by Sam Hawke
I met her furious brown gaze and hated the guilt she was making me feel, hated myself for being angry about it, hated the explosion of feelings like a physical swarm eating me from the inside. But she was right. I couldn’t stop feeling those things—honor-down, there was nothing in the world I was worse at than stopping myself thinking the wrong things—but I could stop blurting them at her and expecting her sympathy.
“I’m sorry,” I said, a little stiffly. “It isn’t your fault or your concern how I deal with my part in all this, An-Hadrea. I know that.” I wanted to say more, but it would just be further justification, and I hadn’t earned the right to expect her to care about it.
We sat in silence for a while. Despite my deserved dressing down, I didn’t want her to go. I strove to think of something conciliatory. “Will you tell me more about tah?” I asked.
She considered me for a moment, and something softer glimmered in her expression. “Come,” she said. Then she sprang away, leading us in the opposite direction, back down the hill toward the lake. It took all my efforts to keep up with her in the dark. Once or twice I thought I’d lost her. Then we almost collided in the grassy space leading down to the shore, and she chuckled, catching my shoulders as she spun around.
“Easy,” she said. “Here, sit.”
Tongue-tied with the usual confusion her sudden changes of mood inspired, I sat beside her on the cool grass, a respectful distance in accordance with her country preferences and my own. She leaned back on her elbows, her gleaming hair half-masking a still profile. Across the dark silky expanse of water, life flickered in the buildings of the lower city. For this quiet moment, it seemed almost as though there was no war, just the shores of the Bright Lake on a warm evening. Sometimes it surprised me how much some parts of the city had not changed.
“So. Tah.” She paused, thoughtful. “Tah is about your place in the natural world around you. Like honor, it is about connection between things. I am respectful to the earth and the spirits dwelling in the secondworld because I know myself to be part of a greater whole. Here, at the Bright Lake, do you feel nothing? No connection?”
I shrugged, feeling awkward, but answered honestly. “I don’t think I even know what that kind of connection would feel like.”
She gestured to the still water before us. “This was once the most sacred place in all Sjona. The Bright Lake was much different back then, but it was the place where all our tribes used to gather for the karodee.”
We still held karodee in Silasta as our biggest annual celebration—a week of sporting competitions, games, and parties—and even I knew it had its origins in the old annual spring festival of dance, song, and trade between tribes. But I knew little about ancient karodee and its significance to the Darfri.
“The karodee was our most important event. We traded fairly and we bonded joyfully with the other tribes, which brought us all honor. And we gave offerings of these great emotions to the mighty spirits of the Bright Lake and Solemn Peak, who dwell here together so close.”
“I’m not sure I understand,” I admitted. “What do you mean by offerings of emotions?” I recalled the little things I’d seen left at Darfri shrines around the city—flowers, hair cuttings, figures of sticks.
An-Hadrea shook her head, astounded at my ignorance. “The spirits of the secondworld take strength from our offerings.” She looked all over my face like I was a puzzle she couldn’t solve. “We give them our hearts. What we feel. Joy. Grief. Admiration. Love. Passion. Hope. These make the spirits strong. Karodee was a time of great excitement, and so the spirits drank up all of that joy and connection and were renewed for the year. And they were grateful for our offerings, and gave us back a bountiful year and blessings on the bargains made and relationships forged at the karodee. It is said babies born or conceived during karodee would grow to be the strongest and wisest of all our people, blessed as they were by such great power.
“This is the same reason mothers take their babies outside to the sacred places close by, and exchange their love and fear and satisfaction and gratitude for blessings for the child. My mother brought me all the way here, to this very lake, when I was just a baby, to have the lake spirit Os-Woorin know me. That is not so common now. But it is why when you take a lover you consummate that in a sacred place, if you can, to feed the spirit there with your passion. Or—this you should understand, at least—why you all gather together to lower your Chancellor into the Bright Lake and feed the spirit with all your grief and loss and sadness and love.”
