The Wrinkled Crown Read online

  But it wasn’t the blandness of these people in gray that troubled her most. It was the way they stood in an anxious, slump-shouldered circle around something, arguing among themselves and coughing and moving angry, nervous hands in the air. Linny crawled up to the back of a conveniently placed bush and listened as hard as she could, but she still couldn’t make out all the details of their speech. They were calling one another fools and idiots and other, even ruder words. Before Linny could figure out what they were saying to each other, one of them had moved off (angrily) to the side, and for the first time she got a clear look at the thing they were gathered so intently around. That thing was poor Elias. One of the gray people must have knocked him down, and he was on his knees, holding himself off the ground with one trembling hand and rubbing his head with the other.

  “Told you there was a madji brat sneaking around,” said one of the gray men, wiping sweat from his forehead. He spat out that word, “madji,” as if it were some vile curse. His voice was hoarse and rough, and in between words he took desperate gasping gulps of air.

  They all looked sick, Linny thought. They looked cranky and wobbly and like people at the end of their ropes. But that didn’t make them less dangerous. Sick animals are worse than well ones—Linny knew that much from the woods.

  “Stupid fool! What have you gotten us into?” hissed another gray man—only actually she was a woman, Linny realized once she began speaking. The woman was mad at the first man, for some reason. “Well, go ahead, bind his hands, now we’re stuck with him.”

  “They take us prisoner when they can,” said the first man sulkily. “He’s got information, right? Probably knows where everything is around here, at least—don’t you, madji boy?”

  Elias mumbled something Linny couldn’t hear, but the man was unhappy with it. He raised his hand over Elias’s head, but the woman yanked the hand away. She must be their boss or something.

  “So tell us, boy. You got any friends out here with you?”

  Elias shook his head.

  “No,” he said. “Just me.” Linny could hear how hard he was trying to hide the shake in his voice. Good lummox! she thought.

  “Stop and think logically for a minute,” said the gray woman to the two gray men. “The hillsickness has gotten to your brains. And you call yourself Surveyors! What do we do with him now, you fools?”

  “Treating him better than they treated ours. What about that officer they took years ago, hunh? Just left her uniform folded neatly under a rock.”

  “You’re not making sense,” said the woman, her voice like ice. “We can’t let him go. Think about that.”

  “He’ll lead us right to that lost village, I bet. He looks like he comes from way up in these logicforsaken hills. We could get a lot of land charted, if we had some help. Hey, boy! Where are you from?”

  But Elias just swayed a little on his knees, and didn’t say anything that Linny could hear.

  “Leave him a moment,” said the woman. “He’s tied up, yes? The rest of you, over here. Now.”

  The gray people shuffled about twenty feet farther away and continued that angry discussion. They clearly didn’t want poor Elias to hear whatever it was they were saying. Elias, meanwhile, was working away at the ropes on his wrists and shaking his head.

  That reminded Linny of one important thing: the knife in her pocket. She sneaked forward to a slightly nearer rock. What should she do? Throwing the knife seemed more likely to damage Elias’s head than to get the knife safely into his hands. All right.

  She would have to sneak across the creek and do this thing herself.

  7

  “THANK YOU, BRAVE LINNET!”

  She moved quickly up through the woods, her heart nervous in her chest, and crossed the creek at the first likely place. Then it was back through the woods on the gray people’s side of the water. She was lucky with the placement of the trees—she could get pretty close to the clearing and still be hiding among the trunks and branches. But the gray people had come to the end of their discussion, apparently, and the gray woman was already walking back to Elias, who was only about twenty feet away, with the other gray people straggling behind her. Linny froze behind her tree.

  “You, boy,” the woman said crisply when she reached him, her voice cold as ice. She gasped for breath like the others, but Linny could tell she was fighting not to let her breathlessness show. That one must be very tough, thought Linny. But the woman was speaking again: “Where are the other madji? We are willing to be lenient if you cooperate.”

  “Don’t know what madji are,” said Elias under his breath. “Let me go, you people. Who are you? What village do you come from? What do you think I’ve done wrong?”

  One of the men snorted.

  “We could just drown him in the creek,” he said, and Linny, who had probably thought about drowning Elias in creeks more than anyone else in the world, felt a deep and acid anger rising up in her. You really should know someone well before you talked about drowning him!

  The woman in gray was frowning.

  “Trouble and more trouble,” she said, choking on her words a little. “Too much delay. Look at us—we’ve got to get out of here. Hillsick, every one of us. We’re on our last legs.”

  “We could take him back with us,” said the man who had wanted to drown poor Elias in the creek. “A wild madji paraded through the Broken City! They might like to see that, down in the Plain.”

  “Yes,” said another man. “Take him with us. Show the fools in Bend we mean business.”

  The Broken City! Linny’s whole mind sharpened itself, like a knife on the edging rod. These nightmarish people came from the Plain? No wonder they were all wheeze and wobble. People from the Plain got sick as anything when they first came up into the hills. Their bodies had to get used to living in wrinkled places. Linny’s own mother had been so sick at first, she had almost died.

