Aloren Page 5

  Since when out of the window she blew.

  They lost their father to Dark in the evening

  When she took the place of his heart.

  She entangled his hands in a golden-white trap,

  And used all of her miserable art

  To confound a sad mind and lead sorrow awry.

  Too loud was the anguish to hear us the cry

  Of the broken-winged swans in their struggle to fly

  From the Dark in the place of his heart.”

  I wasn’t very surprised. Noremes make songs for everything.

  ***

  “They saw Father,” I told Mordan when he stopped by to dictate a letter. “They know he’s gone.” I stuck my finger into the soil and dropped seeds in the holes.

  I had hidden the saddlebag in a hollow wall at the back of the cowshed. Inside, the Marione had crumbled to dust, leaving a strange assortment of flower stones. Roughly three hundred of them.

  An obscure part of the north pasture overlooking a pond made a fine plot. The hills circled round so that the place looked like a green bowl with sun and water in the bottom. I put a pinch of the Marione dust in each hole, hoping it would help somehow, before folding dirt over the seeds. “And they think we’re dead, too. From bandits.”

  “I suppose it’s best they don’t try to look for us,” said Mordan. I scooped water from a pail and threw it over the loose ground. “They won’t question Father’s death. He rode around unescorted most of the time.”

  My knee upset the pail. “Those stupids won’t think how it might’ve happened?” I swung the pail over my head and it landed in the pond. “I needed that for dandelions.” I eyed it contritely. “Marna’s out of rubbish things to throw in her pot––”

  “You said yourself it was bandits,” said Mordan. “And as you’d have absolutely no trouble passing for one, you could do with a swim.”

  I retrieved the bucket, emptied it over Mordan’s head, and promised to meet him later with my pen and ink.

  ***

  I should have anticipated Emry. Floy had warned me: “She’s following you around with a honey jar. I expect she’s looking for an everlasting charm and still thinks you’re a saebel.”

  She found me that afternoon. I was sitting on a stump, copying down a sentence with a quill I’d cut myself.

  “Daifen has been told by an informer that the raid on the armory was lead by Ackerly Celdior, one of Daifen’s council and a White-Ship spy, so a prompt departure from the lord’s service is strongly recommended for Celdior,” Mordan said at the top of his voice. “Do you need me to repeat it again?”

  He launched himself into the air when Emry climbed up beside me.

  “You were talking to that crow, weren’t you?”

  “You’d make yourself sick on an everlasting honey pot,” I said.

  She caught sight of the letter before I could get it behind my back. “You’re writing.”

  “Jam, too.”

  “Or are you pretending? Can you read?”

  “Why do you care?”

  “I’ve never met someone who can read.”

  I was confounded. “Marna can’t read?” I hadn’t thought much about reading, couldn’t remember a time when I wasn’t literate. I’d assumed everyone was born that way.

  “Numbers, maybe.” Emry picked her nose. “Not words. A girl’s brain’s too small. With all that stuff inside she’ll get notions. Her head’ll crack. That’s what happened to Mammy.”

  God knew what Emry thought notions were.

  “Reyna,” called Mordan from a nearby tree. “Please keep quiet.” I bit angrily at my lip.

  “Do you want to learn how?” I asked Emry.

  Her eyes became round. “But my head––”

  “You’ll just be learning to write. Your head’ll be fine.”

  Mordan had to wait to finish his letter, because we started immediately on vowels. I used names from old stories, drawing letters in the dust with a stick.

  “W starts off Wdirn, who cut off his toe and stuck it in the crack in the sea wall to keep Anefeln safe from the Green Sea.”

  “The Green Sea’s gone.” Emry flattened the dust with her palm and drew a slipshod W.

  “Say it,” I commanded.

  “Oooodairn.”

  We slogged through O, Ai, and E, and then Emry got stuck.

  “Agedne,” I said, “the saebel girl who turned into a cedar––”

  “Wait.” She pulled on her braids. “Ain’t that same as Aidel?”

  I cast about for another example, noticed a blue flower at the foot of our stump. I picked it.

  “A is for Aloren.”

  She frowned. “That’s an aster.”

