Tallah

Night overcame them well before Yriea finished her work. They talked of small things. Of the harvest to come and the Winter stores. Wine making for the coming Fall would yield a rich vintage, given Summer’s kind weather. Yriea’s further travels for her father, the new responsibilities she would undertake as she came of age, and the diplomatic tasks she would need to carry out. Pretences of normality.

“There. That should keep. Wish I had some of my oils, but you were in such a terrible rush to leave. Don’t cut it just yet, not until you’re passed the Divide.”

Catharina smiled and felt the hot sting of tears welling up as Yriea’s hands finished their work. She would also take home the toil of one other. Quite the wonderful parting gift.

She heard a splash and turned to see the aelir’rei, naked in the light of the rising Daughter moon, slide down into the well up to her chest. She let out a sigh of pleasure.

“It’s wonderfully cold,” she said and beckoned Catharina in. “Join me. I’m not done with you just yet.”

“People drink out of that, you know.”

“It’ll flow clear in a few hours. Come. I won’t have you be bashful on what could be your last night as a civilised savage.”

“Bathing in drinking water is what you call civilised, lady aelir’rei? I’ve known people gibbeted for less in my homeland.”

“I’d suggest something for your countrymen, but that would be beneath my dignity.”

She more than eagerly obeyed. The water’s touch was icy cold and brought with it a distant memory of the biting chill of Aztroa Magnor. The wellhead was barely two arms’ span across so she and Yriea bathed nearly chest to chest. Her teeth chattered as she submerged down to her neckline.

In the faer light of the moon, Yriea was an aelir goddess of beauty risen from the waters of creation. In spite of the cold, her touch was warm when she placed a hand on Catharina’s chest.

Catharina mirrored the gesture, right hand to Yriea’s heart, left gripping her wrist just as the aelir’rei gripped hers.

“Heart-sister,” they said in joined voice.

This wasn’t a ritual taught to them by the aelir’matar. Nor was it something learned out of the countless books, scrolls and tablets they’d studied together. This was theirs alone, a nameless thing born out of the growth and mastery of their power. Something they’d created together and practised in the dead of night, one step away from disaster.

Catharina reached out for her illum stores and the power opened up inside her like a Spring bloom. It travelled through her veins to the tips of her fingers, beyond Yriea’s skin and deeper still. It cupped the aelir’rei’s heart in a gentle and deadly embrace. She felt the vibration of the aelir’s power going through her and, just like that, they were in perfect balance together.

Two Tempest Callers channelling into one another, taking the power gifted by the other and guiding it back to its maker. On and on in a circle of perfect, knife-edged control that amplified one another’s strength with each pass. Jagged lines of power raced across the water’s surface, adding to the glow of the reflected moon.

If anyone else were to touch the water then, they would be struck down and burned away to ashes. They barely even heard the buzz of power or see the blue lines of discharge as their own overflow singed the grass around the well, flashes of lightning travelling out into the trees.

Both tightened their controls and reeled back the power, kept it from setting their refuge aflame. They both shone with the power, lit from within, their bones and veins black through translucent skin and muscle.

In this state, she read the surface emotions in Yriea. Sorrow was there. Longing. An indescribable sense of loss. Love, as deep as the dark of the night above. All the things that words were powerless to express.

Part of her wondered if Yriea could see what really drove her, and if she’d be disappointed. Part of her knew that Yriea had always known and never cared.

With a shared exhalation, they withdrew from the one another, leaving behind a profound sense of separation and emptiness that Catharina knew would haunt her. She closed off her illum, shut the paths of power and the night became so much blacker for it.

Sleep found them beneath the stars on wet grass still warm from the day’s heat. Briar and Onyx returned with the first morning light to rouse them.

Diolo’s buzz of activity could be heard even before the port city was more than a smattering of colours in the far distance. Traffic increased as they neared the main roads and joined the processions of shipril-drawn carts, foreign merchants travelling in palanquins, and men astride horses. Corallin riders were rare. The great beasts generally belonged to Protectors of the Dominion and were seldom sent anywhere outside the ever-forest.

“It reeks,” Yriea complained, one perfumed sleeved held to her mouth.

“That it does,” Catharina answered. She, instead, breathed in deep the scent of the sea mingled with the many flavours and stinks of an overcrowded port. “It’s like walking away from a faer story and back into the real.”

“Humans and your make-believe stories. Have you so little pride in your history that you’d rather imagine mystical folk to celebrate?”

Catharina chuckled and refused the bait. She tried to pick out the rough words of humans. She thought she caught some words on the wind, but could see none of her own people in the crowd.

Diolo overflowed its white-washed walls. The size of it beggared the two great ports of Vas, even were they to be layered one atop the other. Rough, stone roads spread like a spider’s web well beyond the walls and deep into the countryside. Buildings had sprouted along these thoroughfares like mushrooms at the end of Spring rains, all piled together haphazard into chaotic, narrow districts that brought, bought and sold everything. Countless temples to Isadora and her many aspects were marked by braziers endlessly burning offerings.

