I hadn't noticed it, but with him naked in the water the dimple in his shoulder where I'd bitten him in the forest was distinct.
"We've marked each other, then," I said.
"Did you doubt it?" he said. And sighed, blowing the steam from before him. "She knows what she's about, this healer."
"You feel better?" I watched his chest rising and falling, listened to his voice. It sounded somewhat clearer, but there was a rasp in it that never seemed to leave.
"As much so as I'm capable," Roika said. "When I breathe..." He trailed off, then twitched his ears back and finished, calm, "...it seems to stop partway through the breath. As if I can no longer hold as much air in my chest as I used to. But other than that, I'm more comfortable than I thought I'd be."
"A few months," I said, quiet.
"Maybe."
After that we were quiet. We did not sit together in the spring, but we were close enough to touch if we stretched our arms. That served us well when others came to use the waters. Almost always in threes, the northern Jokka: one anadi, one eperu, one emodo. Loë exchanged greetings with them amiably when they arrived but after the introductions all the visitors observed the silence, relaxing in the heat. I tried not to stare at the anadi cuddled into the eperu, the emodo with his arm slung around the neuter's shoulders. I tried not to hurt at the sight of the Trinity made flesh. The spring soothed my aching body but I flinched from the evidence that the way we'd arranged things at home was not the way it had to be.
That night I found Kaduin, Seper, Denret and Marilin awaiting me in our borrowed room, and their faces stopped me at the door. "What? What is it?"
"Thenet, they..." Kaduin stopped, fighting for equilibrium. Straightening his back, he said, "They don't have the mind-death here."
My knees quivered. I think I began to fall because my hand groped for the door frame and I felt the drag of the wood against my claws. "What?"
"From what we've been able to gather, the northerners don't have the mind-death," Seper said, quiet. "They recognize it when we speak of it, but they seem puzzled that we're so afraid of it."
I stared at them, then turned and headed for the clinic, hearing them follow. Roika was already there, curled on the couch with his eyes closed; Loë was mixing some new poultice, her compendium of remedies held open with a painted rock for a weight. She looked up when I entered and then pushed a piece of paper at me in response to my expression. I nudged Roika. "Wake up. I need your hand."
"Not sleeping," he rumbled, and took up the pen. He wiped his hair out of his face blearily and said, "What?"
"Ask her what she knows about the mind-death," I said.
His glance was sharp then, but he wrote the question quickly and offered it to her. The anadi read it and looked up at us without lifting her head, brows low over her brilliant eyes. Then she started writing.
Roika read the results to himself first, his ears paling. Finally he spoke. "She says what we speak of is a thing out of histories. Healthy people need not fear the mind-death."
"And everyone is healthy here," I whispered.
The anadi leaned over and added a few more sentences, tapping them.
"When she was trained," Roika said, "she was taught to recognize the symptoms of many problems. We are very sick with something... I don't know the word."
"How is it fixed?" I said.
He didn't even have to write that; the tone of my voice and my agitation made it clear what I was asking. She mimed eating and drinking and then wrote.
"We are not eating the right things," he said. "Or we have been poisoned by something that we must stop touching or eating."
I sat—fell—on the end of Roika's couch, feeling the world spin away from me. At the door, I heard Kaduin say, "That makes sense. We have records describing plants that no longer can be found at home, Abadil told me about them. If what they say is true and these Jokka fled the south because all the plants and animals were dying..."
"Then we have been subsisting on foods that don't nourish us," Roika said beside me.
"No wonder the meals here are so extraordinary," Denret said.
"No mind-death," Seper whispered.
I covered my mouth, hiding my tears behind my hand.
"What can be done, though?" Marilin said. "Short of moving everyone here?"
"That's a lot of people," Denret said, and from his voice he was frowning. "And a lot of wood to build ships. We don't have a lot of wood."
"And that's assuming everyone wants to leave," Seper said.
"Why wouldn't they?" Kaduin said. "It's wonderful here!"
"We haven't seen their winter yet," Roika said, the rust of his voice startling against their much clearer ones. "And we're assuming they'd want to absorb us. From what they've said there aren't that many northerners... we'd overwhelm them with our numbers."
"It also begs the question why there are so few of them," Denret offered. "If life is so easy here, why are they not more numerous?"
Loë had been listening to this with growing frustration; finally she grabbed the paper and scrawled on it, shoving the result at Roika. He started answering. "She wants to know what we're talking about."
When she read our answer, Loë frowned. Her question in return stunned us all.
"Why do you have to come here? We could go there, and bring plants."
"But would they grow?" Marilin asked.
Loë's answer: "Soil can be without nourishment, like people. It can be healed, also."
"So that's it," Denret said softly. "We bring back plants and people who know how to farm the northern way?"
"Trade," Marilin said with a little laugh. "In the end it's always trade."
Roika wrote a note and handed it to Loë, who smiled at it and said, very clearly, "Yes." The emperor of Ke Bakil handed the paper to Denret. "Help them build a ship. We'll need to bring back more than one can carry."
"Yes, ke emodo," Denret said, and withdrew with Marilin.