  “Aloren’s the Gralde name,” I said. “Not as common.” The flower’s eye was yellow. Perhaps it was my face and hands, also yellow from the dandelions I had gathered earlier, or maybe it was my blue eyes, or stained dress.

  “You look like an Aloren today,” said Emry. “Sprout.” Then she laughed herself off the stump, and I decided our lesson was done.

  “Your aunt’s calling you,” I said. “She’s a walnut pie needs testing.”

  Emry got up and ran toward her imaginary walnut pie. She wouldn’t speak to me for an hour afterwards, but when that had passed she called me Aloren, which caught on rapidly as a hay fire and clung to me like a spurned lover.

  ***

  “Ice aster.” Tem spat water. “Where have I heard it before?”

  He wasn’t the only one. We all felt something when we heard the word.

  I sat in a patch of meadowsweet at the edge of the pond. The water had sunk, and my seeds had risen, grown into plants that looked like pale versions of their Marione parents. The red-eyed saxifrage had bloomed alone in the spring; and as the others flowered (with the exception of the autumn gentians), I tended them as best I knew how––thinning, weeding, watering, spreading chicken manure.

  Some of the heads had already withered. I held the saddlebag open beneath them, and flicked seeds inside. It was late, and the sorrel had folded its leaves for the night.

  “Maybe they’re like real asters,” said Mordan. “Daisies, fleabane, you know––”

  “I don’t know,” said Tem.

  “They’re composites. Got lots of little flowers on each head. They like the sun. Bloom in late summer, early fall.”

  “They’re ice asters,” I said. “Maybe they bloom in the winter.” I shook a stalk of Mordan’s columbine and rubbed the pods between my fingers.

  “Oh, aye,” said Arin, and he surprised me. For two seconds. “D’you suppose they sprout out of the tips of icicles?”

  “Our Marione flowered in the winter.” I thought of tying his neck into a knot, and accidentally snapped the flower’s stem. Mordan gave a foul curse. “Sorry.”

  “How do you know?” said Arin. “We only saw them in the spring.”

  “How do you know they don’t?”

  “Bird sense.”

  “She’s a fair point,” Mordan said in a loud voice. “Maybe they shoot up in the middle of some snowy field at solstice.”

  Satisfied, I tied up the saddlebag and sat, quite by accident, on the plump waterskin I had just filled and lugged from the river. The cord popped, the bag’s neck stiffened, and water poured between my legs.

  I sprang up, hugging the skin round the middle, but the neck pointed to the ground and my arms did nothing save squeeze the thing dry.

  “She’ll flay my skin off! I haven’t time to fetch more––”

  “Don’t carry on so,” said Arin. “You’ve just got to tell her, ‘Oh, oh, I went to the river and a wolf was there, and he gave me such a fright I soiled my dress, and the waterskin––the wolf ate it.’”

  “How mature you are,” said Floy. Then she said to me, “The pond’s plenty full enough, and the only thing anyone’s going to drink right now is ale, unless you count the horses.”

  I waded into the dark water, dragging the skin behind. Mandy Olen�
��s flute wafted from a window. Tem stepped after and watched my progress with such an air of irritation that I turned and asked him what the matter was.

  “I don’t like that woman.”

  “Marna?”

  “Wouldn’t think twice about turning you out midwinter with a horse blanket.”

  My legs went weak.

  Tem had always been frank, but this was bad. I looked down and grew dizzy. My eyes closed and my mouth grew wide, breathing balance into my body. The mud gave way beneath my feet, and I fell in.

  “Reyna,” Tem called, “did you step in a hole?”

  I stood up, spitting and squeezing out my skirts.

  “If only––” Tem tucked in his neck and his breast puffed out. “Never mind, my head’s scrambled.”

  “Just noticed, did you?” said Mordan.

  Tem ignored him. “If she can’t talk about herself, she wouldn’t be able to write about herself either, would she? In one of those letters to Ederach.”

  “She could’ve carried it to him.” Mordan fluffed water from his back when Arin hunkered down in the shallows next to him. “Wouldn’t he recognize her without a letter?”

