InsaneJournal

Chapter Two of Fortune Favors the Bold


Chapter Two

“I have answered all your questions,” Hala said. “May I leave now?”

Galdane studied her in silence. His daughter sat with her head bowed, her dark hair sifting forwards around her face. It didn’t hide the redness of her eyes; she had been weeping before she came to see him. That was the only thing he could take comfort in at the moment, that he had not been the cause of her unhappiness.

And yet, he had asked every question he could think of to ask. He had asked if she wished to marry Joro, and she had said that she did. He had asked if she loved her husband-to-be, and she had said that she did. He had asked whether there was anything he could do to make her wedding a more joyous occasion, and she had said there was not.

There had been other questions, even more carefully phrased, all of them making it clear that a hint from her was the only thing he needed to go against his own carefully built plans. She had spoken the answer he wanted to hear each time.

If he accused her of lying, there would be no more productive answer. And now the sunlight was shifting to come in through the window behind her, darkening her face further and telling him just how much time they had passed in questioning. Perhaps it was as simple as a bad dream, or bride’s jitters. His beloved Erehini had had those, and she had still fallen into his arms the night of their wedding with a madly happy smile on her lips.

And a year later, she was dead of bearing Hala.

Galdane had long since learned not to let that old sorrow shadow the air between him and his daughter, however. He leaned across the distance between their chairs and pressed her hand. His hand looked far too wrinkled and spotted compared to hers, but it was strong enough to hurl a spear, and to transfer his daughter gently to the care and keeping of her husband tomorrow.

“Then you may leave, yes,” he said. “Enjoy your day. I will make sure that the others do not trouble you too much.”

Hala bowed and stood. She paused, though, instead of darting for the door as he had thought she would. Galdane looked up at her, and saw fresh tears in her eyes, which reminded him far too often of the eyes of a raccoon, continually concerned about threats and danger both. Erehini had had bear’s eyes, confident and calm in the face of danger. It was the one feature Galdane could have wished his daughter to have inherited that she had not.

And then his thoughts stuttered to silence in astonishment, because Hala had kissed him on the cheek, a gesture she had not performed since she was a little girl. On the day she took her first walk in the woods alone and returned unharmed, she had wanted to kiss his hand instead, as everyone in Tristone did when greeting their mayor. She had said she should not be better than any other citizen, even if she was the mayor’s daughter.

Again he wanted to ask her a question, but this time she turned and passed through the door as silently as the shadow of a bird. Galdane put his hand to his cheek and closed his eyes as if he could hold her kiss there.

Erehini had asked only one thing of him on the birth-bed that had become her deathbed: Rear her well, Galdane. Keep her safe and keep her happy and make sure that she marries well and faithfully.

He had accomplished that, or nearly. Though he hoped that he would have years in which to enjoy Hala and Joro’s company and the company of the troop of children he knew they would produce, he could have gone to Erehini and his family at that moment with no regrets.

*

Hala walked slowly through Tristone. As it happened, she had no need of her father’s promise to keep the others away from her. Each one of them looked once and then politely glanced aside. Each member of a couple about to be married could spend the day before the wedding in isolation or only with chosen companions, to explore being a single person on their own for the last time. Joro had already vanished into the woods with Calesto, his best friend, to hunt the small game that others would make fun of him for wanting to kill.

Hala halted at the edge of town and settled on one of the three large boulders that had given Tristone its name. She turned her head back and forth, slowly, trying to breathe the air that already spoke of oncoming winter and snowdrifts higher than the fences, trying to soothe the wound in her soul without looking at the forest.

It didn’t work.

It was under those branches, in a leaf-filled hollow, that she had given in to impulse and, though she had not known it at the time, caused her father to break his deathbed promise to her mother.

She had not known—

But that hadn’t mattered, had it? Hala ran a hand through her hair, yanking several strands loose, and coiled them around her fingers again and again until the blood stopped flowing. Joro would have forbidden that were he here, but he was not, and Hala added more and more hair until the thought of how she would look at the wedding tomorrow made her stop.

If she had known at the time, she would still have given in and let the moonlight and the ale and the shapes of the leaves and the stars lure her to do what she had done. She had lain down with Calesto. Why not? Joro had not known, and it was no secret to Hala that he had spent time with some of the other young women in town, those whose fathers were less strict about keeping to morals and permitted them more freedom. One night a month before their wedding would make no difference to him.

But it had.

Hala had been born with what other women called a gift from her ancestors, though it was a small and peculiar thing, and no one Hala had asked could remember if her mother had possessed it. She bled, always, on the dark of the moon. She could tend to herself in silence and plan the rest of her month around those five days when she would need to move slowly and wear thicker undergarments than usual. Most of her friends and their mothers were not so lucky.

