Hiding

If you ever saw the island, from a distance, you would see a calm, quiet beach with little foamy waves lapping against the edges. A cover of palm trees and huge cocoa trees and banana bushes. A little lagoon with gulls and herons flying overhead, calling. A little town by the coast, made up mostly of docks with huge sailing ships coming into the harbor, and a few little shops and apartments, battered by the wind and sea, with rickety signs on their doors. There were villages by the lagoon, but much of the island was beautiful, untouched wilderness, never before been explored, never been built on.
By the lagoon’s northern edge, not too far from the coast and the town, lay a village called Cripsan. It was built around a group of magnificent cocoa trees, and consisted of straw-roofed huts with little vegetable gardens around back, a well-tramped field outside the cocoa trees with a white wooden pavilion, and a large house set well back among the trees, where the ruler of the village had lived with his daughter. The huts were abandoned, and parts of it were burnt, like some of the huts and gardens. And if you were to look closely at the trees, you would notice the frayed ropes wound tightly around each one of their trunks, and the other ropes dangling from those. The cocoa trees were like prisoners, bound tightly to each other and to the ground. It had been only a year since this had been a busily inhabited village, and Tyrai Srensika had sat in a cocoa tree, one of the smaller ones that didn’t yet have a rope, and read.

“Tyr-aaaaaai!” A loud voice broke her thoughts from the book and back to reality. The voice was undoubtedly Thaki’s. Thaki lived in the village, and when he wasn’t being forced to pick bananas or some such thing, he spent most of his time chasing Tyrai, with a horde of followers. Although Tyrai was the daughter of the hard schichi (a word that literally means bossy) she had a quiet nature and was often absorbed in books, and the village boys knew that she would never tell her father anything that was done to her. So their frustrations were taken out on Tyrai, and Thaki was the ringleader. Now they had caught her up a tree and they knew she would have to come down sometime. Thaki tossed a stick up the tree, which Tyrai ducked, sighing. She had thought the village boys and girls thought her too soft and ladylike to climb a tree, and that they wouldn’t possibly look there. She had been wrong.
She slipped her book into the leather bag which she carried over her shoulder, and walked along an outstretched bough. The villagers followed her on the ground as she balanced above them precariously, not sure what she had planned. In fact, there was no plan, right then. But as she got to the edge of where the branch would support her slender form, she saw one of the ropes that the villagers climbed when they picked cocoa beans. Some of them were now climbing the tree. She had a choice: be pushed violently off or jump. She took a leap and caught the rope in one hand as she flew past it. Then she dropped down and ran for it. Her way was running and hiding, avoiding any confrontations. Her shyness was often mistaken for arrogance. Because of this, Tyrai hadn’t had a friend among the villagers since she was little more than a baby, and these were the people she was around most of the time. Even when she journeyed away and met girls whose fathers were the rulers of other villages, even whole islands (for she lived in a chain of Islands), she was too shy to become great friends with them. So it was a solitary life she led, just her and her books and journals.
She had long legs, and although her father would have strongly disapproved of a lady running like that, she was fast and escaped Thaki and his cohorts fairly quickly. They had done similar things so often that all she felt was disappointment in that tomorrow she would have to find a new place to hide.
It was the next morning before dawn, at the time when the sky is lightening but the sun is not yet visible, that Tyrai found the tree house. It was relatively far from the village and looked like it had been forgotten since before she was born, sixteen years ago. Fallen leaves were thick on the roof, and the inside was caked in dirt. It was made of wood that was beginning to fall apart in some places, but it had once been sturdy.
