“May I help you?” Jaele asked when she had finished eating—standing, moving to somehow fill her hands. As she ducked below the pots, Annial smiled.
“A fine idea. It has been a long time since anyone shared this kitchen with me—even Ilario, who used to sing as he chopped seagreen. A fine idea.” She handed Jaele a small knife and gestured toward a vegetable-laden table. “You may cut those into strips for tonight’s soup. This kitchen was so full, in the days of many ships: Hania and I, Boren her husband, their children, usually a sailor or two, perhaps a Queensfighter. Yes, our kitchen was famed, praised by all, and our rooms were always slept in. Even the top floor. Even the ledges in this room, and the carpets in the library. Ilario’s library. How he searches. There was singing and laughter, and we drank wine.”
Jaele chopped and cut slowly, slipping into the rhythm of Annial’s voice. There was a cool breeze from outside, and a smell of vanishing rain. Time passed. She spoke a bit, and nodded agreement to words she immediately forgot. Safety again, found and clutched.
When Ilario swept in from the hallway, she started. He stopped mid-step.
“Ilario!” Annial cried. “Come sit! Hania and I—I have been telling Jaele about the days when you played here.”
He glanced at the old woman briefly, then looked again at Jaele. “The storm is over, yes? May I inquire why you are in my kitchen?”
She fastened her eyes on the wild spikes of his hair and spoke to him clearly, for the first time. “I am helping Annial. We have been talking. I am sorry this offends you. I will be gone by nightfall.”
“Nonsense!” chirped Annial. “Ilario, what would your parents say? This poor girl has nowhere to stay—she is a traveller, and this house has always been open to travellers. You ungrateful, terrible boy. Tell her she may stay.”
He turned to Annial, and Jaele caught her breath at the smile she saw light and disappear. He said nothing, but spun back into the corridor.
“Jaele,” Annial began, “you must excuse him. I love him as I have loved the others—perhaps more, for we always love the most difficult, yes?” and Jaele said, very quietly, “Yes,” as Annial continued, “But he is a good boy, a good man, and he will soon be friendly. It is just his way. We must wait.”
Jaele set her knife down and wiped her hands on a rough brown cloth. “Thank you,” she said, “for your kindness to me. I will leave your home.”
She heard Annial’s protest behind her as she walked into the darkness beyond the kitchen; back through the scrolls and up the stairs, into her room with its grey window and lowering fire. She sat on the bed and stared at the floor until slowly, almost unnoticed, the map eased into focus.
In the daylight it was layered with colour and shade, so intricate that it seemed she could touch the wrinkled mountains, the desert’s sandy gold, the blue-green twining of river and trees. Bienta’s map, woven—but not, for dark and flowering among these landscapes were words; words spiralling like uncoiling serpents, gleaming up the rugged slopes of hills, shrinking to tiny perfect rain in mountain passes. Some she understood: she saw “Luhr” and “Galha,” letters ringing the crystal spires, and she ached; “Telon” and “Fane,” as well. The other words curled in her eyes unknown. Names stretched over the silga mountains, the desert, the river and jungle—names she had never heard of and did not recognize. There should have been echoes, perhaps; there should have been sounds that reminded her of sky and a lake in winter.
She hugged her knees to her chest and wandered the road from Luhr to a patch of jungle to a small edge of beach that lay still, encircled by water and rocks, the colours pure because there were no words to darken them. Quickly back, leaping over desert where she saw “Perona” but not the other—to Fane, whose cobbles and courtyards were riddled with script, and then the grey, heaving ocean. There were a few words here, folded between waves, and islands fastened to one another with writing like impossible arching bridges. On until, shrinking, she slowed at a coastline that was jagged with emptiness. No words, no names, no rock or hills; only a flat, dark dagger-strip at the corner of the map, fading into fog and then floorboards.
Jaele shivered, looked up and out of the window at the gathering clouds.
