Honor-Bound [ Lore of Penrua: Book III ]

8

The air was cold, but Uarria was prickly-hot, wrapped in a heavy cloak and nestled tight against Ealin's body. The woman's arms passed on either side of her, front and back, and closed her in.

Uarria felt crowded, but lonely, and she felt sick, and she wished she were at home. She straightened her spine and looked up into Ealin's face. Seeing once again how changed Ealin was, Uarria was for a moment terribly afraid that Ealin was her mother, that Ealin had somehow become her mother.

Ealin's face was pale, like Mother's, and it was as beautiful a face as it had ever been: a face Uarria knew. But Ealin had always had dark hair and dark eyes, like Ouchie's. In the dark hallways of the palace, she had changed almost into a different person, with her pale hair and her eyes an uncertain color.

Now, Ealin had changed her hair again. It was no longer a long, long, long braid like Mother's braid. It was short and tousled, cropped to her shoulders. There was something different about Ealin's face, too. Whereas before, that face had usually been softened with a smile, it was now blank, a fresh sheet of parchment unmarred by emotion or thought.

She looked nothing like the woman she'd been.

That expressionless face, in which Uarria saw nothing to latch onto, to understand, frightened her far more than the changes in Ealin's appearance.

"I want Mother," Uarria whispered uncertainly.

"Be quiet, sweet," Ealin said. Her gaze darted down to meet Uarria's for a fraction of a second, then broke away.

Uarria looked past Ealin. The two men who were traveling with them were sitting not far away, their faces lit golden in the flickering light from the camp fire. They were trading a skin of ale back and forth between them. Although there were three grown people with her, Uarria was scared, and she felt very far from home. She felt as if her home were impossibly far away, as if it were somehow uncertain. She missed her father and mother more than she ever had in her life. Even when she did not see her parents—when they were in council meetings or, rarely, when they traveled—she had always been surrounded by familiar comforts.

Now, she wondered when the next time might be that she would see her father, her mother, and Ouchie, a man she loved almost as much as her father himself.

"Where are we going?" Uarria asked in a small voice trembling with misery.

"We're going to see my father," Ealin said. "And your uncle. Won't you like that, little one?"

Uarria frowned. Her uncle, Kaori, lived in the palace. "Why have we gone away if we are going to see Uncle? Isn't Uncle at home?"

"A different uncle. He lives very far away, with my father."

This was all too confusing, and there was something about Ealin that Uarria could not understand. She was not like other grown-ups Uarria knew, who talked to her and saw her and understood her. Ealin had always treated the princess kindly, but she wasn't the same as she had been in the palace.

They sat for a while, Uarria giving up her questions. The warmth of the cloak around her and Ealin's embrace lulled her, despite her troubled mind, and, before long, she sank into an uneasy half-sleep, curled against Ealin's chest with her fingers knotted into the woman's skirt.

She woke some time later when Ealin murmured her name. She sat up, wiping her mouth with the back of a sleeve and looking around, bleary-eyed, at their camp. They were on a rutted dirt road that looked nothing like the road out of the Holy City. Uarria had never been outside of Karelin before, but she noticed the difference. This road was simply two dirt channels in the earth, divided by a mound of grass out of which weeds and flowers grew.