Tyrai left the tree house to inspect it more carefully from the outside. It was almost invisible from the ground, and she had found it only by chance when she was looking for a good climbing tree. It did, in fact, seem built for the purpose of not being seen. It used the branches for walls whenever possible, and it was covered in leaves; so from the outside, it looked simply like a large clump of leafy branches. Climbing back in and examining the wood that the place was built of, she found a curious inscription on one of the wallboards: SR + E. She wondered who they were, and hoped that they had left the place long ago. She wanted it for herself, and it seemed as if it was. The only voices to be heard were the wind in the trees and the call of the birds, a chorus of tweets! and chirrups! She leaned back against the wall and took out her book. She felt that at last she had found a place all her own, and she tried to put the inscription out of her mind, because it implied that the tree house was not hers alone, that it was someone else’s as well, and she didn’t like that. Tyrai was not mean by nature, nor unwilling to share her things; she only had not gotten a good idea of other people from those she had met. She was happiest alone, with only the birds and the trees and books. Books were her hope that one day she would live the sort of life that the characters lived. But in her heart she knew that those dreams were only fairytale dreams, the sort that never came true in real life. And still she read.
A loud tweet outside distracted her, and she looked with alarm at the sun, high in the sky. She had been there all morning, and her father would want her back. She clambered down the tree, taking care not to mess up her clothing because, according to her father, a lady was not supposed to climb trees. Then she ran back to the village center, where the villagers were coming off the ropes for their short lunch break. Glancing over at them, she saw Thaki with some girl’s head in his lap, bragging loudly and levitating a banana. Out of all the village teenagers, Thaki was the only one with magic, and although it was petty magic (why would you really want to levitate a banana?) and he wasn’t very trained (usually the levitated bananas ended up catching fire), people admired him for it. She recognized the girl as Mala, one of Thaki’s most annoyingly admiring sidekicks.
Tyrai approached her house, a white building with red trimmings that wasn’t huge, but looked out of place on the small hill overlooking the run-down huts of the villagers. Palm trees swayed on either side, and a stone path led up to the front door, which Tyrai opened. The first words out of her father’s mouth when he saw her were, “Do you ever think about how lucky you are?”
Tyrai instantly prepared to hear anything. A comment about how lucky she was usually preceded an announcement of something that her father considered a treat, but she considered the opposite. Sika was predictable, agonizingly so.
“Now, someone is coming to stay with us, someone I think you’ll like, but you must seriously improve your behavior if you want them to like you back.” He talked as if he was talking to a child who had just taken too much candy.
Tyrai tried her best to look the picture of innocence. “Improve my behavior?”
“I saw you on a rope yesterday.” Tyrai remembered the brief time she had been swinging on a rope to evade Thaki.
“What’s wrong with that?” she said, although she knew very well.
“You know how many accidents there are on those ropes, Tyrai. They wear out, they snap, the branches break, the harness breaks. All with one result. You fall. Most likely you die.”
“You send the villagers up there.”
“It’s different. They’re replaceable. Disposable. You are not. Never go up there again.” He was ridiculous.
“Anyway, Tyrai, what I was going to tell you originally. In two weeks, Lord Padrak of Rikol and his son Dainon of Rikol will be coming to stay.”
Each word thudded into Tyrai like an arrow. Padrak was the ruler of the Island, as in Sika’s boss, and Sika’s cousin. She had never seen Dainon, but Padrak had come to stay twice before. On the first occasion Tyrai, a less reserved six-year-old, had called Padrak a “big ugly toucan.” She had just seen one of the birds for the first time, and the bright colors of Padrak’s shirt had reminded her of it. The second time, Padrak had put a spell on the eleven-year-old Tyrai so she couldn’t speak at all for the week-long visit. It was Tyrai’s opinion that the higher one was in the nobility of the Islands, the more obnoxious they were. She would hate to meet the Emperor, or his daughter.
Sika continued to spout bad news like a fountain spouting water. “While Padrak and Dainon are here, Dainon will be staying in your room, and you will sleep in the attic.” To Tyrai’s outraged expression, Sika continued, “A week only, Tyrai. You will do it with no complaints, either. You will be a proper young lady while they are here, or you do not deserve to be in my house with these fine people. You will be cast out and you will seek lodging with the peasants. Understand me!”
Tyrai nodded and tried to escape out the door.
