A Promise Broken

by Lynn E. O'Connacht

  A little puzzled, Arèn followed Keilan into the library and along the aisles and bookcases. The kerisai was muttering something under her breath as they walked, and he knew better than to disturb her. When she stopped and reached for a book that was barely within her reach, he didn’t even bother trying to caution her. She’d only ignore him.

  “Here it is.”

  He almost retorted that he could see that, but didn’t.

  “Give that to Eiryn-dai, would you?” she said as she handed him the book. Arèn took it and smiled wryly at the title. Of course it would be something with farakaoina written in it. Of course Keilan would expect the girl to keep practicing.

  “Do you think we upset the Balance with this vote?” he asked as quietly as he could. His hands gripped the book more tightly, but Keilan only shook her head. He waited, wanting more and not daring to ask.

  “If we had, the vote would have gone differently. You know this.” Keilan kissed him on his forehead, her hair tickling his cheeks uncomfortably, and stood back. “Fret about something else, Arèn. It’ll be all right.”

  “I hope so.” He looked down at the book in his hands. The embossed letters read only ‘Study of Farakaoina’. “I hope so.”

  “Why are Arèn-minnoi and Keilan-minnai gone today?” Eiryn asked, dangling her legs over the edge of the fountain she was seated on. It’d taken Radèn-minnoi some time to convince her to go out, but she was glad he’d succeeded. Now she was looking at the boy sitting on the ground beside her hopefully. He’d dressed in summer clothes because the day had promised to be warm enough. So far it’d stayed cloudy, but it wasn’t very cold.

  “I told you.” The boy sighed and looked up at her, shielding his eyes with his hand. “Keilan-minnai and Arèn-minnoi have to attend a meeting, and I’m supposed to look after you and make sure you eat.” Arèn-minnoi, Eiryn knew, had not been the one to tell him so.

  “What if I’m not hungry?” she ventured, toying with the grey sash around her waist. She’d tied it the way her uncle always tied his, just around the waist, because the woman who’d helped her get dressed that morning kept getting Eiryn’s hair caught in it and she’d all but thrown a tantrum. She’d thrown another when Radèn hadn’t addressed her right. Her head still hurt from being yanked on that morning; she was too a girl; and she was still sulky at the world.

  After a pause, Radèn said, “Then you’ll eat anyway.”

  Eiryn pushed herself off the fountain’s edge. Radèn yelped and jumped up to catch her, but she didn’t need help. She landed on her own two feet just fine.

  “Don’t do that!” the boy snapped. “You’ll scare people witless!”

  Eiryn pouted. The fountain wall wasn’t that high. She’d scrambled onto it by herself. Radèn should know better too; he was always complaining about how people treated him like he was made of fragile shell. “What if I am?” she asked and hugged him fiercely, burying her face in his shirt. “You’ll look after me, won’t you?”

  “Always, Ryn-dai.” He hugged her back before lifting her up and holding her in his arms. You’re heavy.”

  “I shouldn’t eat then,” the girl muttered. “Is Arèn-minnoi having fun?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Can I go to him?”

  “Ugh, you’re too heavy,” Radèn said, putting her down again. As he’d tried to carry her out onto the courtyard earlier, Eiryn stuck her tongue out at him and repeated her question. Radèn patted her on the head. “No, but you can stay with me in the gardens.”

  “Can I?” she asked. Radèn-minnoi smiled and nodded. “Yay!” Eiryn danced around him. “Yay! Yay! Yay!”

  “There isn’t much to see until spring, you know.”

  Eiryn slipped one of her hands into Radèn’s, smiling. “But I get to go with you.” She nodded once and Radèn laughed. Scuffing her foot, Eiryn looked up at him pleadingly. She didn’t want to walk again. Walking was boring.

  Radèn shook his head. “If little Ryn-dai wants to go, then go we shall. But she’ll have to behave like a proper lady.”

  Her pouting didn’t last very long because the boy’s laughter was infectious. Soon Eiryn was giggling too. She wasn’t that tired yet anyway. She tugged on Radèn’s hand to follow her and started to skip towards the entrance of the gardens proper. No one stopped them from entering, even though the sun was peeking out through the clouds and Radèn made no attempt to return for the floppy hat he’d abandoned on the fountain rim.

