Hearthfire, page 14
Would they come after her? She didn’t think so. She would vanish, first from the village, then from their histories, then from their minds.
Her feet found their footing at last, and their measured strides went on without her guiding them. She continued into the west as the sun crept its pace across the sky and Toil Moon rose with her sister at her side, just a day past full. Birds still flew overhead. The Bemin rushed on to the sea, its blue waters sure of themselves. The only thing out of place was Carin.
Nameless.
Her mind tried to grasp the word with slippery fingers as she walked, but she found that she could not, however she tried, tie that word she had so dreaded to herself. She was still Carin el Rina ve Haveranth, regardless of what her people murmured in the distance. A fierce obstinance grew in her chest, and she pulled her name to her like she might gather the folds of a fur coverlet to her chin on a cold winter night. She was still Carin. She had a self. She would hold to that self.
In her mind, the name she had heard in that cave in the Hidden Vale, far away from where she walked now, sounded like a sibilant whisper. Caryan.
She allowed it to take up residence in a small part of her for a moment, a brief wonder of who Caryan might have been winding through her thoughts like a snake. And then she sloughed it off, shunted it away, and made room only for Carin.
She thought of Ryd, pulling him out from underneath a pile of giggling children yet again. High Lights was the day they were supposed to take their first steps toward adulthood, joining Haveranth newly named. Instead, Ryd was leagues behind her, Lyah with him. Jenin was dead and Carin simply walked, each step fraying another thread of the life she had left.
Thinking of Jenin slowed her on the path. Carin would never know what happened to hyr now. Carin had always thought her village as a place without secrets—oh, for certain there had been the tiny falsehoods, the typical day-to-day deceptions. But not this. How many times had Dyava held her in his arms and not told her what he knew? How many moments had his smile hidden the truth of their home?
Carin’s feet carried her westward through the afternoon and past sunset until the sky was almost dark. Toil’s light lit the countryside enough for her to see, and when she finally made camp at the base of a sycamore, she could see well enough to find tinder and fallen branches to build a fire. It crackled merrily, and she sat by it sobbing, staring into the flames. The heat of the fire dried the tears on her cheeks and tightened her skin.
She sat that way for a long while, until her face burned and she had to look away.
She needed a plan; Bemin’s Fan would no more welcome her in than would Haveranth or Cantoranth. By now Merin would have sent word to the other two villages of the Hearthland that there was a Nameless one wandering the land. The soothsayers would make sure Carin could find no harbor.
What had she done?
The pit of her stomach churned, seeing again the void of the cave and worse. How could only a few moments change comfort to caprice, home to horror?
She could go north, into the mountains. There, she knew there was enough food in the summer months for her to survive the winter if she started now and gathered quickly. She could build a shelter and live as long as she needed to there. A smaller part of her whispered that she had never been alone. Her village had always been there. Someone who knew how to fish, to mend a pair of leggings, to show her how to raise the poles for the roundhome she had built with her own hands. Even on the Journeying, she had had Lyah and Ryd. She had not been alone. The Carin that had left Haveranth on Planting Harmonix moons before would not have made it back had she set out alone.
She was not certain her new self could face exile the same way.
Carin set snares around her small camp, hoping to catch a small squirrel or a rabbit by morning. When she settled down into her bedroll, she bundled the cloak that had been her Journeying gift into a pillow under her head. The cloak had kept her warm in the moons she had spent walking to find her name with Ryd and Lyah. Who would they be when the sun touched Haveranth tomorrow? Sleep came slowly, and several times before she sank into its depths, she jerked wide awake again, her entire body shaking and her hand reaching out to find Lyah’s, finding only air.
Hours later, she woke harshly in the dark of night, her muscles sore and her heart beating quickly. The buzzing, dizzy sensation she had felt all day still lingered, and she sat up on her bedroll, scanning the land around her for whatever it was that had woken her.
Nothing moved in the camp, and Carin made herself lie back down. The air had chilled, and she unbundled the cloak to pull over her body. She decided it must have been an animal in her snares, or simply a vivid dream that then fled her memory.
“Carin.” A voice sounded in the camp.
Carin sat straight up, head snapping toward the speaker. She knew that voice. The sick feeling she had missed earlier now arrived, sending her stomach roiling with fear and anxiety.
She met Ryd’s eyes from across the embers of her carefully banked fire.
“Ryd.”
What she wanted to say was, Not you, too.
