Aloren Read online

  This is a work of fiction. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Hippolyta Press

  Chicago, Illinois

  Text copyright © 2014 by E. D. Ebeling

  All rights reserved

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior permission of the copyright owner.

  [email protected]

  http://www.edebeling.wordpress.com

  First Edition

  ISBN-13: 978-1497432147

  One

  When I was three, my nurse brought me to see Leode––my fourth brother.

  Mother sat up in the bed and sang softly into his ear. A salt wind came through the window and stung my eyes. I’d wanted a sister, and was determined everyone should know it, so I wailed and fell across the bed.

  Nurse picked me up and took me into the corner where a rocking chair collected the last of the sunlight. She sat down and placed me in her lap, her hand over my mouth. We rocked slowly and Mother sang. I was the only one of us who remembered.

  The ice aster throws high her gossamer skirts

  On the brow of the Pirnon Mireir.

  She laces her slippers and dances a waltz,

  And she weaves her a door in the air.

  Could she weave herself through,

  She would find a sweet land

  Filled with noon-tides of nectar and cream.

  But the door wants a key,

  And the key will not show

  Till she walks neath the water in dream.

  The light slid off my lap, and I fell asleep with Mother’s dark head in my mind’s eye, crowned in the sunset. When I woke she was dead.

  When a person’s body is tired, my father told us, the body gives up, regardless of what the person wants. So even then I knew it wasn’t her fault. But her death shook everything apart.

  ***

  Norembry was a small country, cut off from the rest of the world by mountains and sea, and the Lauriad family was bound to Norembry like bittersweet to a hemlock. My parents were bound tighter. The Queen died in childbirth and dragged the King halfway after her.

  The King, my father, disappeared westward for long circles of time––in part, I suspect, because my eldest brother and I so resembled our mother.

  A year passed. On an early spring morning he came back to us with a new wife. I’ve been told a number of explanations, this the most common: My father was wandering the western mountains, hunting a fox. Some folk say not a fox, but a doe. Others a wolf, or hound. I prefer the fox––a black fox, which was strange enough, and suited her besides.

  Father’s situation grew significantly stranger when he held the fox at the point of a precipice––his arrow eager and his horse blowing––and she proceeded to speak to him in the most common of the Elde tongues. “Spare me the arrow, sir,” she said. “How will you find your way without a guide?”

  Father looked about him, at the dark, misty hills, and saw he was lost. “What ought I to do?” he said.

  “Accept my condition, and then I will lead you back.”

  Father asked what the condition was.

  “After I have led you back, you must chop off my head.”

  He was taken aback. “Seems a wicked thing to do.”

  “You must. And then you must marry the first woman you see.”

  He accepted, and followed her through glens and marshes, over canyons churning with meltwater and great, broken stones, until they were out of the wild. The mist pulled back and the sun shone, and the fox lay in front of him, waiting. The King unpacked his little hatchet.

  In one blow the job was done. And the fox twisted into a woman: a marvelous lady with a face white and sweet as the flesh of an apple.

  ***

  That mayn’t have been the true version of events, but to be sure, Faiorsa was brought home to Ellyned, seated behind Father on his grey horse. Temmaic, Mordan, Arin, Leode, and I were having our morning lessons when the horn sounded.

  We had a glimpse of her out the northwest windows, but weren’t properly introduced until six years later, because we were immediately taken away westward to a big house of wood and stone. I remember the trip. The sky was leaden, and our way hampered by mud. Our caretakers sat stony-faced and silent, packed alongside us, and my legs stuck out over the top of my trunk.

  I looked out the carriage at the rising mountains, and listened as Mordan whispered to Tem, “It’s because of her.”

  “Shut it.” Tem sounded sick.

  “He’s putting us away. Or they’re going to kill us.”

  “Shut your mouth, I said.”

  Father arrived at the house a week later to see if we were unhappy. Unhappy wasn’t the word. We were bewildered.

