A Plague of Giants

There were … I don’t know how many. More than I could count. All tall, pale, and dressed in clacking bones. Some with swords, some with spears—the tools they had used to slay the people of Möllerud and Hillegöm …

I had a glass knife. They had swords and spears and arms that were half again as long as mine, plus bodies that weren’t slowing and breaking down. Combat wasn’t an option, even at one-to-one odds, much less one-to-hundreds or thousands. But the Lord of the Deep had given me a kenning and now an opportunity not only to avenge my people but perhaps learn something that would help rid us of this scourge …

BY KEVIN HEARNE

The Iron Druid Chronicles

Hounded

Hexed

Hammered

Tricked

Trapped

Hunted

Shattered

Staked

Besieged

The Iron Druid Chronicles novellas

Two Ravens and One Crow

Grimoire of the Lamb

The Seven Kennings

A Plague of Giants

Copyright

Published by Orbit

ISBN: 978-0-356-50958-7

All characters and events in this publication, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

Copyright © 2017 Kevin Hearne

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

Illustrations by Yvonne Gilbert

Map drawn by the author

Excerpt from The Fifth Ward: First Watch by Dale Lucas

Copyright © 2017 by Dale Lucas

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 in writing of the publisher.

The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher.

Orbit

Little, Brown Book Group

Carmelite House

50 Victoria Embankment

London EC4Y 0DZ

www.littlebrown.co.uk

www.hachette.co.uk

Contents

By Kevin Hearne

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Map

Dramatis Personae

Day 1: The Bard Begins

Day 2: Eruption

Day 3: The Creature in the Dungeon

Day 4: Kindling

Day 5: Kherns and Hounds

Day 6: The Bloodcat

Day 7: A Stalk Hawk

Day 8: Plaguebringer

Day 9: Revelations

Day 10: Fire and Blood

Day 11: Brotherly Love

Day 12: The Unseen World

Day 13: Death at Dawn

Day 14: The Granite Tunnel

Day 15: New Courses

Day 16: Bryn’s Lung

Day 17: The Cleansing

Day 18: Unhinged Wrath

Day 19: Below the Godsteeth

Appendix

Jereh Table

Kaurian Calendar

Acknowledgments

For Kimberly,

who was first to tell me that the Raelech bard had

some good stories in him.

Thank you always for your love & support.

FINTAN, BARD OF THE POET GODDESS KAELIN: Raelech bard assigned to perform daily for the people of Pelemyn, telling the story of the Giants’ War.

DERVAN DU ALÖBAR: Brynt historian tasked to write down the Raelech bard’s tale. Widowed, providing shelter now to a family of refugees.

GORIN MOGEN: Hearthfire of Harthrad, determined to secure safe haven for his people.

NEL KIT BEN SAH: Fornish greensleeve of the White Gossamer Clan, opposed to Gorin Mogen’s scheme.

KALLINDRA DU PASKRE: Daughter of a Brynt merchant. Fond of honey-apple bacon.

ABHINAVA KHOSE: Son of a hunting family in Ghurana Nent, struggling with how to tell them that he doesn’t want to hunt anymore.

MELISHEV LOHMET: Viceroy of Hashan Khek, the southernmost Nentian city. To him falls the task of repelling Gorin Mogen. Plagued by a persistent health issue.

TALLYND DU BÖLL: Tidal mariner of Pelemyn, widowed mother of two boys.

GONDEL VEDD: Kaurian scholar of linguistics. Married, fond of mustard.

MEARA, STONECUTTER OF THE EARTH GODDESS DINAE: Young stonecutter engaged to a soldier in the garrison in Baseld. Likes to play in the mud.

CULLAND DU RAFFERT: Brynt spice importer in Fornyd, compelled to seek an abrupt career change.

When we encounter a voice that moves us on an emotional level, by turns wringing tears from our eyes and plucking laughs from our bellies, there is an ineffable quality to its power: all we know is that we like listening to it and want to hear more. But when we encounter voices we find loathsome, we usually can pinpoint why without difficulty: too nasal, too whiny, too steeped in anger or sodden with melancholy.

The bard’s voice was the ineffable sort.

He planted himself behind the battlement facing the peninsula, where the vast sea of refugees swirled around their tents, and raised his hands from his sides as if to embrace all the people who had washed up there because of the war. Then he turned slowly as he spoke, including the city in his address as well: “Good people of Pelemyn, I am Fintan, Bard of the Poet Goddess Kaelin.” At once, eyes swiveled to lock upon his form or heads tilted in the far corners of the city to hear his disembodied voice better; conversations subsided, and other magics seemed to begin their work. His beaming face elicited a kindred response and lifted moods; the cup of watery beer from a nameless keg that I had in my hand suddenly tasted like the crisp, legendary brews of Forn; pleasant aromas of fresh food were accentuated and wafted about on the wind, and the less pleasant whiffs of unwashed bodies and rotting garbage faded away.

“It is my life’s work to tell stories,” the bard continued, his smile gone now and replaced with an earnest tone. “And no one else can tell you what I have seen. This great war of our time has indeed been terrible, and I am still struck with its horrors, waking up in the night sweating and—well, I am sure I don’t have to tell you.”

No, he didn’t. Most of the people on Survivor Field were still wearing the same clothes they’d been wearing when they’d had to flee their homes. They were all dirty and ragged now, and purple hollows lay under their eyes, testament to lost sleep, lost loved ones, just … loss.

“But I am also struck by the sudden heroism of people all across the continent. For I have come from the other side of it, the western front, where I participated in the great battle below the Godsteeth.” A tide of exclamation greeted that announcement, and I marveled that it came from far out on the peninsula and from the streets of the city as well. He was not shouting—his volume was what one might use for a toast at a fair-sized dinner party—yet no one had difficulty hearing him.

“Yes, I witnessed that and much more. I can tell you exactly what happened in the Granite Tunnel—” Here the people sent up another cheer. “—and I can reveal that a peace-loving citizen of Kauria, acting at the behest of Mistral Kira, long may she reign, has had a secret role to play in this war and indeed may have finally found a way to bring it to an end. It is why I am here now.” That earned him the loudest roar yet, and he nodded at Survivor Field, assuring them that what he said was true. “Friends, I have permission from the pelenaut to tell you that there is a fleet on its way here from Kauria this instant. And it is coming to pick up the two allied armies that are marching this way across the mountains—one from Rael and one from Forn—and together they will sail across the ocean with your own forces to answer the enemy in kind for what they have done to us!”

The emotion that news tore from the throats of the assembled would have drowned out even the power of his kenning. It was angry at first, not directed at him but at distant shores, a tide of people who had lost almost everything and hungered for a balancing of the scales, and then it lightened, morphing into jubilation as people felt hope for the first time in months. They hugged one another, danced in the mud, tears streaming down their faces as they punched the air with their fists, for it was good news at last instead of another dose of despair, and I was not immune to those feelings. I lost track of the bard for a few minutes as I surveyed Survivor Field and then crossed to the other side of the wall and saw the same celebration happening in the streets of the city.

People skipped out of the buildings to embrace and smile and savor the sight of teeth that weren’t bared in a snarl or a cry. I could not see my own house from the wall, but I imagined that even Elynea might be grinning right then, and I was sorry to miss it; she had never looked anything but haunted since she and her children had come to live with me. And when the bard spoke again, his voice cutting through the noise as people were trying to find their second wind, he was no longer standing on the wall, half hidden by the crenellations, but was up on an improvised stage a few mariners had cobbled together out of crates. “But our relief and the enemy’s defeat will not arrive tomorrow or even the next day. It will take time for it to get here and even more time to prepare the voyage. I am told it could be up to sixty days. In the meantime, the pelenaut thinks it wise that you all hear what has happened elsewhere, for it is doubtful you have heard more than rumors. He has asked me to share what I know with you all, and he is listening as well. I am therefore engaged in your service, and I will tell you the tale in the old way, performing each afternoon until the sun sets. I hope you will take heart, as I have, from the small victories against overwhelming odds, all of which allow us to be here today, to be here tomorrow, and, gods willing, generations hence, to tell these stories again.”

The bard had to pause here for another swell of applause, and while he did, a young woman stepped onto the stage of crates with a giant flagon and presented it to him, speaking a few words in his ear that did not carry like the bard’s voice. Fintan dipped his head in thanks to her, and then his voice floated again on the wind.

“It seems that Brynlön’s reputation for generosity is well deserved! Master Yöndyr, owner and brewmaster of the the Siren’s Call in the city, gives me a flagon of Mistmaiden Ale—purely medicinal, I’m sure—and lodging at his inn for the length of my engagement! Thank you, sir!” Appreciative noises were directed at Yöndyr for having such excellent sense, and I imagined that other inn owners were cussing themselves for not thinking of it first; the Siren’s Call had just received the best advertising possible. Smiling as he did so, Fintan took the opportunity to tip the flagon and then wipe the foam from his upper lip. He then returned the flagon to the woman and wrapped himself in an air of dramatic doom, saying, “Listen.” Everyone I could see on either side of the wall stood rapt, many of us grinning at him in anticipation despite the fact that he had advertised details of a war we already knew too well. It didn’t matter because we were all children again, waiting to be told a story, and we had hope now that it would end well.

“Like all tales worth the telling, I shall begin at the beginning—but your beginning, not Kauria’s or Forn’s or anyone else’s. We’ll get to them later. We’re going to start with the reason this city still stands—your own tidal mariner! So take some time, friends, wherever you are. Fill your cups, visit the privy, do what you must so that you can be free in a few minutes to bend an ear for my tale—come closer to the wall so you can see me if you are out of my sight! If you’re thirsty, I can confirm that Yöndyr’s Mistmaiden Ale can slake a thirst like nothing else! I’ll begin soon!”

An afternoon of entertainment with one of our own featured as the heroine? Maybe with snacks and beer? We couldn’t wait! Everyone began to move and talk at once, and there was a general rush for food and drink on either side of the wall, all other occupations forgotten. Master Yöndyr, no doubt, was delighted.

“Let us begin,” Fintan said, his voice spreading effortlessly across the city and the peninsula a few minutes later. “I’d like to invite someone very special up here: Pelemyn’s tidal mariner, Tallynd du Böll. Tallynd, please join me.”

A woman in a military uniform stepped onto the makeshift stage with Fintan to thunderous applause, favoring her left leg as she did so. She had insignia that I had never seen before, which I at first assumed was due to her blessing but which I learned later meant a new military rank. She had kind eyes, a weary smile, and close cropped hair going gray at the temples. She waved to the refugees on Survivor Field, and Fintan indicated that she should speak.

“Say something. I’ll make sure they hear you.”

“Oh. Well, hello?” Her voice carried for a league thanks to Fintan’s kenning, and she received cheers in response. “Wow. Okay. I want everyone to know that I have shared both my duty log and my personal thoughts with Fintan prior to this. Except I’m sure he will organize it all much better than I ever could or did. Anyway: it’s the truth of things, and I’m glad that he will tell it all. It’s not the sort of tale you may be thinking it is right now. And you should know it.”

Fintan pulled out what looked like a small black egg from a pouch tied to his belt and held it up between his thumb and forefinger. He cast the egg at his feet, and black smoke billowed up in a column, shrouding his body completely until his form resolved into an exact copy of Tallynd du Böll, uniform and all, growing a couple of inches in the process. Fintan was a fairly short, dark man—his skin not quite as dark as that of we Brynts—distinguished by an overlarge nose perched above a generous mouth in a narrow face. It was therefore quite a shock to everyone to see him transform into the distinguished savior of our city, stand right next to her, and say with her voice, “Thank you, Tidal Mariner.”

She gasped—everyone did, honestly—and she said, “Oh, drown me, do I really look and sound like that?” Laughter from the crowd. “Never mind. Thank you, Fintan.” She waved again and stepped off the stage, and the bard told us, as Tallynd, what really happened the night the giants came.

Before my husband died five years ago, in a moment mellowed by drink and the puff of a Fornish gourd bowl, he asked me what price I thought we would all pay for the peace we’d enjoyed for so many years.

“What are you talking about?” I asked him. We were sitting in our small fountain court behind our house, and I was idly using my kenning to curl the water in twirling spirals before they dropped into the reservoir below. He hunched forward, leaning elbows on knees, and withdrew the pipe from his mouth, squinting through the smoke and waggling the stem at me.

“You have been in the military for what, four years now? And you have yet to fight a single battle. There’s always a price to be paid for that.”

“Why must we pay it?” I countered. “Perhaps the price was already paid by those who came before us.”

He bobbed his head to either side, admitting the possibility. “Perhaps you’re right,” he said. “We read all those stale histories in school, you know, and I don’t doubt that they scrubbed away a whole lot of blood and pain. Countless tragedies happening to families like ours, all reduced to a sentence or three, while pages were devoted to what this ruler ate or what that rich person wore.” He snorted smoke through his nostrils. “But I still think we have it coming to us, love. And I worry about it. Because when it comes, you’ll be the first to greet it.”

I laughed at him then. I did! I remember it so clearly now, though it didn’t seem important then. Because in that time, in that place, when he was so handsome and I wanted to have another child with him, when the sun was setting and bronzed his beautiful dark face, I could not conceive of war. I could not conceive of it, in fact, right up until it came to me first, just as he said it would. But by the time it came, he was long returned to the ocean, and our two boys were eight and nine and barely remembered him. I thought that was the worst tragedy in the world until the Bone Giants sailed over my head.

Normally I’m on duty during daylight hours, but by request of the fisher clave I was mapping the crab beds and taking note of the feeding habits of other nocturnal species in the waters north of the peninsula, keeping an eye out as always for any ship-sinking predators. I was in deep water far offshore when I heard, or rather felt, the slicing of keels through water on the surface at moonrise. It was an anomaly since no boats should have been in the area during the course of my mapping. Even allowing for fishermen who ignored the boundary buoys, it was far too much turbulence for one or two rogue net trawlers. I rose to investigate.

During the ascent, I realized the number of keels was not merely an unusual grouping of boats but a massive fleet of transport ships of strange origin. Upon breaking the surface, I saw that they definitely were not a Brynt fleet. Nor were they of Raelech or Kaurian construction or any recognizable profile. They were broad-bottomed sailing ships outfitted with oars, though at the moment they were under full wind from the east. The decks mounted no harpoons or other visible weapons. They were, however, packed with people. Tall, thin people with bone armor on their torsos and arms. They looked like ribs. I also saw handheld weapons, swords of some kind. They all had them, and they were all looking ahead at the firebowls atop the walls of Pelemyn and the smaller lamps along the docks. Unless I was mistaken in the moonlight, their skin was pale and they had painted their faces to look like skulls.

Turning my head to the right, I saw that several ships had already passed by my position and were entering the harbor. All I could see in the moonlight at that distance was the sails, not the people, so I could not tell for certain that this was an invasion in progress. But the stark evidence before me shouted that this was no friendly trade embassy. Cargo ships aren’t packed bow to stern with armed and painted men.

Swimming closer to the nearest ship on a tightly channeled current, I called out to them: “Who are you? I am the tidal mariner of Pelemyn and require an answer.”

Someone replied in a strange language, and that was when I found out they had a few spears, too: three of them plunked into the water around my head, and I do not think I could have been more shocked if they had actually hit me. They were most definitely hostiles, and they had just triggered the war protocols. I was authorized—required, in fact—to use the powers of my kenning to apply coercive and lethal force against an invading fleet.

And I admit that it took me a few moments to process that. I had to look toward the docks again, take in the enormity of the dark shapes in the moonlight, realize what they intended, and say the words out loud to make myself believe it was happening: “This is an invading fleet. Invading us. Right now.”

Up to that point, I had never used my kenning for anything but peaceful purposes. Scout the spawning grounds up and down the coasts, map the crab beds for the fisher clave, make sure the currents kept the coral reefs well fed—that had been my duty. But right then I needed to kill as many strangers as possible to protect my city. It is a disorienting transition to make—I mean from peace to all-out war in the space of a minute—but somehow classifying it as my “duty” every bit as much as my peaceful occupations helped. It didn’t make it easy: it just made it possible. If you drape the word duty over murder, well—you can hardly tell it’s murder anymore. Add the words in wartime, and the word murder simply disappears.

How, then, should I do my duty? Summoning large waves to wash men overboard would be inefficient and tax my system so much that I would age quickly and become useless. Better to use funneled, targeted currents similar to what I used to propel myself quickly through the water.

My first effort to capsize the nearest boat gave the occupants a scare but didn’t succeed. A bit stronger, then: triple the force I would use for myself, applied to the right side of the keel, amidships. Over it went, bodies thrashing in the cold water, and I felt a small ache bloom between my eyes. It was not entirely without cost, then, to focus that kind of pressure, but it was a small cost. Propelling myself to the site, I drew out a black volcanic knife chipped from the flows of the Glass Desert, ideal for water work, and opened some long gashes along the limbs of these unnaturally tall invaders, passing through them to get to the other side, where another boat awaited my attention. Blood in the water would bring the bladefins along to finish the job I had started. Probability of a feeding frenzy was high.

As I repeated the process on the next boat, tumbling tall bodies into the deep, the true size of the force seeped into my consciousness, chilling me far more than the water did. It was no mere raiding party but an army of many thousands, capable of sacking the city. Had I been sleeping at home rather than on duty in the water, most if not all of them would have already landed before I could do anything. I could only hope that the mariners on night patrol would be able to handle those who slipped past me while I did everything I could to prevent any more from landing.

After the second boat, I zipped through the waves back to Pelemyn’s docks to take out the leading ships—the fewer that landed, the better. From there I worked my way back out, always taking out the nearest boat first. Even if some of the invaders managed to swim for shore, they would be cold and weary and demoralized when they tried to attack the walls and would be attacking singly or in very small groups rather than large waves.

Once near the docks, I saw that three ships had landed and a small horde of skeletal giants were disembarking, swords held high, removing all doubt about the nature of this fleet. I wanted to go ashore and help or raise the alarm but knew that my priority had to be preventing the rest from landing.

The ache between my eyes grew incrementally with every ship I scuttled, and I was breathing heavily after three. After the fifth the bladefins and other predators had homed in on the blood and were finishing what I had started. More blood meant more predators on the way; they could chew through the army for me if I could just get them into the water.

I had to dodge several bladefins myself, but they never came back for a second pass when there were so many other easy targets thrashing about, practically begging to be eaten.

And they were eaten. The invaders screamed underwater, but still I heard them, garbled bubbles of terror popping in my ears as jaws sank into them, their severed limbs and intestines floating past me in clouds of blood, each drop a siren call to frenzy for everything in the ocean possessed of more teeth than brains. Seeing and hearing that hurt me, for even then I doubted I was doing the right thing. Had we spoken the same language, I wondered, could we have avoided it all?

They did not look as if they had come to talk, and that was what my duty told me. But even if my duty stood tall and proud like the cliffs of Setyrön, waves of guilt kept crashing against them, determined to wear them down as I dumped ship after ship into the ocean and men flailed and gasped and died. And every effort I made to force water to do my will drew days of my life away, unseen like the undertow of tides yet felt and feared as all forces of nature should be. Aging quickly was the price I had to pay for my blessing, and I swore to myself when I first swam out of Bryn’s Lung that I would never regret using it in my country’s defense—still: ninety-seven ships and pain like a nail in my head. There had probably been a hundred men or more on each boat. Whoever these tall foreigners were, they had sent ten thousand men against us without warning or, so far as I knew, any provocation from us. They would have completely overwhelmed us had I not been on duty.

