Three years and seven months later
The pungent aroma of burning herbs singed my nostrils as Aveela prepared her morning tea. Yet another day as the spirit-speaker for the Second Circle Clan. But the day would quickly turn out more interesting than I had dared hoped for.
“I have a task for you today, child,” Aveela said to me in her slow, warbling way as we sipped our tea together.
I nodded, only half-listening as I knew too well what such a task was likely to be—Sit in the cave and listen to the dripping. Sit by the fire and listen to the flames. Sit in the field behind the hut, where no one can see you, and listen to the breeze. I was an expert at each of these activities but had yet to be able to sustain a full conversation with a spirit since the one that had found me in that cave, warned me of the mournling, and told me of the Seed.
“I need you to go into Shakerton and purchase more parchment and ink. This spirit, Lord Havershram, is exceedingly verbose, and I fear we will soon exhaust my stores before his record has even reached the end of his first decade.”
Shakerton? But that would mean—“You want me to leave and visit the Hume?”
“Yes, yes,” she answered with a wave of her hand. “I can tell how devastated you are by such an assignment.” She smirked at the wide smile I couldn’t have suppressed if I’d tried.
“Quite,” I said, my grin catching at the edges of the word and casting a glow all about it.
Aveela rummaged about her desk beside the kitchen drawers, half muttering to herself and half giving me instructions. “Young Gregory is the keeper of the shop, you understand. You are inexperienced in these matters, and I don’t want him to swindle you.” She removed a small purse of coins from one of the boxes stacked inside the drawer of her desk. “You’ll need this.” The purse made a plinking, waterfall sound as she placed it onto my palm. “It’s all they care about.”
She muttered more as she hobbled away, but I didn’t attend her words closely, too distracted by the bag of shimmering circles in my hand. Five gold circles. Half as many again as I possessed. Mother had entrusted half the Hume coin to me, half to Iredella before she stole away with Father on the night we would come to know as the Night of One Thousand Fires. She and Father had smiled before they left. “This night will change everything.” How right they’d been.
It was the next morning, the sun having just emerged over the rooftops of our first home, Foxglen. Aunt Rugan had sewn the coins into my clothing. She and Uncle had been behaving strangely since daybreak.
My mother returned, screaming her warning. Uncle hid us in an abandoned hut across the street.
The same street where the Hume ran down my mother from horseback. They burned our home. My father was captured, tortured, and executed. How my parents had come into the gold before such an event, I had never learned. Uncle had seemed displeased as Aunt Rugan secreted it away in out garments, so I’d always assumed it was in some way gained during their attempted revolution but couldn’t have said for certain.
I closed my eyes, releasing the memories into the morning fog.
“I’ll be careful to not be swindled, Aveela. Is there anything else you need in town?”
“No dearie.” She waved me off. “They create nothing else I need.”
Most of the rest of the populace of the Second Circle Clan shared Aveela’s sentiment, but I still couldn’t help the swell of excitement fluttering in my throat as I wrapped my shawl about me and hurried outside.
Rushing down the path on the first errand I’d had beyond the wall in over two years, I didn’t see Mirdal crouching behind the bushes before the chief’s house until it was too late and I crashed into him, nearly knocking him onto his side.
He grabbed me and pulled me down beside him, his hand covering my mouth before I could protest at his ill-placed hiding spot. We struggled for a moment until finally I managed to break my face free of his grasp. “Whatever are you doing?”
Anticipating him this time, I caught his hand before he could shush me again.
“Have you seen Serrath this morning?”
“The chief’s son? No.”
He scrunched his expression into a frown and immediately I knew both the problem and the reason for his inauspicious hiding grounds.
“Have the pair of you had a quarrel?”
Mirdal humphed and tossed himself unceremoniously onto the ground. “He’d have to notice me first for us to quarrel.” He crossed his arms over his chest and scowled at the earth as though the dirt path was to blame for the troubles of his love life.
I sighed and crouched beside him. “He’s noticed you.”
“Then why did I spend last night away from here?”
I shook my head. These were the sorts of riddles Mirdal loved to tease his paramours with, but I never knew how to answer them to his satisfaction.
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“You look different,” he said, eyeing me. “And what are you doing out so early? What about your morning meditation in the listening cave?”
“Aveela has sent me on an errand.” A wide grin spread across my face before I could stop myself. “I’m riding out to Shakerton this morning.”
“Shakerton? I am impressed.” Mirdal dusted himself off and agreed to accompany me to the stables. He would tell me of his romantic woes along the way.
We made a brief stop at my aunt and uncle’s who asked me to call upon Eletria while I was in Shakerton. I should ask the Hume after her lover, Parrith’s house, and they would direct me.
“And so you see,” Mirdal resumed as though we hadn’t had any lull in conversation whatsoever, “I’ve little choice but to create a love potion to woo him, and in this, I shall need your help.”
“A love potion? Are you certain that will be necessary?” I suggested the much more reasonable course of simply talking with Serrath first and seeing whether or not he might be wooed by simpler means.
“Normally I can count on you for far more romantic suggestions,” Mirdal cajoled, unhappy with my suit to his reason. “What of the excuses you’ve made to Bansaerin over the years—against my counsel, I might add. And look where that’s led you?”