  “Did you forget us?” I said. We were out in the yard, and he still smelled of his horse.

  He buried my frown in his jerkin. “How, when I’ve been so worried you’d forgotten me?” Something was amiss. He spoke too loudly and his face had all the wrong sort of look.

  He needn’t have worried over our happiness, though. My brothers and I were young and free at last of ceremonies and processions. Between lessons and household duties we had glorious fun striking trails through the woods and playing at games of make-believe. Our roles never changed: Leode and Arin were the poor, brave folk enslaved and tortured by saebels at the beginning of time; and the humans, Tem and Mordan, always came at the last hope, pulling the sun behind them and purging the land of the demon saebels cleverly orchestrated and acted out by me, because I was the only girl. We fought battles, too, with sticks and clods of dirt that always sent someone running home weeping muddy tears––most often me, because I was the only girl.

  Actually, Nilsa was a girl, but this was easy to forget. She had come with the house as keeper and cook, and looked very like the wooden gargoyles leering over the cornice. She acted like them, too. She’d probably hopped off the roof, Mordan said, so we stayed outside when we could. Hal was often outside too, as he tended the yard and caught game.

  Hal owned a red fiddle even older than he was, but it sang like an oriole when he held it under his chin. After dinner he played tunes on the lawn, close to the banks of the green Gael so it seemed as though the river were fiddling. We’d begin to clap and I would dance, sometimes with a partner, sometimes without. And when I lost all concentration my feet would catch in the air and float. No one ever told me why. They just did.

  My older brothers could do strange things, too. They sometimes made the grass underfoot greener or browner when they laughed or yelled. Only Gralde people could make plants bloom or wither just by touching them. But I wasn’t old enough, yet. That’s what our tutor, Master Tippelain, said.

  He came up the road and over the river more than Father did, bringing us metaphysics and history and economics and politics and rumors from the outside world. After a while Tem traded his human hero for a Gralde one in our games. And then he stopped playing with us altogether. Humans were no longer so brave, he said, and he would pointlessly remind us we were all Elde. Gralde––the tallest, most noble kind of Elde.

  “The kind who fart in the wind and shit upstream,” Mordan would say.

  Mordan thought books more interesting than people, and Tem thought himself a man grown at twelve, too old for children. I had to make do with Arin and Leode.

  Perhaps Arin and I should have been friends. We were similar enough: scheming, stubborn, covered with freckles. But the stubbornness always won out, and it troubled me constantly that I had only brothers.

  ***

  One autumn, a few days after I turned eight, Father crossed the bridge with Floy set before him on his horse. She was a Rielde girl, with sa
ndy curls, brown eyes, and no parents; they’d been killed by raiders in Lorila.

  Floy was the answer to a call for assistance sent out by our grossly overworked housekeeper, but Nilsa never get much assistance from Floy.

  The day after Floy arrived she was mopping the floor in my room. I crept behind her and flicked soapy water on her hair. “Why’ve you glue on your head?” I said. “Is your hair falling out?” Then I looked at the ceiling and yelled, “It’s sparrow poop dripping from the garret.” She felt her head and screamed, and I tackled her around the waist and threw us onto my bed, where we jumped and wrestled, mucking up the quilt.

  I did my best to strip Floy of her sensibility, and before the autumn was out we’d made harmful mischief together. One day we found the stinking carcass of a deer in the wood, and made senseless by whatever grudge I was nursing at the time, I convinced her to help me carry it back to the house. We threw it down the well. Everyone got sick, and spent lots of time in the privy, and we had to drink from the river like wildmen.

  Boredom and idleness made occasional monsters of all of us, but I suppose the initiation of Floy into our coterie proved too much. Two years later, someone––someone right among us––turned against us.

  We’d heard rumors about the new Queen, of course. Adults whispered, never quite softly enough, behind the kitchen door. Ridiculous things. (She’d a magic amulet that could strike down whole armies, and a pact with the djain, and twenty-five black dragons from her lover in Omben. And an infant son.)

