Hearthfire, page 31
She stood on wobbly legs and made for the exit.
Culy’s voice stopped her with her hand on the canvas flap.
“If you break these stones, what comes of it? If this magic you say your ancestors created, if it is shattered with the shards of rock, what becomes of us?”
What Carin heard in those questions was, How can we trust you? She wanted to say that the land would return to what it once had been, but she didn’t know what it once had been. Dim memories and cloudy pictures from the Hidden Vale—that was no real knowledge. For a moment, she considered saying that everything would be fixed, like a snapped bowstring restrung. Instead, she heard herself say to the flap of the hut, “I don’t know.”
“Do you know why I am able to speak to you so much more easily than the rest of my people?” Culy asked suddenly.
Carin turned and met hys gaze. “No.”
“You look like us, so you are not from beyond the sea. Your eyes are blue, and those of your companions are green. Long, long ago, those colors were more common here. Some words you use vanished from speech here many cycles past. Since you could not be from across the sea and some of your words were familiar to me, I supposed that your people had moved elsewhere, perhaps far away, and that your language retained something that ours did not. I have made my life one of study, and the words you use that we do not are words I have known. You are not one of us now, but once your blood was born here. If what you say is true, if your people are the reason mine starve, grow ill, and thirst, I will hold you responsible for making it right.”
Hope warred with terror in Carin’s chest. “And if I fail?” Something stopped her, and she took a step closer to Culy. Sy remained seated, as did Sart, but in spite of Carin looking down at hyr where sy sat, she had no doubt that Culy was still in control of everything within the walls of the hut. She thought for a moment, heart racing. She had asked the wrong question. Carin tried again. “What will failure mean, to you?”
Something like triumph shone from Culy’s face. A slight twitch of hys lips, an almost unnoticeable tightening of hys cheeks—Carin couldn’t tell what it was that had caused the change.
“You wish to break the stones your people used to bind the life of our land to their bidding. Whatever comes of that is on your shoulders, for good or ill.”
Carin nodded once, her head heavy on her neck. She took a long breath and held it, listening to her heart beat. Letting out the breath, she reached into the folds of her overshirt and pulled out Lyah’s scroll. “This is what I know of it. It isn’t much.”
Culy reached out and took the scroll, and the twitch of hys lips and tightening of hys cheeks grew more pronounced as hys long fingers closed around the rolled, half-smushed parchment.
In Haveranth, sometimes villagers played a game in the village hearth-home, moving painted pieces of glass over a plank of carved maha. To win, you had to remove all of your pieces from the board before your opponent, and doing so required thought and strategy. Carin felt then as if she were playing with a full set of pieces against someone whose own were piled to the side with only one or two left to remove.
But in her mind, she took one of her glass pieces from the board, seeing the hunger in Culy’s eyes as sy took the scroll from Carin’s hand. She had given hyr something valuable.
If Carin had learned anything since setting her snowshoes down in the Northlands, it was that knowing what a person valued was the most important thing to know about them.
Her shoulders straightened, and she returned to her cushion to sit.
She would do what she must.
THE AIR smelled of salt and fish.
Lyari sat in a seaside roundhome, looking out the window at the estuary that became the place of the Bemin’s death. She felt an odd moment of cohesion, knowing that she had seen the river from source to delta, as if she had witnessed the whole of its life cycle.
She would have given much to be out in it, her bare feet in the silty riverbed, her fingers tickling a climber fish that would later warm her belly with its tender orange flesh.
Instead, she waited inside Harag’s roundhome in an empty room, the fire banked to embers and the windows spatted with mist from the sea. Oil lamps burned, scenting the air lightly with the pimia, though it did nothing about the other smell. Fish and salt.
She couldn’t decide if she liked the smell of the sea. Lyari had come here as a child with her parents to visit a distant cousin, cycles back when she was still hysmern. She remembered playing with many of the local children, but the village of Bemin’s Fan did not ring with children’s voices now.
Lyari sat in the roundhome of Harag, the soothsayer of Bemin’s Fan, a cold soup of clams and lemon in front of her, though she was not hungry and had not yet lifted her spoon to her lips. Outside, snow blew through the village and howled against the chimney and the windows, but it did not stick, melting or blowing away with the warmer winds from the west.
Lyari shifted on her bench, the cuffs of her wrists clanking on the table, which was made of carefully fitted and buffed driftwood. Trees were sparser here. New roundhomes here, Lyari vaguely remembered, were often made with wood cut to the north in the dense forested foothills and rolled down by villagers or pairs of ihstal.
Her food untouched, Lyari wondered what was keeping the soothsayer. Harag had kept her waiting when she arrived in the village, too, leaving Lyari to sink her heels in the sand for long enough that the sun moved a handspan across the sky before Harag finally appeared to fetch her.
Short and thin, Harag had seen some seventy harvests, and with them her dark hair had found its first strands of grey. The soothsayer wore layers of dusty vysa, rose-colored and salt-crusted, and she wore no cloak, her own soothsayer’s cuffs at her wrists inset with small shells. Lyari had had an irrational moment of jealousy over the simple adornment, but it washed itself away on the rational anger of being left to wait.
