mistress must have learned something to upset her: no doubt an affair of the heart, she thought with sluggish, lukewarm envy (for such things lay so far beyond Ogma's horizon that she had little real idea of them), yet for the life of her she could not imagine who it might be. Well, she knew that Maia was to attend Elvair-ka-Virrion's bar-rarz that night. No doubt more would become clear later, for to give her her due Miss Maia had never been one to make herself out better than anybody else, to act standoffish or keep secrets.
In Maia's heart there was a kind of fighting. Part was inflamed with excitement by what Tharrurhad told her, part full of trepidation, exposed and fearful as a fledgling just flown from the nest. She was, in fact, in a state of shock. Again and again she called before her mind's eye that grim, long-ago night which Tharrin had described to her-the exhausted girl, in mortal terror, stumbling on through the mud and rain she knew not whither, her belly big with-with herself!
Her father was not her father. And Kelsi and Nala and little Lirrit-oh, she'd been so fond of Lirrit, she'd been the one she really loved best-they weren't her sisters at all! And Morca? Well, at least that made what she'd done a bit more understandable. They mustn't be left alone, they mustn't go in want. She'd send them money. And Tharrin-she'd need to keep an eye on Tharrin: send one of her soldiers back to Serrelind with him: ah, make sure he got there and all, and the money too.
And she herself? She was a Suban-a marsh-frog! Well, half, for sure, anyway. But her real father-had
a Suban? No, not if they'd been living in eastern Urtah: he'd have been an Urtan. Where exactly was the village? It shouldn't be difficult to find out-they'd not have forgotten the murder after as little as sixteen and a half years. There'd be people there who'd known her father and mother.
Nokomis! She was sister's daughter, then, to the fabulous, legendary Nokomis! Well, that explained a whole basting lot, as Occula would no doubt have remarked. And more than that, she and Bayub-Qtal were cousins! And before the implications of this, poor Maia fetched up literally at a standstill and all of a shake, like a boat in the eye of the wind. "Oh, it's all too much at one go, that it is!" she said aloud, as though declaring to the gods that she was just not going to play any more. She sat down on the grass and began chewing daisies; and a few minutes later Ogma came to tell her that dinner was ready.
Today she could eat all right. Both horror and uncertainty had left her. She knew what she meant to do, and her confidence was only slightly less than her determination. After the meal, telling Jarvil to admit no one, she lay down on her bed, escaping into sleep with the relief of a slave pitching a heavy load off his back and not caring which way up it landed, either.
When she woke, Ogma was rattling pails in the bathroom and a beaker of milk, its top covered with muslin, was standing on the table beside her bed. The sun was setting and the swifts were darting and screaming high up in the cooling air. A passer-by called to someone in the quiet road outside. A scent of planella drifted in from the garden. Suddenly it seemed to Maia that some god was revealing to her a truth-that the world was not, in fact, transfixed upon a few sharp, pyramidal points of great matters. Rather, it was supported easily upon countless passing moments, a myriad diurnal trivia, like the host of befriending butterflies in old Drigga's story, who carried the wandering princess up and over the ice mountain.
She drank the milk and stretched luxuriously, smelling the planella, admiring again the workmanship of the onyx rabbit and listening to the sound of water pouring into the bath. "I'm not cold or hungry or ill," she thought, "and I've got me." Somewhere outside, the blue-finch sang his little phrase, "Never never never never
was the only one he knew. She laughed, sat up and swung her feet to the floor. She'd show them!