  Curiosity drove us to creeping. Mordan caught sight, one midsummer morning, of a strange man closeted in the pantry with Hal. Arin (with the loosest tongue) asked Father later why the man had his cloak and cowl drawn so tight around him on such a summer’s day in the warmest corner of the house.

  Hal seemed like to throttle the cloaked man in Mordan’s retelling. He’d been throwing flatware around. But Arin never listened very closely to Mordan, and only Arin and I were about the house when Hal received his dismissal.

  I could have stopped it. But Arin was yelping in the front hall and I didn’t want my own knees caned for eavesdropping. So Hal walked down the road between two men in green and grey, and never came back.

  I could scarcely eat for a week. And then I mostly forgot about Hal when Biador replaced him as groundskeeper, though I dearly missed the sound of the fiddle.

  Arin was bitter about his knees, though. “If they find that man, will they pull his Marionin?” he asked.

  “No,” said Tem. “Don’t say such things.”

  “What’s a Marionin?” I asked Mordan that evening.

  He was sitting on the hearth, hair wet, shirt steaming. It had been raining all that day. “Birth flowers. Only Gralde have them.”

  He didn’t say anything else, and I only learned the particulars in a lesson: A Marionin was a flowering physical extension of the spirit. It sprang from the ground whenever a Gralde was born. Nobody knew where.

  “Then how does anyone know they have one?” I asked.

  “Mothers see them,” said Tem.

  “Did ours?”

  “Yes.” He had on his stern face, and I knew not to bother him further.

  Two

  On the day the Queen came, Mordan and Arin locked me in the privy. It began with a rat. I’d discovered it––a large, handsome, but dead specimen––floating in a pail of milk in the pantry.

  It was a while yet before supper. I held it well away from my gown so it dripped into a cauldron full of Nilsa’s chicken stock. “Big sea rat like him,” I said, “he’ll be happier in brine.” But what I really wanted was for Arin to pull a rat tail out of his bowl. Just yesterday he’d ground horseshit into my pillow.

  I looked back at Floy, who was sidling nearer and glancing at the kitchen door every minute.

  She gave a great, hopeless shrug. I dropped the rat into the cauldron.

  “I’m not hungry, anyhow,” I said.

  “You’re going to get me whipped,” said Floy. “Not that you’d care a whit.”

  “Not so,” I said, “not unless you tell. It’ll look like chicken in three hours.”

  Floy looked into the cauldron. “She’ll know. It’ll taste bad.”

  “It’ll taste better.”

  “Excellent, I’ll warrant,” said Nilsa. She’d crept up behind us while we were looking into the cauldron. Floy turned round, face tucked in, prepared for a slap. I hid my nose in my shoulder––Nilsa always smelled of fish. “But I wouldn’t have to toss rats in my soup for excitement if ninny-hammer got her onions chopped when she’s told.”

  Though Nilsa was old, she was built like an ox, and she picked poor Floy up by her collar.

  Nilsa’s face was redder than I’d ever seen it––it must be the heat, I thought. But she hooked Floy on the wall next to the cloaks and stripped a pot of its leather thong.

  “Oh, ma’am.” Floy hid her arms in a cloak: they were still bruised from her last beating. I felt a prick of guilt

  “If you’re going to belt Floy,” I said to Nilsa, “you’ll have to do me as well, and you can’t belt me.”

  Nilsa bent so close to me I could see the boil under her left eye. “I’m sore tired of your voice, madam. Sore tired of you, in here, tramping and jawing about like the Queen of Quabberqetzle. I’ve had enough.” She took hold of my arm, so tightly my eyes watered. “Given me grey hairs in my nose, armpits, and arse, but I won’t have any more.” She flung me into a cupboard. Bowls spun about me like tops, and I sat where I’d fallen, too shocked to get up.