“Not so fast! I know your tricks. Surely you want to know what being a proper lady entails, as judging from your current behavior, you have no idea. You will wear something appropriate, and don’t climb any of those confounded trees and ropes. You will not disappear into the woods for hours at a time. You will speak with proper manners…” Tyrai’s thoughts drifted away as Sika continued to recite rules. But something brought her back abruptly. “--- Dainon is a nice boy. Very nice. Handsome too. Wouldn’t you be thrilled to be the next lady of the Island? He’s coming here for the purpose of meeting you. We’re not like some who force marriage on people you’ve never met. You two will get some time to get to know each other, and then Lord Padrak and I will make arrangements. He’s a very nice boy. You’ll like him.”
Tyrai just gaped at him. Marriage? Lady of the Island? Padrak’s son? Her distant cousin, most probably? It was all too ridiculous. She couldn’t marry Padrak’s son. She couldn’t have anything to do with Padrak. As she finally escaped from the room, she decided that she would try to appear as undesirable as possible so Padrak would refuse to let her be part of the family. Her father would be furious, but it was better than a life as Padrak’s daughter.
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Tyrai woke before dawn again, before the villagers were even preparing to start work, and went to the tree house. It was too early for the scorching summer heat that enveloped the Island, and the morning was pleasant as she set about making the tree house her own place, rewriting its history. Fallen flower petals in all colors were strewn about the floor, and paintings of the ocean taken from her room were hung on the walls. Over the inscription, she placed a huge, multicolored leaf from a tropical plant. The outside she couldn’t decorate, to preserve the tree house’s camouflage, but she added new leaves to the outside to make it even more hidden. Leafy vines were tied together to make a door hanging that obscured the opening completely. She climbed up and down a few times, inspecting it from every angle. Then she carried up a huge pile of palm leaves and stuffed them in a corner to make a seat. She sat down and opened her book. It was something written by a mainlander that she had gotten in town. It was precisely the sort of thing that her father hated for its “radical ideas.”

“Srensika!” Tyrai’s heart sank. How had Thaki found her hiding place already?
“What do you want?”
“Where’s your door?”
“Find it yourself,” Tyrai snapped. “How’dya find this place at all? You’re not supposed to be here, are you?”
“I... know.... things,” said Thaki slowly, apparently thinking he sounded like one of the people who sat in the square of Shipperton and pretended to be able to see the future. He poked his head and then the rest of his body through the door. “Wow. You really fixed this place up. Don’t worry. It’s our little secret.”
Tyrai had no idea why Thaki was acting so strange, nice, even. “What do you want?” she repeated.
“To find this tree house.”
“You knew about it?”
“Uh huh.”
“How?”
“Figure it out yourself. Anyway, I came to find the tree house, but it’s a surprise to find you. Not quite a pleasant surprise, but” he said, turning the book over so the letters were upside down, then right-side up, then sideways ----“I have a question for you.”
“What?”
“What d’the words say?” Tyrai and Sika were the only people in the village who could read.
“There’s a lot of words, Thaki.”
“All right, what do some of them say?”
“Well, it’s about a boy who runs away from a village and tries to find the college of magic.”
“I’d like to do that.”
“What, run away, or go to the college of magic?”
“Those things, too, but I meant reading and writing.”
When Tyrai said nothing, Thaki continued.
“You teach me how to read and write, I’ll stop chasing you, and I’ll tell the rest to stop too. They do everything I say.”
This seemed an unusual thing for Thaki to want, since he got so much pleasure out of being nasty to Tyrai, and didn’t seem the sort to want to be sitting down looking at pages. “Why do you want to learn?”
“Because they don’t want me to learn. The nobles, that is. Lord Padrak and all. Your father. So I figure there must be some reason, and I don’t think you’re like them. I think you’d do it. Especially if something’s in it for you. I want to know the secret. I’m right. You’ll do it, yes?” Thaki fixed her with a stare that said clearly, If you say no, you’re as bad as they are.
Tyrai weighed the possibilities. She decided that there could be nothing wrong with teaching Thaki, and then there was the added bonus of not having to constantly run away and hide, if he kept his end of the bargain.
“Yes, I’ll do it. But you’ll keep your word, or I’ll tell my father everything you’ve done to me in your life.”
“Nah, you won’t, but I wouldn’t lie to you. Jus’ you nobles lie.”