For a long while, neither of them spoke. Dawn began to color the sky, and Carin got up and rekindled the coals of the fire into dancing flame, feeding them with the wood she had set aside.
Ryd simply took his rucksack from his back and set it against the trunk of the sycamore, rummaging about until he pulled out a fishing line and hook. He walked the bank of the Bemin until he found an eddy, and Carin watched from the fireside as he cast the hook out into the swirling waters.
When he came back with two small fish, Carin cleaned them, and she marveled at how quickly they fell back into the routines of the Journeying. The fish roasted in a pan held by Ryd’s steady hand, which he switched every so often to give his muscles a respite from holding it in one position.
“Why did you leave?” He flipped one of the fish with a wooden fork.
“Why did you?” Carin countered.
“I couldn’t go back to the way things were,” Ryd said. The smell of roasting fish made Carin’s mouth begin to moisten, but she wasn’t sure she could trust her stomach with food.
“Nor could I,” she said.
He looked at her, his eyes as pale as the pre-dawn sky against the brown of his skin. “You had everything in Haveranth. You had a plan to join the village, a home you built, a place.”
Carin frowned, looking closer at this boy she had known since swaddling clothes. “You had those things.”
But she knew before the words had escaped her mouth that his saying he couldn’t go back to the way things were did not mean the same as hers. Carin thought of the many times she had pried children off him, and how she had done it without thinking of just how that would feel, to be the one at the bottom of that pile. How disrespected he must have felt, and rightly so. Shame filled her at the realization that she hadn’t bothered to see something so clear.
Ryd now gazed off into the distance, to the north where beyond the tree line the mountains would rise with their snow-capped peaks and jagged stones. “No one even saw me go.”
“What?”
“I was at the hearth-home, in the very center of things, when Merin called for the first born to name herself and you did not speak. I saw everyone react to your loss. Lyah started murmuring—I could see her lips moving, and she wasn’t saying Nameless like everyone else was. Dyava’s shoulders started shaking, and I saw him looking around for you. Then I saw you, on the far side of the river and almost out of sight. So I left the pavilion, and no one noticed.”
Carin felt as though her heart would collapse in her chest. Dyava. The entire village would have been there, waiting for the naming ceremony and the feast to move them past another High Lights into the harvest quarter of the cycle. Surely someone had seen him…
But looking into Ryd’s face, she knew he had the right of it. No one had noticed him go. For the first time in the life they had spent together, Carin felt as though she truly knew him.
She spoke haltingly then, her words jumbling in her mouth until she was afraid they would come out with no order. “For me…I couldn’t stay. Not when I know what I know, what we all know. High Lights is naught but a bandage tied on a broken leg,” she said. She paused before going on. “Did you realize that our whole families know this thing? Everyone beyond their eighteenth harvest. They have always known, what our people did to build our home. Who they have hurt. I couldn’t stay. I had to leave. I don’t know if I can ever do anything that will make it right, but…”
A light blush of color appeared on Ryd’s cheeks, but he nodded.
The dizziness Carin felt buzzed around her as if she were at the center of a beehive. She meant what she had said, or she wouldn’t have been there, so far from home. But home, the home she had left behind. Her mother. Dyava. Lyah. She blinked at Ryd, her skin tingling and crawling. The sky seemed to grow darker in her field of vision. She tried to form Ryd’s name with her lips, but no words would come.
His face swam in front of her eyes, and the last she saw before she fell was his arm reaching out to catch her.
He missed.
JUST BEFORE dusk, Sart returned to the small cairn of pebbles where she had buried the brick of halm. By now the dampness of the clay would have seeped into the wood, softening it. A proper halmer would then begin to shave away the first chunks of wood to reveal whatever item they desired to craft. Sart dug up the brick, keeping her eyes alert on her surroundings. None of the rovers paid her much attention; they seemed to know enough about a halmer’s craft to know that nothing happened quickly and that it would be morning before anything started to truly take shape. The wood would have to be buried and shaped at least twice more. From a brick this size, a halmer could indeed make two belt knives.
Sart’s spade struck the brick, and she carefully sat back on her heels, clearing a space around the brick. Kahs had taken to having a boring conversation with one of the knifers, and the rover leader stood off by himself then, peeling long strings from a chunk of dried smoked meat.
The brick of halm uncovered, Sart moved it to the side in the hole she had dug and surreptitiously began to chisel out a hole on one side. She worked quickly, displacing the clay and smearing it around the edges of the main hole. When it was large enough, she pushed the brick of halm into the wall of the hole and smeared clay over it, leaving a large empty divot in the ground, devoid of the wood the rover had given her.
