The Silences of Home

by The Silences of Home (v5. 0) (epub)

  “Father, you’ll want to wait for us here. His eyes are tender now, not suited any more to the upper floors.” In two steps they were in a circular chamber flooded with sunlight. Nellyn’s eyes watered and he closed them, rubbed at them with his fingertips until they cleared. “This here’s a room that has to be bright. It’s where we watch the harbour and the sea—where I watch, since Father’s not up to staring at the water all day, and his hand shakes when he tries to write. See, here’s the desk and the daily log. Fresh parchment here, writing sticks. The old logs are on these shelves, bound at the end of every year. I’d say there’d be generations of books here, going back to a time when this tower was just new—all the records of storms, wrecks, sightings of new ships, or weeks and weeks of calm sometimes. You even have to write about the calm days, though I couldn’t say why.”

  They were all standing at the wide, curved window with its countless squares of glass. Thick, bubbled glass, but Nellyn could see unending water below, cliffs to his left, the icemounts that turned and sang in the harbour and just beyond, where it widened into sea. He touched the glass and the cold metal that held the glass together, very lightly, knowing that it would be solid and strong, but still afraid.

  “So then, Lanalla—or is it. . . .? Yes, yes—Lanara, of course—my Gelartan’s always chiding me for forgetting names. The price of a lifetime of isolation, I tell him. He’s lucky to have found me at all, up here. . . . Lanara, yes—this, as my father will tell you, is the most important place in the signal tower excepting the lightroom itself. Two Queens have visited us here—even our revered Galha, may the First comfort her now—and each one has bade us take great care with the daily logs. You must record with precision and fine script—but you’re of Queensfolk stock, of course, you’ll know about writing. . . .”

  Lanara turned away from the window. Nellyn turned as well and watched her walk toward the staircase. Long, firm strides—but then she stopped, and Nellyn ran to her and caught her as she fell.

  Alea’s body hurt. Not just in the places she would have expected to pain, carrying a baby, but in all places—every muscle, every bit of skin, and her innards too. She walked very slowly up the tower’s stairs, sometimes leaning on the handrail or lowering her head to its cool metal. It’s only winter, she thought again, as she had so many times since coming to Fane. And the baby won’t come till the summer. She paused and arched her back. This felt wonderful for the space of three heartbeats. It’s because I’m here, enclosed by walls. And even when I do go out, I’m bound by the sea and that horrid path. I remember my mother, only days away from birthing Alnanna, dancing by our fire as if she weighed nothing more than a spark. And the next day she rode . . . Alea shook the images away, knowing that they would return. These memories were as comforting and relentless as the sea water that rose and fell against the cliff.

  She climbed through hers and Aldron’s sleeping floor toward Nellyn and Lanara’s. In the month since Drelha and her father had departed, these spaces in particular had changed. The shutters were always open during the day; light shone from the polished wood of floors and chairs and tables. Despite this brightness, Alea found her room drab. The screen that hid their sleeping mat from the staircase was brown, as was the carpet. “A very sensible colour,” Aldron had said when they had examined their room for the first time in daylight. But she longed for other colours—scarlet, green, orange—and knew that these were Alilan colours and thus unacceptable in their new home. They were by the sea now, and there should be no attempt to call back the hues and textures of the lake country or the plain or the desert, the painted wagons and the blankets by the fires.

  Aldron was aware of her yearning. He had brought gifts back with him on his last three trips into town: light blue, pink, and yellow glass vases. He had set them on the table, the windowsill, the floor, trying to coax as much light from them as possible. She did love these things (and him for his eagerness to cheer her), but she did not touch them. They were beautiful, delicate, like tiny icemounts trembling indoors.

  She stepped quietly into Nellyn and Lanara’s chamber. Nellyn tended the signal light from midnight until after dawn; he sometimes slept until midday. She glanced at the sleeping screen—cream-coloured linen—but could see nothing behind it. This room was more cluttered than hers: there were several low tables and chairs, two carpets (both green), a bookcase that had somehow been made to match the contour of the wall. The old man had kept little wooden boats here. Now that these were gone, the shelves were mostly empty. Lanara had set some books on the section of shelf furthest away from the bed—just a few, in a short, neat row. Sitting cushions were strewn about. As if, Alea thought, we may suddenly be flooded with visitors. The cushions at least were brightly coloured, though they had been so dirty at first that they had all looked grey. The previous signal tower keepers, it seemed, had received few visitors.

