Hearthfire, page 15
Her fingers dug deep into the flesh of his wrist. For several long moments they sat like that, until Ryd’s arm began to ache and his fingers went numb from the pressure of hers restricting his blood.
Ryd carefully pried her hand open to release his wrist, and she let him, her arm falling to her side. She made no other move to change position, her right hand still moving in the air and her eyes fixed on something he couldn’t guess at.
He tried to get her to move, but after several attempts he left her there, face up on the ground, soil and leaves clinging to her hair.
Ryd ate one of the fish and wandered the camp in a circuit, always keeping Carin in sight. He didn’t know what to do. He’d never seen anyone in this type of state, and watching her watch nothing made his mind spin. Instead of sitting next to her, he walked the perimeter of her camp, finding her snares. One had a rabbit in it, and the animal had strangled itself on the snare.
Ryd hadn’t cleaned a rabbit in cycles, but he found the memory of how to go about it returned quickly enough. He somewhat clumsily scraped the pelt—bits of flesh clung in some places and his knife blade cut through in others—but he succeeded as much as he hoped to. The rabbit meat he cut into strips and set up to smoke over the fire. As he watched it steam and then sizzle, he tried to keep the knot of panic from jostling his ribcage. His mind wove to and fro through worries. What if Carin never recovered? Where were they supposed to go even if she did? How was he supposed to know what to do?
For over an hour, Ryd sat, until the heat of the fire made perspiration bead on his upper lip and his eyelids stuck when he blinked, then began to water. He made a few circles through the camp, looking out at the bushes around them for any berries or edible plants he could gather. He didn’t find much nearby; a few sparkleaf bushes yielded a double handful of citrusy foliage they could eat, but Ryd couldn’t bring himself to venture farther out of the camp. When dried and boiled or smoked, the sparkleaf would also dull pain and cleanse wounds, but there wasn’t enough to spare for the drying of it.
The sun continued its arc to the sky’s zenith, then began its descent as Ryd tended the fire, turned the strips of rabbit, and kept a close eye on Carin. Three more times he attempted to rouse her, but she didn’t respond to his shaking of her shoulder or his yells right beside her face. When the grove went silent around him after one loud yell, Ryd stopped trying that way to wake her.
For the first time in his life he felt completely and totally alone. Vulnerability he had felt; his childhood of being smaller than everyone else had given him that. He had never been this physically alone, however, and the slow-returning sounds of chirping and buzzing reminded him that he had no concept in his mind of what to expect outside of the boundaries of the village he had voluntarily left behind.
Ryd thought of his parents, thought of the village that would be celebrating Lyah’s entry into full villager status. Her name. He and Carin would never know what that name was. His own came unbidden to his mind. Ryhad.
In the Hidden Vale, with the return journey to Haveranth still ahead of them, his name had fallen into his core with the same resonance of two strings plucked in harmony. Now it felt jangled and wrong, as if he had no right to it. He had chosen to forever be Ryd. His clothes were loose upon his body, and yet everything felt too tight. He fought back the rising wind of panic.
A few feet away, Carin stirred, her right arm finally falling to her side, where her fingers still twitched slightly, pale from the lack of blood flow. Her eyes, so wide and unblinking for so long, closed for three breaths. Ryd hurried to her side, taking her right hand in his and rubbing it to return circulation.
Carin opened her eyes. Red blood vessels showed through the whites, making the blue of her pupils stand out vividly like the first ripe Early Bird apple on the tree.
“Carin?” Ryd said her name gently, still massaging the palm of her hand. He didn’t expect a response.
He counted her breaths as time passed. Sixty. One hundred. Two hundred. She blinked occasionally now, tears leaking from the corners of her eyes and running down her cheeks to wet her hair. She closed her eyes again.
Another hundred breaths passed before anything changed. Finally, Carin’s eyes opened and focused on Ryd’s.
“Ryd?” She said his name almost as a whisper.
“What happened?” he asked. “Are you okay?”
Carin didn’t answer, but she squeezed her eyes shut, her throat convulsing and her hand tightening against his. Perhaps it was shock, like the way they had all reacted after Jenin’s death. How could someone change everything they ever knew so quickly?