On the wind there was a symphony—no, a riot—of scents for her to identify. She distinguished the exotic smells of far-off spices, the tang of fruits, rotten and fresh, fish of myriad assortments, smoked or grilled meats, and so many wines. Perfumes were plentiful but, like all aelir-made things, the scents of those were subtle, barely-there among the cacophony of smells, but impossible to ignore.

The aelir’matar had spent long seasons teaching her to separate all that her senses took in, to learn to listen and to see, to smell, to taste and touch.

Vanadal voices ruled over the cacophony, angry and loud, always arguing over prices and trade conditions. Interspersed among them were the elendar’s musical tones, politely offering their services. Fewer and rarer were the bastil almost-animal growls. She hadn’t managed to learn their tongue, but she recognized its unnerving presence, like pockets of cold air in the midday heat. And, of course, there were the aelir and their many dialects.

She stole snatches of conversation as they walked. A vandal captain bemoaning the price of berthing his ship and buying fresh supplies for the trip back to the other side of Nen. An elendine proposing a business transaction to an aelir’sar of a far Protector, given his reedy accent and poor grasp of the elend tongue. He was being mocked ever so subtly, and did not even know it. Further on, a hushed conversation between two vanadals about the human ship they’d seen moored on the farthest dock. And so on.

Would she discover that the years had brought the same kind of exotic exuberance to Amaranth or Calabran, back home? In her heart she knew it wasn’t so. Humans couldn’t build like this, couldn’t open to the world outside their rocky shores.

That would change. It would be given no choice but to change.

“Now that’s a wonderfully set expression on you, Cat,” Yriea purred by her side. “Hid it so well for so long that I almost believed you outgrew it.”

Catharina reeled in her wandering attention and carefully constructed a smile for her companion.

“I was distracted.”

“And now you look like an imbecile. Heard that about the ship?”

“I did.”

“Jar of wild honey says it’s come for you.”

“For shame, lady aelir’rei. Proposing a wager on something that can only be a certainty for yourself?”

Briar opened up the swelling crowds like a shark among a school of fish. Sailors and merchants alike hastened to get out of way and bow respectfully to the riders. Some offered wares and were ignored.

With each step towards the piers, Catharina felt an elating sense of inevitability. She saw human sailors, clustered in threes and fours, drinking at open-air taverns. Quiet men with lowered heads, keeping to themselves and speaking in low voices. A vanadal enforcer would need very little reason to draw up and hang a human, and this was known.

Some saw her passing and raised their mug of ale in quiet salute. They urged the others to finish their drinks.

The Wild Summer sat alone at anchor, fat belly dipped low in the water. She was an ugly old three-masted beast that had been sailing the Divide for longer than Catharina had even been alive. She recognized it immediately for it was this very ship that had brought her over to Nen, captained then, like now, by a peg-legged man named Pascal of Valonia Holding.

They’d exchanged many letters over the seasons, her one real contact to the reality of her home.

Two escorts hung at anchor much further out, sleeker hunters with ballistae glinting in the sunlight. Four sleek aelir craft prowled outside their range of fire, clearly not there to guard against vanadal raiders.

“Trust is in low supply these days,” Catharina said as she dismounted and retrieved her luggage.

“The escort is close to port. Who’s mistrusting whom, I wonder?” Yriea answered. She stretched, hands clasped above her head. “Come, I’ll walk you to the gallows.”

Briar licked Catharina’s hand when she reached over to caress the beast’s head. “Goodbye, my loyal mount. Be kind to Yriea. She means well but her mouth runs away from her.”

This part of Diolo was nearly deserted in comparison to the rest of the port. It would fill back up once the human craft was gone, Catharina knew. For now, only the vanadal dock workers dealt with the sailors from the Summer, carting in supplies and materials. Some of them, carpenters judging by their tools, were just rowing back from the ship, their repair work finished.

On the pier, waited on by a row boat, was an old man. Catharina felt her face grow cold at the sight of him. Henrigh, the steward of house Voc Anghan, her mother’s personal creature. So, this was the insult chosen to be sent across half-a-world to greet her return to the fold.

“Want me to blast him into the sea?” Yriea asked, a mischievous edge in her voice.

“What?”

“You look as if you’ve just stepped in some droppings. Figured it’s that decrepit thing over there to blame. I could just send him back home quicker.”

“Don’t hurt the worm. His continued existence is burden enough on his soul.”

They stopped before the stone pier. Yriea took her hands in hers and kissed the back of her knuckles. “Be safe on your travels, heart-sister of mine. You will be missed. And my home will definitely be much colder now that you’re gone from it.”

She felt again the sting of tears and pulled her hands away, feeling a chill at that breaking of contact. “I’ll miss you too, Yriea. Thank you for everything you’ve done for me over the years. May you live happily and free in the light of the Goddess.”