by Joni Sensel
“I care nothing about any Vault or your news. As for villages, we keep to ourselves for a reason.” The longer he talked, though, the less his voice slithered. He glanced at Mo. “It’s troubling that they got past the black lands. The Reapers will answer for that.”
“I’ve been trying to tell you, them Reapers do more harm than good,” Mo muttered.
“Did Farwalkers in the past try to convince you to leave here?” Scarl wondered. “Or talk of destruction?”
The white-haired man only stared back, stone-faced.
“The water gives the lectrick,” Trisha muttered, as though the words had been said many times, “and we’ll let nobody take it away.”
“Nobody wants to,” Scarl assured them. “The Forgetting is over. Ariel walks for remembering.”
“And, please, I’d so love to learn about your lectrick!” Sienna said. “Do you need a Flame-Mage? I—” Scarl caught her eye, and she stopped.
Ennis’s gaze roved from one to the next, stopping on Nace.
“Nothing from that one but fists,” Ennis observed. “Why?”
Never raising his eyes from the floor, Nace tapped his lips and shook his head. Ennis’s white eyebrows bunched. Ariel could see that he thought Nace refused to answer.
She opened her mouth to explain.
“He means no disrespect,” Sienna said, faster. “His name is Nace Kincaller. I’ve known him since the day he was born. He speaks to the kin because he can’t speak to us.”
“He hears well enough, apparently. Look at me while you do it, boy.”
Nace’s head came up immediately, though he did not hide the resentment in his eyes. Years of experience with unkind stares perhaps helped him meet the master’s regard. To Ariel, it seemed to last painfully long. Abruptly puckering his lips, Nace released a stream of pure notes, not just whistles but an entire birdsong. He stopped as quickly, never breaking the stare.
Ennis slowly cranked his head toward Mo, his eyes leaving Nace only once his head had stopped moving.
“I believe they all may be crazy,” he said. “They’re too strange even to drown; they’d poison the water. I’d like to put them in a zoo, but I don’t want to feed them. Send them on.”
“You don’t want to hear anything I have to share?” Although she couldn’t deny a rush of relief, disappointment—desperation—crowded in behind. Ariel had begun to believe they would win him over, but more importantly, she needed to ask questions here. Surely someone had answers about the map on the back of the door. “Can’t we at least stay this evening to talk?”
“If the people of Electron wish to hear your voice, fine. I don’t care. Just stay out of my way and leave here by morning.”
“Please—” Sienna flung herself onto her knees at his feet, her hands clasped before her. “I came with the Farwalker to find somewhere new. And I so want to know how to craft the lectrick. I’d trade anything for it. Anything. Please, would you let me stay here and learn it? I won’t be any trouble, I promise.”
Ariel goggled. The agreement had been to deliver Sienna to the first village they reached, but she never would have insisted on leaving the Flame-Mage in such an odd place, even if the people hadn’t been so unfriendly.
She and Scarl swapped a bemused look. He shrugged ever so slightly.
Ennis looked down on Sienna almost long enough to count the hairs on her head.
“Well, she’s not hard to look at,” he said, to no one in particular. “And she must have some skill.” Only then did Ariel realize he’d slipped her hair clips into his pocket. Her heart cringed at their loss, but she knew they’d been traded for something more valuable, possibly including their lives.
“Maybe she could talk sense to the Reapers,” said Mo. “They only seem to know one use for flame.”
Ennis heaved a great sigh. “I suppose,” he told Sienna. “If you can find someone to keep you from begging your dinner, remain with my grace. If not, you’d best depart with your friends. We don’t tolerate mooches or thieves. No matter how pretty.” He rose, stepped around Sienna and her thanks as if she might be contagious, and left through a door opposite the one they had entered.
Everyone else remained frozen.
“Never seen that,” Trisha said to Mo, her eyes round. “Never seen him so flummoxed.”
If that had been flummoxed, Ariel decided, she never wanted to see Ennis angry. Actually, she never wanted to see him again at all. She thought he might have been right: Sienna, at least, was crazy.
