Sweet Sixteen, Chapter 13 ~ Just a Girl

The book was still there when Elly dragged herself out of bed, unrested and running late for school.  She lifted up the corner of the blanket in an absurd hope that it wouldn’t be there, but wasn’t surprised to see it there.  She didn’t have much time to talk to her parents as she slapped some butter on a slightly toasted piece of bread and hustled out the door, chewing as she went.  Perhaps it was just as well.  Several puzzle pieces about discussions she’d overheard in the past, and her father’s mysterious disappearance, had fallen into place while reading last night, and she almost felt like blurting out, “I’ve figured it all out, you know.”

Only, she hadn’t.  Encountering the book was like finding travel books on Europe, Asia, and Africa without knowing those places had even existed.  It told her there was a good chance her parents, or her father at least, had been to those “otherworlds” or perhaps even came from one of them.  It didn’t tell her anything else about what had happened, and didn’t tell her why they kept it such a secret.  It didn’t explain the Lost One.  It didn’t explain Elly.

She spent a hazy day at school, thinking about what she was going to say to Sien.  She now understand what the Queen of Seven reference was about.  She still had that stupid sign — “luv your Queen of Seven.”  She’d taped it to the inside of her locker, and between every class she stared at it.  He couldn’t possibly be serious . . . could he?

When school let out, she didn’t go to the café.  She told herself she needed time to think.  She didn’t want to deal with talking to her parents, so she phoned her mother to say she was going to go over to Jani’s to study and would probably stay for supper.  Instead she went home and slipped inside invisible, returning to her room and sitting in her closet with the book.  She studied all of the author’s notes on Airidan again, looking over a somewhat simplistic map and sketches of the native fashions.  As old as the book seemed she didn’t know how accurate it was anymore, but she was sure it was the same Airidan Sien claimed to be from.  The House of Auriel ruled in the absence of the Queen of Seven; she supposed that made him royalty of some sort.

He didn’t seem like royalty.  He was a bit odd, granted, but she had a hard time placing him in this fantastical setting.

After she’d tired of Airidan and the fabled Queens she paged through the book looking for clues about her parents.  Her father must have picked this book up somewhere . . . he certainly wasn’t the author, her dad didn’t have that nice of handwriting and he wasn’t that old.  She thought.  But where had he gotten it?  Which of these places had he been to?

And what had happened there?

She fell asleep on her closet floor, hunched over the book, and dreamed that she was alone in an otherworld, sketching a kind of lizard with two heads and a long tail that curled up like a roll of Juicy Fruit.  She was having a hard time keeping the lizard from running away, and tried pinning its tail to the ground with a diaper pin she’d found hanging from a tree.  She had to run after it, and she found that it could leap like a cricket.  She decided to call it a Cricket Lizard.  Or Juicy Fruit.  Finally she caught it and held it to the ground, trying to pin its tail even though it thrashed and tried to knock her over.

She sent the pin down through the tail and into a stone underneath.  The lizard looked at her with dark, liquid eyes, and then it was the Lost One, her pale white hand oozing blood pinned to the rock.  Elly jerked away and woke up, grimacing at the soreness in her neck and noticing that she’d drooled on the book.

She crawled out of the closet and looked at the clock, seeing that it was late evening already.  She wondered if Sien was still waiting at the café.  Unlikely.  He’d probably realized he’d been stood up and went home.

Suddenly she felt very guilty, picturing Sien waiting at the café for an hour, maybe more.  She closed the book and shoved it back under the blanket, and decided.  She had to see him, she had to know for sure what was going on.

---

It was dark when the bus dropped her off near the Golden Jade Campground.  She retraced her path to the Auriels’ bus, undetectable to anyone who might be watching.

Light spilled out of the front portion of the bus, the unpainted windshield and folding door, making it look like an odd, large flashlight.  Elly stood in the light falling from the door and looked behind herself, seeing how the light passed through her uninterrupted and left no shadow.  Most of the time she took it for granted, this ability of hers she had never questioned the origin of, but sometimes she had to pause and wonder at the laws of nature she was breaking.  Or perhaps she wasn’t breaking any laws of nature; just rules stated by mortals who didn’t know all they thought they did about the universe they were born to.

She knocked on the glass, and almost immediately Sien appeared, swinging himself around on the pole by the steps.  His hopeful look creased into a frown when he saw nothing outside, and Elly stepped to the side when he opened the doors.  “Hello?” he called into the night.

While he was looking the other way she returned to sight and said, “Hello.”

He jumped.  “Ele—Elly!  Where did you come from?”

“Venus.”

“What?”

“Men are from Mars, women are from Venus.  Why does no one get that joke?”

“I just . . . didn’t see you there at first.”

She shrugged.  “I’m sorry I didn’t meet you at the café.  Can we talk?”

