The Giant Singer: The Sibylline Saga: Book Two, page 4
Eoghan nodded to my family and even managed a, “Pleasure to meet you,” which was impressive for him, I thought.
“A surveying job?” Mother asked. She had been there when Nikita first spoke to me that morning, and she knew it was something about the war. Something secret.
“A surveying job,” I said with a confident nod, and left it at that.
“When do you leave?” Mother’s voice was soft and resigned.
Eoghan and I exchanged a brief glance, but of course, I was the one to answer. “First thing in the morning.”
“Well, this is very odd,” Edith said with half a laugh. She moved back toward the washbasin and reapplied her rag to the mixing bowl she had been scrubbing before we entered. “Why the urgency? Is that where you were all morning? Mother has been so cagey about it.”
“Yes.” I pulled out a chair at the dining table and eyed Eoghan meaningfully. Sit down. Be polite.
He took a deep breath, but he began to dutifully unbuckle the massive pack, which rode high on his shoulders. Eoghan laid it down carefully. Pots, utensils, and tools hanging off the back clanged when they hit the floor.
I patted the chair meant for him, satisfied he would sit, and fetched down a tin of pound cake from the shelf.
Mother eyed him warily. She had resumed wringing her apron between her hands. I wished there was some way for me to reassure her, but there wasn’t. I couldn’t lie to her, couldn’t tell her the truth. I figured introducing her to Eoghan before we left was the absolute best I could do.
I served out two portions of the pound cake and set one down in front of Eoghan with a muffled clink of ceramic on wood. He stared at the cake like it was something foreign and possibly dangerous.
“It’s pound cake,” I said in a softer voice, handing him a fork. “Here. Eat. It’s good. Made it myself last night.”
“Excuse me?” Edith said, eyebrow raised.
“Edith helped,” I added, which was patently untrue. I couldn’t bake to save my life, and I had spent the entire evening sneaking fingerfuls of raw batter out of the bowl while Edith measured and mixed.
Edith rolled her eyes. “Pfft.” She set the now-clean mixing bowl on the rack to dry, then stole my plate of cake. She slid it away right as I was going to slice off a bite, so my fork hit the table instead.
“Hey!”
Somewhere in the midst of our back-and-forth, Eoghan relaxed a miniscule amount. He lifted his own fork and finally began to eat.
Mother sat down opposite him and watched his steady progress through the cake. He didn’t look up once.
“So, Eoghan,” Mother finally said. “Where’s home?”
Eoghan paused for half a second as he took in the question. “Grew up with my Nan near The Great Forest. Haven’t been there in nearly fifteen years, though. Home is where I set up camp at night.”
“And where’s that?”
“Near the Lesser Apgatt, right?” I asked.
He glanced at me before forking the last bite of his cake. “I’ll camp in the woods back of your house. It’s closer.”
“We have a spare cot we can lay out on the floor here,” Mother offered, her voice solemn. What must have been going through her mind? This stranger in her house, about to take her daughter out into the wild world, only the fates knew where.
“I’ll camp in the woods,” Eoghan said with finality. He laid his fork on his empty plate and stood up with a scrape of his chair on the wooden floor. “Thank you for the cake. It was delicious.”
“You’re leaving?” I asked, unimpressed.
“You said you wanted help packing.”
“Yes, and I also said something about a real meal. Don’t think I’ve forgotten.”
He let out a barely there sigh. “I didn’t expect you had.”
Edith laughed. “He’s got your number, Nora.”
“Yes, thank you, Edith.” I gestured for Eoghan to follow me to the back of the house, to my bedroom.
We spent the next two hours carefully sorting through my possessions and packing them into a set of sturdy traveling bags from the storage shed. Eoghan seemed to find himself in his element, because he finally opened up a bit as he directed me about the room.
“Wool, not linen. It’ll be much colder at the higher elevations. Linen won’t keep you warm if it gets wet…I have a cooking pot. You don’t need more…At least two more pairs of socks. You’ll change them twice a day. Don’t you have any thicker ones?...Do you seriously need all these tools?”