  The writing room was, as usual, so dazzlingly sunny that Alea had to stand still and wait for her eyes to adjust. As she waited, she heard a familiar sound from above. Lanara in the lightroom, scraping tallow drippings from the floor. “Some other signal tower keepers are starting to burn oil,” Drelha had told them. “Oil! Candles are good enough for us and always have been. We’ve had many a fisherman thank us for our light on foggy days or nights.” The level above the writing room was so low-ceilinged that adults had to stoop; it was stacked with candles, as was the shed beside the tower. And Lanara spent hours every morning, after she had extinguished the flames and trimmed the wicks, kneeling on the floor with a metal tool, jabbing at the tallow that had congealed upon the wood during the long hours of the night watch.

  Alea walked to the window. She rolled her forehead back and forth over the rippled glass until the sweat was gone. She smoothed the damp hair away from her temples, tucked it behind her ears.

  “Alea,” Nellyn said from behind her, “you must not climb all these stairs. I keep telling you. . . . Here, sit”—and she turned and let him guide her to the stool.

  “It makes no sense,” she said, propping her elbow on the desk and placing her hot cheek on her fist. “I’m only five months gone with child. I was strong before this. . . .”

  Nellyn sat down on the edge of the desk. He was silent. He so often was, when others would have filled the air with words. She looked down at the parchment that lay between them. “Will you read it to me?” she said. “What you and Lanara wrote about last night.”

  Nellyn held the sheet up and squinted at it. “My writing is terrible, even though I have been practicing. I have asked her to help me, but she is too . . . tired.” Another silence pooled between them. Lanara’s scraping was very loud. “My entry is short,” he continued. “It says: ‘Dawn. Light fog, water calm.’ That is all.”

  “And Lanara’s entry?”

  Nellyn smiled a bit, as he followed the marks Lanara had made. “Longer than mine, of course—though she never writes as much now as she would have . . . before. She wrote: ‘Midnight. Winds gentle from the north and east.’”

  Alea glanced at the balcony outside the window. Long branches of wood were attached to the railing, and a collection of smaller wooden pieces extended from them. Two of these, shaped like flowers, were spinning very gently. The rest were still.

  “‘Water ruffled, but few waves. Half-moon risen. Icemounts in harbour quite bright. Some activity on two small boats just arrived from north. Queenshouse windows lit.’”

  The scraping stopped just after his voice did. Nellyn and Alea looked up, then at each other. “Will she come down?” Alea asked.

  “No,” he replied. Both of them were nearly whispering. “She will polish the mirror and the glass pieces. And the windows too, though she may have already done that.”

  “I came up to tell you both that the midday meal is nearly ready,” Alea said. “Do you think she’ll eat with us today?”

  He set the parchment down on the desk exactly where it had been before. “No,” he sa
id, and turned his head so that Alea could not see his face.

  “I don’t understand her, Nellyn,” she said, her words faster, louder, because she had not expected to speak them. “Her pain, yes—of course I understand that. But we Al . . . the Alilan are loud about their grief. They drink and dance and weep together, for grieving must never be solitary. Lanara is too alone.”

  He looked back at her. She had learned to read his face, which had at first been so strange to her. The slight narrowing of his eyes, the single line that creased the dark blue skin of his forehead: these were signs of a difficult emotion for him. “For the shonyn,” he said, each word as carefully placed as ever, “there is no grieving. Death, as you and Lanara call it, cannot change their days or nights. Dead shonyn are rowed to the lynanyn trees and covered with earth, there among the roots. So these shonyn continue to live, as always.”

  “And the ones who row them across?” she asked. “The ones left behind? They aren’t sad at all?”

  He lifted his hands, spread his fingers apart. “Perhaps, though in a different way from the one you know. I. . . .” His fingers curled, dug against his palms. “I cannot describe these things now. I am outside them.”

  Alea nodded. She looked out at the sea and drew her hands in light circles over the places where her baby moved, beneath.

