Given to the Earth

by Mindy McGinnis

  Yet she cannot sleep with such a heavy silence between them. It presses down upon her, a new disappointment she has brought to Stille after failing her Keepers in Hyllen so often. She is so aware of Vincent, even in the darkness, that she knows he does not sleep and that they both stare at the same spot of nothingness. And though he may tease her about the difficulties of being married to her, they are quite real.

  “I’m sorry.” His voice is a wine-soaked exhalation so quiet she is at first unsure which one of them spoke it.

  “What have you to be sorry for?” she asks, moving her hand closer to him under the covers, enough for her to feel the heat radiating from his body.

  “To come to bed drunk, to wake you from sleep with the crash of a body next to yours. You might have thought . . .” He lets his sentence fade out, not wanting to recall spilled milk and blood, the mildew stench of the dairy, and Cathon the Scribe’s teeth scattered on the stone floor.

  “He is long rotting,” Khosa says, though she suppresses a shudder. “And Merryl guards our door. He’d let no one in who would do me harm.”

  “Some nights I doubt he’ll let me in,” Vincent says.

  “I would never give such an order,” Khosa says, a bit too sharply.

  “I know that,” her husband says, but they are quiet again, and she fears they both think the same thing: Only because you don’t have to. No, all it takes to dissuade Vincent from touching her is his respect, her reluctance a wall between them.

  She wishes she could reach for him and do what most wives find pleasurable, or bearable at the least. Every night she tries to take the wall down, stone by stone, one more breath of touch, a moment more of shared heat.

  Khosa tries again, in the dark. With her eyes closed and her mind on another, she presses her palm against Vincent’s bare back, her hand soft against the muscles between his shoulder blades, which flicker under her touch. They lie together silently, tense as Tangata about to pounce, each of them silently counting the other’s pulse beats. She pulls away at last and wipes her hand discreetly.

  Vincent rolls to face her, and her heart dips, the soft sheets around her suddenly as rough as Cathon’s robes had been. Rotting or not, the Scribe still haunts her. But her husband is not that man.

  “What did you think of Sallin’s proposal?”

  Khosa’s heart slows, and she settles more deeply into the cocoon of the bed, pleased that her husband shares the running of the kingdom with her, even if its citizens so recently would have seen her drowned.

  “Honestly?”

  “Always.”

  “It is not unwise.”

  “A hearty endorsement,” Vincent teases, and she hits him with a pillow.

  “Truth now,” he says, after tossing it back. “What are your thoughts?”

  Khosa bites her lip in the darkness, searching for words. She wants to answer Vincent honestly, but must do so with care. The closeness of their bed this night may not be what her husband wishes for, but is more than they’ve shared in recent memory, their friendship weakening under the requirements of matrimony.

  “You know that I still dance?” she asks quietly, her feet twitching even at the words.

  “Yes, of course,” he says. “Though I had hoped it might fade, in time.”

  “It may,” Khosa agrees, but one ankle gives a sharp jerk in disagreement. Only she, the king, and Merryl know that the bars on their chamber window are not to ward off attackers, but to keep the Redeemed from the sea when her body demands it.

  “You do not think it will?”

  Khosa sighs, her fear sailing to the arched ceiling above them. Only another Given could understand the pull she feels—or, she thinks darkly, one of the unfortunate sea creatures captured in a trapman’s net, dragged to the shore to drown in air.

  “Is it . . .” Her husband’s voice is hesitant again, another stone returned to the wall between them. “Is it like desire, then?”

  “Somewhat,” she says, rolling onto her own side to face him. “Like being near the one you want, but keeping yourself from them because you must.”

  “I can certainly understand that,” Vincent says, his voice stiff and formal as when he addresses people in the great hall. “You speak as though you know how it feels to deny yourself.”

  “Yes,” Khosa says slowly, dropping her eyes.

  “You still feel for Donil?” he questions his wife.

  “Yes,” Khosa answers, raising her gaze to his without shame, for she harbors none.