After a moment, Carin dropped his hand and sat up, blinking to clear the tears from her eyes and looking around the campsite. Carin pushed herself to her knees, and though Ryd clearly saw the shaking of her right arm as she used it to brace herself against the ground to stand, she ignored the quivering limb as she rose to her feet. She straightened her shoulders, rolling each backward, one after the other. Her gaze scanned the campsite, then took in the river beyond, the position of the sun and shadows. She swallowed once and let her hands fall to her side.
Ryd watched her, a stone sinking into his stomach. She wasn’t going to talk to him. He could almost see her body closing its shutters.
Sure enough, when she spoke, Ryd knew whatever happened was her experience alone.
Carin gave the air an experimental sniff. “Is there food?”
LYARI VE Haveranth sat by the banks of the Bemin, watching the sun slice clean lines across the late afternoon stillness. A climber fish jumped—she knew what it was from the silver-green scales that flashed in the light—and for a fleeting moment, Lyari wished she could be that fish. To have a simple existence. To spawn, swim downstream, grow, eat, mate, toil your way back upstream, up ladders of rocks and white-capped rapids, lay your eggs, continue, continue, continue, fearing only a fisher’s spear or a tiger’s paw.
She envied the fish she was so good at ending. Even from where she sat, she tracked the climber fish’s movements under the water, a blur near the surface, vanishing as it dove deeper, then reappearing as a bend of light before jumping once more. Lyari allowed the fish to disappear from her sight, instead standing and turning back to the village. She let her feet carry her where they would, and they took her in the direction of Carin’s roundhome.
Opening the door to enter felt strange, like putting someone else’s shoes on your feet. Lyari thought of the hundreds of times she’d climbed through Carin’s bedroom window, her feet covered in dust or water or snow depending on the season of the cycle. She thought of clambering into bed with Carin, their breath scented by the vanilla-tasting rilius resin that cleaned their teeth, giggling into their pillows so as not to wake Rina.
The hearth was cold; never had a fire been lit on its stone. The chimney above was clean and unmarred by soot. The beautiful carved maha table stood to one side, and the sight of it made Lyari want to sick up and cry at the same time.
This home had been meant for her fyahiul, for the woman Carin had been meant to become. But Carin was now dead, or as good as. Nameless. The adult who was meant to live in this roundhome had never come, leaving less than ghosts to haunt its spaces.
Lyari made her way into the bedroom, where the sick feeling strengthened. Here there was evidence of Carin’s departure. A set of torn leggings from their Journeying, their knees saggy and stretched. A rumpled dent in the coverlet. Lyari kicked off her leather clogs and climbed into the bed. The room was hot in the summer afternoon, but she burrowed under the coverlet anyway, rolling onto her stomach and pulling one of Carin’s pillows to her chest.
She expected tears to come, to fall down her cheeks in salty rivulets to mourn the loss of her oldest friend. Instead nothing came, only a cavernous hollowness in her chest that seemed wont to consume her.
Lyari lay there for some time, until sweat slicked her back and her face stuck to the pillow’s bavel surface. Finally, she kicked back the heavy coverlet and stood, feeling lightheaded. If she’d thought curling up in Carin’s bed would help, she’d been wrong. Instead, Lyari felt the gaping loss of her friend all the more acutely. She straightened the coverlet and replaced the pillow, fluffing it between her palms as if perhaps Carin would return to lay her head upon it.
When she bent to fluff the second pillow, something rough touched her hand.
Pulling the pillow to the side, she saw it. A folded piece of parchment.
Lyah, it read.
With a shock, Lyari realized that Carin wouldn’t have known, couldn’t have had any way of knowing her new name.
You won’t understand why I’ve had to go. I couldn’t return and ignore what we learned. Maybe this is what Jenin meant, when sy said the Journeying was just as much choice as a quest for identity. I know who I am, and I cannot be what I must to continue on in our home.
I will miss you, and Ryd, and Dyava.