  “He hasn’t seen her since she was four. And if he were to recognize her, she’d have considerable difficulty explaining herself.”

  I had another idea.

  “Couldn’t any of you to write a letter about me in”––I glanced at the moon––“half a month? When you have hands?”

  Tem’s head shot up. “Yes! But I still don’t know… Let’s wait for the next time around––a month and a half.”

  I didn’t know what to think, scarcely dared trust to hope. And after two weeks I forgot all about it. The foreigners came up the road, and the pace of living was troubled enough to quicken.

  Seven

  Norembry’s water was sweet, the old envoy said, and looked wistfully at his tankard of ale.

  Ironic that the water he liked so much was pond water. The pond was harmless, I had decided, and hauling water from the river an unnecessary bother. Marna didn’t know about the switch. Her attention was set elsewhere, because the envoy and his three fellows had traveled to Milodygraig all the way from Benmarum, over the sea.

  Wille was ecstatic. “Bless my birth flowers,” he said. It was their first morning at the inn, and they sat bent over a pile of notes, long-stemmed pipes crisscrossed over the table. “Do you fellows really have windragons across the sea? In Evenalehn?” Unlike Mordan, who jumped to every conclusion possible, Wille only jumped to the conclusions he liked.

  I swept filth into a crack under the table. “It’s Virnraya with the windragons,” I said quietly, “not Evenalehn. And it’s not across the sea. It’s south of it.”

  “This is Aloren, the midget smartass, and I’m Will,” he introduced us.

  I jumped when Marna poked me in the back with a finger. She was reinforcing the cellar for the winter, and I went outside to haul stones and barrels of new sloe-wine all morning under her acrid supervision.

  That done, I drew a tankard of pond water for myself and stumbled back into the common room. Wille had made quick work of ingratiating himself; he sat right among them, communicating mostly in gestures. I sat on the bench beside him so Marna wouldn’t spy me and send me groaning in another direction.

  I must have stunk. “Where’ve you been?” He wrinkled his nose and said to the envoy beside him, “She doesn’t say much.” When Wille was in a crowd, nobody but Wille said much. It didn’t help that the emissaries could speak only bits of Gralde and Wille only bits of the trader’s tongue.

  I tried to help. The foreigners spoke with harsh, quick accents, too quick for me. And they were human. I couldn’t tell the color of their eyes in the dim room, but it was obvious in their movements––picking teeth, drinking, retiring to the john. Each purposeful and premeditated.

  I’d heard terrible things about humans, but these fellows were so mundanely pleasant I forgot they were human after a while; and word by word we learned they’d been sent across the sea by the council of Evenalehn, capital of Benmarum, to scout out Lorila and determine whether she needed help. For Lorila, Norembry, Aclun, and the other sea-states fit into a substantial trade loop with the republic, and the republic of Benmarum eyed them with a motherly regard for economic welfare.

  I leaned in. “What about Norembry? She needs help too.”

  The oldest of the humans smiled down at me (so indulgently I wanted to kick him). “What’s wrong with Norembry, little one?”

  “Lorila has four men hostile to each other,” said the skinny man across from him, “all with claims to the throne. When the Ravyir dies it’s likely to be a bloodbath.”

  Wille muttered in Gralde, “We’ve got more than four men and none of them have claims to the throne.”

  I translated: “Norembry has lost her king and his children are missing. All of them. And the Queen’s a witch.”

  They laughed. Another envoy took his pipe from his mouth. “We disembarked in Ellyned, and the city was quiet as the sea.”

  “Hold your tongue, Reyna,” said Floy from the windowsill.

  “I don’t want to leave, though.” The old envoy looked out the window. “This land has the sweetest rivers. Beer can’t compare.” He pushed his mug away.

  I looked down at my own mug––full of my country’s sweet water. I slid it beneath the envoy’s chin. “Stay,” I said. “You’ll get all the water you want.”

  The skinny envoy chuckled. He said it ought to be a fair trade, and he took the old envoy’s ale and set it ceremoniously before me.

  “Bit strong for babes?” said the old man.

  “It’ll quiet her crying,” said another, and they laughed.