And the dark of the moon had come after the full of the moon she had spent with Calesto, but the blood had not come with it.

That was nearly the same day Galdane had told her about the final part of his promise to Erehini, that he would marry her to her chosen husband and do it faithfully. She was always to have been Joro’s, and polite eyes would be averted from the other beds they had shared before the wedding.

Except…

There would be no hiding this. Joro had made sure not to lie with her, explaining that he had always mated hastily before and wanted to savor the experience of falling in love before he did it this time. He knew about her gift, too. He would know that the child she carried was not his.

Hala had, single-handedly, cast a blot over her father’s soul and her own future happiness, and she had not known she was doing it. Calesto had assured her, with a proven hunter’s confidence, that one time only was not enough to get pregnant. One needed to lie multiple times with the same woman to produce a child. Hala had heard the same thing whispered among her friends. She had had no reason to disbelieve him.

But it was not true. It was not true.

Her father…

Hala clenched and flexed her fingers, and all the pieces of hair she had wound around them broke like fragile strings.

Her father had assured her he would not be angry, did she not wish to marry Joro. They would have a life together after that, and she would find someone else that she loved and marry him in time.

Hala laughed aloud, and flinched when the sound called a raven’s response from the trees. She had not meant to sound so bitter.

But her father did not know what it was like to live with himself. Hala could refuse to marry Joro and retain a small bit of happiness—but it would be such a small piece. Her father would sigh for the rest of his life. Any reference to the child and to the broken marriage would darken his eyes for days. He would lead conversations back to the topic with the insistence of a man picking at a broken scab, and refuse her attempts to murder the subject.

He was not a man strong in happiness, her father. And he made the others around him bear the burden of his never-quite-voiced complaints.

Hala was relying on the slim chance that Joro would not count, or that the child would be born late, or that it would look enough like her husband that Joro would suppose they had lain with one another before, some drunken night in celebration of a successful hunt that he could not remember. There had been several about the right time.

She would rather wait to see if such a chance might come to pass than know, from this day on, that she had condemned herself to a life of misery and her father to judgment and nothingness after his death.

When the cry rang to her, from another of Tristone’s boulders which always carried a sentry, that the Wanderers were coming, Hala was relieved. They would be a distraction for the others, so that they need not think about her reddened eyes and slow movements.

If they are good enough at magic, they might even be a distraction for me—

And then Hala swallowed, hard.

Perhaps they have magic that can kill the child, or delay its birth, or mask its features. I might—I must ask.

Hope was such a hard thing to cherish any more that Hala nearly tried to smother it in its nest, but still, it chirped there as she walked towards the northern edge of town to see the wagons come in.

*

Laiskaiss made faces at herself in the water basin until she was certain that she had the right smiles. It had been six years since they visited Tristone. The Rock-and-Moss people in this town had a certain set of smiles, a certain set of gestures, they expected to see from the People, and without them they would accuse the People of magic—a word so strange that Laiskaiss had never learned its full meaning, even though she knew the town’s language—and chase them away. Laiskaiss did not wish to be chased away. She had had quite enough of jouncing in wagons for some time, and she could use the pause to have sex and chase squirrels for the Sister.

“They are sending you as a forerunner?”

“Of course,” said Laiskaiss, and practiced one more smile. There. That was just the right smile to offer to the young women who would have been girls when she last came this way, too young for her to lie with. Low and glinting, like the flash of bright water from a distant hilltop. Some of them would shy away from her all the harder, but some of them would draw near, unable to help themselves, and Laiskaiss would take her choice of the prettiest.

The wagon jolted over a rock just then, and the basin jumped and splashed some of the water on the floorboards. Laiskaiss waved an arm. Corissith, who had been leaning against the wall behind her and watching her practice with the amusement he displayed towards his big sister at all times, tossed her one of the rags their mother had marked as fit only for cleaning. Laiskaiss blotted the water up, and then tossed the rag towards him again. Corissith was not quick enough to duck, and caught it with his face.

“I wish I could see Tristone,” said Zhossith’s wistful voice from beneath the bed.

“Why not?” Laiskaiss said, and stooped. The box came easily into the light. Made of pine and carved with leaves on the lid, it was very light and flat, having been intended originally for Rock-and-Moss clothing, perhaps a skirt. Laiskaiss opened it and took out her youngest brother.

“Mother would not like you doing that,” said Corissith, but in an interested voice. In reality, when Molisstath was near, he was as frightened of her as everyone else among the People, but when she was walking with the donkeys, as now, she fascinated him the way a wildfire would.

“I won’t lose him,” Laiskaiss assured him, and then lifted the carved bones that were Zhossith now to her eyes.

