by Sylvia Kelso
Iatha let out a grunt. “They’d best be happy, any road. If Shothen does as he was told, we’ve pulled half Dhasdein’s thorns overnight.”
Half Dhasdein’s thorns. The ramifications were opening wider and wider now. The woman, the farmer’s questions might change their lives, but if Shothen tried the half of what we had Seen . . .
It would not simply change Mel’eth. One trial, one Sight, and we could already have begun to transform the River world.
For a vertiginous instant I wanted to cower and squeak, This is too much, I can’t do this! No matter what we Saw, I could not bear the responsibility.
Then I shot upright at a new thought, horrific as a lightning bolt.
“What if he thinks it was for Dhasdein? If he thinks it was a—a—!” A partiality, a favor, a personal signal to the crown prince? A reward? Or, Mother spare me, some sort of lure, some new overture?
“I never meant it to—! It was real! It was a Sight!”
“Of course it was, dearling.” Iatha patted me, too elated to think. Even if she far too clearly understood who “he” must be. “We could tell that. Neither fear nor favor. To anyone.”
Tez, more perceptive, touched my wrist and said, “Let Dhasdein think what it likes. If there is favor, it’s also for Iskarda and Amberlight.”
Because if Mel’eth made peace with Dhasdein they would have to stop raiding the River trade, maybe even lower their punitive tolls. And from better River trade, we would benefit too.
I started to laugh. I could not help it, that Tez intended comfort not from the thought that I would do no favors, but that I would distribute them for us and Dhasdein both.
She gave me a glinting smile. “So long as you See truly, and speak with no knowing fear or favor,” she said, “someone will
always find fault, because you do not favor them.” She anticipated me. “As, sooner or later, any Sight must do.”
I groaned. Tez stood up.
“Let troubles hatch in their own time,” she said. “For now, let’s go home.”
* * * *
We rode into Iskarda just ahead of the first winter storm. And on its heels, couriered up from Amberlight, the letters came.
I had been up the mountain, hunting hares: another of those tiny remembering stabs, that this time it had been with Duitho and a troublecrew recruit. At midday a new fall drove us home, laughing and shivering and shaking off snowflakes in the wine-sharp air that had greyed abruptly over threadbare patchwork of dark and light trees, silvered grass, fallen snow. So different from the clammy cold of Kaastria. But as I came up our own house steps, Ashar popped up at my elbow, troublecrew on watch, and said, “Tez wants you. In the council room.”
“Oh.” Nothing in her face or look. That alone made my belly drop. I shucked outer boots and cloak in the damp-floored hall. When I came into the council room, the brazier was lit as for a meeting, but Tez was alone.
She looked up. Our eyes met. We did not have to say, There you are, or, You wanted me? Or, What is it? Or, There is news, but not what you might expect. Or hope. I drew up a chair, and she passed me a sheet of papyrus that had lain before her on the tabletop.
It had been the enclosure in a double packet. The outer leaf lay there as well: slightly crumpled, stained, perhaps with mud. It still held a faint, elusive scent that I had never smelt before.
But Two knew it. The tang of reed-beds. Of the great upRiver swamp, labyrinthine windings of reeds and strange beasts and mud.
“Dearling,” it began. My mother’s so familiar, instantly recognisable, bold Amberlight hand.
A gap followed. The papyrus had a peculiar texture, as if it had been spattered with water, and dried.
“We have your letter from the Isles. This last quarter moon, we asked Rion, the folk’s Seer. She dreamed that she saw you leave a ship in Marbleport. She says, You are safe home.”
There was another gap.
“From what she says, you have grown.”
Already my own heart had constricted in my chest. I could feel her longing, yearning to be here, to touch, hug, experience the full dear reality of flesh and blood. To see for herself how her child had changed.
“And I think, you may truly have come of age.”
My own heart was bursting with the need to see and hold her, shout out the whole story for myself. How had she guessed? How did she know? Sheer mother’s wish, some described, deciphered detail of the seer’s dream?