Seper crouched alongside me, setting an inquiring hand on my knee. "No," I said. "There's nothing to be done for me. I'll be along in a moment."
"All right," it murmured, and took Kaduin with it.
Loë respected the silence I used to compose myself. So did Roika, until at last he couldn't anymore. "Would she have been willing?" he asked me. "Would she have borne children had she not feared the mind-death?"
I heard the memory of Dlane's words about children existing as parasites that sucked the intelligence from their mothers through their birth-veils. I heard the terror that had lurked beneath her every diatribe on the subject. I thought of the society we'd created, the one that coddled the anadi in their cloistered worlds—and later, the Stone Moon's prisons—to protect them from the possibility of the mind-death while also denying them the choice to abstain from breeding. I thought of the emodo who'd gone to that duty, hating it for its implications, and what that had done to the relationships between sexes.
I thought of generations of misery and anger and injustice and fear and the fact that we could no longer blame it on unchangeable biology... but on a problem that could have been solved had we known it existed.
The sob surprised me, so abrupt my chest hurt. And then another followed it, closing my throat. I bent over myself as if I was about to vomit, and I was, I was... vomiting a lifetime of unnecessary suffering and the one death from which I had never recovered.
Roika rested a hand on my shoulder as I wept. When I didn't resist, he held me. I forgot my anger. He was dying, Dlane was dead, and all our strife had been predicated on a false premise. What did any of it matter anymore?
The northern Jokka greeted the new plan with enthusiasm; to trade with the ancestors! To cross the sea and investigate the land from which they'd come! And to bring with them the means by which to succor their distant cousins! How could they have resisted such a mission? The crew of the Endurance began teaching their hosts how to build an ocean-going vessel and every day Kaduin and Seper went to the cove with them to
contribute to their efforts.
I remained in the healer's home. Each afternoon she went into the het to see to the Jokka who had called for her services, so I kept watch on Roika and studied the strange compendiums Loë left on her table for our edification. They remained opaque to me but most of them were illustrated and the pictures were distracting. As the days wore on, Loë practiced the southern tongue and set me to work on making the salves she used to ease Roika's breathing. My health improved: when brushing my mane I could feel the change in texture in the new hair growing from my scalp, and my skin shone under the wan winter light. My claws, which I had never thought of as brittle, strengthened demonstratably and so did my body. I slept lighter and better, without the near unconsciousness of an anadi's slumber. If the diet in the north did not complete my botched Turning, it did at least restore some of my wind. I found it remarkable how little my weakness had to do with becoming anadi and how much it had to do with whether I was eating properly. Nor was I the only one to bloom: Kaduin, Seper and all the Jokka of the ship changed with me.
Roika did not. He often turned away food and when I tried to insist that he eat Loë held up a quelling hand with somber eyes.
"Will he make it home?" I asked her at last. "How long before it's over?"
But she would not answer and it was just as well, for I feared that the question I'd asked was less about Roika and more about me. I often found myself sitting in the front room beside one of the windows, watching the beautiful, vibrant northerners walk past in their triads. I felt insubstantial, a ghost without anchor to a living world. I did not belong here, but there was nothing left for me at home, either. My only link to the life I'd lived, the one that had had meaning, was slowly dying in the adjacent room. Once he was gone, what would be left to make sense of any of it?
The weeks passed. I heard reports of the progress of the new ship, of the discoveries about the languages, of what gifts the northerners were planning to pack and when they thought would be the best time to go. I listened to these reports because they were delivered by Kaduin and other Jokka glowing with the realization that they would be bringing home Ke Bakil's salvation. But I did not remember the details of any of it. The days flowed through me. I spent them sleeping, helping Loë or standing vigil over Roika's bed. As the weather grew colder his bouts of coughing grew more frequent, and I added cutting wood and feeding the fire to my duties.
I often found myself holding him as he fought his body. He would allow no one else's touch in those moments. The rush of his blood beneath his skin was so frantic I could feel it speeding under my hands as I steadied him. We spent many wordless nights that way, and afterward I would use one of the soft sea sponges the anadi gave me to wipe down his skin in front of the fire.
"Ask her," he said to me after one particularly harsh session. "When she comes home. If there's some way to tell if Kaduin will contract this."
He collapsed before I could tell him that I couldn't write. But it didn't matter in the end, for when Loë returned from her errands she studied him and said, slowly but intelligibly, "The final phase is coming soon."
I looked up at her, ears slicked back. She sat on the stool by the couch and checked his wrist again, touched his face, smelled her fingers. "A few months now," she said. "Certainly within a year. Please accept my condolences for the forthcoming loss of your mate."
"My—he's not..." I trailed off.
"Not your mate?" she asked, careful of the words. "You have metal rings, both of you? That does not mean the same? I assumed it did, from how the two of you act to one another."
"It's complicated," I said. I swallowed. "He has a son. This disease..."
"The young male?" she guessed. "Do not fear. The adult disease is not passed from parent to child. It develops on its own, spontaneously. Unlike the disease that afflicts infants, it may linger for years before killing, but we have entered the last phase. It won't be long now."