That was all. The pen’s nib had scratched into the parchment on some words, and on what we learned it seemed to have shaken, the runes forming the words uneven and jagged. Lyari stared at those lines, willed herself to look deeper within them, to connect with Carin and see what was in her friend’s mind.
But simple will could not bridge that distance.
“She wrote to you.”
Lyari started, then turned to see Jenin leaning against the wardrobe, hys eyes somber. The sight of hyr made Lyari’s heart jangle, and she swallowed, nodding. Lyari read the note aloud, watching Jenin’s face as the words tumbled from her lips. On the Night of Reflection, children were given the chance to pick tokens out of a bag. Each would correspond to a gift, and each gift was handmade by one of the adult villagers. As Lyari read the note to Jenin, she felt the childish apprehension of reaching into that bag, as if within her was a pile of emotions and she wasn’t sure which would come out in her hand.
Jenin cleared hys throat when she finished, and fleetingly, Lyari allowed herself to look at the jagged slice across hys neck. The sight gave her a start.
“You see me as you expect to,” Jenin said, raising hys fingers to hys neck. “My body is only as mutilated as you think it is.”
Lyari didn’t know what sy meant by that. Her gaze flicked upward to Jenin’s eyes, standing straight, her fingers holding the note with a light touch that kept the parchment from falling only barely.
“What do you think she meant, that she couldn’t stay here?” Jenin changed the subject back to Carin, eyes boring into Lyari, seeking an answer at which Lyari could not guess.
“She meant that she could not live with this sacrifice.” The word came easily from Lyari’s tongue. Sacrifice. What was this life in Haveranth if not that?
“Is that all she meant?”
Lyari thought about that, about what that meant. She looked again at the shaky runes that spelled out Carin’s reason for leaving. What did it mean if Lyari could live with something Carin could not?
Weakness, a voice in Lyari’s mind whispered. She shook the word away, met Jenin’s eyes, and shrugged.
Jenin seemed not to care that Lyari hadn’t answered hys question. Instead, sy looked around at the bedroom and gestured widely. “It is a shame such elegant work will be turned to ash.”
Lyari nodded, wistfully gazing around the roundhome. She finished making the bed, placing the pillows atop the coverlet and smoothing out the wrinkles. She tucked the note into her belt pouch, feeling Jenin’s gaze upon her.
This home was a reminder of so many things. Of a past now washed away by a village’s whispers. Of a friend lost to the wilderness. Of how easily change could engulf a life.
Lyari met Jenin’s eyes once more, and she made a decision. She would move into Carin’s home, and though the village would erase Carin from memory, Lyari would not. As apprentice soothsayer, she would remember.
It took only a few hours to carry her necessities into the roundhome, to arrange the bedroom and the kitchen to her liking. Someone had stocked several items on the worktop. Bundles of hanging herbs, a few scattered carafes of conu juice and icemint tea and goat milk. The milk was warm, but did not smell curdled. She placed it in the shallow, stone-lined cellar off the kitchen and found bundles of brined meat. These things would have gone to waste before anyone else thought to look for them. For Rina, Lyari supposed, coming here would be too much to bear, at least until time washed her daughter away. Jenin came and went as she worked, hys face curious or neutral, never speaking again for the remainder of the day.
Lyari once saw Rina, her shoulders bowed, carrying a sheath of bronze ingots from her shed to her forge.
Time would erase her daughter from the village consciousness, this Lyari knew. No one spoke of the Nameless. For anyone else, moving into the home built by one would be taboo, but Lyari was the soothsayer’s apprentice.
Still, she would have to tell Merin, if no one had yet done so themselves.
Lyari made her way to the soothsayer’s home outside Haveranth. As always, she did not knock, only pushed open the door. Merin was not in the central room by the hearth, though Lyari heard her voice from the far room and followed it. The door was closed, and she waited outside.
“Harag, it is already done.” Merin’s voice sounded as though it had been stretched out like gut twine to dry in the sun. “Sahnat hunts, and he never fails.”
