The Mansions of Idumea (Book 3 Forest at the Edge series) (6 page)

Perrin had to admit that might’ve been
accurate. The boy did look half-starved, even though he ate more
than Perrin each day. When Perrin was that age he was already
growing larger than his father, but Peto seemed destined to take
after his maternal grandfather. While his face was an exact copy of
Perrin’s, Mahrree said his gray eyes and brown hair reminded her of
Cephas Peto.

“Then Peto, I have exactly what you need to
kill your appetite.” Perrin pulled Mahrree into his arms and kissed
her—

“Augh! Why do you always have to do that in
front of me?” Peto wailed and covered his eyes dramatically.

Jaytsy just rolled her eyes and put the
steaks on the table.

Mahrree laughed at her son once Perrin
finally released her. She looked around. “Where’s Shem? Usually you
save those ‘Advantages of being married’ greetings for when Shem’s
here.”

“New batch of ten recruits,” he told her.
“Full of bravado until ‘Shem the Guarder’ fell from the trees. At
least two will need to change their trousers when he finally lets
them run back to the safety of the fort.”

Mahrree winced. “Ooh, they must be very green
if Shem’s missing dinner to start toughening them up.”

“He signaled he’d try to come by tomorrow.”
Perrin took his chair at the table. “But that may depend on how
well the recruits handle their middle-of-the-night training ride
tonight.”

“I can’t wait until he takes me along,” Peto
said as he sat and snagged the largest steak before Perrin’s fork
could stab it. His ignored his father’s playful glare. “But Uncle
Shem says it’s too scary and won’t take me until I’m seventeen or
eighteen.” He sighed in frustration and dove into the bowl of
potatoes just ahead of his father, who grumbled. “I know all the
stories. I wouldn’t be scared.”

“Oh, yes you would,” insisted Jaytsy,
buttering her bread in a less aggressive manner than her brother
usually did. When Peto attacked sliced bread, it nearly regressed
back into cracked wheat. “Besides, you’d have to go on horseback,
and you’re too scared to even mount a horse. Peto the Puny,” she
added in a mumble before biting primly into her crust.

“Jaytsy!” Mahrree admonished her.

“—the Giant!” Peto added with a wicked
grin.

“That’s enough!” Perrin snapped at him. “What
did we say about using those names?”

“I didn’t say, ‘Jaytsy the Giant,’” Peto
pointed out, not one bit shaken by his father’s sternness. He’d
seen him much worse. “Mother said ‘Jaytsy.’ I merely said ‘the
Giant.’ You’re the one who assumed they go together.” He shoved a
chunk of potato into his mouth.

Perrin looked critically at his wife.

Mahrree pressed her lips together—her
expression that meant she was proud of her son’s recognition of the
rhetoric, and disappointed that he was still calling his sister
names. But Jaytsy still started it, this time.

“Don’t you two think you’re getting a little
big for name calling?” said Mahrree sharply to her daughter.

Jaytsy batted her long dark lashes. “
I
may be getting too big, but . . .” She raised her eyebrows at her
little
brother and left the rest of the sentence
hanging.

Mahrree squinted in disappointment that also
tried to mask a bit of amusement.

But her husband glared at her. “And you had
to start teaching them to debate when they were six and five.”

“I wouldn’t go so far to call it debating,”
Peto said to his potato which he analyzed with great adoration.
“Maybe arguing.”

His sister rolled her eyes. “Given the
context, arguing is the same as debating. Have you still not
figured that out? Now, fighting: that’s different—”

“So Jayts,” Perrin said to change the
subject—and so that he wouldn’t have to report himself for
insubordination by allowing debating in his house, “what’s new in
the world of teenage girls?”

She blinked at him. “Sometimes you say the
oddest things, Father.”

“So there’s nothing new?”

“There’s always something new!”

“Well?”

She shrugged and indulged him. “If boys like
it when girls cut their hair short above their eyes or not. They’re
calling them bangs.”

“Hmm,” Perrin said with a studious nod. He
rarely knew how to respond beyond,
hmm
. But that always
seemed to suffice to show he was concerned about his daughter’s
life, yet had no idea what any of it really involved.

