Hearthfire, page 27
The villagers, apart from Jen and Tinan and Valyr, mostly kept their distance from the Hearthlanders, only occasionally coming to speak with them after the initial suspicion and curiosity had been blunted.
When Tinan came to the end of hys sentence and paused, Carin grasped hys arm a little tighter. “Do you know of a soothsayer?” Carin asked the question as she had been learning to, not only slowly and with careful precision, but forming the words in a different part of her mouth. The words felt as thick and heavy in her mouth as they did in her ears.
Tinan looked confused by the question, but repeated back, “Soothsayer?”
Carin tried to explain with the terms she was used to. Midwife. Wise woman. Namekeeper. Murderer, Carin’s mind added helpfully, though she did not give that word voice. None seemed to bring clarity to Tinan’s eyes.
She fumbled through words, feeling like she was speaking under water.
Finally, Tinan looked at her with dubious understanding and said, “Find Culy.”
“Culy?”
“Sy knows many things.”
“Where does sy live?”
This time Carin was unsure if it was the words of her question or the question itself that muddled Tinan’s face with confusion.
“Live?” sy asked.
Carin gestured at Suonlys around them. “You live here. Where does Culy live?”
Tinan slowed hys gait as they passed round a low dwelling. “I do not know where sy is. Sometimes sy is in Crevasses, sometimes sy is in Sands. One cannot know. But one passed through here recently, and she said Culy was in Crevasses now.”
Surprise made Carin blink, unsure what kind of answer she had just gotten. “You mean sy moves around?”
Tinan greeted Carin’s confusion with a blank look of hys own. “What do you mean?”
The idea that perhaps these Northlanders did not live in one place had not occurred to Carin, but as they rounded the dwelling, she looked again at the canvas that wrapped it. It could be removed, rolled up, easily transported. The empty poles where no one had unrolled their canvas. Pallets instead of beds. She stopped walking and reached out a hand to steady herself on a tree.
“Do you need to sit?” Tinan asked.
Carin shook her head. “You do not stay in one place to make your lives here.”
“And you do?” Tinan looked at her curiously, almost in awe. “How do you find food?”
“We grow our food. We plant it and tend it and harvest it.” Carin felt her eyes growing wider, and Tinan’s did the same. “You do not?”
“We find food where we can,” Tinan said. “We make our beds where there is food and water to be found. When we no longer find enough, we move on.”
Carin thought of the meager hunting Ras had done and their dwindling supplies.
When she returned to Ryd and Ras, Carin took a deep breath and sat next to Ryd on the log they had dragged over to their tent. “Tinan told me about someone who may be able to help us.”
Ryd looked up from the small tiger he was whittling and met her gaze. “You can understand them much better than I can. I’m glad one of us can talk to them.”
As much as she agreed, it felt good to allow her speech to relax into the familiar patterns of home with Ryd. Her jaw ached from speaking so slowly and in such a different part of her mouth than she was used to.
“Hys name is Culy,” she said.
SART WISHED she could call down lightning from the sky to blast every rotted rover in Crevasses.
For days she’d been slogging through the mud—or rather, Tahin had—trying to make up lost time, and for days she had been dogged at every step by bands of rovers. There were far more of them than usual for the season. With Vigil and her sister both plump and jolly above her head, Sart had taken to riding at night through the rippled hills of Crevasses, avoiding any glow in the trees that could indicate rovers’ fire.
The starlight above was cold and bright, as if competing with Vigil’s shine, and the path of the moon lit her way across the hills.
It would snow tomorrow, if not in the darkest hours of the night once Vigil tucked herself away beyond the horizon. Sart could smell it on the wind, the dusty chill that would accompany first flurries, then the larger flakes that would stick. At least she hoped they would stick. Snow water was much better to drink than water potted from some mucky, half-frozen creek.
Tahin whistled quietly in the night, her flanks rippling and bulging with her rolling gait. Sart leaned forward over the ihstal’s neck, twining her fingers into the fur of her coat that had begun to grow its winter underlining.