This one earned my first pushback.
“Yes, I need these tools.” I snatched my caliper back from him. “How do you expect me to do my job without my cartography tools?”
“You’re not going to be mapping anything. You’ve got all the maps you need.”
“Like hell, I won’t be mapping.” I stowed the caliper carefully into its slot next to my pen knives and rolled up the toolkit into a tight bundle. Admittedly, there really wasn’t room for it in my overfull pack. But I needed these. And for hell’s sake, now that Eoghan had said they weren’t necessary, I would sew an entirely new travel pack if it meant I could get my cartography tools to fit.
“What—” Eoghan bit off whatever charged comment threatened to burst out of his mouth. He took a deep breath in, then let it out. “Fine. But you’re carrying it, not me. Every ounce of weight matters.”
“I understand,” I said, with only a little bit of petulance in my tone. Honestly, it could have been much worse. “I’ll carry it.”
He eyed my skinny arms and narrow frame almost like he didn’t think I could carry the pack empty, much less full. But he kept his mouth shut, and I kept mine shut likewise. There were no more arguments.
Eoghan spent the rest of the afternoon on our front porch, with the cheerful ram dozing on his thigh. Mother and I stared out at him from the window. He didn’t seem to be doing anything at all. From this vantage point, his face wasn’t visible. But from his posture and the way he leaned his head back against the railing, he might have been just as deeply asleep as the goat on his lap.
“Are you sure about this?” Mother asked in a low voice.
I thought long and hard before answering her. “I don’t have a choice.”
“There’s always a choice, Nora.”
I chewed my lip. Outside, Eoghan shifted his weight and laid a gentle hand on the ram.
Mother was right. I had a choice. I didn’t have to go anywhere in the morning. I could return to the paper mill and hang up my paper to dry in the airy shed. I could spend the afternoon at Nikita’s house, translating and copying and drawing. I could spend my days helping Mother with the animals. Or I could join the war effort. They always needed cartographers, despite Nikita’s insistence that I stay in Tutree.
“You’re needed here,” she had always said when the subject got brought up.
Until now, of course. She had practically shoved me out of town herself.
And I was leaving. I didn’t have to, but the more I thought about it, the more I knew I wanted to. A chance to see the Giant’s Mountain with my own eyes? And maybe look upon the Giants themselves?
It had been nearly a thousand years since the Giants last walked the earth. All we had were faded, deteriorated accounts written in dead languages and half-destroyed drawings. And there was no way to tell what was a literal description and what was metaphoric or poetic.
But the Giants were real. They had promised they would rise up in the time of Lujor’s greatest need. I wouldn’t just be learning history; I would be making it.
I’d get to examine secret archives from the High Reliquary himself and do something that mattered. And in my heart of hearts, I was desperately glad this mission would be sending me in the opposite direction of the front lines.
“I’m sure, Mother,” I said. “I’m terrified, to be honest. But it’s the opportunity of a lifetime, where we’re going. I want to go.”
Mother’s eyes slid back toward Eoghan dozing on the porch. “And you trust him?”
“I’ll learn to trust him.”
“Is it safe where you’re going?”
I let out a heavy sigh. “Is anywhere safe anymore?”
“Home is safe,” Mother said.
I slipped my hand into her crooked elbow and hugged her arm tightly. “Our home is safe, but not everyone is as lucky as us. I can help them. I can stop this war.”
Mother pressed her lips into a thin line and drew her eyebrows together. “You’re going up the mountain, aren’t you?”
I said nothing, just hugged her arm closer.
Four
That evening, after an awkward supper where Eoghan said a grand total of six words—“Please pass the beans,” and “Thank you.”—I walked him out to the back porch to say goodnight.
“We’ll leave at dawn. Be ready to go,” he said, shrugging on his pack once more.
“Why dawn?” I asked. “Seems like every journey starts at dawn. I always thought it was just something they said in stories to make it sound more dramatic.”