When the last ship capsized and the pale figures cried out, knowing what awaited them in the deep since they saw what had happened to all the others, I took a moment to simply tread water with my own muscles, bereft of my kenning, weary beyond anything I had ever known. The firebowls of Pelemyn were not even visible where I was, which told me I was far out to sea. Returning to the docks meant I would have to weave through the feeding frenzy, but it was necessary: better to dodge bladefins than krakens. I was in deep enough waters that I would have to worry about true monsters, and a disturbance in the currents beneath me hinted that one was approaching, attracted by all the blood.

That prompted me to wonder: How did such a fleet cross the ocean without falling prey to krakens? If I had felt the fleet’s passage on the surface, then surely the krakens would have.

I skimmed the floor of the ocean on the way back, opting to swim underneath the ongoing frenzy but unable to avoid seeing some of the aftermath. I saw a crab scuttling across the ocean floor with a pale chewed hand clutched in its claws. That was a hand that had belonged to a man who had used it to greet his friends once, or hug his mother, or offer a gift of love or perhaps an apology. Now it was food for a crawling thing in the ocean, and I had made that happen.

Ninety-seven hundred deaths on my head if my estimates were correct. And it was all duty. Not murder.

Per protocol, I had to report directly to the pelenaut after using lethal force, so I would use the Lung’s underwater locks to get to the city Wellspring from the harbor. I did surface briefly to see what was happening at the docks and immediately saw the bodies of a few mariners and citizens lying sprawled on the boards. The firebowls illuminated a battle for the walls in progress—the invaders had actually reached the top without benefit of towers or ladders. The ghoulish giants swarmed on top of one another, making ladders out of their own bodies, quick and lithe and horrifying like snow spiders—if spiders could wield swords! Once I saw them confronting our mariners at the top, I worried that we might lose the city to these mere three hundred, because one of them, dressed in no more than bones and rags, hacked down a mariner by first splitting his shield and then carrying the blow through to cave in his skull through the helmet.

I had never seen the like; that took incredible force. Their weapons were swords in the sense that they were blades attached to a hilt but were nothing like any sword I had seen before. Only one side had been sharpened, and the blade angled up to a ridge, then back down again. Viewed from the side, the sword looked like a child’s drawing of a mountain, albeit a gently sloped one. Their long reach and that design, coupled with good steel, clearly gave them a deadly advantage. There were only a few of them up top as yet, though more were ascending, and they were mowing through mariners like cutting summer wheat. I almost decided to climb out of the water to give what help I could, but someone had raised the alarm with the garrison, and a squadron of archers arrived on the south side as I watched. They let loose a flight, and the giants went down, their scant armor doing little to stop the arrows. Another flight aimed at the base of the human ladder buckled it, and the pile of them collapsed to the ground. They wouldn’t make it back up the wall again. Confident that the garrison now had matters in hand, I ducked down beneath the waves and cycled through the Lung’s locks.

I emerged in the Wellspring behind the coral throne, in the pelenaut’s pool but around a little-used corner. None but one of Bryn’s blessed could navigate the locks without drowning, but the egress was guarded by a mariner anyway—one who had a spear pointed at me until she recognized my face. She raised it and apologized once I gave her a tired grin in greeting. “We’re feeling some pressure here, Gerstad,” she said, addressing me by my military rank rather than my kenning.

“As you should be,” I said, dripping on the floor a moment before wicking away the moisture with a thought, dropping it back into the pool. “I have a report for either the pelenaut or the Lung. May I see one or both?”

“Certainly. I can’t leave my post now but please proceed.”

“Thank you. Before I go—how old am I?”

“Your pardon?”

“How old do I look?”

The mariner shrugged, uncertain. “Midthirties?”

That was a relief because I’d appeared to be in my midthirties before the watch began. Well, maybe my younger thirties, but midthirties wasn’t bad. I felt older and slower and wanted nothing so much as a cup of tea and a day or three of sleep, but that would have to wait. I trod down the short hall with the pool’s feeder channel on my right and rounded the corner to find the pelenaut pacing in front of his throne and his wall of water. The Lung was there, too, along with several military personages of higher rank than mine—even the Könstad was there—and some others I did not recognize. Before I could say anything or salute, the pelenaut spied me and interrupted the Lung. “Ah! Gerstad Tallynd du Böll! So glad you’re here! Please come, report.”

I recounted what I had done and the reasoning behind it and watched for signs of disapproval. I couldn’t tell if I had done the right thing: they all wore masks of grim stone, and I was giving my report without knowing the full situation outside. Had any of the invaders made it into the city? When I finished, Pelenaut Röllend said, “Thank you, Gerstad. Könstad du Lallend.”

“Yes?”

“Please fetch me an update on our casualties and dispatch the rapids while I talk to the Gerstad for a moment.”

He motioned me to follow him and led me around the corner to his pool behind the throne, the same way I had entered. He dismissed the mariner on guard there and waited until we were alone, and then, much to my surprise, he hugged me.

“There is no doubt you have saved Pelemyn tonight,” he said. “Thank you. I was asleep until moments ago and would not have been able to stop them as you did.”

“Normally I would have been asleep, too.”

“We were fortunate for sure. I know you must be tired, but I can’t spare you now. There’s more to do.”

My headache flared at the mere thought of more water work, but I tried to smooth away the wince on my face and keep the pain out of my voice. “Of course, Pelenaut Röllend. What can I do?”

“I’m worried that we weren’t the only target. I need to know as soon as possible if other cities were attacked. If they haven’t been, then we need to warn them that an attack may be coming.”

“Down to Gönerled, then?”

“No, I’m sending a couple of rapids there. I need you to go up to Festwyf with all possible speed.” I had to swallow my fear at those words, and he saw it. “I know that’s asking a lot.” He was asking me to move so quickly through the water that I essentially became it and in the process stripped away years of my life. I had told my boys often that this day might come, but now that it was here, I doubted that they truly understood; already I had lost some time, and who knew how much older I would be when I came home?

“It’s your prerogative to ask,” I said, and once I got past my visceral reaction, I agreed it was necessary. Advance warning might be the difference between saving the city and losing it. “May I beg a small favor in return?”

“Of course.”

“Look after my boys while I’m gone. I was supposed to be home in time to take them to school, and if I’m not there—” They had already gone to sleep one night and woken up without a father the next morning; I didn’t want them to lose another parent the same way. They would be worried regardless, but maybe someone could reassure them.

“Done,” he said.

“Thank you. And …” My question died in my throat. “Never mind. Time’s wasting.”

“No, go ahead and ask. You’ve certainly earned an extra question. A promotion, too, once we have the luxury of ceremony again.”

“Do you know who these people are? Or why they attacked us?”

The pelenaut shook his head. “I’ve never heard of them. Haven’t managed to even see them yet, but I’m told they’re definitely not Hathrim.”

“No. These are not like any giants we’ve seen before.”

A helpless shrug from the pelenaut. “I had no idea they existed. Which makes me wonder where they came from and how they knew we existed.”

“I’ll seal my questions in a jar, then, and open it later. Currents keep you safe, Pelenaut Röllend.”

“And you, Gerstad du Böll.”

I was back in the ocean minutes later, headed north, pushing water in front and pulling it down the length of my body, sleeving myself through the deep, but this time I pushed and pushed until the resistance faded and the water welcomed me as part of it, my uniform slipped away and foundered in my wake, and I became the tide rolling in to Festwyf, where the fresh sluice of the Gravewater River fed the Peles Ocean. I lost time traveling that way—so much time—and more prosaic things, like my glass knife. I didn’t pull out of the tide trance until I hit the freshwater. There I slowed down, felt the sharp ache of a year’s strain on my organs and bones—quite possibly more—and surfaced.

Festwyf was quiet, and for a moment I harbored a hope that all was well. The firebowls still burned on the walls and the docks as they should. But upon closer inspection, there were bodies slumped over the walls near those fires. There was blood in the river and corpses bobbed near the docks. And at those docks, stretching back into the ocean, was an anchored fleet of the giants’ ships.

But there were no screams or sounds of fighting, nor were there sounds of a victory celebration. In fact, there were no sounds of a city at all, even those which a city at night might be expected to make. There was only the sound of water, and this was the first time in my life when I did not find it comforting.

I swam closer to the docks and pulled myself out of the ocean, concluding that there was no reason to be worried about my modesty when everyone was dead. I saw that there were both Brynt and giant bodies littering the area, but far more Brynts. The giants had surprised Festwyf as they had surprised Pelemyn, except that Festwyf had had no tidal mariner here to keep them from landing. The other two tidal mariners, aside from Pelenaut Röllend himself, were to the south in Setyrön and Hillegöm; one could only hope they were in a position to do as I had done.

When I came to the first dead invader, who had three arrows through his chest, I crouched down to examine him a bit closer, since I’d had no chance previously. They were pasty men, seven to nine feet each, possessed of stringy muscles and little else. They had no armor whatsoever on their legs—no pants either, which I thought vaguely obscene—and only rudimentary fibrous material strapped to the soles of their feet. They wore bands of cloth wrapped around their loins and then a basic undershirt belted to it. On top of this they had tied a sheet of flat rib bones to the front and back of their torsos. Said bones were too large and wide to be human as I originally feared. They had also tied smaller sets of these to rest on top of their shoulders and to protect their upper arms. No helmets, but not for lack of steel. Their swords were well made. Except for the handles; those were wrapped in poor cloth rather than leather. With a start, I realized they had no leather at all. Even their belts were made of woven fibers.

I mentally added to the giants’ list of contradictions: Though their boats were crude, they had enough sophistication at sea to coordinate an attack at multiple sites on the same evening. But none of them remained on their ships—they were all silent, anchored hulks. So where were the invaders now?

I took the giant’s sword—a bit heavy for me, but it might prove useful later—and padded barefoot across the planks of the docks to the city walls. No one challenged me. The gates were open, and piles of the dead stared up at the sky or lay sprawled in positions they would never adopt in life, and each one of them said to me that I would find nothing different beyond. They were right.

Inside the city there was no sign of survivors apart from lit buildings. I investigated a few of them to see if anyone remained inside, but in each case they turned out to be untended candles or fires burning low, illuminating a massacre of the inhabitants. The Wellspring was littered with the bodies of the city’s leaders. And I discovered that many people had been slain in their beds, efficiently murdered in their sleep.

Bryn preserve us, they had killed the children, too.

So these giants were not fond of war cries and waking up the populace. In fact, much of Pelemyn might still be unaware the city had been attacked if they were living far from the ocean walls. I thought about what I’d seen so far at both Pelemyn and Festwyf: Any person the giants saw was a target. Beyond that they had no clear military goals. They weren’t loading their ships with material goods, so it wasn’t our wealth they wanted, nor did they want to conquer and rule. They certainly gave us no diplomatic warning. They simply came to wipe us out. No threats or bluster or even an overture of diplomacy. Just blades parting skin and sawing flesh.

“What did we do to deserve this?” I wondered aloud, stunned. “Why slaughter us all?” The dead gave me no answers.

There might have been some survivors hidden away—I dearly hoped there were—but it wasn’t my mission to conduct a search and rescue. I had to find the giants, and they had already moved on. I had to move also, even though all I wanted to do was weep for the dead.

Back to the Gravewater River. I dived in with the giant’s sword and sleeved myself upstream, keeping my head above the surface and my eyes turned to the southern shore. The Merchant Trail there was wide and would allow an army to move quickly. I found them only two leagues away, setting up a camp under moonlight and torchlight. They had raided for food at least and had a significant train behind them—everything pillaged from Festwyf, right down to the carts. I could make no accurate count but was sure there were many thousands, and they sprawled for a good distance along the riverbank. They obviously planned to move at speed down the Merchant Trail and attack the river cities in turn. They had no siege weapons and needed none, counting on surprise and their overwhelming numbers to win.

My orders were to report on Festwyf and the army’s whereabouts; technically, I had all I needed and should return now. But the pelenaut had also mentioned warning Festwyf if possible. I couldn’t do that now, but I was the only person who could warn Fornyd that there was an army bearing down on them in time to make a difference.

I didn’t know who was running Fornyd in the pelenaut’s name, but he or she would probably want some evidence of my report despite my kenning and in whose name I worked. I hoped the sword I carried would suffice.

Moving away from the riverbank toward the center where I’d be able to go a bit faster, I was just beginning to sleeve myself upriver when a giant shouted in surprise. My eyes tracked the sound to the shore, where I spied a slack-jawed brute relieving himself, adding his own stream to the river’s. His painted skull face gaped at me in disbelief. I could have simply moved on and probably should have, but instead he became a target for all my frustration and rage over what I’d seen in Festwyf. I wanted someone to pay for it, and he had been there. He had taken part in it. And he was in front of me now.

“So much blood you’ve spilled,” I growled at him through clenched teeth, though I’m sure he didn’t understand a word. “Drown in it!”

His body was largely made of water, as all creatures were, and I called to small pockets of it on either side of his chest, just a short pull, about the length of a finger joint. The blood burst from the vessels in his lungs and began filling them up with every beat of his heart. He tried to shout again but coughed wetly instead, and then he gurgled, collapsed, and died. I waited to feel better, for some sweet rush of justice or vindication, but it never came. That life, taken in anger, had not been my duty. I still regret it even though he quite probably deserved it.

I didn’t resume my full-speed pace upriver because I wanted to scout as I moved. Three times on the way to Fornyd I stopped, woke up camps of merchants sleeping in tents by the bank by shouting at them, and told them to head to Fornyd immediately or they would meet an army that would slaughter them. They didn’t question my authority; I floated in the river without being moved by its current or visibly swimming against it, and they knew that tidal mariners would not appear out of the river if it wasn’t an emergency.

At the gray croak of dawn I arrived at the riverside docks of Fornyd, looking at it the way the invaders would: a fat fish that practically jumps into your stew pot. The walls were not especially high or thick compared to those of the coastal cities. It would fall quickly if taken by surprise. Even with warning it might fall quickly. The giants would be atop those walls in no time, and there were more of them in that army than there were perhaps in the entire city; Fornyd was more of an ambitious town than a city, a trading hub for the farmers who sprawled out to the south and east and west.

The Lung’s Locks had not been used in years, perhaps not since my last visit when I was doing my river tour as a new tidal mariner. They had crusted over with sediment, and it took some work to open the outer hatch. Inside, however, the locks were unusually clean. Cleaner than Pelemyn’s, and Pelemyn’s enjoyed frequent use. The sleepy mariner stationed at the other end was mightily surprised to see me emerge, however. He jumped and made an undignified noise and only then remembered that he was supposed to be professional should a tidal mariner ever show up.

“I—uh. Sorry, mariner. Tidal Mariner. Sorry. How can I help?”

“I came at speed with urgent news. If you could provide me a robe?”

“Oh! Yes! Of course! Sorry again!” He turned to the wall behind him, where a robe waited precisely for occasions such as this. He plucked it off the hook and held it out, politely keeping his head turned toward the wall. When I had pulled myself out of the pool and wrapped the robe around me, he escorted me to the Wellspring and begged me to wait while he summoned the city’s quartermaster. It was still quite early, and she wouldn’t have risen yet.

She appeared less than a minute later, a woman in her forties with hair cropped short like mine, a blue robe hastily thrown on and still knuckling away sleep from her eyes but anxious to hear what I had to say. I liked her immediately—I had been kept waiting in the past by others.

“Yes? What’s the matter?”

“Gerstad Tallynd du Böll, sent by the pelenaut,” I said by way of introduction.

“Quartermaster Farlen du Cannym. What news?”

I held up the giant’s sword and said, “About ten thousand giants carrying these are headed this way. Festwyf is already lost, and you’re next.”

Her nostrils flared briefly and her eyes widened, and then she visibly controlled herself and clasped her hands together. “Hathrim are coming here?”

“No, these aren’t Hathrim. They top out at nine feet, I’d say, rather than twelve. They crossed the ocean. We’ve never seen them before.”

I explained the night’s events and respectfully suggested that her duty must be to warn not only the people of Fornyd but the other river cities and perhaps even Rael. Pelemyn was a safe place for people to run if they wished; I could speak for no other cities yet since the situation was still developing, but Pelenaut Röllend would keep it safe in my absence.

“Use archers, or pikemen if you must,” I offered. “Keep them at a distance because at close range they will win with their reach and these weapons every time. I’ll leave this with you so that your mariners can test it.”

“Leave? You’re leaving?” A note of panic might have crept into her voice and expression. She didn’t seem the type to boil over quickly, however. Perhaps it was only stress, which would be understandable.

“I must report back to the pelenaut and tell him about Festwyf. I’ll also tell him that I warned you and that you will hopefully warn the other river cities.”

“Of course; you can be sure of that. But … I have so few mariners here. Hardly any of the blessed, just a few rapids. We cannot possibly hope to stand against ten thousand.”

“I know, Quartermaster. But this isn’t a war you have to win by yourself. Pelenaut Röllend would never expect that. This is developing too quickly for anyone to help you—and I’m sure that’s by design. They are trying to move so quickly that each city is taken by surprise. But now you have the opportunity to save many people. Reduce the enemy’s numbers if you can. And seriously consider evacuating. If the invaders follow the pattern of Festwyf, they will leave the city intact, taking only food. They have no cavalry, and they don’t know the surrounding area like you do. They’re simply coming up the road and killing whatever’s in the way. So my advice is to get out of the way.”

She took a deep breath and nodded once on her exhalation. “I understand, Gerstad. Head for high ground when the floodwaters come.”

I knew Fornyd was in good hands then. “Exactly. What are floods but Bryn’s admonishment that we should build better? Let the flood pass over and rebuild in its wake.” I bowed. “And if I may make a suggestion, hide all the wells you can. Make them drink from the Gravewater. Since they’re not from around here, they probably don’t know how it got its name, if they know it at all.”

Her head jerked in surprise. “Oh! Yes, we’ll do that.”

“May the currents keep you safe.”

“And you as well.”

She was calling for her mariners and longshoremen before I left the room. I returned the robe to its hook and cycled through the locks to the Gravewater. Once there, I pushed myself past the flesh, becoming one with the tide again and flowing back to Pelemyn. I was using the Lung’s Locks for the second time by midmorning. The same mariner who’d been on duty during the night was still there. She looked worried this time as she helped me out of the pool.

“What?” I said. My voice was dry and scratchy to my own ears. “How bad is it?” Once I had wicked away the water and the mariner had settled a robe about my shoulders, a coughing fit racked me and everything hurt. Stabbing pains in my abdomen like a harpoon in my guts. Needles in my fingertips and toes. A vise squeezed my spine and all the muscles in my back, and my legs didn’t want to support me. I knelt at first, and when that was too much, I slumped sideways, curled up into a ball.

“I … it’s nothing, Gerstad. Forgive me,” she said. “Welcome home. Just catch your breath.” She patted my shoulder a couple of times as if I were a child. We both felt awkward about that, but she clearly didn’t know what else to do.

“Tell me,” I gasped, lying in a fetal position on the deck. We were still behind the coral throne, and no one else yet knew I had arrived unless my coughing fit had alerted them. “I need to know before I see myself in a glass. Before the others see me, too, so I can deal with their faces. Yours is a kind one.” She pressed her lips together and shook her head. “Please. You’ll be doing me a favor.”

