Heartseeker

  G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS

  an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  375 Hudson Street

  New York, NY 10014

  Copyright © 2018 by Melinda Beatty.

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  G. P. Putnam’s Sons is a registered trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Ebook ISBN: 9781524740016

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Beatty, Melinda, author.

  Title: Heartseeker / Melinda Beatty.

  Description: New York, NY : G. P. Putnam’s Sons Books for Young Readers, 2018.

  Summary: “When the King hears that Only Fallow can see lies and only tells the truth, he summons her, and she must learn to navigate the dangerous, political world of the King’s court” —Provided by publisher.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017041588 | ISBN 9781524740009 (hardback)

  Subjects: | CYAC: Fantasy. | Courts and courtiers—Fiction. | Kings, queens, rulers, etc.—Fiction. | Ability—Fiction. | Honesty—Fiction. | BISAC: JUVENILE FICTION / Fantasy & Magic. | JUVENILE FICTION / Action & Adventure / General. | JUVENILE FICTION / Royalty.

  Classification: LCC PZ7.1.B4342 He 2018 | DDC [Fic]—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017041588

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Jacket Art © 2018 by Vivienne To

  Jacket Design by Jessica Jenkins

  Version_1

  To the ladies who Order me around—I love you all to Manayunk and back.

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Acknowledgments

  1

  Call out, call out, you loud jays, you honey-throated sparrows!

  Sing out the summer as it pours into the valleys,

  Into the Hush, the Rill, the Lannock, and the Blue.

  Cry warmth for the Sandkin plains,

  For the Mollier vines.

  Lift up your voices for gentle Dorvan tides

  And cool Folque stone.

  You sons and daughters of Orstral,

  Join the chorus of the coming of the long light!

  —Jylla Burris, poet, Songs of Orstral

  Lies are beautiful.

  But when we’re small, “You mustn’t lie” is near the first thing we’re taught. I didn’t understand Mama’s and Papa’s serious faces when they finger-wagged my brothers and said that lying about wrongdoing was even worse than doing the wrong itself. But then, no stern looks ever passed my way on the subject—of lies, that is. I knew from little that lies carried their own punishment and their own reward. Mama could always count on me to answer questions like “Who tracked in all this mud?” or “Who broke the leg off the best dinner chair?” It wasn’t that I wanted to tell her, but the truth always seemed to pour out before I could even think about fudging the story. Besides, saying anything other than the truth always ended with a dull thump behind my eyes. Not everyone could gasp like I could over the twinkling sparks or the colors that ringed bright halos round the liar, making the lie itself prettier than a summer sunset over the orchard. But I’d have given it all up in order to be able to tell one of my own.

  I wasn’t sure it was natural. The rector at sanctuary had always made plain his thoughts about unnaturalness. “Mother All sees you,” he’d intone from the lectern, “and knows your heart. Seek out those things that are contrary to Her laws and push them far from you, lest you be corrupted by them.” I knew well enough what corruption was. It was a blemish on the apple—the brown, mushy blight under the skin that spreads, making the fruit fit for nothing. So I kept my secret close, buried under my own skin, like the seeds at the apple’s heart. But as my non says, “Seeds ain’t ever content to stay seeds. Seeds grow roots to take what they need from the dirt so they can see the sunlight.”

  When I’d just about seen seven harvests, Jonquin came in from the orchard bruised, bloody, and covered in earth and the stink of rotten fruit. Mama was at the stove, apron still wrapped round the brown day dress that she wore at the bakery. My brother’s entrance surprised her so much that she dropped the ladle into the soup. It was usually Ether who could be counted upon to wander in covered in Mother knows what. But Jon—the Jon me and Ether got told we needed to be more like—wasn’t one to come to dinner in such a state.

  “What in the name of All happened to you?”

  “Was climbing,” he muttered, swallowing his words as if they’d had a bitter taste. “Fell out of Grandfather.”

  Ether was warned half a hundred times before breakfast not to venture too high into the tallest tree in the orchard, but long-legged Jon, who was thirteen and sure-footed as a squirrel, wouldn’t be so clumsy. I couldn’t help wondering what he was hiding with his eyes cast straight down to the floor.

  A lapis-blue shimmer rippled around him, like the haze of a hot summer’s day across an empty field. Ether told whoppers so often, he shone like a blacksmith’s forge. He hadn’t even got any shame left about it. But Jon did. And, oh, wasn’t it lovely? I was so taken, I laughed out loud, dropping the pea pod I was shucking back into the basket between my knees. “Tell us another, Jon!”

  Both my mother’s and brother’s head turned sharpish at me. They didn’t half look alike, framed by the same ashen hair and peering with the same blue-gray eyes, though Mama’s face was beset with puzzlement while Jon’s was near murderous. I bit my tongue inside my mouth, trying to punish it for flapping when it should have been still. I wished I could’ve shrunk down to the size of a pea and dropped right into my own basket.

