by Kevin Hearne
“That was the origin of the western front of the war: an eruption and the execution of a plan crafted long ago. South of here, on the Brynt coast, one possible origin of the eastern front and all our woes occurred on the very next day—Thaw 18, 3041! My discovery of it was quite accidental, and had a certain seventeen-year-old merchant’s daughter not kept a diary, it would have been lost forever. Let us see what happened, shall we?” He plucked out another black sphere and held it high. “Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the delightful Kallindra du Paskre.”
This time a slim Brynt girl with large sleepy eyes, cool dark brown skin like mine, and tight curly hair allowed to grow into a cloud around her head emerged from the black smoke. She wore a light yellow tunic belted over blue pants and the slip-on sandals that we Brynts tend to favor over all other footwear. Her sardonic tone and faint grin suggested that she was perpetually amused by the world—but only because she was laughing at us, not with us.
We’ve just had the strangest encounter.
A sunburned woman crouched over a campfire as we came around the bend in the road leading to Setyrön, and she became defensive when we approached. She backed away from the light, drew a knife from a sheath, and eyed us warily like we were bandits.
Perhaps she was only embarrassed. She had almost nothing on.
Perhaps she’d been sunbathing. It was a beach, after all, and a rather nice one. It was the last gasp of twilight now, but she might have fallen asleep in the sun. I couldn’t believe it, though, because this trade route was fairly well traveled, and I saw an odd watercraft of some kind pulled up onto the sand; she might well have been burned in the boat.
Checking on the reaction of my parents, I saw Father’s jaw drop, and Mother closed his mouth with an audible chop as his teeth clicked together. Jorry, seeing this, clicked his own jaws shut, and I found that part amusing, but the rest of the scene was uniformly odd.
The woman was more than seven feet tall and moved with the sort of grace one sees in professional dancers. She was lean and looked hungry; slim muscles stood out on her arms and legs, and she didn’t have a trace of belly like normal women do. It was like she was saying she’d never make room for a child in there. She looked half starved. Well, more like seven-eighths. Around her bony hips she had tied a piece of coarse cloth, but that was all. I think it was Jorry’s first look at bare breasts, and he must have been so disappointed. He’d doubtless dreamt that his first pair of breasts to ogle would belong to someone shorter and rather more friendly and perhaps not so dreadfully pale. The woman didn’t have the milk-white skin of the Fornish, but there wasn’t anything like a respectable color to it either. It was difficult to assign a shade to it with the deepening darkness on one hand and the firelight on the other, but we could tell she wasn’t from Brynlön or Kauria. She couldn’t even be a Raelech or a Nentian. It was like all the richness of her life had been drained away.
Father slowly got down from the wagon and held up his hands to show he meant no harm. He asked the woman if she was all right in the trader’s tongue and got no reply. Without advancing, he repeated the question in Brynt, Kaurian, and even Fornish, all to no avail.
I thought he should have tried the Hathrim tongue, for she was almost tall enough to be one of the giants and everyone knows they’re pretty pasty bastards, but I don’t think Father knows their tongue well, if at all. I know only a few words myself, but I will hopefully learn more soon at the trader clave in Setyrön.
The woman kind of spat something out—I thought it might have been a sneeze at first—but then we realized she’d tried to say something to us and it made no sense in any language we knew.
“I beg your pardon?” Father asked.
The woman made the spitting noises again, and her tone made it clear that she was annoyed. Father gave up.
“I don’t think she wants to buy anything,” he said drily, climbing up to the driver’s seat. “I’m not going to waste my time with someone who looks ready to fillet me.”
“Shouldn’t we at least show her a tunic?” Mother asked. “We have the supply, and she’s got the demand if anyone does.”
“Do you see a purse on her, my love?” Father asked. “I honestly think she could use a few pies more than clothes. Looks like she hasn’t eaten in a year. Jorry, load the crossbow in case she gets any ideas.”
Jorry and I were inside the wagon as usual, watching all this from some very purposefully constructed gaps between the planks.