She did not leave the steep harbour house. She slept, then sat watching sea and sky: crimson-gold dawn, night that convulsed with lightning. The ships creaked, empty and bound. She thought, I will speak to the sailors about passage east when they return—but they did not, and she was more relieved than sorry. Too tired to imagine another departure, despite the man she had seen in the shonyn river; the man who would surely be swimming now, across. She lay propped on an elbow, tracing the carpet map in silence, thinking, Soon I will be stronger.
Every morning, she heard the front door below her crash shut. She crouched on the window ledge and watched Ilario stride along the wharf and vanish. He rarely returned before dusk. She would go downstairs to the kitchen, where Annial would be waiting. “Jaele dear,” she said the day after Ilario had told her to leave, “you are wise to stay. He will soon be kind.”
Jaele drew her fingertips along the books and smelled age and crumbling. Golden letters twisted like vine; hidden beneath scrolls were stone tablets, cold and grey and porous as dead coral. Deep-coloured rugs prickled her feet.
Sometimes she went into the town after Ilario had done so. Annial wrapped her in a long woollen cloak the first morning, clucking and smoothing with her old crab hands. “The wind is bitter,” she said, “especially where the buildings crowd close together. The winter is breathing on our skin. The boats will not leave their moorings now—not until spring.” It is too late, then, Jaele thought, and again felt thankfulness and regret. He has already swum, and I will follow him later; I will cross the Eastern Sea in spring—and there was something so comforting about these words that she smiled.
“Far from the glorious comings and goings when I was young,” Annial was saying. “Poor Fane, so dull, only a shadow of before, like myself.” She paused and stepped back to look at Jaele. “How well the cloak suits you: dark like your eyes. It was mine when I stood taller. Now go on and explore, and we will drink some steaming herb water when you return.”
That day—and on those that followed—she walked without choosing a way, angling her body into the salt sting of the wind. She rounded corners into places she would not see again: sudden bowers of blue leaves and moss-damp cobbles; a square with a central fountain, cracked and fallen and spilling violet dust; a steep, wide avenue flanked by houses whose doors gaped on weed-shattered sky.
There were other places that she did see often, without effort. She ducked one day into a cramped, cloth-hung marketplace and sucked in her breath at the stench of meat. Meat everywhere: dangling from wooden spikes, layered deep in blood on trays, stripped and slabbed and oozing in piles on the stone ground. Children sat on their haunches, fanning away flies, flicking at maggots with dagger points. Jaele threaded her way around the stalls and spikes as people thrust past her with eager, outstretched arms. She did not see the end, but unexpectedly it was there: space above her head, lungs gasping relief and daylight. Somehow her unguided steps led her back to this market, and she stood still for a moment each time, gazing before she turned back.
She also came frequently to a short lane that blossomed into a vast spreading tree. Its boughs bent almost to the street; from beneath they were belled as the rib cage of a great ocean creature, and they fluttered with slender white leaves. The first time Jaele saw the tree, she stopped walking and gaped, for the air seemed dazzled with sunlight or snow. She sat against the strange smooth wood, feeling the long leaves stirring against her hair, though there was no wind here. A harbour tree, she thought. Although she never tried to, she returned to it often by day and once or twice by night, when it shone the falling paths of stars.
The place she found most easily was the tunnel and the weavers’ quarter beyond. She knew the dank, pitted walls and the echoes, the shado
wed courtyards and the figures that were never familiar enough. The ivy was golden and russet, now, tendrils curling over the cloaks and carpets. At first she sat at the end of the alley and sank slowly, deliberately, until the many clatterings became one: one shuttle flying, one head thrown back in laughter. Each time she sat there, the backward-circling became more difficult. There were faces around her that she began to recognize, and rhythms of coins, singing, occasional silence that she came to know. Each time, she yearned and grasped and felt a new distance, a slippery transparency at which she raged. But still she went often to sit there, and did not want to leave.
Everything was twinned: a bright image and a darkening one. The smell of the sea; the fishing boats pulled up on the beach beneath the cliffs; women with long thick hair; boys slender and sharp; the sounds of an inn drifting out into the street at dusk. All of this was so close that memory buckled away from her. She thought that someday it would die.