  “And then how do we explain where we found him?” said the gray woman. “Well? We’re not even supposed to be out here so far, you know that. Or you would know if you hadn’t left some high percentage of your brains back down in the Plain.”

  She spat to the side in disgust, and then she held on to her stomach for a moment, as if even spitting were almost too much for her.

  “If we could get the wheres of some lost village out of him, it wouldn’t be a complete waste,” said a third man. “Where did you appear from, boy? You must know that.”

  Linny could see Elias shrug. He was being very brave, she had to admit, especially considering he was only Elias.

  “Oh, he’ll talk eventually,” said the let’s-drown-him man. “I’ll bring the map over so we can make proper notes.”

  Elias just stood there, his head hanging, looking stupid, and for once Linny approved. Please, oh please, keep letting them think you’re stupid, she thought in his direction. Stay stupid. But be ready to jump when I figure something out.

  She fingered her whittling knife and studied every tree within reach, looking for a good idea. But she had never had to rescue anyone from a bunch of gray people before, and the trees weren’t full of helpful suggestions.

  That was when she saw that one most awful man walking in the other direction, over to what Linny now saw were a few gray tents pitched on the far side of the clearing. That must be their camp, then—and that seemed like a stroke of good luck. Linny hated to leave Elias with that gray woman, but she couldn’t see anything better to do. So she slipped very carefully away from the edge of the woods and then made as speedy a way through the trees as she could, following that man, all the while, of course, being as extra careful about noises as a person possibly could be. When she neared the tents, she sneaked up very close again to get a good look. There was a small metal stove with a pot on it, bubbling slightly. She had never seen a stove like that. They had set up a lightweight table between their tents, she saw. It held a big piece of paper, attached to a board. If it was meant to be a picture, it was a funny one, that was for sur
e—all squiggles and flowing lines and numbers. What kind of a picture was that?

  But then even as she squinted squinted squinted at it, a bunch of little loose pieces clicked into place in her brain, and she almost crowed aloud in triumph (but remembered in time where she was).

  That line there! That was the creek running down from the hills. That was the very creek she had come sneaking across, just a little while ago. She was absolutely sure of it, even though on the paper it was no more than wavy lines and numbers. She could see how the drawing of the creek bent, and she remembered the real creek bending, just in that way.

  “It’s the map,” she said to herself, remembering how important and mysterious the word had sounded in her mother’s mouth. A map was a picture of a place.

  Meanwhile the awful man had ducked down into one of the tents. He came out a moment later with—was that a pencil? Yes. A pencil and a bunch of metal tools, though not the kind of tools you make lourkas with. Then he came over in Linny’s direction to the table with the map on it, which he stopped to study for a moment, reading the secrets of those squiggles. Linny was so close she could see the veins on the backs of his hands. Way too close, that meant! She had been too eager to see what he was up to.

  Her tree was only about ten feet from him. It wasn’t the very best tree, either, despite the handy leafiness of the branch she was spying through now; she was pretty sure anyone who looked really closely would see her curious eyes burning through those leaves. Gazes leave little marks, like tiny insect bites, on the backs of people’s necks. Sometimes a person will twitch if you stare too hard, or even scratch a gaze mark with an absent-minded hand—and then catch himself scratching, and figure out what’s up, and turn. Linny knew that from experience, and that mere thought was enough to put a nervous little tickle in her throat. She willed herself as still as a tree trunk, she willed the welling-up cough away, she closed her eyes to keep them from biting, and she held her breath, which she knew she could do for longer than most people, though not forever.

  It worked. Footsteps, heading away. He had left, with the map on its board in his hands. He left another roll of paper behind on the table, though. Aha, thought Linny. She was beginning to see the shape of a possible plan.

  She was careful to wait until he rejoined the group on the far side of the clearing, because people’s eyes will travel toward someone walking and might catch an accidental glimpse of someone, even a small-sized, cautious someone, sneaking about in the background. But when the awful man started talking to the group, and all the gray people’s attention clumped around the sheet of paper on the board, Linny made her move.

  Staying very low, she slipped over behind the table, used a quick hand to filch the roll of paper there, and faded immediately behind a tent, where she tore a strip of the paper off, twisted it a few times to made a wick, and then crept over to the stove to light it. All that was easy-peasy, for someone as practiced in wickedness as Linnet. The part she wasn’t sure about was the next bit, because that depended on the material those tents were made of. Most kinds of cloth will burn, but some take longer to get going than others. She took her little flame behind the far tent and went to work on its corner, using one hand to scrabble up some dry grass and a stray twig as backup for her paper.

  Burn, burn, burn, burn! she told the patch of fabric being licked by that tiny little tongue of flame. Burn, oh, please burn!

  It darkened a little.

  The wick was almost out, and the twig she was also holding to it was slow to take, too. And then the twig stopped resisting and let a bead of fire take it, and the tiny dark spot began finally to spread and to smoke, and Linny set up the twig next to another patch of tent and flung herself back into the relative safety of the woods.