  I ignored them, looking at the amber-colored stuff. There was something odd about the ale Marna set aside for guests, I knew. It wasn’t uncommon for them to put in for the night, call for a drink, and board for a month.

  I took a whiff of the stuff: it calmed me, made me think of spicy lavender, of silver-green by still pools where river-daughters sleep with open mouths.

  “Palendries,” I called to Floy. “She brews them.” I took a swallow of the stuff. It felt thick in my throat and heavy in my belly, making my limbs relax and my eyelids droop. In the back of my mind came a picture of yellow roses on a white wall, and the feeling that came with it seemed foreign as the humans. I smiled. I felt utterly, dangerously content.

  Across from me the old envoy drank my pond water. He was smiling, too.

  Foreign folk said the water was bitter outside Norembry, that we were a lucky people with our sweetwater wells and shining rivers. But I’d never left Norembry, and what I knew, I knew only from Master Tippelain.

  I’d been eight or nine. My brothers and I were having a lesson, and I stared at the rain running down the windowpane.

  “Reyna,” the master said.

  I blinked. “Uh?”

  “Perhaps you could give us the answer?”

  I leaned back and rolled my eyes up into my head, and said, “What’s the question?”

  He sighed. “Your mother wasn’t nearly so empty-headed.”

  Forever pulling my mother into it, was Master Tippelain. “She didn’t have a shitflinger for a tutor, I bet. And you didn’t say what the question was.”

  “Don’t be an ass,” said Tem.

  “What question was it, though?” I turned and made a face at my brother.

  The master said wearily, “Where does Norembry get her water?”

  “The sky.” I pointed toward the window.

  Arin sniggered, and Master Tippelain pulled at his beard. He had come to us with a full set of whiskers. They were looking sparse and scraggily of late.

  “From Avila, scatbrain,” Mordan said. “Most of it comes from the River Cheldony––she starts somewhere in Avila and passes into Norembry.”

  “Bugger your River Cheldony.” But I remember brooding on how a river so vital could pour from a land so terrible. Avila, in the far nor
th, was home only to the lunatic saebels. After the River Cheldony crossed the border into Avila she passed out of existence on the maps.

  “And the property?” said Master Tippelain. “The most important property of water?”

  I put my chin in my hands. “Keeps us alive.”

  “Have I got through to any of you?” He rapped his cane on the floor.

  “Yes,” said Mordan, who was half Father and half encyclopedia. “You can’t bend water to your will––it’ll run through your fingers. Because it used to be the only thing around. It was here before the struggle. Refuses to take sides––”

  “We get it,” Tem said.

  “What struggle?” said Arin.

  “The struggle,” said Mordan.

  ***

  Good and evil did battle in my mind that night, and evil won because I drank the whole mug.

  My pleasure was cut short by Padlimaird Crescentnet. Paddy was an irritable boy, about Arin’s age, with a head of flaming hair and a horde of mean older brothers. He’d sat down next to Wille and was watching the envoy drink his water.

  “What the hell’s so thrilling about a mug of water?” he said, and reached over and snatched the mug from the envoy. The old man looked confusedly at his empty hands.

  Marna saw it. She cuffed Padlimaird’s ear. “Got no manners, the whole brood of you.”

  Padlimaird ignored her and took a great gulp. He twisted his plump cheeks, turned in his seat, and spat the water into Marna’s face.

  “This,” he cried, “this stuff’s nasty.”

  Unfortunately, Marna had got a mouthful from Padlimaird. “Standing water?” She seized my arm and dragged me from the bench. “How long’s this been going on?”

  “Oh, Reyna.” Floy was up and throwing dust from the rafters. “I thought you’d stopped with that nonsense.”

  Marna turned my head with a ferocious whack. “You, red-toed little eft, will be the death of my inn.” She shook me furiously––the blood thumped so loudly in my head I thought it might pour out my eyes.

  The old human got up, eased my shoulders from her grasp, and pushed me behind him. “Calm yourself, madam. You’ll frighten the girl to death. I hardly care what I’ve drunk the past few days––I haven’t taken sick.