The sea snake had disappeared, Jaele noticed as the half-giants strode into the ocean. They walked out and out, singing; she understood nothing but glee. When they reached the rafts, the water was at their necks. She watched them haul their glistening bodies onto the wood, watched them throw the nets shining as spiders’ webs, or birds’, against the sky.
Their nets and arms were enormous; the fishing did not take long. The rafts remained tethered to their tree trunks; the half-giants simply tossed the nets and pulled them slowly back. Tails and fins and mouths thrust above the surface so that it was stormy. The fishers laughed and clacked above the noise. When all six nets lay alongside the rafts, the half-giants leapt into the water and surged back to the shore.
They sliced and gutted their catch so swiftly that Jaele could hardly see their hands. By the time the sun was directly overhead, the nets sagged empty and the ropes were thick with split cleaned fish. The half-giants stood together for a few moments, talking and gesturing; then they turned and walked again toward the trees.
She did not move. She remained beneath the tree, hidden until long after they had passed. Unready—still too tender.
She ate more of the silver fruit as the sun dipped again toward the sea. She also found berries, fat and blue among vines, and these were bitter. At dusk she walked among the slanting outlines of fish, poles, rope, but touched nothing. Invisible, her footprints already skimmed away by night wind.
The sea snake had returned, and lay with its head and neck raised out of the water, regarding her unblinkingly. She placed her fingers lightly on the smaller, smoother scales beneath its jaw. “Time again,” she said, and cleared the rough strangeness from her throat. Then stood with her feet washed in waves, yearning for new direction.
The sea was stranger on top than underneath—stranger in light, distance, time. Maybe because of the sky. The space around us was so endless that I saw clouds above and away—but further a flood of white-gold, or a column of spinning rose. I could never tell how far. The water we swam in was calm, but I could see waves advancing, so distant that sometimes they never reached us. Once or twice the sea snake arched us up into the air, but we were still so tiny. I wanted to be lost, but we weren’t. Just tiny. I think of Ilario’s carpet now, and Bienta’s map, although I didn’t then. I thought of nothing, in those first days—felt nothing except hunger and thirst. It is only now, telling this to you, that I try to know what I saw.
Once, a waterspout thundered upward, shattered by dawn sun. The sea snake slowed, and they passed so close that Jaele’s body was soaked as if by rain. Colours leapt and wove, and her ears pounded. They glided into clear water beyond the spout. When she turned back, it was gone. They swam on, out of, into silence.
Just before the first shorebirds appeared, they met a group of sea snakes. The creatures rose from the waves, cascading water and grunting, chirping, bellowing. Some were very small; others were huge, and could have carried many of Jaele. For a time they travelled together, the others leaping around them so playfully that she smiled. Then, with final noises and a slapping of tails, they sank. Bubbles frothed and stilled. “You are nearly free,” she said to her sea snake, and knew that this was so.
As they drifted and swam, Jaele remembered. Not fire in thatch or blood-clotted sand; not her own fingers scraping stone, in silence. Those would return—but later, and perhaps changed. Now she remembered holding her brother on her lap, smelling sun and salt in his silken baby hair. Remembered her parents’ voices late at night, laughing and low. “Don’t talk so loudly, Reddac,” her mother whispered, “Jaele’s sleeping,” and her father whispered back, “No she isn’t” with such a smile in his voice that Jaele almost giggled. And then she thought of Lallan by the river, saying “They are here, present.” “River tree earth house man woman,” Jaele murmured in Lallan’s language. “Water cloud shore black wood looping time. . . .”
Images bruised but not raw, unburied and shining in the Eastern Sea.
Rain was falling when she heard the bird calls. This was the first rain. It was flesh-strippingly cold, and her hands were slithering nerveless from the sea snake’s ridges. She lifted her head; the noise came again, raucous and close. Bird cries—and suddenly she smelled the land: wet, moss-covered rocks, dripping leaves, woodsmoke, roasting meat and peeled sourfruit. She closed her eyes.
