galley," bade the Queen.
"No one's going anywhere," said Jezera.
"Do you think to stop me?" Alturio took a step back from the looming ogress, but raised his spear.
Jezera's giant fist seemed to lash across the hall, so lengthy was her reach. Loren flinched and gasped, but Bear gripped her shuddering hand harder. As Loren numbly played the moment over in her mind, she realized the ogress had flexed dozens of muscles in that one swing, having stepped forward in a lunge to bring her outflung fist, cruelly jacketed in the battered helm, whistling into Alturio's own helm with a screech of buckling metal that merged both crumpled surfaces, so that he dangled from her fist until the pinched metal squeaked, released its catch on Jezera's hand, and dropped him to the floor with a hollow clang, streaming blood, and his eyes quivering until they came to rest, forever, on the queen.
"Jezera, no!" shouted Kiera.
"I know what you said."
"You promised!"
"If I seemed to nod and grunt, perhaps I was only belching? This is easier." When Jezera rose back onto her heels and glowered at the soldiers, they milled uncertainly behind their sprawled leader,
having only a weaponless king and queen at their backs.
"Kill them!"
"Perhaps I wasn't clear," said Jezera. "It's not us that mean you any harm, your majesties, but the Alsantians coming to lay siege to your airship. While your soldiers do themselves credit, killing more than their weight in Alsantians, your enemies have really committed to this, with thousands ready to take the place of their dead comrades."
"We're here for Princess Berengere." Unable to look on the master and mistress she was renouncing, Kiera's eyes sought out Loren. "Your grace. Help us now as you did in Havala."
As all eyes went to Loren, she felt her cheeks pinking again. "That was in the heat of the moment, Kiera."
"A thousand Alsantians will make for a very hot moment, your grace. It's not the end of a world, but it'll be the end of us, if you don't act now."
"Stop it!" shouted Berangere. She clasped Loren's hand fiercely. "It's not a hat trick! It's not as if she's practiced escaping certain death!"
Now the steel striking steel rang above, on the upper deck of the airship.
The king leveled an accusatory stare at the queen. "Had we ascended when I ordered..."
As the queen drew herself to her feet, Loren noticed a shocking detail--how had she not noticed before? When Berangere gasped, she realized she wasn't the only one slow to see this crucial particular: the queen's profile sloped steeply, protruding so far that she had to support herself with one hand on her back and the other on the arm of her throne.
Bear's mother was pregnant! Her baby bump had been concealed by her copious black gown, and from not having raised from her throne in their presence.
"Is that..." Berengere's wide eyes and baffled chin brought a hot tear to Loren's eyes. "Are you..."
"Your grace." Loren looked around the room. It took a moment before she realized that the Queen spoke to her, that Bear's mother had addressed the lowly fox-girl who she had clearly, openly, and candidly resented, for no good reason. As the queen's subjects included humans, dwarves, and a multitude of talking animals, it seemed unlikely that a long-standing prejudice could explain this disdain, and she had not known Loren long enough to have formed a rational judgment of her daughter's best friend. Discarded with little sense and enormous whimsy, Loren began to feel like she was thought of as a clashing scarf, as if she was only a poor fashion accessory for Berangere.
"Are you talking to me?"
"Yes, your grace." The Queen hissed between her teeth, but Loren saw this hiss was not one of loathing, but from a wave of wracking pain that had beset the extremely pregnant monarch. "If you have the means to escape, take me with you."
"Now hold on a moment," roared Jezera. "While we sympathize...."
"Oh, you do?" The queen's disdainful smile slashed through the pain wracking and convulsing the bent shudder keeping her slanted, one hand on her back and the other on the arm of her throne. "You think so?" She gritted her teeth.
"Not that I'm a mother," said Jezera smoothly, "but I have one."
The queen rolled her eyes.
"How can we take you with us? You're needed here...and we don't even know the where, or more importantly, the how of our escape."
"You don't think I know about my daughter's pet?" Bear's mother panted with violence now, so violently, in fact, that Loren realized she was not only pregnant, but in labor, and even though the masterful queen so mastered her sneer for the benefit of the concerned onlookers--not only her king, soldiers and staff, but the rebellious children, traitors, and monsters who dared her outrage--the hour was not far off--a realization that snaked in Loren's spine with a fanged chill that bit so deep, her hand, clutching Berangere's, clawed harder, making her best friend yelp.
