The Truth-Teller's Tale (2 page)

“What does she plan to name the little girl? Has that been announced yet?” my mother asked. My father was overseeing the taproom, but Melinda, my mother, Adele, and I were eating around the small table in the kitchen.

“Her official name is Arisande, but there will be a secret name as well,” Melinda said, helping herself to some potatoes.

The three of us stared at her. “A secret name?” said Adele. She looked predictably delighted at the concept.

“Oh, yes, just like the prince!” Melinda said. “Here, Eleda, would you pass me that ham?”

I handed her the requested dish. I was frowning. “A secret name?” I said, not sure what that was but knowing already that I disapproved. “What's that? Why would anyone have need of such a thing?”

Melinda shrugged. “Some affectation of royalty, I suppose. Prince Darian has a secret name, too—and so does Lirabel, for all I know. They are kept in the royal record books and inscribed on the tombstones, but no one ever calls the members of the royal family by those names. Well, they're secrets.”

“I have a secret name,” Adele said.

“Yes, it's
Liar
,” I shot at her.

“Girls,” Mother reprimanded.

“There will be a great naming ceremony in a week or two and then—well, now, Hannah, you and your girls would be interested in this—then there will be a full year when Lirabel will invite Truth-Tellers and Safe-Keepers from all over the kingdom to come in and visit with the little girl. She did the same thing when Darian was born. You can't believe the number of Truth-Tellers who announced, in the most pompous way, ‘This boy will be brave and strong and true. He will grow to be a young man of exceptional honor.' That sort of thing. As if you could know such a thing about a baby.”

“What did the Safe-Keepers have to say?” Mother asked.

Melinda gave a rather unladylike snort. “Well, of course, they never say much, do they? I suppose they were all watching him with their eyes half closed and storing up little bits of information, and in twenty years when he turns out to be demented or ill-favored or just plain odd, they'll nod their heads and say, ‘I knew when he was in the cradle.' ”

I was giggling. Adele looked amused, but in a pitying way, as if Melinda was too obtuse to understand some great and obvious truth. My mother said, “My, it sounds like you have a low opinion of Safe-Keepers.”

Melinda shrugged her thin shoulders in her fashionable dress. “Not at all. You know my own daughter is a Safe-Keeper, or she used to be, and she is the dearest girl. But I do always wonder how much these people really know, and how much they pretend they knew after a secret has already been revealed. It does not seem like it would be so hard to nod your head wisely and say, ‘Ah, yes. I knew it all along.'”

“They really do know,” I said regretfully. It pained me to admit that anyone could willingly swallow knowledge and hold it inside himself for days or weeks or decades, but I simply knew it was true. “And it's harder than you would think to keep a secret.”

“
You
couldn't do it,” Adele said in a taunting voice.

I stuck my tongue out at her. “
I
wouldn't want to,” I replied.

“Anyway, so I thought you and Bob might be taking the girls into Wodenderry in the next few months,” Melinda said. “I can make sure you're introduced to the queen, if you like, for I know everyone at court. But you'd be welcome without my introduction.”

All three of us were staring at her with our blue and green eyes.

Melinda put down her fork, an arrested expression on her face. “What?” she demanded. “What did I say?”

My mother also laid down her silverware, as if it had suddenly become very heavy or very breakable. “Why would you think Bob and I should take the girls to Wodenderry to meet the princess?” she asked in a careful voice.

Melinda looked surprised. “Because Adele is a Safe-Keeper, of course, and Eleda is a Truth-Teller. They're still really too young to be practicing, I realize—indeed, it's rare that they would even show signs of their talent at this age—but it won't be long now before they're hiding secrets and announcing truths. I think Lirabel would be charmed to have such fresh, young faces at the palace.”

My mother was still staring. “My daughters? Are—they are—such special people? But are you sure?”

Melinda looked even more surprised. “Well, of course I'm sure. Do you mean to tell me you didn't know?”