“You brought us down here expecting to kill us, didn’t you?” Scarl demanded of Mo.
“Didn’t know what to expect,” Mo said. “Hasn’t happened while I’ve been alive. Just following the steps I was taught.”
Ariel touched Scarl’s clenched fist, hoping to pass some calm into him. “Never mind,” she whispered. “Did you see what’s on the door?”
CHAPTER 33
Dog Moon Over the Spillway
Ariel stuck her nose close to the thin glass that covered the image. The paint and the surface beneath had cracked and spotted with age. Although this drawing included details that did not appear on her map, and the scale seemed off, there was no mistaking the focus of this one:
Ariel had long thought this part her map looked like a slug with its tentacles alert. Trisha jostled her out of the way to shove open the door.
“What does this mean?” Ariel asked. She pointed.
The woman craned her head back to check. “It’s the lake. And the dam. As if you were a bird looking down.”
Ariel’s chest squeezed so tight with excitement, she barely could breathe. So the map did show a place as well as a time—and they’d finally found themselves on it! She traced her finger along the marks for the dam.
“‘Walk across the waning moon,’” Scarl said behind her. Her own nighttime words gave her a shiver. “The lake is a crescent, too, like the moon. Waning. The dam must be how we cross it.”
“Where does the river go?” Ariel asked Trisha. This drawing didn’t extend much beyond the lake’s boundaries, a few tributary creeks, and a short stretch of river downstream. Her map seemed to follow that outflow.
“Where all rivers go, I suppose. To some sea.” Trisha’s tone implied that following a river was the silliest thing someone could do.
“There’s a waterfall somewhere, though, isn’t there?”
“No idea. Come on outta here. If Ennis comes back and you’re still in his room, we all might be sorry.”
Swallowing more questions, Ariel and her friends obeyed.
“It ain’t a waterfall, exactly, but there’s the spillway,” Mo told her, once he’d shut the door behind them. When she asked what he meant, he said, “I can show you.”
On their way back to the great hall, Trisha poked Ariel. “You said gifts. I only seen one. What else you got?”
Ariel blew a frustrated breath. Rather than proceed with routine farwalking duties as if this trip and this village were like any other, she yearned to look at her map, talk to Scarl, and see what a spillway might be.
“Let us rest a minute and eat,” she pleaded, “and then I’ll have several things for you.”
“Don’t know any as will share their supper,” Trisha replied.
Ariel rolled her eyes. “We’ve got our own.”
For the next few hours, she felt like a pollywog in a bucket, gaped at and chased after and fingered. The worst moment, even more unpleasant than the meeting with Ennis, came early. A trio of small boys dashed up as Ariel was introducing herself to the crowd. Goading one another, they shouted:
Kill the Farwalkers! Kill them all!
Toss ’em over the spillway wall!
Suppose one comes back from the dead?
Knock him down and bust his head!
Shocked, Ariel fought to swallow a sudden lump in her throat. Scarl gathered himself as if he thought somebody might try to follow the rhyming suggestion.
“Go on, now,” chided Trisha, who hovered nearby. “You coul
d say hello first.”
Ariel wondered if it was the hateful chanting or the killing that Trisha felt should begin with “hello.” Then one little boy stuck out his tongue. That homey insult, which made him look even younger than his half dozen years, flipped Ariel’s heart like a pancake. Her laughter burst out where tears had just threatened.
She reached into her pack. Her retort rose in her mind only just before the words hit her lips:
You’d better kill me pretty quick
Before I hit you with a stick.
’Cause I could beat you black and blue
Or—look what I could do to you!
Her rummaging fingers yanked out her eel skull and held it high.
The boys screamed, the adults—most of them—laughed nervously, and a few older children crowed and shoved closer. She let them all have a good look. When she heard a few more snatches of rhyme from the crowd, she offered the skull as a prize to whoever could sing the most verses.