"We have to take her, Bear." The certainty was so awful it numbed Loren's ears and lips, so that the battle sounds, and their echoes in the feast hall, seemed worlds away, and she didn't hear her own faint mutter so much as taste the bitter realization that this hateful woman must be spared, for the sake of the unborn child. When resentment and envy overshadowed Bear's bitter acceptance of what she must do, she realized that whether the baby was Bear's sister or brother, it was more family than Loren would ever have, or given her own vile mother, ever wish for.
"She's faking it," said Berangere. At an incredulous glare from the King, and a snicker from Jezera, who flexed her armor-shelled hands with a metallic crackle that jangled like breaking piano strings, Bear's hand flew to her eyes. For all of her willingness to shield Loren body, soul, and deeper still, her heart, from the innumerable horrors of Earth, Alsantia, and Havala, shields will crack under the right blow, or at the wrong time; for all of her wide reading, deep thinking, and leadership, and for all that she let Loren play the child, she was just as in need of mothering, and the invisible armor she had fused from love, will, and pride cracked with an awful sob: "she's not my mother, Loren!"
As Loren cupped her friend to her, and pressed her head to her shoulder, Bear stiffened, then slacked into tearful weeping. Had she held this back since Earth? Since childhood, when Bear was the one to steal back blocks and board books from Conrad? Was it her unborn brother, or her unlived childhood that grieved Bear now?
"For shame, Berangere!" The king's face so riveted to Bear's that he ignored the bared blades, his battered, unconscious captain, and the malevolent ogress grin that stood between them, and as he strode towards her, they all stood aside, even Jezera, though she sidestepped with sarcastic slowness and a sneering tip of her head. "Think before you renounce your inheritance! I care little whether you despise me, for that is a family tradition. I loathed my father, and he the king before him, into perpetuity. But your mother and our people stand in need, and it is in your power to protect."
"Don't talk to her!" The shout shot so fast and loud from Loren's numb lips that it seemed some other girl had yelled it, and Loren staggered more under that realization than under Bear, who had slacked even more, until the tall girl was nearly draped over her, wetting Loren's back with tears. "I'm the one with the power!"
As the ring of guards slowly reshaped, encircling not only the ogress, but Loren, it dawned on her that their bared blades were not only for Jezera, but the other monster in the circle, the shapeshifting foxshadow that only dressed as a girl, and that knowledge weakened her only for a moment, before rushing in to give her strength. "That's right!" she shouted louder, "for once, I'm the one with the power!"
"Read the room, girl," This cautious note hissed through Jezera's yellow teeth, still set in the mocking smile Jezera sneered to spite the arrogant king and cow his soldiers. "Don't help me!"
"If either monster makes a move, kill them!" shouted the queen, who had shuffled a step from her throne, both hands on her belly. As she moved toward the guards, Kiera, who had found herself outside the circle, moved to intercept, but the Queen turned a disdainful look upon her and waddled to the other side of the formation.
The king, also caught in the widening circle of soldiers, looked askance toward his wife, a nervous laugh escaping his lips. As he backpedaled to the armored line, he warily eyed Jezera, who favored him with a malicious leer that mimed slavering hunger a little too well. "We're only talking, my dear." When he struggled to squeeze through his soldiers' locked shoulders and shields, the ogress's long arm, threading through stabbing spear shafts frighteningly quick, batted him back to her with her helmeted hand. While she handled him with some care, he was nearly impaled when a guard, having waited with baited breath for the ogress to turn the feast hall into a butcher's shop, could no longer hold himself back, and lunged for Jezera's chest.
When the king, in that moment, dodged as spryly as a dancer much younger and less dignified than his exalted rank, the spear's wavy blade flickered through his skirting robes to lodge an inch deep in Jezera's ribs.
Jezera hissed, snarled, and flung her clutched helmet with such force that it mashed through the soldier's shoulder blades with a gory pop and a red splash, replacing his startled head with the wrecked, gouged steel of the helmet. In her pain, she hulked large, and the spear point was squeezed so tightly between her ribs by her flexing muscles that its blade snapped, and the spear clattered to the floor.