The coast advanced in pieces, edges, shadows through the downpour. She felt the sea snake slowing; felt its belly grinding against pebbly sand. Neither of them moved for a long while. When her eyes opened, she saw a flicker of hillside, and knew that it had brought her to the place where they had begun.
The serpent lowered its head, and its body vibrated; somewhere deep within was a thrumming, a warm urging voice. She slipped smoothly down and stood on her shore. Scales were slick against her forehead; perhaps if she leaned long enough, she would carry their imprint away with her. She straightened and stroked the great neck, the wedge-shaped nose, and its tongue darted dry along her hand. She smiled.
“Please,” she said, and held the fishfolk bag out to it, “take this back to them. I do not need it now.” The sea snake opened its mouth; hand-sized teeth closed gently around the bag. “Farewell,” she said more quietly, the word lost in rain. Then she turned. She walked, even though she could not yet feel her feet or the earth—walked up the slope and did not look back.
Fane’s streets were deserted but for the rain, which coursed brown and choppy as the branches of a river. It was warmer water than the sea; Jaele began to sense blood again, a sluggish prickling through her veins. There was stone beneath her, peeling paint and buildings beside, arches and tunnels, damp, drifting smoke. A person passed her once, hunched and hooded; she shrank against a wall and did not breathe until she was again alone.
Only two boats rolled in the harbour now. She stood on the wharf and gazed at them so that she would not have to turn her eyes elsewhere. Time had passed, and there were only two boats. She could not remember what the missing one had looked like. Ragged and splintering—but exactly?
The house was grey as rain, except for the darker smudge of door. She could not tell if there were smoke, or shapes behind the windows. She walked slowly.
It was warm: the lanterns were lit, and although the fires in the front hearth and in the kitchen were very low—almost out—the wood was still deep red with heat. The door was unlocked. There was a smell of slightly burning bread. I knew as soon as I stepped inside that the house was empty. I stood by the round table and stared at the scrolls and books, scattered as if I had just missed the hand that had moved them.
I pulled the bread from the oven using Annial’s wooden paddles. There were black, cracked-open bubbles on the top of each small loaf. I was so faint that I could hardly put them on the cooling rack. I ate, scalding my fingers and mouth, consumed by guilt because how could I eat Annial’s bread when she was gone?
She ate bread and seagreen and speckled sourfruit that was palely unripe. Drank water from the barrel outside the kitchen door. Sat in a wall niche, limp with sleep, following the rain on the moon windows.
She woke at night and called out for Ilario before she remembered. The silence made her shiver. She rose and went through the reading-room to the stairs. They creaked, of course. The hallway lanterns were also lit, but were flickering more faintly than the ones below. She did not turn to the left to her room—right instead, to a door she had never opened.
The walls were bright with cloaks, with tapestries, with glancing firelight. The bed was high off the carpeted floor, covered in a many-coloured blanket. There was a wooden cabinet with glass doors; inside were leggings and tunics, carefully folded.
There were only four books here, all slender and bound in dark green. They were stacked on a small square table beside the bed; Jaele sat on the blanket and reached for them. She opened the uppermost book with trembling fingers; the pages rustled and creased. They were cream-coloured pages, the ones at the end clean an
d fresh. She turned to the beginning.
Ilario’s writing was beautiful. The letters looped and twined, and the lines were spaced as if he had measured the distance between them. He had used a dark red writing stick. There were no smudges, no words scratched out and begun again. “There is a roughness in my throat that is not the winter—I am sure of it, although Annial steeps me in herb water and scolds me as if I were merely a boy with a chill.”
She closed this book and drew out the bottom one. Black writing stick this time, and words that slanted gently at the edges of the page. “Tonight the man with the wooden flute spoke of Luhr, and I watched the name appear in the weaving of the carpet. He was young and tall and fair, and sang to me when the others had gone to sleep. I was so small when father took me to Luhr, but this traveller made me remember.”
