The Last Orellen

Only a couple of days after they departed from The Lonely Twins, magic faded from the world again. Before it happened, Kalen and Yarda had enough time to record a jar for each of their families. It was practice, but it was also an indulgence. Kalen had only purchased supplies for three more jars.

It’s worth it, though, he thought as he waited his turn in the ship’s small galley on their fourth afternoon back at sea. Yarda had made him play the jar for him again and again, astonished at the sound of her own voice. My own sounded like a six year old’s. Maybe I should try again.

“Last of the fresh plums, lad,” said the cook, passing him one shallow bowl of fish stew with a single wedge of plum on top and another with a chunk of gourd. Each bowl had a hunk of bread in it. “Skimpy supply of them on the Twins this year.”

“Thank you. I’ll bring the bowls right back.”

The afternoon meal aboard the Ester Ivory was conducted in shifts. If you didn’t turn your bowl back in quickly someone from the next group was likely to track you down and ask what was taking you so long.

Kalen shared the meal with Yarda, who’d been spending more time on deck now that the weather had turned pleasant. She sat on a small stool, and he stood beside her, his legs already so used to the rocking of the boat again that he hardly noticed the amount of balancing that was going on to keep him from spilling his meal.

“Yarda,” he said, sopping up the fishy gravy with his bread, “do you think if a man was born on Elder Twin, but his parents were from Tiriswaith, he might have an accent from Tiriswaith instead of the place he was born?”

Yarda tipped her head thoughtfully, watching the Tiriswaithan sailors who were taking their meal nearby. “He would probably have something between the two, I wager. I don’t think he’d sound just like one of the other. Mayhap when he was younger he’d take after his parents, and then he’d grow more and more into the accent of his birthplace.”

“That makes sense.”

“Why do you ask?”

“I was just wondering. The Tiriswaithan accent’s a nice one. Very different from Hemarland.”

Yarda held a hand up to partially cover her mouth, “I don’t like it a bit,” she whispered conspiratorially. “Every man of them sounds like he’s talking half under his breath all the time. Makes me strain my ears.”

Kalen smiled. “Except when they’re excited. They’re as loud as any sailor then.”

It was true that the Tiriswaithans were soft-spoken in general. And the rhythm of their speech didn’t have the roll to it that Kalen’s and Yarda’s did. Words were all quite distinct from each other.

It will do. He could hardly hope for a better chance to practice a foreign accent than to be trapped on a ship for weeks with men who spoke in it. How will I know if I get it right, though?

He’d just have to ask. Most likely nobody would mind if he said he admired the way they talked and wanted to mimic it. Kalen had yet to meet a sailor who didn’t want some harmless and peculiar distraction in his day. Making fun of Kalen’s accent would surely give them that.

He polished off the last of his fish and took the bowls back to the galley.

“It was delicious,” he said, making his first attempt.

“Aye, I’m glad you liked it, lad,” said the cook without looking up from his work. “You’re always a good one for compliments.”

“My mother says people who complain about food they didn’t make themselves shouldn’t be allowed to eat it.”

“Did you lot hear that?” the cook said to the next group of sailors as he filled their bowls.

“That funny talking he’s doing?”

“No, his mother’s wisdom! I’m going to tell the captain it should be made a shipwide rule.”

So it’s funny. Well, it’s just my first time, Kalen thought, heading back out. If I can memorize a cantrip’s sonic pattern, I can memorize an accent.

It was something he’d thought of last night, lying on his mat in their dark cabin. If the worst came to pass, and he had to travel with Yarda all the way across the continent, it would be better if he were not Kalen, son of Jorn. It would be better if he weren’t from Hermarland at all.

He had left home not only to receive training, but to keep his family safe. So he would layer safety upon safety. If he could manage it, he decided, Kalen son of Jorn would disappear until the moment he arrived safely on the Archipelago and met Arlade and Zevnie again. Or, failing that, until he made it back to his own village.

It was only in case everything else went wrong. In case he had to tell Yarda the truth. In case they traveled through enemy lands.

Of course it’s going to be hard to explain how Yarda and I ended up together if we’re not from the same island. And it would be better if she weren’t the most recognizable person in the whole world. It’s not a perfect plan yet.

But he would make do. And on a long trip, with Yarda in poor health, there might be many people Kalen dealt with on his own. In those instances, at least, he could be somebody with no ties to his true home.