Sart pushed the spade down into the bottom of the hole, burying it deep in the clay. There weren’t many rocks there, but she hoped she wouldn’t come across a layer of soil or sediment. She pulled the spade out and looked at the tip. Still clay. Pleased, she worked the spade around in a rectangle the same size of the brick she had just hidden away. No one paid her any heed as she worked, and after a few minutes, she had a clay brick. She filled in the gap at the bottom of the hole with stones and a thin layer of displaced clay.
Returning to her fire, she unrolled a cloth set of tools, their handles worn and shaped by hands that were not hers. This was the risky bit, she knew—because the moment they saw her working with tools, they would be curious enough to watch her. She re-rolled the tools and held them close to their body, returning to the hole and positioning herself with her back to the rovers. Sart took out a few of the large chisels and laid them out in front of her.
The magic she had spooled within her still filled her with a hum, and Sart allowed the voices of the rovers to dissipate, saving what magic she had for the task she planned. The first thing she did was draw the moisture from the brick of clay until she could pick it up at one end without the other sagging. Satisfied, Sart felt a small radius of humidity around the brick as it gave off the water, watching wisps of mist form in the cool sunset air.
Footsteps behind her made her freeze.
“Why is it that color?” The rover leader grunted.
Even from where she crouched, Sart smelled the smoked meat on his breath.
She filled her voice with as much disdain as she could muster. “It’s been buried in clay all day. That’s the clay you’re seeing.”
“What are you waiting for?” he asked. “Aren’t you going to carve it?”
Sart’s teeth ground together, and she tried to suppress the sound. She hadn’t had the chance to get to the next bit of her illusion; if she cut into this block of clay with him looking on, she wasn’t sure if she was good enough that he would see the whiteness of halm appearing under the chisel or only the thick brown clay. To buy herself time, she nodded and stared at the tools she’d laid out, her mind whirring through possibilities.
She made a show of choosing a tool, picking up one chisel after another and making an unhappy sniff with each until she found one and twirled it in her fingers.
“Get on with it,” the man said.
“This is more complicated than whittling a child’s bauble out of driftwood,” Sart growled. “Unless you want something as useful, I suggest you find some patience.”
Her irritation was unfeigned, and Sart looked back and forth between the chisel and the brick, ignoring the rover where he towered over her, his shadow stealing away her light.
Illusion was something best done outside the eyes of the one to be deceived; her mud-drawn brand had been with her for several days now, and she had completed it far from the seeing of anyone in the Crevasses. Not that most of the folk there paid Sart Lahivar any mind except to dip their heads out of respect when she crossed their paths—or thumb their bottom lips if she’d beaten them at bones recently.
Now she was going to have to attempt to alter the perception of an item in front of the person she was trying to fool, and Sart would have much rather sat back in front of her fire with a cup of pine ale and some of the rover leader’s dried meat.
She had watched halmers work their craft before, and she brought those memories to mind now, thinking of the way they had slid the chisels across the bricks of halm, exposing white flesh like jicama from the clay-moistened wood. Sart took hold of the chisel in one hand and the brick in the other, her fingers finding the clay and comparing the feel of it to that of the halm she had tucked into the wall of the hole and hidden. She allowed the hum of magic to rise around her, filling her mind with the feel and picture of halm. Its density, its paleness that almost glowed, its smoothness in all forms. The soft give of the clay beneath her fingers seemed to harden, and Sart traced the corners of it while the rover looked on.
Sart felt a presence behind her, and she looked up to see Kahs and the knifer woman sy’d been speaking to. “Don’t look over my shoulder like that,” she said, pointing to the opposite side of the hole. “I can’t concentrate with your breath on my neck.”
“I’m not breathing on you,” Kahs said, hys feet squelching in the clay behind her.
“It’s an expression. Move.”
“I’ll give the orders here, halmer,” the rover leader said, and she turned her head to look up at him.
“If you want me to work, make hyr give me some space.”
“Kahs, move.”
Kahs spat—the gob of saliva sailing by dangerously close to Sart’s cheek—but sy moved as told.
“What’s your name, rover?” Sart asked the leader. She had a rather decent list of those who’d wronged her, and she wouldn’t be opposed to adding his name to it.
“Barit.”
