Ozark Trilogy 1: Twelve Fair Kingdoms Read Online Free PDF Page A

that.”
    “What, then? You didn’t just ‘drop in’ on your way to buy a spool of thread somewhere.”
    Anne pulled her chair near the fire, folded her arms across her chest, fixed her attention on me, and waited.
    “I, Responsible of Brightwater,” I recited, “am touring the Twelve Castles of Ozark, Castle by Castle, in preparation for the Grand Jubilee of the Confederation. Which is—as you’ll remember—to be convened at Castle Brightwater on the eighth day of this May. And I begin here, dear cousin, to do you honor.”
    “And because Castle McDaniels is closest.”
    “And,” I capped it, “because a person has to begin somewhere. There is one advantage; if I start with you, then it follows that you’re first done with me.”
    “Ah, yes,” she sighed, “there is that.”
    She leaned back in her chair and sighed again, and I tried to keep my spurs from making holes in her upholstery.
    “What’s required?” she asked me.
    “One party,” I said. “A very small one. In honor of my tom; you know. In honor of my Quest.”
    “In honor of the Pickles.”
    “The Pickles? Anne!”
    On Earth, we are told in the Teaching Stories, there was a food called pickles, made out of some other food called cucumbers. On this world, Pickles are small flat squishy round green things, and they bite. They certainly are not good to eat, even in brine, and we grant them a capital letter to keep the kids mindful not to step on them barefoot.
    “Well,” said Anne of Brightwater, “it’s just as sensible.”
    “It would be just as well,” I said, “not to mention the Pickles in your invitations.”
    “Responsible, dear Cousin Responsible. I despise parties. I always have despised them, and you know it. Why don’t you be too tired, instead?”
    The fire crackled in the fireplace, and a nasty wind howled round the Castle walls, and I knit my brows and glared at her until she sighed one more time and went away to give the necessary orders. My mention as she stepped into the hall that she’d best expect a comset film crew did nothing for her expression, but she went on; and I got myself out of my spurs and hung them over a comer of her mantel.
    There could be no treason here—and that was what all this foolishness in fact amounted to, of course, plain treason—not in Castle McDaniels. The Brightwaters and the McDaniels had been closer than the sea and its shore ever since First Landing, and if there was anyone in this Castle who was not kin to me by birth or by marriage, or tied to me by favors given and received, it was some ninny such as stood guardmaid. Nevertheless, a Quest was a Quest, and it had to be done according to the rules. I had had a boring flight, tooling along through the air and waving to passing birds; and I would have a boring supper with Anne’s boring husband, and then we would all have a boring party and be boringly exhausted in the morning. And then before lunch I would be able to lake my leave for Castle Purdy.
    At which point a thought struck me, and I pulled my map from my pocket and unfolded it. Upper right-hand comer of the pliofilm, the small continent Marktwain, with the Outward Deeps off its coasts to the east. To the south of Marktwain, Oklahomah, a tad bigger. To the west, and dwarfing both, the continent of Arkansaw, with little Mizzurah almost up against its western coast and sheltered some from the Ocean of Storms by its overhang to the north. Then across the Ocean of Storms, in the northwest corner of my map, was Kintucky, big as Oklahomah but with only the Wommacks to manage the whole of it. And last of all, filling the southwest corner; the huge bulk of Tinaseeh, the only one of our continents to have an inland sea, and its Wilderness Lands alone as big as either Kintucky or Oklahomah. And the empty Ocean of Remembrances, filling all the southeast comer.
    True, the most obvious route, and the one I had described to me by arguesome Jubal, was straight over to Arkansaw. But