Now she waited again. Lyari tapped her right cuff against the table.
Harag appeared after a few more moments, strands of pale pearls hanging from her hand. The strand bore pink and black and white pearls, sometimes grouped, sometimes alternating. On closer inspection, there were as many black pearls as pink. At one end, there was hardly any white, but at the end dangling from Harag’s left hand, there were no pink pearls at all.
Harag sat, her eyes hard as glass.
She laid the string of pearls out in the center of the table, her fingers tracing across the black and white end with a tightness to her face.
“Every time a child is conceived, I add a black pearl,” Harag said. Her voice sounded somehow like the driftwood table, tossed about but buffed into working order. “When the child is born, pink. If the child is lost…” she trailed off.
Harag’s hands went to the coil of pearls in the table’s center. Mostly black and pink, Lyari reached out and touched the strand. The pearls were cold against her fingertips.
“When the last reinvocation was completed, Tavis ve Beminohna began this strand. At its start, every child conceived found hyr first breath.” Harag moved her hand back to the black and white end. “Now every child conceived dies.”
The strand ended with a black pearl, followed by a white one. Lyari knew that it had been only recently that whoever carried the child had lost hyr.
Lyari knew that in Haveranth there were only ten children with ten harvests or fewer. Until she saw the pearls, though, the meaning of it had escaped her.
Harag saw her face, and when she spoke, her voice was as bitter as the saltwater sea. “You are not prepared for this,” she said. Anger dripped from her words like beeswax from a candle. Lyari felt it pool around her, but she did not let it touch her.
Merin had told her a little of this. That their population suffered and declined, she knew. But what was she to do about it? Nothing.
Instead of helping bring new life into the land, Merin had focused on ending it. Lyari met Harag’s eyes. A strand of hair fell into her face, and Lyari pushed it back. “I will find a way to right this.”
When Harag scoffed, Lyari pushed on.
“Before the reinvocation, not after.”
“That is not possible.” Harag’s voice wore coldness and sharp mistrust. “You have no magic. You are barely more than hysmern, playing at being grown.”
Harag pulled the strand into her hand, draping the coils across her palm.
“You think you will succeed where I have not?” Harag let the strand of pearls slip through her fingers, where they hit the table with a patter like heavy rain. “You think that you, barely named and somehow soothsayer, will manage to right a course Merin herself could not alter? You are a fool.”
“I will do it.” Lyari’s voice sounded distant in her own ears, like listening to the sea through a large shell.
The room seemed to grow dimmer, and Harag stood, her hands in front of her body as if she were cradling a ball of yarn. A sharp crackle sounded behind Lyari, and she jumped, turning to see the fire blazing from embers to flames in an instant. The oil lamps on the kitchen worktop did the same, their flames as long as Lyari’s fingers. She heard a sound like a whisper, and the windows began to ice over, spirals of frost twisting across the glass.
“You are nothing,” Harag said. “You know nothing. You play at things you do not understand. You are not the one who will right this land.”
And you are? Lyari once again felt words pressing hard at her teeth and wanted to voice them, to throw them at Harag like stones, to dash the string of pearls, constructed by soothsayers over five hundred cycles, against the floor of the roundhome. Instead, she looked up at Harag and placed her elbows on the table, hands clasped in front of her face. She thought of Old Wend taking his cup of cordial and licking ruby droplets from his lips, how Rina and Ohlry had done the same, only Varsu waiting for her to begin and never touching his.
Lyari looked at Harag over her hands and did not move.
Now was not the time to push back, not like that.
She noted how quickly the other woman had moved to magic, and as the flames died down behind her and the frost began to melt on the windows with the spray of the sea, Lyari marked it well. Then she took the strand of pearls, sliding it from the table and coiling it over and over around her arm. She tucked the end back against her skin, securing it. Then she got up and walked to the door.
Harag made a strangled sound behind her, but Lyari did not turn.
Harag did not try to stop her.
She pulled her cloak from the hook near the door and sheathed herself in it, unbinding her ihstal mount from the post outside of Harag’s roundhome. Mounting the happily whistling beast, she nudged it forward into the town.
A pair of children tossed stones toward the sea as she rode past, and in her mind was a cool whisper as her eyes fell upon them. Hadrit. Lahany. She felt their names swirl into her, take root in her belly where they made a new home.
A small smile danced at the corner of Lyari’s mouth and felt sweetness on her tongue. Her untasted soup still sat cold on Harag’s table, and Harag had just told her all she needed to know.
Old Wend may have hated it. Harag may have resented it.
But there was only one real soothsayer in the Hearthland, and all names belonged to her.
The pearls warmed to her skin.
THREE DAYS after Carin gave Culy the scroll, sy told her sy knew where one of the stones was.
As much as Carin couldn’t shake the feeling that she was being toyed with, she had to go. Sart offered to take her, and within moments, it was decided. Tahin, Sart’s ihstal, could easily carry them both, and they would move faster mounted.