  But Floy was spared the beating, because right as Nilsa raised the thong, a cat wound through her legs and knocked her over.

  Close behind were my brothers Mordan and Arin, who both did their best to prevent Nilsa from rising by tripping over her, one right after the other.

  The cat sought refuge under a chopping block. There was a bird in her mouth, flapping wildly. My brothers must’ve been trying to rescue it.

  I didn’t much care; I unhooked Floy from the wall, grabbed her wrist, and pulled her out the door.

  We ran up the back stairs, and I thought vaguely about the punishment I was likely to receive when Father arrived. It was the afternoon of Leode’s seventh birthday. Father never missed birthdays.

  We reached the second landing, and Floy took a deep breath and said, “Why’d I listen? Why do I always listen? By the blessed Mother––”

  “Shut it.” I pulled her along the second-floor corridor and flung open a big chest. “In here.”

  “It smells like mushrooms,” Floy said.

  Her head was already inside, so I pushed the rest of her in and slammed the top down. “If you stay in there long enough, maybe she’ll forget.”

  I heard the thunk of boots running along the corridor. The cat ran by, and then the boys, so fast that my skirts blew out. “Is Nilsa coming?” I asked them.

  “I hope not.” Mordan took big, wheezing breaths.

  “We’re going to be thumped.” Arin shook the hair from his eyes and he and Mordan followed the cat into the privy.

  “She’ll lock me in the garret with the bats,” wailed Floy. I gave the chest a thump and walked after my brothers.

  The door was flung wide. I invited myself in, and the cat set to clawing through my skirts. Arin grappled round us with his gangly arms, caught her, hoisted her over the latrine. She let the bird loose, and he let go the cat to shoo the bird away. The yowling cat plummeted down the latrine chute.

  Arin looked down the hole.

  “What’ve you done?” I breathed. I was thrilled about it, almost ecstatic, and I made toward the door to tell Biador or Tem. One of them was perhaps close enough to hear.

  “Reyna––” said Mordan.

  “Biador!” I called. Before I could progress further Arin, who had just last month got caned for dropping my kitten in the river, put his hand over my mouth. Mordan grabbed my flailing arms and twisted them behind my back.

  In two blinks of an eye they had shut the
door and were somehow bolting it from the outside. “Just calm down,” said Mordan through the keyhole, “and we’ll let you out.”

  “Mordan!” I pummeled my fists on the door. “You jackhole.”

  “Mind you take extra care to hold your bladder,” said Arin. “Puss doesn’t like the wet.”

  Biador shouted something up the stairwell—I could hardly make it out, but the boys exchanged whoops of excitement. Father must be here.

  “You’ll get your hides tanned black,” I said. I heard the knob rattling from the outside, and Mordan’s voice:

  “It’s stuck.”

  “Let me try.”

  “You idiot, you tied it too tight.”

  The door shook, and Floy’s voice came through the keyhole: “Reyna?”

  “Let me out!”

  “Give it a minute.”

  I heard them rustling around. “Hurry up,” I said. “It reeks something awful.”

  “Knot’s slippery as a fish,” said Floy.

  “Floy, go get a knife,” said Mordan.

  “A knife?” said Floy. “Nilsa’s in the kitchen, and you almost cracked her head open. I’m getting your father.”

  “No, you’re not,” said Arin.

  Floy didn’t answer, but I heard her boots running down the hall

  The boys rushed after, leaving me alone.

  ***

  Later, when I was wet from the river and Floy was a sparrow, she told me everything.

  She’d gone out the pantry door with Mordan and Arin, and raced them all the way to the place where my eldest brother, Temmaic, was teaching my littlest, Leode, how to thrust and parry with staves.

  Tem, fourteen, threw down his pole. “He can’t be here yet, it’s too early.”

  Arin pointed at the rider on the south road. “Biador said—”

  “It’s probably the supplies man,” Tem said. “The dogs haven’t even come out.” The wind whipped his words about, and he blocked the sun with a hand.