From now on, when there wasn’t a good amount of magic to work with, he would work on his lies instead.

There won’t be any stupid stories about bosuns, he promised himself. There won’t be any mysterious holes in my new backstory. Everything about me will make sense this time. I’m not so little anymore that people will think I’m only confused if I get it wrong.

He would make up a lie better than the one the Orellens had given him.

Even if he never had to use it, he liked the idea of beating them at something.

#

Without fail, if he hadn’t seen them around all day, Captain Kolto would come in the evenings to knock on the cabin door and asked after Kalen and Yarda’s wellbeing. They’d both told him it wasn’t necessary, but he said it was what a captain did when he had paying passengers. There was no swaying him from it.

A couple of nights after Kalen had embarked on his quest to craft a new history for himself, he greeted the captain at the door with a brand new recording jar in his hands. “Would you talk into this please?”

“Eh?” said the captain, looking flustered.

“I’ve already imbued it. It’s ready as soon as I uncork it. If you could just talk about Tiriswaith for a short while that would be perfect.”

“Guess we sailed through another patch of magic today?” Kolto said wryly, looking over Kalen’s head to where Yarda sat hunched on the bunk, trying to knit something with swollen hands.

Yarda shrugged.

“No. We didn’t. I can use up the magic I naturally have in my pathways without ambient mana being present. It’s just uncomfortable for me until they refill.” It had seemed worth it this morning when the idea to record the Tiriswaithans struck him, but now he felt like he was walking around with an essential part of himself missing. And he knew from past experience that it could take days and days for whatever mana he ran across to accumulate sufficiently in his pathways for him to cast another spell.

So he couldn’t take no for an answer.

“Maybe you could talk about your fish,” said Kalen, holding the jar insistently toward the captain’s mouth. “Or your son. Or your wife.”

“You know all my usual subjects, don’t you?” the captain said with a laugh. “All right. Just a few minutes. I’ll tell you a story about someone else since I can’t have you thinking I only love three things.”

He talked about his grandfather, who’d sailed with a pirate crew for a single season in his youth and hated them all so much that he’d remembered their faces for his entire life. One of the men he’d crewed with, nearing seventy, tried to settle down and retire in Tiriswaith; and Kolto’s grandfather, also the same age, had chased him out of town wielding the spoke of ship’s wheel as a weapon.

“Is that enough?” he asked when he’d finished.

“It was great!” Kalen said, re-corking the jar carefully. “Just what I needed.”

With this, he would be able to practice even once he’d left the ship.

“It’s a strange new hobby you’ve got,” Yarda said after the captain had gone. “And yet I suppose it’s good you’ve got one, or else you’d have gone through every scrap of that new paper you bought by now.”

Kalen had bought a box of paper sheets from Ben and Polla before they left. They were disappearing fast even though he and Yarda hadn’t composed a new letter together lately.

“I can’t help it,” he said. “I’m trying to study a spell I learned from the enchanters’ son. It’s a really amazing one, but I didn’t have the chance to read about it so I’m trying to break it down myself. I need good notes to keep my thoughts in order.”

Going from practical knowledge of how a spell worked to figuring out the theory behind it was the complete opposite of how he usually learned things. But Summon Blob was such a streamlined spell, that he really wanted to know it inside and out. If he knew it, maybe he could modify it.

Or expand it. It only worked on an area twice the width of Kalen’s palm right now.

And it would be an absolute dream to make it into some kind of wind spell, though he didn’t have the faintest idea how to do it or what that would even look like.

Before bed that night, he made a tiny x on the corner of a page in his healing magic book. There was one for every day he’d been away from home, and with just fifteen more, they would arrive on the continent. And Kalen would find out what, if anything, his letters to Arlade had wrought.

Please be there, he thought, listening to Yarda snore. Please. I’m making plans for if you’re not, but without you, everything is so much harder.

#BIG BREAK#

“Is it just me,” asked the first mate, raising his voice over the howl of the wind, “or does the boy actually like sitting around in an icy gale?”

Kalen had been sitting on deck with his eyes closed, trying to garner some insight from the gusty day.

“Boys take strange notions into their heads,” the captain replied. “I’ll make him go below if the sea gets any rougher. And he’s a practitioner. I’m sure he’s fine.”

“His lips are blue. And his cheeks look like they’ve been thrice-slapped by nature herself! I think if he were going to learn some magic thing, he’d have done it by now.”