Carin packed her rucksack, her clothes clean but smoky from being dried over the fire. The nights they managed to do the washing—winter, according to Sart, was the only time anyone managed to clean their clothes regularly inland—she, Ryd, and Ras would sit nude by the fire, bathing themselves as best they could with the melted snow they set aside. They traded Ryd’s carvings and bone tools for soap and other things they could not make themselves. The soap smelled of lye, but Carin would rather smell like that than the underside of a latrine. Ryd learned to emulate the tools the Northlanders used to scrape their skin clean, flat bone paddles with a curved handle they would draw over the whole of their bodies to dry themselves or clear away grime. They had seen no towels.
She heard Ryd come in before she saw him, and she knew it was him by his breathing. Ras always sounded like he had something lodged in his nose, and he snored loudly enough that Carin wondered if Culy could hear him from the opposite side of the waymake.
“You’re really leaving.” Ryd said it with a finality that proved it wasn’t really a question.
“I have to.”
“I know.” He came to sit on a rock by the fire, poking at the banked embers with a stick to stir it into flames. “I thought I would be with you, though.”
“I’m not leaving forever. I’ll be back.” Carin regretted her words the moment they escaped her mouth, but she didn’t try to walk them backward. Instead she smiled wryly at Ryd. “You will be well here. They already value you for what you make.”
Ryd looked at his hands. “Who would have thought I would be a carver?”
“Not I,” said Carin. She pushed down on the clothing in her rucksack and pulled the leather flap over the top to close it, then met Ryd by the fire. “Do something for me.”
“Of course.”
“Learn all you can from Culy. About this land, about what sy knows. It’s been a long while since our lessons ended in Haveranth, but we know nothing here. And this will be our home, for good or ill.” She remembered Culy’s words. They echoed a Hearthlander proverb that Carin now figured must have found its footing here.
“Or it will be our grave.” Ryd gave her a crooked smile that she never would have seen on his face even one cycle past. His face was thinner, but there was a clarity to him Carin had not seen before, and it wasn’t just the newfound muscles of his body making him look sharper. He saw more, watched more, observed more.
“Perhaps.” She took his hand in hers and squeezed it. “Do not tell Ras what I asked of you.”
“You don’t trust him.”
“I trust you.”
Sart and Carin were on the path to the northeast shortly after, leaving at midday even though they would only have a few hours of light to travel by. It had been moons since Carin had mounted an ihstal, and she knew by the time they reached Boggers that she would regret being out of practice. It felt strange to be propelled over the slowly leveling hills on feet that were not her own, and stranger still to have Sart in front of her, the other girl’s back against her chest and Carin’s knees fitted behind Sart’s.
Sart spoke of magic as they rode, explaining in patient terms what she had meant by control. “All things seek balance,” she said. “If you gather magic to you, it must be used or it will find a way to use itself—not always in the way you would hope.”
That brought a flash of heat to Carin’s face at the memory of the trees she had set fire to after killing the fyajir and tiger. She didn’t speak for a long while as they rode.
As the days passed on Tahin’s back and the nights with Sart teaching Carin control of her magic by firelight, the land grew flat around them. The snows stopped, and the air grew balmy. While the winter sun occupied its apex in the sky, Carin would feel trickles of perspiration down her back and soon took to riding atop her cloak instead of wearing it. When she asked about the weather, Sart only laughed.
“The farther north, the warmer it will be. We are only a few days from Boggers.” Sart stiffened when she said it, as if remembering something, but Carin didn’t ask.
They didn’t encounter many other people on the way, and those they saw mostly kept their distance. Perhaps it was the halm bow strung across Carin’s back or the ihstal they rode, but Carin felt relief enough to be left unmolested.
Sart pulled Tahin to a halt near dusk, over a turn after they’d left Alarbahis. She slid from the ihstal’s back and sank into a crouch, motioning to Carin to do the same. “Keep a hand on the halter,” Sart said, passing off the leather strap to Carin.
Carin obliged, holding the strap at her side and slinking forward. The ground around them had grown wet and soggy, but it did not yet pass for the bog the region was named for. In the distance, Carin could see a glimmer of light over the next rise.
“Lahglys,” Sart said. She looked behind them, then at Carin, her eyes moving from Carin’s feet to her head and back. “There’s not a lot of time to explain, and I could be wrong. I overheard that there are some rovers at Lahglys who want nothing to do with Wyt and the people she’s gathering. While we’re here, I might try and speak to them.”
“You want to stop and talk to rovers?” Carin had heard folks in Alarbahis talking about Wyt and the rovers she was supposedly gathering to her, and indeed she’d encountered some of them that day Ras had gone hunting with Ham and the others. But Carin didn’t feel particularly inclined to stop and talk to people who might kill her before she could reach even the first stone. “Couldn’t we come back after we find the stone?”
“We’re here now,” Sart said. “Besides, they’re in our way.”
Carin wasn’t quite sure what to say to that.
They stayed where they were for a few more moments, then Sart looked over her shoulder at Carin. “You’re not the only one with magic, my new friend.”
A bright twinkle shone in Sart’s eyes, and she led the way forward. When they reached the rise concealing them from the waymake of Lahglys, Sart took Tahin’s halter from Carin and stood, murmuring into the ihstal’s ear. Tahin whistled happily, then sprinted away to the east.