  “Aldron’s down in the town again,” Alea said as they returned to the kitchen. Nellyn held out his hand once or twice when she seemed to be tiring, but she smiled at him and shook her head. “He’s looking for a stonemason who’ll supply us with some flat stones for the cliff path. He claims he’ll lay them himself. Lanara’s pay is good enough, he says, and the path really is awful . . . though with a better one I may never see him again—he’ll be off to Fane every day.”

  Nellyn half-turned to see if her expression was light-hearted or melancholy, but then they reached the bottom step and saw Aldron bending over the brick oven. He straightened when he heard them, and grinned as he tossed a chunk of bread from hand to hand. “Apologies, my sweet,” he said to Alea, who had made a low sound in her throat. “I know how you hate me to pick at your bread before it’s done, but it’s utterly irresistible.” He grasped her hand and pulled her in to him. She laughed when he popped a piece of the bread into her mouth. “Better every time,” he mumbled around his own mouthful. “I say again: this settled living will make a fine cook of you.”

  Nellyn saw Alea’s eyes shift. She walked over to the fireplace and leaned against its stone rim, stirring the soup that hung in a pot above the flames. Aldron rolled his eyes at Nellyn; this was something he often did, which Nellyn did not comprehend at all. “I brought you back a gift,” Aldron said, coming up behind her. He slid one hand over her belly. The other, behind his back, held a glass vase. The fourth he had given her this month.

  “Violet,” she said after he had presented it to her. “It’s beautiful.”

  “I thought,” he said, taking it from her, “that we could put it here, on the windowsill beside the door. It’s set in the wooden casement, you see, so the light will be even stronger, especially in the morning. . . .”

  They all stared at the vase for a moment. It’s like frozen water, Nellyn thought. Its edges swam and blurred, in the sunlight on the sill.

  “How do you pay for these?” Alea asked. She did not sound angry, but Aldron cleared his throat and took a step away from her. “Not with Lanara’s Queenspay, I’m sure,” she went on.

  “And what do we have to trade for such fine things? Aldron. Look at me and answer.”

  Even Nellyn could hear her anger now—but Aldron faced her when he said, “I didn’t mean to, the first time—but there was a child crying in a doorway. Such a child, Alea: small and dirty, hardly any flesh on her. So I Told her something—a trifle—just a little rainbow in the air that coloured her clothes for a moment. But someone who was passing saw and offered me coins if I’d make a picture for his wife too. She was sad, he said—this news about the Princess—so. . . .”

  “So.” The word was heavy—lynanyn falling from a branch into the river. “How many times? And for how long will they be trifles?” She crossed from the fireplace to the window and laid her head against the wall. “How can you continue to make a mockery of this kind of Telling? You know how careful I’ve been not to Tell at all, ever, though this causes me great pain. Swear to me, Aldron, promise me that you’ll never try to change anything with your other . . . gift.”

  Nellyn stood very still. He understood little of this exchange, just Alea’s fear and anger, and Aldron’s discomfort. Aldron angled his head to the side and tucked his chin against his collarbone. Nellyn thought, He must truly be ashamed—but then he saw Aldron’s lips part and heard something, only a whisper, like wind between stones. Alea must have heard it as well, for she lifted her head and turned it to look at the vase beside her.

  Nellyn blinked. There was a flower in the vase, slender, with dark purple petals that clung tightly together—the same kind as the one Aldron had given her in the inn, so long ago. A tall flower, fresh-cut—from where? The frozen moss, or a hollow in the snow—or perhaps Aldron got it in town and put it in the vase quickly when I was not looking?—but Nellyn knew this could not be true, and he let out a long, shuddering breath.

  “I swear it,” Aldron said quietly as Alea went to him. She wrapped her arms around his neck; her linked hands were in his hair. “Except for this one, small use,” he said, and she laughed against his shoulder, though Nellyn saw that she was also crying. “Except for this, I swear it.”

  I must leave, Nellyn thought. He looked at the flower and found that his feet would not move. His heart was drumming strangely, too quickly but with long spaces between beats. It was so loud that at first he did not hear the bell, and when he did, he thought the ringing must be within him, as his noisy heartbeat was. But Aldron and Alea raised their heads, and a moment later Lanara came to a slipping, stumbling halt on the stairs above them.

