BVC Announces Friend And… by Sherwood Smith
Friend And…
CJ’s Third Notebook
by Sherwood Smith
From storytelling to the Great Pie Fight, the M girls’ last adventures before they get punted into world affairs . . .
First written when Sherwood Smith was a teen, the series called CJ’s Notebooks feature a gang of girls around thirteen-year-old Queen Clair of Mearsies Heili. The M girls, as they come to be known, prefer their villains silly, their throwing pies gloppy, and their adventures fun. But villains don’t ask first if the girls want to be dragged into dangerous escapades, so they’ve had more than their share.
In this third notebook, the M girls indulge in storytelling between adventures with some new and old friends (and enemies). Plus, there will always be sinister encounters with the Chwahir, particularly when Clair and Jilo meet face to face at last.
And then there is the girls’ favorite, the “Great Pie Fight!”
This is the last of the home adventures before they get dragged into world affairs . . .
A novel of Sartorias-Deles, and the third of CJ’s Notebooks
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Sherwood Smith has published over forty books, one of which was an Anne Lindbergh Honor Book; she’s twice been a finalist for the Mythopoeic Fantasy Award and once a Nebula finalist. She fell in love with Chinese historical dramas and hero tales six years ago, and ever since has immersed in Asian history, literature, and language.
1: That Story
Diana took us all by surprise one night, not long after we had thoroughly de-cootie-ized the white palace to make sure no Chwahir cooties remained. The idea of villains having cooties being something I brought with me when I left Earth; the girls loved the idea all the more because cooties are invisible.
Getting rid of Chwahir cooties in the white palace consists of us walking through making ridiculous jokes, or having pocalube contests—that is, our form of cursing villains, requiring at least seven adjectives and a really good insult word at the end.
I should probably mention that this de-cootie-izing happened after Kwenz of the Shadowland Chwahir had pulled a flooey on us by taking over Mearsies Heili, as I described in the record before this one. But before his far more horrible brother, Wan-Edhe, King of Chwahirsland all the way around the world on the Sartoran continent could get here and start in with whatever his evil plan was, we got our kingdom back.
Here are the main things to remember from that mess.
One: While Kwenz attended to the magic, he let his heir, Jilo, get rid of us girls however he wanted to. Jilo decided to get in some practice in dark magic by sticking the girls under various enchantments all over the place—except for Clair. And me.
Two: I wasn’t one of Jilo’s experiments in dark magic because this mysterious villain, Rosey, or sort-of villain, who was a friend of Kwenz (that would definitely mean a villain!) had insisted that if I got stuck half a continent away, with a nice family containing a sweet girl who only thought about household things, that I would forget being a princess and take up a new life. Well, that’s sort-of villainous, in that I wasn’t tossed into the deepest dungeon in Land of the Chwahir (and they have a lot of dungeons) or even croaked.
Three: I ran away, and with the help of Clair’s cousin Puddlenose, and some pirates-turned-privateers under the direction of Captain Heraford, we sailed for home.
Four: We freed the girls, found where Clair had hidden herself under enchantment as a last protection over the kingdom, and thus we were able to break the enchantment the Chwahir were building.
Five: Kwenz and Jilo (who is Puddlenose’s age, mid-teens) had retreated to their Shadow castle beneath our city on the cloud.
Did I forget anything?
Oh yes.
Six: Or this should have been Number One: Us.
We’re a gang of girls, and we love the fact that we would get to stay a gang of girls, because in this world—Sartorias-deles—if you get to a certain spell before you reach puberty, you can stay physically a kid. It doesn’t mean you get to stay alive forever, you just don’t make the change to grownup.
Clair stopped growing at thirteen, a year or two after she became queen, and she adopted me. She gave me a new name, Cherenneh Jennet, which got shortened to CJ, and eventually she made me her left-hand splat, or sidekick, which came with a title: princess.
There are seven more girls, but either you know us already, in which case a list is boring, in fact, you’re probably already skipping this part. Or you don’t know us, in which case the names won’t mean anything and the list is still boring. So, as I launch into the next of my records, I’ll put in stuff about us one at a time.
Here’s Diana, to start.
She’s the quietest of us. She’s also the one with the most mysterious background—even more than Seshe, who also refuses to say where she came from.
Diana is tallish, with glossy dark braids, dark eyes, and deep brown skin. She’s got the longest eyelashes of the girls (Irenne actually went around peering at us once to figure that out) but she is the least interested in appearances—just as Irenne is the most.
Diana wears the same clothes as long as she can, jumping through the cleaning frame every day instead of bothering to change. I mean never. If she goes swimming, she wears her clothes, she only kicks off her shoes. Which she, like me, wears only in winter. When her duds have ripped into rags, or worn through, she will reluctantly get something else that looks pretty much the same.
She’s our expert at woodcraft, and lock picking, and she collects weapons as trophies from our adventures.
I put all that partly so you get the picture, but also so you’ll realize that of all of us, she’s the least likely to Make Announcements.
Various of the girls had made announcements since Clair adopted us. Certain ones really loved to make announcements. Diana had never done it, as far as I could remember.
