Sarabande: River of Falcons Book 4

5. A Secret in the Trees

Drift had not been sleeping well. She felt that it ought to have been a great relief to free the Queen and defeat the sorcerers so that the royal family could finally take back the Palace. However, she had found that she did not feel settled there. She missed the little cottage where her adoptive grandmother, Summer, had raised her. And she missed Summer, who was kept so busy by the Queen that Drift rarely saw her.

Drift was kept busy too, and her duties in town and at the Palace Clinic often put her in close contact with the Queen, who seemed unsuited to a maternal role. They tried to be polite to each other, or at least Drift tried to be polite, but she had to admit that the woman still seemed like a stranger; often an unfriendly one. And then there was the problem of the Queen's dishonesty about where Drift had really ome from adn whether she really was her daughter, but Drift did not want to dwell on that. It only made her angry.

Such thoughts were spinning in Drift's mind because she was spending the morning with the Queen in the tall tower where the women of the royal family had done their weaving for many generations. It was the oldest tower of the Palace, and had been built by the First Princess, so Drift felt a heavy obligation to maintain the tradition of weaving there. However, she could not help glancing out the window and wondering what her younger half-brother, Ubi, was doing, nd how Sasha was getting along on his trip to revisit his abandoned home in the mountains.

Drift was trying to complete a small tapestry as a gift for Sasha. She hoped to find a moment to slip away somewhere quiet with him that evening, providing her duties and the Queen's demands did not prevent her from seeing him, and providing he came back in time from the trip he had gone on with his mother and sister.

She shook her head in irritation. Her weaving was not going well. She would have to redo the section she'd been working on since breakfast. She glanced furtively at the Queen, who was working on her own loom. The Queen seemed very tired, which gave Drift hope that she would not notice that Drift was pulling out her work. It angered the Queen when Drift made mistakes in her weaving. But then again, many things angered the Queen.

*

Ubi had a project of his own that he had been working on all through Lunamellis, or Sweet Moon (the tenth of the thirteen annual months, named for the custom of harvesting honey from the hives, and melons and pumpkins from the fields). His project was to build a private tree-house. He wanted to have a retreat where he could get away from the bustle and constant chores of palace life, and he wanted it to be completed before the weather got cold.

He had begun construction several weeks earlier, but other duties kept interfering. Last week his mother the Queen had sent him, along with Sasha, across the old stone bridge to town, to work on a chimney for the elderly sisters who spun wool and wove cloth for the townsfolk. (Had he left the hammer there?) The chimney had been damaged by the sorcerers' lightening bolts. Now that the royal family (what was left of it) was back in the Palace, they often went out to help with rebuilding.

By the time Ubi was free to return to the overgrown old orchard in a neglected corner of the palace gardens, he knew a lot more about mixing mortar and pointing bricks, and he had his own mason's trowel the blacksmith had made him, but his hammer was no longer to be found. He had a pocket full of rusty nails, a pile of rough-cut planks, and a saw, so all he really needed was his hammer, but it seemed to be gone.

The tree Ubi had chosen for his treehouse was a venerable monster, a huge apple tree with a thick trunk reaching far overhead and a mass of strong branches circling up it. If the tree had stood on its own in the open, it would have been too perfect a treehouse tree to actually hide a treehouse in. But this one was ringed around by trees that probably were once its own seedlings. They had almost as thick trunks and high branches as it did, and it was well hidden by them. Only inquisitive boys like Ubi (and Arty, who often came up river from the village of the Artula or Otter People to visit), would ever find and climb a tree like this. It was a safe bet that the Queen would never take an interest in it.