Grimacing, the mariner told me, “You look to be in your midforties now, Gerstad. Well, maybe the downstream half of it. I’m sorry.”

Almost fifty, then. I had looked to be in my midthirties when I woke up. But in truth I am twenty-nine.

I wondered if my boys would even recognize me when I got home. But before I could think too much along those lines, I nodded, said thank you, and extended my arm. The mariner grasped it and hauled me to my feet. I leaned on her for a moment, and she was patient while I collected myself.

“All right,” I finally said, standing straight and clutching my fists at my sides. “To the Wellspring to report. Currents keep you.”

“And you.”

I don’t even remember giving that report. I remember the shock and pity that flowed across the faces of the pelenaut and the Lung when they saw me. I remember them saying that Gönerled had been lost as well and remembered that my sister lived there. I know there was more, but nothing stuck in my memory.

“I need you to go home and rest now,” Pelenaut Röllend said. “You’re dismissed until the morning.”

The walk home across cobblestone streets was slow and painful to my knees, and though the sun was shining, I pulled up the hood of my robe and kept my head down to avoid encounters with people I knew. The last thing I wanted was to talk about what happened and why I looked so old.

People were still going about their business like it was any other midweek morning. Buying apples in the market and haggling over the price of cooking herbs. Apprentices running errands for their masters and laughing at ribald jokes. It was still too early: they had no idea that entire cities had been wiped out last night and might not even know that Pelemyn had escaped the same fate by lucky chance. They’d all know by the end of the day. But right then the blissful normality was a living memory of what Brynlön had lost. They wouldn’t be like this tomorrow or the day after that or for many days to come. For me it was like experiencing the past: these people were already ghosts from a better time.

And seeing them so happy, knowing it was to be that way for only a little while longer, and knowing that so many more were simply gone, like my sister, I wept.

There had been no time to weep before, to feel the enormity of it, because duty had given me no choice. And there had been the anger, of course. But on that lonely walk home, the only one aware that these were the final hours of what we once were, I could feel it. The sorrow bubbled within me until I could hardly breathe. I tried not to sob aloud and draw stares. I wouldn’t want to ruin anyone’s last few minutes of happiness.

But when I got home and closed the door behind me, I held nothing back. I simply dropped to the floor and cried for Festwyf and Gönerled and the others. For my sister and the mariners who’d died on Pelemyn’s walls and the people down by the docks. For my shortened life and knowing that I’d have to shorten it further before this was done. For the years I wouldn’t be with my boys. I knew I would never live to see my grandchildren, and I cried for that. And I knew that if I didn’t do my duty, then I wouldn’t have grandchildren at all, nor would anyone else.

And the worst part was not knowing the answers. Who were these giants, and why had they attacked us? How was it possible to cross the ocean in such huge fleets?

Picking myself up off the floor, I shuffled wearily to the kitchen and found a note from the next-door neighbor: “Boys are happy and off to school. Sleep well! —Perla”

And underneath that was written:

“Checked on them personally. They are safe. —Föstyr”

Thank the currents for that. I wondered if school would even continue for much longer. This might be their last day of bliss as well. I hoped it would be a good one and worth remembering. And I hoped that when they got home, my boys would love their older mother as much as they loved their younger mother from yesterday.

I wiped away tears from my cheeks, hoping nobody had seen me lose control, but then realized I was not the only person weeping. Seemed like everyone was because we did remember those last few hours of happiness before the news of the invasion, how sweet and peaceful life had been. And when the bard dispelled his seeming, the roar from Survivor Field grew and grew, not so much for him but for Tallynd, for she came back to the stage to wave and blow kisses at us. She was crying, too, and I understood why the bard had had to tell that story for her. How could anyone expect her to relive that as a performance? That gray at the temples I’d seen before—I thought stupidly that it reflected her true age. Like most people I’d heard that our tidal mariner had saved us the night of the invasion, but I had no idea what that involved or that she was a twenty-nine-year-old widow with two young boys.

All blessings have their particular curses, I’m told. Hygienists never age the way tidal mariners do, for example, but they become absolutely paranoid about contaminants and infections and scrub themselves constantly since they perceive impurities in almost everything.

But sacrifices like Tallynd’s should be recognized and rewarded. And just as I was thinking I should create the most glorious gift basket of all time for her, Pelenaut Röllend appeared and joined Tallynd and Fintan on the precarious stack of crates. He had the most glorious gift basket for her in his hands, which satisfied every Brynt’s dire need to give her one right then. Fintan projected both of their voices, and that was when I learned what that insignia on her uniform meant—it was indeed a new rank, and she wasn’t a Gerstad anymore.

“Second Könstad Tallynd du Böll, almost everyone within hearing right now owes their life to you, and they know it. If I don’t give you this gift basket right now, your house will be buried with them tomorrow.” Cathartic laughter and cheering. “Please accept this from a grateful pelenaut and a grateful people.”

She sort of laugh-cried, a chuckle followed by a sniff, and took it from him. “Thank you. Thank you all. This is the best gift basket I’ve ever received, and I will cherish it. It will have a place of honor in my home.”

There was more applause for her because she deserved all we could give, but eventually she and the pelenaut waved and departed, leaving Fintan alone on the stage.

“There will be more tomorrow,” he assured us as the sun was setting. “But these will be stories from the far west! Until then, may the gods of all the kennings keep your loves!”

Cheers followed the bard as he stepped down off the crates and took a long draught from the flagon of Mistmaiden Ale; the woman from the Siren’s Call had never left. He thanked her and asked her to lead the way to Master Yöndyr’s establishment, then he turned to me.

“Coming, Master Dervan?”

“Absolutely.”

Before we go forward, we should probably go back. My association with Fintan had begun the previous day, when he arrived at Pelemyn in the company of a Raelech courier and ruined what was shaping up to be a pleasant day of boring logistic details. Couriers didn’t normally cause a stir, but this one had become annoyed when she wasn’t ushered immediately into the pelenaut’s presence.

That was the explanation of the breathless mariner who burst into the Wellspring, helmet askew, to seek guidance on how to proceed. The pelenaut flicked a finger at his Lung, Föstyr, and the old man stepped forward, arched an eyebrow, and pointed out to the mariner that he had left out why the courier had been detained. Normally couriers were brought immediately to the throne.

“She’s with a bard, sir, and insists that he be allowed to accompany her.”

Silence for a few seconds, and then the pelenaut asked Föstyr, “Presumably there is some problem with the bard?”

The Lung nodded once, the wattles under his chin rippling at the sudden movement. “An old law, sir. Raelech bards aren’t to be trusted.”

The pelenaut frowned. “How old is this law? Rael is our ally, and this bard is escorted by a courier of the Triune Council, is he not?”

“It’s a very old law, sir.”

“Then let’s move on and flush it down the shit sluice. Bring in some extra mariners if you think it prudent but allow the courier and bard to approach.”

Föstyr rattled off some orders and there was a general scramble to obey, and the pelenaut looked back at me and smirked briefly, sharing a moment of amusement that the same muscle-bound bullies who used to slap him around as a child now thought of nothing but his safety.

Pelenaut Röllend and I had been childhood friends and used to get beat up by the same bands of fish heads in our youth, before he got his kenning and became politically powerful. After he closed the university out of necessity—my office and classroom were lodging for refugees now—he brought me to court to be a historian of sorts during a historically significant time, since his usual court scribe had been drafted to help administer the families staying in Survivor Field and record the many deaths they reported. My fingers were ink-stained and cramped from sitting at a desk behind and to the right of the coral throne and scribbling down everything I could, but I was grateful for the work and the cot to crash on when I couldn’t bear to face Elynea and proud of the leader my old friend Rölly had become.

He didn’t sit on his throne very much; he tended to pace in front of it, fully engaged in the governing of the country, especially now that we were fighting for our very survival as a people. “Water which does not move stagnates,” he explained. And when he wasn’t forced to govern from (or in front of) his seat of power, he toured the city in disguise, taking only a discreet bodyguard along to “solve problems upstream” before they could flow down to him in the Wellspring.

Once she was admitted, the courier proved to be an unusually tall and striking woman, her hair pulled tightly from her face and gathered in the back with a golden torc and a pair of goggles dangling around her neck. Her rust-red leather armor—and the bard’s as well—was spattered with the guts of insects, the visible drawback to a courier’s kenning. The ability to run so fast that insects became a hazard simultaneously thrilled and disgusted me.

The bard stood a step behind the courier when she halted in front of the throne. She nodded to the pelenaut and said, “Pelenaut Röllend, I am Numa, Courier of the Huntress Raena,” in that strange formal protocol the Raelechs used: always their given name, profession, and patron goddess. She told him about the approaching armies that were supposed to join with us and mount a counterattack against the Bone Giants, which would have been very interesting to me if the bard hadn’t been there with her. I confess I missed some of the details because I was far too curious about her companion—which probably proves that I am not the best court recorder.

Bards and couriers were elite castes in the Raelech system, which allowed only seven and twenty of each to exist at any time. Couriers we saw often, but I doubted anyone in the Wellspring had ever seen a Raelech bard before. He had a pack on his back with a couple of stringed instruments sticking up out of the top, a rather full pouch of something at his belt that was far too big to be a purse, and a pleasant, confident expression that I envied. I would not be so comfortable meeting the ruler of another country.

“Very well,” Rölly said when the courier’s official message ended. “What other news do you have for me?”

“Only an introduction, sir, and a request for lodging this evening. I will return in the morning to take any reply you wish back to the Triune Council.” Numa took two steps back so that the bard was closest to the throne, and she gestured to him. “My colleague in service to the Triune and my lifebond, Fintan.” Her smile as she introduced him was proud.

The pelenaut was not the only one who had to squelch a look of surprise at that personal addition. Fintan was not conventionally handsome, and the top of his head reached only to Numa’s chin. They did not appear to be well matched, but that only increased my curiosity.

Rölly stopped pacing, netted his fingers together, and nodded once at the bard. “Tell me why you are here, Fintan.”

“I …” He flicked his eyes back at his wife, who nodded in encouragement. “I am a gift of sorts from the Triune Council.”

“A gift?”

“It would be more accurate to say I am on loan. I am to go with the Raelech army once it arrives, but in the meantime, I am to provide my services to the people of Pelemyn free of charge.”

“Your services?”

“Entertainment, sir.”

“What? Singing and dancing?”

The bard shuddered at the thought of dancing and said, “The occasional song, perhaps. But mostly it will be the tale of how we got here so that we will know where we are going.”

Pelenaut Röllend’s eyes widened. “You presume to know where this is all headed?”

“No, sir. The future always waits until the present to reveal its plans. But the past can clarify our goals for us sometimes, help us say goodbye to those we haven’t let go, even realize that we need to change. That is the magic of stories. And my kenning allows me to tell stories better than anyone else, if you’ll allow me a moment of immodesty.”

“I don’t understand. The Third Kenning is of the earth, but the Raelech blessed are known for erecting stone walls and destroying them more than anything else. How does that allow you to tell stories well?”

“Bards do have an unusual adaptation to the kenning, sir,” Fintan replied, and flicked his eyes to his wife. “We share one with couriers, in fact: a perfect memory, the memory of earth. Crucial to storytelling and to relaying messages alike. But where couriers are gifted with extraordinary speed, bards are gifted with extraordinary voices. Our voices can be heard for a league if we wish it, and we can also take on the voices and likenesses of those we have met. It allows us to tell the story of the earth and the people on it.”

“You can change your appearance? I have heard rumors of this talent but have never seen it. My Lung informs me that we have a law against it.”

“I’m well aware, sir. Most of the nations do out of an excess of caution. It’s why we bards are rarely seen outside the borders of Rael. May I have your permission to demonstrate this aspect of my kenning?”

The pelenaut nodded, and Fintan fished in a pouch to produce one of his black spheres, about the size of a small egg—at that time we didn’t know what it was. When he pulled it out, Föstyr barked and four mariners sprang forward, spears pointed at the bard’s throat. Fintan froze and Numa protested as more mariners surrounded the pelenaut and moved him back from the perceived threat, but Röllend demanded that they leave the bard untouched and then, somewhat exasperated behind a wall of flesh and armor, asked Fintan what he might have there.

“My deepest apologies for not explaining first. It is a natural rock we extract from the Poet’s Range, easily broken and hollow inside, that will release a gas that allows me to cast a seeming.”

“How does a gas allow you to cast a seeming?”

“I am imprinting it now, as I hold it, with the form and voice I wish to take.”

“Whose?”

“Yours, Pelenaut Röllend. I thought it might be amusing.”

“You thought it would be amusing to impersonate the pelenaut?” Föstyr roared. His anger caused some of the mariners’ spear points to twitch, and Fintan’s eyes shot back and forth between them.

“I am reevaluating the humor now, and I admit it does not hold up well to inspection. My comedic instincts are below average at best.”

Rölly shot me a glance that indicated that he thought the bard’s humor was perfectly serviceable. “Remain still,” he said, “and explain precisely what you were about to do with that rock.”

“I was going to throw it onto the toe of my boot, where it would break, and once the gas rose and adhered to my form, I would seem to be you. If I may be allowed to continue under the close supervision of your mariners, you will see how easily the illusion is pierced—ah, no. Not pierced. Poor choice of words.” The bard tried to make eye contact with the mariners without moving. “Please do not pierce anything, gentlemen.”

“Very well. Mariners, please take a step back and let the bard enact exactly what he spoke.” As they did so, Pelenaut Röllend added, “Make sure that rock goes to your feet and nowhere else, sir, or my mariners may misinterpret your intentions.”

“Understood.”

Once given room, Fintan tossed the pellet down, the gas rose up around him, and he copied Pelenaut Röllend’s form perfectly, growing a foot in stature and changing his clothes from the Raelech rust and brown leathers to the Brynt blue and white tailoring. He smiled broadly and spoke in the pelenaut’s own voice, “You are looking very fine today, sir, if I may say so.”

After the gasps of awe at this demonstration I followed the gaze of Föstyr, who was turning his head back and forth to judge the accuracy of the copy. If he found a flaw, he didn’t say so.

“Well done,” the Lung said. “And how do we banish this seeming?”

“Any physical contact or a strong wind can blow it away. Or rain, for that matter. It is easily dispersed. Please ask one of your mariners to clap me on the shoulder or shake my hand or any other nonlethal contact and watch what happens.”

Föstyr chucked his chin at one of the mariners, and the man reached out with his left hand and laid it on the bard’s shoulder. The fabric of the tunic parted like vapor, his hand sank out of sight as if into a cloud, and when he removed his hand, there was a hole in the pelenaut’s seeming through which we could see Fintan’s leathers somewhat below. The seeming of the pelenaut said, “Thank you, that will do admirably,” and his voice changed from Röllend’s baritone to Fintan’s tenor by the end of the sentence. “You see, I never physically change my shape—it is all an optical illusion—and the seeming cannot survive physical contact.” The seeming began to warp and slide in disturbing fashion as the gas lost the surface tension keeping it together. Fintan slowly raised his own left hand and wiped at his face so that we could see him again, and after that larger breach was made, the seeming came apart much more quickly over the rest of his body. “When I perform, I have a different gas that disperses this more quickly. These gifts of the poet goddess are intended to help me tell stories, not practice espionage, and it is easily countered.”

“But you understand why it leads to mistrust,” the pelenaut said.

“I do, sir. That’s why we wished to be forthright with you,” the bard said, and the pelenaut asked the mariners to back off.

“This story you wish to tell,” Föstyr said. “Can you give us the short version?”

“Certainly.” Once Fintan outlined the broad swaths of his tale, it was quickly decided to accept the bard’s services and allow him to meet Tallynd du Böll. The pelenaut grew enthusiastic about what it would do for the city’s morale—the prospect had already visibly improved his own—and then he startled me by whipping his head around in my direction.

“Master Dervan. Come forward, please.” I laid down my pen and rose, clasping my hands behind my back to hide my stained fingers, then limped as quickly as my old knee injury would allow. The pelenaut signaled with an arm that I should stand beside him, and once I did, he presented me to the bard. “Numa and Fintan, this is Master Dervan du Alöbar, lately of the university but currently my court historian. I would consider it a personal favor, Fintan, if you would allow him to record your tale for posterity.”

If the bard was as surprised as I was by the request, he hid it well. He was so smooth that I wondered what it would take to rattle him; even the spear points had only made him careful. “A pleasure to meet you, Master Dervan,” he said. Numa said nothing but nodded at me when our eyes met. “And of course you are welcome to write it down. Should I be worried about the speed of your handwriting?”

The pelenaut smiled and answered for me. “He will do his best, and of course you shall approve the manuscript.”

That elicited an answering grin from the bard. “An opportunity to improve on my performance! A dangerous incentive to offer a poet.” His eyes slid over to me, amused and clearly teasing me. “We could be editing for years, Master Dervan.”

“So be it,” I said, infected by the bard’s good nature.

“Excellent,” Pelenaut Röllend said, and then he deftly handed the Raelechs off to Föstyr to see to the details of their lodging for the evening while he recessed the court for a few minutes and drew me with him behind the throne to the Wellspring’s water wall. Normally this fell in an unbroken curtain of water that made only a pleasant background noise, but there were rocks set in the wall and Rölly used his kenning to split the stream again and again around those rocks to make the water drop as noisily as possible into the drainage basin and thus obscure our conversation from any nearby ears.

Rölly threw an arm around my shoulders and said in a low voice, “Welcome to the world of intrigue, Master Dervan. That man is a spy for the Triune Council. A very politely introduced spy but a spy nonetheless. And you get to watch him.”

“What?”

“You’re perfectly suited for the job.”

“How can you say that, Rölly? I’m an historian. I study things in the past so I don’t have to deal with people in the present.”

“Remember to keep your voice down,” he cautioned. A recessed court did not equal an empty one. “And you weren’t always an historian. You were an excellent mariner before your injury forced a career change. And Sarena must have taught you a thing or two.”

My jaw dropped. Sarena had been a spy for Rölly and for his predecessor as well. Publicly I had presented her death as the result of a tragic fatal disease, but the two of us and the hygienist knew that she actually had been poisoned at some point with a slow-acting agent. Her liver failed over a period of weeks, and we had no idea who had done it or when precisely she had been poisoned. A representative from almost any country could have been responsible; someone had wanted her removed permanently from the diplomatic corps and had been exceedingly clever about it. She had shared some of her professional life with me as she weakened, knowing the end was near, but it was nothing like training.

Turning down my volume but turning up the desperation in my expression, I said, “A thing or two doesn’t make me perfectly suited. I don’t know what to do. I can’t fight well or keep secrets or anything.” I could hold a spear or sword but could not be expected to hold my ground. I could still walk without a cane most days, but my right knee would buckle at any pressure more strenuous than moving slowly forward.

“You don’t know any secrets, so it’s not a problem,” he said, and that was true. Sarena had never shared anything sensitive with me. “And you don’t need to fight.”

“What am I supposed to do?”

“Have lunch with the guy every day and write down his story. Add in what you want about what’s happening here. Ask him questions about Rael or whatever you like. He’ll ask you about yourself and the city.”

“And I’m supposed to answer?”

“Of course. Tell him the truth. Even about Sarena if he asks. I’m sure he already knows, and there’s no way we can hide our situation here when he can see it for himself.”

“What’s the catch?”

“You can’t sleep in the palace anymore. You have to go home, Dervan.”

My stomach churned at the thought of it. “Why? I prefer it here, and I don’t mind the cot.”