  Mama gave him the hard eye, and her hands bunched on her hips in two tight circles. “Jonquin Fallow, have you been brawling? You think I don’t know what it looks like when a boy falls out of a tree?” She caught him by the jaw, turning his face toward the kitchen window, revealing several fist-sized bruises on his cheek. “I’d expect this sort of nonsense from your brother, not you!”

  Jon opened his mouth as if he was going to deny the whole thing, t
hen thought better of it.

  “It won’t happen again,” he growled, wiping a smear of bloody dirt from the corner of his mouth. Blue flared out from behind him, daring me to look.

  “Who was it?” Mama pressed.

  Jon pressed his lips together, firm and thin, but his stubborn was no match for Mama’s. “Lutha and Mandrake Bonniway,” he answered at last.

  “Those nasty whelps ain’t no concern of yours. You go letting your pride get bigger than your sense, and a beating’ll be the least of your worries.” Mama picked a few bits of twig from his unruly hair, her face gentler now. “You’re better than that, Jon.”

  My brother’s face screwed up, and he cast his eyes at the floor, wrestling with shame.

  Mama’s nose wrinkled. “Ach, you smell like the bottom of the cider press. Go clean yourself up for dinner. We’ll speak on this later.”

  Jon’s shoulders, too narrow to be a man’s but too broad to be a boy’s, slumped in relief at having been dismissed to the washroom. The washroom was new—a spoil of our recent fortune.

  It was only a bit of good luck that the Bird in’th Hand tavern had started selling Papa’s Scrump—a strong, smooth cider—when the Master Brewer of Bellskeep came through on his way to Mollier’s Hold in the south. He made a great fuss over it, took four barrels back with him, and, not three months later, returned with a royal warrant to supply the palace. Pasture that had been wild last season was now mown and either lined with new apple tree cuttings or purple with new lavender, which gave the Scrump its color and flavor.

  But with the new coin came new troubles.

  Having water that came into the house was a blessing to our backs, which got bent hauling bucket after bucket in from the well, but it didn’t do much to wash away the envy of our hallsmates. Presston was a simple place with simple folk—we all got on pretty much the same. When the warrant came, Mama and Papa urgently schooled us on modesty about our recent wealth. They knew what was coming, though it was a nasty surprise for me, Ether, and Jon. We never spoke a word about the washroom, the feather beds, or the clothes that weren’t threadbare anymore, but we didn’t have to. Everyone in town already knew.

  For Jon and Ether, it was nothing short of a joy to have a wealth of fawning new friends. But, unlucky for me, I could see through the compliments not meant, the invitations given just ’cause of our coin. I began to prefer my own company to the false fondness of my hallsmates. They thought me proud or vain, but small as I was, being avoided felt better than lied to.

  Then came the whispers that weren’t really meant to be quiet. The shoves in the play yard that were harder than they needed be. It all told me one thing—they thought I was too big for my britches.

  I snuck a peek at Mama, who was looking toward the washroom. I wondered if maybe I could make an escape and dodge any uncomfortable questions, but all too quick, she turned her eye on me. I froze like a rabbit faced with a hound.

  “And you, little miss,” she said sternly. “If you come across your brother tussling with those boys in the orchard again, I expect to be told straightaway, are we clear?”

  She thinks I saw it, I realized. “Yes’m,” I said quickly.

  She turned back to the stove, muttering her frustrations under the bubbling of the pots. I slid from my chair, put the basket on the floor, and crept into the stone room with its giant copper basins. Jon stood with his back to me, waiting for one to fill, but already he was hard at work, scrubbing his ears with a wet cloth. Blood from a cut on his temple clotted in his sandy hair. “Go away, Only.”

  I sat on the wooden stool that Papa had made so I could reach the washing basin. From there, I could see the bruise darkening on one of his cheekbones. “What’d Lutha and Drake do this time?”

  A hard look came over my brother’s dirty face. “They think they can just steal from us like it’s nothing, but they’d never have done it before King Alphonse and his warrant. Lutha said we have fruit to spare now that we’re rich.”

  “We ain’t rich!” I exclaimed. The words were familiar—it felt like I didn’t go one day at halls without someone raising my dander with a taunt of “cat that got the cream” or “jinglepockets.”

  Jon didn’t look at me as he held the cool cloth to the bruise. “Well, you know that and I know that, but all anyone else knows is that Father makes Scrump for the king now, so we must be. And that means we got ideas above our station.”

  I thought for a moment. “Why did you lie to Mama? About falling out of Grandfather?”

  “And that’s another thing,” he hissed, moving closer to my face. “Why would you fink me out like that? Where were you hiding? Up a tree?”