Some resonance from the past, carried further than I could imagine? Something from the qherrique?
“So we have talked it over, all of us. We are,” something crossed out there, black and so decisive not even a letter remained. “We reached here before middle summer. We are all safe and well. We arrived in time.”
I did not have to wonder where they were. At Thilliansar, the place whose name she would not even write. Past the Source, with the mysterious people of her own partner, her dearly beloved Errisal. Who had written for help before last spring, and whatever the crisis, had that request fulfilled. Their quest had been successful too.
So why, my selfish heart was crying, are you not already headed home?
“And we have decided it is time. You are of age. You have your Craft. Tez and her consort will be settled in Iskarda. You should have the House to yourselves.”
My vision greyed as my heart gave one great jerk. My mind, like my body, was shocked to incoherence. Someone, somewhere, was repeating silently, No. No. No.
“You will watch over and help each other. You will have
counsel, from Iatha, from Tanekhet.” The writing actually
wobbled a little there. “You will miss us, but you will manage very well. We,” there was another blot, “will never cease missing you. But we all know the choice is right. The folk from Marbleport, and Ahio, Keraz and Quiran, and Esrafal, will return when spring comes. They have ties, places that they still need to fill. But your fathers, and Zuri and Varris, and I, are not coming back.”
The writing itself wavered, on its creamy background, as well as swimming through my tears. Errisal, I glimpsed, and ‘dearly beloved,’ too long apart, more about arrangements in the community, a new place chosen, a house built, where they would all live together. Why, not even Two could tell me, would they not do that as a matter of course? And one day, perhaps next spring, an excursion even further, over the mountains beyond the River’s Source.
“It is time for new blood in Iskarda. But it is also time for us to move, to live differently. Perhaps to be someone else.
“It grieves Sarth the most that he must break our promise, to tell and show you everything. But we will always love you. Letters will come. Letters, I hope, will return. And one day, I so hope, you will make another journey. We will look up the track for travelers and find none so welcome, my dearling. You, and whoever you may bring. We will always hope, look, long to meet again.”
They had signed it underneath. The letters were blotched in two or three places, but the hands were perfectly identifable. I had seen all three many times. “Your mother,” first, and, below that, “Your father,” twice.
Silently, Tez pushed the outer cover over. Now it was inner side up. “My ever-beloved daughter,” the writing began. It was not my mother’s hand, but I knew it all the same.
If I had lost all three parents, Tez had lost a blood mother, then an adopted foster-mother, and a blood father. Unlike me, she had only had those last for twelve years of her grown life.
I looked up. Her eyes were swimming too. We fell in each other’s arms then, and wept as only sisters could.
* * * *
Pass over the House’s consternation, lamentation, protest, grief. Pass over too, the surprising number who tried, tactfully or clumsily, to comfort me. Even those who did not know the full story of my journey considered my lot the worst in the House. Of all the commiserations, I remem
ber Saarieq best.
The consort’s eldest child, she was ten now to my human
thirteen, while Darr was eight and Aretho only seven. I had known them as well as children may, who live fifty miles and three or more years apart. We only shared a house for the few weeks before Asaskian took them off to Amberlight, and now we seemed divided by the universe between children and adults. But the fourth day after the letters came, when I was all but raw from well-meaning attempts at sympathy, I fled Iskarda for the sanctuary of the lookout. Alone, I thought, until I came into the little rock-bay to find Saarieq standing, silent, motionless, before the qherrique.
It was not a rapport. She turned too quickly, and the qherrique, almost indivisible from the mealy grey of snow-littered rock and weeping white-grey mist, had not kindled for her. But her small pointed face in its frame of pale fur and damp brown hood was quite composed.
“I never came,” she said, “up here before.”
“But you found the way,” Two said.
She looked startled. Though I doubt she ever heard Two speak, she knew who it was. I had been startled myself. I waited to see what either of them would say next.
