Eleri was at least in her bed, and not at a desk. Curled into a ball beneath a light sheet, she looked worn and thin, and though none of them had been at their best since the beginning of summer, there were new shadows beneath her eyes that even sleep hadn’t erased.
Biting her lip over the poorly concealed exasperation she’d displayed the past few days, Eluned touched her sister’s shoulder, and murmured: “Breakfast’s nearly ready,” waiting only until she was sure Eleri had woken properly before slipping out.
Griff, after failing to find any hidden bedrooms, had settled on the opposite side of the great hall, in a room with an entire wall of drawers and cupboards. It was meant to be a linen press, and there was barely enough space for him to fit a narrow bed and still open the doors, but Aunt Arianne had shrugged and let him have it. They did, as she said, have other places to put the sheets.
Since Griff was not inclined to be tidy, a tiny room full of shelves still required wading through all his latest projects to get to the bed. Eluned picked up his newest passion—drawing the routes of the train lines over the maps he’d coaxed out of Aunt Arianne—and put them out of the way, then tackled the task of getting him up. He was sleeping in his usual manner, sprawled almost on the floor, and required far more than a touch to shift, but Eluned’s spirits were rising, and so she kept at him until he stirred, and then let herself enjoy a fine breakfast, and greeted Melly and Nabah’s arrival with an unalloyed cheer that only increased when a long-bodied tiger purred softly up to the curb behind them.
“All ready to go then?” asked a bright-eyed girl underneath a very proper chauffer’s hat. It took Eluned a moment to recognise the dragonfly girl, Sun Li Sen, who’d fetched them an umbrella.
“Mama Lu has a small transport empire,” Aunt Arianne said, in response to Eluned’s unspoken question. “And yes, all ready. Might Griff ride up front? It may help his travel sickness.”
“’Course,” said Li Sen, and opened the front passenger door, adding to Griff: “Let me know if you want me to pull up.”
Eluned settled onto the right of the back seat, with Aunt Arianne between her and Eleri, and Melly and Nabah opposite, both formally thanking Aunt Arianne for the invitation. Melly had pulled her hair into two short, fat braids, the ends threaded with silver and puffed out into little balls, and Eluned admired the way they bobbed whenever she excitedly turned her head.
True to Aunt Arianne’s assessment, there was no shadow on the tall girl’s face, only pleasure at a rare treat.
“Which do you like more?” Griff asked their driver, bouncing on the front seat. “The tiger or the dragonfly?”
“Dragonfly’s a fun challenge. The tiger goes fast.” Li Sen swung them sedately around a corner, heading west past the Great Barrows. “But it’s a new thing coming out of Nathaner’s that I like best—a courser—basically two wheels in a line with an engine between them. It’s got the tiger’s speed, and going around corners—!” She sighed happily.
“Driven something not released yet?” Eleri asked, proving that she was, after all, listening.
“Grandama has a controlling interest in Nathaner’s,” Li Sen said. “I get to do test-driving sometimes.”
“Do you worry about having your fulgite stolen?” Griff asked.
“It’s a risk,” Li Sen said, and fished a pistol out of a pocket in the driver’s door. “Getting enough to keep the business going’s as much a problem as stopping it from being taken. Nathaner’s is looking at motopetrol engines. Smelly and noisy, but a nice surge of speed.”
At this point conversation died away as they joined a larger road heading west out of the city, and Li Sen demonstrated that tigers could indeed go fast. Not enough to outrun the morning windstorm, but it was a fortunately weak one, buffeting but never threatening the tiger’s swift racing.
For a time they simply gaped out the windows, but they had a nearly two hour journey ahead of them, so Nabah was soon asking Aunt Arianne about the places she’d travelled. This was a formidable list: Aunt Arianne didn’t seem to have stayed more than a year in any one place.
“Did allegiance not concern you?” Nabah asked intently. “If you had died in these lands, you could have been trapped in an unlife, or a punishment Otherworld.”
“That’s why so many travellers attempt a bond of allegiance with Epona, whose Otherworld can be reached almost anywhere—though given that in Epona’s Otherworld you get to be a horse, you do need to genuinely like the things to want that future. Some do as I did and thoroughly research a new country’s laws, then obey them strictly. So long as the land has a strong territorial allegiance, most gods will accept a traveller who has respected their edicts even if they were not born there—they want observant souls in their Otherworlds, after all. There are places I would never visit, but most because of how I stood under secular laws, not the requirements of the Answered.”
“But even then, if your soul didn’t go to Annwn you would have no chance to meet…”
Melly, turning to peer at a roofless house, elbowed Nabah in the ribs. This brought a moment’s annoyance, then Eluned could practically see the forthright Nabah remember why the Tennings were with Aunt Arianne in the first place.
“Wasn’t it dangerous, though?” Nabah asked instead. “Being a Prytennian woman travelling alone?”
Melly and Eluned exchanged helpless winces, for that was a question even Eleri would think twice about asking when you considered some of the stories about other lands and their ideas about Prytennian women. Aunt Arianne was wearing only a light veil today, but being able to make out her features didn’t help with guessing her feelings.
Sounding as unconcerned as ever, she said: “I usually travelled in the company of friends or relatives, which does make matters easier, wherever and whoever you are. There were occasions where the stories told about Prytennians drew some uncomfortable attention, but nothing more. Still, don’t think of Prytennia as some blessed haven of safety in an unjust world—the nearest I’ve ever come to being attacked was in my parents’ own house.”
“What happened?” Eluned asked, startled into the kind of prying she’d usually back away from.
“One of your grandmother’s students, very drunk, decided I liked him far more than my own opinion on the topic.” Aunt Arianne shrugged. “I kicked him somewhere memorable and spent the night in my treehouse.”
“What did Grandama Seaforth do to him?”
“I never told her. The next day he behaved as if he couldn’t remember the night before, and I couldn’t decide whether he was lying. But that was around the time your grandmother’s illness started to really impact her, and soon she had no energy for students.”
In the silence that followed this, Griff, from the front seat, said: “Can we have a treehouse?”
This was such an entirely self-centred thing to say even for Griff that Eluned drew breath to snap at him, but Aunt Arianne simply said: “I gather it’s not me, but Cernunnos that you’d need to ask that.” And then she laughed, a spontaneous sound lifting above her usual calm. “Oh, though I would enjoy the reaction of the next deputation of the Wise. Don’t tempt me. Plus we must remember that the trees are full of folies, and they don’t seem to love company.”
They all speculated on whether the folies really could be cats wearing bushes as a disguise, and then Melly began to ask about France, and whether Aunt Arianne had ever met any of the winged god-touched of the Cour d’Lune. Eluned sat back and listened, and tried to work out how old Aunt Arianne would have been when Grandama Seaforth died.