Of Sea and Stone (Secrets of Itlantis) (16 page)

Still, everything was utterly silent. Everything was dark. Two hands gripped mine.

“Our forefathers went below, to the sea, to save themselves. Many, many others did not make this choice, or could not. We remember them.”

“We remember them,” the people repeated.

Another orb flickered to life in another woman’s hands. She also wore a white dress. She raised the orb over her head as the light blazed brighter and brighter. The orb began to float, and everyone in the room began to sing, softly at first, but with swelling fervor. I didn’t know the words, but it was beautiful, and simple, and I could pick out bits of the tune.

A third orb ignited, this time held by a boy dressed in a white tunic. He was young, with dark curly hair like Kit’s. He raised the orb over his head, and it floated to join the others.

By the time the fourth orb was lit, I was singing too. Not for these people’s ancestors, but for my family. For the people of the Village of the Rocks, who were lost to me. For Nealla and Kit. For my mother.

I clutched the two hands holding mine and I sang while tears ran down my face. I was safe in this darkness, safe in my grief, safe in my joy.

IN TOTAL, SIX orbs were lit, one for each city of Itlantis, and sent up to dangle above the crowd, beaming white light like stars across the garden sphere. They hung, glittering and swaying as the song rose to a crescendo. The people were shouting and crying and raising their hands, and then it ended. Everyone was silent once more. The orbs faded to a soft, gentle glow. The white-clad orb-lighters vanished into the crowd, and everyone blinked at each other and managed smiles. I surreptitiously wiped at my tears with my shoulder.

“They have been remembered. Now let’s eat!” someone yelled.

The crowd laughed, and the spell was broken. The lights came flooding back on, and the brightness made everyone cringe and giggle. I looked down at my hands. I was holding Lyssia’s hand.

I was also holding Nol’s.

He let go immediately. I didn’t look at him. He didn’t look at me. He stepped into the crowd, heading for the food, and didn’t stop.

“Come on,” Lyssia said, linking her arm through mine as I stood in stunned and wordless silence, trying to understand what I’d just experienced. “Let’s find some food.”

The scent of crab cakes and buttered tarts hit me, and my mouth watered. But my head was in a tangle. My chest ached with thoughts of Kit, my mother, the destruction at the Village of the Rocks, and my hand was still tingling from Nol’s clasp. I rubbed my palm, bemused, until Lyssia dragged me forward to a table and shoved a plate in my hand.

“Eat!” she commanded.

A plate, not a shell, but otherwise it all felt so familiar. I piled my plate with pastries and sweetmeats and steaming strips of pink-fleshed fish. Servers piled on things that I hadn’t even asked for—flaky biscuits, roasted clams, and some kind of seaweed that I determined immediately not to eat.

When my plate was piled too high to hold anything else, I joined Lyssia, Cal, and Dahn at a bench beneath the cascading blue flowers that hung over the sides of the climbing pathways. Every bite was ecstasy. I shut my eyes and savored the taste of smooth, buttery fish on my tongue.

“You certainly aren’t afraid to enjoy the finer things,” Dahn remarked quietly.

I opened my eyes. What was that supposed to mean? Was he mocking me? Trying to remind me of my previous station as a servant?

His expression told me nothing. He lifted one eyebrow and took a bite of a lobster roll. Annoyance—and impatience—with his games filled me, pushing words up my throat and onto my tongue.

“I don’t know what you—”

“Ack!” Lyssia squealed, reaching across me to snatch the seaweed from my plate. “Someone gave you a kissing branch, Aemi! The holder has to run or they will be kissed!”

“You’re currently holding it,” I said.

She shrieked and dropped it in my lap. “Now it’s yours!”

I looked at Dahn and Cal. Neither appeared ready to make a move. “I hardly think I need to run anywhere. I’ll just finish my dinner if you don’t mind.”

“Haloo, found one,” someone shouted, and a rush of footsteps thundered toward me. A pack of grinning, sweating young men stopped before our bench and stared at me like dogs waiting for a command.

“Go away,” I said.

“We can’t go away until you’ve given a kiss,” they declared cheerfully but insistently.

