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.
