"I don't know," Rowan said in her most doggedly gentle voice. "Be patient."
"Well, maybe we should scan for her.
"No," Rowan said. "Absolutely not. Remember what we decided."
"She's probably forgotten we were coming," Kestrel said. "I told you she was getting senile."
"Don't say things like that. It's not polite," Rowan said, still gentle, but through her teeth.
Rowan was always gentle when she could manage it. She was nineteen, tall, slim, and stately. She had cinnamon-brown eyes and warm brown hair that cascaded down her back in waves.
Kestrel was seventeen and had hair the color of old gold sweeping back from her face like a bird's wings. Her eyes were amber and hawklike, and she was never gentle.
Jade was the youngest, just turned sixteen, and she didn't look like either of her sisters. She had white-blond hair that she used as a veil to hide behind, and green eyes. People said she looked serene, but she almost never felt serene. Usually she was either madly excited or madly anxious and confused.
Right now it was anxious. She was worried about her battered, half-century-old Morocco leather suitcase. She couldn't hear a thing from inside it.
"Hey, why don't you two go down the road a little way and see if she's coming?"
Her sisters looked back at her. There were few things that Rowan and Kestrel agreed on, but Jade was one of them. She could see that they were about to team up against her.
"Now what?" Kestrel said, her teeth showing just briefly.
And Rowan said, "You're up to something. What are you up to, Jade?"
Jade smoothed her thoughts and her face out and just looked at them artlessly. She hoped.
They stared back for a few minutes, then looked at each other, giving up. "We're going to have to walk, you know," Kestrel said to Rowan.