And then it was as if all the thoughts inside my head went into a dizzying whirl, spinning around three times before yielding up a bright, tiny nugget of light. It was as if knowledge burst inside me in a star-colored pinwheel. Suddenly I had a piece of information I had not had before—and it was certain, it was absolute.

“Oh!” I said, and I knew I sounded amazed. “Melinda's right! We are—it's just like she said. I'm a Truth-Teller. Adele's a Safe-Keeper. She's right. It's true.”

My mother looked at me, uncertain but hopeful. “Well—if you say so. I've never known you to tell a lie, not ever. But does that mean—if you're a Truth-Teller—you couldn't lie, even if you wanted to.”

“But I never want to,” I said, a little too earnestly. Adele giggled.

My mother turned her doubtful eyes on my sister. “And does that mean Adele—”

“She's a Safe-Keeper,” I said a little grumpily. Because now that she had an official
sanctified
reason never to tell me anything I asked, Adele would be even more insufferable.

“Well, isn't this excellent news!” my mother said, puffing up a little with pleasure. “Melinda, you'll never have to ask me again what I'm wishing for. This is better than a dream come true!”

Melinda looked from me to Adele. “Are you happy? Or are you shocked at the news?”

“I'm quite happy,” I said—and then, to be scrupulously honest—“though I admit I am a little shocked.”

“And you, Adele?” the Dream-Maker asked. “Are you surprised as well?”

Adele gave us all her most annoying smile and said, “I knew it all along.”

 

 

You would have thought my father had been told his daughters were next in line to take the throne. There had never been a Safe-Keeper or a Truth-Teller on either side of the family, and he could not have been prouder. He told all of his acquaintances; he told guests who checked into the inn for the night; he managed to work the information into every conversation he had with friends or strangers. My father in general was a hearty, happy, genial man who thought his life had been blessed beyond his desserts; his ruddy face was always creased in a smile, and his big hands were always reaching out to pat someone on the back or offer help in some task. To him, this was just further proof of the overwhelming goodness of the world.

Within two days of learning the news, he had written to the royal arboretum and ordered two full-grown trees to plant in the green area behind the inn. One was a kirrenberry, the tree of silence. Sit beneath it in spring or summer and its limbs, with their flat dark leaves, would stretch noiselessly above you; in autumn or winter, you would hear no rustle from its slim branches as they shook in a frenzied breeze. It was traditional for Safe-Keepers to plant a kirrenberry tree on their property so that anyone desperate to tell a secret would know where to go to speak in safety.

A few yards away from the kirrenberry, he planted a chatterleaf, the tree that Truth-Tellers had taken as their emblem. This was a species that was never silent at all. Its lime-bright leaves made silky whispery sounds during any light spring breeze; even in the dead of winter, its bare twigs and branches rattled against one another like sticks in a drummer's hands. Birds of all types were drawn to its lush greenery, and once settled on its springy branches they would commence to sing endless arias. Crows and ravens made their nests among its upper reaches and engaged in unending gossip. A whistle from a chatterleaf would yield a deep and satisfying sound, like a foghorn in Merendon harbor or the bellow of a small, angry animal.

I loved that chatterleaf tree more than I could say. I loved the varying sounds it made depending on what kind of wind stirred its branches—a shushing susurration if the breeze was faint and the leaves had almost all dropped away; a clattering, jabbering, conversation when wilder winds whipped up off the ocean; and a rich, sad, moaning when spring storms lashed through Merendon, shaking all the rafters and bending the trees nearly double.

But during no storm and no season did the kirrenberry tree make a sound.