  Vincent sighs, closing his eyes against her. “Very well. Continue,” he says.

  “It is like that,” she goes on. “I do not believe that I am Given to the Sea. It is life that calls me. I feel it for Donil, and I felt it too for Dara, in that moment when she led me to the water. She’d pulled life from a tree only moments before, killing it with her magic and bringing it into herself.”

  The silence from his side of the bed is heavy with anger now, toward her or Dara she doesn’t know, but she plows on, the damaging words already out.

  “Whatever is inside of me, husband, it’s calling for life. Perhaps I go not to the sea but to something beyond, to land not yet inked on maps. Our world is dying. Ank the Feneen said as much. Birds do not build nests, the Tangata do not make kits, the Indiri themselves are of the very earth and do not thrive. Where we stand fails. Why fight for soil that reeks of salt? Why not do as Sallin says and strike out for new earth?”

  In her passion, she’s clutched onto him, her hand linked in his, their knucklebones digging into one another. She attributes his silence to this, his bated breath held by her reckless words.

  Until it is released in a long, wine-soaked snore.

  CHAPTER 7

  Dara

  I’ve been alone long enough to know when I am that no longer.

  The weight of a glance can be felt, and this one presses upon me. I’ve felt it for three suns, on my lee and to the stoneward, though never on my back. No enemy circles behind an Indiri, even those we cannot see. The fire I’ve built burns low enough not to blind my eyes to the dark, my shoulders are pressed against a tree, my fingertips rest on the blade at my hip, my crossed swords on my knees, my bow beside me. Nothing that bleeds will come near without losing a bit of itself.

  The crack that comes from the darkness is purposeful, a foot brought down on a branch meant for me to hear. Alongside it, I catch a whiff of Tangata, a mix of wet beast fur and the darrow root they seek out. But no cat treads on sticks.

  “Come out, then,” I call. “Or the next sound you hear will be the last beat of your heart.”

  I’m answered by a cat, a long, low purr that has me reaching for my bow only to be stopped by a voice at my ear.

  “Slow then, young one,” it says. “How be it that I come upon the last, and her so easily led astray by my pet?”

  “If a Tangata be your pet, then you are in luck. My blade will take you down and save you the indignity of a death by its claws.” Though my words are sharp, I have to squeeze them past the pressure in my throat.

  “Are we not all undone by what we love, in the end?”

  The blade at my skin eases, and I look down to see it is held by a hand as speckled as my own, though it is old and withered. Thoughts of violence flee, and I am left waxen, a half-melted candle bent at the middle.

  I have never seen an elder Indiri, only glimpses of white hair and spotted skin drawn from my ancestor’s memories. And so I memorize her as she moves into the firelight to sit across from me, that my children, should I have any, may hold the sight dear.

  “I thought I was the last,” I say, the Indiri language tripping from my tongue for the first time with someone other than Donil.

  “Not the last, but the only one able to bring more of our kind to the world. I am long past such things.”

  “I am Dara.”

  “Faja,�
� the woman replies, tilting her head. “Who was your mother?”

  “Ingris,” I say. “And her mother, Fanwe.”

  Faja closes her eyes for a moment, diving into her memories. “Ah, yes, Fanwe.”

  “And your mother?” I ask, but Faja shakes her head.

  “You can search your ancestors back to the dirt we came from and not find her, child. My mother had finely pointed teeth and lovely stripes in her coat.”

  “You are the Indiri raised by Tangata.”

  I search the older woman’s face, having never seen it among the memories of my ancestors. I cannot help but be prideful at the sight of her. The Given’s musty scrolls and stacks of books may have held their own kind of truth, but they had proclaimed the Indiri extinct except for myself and my twin. But one had lived on. Raised among cats and wild as a Pietran Lusca, but alive.

  “You are flesh and blood,” I say. “Not the legend some think.”

  “A little too real.” Faja winces as she straightens her legs. “Legends live long, retaining their youth and beauty with each generation. I am fading and not long for this world.”