“I understand your home is fraught with memories of your wife. But you have dammed up your emotions long enough, and you need to let them flow again. You can heal from this, and you will. That is what I say to every Brynt alive right now.” He squeezed my shoulder and found my eyes. “Look, my friend, this is history happening right now. It needs to be written down, and I trust you to do it. You told me once about the people who always write the histories. Who are they again?”

“The victors,” I said, and he smiled at me.

It was a bit dizzying to have another sudden change in my career—from mariner to scholar to court scribe to pseudo-spy with the country’s fate possibly stranded in a tidal pool. But I remembered to count my many blessings: the majority of Brynts had lost far more in the invasion than their comfortable careers.

Elynea had lost practically everyone she knew except for her children. Her husband and her neighbors had all been hacked to component parts by the Bone Giants just outside the walls of Festwyf. Her husband had gone outside that night to investigate alarming noises and shouted at her to pick up the kids and run, don’t look back. Spurred by the fear in his voice and the cries of others, she had done just that, barefoot and carrying nothing but her children.

They woke up screaming for their father most nights.

The kids seemed happy, though, when I arrived at my wee cottage with some fresh fish and a bag of rice practically plucked off a Fornish grain barge that had just docked. Through the window I saw (and heard) that Tamöd was pretending to be a tidal mariner diving for pearls and Pyrella was impersonating an unusually argumentative oyster. Elynea watched them from a chair at the kitchen table, eyes puffy and red but not actively weeping or even frowning. She wasn’t smiling either, but perhaps the antics of her children would make that happen soon. I paused, feeling somewhat guilty at interrupting their peaceful moment by walking into my own house. But the fish wouldn’t be getting any fresher that way.

I knocked on my door as a warning and called out a friendly hello. They startled and then relaxed, the kids shouting “Dervaaaan!” by way of welcome. Elynea rose, self-conscious, and looked about the kitchen and living area, perhaps to make sure nothing had been damaged by her inattention.

“Oh,” she said, “we didn’t expect you.”

“I didn’t expect to be here either. Things have changed a bit at the palace.”

“They have? Not for the worse, I hope.”

“Too early to tell. Hopefully it’s for the better. But I won’t need to work quite as much. Occasional morning meetings, but mostly I’ll start at noon from now on and be finished by the early evening.”

“That actually sounds like a better job. Is it?”

“We’ll see. I start tomorrow.”

Tamöd and Pyrella regaled me with tales of the tidal mariner and the oyster while Elynea and I tiptoed around each other, anxious not to invade the other’s privacy. She pretended she hadn’t been crying, and I pretended I didn’t notice.

“Perhaps, if you will be here in the morning, I could look for a job,” she ventured over dinner.

“While I look after the kids? Sure, I can do that.”

“Thank you,” she said, and then said practically nothing else the entire evening as if she felt she had trespassed enough.

Elynea made an effort to look confident and capable in the morning, and I think she pulled it off. Her curled cloud of hair was pulled back from her forehead with a white headband, and she wore a deep orange tunic with a white belt and brown pants tucked into boots.

“That’s new,” I noticed.

“Donated to me by the kind woman across the street.”

I wished her luck and assured her that the kids would be fine, and she left in what I supposed passed for good spirits.

She returned at noon, defeated, her voice grating like a millstone. “There’s no work to be had. At least no work for me. So many desperate people looking. Some of them can still smile, though.” She shook her head. “I don’t know how they do it.”

I was silent for a few moments, thinking about how I managed it. When I thought of Sarena, watching her die slowly and helpless to prevent it, I found it impossible to smile, too.

“I think … maybe …?” Elynea turned to me, waiting for me to finish. “They have figured out a way to forget temporarily.” Her eyebrows climbed, and she shook her head at the impossibility of this. “No, I know you can’t ever forget such a huge part of yourself,” I assured her. “It’s always there, an enormous thing—like the palace. But sometimes, you can go into a tiny room, lock the door behind you, and that vast, overwhelming sadness is on the other side. It’ll always be there, and you can’t stay in that locked room forever. But maybe, while you can’t see it, you can forget about it a tiny while and discover something to smile about before you have to emerge and face the enormity again. And then, who knows? Maybe you’ll find more and more rooms to smile in, and over time the character of the palace changes until it’s the sadness that’s locked in those tiny rooms and not the happiness. Maybe that’s what healing is like.”

Elynea stared at me, a plateau of sorts that I hoped might end well, but she dissolved into a loud sob and ran into my bedroom, slamming the door.

“Or maybe my skill with extended metaphors leaves much to be desired,” I said.

“Why did you make my mom cry?” Tamöd shouted.

“You’re so mean! I hate you!” Pyrella added, and the two of them ran to the other bedroom and followed the example of their mother by slamming the door as forcefully as they could. Sadness and anger behind the doors.

“Shit,” I said. This was why I preferred history. All the shouting was in the past, and none of them had been shouting at me.

This is not to say that Elynea and her children were not welcome to my home; with my wife lost the winter before the invasion, I had more space than I needed, and sharing it was the least I could do in a time of crisis. Sharing any more than that, though, was impossible. Perhaps she saw the yawning empty place in my chest that Sarena used to fill and speculated about moving in there, and maybe she wondered if I could occupy the space in her heart where her husband used to live. It was a terrible idea: neither one of us would be anything more than a squatter. I counted on my new work to distract me from such matters and give me an excuse to stay out of her way. We would all be better off if we respected one another’s emptiness.

But as I began to make myself a solitary lunch before heading to the wall for the bard’s first performance, I resolved to write this story as you see it set down now. The bard would have his story, and we would have ours. There is heroism to be found in great battles, it is true: warriors with stable knees who fight and know that they will die for an idea or for the safety of loved ones back home. But there are also people who spend their entire adulthood at a soulless job they despise to make sure their children have something to eat that night so that one day those kids may lead better, more fulfilling lives than their parents. The warrior and the worker both make sacrifices. Who, then, is more heroic? Can any of us judge? I don’t think I’m qualified. I’ll let history decide. But I do not think we should leave it all up to warriors and rulers to speak to the future. We all have our stories to tell, and since I’ve been granted permission by Pelenaut Röllend himself, I will add a few of my own to the bard’s.

The space on either side of Pelemyn’s western wall looked quite different when we returned for the bard’s second performance. By midafternoon, the closest lots on the exterior of the wall had been cleared—the pelenaut sent longshoremen to help the dislocated families move—and wood benches had been hammered together and arranged in rows to provide dense seating. The longshoremen also helped food and drink vendors set up an alley of stalls behind the benches, including one from the Siren’s Call, while hygienists worked with a visiting Raelech stonecutter to construct a row of public privies and tie them into the sewers.

It wasn’t the plodding drudgery of day-to-day living; people worked with a purpose, with small tight grins on their faces, anticipating the fruit of their labors. I knew because after I met Fintan for our first lunch and faithfully wrote down everything he had said the day before, there was an hour or so to spend before he spoke again, and I decided to help however I could. I wound up helping a family from Göfyrd relocate to another plot so that the privies could be built underneath their original campsite. It was something of a chore for the family and me, but they felt, as I did, that the bard’s story would turn out to be worth it.

The structures inside the city were not so easily moved, but building owners with a view of the wall put out chairs on roofs or rigged scaffolds in some cases so that they could see, and even though their view would consist primarily of the bard’s backside, there were people willing to pay for such seats.

Once I returned to the wall, I saw that someone had constructed a sturdier stage for the bard as well. Instead of a hastily assembled stack of crates, he had several square layered platforms, like a cake, that allowed him to be seen above the battlements. He climbed atop it, threw his arms wide, and let his voice ring out through the city and beyond it. “Hello, friends! Are we ready for day two?”

An answering roar assured him that the city was. Or almost. It was already clear from my vantage point on the wall that the benches would not come close to providing enough seating for everyone in Survivor Field who wished to see the bard. Many more clogged the area in front of the stalls, and a seething mass of heads could be seen beyond that point, people streaming in to get closer once the bard spoke. They didn’t absolutely need to—his voice clearly carried to wherever they were—but they wanted to lay eyes on the people he seemed to be, however distantly. It would be a challenge for the pelenaut’s men and women to solve.

“Before I continue the tale I began last night, I wish to give you time to settle in, as it were, for a fine afternoon’s entertainment. I see people streaming in from far off in Survivor Field, and I am sure some of you are currently occupied in some kind of work or another and cannot simply drop it. And so I will sing you one of the old Drowning Songs that my master taught me when I was an apprentice.” An appreciative noise swelled from the crowd.

“I do not know if you knew this,” Fintan continued, “but the Brynt Drowning Songs are popular in Rael. They speak of dangers and poor decisions and teach your children well how to survive the sea. They also have the benefit of being short, which makes them easy to remember.” He had brought a small handheld harp with him, and he plucked a major chord, its notes singing across the city.

“I was reminded of this one by Master Yöndyr’s Mistmaiden Ale. Haven’t sung it in many years, but perhaps you will recognize it. This is ‘Mistmaiden’s Kiss,’ though of course the Mistmen are equally dangerous and you can switch the gender to suit you.” He struck a different chord, a haunting minor one, letting the notes fade in the air before he launched into the lyrics:

In the chill gray of a Barebranch morn

She came to me like curving coils of vapor;

Out of the air’s moisture was she born

With skin like onion paper.

Pale, hungry, lithe, and beckoning,

With a breathy sigh she begged a kiss,

But on her lips lay a reckoning

And a trip to the abyss.

I fought my lust and tried to run,

But it was all for naught in the end;

I kissed her and it’s done,

So into darkness I descend.

His rendition gave me chills, and I shuddered, thinking of the wraiths that haunted the Mistmaiden Isles and how terrible it would be to join them. Fintan caught my expression and grinned. “Good that we heard that one on a bright sunny day, yes?” Laughter from the city as he carefully put his harp aside.

“Right! I have three tales for you today. Just as we bards rarely leave the borders of Rael, Fornish greensleeves are rarely seen by anyone outside their country. They don’t like to leave their forest as it gives them that fish-out-of-water feeling, and even when they do, they avoid outsiders. I imagine it’s because people stare at them. And if you aren’t sure why that would be the case, well, I’ll show you. Meet Nel Kit ben Sah,” he said, producing a black sphere from his pouch and tossing it at his feet.

A ripple of awe spread through the crowd when they saw the pale figure revealed on the stage, diminutive and blond, sheltered from the sun all her life from living under the vast canopy of Forn. Her clothing was brown yet mottled in a pattern that would allow it to blend into the bark of most trees. Over her shirt she wore a hunter green waistcoat, also broken up into a pattern that would deflect eyes and keep her camouflaged in the canopy. She carried a bow and had a quiver of arrows strapped to her back—none of which was the awe-inspiring part. We had a few Fornish immigrants living in Pelemyn and their traders often visited our port, so it wasn’t her size or pale skin that amazed everyone. It was the living bark on her arms and legs that drew gasps from the crowd. No other kenning wrought such a transformation on the blessed. The moss growing on the bark of her arms gave her the green sleeves of her kenning’s namesake, and mushrooms like miniature white shelves grew on her shins. (I wondered if she ever ate them, and as soon as I thought of it, I knew it was the sort of question you would never, ever ask her if you wanted to live.)

My cousin Pen Yas Min has abruptly been granted permission to seek her kenning! I am filled with the excitement of planting season tripled, when you have a handful of seeds and can envision the bounty that will spring forth months later, but there’s also the worries about weather or blights that could ruin the harvest. It is a period pregnant with potential, and I love such moments for their mystery.

Her parents were originally against it, but someone must have changed their minds—perhaps my great-uncle, Mat Som ben Sah, our clan’s only other greensleeve. He may have reminded them of the prestige that comes with having a blessing, and with that prestige came economic opportunity. And Pen did not fail to remind her parents that seeking a kenning was not only her dearest wish but that younger Seekers typically enjoyed more success than older ones.

So they held the farewell ceremony, bidding goodbye to their child and she to them in case she was taken by the roots, and I think by that time her mother was genuinely excited for her and at peace with the decision. Her father had more difficulty performing his part of the leave-taking with open petals. He doubtless hoped Pen would grow closer to the family trunk, and I think he would have trimmed her ambitions if he could, kept her like treasured topiary, beautiful and safe but ultimately the reflection of the gardener’s will rather than the will of the Canopy. Should Pen be taken by the roots, I feared he would blame his wife for it; so many people thought it appropriate to prune the branching of others and could not bear to watch others grow as their natures suggested.

Pen and I traveled together on the Leaf Road to the First Tree in Selt, and I was pleased with her sure-footed progress and unaided stamina. Should she be blessed, both her agility and her stamina would improve.

The road widened the closer we got to our capital, and we saw the increased traffic that justified it. Merchants and craftsmen and harvesters and herbalists, scions with their students following branches of thought to their ends, and the occasional benman like myself who nodded to me as I passed.

Pen tapped my shoulder after one such encounter, her eyes large with wonder, and asked me, “Was that a thornhand?” I was surprised at first that she had never seen one before and then realized she would have had no occasion to before now. They were almost all stationed on the southwestern coast closest to Hathrir, defending against timber pirates, whereas our clan was in the northwest foothills of the Godsteeth. “Yes, it was.”

“How do they sleep?” she asked, worried about the thorns growing at the base of their skulls and spreading out down the spine and over the shoulder blades.

“On their stomachs, usually. Some of them manage to sleep on their sides. Depends on how they arrange their arms,” I explained, for the tops of their forearms were thorny as well from near the elbow all the way to the backs of the hand.

“Have you ever seen a thornhand fight?”

“No. We’ve been blessed with peace, so there’s been no call for them to transform. I might see it someday, but that’s no cause for joy.”

She was silent for a while, considering. It was possible that she might become a thornhand herself and have that difficulty sleeping. Possible that she might be called upon to fight the Hathrim and leave the Canopy to do it. And also possible that she might spend her life prepared for a fight that never came. When people sought the Fifth Kenning, they often hoped to be a grassglider or a greensleeve or even one of the specialized culturists while willfully ignoring the chances of becoming a thornhand. That was why she would see more of them when we arrived at the First Tree: every Seeker should know the fullness of her odds before being presented.

The Leaf Road turned from a mixture of hardwoods to exclusively silverbark branches, and I knew we were close. Our progress slowed because we had so many more people to weave through, but I don’t think Pen minded at all. She was enjoying the strangeness and wonder of Selt, seeing the vines and ladders trailing or dangling all around the Leaf Road that led to merchant and craft huts, clan halls, or private homes. Such things existed in the White Gossamer Grove in the north, but not on this scale.

We reached the ring of sentinel trees that guarded the First Tree, and two members of the Gray Squirrel Clan stood there, blocking the Leaf Road that led to the trunk. Only greensleeves could go any farther, and only those who had business to conduct in the sway and spoke for their clans. We halted in front of them and bowed.

“Bright sun to you both. I come with a Seeker. Where shall I take her?”

The one on our left nodded, an older woman. “Northeast side today, shortly after noon. You should have time to make it.”

That was a good piece of luck. Had we missed it, we might have had to wait up to a week before the First Tree was ready to accept Seekers again. We thanked them and circled around to the north, pausing at the Silver Leaf Public House to take in some greens and juices. There was a gathering of Black Jaguars in one corner whom I recognized because Pak Sey ben Kor was with them, along with one other I’d seen before at the Second Tree in Pont. I wondered what brought them to the First Tree. But then I saw that all their attention was pointed at a young man about Pen’s age. A clan send-off for their own Seeker, then. One with some fairly close ties to Pak or else he would not have made the trip. Well, good for the young man: I hoped he would serve the Canopy well.

I was fortunate not to be spotted by the Black Jaguars during our repast, but once Pen and I departed and made our way to the Seeking ground, we could not avoid Pak Sey ben Kor’s notice. Especially since he was the personal escort for his clan’s Seeker and joined us underneath the First Tree’s canopy. There were sixteen Seekers all told, each from a different clan and escorted by a greensleeve. To the Gray Squirrel record keeper I introduced Pen as my cousin and offered her as a Seeker to the First Tree on behalf of the White Gossamers, and it was thanks to a similar introduction that I learned that the Black Jaguar Seeker was Pak Sey ben Kor’s nephew. He looked confident about his Seeking, though whether he truly was or was merely pretending to be I could not tell. Most of the others, including Pen, had a very sensible sequence of expressions cycling on their faces, from excitement to uncertainty to dread and back again.

Rich and loamy soil squished pleasantly between our toes. The Seekers all disrobed and stood waiting in a cluster an arm’s length away from one another on all sides. When the Gray Squirrel attendant nodded to us, we greensleeves each extended our shoots into the earth and spoke to the roots of the First Tree, introducing our Seekers again and sharing our love and pride and hope.

The earth rumbled and croaked beneath us as the roots of the First Tree stirred. Pen looked down at her feet, where the soil churned, and then up at me, tears shining in her eyes and a curious half smile on her face. I remembered that feeling. Being taken by the tree is a wondrous admixture of the sun and all the horrors of night, for you are struck by the immense power it represents and how very small you are in comparison, feeling all the hope for a blessed life along with the terror of dying in darkness.

Brown roots spiraled out of the soil and twined around the Seekers as they stood still. And then, when they were all wrapped up and began to descend into the earth, drawn down to be blessed or devoured, there were some last looks at their clansmen and then up at the Canopy and what little sunlight filtered through the leaves. For approximately half of them, it would be their final chance to see the sun.

By long-standing tradition we greensleeves withdrew our shoots as soon as the Seekers disappeared beneath the surface and ascended to the lowest branch above, there to wait out the time until we reunited with our clansmen or carried sorrowful news back home.

It was a tense and fearful time made longer by uncertainty. They were all down there long enough to suffocate. Except that the blessed would be brought into symbiosis with the Canopy and sustained during the process. So our clansmen might already be dead after a few spare minutes or else going through the racking pain of mutation. We would not know until they rose from the earth or did not. It was the lot of birds to chirp and chase one another, the lot of others to smile and eat and sleep and fight and lie with one another, but it was ours to worry and hope.

An hour passed, and the Red Horses were blessed with a new grassglider, a grinning young woman who waved at us as soon as she emerged. The Yellow Bats got a new culturist blessed with the ability to husband teas, an economic boon for sure. The Blue Moths sprouted a new thornhand. And the blessed were slowly returned, one by one, until seven greensleeves had departed with their newly blessed and nine of us remained on the branch. It would not be unheard of for nine of sixteen to be taken by the roots. It would be almost common. But there might yet be a new greensleeve to arise from the earth, or a thornhand. We had not passed the time of no return: the Gray Squirrel record keeper would tell us when we could extinguish our hope. So I continued to wait … and hope. And so did Pak Sey ben Kor.

We nine stared at the earth, willing it to bubble and shoot forth hands and then the heads and bodies of our clansmen, returned to the air to serve the Canopy for the span of a lifetime. But nothing happened. The soil remained still, and the sun continued to sink toward the horizon. My throat began to close, and I fought back tears that wanted to spill for Pen.

Not yet. She could still emerge.

My eyes began to dart back and forth between the ground and the Gray Squirrel recorder who kept the time. She was looking at a sun-stone to determine when the longest recorded time of blessing had passed, and I wondered how accurate it could possibly be, denials already building in my mind. The First Tree couldn’t have taken Pen. If the Gray Squirrel had one of those new clockworks from Rael that ticked away the moments as its gears turned, that might be more accurate than squinting at a half-seen shadow underneath a silverbark’s canopy. She raised a finger and took breath to speak, and I thought, No, not Pen. Not Pen.