Eoghan’s eyes had fallen to stare at my knees—his favorite thing to look at, I supposed. “Can’t hike at night.”
“But you can hike at noon,” I countered, with a hint of petulance. “Shoot, we could leave now and get a few hours in before nightfall.”
With an eyebrow raised and the corner of his mouth quirked up, he almost seemed amused. It was weirdly delightful. An insane ambition to make him actually laugh implanted itself in my chest.
“You want to leave now?” he asked. And for the first time, there was a hint of irony in his tone.
“No.” I said it a little too fast, just in case he was being serious.
Someday, I’d make this man laugh. Not today, maybe. But soon. We had plenty of time.
“Dawn it is, then,” he said.
Eoghan disappeared around the back of the house and into the woods shading our yard. I watched him go, my eyebrows furrowed, until he disappeared between the trees.
The door opened and closed behind me, and Edith appeared at my side. She mirrored my posture: arms crossed, back ramrod straight, staring deep into the woods where Eoghan had gone. We even had the same curly hair pulled back into hasty braids.
“I like him,” she announced. “Bit of a wallflower, but he seems like a good sort of person.”
“Hm.”
Edith put an arm around my shoulders and turned me toward the door. “Come inside, love. Mother’s put on some tea. If we only have one more night with you, then let’s make the most of it.”
The three of us spent a quiet evening at home. Mother decided all the chores could wait until the next day, so as soon as the bare minimum was done to keep the animals safe overnight, she pulled out a dusty bottle of whiskey to spike our tea with. We sat in our usual chairs near the fire, setting the world to rights, and got more and more giggly as the sun got lower.
I had a bit of scrap paper and my little tin of charcoal in my lap. As we talked, a simple portrait of my mother and sister blossomed into being. It was happy, with hints of smiles and squinty eyes. I exaggerated the light from the fire, the lamps, and the twilight outside, trying to make it even cheerier than it really was.
Because under all the ease and companionship, there was the constant threat of melancholy. This was our last night. Tomorrow, I’d be gone, and only the Old Kind knew when I’d see them again.
Mother must have been thinking the same. Occasionally, she would look at me, and the light in her eyes would dim. But then she’d straighten her spine, affix that smile to her face, and say something rude about Mistress Malacky down the road. And of course, that set us all to giggling again.
We stayed up late, but Mother had a farm to run, and that meant she’d be up with the sun as well. So, we had to go to bed eventually. She hugged me tightly outside my door but refused to cry.
“Don’t leave without saying goodbye,” she said sternly into my hair.
“I won’t, Mother. I promise.”
She squeezed my hand one last time, took a deep breath, and turned toward her own bedroom.
But even with the late hour, I couldn’t sleep. Finally alone, I pulled Lachlan’s archives from the travel pack and spread them out on my desk in my bedroom. I placed my lamp carefully and sat down to read through the pages.
There were four accounts. The oldest was by a man named Lewys, written in Old Ambic. Lewys was very fond of grandiose descriptions of literally everything he saw, but then again, Old Ambic always felt a bit pompous anyway.
The second was a woman called Elaine, who traveled up the mountain with her teenage son. Her account of the journey was very practical. The third was another woman, Tanisha. She was from Amau and was a bit of a stickler for detail. Tanisha had included rudimentary maps and several sketches of landmarks and had even counted her steps in some cases. Tedious, but useful.
The last one was a young man named Luthor, a true adventurer. He wrote daily entries about the views, his girlfriend back home, and his wolfhound companion named Lobo. I admittedly fell a little bit in love with Luthor as I read his account of finding the fabled Archways, about the cliff where he could see all the way to the ocean, and his nights spent cuddled with his hound for warmth. And when I reached the end of his entries, I remembered what Lachlan had said earlier that day.
“What happened to these people?”
“Executed. Three of them were before my time. This last one, I was a docent back then. It was done in secret. I didn’t learn about it until much later, but I was there in the Reliquary when it happened.”