  Letting go of the boy’s hand, Eiryn spun under the archway, caressing the smooth stone with her fingers. Radèn stood in the shade of the wall, twiddling his fingers, before he nudged Eiryn through the archway and onto the sandy path.

  He was still laughing, but there was something about his voice that reminded Eiryn of taut cloth. “You’re impatient, aren’t you?”

  Eiryn stopped, stumbling over her feet, to look back at him. He sounded impatient. Didn’t he? She nodded, though, because she wanted to go explore with him. She hardly ever got a chance to and she bounced back to tug him forward. “Cooooome!” she whined. Radèn was being so slow and she felt like running along the grass, which would probably make the gardeners angry with her, but she didn’t care. “Come, come, come, come!”

  “All right. All right,” Radèn laughed. “Stop pulling my arm off, Ryn.” When he resumed walked, Eiryn skipped beside him happily. Arèn-minnoi would probably have been angry with her for being impatient, but Radèn didn’t seem to mind. She hadn’t been outside at all since dai had gone. Amaru-dai had loved all of the gardens and taken Eiryn out into them at every opportunity. If her mother were still with her, like Radèn was, she’d have been in one now too. At the thought, Eiryn wasn’t sure she wanted to go anywhere her mother loved, though. Not even with Radèn. Not today, not even though she wondered if she’d hear her mother lingering there too.

  Before Eiryn could find the words to tell Radèn she’d changed her mind, a butterfly caught her attention. Resting on a lonely, bright red flower, the butterfly was pale as white shell with little specks of blue. Eiryn cried in delight, but the butterfly ignored her. It beat its wings lazily and stayed resting on the flower.

  Eiryn hadn’t expected butterflies. Or flowers, even. Those remained, little splotches of red or orange or purple stubbornly showing through the yellow and brown of autumn. But flowers weren’t butterflies sunning themselves. Dragging Radèn along, Eiryn rushed to the red flower in the bushes. They startled the butterfly away. Eiryn chased it from flower to leaf to flower to leaf to nowhere, with Radèn-minnoi chasing after her. Soon it’d become a game of tickle-monster except that Radèn only caught her the first time and then not again until she was entirely out of breath and threw herself onto a bench along the path. Panting too, Radèn sank down beside her and she was very good and did not tickle him.

  Instead, Eiryn looked around and tried to discover where she was. She didn’t think she’d ever been in this part of the gardens before. The bench was facing a hedge, still dotted with small orange flowers. Treetops rose from behind it, their leaves a mix of brown, red, orange, yellow and green. Behind those, the pale palace wall shone bright in the sun. “Radèn-minnoi?” Eiryn asked. “Why does the stone shine so much?”

  By now the boy had caught his breath and looked up. “Because fasaoi made it so.” He shrugged. “You need to study very diligently to learn.”

  “Will I be able to make things shine like pearls?”

  “Maybe.”

  Eiryn jumped up and ran off, wanting somewhere familiar. She didn’t wait for Radèn to follow her, though she could hear his soft footfall on the path behind her. She didn’t know where she was going either. The gardens were larger than dai had made her believe they were. Eiryn passed a small stream, countless of beds of cut flowers and a lot of hedges and bushes.

  When Radèn caught up with her, he scolded her for running off and took her by the hand as he led her away and down another path, past a pond with stream leading to it, towards a small miniature wood.
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  Eiryn started to pull back, her hand slipping from Radèn’s. He didn’t seem to mind, or notice, and walked on without her. Past the first pale-barked trees, Radèn turned around. “Come on, Ryn. You’ve never seen the winter gardens before.”

  Shaking her head, Eiryn stayed where she was. Dai had loved that wooden garden with its needle-leaves and strangeness and Eiryn didn’t want to listen to her mother today. Telling dai, again and again, that she’d promised she wouldn’t follow made her so tired. Eiryn didn’t want to be tired all the time.

  Radèn vanished along the path. Eiryn squeaked and rushed forward as far as she dared, but the boy was nowhere to be seen. Before she could decide to run in after him, she heard a loud snap and a cry coming from somewhere high up. Eiryn shrieked along because that voice was Radèn’s and she ran towards the direction it’d come from. Climbing trees and breaking their branches was almost certainly not how anyone who wanted to be the rysharoi should behave, she was quite sure of that, and Radèn could get hurt. Eiryn knew that even if she was only four and no one but Keilan-minnai thought what she said was worth listening to. Radèn was eight, so he should know that too.