She had to reach Culy before sy moved on. Sart wasn’t about to spend the cold months haring about Sands. You couldn’t even drink the snow water in Sands if it happened to snow at all. Every bit of it was full of grit, and there wasn’t enough tatting in the land to filter all of that out. Boggers and Salters weren’t much better.
Sometimes Sart’s upbringing showed. Though she’d spent much of her childhood outside of Crevasses, it was Crevasses where she felt most at home. She understood the land there, and it seemed to understand her. Her magic came to her more readily, flowed through her and spindled within her without fighting. Farther north, where the sun baked the vast deserts of Sands and cooked reaches of stagnant water in Boggers—and even farther north, where the kazytya roamed in Taigers—it was like meeting someone you thought you knew only to find out they’d changed while you were away.
When dawn’s cold touch lit the land, bringing its icy beams to make the falling snow sparkle, Sart rounded a bend in the road and came finally to light on Alarbahis.
She could have wept for the joy of it. Her feet felt like weeping too, as did her inner thighs and her lower back and most of the rest of her.
Sart slid off Tahin’s back and led the ihstal toward the waymake. Most of the huts were taken, which was hardly a surprise given the season. She liked walking into Alarbahis in winter, when the homes were full and the chimneys pumped smoke into the air. Seeing most of the huts occupied also told her that there was food nearby. Perhaps a herd of saiga or halka or fyajir was nearby. A single halka could feed the entire waymake for a day or two. Maybe Sart would go hunting herself. Rule was, you shared the meat but got to keep the rest. She could use with some new bone tools and with winter coming, another layer of hide wouldn’t go amiss in her bedroll.
The snow had begun to fall in earnest, as she found an empty hut and began to close it off. Her canvas was stiff for lack of use, but sturdy and waxed to hold tight against winter’s winds. She worked quickly, securing Tahin to a post in front of the hut and lashing the canvas to the lower rungs of the roof to close out the snow. It didn’t take long before she had her hut secure, inside swept out and bedroll set up, flaps tied tight.
Set up bed first, that was her motto. The last thing she wanted was to get caught up with Culy over breakfast and have no blankets to crash into.
The waymake was just beginning to stir around her, the sounds of flints striking to kindle fires, coughs and grunts and the occasional laugh. Sart strode through the huts, walking toward the northern edge of the waymake where she knew she would find Culy.
Hys hut was always inviting, the canvas painted with red-orange runes of hearth and home and kin. Smoke drifted from the chimney, silvery in the morning light. Sart opened the flap and ducked inside without announcing herself.
Culy sat cross-legged on hys pallet, a woolen cloak around hys shoulders and a plate of baked eggs and what looked like spiced saiga meat on hys lap. Sy smiled as Sart approached. “Took you long enough to get here.”
“The world conspired against me. If you hadn’t been in such a hurry to leave Salters, I could have caught up with you there.”
“I had to be here at a certain time.”
Sart plunked herself down next to Culy on the pallet, reaching over to snare one of hys eggs. She peeled it carefully, discarding the shell into a small bowl at the center of the hut. “Where’d you find the clucker?”
“Traded a halm knife for three of them. They’re out back.”
Sart sat back, impressed. “Three cluckers. All layers?”
“One crower among them.”
“Culy.” Sart shot a glance over her shoulder in the direction he’d indicated, excitement taking spindly root in her chest. “You mean to say that those layers could hatch chicks? Did you know you were getting a crower with them?”
“They were too young to tell.”
“A halm knife for three breeding cluckers. You have an ihstal’s luck, my friend.” Sart bit into the egg, relishing the give of the white and the silken richness of the yolk that threatened to spill out over her lip. She caught it with her thumb and licked it away.
They sat and ate in silence for a few moments. Sart stole another egg—Culy had started with four—and part of the saiga, and her stomach rumbled, wakened by the touch of fresh food.
