Given to the Sea

by Mindy McGinnis

  “A few things to make a roomful of girls blush, and if you don’t know what those are, then her stories aren’t true,” the girl says, and their conversation fades as he walks with her over the hill to where the cook has fires banking.

  “Hopefully he’s not so easily distracted in battle.” Dara is beside me, her eyes following her brother.

  “I doubt there will be any pretty kitchen maids on the field,” I tell her. “Though it seems girls do wander onto it even when a Stillean prince requested their presence elsewhere.”

  Dara’s eyes narrow, and her mouth makes a flat line that usually is a precursor to someone getting punched in the nose. “A Stillean prince would be wise to not relegate an Indiri to a dank library when the sun shines on a field of battle.”

  “Donil says you know of a better way to get a tree down than an ax,” I say, changing the subject.

  “That I do,” she says. “My own voice.”

  The men blanch when I give the order. They’re well into their work, halfway through the trunk of the tree and sweat running down their faces. They resent me taking advantage of royal blood to tell them to stand aside for her, yet I am obeyed. But I cannot banish the disgust on their faces when she sails past them, cape swirling.

  Even though I’ve known them a lifetime, the Indiri never fail to amaze. Dara lays a hand on the tree, says a few words in her own language. “This one wasn’t ready,” she chides the workers. “It gave you trouble.”

  “Changed the blade twice,” acknowledges an older man. “But it doesn’t seem overly bothered by the bite of metal.”

  “Too late, even so,” Dara says, eyes on the green gaping wound at its base. “Finish the job after I’m done. That’s not work I’ll take part in.”

  A few of the men nod, but many of them glare at her. She ignores them, moving on to a tree as thick as her waist, roots wound deeply into the ground. “This one, maybe,” she says to herself, again resting her palm against the tree. She closes her eyes and her brows twitch, a string of words no one but Donil can understand flowing from her lips. Dara relaxes slightly, now pressing her whole body up against the trunk.

  It starts beneath my feet, a slither I mistake for a snake. My hand goes to the sword that Donil had informed me moments before was little better than useless. It’s not a snake slipping between my ankles, but the rough root of a tree unwinding itself from the soil.

  “Filthy fathoms!” The first man in the group of woodcutters notices, leaping and knocking into his brethren, who look down to see an army of roots—large and small—unspooling around them as the ground shifts.

  Jaws agape, we all look to Dara. Her eyes are still closed, mouth purring in Indiri as the tree wilts beneath her touch, the limbs drooping low, green leaves being sapped of vitality as they curl into themselves. The trunk tilts slightly, like a drunk wandering home, using its own limbs to lie down quietly and die softly, her body easing to the ground with it.

  There is silence in the woods when she’s finished, and her body lies prone on top of the dead trunk. When the men take down a tree, there is a crash that shakes the earth, the violent descent tearing branches from neighbors as it falls, crushing saplings beneath its weight. The silence that fills the forest after a tree is cut down is a watchful one, a quiet that means every living thing knows a predator has won a struggle.

  This is different. This tree fell where it would, not harming as it went. The silence here is awestruck and reverent, like a deathbed passing of one whose time had come. And while it’s a death that occurred, the air is thick with life, and the thought of a bed not far from my mind as I look at Dara sprawled, cheeks warm with blood. The tree’s smallest branches curled around her as it fell in a way that brings a pang to my chest similar to the one I felt when thinking of Donil sifting his Indiri memories alongside Khosa in the library, little space between them.

  It’s jealousy, something not even a royal is immune from. But how it found its way into my heart at the sight of a tree wrapping limbs around Dara, I don’t know.

  “Depths, woman.” One of the men comes forward. “I’ve cut down many trees. What in the name of my ancestors did you do to that one?”

  Dara opens her eyes, brushes aside the limbs that hold her to the trunk, and rises. “I asked it to fall,” she says. “For me.”

