Agna’s sight began to adjust to the interior light, and she forgot what she’d intended to ask next. She turned to take in the paintings on the walls, which were interspersed with candle sconces and bundles of flowers hanging up to dry. Every wall had at least one work. Many were unframed canvases, simply tacked onto stretchers and mounted on the wall. A few were watercolors on paper, glued to board backing. A vast oil painting of a group of people had pride of place across from the front door. Agna tiptoed closer, fighting an uneasy feeling of déjà vu. Of course not, she chided herself. That would be ridiculous.
The people in the painting were all Kaveran, it seemed, and Agna tried not to sigh with relief.
A splash broke her concentration, and Agna turned. The kitchen took up one end of the front room, and Keifon had hurried to help haul up a rope-and-pulley cold box. Water sheeted off the platform and dripped into the underground storage chamber below. Dara set the brake and selected a sealed jug from the cluster on the platform. Agna glanced around the rest of the room; the house was fairly large by the village’s scale, a stone cottage built out in wings, likely over a period of many years.
Keifon handed Agna a glass of cold water and peered at the painting.
“Thank you. – Thank you very much,” Agna tossed across the room.
Dara dried her hands on a kitchen towel and joined them in front of the group painting. “Four generations,” she announced. “That’s me, third from the left in the second row. Of course, I finished that part later. Actually, I only made the initial sketch at the reunion, and spent a year going around to fill the others in. Not a museum piece, of course. Great sentimental value.”
“I can see why,” Agna marveled. “Though the detail is amazing.”
Dara laughed. “Well, that comes from taking your time. You have that luxury when you only paint five people out of forty at a time. Though I lugged that canvas up and down the east road so many times that it didn’t feel like any kind of luxury.”
Agna turned to the next piece, a watercolor of a field and farmhouse. “You work in oil and watercolor, then?”
“A bit. I studied in oils in Prisa, many years ago. But you have to try new things or you get stale.” As they made their way around to each painting, she explained that she’d spent a lifetime painting during off hours as a midwife. “Working on a sketch is quiet if you’re waiting up, and the more people and places you see, the more it benefits your work.”
Agna was fully enthralled, and spent the next half hour asking about the interplay between art and medicine. Dara offered them supper, which Agna resisted with a great deal of inner conflict. She didn’t mean to impose on Dara’s hospitality, but she hadn’t even seen her work space yet, and Dara would have so much more to tell.
Keifon looked up from his seat on the floor and gave her a little go-ahead wave. Bear snuffled his knee, investigating this unauthorized lapse in belly-rubs.
“Aren’t you the charmer, Bear.” Dara bent to add a scratch of her own, sending the plumy tail lashing.
Agna gave Keifon a wry smile and mouthed You, too. He put on a dignified face and returned to his duties as he spoke up.
“Is there anything we can do to help? We don’t mean to impose.”
“Not so much, young man. I’m happy to talk shop for a while; there aren’t many others out here. Tell me about Nessiny, then, while I get this together. There’s a dear.”
Keifon jumped up to wash his hands and pitch in. The three of them assembled a light meal of green salad, bread and currant jam. Agna chattered about the Murian art market, her father’s agency, and Marco, her contact in the business. She and Marco had corresponded about the art scene in Kavera, she explained, and though she hadn’t spent much time in Vertal or Prisa, it was fascinating to meet people along their caravan route who were involved in art.
They sat at the wooden slab table in the kitchen to eat. Bear propped his head in Keifon’s lap until Dara chased him away, chiding him about his manners.
She settled at the head of the table. “What are you thinking to do with all of this information, then? Buy up art for your galleries in Nessiny?”
Agna flushed and swallowed a bite of bread and jam. Keifon met her guilty glance. “It’s-it’s complicated,” Agna stammered. “I’m not sure yet. That’s one thing I’m trying to figure out with Marco, what the market back home might take to.”
“Hmm. You’re their agent in the field, huh?”
“I suppose so. Unofficially.”
“Well, I haven’t spoken to a Nessinian art dealer since I finished university, unofficial or not, so I’d say you’ve got a unique business model here.”
“Thank you, ma’am.”
Keifon nudged her knee under the table, and Agna glared at him. He beamed at her with unmitigated pride. She nudged him back and took another forkful of salad.