“Truly ground-breaking thinking,” Mahrree
said. “They’re not worried about the boys thieving, or what kinds
of work the Administrators will decide for them if they fail to
improve their scores—just if they like shorter hair or not.”

“Girls are silly,” Peto said.

“I agree,” said Mahrree.

Perrin pondered that. “I don’t remember girls
being that silly when I was fourteen.”

Jaytsy asked, “And how much of an expert on
girls were you when you were fourteen?”

Perrin paused. “All right, probably not that
much.”

His wife and daughter laughed. Peto ate some
more.

“No, girls were silly,” Mahrree admitted.
“Every time I hear you talk, Jaytsy, I find myself remembering more
things from my childhood that I thought I finally forgot. But
truly, I don’t think we ever fretted about our hair. I don’t think
boys even notice that.”

“They don’t,” Peto said, gulping down his
water.

“How would you know?” Jaytsy asked. “You
barely qualify as a ‘boy.’ More like a pig-thing.”

“Oh, ha-ha.”

“Jaytsy!” Mahrree chided.

“Mother, I didn’t call him a name. I didn’t
say his name
is
‘pig-thing.’ I just said he is
like
a
pig-thing. Big difference.”

“And you had to teach them to debate,” Perrin
glared at his wife.

She glared back with a look that said,
You
and I will finish this argument later
.
Alone
.

His saucy wink at her meant,
You better
believe we will
.

“Back to the issue of the silliness of
girls,” Mahrree started, biting back her grin that she knew her
husband noticed, “now that they’re getting older, you’d think
they’d be concerned more with truly worrying issues. Such as, will
any of those boys be worth marrying in a couple of years?”

“Oh, don’t talk about marrying, Mother!”
Jaytsy said. “I’m not even fifteen yet. Girls aren’t supposed to
worry about marrying until they’re at least sixteen.”

“Or twenty-eight,” Perrin declared. It’d take
him that long to figure out females. Peto was easy, as all boys
are. They’re a mixture of a puppy and a colt: just feed them, let
them run around, and rein them back in every now and then.

But girls?

Now Jaytsy rolled her eyes at her father. She
was very practiced at it, exercising those muscles a few dozen
times each day. “I don’t want to waste away until I’m twenty-eight,
either! Practically a grandparent.”

Perrin and Mahrree glanced at each other and
the stray gray hairs that each was beginning to sprout.

Distinguished on him, she frequently
said.

Wiry on her, he never bothered to
mention.

“I’m not marrying anyone off yet,” Mahrree
promised. “I’m just saying they should start thinking about more
important things, like . . . the condition of the world, the ideas
from Idumea, the politics—”

Jaytsy scoffed. “Idumean politics—really,
Mother? Teenage girls?”

“Well,” Mahrree said, slightly insulted,
“you’re interested in what’s going on in the world—”

“Only because that’s all you and Father talk
about! Only because you drill into our heads every dinner time what
we should be worried about and how to fight it.”

“Hear, hear!” agreed Peto taking a bite of
steak. “The Administrators this, the Administrators that,” he
garbled as he chewed. “Good thing the Administrators don’t have
ways to hear what goes on in this house, or you’d both be on that
‘watched’ list the Administrator of Loyalty supposedly has. Maybe
the next time you punish me, I can threaten to write
someone a
letter
,” and he raised his eyebrows.

Jaytsy laughed as Mahrree and Perrin
exchanged looks of amusement and concern. Mahrree had mentioned to
them once that she used to send letters many years ago, and got
nothing back in return but form letters. It was part of a
discussion they’d had about the unresponsiveness of the
Administrators, but Perrin saw the flickers of fear in her eyes
when she admitted to possibly overstepping her bounds.

But her children mistook her apprehension as
annoyance, and occasionally threatened to write their own letters,
just to watch her eyes bulge.

Mahrree sighed. “I’m sorry. I know sometimes
we pour it on a little thick—”

“You’ve raised us to look at everything with
a sufficiently cynical eye—don’t worry.” Jaytsy said, her voice
suddenly serious.