It must have been a very old and well-known ditty. The girl who won, probably nearly as old as Ariel herself, sang ten more verses. By then, Ariel could have joined her on several. Most told how Farwalkers were ugly, hateful strangers who went places they shouldn’t, knew things they shouldn’t, and would steal the lectrick if they got half a chance. Ariel noticed, however, that several verses weren’t exactly untrue:
They find the treasures of the dead
That should be left alone instead.
They’re outside time, and nature, too;
They’re friends with ghosts, but not with you.
So if you want your life to last
You’ll catch ’em quick and kill ’em fast.
She had befriended a ghost and found treasures left by people long dead. As she considered it, though, the winner sang a few lesser-known verses that stopped Ariel’s thoughts cold:
There ain’t no fail-safe we can make
That they can’t take apart or break.
They’ll wreck the dam and cause a flood
That won’t leave nothing left but mud.
Old Noah says to save him strife:
Just finish a Farwalker’s life.
The girl beamed. The crowd nodded its approval. Just then, nobody had more verses to offer.
Ariel found her voice. “You know what the fail-safe is?”
The reactions she received ranged from pity and bemusement to alarmed stares. “We got all sorts of fail-safes here,” Trisha told her, with a nervous glance at the others as if she expected someone to stop her. “Couldn’t keep the dam working at all without ’em.”
“But what are they? What do you do with them?”
“Relief valves, switchovers, shunts …” Most of the words Trisha used meant nothing to Ariel.
“It may have been a common idea before the war,” Scarl told her. “The tools people used then were complex.”
“Could we see one?” she asked. Nearly everyone around her tensed. Their trust of a Farwalker didn’t stretch that far. Not yet. For the moment, Ariel stuffed back her need to know more and awarded her eel skull to the contest’s winner.
All evening afterward, more verses of the song popped from people’s memories. Ariel even recognized a few verses from rope-skipping songs she knew, except with “sea monsters” replaced by “Farwalkers.” It felt very strange to discover a place where the boogeyman turned out to be not a fright like Tattler, but you. Yet it was comforting, too. If she was the worst monster the world could dish up, any others could not be that bad.
The people of Electron seemed to agree, and most of them warmed to their guests. The gifts Ariel had brought from Skunk didn’t hurt. She passed along requests for Healtouches and Storians, just as she had before, although with much less hope that anyone might volunteer. She also mentioned Skunk’s plea for good-looking husbands. That generated more interest. As the crowd buzzed, Ariel realized that Electron had a surplus of young men and boys.
“Are their girls pretty?” someone asked.
“Well, Sienna is from there,” Ariel said. She wasn’t sure that reply was quite fair, but when they heard it, at least four young men, including one not older than Nace, offered to go right away. Ariel stammered.
“I can tell you about them and Skunk,” offered Sienna, who’d been listening. She shot a glance toward Ariel. “If that’s okay?”
“Sure.” Ariel waved her ahead, glad for time to recover. When she stepped back to make way for Sienna, she overheard Mo speaking in low tones with Scarl nearby.
“… not enough girls,” he was telling the Finder. “Big problem for us. It’s part of the reason there’s Reapers and black lands at all. Too many bucks fighting over the few girls we got. The troublemakers get tossed out to fend for themselves.”
“So you have a gang of young men running wild out there?” Scarl shook his head.
Mo nodded sourly. “Some of us have been working on Ennis to change it. It ain’t right. And it certainly ain’t birthing us any more girls.” He elbowed Scarl. “You might get a chuckle to know that the first thing half this lot wondered when they saw you, I guarantee you, was why you was lucky enough to have two.”
Scarl snorted. Then he noticed Ariel listening. He asked, “How much can I get in trade for the pair of them, Mo?”
Making a face at him, Ariel turned back to the volunteer husbands. They’d begun to clamor for more about the journey.
“You’ll have to ask your parents and master, if you’re still an apprentice,” she said. A few faces fell. “And I can’t take you just yet. I have somewhere else to go first. But I’ll return for any of you who still want to go… well, pretty soon. If Ennis will let me.”
