“—after you’ve eaten,” she added, as someone knocked on the door.
I perked up.
Breakfast was good, and even better, it was served to me in bed. So I didn’t have to get dressed before falling onto a tray of buttered toast—cold, because that was how they did things here—the widest bacon I’d ever seen—from super hogs, apparently—fried eggs with nice runny yolks to dip the toast in—what pieces I hadn’t already slathered with butter and jam—a couple of fried mushrooms that were okay, and a gristly piece of black pudding that wasn’t. I pushed it over to the side of my plate, so that it didn’t touch any of the good stuff.
I also drank another gallon or so of hot tea that warmed me all the way to my toes. And then lay back against the pillows, full as a tick and pretty much unable to move. Which may have been the plan, I realized, as Gertie shut the door decisively behind the maid who’d just taken my empty tray away.
And, damn, I was not ready for another lesson right now, I thought. Especially not of the type she seemed to prefer. The first one we’d ever had, she’d tossed me into an arena with the other acolytes and older initiates, and had told them to all attack me at once.
Fun times.
And they hadn’t gotten any better since.
“Look,” I said. “Is there any way we could—” And that was as far as I got. Because she turned from the door and threw something at me, something I instinctively put out a hand to protect myself from and accidentally caught.
And the world fell away.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Damn it! I thought, staring around.
But at least it wasn’t horrible this time. There were no blood-splattered gladiators s
inking to their knees, no terrified mothers running with their babies, no monsters out of an ancient bestiary attacking anybody. No anything.
I appeared to be entirely alone, in some sort of little courtyard.
Damn it, Gertie! I thought again, feeling a surge of genuine anger. She always did this. Her straightforward conversation style was the exact opposite of her training methods, which were oblique as hell and often provided more riddles than answers.
She said it was because a Pythia had to be able to figure things out for herself, and not just wait around for someone to give her a solution to her problems, which I totally agreed with—in theory. But in practice, it was absolutely maddening. Especially when I didn’t even have any clues to use!
And there weren’t any around here.
There was nothing here except for a floor of gray stones of all different shapes and sizes, which had been fitted together with the cheerful disregard of a toddler forcing a solution to a puzzle. And a round circle of the same stacked stone with a little wooden house on top, like a wishing well out of a fairy tale. There were some vines scrawling all over it and up the side of a house made out of—you guessed it—the same gray rocks.
The vines provided some much-needed color, because the sky was gray, too, as was the ocean that I discovered when I rounded the house and found a beach so close that the incoming tide tickled my toes.
There was nobody on the beach, but there was an indentation in the sand that looked like it had been dug out. The tide had filled it in and then retreated, leaving a bunch of tiny silver fish behind, trapped in a miniature sea. I walked over and watched them for a moment, their small bodies darting here and there, their skins flashing silver in the sunlight. The vines weren’t visible from here, so everything was completely gray: the silver fish, the pewter sky, the craggy, whiteish-gray cliffs in the distance, the darker, rolling tide, and the pearly foam on the ashen sand. It was beautiful, in a stark, monochromatic kind of way.
I didn’t get it.
“My grandmother’s home, when I was a girl,” someone said, and I looked behind me to find Gertie standing there. I knew it was her—the voice was the same—but the body definitely wasn’t.
The purplish curls with their gray roots were gone, and in their place were bright red braids that stretched almost to her waist. The more-than-slightly-padded, grandmotherly figure I knew was also missing, replaced by a slender, boyish body in an old-fashioned outfit—but not a girl’s. Gertie had found some knee breeches somewhere, along with a white linen shirt that was far too big for her.
She looked to be about eight, maybe nine, and had a pail full of clams in her hand, which explained the holes dug around the beach. Her feet were bare, her face was freckled, and her shanks were sandy, making her completely unrecognizable as the woman I knew, except for the voice. And the eyes.
They were the same shrewd brown orbs, which looked a little odd in a child’s face, but I didn’t see them for long. She squatted down, the wet sand seeping up through her toes, to dig another hole with a trowel she’d fished out of the pail. I squatted down, too, not knowing what else to do.
“My grandmother took me in,” she told me, as she worked. “After my father died. I had been close to him, you see, and didn’t take his passing well. Hilde was much better behaved. Not that she didn’t grieve, but she kept it to herself for the most part, and put on a brave face for our mother. I was . . . less inclined . . . to do likewise, and eventually mother decided that she needed a respite and sent me here.”
Another clam hit the bucket, and a dog came loping up, with shaggy black fur covered with wet sand. He proceeded to shake it all over us, causing Gertie to yelp and me to end up on my ass, because the sand was slippery. And cold, I thought, feeling it ooze under my nightgown-clad butt.
“A lot of help you are!” Gertie told the dog, who licked her face, unrepentant.
She regarded him sternly. “You aren’t getting around me that way. You want clams for dinner, go help me find some.”
She pointed down the beach, and the dog ran off enthusiastically, although how many clams it was going to find was debatable. Especially since it stopped halfway to chase a wave. Gertie sighed.