  “The world is not long for itself. The sea—”

  “I know,” Faja says, unconcerned.

  “How, when Stille has only just learned?”

  Faja’s brows draw together, dark lines meeting in the firelight. “Do you not feel it, young one? When I was small, I ran through these woods fearing nothing, knowing the branches would catch me if I stumbled, leaves would move to cover me if it rained. Now if I fall, I land on sharp rocks, and the trees watch me bleed.”

  I nod, having gone through memories and seen my ancestors sleeping unconcerned beneath trees that would wake them against enemies, while I spend sleepless nights in the forest.

  “It is all I’ve ever known, this weakness,” I tell her. “When I search my mother’s memories, and those before her, there is a feeling of strength I have never called my own.”

  “It left with the Indiri,” Faja says. “The day our people were culled, our magic left too, leaching out with every rain until there is hardly any left. Our earth grows smaller, and what’s left of the Indiri weaker with every pull of the tide that takes a bit of the shore out to sea.”

  I am quiet, too aware that though the Stilleans fear my might, I am merely an echo of those who came before me.

  “Are there more?” I must ask, though I know and fear the answer.

  Faja shakes her head. “Yours is the only face I’ve seen that reflects my own, and you smell of the surf, not the woods.”

  “I smell like the only place that would offer my brother and me shelter,” I snap. “If it be near the sea, what of it? Better to stink of salt than the rot of death.”

  Faja’s smile is buried in wrinkles, one hand up to ward off my anger. “Ah, there’s an Indiri. I see her in there now, under those nicely stitched clothes.”

  I come to my feet, hating the very wool of the Hyllenian sheep that swirls around me as I do. “Were you not Indiri, I’d have you on your back for that.”

  Faja’s humor disappears. “I doubt that, young one. You’re a warrior—I can see it in the lines of your body—and where you’re from, I doubt any can best you. But I’m Indiri born and forest raised. Come at me, and you’ll find that the Tangata taught me a thing or two.”

  I unclench my fists, ignoring the anger still coiled in my belly. “I’ve not spent my entire life searching for an Indiri only to spill her blood. Do you not have any word to give me? Rumors of others or a hint of hope?”

  Faja meets my eyes over the fire, her spots darker than mine with age. “There are no others, child. As for hope—it goes out with the tide.” She comes to her feet somewhat shakily, her years betraying her. “Go back to where you came from, Indiri. As for any word I can give, there is only one for all of us. Indiri. Stillean. Pietra. Feneen. We are destroyed.”

  CHAPTER 8

  Ank

  My mother never meant for me to live, and more than once, I wished it had been so. The caul I was born with kept me from seeing with my eyes, but gave me a different gift, to know a person’s true nature with a brush of a hand, their skin upon mine. Though my caul fell away years ago, it hangs, curled and dry, in a pouch around my neck. I have often wanted it back upon my face, to spare me the sight of things that cannot be unseen.

  Feneen floating in the river, Pietra crushed by the sea, Stilleans feeding girls to the depths, and the Indiri reduced to a dirt plain where nothing grows. Except for the two Indiri . . . I smile at the thought of them. The girl, ready to slice my throat at a cave’s entrance for an imagined insult. The boy, loyal and foolish, stepping in front of the Stillean prince to protect his friend, though his own blood is rare.

  The Indiri are true, the girl a whirlwind of pride and wrath, the boy a pillar of loyalty and trust. Others have proven less worthy, and it was with no little happiness that I heard of the death of King Varrick, a man of dark appetites. Yet even an aged caulbearer with the face of a youth can be surprised, as I was when I touched the young Lithos.

  Of all those I have known at a touch, the Lithos is the most at odds with himself. Outwardly he must behave as the leader of the Stone Shore, a man as hard as the place his people call home. He has no family, fathers no children, and knows no friends, so that ties will never compromise his battle acumen. The Lithos sends his own people into the sea on the Culling Days, ridding the land of the old and infirm, the weak and the dying. Boats without oars go into the sea to be tipped by the Lusca, foul sea beasts that have learned the cycles of the moon and know when to come close to Pietran shores for their fill of flesh.