Once her younger brother had been a six-year-old boy, but a bear had killed him. Their mother had found his body, cut off his thumbs, flayed the skin from the bones, and sat over the bones in silent vigil for three days and two nights. Then Zhossith had come back and lived in the bones. He could listen all the time, but he could only see when someone else laid the holes drilled in the bones against her eyes.

Zhossith said, “This is the wagon.”

“We are not yet outside, little brother.” Laiskaiss gathered the bones up in one hand and nodded farewell to Corissith. Then she opened the door, jumping easily onto the balcony and over the side. The donkeys complained, perhaps at the sudden loss of her weight. But they complained about everything, so Laiskaiss was not inclined to pay them any attention.

She jogged easily past the wagons, around the train and onto a trail through the forest, just in case her mother heard the bones clattering in her hand. Molisstath had done more marvelous feats before. Laiskaiss loved her mother, but she was like an iron wheel: hard to make roll, hard to move from her rut. She had decided before they left the Barking Ocean that Zhossith would not see Tristone because the risk of the bones being lost was too great, and she would not change her mind simply because Laiskaiss had three years of learning to be careful around her littlest brother now.

Zhossith didn’t complain. The sound of his voice might alert Molisstath, too. He was silent as Laiskaiss burst through ray after ray of sunlight, charging over logs, kicking up leaves, dodging the sudden and startled leaps of deer who thought she was mad. Laiskaiss greeted them in what little of their own language she knew, but she was not good at silence and small gestures, and that was how the deer people spoke among themselves. They did not stay to listen to her, but flashed up their white tails in rejection and darted away among the trees.

Laiskaiss paused when she saw the large boulder that she knew marked the northern tip of Tristone. She lifted the bones to her eyes once more and let Zhossith look all he desired.

The town was one of the largest the People would visit, sprawling across the ill-defined flat land that came into existence, quite abruptly, beyond the edge of the Horse Forest. Laiskaiss knew the Rock-and-Moss people had cut down trees to make this land, and probably smashed a hillock or two flat, as well. What else could account for the absolute smoothness of their cropfields, stripped now in anticipation of winter, when the land in the Horse Forest went up and down as it pleased?

Most of the land was brown and gray, and much, much too flat. The boulders were a welcome relief, as were the few small, stubborn thickets that Laiskaiss saw growing here and there where someone human had presumably not found them too great an inconvenience. And then the houses started. They were at least pleasant to look at, white on the sides but painted red and green and blue on their pointed roofs, as if the townspeople, sorry for chasing color out of their lives, sought to coax it back with a few conciliatory gifts.

Laiskaiss could not understand why anyone would want to live in a house. She could not understand why anyone would want to live with horses, which had turned around and trampled the People in their madness long ago, killing many of them and bringing about the curse. But she had prayed before the Sister this morning, and she had been in Tristone before and survived.

So long as one survives, then there may be joy.

With a final call on Loon’s name to avenge her if a horse turned on her in its horrible silence and smashed her with a hoof, Laiskaiss took the bones away from her eyes. Before she could fold them into one of the pouches at her belt, Zhossith spoke.

His voice was not his voice, but that of the Void, the darkness between the stars where sounds and summers went. Laiskaiss had known that his spirit had come back from the Void when their mother called him, of course, and that the darkness was pouring into and changing him all the time, like oil being poured on a polar bear fur to discolor it. But he had rarely spoken in that voice during the three years since he came back to live in the bones, and it made her tremble now to hear it.

“They understand power, there.”

Laiskaiss made sure her voice did not tremble. She was still Zhossith’s big sister, no matter what else had changed. When he had lived, eleven years had lain between them. She used those eleven years to protect him and make sure that joy had time to find him, and she would not give up the duty. “In Tristone?”

“Yes,” said Zhossith. “They understand power. They live with it. Do not let it consume you.”

Laiskaiss nodded, then realized he could not see her, and said, “I will not.”

Heart high with the warning and head swimming with excitement like nausea, she began to run down the hill. She had the first smile on her face, the large, wolf-like one that said she knew the secret of the pack and the deer did not.

This was the way it always was: someone had to go first and dazzle the Rock-and-Moss humans, who were always more numerous than the People, so that they would not turn on them with stones and swords. There was no one among the People better at dazzling than Laiskaiss. So she was the forerunner.

She heard the sentry on top of the boulder crying out now, about the People. They called them “Wanderers” in this tongue. It made Laiskaiss wish they knew about Loon and the Sister, so they would know that traveling was not the most significant thing the People did.

And then she swept past the boulder and into the town.

