47. Idrilia
IDRILIA
A single observation is not data. It is an anecdote, and anecdotes are most persuasive when they confirm what we already believe.
—From the field notebook of Princess Idrilia
Ihad my feet in a basin that Ursa had loaded with a cloudy green steep of mountain herbs. It smelled foul and stung, but it was a fair price for being able to feel my toes again.
"Hold still," Ursa said, crouching at the basin with my left foot in her lap, working at a blister on the heel with a cloth and no mercy. "If you flinch you'll slop it everywhere and I'll have boiled up these weeds for nothing."
"It hurts."
"You wanted to go up a mountain, and this is the price you have to pay." She turned my foot to the lamplight and clicked her tongue at the state of it, the broken skin and the place where the boot had rubbed me raw across four days of going up and down a mountain. "That and your mother's fury."
I grimaced. "I'll take your stinky and stingy remedy any day over a visit from my mother."
"I bet." She kept rubbing. "It's a shame that it was all for nothing."
"A shame indeed," I agreed.
The expedition had been a failure, but not because of anything I had done, and since we'd all come down the mountain unharmed, it was all good.
I was already planning another one after the Catonian ball.
We hadn't found anything on the first and second day, and by the third the weather had started to worsen, but we'd gone up anyway, until Jeffson decided the wind was changing and we should turn back.
I'd promised my crew that I wouldn't push, and I'd meant it, so I'd given the word and we'd come down empty-handed with the storm on our heels.
No living plant in bloom and no makeshift field laboratory. The site the journals had talked about was somewhere up there, but until the snow thawed, it was unreachable.
I'd brought back only one thing, and I'd spent the whole drive home trying to explain it away.
During the worst of it, when the storm had caught up to us and we were in the whiteout, I'd seen something.
The snow had been coming hard from the side, and Jeffson had us all tied to each other with a rope so no one would get lost, and at some point I'd seen something that made no sense.
Off to the left, where the ground fell away into a couloir, there had been a shimmer, a bending of the light, and in it, or behind it, or through it, the suggestion of shapes, two of them.
They were gone before I could make sense of what I'd been seeing, swallowed by the next gust.
Snow-blindness. That was the answer. That and exhaustion, and three days of cold air that was too thin for my lungs because I was not used to high altitudes.
Denna and Palel had been struggling as well, but Jeffson and the two porters had been fine.
They were used to these mountains and the thin air high on their slopes.
The auroras also played tricks on the mind. A tired eye in a whiteout would invent shapes because that was what humans did. They searched for patterns and saw shapes where there were none. The mind couldn't bear a field of featureless white, so it manufactured a pattern.
It was a tidy, logical explanation, one I could sleep well at night accepting.
It just wouldn't take.
A hallucination born of fatigue drew on what the mind had stored, and mine was full of stories I'd read in Professor Haldren's journals.
That could easily explain what I'd seen because it matched the description I'd read.
The problem was that I had never seen a visual representation of those stories, and I wasn't imaginative enough to create it out of thin air while trudging in snow and trying to get down a mountain during a storm.
It was just one single observation, and it was unconfirmed because no one other than me had seen it. I'd asked Jeffson afterward whether he'd noticed anything strange to the left in the squall, and he'd said no, only snow, and looked at me as though the altitude had gotten me seeing things.
One observation, made under difficult conditions, by someone who wanted very badly for the legends to mean something was not data. It was the textbook example of how a sane mind could talk itself into believing things it shouldn't.
"Your feet are in bad shape," Ursa said.
"I know. I'm giving you an excuse to abuse me. I know you derive sadistic pleasure from tormenting me."
She glared at me. "I do not enjoy tormenting you, Your Highness. You are perfectly capable of doing that to yourself."
Ursa dunked the cloth, wrung it, and was reaching for my other foot when the door opened and the temperature of the room dropped ten degrees as my mother stormed in.
Ursa was on her feet, and before I could blink had somehow blended herself into the wall like a piece of furniture or a fixture. My mother didn't even see her. She had eyes only for me, for the basin, and for my ruined hands.
Her fury was cold.
"You're back," she said in that icy tone that could petrify seasoned warriors.
"I'm back. Just in time as promised."
We were leaving for Catonia tomorrow, and I'd been cutting it short, which I expected my mother to give me an earful about.
"Just barely, and with nothing but blisters to show for your efforts." She came closer. "You gave me your word you wouldn't go before the ball, and then the moment my back was turned, off you went."