“He is a wind practitioner, he says,” one of the seamen piped up while he checked the knots in a rope. “Maybe he’s like the current finder in a whirlpool. Happy as he can be to get tossed about!”

“I’d like that!” Kalen shouted to them.

“Say what, lad?” called the mate.

“I’d like it if I could figure out how to be like the current finder in a whirlpool!” Right now, he was about as far from it as he could imagine. The wind was freezing him to death. It didn’t feel like he belonged to it or it to him at all.

“Good gods,” the mate muttered. “He’s trying to keep up that horrible accent even with his teeth chattering.”

“Getting better though isn’t it?”

“The accent? It seems a waste of effort to me. Who bothers with such things?”

“Boys take strange notions into their heads,” the captain said again.

“Says the man with a pet fish.” The mate sighed. Then he spoke so quietly that his voice was barely a whisper on the wind. “More seriously, Kolto, is it all right to leave him and the woman on their own in Granslip Port?”

The captain glanced at him. “It’s the voyage they paid for. His master will meet them there.”

“Eventually, he says. I don’t like to think of him on his own, at his age, dealing with a relative’s dead body in a land he’s never seen before. She’s not well, even on her best days.”

“Don’t speak such dark words to the sea,” Kolto murmured, making a sign against ill luck. “I have given it thought. I’ll pass word of them to the harbormaster. He’s a decent man from what I’ve seen of him over the seasons. If all goes wrong, the boy can rely on him until his master arrives or another ship bound for Hemarland comes in.”

“Aye, I like that last one better,” his friend said. “The oddling’s mother can feed him up for another year or two before he goes off to chase after sorcerers.”

#BIG BREAK#

Three days before they were scheduled to arrive, Kalen felt the continent for the first time. He’d been expecting to sense it for a while now, so as he stood at the railing and looked east, he noticed the faint whisper of magic even before he normally would have.

It grew slowly but steadily as the morning passed. It was still too thin for casting when Captain Kolto approached him. “We’ll pass the Mage Line in a couple of hours, I wager,” he said. “After that, we’ll be in the Bound Waters.”

“The place where the ocean belongs to the countries and kingdoms of the continent,” said Kalen. He remembered the long-ago day when Nanu had first shown him her map.

“Yes. Most mark the edge of their territory at sea by the Mage Line. It’s where the magic becomes tangible to practitioners.”

We’ve already passed it, thought Kalen. He opened his mouth to tell the captain so, but then he reconsidered.

“Why is it called the Mage Line?” he asked. “Why isn’t it just called the Practitioner Line?”

“I think mage is the rank of achievement where all the various families begin to agree more on one’s qualifications, isn’t it?”

“That’s right,” said Kalen, pleased to have the chance to talk about it. “Your pathways redendrify; they split and become a wider and more complex lacework. It’s a more undeniable change than the other advancements, so pretty much everyone defines a new mage the same way.”

The captain nodded. “I’ve heard something of the sort. Since everyone agrees on what a mage is, the Mage Line is the place where most mages first feel the magic of the continent appear, or finally feel it disappear, during voyages.”

“Oh,” Kalen said in surprise. “Does it…does it ever move? Like auroras do?”

The captain shook his head. “Not enough to matter. Or else there’d be no point in using it to mark the boundaries of a territory, would there?”

Kalen couldn’t quite keep a smile off his face. He hoped he only looked excited by the news and not overly pleased with himself.

“That’s interesting!” he said. “Thank you for telling me about it. I look forward to having magic around again.”

Kolto chuckled. “Well, once you reach the continent, you don’t have to worry about that anymore.”

That’s right, Kalen thought. He knew it to be a fact, and yet it was hard to grasp. He would soon be in a place where the mana never faded away. It would always be around him, not as thick in most places as an aurora at its peak, but unfading. Inexhaustible.Eternal.

I could cast spells all day. Every day. From now until the very end of my life.

All his life, there had been a limit. And weeks or months of waiting. There had been so many lists of what he must urgently accomplish whenever the precious moments for his practice arrived. Failures and even the most minor mistakes had always been so very bitter because they meant he had wasted one of the few chances given to him. But on the continent, and even moreso on the Archipelago when he finally made it there, none of that would be a problem.

There will be other problems. Some of them may be much worse problems. There are people here would would kill me if they knew what I am.

But still…

Kalen wondered if this was what birds felt like when they first toppled out of their nests and discovered the world was not a small dark cup, but a vast and endless sky.