That always surprised Perrin: one minute she
was a flighty girl, the next she was a sharp-tongued young woman.
The fact that he was never quite sure which was about to show its
claws kept him perpetually on guard.

“And I agree with what you say, really,” his
daughter said earnestly. “It’s just hard to be around everyone else
when no one else thinks the same as we do. Sometimes I just wished
we weren’t so different.”

Mahrree sighed.

“I just sometimes wished . . .” Jaytsy began,
then stopped.

Perrin noticed she had picked up her mother’s
habit of not finishing thoughts out loud. He counted to three—if he
counted to ten, she’d completely forget what she was talking about;
she was only fourteen, after all—before he asked, “Wished for
what?”

“I wished we could just be like everyone
else. Or rather, that everyone else could be like us. Maybe the
Creator could just, I don’t know, shake everyone up a bit. Make
them see things the way you force us,” she smiled apologetically,
“to see things. Notice all the problems, instead of ignoring
them.”

“Ah, Jaytsy, that’s not really something you
want, is it?” Mahrree said. “What would it take to ‘wake up’ the
world? Whatever shakes them will shake us as well.”

Jaytsy exhaled loudly. “It’s not like I want
everyone punished, Mother! Just . . . make them awake, that’s
all.”

“But Jayts, some people can be as impossible
to wake up as our Peto here,” Perrin told her, hoping to lighten
the moment.

“Father, I have to tell you,” Peto said
gulping down the last bits on his plate, “most of the time when you
try to wake me, I’m just ignoring you.”

Mahrree sighed again. “That’s exactly what
the world does—ignores the problems. No amount of shaking can fix
that, I fear.”

Chapter 2
~
“Did something happen?”

T
he last thing
Mahrree remembered was Perrin snoring. It was still dark but dawn
must’ve been coming soon. The air just had that kind of feel to it.
She sighed and wondered how long her husband would continue
imitating the noisy forest. She tried rolling him, but never had
much success in budging the man that weighed twice as much as
her.

It was only because she utterly adored and
loved the swoon-worthy man, who was
usually
the most perfect
husband in the world, that she didn’t hit him over the head with
the rod of iron she kept by her side of their massive bed in an
effort to silence him so she could get some uninterrupted
slumber.

Random thoughts went through her mind as she
tried to drift back to sleep. Things to clean. Things to cook.
Things to tell her husband. Things to tell her mother. Things to
tell her children. Things to tell her students . . .

Ugh.

Her students.

Now she definitely wasn’t going to get to
sleep. Whenever her collection of twenty rowdy teenagers invaded
her mind, she found herself tensing up in frustration. They caused
nearly as much damage in her brain as they did in the village.

It wasn’t as if the Shins needed the silver
slips she was paid; they always went straight down into the cellar,
along with extra slips Perrin earned that they also didn’t spend.
Mahrree became the “special cases” teacher when Peto was five and
she learned Idumea would never allow parents to be their children’s
teachers. At least the commander’s wife could give him leads on
which students seemed overly tired in the mornings after nights of
thieving, and she could also keep in touch with her children’s
education.

Mahrree sighed as she looked up at the
ceiling timbers; Perrin’s snoring had developed a goose-like
honking quality, which meant silence was about another thirty
minutes away, so until then she had nothing else to do but fret
about her students. The Instruction Department’s annual exam would
be at the end of Planting Season, just a few weeks away. How the
boys performed would dictate the rest of their lives, yet she
couldn’t get them to fully grasp that.

Those who tested well could apply to a
university and train to become just about anything: doctor, law
assessor, university professor, Command School officer, or,
laughably, an assistant to an Administrator.

Average scores on the exam meant an average
job as well, not requiring excessive intelligence but the ability
to learn a trade such as blacksmithing, farming, weaving,
teaching—although don’t ask Mahrree her opinion of that mid-range
designation which was also the same level as a mere
performer
—or soldiering.

The lowest scores meant one’s job in life
would be nothing more invigorating than removing rubbish, digging
ditches, or, disturbingly, also becoming a soldier.

That had irked Perrin to no end. The worst
students could still join the army? The assumption that rebellious
teenagers suddenly turned into obedient young adults when they
stepped into a fort baffled both of them.