“The crossbow? You want me to shoot her?”
Father turned in the driver’s seat and frowned at Jorry’s tone. His eyes tried to find us even though it was as near dark as made no never mind and all we could see was the reflected firelight on half his face. He knew we could see him well enough, though. “A pair of tits can rob you just as easily as a pair of balls, boy. It doesn’t matter that one is prettier and less hairy than the other; you hear me? You’re still broke at the end of the day and on your way to starving.”
Mother scowled at the phrasing but couldn’t argue with the lesson. My brother said, “Yes, sir.”
My father will never be welcome at any Wellspring for saying such things and neither will I, but I love him for always speaking truth to us, harsh or embarrassing or sorrowful as it may be. But I think his forthright manner makes him a trusted trader; the du Paskre name will always be honored at the clave if not at the watered courts of the quartermasters. Jorry scrambled to get the crossbow ready.
Father took the reins from Mother but didn’t snap them until he heard the crossbow cocked. The strange woman watched him warily, not moving, still in a defensive stance. When father snapped the reins and clucked his tongue at the horses and the wagon began to move, the woman cried out and took a few steps toward us. She dropped the knife and spread her long arms away from her sides, empty-handed, and her tone was pleading instead of angry.
Calling a halt and reining in the horses, Father eyed the woman and then searched the darkness for possible confederates. We carried valuable goods but weren’t prosperous enough to go around hiring Raelech mercenaries to guard the wagon, so plenty of footpads thought we were ripe for the picking. Sighing as he handed the reins to Mother, he got back down.
“Keep the bow trained on her, Jorry, but don’t fire unless I say so or unless someone attacks me. Kallindra, load another bow just in case.”
I didn’t answer but moved quickly to obey. We had a tiny lantern to see by, nothing else. I did my best to keep an eye on what was happening while I did this. The woman had frozen with her arms outstretched. Father duplicated that posture, keeping out of Jorry’s line of fire. When she saw him spread his arms, she exhaled in relief and smiled as she dropped her arms. Father didn’t smile back, but he nodded at her and slowly returned his arms to his sides.
Under his loose brown trader’s robes, he wore a mail shirt and a lamellar tunic of the sort Nentians favor. He had small daggers strapped to either forearm, hidden by his sleeves. He wouldn’t be able to stand up to a soldier, but neither was he as harmless as he looked.
The woman tried to appear friendly now, but she was clearly nervous. She waved an arm at the sky and said something that sounded like a question. Father shrugged and gave a tiny shake of his head. She could have been asking if he was enjoying the fine weather or asking about constellations for all we knew.
She looked crestfallen for a moment, then tried something different. She pointed to herself and spoke about six syllables very slowly. Father repeated them, but she shook her head and repeated only the last two, again pointing to herself.
“Motah,” she said. Or something like it.
“Motah,” Father repeated, and she smiled. The first few syllables must have been the equivalent of saying “My name is” in her language. But now that I think of it, maybe Motah was the name of her people or the word for “tall daft naked woman.” Mother keeps saying I shouldn’t assume, and she’s right; it’s bad for business.
“My name is Lönsyr,” Father said. �
��Lönsyr.”
“Lonzeer,” the woman said, by and large bungling the vowels and swapping a z for the s.
“Close enough, sure,” Father replied.
The woman began pointing at the beach and asking questions, her eyes hopeful. Father told her she was concerned with sand, and then a beach, and then a coast when she seemed unsatisfied. The woman danced around in a circle and shrugged. Remembering the strange boat that I could no longer see in the darkness, I spoke up for the first time through the side of the wagon.
“She wants to know where she is, Father.”
“What? Hmm. I think you may be right, Kallindra.” He spoke to the woman again. “You’re in Brynlön. This is Brynlön.”
The giant woman cocked her head at him. “Lonzeer Breenlawn?”
