Chapter 3
Frieda studied the meadow from every angle in much greater detail than she ever had before. In the end, she faced the wall and watched the people. Whatever else she experienced here, those people were the crux of her life here. Whatever answers she wanted or needs she needed, the solution would come from them.
If she thought about them long enough, someone would come toward her. Who would it be this time? Would Deek come to visit her again? Even as she wondered, a cluster of figures left the main group and Frieda recognized them right away as women. They wore the same long white shift Sasha wore, and their hair hung smooth and lustrous down their backs instead of bound in ropes like the men. Their white gowns drew Frieda’s attention to her own clothes. She still wore the woven shirt and pants she had on when she arrived in the Avitras village with Anna.
Before Frieda could say a word, the women surrounded her with warm smiles of greeting. “We’ve been waiting for ages to meet you. Did you find your house? Is it comfortable enough for you? Do you have everything you need? When are you coming to the convocation? Were you injured when you fell? We have a medicine woman who handles injuries. We don’t get many, but if you are injured, she’ll fix you.”
Two women took Frieda’s hands on either side, and the others pressed her on all sides and bombarded her with questions. “No, I wasn’t injured. Thank you very much for taking me in.”
The woman on her left brought her face close to Frieda’s and murmured low. Her hair shone with the same glossy brown as the others, but something around her eyes told Frieda she was older than the others. “It wasn’t we who took you in. You came to us through the water. We didn’t know about you until you called to us to come for you. We wouldn’t have taken you otherwise. We would have left you where you were for your own people to find you.”
Frieda shook her head. “The Avitras aren’t my people.”
The woman frowned. Then Frieda recognized her from her vision. She was Deek’s mother, who waved to him across the undersea meadow. She frowned the same frown as Deek. When they frowned, they looked exactly alike.
“They aren’t?” the woman asked. “That’s strange. We thought they were.”
“I only just came to live with them when I fell out of the tree,” Frieda explained. “I thought I might find a home there, but I hadn’t yet. I.....I don’t really know where my home is, to tell you the truth.”
The woman pursed her lips and furrowed her eyebrows. Frieda could have laughed out loud, she looked so much like her son. Then her expression cleared. She smiled and pressed Frieda’s hand again. “Well, never mind. You’re here now. That’s all that matters.”
“I never called you,” Frieda insisted. “I didn’t even know about you then.”
The woman waved her hand. “None of that matters. You’re here, and you are Frieda, as we know. I am Jen, and this is Trin.” She indicated the woman holding Frieda’s other hand. “She is my daughter.”
A light came on in Frieda’s mind. “So you must be Deek’s sister.”
The women surrounding her exploded in a hubbub of talking and exclaiming and laughter. “Yes, yes! We’re all Deek’s family. That’s why we’ve come to welcome you.”
Frieda blushed. “That’s very kind of you. I didn’t mean to call all of you at the same time.”
Jen waved her hand again and beamed. “You didn’t, but we did, and here we are. We’ve been waiting so long for a chance to welcome you, but Sasha said we ought to let you understand the place a little better before we....What was the word she used? Oh yes, I remember. She said before we mobbed you.”
Frieda chuckled. “Thank you, Sasha.”
The group burst into fresh gales of laughter. Frieda would have been embarrassed if the whole scene hadn’t been so jolly. Every word out of her mouth delighted the women no end.
“So,” Jen went on, “do you understand the place well enough to let us mob you now?”
“I think so,” Frieda replied. “I must, if I called you to do it.”
Jen tugged her hand. “Good. Then come with us. We want to show you around.”
Frieda let them lead her forward. “Show me around? I thought this was all there was to it. What else is there to show me?”
They didn’t answer, but led her across the meadow and around the forest to another open area Frieda hadn’t seen before. Behind the waving seaweed trees, an embankment rose out of the ground as high as the tallest tree. Tiny houses exactly like hers and Sasha’s dotted the surface. A carpet of greenery covered the hillside and the round domes, and colorful flowers decorated the landscape.
Frieda stared at it for a moment before she recognized the cave-pocked corral bank she’d seen in her vision. So this was where the Aqinas lived.
Jen murmured in her ear. “This is our village.”
“But why don’t I live here with you?” Frieda asked. “Why is my house all the way over there by itself? And Sasha has her house in the forest.”
“That must be the way you want it for now,” Jen replied. “Maybe that’s how Sasha knew you didn’t want a mob greeting right away. She saw your house standing all by itself and thought you might need space to settle in at the beginning. She’s been living there for months. She hasn’t come to live in the village yet.”
“She said she lived there with Fritz,” Frieda recalled. “Has he left the village to live alone with her? That must have been hard for him.”
“Well, it wasn’t exactly like that,” Jen replied. “He goes back and forth. He comes to us, and he goes with her. He lives in both places, if you think about it.”
“That must be even harder,” Frieda remarked, “having a foot in two places.”
Jen shook her head. “Not really. He’s happy there with Sasha, and when they want to be with family, they come here. It isn’t all or nothing.”
Frieda nodded down at the ground. “I’m sure it will become clear to me after I’ve been here for a while.”