“I’ve hardly done more than ask Bansaerin to prove his interest by foregoing a romantic entanglement with another for a fortnight before making his case to me.” This wasn’t entirely true—there were times I had asked a great deal more, but if he was going to pursue me with such a jumble of persistence followed by inconsistency, which he seemed determined to, I thought it only fair to offer him the same path as his means to success.
Mirdal and I bickered as I readied Gwinny’s saddle and bridle. She tossed her mane as I rose from tightening the girth beneath her. The flowers and feathers I’d woven into her hair a few days before caught in the pale gray light of the extended dawn. It had been several years since I had fantasized about seeing the true sunrise the ancient Lifkin were always writing about. It appeared at moments of transformation and revelation in their stories so often that for a time, I wondered if it wasn’t some sort of metaphor I was misunderstanding in the translation through time. But of the few stories that had made their way to our small encampment, I had heard was possible to the south to see the barest hint of a true sunrise. Saddling Gwinny, the dream returned to me.
“Since you will be in Shakerton and as you’ve agreed to help me whatever my request”—Mirdal smiled in that impossible way of his where, regardless of what he asked, I could not argue—“I need a bottle of lavender oil to complete the concoction for my love potion.” He gave me three healing poultices and walked with me to the gate. “You should be able to trade those for a flask.”
“I’ll bring you back the best lavender oil poultices can find.” I squeezed his hand.
“Be careful in the forest.”
I agreed and set off—there was hardly a way to be anything but careful in the forest if one wanted to survive the excursion. Gwinny spooked as something moved toward us through the underbrush. I let out the breath I’d been holding as Bansaerin came into view.
He’d swept back his hair, so black it seemed to call the forest shadows to its depths, and the gold of his eyes shone extra bright in the dimness of the forest. He smiled when he saw me, and my cheeks flushed at the flutter in my stomach—such reactions are likely unbefitting of a spirit-speaker, but how many spirit-speakers have tattooed, would-be revolutionaries to contend with?
“And what might you be doing in the forest this morning, Draeza?” His eyes glittered as he looked me over, and a small furrow appeared across his brow. “Are you going somewhere? I would have asked if you were here to see me, but you’re a little too equipped for that, aren’t you?”
“I am.” I told him of my mission to Shakerton for Aveela.
“I don’t like it. The Hume are dangerous. She shouldn’t have sent you by yourself.”
“Then perhaps she knew I would run into you,” I challenged. “Escort me there, if you’re so worried.”
He grinned again and tugged on his horse’s reins. “I cannot abandon my post entirely, but I will see you halfway and meet you again before true dark.”
I did not ask whether the chief had appointed him to this particular post or if he had assigned it to himself—such distinctions had grown murky between the pair of them over the years.
“How is your training coming along?”
I raised my brow and turned toward him. He’d had mixed reactions to my being named spirit-speaker as time went along, especially as he began to perceive, correctly, the ways in which my training softened my thoughts toward the Hume. “It is slow,” I admitted. “Aveela believes I am progressing, but perhaps she only says that to keep me from getting discouraged. She is ever instructing me to be patient.”
I told him of my frustrations, the many years of training and silence ahead before I would be able to speak to the spirits as Aveela did.
“I wish she would grant you more breaks in your studies.” He leaned toward me and dropped his voice an octave. “I miss seeing you at our meetings.”
That flutter returned to life in my stomach. It was a silly, pleasant sensation.
“I don’t have any tasks to complete tonight for Aveela. Do you have a meeting planned?”
He hesitated for a moment, an expression I couldn’t decipher across his face.
“Yes of course,” Bansaerin answered, smiling as wide and brightly as ever.
“Excellent.” Two things to look forward to in one day.
We continued talking as we rode. Most of the conversation consisted of Bansaerin’s warnings about the Hume, though what specifically I should be looking out for in Shakerton he wouldn’t say.
“Their situation grows more dire, and with that scarcity, they’ll become desperate.”
I had heard that many of the Hume were leaving Shakerton. Even with the Order’s blessing upon their fields, it was difficult for them to eke out a living. I suspected the hefty penance the Order demanded alongside this blessing had at least something to do with that. We were lucky indeed to have the Seed to help us.
Though it was not something I thought of often now,I reflected upon our situation before I had found the Seed. It was something I often avoided as the the memories of my own before-the-Seed time brought me pain, an ever-present reminder of what I was missing out on each day. But before the seed, we’d been doing a great deal of trade with Shakerton, growing more dependent upon them with each passing season. Hunger seemed to be a near-constant threat in the northern reaches of the kingdom. From what the elders told me, it hadn’t been a concern before the Displacement.
“I promised Mirdal and I promise you as well, I will be careful.”
We had reached the middle of the trail through the forest, and it was time for us to part ways.
Bansaerin crooked his finger and slipped it beneath my chin as he had done the night of my initiation. “Keep your head up.”
The fluttering grew so intense I half expected to hear a bird within my stomach, flitting about. It was a phrase I had taught him early on in my training, from an ancient Lifkin love song. ‘Keep your head up,’ the lovers had reminded one another before they separated and repeated to themselves while they were apart. ‘Keep your head up. I will find you again.’
It was a promise they kept, though it led to their deaths.