  My heart sank. I never could bear his displeasure—not my Jon. If I couldn’t tell him, who could I tell? “I wasn’t there, Jon, honest. It was just so . . . pretty.”

  “What do you mean, ‘pretty’? What was pretty?”

  “The lie you told. I could see it. Like a shimmer of blue, all round you.”

  His face twisted in confusion. “Only, you can’t see a lie.”

  “But I did, I did see it!” I protested. “Tell another one and I’ll prove it!”

  “Don’t be stupid,” Jon grumbled, stripping off his dirty tunic. “Just leave me alone so I can wash.”

  Mama was right. The rotted fruit flesh that was starting to dry on his clothes smelled to high All. “If you didn’t fall out of Grandfather, how . . . ?”

  “They pelted me with rotten apples from the ground after I lost the fight.” My brother hung his head. “Just get out, all right?”

  Tears stinging my eyes, I slunk out the door feeling mad for Jon, who didn’t deserve to be abused by the neighborhood boys, as well as at him for not believing me.

  Peeved, I stomped out of the washroom only to run straight into Non.

  Non’s steady hands had brought me into the world and showed me the working of it. They taught me how to hold a knife, a spoon, and an apple peeler. They soothed my skinned knees and other small hurts with balms she made from the herb garden.

  Everyone in town knew that Non was the one to go to for wisdom that’d bring peace to a troubled mind or an upset stomach. There was scarcely a soul in town that hadn’t had some help from her healing hands—hands that now gripped my shoulders while her twinkling, crinkled eyes fixed on me like she’d never seen me before.

  “It’s a bad habit, mind,” she began, her voice hushed, “but I couldn’t help but sneak a listen at what you were jawing about with our Jon.”

  I crossed my arms in a temper. “Jon was just trying to stick up for the orchard. Those Bonniways deserved anything they got.”

  “Psht,” Non snorted, waving her hand. “Boys’ll always use their fists when they ought to use their words instead. What interests me more,” she said, bringing her wrinkled face close to mine, “is what you had to say about lies.”

  Non shuffled me through the kitchen and toward the stable door that led to the garden. Mama turned her head as we passed. “Mam, where are you going with Only? I aim to put food on the table soon.”

  “Won’t take but a minute, lovey,” Non replied, giving my mother a gentle smile. “’Tain’t nothing important, just pulling rosemary to go with the stew.”

  The same blue shimmer that had covered Jon shot faintly round Non, but her soft eyes turned to me, sharp and gray with warning. I heard my mother’s voice exclaiming, “I’ve got plenty rosemary, Mam!” as Non hurried me out into the twilight.

  The air was heavy with the scent of damp good earth and late-summer lavender. The faint sound of a fiddle drifted up the hill, along with bits of laughter and song. It was the first year Papa was to have the help of the Ordish with the harvest, and my heart was powerful curious. I’d seen the river folk’s barges pass by before, but it was another thing to have them just at the bottom of the hill with all their strange ways and little magics that coul
d fool the eye or move the elements.

  Non twigged the shine in my eyes. “Sounds lively, don’t it? They’re good folk, the Ordish. And they’re hard workers, too.”

  “Papa says we’re not to go near,” I groused. There’s nothing like being told not to do a thing to make you want to do it something fierce, but neither me, Ether, nor Jon wanted to be the whelp to have to clean the mash from the presses at the end of the season as part of our correction.

  “And you must mind your papa,” Non declared. “It takes a while to know the hearts of strangers. But I reckon we’ll find them nowt too different from ours.” She chucked me under the chin. “And it’s matters of the heart we come out here to jaw on.”

  We walked toward the small plot a little ways from the house where she grew her herbs. I knew well enough never to pluck anything from the soil without Non watching, as not everything there was friendly. Black currant grew next to nightberry, mint next to snakewort, and summer lemon next to daggeroot. It wouldn’t take much to make a terrible, sickening mistake. Non took a deep breath of the fragrant air as she sat on the stone bench beside the laurel bush and patted the empty space beside her.

  “You know, Pip,” she said after a moment, “you know that you’re a good girl, don’t you?”

  I nodded. “Yes, Non.”

  She yanked a small sprig of rosemary and crushed it between her fingers. The savory smell made me think of the thick, delicious stew on the stove. My stomach grumbled, and I couldn’t help but wonder why were we out here instead of sitting round the table.

  “Your papa built that,” she said finally, pointing at the handsome stone wall.

  “I remember, Non. It was just this spring.”

  She chuckled and tapped the side of her head. “You think old Non’s had a funny turn, I reckon, but I know what I’m about. What I’m trying to tell you is that lies are a bit like walls.” Non pointed to the end of the garden. “What’s on the other side of that one?”

  Surely even Non wasn’t so forgetful. “The lavender fields,” I answered, puzzled.

  “Good girl. How do you know?”