She startled a young woman riding a gray horse, who jerked the beast to a stop and stared at Laiskaiss with wide eyes. Laiskaiss turned her head away so she would not meet the horse’s gaze. She had nothing to say it, and it would have nothing to say to her. The goddess had been able to do very little to avenge the injury that horses had wrought on the People—except to take their language away. Now, while every other animal in the world spoke and sang out, horses had nothing to communicate. They were settled humans’ slaves instead, and spoke their tongue. It was not worthwhile to speak of them as persons in their own bodies.

It is silent to me, Laiskaiss thought, and then she was past the horse and other humans were noticing her, and she knew the Sister’s protection had kept her safe. She lifted her head and gave the low, glinting smile, then began to whirl.

She danced up to the Rock-and-Moss men and women staring at her in fascination, and stared back. She gave the women the smile, liking the look of them; if many of these women had been too young to lie with her when she last visited Tristone, she had also been too young to think them beautiful. Now she did, with their skins red-fired brown instead of the gold-fired brown of the People, their higher cheekbones and narrower chins and wider eyes, their thick curly dark hair and their eyes that taught brown to mean new things.

Laiskaiss touched the fingertips of a young woman staring at her. The girl jerked her hand away, blushing. She was probably no more than sixteen, but she had shoulders to lay a head upon, and hands made for stroking, and legs that Laiskaiss thought could be taught to dance. Laiskaiss made the smile just for her, briefly.

Then she sprinted through a gathering of chuckling, staring men to take and bow over the hands of an older woman. She looked as old as Molisstath, with the same iron-gray hair, but she was probably only in her thirties; Rock-and-Moss people weathered fast, as if they must be like the earth in more than stillness. She flushed, but not as much as the girl had, and returned Laiskaiss’s gaze with a boldness that delighted her. There were lines around her deep brown eyes that said she might know what joy was already. Laiskaiss changed her smile again, to that of someone acknowledging a friend. It sometimes grew tiring, to be the only one who knew about laughter.

She let the woman’s hands drop, sprang onto the doorstep behind her, and then scaled the house. Gasps and laughter and nervous shrieks followed her to the top. Laiskaiss stood on the roof, painted red, so that everyone could see her, and held up her hands. A swift flicker, and she carried things in them, one of the polar bear fur bracelets that her mother had made and acorns rescued from the cache of a squirrel who would need them no longer. Another flick, and Laiskaiss tossed the gifts down to the Rock-and-Moss people. They scrambled for them instead of flinching. That was an excellent sign that they no longer feared her.

They did not hold swords or stones. Even better.

“Good people,” said Laiskaiss in their language, though she felt constrained as always. They only said “people” to mean “humans.” It was like being suddenly deaf to all animals and all trees when she spoke their words. Laiskaiss would go back into the forest tomorrow morning and sing all the names she knew to make up for it. “We have come here to entertain you, to show you magic, to trade and to bargain and to lend you what we have in the way of the small skills of laughter.” She took a glittering stone out of one of her pouches this time, bowing to conceal the motion, so that they would think it had simply appeared in her palm. The stone was the color of a sunset’s eye, glittering and deep and purple. Laiskaiss looked over the crowd for a moment, then added, at precisely the right moment, when the fascination in their eyes glittered like the stone, “That is, if you will have us.”

And she heard the roar of their assent and saw the woman she wished to sleep with that night in the same moment.

She stood silently in the crowd near the house, head tilted back so that her black hair fell away from her face and Laiskaiss could see every detail. Her hair looked like wings. So did her cheekbones. She had eyes like a hawk’s, wild and vivid and very lonely. Her beauty swooped like the same hawk to strike Laiskaiss’s heart.

Laiskaiss tossed her the glittering stone. She could not help it. There was no one else here who so deserved to have it.

The woman caught the stone, and bowed her head to examine it. The next moment, she looked up wildly, and gave Laiskaiss something better than a smile: a startled look of wonder. She was suddenly no longer hawk but deer, and this time Laiskaiss had no trouble understanding the language.

“For the prettiest woman here,” Laiskaiss said, and the crowd responded with shouts of approval. Laiskaiss spread her arms, feeling suddenly that she might come to think of the Rock-and-Moss people as like herself after all. “What is your name, jegazhala?”

None of them would know the endearment. That was all right, Laiskaiss thought, watching while her hunger grew. They could tell, or thought they could tell, what it meant from the tone.

The woman did not flush. She only said, “Hala.”

“Hala,” Laiskaiss repeated, and then smiled at her and threw up her hands again. “In the name of Hala, then, and of her beauty, will you welcome the Wanderers to Tristone?”

And again they shouted out in excitement, just as the donkeys led the first wagon around the farthest house and into town.