  Looking around, Eiryn saw nothing. When she heard cloth scraping against something rough, she tilted her head up. Radèn was standing on a low branch that looked about as thick as his foot. He hugged the trunk of the tree and Eiryn wasn’t sure how he’d managed to climb into it. The branch didn’t look low enough for the boy to grab hold of it.

  Placing her hands on her hips the way dai had sometimes done to scold her or Arèn-minnoi, Eiryn tried to look stern and grown-up. “Rysharoii should not climb trees!” she yelled. “They should behave like proper rysharoii!”

  “Every day a rysharoi except today!” Radèn-minnoi called back, laughing. He sat down and scooted away from the trunk and safety. Eiryn could see him better that way, but still. When Radèn tumbled off the branch, she screamed and closed her eyes. She screamed again when she felt someone pressing her into a hug.

  “It’s all right, Ryn-dai. I’m all right.”

  “You could have been hurt,” the girl sobbed. She could feel snot running out of her nose and she didn’t care that it got Radèn’s grey shirt dirty or that his parents would be angry with him for it. “You could have left like dai. You could have!”

  “But I didn’t and I’m not. Shh, Eiryn-dai. Shh.”

  She was not in the least bit mollified. “I’ll tell Arèn-minnoi you were climbing trees.” Radèn would probably tell Arèn-minnoi that she’d been climbing walls and running over the grass, but neither of those would kill her.

  She felt, more than heard, Radèn sigh. “I’m sorry?”

  When he lifted her up this time, he didn’t tell her that she was heavy. Not once as he carried her all the way back to the palace entrance. The big one with the great steps that no one ever used, except them that morning when Radèn had sneaked her out of the palace. Eiryn wound her arms around his neck as he walked, sniffling against his shoulder, and she didn’t care how it might look.

  “You’ve got your hands full with her, haven’t you?” a voice sneered. Eiryn couldn’t help but look up and quickly pressed her face against Radèn’s neck again. She gripped his shirt with one hand and tugged her hair forward and over her ears as fast as she possibly could with the other. Her scalp stung and her nails dug into her skin even though she was gripping Radèn’s shirt, but she didn’t complain. “Shouldn’t you be off learning how to make arguments instead of watching over toddlers?”

  “Leave her alone, Janyn.”

  Eiryn tried to melt into Radèn-minnoi. Her mouth tasted tangy now as she’d bitten her tongue. She never liked it when Radèn sounded like that. He and Janyn had never gotten along; Keilan-minnai said they’d been fighting even before Eiryn had joined their classes.

  “I’ll be the next rysharoi, Janyn. Don’t make me practice ordering you around already.”

  “Father says she’s sifanou.”

  Eiryn couldn’t help it; a sob escaped her. Even she knew that that was the worst thing you could possibly call a person. Radèn-minnoi put her down and pried her hands loose from his neck. She hugged his waist instead. Radèn patted her on the head, but it did little to soothe her. She wasn’t upsetting the Balance, even if she didn’t quite know what that meant. Arèn-minnoi would have done something; dai’d always said he was married to the Balance. She wasn’t upsetting it. She wasn’t.

  “Father says that’s why they’re having a meeting,” Janyn-minnoi continued as Eiryn shuffled around Radèn to be behind him, to put someone nice between her and Janyn-minnoi. “They’re discussing what to do with the pointy-eared sifanou. The faslaeraoina will deal with it.”

  “Enough!” Radèn snapped. He balled his fists then relaxed them again as he turned to push Eiryn towards the steps. “Go to Arèn-minnoi’s chambers, Eiryn-minnai.”

  She was reluctant to leave him behind, keeping a fearful eye on Janyn-minnoi. He was bigger than Radèn. Older too. Now, more than ever, she was grateful that Janyn wasn’t able to use fasaoi yet. He should; Radèn’d said he was old enough. But he couldn’t.

  “Eiryn-minnai.” Radèn’s voice sounded strained. Tugging on her hair nervously, Eiryn did as she’d been told, scared enough to bound up the steps two at a time once they were narrow enough. Radèn-minnoi had told her to go, so she did. Eiryn didn’t try to understand the whispers of people she passed, pulled away from someone who’d tried to grab her, and ran all the way back to Arèn-minnoi’s chambers. When she reached them, she couldn’t even feel proud that she’d remembered how to get there.