“Yes, of course,” he said quickly, shutting the bus door.  “I know you must think I’m crazy—”

“I don’t.”  She turned and crossed her arms, shaking her head a little as she took a few steps away from the bus.

“You don’t?” he echoed, sounding skeptical but a little hopeful.

“I’ve always known things aren’t quite the way they seem.  It’s not that hard to believe in the existence of otherworlds.  I don’t know why I didn’t figure it all out a long time ago; I suppose I just stopped being curious, thought I was too old to care about my parents’ stuff anymore.  But the joke’s on me; now it’s my stuff.”

“Uh huh.”

She turned around, realizing that she’d started to ramble.  “I meant to say, I read about your Airidan, and about Lsi and Jun and the Queens and all that history.  Is that what this is about?”

“You what?”  He looked startled.  “Where did you read about Airidan?”

“A book.  Just . . . a book my dad has, or had, till my mom hid it.”

“Wait, your dad is from Airidan?”

Elly laughed, realizing the absurdity of the question — and the fact that it wasn’t so absurd after all.  “I don’t know.  I don’t think so.  I thought he was from a little town in Wisconsin.  Not the most exotic place, Wisconsin, trust me, I’ve been there.”

“But he has a book about Airidan?”

“Not about Airidan, it’s about a whole bunch of different worlds, and about Keys and Gates and everything I ever wondered about when I was a little kid and couldn’t understand what my parents were hiding.  Don’t ask me where he got it, I don’t know.”

“And you read the Annals of the Queens?”

“Something like that.”

“Then . . . .”

“I want to know if that’s just some old legend, or if you really believe in it.  Is that what that note on my locker meant?  Is that what you were talking about yesterday?  Are you searching for someone to take back to Airidan?”

He hesitated, then frowned.  “You make it sound like a bad thing.”

“Is that a yes?”

“Yes.  Yes, when I saw you, I knew you were the one.  I didn’t want to scare you away and that’s why I didn’t tell you.  I was waiting for the right time.”

Elly laughed, nervously, and held up a hand.  “Sien, just hold on, okay?  There’s problems with this whole Queen of Seven concept.  Believe me.  I’m not your girl.”

“I know it must be confusing but . . . here, come meet my father.”  Sien motioned toward the bus.  “He’s from Airidan, he understands it even better than me and he can explain everything.”

“I don’t need an explanation, Sien, I told you—”

“Just come inside and meet him.  Please.”  He opened the door and looked at her expectantly. 

Elly sighed and stepped up into the bus.  She knew what she had to say would disappoint them both, and doubted very much that any “explaining” Sien’s father might try would change a thing.  But maybe if Sien wouldn’t listen to her when she said “no” his father would.

She stood by the driver’s seat and stared down the length of the bus, taking in the furnishings.  She recognized the area closest to her as a kitchen of sorts — there was a metal washtub on the table to the right, it was filled with soapy water and there were dishes stacked on both sides.  It looked like Sien had been in the middle of doing the dishes.  Further down she could see the blue light of a television flickering over an old man hunched on a bus seat.  He was watching her.

Sien stepped up beside her and said quietly, “Go ahead.  He knows who you are.”

Elly walked slowly down the center aisle, meeting Ren Auriel’s eyes.  They were pale and watery, but he regarded her with open appraisal.  He leaned over to turn the tv off, not taking his eyes off her.

“My name is Eliasha.”

“Ren Auriel,” he said, caution in his cracked voice.  He motioned to the office chair at the desk across the aisle.  “Please sit.”

She swiveled it around and sat down, glancing up at Sien briefly before returning her attention to his father.  Ren Auriel looked near death, a very study of everyone’s worst fears about growing old.  But it was clear to Elly that he was no senile, fragile Alzheimer’s patient — there was a formidable opponent hidden behind the wreckage of time, an otherworldly essence untouchable by the forces that crippled the body and ate away at the flesh.  It gave Elly pause, wondering how she could see so clearly inside the man before her, but only clearly enough to know there was a mystery blocking her sight.  It was disturbingly like when she had first seen Sien, and known without knowing how or why that here was someone who would change her life.

“I’m not your Queen of Seven,” she said, cutting to the chase. 

“But—” Sien began.

Elly held up a hand.  “I read about it, and gave it some thought, I admit, but one thing that kept popping out at me was that as Queens came and went, the one thing that remained was the Auriels.  Well, and the ever-doomed-to-fail armies of Lsi.  Poor bastards, I felt kind of sorry for them.  Anyway, my point is, Airidan doesn’t belong to the Queens, not since Jun.  It belongs to the Auriels, and the Queens have just been your instruments of power over the years.  Centuries, whatever.  I’m not interested in being an instrument of power.”

“Elly . . . ” Sien said uncomfortably.  Then, to his father, “She’s . . . um . . . not usually like this—”

“Yes I am,” Elly retorted, giving him an indignant look.