Sart was somewhat surprised that he answered, but then remembered that he planned to kill her if she didn’t perform the task he wanted, so she figured she wasn’t much of a risk.
Her fingers told her that the magic had worked all it was going to. The feel of the brick against her flesh was right, hard and smooth with sharp corners. A moment with the chisel would tell her if the illusion she had built would extend to its innards.
Sart licked her lips, then pinned her tongue between her teeth, frowning as she pushed the chisel into the enspelled clay brick. Her forehead felt clammy where perspiration had broken out, but she ignored it.
Clay rolled back under the chisel, curling away. Easy, quick, and…white. Sart breathed her relief as inconspicuously as she could. The curl of clay looked just as halm should, like sharp white cheese, but smoother and more pure.
Sart’s mouth slowly began to lose its dryness, and she made sure to keep her breaths even and deep.
Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Barit’s lips spread into a grin.
He had a bit of dried meat between his teeth.
RYD’S BREATH came sharp and shallow as he shook Carin. She’d fallen sideways, almost landing in the fire, and he’d been hard-pressed to move her before her hair caught flame. A few black strands had singed, curling in on themselves in kinked spirals.
She was breathing; that much was good. Her eyeballs seemed to flit back and forth beneath her lids, and the sight unnerved him as much as the mere fact that she had collapsed in front of him. The fish he’d caught still sizzled in their pan where he’d dropped it on the ground.
Carin’s lips showed a white line around them, harsh against the brown of her skin. Ryd patted her cheek, panic rising within his chest like a flock of birds taking off from his parents’ fields. One moment she had been talking to him, the next she had dropped like a stone into a pond. Ryd didn’t know what to do.
“Carin!” He shouted her name at her, then choked on it as he remembered that it wasn’t her true name, that he’d never heard her true name spoken. He felt for a moment as if the two of them had frozen in time somewhere, continued on a path they weren’t meant for.
Her eyelids fluttered, then opened, exposing her irises, deep blue and unseeing.
Ryd reached out and patted her cheek again, and her hand snapped up, closing tight around his wrist. Her breath hissed out, and her chest went so still that for a moment Ryd wondered if she had died, and his entire body tightened like a snake in a striking coil.
But then she sucked a deep breath in, raising her free hand in front of her face, her fingers seeming to trace something there that Ryd could not see.
Her feet found their footing at last, and their measured strides went on without her guiding them. She continued into the west as the sun crept its pace across the sky and Toil Moon rose with her sister at her side, just a day past full. Birds still flew overhead. The Bemin rushed on to the sea, its blue waters sure of themselves. The only thing out of place was Carin.
Nameless.
Her mind tried to grasp the word with slippery fingers as she walked, but she found that she could not, however she tried, tie that word she had so dreaded to herself. She was still Carin el Rina ve Haveranth, regardless of what her people murmured in the distance. A fierce obstinance grew in her chest, and she pulled her name to her like she might gather the folds of a fur coverlet to her chin on a cold winter night. She was still Carin. She had a self. She would hold to that self.
In her mind, the name she had heard in that cave in the Hidden Vale, far away from where she walked now, sounded like a sibilant whisper. Caryan.
She allowed it to take up residence in a small part of her for a moment, a brief wonder of who Caryan might have been winding through her thoughts like a snake. And then she sloughed it off, shunted it away, and made room only for Carin.
She thought of Ryd, pulling him out from underneath a pile of giggling children yet again. High Lights was the day they were supposed to take their first steps toward adulthood, joining Haveranth newly named. Instead, Ryd was leagues behind her, Lyah with him. Jenin was dead and Carin simply walked, each step fraying another thread of the life she had left.
Thinking of Jenin slowed her on the path. Carin would never know what happened to hyr now. Carin had always thought her village as a place without secrets—oh, for certain there had been the tiny falsehoods, the typical day-to-day deceptions. But not this. How many times had Dyava held her in his arms and not told her what he knew? How many moments had his smile hidden the truth of their home?
Carin’s feet carried her westward through the afternoon and past sunset until the sky was almost dark. Toil’s light lit the countryside enough for her to see, and when she finally made camp at the base of a sycamore, she could see well enough to find tinder and fallen branches to build a fire. It crackled merrily, and she sat by it sobbing, staring into the flames. The heat of the fire dried the tears on her cheeks and tightened her skin.
She sat that way for a long while, until her face burned and she had to look away.