"It was an easy expedition. The weather turned and we came back down safely. No one was hurt."
"No one was hurt." My mother reached down and took my hand, turning it over, and held it to the light.
I watched her scan it like a formal accusation manifest. The calluses across the palm from ropes and rocks. The nails broken to the quick. The windburn that had cracked the back of my hand red and raw.
"Look at this." She shook her head. "Look at your hands. The ball is in two weeks, and these are the hands of a woman who digs ditches for a living."
"I can wear gloves." I tried to placate her.
"They are the hands of a field worker," she said, ignoring my suggestion.
"You are a princess of Tarina. You represent our court.
You are going to shame us." She set my hand down, gently, which was somehow worse, and looked at my feet in the basin.
"When you stand in a Catonian ballroom in two weeks, every woman in that room will look at your hands, your sunburnt face, and your feet, and they will not think what a wonderfully dedicated scholar Princess Idrilia is.
They will think that Tarina cannot afford servants and that their princess is put to labor like a pauper.
Do you understand what that costs us? Not you. Us."
I got where she was coming from, and I couldn't hate her for it, because from her perspective, she was right.
My mother had spent her whole life as the keeper of Tarina's face, and to her, a daughter's hands were a page the whole Federation could read, and I had scribbled the wrong text across mine.
"I'm a botanist, Mother. It's a known fact that shouldn't surprise anyone. I climbed a mountain. The hands heal."
"You are a princess first, and a botanist somewhere down the list, far down, after a dozen things you find tedious and do anyway because you were born to them. That is the order of it. You have it backward, you always have, and one day it is going to cost you more than nasty gossip."
To her, being a princess was the foundation everything else was built on.
To me, it was a stone tied to my ankle, a thing I was forever swimming against to get an hour at a bench or a week on a slope.
The same life looked at from opposite ends, and neither of us would ever want to stand where the other did.
"Do you know what I am holding together?
Do you have the faintest idea? And when I hear that my youngest daughter defied me and went up the mountain, I said a prayer to Elurion, hoping she'd at least had the sense to wear gloves and a hat to protect herself from the sun.
But when I find a window to come and see how my daughter is faring, I find her sitting with her feet in a basin of healing herbs, looking like she lost a fight with the mountain, because she could not, for just a few weeks, behave as though her family's name were worth more to her than wild weeds and even wilder tales. "
Somewhere in the back of my mind I wondered how she'd found out about the wild tales surrounding the Silver Princess, but I was too angry to devote any serious thought to it and too busy composing my retort.
"Then don't spend your windows on me," I said. "Spend them on your politicking and your scheming and matchmaking."
I wasn't supposed to let on that I knew about Cardilia's betrothal, and I hoped I hadn't said too much because I was angry and frustrated and had not guarded my tongue.
She threw her hands in the air. "Even my best scheming, as you call it, won't help to find you a suitable match.
You've made yourself impossible to match well.
I won't humiliate myself by trying and hearing refusals.
" She turned for the door. "All you can hope for is the second or third son of a duke glad of the connection and not too particular, and you'll take him, and we'll all pretend it's a wonderful pairing.
I'm done courting better on your behalf.
I wash my hands of it. You've worn me out. "
She reached the door.
I wasn't wounded, not the way she'd meant me to be. In fact, I wasn't wounded at all. I was relieved.
"Good," I called after her.
She stopped.
"I mean it, Mother. Stop looking. It's the kindest thing you could do for me. I'll be grateful."
She didn't turn around. She stood a moment with her hand on the handle, her back very straight, and then she went out without another word and shut it behind her.
Ursa peeled herself off the wall, came back, and resumed her work on my feet without a word.
I was grateful for her silence.
I sat with my feet in the cooling water, closed my eyes, and thought of the unnatural shimmer in the snow that no one but I had seen.
The next morning, we left for Vedona.
It was the same journey I had made every year since I was a child, though I hadn't been made to attend the ball itself until I turned eighteen.
I actually enjoyed the days of travel across the width of the Federation, with nearly the entire household strung out in a convoy with our wardrobes stored in heavy trunks lashed down, and my mother leading it like a general.
I loved stopping at inns along the way and meeting new people, but I absolutely detested the annual ball itself and all the official luncheons and dinners during the days preceding it and the ones following it.
It was hours of standing in shoes that hurt my feet, smiles that hurt my cheeks, all while being looked through by people who had decided long ago that I was no one worth looking at.