With a shout, the ring of soldiers tightened so quickly and surely around Jezera that they scarcely noticed their princess clinging to Loren, who molted between flesh, fur, and shadow with a shocking mutability that might have startled and frightened them had their bloodlust not been whetted by the death of their comrade, and the sight of their king swung high over their heads, clutched by the back of his robes. As he dangled, the cords of his hood dug into his neck, pinking, then reddening his squealing face. "Please! Stop! Stop!"
"Kill her now!" As the queen tottered toward Loren, and pointed her finger with murderous intent, Berangere screeched, turned her head, and sidled in their embrace onto Loren's other side.
Then the walls buckled and burst, stoved in under the horns and hooves of a half-dozen karik knights, led by an enormous iron chariot drawn by four kariks, whose driver was a young colossus himself, at least two heads taller than any man in the room, if not the ogress, but gripping a spear so massive that it would surely trouble Jezera more than her prick from the broken spear on the floor. As the walls erupted into slats and splinters, nails flew, and one grazed Loren's temple, drawing a fine, bloody line that quickened her breath and heartbeat.
As the queen screeched and raised her hands in a piteous attempt to shield herself from the two-ton karik bearing down on her, Loren's hand flew up as well, hastened by an instinct she did not understand, and drew a red line under the Queen, which wrenched into a shadowy gulf, plucking Berangere's mother from this world to somewhere else, somewhere Loren could not say where, only that it was outside of reason and knowledge, in the chaos of the unknown. As the queen hurtled by, Kiera's hand lashed onto the Queen's, and, being the miniature soldier she was, was dragged in as well.
The dead soldier was sucked in after them, then two of the living, who clutched at their comrades as the unzipped real world struggled to fill this gash, which wasn't satisfied with dead and living bodies, but picked up the wooden thrones, which, hollowed of their monarchs, proved light weights to pitch into the upwelling, shadowy abyss.
As the dark chasm swallowed queen, corpse, comrade, and the ancient artifacts of their people, the Ephremians seized their king's arms to pull him away from the shadowy maelstrom converging on the rupture in reality.
"Loren!" Bear shouted in her ear. "What did you do?"
"I saved her," she stammered.
"Bring her back!" Bear wailed. "I didn't want...this!" Berangere shoved herself free from Loren's embrace.
"Bear! It's not my fault!"
"How interesting," snickered the tall charioteer, as he hefted his spear high and surveyed the room. "While I know your friends, and feel that I know you by reputation, it's good to finally meet you, shape shifter. Or should I call you a world shaper, instead, given your handiwork."
"By my friends, who do you mean?"
"All you Earthers," yawned the massive boy. A silver ring, devoid of ornament, rested on his brow, and a golden crown, much too small to ever rest on his head, dangled from a chain around his neck. "Don't expect me to know them all by name. But I remember the Architect's boy Lucien, and the Marchioness, of course."
"Who are you?"
The boy snorted. "You don't know your king?'
"There is only one king in Ephremia." As the wind shrieking towards Loren's portal had quieted to a whisper, the king's tenor rang crisp and clear in the feast hall. He had torn free from the soldiers holding him, and his face was etched so proudly that it did not tremble, but stayed in this graven expression even after the shudder of the huge spear slamming into him, piercing flesh, bone, soul, and ship's hull.
The boy's hand remained outstretched as a sneer rippled on his face. "And his name is Vemulus."
Berangere moaned, staggered backwards, and clutched Loren's hand.
For an awful moment, Loren's hand flicked toward Vemulus. The problem of the door-listener came back to her; if she didn't know whether an eavesdropper at a door she tore into with her portal would still exist, why not test the idea on this murderous boy? Then she flinched, and drew back her hand. Whatever it did to Vemulus, it might tear a hole through herself, making her a villain that deserved to be in this hell-world.
"That's very diplomatic of you," Jezera said, her eyebrow arching as she looked on Vemulus.
"Be grateful. I intended that spear for you." When Vemulus looked on Jezera without fear, Loren thought the ogress might prove unequal to this boy usurper, so long as he kept to the high ground aboard the a karik chariot. But she wasn't sticking around to see the results.
