Aloren (6 page)

Seven

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Reyna,” the master said.

I blinked.  “Uh?”

“Perhaps you could give us the answer?”

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

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

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

“Don’t be an ass,” said Tem.

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

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

“The sky.”  I pointed toward the window.

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

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

“Bugger your River Cheldony.”  But I remember brooding on how a river so vital could pour from a land so terrible.  Avila, in the far north, was home only to the lunatic saebels.  After the River Cheldony crossed the border into Avila she passed out of existence on the maps.

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

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

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

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

“We get it,” Tem said.

“What struggle?” said Arin.

“
The
struggle,” said Mordan.

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“The girl must go.”  Her face was red, her hair falling from its knot, and I stood very still behind my human.  “This, sir, is a gross dereliction of duty.  I sincerely apologize.  I didn’t guess at first, I had no idea, but she is most certainly a halfwit.”

“My good woman,” said the human. “My good woman!  I fear our conversation would slow to a trickle if the girl left.  She’s more fluent in the common speech than even you.” 

So I stayed, though my cheeks grew red with Marna’s slaps, my legs swayed for exhaustion, and she personally tasted the stuff I poured into the cistern.  

Not brave enough to ask their names, we called the envoys Hoary, Skinny, Stocky, and Silent, and laughed over their peculiarities.  Emry found them so peculiar she hid like a frightened rabbit whenever they came into the common room.  Like most mountain folk, she believed humans exhaled noxious fumes and shot fire from their golden eyes.  She’d claw her way up a support and sit in the eaves listening to the gems Wille and a handful of other boys extracted from more talkative Hoary and Skinny, and wouldn’t come closer until Padlimaird Crescentnet started catcalling. 

At first she was content to stick her tongue out.  Then one day she grew bolder and dragged a stool over to the table where she could glare more comfortably at him.  Marna was off in the village easing a birth, and the envoys were discussing the tangled state of the peerage in Lorila.

I leaned over the table I was scouring to listen, but Paddy soon drowned them out:

“You’re too titchy to know jackshit,” he said to Emry.  “You don’t even know where Lorila is.”

“I do,” said Emry.  “It’s on the other side of the hills.”

“There’s a lake you’d have to swim across first.  Can you even swim, slop-for-brains?”

Emry looked round, and lowering her voice, said, “I can write.” 

Indeed, astonishing herself and me, Emry was progressing in leaps with her writing.  We had to wipe paragraphs from the dust in front of the beech stump.

Paddy scoffed.  “Then why hain’t your head cracked like your mam’s?” 

“Writing don’t do that,” Emry said.  “Mammy was reading.”

“Reading what, exactly?”

“A book…about Lorila.  She
came
from there.”

Emry upset her stool and ran up the stairs.  I looked after, wiping sand from my elbows.  She had a
book?

There came a righteous thumping from the staircase.  Pulling it from under her arm, Emry showed us her small, moldy, water-stained wreck of a book.  Judging by the straw sticking out of the binding it was accustomed to being jammed into her mattress. 

She slammed it on the table, spilling a few mugs and slopping up the cover.   She flipped it open near the middle and clumsily read an excerpt:

“
Sunny today.  It’s hard to keep the boy from getting burned without smothering him in linen.  He’s a good babe, though––a blessing, because she hasn’t much patience with crying, but I’m beginning to fear his silence means illness.  Illness or not, she insists on pressing eastward, and I believe she is making towards…
” Emry stumbled over a word, and I slid beside her, pretending to scrub, looking at the messy writing. 

“Virnraya,” I whispered into her ear.  She said it aloud. 

“There, see?  See what I just wrote?” 

Scouring tables hadn’t put me in a friendly mood.  “Stop acting like a goose with its head stuck up its butt.”

“Really,” said Floy, who was picking at the crumbs beneath the table.

I kept on, getting louder: “Your mother wrote the book and you’ve just read it––there’s no difference––and your mother’s head never cracked, just like yours isn’t going to, unless someone sticks a firecracker in your ear, or you drive yourself crazy, which is far more likely.” 

Of the tongues I’d tied around the table, old Hoary’s was first to recover.  He pulled an eyeglass from his cloak.  “Let me have a look.”  He wiped the leather with his sleeve, and opened it to a different page. 

I leaned over his shoulder.  “Need translating, sir?” 

He frowned at me.  “I understand Rileldine, little gaireld-dun, but you’re welcome to join me at my studies.” 

“Well, if that ain’t the stupidest thing,” said Wille, and he began chatting in Rielde with the human next to him.  I hadn’t noticed the journal was in Rielde, or Rileldine, as he called it.  The Elde languages are very closely related, more dialects than anything, particularly for the border folk. 

But I was upset by something else––  “Tree-girl?  Floy, he just called me a little tree-girl.”