“Oh, fire and mud,” Father groused. “This will take all night!” He held up his hands to the woman in what he hoped was a universal signal to wait. “Excuse me for a moment.” He stalked back to the rear of the wagon.
“Kallindra, fetch me a map of the continent. Jorry, keep her in your sights.”
“Yes, sir,” we chorused. I rummaged through a trunk for a recent map of Teldwen drawn by some Kaurian to celebrate the crowning of their new mistral, and once I found it, I slipped it through a gap in the planks for Father to take. There was no need to open the back door; security always. The woman hadn’t moved during this time. She waited patiently.
When Father returned to her, he squatted down and unfolded the map on the sand near her campfire. The woman’s face lit with a large smile and showed off a few crooked teeth. Father started by pointing at the cities nearby—Möllerud and Setyrön—and then jabbed repeatedly between them and said, “We are here.”
Motah, if that was her name, grinned and made affirming noises and then suddenly clocked Father upside the head with her elbow. He fell over, stunned, and she ran out of the firelight toward her boat, taking the map with her.
“Hey!” Jorry shouted, and he fired the crossbow into the dark in her general direction but must have missed. We heard no grunt or scream, only the sound of a boat hull scraping across the sand. There was no use wasting another bolt. We couldn’t see anything past the fire.
Father sat up and cursed loudly to let us know he was all right, and Mother laughed at him. She even slapped her thigh.
“You see there, Jorry?” he roared. “I just got robbed by a pair of tits.” Mother nearly fell off the wagon from laughing so hard.
I wonder sometimes what kind of parent I will be with the examples I have to follow.
I also wonder where that woman was from. She was so very strange. We will have much to talk about at the clave when we get there.
When it was clear that Fintan had finished speaking in Kallindra’s personage, the crowd murmured among themselves instead of applauding, but he seemed to expect this. He nodded at Survivor Field as he took shape in the green smoke and said, “Fascinating, isn’t it? One invasion caused by an eruption and another that may have been facilitated by a chance meeting. Of course we don’t know that Motah—or whoever she was—ever made it back to her home successfully. But I happen to know that there were other scouts like her, perhaps a large number of them, and we don’t know how many of them managed to secure a map. As I said, a recording of this encounter only came to me by accident. What else the Bone Giants learned of us and how they learned it is a mystery to be solved later.” Fintan held up a finger and waggled it back and forth as he spoke.
“I am fascinated by Kallindra’s record not because it is the history of the blessed or of the military or of some political leader but because it is the record of an ordinary person who had no idea what was coming. And ordinary people have their stories, too, don’t they? You all have your stories, I’m sure!”
A roar from Survivor Field answered him.
“I thought so. That is all for today, so let the story tonight be of fine drink and finer company! Tomorrow we will hear more from Nel Kit ben Sah and find out what was happening in Kauria and Ghurana Nent!”
I didn’t sleep well and woke before dawn. I made a cup of tea and sat at the kitchen table with my hands folded around the Raelech porcelain, part of a set my wife had been gifted long ago, feeling the heat seep into my fingers and watching the steam rise from the surface in a sort of nonthinking haze. I didn’t notice Elynea emerge from my bedroom until she pulled out a chair and sat across from me, murmuring a soft good morning.
“Good morning,” I replied. I hadn’t seen her or the children since they had all slammed doors yesterday to demonstrate their displeasure with me. When I had come home after the bard’s performance, the doors were still closed and the house was quiet, and I didn’t want to disturb them. I stretched out on the couch after a cold meal of bread and smoked moonscale and began a string of short uncomfortable naps that passed for slumber. The cot in the palace had been easier on my back. “Can I make you a cup?”
“I want to apologize,” Elynea said, her eyes downcast but her voice firm. Tea apparently would be a distraction when she had apologies to make.
“There’s no need,” I said, and she looked up. “Truly. I’m sorry I upset you and the kids.”