As the karik knights clip-clopped around the long hall, circling to flank Berangere, Loren, Jezera, and the remaining Ephremians, Loren's long, shuddering growl echoed in the hall. The Ephremians shivered as they fell back to back with the ogress they fought minutes ago, and some spared a flinching eye for Loren as they awaited the final, awful Alsantian attack.
Loren's shudder so wracked her that it fragmented her every thought. Was she really going to risk a leap in another portal? In her uncertainty, her hands shifted from flesh to fur to shadow, until she no longer knew whose hands she stared at, until she no longer knew whose eyes followed her rapid changes. When Bear's hand writhed in hers like a scuttling insect, Loren's eyes flicked to her friend's face, now wrinkled in revulsion, a look of horror that sundered Loren from the memory of her past self at last.
She was never a girl. She knew that now.
And now she saw through the lie of the fox as well.
The other thing, the thing that wouldn't come into focus, the shadow that oozed through and around both fur and flesh, as if the girl and the fox were only masks that she, that it, peered through--that was the truth, and Loren was the lie. Even when Vieno took pity on her on the northern shores of Alsantia, and whispered unpleasant truths of her fox nature, those whispers were only more lies burying her true nature. When she believed herself a girl, and thought herself good, her darkness was only playing.
Loren scowled so heavily that she felt it like a great weight, like a graven war mask she glared through, like the head of a lion she roared through. "Who do you trust, Bear? Her?" She pointed a contemptuous finger at Jezera.
"Hey! With your protector gone, I'm all you've got," growled Jezera.
"Him?" Her hand swung toward Vemulus.
"Meaningless," chuckled Vemulus. "Your every choice leads to death. Unless I find myself in a forgiving mood." The self-proclaimed Alsantian king drew another spear from the chariot's iron quiver.
"Or me?"
"It's always us, Loren," Berangere said, but not without the trace of a shiver, and a subtle swallow of some indigestible lump mashing revulsion with fear. "What are you waiting for?"
A reason to live. The voice whispered in the dark interiors of Loren's new shadow-self. She realized she no longer recognized her own mental voice. That which had been Loren was now alien, like the soiled rags that remained of her vestments. Even her name felt like something other than who she was. "Say my name, Bear."
"What..."
"Just do it, Bear."
"Whatever's hurting you, Loren, I'm here for you."
"Thank you." It was just barely enough. The shadow gusted down to some dark cave in her soul she would no longer be able to ignore, while the fox slunk to the shadowed corner of her waking mind,
tapping its tail as if only abiding this recreation of Loren for the time being.
Loren raised her hand and drew another red line, this time a deeper and wider slash in reality, a wound that gaped to a cooler world.
Ever a barger and crasher, Jezera bounded through first, cackling in glee as she made a very rude gesture at Vemulus. When Berangere stood wooden at the edge of the world-gate, Loren clutched her friend's hand with all her feeble girl's strength and darted through.
The first time she had passed through one of her portals, it was so bewildering that she remembered it only as a fracture in her experience, for one moment they were on Havala, with flames converging on and crumpling the train, and the next they tumbled through the blackening shards of an enchanted mirror, which then melted, bubbled, splintered, and splashed back through the entryway it had made, leaving them startled and surprised in the Architect's colossal strider.
This time, Loren was prepared. As they flickered through the gate, only her consciousness seemed to flutter through, a consciousness cleaned of girl, fox, or shadow, but joined to Berangere. While there were no fingers or feelings in this space between worlds, they clung even tighter, as if their souls had mingled.
Her aching hands were cracked, reddened, and covered with dust, and her knees ached as if she had fallen asleep there on all fours. As Loren stretched to take the measure of her pains, the fox stirred in the back of her mind, and she felt, for the first time, reassurance that the fox was still there. Something tickled her lurking, half-asleep fox mind--some familiar scent of soup, potatoes, and granola. Then this weird, nostalgic aroma was clawed to shreds by the scent of Bear.
Berangere sprawled unconscious in a rubble of shattered stone, splintered slat, and sharp-sheared, rusted struts. Laying her palm to Bear's neck, Loren felt her pulse hammering. Either they had been there only a few moments, or Bear's fears had continued to race in her unconsciousness.