  “Seems a rather large favor,” says another, sidling up to the tree and toeing it cautiously, as if to check if it’s actually dead.

  Dara shrugs, bright eyes meeting mine. “You just have to know when they’re ready.”

  CHAPTER 31

  Khosa

  I AM NOT GOOD AT MAKING FRIENDS.

  It can’t help that Dara doesn’t wish to be here any more than I wish to see her. When she sailed through the library door instead of Donil, I’m sure that even my stone face registered disappointment. We sit among piles of books and charts, her dark head and my light one bowed, mine over my notes, hers with the weight of memories far back in time.

  “Tides,” Dara shouts, pushing away from the table between us. “Ask me something different.”

  I sigh, and cap the inkwell. The Indiri memories are deep, but the very width and breadth of them make them hard to navigate. Dara can flip through them quickly when looking for something specific, but I have only vague outlines to give her, guesses stitched together from moldy maps that I’d prepared in hopes of seeing Donil.

  The last prompt was an attempt to judge the rise of the sea near Sawhen, a small outpost near the base of the mountains. I thought it might be easier to look for mountains, large and looming in anyone’s memory, then tease out details. Instead, I got this outburst—another in a growing line—and no notes to add to the fairly short list of information I’ve gleaned from her so far.

  “Let’s take a breath,” I suggest, and Dara waves her hand at me as if it is nothing to her, but I know different. Diving into the memories wears her down, even if she won’t admit it. I fill a glass with water from a pitcher and offer it to her, which she takes without a word of thanks, her other hand massaging her temple.

  “Does it pain you?”

  “No,” she growls back, though she pinches the bridge of her nose. “Why do you persist in this?”

  Surprised, I glance up from the notes I had been making. “To calculate the—”

  “No,” Dara says again. “Why are you, of all people, doing this work? Stilleans would feed you to the water, yet you strive to save them from it when a cadre of Scribes can do the same?”

  I finish what I’m writing, the beginning of my sentence drying while the end remains wet, the words on the page easier to manage than those in my head.

  “I go to the sea regardless,” I say, blowing on the ink to dry it. “From birth I have been called the Given, a girl born only to be taken away. Yet here in Stille, I have become other things as well, a friend, a girl named Khosa—”

  I cut myself off, unwilling to go farther and reveal that I would become a lover too, taking her brother to bed.

  “I am Given still,” I go on. “But I would not see this place ruined, my friends sharing my fate.”

  Dara sighs and takes a drink. “Pretty words.”

  “That fall on deaf ears, I presume?”

  She considers that a moment. “I hear you, but do not understand. If an entire city wanted me dead, I’d raze it to the ground and piss in the ashes.”

  “Not if Vincent was in it,” I counter. “Not if Donil was.”

  She only shrugs, and peers at me over her cup. “Maybe.”

  When her glass is empty, we face each other again, my quill at the ready. I look to the map, searching for a location that might prove more fruitful.

  “How about the Forest of Drennen?” I suggest. Dara seems less prickly at the idea of delving into memories that relate to the woods. This morning I’d tried asking her to comb through memories about the sea, which earned me
a snarl and a reminder that the Indiri have nothing to do with it. And while that has proven mostly true, the few memories of it she has pulled from the past have been shockingly clear, the novelty of the sight seared onto the mind of the beholder.

  “Fine,” she says, tilting her head back and closing her eyes. “Say more.”

  I flip open a book to where a marker with my handwriting indicates there is some snippet of information here, a recollection of Drennen from a time past that might help guide our delving.

  It’s only a few sentences, a brief description of the forest as the bored Scribe cataloged a list of goods Stille had retrieved as tithe from the farthest reach of the kingdom, the village of Hygoden.

  “Look for . . . shaggy undergrowth, enough to lend shelter to a colony of rabbits.”

  Dara makes no indication of hearing me, but her face spasms as it always does when she first tries to remember. I read on.