Her eyes dropped back to the tabletop, and she traced a slow pattern on it with her finger. “I know you didn’t intend to. You were right that healing will be slow. Here we are nearly a year past the invasion, and I’m only now beginning to think of rebuilding my life. I think perhaps the well of my patience had run dry after my job search yesterday morning and I needed time for it to refill.”
“I understand,” I said. “You’re welcome to search again this morning if you and the kids can stand it. I’m free until a half hour before noon.”
“Thank you,” Elynea said, her voice fervent. “I’ll change and go right away. I don’t wish to be a bother to you any longer than necessary.”
“We’re all bothered these days,” I said. “But you’re far less of one than you think. Your welcome is still fresh and clean here.”
Elynea made a grimace that might have been an attempt to smile in gratitude and disappeared into the bedroom to change into the same orange ensemble she had worn yesterday while I set about making breakfast. She woke the kids and told them all was well and she would be back before noon, adding to Pyrella that she should try to teach her younger brother something today. They were sad to see her go but distracted themselves soon enough after they had eaten.
If Tamöd’s play was any indication of his future, he would seek a kenning as early as he could. He wanted to be a tidal mariner with all his being.
Pyrella, I noticed, never pretended to have a kenning. Perhaps she was simply playing foil to Tamöd, but I noticed that she chose to oppose him with defensive creatures or those which renewed themselves easily. She was the oyster in a shell, or a sea turtle, or even ever-blooming algae but never an aggressive predator like a bladefin or a longarm. Tamöd even asked her to switch. “Come on, be a kraken,” he said, and she refused. “But it’s no fun beating up algae,” he complained, and as soon as he did, Pyrella changed the game on him as if she’d been waiting for him to say that. I suspect that she had.
“Maybe you don’t have to always beat things up,” she said.
Tamöd looked lost. “What else is there?”
“There’s growing.”
The seven-year-old scoffed. “Tidal mariners don’t grow things, stupid!”
“Of course they do. Nothing grows without water.”
“I know plants grow with water, but that’s not something a tidal mariner does!”
“They do, but they’re sneaky about it. Tidal mariners influence the currents, right?” Pyrella prodded him.
“Yeah, so?”
“All the food that ocean plants and animals need is carried on the currents, and tidal mariners use those currents to help everything grow faster, which helps feed us, too. There’s even a song about it! The Current Chorus. Do you know it already?”
“No.”
&n
bsp; “I can teach it to you. Or everything I know anyway. All the tidal mariners know the whole thing.”
That hooked him. If the tidal mariners knew it, he wanted to know it, too. “Okay!”
My house was an endless repetition of the Current Chorus after that, but I didn’t mind. I knew firsthand that the education system had been dissolved in the flood of refugees and if children weren’t taught by clever older siblings or their parents, they wouldn’t be taught at all. I and a few of my erstwhile colleagues had thought of trying to establish an open-air school somewhere on Survivor Field, as all the city’s school buildings were currently occupied by families, but none of us could figure out how to get paid and eat at the end of the day. Education had become a luxury item no one could afford.
I taught them both the last few verses, which Pyrella hadn’t learned yet, and they proudly sang the whole thing to their mother when she returned. Halfway through it, she finally smiled for the first time since I had met her, and when I left the house to meet Fintan for lunch, they were all laughing together, and that might have been a first, too, since the invasion.
I was smiling to myself as I walked, shaking my head a bit in wonder. No well-meaning words or kindness of mine had pierced Elynea’s depression in months, but an old children’s rhyming song had. I think it must have been the chorus:
Currents bring us food today,
And to creatures in the bay,
While we sing and dance and play,
Currents wash our poop away.
Yes, indeed. Indeed they do.
At my first session with Fintan he was very reserved and had little to say to me besides reciting his tale more slowly for my dictation. I had thought that perhaps his earlier easygoing manner had been an act for Rölly and that like many performers he was dour and reserved while not on stage. But during my second lunch with him he proved quite eager to talk over our food, and I had to reevaluate the first day: he had merely been watching and absorbing his new surroundings, and now that he had become somewhat oriented, he was ready to probe.