Creaking steps, fresh crumbling, and new shattering suggested the ogress was also nearby, but Loren's sense of direction, spatial sense, and, in fact, most of her senses, even common sense, had been so blasted by their portal journey that she couldn't hazard a guess as to Jezera's location. Moreover, Loren couldn't even place what world she was on. Not for sure. Only her sense of smell was telling her the unvarnished truth, and if it told her this was Earth, she was unwilling to believe the rest of its wild claim as to where they had arrived.
"Ogre?" Receiving no reply other than the echo in the wreckage, and new dust streaming from the caved-in roof, Loren turned to Berangere. "Bear?" Seeing her friend so weak and helpless brought Loren home to the girl she had been, not only needy of her friend's approval, but her smarts. For Berangere wasn't just booksmart--although she had oodles and oodles of that--but had a good head on her shoulders for the real world. In fact, Loren was so accustomed to trusting Bear's level head that she often felt she had misplaced her own. Once happy to snicker at the dumb things coming out of her own mouth, there was no now time for foolishness, not when madness had become the rule of the day. As Loren felt herself shrink, her skulking shadow went elsewhere, and as it evacuated the dark center of her being, she felt its contemptuous snicker, scorning her for pretending to idiocy and weakness to feel more certain of Bear's capability and strength, as she had become habituated to doing since childhood. If she was weak, Bear could be strong--and she did so love it when Bear was strong. Believing in Berangere had enabled Loren to smile in The Mansion of the Shining Prince, to hope in Alsantia, and to keep going during Havala's doom--even though she wasn't so naive as to be unaware Berangere wasn't smiling in The Mansion, acted without hope in Alsantia, and was just as crushed by despair when the inferno consumed Havala.
But now, when Loren had to be strong, her strength faded, and she felt herself to be only herself, and it was no victory, but a draining loss of all the shadow's dark power.
"Bear! Wake up!" When she grasped Bear's vestments in her fists, her fingers curled and snubbed into paws, and her nails snagged the soiled, ragged fabric, tearing a long strip that unraveled Berangere slowly into the rubble, as if Bear was unwound gently from Loren to the floor.
As her tail thrashed and her whiskers itched, a sudden jostling deeper in the ruin rose Loren's hackles, until she jumped nervously from scrap to boulder to doorframe, where she peered both ways down the hall, then scurried back to Berangere, where the tight, knotty fox melted back to a frightened girl, sloppy with sniffles, wet eyes, and cheeks, dripping all over Bear. She cried so much her hair pasted to Bear's forehead, chin, and shoulders.
Bear wouldn't wake up. No matter how loud she pleaded or how frantically clutched Bear, her friend was just not there, and if not for the rush of breath raising her chest and trembling in her nostrils, the hot flicker of her eyelids, and cheeks ruddier than they ever were on Earth, Loren might have taken her friend for dead. For a moment, Loren was reminded of the ugly iron bed they shared in the mansion. Nine times out of ten, Loren drifted off first, but every now and then, Bear would nod off over a book, and that look of peace was what she saw now.
Perhaps it was her relentless thoughts of the Mansion. Perhaps it was the persistent kitchen aromas, pressing through the fresher, ranker stench of the rubble, mingling dust, scorched timber, mud, and the rain that poured through the cracked roof. In any event, this is when a thought seized Loren,
an idea so dogged that it took her by the scruff and shook her, head to tail. No sooner had she thought of a figurative tail than one shuddered between her hind legs. Her changes now happened faster than she could account for, so that she no doubt passed through transitional phases without being aware of that fact. What did she look like now? What would Bear see? Would Bear ever look at her again? As this thought filled her with despair and dread, and she bent over Bear, the floor creaked, a shadow fell over them, and the back of Loren's vestments were pinched tight as she was picked off Bear as easily as a flea.
"You're in for a surprise."
When Jezera smiled as if she knew the punchline to a private joke, Loren did her best to affect a nonchalance she did not feel. While indignant at being dangled over the wreckage, she raged with an angry grief that her best friend, possessed of an intelligence that animated her with spirited life, now lay as broken as the debris, and the jagged fangs of Jezera's sarcastic smile spiked Loren with a roiling excess of shapeshifting energy and storming strength she didn't know she had, fusing her surface and deep tensions until they demanded dynamic expression.