Her skin was perfect Amberlight, though it was expression rather than features that bespoke Tez. Her hair, straggling brown and almost straight, and her eyes, not yet hooded but dark green in this light as shadowed forest pools, were pure Tanekhet. As were her composure, and, I already knew, her wits.
“Shall I go away?” she said.
Raw from my parents’ loss and the other grief that I could not share with anyone, my heart shouted, Yes! This is my place. My own! I would not let it add, This is where I met him first.
“It won’t speak to me, will it?”
I did not need willed compassion, let alone rational thought to reply. Two and I had already Seen.
We said, “Not yet.”
Her eyes went wide. She knew what she had heard, but she did not exclaim, either in fear or delight. Only that look asked, Truly? with all the vulnerable ardor of a child.
“You’re bound to have a Craft.” At least I could manage
manners about this. “After all, your mother was a light-gunner. And her parents had—have—some of the best ears in Amberlight.”
The sun came out, briefly but composedly, in her face. Then she tucked her head down and dug a little in the snow with the toe of a boot. I had just enough intelligence left to find an out for us both.
“Let’s try the lookout,” I said.
We swept snow off the time-polished boulders and settled ourselves, looking out as generations of Iskardans had looked, through gelidly bleached old hellien leaves, over the spatchcocked white and brown hillside, the building blocks of Iskarda, the huge dun and silver-grey and dark-mottled vista beyond. In the wake of the first storm, the winds had almost subsided. Nothing stirred the air but our breaths.
And presently, like generations of Iskardans, I found in that indifferent, enduring landscape a modicum of my own peace.
Saarieq had her father’s sense of timing as well. I hardly
noticed her move on the boulder beside me, though Two said she had drawn up a knee and laid her chin on it, not looking directly at me. Her voice was very small, and quiet.
“If you wanted, you could share my mother,” she said.
Whatever our other divergences, we had been raised as girls of Iskarda. We both stared steadfastly out toward the River, letting silence speak the rest. Her compassion, her sense of the loss. The scope of the offer, not in the least childish. My struggle to avoid the worst reaction to a seeing heart’s sympathy, and not, in equally un-Iskardan fashion, to burst into tears.
Presently I managed to swallow, and say in a fairly normal voice, “Thank you. I think—in a way—I already do.”
Her mother. My sister, my House-head, who had never
wanted me to leave Iskarda; who had foreseen a shadow of the grief it would bring.
Saarieq slid neatly down from her boulder and scrambled up on mine. She squeezed in beside me and then she set a hand on my knee. Half a diversion, the skill of the people-handlers who had bred her, half the trust of a child who, as I had, burned to know new things. She said, “Tell me about the Isles, Chaeris.”
A bitter wind breathed round us, warning of more snow on the way, but stirring my heart from its own winter loss and apathy.
“Come down to the House, then,” I said. “To the kitchen, where we won’t freeze.”
She asked again that evening, almost straight after supper, the time when tales and songs would go round the kitchen. And music, once, from my father Sarth’s flute, and from Esrafal the House musician’s drum. Now, in the first lull, Saarieq repeated in that small solemn voice, “Tell us about the Isles, Chaeris.”
I could not have spoken long. But it was easier than I had thought, in some way a letting of grief, to answer, knowing Two could bring out the information, “Which Isle would you choose?”
* * * *
After that they would ask almost every night, just for a few minutes of description and anecdote: the houses at Ve Pool, the ships of the Isles. Veenn and Dath and Skeag, Fiskri and his family. Most of all, Nouip: the dark house at Evvamoor never failed to keep the whole kitchen enthralled. It became a qualified joy, to forget the absences round the hearth, and gift others with the treasures of my voyage.
Early the next moon, Saarieq brought me a message from Tanekhet.
“Fa says, he has a ‘streaming nose’.” She gazed up at me with her usual solemnity, but I was learning to read her now. Tanekhet’s own irony was in the quote, not to mention the glint. “He says, as a favor, will you work out today with Keshaq?”