“Then
I
can go away.” I pushed my plate aside and threw myself into the tangle of flowers behind me. The boys shouted in mock rage and gave chase as I ducked down a path, wrenching my skirt up so I could run. I passed a young man clutching a similar bit of seaweed sprinting the opposite way, and he flashed me a “good luck” grimace before he rounded a corner, vanishing just before the trouble of girls chasing him passed me, giggling and shouting.

This was a bizarre tradition.

I scurried up the path with the boys behind me in hot pursuit. I dropped to my knees behind a bed of flowers, panting, and they ran by. I rose to my feet.

“Wait, there she is!”

A hand grabbed my arm and yanked me back into the flowers. I whirled to confront my attacker.

Nol.

He pressed a finger to his mouth and rolled his eyes at the sounds of the boys looking for me. I opened my mouth to ask him a question, and he shook his head and smiled, as if he were somehow pleased by the fact that I was at the mercy of silence.

I realized I was still clutching the seaweed. I dropped it on the ground, and Nol crouched and snatched it back up.

“What are you doing?” I demanded in a whisper.

“If you lose it in your flight, then you’ll have to kiss everybody pursuing you,” he said. “Otherwise, it’s simply your choice. Haven’t you read about this from the pryor?”

“No,” I said, and heaved an exasperated sigh. The boys must have heard me, for they thrust aside the flowers.

“Aha!” one shouted.

“You found me,” I grumbled, throwing up my hands. “This is a horrible game, and I don’t like being chased.”

“Then surrender,” one of the boys demanded, grinning again. “Pick one of us to kiss. Or him.” He gestured at Nol.

Nol was politely unreadable.

I stared at them all, Celestrusean youth with easy smiles and happy eyes. Nol, with pain in his. Anger filled me at this silly, stupid game. “I won’t,” I said, throwing the seaweed at them. It bounced off the chest of one of the young men and fell to his feet. He stared at it and then me. “I’ve already been caught once by you people, and I won’t be humiliated by being forced to provide favors as well.”

I pushed past them for the path, and none of them made any move to stop me.

~ ~ ~

Lyssia ran a comb through my hair as I sat on my bed, my face resting on my arms. She hummed the song from the lighting part of the festival under her breath, and the sound soothed me.

“They just wanted to have fun,” she said quietly as she played with my hair. “They didn’t mean any harm. It’s a tradition, that’s all.”

I stared at the sea beyond the glass and didn’t respond. Something deep and sad had uncorked inside me. The boys’ game had reminded me of everything the Itlanteans had done to me, and it ached.

“I’m sorry, Aemi.” She sounded genuine. “No one should have to do things they don’t like for another’s amusement. Next year I’ll make sure you are not made to participate. I promise.”

Next year
. I would not be here next year, but she had no way of knowing that. I bit my lip as words filled my mouth. Words I wanted to say, but couldn’t.

“I’m glad you went with us,” Lyssia said. “Thank you. I had the most wonderful time, and I hope you did too.”

“I think Cal is nicer than Dahn,” I said.

Lyssia lowered her lashes. “He was handsome tonight in his blue tunic. He was thoughtful to match my colors. It can be a sign of a couple to do so at festivals.”

“Ooooh,” I teased. “And do you accept his tacit invitation? He is,” I mimicked her voice, “the governor’s son.”

She sighed. “He’s wonderful.”

I couldn’t disagree. I liked Cal.

“Are you old enough to think about marriage?” I asked her, for I was curious.

In the Village of the Rocks, a girl was old enough to marry when she was declared a woman in the village, which usually happened when she had assembled—through barter, gifts, or making them herself—all the things that a woman needed. Clothing, bedding, bowls and pots and dishes of clay and shell, needles of fish bone, nets for fishing, a good spear for fishing, a boat for fishing...well, much of it had to do with fishing. This varied from girl to girl, but generally they had seen nineteen summers or more by the time they’d accomplished this task and demonstrated competency in all the things they had acquired. The spear was not often a favorite. I’d always known it would have been mine, had I ever had the chance to be declared a woman in the village. Thralls never did, living instead in a perpetual twilight of childhood even as they aged and grew. They never saw status of acknowledged adulthood.

Lyssia dropped her head in her hands. “I don’t know. I am of age, if that is what you mean, but I do not know if I want this right now. There is still much to do. Places to travel, boys to flirt with. If I marry, I will be my husband’s partner in our life together, in our family occupation, in running a household. I do not know if I am ready to shoulder those responsibilities.”

