“I can’t find Eugenie,” Persun yelled at him.
“His Excellency’s woman? Isn’t she in Commons? Didn’t she go in with Asmir?”
“She didn’t, Sebastian. She changed her mind.”
“Ask Linea, over there. She took care of Eugenie.”
Persun chased the indicated woman and asked. Linea didn’t know. She hadn’t seen Eugenie since early this morning. She thought Eugenie must be in her own house, or perhaps in the garden.
Persun ran back up the trail to the estancia, to Eugenie’s house, cursing under his breath. She wasn’t there. Soft pink curtains blew in the spring wind. The house smelled of flowers Persun Pollut had never seen. The woman wasn’t there. He went out into the grass garden and searched for her, down this path and that, the mild spring airs moving above him and around him, the perfumes of the fragrant grasses like a drug in his nostrils.
He called, “Eugenie?” It did not seem a dignified thing to do, to walk about the gardens calling her by her first name, but he knew no other name to call her. It was what everyone called her. “Eugenie!”
From the village the trucks rose with a roar of engines. He went there once more, plodding. A few remaining people. A few remaining pigs, chickens, a lonely cow lowing at the sky. The sun, down in the west, burning its hot eye into his own
“Are they coming back?” he asked. “The trucks?”
“You don’t think we planned to stay here with everyone gone, did you?” an old woman snapped at him. “What happened? No one seems to know, except that the Hippae are coming to slaughter us all in our beds.”
Persun didn’t answer. He was already on his way back to the house to try one last time, He went through the big house, room by room. She wasn’t there. To her own house again. She wasn’t there.
He did not think to go to the chapel. Why would he? The people of Commons had scant use for chapels. Some of them claimed religions, but they were not of edificial kinds.
He went out to the car, offered the old woman a seat in it, loaded her crate of chickens aboard, and took off once more, flying low as he cross-hatched the grass gardens, looking for Eugenie. Once at commons, he searched for her again, thinking perhaps she had been in one of the trucks.
Darkness came. “I have to go back,” he cried to Sebastian, who had just returned from a final trip. “She has to be still out there.”
“I’ll go with you,” the other said. “I’ve got everyone unloaded. They’re all getting settled down in winter quarters.” “Have you heard any news of His Excellency?” Sebastian shook his head. “No one’s had time to ask. How was he hurt?”
“His legs were trampled. And he was struck on the head. He was breathing well, but he didn’t move his legs at all. I think he may be paralyzed.”
“They can fix that kind of injury.”
“Some kinds they can fix.” They lofted the car once more and headed it away from Commons toward Opal Hill. They had not gone far before they saw the fire, wings and curtains of fire, sweeping across the grasses and towering above the estancia.
“Ah, well then,” murmured Persun. “So I was not a hysteric after all. Father said I might be.”
“Are you glad of that?” Sebastian asked curiously, turning the car in a long curve so that he could look down on the blaze. “Or would you rather have been called a hysteric and Opal Hill still be whole? I saw the panels you carved in the lady’s study. They were the best things I have seen in a long time. No, the best I have ever seen.”
“I still have my hands,” Persun said, looking at them, turning them over, thinking what might have happened to them if he hadn’t been skittish as any old woman. “I can carve more.” If Marjorie was safe, he could carve more. If they were for her.
“I thought the gardens were supposed to stop the fires.”
“They do. Unless the fires are set and dragged through the gardens and carried into the buildings. As these were, Sebastian. As these were.” He peered down at the ruin, biting back an exclamation. “Look! Sebastian. Look at the trail!”