After dinner, Dara set Keifon to harvesting berries from the side yard under Bear’s supervision, freeing herself and Agna to tour the workroom. Agna’s notes grew to five pages as Dara pulled one work after another from a storage closet, telling stories about the subjects and her influences and her years at the university in Prisa. Agna noted Kaveran makers of paints and canvas, other artists’ names and addresses, and everything Dara could tell her about the art world in Kavera for the last fifty years. The excitement simmering in the back of Agna’s mind threatened to boil over. She had enough leads to keep her on the run for the rest of the year, if not longer.
As Dara slotted a canvas back into the closet, Agna glanced around to make sure that Keifon and Bear were still outside. “Actually… I have been giving some thought to dealing art here. I haven’t decided yet, so I haven’t told Keifon about it. Or my father,” she added, and regretted it. She sounded so childish. “But Marco and I have written about the possibility. And that’s one reason why I want to learn as much as I can.”
Dara turned from the closet, a smile sneaking across her face. “I see. And what are your other reasons?”
“Well… I love it. That’s all. It’s fascinating.” She spread her hands, notebook in one, pencil in the other. “I learned all about history and the Nessinian movements, and I’ve grown up around artists all my life, but I never went out and talked to people like this.”
“Good answer,” Dara replied. “Though you’ll find plenty of artists only want to put food on the table – or line their pockets – and some guard their process like dragons. They aren’t all nice old ladies.”
“Oh, I know. Still.”
“Another good answer. Well, child, you and your friend had best get moving before it’s dark.” She closed the closet door. Agna despaired to think that there might be more that she hadn’t seen. “You’re welcome back any time.”
Agna did not demur that her contract would expire by the time the Golden Caravan came this way again. “Thank you so much for your time, and your hospitality. It was a true honor meeting you.”
“My pleasure. – Oop, here they come now.” Bear rampaged through the front door as Agna and Dara emerged from the studio. Keifon followed, balancing a colander heaped with berries. Dara took it off his hands and sent them home with another round of thanks.
Dusk was falling as Agna and Keifon returned to the lane, aiming for the rise in the distance where the bonfire glowed. The air was heavy, but the sun had set low enough that shade was no longer in short supply. They shifted to the middle of the lane, where the dirt was hard-packed. Agna clutched her notebook and twirled as she walked. The early stars wheeled overhead.
Keifon chuckled. “That was amazing. I’m so glad you could come here.”
“Thanks for coming with me.” Agna considered all the things that it would be ludicrous to say, like I hope that wasn’t too boring for you. She hadn’t seen him so relaxed in weeks.
“My pleasure.” He sighed happily. “Do you think she’d adopt me?”
“Her dog already has.”
Nightfall had brought some relief from the heat, but Keifon and A
gna set up their cots next to the fire pit, under the clear sky. Agna watched the stars with names and dates and colors swirling through her head until they spun her into sleep.
Keifon: Freedom
The Laketon shopping district dissolved into rows of houses, and Keifon hesitated, turning back. He was sure that he had passed a jeweler’s shop half a block ago. He stood for a minute, feeling sick, on the edge of something too large to comprehend. It was time. It didn’t matter what he did next. He could stay in Kavera or go back to Yanwei or fly to the moon. He could find someone and get married and settle down on a farm and have six children, or he could stay alone for the rest of his life. It was all immaterial to this decision.
The bells on the door jangled as he pulled it open, shattering his concentration. The guard by the door looked him over and let him pass.
“Can I help you, sir?” The jeweler was Kaveran, after all, not that it mattered. She spoke Yanweian readily.
Keifon swallowed. “I’d... like to sell this.”
“Speak up, please?”
He stepped up to the glass counter. The jeweler waited as he fumbled with the clasp. The stiff pivots and joints loosened, and the segments slithered into his hands. Keifon closed his eyes, taking deep breaths to fight the clench in his throat.
In one swift second, he was unchained from his home and everything that had happened there and everything he had been – and at the same time, it was just lifeless metal, and nothing had changed at all. He had always been free. The land where he was born still soaked in the sun, in another family’s name. Eri, his wife, his love, the owner of this torque’s match, had left him starving in the night. But day by day, she had taken another role in his pantheon. She was no longer his wife or his lover, or even his friend. She had kept their little girl safe – safe from him, in the beginning – and raised her into a thing of wonder. He would honor both Eri and Nachi by giving up the past.
