‘Behave yourself, Squire,’ I advised him. ‘Do your prancing and
cavorting around on your own time. You really don’t want to make
me cross, now do you?’
He seemed to get my point, and after a mile or so of getting used
to each other, we settled into a rolling canter that literally ate up
the miles.
‘This is much better than walking, Aunt Pol,’ Geran said
enthusiastically after a little while. ‘I’ll bet my feet won’t be sore tonight.’
‘No, probably not, but some other part might be.’
Geran and Squire hit it off well almost immediately, and I felt
that to be a good thing. The young prince was carrying a heavy
load of grief, and his friendship with our horse helped to take his
mind off that.
We reached Sulturn in two days, but I bypassed the city and took
a room in a village inn rather than one of the more opulent lodging
houses in Sulturn itself. I felt that it was safer that way.
We continued on toward the northeast for the next several days,,
and I spent a fair amount of that time giving Geran instructions In
the fine art of being unobtrusive. To further that end, I dyed lhis
characteristic sandy-colored hair black. It was just possible that
Ctuchic’s Grolims might know that virtually everybody in the line
of iron-grip and my sister had the same color hair and they’d be
looking for blond little boys. I also concealed the tell-tale lock in my
own hair with some intricate braiding. If some Grolim happened to
be searching for ‘a lady with a white streak in her hair and a
sandy-haired little boy’, he’d look right past us.
As we approached Medalia in central Sendaria, the probing
thought I kept more or less continually sweeping on ahead of us
bore fruit. I caught a flash of that dull black color that identified an
Angarak. It wasn’t the glossy black of a Grolim, but at this particular
time, I didn’t want to encounter any Angarak, be he Murgo, Nadrak,
or Thull.
I nudged Squire into a side road, and Geran and I bypassed
Medalia and continued on toward the northeast along the back
roads, avoiding Ran Horb’s highways entirely.
All in all, it took us about two weeks to reach Lake Erat. I
concealed Geran and Squire in a thicket on the south shore of the lake
along about evening, went off a ways, and donned white feathers.
I wasn’t going to blunder into anything without looking it over very
carefully, and owls have very good eyes in the dark.
The east side of Lake Erat was very sparsely populated in those
days, and I soon located all my neighbors. As it turned out, there
weren’t any foreigners in the area at that time, so I judged that it’d
be safe for us to go through the barrier I’d erected and get inside
the protective walls of my house. I flew directly there and advised
my rose-bushes that I’d returned and that I’d be very happy if they
opened a path for me. Then I went back to fetch my nephew and
his horse.
It was almost midnight when Squire waded across the river just
to the south of my house, and we rode on up to the edge of the
thicket and on along the narrow path the roses had opened for us.
‘It’s a very big house, isn’t it?’ Geran observed a little nervously,
‘but isn’t it awfully dark?’
‘Nobody lives there, Geran,’ I replied.
‘Nobody at all?’
‘ Not a soul.’
‘I’ve never lived in a place where there weren’t any other people
around, Aunt Pol.’
‘We don’t want other people around, Geran. That was the whole
idea.’
‘well -‘ He said it a bit dubiously. ‘The house isn’t haunted. is
it Aunt Pol? I don’t think I’d like to live in a haunted house.’
I didn’t even smile. ‘No, Geran,’ I assured him. ‘The house isn’t
haunted. It’s just empty.’
He sighed. ‘I think I’m going to have to learn how to do Some
things I’m not used to doing,’ he said.
‘Oh? Such as what?’
‘Well, we will need firewood and things like that, won’t we? I’m
not good with tools, Aunt Pol,’ he confessed. ‘There were all kinds
of servants in grandfather’s citadel, so I never really learned how
to use an axe or a shovel or things like that.’
‘Look upon it as a chance to learn, Geran. Let’s put Squire in the
stable, and then we’ll go inside. I’ll fix us some supper and then
we’ll see about some beds.’
‘Anything you say, Aunt Pol.’
We had supper, and then I set up a pair of cots in the kitchen.
We could explore the house and choose more suitable quarters in
the morning.
The house had been untended for quite a long time, so there were
cobwebs in the corners and a thick layer of dust over everything.
That was intolerable, of course. Over the years I’d paid occasional
visits to my former seat of power and I’d customarily tidied up with
a wave of my hand. I decided that this time I’d do it a little
differently. My youthful charge had just emerged from a crushing
tragedy, and I didn’t want him brooding about it. He needed something
to keep his mind ~ and his hands – busy. Cleaning the house from
top to bottom and from one end to the other would probably keep
us both out of mischief for quite some time. It would also avoid
alerting any stray Grolims to our presence. At that particular time
I wasn’t familiar enough with Grolims to know just exactly how
skilled they were in the exercise of their talents, so it was better to
be a little on the safe side.
I arose just before dawn and started preparing breakfast. MY
kitchen had been built to feed quite a number of people, so the
stoves and ovens were very large. It seemed just a little ridiculous
to heat up a stove bigger than a farm wagon just to feed[ two people,
but it was the only stove available, so I laid in the kindling and
piled on firewood that had lain in the wood-box for generations.
Geran had been right about one thing, it appeared.
He was going to be spending a lot of time chopping wood.
Geran woke up when the smell of breakfast began to reach him.
I’ve known a lot of little boys over the years, and that’s one
characteristic they all have in common. As a group, I’ve noticed that they are
always hungry.
‘what are we going to do today, Aunt Pol?’ he asked me after
he’d spooned down his second bowl of porridge.
I ran one finger across the back of an unused chair and held
it out for his inspection. ‘What do you see, Geran?’ I asked
him.
,it looks sort of dusty to me.’
‘Exactly. Maybe we ought to do something about that.’
He looked around the kitchen. ‘It shouldn’t take us too long,’ he
said confidently. ‘What shall we do when we’re finished?’
‘There’s more than one room in the house, Geran,’ I pointed out.
He sighed mournfully. ‘I was sort of afraid you might feel that
way about it, Aunt Pol.’
‘You’re a prince, Geran,’ I reminded him. ‘I wouldn’t want to
offend you by making you live in a dirty house.’
‘It takes a lot to offend me, Aunt Pol.’ He said it hopefully.
‘It just wouldn’t do for us to live in all this filth, Geran. We’ll
have the house all bright and shiny in no time at all.’
‘It’s a very big house, Aunt Pol.’
‘Yes, it is rather, isn’t it? It’ll give you something to do, and you
can’t go outside to play.’
‘Couldn’t we just close off the parts where we won’t be living.?
Then we could clean the three or four rooms we’ll be staying in and
let the rest go.’
‘It wouldn’t be right, Geran. It just wouldn’t do.’
He sighed with a kind of mournful resignation.
And so the Rivan King and I started cleaning house. He wasn’t
happy about it, but he didn’t sulk too much. The one thing I didn’t
tell him had to do with the fact that dust keeps right on settling
and web-spinning spiders are the busiest creatures in the world.
Just because you cleaned a room yesterday is no guarantee that it’s
not going to need cleaning again tomorrow.
We did other things, of course. There was a farm cart in one of
the stables, and I periodically hitched Squire to the cart and went
Out to buy provisions from nearby farms. Geran didn’t go with me
on those occasions. I left him in my library the first time, and when
I returned, I found him sprawled in a chair looking disconsolately
Out the window. ‘I thought you’d be reading,’ I said.
‘I don’t know how to read, Aunt Pol,’ he admitted.