She needed a plan; Bemin’s Fan would no more welcome her in than would Haveranth or Cantoranth. By now Merin would have sent word to the other two villages of the Hearthland that there was a Nameless one wandering the land. The soothsayers would make sure Carin could find no harbor.
What had she done?
The pit of her stomach churned, seeing again the void of the cave and worse. How could only a few moments change comfort to caprice, home to horror?
She could go north, into the mountains. There, she knew there was enough food in the summer months for her to survive the winter if she started now and gathered quickly. She could build a shelter and live as long as she needed to there. A smaller part of her whispered that she had never been alone. Her village had always been there. Someone who knew how to fish, to mend a pair of leggings, to show her how to raise the poles for the roundhome she had built with her own hands. Even on the Journeying, she had had Lyah and Ryd. She had not been alone. The Carin that had left Haveranth on Planting Harmonix moons before would not have made it back had she set out alone.
She was not certain her new self could face exile the same way.
Carin set snares around her small camp, hoping to catch a small squirrel or a rabbit by morning. When she settled down into her bedroll, she bundled the cloak that had been her Journeying gift into a pillow under her head. The cloak had kept her warm in the moons she had spent walking to find her name with Ryd and Lyah. Who would they be when the sun touched Haveranth tomorrow? Sleep came slowly, and several times before she sank into its depths, she jerked wide awake again, her entire body shaking and her hand reaching out to find Lyah’s, finding only air.
Hours later, she woke harshly in the dark of night, her muscles sore and her heart beating quickly. The buzzing, dizzy sensation she had felt all day still lingered, and she sat up on her bedroll, scanning the land around her for whatever it was that had woken her.
Nothing moved in the camp, and Carin made herself lie back down. The air had chilled, and she unbundled the cloak to pull over her body. She decided it must have been an animal in her snares, or simply a vivid dream that then fled her memory.
“Carin.” A voice sounded in the camp.
Carin sat straight up, head snapping toward the speaker. She knew that voice. The sick feeling she had missed earlier now arrived, sending her stomach roiling with fear and anxiety.
She met Ryd’s eyes from across the embers of her carefully banked fire.
“Ryd.”
What she wanted to say was, Not you, too.
For a long while, neither of them spoke. Dawn began to color the sky, and Carin got up and rekindled the coals of the fire into dancing flame, feeding them with the wood she had set aside.
Ryd simply took his rucksack from his back and set it against the trunk of the sycamore, rummaging about until he pulled out a fishing line and hook. He walked the bank of the Bemin until he found an eddy, and Carin watched from the fireside as he cast the hook out into the swirling waters.
When he came back with two small fish, Carin cleaned them, and she marveled at how quickly they fell back into the routines of the Journeying. The fish roasted in a pan held by Ryd’s steady hand, which he switched every so often to give his muscles a respite from holding it in one position.
“Why did you leave?” He flipped one of the fish with a wooden fork.
“Why did you?” Carin countered.
“I couldn’t go back to the way things were,” Ryd said. The smell of roasting fish made Carin’s mouth begin to moisten, but she wasn’t sure she could trust her stomach with food.
“Nor could I,” she said.
He looked at her, his eyes as pale as the pre-dawn sky against the brown of his skin. “You had everything in Haveranth. You had a plan to join the village, a home you built, a place.”
Carin frowned, looking closer at this boy she had known since swaddling clothes. “You had those things.”
But she knew before the words had escaped her mouth that his saying he couldn’t go back to the way things were did not mean the same as hers. Carin thought of the many times she had pried children off him, and how she had done it without thinking of just how that would feel, to be the one at the bottom of that pile. How disrespected he must have felt, and rightly so. Shame filled her at the realization that she hadn’t bothered to see something so clear.
Ryd now gazed off into the distance, to the north where beyond the tree line the mountains would rise with their snow-capped peaks and jagged stones. “No one even saw me go.”
“What?”
“I was at the hearth-home, in the very center of things, when Merin called for the first born to name herself and you did not speak. I saw everyone react to your loss. Lyah started murmuring—I could see her lips moving, and she wasn’t saying Nameless like everyone else was. Dyava’s shoulders started shaking, and I saw him looking around for you. Then I saw you, on the far side of the river and almost out of sight. So I left the pavilion, and no one noticed.”
Carin felt as though her heart would collapse in her chest. Dyava. The entire village would have been there, waiting for the naming ceremony and the feast to move them past another High Lights into the harvest quarter of the cycle. Surely someone had seen him…
But looking into Ryd’s face, she knew he had the right of it. No one had noticed him go. For the first time in the life they had spent together, Carin felt as though she truly knew him.