“Oh, he’ll allow it,” Mo said behind her. “If you’d told him that first thing, he’d be in here arranging it personally.”
Scarl kept a close eye on Nace and the older boys in the crowd, but no more trouble arose. Trisha proved wrong about dinner, too. Several families offered food. One bubbled over with children, and Sienna soon began charming their parents, hoping they’d be willing to feed her in exchange for a nanny while she established her trade. Ariel couldn’t believe anyone would choose to stay in this place.
She said as much to Sienna as they went together to Electron’s strange outhouse. “Even their out house is inside,” Ariel said as they pushed through the door. “How weird can you get?”
“I think it’s rather …” They stared around the large and well-lit tiled room. Their reflections stared back from a monstrous looking glass on one wall.
“… pleasant,” Sienna finished faintly. “Warm, fewer bugs… and what a marvelous glass!” She flirted with herself in it.
Ariel gazed in dismay at the row of basins below. “These can’t be the drop-holes or chamber pots… can they? I don’t want to see myself the whole time.”
Sienna peered into a basin. “Too high. These look more like washbasins to me. Except they’ve got holes in the bottom.” She pulled what looked like a dipper handle. Water spurted. Sienna squealed and leaped back.
Ariel laughed. With much trepidation and giggling, between them they figured out the correct use of the various closets and basins. At least, they hoped so.
“See?” Sienna said. “This place is odd, I’ll admit, but I do want to stay. So many new things are exciting, don’t you think?”
Fond of novelty herself, Ariel had to agree.
“Besides,” Sienna added, “the lectrick is worth it. All this time I’ve thought you and Scarl have been… well, rather silly about your necklace, whatever messed up Willow’s bridle, all that. I thought you both let your imaginations run wild. And now right before my eyes is something straight out of a fable, way better than gold or a dragon. It makes me wonder what else I believe that is wrong, but I’m tingling just thinking about it.”
“Okay,” Ariel said. “I just wanted to check, ’cause I wouldn’t leave you if you hated it here.” She reached for the door.
“Ariel, wait. I want to say something priva
te.”
When Ariel turned back, Sienna would not meet her eyes. Instead, she traced the tiles around the washbasins. “Please don’t take this wrong. I care about you, and I don’t want you hurt.”
“Is this about Nace?”
“Hear me out,” Sienna said. “A couple years back, I was out in the trees with a fellow I liked, and we got sort of… friendly. Until Nace burst from a bush, raising a ruckus, and he ran home and riled up my parents, and it was just a disaster.”
“Maybe he …” Ariel didn’t enjoy this idea, but she pushed on. “Maybe he liked you himself and got jealous.”
Sienna barked a laugh. “Hardly. But you don’t get it. It’s not that he got me in trouble. That all came from the girl my friend had promised to marry.”
Ariel worked to keep her face blank, but Sienna never paused. “Nace could only have known I was there if he’d been following me. Spying. And it wasn’t just once. I can’t tell you how many—All right. I’ll be totally honest. I’ve done a few things I probably shouldn’t. I just got so bored. And Nace always found out. Every single time. He kept most of my secrets, but he let me know that he knew. At first I thought animals told him, or birds, but no Kincaller’s that good, and why would they care? I started wondering if Tattler whined to him somehow, but that was ridiculous, too. And then twice Nace showed up to stop me before. Like he knew in advance. It’s bizarre.”
Ariel wondered just how naughty Sienna had been, but that wasn’t the point. “His mother’s a Judge, though. He’s probably got some of that skill. And he’s pretty observant.”
Sienna huffed. “Fine. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”
“Sienna! If you hadn’t done anything bad, there’d be nothing to tell me!”
Sienna’s face worked, and she stalked to the far end of the room. Ariel groaned. She didn’t want to leave with hard feelings between them. “Oh, Sienna…”
The Flame-Mage spun and strode back, pulling a lock of her hair between her teeth. She spun again, pacing. “I hate being embarrassed. You know? Hate it. I suppose I could be … blaming that feeling on him. When it’s all my own fault.”