She dreamed, not of her parents, but of Dorin. In these dreams she stood before him and screamed, swelling to fill the sky above him, and she woke voiceless with fury.
Days went by and still Jaele did not meet Ilario again. “He is occupied,” Annial said once, as she and Jaele stood stirring cauldrons of broth and seagreen. “He is searching, I believe, although I think there is no hope.”
“No hope?” Jaele asked, and the old woman whispered, “Shh, child, in case he hears you. As I said, I know nothing for certain. Hania often said so, as did Ellrac, the Queensfighter—I have told you about him? He gave me flowers.”
Jaele woke one night, shaking from a dream. She pressed her forehead against the window; the sea was skittering rain, and the glass was very cold. She was widely, inescapably awake.
The stairs creaked beneath her feet, and she cringed; she had never wandered the house so late. Accustomed shapes loomed strangely in her iben-vision, and she trailed her hands over them to make them real: books, chair backs, the jutting edge of the table. The kitchen door was closed; there was no light below it. She pushed it open.
Ilario was sitting on a stool, leaning over a counter with his head gripped in his hands. A single candle-flame fluttered in the tiny wind from the door. Jaele wiped away the tears of her vanished iben-sight and found that he was looking at her.
“You are still here.” His voice was low, and she could hear no anger in it.
“Yes,” she replied, her own voice rough with sleep. He raked his fingers through his already tousled hair and was silent.
“Ilario,” she said, whispering because of the night, “I am sorry that my presence galls you, but I have nowhere else to go—and now the winter is coming, and I will have to stay in Fane until the spring. I will have to wait.”
Ilario glanced up at her, and the shadows twisted his lips into a half-smile. “Girl, your speech is windy and meaningless. Please breathe. Several times.” She did. He continued, “As it is so late, my customary unpleasantness is dulled. You could sit, if you liked.”
She sat down carefully on one of the cushioned wall ledges and looked around the kitchen: smudged clumps of vegetables, towers of bread, the silver-beaded windows. He growled a laugh. “You may look directly at me. How well I intimidate! Better than I had imagined.”
Jaele looked at him. He seemed pale, between the darkness and the candlelight. “Yes, you intimidate,” she said, not whispering this time. “You are miserable. I hide from you. I know when you go out in the morning, and I scurry around at dusk so that I can eat and be back in my room by the time you return. Am I talking too much?”
He answered, “Surprisingly, I am enjoying your blethering. Proceed.”
Jaele cleared her throat and ran her fingernail along a knife groove in the wall beside her. “I don’t know what else to say. I have no money. I must wait until the spring to continue on my way.”
“Why?” He was lounging against the wall opposite her, but she could sense interest in the lines of him.
“I do not know if I can explain it to you. It is a . . . sensitive thing.”
“Ah,” he said. “So you wish to stay in my house and eat my food until the spring, at which time you will be off again without telling me where or why. I see. That is considerate of you.”
“Very well,” she said, clenching her fists, “tell me why you sit here alone in the middle of the night. Why you go alone every day. Why you are so unpleasant.” She was breathless with the memory of her brother, and the vivid, heated twining of their words.
Ilario gazed at her steadily. After a time he smiled, and she remembered how he had smiled at Annial. “These too are sensitive things. I concede your victory. Although,” he added, “to be fair, I am not foisting myself upon your household.”
They sat for a while without speaking. The rain made slow dancing shapes on the floor and walls. When he stood, she followed him with her eyes.
“I thank you for your fascinating tale,” he said. “Perhaps you will tell me more some other night.” At the door he turned back. “Please blow out the candle before you return to your bed. A fire would do little to endear you to me.”
Jaele grinned at the closed door, then rose and quenched the candle. She fell asleep on the ledge and woke at dawn to Annial singing of fishfolk and gold.
The day after her talk with Ilario, Jaele went with Annial to a fruit market. It was muddy, darkening afternoon when the old woman stood among the pots and declared, “We must have speckled sourfruit. This is most desperate. Come with me, child—I may require the aid of younger arms.”