“This is not a thing we were prepared for.” The voice that responded to Merin’s statement was thinner still than Merin’s, as if heard from the opposite side of a cavern, and it was unfamiliar to Lyari, though the name was not. Harag, soothsayer of Bemin’s Fan.
“I know that as well as you. I received your message. Not long remains.”
Lyari listened, intrigued by the words she heard. Merin had spoken before of an event coming, one she said she would explain to Lyari after her Journeying. Now it seemed that time would come sooner than Lyari had expected.
“We will prepare as best we can,” Merin said. In her tone was resolve, but also worry.
A thin tendril of the same worked its way into Lyari’s breast. After Merin’s words faded, no more came.
She started when the door opened in front of her, though Merin looked unsurprised to see her.
“Lyari.” Merin reached out and clasped her shoulder, her eyes assessing as if she could see into Lyari’s very thoughts. “Come, child. It is good you heard that. There are things it’s time I told you.”
SART WORKED into the night, the flickering light of the fire dancing across the white wood illusion she had built. Every once in a while, one of Barit’s rovers would come up behind her on her watch, pausing to ask her a question about halmwork—she answered with responses cut of whole cloth and about as true as a child’s answer to who had first hit whom—but for the most part she worked in peace. When dawn broke to the east, she had two sharp knives upon her lap. Toil waned above, its sliver of a crescent working toward the tree line to vanish shortly from sight.
When Barit stirred from his blankets with a yawn and a loud fart, he immediately came to her side and let out a whoop at the sight of the two knives on her lap.
He reached for one, and Sart slapped his hand away. “You have not yet guaranteed my safety. I have made you what you asked for. You will get it when I say you may have it.”
The back of his hand smashed into her cheek, sending her sprawling on the muddy creek bank. “I didn’t ask for nothing, halmer.” He spat. “You’re here because I told you to be here.”
Sart’s chest tightened with a hot ball of rage. Her cheek smarted where he’d hit her, and the two knives had landed in the dirt. Barit walked toward her, one foot on either side of her legs. He bent to pick up one of the knives, and Sart froze. His proximity would work to her advantage; the other knife was well within her reach, and even without it she could land a punch to his eggsack or drive a pair of fingers up under his kneecap. Two knives wouldn’t be enough. Sart already knew that from what she’d overheard from Barit and Kahs that first day. She concentrated on the hum of magic in her skull, felt the buzz of it through her bones as if it were waiting, hoping for the chance to lash out. Or maybe that was just her.
Barit tested the edge of the blade on his thumb and grunted his pleasure at the sharpness of it. Sart carefully schooled her face in nonchalance with a touch of the fear she knew he would expect. She allowed her chest to rise more quickly, to show her anxiety at his closeness. She let her gaze settle upon the knife she had made from clay, the one that even now fooled his eyes and hands. She gave him reason to think she feared its blade against her skin.
The rover leader caught her by the hair, his fingers barely finding purchase at the back of her head in its short black length. He nodded to Kahs and one of the knifers. Tark, Barit had called the knifer. “Seems we’ve caught ourselves a halmer proper.” Barit said, sneering. He jerked Sart out from where she still lay sprawled, pulling her to her knees. “Let me tell you how things are going to be, halmer.”
Sart hated the feeling of his fingers in her hair. She could smell his breath even at arm’s length, and it smelled of morning dryness and rotten meat. But she forced her head to bob in a sharp nod.
“You’re going to make Kahs here a new bow,” he said. “Sy’s in dire need of a nice halm bow. Isn’t that right, Kahs?”
Kahs gave a laugh, reaching out to punch Tark lightly in the shoulder. “A new bow’d be welcome, sure as spring,” Kahs agreed.
“And when you’re done with that,” Barit went on, “You’re going to make me a sickle-sword. These here knives are for Targ and Owit. You can make a couple spares after that.”
“And where exactly am I supposed to find enough halm to work all that?” Sart spat. Her cheek still throbbed where his hand had smashed into it. She’d have a bruise, to be sure. Culy’d be thrilled to see that, assuming Sart ever made it to hyr.
“We’ve got your halm,” said Tark. “You’ve got work to do.”