“Family occupation?”

“Yes,” she said. “Was it not that way in the settlement you came from? Husbands and wives both work in the same field, and train their children to do the same. It is why my father wishes for me to wed a scholar.”

“But your father married a dancer,” I said, before I thought better of it.

She giggled. “Yes, and she never was good at copying documents, but he was far worse at dancing.”

“Do the women always take the men’s professions here, then?”

“Not at all,” she said. “It is a decision jointly made. Usually whoever has the nobler or more desirable profession, I suppose. In my parents’ case, well, their pairing is nearly unheard of. Two different spheres of work marrying. But it happens.”

“In the Village of the Rocks,” I said, “women fished. Men fished. Everyone fished. It was all the same, really, but women were lesser still.”

“The Village of the Rocks?” Lyssia repeated, puzzled. “What is that?”

I froze. I had forgotten myself. Panic shot through my limbs and turned my fingers numb. My mouth opened, but no words came out.

“Aemi? What’s wrong?”

I shut my eyes. “Nothing. It’s nothing. I meant the outpost I lived at before. That’s all.”

“Oh,” she said. “You called it that?”

“Yes.” Cold sweat broke out across my back, but I tried to act nonchalant. “An odd nickname, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” she said musingly, and changed the subject. “What do you think you’ll take to Primus?”

I let her chatter about clothes and fashion while I tried to calm my thudding heart.

I’d almost given everything away.

I SAT ALONE in the garden sphere for Celestrus, my legs folded beneath me as I sat on a bench of smooth white stone. It was the most private garden of them all. Flowers of silvery-white and pale pink descended in a curving pattern from the ceiling, in perfect imitation of the structure of the city architecture. The paths, all straight lines and perfectly measured circles, remained on the same level, weaving between tall hedges and underneath drooping trees with purple leaves and twisted branches. Fountains splashed in basins around almost every corner, creating a soothing murmur of sound that drowned out the voices of other visitors. Everything was lush, quiet, and peaceful.

I took a deep breath of moist air. We had only a few days until the trip to Primus. Part of me ached to see unfiltered sunlight again, but another part of me could not think of leaving the people I knew.

“Aemi,” a voice whispered. I opened my eyes.

Nol?

We were supposed to be meeting to discuss plans again, but he was early. I straightened and rearranged my features into an emotionless mask. “I thought we were meeting after the evening meal.”

Instead of answering my question, he dropped a package into my lap.

“What’s this?”

“Open it,” he said.

I undid the slick fabric and unfolded it to find a sleek silver jumpsuit. Metallic threads made a wavy pattern across the arms and chest, like waves on an otherwise calm sea. The fabric felt like wet sand—smooth and firm.

“It’s the same kind that the military wear,” Nol explained. “The fabric keeps the wearer dry and warm. It even guards against shark bites and jellyfish stings. We’ll wear these when we make our escape.”

I ran my fingers over the fabric as a lump lodged in my throat.
Escape
. The word goaded me like a knife prick to the chest. “Where did you get this?”

“Never mind that,” Nol said.

I leveled a stare at him, using my best imitation of Crakea and her disgruntled wrath.

He sighed. “I’ve made some friends who have access to all kinds of things, that’s all. And I’ve been earning coin on the side in spear-throwing competitions.”

I raised an eyebrow. “Spear throwing? And you’re making money?”

A surprised smile twitched across his lips. “If we faced off, this time I would win. I’ve improved since the last time.”

A reckless boldness filled me. I needed a laugh, a distraction from the sadness pulling at my insides. “Prove it.”

“What?”

“You think you can win. I want you to prove it. Show me where you’ve been having these competitions.”

His smile vanished, replaced with a suspicious look. “I don’t know. You’re a schemer.”

“Well,” I said, as if reconsidering. “If you’re afraid I’ll best you—”

With a scoffing laugh, he reached down and grabbed my hand to pull me to my feet. “Come on, then. You won’t best me. I’m certain.”

We left the Celestrusean garden sphere and descended to the commons area of the city. Wide corridors led away in every direction. We were in the middle of a vast hub of traffic and commotion.