“Tuanye,” she said. “I missed proper food.”
Culy set hys plate down on the floor of the hut and leaned into Sart’s shoulder. “Lean times,” sy said.
“Is it ever anything else?”
Something flickered in Culy’s eyes. They were grey like the sea far to the north, but in them were flecks of green. Hys hair was the same gold-brown as his skin, far lighter than anyone else she knew, though she had known hys parents and hys mother had had the same hair as hyr. The touch of hys shoulder was a comfort, and one Sart had missed as much as the food she had just devoured.
“I found a spring,” she said.
Culy’s eyes snapped to hers, and sy said only, “Tell me.”
So Sart did.
When she finished with the tale of the spring and the avalanche and, finally, the rovers she had temporarily dismantled, Culy’s face had grown quiet like a waiting kazytya.
“Wyt will be a problem,” Culy said. “She’s gathered at least fifty rovers to the north, and another twenty or so who aren’t rovers at all. Families.”
Sart looked at hyr, aghast. “How can so many people survive in one place?”
“I would very much like to know the answer to that question. I can’t get anyone near her, though. I’ve tried.” Culy’s eyes grew distant, a look Sart knew all too well. Sy had people throughout the land, and at any given moment, she knew sy could reach out to any of them. If hys attempts to infiltrate Wyt had failed, there must be some reason.
Sart would have to find out how sy did it someday.
“Are you wintering here?” she asked.
Culy leaned back against the piled coverlets, and Sart joined hyr a moment later, their arms still touching. “I had planned to, but if Wyt’s people keep making forays into the waymakes, I’ll have to do something about it.”
The rovers had never really organized before, and for good reason. It took food and water to supply large groups of people, and those two things usually weren’t found together in abundance. “Do you know where she’s based?”
“Salters, up to the north, just on the northern crest of Boggers. You know where the big ihstal herds used to run?”
Sart nodded.
The light from the fire’s embers made Culy’s skin glow and flicker. “Strange days we live in, Sart. Sometimes I think—”
Sart didn’t get to hear what Culy thought, because someone burst through the tent flap and collapsed on the goatskin rug. Blood smeared across the cream-colored fur in a bright red arc.
LYARI’S SHIRT chafed her neck. Higher upon her chest than she liked it, it barely scooped at all and felt like the nooses Tamat used to wrangle hys goats in the fields. Above it was a beaten bronze necklace that remained cool upon her skin even though she’d been wearing it for the past hour. The soothsayer’s cuff still hung loosely at her right wrist, its runes flashing in the firelight, and she wore Merin’s on her left now. In remembrance.
To anyone else, it would seem simply traditional.
To Lyari, it meant more.
Her pale green tunic reached only to her elbows in spite of the chill of the day, soft wool from Cantoranth sheep, slit at both sides to allow free movement of her hips and belted at her waist with more beaten bronze. Each scale of her belt shone with a different rune, each of the moons of the cycle. Vigil Moon was high overhead, and its rune on her belt sat just over her right hipbone.
Leggings of wool-lined leather covered her legs, and tall triple-lined boots covered all the way to midthigh, almost meeting her tunic. Her hair flowed loosely down her back, and she sat at her trestle table, strands of pale green vysa with tiny brass clasps laid out on the shining maha tabletop. She took one by the clasp and twisted a small lock of hair between her fingertips, fastening the brass around it near her scalp. She repeated the motion fourteen more times, one for each moon, each tiny clasp bearing runes like her belt. When the last clasp took hold of her dark hair, she laid her hands in her lap to rest.
Carin used to plait her hair for her.
Lyari thought of the day of their Journeying, the day of their departure, the bells tolling across the village to summon everyone to their work. They had missed the first bell, and the second, and Lyari had begun her Journeying much as she had begun anything else in her life, her hair sloppy and escaping its plait, tumbling over one shoulder where it would flop about with every move she made.