Jen cocked her head to one side. “Then have you definitely decided to stay here? You don’t have to, you know. You could go back to the land. No one would blame you if you did.”
Frieda blushed. She couldn’t look any of these women in the eye, especially not Jen, who regarded her with the same frank expression Frieda noticed in her son. “I only meant it would become clearer to me the longer I stayed here. There’s still so much to learn.”
Jen burst into a radiant smile and took her hand again. “Come to our house. Let us welcome you.”
Frieda could hardly protest. The group swept her up the hill into the village, where narrow footpaths wound between the rounded dome houses. An eerie silence shrouded the place. No other people hung around the houses. No other women laid their laundry on the bushes to dry. No one looked out their windows to see what was going on. Frieda didn’t see another living soul anywhere. “Where is everybody?”
Jen’s head whipped around and her eyes widened. Then she laughed. “They aren’t here. It’s just us.”
Frieda turned bright red again. She’d forgotten. All the people were out there by the wall—or wherever the ocean hid them when they weren’t in her immediate field of interaction. That in itself was going to take some getting used to. She wouldn’t see anybody if she wasn’t directly engaged with them at any given time. No wonder Deek said he didn’t know all the Aqinas. No one could.
The women ushered her up the hill and through the door of one of the houses. From the outside, it looked as small and unassuming as the others—perfectly round, tiny, and half-buried in the ground. Already Frieda’s vision of the caves in the coral bank faded so she saw only the house and village in front of her with its soft fuzz of green grass and nodding wildflowers.
On the inside, though, the house stretched back into the hillside with several sets of tables and chairs scattered around and multiple beds of all sizes lining the walls. Frieda stopped in the doorway. “How many people live here?”
“
This our family home,” Jen told her. “Several families share this house. My sister and brother and their mates and children all live here, and their children’s children and some more distant cousins. We come here to spend our time together and raise our family together.”
Frieda studied some smaller beds, too small for adults. “I didn’t think about the children. I haven’t seen any since I came.”
“You won’t see them until they become part of your life,” Jen replied. “Sasha has been here almost a year, and she still hasn’t seen any.”
“How is that possible?” Frieda asked. “Didn’t you say she comes here all the time to spend time with your family?”
Jen shrugged. “I can only imagine it’s because she was single and childless when she came here, just like you are. It doesn’t happen to our people, since they grow up around their younger relatives. They are never not around children. But a person who hadn’t been here before, who had no children of her own—I suppose it must be different.”
“Then how could I ever see them?” She swallowed hard.
“I’m sure you’ll see them when you have children of your own. Children will be part of your life then.” Jen laughed. “You won’t be able to get away from them.”
The group erupted into conversation and laughter. They settled into a loose circle in the chairs, with several different conversations going at once. On one side, two women fell to discussing their own children, what they said that morning when they woke up and what they played when they got together with their friends. On the other side, another three women started negotiating plans for a large family gathering at another house. They decided who they would invite, and who would handle what aspect of the planning and arranging.
Frieda listened to all this intimate community discourse with a sinking heart. As warmly as these women welcomed her, she still sat on the outskirts of their close-knit world, an outsider. Would any Aqinas ever talk to her that way? Would she ever enjoy the closeness of those bonds? Her heart twisted into a knot. She couldn’t stand to live in a place like this without them. The image of Sasha in her isolated house in the woods rose before her eyes. Was that her future here—to live in a lonely bubble apart for others, a tragic accident brought about by a clumsy fall from a treetop balcony?
She almost got up and walked out of the house when a gentle touch on her hand made her look around, and she found Trin gazing into her eyes with bright interest. At close range, Trin didn’t look like Jen or Deek. “You must miss your own people. I can see the women you left behind on land. You must be anxious to get back to them.”
Frieda blinked hard. “It isn’t just my people. I have two sisters out there somewhere. My sister Anna is still with the Avitras. She probably thinks I’m dead. I should find a way to get in touch with her and let her know I’m all right. My cousin Aimee is with the Lycaon, and my other sister Emily was on the Romarie ship with us, but I don’t know what happened to her when the ship crashed. She could be alive somewhere and worried about the rest of us, or she could be dead. It’s very nice here, but I couldn’t settle here or anywhere else if I was worried about them.”
Trin nodded. Her gaze never wavered from Frieda’s face. “You could go find them. Then you could come back if you wanted to. We aren’t going away.”
“Does that happen?” Frieda asked. “Do people go back and forth?”
“Well, not really,” Trin replied. “Very rarely, a group of Aqinas will travel up onto land to intervene when the other factions get too violent with each other, but they don’t stay long before they come back. Sometimes the other factions call on the Aqinas to negotiate a peace agreement when no one else can. That’s the advantage of staying neutral.”
Frieda nodded. “I heard about that, but Aqinas don’t go up onto land and then come back any more than other Angondrans come down here into the deep ocean and then go back. That wouldn’t happen.”
Trin dropped her eyes to her lap. “You’re right. It wouldn’t happen. It couldn’t. The algae that allow us to live here couldn’t survive any extended time out of the water.”