She spoke haltingly then, her words jumbling in her mouth until she was afraid they would come out with no order. “For me…I couldn’t stay. Not when I know what I know, what we all know. High Lights is naught but a bandage tied on a broken leg,” she said. She paused before going on. “Did you realize that our whole families know this thing? Everyone beyond their eighteenth harvest. They have always known, what our people did to build our home. Who they have hurt. I couldn’t stay. I had to leave. I don’t know if I can ever do anything that will make it right, but…”
A light blush of color appeared on Ryd’s cheeks, but he nodded.
The dizziness Carin felt buzzed around her as if she were at the center of a beehive. She meant what she had said, or she wouldn’t have been there, so far from home. But home, the home she had left behind. Her mother. Dyava. Lyah. She blinked at Ryd, her skin tingling and crawling. The sky seemed to grow darker in her field of vision. She tried to form Ryd’s name with her lips, but no words would come.
His face swam in front of her eyes, and the last she saw before she fell was his arm reaching out to catch her.
He missed.
JUST BEFORE dusk, Sart returned to the small cairn of pebbles where she had buried the brick of halm. By now the dampness of the clay would have seeped into the wood, softening it. A proper halmer would then begin to shave away the first chunks of wood to reveal whatever item they desired to craft. Sart dug up the brick, keeping her eyes alert on her surroundings. None of the rovers paid her much attention; they seemed to know enough about a halmer’s craft to know that nothing happened quickly and that it would be morning before anything started to truly take shape. The wood would have to be buried and shaped at least twice more. From a brick this size, a halmer could indeed make two belt knives.
Sart’s spade struck the brick, and she carefully sat back on her heels, clearing a space around the brick. Kahs had taken to having a boring conversation with one of the knifers, and the rover leader stood off by himself then, peeling long strings from a chunk of dried smoked meat.
The brick of halm uncovered, Sart moved it to the side in the hole she had dug and surreptitiously began to chisel out a hole on one side. She worked quickly, displacing the clay and smearing it around the edges of the main hole. When it was large enough, she pushed the brick of halm into the wall of the hole and smeared clay over it, leaving a large empty divot in the ground, devoid of the wood the rover had given her.
Sart pushed the spade down into the bottom of the hole, burying it deep in the clay. There weren’t many rocks there, but she hoped she wouldn’t come across a layer of soil or sediment. She pulled the spade out and looked at the tip. Still clay. Pleased, she worked the spade around in a rectangle the same size of the brick she had just hidden away. No one paid her any heed as she worked, and after a few minutes, she had a clay brick. She filled in the gap at the bottom of the hole with stones and a thin layer of displaced clay.
Returning to her fire, she unrolled a cloth set of tools, their handles worn and shaped by hands that were not hers. This was the risky bit, she knew—because the moment they saw her working with tools, they would be curious enough to watch her. She re-rolled the tools and held them close to their body, returning to the hole and positioning herself with her back to the rovers. Sart took out a few of the large chisels and laid them out in front of her.
The magic she had spooled within her still filled her with a hum, and Sart allowed the voices of the rovers to dissipate, saving what magic she had for the task she planned. The first thing she did was draw the moisture from the brick of clay until she could pick it up at one end without the other sagging. Satisfied, Sart felt a small radius of humidity around the brick as it gave off the water, watching wisps of mist form in the cool sunset air.
Footsteps behind her made her freeze.
“Why is it that color?” The rover leader grunted.
Even from where she crouched, Sart smelled the smoked meat on his breath.
She filled her voice with as much disdain as she could muster. “It’s been buried in clay all day. That’s the clay you’re seeing.”
“What are you waiting for?” he asked. “Aren’t you going to carve it?”
Sart’s teeth ground together, and she tried to suppress the sound. She hadn’t had the chance to get to the next bit of her illusion; if she cut into this block of clay with him looking on, she wasn’t sure if she was good enough that he would see the whiteness of halm appearing under the chisel or only the thick brown clay. To buy herself time, she nodded and stared at the tools she’d laid out, her mind whirring through possibilities.
She made a show of choosing a tool, picking up one chisel after another and making an unhappy sniff with each until she found one and twirled it in her fingers.
“Get on with it,” the man said.
“This is more complicated than whittling a child’s bauble out of driftwood,” Sart growled. “Unless you want something as useful, I suggest you find some patience.”