  “The timber here is plenty, rough-barked trees vying for the light of the sun against the smooth ones.” I pause, giving Dara some time. She spins one finger in the air after a moment, and I continue.

  “There are clear markings where the cats have sharpened their claws, some trees nearly skinned. Early this morning, we ousted a family of them, the youngest of the kittens too slow to disappear into the violet-flowered brush, so it climbed instead, spitting at us as we passed underneath his perch, fur puffing him to twice his normal size.”

  Dara says nothing, her brow furrowed in concentration as she flicks through memories that she claims she’s never found the beginning of. The small candle I keep nearby burns down two finger-widths before she motions for me to continue. I clear my throat.

  “The canopy is thick, the sun barely breaking through—”

  “Oh, piss in the salty sea, you’re describing every wood on the damn island,” Dara yells, leaving her chair and kicking a nearby stool for no reason. I lean back from the table, not knowing what to say.

  “Ooohh, there’s trees in this woods—that’s helpful,” she goes on. “And the sun shines on them, and it has animals in it.”

  “Dara,” I say carefully, but there’s no point.

  “Don’t tell me,” she mocks. “Next it says there’s a breeze.”

  I glance at the pages. “Actually, yes. And it smells of fiverberries.”

  She was prepared to sneer at my next words, her face already twisting into one when she stops. “Fiverberries?”

  I check again, to be sure. “The breeze is soft and from the west, carrying with it the pleasant smell of fiverberries.”

  Dara comes back to her chair and closes her eyes. “Fiverberries,” she says to herself. “Something . . . once . . .”

  And she’s gone, lost somewhere that stretches far beyond anything I can imagine. I give her as much time as she needs, not even bothering to gauge the passage of it as the candle beside me shortens. The few instances when I’ve been able to find historical mentions of landmarks with a corresponding Indiri memory have been precious victories for both of us. Even though we may not like each other, I am learning my way around her, and Dara is on a scent now, keen to run it down like the hunter she is.

  She is expressive with others’ memories as she is in her own present, and I watch, fascinated as she relives moments from her ancestors’ lives; grief, joy, pain, happiness, and finally a flaring ecstasy that is hers alone as skin that I relish on another lights with discovery.

  “Fiverberries,” she says, tapping her hand twice on the table, eyes still closed as if she’s afraid the memory will escape her if she opens them. “And something about the brush . . .”

  I glance back over the entry. “The youngest of the kittens too slow to disappear into the violet-flowered brush—”

  “I’m there.” Her jaw goes slack in concentration.

  I abandon the history, switching over to the many maps that scatter my work area. An outsider would walk in and think me messy—or yes, I know it, mad—but there is a system here of my own devising, and I lay my hand to a pile that references Drennen with no hesitation.

  “What do you see?” I ask.

  This is the point where no amount of research on my part or concentration on Dara’s will make any difference. She can see only what her ancestor saw, and if this Indiri moved inland instead of toward the sea, it is useless to us.

  Dara’s hands dig into her temples as she silently examines what she sees through the eyes of a many-times ancestor, and I hold my breath. While the Indiri have a unique gift of passing on their knowledge, memories are a tricky thing, colored by emotion. Dara warned me when we began that what resides in her head is not like the pages of the book under my fingers, a catalog of the day’s events. She can no more tell me what her ancestor had for dinner that night than I can say what I ate a week ago.

  “Because it’s not important,” she told me. “Unless it was poisoned,” she had added. “They’d remember that.”

  And I can’t help wonder as I watch Dara’s lips move in the fading light of evening what could be so momentous about fiverberries and violet-flowered hedges in the life of an Indiri. So many of her recollections have been tinged with violence, bright, pulse-pounding battles that any warrior would carry with pride, handing it down to the next generation. But Dara’s face flickers with happiness, the tug of a smile on her lips giving her a moment of beauty that disappears when she opens her eyes. The brightness of her gaze rips through me like sun through a morning mist, the vicious cast of victory claiming her face again.