Was it really only a few weeks ago that we had gathered here for the funeral? I had never thought much about its origins. “It’s a tradition. I never thought about it as relating to a spirit of the lake, though.”
“You lower him into the lake so that his wisdom and knowledge may be absorbed by the great water spirit Os-Woorin. And Os-Woorin guides him safely to the afterlife.” She sighed. “I do not understand Silastians, Jovan. These are the simple things that are told to a child. I have seen all the libraries, the books. Your sister might be a page in one, so often is she squashed between them. What do your books say, if they do not tell you the stories of your past?”
Again, she left me unable to think of an answer. I supposed that as residents of the city grew further from religion over time, they had stopped valuing the Darfri stories of their past, and ceased recording the spiritual significance of things. Etan had always said that language was not neutral. There were consequences and value judgments in the manner in which we chose to record things. History recorded in the written language of the Credians’ past had no words for these Darfri concepts. So while the Darfri in the estates had continued their verbal storytelling tradition even after we had robbed them of the right to read and write, we had forgotten.
An-Hadrea seemed unbothered by my silence, and showed no sign of wanting to leave. She breathed the night air in deeply and looked up at the stars. The moonlight gave her profile an otherworldly sheen. How could she be so righteously furious at me, with just cause, but then such a short time later relax in my presence as if it were the company of a trusted friend?
“Will you tell me a story of our past?” I asked at last.
She smiled. “Yes. Shall I tell you about how your city came to be?”
“Please.”
“Before the refugees came here from across the Howling Plains, our tribes were not so settled in a single place. We moved around the lands, following the seasons. You know this?” I murmured agreement. The mechanics of history were taught to every Silastian child. The arrival of the refugees from Crede, their integration with the local tribes, and the sharing of their superior technology and engineering skills, which made it possible to build safe and manageable trade routes out of the resource-rich but geographically isolated Sjona. Our eventual government formed by the emerging leaders of the regions around new Sjona—some of original Credian descent, some local. This I knew. And objectively I knew that Darfri had been the dominant belief, part of the accepted main culture, but there was little mentioned in the texts about what that belief had meant.
“Over time, the idea of one country with central leadership grew more appealing, and with it the dream of a central city. Silasta, the word, meant meeting place, did you know? The first Councils met here, still really just a group of leaders and allies from around the land more than a true government. There were settlements here for many years but there was debate about the building of a permanent stone city. It held the promise of many things; prosperity, security, learning. But it involved taking much from the spirits here. Dredging channels in the marshlands, carving out much of Solemn Peak to use its rock, reshaping the Bright Lake and the path of the great river. Some Speakers argued that the spirits would not support such infrastructure.”
“What changed their minds?”
“The first Chancellor, Telasa. She was a woman of great charisma and vision, and also great understanding of the fresken of the land, though she was not a Speaker.”
> “And a Speaker is someone who can communicate with the spirits.” That one I knew. “What is fresken?”
She looked at me, a half-smile softening her exasperation. “How is it that you can live here and not understand the land on which your city stands? It is like you walk around with one eye shut.”
“I wouldn’t like that,” I murmured, and she laughed.
“I have seen that about you,” she agreed. “You do not like being unbalanced, yes? I told you before, tah is all about balance. Understanding that the country is more than dirt and grass and wind and stone. There is power in the land. Great spirits, long memories. This power is what we call fresken.”
She gestured at the lake. “The stories say the Chancellor understood the fresken like our greatest elders. And she called upon the great spirit of the lake, Os-Woorin, and it blessed this place as the site for a great city. Water spirits are very powerful, and Os-Woorin the most powerful of them all. Its blessing held much sway.”
I chose my words carefully, not wanting to disrupt this fragile warmth she offered, though I didn’t quite want to articulate why. “How did the spirit show itself?”