“The time has passed, greensleeves,” she said, looking up at us. “Your clans have honored the First Tree.”

Not Pen.

“Wait! Look!” Pak Sey ben Kor shouted, pointing at the earth.

It was moving. And I was in time to see pale fingers erupt from the soil and clutch at the air. Then a second hand, both arms—and they were arms covered in silverbark. “It’s a new greensleeve!”

I gasped and stared, unblinking. The Gray Squirrel had spoken too soon. Or else this was the new record for longest blessing. Who did those arms belong to?

Blond hair like mine and a face racked by pain emerged—it was Pen in all the first agonies of the blessing! I cried out in relief, and my fists shot up to the sky. I nearly fell off the branch in my excitement. “Pen! You’re blessed!”

I dropped down from the branch and ran to her, steadying her before she could fall. Most new greensleeves couldn’t walk for the pain in their legs—I certainly couldn’t. The Gray Squirrel came over with a modesty blanket that wouldn’t cover up her bark, and together we helped her to a recovery lift. She wept and asked me why it hurt so much.

“The symbiosis isn’t complete yet. You’ll be in pain for another couple of weeks while your body adapts to the silverbark. But getting you to full sun is important now. We have just a couple of hours before nightfall.”

“Why didn’t you tell me it hurt so much?”

“Would it have stopped you from wanting to be a greensleeve?”

“No.”

“Then there was no point. I know it might not feel like it right now, but you have been truly blessed, Pen. When the symbiosis is complete, you’ll feel that blessing every day. I know I do.”

The Gray Squirrel whistled and shook a rope vine to signal to the attendants up top that it was time to do their jobs. The lift began to rise, and the Gray Squirrel stepped off, leaving me alone on the lift with Pen. I spared a quick glance back at the branch where we had waited; it was empty now. Pak Sey ben Kor and the rest of them had departed, disappointed, no doubt, with hearts crushed by grief. I was sorry for them and their Seekers but also wondered if this might not be the first hint of the Black Jaguar Clan’s autumn. Their summer of rule had been long and prosperous, but perhaps they had become complacent and the First Tree wished to make a point. Or perhaps there was no significance to it at all. They were a large clan and no doubt had many Seekers throughout the year. One or two or three taken by the roots would be expected. But if they lost Seekers consistently, then—well, I suppose it didn’t matter that much. The White Gossamers had no consistent presence at the First Tree and none at all on the east coast at Keft. I didn’t want to be that presence, and I doubted Pen did either. I wanted to serve the Canopy in the field more than the sway, and I thought my cousin was of like mind. Or would be once the pain subsided.

“Will you … stay with me?” she managed to say through clenched teeth.

“Just tonight, then I must get back to my duties. You are supposed to make your own way home anyway, trusting root and stem to guide you. But we have much to talk about in the meantime, and that will be a pleasant distraction from the pain. You’re going to love how the sun feels, trust me. Ah, here we are.” We arrived at the high-branched station of the Gray Squirrels operating the lift, and they nodded at us as they continued to operate the pulleys and lift us higher, above the First Tree’s topmost leaves. The full afternoon sun hit Pen’s silverbark on her arms and legs, and she gasped.

“Oh! Oh, that’s better. I mean it still hurts, but not as much. I can at least think now.”

“Then think about this: you’re one of the White Gossamer Clan’s three greensleeves now, Pen Yas ben Min.”

Her wince of pain wilted, and a smile blossomed in its place. She even managed a chuckle. “Thank you, cousin.”

“Thought you might enjoy that account of a Seeking,” Fintan said, dispelling the seeming with a shattered green stone that sent up a corresponding plume of green smoke. “We will hear more of Nel and Pen in days to come. But now I will take you back to the night of Thaw 17, 3041. Some of what I will say comes directly from the journal of Hearthfire Gorin Mogen, some of it from eyewitnesses, and some of it, I admit, is the privilege of a poet.” A few titters greeted this last. Dipping his hand into his belt pouch, he withdrew a seeming stone and imprinted it. “Though kennings are not hereditary and the giants insist you do not need to be blessed to become a Hearthfire, some blessed member of the Mogen family has ruled Harthrad for the last hundred and thirty years, and it is from that island that the finest smiths in the world can be found. Say hello to a leader of the Hathrim.”

Despite his warning, no one was prepared for Fintan’s transformation into a pale-skinned, broad-boned giant. He disappeared in black gases, and his new bulk rose out of it, a colossus twelve feet tall with a square, black-bearded face punctuated by ice-blue eyes and a snarl. He was wrapped in the fur of some massive white-pelted animal, and when he roared, people screamed. I might have been one of them. He laughed at us, enjoying the fear and no doubt relishing the power of his kenning. When next he spoke, it was in a gravelly rumble entirely unlike his normal pleasant tones.

The only reason I didn’t kill the lad who woke me was that he did it from the door and closed it on the dagger I whipped from under my pillow and threw at his face. I am prone to violence beyond reason when I am woken from a sound sleep. The rest of the time I like to think I have a reason for my violence.

“Hearthfire, you have urgent matters of state to attend to,” he shouted through the door. My dagger still quivered in the wood. Real Fornish wood, not glass or steel. The damn door to my bedchamber was worth more than much of my Hearthroom.

“The matters of state can urgently hump a sand badger until the morning,” I growled, and my hearth stirred beside me, sensuously stretching and curving in ways that soothed my sharp edges. I did not want to leave her.

“We would not wake you if it were not dire.”

Since Sefir hadn’t yet been fully roused, there was no reason to continue the argument and risk waking her, too. I slid out of the sheets, cursed silently, and allowed the moonglow streaming through the skylight to guide me to a chest on which was folded my favorite ice howler fur. Draping it about me, I opened the door and glowered at the lad who’d been sent to fetch me. I didn’t know his name, but he knew enough about the expression on my face to skitter out of throttling distance.

“Your advisers wait in the Crucible, Hearthfire.”

“Understood. Begone.”

He scampered away, and I stalked down the halls to the Crucible. Rumblings from Mount Thayil vibrated through the walls of glass and rock.

My advisers were there as the boy had promised, but none would meet my eyes. My feet must have been in a sorry state, judging by the mournful gazes directed there. These men would plunge their hands into lava for me, charge a wall bristling with archers at my command, but they would not look me in the eye. I sighed and wondered if I would ever meet another again—apart from my hearth—who could match my stare for more than a heartbeat.

“Well? What is it? Report.” They shuffled their feet and made throat-clearing noises, and one or two ventured a mumble but spectacularly failed to say anything intelligible. The news must be dire indeed for them to remain so taciturn—especially when they were in full armor and I was wearing nothing but a fur.

“I have never punished anyone for speaking truth,” I said quietly. “Nor will I now.” I paused, and after none of them took the cue to speak, I continued in the same low tone. “I have never punished anyone for remaining silent, either. But if you don’t tell me why I’m not in bed with my hearth, I’ll let you all take a swim on the Rift side of the island; is that clear?”

Their very beards trembled. It was Halsten who managed to speak first, an orange-haired, overmuscled houndmaster who braided his mustaches with silver thread. He was openly mocked for his vanity but secretly envied if I guessed correctly.

“Hearthfire, it’s the volcano …”

“Has it blown?” I snapped, my eyes narrowing.

“No, no, not yet,” Roffe assured me. No one would ever confuse him with Halsten. Roffe’s beard was brown and curly and spread like a fan to cover his chest. “But the firelords assure us of an eruption today.”

“A huge one,” Volund added, somehow managing to convey that this tiny fact was the most important ever uttered.

“I see.” If I had leisure, I would make sure to ask the firelords monitoring Thayil why I got less than a day’s notice of the end of my realm. “Our crops?” We had planted only a week ago, but already some seedlings were sprouting.

“Total loss,” Halsten said. And with less than a day to work at it, there would not be time to transplant anything.

“The city?”

“The same. We must abandon it if we wish to survive.”

“Teldwen’s tits!” I cursed, and as if in reply, the ground quaked beneath us and the sky boomed with a thunderous explosion, shattering the skylights in the Crucible. The stone pedestals set throughout the Crucible shook, toppling the priceless glass sculptures to the floor and exploding the heirlooms of my line. My sire’s works, his sire’s, my own, and my son’s recent master work exploded into slivers and shards across the polished marble. “Apparently I am not to be given enough time to get dressed.”

They didn’t hear me over the cacophony rolling through the sky. My father had warned me this day might come, and his father before him. And the firelords had warned my sires just as they had warned me: Mount Thayil would erupt again, violently, and when it did, there would be little hope of saving the city. So my grandsire had been the first Hearthfire to commission the building of transport ships, a fleet to be used for nothing except evacuating the entire population of Harthrad on short notice. The project had consumed plenty of treasure, and there were those who showered the family name of Mogen with ridicule because of it. Why do we have a functional port and a fleet of glass boats that generates no revenue whatsoever? Why are we paying men to build and maintain empty ships that are in some cases older than anyone alive? Why are we storing perfectly good food and water when we could sell it or consume it? I expected that the owners of those sneering voices would be eager to board the ships now, and a small part of me wanted to make them grovel first. But that was truly the small part of me; I knew that some of those giants would be my staunchest defenders once I saved their lives.

“Give the evacuation order,” I shouted in an attempt to be heard. “Bring only tools, weapons, armor, coin, and family members. Leave everything else behind. People who refuse to leave everything else behind will be left behind.”

“Yes, Hearthfire!” my men chorused, and then Roffe followed up. “Where are we going? Tharsif or Narvik?”

For the first time I had cause to smile. “We’re not staying in Hathrir, brothers. You know very well none of the other Hearthfires will welcome us—especially Winthir Kanek. My very presence in Tharsif would be a challenge to him. And the other islands in this blasted archipelago cannot sustain us. So we’re going to Ghurana Nent, north of the Godsteeth, bordering Forn but south of Hashan Khek.”

“We’re invading?” Volund’s voice was strangled with surprise and a note of hope.

“No, Volund; armies invade, and they attack the native populace. We’re refugees, you see, so we’re settling. Settling in a land with bountiful natural resources we won’t have to import anymore. Close to a mountain that won’t explode on us and full of metals and close to our Fornish trading partners in Pont. Closer still to forests we can harvest ourselves. We will all build new hearths and prosper. And our excuse for all is the eruption of Mount Thayil. Thus we turn a disaster for our generation into a boon for our heirs. We plead innocence and beg for charity, and all the while we build defenses, and by the time the Nentians realize we don’t plan to ever leave, they’ll discover that they have a hare’s chance in a falcon heath of making us. This was my grandsire’s plan, passed on to my sire and passed on to me. Think on it,” I admonished, waggling a finger, “but say nothing. Have everyone get safely in the sea and then follow my ship, telling them only that I’m leading them to safe harbor. Is that clear?”

“As glass, Hearthfire,” Volund said. He was smiling now, and so were Roffe and Halsten. They finally saw what my grandsire had seen—that this eruption, long expected, wasn’t the end for us but the beginning. Indeed, it was a much-needed spur to our withers, urging our people off this blasted rock to a land large and rich enough for the Hathrim.

The air boomed again, and I had to shout to be heard. “We will speak more in private once we arrive. I must retrieve my armor and tell Sefir we’re leaving. Halsten, don’t forget the damn hounds and some livestock. We will need them eventually. See you at the docks.” My advisers turned to relay my orders to the city, moving in a strange sort of pantomime. Normally I would hear the creak and clank of their armor as they moved, but all was lost to the bone-shaking roar of Mount Thayil.

Roffe never made it out. A black boulder of volcanic basalt plowed through the ceiling and obliterated him, and the impact vaulted Halsten and Volund a good distance away. Had my grandsire not built so well, the entire structure might have collapsed on us. As it was, we had no time to bid Roffe a proper farewell, not if we wished to survive ourselves. We needed to get out fast and hope that everyone with some kind of kenning made it to the boats.

Harthrad has a goodly measure of firelords like myself and a number of lesser lavaborn but no furies like some of the southern cities. In Ghurana Nent there will be few opportunities for our young giants to visit the fires of Olenik, to burn away the child and be reborn immune to flame and heat. I have not spoken of it yet to anyone, but I think it is vital for our long-term survival that we find the Sixth Kenning, which some believe is a fable but which logic insists must be there. For without it—or at least reliable access to the First Kenning in Olenik—we will flicker and wane as a people until we are snuffed. Better that we find the Sixth Kenning and gain dominion over animals. Think what we could do then with our hounds! Discovering it would be a great gift to my people and a fine legacy.

I gave the Crucible one last look as Halsten and Volund got to their feet. All the beautiful glass blown by the Mogen line was destroyed, and the stained windows cracked and slid out of their iron frames, shards tinkling in silence compared with the thunder in the sky above. The gold and glass throne would melt in a lava flow, the stone of my hearth would crack from the quaking earth, and all my material wealth would burn except for the large sack of gems I would take to finance the building of a new city. Raelech stonecutters weren’t cheap, but they worked fast and loved nothing so well as riches from the earth. Even with their help, my people faced a trial of flame ahead.

As my world fell about me and I ran to my bedchamber, I laughed as I realized that I was looking forward to it.

The giant’s fingers reached into a different pouch and pulled out a green pellet, and Gorin Mogen in his ice howler fur shrank and disappeared, replaced by Fintan the Raelech bard, looking very pleased with himself and enjoying the reaction of the crowd. He threw up his hands.

“That was the origin of the western front of the war: an eruption and the execution of a plan crafted long ago. South of here, on the Brynt coast, one possible origin of the eastern front and all our woes occurred on the very next day—Thaw 18, 3041! My discovery of it was quite accidental, and had a certain seventeen-year-old merchant’s daughter not kept a diary, it would have been lost forever. Let us see what happened, shall we?” He plucked out another black sphere and held it high. “Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the delightful Kallindra du Paskre.”

This time a slim Brynt girl with large sleepy eyes, cool dark brown skin like mine, and tight curly hair allowed to grow into a cloud around her head emerged from the black smoke. She wore a light yellow tunic belted over blue pants and the slip-on sandals that we Brynts tend to favor over all other footwear. Her sardonic tone and faint grin suggested that she was perpetually amused by the world—but only because she was laughing at us, not with us.

We’ve just had the strangest encounter.

A sunburned woman crouched over a campfire as we came around the bend in the road leading to Setyrön, and she became defensive when we approached. She backed away from the light, drew a knife from a sheath, and eyed us warily like we were bandits.

Perhaps she was only embarrassed. She had almost nothing on.

Perhaps she’d been sunbathing. It was a beach, after all, and a rather nice one. It was the last gasp of twilight now, but she might have fallen asleep in the sun. I couldn’t believe it, though, because this trade route was fairly well traveled, and I saw an odd watercraft of some kind pulled up onto the sand; she might well have been burned in the boat.

Checking on the reaction of my parents, I saw Father’s jaw drop, and Mother closed his mouth with an audible chop as his teeth clicked together. Jorry, seeing this, clicked his own jaws shut, and I found that part amusing, but the rest of the scene was uniformly odd.

The woman was more than seven feet tall and moved with the sort of grace one sees in professional dancers. She was lean and looked hungry; slim muscles stood out on her arms and legs, and she didn’t have a trace of belly like normal women do. It was like she was saying she’d never make room for a child in there. She looked half starved. Well, more like seven-eighths. Around her bony hips she had tied a piece of coarse cloth, but that was all. I think it was Jorry’s first look at bare breasts, and he must have been so disappointed. He’d doubtless dreamt that his first pair of breasts to ogle would belong to someone shorter and rather more friendly and perhaps not so dreadfully pale. The woman didn’t have the milk-white skin of the Fornish, but there wasn’t anything like a respectable color to it either. It was difficult to assign a shade to it with the deepening darkness on one hand and the firelight on the other, but we could tell she wasn’t from Brynlön or Kauria. She couldn’t even be a Raelech or a Nentian. It was like all the richness of her life had been drained away.

Father slowly got down from the wagon and held up his hands to show he meant no harm. He asked the woman if she was all right in the trader’s tongue and got no reply. Without advancing, he repeated the question in Brynt, Kaurian, and even Fornish, all to no avail.

I thought he should have tried the Hathrim tongue, for she was almost tall enough to be one of the giants and everyone knows they’re pretty pasty bastards, but I don’t think Father knows their tongue well, if at all. I know only a few words myself, but I will hopefully learn more soon at the trader clave in Setyrön.

The woman kind of spat something out—I thought it might have been a sneeze at first—but then we realized she’d tried to say something to us and it made no sense in any language we knew.

“I beg your pardon?” Father asked.

The woman made the spitting noises again, and her tone made it clear that she was annoyed. Father gave up.

“I don’t think she wants to buy anything,” he said drily, climbing up to the driver’s seat. “I’m not going to waste my time with someone who looks ready to fillet me.”

“Shouldn’t we at least show her a tunic?” Mother asked. “We have the supply, and she’s got the demand if anyone does.”

“Do you see a purse on her, my love?” Father asked. “I honestly think she could use a few pies more than clothes. Looks like she hasn’t eaten in a year. Jorry, load the crossbow in case she gets any ideas.”

Jorry and I were inside the wagon as usual, watching all this from some very purposefully constructed gaps between the planks.

“The crossbow? You want me to shoot her?”

Father turned in the driver’s seat and frowned at Jorry’s tone. His eyes tried to find us even though it was as near dark as made no never mind and all we could see was the reflected firelight on half his face. He knew we could see him well enough, though. “A pair of tits can rob you just as easily as a pair of balls, boy. It doesn’t matter that one is prettier and less hairy than the other; you hear me? You’re still broke at the end of the day and on your way to starving.”

Mother scowled at the phrasing but couldn’t argue with the lesson. My brother said, “Yes, sir.”

My father will never be welcome at any Wellspring for saying such things and neither will I, but I love him for always speaking truth to us, harsh or embarrassing or sorrowful as it may be. But I think his forthright manner makes him a trusted trader; the du Paskre name will always be honored at the clave if not at the watered courts of the quartermasters. Jorry scrambled to get the crossbow ready.

Father took the reins from Mother but didn’t snap them until he heard the crossbow cocked. The strange woman watched him warily, not moving, still in a defensive stance. When father snapped the reins and clucked his tongue at the horses and the wagon began to move, the woman cried out and took a few steps toward us. She dropped the knife and spread her long arms away from her sides, empty-handed, and her tone was pleading instead of angry.

Calling a halt and reining in the horses, Father eyed the woman and then searched the darkness for possible confederates. We carried valuable goods but weren’t prosperous enough to go around hiring Raelech mercenaries to guard the wagon, so plenty of footpads thought we were ripe for the picking. Sighing as he handed the reins to Mother, he got back down.

“Keep the bow trained on her, Jorry, but don’t fire unless I say so or unless someone attacks me. Kallindra, load another bow just in case.”

I didn’t answer but moved quickly to obey. We had a tiny lantern to see by, nothing else. I did my best to keep an eye on what was happening while I did this. The woman had frozen with her arms outstretched. Father duplicated that posture, keeping out of Jorry’s line of fire. When she saw him spread his arms, she exhaled in relief and smiled as she dropped her arms. Father didn’t smile back, but he nodded at her and slowly returned his arms to his sides.