He had been talking about Luthor.
There were only a few hours left before I had to get up. Eoghan would be at my door at dawn, pack high and tight, eyes on my knees, probably. So I carefully stowed the four archives in their folders, then into the leather case. And the case itself went into my own travel pack, which stood ready and waiting by my bedroom door.
Tomorrow, the adventure would begin.
Bang! Bang! Bang!
I jerked onto my elbows with a gasp, staring blearily around at my still-dark bedroom. The house was quiet, and for a moment, I thought I had dreamed the noise. But then…
Bang! Bang! Bang!
The front door.
“Nora!”
Eoghan? My foggy brain struggled to keep up, then I gasped. “Eoghan.”
I scrambled out of the bed and promptly tripped over my sheets, nearly hitting the floor before managing to disentangle myself. The way Eoghan had called my name set my heart racing without me knowing why. I pulled open the door just as he raised his fist to knock again.
“What? What is it?”
Mother’s door opened behind me, and she rubbed her eyes. “What’s going on?”
“Get dressed.” Eoghan pushed past me into the house. He went straight for my bedroom, with me trailing behind. “We have to go. Now. Zoya, Edith, pack what you can and get out. Head south. Go on foot or by horse, if you have one. No time for any kind of cart or carriage.”
He picked up my pack and made to hand it to me, then paused.
“Why aren’t you dressed?”
“Eoghan, what is going on?” I asked.
“What do you mean, get out?” Mother added.
Edith finally appeared in the main room, still tugging on her clothes, as if she had only just thrown them on to cover herself. “What’s all the yelling about?”
Eoghan snatched up the pile of clothes I had left out the night before for easy access and shoved those into my hands instead.
“Amau is coming,” he replied.
Mother’s breath stopped on a gasp.
“I saw them coming up the valley. They’ll be here in minutes. We have to move.”
“No,” I said breathlessly, still clutching the pile of loose clothing.
Mother was already moving, scrambling to the kitchen to gather supplies.
“Yes,” Eoghan said. “I’ve seen it before. They’ve got wagons backed high with barrels. It’s pitch. They’re going to fire Tutree.”
Edith let out a whimper and hurried to help Mother gather up yesterday’s bread and sacks of beans and salt. Even the tin of pound cake was tossed into the bag.
“They wouldn’t.” I remained rooted to the spot. “We’re too far southwest. They don’t want anything from us.”
“They would, and they are.” Eoghan bent low to get on my eye level and gripped me by my upper arms, but I could barely feel it. “Get dressed. Your family can alert the town, but you and I have to go. Now. Get dressed.”
He pushed me deeper into the room and shut the door to give me some privacy.
I stood there for a few seconds, still frozen. But the clatter of a dropped pan in the kitchen shocked me into action. Mother and Edith were packing in a panic to evacuate our home. And our family was the only one who even knew evacuation was needed.
I ripped off my sleeping shirt and set about getting dressed with steady hands. And then, instead of picking up my pack and opening my bedroom door, I pushed aside my curtains and climbed out the window.
I didn’t even spare a glance back at the house while I jogged down the street. As if I would ever leave my town, my family and friends, my neighbors, when they needed me. This was one lesson Eoghan would have to learn about me the hard way.
The town was hushed. The moon was long set, and the stars glowed in a blanket of sparkling diamonds in the sky. Sometimes, when I was very quiet and strained my ears, I liked to think I could hear them. That the stars had a music of their own, like the wind, the trees, the birds, and the crickets.
But now, the only sound was the crunch of the gravel road under my booted feet running toward town. Everyone was inside, tucked safe in their beds. The animals were quiet in their barns, and the world was still. Everything seemed perfectly fine.
I slowed to a halt, breathing hard, and stared around.
Everything was perfectly fine. Nothing out of place. Not a noise that didn’t belong. Just the crickets, the stars, the wind, and the darkened homes sleeping around me. Suddenly, I felt foolish for rushing out of the house at the word of a stranger.