She shrugged. “The stories vary. Some say the spirits spoke inside our heads and gave us a message. Others say Os-Woorin itself rose from the lake, a glistening and magnificent being, and spoke in a great, booming voice that all could hear. But no one has seen such a thing in so long, we do not know for sure.”
“And if your lake spirit spoke now, and told the army to stop attacking? Tain needs to be able to speak to the rebels if there is going to be any chance at stopping this. Could your lake spirit give him that chance?” I smiled, but was only half-joking. The things I’d seen and felt, first at the base of the walls and then again at the fall of the lower city, couldn’t quite be explained. It was unlikely there were powerful beings hidden in the water, but the idea didn’t seem as impossible as it would have a month ago.
She regarded me seriously. “I suppose it could, if it so wished. But I am … I am not trained in the handling of fresken, though once I was told I would have the aptitude for it.” She dropped her gaze to the side, giving me the sudden sense that she was hiding something, though perhaps it was just suppressed anger at having been denied the learning she had clearly wanted. Her voice sounded fainter when she finally added, “Handling fresken without the instruction of a Speaker is forbidden. Without training, how could I know how to persuade a small spirit, let alone a great water spirit?”
“I think you could persuade anyone of anything,” I said, and she returned my smile. We sat there in silence awhile and I shut my eyes, enjoying the new peace humming between us.
Eventually I found myself saying, “Proofing, it’s called. What I do. And it’s not only because it’s tied to my family’s honor. I do it because Tain’s my Chancellor and my friend, and he’s in danger. Whoever killed our uncles is trying to kill him, too.”
“But he does not want you to continue?”
Apparently any conversation I had could be prey to An-Hadrea’s excellent hearing and her ability to hide her tall form in unlikely spaces. “No.”
“He says this because he loves you, yes? And he does not want to put your life before his.”
“Yes. He means well. He’s a good man—better, I think, than any of the Council knew when he took over. Maybe better than his uncle knew, too. But he’s thinking as a good man and a good friend, and not as a Chancellor. Some or all of the most powerful people in the Council are the ones responsible for what’s happened out on their estates. If Tain died, even if we somehow broke the siege without killing one another, there would be no one to hold them accountable, no reparations for you, no conciliation. Without him, we have no hope.”
She bit her lip, her head cocked to one side. “I suppose he thinks he would not be the Chancellor that you need, if he did not care about his friend’s life.”
“I don’t mind him caring,” I said. “Our families have always cared about each other. I don’t expect him to view my life cheaply. But he’s seeing only half the picture, thinking only about how he’d feel if I died.”
“But you, too, are looking from the other half. You are thinking only about how you would feel if he did.”
The truth of it hit me like a barb in my chest. If the poisoner reached Tain without me stopping them, I would have failed in my duty, and the city would be doomed. But, honor aside, the true pain, the true fear, was the thought of losing my best and only real friend, the only person outside my family who truly knew me, who understood how I worked inside and didn’t judge me poorly for it. Who would I be, without his friendship? What would I do, without my role at his side?
“I suppose you’re right, An-Hadrea.” I stared back at the water, no longer able to meet her shadowy gaze.
The small puff of her breath against my cheek alerted me that she had rolled close, and I turned with a start. She lay propped on her side, her face close to mine, and silvery moonlight illuminated the dusting of freckles across her nose and cheeks. “Hadrea,” she said, and for the first time, her eyes held a trace of vulnerability. “You may call me Hadrea, Jovan.”
“Hadrea,” I tried, frozen on the spot. Her skin smelled like oranges.
She smiled. “I like the way you say it,” she said.
And then she kissed me.
* * *
After a night filled with dreams of boons asked of and granted by strange watery men, I woke early and picked my way through my crowded apartments, trying not to disturb any of the sleeping people. Only after stepping outside did my heavy cloak of anxiousness lighten. So absorbed was my mind with thinking about Hadrea that it hadn’t had the space to think about the encroachment or the change to my careful routine.