“I can do that.” I always seemed to fall into her propriety. Even when experience, let alone Azo’s training, demanded, what is that conniver up to now?
I worked out with Keshaq the next day as well. It was painful
at first, the way a half-resemblance to a lost beloved can be, as it was when a gesture or voice-turn of Tez’s brought back my
father Sarth. When Tanekhet reclaimed his partner, Duitho asked me, just a little too casually, “Chaeris, can you fill in today with
Nethor?”
Nethor was the recruit who had gone hunting with us. Our first Iskardan troublecrew, and only the third of a more revolutionary kind, for Nethor was a man.
Or at least, a youth, an inch shorter than me, swarthy as most Iskardans, with straight black hair that spoke of Dhasdeini or Cataract blood, springy as a tree-snare, wiry and tireless. True to his outlying hunter mother, who had dispatched him to us as casually as she would have lent a bow.
“You’d be the best,” Duitho was saying cheerfully. “You’ve worked out with men before.”
I just contained Two’s spark. Never mind working out with
Keshaq. Never mind my fathers’ training either. They had guessed about Therkon and the Isles, or they had actual intelligence from Dhasdein. And they meant either to burn out the memories’ sting, or to “draw me out of myself.” Fussing about the shadow I could still feel round me, as transparently and well-meaningly as
Saarieq.
Luckily, I had my back to Nethor himself. I kept my voice quite easy as I answered, “Whatever you say, Duitho.”
Nethor and I worked well together, even hand-to-hand. At least he did not remind me so piercingly of Therkon as did Keshaq. We fell in the habit of hunting and doing troublecrew work together. He had a sharp mind and a fierce thirst for troublecrew lore, and once he realized how much Two could tell him, he began to seek me out in the kitchen as well. Politely, never encroaching. But insensibly, we drifted into comradeship.
Mid-winter came. We put out the fires and waited for dawn, while up by the village’s holy stone the Mother’s Chosen offered his wrist to the sacrificial knife, and the token of his life for Iskarda. Two knew how it had been done in the old d
ays, but she thankfully spared me the worst of those memories.
And when the sun topped the mountains in a well-omened brilliantly white morning, I bit back tears as I saw light lifting far south in the Isles, on another mid-winter morning, by another stone slaked with blood.
In all those days, weeks, months, there was no word from Dhasdein.
Our intelligencers did not need to gather word of Therkon’s welcome, it reverberated from one to the other River’s end. They did report with cruel clarity the official explanation for my
absence: the lady Chaeris had wanted, needed, to go straight home. But after the fuss, reports became mere routine. Dhasdein was setting its Outsea trade in order. Building merchant ships. Haggling, as ever, with Mel’eth and Shirran. I bit my nails in
private until Tez observed with careful casualness that if Shothen had made overtures for finance before winter, it would have been at a level far beyond our reach.
It hurt more than I wanted to admit that Dhasdein sent
nothing, official or private, to Iskarda. But the news I truly feared, dreaded, could not bear to think about, never came.
And after mid-winter Nethor’s company was gradually
augmented by other young, unattached men, first of the House, then of Iskarda.
They would stop to watch a workout. Or to talk at a guard-post, in the kitchen, passing on the street. Three or four would gather instantly, if I had errands to Iskarda itself. In the close quarters of winter, immersed in training, busied with spring plans for Marbleport, trying so hard to ignore the silent questions eating my own heart, I hardly thought about it. Until the morning I came upon Duitho, Tez and Iatha outside the council room, and heard Iatha answer some question with a brisk, “Like bees to a honeypot. It’ll still take some time. Give him his chance. Let her alone.”
My feet, silent in indoor moccasins, clove to the floor. I had just wits to draw back, muscle by muscle, to the shelter of a doorway, and slip inside before I had to explode.
I had thought Duitho’s plot to yoke me with Nethor a devious