So she punched the ogress.
It was a gigantic fist, humongous as a small storm cloud, conjured from the dark, shapeshifting matter that had possessed Loren, and it struck Jezera with the full force of a food truck, pitching her topsy-turvy into a double somersault until she flattened against the far wall, which, being already half-rubble splotched with scorch marks, teetered and collapsed under her monstrous weight, spewing a cloud of detritus and dust.
As the debris spattered back, Loren hacked and coughed, and Bear's arms flew to her face to block the drizzling dust.
"Lor--koffkoffka--ahhhhh-" As Bear drew in air clogged with glinting dust, Loren knelt at her side, lifted her shoulders onto her lap, and clapped her on the back--which only made Bear draw in a deeper breath by reflex, and wheeze some more. "Loren!"
"Bear! We have to run!"
"Where are we?" Bear's head twitched as she tried to focus on Loren, and failed, her bleary eyes not connecting with anything in the blasted room.
As Jezera rolled over and lurched to her feet, Loren gripped Bear's hand, squeezed, and pulled her towards the shattered remnants of the central stairwell. "It should be over here."
"Over where? What?" Bear gasped, hacked, and wheezed as she trailed behind Loren. "Where are we?"
"We're home, Bear." As Loren's despair echoed, it re-infected her with sorrow, multiplying like some mournful swarm breeding sadness too enormous to bury, even if she wanted to spare Bear from what she felt. And, she realized, she no longer did. Suppressing her feelings only deprived her friend, and most importantly, herself, from knowing the real Loren.
"Home?" Bear rasped. "Where's my mother?" As she wailed, a shudder ravaged her so fiercely that it shook Loren's hand. "My father, Loren!"
Although the ogress still lumbered behind them, Loren drew to a halt, and squeezed Bear's hand in sympathy. "I said home, Bear. Not Ephremia." Then she pulled Berangere into a fiercer trot, just a stomp ahead of Jezera.
"Home?" Berangere muttered.
"Isn't she quicker than this?" sneered Jezera.
"Do you want me to punch you again?" From the deep darkness hiding within, Loren summoned the wind to bellow so loudly that Bear's half-blind eyelids rippled, then squeezed shut.
"You punched the ogress?"
"To be fair, it wasn't her, so much as the rest of it." When the ogress grumbled, her lips bubbling on their mouthful of blood, Loren felt a savage righteousness. She had done that! Then she felt sick to her stomach, and her eyes watered.
"What do you mean by that!" Loren had never seen Berangere so angry. Summoning all the strength in her rangy, wiry form, Bear stopped in the blasted foyer, just before the door where they had struggled to move the box blocking the cat flap--it seemed years ago, though it was not even a month. As Bear drew herself up, she pulled Loren tightly to her side. There was only certainty shaking in that strong mind as it rounded on the ogress. "Say that again, and I'll punch you in the nose!"
"I doubt that," Jezera said lazily, "as you're not a lefty, and I broke your good shoulder."
"Stay back!" Bear shouted, and, amazingly, the ogress stayed--just out of arm's reach.
"Now what?" Jezera yawned. "What dreadful thing do you have in store for me, shadow-weaver? Or will you let your friend lecture me to death?"
"What's a shadow-weaver?"
"You should know. You had classes here, didn't you?"
"Just tell her what a shadow-weaver is!" Berangere's shout shivered the scorched, peeling, sky-blue paint on the walls, revealing the coat of white underneath, and taking Loren, for a fragment of a second, all the way back to the day of her arrival. That's right--the walls had been white once. When they brought her here, the white halls stretched on and on into darkness, a monotonous white that swallowed Loren up. Now--or rather, then, she told herself, knowing the upstairs was likely totally gone, gauging by the holes in the ceiling--only their bedrooms were white, although the paint had taken on a dingy patina. "Stop talking nonsense! We've never been here!"
In the long hush, Bear's eyes raced here and there in the rubble and what still stood of the ruin, before falling on Loren. "We are home, Loren. This is the Mansion of the Shining Prince!"