Tyrai ignored that.“First lesson starts now.” She wrote an A on a piece of parchment, and made Thaki copy her.
----------------
Every day from then on, under cover of starry night, Thaki and Tyrai would meet in the tree house and have lessons. Thaki was a good student, and he kept to his word. Tyrai was not bothered by him or the others. During the lessons Tyrai learned a little of Thaki’s past, including that the little magic that he knew he had learned from a woman named Farrai. Farrai and Thaki were the only people in the village with magical talents. Thaki lived in one room with his parents and two younger brothers, Yaka and Darsi. Thaki was by far the oldest at seventeen, Yaka being about ten and Darsi about eight. Thaki had had a different father from his two brothers, his father having disappeared mysteriously in the night after it was heard that he insulted Padrak. She heard about the things the villagers had endured under Sika and Padrak, and he said that some of the people had hope that Tyrai would be a better schichi.
“I don’t think I’ll be a schichi at all,” said Tyrai on that occasion, “not if I can avoid it.”
Thaki’s voice took on a coldness then, and he said, “Oh, right. You’re marrying Padrak’s son and going on to bigger and better things.”
“That is something I will certainly be avoiding.”
“What aren’t you avoiding?”
“I’m going to run away and go to the City.” Tyrai knew it sounded like a child’s dream, like something a young girl throwing a tantrum would say with their hands on their hips to anger their parents. But Tyrai had held on to this idea ever since she could form the words, and never thought it was stupid. She thought that someday she would do it, but the time kept moving away from her. When she was six, she had figured to do it when she was a “big-girl” of eight. When she was nine, she thought she would do it when she was twelve. Now she was sixteen and still in the village.

The agreement with Thaki had measurably improved Tyrai’s life, but there were some among the villagers who insisted on being an annoyance. The worst of these was Mala. She followed Thaki everywhere, and Tyrai thought that if she were Thaki she would have been immensely aggravated, but Thaki wasn’t. Tyrai realized this for the first time when he told her that Mala was his girlfriend, and not to insult her in front of him. It was the most awkward moment since the lessons started, and Tyrai quickly went back to reading. Thaki was now reading and writing all the letters and a few small words.
Then there was the impending arrival of Padrak and Dainon. When the dawn of their invasion came, two maids, Charla and Paniah burst into Tyrai’s room. Charla was older, tidy and serious, but Paniah was the same age as Tyrai, and she could have been beautiful, but for the scars that marked her face in many places. They assailed her immediately, ripping off her favorite clothes and plunging her into scalding water, yanking at her long hair with a wooden comb and arranging it into a series of twists on the top of her head. Charla whipped out a blue sleeveless dress with ruffles (that is, even more ruffles than what Tyrai usually had to wear) that Paniah pulled insanely tightly around her waist and back so that she could only breathe very shallowly. Her feet were stuffed into silvery shoes two sizes too small with uncomfortable heels. A diamond necklace and a matching bracelet went forcibly on. Charla clucked about how dark she was from the sun and Paniah tried to yank the corset yet tighter. At the end of it all, they brought out a full-length mirror, bordered in spirals of gold. “Now aren’t you lovely, Lady!” Charla gushed. Tyrai looked obediently into it, and saw someone else. That someone else was reasonably pretty, she had to admit. But it wasn’t her. Definitely not. Paniah looked at her strangely for a moment, and then left. Tyrai remembered Paniah as a little girl. They had been friends.

“Come on, Paniah!” Tyrai was an excited five-year-old, jumping up and down in a white lacy little dress.
“Do you really think we’re allowed?” said Paniah softly.
“Of course. It’s fun!” Tyrai pulled open the huge door to her father’s house, beckoning Paniah in. She looked around at the high ceiling and the spiral staircase that Tyrai ran up every single day. “Follow me!” Tyrai ran up the staircase.
“I don’t think we should, Tyrai.” But Paniah followed, all the way to the top, on the third floor. It was a very long way down.
“Do you want to go first?” said Tyrai.
“No, that’s okay. You go.”
