The Dreaming Mark and the Vessel of Fools

A convenient cover story

If you plan on staying with us that long, Wagonmaster Bren had told her, you'll need to find a way to earn your keep. We can scarcely afford more idle mouths here. It had made enough sense to Lynia coming from him, but he had been distressingly vague about exactly how a runaway princess was to be useful to a caravan of merchants and performers. Try asking three wagons back, was all he'd said.

Using the heirloom staff as her walking stick again - Lynia did not yet trust her legs, after a few solid days laid up in the cot - she trudged through the sands for the handful of feet it took. The door to this wagon had no window, not even a shuttered one, and was decked with a sign that read, "Please knock!!!"; each successive exclamation point looked as if it were added a while after the previous one, perhaps in the wake of repeat intrusions. Lynia tapped at the door with the head of her staff.

"Yes?" came a stern-sounding but feminine voice. "Someone need us already?"

"I... suppose?" Lynia called back. "The Wagonmaster sent me, said I could be of help."

The voice inside lowered to a murmur, and sounded as if it were discussing things with somebody else who was even less audible. But a moment later, the door opened a bit, and the sharp gaze of a pair of shadowed, made-up eyes peered at Lynia through the gap. Lynia raised a hand in greeting, but the eyes looked away, towards the rest of the wagon. The stern-sounding woman spoke to somebody else inside. "Definitely a woman. Young. Well-kept. Polite enough to knock. Think she's the one we found alone a few days ago."

A soft, faint voice from further inside replied, barely loud enough to hear through the open door. "Well don't leave her outside to bake, Jasmine."

The door opened only a little bit more, an a bangle-clad arm came through the gap, as if to help Lynia up the step and into the doorway. "Inside, then." Lynia took the hand, and allowed herself to be helped in.

She found herself inside an oddly spacious, but densely packed, dressing cart. Colorful dresses in all kinds of shapes hung from hooks and hangers on either end. A large trunk was sitting wide open, with an insert pallet holding several glimmering bracelets, necklaces, and chains, on top of an array of differently designed sandals with ornamental straps and costume jewelry. Capes and sashes were draped over the backs of short chairs.

In front of Lynia was the woman who'd helped her climb inside, a tan-skinned, purple-haired woman with a slender but toned build. At present, she wore a long slit skirt with a pink and green pattern, and a strapless top that only went down halfway as far as her navel. Off to the side, sorting through the trunk of sandals, was a somewhat more pale, lighter-haired girl in a thin, red robe that concealed most of her bodily attributes.

The tanned woman stuck her hand out again. "Jasmine," she introduced in a single word. "And she's Helena," she added, nodding towards the other girl.

Lynia ignored the hand and simply bowed towards her. "Uh... Lyssie."

Jasmine retracted the hand and shrugged. "So you're looking for ways you can help us out, then."

"If I'm going to stay with the Caravan, then, yes."

"Can't go back home? Done something to shame the family?"

Lynia swallowed a lump. "I don't think 'shame' describes it?"

"Displeased the King, then?"

"However did you come to that conclusion?" Lynia was, perhaps, trying too hard to sound innocent.

"I suppose the art of concealment is a new thing to you. It's hard to hide royal lineage."

Lynia let her head hang low. "I thought I'd been doing so well at it..."

"I wouldn't say you're bad at it," the red-robed girl interjected, having turned around on the little stool by the costume trunk. "You're just stuck with difficult circumstances. Most Cayneans' hair is lighter, golden or honey. And it's rare to see a native Caynean with skin as light as yours unless they've spent most of their life indoors."

Lynia gingerly took hold of a lock of her hair, and stared at its teal color against her pale fingers. Surely she hadn't been that sheltered...

"That's a pretty distinct shade," Jasmine responded, seizing the lock of hair between her thumb and forefinger. "Matches your eyes. Hard to mistake. Harder to hide."

"Suppose there's no point hiding my name from you, then." Lynia seized her own hair back and took a half-step away from her. "I am Lynia, princess of the kingdom of Caynea."

"And why's a Caynean royal need to hide among the caravan?" Jasmine's eyes stared sharply and seemed as if they saw straight into Lynia's mind. The sensation made Lynia quite uncomfortable.

"I need to make my way north. The King plans an invasion and I must warn anybody I can. And until I get there, I'd like to at least keep a low profile."

"Makes sense to me." Jasmine almost seemed like she'd stopped caring about the whole thing, now that it was out in the open. "Well, I've got some ideas how you could help the Caravan in the mean time, but we're gonna have to make sure you don't get found out while you're working with us. How's your dancing?"

"Well... I was supposed to have taken ballroom lessons back at the Palace, but never quite found the time..."

"I'm less interested in that kind of dancing," Jasmine almost interrupted.

Before Lynia could express her confusion or offense, Helena interjected again. "What she probably means, Miss Lynia, is probably not a form of dancing you're familiar with. Miss Jasmine is a swords-dancer."

"I might know a thing or two about that, but I confess I've never trained as one before."

"You would not need to wield a sword," Jasmine assured. "In fact, that stick you're carrying might be just the thing. How do you feel about sparring against live steel?"

She thinks about her self-defense trainer back at the palace. Raylen was the King's most trusted general, a brilliant tactician and a well-respected mentor. The King never once needed to ask him to teach Lynia to defend herself. She recalls it was his idea from the start, and Lynia went along with it, because it was preferable to more endless hours learning court manners and diplomacy. Even if it did mean that she never had time to learn to dance for whatever eligible suitor ever came her way.

"I am all for it," Lynia replied. "I hope you'll be able to keep up with me."

"Awfully presumptuous for a royal. Let's see you don't eat those words once we're on stage," Jasmine smirked. "Helena? Your turn."

Helena almost giggled; the smile on her face spoke volumes. "She's faster than you might expect in a fight. It's half the reason she draws as many tips as she does; she's so quick with a sword that she just does her training on stage. It looks so much like dancing to the common folk that they can't help but toss a coin her way."

Jasmine's face lost its energy. "Helena. We should get her something to wear now."

As Helena started digging through the trunk, Lynia looked down at the clothes she wore, a simple set of commoners' things, a slightly-too-large tunic and baggy trousers, with a hooded mantle to top it off. "What's wrong with what I'm wearing?"

"The hood," dismissed Jasmine.

"Wouldn't it conceal my face?"

"It makes you far too obvious. People who need to hide their faces don't go to festivals, let alone participate in them." Jasmine, without waiting for a sign of consent, pulled the old hooded mantle right off of Lynia's shoulders. "No, there's a better way to hide you in plain sight, and it's to dress you like a 'princess.'"

"Surely that's more obvious than the hood?"

"There's some nuance there that you aren't picking up on," Helena added, rummaging through a costume box. "We're common merchants and performers, not royalty. We wouldn't have the sort of garments you'd wear to court. But with a little cleverness, and a little creativity..." Helena withdrew as many baubles and bangles as she could find and passed the handful to Jasmine, who then showed them to Lynia.

"I wear these, typically, when I'm performing," Jasmine explained. "They're valueless; mostly bright paints and glass. They'd look like what a princess wears. Or rather, they'd look like what a commoner imagines a princess would wear."

"Wouldn't that make such a commoner think that I'm a real princess?"

"No. The point is that even a commoner would know these are fake. And if the baubles are fake, then so too would be the woman wearing them."

"So you would have me disguised as... myself?"

"To hear the Wagonmaster tell it, it's worked before."