I checked on the new food production hubs first, and found them running smoothly. We still had stores of millet, dry scarlet beans, rice, and some salt, but everything else had been run down to the dregs. The sealed cases in cool storage still held some cheese and a small, mismatched collection of bindie eggs, and our lutra and oku still produced milk. Tain had warned the Council yesterday we would be searching everyone’s homes, so today we welcomed “anonymous donations” at the collection points, hoping to shake out some hoarded supplies. One of the cooks told me he’d already had parcels left by the door early this morning.
That finished, I headed to the Manor, feeling strangely lighthearted and wondering whether Hadrea would appear. She’d vanished so quickly after the kiss last night, I didn’t know what to expect on seeing her again. I passed Marco on my way to report to Tain, on the front steps of the Manor, and greeted him. “Is the training going well?” Most of the Warrior-Guilder’s time since the retreat had been spent drilling civilian groups in the use of hand-to-hand weapons.
He shrugged. “I don’t know about that, Credo. Some are improving. Some resent being present, and are sullen and disrespectful. Some are trying, but they are barely strong enough to hold daggers, let alone anything bigger. Their lives have been soft, without physical labor.”
Athletes and certain tradespersons had the musculature and coordination to respond to the training, but so many Silastians lacked those physical skills. They weren’t the kind of thing you could learn in a few months, let alone a few weeks. “I know it must be frustrating, working with people like us.”
Marco patted my shoulder with a smile. “I am a teacher. If I grew frustrated teaching, I would not be much of one. In any case, in these times, what satisfaction is there better than the satisfaction of a job done well? They’ll do the best they can.”
“That’s all we can ask,” I said, but we both knew it wasn’t enough.
Inside the Manor, Argo directed me to the Council room, where a bleary-eyed Tain and Eliska pored over a model of the bridge tower fortifications set up on the great table. As I sat down to join them, Eliska offered me a dried fig from a small jar.
“Part of the food ‘donations’ Argo found this morning,” she said, taking one for herself. �
��Along with a few bottles of spices—cinnamon and barbanut, I think. I suppose one of the Families had them hidden.”
“I wonder what we’ll find in the search,” Tain said grimly.
Eliska chewed with impolite delight. “Honor-down, I haven’t had anything sweet in weeks.”
I took one, only then noticing Tain had a piece beside him. I glared at it, then him, and he glared back.
“By all the fortunes, Jov,” he said, weary. “We took them out of a sealed jar. Marco had two already.”
Glancing at Eliska, who was studiously concentrating on the model bridge and pretending she couldn’t see us, I sighed. It was only a matter of time anyway. “I don’t care.” I meant it in two ways. “You think poison can’t be sealed in a jar?” I examined the dark brown and purple shades and took a deliberate and careful bite. They had been preserved with sugar and citrus, and caused a normal drying sensation on my tongue.
Eliska stopped chewing as I ate. She looked panicked, as if torn between spitting out the fig and risking poison to avoid the rudeness. Tain, on the other hand, set his jaw and met my gaze.
“You can’t be here all the time, Jov,” he said. “And we have more pressing things to worry about. Now, enjoy your fig, and tell us about the food stores.” He took a bite of the fruit and chewed deliberately. My heart beat faster, fury rising within me. I pressed my hands hard on the table to fight the urge to gouge it out of his mouth. Poor Eliska sat there, staring at the model with her mouth half open, her skin darkening with embarrassment.
I was saved from making things even worse by a knock at the chamber door. Credo Javesto came in, hands woven together and brow a mass of tight lines. “Honored Chancellor,” he said. “I’m sorry to interrupt. Fighting’s broken out in the south block food station, between some of the city Darfri and some Credolen. You’d better come.”
We all stood and followed, but as we did, Tain gave me a sidelong glance and dropped the remaining fig on his papers on the table like a tiny apology. I nodded stiffly, trying to swallow both my instinctual anger and the sting of guilt, and couldn’t help but remember what Hadrea had said last night.