  “The Forest of Drennen, my third-great-grandmother, violet- flowered bushes—those are called waterleaf rue, by the way—and fiverberries.”

  I dip the tip of my quill in ink, ready to capture the fleeting moment as she reels it off.

  “It’s the same spot as your Scribe, as best I can tell. The tree he mentioned the cats sharpening on? Once they’ve picked a spot, the whole clowder uses it. An older tree can bear scars from cats long gone, the tree growing and widening the claw marks. If you can find one old enough, it’ll look like a Tangata the size of a house has been at it.”

  “You’re sure it’s the same spot?”

  She nods her head. “Waterleaf rue grows only in Drennen, and then only on the western edge where there’s enough light for it to flower. Fiverberries come into season in waves, and there’s only a very small area where you’d have the rue flowering and ripe fivers at the same time. Toss in the clawed tree, and yes, it’s the same spot.”

  “And the sea?”

  “She heard it, breaking on the land. I couldn’t see it, but I could hear the tides even though it wasn’t waves. Only the tide, in and out. Like now,” she adds, cocking her head toward the window.

  “So it couldn’t have been far.”

  “No, I imagine if she’d gone even ten paces to the west, she’d have broken out of the forest and onto the beach.”

  I return to the Scribe’s pages, searching for references to the sea. My eyes dash over the lines, his neat handwriting illuminating in rigid columns what a pound of clean wool was worth, but not giving me what I want.

  “Wait,” I say, my breath rushing out as one word stops me.

  “My apprentice has developed a taste for the clams of this area, which have a sweeter edge than those from Stillean trapmen. But the sea is a half day’s journey, so he’ll have to be satisfied with—”

  I stop reading, not caring if the Scribe’s apprentice was satisfied or not. “Which ancestor again?”

  “Third-great-grandmother.”

  I consult my list of her ancestors, their names and the ages they lived to listed neatly, back farther than my own bloodline.

  I’ve made notations on the maps, some of which bore cartographers’ names—–whose births and deaths helped me narrow down when they’d been made. I do sums, checking the date on the Scribe’s journal entry and jotting down Stillean c
alendar dates next to the Indiri names. Their lifespans are so chillingly spare when represented by my black slashes, yet so colorfully rendered inside Dara’s head.

  “Well?” she asks.

  I glance up, surprised that the only light left to us now comes from the candle, even its flickering flame almost drowned in a puddle of wax. I was lost in my facts, and she let me be, as I have left her for long periods in her world of memory and dream.

  “I can’t say exactly,” I tell her. “I have to guess how far a half day’s journey would’ve been for them, which means first ascertaining how big their party was, although I’m guessing not large by the fairly paltry amount of tithes they gathered. You also have to take into account that while the sea is definitely rising, it may not be doing so at an even rate. It could gain three hand spans in a moonchange, for example—”

  “Khosa.” She stops me.

  I look again at the date on the ledger, and at her third-great-grandmother’s lifespan. Barely three generations separate them, but she could hear the surf, while my Scribe couldn’t spare the time to reach it.

  “Fast,” I say. “It’s rising fast.”

  I expect her to curse, maybe kick some furniture again, but instead her head sinks and she sighs. “I don’t know how to fight an enemy that will only rust my sword,” she says. The flame is down to a blue flicker, the shadows under her eyes dark as those that lurk in the corners.

  “I’m done in.” She rises from her chair and is to the door before I stop her, not finding the courage to ask the question to her face.

  “Your memories,” I call, “they’re mostly battle and blood. What did your third-great-grandmother find in waterleaf rue and fiverberries, that you should know it now?”

  Dara turns, the tiniest of smiles on her lips. “She was falling in love. Those moments burn deep and hot, down into the bone if you let them.”

  “Oh,” I say, surprised that Dara who seems made of only sharp edges would know this. “I see.”