  Just at that moment, the voices of those gray people seemed to rise into a louder argument, and in the middle of that tangle of voices, Elias shouted out, sharply and wordlessly, like someone who has just been hurt. The woman said something angry. Others did as well. And Linny felt the icy thrill of horror dance along the bones of her back.

  She had taken too long!

  She was racing back through the woods as she thought this, and she was no longer quite as quiet as she had been earlier. What were they doing to him? Who were these horrible gray people?

  Whoever they were, they were still arguing among themselves, that was for sure, arguing and coughing. Linny kept an ear on those voices as she made her way back through the trees. She was close enough now that she thought she could pick out another sound, too—Elias’s breathing, the way you breathe when you’ve been hit. He’d better not be badly hurt, or her plan—if you could call it a plan at all!—went bust.

  And then the voices changed tone completely, from anger to alarm.

  “Hey! What’s that?”

  “You must have knocked the blasted stove over!”

  “That’s my tent!”

  Linny smiled grimly to herself. They were scattering now, she could hear, back to the camp, at the lurching pace of people whose lungs are misbehaving. She peeked through the leaves—yes, there was Elias, still kneeling on the ground and left behind for the moment. He was dazed, but he had wiggled his feet out of those loops, and now he was struggling with the ropes around his wrists. Good.

  “Hey, pssst, Elias,” said Linny, coming out from behind her tree. “Quick, while they’re busy.”

  The expression on his face—well, Linny just wished she had the talent for making pictures that Sayra had. She would have loved a picture of Elias’s face as she grabbed his arm and dragged him back into the woods, away from the burning tent and the commotion and the noise.

  Thank goodness the gray people hadn’t hurt his legs, whatever they had done. Thank goodness they had been a little careless with their knots. He moved along fast beside her, for once not being bossy or complaining or saying much of anything, just desperate to get away.

  “Across the creek,” said Linny. “Here, quick, before they figure this out.”

  She had to help him with the creek. It’s hard jumping from stone to stone when your arms are still tied behind your back. But Linny steadied him, and they made it without too much loud splashing or inconvenient drowning.

  “Good, good, good,” said Linny, once they were safely back in the woods on the far side of the creek. Then it was really time to get the remaining ropes off him, as hard as it was to stand still, sawing away at ropes, when you knew gray people might be coming after you any minute.

  “Quick, quick, can’t you do that any faster?” said Elias—first full sentence out of his mouth. (Not “Thank you, brave Linnet,” you’ll notice.)

  “Want to do it yourself?” she said, stepping back for a second. “They did a better job with these.”

  Elias made a desperate squawk-like sound, and even Linny wasn’t going to waste more than a second on making Elias pay, not now. The ropes gave way, strand by strand, and soon enough she was pulling them loose and Elias rubbing his wrists and obviously trying not to cry. Under ordinary circumstances, Linny would have felt obliged to make a sarcastic remark or two, but his hands were scarily white and there were angry marks on his wrists where the ropes had been. Not to mention that flushed print of a hand on his cheek.

  “Why’d they do that?” said Linny. “Gray monsters! Why’d they hit you that way?”

  There was no why, though. She had never heard of people like that, who would hurt someone for what as far as she could tell was no reason at all.

  “Linny, we’ve got to go,” he said, and she knew what he meant. They needed to be farther away from people who would do something like this to a person. Plus there was Sayra, back home, fading. They couldn’t let the gray people slow them down this way.

  “Come on, then,” she said. “I’ll hide us up this slope. Can you walk?”

  Elias nodded, and he shook a foot to show Linny his legs were fine.

  “Okay,” said Linny. “Follow me. I’ll get us lost from them.”

  That wa
s another thing about Linny’s talent: she could find places other people would lose themselves looking for. It came in handy, if you were a person whose criminal lourka-making career called for a lot of hiding from other, possibly angry people. She sought out the crinkly places in the woods, and by the time she said, “All right—here!” and dropped to the ground in a hollow just large enough for a couple of kids about their size, Elias was looking as pale as she had probably looked the day before.

  “You all right?” she said. “That was awful.”

  Elias shook his head, not at Linny, but like someone trying to remember how to think.

  “Don’t worry. They won’t find us here, not right away,” she said, more confidently than she really felt. “There’s something wrong with them all. They couldn’t run up this hill if they tried.”

  “C-catching my breath,” he said. “Then we can go.”

  “I’m not going back to Lourka, you know,” said Linny.

  “I know,” said Elias, still breathing hard. “Neither am I. Don’t you see? Those gray people were looking for us—I mean, for Lourka. They kept talking about lost towns and lost villages, and it was the ones tucked up into the hills that they meant. We can’t be accidentally leading them there. I’d better come along with you.”

  She was startled, and then, to her surprise, actually a little tiny bit glad.

  “You mean, you want to come downhill with me? To the Broken City with all the different names?”