  Standing in front of the door that had Arèn’s name written on it with silver lettering, Eiryn was shivering. Her head was throbbing and her nose was runny. She wiped the snot away with her sleeve and stood there. She couldn’t hear her mother. Couldn’t even feel dai now. Eiryn knocked on the door, gulping back sobs as best she could. When no one opened it for her, she tried to reach the handle herself. She wasn’t tall enough to get a good grip.

  This time, when she knocked again, Arèn-minnoi opened the door. He stared at her, bewildered and sad before his face shifted into concern. “What’s wrong, child?”

  Eiryn had no answer. She let him scoop her up into his arms and carry her inside. When she heard the door click closed and felt her uncle’s hand stroke her hair, she started to cry all over again, like a wave inside of her had washed away a sand castle. She couldn’t stop. Arèn-minnoi carried her around the room, making noises that were supposed to be soothing and weren’t because he wasn’t dai.

  Eventually, he sat down by his desk and settled Eiryn on his lap. “What’s wrong?” he asked again as she snuggled up to him. He smelled of lavender. He almost always smelled of lavender. Dai had never liked it much. It still took Eiryn a long time to answer.

  “Janyn-minnoi said – He said –”

  “Go on…”

  “He said, he said, that I was, was sifanou.”

  Her uncle stilled against her. Very quietly, he asked, “Janyn Enroi’Myrtan?”

  Eiryn nodded, clinging to her uncle more tightly. His voice scared her; it sounded so much like Radèn’s had, but she didn’t want to be alone. She wasn’t as scared when she wasn’t alone. She wanted Innas. Dai’d given her the doll. She wanted dai.

  “You aren’t sifanou, asafai. You aren’t. Shh. Why did he say that?”

  “Hi-his f-f-f-father said –”

  “Sssshhh.” Arèn-minnoi shifted her on his lap and it took Eiryn a while to understand that he was untying his sash. Arèn-minnoi wiped at her eyes and nose with it.

  “Radèn-minnoi stayed with him,” she muttered. “They were angry. They –”

  “You’re a good girl, Eiryn-dai,” Arèn-minnoi interrupted her. He was still wiping her tears away. “A very good girl. What did you study today?”

  Eiryn pursed her lips in thought. Radèn-minnai had come to visit and he’d let her practice the farakaoina she’d felt like practising. Her uncle would be a
ngry if she told him that, and her head hurt incredibly much. She didn’t want to lie and she had trouble enough finding words for the truth. “Farakaoina I’d learned…” she answered. She looked down at her uncle’s lap.

  “Really?”

  Eiryn nodded. “He didn’t want to teach me new ones.”

  “That’s good.” Eiryn looked up and her uncle smiled at her. “It’d have been dangerous if he’d taught you anything new.”

  “Oh.” Eiryn didn’t understand why and she didn’t, at that moment, particularly care. Her uncle was humming some farakaoina now, so she focused on that. It wasn’t one she’d heard before, but it soothed her head and eyes a little. After a while, she asked, sleepily, “Arèn-minnoi? Can you make stone shiny?”

  “Huh?”

  “Can you make stone shiny?” She looked up and, seeing his frown, slid off his lap to fetch one of her pearly shells from the bedroom. When she was back, she held it out to him. “Like this. Can you make stones shiny like this?”

  Arèn-minnoi leaned forward to mess up her hair. Eiryn tugged at it with her free hand and shied away from him a little. For a moment, he looked like he might cry too, but then he said, “No, child. I can’t. It takes many people using fasaoi to change one stone permanently. They’re too large for one person.”

  “Can I turn little stones shiny?”

  “When you’re older you can learn the farakaoina for it and try, but your voice will probably be wrong for it. It takes a very low voice to make any stone shiny.”

  Eiryn nodded and went to put the shell back with the others. When she turned back, she laughed. “You have flowers in your hair.” She hadn’t noticed them before. Arèn-minnoi didn’t seem to like flowers very much, other than to smell of lavender.

  “You should wash your hands,” he told her and Eiryn bounded over to the dressing table in the bedroom to do so. She skidded to a halt in front of it and stood on the tips of her toes, but she still couldn’t reach the basin. She called for Arèn-minnoi. When he appeared in the archway and chuckled, she looked at him angrily which only made him laugh more. Eiryn stomped her foot, but Arèn-minnoi ignored her. He strode over and lifted her up, so she could reach the basin and wash the dirt off her hands.