Under his loose brown trader’s robes, he wore a mail shirt and a lamellar tunic of the sort Nentians favor. He had small daggers strapped to either forearm, hidden by his sleeves. He wouldn’t be able to stand up to a soldier, but neither was he as harmless as he looked.

The woman tried to appear friendly now, but she was clearly nervous. She waved an arm at the sky and said something that sounded like a question. Father shrugged and gave a tiny shake of his head. She could have been asking if he was enjoying the fine weather or asking about constellations for all we knew.

She looked crestfallen for a moment, then tried something different. She pointed to herself and spoke about six syllables very slowly. Father repeated them, but she shook her head and repeated only the last two, again pointing to herself.

“Motah,” she said. Or something like it.

“Motah,” Father repeated, and she smiled. The first few syllables must have been the equivalent of saying “My name is” in her language. But now that I think of it, maybe Motah was the name of her people or the word for “tall daft naked woman.” Mother keeps saying I shouldn’t assume, and she’s right; it’s bad for business.

“My name is Lönsyr,” Father said. “Lönsyr.”

“Lonzeer,” the woman said, by and large bungling the vowels and swapping a z for the s.

“Close enough, sure,” Father replied.

The woman began pointing at the beach and asking questions, her eyes hopeful. Father told her she was concerned with sand, and then a beach, and then a coast when she seemed unsatisfied. The woman danced around in a circle and shrugged. Remembering the strange boat that I could no longer see in the darkness, I spoke up for the first time through the side of the wagon.

“She wants to know where she is, Father.”

“What? Hmm. I think you may be right, Kallindra.” He spoke to the woman again. “You’re in Brynlön. This is Brynlön.”

The giant woman cocked her head at him. “Lonzeer Breenlawn?”

“Oh, fire and mud,” Father groused. “This will take all night!” He held up his hands to the woman in what he hoped was a universal signal to wait. “Excuse me for a moment.” He stalked back to the rear of the wagon.

“Kallindra, fetch me a map of the continent. Jorry, keep her in your sights.”

“Yes, sir,” we chorused. I rummaged through a trunk for a recent map of Teldwen drawn by some Kaurian to celebrate the crowning of their new mistral, and once I found it, I slipped it through a gap in the planks for Father to take. There was no need to open the back door; security always. The woman hadn’t moved during this time. She waited patiently.

When Father returned to her, he squatted down and unfolded the map on the sand near her campfire. The woman’s face lit with a large smile and showed off a few crooked teeth. Father started by pointing at the cities nearby—Möllerud and Setyrön—and then jabbed repeatedly between them and said, “We are here.”

Motah, if that was her name, grinned and made affirming noises and then suddenly clocked Father upside the head with her elbow. He fell over, stunned, and she ran out of the firelight toward her boat, taking the map with her.

“Hey!” Jorry shouted, and he fired the crossbow into the dark in her general direction but must have missed. We heard no grunt or scream, only the sound of a boat hull scraping across the sand. There was no use wasting another bolt. We couldn’t see anything past the fire.

Father sat up and cursed loudly to let us know he was all right, and Mother laughed at him. She even slapped her thigh.

“You see there, Jorry?” he roared. “I just got robbed by a pair of tits.” Mother nearly fell off the wagon from laughing so hard.

I wonder sometimes what kind of parent I will be with the examples I have to follow.

I also wonder where that woman was from. She was so very strange. We will have much to talk about at the clave when we get there.

When it was clear that Fintan had finished speaking in Kallindra’s personage, the crowd murmured among themselves instead of applauding, but he seemed to expect this. He nodded at Survivor Field as he took shape in the green smoke and said, “Fascinating, isn’t it? One invasion caused by an eruption and another that may have been facilitated by a chance meeting. Of course we don’t know that Motah—or whoever she was—ever made it back to her home successfully. But I happen to know that there were other scouts like her, perhaps a large number of them, and we don’t know how many of them managed to secure a map. As I said, a recording of this encounter only came to me by accident. What else the Bone Giants learned of us and how they learned it is a mystery to be solved later.” Fintan held up a finger and waggled it back and forth as he spoke.

“I am fascinated by Kallindra’s record not because it is the history of the blessed or of the military or of some political leader but because it is the record of an ordinary person who had no idea what was coming. And ordinary people have their stories, too, don’t they? You all have your stories, I’m sure!”

A roar from Survivor Field answered him.

“I thought so. That is all for today, so let the story tonight be of fine drink and finer company! Tomorrow we will hear more from Nel Kit ben Sah and find out what was happening in Kauria and Ghurana Nent!”

I didn’t sleep well and woke before dawn. I made a cup of tea and sat at the kitchen table with my hands folded around the Raelech porcelain, part of a set my wife had been gifted long ago, feeling the heat seep into my fingers and watching the steam rise from the surface in a sort of nonthinking haze. I didn’t notice Elynea emerge from my bedroom until she pulled out a chair and sat across from me, murmuring a soft good morning.

“Good morning,” I replied. I hadn’t seen her or the children since they had all slammed doors yesterday to demonstrate their displeasure with me. When I had come home after the bard’s performance, the doors were still closed and the house was quiet, and I didn’t want to disturb them. I stretched out on the couch after a cold meal of bread and smoked moonscale and began a string of short uncomfortable naps that passed for slumber. The cot in the palace had been easier on my back. “Can I make you a cup?”

“I want to apologize,” Elynea said, her eyes downcast but her voice firm. Tea apparently would be a distraction when she had apologies to make.

“There’s no need,” I said, and she looked up. “Truly. I’m sorry I upset you and the kids.”

Her eyes dropped back to the tabletop, and she traced a slow pattern on it with her finger. “I know you didn’t intend to. You were right that healing will be slow. Here we are nearly a year past the invasion, and I’m only now beginning to think of rebuilding my life. I think perhaps the well of my patience had run dry after my job search yesterday morning and I needed time for it to refill.”

“I understand,” I said. “You’re welcome to search again this morning if you and the kids can stand it. I’m free until a half hour before noon.”

“Thank you,” Elynea said, her voice fervent. “I’ll change and go right away. I don’t wish to be a bother to you any longer than necessary.”

“We’re all bothered these days,” I said. “But you’re far less of one than you think. Your welcome is still fresh and clean here.”

Elynea made a grimace that might have been an attempt to smile in gratitude and disappeared into the bedroom to change into the same orange ensemble she had worn yesterday while I set about making breakfast. She woke the kids and told them all was well and she would be back before noon, adding to Pyrella that she should try to teach her younger brother something today. They were sad to see her go but distracted themselves soon enough after they had eaten.

If Tamöd’s play was any indication of his future, he would seek a kenning as early as he could. He wanted to be a tidal mariner with all his being.

Pyrella, I noticed, never pretended to have a kenning. Perhaps she was simply playing foil to Tamöd, but I noticed that she chose to oppose him with defensive creatures or those which renewed themselves easily. She was the oyster in a shell, or a sea turtle, or even ever-blooming algae but never an aggressive predator like a bladefin or a longarm. Tamöd even asked her to switch. “Come on, be a kraken,” he said, and she refused. “But it’s no fun beating up algae,” he complained, and as soon as he did, Pyrella changed the game on him as if she’d been waiting for him to say that. I suspect that she had.

“Maybe you don’t have to always beat things up,” she said.

Tamöd looked lost. “What else is there?”

“There’s growing.”

The seven-year-old scoffed. “Tidal mariners don’t grow things, stupid!”

“Of course they do. Nothing grows without water.”

“I know plants grow with water, but that’s not something a tidal mariner does!”

“They do, but they’re sneaky about it. Tidal mariners influence the currents, right?” Pyrella prodded him.

“Yeah, so?”

“All the food that ocean plants and animals need is carried on the currents, and tidal mariners use those currents to help everything grow faster, which helps feed us, too. There’s even a song about it! The Current Chorus. Do you know it already?”

“No.”

“I can teach it to you. Or everything I know anyway. All the tidal mariners know the whole thing.”

That hooked him. If the tidal mariners knew it, he wanted to know it, too. “Okay!”

My house was an endless repetition of the Current Chorus after that, but I didn’t mind. I knew firsthand that the education system had been dissolved in the flood of refugees and if children weren’t taught by clever older siblings or their parents, they wouldn’t be taught at all. I and a few of my erstwhile colleagues had thought of trying to establish an open-air school somewhere on Survivor Field, as all the city’s school buildings were currently occupied by families, but none of us could figure out how to get paid and eat at the end of the day. Education had become a luxury item no one could afford.

I taught them both the last few verses, which Pyrella hadn’t learned yet, and they proudly sang the whole thing to their mother when she returned. Halfway through it, she finally smiled for the first time since I had met her, and when I left the house to meet Fintan for lunch, they were all laughing together, and that might have been a first, too, since the invasion.

I was smiling to myself as I walked, shaking my head a bit in wonder. No well-meaning words or kindness of mine had pierced Elynea’s depression in months, but an old children’s rhyming song had. I think it must have been the chorus:

Currents bring us food today,

And to creatures in the bay,

While we sing and dance and play,

Currents wash our poop away.

Yes, indeed. Indeed they do.

At my first session with Fintan he was very reserved and had little to say to me besides reciting his tale more slowly for my dictation. I had thought that perhaps his earlier easygoing manner had been an act for Rölly and that like many performers he was dour and reserved while not on stage. But during my second lunch with him he proved quite eager to talk over our food, and I had to reevaluate the first day: he had merely been watching and absorbing his new surroundings, and now that he had become somewhat oriented, he was ready to probe.

“Forgive me, Master Dervan, but is it true what I’ve been told? You are married to Sarena du Söneld?”

“Who told you that?”

“I dined with the Raelech ambassador to Brynlön last night, and he mentioned it.”

“Did he also mention that my wife has passed?”

Fintan blanched. “No. No, he didn’t, and I’m so sorry to hear it. I would not have brought it up if I had known.”

“Why did you bring it up?”

“I remember my master speaking of her once. He met her in Killae and praised her wit.”

“Really? When was this?”

“Three years ago.”

Well before her death, then. She made at least two trips that year, I think. I remember she complained that one of the members of the Triune Council at that time had been more than unusually stupid.

“Huh. And you merely wished to pass on your master’s compliment?”

“Well, I had intended to notice out loud that you seemed to be a couple wedded to diplomacy as well as each other, not unlike my own wife and myself, but now it already seems like one of the most inept pratfalls in the history of conversational gambits.”

“I’m not a diplomat of any sort.”

“Oh? Your position in the Wellspring, then—?”

“Is both recent and temporary,” I finished. “I used to teach at the university,” I added, anticipating his next question.

“Ah, but the university is closed. I understand now. Well, I’m not much of a diplomat either. I nearly got myself skewered when I first arrived, and now I’ve quite likely offended you and who knows who else since I’ve been here.”

I assured him that I was not offended. “Though I can’t speak for others,” I said.

He grinned at me and gave a soft chuckle. “I will take what relief I can, then.”

Sarena’s few lessons to me on her deathbed came back to me as Fintan spoke. “The Raelechs are so very affable,” she had told me. “They want every conversation to be as pleasant as milk and cake. Too much of that sugar will make you sick, though. A little milk and cake can make you happy, but it’s easy to go too far with them. You have to remember they’re our allies, not our friends, and even friends don’t always watch out for one another like they should.”

Bryn of the Deep, I miss her. And I was already seeing what she meant. Fintan was quite likable but clearly calculating behind all that good nature; though he made light of planning what to say to me, the fact was he had planned it in a way that ensured we would be speaking of politics sooner rather than later.

I could not fault him, though; I was calculating, too. Perhaps I could dive deeper under the surface than he could. The challenge of outwitting him excited me, as I imagined Rölly thought it would. Hopefully my enthusiasm wouldn’t lead me to drown.

The wooden benches had been expanded and were already filled to capacity when we arrived for the afternoon performance. A cheer greeted the bard when he stepped up onto his stage with his harp.

“Friends! Fifteen minutes until we begin! One of our tales will be set in Kauria. Their love of peace permeates everything they do—even tending their gardens. So today I will sing you a brief hymn sung by gardeners and farmers alike before they tend their crops or their flowers and herbs, and then we will get to the stories. This is ‘A Gardener’s Ward Against Discord.’

Bees will sting,

Ants will bite,

Birds shall dive

And nothing shall thrive

When Anger, Spite,

And Impatience arrive.

Still your wrath,

Calm your mind,

You should know

Your garden will grow

When you are kind,

Reinei’s wind will make it so.

“Let me introduce you now to a young Nentian man,” the Raelech bard said after the fifteen-minute waiting period. “I had occasion to speak with him earlier, and his story will be free-form as it progresses, but for this first appearance I will share with you one of his journal entries, verbatim, dated Thaw 21, 3041. His name is Abhinava Khose.”

The copper-skinned Nentian lad who took shape in the bard’s smoke was tall and lean yet muscular; he would bulk up soon as he matured into an imposing man, the sort that does not stand so much as loom in your presence. He had a broad nose and the long, straight black hair of his people falling to his chest. His leathers, flared at the shoulders, were dyed in tans to blend in with the grasses of the Nentian plains. He wore khernhide boots that indicated privileged status, and his voice was a smooth baritone.

This is my last day pretending to be a proud Khose hunter.

I don’t think what I feel matters to anyone but me, but I must tell it to someone. Since I have no one to tell—or no one who will care—I will tell it to this small journal. I think my aunt gave it to me years ago when I was a child, thinking I would draw something cute in it and make memories for my later years. It has collected dust until now, but I am glad to have found it again. I will fill it with memories that fall short of adorable but will perhaps prove invaluable to me later on. Though I am still quite young, already I can see how I change as I age, looking back at my old self at fourteen and fifteen and wondering what that kid was thinking. So perhaps what I write today will help me some years hence. More likely it will make me laugh at my own foolishness.

I have walked seventeen years under Kalaad’s blue sky, and my father says I should choose a bride soon. He says it like I should choose a melon in the marketplace for breakfast, which I doubt the girls would appreciate. When we are in the city, he keeps pointing at girls and saying, “How about her?” and I shrug my indifference, never saying what I really think.

That one’s eyes are flat dead things.

That one has a voice like claws on stone.

That one smells like borchatta soup.

And none of them are the boy I love. He is the son of a chaktu butcher with whom my father frequently does business because they were schooled together. He is so strong and beautiful but has never shown any interest in me, so I imagine that someday soon his father will talk to him like mine does and have him choose a bride like she was some kind of breakfast fruit. A bridefruit.

That day is coming for me also. And then I will have to tell Father—and Mother, too—that I have no interest in women except as friends. I am sakhret, and so their dreams for me are not going to work out the way they hoped.

Father will be angry at first, but I hope not frightfully so. He will be more upset that I didn’t tell him sooner than upset by the thing itself. What will anger him far more is telling him that I don’t wish to be a hunter like the rest of the Khose men since before the First Kenning. The whole family is to go out tomorrow on the annual khern hunt, and I would rather do almost anything else. Clean the stables. Walk alone in the Gravewood. Choose a bridefruit. Ugh.

I cannot pinpoint the moment when I stopped wishing to hunt animals or even eat them. Maybe it was the scream of a khek hare or the terrified bleating of a gut goat. Some creature’s peaceful grazing interrupted by violent death so that we could graze later on its flesh marinated in a slow-cooked sauce and turn its hide into boot leather. I simply do not want to make my life’s work ending the lives of other creatures. He will say it is the way of animals to hunt and eat other animals, and that is true. But I have no taste for hunting anymore.

That is not to say I have no skill at it. Or that I have skill at anything else. I do not know what else I want to do, and if I tell my family I don’t want to be a hunter, I know that’s one of the first questions they will ask me: What else will you do, Abhi? How will you put food on the table if you do not put a spear through its neck first?

And I don’t know for sure. Go to Rael, perhaps, where they have the Third Kenning and their Triple Goddess to match and know who they are as a people. There is no national identity crisis there. The Earth Shapers are so very grounded, ha ha. I have no interest in pursuing their kenning, but perhaps I could apprentice myself to a beekeeper …?

Kalaad in the sky, I need to think of something better than that! Father will stomp me into the grass if I tell him I want to keep bees.

Maybe a farmer. Something he doesn’t fully understand but he respects. I need to be ready with an answer when he hands me a spear tomorrow and I refuse to take it.

Whatever happens, I know my life will be much different when the sun rises than it is today, and I thought I should record a small part of it before it’s gone forever.

“That was short, I know,” the bard said, “but diary entries are rarely much longer. Soon enough Abhi will long for the days when all he had to worry about was the annual khern hunt. We will come back to him tomorrow but return now to our greensleeve, Nel Kit ben Sah, who has left her cousin to recuperate and returned to her duty on the western coast.”

Coastal patrol is a mixed blessing. On the one hand, we are always looking out into the sun and never drinking the twilight peace of the canopy, but on the other, there’s a decent chance we’ll see something strange at least once a week.

Yesterday in the night, for example, one of the Hathrim mountains bloomed into the sky. The ash blossom could be seen in the dawn, spreading and flattening in the blue and promising gray rain on our green forest. We think it is Mount Thayil above Harthrad, though we cannot be sure. But I have never seen anything so strange as what I saw early this morning. I don’t think I’ve even heard of such a thing.

In the black hour before sunrise, flickering lights danced on distant waves. Many tens of tiny fires moving north on the surface of the ocean.

I knew it could only be one thing: Who else builds ships that can stand the scorch of fire? Only the giants do this. Lacking trees, they build glass boats and burn putrid blocks of compressed vegetables and dung in large steel bowls and keep the blaze going forever with the talents of their firelords.

Seeing their trade barges pass in the night is common. But those ships keep fairly close to the shore and move in ones and twos, and we can hear the beat of the drum and the grunt of the oarsmen as they pull their way through the water. These were far out—so far that I would not have seen them without the fires—and making no noise that I could hear over the susurrus of the tide. And there were far too many of them to represent a trade convoy. In all my years of patrol I have seen no more than six rowing together. These were many tens.

What could it mean? Follow the branches until you get to the trunk: the ash blossom was indeed Mount Thayil, and it represented the death of Harthrad. The Hathrim had to evacuate their land. But instead of going south to other Hathrim cities, Hearthfire Gorin Mogen was moving his people north. All of his people. To where?

I doubted that he would be so foolish as to make landfall on Forn, though we should be wary of it regardless. Desperation can drive anyone to madness. Or maybe it wasn’t mad; if he planned to cut down our trees and return south, the potential income from such a timber raid might be significant enough to finance the building of a new city. Panic seized me at the thought. We didn’t have any thornhands up here in the north since the Hathrim timber pirates typically attacked our southern shores, so who could stop him? I couldn’t do it all by myself.

That branch, I decided—I hoped!—was unlikely. He wouldn’t conscript his entire population into piracy and risk them against our defenses. I mentally leapt elsewhere: the vast stands of pine on the north slopes of the Godsteeth were unguarded by the Nentians and represented unthinkable riches. What if he landed there, clear-cut as much as he could ship, and then sailed south to start anew? The death cries of the trees would be horrible, but I don’t think the Canopy would move to prevent it, and that might be the same calculation Mogen already made. I could hear the arguments of the cautious now: We should not risk our roots for trees outside our borders. If the Nentians cannot be bothered to worry about their resources, why should we? It is Forn we are pledged to protect, a fact no one can dispute, and so the Canopy will allow an unspeakable desecration and I will have nightmares and feel the bite of axes in my limbs for weeks after it happens. My eyes fill up just thinking about it.