So when she said, after we’d eaten tacos and cleaned up the mess, “I need to say something,” everybody stared in surprise.
Diana reddened. But she looked around, made sure she had everyone’s attention, then said, “When Jilo turned me into a lion. I could smell my way here. Even if they’d blinded me, I coulda. Because human smell trails are all round the Junky.”
“Eeeeuw,” Irenne exclaimed, hands on her hips.
Falinneh laughed. “You sayin’ we stink?” She danced around, sniffing at her own armpits and pretending to faint.
“You smell like humans. Or, sort-of human.” She eyed Falinneh and Dhana.
Nobody could argue with that: Falinneh is sort-of-human, and Dhana in her natural shape isn’t human at all.
“So I was thinking. The Chwahir don’t have forests. Not here. Not in their homeland.”
We nodded, or said various kinds of “Yep.”
Puddlenose had told us that former Chwahir kings had pretty much destroyed all the forest in their kingdom back when they were building mighty fleets in an effort to gain more land. The Wood Guild in the rest of the world makes sure no greedy kingdoms deforest their land, but the Chwahir paid no attention, and the Wood Guild basically said “Yoooou’ll be sooorrreeeee!” a few centuries ago.
And they are. That is, Wan-Edhe isn’t sorry, but his land is in trouble. His idea for fixing things is conquering his neighbors—and for some reason, us, a continent away. This explains the Chwahir outpost under the cloud. We believe that Wan-Edhe wants to grab Mearsies Heili for its good forestland and soil, but most of his magic attacks and the like have had the white palace as a target.
Diana went on. “Even though everybody is careful when we come and go, we still leave signs. Can’t help it.”
“Did you learn more about the Chwahir while you were under that shape-changing spell?”
“In a way.” Diana gave a sharp shrug. “Before he stuck the spell on me, Jilo demanded to know where our hideout is.”
“He did to me, too,” Irenne exclaimed. “I thought it was so they could search for mor of us, the divert a stream into it just to ruin it.”
“He didn’t ask me,” Sherry said, looking wistful—as if she’d missed out on something.
“That’s because everybody in the world knows you’ve got no sense of direction,” Irenne said briskly. “Even a Chwahir clod knows you might say east instead of west.”
“True,” Falinneh pointed out, a freckled finger stuck in the air.
Sherry grinned.
Seshe said, “He asked me. And though he didn’t say why, I got the feeling he wants the Junky. For him and his friends.”
This raised a howl of outrage—led by Yours T. “We did all the work,” I bellowed indignantly. “Um. Actually, Clair did. By magic. But we designed it, and brought down all the things, and made all the decorations, ourselves. It would be totally wasted on a bunch of Chwahir clods.”
After a storm of That’s right!s and What a bunch of slobs!, Diana said, “Anyway. I was not a lion long enough to really learn lion things, but I did smell us all around. We can’t help making little trails because we come and go so much. I just spent yesterday looking. We go around often. Weeds don’t grow right outside the tunnel. Grass patterns look bald where we walk a lot. Even where we shove past bushes.”
“What do we do?” Sherry asked, hugging her fists under her chin, where they were almost hidden by her wheat-blond spiral curls that bounced around her face. “We can’t fly in and out.”
“No. I think we need to leave by the tree more often. And we should make trails away from the Junky.”
“Lots of trails,” I said. “Leading south, west, north. Not east, toward the Shadow, or they might get suspicious. We want nothing leading nosers right to the Junky.”
Irenne rolled her eyes. “Won’t that make our patrols even lo-o-o-onger?”
Nobody said anything, because Irenne said it in that Oh I’m simply going to die voice. “Patrolling just to make sure there are no Chwahir infesting the woods is already boring.”
“I see it as doing something to remove one worry for Clair,” Diana began slowly.
I could just see a squabble ahead. I didn’t want to listen to it, and from the way Seshe looked away, and Sherry got solemn, and Falinneh began hopping from one foot to the other, ready to fire off stupid jokes, I knew they didn’t want one, either.
I said, “We can always try to make it fun. But it’s a good idea, and I’m glad you caught that before someone did snout out our hideout. How do we make trails on purpose, Diana?”
“Go single file. Try to stick to one place—if you really look, you can see beginning trails already.”
“Yeep,” Falinneh sail solemnly.
“Glurk,” Gwen glurked.
Sherry grinned, parted her lips—and before they could get into a game of making weird noises, I said, “Okay, for a while, every patrol spend a little extra time making a trail that goes off nowhere, then come back by tree branches, and go in and out by the hollow tree instead of the tunnel. We can do that—explore new parts of the forest—have picnics. How’s that sound?”
Everybody loved that idea. Or if Irenne didn’t, she pretended to. She’d been looking at everybody just the same as I had, and hadn’t seen anyone jumping on her idea. She wanted to be popular more than she wanted to be right, so she usually changed her mind if the others didn’t like one of her ideas.
“I got first dibs on picking picnic food,” she said, and when most of the others began shouting, “Don’t forget to add…” before adding their favorites, the bad moment passed.
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