AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“In the garden already,” she panted back.
In a few moments, they were all there, huddled in the center of the enclosure as far as possible from the high stone walls, the heavy linen canopy, and the bulk of the house itself. Far from anything that could fall on them, crushing them beneath its weight. Brandon glanced fearfully at the grass beneath his feet. Couldn’t the ground open up just as easily and swallow them whole? Was any place truly safe once the world was determined to shake itself to pieces?
“When can we go back inside?” the cook asked after a few moments had passed and nothing else had happened.
“Not yet,” came Villette’s voice, sharp and clear. Brandon let himself look at her as she stepped out from behind the maid’s shadow. He had never given up the night shift, much to the delight of Finley and Nadder, and so he had never had a chance to see Villette in full daylight. That creamy brown skin. Those deep-set eyes, dense with sadness. That rich dark hair braided away from her face. Too beautiful to look at straight on. He shifted his position so he could watch her from the corner of his eye.
“Not yet,” Villette repeated. “Give it a few minutes. The tremors tend to come in—”
A hard shiver ran under their feet, throwing them all off-balance. The little maid screamed and pitched to the ground; the sound of breaking glass came from inside the house. Brandon found the gardener clutching him for support. Nadder had one hand around Villette’s arm to hold her steady.
This tremor didn’t last as long as the first one and didn’t feel as bad. “How long till it’s over?” Brandon asked.
The gardener shook his head. He was a stooped older man of indeterminate heritage, always civil if not particularly talkative. He had told Brandon his name was Abenza, but everyone called him Abe. “No telling. But usually if there’s nothing for a half hour, you can say you’re safe for the day.”
“It’s been a while since we’ve had quakes this often,” Finley said. “At least ten years, yeah? I was a kid.”
“Weneverhad anything this bad down in the islands,” Brandon said.
Nadder had released Villette, though he still stood near enough to catch her if another tremor set them all careening. “Really? I thought they shook the whole country.”
“It’s the seams,” Abe explained. “Sometimes they can’t hold together.”
Brandon just looked between the two of them. “I don’t even know what you’re talking about.”
He thought he heard faint amusement in Villette’s voice. “When Cordelan knit the lands together, he couldn’t bind them all perfectly. So there are seams between Marata and Chibain, for instance, and Marata and Oraki. There’s also the long crevice that divides Corcannon from the mainland. Sometimes the world shifts, and the lands shove up against each other, and then we get quakes.” She arched her dark brows and smiled at him. “Aren’t there seams between the islands and Marata? I would think you’d have just as many quakes as we do.”
He knew what she was talking about now. The borders between the five islands, and between the islands and Marata, were stony, inhospitable stretches of land sometimes more than a mile wide, sometimes narrow enough to toss a rock across. His father had always maintained that Zessaya had made those passages so difficult to traverse because she wanted to keep Maratan marauders from slipping over to the islands. It happened anyway, of course, but never at night, when a man or a horse could easily go lame trying to make one of those crossings.
“We have—seams, as you call them,” Brandon said. “But I don’t recall the land ever rolling like that. Maybe the islands are just floating on the ocean, so they don’t shake so much when there are tremors.”
On the words, the ground rumbled again, just enough to let them feel it, not enough to make any of them lose their balance. Brandon thought he heard Finley curse under her breath before she looked apologetically in Villette’s direction.
“Once it stops, when will it start up again?” Brandon asked.
Abe shook his head again. “Nobody knows. Could happen again tomorrow. Might not happen again for a decade.”
“Unnerving, isn’t it?” Villette said. “Especially for people who like to know exactly what the future holds.”
“Nobody ever knows what the future holds,” the cook said briskly.
“Then why does anyone ever seek to control it?” Villette asked whimsically.
No one tried to find an answer for that. The group was starting to pull apart, the servants edging toward the house, Villette drifting toward the patio.
“I wouldn’t sit under the canopy. Not just yet,” Brandon cautioned her. “If there’s another quake and that comes down, it could suffocate you.”
“I’m just going to fetch a chair and bring it back out,” she promised. “I’m tired of standing.”
Finley and Nadder were advancing on the tall stone wall, their heads canted back as if they could see over the top. “Can’t tell if that’s a crack or not,” Finley said, raising herself to her toes and lifting her hand as high as it would go to trace some pattern in the material. “Feels pretty solid.”
“I’ll go outside and check from the other side,” Nadder said, heading for the door.
Villette emerged from the patio, carrying one of the lacy ironwork chairs that usually sat in front of her table. “Certainly! You must make sure the wall can’t possibly be breached by any random resident of the household.”
Brandon hurried over to take the chair from her hands. “Where do you want to sit?”
She smiled at him. “By the fish pond, of course.”