I could not read more. The cloak I had watched him buy was shining—the cloak I would bury my face in before leaving the room, seeking his scent and the years and years of his warmth which I had not known. I grieved for him before I knew for certain—and I had thought, so recently, that this keen grief was past.
No fire burned in her hearth, and the room was chilly. (Was it spring, still, or early summer? Or autumn? Her body twinged, almost throbbed its confusion.) She knelt by the carpet and could not speak; the darkened shore lay empty. She glanced at her bed, which was neatly made, and rose to look out the window. Rain pattered, then pounded as the wind lashed. She could hardly see the boats; the cliffs had vanished.
She stripped off her tattered clothing and slept with the blanket drawn up to her chin. Dreamed of piping, horses, pitching stars. The rain had stopped when she opened her eyes. Voices rose from the docks. She washed her face and stretched into a tunic that lay folded on the table. Soft, blue, newly stitched. It felt unbearably light against her skin.
Jaele threaded her way among people and streets.
I had been away—far away, alone and in silence—for so long: I felt myself blinking, waking in these streets. Imagine how you will feel, walking again in your mountain air. I thought “I wept in a stone garden by a lake,” and I was filled with that place and this one, both.
She came to the fruit market almost without thinking, and walked quickly past the rotting wagon. Tylla was working alone in the sourfruit chamber. Her hair shone red in the weak sunlight. She saw Jaele among the other customers and turned her face away.
“Tylla,” Jaele said, and for the first time in so long heard an answering voice.
“I am surprised that you are here. Forgive me if I do not seem happy to see you.”
Jaele breathed deeply. “I did not expect a warm welcome—nor do I deserve one.” A plump man dropped five shells into Tylla’s palm and reached for three small sourfruit. Jaele said, “I have been away, as you know. Annial and Ilario are gone, but everything in their house is warm, even the bread.”
There was a long silence. Tylla walked over to a pile of sourfruit, rearranged it. When she returned, she spoke steadily. “Go to our sourfruit grove. Go now, before I decide you should not.”
“Thank you,” said Jaele.
The river was swollen, deafening. She found and followed it until she saw the hewn steps, the ledge, the rust-handled door. She did not slow or stop; a new fear was waiting.
Her feet sank into the earth of the grove and she stood still for a moment, bathed in leaves. She heard Annial singing: a young girl’s voice, caught and reflected by scarlet branches. Jaele followed it as she had the river.
Serdic turned to her when she came through the trees. He was sitting on the ground beside Annial. Her hair was loose and tangled over her thin shoulders; her eyes wide and soft. Hands upturned and motionless in her lap. Lips cracked, open on this song that had no words, only lovely piercing waves.
Serdic was smiling so sadly that Jaele dropped to her knees in front of him. She held out her hand, which shook; he grasped it in his, which did not. His cheeks and neck still curved white bruised.
“Annial.” Jaele repeated her name until the singing faltered and died.
Annial’s eyes darkened with focus, leapt from Jaele’s face to the leaves and back. “He is gone,” she said in an ancient brittle voice, “and I am gone. In my way. Young Serdic has kindly brought me here. And you are safe, sweetlet. Jaele.”
Jaele reached for her, took the tiny sharp hands in her own—but they lay still, and the song began again. After a moment Serdic drew her up and led her into the trees.
They stood apart. She rubbed the backs of her hands across her eyes, and he spoke, low and quickly. “Ilario died about four days ago. I had been visiting him—them—every day since my return from my village. Four days ago I arrived at the house. I could hear Annial screaming while I was still outside. She was holding him so tightly that I had to hurt her, I think, to separate them. She quieted, and I carried her here. Then him. It was like carrying a baby—not a child, a baby.” He paused; she watched him swallow. “Tylla and I buried him among the roots. Yesterday at dawn Annial wandered away and I found her at the house, baking bread and tending the fires. She held out her hand when she saw me, and after I had damped down the fires, we came back here. She has been singing since then. Not eating or drinking or sleeping—only singing.”
“Could you tell,” Jaele said after a moment, “if there was pain for him?” She wanted to say more but did not.