Her irritation was unfeigned, and Sart looked back and forth between the chisel and the brick, ignoring the rover where he towered over her, his shadow stealing away her light.
Illusion was something best done outside the eyes of the one to be deceived; her mud-drawn brand had been with her for several days now, and she had completed it far from the seeing of anyone in the Crevasses. Not that most of the folk there paid Sart Lahivar any mind except to dip their heads out of respect when she crossed their paths—or thumb their bottom lips if she’d beaten them at bones recently.
Now she was going to have to attempt to alter the perception of an item in front of the person she was trying to fool, and Sart would have much rather sat back in front of her fire with a cup of pine ale and some of the rover leader’s dried meat.
She had watched halmers work their craft before, and she brought those memories to mind now, thinking of the way they had slid the chisels across the bricks of halm, exposing white flesh like jicama from the clay-moistened wood. Sart took hold of the chisel in one hand and the brick in the other, her fingers finding the clay and comparing the feel of it to that of the halm she had tucked into the wall of the hole and hidden. She allowed the hum of magic to rise around her, filling her mind with the feel and picture of halm. Its density, its paleness that almost glowed, its smoothness in all forms. The soft give of the clay beneath her fingers seemed to harden, and Sart traced the corners of it while the rover looked on.
Sart felt a presence behind her, and she looked up to see Kahs and the knifer woman sy’d been speaking to. “Don’t look over my shoulder like that,” she said, pointing to the opposite side of the hole. “I can’t concentrate with your breath on my neck.”
“I’m not breathing on you,” Kahs said, hys feet squelching in the clay behind her.
“It’s an expression. Move.”
“I’ll give the orders here, halmer,” the rover leader said, and she turned her head to look up at him.
“If you want me to work, make hyr give me some space.”
“Kahs, move.”
Kahs spat—the gob of saliva sailing by dangerously close to Sart’s cheek—but sy moved as told.
“What’s your name, rover?” Sart asked the leader. She had a rather decent list of those who’d wronged her, and she wouldn’t be opposed to adding his name to it.
“Barit.”
Sart was somewhat surprised that he answered, but then remembered that he planned to kill her if she didn’t perform the task he wanted, so she figured she wasn’t much of a risk.
Her fingers told her that the magic had worked all it was going to. The feel of the brick against her flesh was right, hard and smooth with sharp corners. A moment with the chisel would tell her if the illusion she had built would extend to its innards.
Sart licked her lips, then pinned her tongue between her teeth, frowning as she pushed the chisel into the enspelled clay brick. Her forehead felt clammy where perspiration had broken out, but she ignored it.
Clay rolled back under the chisel, curling away. Easy, quick, and…white. Sart breathed her relief as inconspicuously as she could. The curl of clay looked just as halm should, like sharp white cheese, but smoother and more pure.
Sart’s mouth slowly began to lose its dryness, and she made sure to keep her breaths even and deep.
Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Barit’s lips spread into a grin.
He had a bit of dried meat between his teeth.
RYD’S BREATH came sharp and shallow as he shook Carin. She’d fallen sideways, almost landing in the fire, and he’d been hard-pressed to move her before her hair caught flame. A few black strands had singed, curling in on themselves in kinked spirals.
She was breathing; that much was good. Her eyeballs seemed to flit back and forth beneath her lids, and the sight unnerved him as much as the mere fact that she had collapsed in front of him. The fish he’d caught still sizzled in their pan where he’d dropped it on the ground.
Carin’s lips showed a white line around them, harsh against the brown of her skin. Ryd patted her cheek, panic rising within his chest like a flock of birds taking off from his parents’ fields. One moment she had been talking to him, the next she had dropped like a stone into a pond. Ryd didn’t know what to do.
“Carin!” He shouted her name at her, then choked on it as he remembered that it wasn’t her true name, that he’d never heard her true name spoken. He felt for a moment as if the two of them had frozen in time somewhere, continued on a path they weren’t meant for.
Her eyelids fluttered, then opened, exposing her irises, deep blue and unseeing.
Ryd reached out and patted her cheek again, and her hand snapped up, closing tight around his wrist. Her breath hissed out, and her chest went so still that for a moment Ryd wondered if she had died, and his entire body tightened like a snake in a striking coil.
But then she sucked a deep breath in, raising her free hand in front of her face, her fingers seeming to trace something there that Ryd could not see.