With careful hands, she reached up to her scalp, where her hair parted down the center, framed by the clasped strands of vysa. Her fingertips took hold of her hair and began to plait it against her head, ringing from temple around to the back, where she twisted it into a knot and pushed a halm stick through it. Starting again on the other side, she did the same again, meeting it at the back of her head and joining the two plaits. Pulling the ends of the vysa strands from the circle of plaits so they trailed down through the rest of her hair, she shook the lot of it over her shoulders.
Her fingertips trembled when she finished. She took her place on a cushioned chair at the head of her table then and waited.
At sundown, her door opened without warning, but Lyari was not unprepared. One by one, the elders of Haveranth filed in. Rina, dressed all in deep scarlet that bloomed out of her cloak like the petals of a hibiscus. Old Wend in warm gold like turmeric; Ohlry in hys pale blue like the winter sky; Varsu with his folds of indigo robes falling like dusk to his feet.
Rich colors, all adorned with the same belt as Lyari wore. They sat at her table without comment, and Ohlry pulled a bottle of redberry cordial from hys cloak, pouring it into squat glasses that twinkled in the firelight. It was her position to take the first drink, she knew. Doing so would bind her to the elders and the governance of Haveranth.
All seated and still silent, Lyari waited.
Old Wend held his cup to his lips and drank, licking the viscous red liquid from the corner of his mouth before speaking. “Soothsayer,” was all he said.
“Soothsayer,” the others repeated, stealing glances at one another and at Lyari, who sat shocked in her seat, too surprised to say anything.
Old Wend drained the rest of his glass.
Silence stole over the room, except for the crackling of the fire in the hearth.
No one seemed to know what to do; the soothsayer always drank first, and Old Wend knew that as well as Lyari did. His taking the first drink would have been considered a grievous insult if Merin were there. But Merin was not.
Lyari felt very, very young.
Old Wend had seen as many harvests as Merin, or very near to it. Ohlry and Varsu had each seen over a hundred, and Rina, until now the youngest of the elders, had nearly that herself. With eighty harvests she had birthed Carin, still within her reproductive time, but barely. Merin’s notes had told Lyari that in cycles past, no elder with fewer than one hundred and fifty harvests had been accepted.
Lyari had just barely seen eighteen.
She was to have continued working with Merin for scores of cycles to come before this day. In one movement, Wend had made clear his lack of respect for Lyari.
The room, along with all the people in it, seemed to know that as well as she did. Rina and Ohlry lifted their cups and drank, small sips each without meeting Lyari’s eyes.
Lyari’s cheeks grew warm, and she placed both palms on the smooth maha table, drawing from the coolness of the wood, willing it to spread through her body so her humiliation would not show.
“Some three cycles until the reinvocation,” Varsu said then, straightening his robes and leaning forward on the table with both arms. He hadn’t touched his cordial.
Touching hers would admit that she had no control over the meeting, and, without looking around at the others, Lyari carefully slid the squat glass of ruby liquid away from her on the table and stood. “Three cycles,” she repeated. Her voice held steadier than she expected, and Old Wend had the decency to cough.
She thought she saw a flash of triumph in Rina’s eyes, but it was gone so quickly she might have imagined it.
The rest of them were silent, and it was the quiet that Lyari did not like. The quiet meant that they were thinking too hard about whether she deserved this place. In the coming moons, Lyari would have sat alongside Merin at the head of her table—a table that had now been burned to ash—and over time, Old Wend and Rina and Ohlry and Varsu would have come to accept and respect her place there.
Time was no longer a luxury Lyari could enjoy. Instead it slipped around her fingers like a sly fish in the river. Flowing always away, toward the sea. Never back again.
“Three cycles,” she repeated. “In that time, we will prepare for the reinvocation.”
“And how do you expect to do that?” Old Wend demanded. His knees cracked as he stood, placing both gnarled hands on the edge of the table where his knuckles stood out, pale in the dim light. “You’re greener than the first planting’s sprouts, girl.”