With no further hesitation, Tyrai leaped onto the wooden banister, pushed off, and began to spiral down. Paniah was not too far behind. Tyrai threw her arms up and screamed with little-kid delight. Faster and faster... Suddenly a vase on a stand was directly in the path of Tyrai’s sandaled foot. She put it on the banister and skidded to a stop. If something broke, she would be in trouble for sure. Paniah screamed behind her, and suddenly they collided. Tyrai went off the edge, hanging on desperately to the golden beams under the banister and screaming. It wasn’t all that far down anymore, but to a five-year-old child, it looked like an eternity. Paniah leaped off the banister and looked at Tyrai, tried to grab her hands and pull her up. Her back banged against the stand with the vase, and pieces of china went flying as if in slow motion, along with tulips and water, splashing on the red carpet. Paniah screamed again as Tyrai disappeared over the edge. However, she was running up the stairs again in no time at all.
“That was an adventure,” she said. And then she heard footsteps. Sika’s footsteps. He looked at the shattered vase, then at Tyrai, and at Paniah. He picked up shards of pottery in his gloved hands and hurled them suddenly at Paniah’s face. She fell down, crying.
“Never... come... into... my... house!” Sika yelled, throwing a shard with each word. Then Tyrai attacked, punching her father with childish fury.
“Stop it!” she sobbed. “You’re not my daddy! You’re a monster! Go away! You’re not my daddy!” Paniah ran, still screaming, out the door.
Sika grabbed her wrists.
“I am your father, Tyrai Srensika, and I told you not to let your little friends in here. In fact, this is the last time that Paniah is your little friend. You may never play with her or the others again. They’re not like us.”
“Paniah’s my friend and you’re a monster!”
“Do you want some of what she got?” yelled Sika, holding more pottery pieces in his fist.
“Go away!”
Sika did, walking through the door to his room and locking it while Tyrai sobbed in the hallway. The servant who came to clean up the vase was an old man who said to Tyrai before taking her upstairs, “Your daddy is a monster, Lady Tyrai.” He looked at her with haunted eyes. In a week or so he mysteriously disappeared. Such things tended to happen to people who said things like he did.
Tyrai’s father then walked into her bedroom after the two maids had left. He walked in and was silent for a moment as he looked her up and down. It seemed to her that he knew what she had been thinking about.
“I trust you will act as beautiful as you look,” he said firmly. It wasn’t a question.
“Yes, Father.”
“And you will move out of this room now so that the maids can prepare it for Dainon.”
“Yes, Father.”
“Good girl. Don’t climb trees.”
“Yes, Father,” said Tyrai for the third time, and went to go climb a tree. She was late to meet Thaki.
He was already there, waiting and looking at Tyrai’s interior decorations. When she walked in, he looked stunned for a moment, then said, “You’re really trying to impress Lord Padrak, aren’t you?”
“Nah,” Tyrai said. “All my father’s idea. How do I look?”
“You look… like Lady Tyrai Srensika of Rikol,” he said, in a weird tone of voice Tyrai had never heard from him before. “I mean, you look great. But it reminds me of how totally different you are from me and, uh, Mala, for example.”
Mala again. Tyrai had the sudden urge to do something violent toward her, which was strange, because it was very unusual for Tyrai to want to do anything violent. Thaki must have seen some of her thoughts on her face, because he said, “I know she’s kind of mean to you, but she does have a good reason to hate nobles. We all do.”
“Let’s start the lesson,” Tyrai said abruptly. She extracted the handmade book of scraps of parchment used for Thaki’s lessons from her bag, and a book. Thaki had already mastered the basics of reading, and now Tyrai was stealing him books from her father’s library. She was teaching him everything that her tutors had taught her, but unlike Tyrai, who had regarded learning history and such as a chore, Thaki took it as an opportunity.
Tyrai was so absorbed in the teaching that she did not sense someone striding through the rainforest until they were caught up in a whirl of magic and swept out of the hidden door and went splashing into the mud below.