  Witt does all these things. I have seen him send young mothers and weak babies to the monsters, slit sickened throats with bladed Hadundun leaves, order his men across a river on a human bridge, all while wearing a stony face. Yet inside he cries, so much that I believe him to have drowned long ago, although his heart has yet to hear of it.

  “Let us hope the Hyllenians have shorn those sheep,” Hadduk, the new Mason, mutters beside me, pulling his hood closer to his face against the rain. “I’d have a new cape out of one of them, or it’ll be mutton.”

  “The Hyllenians know best when to shear their own sheep,” the Lithos says on my other side, rain running down his own unprotected face. “I’ll not tell them how to shepherd, and they’ll not teach me to make war.”

  Hadduk grunts in response, and I nod my approval to Witt, who ignores it.

  “Lithos, what are your plans for the Feneen once we reach the Stony Shore?”

  It is not the first time I’ve asked, all other answers I’ve received not to my liking. The Lithos sighs. I am as persistent as the rain that’s fallen on our march during the past three suns. We return home with an army more Feneen than Pietra, and many families will be lost to grief upon our arrival. I’d see my people’s arrangements settled before that grief turns to anger and the Feneen are counted as enemies in their midst.

  Witt spits rainwater from his mouth. “Ank, I’ve not thought much past getting what’s left of my men back home.”

  I know this is untrue, as I’ve seen the young Lithos’s eyes scanning his troops and seeing more of my own among them than faces he knows. Any commander worth his steel knows when he’s outnumbered, and not only by the Feneen who march with him. Stille holds many and more. How the Pietra will lay claim to the land is hard upon the Lithos’s mind. As well it should be, with the tides rising on all sides and generations of his people yet to come needing somewhere to put their feet.

  “Gahlah’s lancia is undone,” I say, ignoring the sidelong glance from Hadduk that would slice me to spine if it were a blade. “Give us their barracks and any bedding not warmed by Pietran backs. My people can sleep easily under stars, but a layer of feathers between them and the ground would not be unwelcome.”

  Witt waves a hand at me as if it were already done, and
I see the price I asked was too low, something to remember for later. I offered the might of my people once to the Stilleans, only to be rejected by Gammal, and then his son, Varrick, both dead now—something I had not looked for. Had I known that Vincent would ascend so soon, I might have stayed true to my mother’s Stillean blood and fought against the men I now ride with.

  My hand goes to the caul at my throat for reassurance. It has never led me wrong, and I know that for all his actions, the Lithos of Pietra is a good man. I keep saying this to myself.

  For I cannot afford it not to be true.

  CHAPTER 9

  Witt

  I stink of rain and wet beast, my clothes soaked so thoroughly they weigh more than my body. Still, I will be the last man to bed. First I must see to my horse, Cavallo, who does not know that much has changed since our leaving. He will find rest long before I do, as there are homes to be visited, homes that no soldier will be returning to. I envy my horse the luxury of ignorance.

  They anticipate my coming, these houses where lights still burn. The men who survived the Stillean shore were given leave to return to their families for the night. They bed their wives in the dark, while others cling to hope, lanterns lit. I move from light to light, extinguishing them with a word.

  Hadduk is with me, though the task does not suit him. Pravin knew always what to say, even when duty made for hard words. He found ways to soften blows that landed on hearts, though none would ever call him weak. I feel my throat closing at the thought of him, as another light goes out at my back and we proceed to the next, a line drawn through a name on Hadduk’s list.

  Choosing him as Mason was a poor choice, one made in haste on a night filled with loss. In my own grief I had looked on Hadduk, who was unmoved at the loss of so many, and thought him a good candidate. In truth he should be Lithos, and I no more than a lancia. If it were so, I’d be behind one of these doors, bedding my own wife.