The first person to come by the inn and inspect our new acquisitions was Roelynn Karro, daughter of the wealthiest merchant in town. She was our age exactly, because she had been born when we were only three days old, and she had been our best friend ever since we could remember. She had dark hair of a rich chestnut hue, and her eyes were a complex hazel. In personality, she fell somewhere between Adele and me. She could keep her counsel, if she felt like it, but she was never so happy as when she was discussing some friend or recent event. Though she was the richest girl in the city of Merendon, I often doubted that she was the happiest. Her mother had died when she was quite young, and her father was a gruff and greedy man whom everyone respected but no one liked. His first name was Delton, but you had to think hard to remember that; everyone in the entire town referred to him simply as Karro. Her older brother, Micah, seemed to have assumed the task of raising her, though he did a slipshod job of it, as you might expect from a boy of fifteen. The result was that Roelynn was as wild as a summer bramble and just as prickly.

She admired our new greenery, though. “Very nice,” she said, putting her hand on the smooth bole of the chatterleaf tree and swinging around it in one complete revolution. “And I thought the new sign out front looked quite pretty.”

Adele giggled. In honor of our new status, our father had rechristened our inn the Leaf & Berry and had just hung the plaque this morning. “We must have the only inn in the kingdom with that particular name,” my sister said.

Roelynn swung around the tree a second time, rattling the trunk enough to send a few of the resting crows off in search of more stable perches. “Listen to those birds!” she exclaimed. “Are they never quiet?”

I shook my head. “The nightingale sings till dawn, and the songbirds call out the entire day.”

“Something to listen to, then, when you wake up in the middle of the night,” Roelynn said. “Or when you don't want to think too much during the middle of the day.”

I gave her a sharp look. “What wouldn't you want to think about?” I demanded.

She shrugged. “Oh—anything. All the little problems of the day. I like your tree, Eleda.”

But she liked Adele's equally well, and the two of them sat on the ground beneath its thin branches for a good ten minutes, neither of them saying a word. I grew restless and went inside the inn to see if there were any tarts to spare. When I came back outside, Adele and Roelynn were sitting on the green bench that was situated midway between the two trees. I sat beside Roelynn and shared the treats.

“So the two of you are professional women now,” Roelynn said. “Will you have customers come to call? How much will you charge? Will your parents set aside a room for you to hear secrets and pronounce truths?”

Adele and I looked at each other across Roelynn's figure. These were questions neither of us had thought to ask yet. “I suppose we will eventually,” I said at last. “But—I mean—we're twelve years old. Who's going to trust us with important news?”

“I would,” Roelynn said.

Adele gave her a searching look. “Do you have important news?”

I felt that squeeze on my heart that I had learned meant the truth was obvious. “Yes,” I said. “She does. Roelynn, what is it?”

“My father has made a deal with the queen,” she said. She didn't sound very excited about it. “He's going to handle all the royal shipments that go through the port of Merendon. He's going to become a very wealthy man.”

“He's already a wealthy man,” I said dryly.

Roelynn nodded. “He'll be almost as rich as the queen herself, or so he says. He thinks maybe one day she'll grant him a title and he'll become a nobleman. It's all he can talk about.”

“I'd like to be rich,” Adele commented.

“Me, too!” I replied. “But, Roelynn, you don't sound happy about it at all.”

She sighed and leaned against the back of the bench. “He says he wants Micah and me to start behaving like gentry. He doesn't want us to go to the Merendon school anymore—he wants us to have private tutors. He wants us to dress in better clothes and—and—”

“He wants you to make different friends,” I said.

She nodded glumly. “He says you're daughters of tradesmen.”

“Well, we are,” I said.

Roelynn tilted up her small, pointed chin. “I don't care,” she said. “You're my
friends
.”

Adele was smiling. “We'll still be your friends,” she said. “Nothing will change that.”

Roelynn hesitated before speaking again. “And so I hope,” she said. “But there's something else, something that might take me away from Merendon forever.”

We both leaned forward and spoke in matching voices. “What?”

“My father has decided I should marry the prince.”

We both stared at her.

Roelynn nodded, even more glum. “It's true. He thinks this new shipping contract is just the beginning. First, he'll get all that money. Then he'll win a title. Then he'll propose to the queen that she should marry her son to me.”