“Thanks for saying that, though,” Frieda went on. “It shows you care about me, but if left here to find my sisters or my cousin, I would never be able to come back.”
The faintest touch of a smile brightened Trin’s face. “At least you’re thinking about it. I’m glad you’re happy enough here to consider staying.”
“Do you want me to stay?”Frieda asked.
“Of course,” Trin exclaimed. “We all want you to stay very badly.”
“Why?” Frieda asked. “I don’t see why you would make such a big deal over a stranger.”
“Isn’t it obvious?” Trin asked. “The Aqinas suffered the same loss of females the other factions did when the plague devastated our planet. We’re desperate for any woman who wishes to join us.”
Frieda’s eyes popped open. “I didn’t know that.”
“Didn’t the other factions tell you about the plague?” Trin asked.
“Sure they did,” Frieda replied. “But everyone assumes the Aqinas escaped it. Don’t ask me why. Maybe it’s because all the other factions asked the Lycaon to send human women to them to help rebuild their populations, but the Aqinas never did.”
“We would never do that,” Trin exclaimed.
“You should,” Frieda urged. “The other factions say all kinds of terrible things about the Aqinas. If they knew you needed females as badly as they do, the other women might want to come here.”
Trin regarded her with sparkling eyes. “Would they really? If you had known what Aqinas territory was really like, would you have chosen to come here of your own free will?”
Frieda looked down at her hands. “Well, no, I can’t say I would.”
Trin laughed. “Sasha told me the same thing. She said she would never have come here if she’d know what it was going to be like. She said it’s too foreign to what you’re used to on land. But now that she’s been here a while, she’s used to it, she has family and friends, and she’s happy here.”
As if in answer to their conversation, a shadow crossed the doorway and Sasha herself entered the room. Frieda raised her eyes to her face, and Sasha smiled at her. She greeted several different women in the room before she sat down next to Frieda. “I thought you’d be here. How are you finding everything?”
Frieda looked around the room. “It’s hard to complain, but it’s still a long way from what I’m used to. I still feel like a fish out of water.”
Sasha laughed. “Just keep breathing, little fishy, and let these women take care of you. You’ll be all right.”
Frieda glanced around the circle of white-clad figures. Every woman in the room glowed with inner light. Not even Jen, with the obvious signs of advancing age, showed any blight of ill-health or mental weakness. They all engaged in animated conversation and lively intimacy with each other.
“All these women,” Frieda remarked. “How could your population be in danger with women like these around?”
“I know what you’re thinking,” Trin replied. “You think all the Aqinas are like our family, that a family with this many women would never need any more. But our whole faction isn’t like this room. We came together to welcome you.”
Sasha spoke up. “You have two sisters and a female cousin. You’re used to female family around you, and that’s what you found here. You wouldn’t feel comfortable with anything else, so the water brought you what you most desired. But most Aqinas families suffer from too few females. Fritz has no sisters, no female cousins, and no nieces. His parents have one daughter-in-law besides me, and we are the only younger generation females in his family.”
“That’s terrible,” Frieda exclaimed. “What are you going to do about that? How can your people survive without bringing in human females from outside?”
“We can’t,” Trin replied, “but we can’t ask them to leave the Lycaon to come here. That would be....”
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“What?” Frieda asked. “Would it be too much for your honor to handle? Holding back only feeds the other factions’ suspicions about you. Showing them you share their vulnerability would go a long way toward bridging the gap between you and the other factions.”
“Nothing can bridge the gap between us and the other factions,” Sasha told her. “They live on land and we live here. No faction would send those women to us, and the women would be crazy to come on their own. You know that.”
Frieda shook her head, but she couldn’t deny the truth. “There must be some way.”
Trin took her hand again. “There is. You’re here, and so is Sasha. Women will come to us. It just might take longer for us to recover.”
Frieda muttered under her breath. “There must be a way.”
Sasha looked away and started talking to someone else. Trin leaned forward. “How did your meeting go with Deek?”
Frieda’s head shot up. “It went fine. He’s very nice.”
Trin didn’t smile. She studied Frieda. “He is Fritz’s second. Did you know that?”
“His second what?” Frieda asked.
“Just his second,” Trin replied.
“I don’t understand you,” Frieda told her.
“He helps Fritz make decisions,” Trin replied. “When Fritz travels to negotiate with the other factions, Deek stands at his side. They’re really joint leaders together. If anything happens to Fritz, Deek will take over.”
Frieda narrowed her eyes. “Why are you telling me this?”
“I just thought you’d like to know,” Trin replied. “You seem to want to understand how things work here.”
“I do.” Frieda shifted in her seat. “No, I didn’t know that.”
“They work together at the convocation,” Trin went on.
“What’s the convocation?” Frieda asked.
“It’s where the Aqinas get together to monitor developments on land,” Trin replied. “We use the water to keep track of what the other factions are doing.”
“Do you mean like spying on them?” Frieda asked. “That sounds exactly like the other factions’ accusations against you.”
Rohn (Dragons of Kratak Book 1) Page 53