“Sien,” said his father, “Do not worry.  You have done well.  Let us talk.”

Sien looked chastised by Elly, and gave his father what seemed to be a grateful puppy look.  It made Elly angry for reasons she couldn’t understand, but she said evenly, “You should sit down, Sien, you don’t look comfortable hunching over like that.”

He stepped back wordlessly and pulled a three legged stool out from under the kitchen table, then sat down next to the TV.  Elly looked back at Ren expectantly.

“It is true,” the old man said slowly, “Airidan doesn’t belong to its Queens.  But it doesn’t belong to the Auriels, either.  It belongs to its people.  The Auriels and the Queens both serve the people, protecting them from the Lsian enemies as well as maintaining order and tradition in times of peace.  It is not about the Heirs of Auriel controlling a puppet Queen.  It is about the Auriels and the Queens working together to serve Airidan.”

“But that’s just it.”  Elly shrugged.  “I don’t care about Airidan.  It’s not my homeland.  Homeworld, whatever.  And none of your other Queens were, after Jun — that’s one of the big Rules, isn’t it?  So I can’t help thinking that the only thing in it for them was the power and prestige.”

“Who can say what was in the hearts of the Queens?  There were six of them, all six very different women from different worlds.  I am sure at least some of them came to love and care for Airidan as if it was their homeworld.”  He gently shrugged his thin shoulders.  “But then, I only have history’s word to go on.”

“Okay.  So they had all their own reasons, whatever they were.  But I don’t.  I don’t want the power, or the prestige, or the warm fuzzies of adopting a new homeworld.”  Elly shook her head.  “I like my life, here.  So obviously, I’m not Lucky Number Seven.”

Ren cracked a smile.  “You are young, and very much of this world.  But—” he directed a fond look at Sien “—I have a feeling my son’s instincts were correct.  When you walked into this bus, I felt it.  The spark.  You’re not just a girl.”

“Well, no.  I’m a Key, I suppose, like my father.  Like you, like Sien.  We’re different than a lot of other people but we’re not one of a kind.  Now, I know there’s supposed to be a voodoo ‘knowing’ that goes on between the Auriels and their Queen, but—” Elly inserted a sigh “—I think you’re mistaking that with your run of the mill, garden variety voodoo ‘knowing’ that goes on between Keys.  I feel it.  My dad knew right away that you were a Key, Sien.  I can tell.”

Sien looked at her funny.  “I . . . didn’t.  I mean, I didn’t know your dad was a Key when I saw him.  I didn’t feel anything, like when I saw you.”

Elly smiled and laughed a little, looking down at the treads on the floor.  “Well, there might be another explanation for what you felt when you saw me.”

Sien looked away.

Ren caught her meaning and said, “No — you see, the relationship between the Auriels and their Queen is of a pure nature.  It is built on respect and reverence, not lust.”

Elly just kept smiling, amused.

“I understand your cynicism,” he told her sadly.  “I watch this television set because I am too old and weak to move from this seat except when necessary, and from it I know quite well what kind of a world you are born to.  Sien brings me books from the library, as well, and even your literature showcases your culture’s obsession with lust.  Nearly everything seems to come back to it.  Naturally you see it where it doesn’t exist.  But the Queens of Airidan and the Heirs of Auriel are above such things.”

“Oh really.  I suppose you grew Sien in a test tube, then.”

“Elly,” Sien objected, horrified at her disrespect.

“What?” she shot back, feeling challenged.  “I’m a vulgar girl formed by a vulgar society, I can’t help it.”

“I’m sorry, Father, she’s—”

“Do not apologize, Sien.”  Ren held up a bony hand.  “I am not shocked and appalled.”  He smiled slightly.  “She presents a challenge, but then, there is no reward without challenge.”

“Excuse me, I’m right here,” Elly said with a frown.  “And I’m not your challenge or your reward.  Perhaps I’m not making myself clear, but I came here to decline your invitation to become your slave-Queen, not for you to talk me into it.”

“The Queen is not a slave,” Ren said calmly.

“Then explain these ‘Rules,’” Elly replied.  “Seven rules the Queen has to pass if she wants the crown.  Any real Queen, if you ask me, makes the rules.”

“It isn’t a matter of the Queen following rules.  Those are simply the ways that the Heirs of Auriel can tell if a woman is the Queen or not.  To the Queen, the Seven Principles are not ‘rules,’ they are simply who she is.”

“They’re not really rules,” Sien piped up again.  “It’s not about that, it’s . . . it’s like a description of the Queen — if you don’t fit the description then you’re just not the Queen.”

Elly nodded.  “Then I’m not the Queen.”

“Why?” said Ren.  “Is there one rule that you do not fit?”

“Yes, yes one in particular.  But I don’t remember what they all were.”

Ren looked to Sien.  “Well, then we will review them.  This can all be cleared up quite simply.”