  “The bridgetower bell,” she gasped. “And there are banners—blue and green—and Queensfolk on the wharf.” Her eyes found Nellyn’s, and she smiled, though he could not. “The Queen is coming. The Queen is here.”

  BOOK THREE

  TWENTY-NINE

  On Queenswrit Eve, Luhr’s marketplace was cleared of wagons and stages and sleeping mats so that there would be room for all the people. They would gather throughout the day, until every corner of the marketplace and many of the surrounding streets were filled. The crowd would sing and cook food on small braziers and wait for dusk, when the Queen would step onto the balcony of the Scribeslibrary, in which all the records of the realm were kept. Her people would call out to her then, raising their arms, straining for a clearer view. Lanara remembered the Queenswrit Eves she’d spent as a child, hemmed in by legs until Creont lifted her to his shoulders. She had looked down at the crush, and blinked at the noise, and thought that there could never, ever be more people than this gather to see the Queen.

  Lanara knew she had been wrong, on the day Queen Galha’s ship sailed down to the mouth of the Sarhenna River. The citizens of Fane flooded every street, even ones with no view of water. They lined the river and the wharf, every one of the six docks and each of the boats in the harbour. They climbed up to perch on roofs, so that the gleaming red tiles were nearly invisible. They stood on balconies and leaned out of windows. Some even clambered from boats onto icemounts, where they huddled together beneath blankets. So many people, the most Lanara had ever seen in one place—and all were silent as the ship came slowly down among them.

  “A little higher,” she whispered to Aldron, who grunted and stood taller. She teetered a bit, clamped her legs under his armpits. It had taken a long time to push their way this close to the river, but close as they were, she had not been able to see anything except people and the bridgetower that rose beside them. Aldron had muttered, “I hope our dear ones won’t be able to see us from the tower. Up you get, now. That’
s right, woman: up!”

  She could see the river, now, and the bridge, which had split into two halves. Each half was being hauled up by invisible chains and wheels within the bridgetowers on either side of the river. The metal of the chains clanked and occasionally screamed into the silence, which Lanara thought she could almost see. Seabirds called from the sky above the harbour, and the icemounts sang and groaned. Water lapped against creaking timber. All this was faint and small, almost unnoticed; it was oar strokes that everyone heard most clearly, and the heavy flap of sails.

  Queen Galha stood alone at the ship’s prow. Lanara saw the red ribbons first, vivid as blood or blossoms against the Queen’s dark hair. Some of the ribbons were long, and fluttered beside and behind her. The ship surged closer, and Lanara saw Galha’s face: the sharp, firm edge of her jaw, the steady shine of her eyes. The closed line of her mouth. Lanara did not look away from the Queen’s face until the ship drew level with the bridgetower and its deck became visible. Malhan was there, standing below and behind Galha, gazing up at her. Lanara waited for him to turn and scrutinize the crowd, the sailors who were heaving the Queensship anchor up and over the side, the party of Queensguards who were lining up to grasp the end of gangplank—but he did not. He looked only at the Queen. Lanara glanced from Galha to Malhan and saw that everything had changed for them as well. Of course this was so—how could it not be?—but she shivered.

  “Look,” a man murmured. Others were murmuring too, and pointing. “The Raider that killed the Princess—may the First rot him and all his kind. . . .” Lanara turned away from Malhan and the Queen and saw the other man—or perhaps he was half a man, for his flesh looked thick and strangely coloured, and his hands, lashed together to the wood of the foremast, were wrong, somehow, as if they had been plucked from a beast and attached to the ends of these arms. Strips of filthy cloth hung from his body; his head lolled, and long, snarled hair hid his face. Someone in the crowd cried out, and a rock flew and landed on the deck at the prisoner’s feet, which were also tied to the mast. Lanara wanted to laugh. Such a feeble, helpless attempt. Even a hundred arrows in his chest would be as worthless an expression of hatred and grief. She watched him as the anchor sank and the mooring rope pulled taut. She willed him to lift his head and see her; she felt sick with the desire for him to do this.