Serdic touched the line of her jaw, very lightly. “I cannot say. Not without guessing. But he looked as if he were trying to sleep.”
They went back to Annial and sat with her as she sang. She paused once and said to Jaele, “He is a good boy,” then sang again, as if she had not spoken. Jaele closed her eyes. She had been to the Raiders’ Land, where everything had changed; now here, among the crimson trees where Ilario also was, enfolded by earth and roots.
“It is late,” Serdic said at last. “Tylla will be back soon.” He and Jaele smiled at each other.
“Ah,” she said. “Then I suppose I should leave.” She rose and kissed Annial’s hair. The old woman lifted a hand to touch her.
Serdic and Jaele walked slowly toward the door. “It is so good to see you, Jaele,” he said, not looking at her. “Did you find what you sought?”
She took a few steps. “I do not know. Yet.” Then, swiftly, “And you? How was the winter in your town?”
They faced each other, the door and distant river roar beside them. “It was beautiful,” he said with another small smile, “as it always is.” Annial’s song was a thread, now, winding and thin.
“Serdic, I am sorry—so sorry. For . . . before.”
He shook his head. “Never mind before,” he said. She stepped into his arms and felt him breathe once, twice.
“I am here to stay this time,” she said as she drew away.
Serdic put his hand to the door ring and she slipped out of the grove.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
“Here to stay.” I imagined that it was true, at first.
The days and nights were warm after the rain had passed. The fires in the house burned to ash, except in the kitchen. Jaele returned to the sourfruit grove on an afternoon that smelled of spices and blossoms. She leaned over the bridge and watched the muddy river; the scales of the carved fish were slippery beneath her palms.
Annial was sleeping on a pallet against one of the kitchen walls. Tylla and Serdic were at the table, which was covered with freshly picked sourfruit. Jaele smiled at Tylla’s look of surprise. “Yes,” she said, “this time I came back.”
The girl smiled slowly in return. “I—we are glad of it.”
Jaele sat next to Annial and touched one of her bone-ridged hands. She remembered Saalless and thought, They could have filled each other up with memories. “I am happy to see her sleeping,” she whispered, and Serdic nodded.
“It was days before she would—and now she sleeps more than she wakes.”
“And does she still sing?” Jaele ask
ed.
“Sing when you are far from me, sing when you are near.” Jaele looked down into Annial’s eyes, which were clear and bright as fishfolk sea. It was a song they all knew. They sang it together, Annial’s voice rising above the rest, and then they sang others—children’s ditties, ballads of love and battle—until the sourfruit had all been cleaned and put into baskets and bags.
“I am not sleepy,” Annial declared when there seemed to be no more songs. She was still lying down, her stiff fingers were bent around Jaele’s.
“That is good,” Jaele said, “because I wanted to talk to you. I wanted to tell you that you can come back to the house and live with me there. I will stay with you. If you like.”
Annial regarded her—they all did. Jaele could hear the crimson leaves rustling; could hear, almost, roots twining above and below the earth. At last Annial said quietly, “Hania is gone, and her children, and theirs, and now my Ilario. I knew I would be alone—but not there, not where we lived together. I cannot go back there. And,” she continued, her eyes sharpening on Jaele’s face, “you are a traveller, like all the others.”
“But I will stay,” Jaele said, then fell silent. She gazed at the crystal, which shone as brightly as she remembered. Tylla disappeared into the trees with bags of sourfruit slung over her shoulder.
Annial hummed a tune Jaele did not know. Then she unclasped her hands from Jaele’s and said, “I will be happy, in Lirella’s grove.”
“Who is Lirella?” Jaele asked Serdic later, as they sat on one of the docks, in the shadow of the two ships.
“My grandmother. She and Annial were friends, especially after Hania died.”
Jaele lifted her face to the sky, which was tumbled with white clouds. Sunlight lanced between them—white-gold in the water that rolled only softly.
“This wind makes me want to travel,” Serdic said. “To follow the road as far as it goes.” He paused. “I suppose you’ve had your fill of travel.”
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