I focused on his slack face, seeing the drawn skin and the unhealthy color of it. "You speak well."
"Do I?" she said. "Good. I have been taking lessons from my sibling and its mate. They are more often at the cove among the others and have more opportunities to practice. Once one learns the changes in sounds between the languages, it is not hard to guess at how unfamiliar words should be said. Tell me if I say something poorly, though. I wish to be prepared for the journey."
I glanced up at her. "You're going?"
"In summer, with the trade vessel," she said. "Yes. I am already making a list of things I want to bring." She looked at Roika. "Your people need healers. This het has several herbalists; they can handle the work while I am gone. I am the most knowledgeable of the healers here. I am needed in the south."
"Why have you not spoken before?" I asked.
"I have, among the others," she said. "But my duty as a healer requires a higher standard. I did not wish to speak to you of your mate's illness before I could speak well and be understood." She glanced at me, curious. "Why do you not write?"
"I didn't learn," I said. "I know enough to read and write simple things, but... we have no paper in the south. There are almost no trees. We write on stone or bark, and it's expensive."
"No trees!" she exclaimed, ears flattening. Then she frowned. "We will have to bring seeds. And saplings. Someone will have to devise a way to keep them upright on the ship. I will tell the others."
"Do you really think it will work?" I asked her.
"If there are plants and animals and water in the south, then there is potential," Loë said. "And if we cannot realize the potential, then we will find some other way. But your disease will end. We will not stand by when our cousins need our aid. We are a family long parted, but we are family all the same. We will make our reunion cause for rejoicing."
I could not tell her why my throat contracted because I didn't know myself, save that this was what Dlane could have been had we been born more fortunately.
"I never told you about how my House came to be Broken."
He rarely spoke anymore, and when he did I remembered the beautiful deep bass that had made my bones shiver in my flesh... for memory was all I had left of it. His voice had become a hoarse ruin that he mitigated by speaking softly. I finished rebuilding the fire and then joined him, sitting on the edge of the couch. "Your House. You mean the one before Edze."
"The one I fled in the south." He met my gaze with eyes made cloudy by too many nights spent coughing instead of sleeping, coughing until the tiny blood vessels in them broke.
"From the het past Serelni," I said, recalling the day in Neked Pamari when he'd told us of it, chasing Dlane and I in our flight from het Serean. "I didn't think there were any hets past Serelni."
"Because the one I'd lived in died," he whispered. He cleared his throat and continued. "It had been dwindling for years by the time I was born to one of its two farming Houses. My sire wanted me to be the next Head of Household. Every day he told me how he expected me to behave so that I might develop into the kind of emodo who could lead a House and rule a het, for without the two farming Houses the het would have foundered and everyone knew it."
"Your father wanted you to be chosen?" I said. "Was he important, then?"
"Enough that I had a chance," Roika said. "But I didn't want to be Head of Household. That was his ambition, not mine."
"You wanted to be an artist," I guessed, ear flicking out. "Or a lore-knower."
He laughed, a thin, breathy sound. "No, nothing so dramatic. The truth is that I didn't know what I wanted to do with myself, Thenet. My sire never allowed me the leisure to consider any other path. He set me against the Head of Household's favored choice and began politicking, currying favors with the members of the House who did not favor me, prejudicing them against each other and the Head's selection. And when he was not conspiring within the House, he was helping the House destroy our rival within the het." He rested his head on the back of the couch, eyes closed. "I wanted nothing to do with any of it. The qua
rrel was affecting our food supply. When I could steal away from my sire I was in the fields, trying to help the others save us from famine."
"You failed," I said, quiet.
"I failed," he said. "My father didn't and I became Head of Household, but by then the settlement had lost so many people there was no reason to stay. The het disbanded entirely and all the refugees fled for other towns. That is how I came to be in het Serean looking for anadi for House Edze. I had chosen to break from my House and begin a new one."
My hands rested loosely in my lap as I watched the fire and felt the story seep into me, make sense of everything, from Roika's inability to love without control to his obsession with saving the Jokka. His sire had been so fanatical about shaping an emodo to rule a House that he'd shaped an emodo to rule a world. "He'd be proud of you."
"Yes," Roika said. "I'm afraid so." At my glance, he said, "He sacrificed everyone else in order to fulfill himself. I often wonder if I have done the same."
"Your father," I said, "wanted a son with power to reflect that power back onto him by association. You wanted power to prevent Ke Bakil from going the way of the het where you were born."
"I did it for myself too, Thenet," Roika whispered. "And I sacrificed a great many people to satiate my own need for order and control."
"But you still saved a world," I answered.
He opened his eyes, the fire reflecting off them. Though he said no more, he slept easier that night.
It was the last extended conversation I had with Roika. Loë's assessment of the disease had been correct, and as the winter days crawled past I spent them tending to him with her help. Kaduin no longer reported the progress of the ship-building initiative to me, for he hated to come into the clinic where his father was dying. Seper brought me the news instead, whispering it into my ear as I rested from my long nights of caretaking, one arm holding Roika against my side and my cheek pillowed on his gray hair.
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