The trees from our side of the Godsteeth would be even more profitable, of course, and we would need to patrol the passes in great numbers to make sure the Hathrim never harvested so much as deadwood without permission.

When morning came, they extinguished their fires and I could see nothing, sunlight glinting off water and distance disguising details. But there was no question that this had to be reported to the Canopy. Greensleeves up and down the coast needed to know about this, and if the Hathrim were heading for Ghurana Nent, the Nentians needed to be warned, too. They might not care as we did about the clear-cutting, but they would care about their borders being breached.

The details and the thinking cannot be communicated well by root and stem, so I am on my way to report to Pont in service to the Canopy, breaking my journey to record this and spade a small meal down my throat, dangling my feet over the edge of the Leaf Road. No doubt some other greensleeves will be there, adding their branches of understanding to the problem. With any luck, Pen might be well enough to travel now and meet me at the Second Tree. I would be proud to introduce her to everyone. And if I can convince the Canopy to defend the northern slopes of the Godsteeth from wholesale slaughter, I will.

A flash, a cloud of green smoke, and Nel Kit ben Sah dissolved all too soon. The bard bowed to Survivor Field, saying, “More from Nel tomorrow. But now I must introduce you to Gondel Vedd, a linguist at the Senn College of Languages at the University of Linlauen in Kauria. Please excuse his initial appearance—he will clean up nicely later, I assure you.”

Once Fintan cast down his next black sphere, a Kaurian man, mildly stooped and on the edge of elderly or, to be charitable, in very late middle age, looked around in wonder. He was bald on top, his remaining hair was white and unkempt, and he had a mustard stain on his tunic. He didn’t look particularly brilliant or heroic but did have a quick intelligence in his eyes. His voice surprised me; it was a high tenor but strong and confident.

A hammering fist on the door woke me after a fitful two hours’ sleep, and it was still black as tar in my rooms. I’d stayed up until my last candle guttered out, reviewing ancient texts on the origins of the Rift—again—and my eyelids felt weighted and sticky as if someone had poured honey on them as a practical joke. “Gondel Vedd! The mistral requires your counsel!” a voice boomed, followed shortly thereafter by more pounding. Apparently Her Grace wanted answers on the Rift, too. Or else I was in serious trouble. My husband grumbled, and I felt him burrow underneath the covers next to me.

I stumbled blindly out of bed, kicked over the chamber pot, and groped my way toward the front door. An impatient cyclone frowned at me when I opened it. He held a lantern up to my eyes, and I squinted at the sudden glare.

“You’re Gondel Vedd?” He sounded disappointed, as though he’d expected someone much more impressive. My parents would have sympathized. They’d always expected me to be much more impressive as well.

“Yes, I am he. How may I help you?”

“The mistral requires your presence at the palace. I’m to bring you to her immediately.” He said this quickly, as if the speed of his tongue could lend greater urgency to his mission.

“Is my head to be struck off?”

The cyclone blanched, the question taking him by surprise. He considered it seriously, though, unable to appreciate the absurdity—for why would the mistral need to decapitate men when she could simply feed them to the ocean?—and then said in reassuring tones, “I doubt it, Scholar. That form of execution is only practiced by the Nentians.”

“Ah. You relieve me excessively. Let me get dressed. What time is it, Cyclone?” I called.

“Two hours before dawn, I think.”

“Too blasted early,” my love mumbled.

“You could show some concern here,” I whispered to him.

“Mmf. Can’t be mad at me. I’m unconscious.”

“You can be sure we’ll talk when you’re conscious, then.”

What had happened that the mistral needed to see me at this time of night? Perhaps she needed my aid translating something in the old language. I hoped it was something simple like that. I could see no other positive reason for sending a cyclone for me at this hour. Mistrals do not bestow medals and titles on scholars before breakfast. Or after it, if we are to speak honestly.

“Has the mistral not slept?” I asked.

“I’d be surprised if she had, what with this—well. You’ll see.”

Interesting. Whatever had happened today had little to do with me, then. Until now. “I’m sorry to hear of her unrest. But the wind will bring us peace,” I said, taking comfort in the ritual phrase.

“We breathe it as we speak,” the cyclone answered automatically.

I shoved my ancient shanks into some breeches and hastily pulled a tunic over my head. Finding my belt proved problematic, and I could almost feel the cyclone’s impatience boiling over as I scrambled to find it.

“What are you doing, Scholar?” he called from the doorway. “We must be on our way.”

Finding my boots was no problem at all. I nearly tripped over them, and I yelped in fear. That was a broken hip narrowly escaped. And Maron slept through it, ripping out a tremendous snore.

“Are you all right, Scholar?”

“Yes, a moment. Almost ready.” I was probably a mismatched horror, and the fops at court—if any were awake—would mock me mercilessly, but on the whole I counted it better than appearing nude. Careful searching allowed me to find the pitcher of water on my bureau. I poured some into the washbasin next to it and splashed my face, then tried to tame my hair by drowning it so that it hung from my scalp like sodden clumps of wool.

“All right, we can go now,” I said, returning to the front door. The cyclone’s face suggested that his second impression of me was worse than the first.

A chariot awaited in the street, and we managed to travel three whole blocks before the cyclone brought up my family.

“Forgive me for asking,” he said, “but—”

“Yes, Tammel Vedd is my brother,” I interrupted, “and no, we are not very much alike.”

“Oh. Well. Um. Great man, your brother,” and then he added, “Sorry,” perhaps realizing he’d implied I wasn’t a great man or as if he thought I might not agree.

“No need to apologize. It’s true that my brother is a great man. But for all that, we do not speak very much.”

It was a bald statement of fact that didn’t assign any fault, but I knew the cyclone would assign the blame for our chilly relationship to me. The wind of conversations about my brother always blew in the same direction, but I was always grateful when they got to this point, because the awkward silence that followed for whoever was with me was a blessed silence in my mind. I am as proud of him as I should be, but I do not enjoy constant reminders that I am the lesser son.

There were only occasional Hathrim firelamps in the streets, and so we traveled in near darkness, much of Linlauen’s beauty shrouded in black, thin clouds obscuring the stars. But the gentle and omnipresent wind from the ocean kissed our faces, freshness with an aftertaste of salt, and the distant crash of waves on the base of the cliffs was a soothing counterpoint to the clack and rattle of the chariot on the cobbled street.

Descending from the summit of the university grounds, we followed the winding trail of the coastal road through an expensive merchants’ district and then past the soaring spires of noble houses before ascending again to Windsong, Kauria’s seat of power and monument to the glory of Reinei.

Once we arrived and the cyclone transferred care of the chariot to the palace hostler, I thanked him for his escort. The young man examined my face for signs of sarcasm but found none. “It’s only my duty,” he mumbled. Then, remembering his mission, he spoke briskly. “Come. The mistral bade me hurry.” He led me through a labyrinth of passages and narrow guarded doors until we entered the Calm from a small niche to the west of the mistral’s dais, which stood in the center of the circular room. The legendary tones and chimes of the wind hummed and tinkled as currents of air were circulated through the traps and tunnels of Windsong, but at present the Calm did not live up to its name. There were at least a score of people in the room, all bunched to the north of the dais, most of them talking over one another, but all conversation ceased when the mistral’s attention slid to our entrance. And with her attention came everyone else’s.

I recognized the mistral’s chamberlain, Teela Parr, and a Priest of the Gale named Borden Clagg, but the others were strangers. Nobles and merchants speak the languages of money, fashion, and power, and those are the only three languages with which I have little acquaintance.

The cyclone bowed before her, and I looked down until she deigned to recognize me.

“Mistral Kira,” the cyclone said in a rich, full tone he’d never used with me, “Scholar Gondel Vedd, as you requested.”

“Thank you, Carlen,” she said as I was wishing I’d taken more care in dressing. Unlike my poor cell at the university, the Calm was very brightly lit, and it cast into sharp relief the many wrinkles in my tunic and highlighted the spectacular mustard stain on my right breast. “It seems we caught you at a bad time, Scholar. We would not have disturbed your rest had there not been great need.”

“Please excuse my disheveled clothes. I was given to understand that haste was at a premium. How may I serve the mistral?”

I’d only ever seen portraits of her before, hanging in the university library; in person she was stunning. Tall and slim, Mistral Kira wore the traditional sky blue color of Kaurian leaders, a length of light cotton fabric wrapped cleverly about her body and chased about the edges with strips of soft yellow and sharp orange. It was fastened with silver brooches at her right shoulder and left hip. The silver sapphire crown shone at the top of her forehead; from this towered a magnificent headdress in blue, yellow, and orange, adding another half meter to her height. Eight thin silver torcs circled her neck, but she wore no other jewelry, not even rings. Her skin was as dark as mine but unblemished as yet by time.

“Begin by speaking plainly,” she said. “I need not be reminded constantly of my title. I am told you are a linguist.”

“Yes, Mis—ahem. I am. Fluent in all six modern languages.”

“That is all? I was told you know the ancient tongue as well.”

“I do, yes. Uzstašanas is a mother tongue to the modern languages spoken today.”

“Excellent. I’m glad to be so well informed. Nobody told me of your fondness for mustard, though.” She arched an eyebrow at my tunic, and the assembled courtiers laughed on cue. That was okay, I thought. I still had no idea what I was doing there, but I was willing to suffer some official ridicule and the laughter of fools if it meant I could avoid the dungeons.

“Scholar, I’m afraid I must send you to the dungeons,” the mistral said.

My face fell, and I think I aged past my life expectancy in the second before she continued.

“But not as a prisoner, you’ll be glad to hear.” Yes, if she could have mentioned that part before my bowels liquefied, I would have been glad indeed.

“Oh,” I managed to reply.

“An interesting situation has arisen, and we require your skills. My chamberlain will fill you in on the details, but I wished to meet you and make clear that I am very interested in what you may discover down there. I am sure you will do your best work, and I thank you in advance for enduring the coming hardship.”

“Hardship?” I repeated.

“Farewell, Scholar. I look forward to your report. Do be quick, for there may be something we need to act on immediately, but do not be so quick that you ignore details. Teela? If you please.”

The chamberlain stepped forward and took my arm, guiding me to another door behind the throne. There were a bewildering number of them back there, each with its own guard. It occurred to me as we were about to walk through it that I hadn’t said farewell to the mistral. I swiveled my head around in an attempt to give my audience a sense of closure, but I saw that the mistral was talking already to someone who was dressed in an absurdly aggressive shade of purple.

“Don’t bother,” Teela Parr said, recognizing the thought behind my glance. “And don’t worry; you did well. Most people babble or weep or even swoon the first time they meet her. She has that effect on people.”

We entered the famous Silverbark Room, named for the four pieces of furniture made from the prized Fornish silverbark tree. Tales of its splendor do not do it justice. On a Nentian rug that rested on a floor of Raelech marble, two chairs faced a small sofa with an exquisite tea table between them. The legs of the chairs, sofa, and table were carved with the leaf silhouettes of different rare plant specimens never seen alive by anyone who wasn’t Fornish. The pieces represented a nearly priceless gift from the Black Jaguar Clan, the current rulers of Forn. These rested in the center of the room, which had vaulted ceilings and a series of stained glass windows high up opposite the door. Two windows were left clear and open to allow for a pleasant draught of ocean air through the room.

There was a silver tea service set upon the table with sachets of loose-leaf black tea from Perkau, and the chamberlain asked me how I took mine.

“Milk and honey,” I said.

“Please, sit,” she said, gesturing to one of the silverbark chairs. I felt it would almost be criminal to sit on such a work of art, but apparently I was headed to the dungeons whether I sat or not. I sank into it, and the upholstered cushions cradled my bones with almost sinful luxury. A soft sigh of pleasure escaped my lips, and the chamberlain looked up from pouring tea and smiled.

“Nice, isn’t it?” She looked to be slightly older than the mistral, perhaps in her early thirties, but she was not quite as tall. She had large eyes and a narrow nose, and her hair was curled tightly in rows and gathered in one long braid held by three silver rings, which fell all the way to her waist. If I remembered correctly, she was from one of the Finch houses, but she wore the mistral’s osprey on the left shoulder of her tunic.

“Very nice,” I agreed, and thanked her for the tea.

“I’m afraid the mistral might have scared you a little bit back there,” she said, leaning back into her seat with her lips curving in faint amusement over the rim of her teacup. “The hardship will be the time you must spend in the dungeon itself, with no breath of Reinei’s peace to sustain you. We will do what we can for your comfort, but there is only so much one can do with a dungeon.”

I nodded sagely as if I knew all about the challenges of creating comfortable dungeons.

“We have a special project for you, Scholar. A very odd person washed up on one of the islands in the archipelago on the ocean side.”

That last part hardly needed to be said. People never washed up on the Rift side. The longarms or the bladefins always got them.

“Washed up as in dead?”

“Nearly so. More like a shipwreck. Except it’s better described as a glorified rowboat. And the strange man we found in it doesn’t speak a word of Kaurian.”

“I begin to see why you might need me, then. But surely you have translators available, diplomats who usually handle this sort of thing.”

“Usually we do. But he isn’t speaking any language they know. One of them theorized he might be speaking the ancient tongue, so we had to go digging for civilian linguists, and you were at the top of the list.”

A knock sounded at the door, and a young page came in with folded garments across his arms. “The mistral sent me with a change of clothes for the scholar. She thought you might wish to change before you go downstairs.” The clothes were neatly pressed and of much finer quality fabric than I was used to. The tunic was a copy of the chamberlain’s—a sort of palace livery, really, for the page was wearing the same thing—a light desert tan with a sky blue sash running diagonally across the chest and an osprey clutching a fish embroidered at the top of the left breast. Resting on the tunic was a small unopened jar of imported Fornish mustard.

I smiled. “Please tell the mistral I appreciate both her courtesy and her wit.”

My parents used to tell me, in concert, that I was far too smart for my own good. They tried to discourage my love for language early on, and I was forced to sneak away to the university library at night to explore nautical records in the language of the Brynts, learn the few plant songs available in the percussive syllables of Fornish, and exult in the musical, rolling rhythms of the Nentian plains on the rare occasions when they put into port. At the time, in my youth, I naturally thought my parents’ brains were contaminated with dung. How could intelligence, a natural advantage, ever prove to be a disadvantage?

Only as we descended into the dungeons did I concede that they might have had a valid point. It was dank, the air mildewed and moist, heavy with the reek of chamber pots.

Had I listened to my parents, I would not be here. I would have traveled down to the Tempest of Reinei in my sixteenth summer, said the words to the Priests of the Gale and had the words said to me in kind, and then I would have walked to the edge of the cliff and thrown myself into the howling swirl, a literal leap of faith that Reinei would bless me with the kenning of the wind. A short while later, I would have emerged under my own power and joined a profession commensurate with my Windclass, or I never would have emerged at all, dashed against the rocks or dumped into the sea like so many others. Either way, I wouldn’t be in a still dungeon, charged with speaking to a foreign stranger.

But I consciously chose this Windless life. It was the only way to guarantee I’d have a life, after all, since the Tempest takes as many as it blesses. It blessed my younger brother and took the older one. But neither of them ever visited a dungeon out of the comfort of the wind. And Teela Parr clearly did not want to add a visit to her duties. “I have to get back to court,” she said, stopping outside the door, “but let me give you a conversation piece to get you started.”

The chamberlain produced a book bound in matted reeds, the paper inside of a strange texture to my fingers. The cover had a circle of leather glued in the center, hand-tooled to read ZANATA SEDAM in embossed letters. I read them aloud, and Teela asked me if I knew what it meant.

Frowning, I said, “The second word looks like it’s close to two different numbers in the ancient language, but I don’t know what the first word is at all.” I flipped open the book and found a tight, flowing script using the ancient alphabet; a few words looked familiar, but none of them were immediately recognizable except— “Fire!” I said.

“What? Where?”

“This word here. Vatra. That’s ‘fire’ in the ancient tongue.”

“So you can read it?”

“I can read that word. Let’s see if there are any others … yes. Here is voda. That’s ‘water.’ ”

“Very good, Scholar. But what about the rest of it?”

I tore my eyes away. “You gave it to me less than a minute ago.”

“What I mean is, do you recognize the language?”

“It’s drifted away from the ancient tongue like all the languages have over the centuries, but perhaps not as far as ours has. Certain words resist change because of their frequency of use, like numbers and everyday nouns. If they shift at all, they shift in pronunciation or at least share the same roots as older versions of a language, but it’s rare to develop completely different morphology—”

Teela held up a hand to stop me. I guess I had been babbling a bit. “Just tell me if you can read it now or later,” she said.

“Later. Once I talk with him, I will have a better idea of how long it will take.”

“Thank you. I will let you begin. But be careful. Do not let him get his hands on that book.”

“Why not?”

“Because the cyclones were at great pains to take it from him. He wants it very badly. So we want to know why. Is it a diary or what?”

“There’s no way it’s a diary.”

“How do you know?”

“It’s a completed work. Same script throughout. The handwriting is consistent with someone copying a text. Which means this probably has religious significance to him.”

“Holy writ? Like Reinei’s Wind?”

“Kaurian sailors never leave port without it, right? It’s not so difficult to imagine that this sailor would also bring with him a volume of comforting thoughts.”

Teela Parr nodded. “All right. I’ll come back to check on you soon. Good luck.”

I tucked the book underneath my new mustard-free tunic and followed the guards down into the damp and dark. The stranger waited in a single large cell. It was one of the nicer ones, with decent lighting and fresh matting for his sleeping tick. He had eaten his fill three times, I was told, so much that his stomach visibly bulged. A table and a chair already waited in front of the cell with a stack of paper on it, along with a fresh quill and ink pot.

Seeing the foreigner reminded me of my childhood, when I laid eyes on a teabush serpent for the first time: a sense of childish wonder coupled with a twinge of fear that this new thing in the world might be dangerous. He was too tall to be Fornish but a bit short to be one of the Hathrim. His skin looked pale and sickly to me, but I suppose sickly always goes together with pale in my mind anyway, and I am certainly no healer to judge these things properly. Apart from the slight bulge to his abdomen, he had a skeletal appearance, sharp-bladed cheekbones scraped clean and hollows under his dark brows, ribs starkly outlined on his torso. He definitely couldn’t be a stunted Hathrim; they had stocky builds and were fond of their beards and leather. His only clothing was a broad strip of cloth like a bandage wrapped around his hips, fastened with a length of coarse rope. And it was his choice to remain immodest, for I saw a folded set of fresh clothes resting in his cell.

Extraordinary. A new race of people from somewhere across the ocean. How had he ever managed to cross it?

He eyed me with suspicion at first, leaning against the wall to my left with his arms crossed in front of his chest and his right leg crossed in front of his left.

“Hello,” I said. “My name is Gondel.” I tapped my chest. “Gondel.”

I got a glare for my trouble at first, but my expectant expression must have persuaded him to respond in kind. He tapped his chest once and said, “Saviič.” The ch sound at the end of his name told me that they were hewing to the old alphabet.

“Hello, Saviič.” I held up my right index finger. “Jedan,” I said. Then I lifted fingers in succession and continued to count to ten in Uzstašanas. “Dva, trik, četiri, pet, šest, sedim, osim, devet, deset.”