“Not my best spell, but rather good, I think,” said a voice Tyrai had not wanted to hear ever again in her life. It was silky, slippery, with no hint of anger. That was what was so unnerving about Padrak. He knew that he could order almost anyone beheaded without screaming and ranting. “The final splash in the mud was particularly entertaining. And I did not predict the additional bonus of a peasant boy. Tell me, boy, why ever would you think you have a chance at love with Tyrai Srensika.”
“I’m not---”
“He’s not---” Her outrage at Padrak was briefly set aside by shock at the idea of marrying Thaki. He was, after all, until this week, someone she hated. Besides, he could have any other girl in the village he wanted. And he had already chosen his girl. He was probably kissing Mala by the lagoon at twilight, or something romantic like that which Tyrai had never really experienced, only read about in books. The idea of them falling in love was absurd.
“Well, if you aren’t young lovers, what are you doing here?”
“She’s, uh, she’s teaching me---” Thaki’s bold manner was gone, replaced by fear of what Padrak might do. Padrak had murdered Mala’s older brother and Farrai’s younger sister Ennai brutally without even telling the reason. Ennai was the most mysterious. She had actually disappeared for half a year. Then the village had woken up one morning to see her body on one of the ropes.
“How to read,” said Tyrai coldly.
Padrak’s lip curled in anger. “Then you, Tyrai Srensika, are wasting your time. These peasants could no more learn to read than could the mud on your dress. You, boy, go back to the bananas. All you’re good for. I will notify the schichi of your skipping work. Tyrai, you will meet me at sundown by the ropes. Look presentable.”
Padrak then departed, and Thaki said, “Ughh. I didn’t know he was here…”
“He is. How did he know of the tree house, though? How did you know of it, by the way?”
“I just found it.” Thaki was obviously hiding something.
“No, you knew of it before.”
“And what if I did?”
“Then you should tell me how.”
“I knew what it was used for originally.”
“And what was that?”
“There is nothing in our deal that says I have to tell you my secrets. We should go.”
They went their separate ways then, many thoughts swarming their minds. Thaki was wondering about Tyrai, whether she had seen the “reading lessons” as an excuse to be alone with him. He realized that he knew the schichi’s daughter very little, or her motives, which had seemed so innocent at first, just not wanting to be picked on. Tyrai was thinking again about the letters on the wall, and who could possibly have built the tree house. It was so strange, though, the letters. Tyrai knew that only her family and now Thaki could write.
She looked down at herself and saw that the efforts of Charla and Paniah were completely wasted after the dumping in the mud. She would somehow have to get past her father into the house and change. Luck was with her for just about the first time that day, because Sika was out, riding with Padrak and Dainon. She got into the tan-colored dress she had been wearing earlier, combed out her hair, and put it in a loose bun. She knew her father would be furious at the lack of ball gown, but as Padrak would be telling him all about hiding in a tree house with a peasant boy, good clothing did not much matter. He would be furious whatever she was wearing.
Sure enough, when Sika came back from riding, he stomped into the house in his black leather boots and quickly rounded on Tyrai, sitting in the attic.
“You--- you---you!” was all he could gasp out at first, but then the shouting started. It was clear that Padrak and Sika combined had blown the story way out of proportion, as angry people did, because this is what Sika screamed at Tyrai:
“LORD PADRAK JUST TOLD ME WHILE WE WERE RIDING THAT YOU WERE HIDING IN SOME TREE HOUSE IN THE WOODS KISSING SOME BOY FROM THE VILLAGE!” Sika did not have the self-control of Padrak.
“Me, kissing, some boy?” said Tyrai. Where had he got the kissing?
“LORD PADRAK ASKED YOU TO COME DOWN BUT YOU REFUSED SO HE HAD TO BRING YOU DOWN BY MAGIC!”
“Noo…”
“DO YOU HAVE NO RESPECT FOR YOUR SUPERIORS? HAVE I TAUGHT YOU NOTHING?”
Tyrai looked at him blankly, waiting for the storm to end.
“HE SAYS YOU ARE TO MEET HIM AT SUNDOWN. I HOPE HE BEATS A LESSON INTO YOU!” Sika stormed off in a huff into his room, like a little boy after a tantrum, and Tyrai escaped from the house for a few last moments of sanity before she had to face Padrak.