When they reached the end of the wharf, Jaele stopped before the crumbling tower that overlooked the river. So much of the tower had fallen that she could almost touch its topmost stones. Its round base was very wide. “This tower must have been enormous,” she said. Her fingernails pressed into them moss that grew in the fissures between the stones. “Do you know what it was?”
Annial smiled. “Of course I do, sweetlet. There was a bridge here, long, long ago, when my grandmother was a girl. She told me that when the ships came down from Luhr, the keepers of this tower and the other across the river would raise the bridge with great wheels and chains. The boats would then pass through to the sea.” She sighed. “When I was a child, there were still links of chain inside, all rusted and bent. But the bridge itself was gone—and now the chain is gone too. There is only the stone, and I suppose it will vanish soon enough.”
Jaele looked across the river at the ruin of the other bridge tower. Beyond it were roofless houses with shattered, yawning window, and doors that hung from single hinges. She saw the road, which began where the bridge must once have rested. It widened past the houses and climbed until it reached the emptiness of the coast.
She said, “Your grandmother must have told wonderful stories.”
Annial nodded. “Oh, yes. Wonderful stories—I could almost hear the chains screaming and the Queensfighters calling from the ship. The children say I am like her.” She frowned at the basket in her hand.
“Speckled sourfruit,” Jaele reminded her.
Annial cried, “Of course! How we have dawdled. Come, come!”
It was raining slightly now: mist on eyelashes and hair, an odour of wet stone and crimson-brown decay. Jaele hastened to keep pace with Annial, who bobbed quickly along. After many turns and slippery stairs they arrived again at the river, which thundered between steep walls of grey rock. Annial led Jaele over an arching bridge; the railing was carved with faces and shapes that looked like leaping fish. The water below was white.
“Follow, follow, follow. . . .” Annial was singing, her voice like spray. “. . . the river bends and cries . . . come my love to find me. . . .”
The market was not what Jaele had expected: the open space of Luhr, perhaps, or even the hanging ropes and awnings of Fane’s meat quarter. She and Annial came to a low stone building and passed beneath its squat entryway. Beyond was a courtyard, empty except for a dirty, sleeping chi
ld and a rotting wagon lurched onto its side. Annial turned right and continued through another door into a roofless room that smelled of overripe sweetness. There was a woman there, huddled on the flagstones among piles of sunfruit, which glistened with rain. Annial moved swiftly on, down some stairs to a deep earth-scented chamber where a man stood with grapes gleaming silver in his palms. He chanted, “Smooth and cool, silver and cool,” but Annial did not pause.
There were more underground chambers, more steps and corridors and rooms that lay open to the darkness and rain. In each place was a different kind of fruit. People with baskets bent and sniffed, shook or gripped the fruit before moving on or dropping payment into waiting hands. Jaele saw all this as she scurried to follow Annial.
“Why,” she panted once, hoping Annial would hear her, “are these fruit so fresh when it is almost winter?”
The old woman called back over her shoulder, “Much of it is grown indoors, under glass. Some grows for much of the year in the jungle which lies to the north. A valiant few harvest this jungle fruit. We are lucky, here in Fane, to have the freshest until the snow. Then we must wait again for spring.”
Annial stopped at last in a tiny room lit by a lantern which swayed gently, blurred with trails of water. By now it was very dark; the orange and blue of the speckled sourfruit were muted. Two figures stood in the corner. As Annial and Jaele approached, a male voice cried, “My lady Annial! I thought you had forgotten me,” and she laughed gaily in reply.
“Serdic,” she said, “you are ever pining, and I am glad that you miss me. You are as gallant as my Queensfighter. . . . But see, I have brought someone with me today—a friend.”
The young man was swathed in a cloak. Jaele saw his face, which was very slender, and a bit of dark hair, but little else. The woman beside him was similarly covered against the rain. She was very short, and her cheeks were round and flushed. Both were smiling.
“Jaele,” Annial said, extending her arm toward the two, “please meet Serdic and his sister Tylla: my old friends, and staunch providers of speckled sourfruit, like their parents and grandparents before them.”
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