Saviič uncrossed his arms and took a couple of steps forward as I spoke, then shook his head when I finished. He began counting as well, correcting my poor pronunciation, or rather correcting the ancient words into his modern equivalent. The first four numbers had changed to jed, duv, tri, and čet, and sedim had changed to sedam. Interesting and encouraging. But what he said next was unintelligible babble to me. I think my lack of comprehension showed on my face, because he sighed in frustration. Remembering that the title of his book contained the word sedam, or seven, I withdrew it to begin discussing it with him.

Upon seeing it, he cried out and rushed the bars, startling me and causing me to stagger backward until I ran into the table and toppled onto it, beyond the reach of his long arms. I made an undignified noise and eventually landed on the floor, where additional noises and my continued flirtation with a broken hip brought the guards to the cell with spears pointed toward the prisoner. “It’s all right, I’m fine, just help me up,” I said. “The chamberlain wasn’t kidding. He really wants that book back.”

One of the guards hooked a hand under my arm and hoisted me to my feet. I thanked him and seated myself at the table a safe distance from the bars. I straightened the paper and righted the ink pot that had tumbled on its side during my fall—luckily the cork had been in place. Placing the book in plain view on the table but well out of his reach, I smiled at Saviič to reassure him that I was not annoyed and pointed at the title. “Zanata Sedam. What is zanata?” I circled the word with my finger and then pointed at it, repeating my question so that Saviič would know I wanted to know that word. I saw that he was paying more attention to the guards than to me, so I asked them to retreat while I spoke with him.

“I won’t be falling down again,” I told them. “Thank you.”

With the menace of the spears removed, Saviič focused his gaze on the book and on my question. He sniffed and rubbed at his bare chin, refolding his arms and thinking about the problem for a few seconds before answering. Then a half smile formed on his face as he met my eyes. He held up a finger. “Zanata jed: Vatra.” Fire.

A second finger appeared. “Zanata duv: Vjetar.” Wind.

The third finger went up, and he said, “Zanata tri: Tilo.” That was the earth. He was naming the elements, so zanata must mean “elements.” As expected, for the fourth finger he said, “Zanata čet: Water,” that was water. But if the title was Zanata Sedam and he had named the four elements we all knew, what were the other three?

With all five fingers extended he continued: “Zanata pet: Bilje.”

“Bilje?” I repeated, frowning.

He nodded. “Deh. Bilje.” That couldn’t be right. Bilje was a catchall term for plants, and they weren’t an element. Unless he wasn’t referring to elements after all. Still with a half grin on his face, he raised a finger on his other hand and said, “Zanata šest: Zivotinje.” Animals.

“Reinei give me breath,” I said. “Are you talking about kennings?” Of course he didn’t understand my Kaurian. He shook his head and continued, holding up seven fingers.

“Zanata sedam: Vječnast.”

I didn’t recognize that word. But I couldn’t give up now.

Uncorking the ink pot and snatching up the quill, I quickly scribbled out childish illustrations of fire, water, earth, and wind and then wrote the old words next to them and showed them to Saviič, confirming what each one was supposed to be. “Deh, deh,” he said, nodding each time. I drew a flower for a plant and then pointed at the osprey for the animal, and he confirmed those as well. I then wrote the word vječnos and rose from the table, coming around to hand him paper, quill, and ink pot, asking him to draw what that word meant. With all the examples he already had and a large blank space to fill in, he knew precisely what I wanted. But he waved me off and spewed a river of words at me, only a few of which I might have recognized but couldn’t place into any meaningful context. His body language proved to be much better. He tapped his skull and shrugged, communicating that he knew of no way to draw the meaning of the word. It must be an abstract concept rather than a common noun.

That was all right. I knew the title of the book and already suspected that it would give the fops in the Calm plenty to talk about. Reinei blow me down, it would give the whole world plenty to talk about! Returning to the chair side of the table, I sat and penned a quick message to the mistral’s chamberlain: “Reinei’s wind has brought us something remarkable indeed. I know not yet whether it is for good or ill, but the title of the book is Seven Kennings. Not six—seven! Same order as we count them. Sixth is for animals. Seventh is unknown as yet.”

I didn’t quite know what to add after that. Several profanities and exclamations came to mind, and I almost wrote one of them down when I realized that this piece of paper might become part of history. I would not want to be remembered as the man who wrote “great lakes of longarm shit!” to the mistral’s chamberlain, so I confined myself to adding a few surplus exclamation points—and ended with “Learning more.”

Folding it and handing it to one of the guards to deliver immediately into the hands of Teela Parr, I then began to write down my recollection of these events while they were still fresh in my mind, for I sensed that a full accounting of my labors would be demanded sooner rather than later, and being thorough might allow other eyes to notice something of significance that I, in my haste, might have missed.

I sent the other guard to fetch a set of children’s primary language cards, the kind with pictures and words underneath them in large letters, and another ink pot and quill for the prisoner to use when he had need. I will learn the language of this strange, bony giant from across the sea, and maybe Kauria will be the first nation to secure access to the Seventh Kenning, whatever and wherever it was.

I looked up to check on Saviič and found him staring at me with curiosity. I smiled back at him. “This is good,” I said. “How do you say good, Saviič? Dobar?”

He wasn’t sure what I meant, so he tilted his head and ventured a guess. “Dobro?”

I grinned and nodded. “Dobro. Deh. This is dobro.” Maybe we could let him out of there once we could speak well enough to let him know we just wanted to talk and read his fascinating book.

He smiled back, and I almost wished he hadn’t. His teeth were rotten, and he laughed unpleasantly as he said, “To če biti dobro kad smo osvojiti svih sedam zanata.” I think I have that right; I asked him to repeat it so I could translate it later. Anything said with that much menace deserved a closer look.

When the bard dismissed the seeming of Gondel Vedd, there was quite a bit of noise but only distracted applause; everyone was eager to discuss, or rather shout about, the revelations of the tale—that the Bone Giants were not illiterate savages but religious zealots, and they knew of a Seventh Kenning. A Seventh Kenning. I think many people might have missed the last few paragraphs of that particular story because they couldn’t contain their surprise once they heard about it. Unlike Gondel Vedd, I will write down a couple of exclamations I heard on the wall because that’s history, too:

“Fuck me with a kraken cock! A Seventh Kenning!”

“I couldn’t shit harder if you fed me week-old shellfish!”

It’s hard to imagine what that kenning might be, however, since the Bone Giants displayed no magical talents in their invasion. Foremost in my mind was the question why we hadn’t learned of this captive earlier: the Kaurians had done us a disservice by keeping it to themselves. Fintan picked up on such sentiments, especially the angry epithets spewed by one reactionary mariner nearby who thought that the Kaurians had allowed us to be attacked and hadn’t behaved like allies at all, and addressed it.

“Some of you may be thinking right now, with the benefit of hindsight, that the Kaurians should have told us immediately of their discovery. But remember that they had no idea of what was to come. They had a single strange man in captivity and the same language barrier that we faced. Except that they had a way to solve it. We will check back with Gondel Vedd later to see what he learns, but you already know the most important bit: not only is there a Sixth Kenning, there’s a Seventh! Or at least the Bone Giants think there is. They didn’t use one when they attacked—they just had surprise and overwhelming numbers—but maybe they’re looking for it. Maybe the source of the Seventh Kenning is hidden somewhere on this continent, along with the Sixth, and that’s why they have come: they want it for themselves. It is food for thought, yes? We’ll continue tomorrow!”

Fintan and I parted for the evening, and I smiled on the way home, savoring the idea of a Kaurian fleet transporting our armies across the ocean to strike back. And since the bard had mentioned that Gondel would at some point join us—he’d no doubt go with us if he could speak the Bone Giants’ language—I’d have to put together a suitable gift basket for our meeting. Perhaps themed around some fine mustards.

Elynea and her children surprised me when I came home by not being there. And neither were most of my belongings.

The first thought I had upon seeing my looted house was that Elynea and the children would have no place to sleep except the floor because the couch and the beds were all gone. Then I worried that I would have to sleep on the floor, too, and Bryn of the Deep, it looked pretty rough. Only after that did the thought enter my head that maybe Elynea had something to do with the robbery.

Unworthy of me, perhaps. Unjustified by any facts other than the single one that she was not in my house at a time when she usually was. But I supposed there would be no reason to stay in my house in such a state if she had gone out and come back to discover it this way.

Not everything was gone. My writing desk still squatted in my bedroom, together with my materials and papers; that was a mercy. Such things were worthless to desperate people right now, but beds and couches were in short supply out on Survivor Field.

So, apparently, were bathtubs. Mine was gone, the drainpipe to underground sanitation sluices sticking up out of the tile like a lightning-struck stump. I cursed, and it echoed off the walls. I still had a commode, at least. And although they had carried off my wardrobe, they had tossed my clothes out of it first, leaving them scattered about on the floor.

My pantry was bare, every scrap and crumb of food pillaged. I supposed there must be far hungrier people than I who needed it. My dishes and silverware were missing, too. Recognizing a pattern, I saw that most of my personal items remained but all the housewares and basic needs had been stripped. If it was indeed Elynea who was responsible for this, I didn’t begrudge her a bit of it, though I would have liked to hear how she explained such behavior to her kids.

There was nothing to do but inform the constabulary and make inquiries with my neighbors, not in any hope of recovering my possessions but merely to let them all know it had occurred, and perhaps my neighbors would beware and take steps to make sure it didn’t happen to them.

Dame du Marröd, the nice widow across the street who’d given the orange tunic to Elynea, had seen nothing.

“You didn’t notice some dodgy types removing my bathtub and furniture?”

“I was knitting a pair of socks for my grandson and listening to that bard fellow tell his story,” she said. “And the young men I have staying with me were all out working or looking for work today. I’m sorry, Master Dervan.” She sniffed a couple of times, uncertain and a touch worried. “Do you need a bath now?”

“No, thank you, I have much else to do. I might take you up on it later, though.”

“Of course, dear.”

When the constable arrived, one Master du Bartylyn, he let me know that I should not hold out any hope of swift justice. A slightly pudgy and avuncular gentleman with a beard going gray and a nose that looked like it had been broken more than once, he had a voice that was both tired and sympathetic. “There’s been a rash of these types of robberies recently. This is the fifth one this week. We haven’t recovered anyone’s belongings yet, and I’m doubtful we will. Everyone’s moving in and out all the time with this refugee situation, and nobody looks twice at furniture moving now. It’s so commonplace that you’d have a difficult time distinguishing between lawful and criminal furniture moving, you know?”

“Right. How does one move furniture suspiciously these days?”

The constable chuckled. “Well, you’re being quite sensible about it. The last family screamed at me for not instantly returning their grandmother’s candelabra to them.”

Shrugging, I replied, “I suppose it’s nothing to scream about compared to what most people have lost. I can’t summon too much outrage when they left me my work and my clothing.”

“A man with perspective! That’s rare. Well, if we do find anything, we’ll be in touch. Thanks for reporting it in any case. Helps us establish a pattern.”

“And if you see Elynea or her children?”

“Same thing: we’ll let you know.”

I returned to the palace to sleep on my old cot for the evening and let a mariner know why I’d returned and ask him to please inform Rölly. My friend the pelenaut had me join him for breakfast in the morning, sending a longshoreman to take me to a small private dining room. He had decided that morning that everything was orange, or at least he would be, dressed head to toe in varying shades of it. It wasn’t a traditional palette for Brynlön, and I wondered if Rölly had lost a wager.

We bade each other good morning and sat at the table, and a longshoreman promptly set glasses of orange juice in front of us. I wasn’t going to comment aloud on the overload of orange, but after that I couldn’t resist.

“Are we celebrating citrus today?”

Rölly looked down at his outfit and smirked. “A Kaurian ambassador arrived last night with a shipment and I’m meeting with him later today, so I suppose we are.” He plucked at his tunic and snorted. “Everything you see on me was a gift from him in the past few years.”

“No. He’s been giving you orange clothing every time he visits?”

“Yes, he has. I’m trying to visually communicate to him that perhaps it’s time to be a bit more thoughtful. You think it’s too subtle?”

Shaking my head and chuckling, I said, “I’m so glad I don’t have your problems.”

“Yes, you should be. But I understand you have your own. Your home was robbed?”

I let him know what happened and asked to resume my residence in the palace, but he surprised me by stating that he’d have some longshoremen bring me a cot and a chair for my writing desk instead. “I’d really rather you weren’t in the palace, Dervan. Föstyr tells me that—well, never mind. I am purposely sheltering you from what’s happening here.”

“I don’t understand why.”

“This bard is going to be trained in reading facial expressions. He’ll be able to tell when you’re hiding something. I need your reactions to be genuine and open.”

“Reactions to what?”

“Whatever he says. He will say some things just to see how you react.”

“Huh. That might explain yesterday. He brought up my marriage to Sarena as if she were still here.”

The same longshoreman as before arrived with plates for us, and after the pelenaut thanked him and he left, he ignored the food and leaned forward, eyes boring into mine. “Tell me exactly what he said as best as you can remember.” I told him, and he leaned back when I finished, wagging a finger at me. “You see? He has already begun.”

“Begun what?”

“He’s assuming you’re a trained spy because of your close ties to both Sarena and myself. He will be looking for tells that you are trained, and he mentioned Sarena entirely to gauge your reaction.”

“You mean he already knew about Sarena’s passing?”

“Of course he did, Dervan! The Raelech ambassador he mentioned visiting was at her funeral.”

I felt an ache bloom between my eyes. I’d been so foolish to think I could match wits with a trained bard. “I’m really not suited for this, Rölly.”

“You’re fine. Ask him something for me next time, will you? Pretend you know nothing about the Triune Council members—”

“I won’t have to pretend.”

“That’s good. Ask him who they are and what they are like. Listen but also watch his face as he describes them. Does he make small expressions of disgust when he thinks of any of them? Does he blink his eyes a lot or look elsewhere when talking of one of them? Notice everything.”

“Why? Is there something going on with one of the council members?”

“Maybe and maybe not. I don’t want to say anything because you can’t give away what you don’t know. Just be openly curious and clueless. And watchful.”

We didn’t say much after that, just fell to feeding our faces, but my mind whirled with so many questions that I didn’t even notice what we ate. Something fishy.

I spent the remaining hours of the morning back at my house, picking my clothes up off the floor and folding them into neat piles. I stacked them on top of my writing desk, having no other place to put them. Then I sorted through the papers that had been casually perused and tossed aside with little interest. I had to reorder my manuscript, but nothing was missing; in fact, I found something extra. It was a note from Elynea that she evidently had left on my writing desk, thinking I would have seen it there immediately.

Master Dervan:

I didn’t get a chance to tell you before you left, but during my job search this morning I ran into an old friend from Festwyf. I thought he had perished with most everyone else, but he is in a stable situation here and has room for us to visit. We’ll spend the night there and try to return tomorrow before you leave for the afternoon.

—E.

So perhaps that was what had put her in the mood to smile yesterday. And perhaps she hadn’t been involved with the robbery after all but merely made it possible by leaving the house unoccupied—and unlocked—in the afternoon.

I heard the creak of my front door, followed by a gasp and Pyrella’s voice: “What happened?”

Tamöd, with a note of outrage, cried out, “Where’s all his stuff?”

“Lord of the Deep,” Elynea said, and I entered the living area to find them frozen in the doorway with wide eyes.

“Welcome back. I’m glad you’re well. I was worried,” I said, waving her words that were still clutched in my hand, “and I just found your note.”

“Are you moving?”

“No, quite the opposite. I’m staying no matter what, it seems. But I’ve been robbed. Everything’s gone except my desk and clothes.”

“Oh, that’s terrible.”

“You mean there aren’t any beds?” Pyrella asked. “Where will we sleep?”

“The longshoremen walking up behind you have the answer to that, I believe.”

Four longshoremen, obviously sent from Rölly as they were wearing palace corals, arrived with a total of four cots, four chairs, and a basic square wooden table. One of them remained behind to install a new lock on my door, one of the expensive ones forged from Hathrim steel. Elynea and her children stood mute the entire time, trying to stay out of their way.

“I’d understand if you wished to find lodging elsewhere,” I said after the longshoremen had all departed.

“No, no. The kids have been happy here.”

I noticed that she didn’t include herself in that happiness.

“But you had good news? You found a friend?”

A smile. “Yes, a neighbor of sorts who lived three farms away from ours, Garst du Wöllyr. He lost his farm and land, of course, but he was always good with tools and has started over here as a carpenter. Making furniture, actually. He might be able to help you get some bed frames if you would like.”

“That would be lovely. I’m sure the comfort of these cots will leave much to be desired. Perhaps you could inquire what that might cost when you see him next.” I did not have inexhaustible funds and could not count on my friend to refurnish my home for me beyond what he already had provided. What he had delivered had no doubt been intended for someone on Survivor Field, and I would have felt guilty accepting it save for the fact that Elynea was one of those survivors.

“I will. Actually …” She stopped and looked down.

“What?”

“He might have a job for me. Mostly painting or staining assembled pieces. Some sanding, perhaps some other finishing work.”

“I didn’t know you were a woodworker.”

“I’m not. But I might as well learn a new skill since I cannot tend goats I do not own or land I do not possess.”

“And he’ll pay you for this? It’s not an unpaid apprenticeship?” I would have an objection to make if this Garst was looking to take advantage of Elynea’s desperation.

“No, it’s paid. I can’t formally apprentice with him since he’s not a master anyway. But there’s so much demand for pieces right now and people are so strapped for cash that they can’t afford master-made items anyway, so Garst has all the work he can handle. Most people are willing to take them raw, but if I finish them, we can charge a bit more, and with increased production he can take on more work.”

“I see. Well, that certainly sounds good if you’ve planned what to do with Tamöd and Pyrella.”

“I was hoping we might continue our arrangement where you looked after them in the mornings. I would go to his shop before dawn and return before noon when you have to leave.”

I nodded. “That would be fine most days except for the few I have to have breakfast meetings. Perhaps we could ask Dame du Marröd to help on those occasions or someone else you might know.”

“Dame du Marröd would be perfect if we can convince her.” She looked down at her kids, stroking Pyrella’s hair. “You two liked her, didn’t you? You wouldn’t mind spending just a few hours with her once in a while?”

“That would be okay, Mommy,” Pyrella said. Tamöd was somewhat doubtful.

“Does she know any tidal mariners?” he asked.

I felt a small upwelling of hope on behalf of Elynea; a job would help her move on more than anything else. But since I had been so abysmally wrong about everything I thought yesterday, I wondered what I was missing now. Where was Garst du Wöllyr getting his lumber, for instance? And if he needed help finishing pieces so badly, why had he not already hired someone else from the vast pool of labor clamoring for work right now? It bore investigation, but I didn’t want to pry or sour what could potentially be a great blessing. Rather than swim against the currents, I would swim with them and wait.

I met Fintan at the Siren’s Call and purposely took him to eat at a Kaurian café, guessing that they’d have fresh ingredients from their homeland since a boat had come in the previous night loaded down with citrus and who knew what else.

On the walk over there through Pelemyn’s streets, I neglected to tell him that my house had been robbed; he’d ask what happened to the pages I’d written thus far, and I’d be forced to explain that they’d been tossed around but not destroyed or taken. A fortunate thing, that, considering what I had been writing, and perhaps doubly fortunate that I had a better lock on my home now. Taking even further measures to hide the manuscript as it was completed might be wise. Perhaps an enchanted Hathrim lockbox, one of the fireproof ones, hidden away somewhere beneath the floorboards. Rölly might have one I could use.