The torque had never belonged to Kazi. Kazi was gone, and no metal working could ever change that. Keifon had hungered for some tangible sign from Kazi, but Kazi had given him nothing: no letters, no tokens, no marriage contract. No evidence. Nothing but his time, his trust, his body, his love. Keifon’s memories would have to suffice.
Edann had claimed that the institution itself was a lie, that no one could be trusted, that Keifon had been a fool to commit himself to any of them. Keifon did not believe that, even in his darkest hours. Yet clinging to the vestiges of a dead love would not prove Edann wrong. Moving ahead would.
Keifon could not chain any of them to him by wearing this earthly thing. Neither could he wear it to remind himself any further of the mistakes he’d made, because his mistakes were the river that had borne him to this point. He had washed up in this land, had made new mistakes, had tried again even when he wished for nothing more than escape. He had persisted in living, and in being himself, even after every course plotted out for him had failed.
The torque was warm in his hand. He cleared his throat and spread the chain of metal and stone across the jeweler’s counter. The sinuous clicking broke the staring silence of the jeweler, the guard, the jeweler’s apprentice, and the one other customer in the shop. “I’d like to sell this, please.”
“Sir...”
“It’s desanctified. I was divorced four and a half years ago.”
The jeweler turned over the uncoupled ends in her slender fingers and inspected the back of the torque through a magnifying glass. Keifon laid his hands on the counter, having nothing else to do with them. The torque hadn’t been outside his reach since the first time he’d taken it in the church in his hometown. As the jeweler consulted a reference book and studied several other details, Keifon’s sickness subsided. The jeweler treated it with careful respect. She would weigh it, measure it, determine its value, and translate its workmanship and its rarity into coin. It was only an object.
“Where and when did you buy this? Can you tell me the maker’s name?” Her tone was pleasant and balanced. She was skilled at not sounding as though she were checking for thievery. It was not a personal slight.
“It was eight years ago, in Yanwei, in Eastwater. It’s in ranch country, in the northeast. There was just the one jeweler in Eastwater. Um.” He searched his memory, slipping past Eri and the priests at their wedding, Jafi standing in for his dead parents, the scent of flowers filling his head, and the joyful, spinning music. The jeweler’s name. In Eastwater. “Uh, Zara. Zara Medri was the head of the shop at the time.”
The Kaveran jeweler could not buy the memories of Eri, her fingers gliding over the gold on its velvet tray. Keifon could not trade away the memory of taking the chain in the church or the little tremor in Eri’s voice as she spoke the vows. He would keep all of that. It was a part of him.
“Hm. That checks out. Thank you.” The jeweler lifted the chain and weighed it on a scale, juggling tiny lead weights onto the opposite side. The scales swung into balance. Tucking her fine brown hair behind her ears, the jeweler made notes on a slip of paper. “Now. We can offer you forty unions for it.”
It was the opening move of a complex game which Keifon had no intention of playing. He made a token effort to argue it up to forty-eight, and the jeweler capitulated.
“I won’t keep you, sir.” She made another note and copied it on another page, then passed the slip to her apprentice. “Thank you very much.”
“Thank you.” He wandered after the apprentice to the other side of the shop. After more pleasantries and exchanges of paper and words, Keifon walked back onto the street with the weight of his dead marriage lying against his hip in Kaveran coins. He stopped to breathe, one hand clasped against his naked throat.
He had punished himself for as long as he could, and it had not stopped him from living, nor from trusting again, however slowly. He was still alive. He remembered those whom he had loved. He shivered at the absence of the torque’s weight and the brush of his clothes against his uncovered skin. He had the rest of his life to adjust to the feeling.
Agna: Second Chances
“Hey.”
Agna turned as Keifon took a seat next to her on the bench. “Hey. – Oh.” She saw that his skin was bare under his collar. The exposed line of his collarbone seemed obscene. “You actually did it.”
“Yeah.” His hand rested against the back of his neck, a familiar gesture with new meaning. “It’s... weird.”
“It’s a big step. Are you all right?”
He glanced at her, as if to gauge her sincerity. “I think so. I’ve been walking around the city since then. Thinking.”
“Yeah. I’ve been out here thinking.”
Keifon lowered his hand. “Good day for thinking, I guess.”
“Who knew.”
“Thinking about Laris?”
Agna blew out a breath. “Among other things. It never stops being complicated. I wish things were easy.”
He laughed quietly. “That would be nice. Why aren’t things easy?”
“According to your religion, it’s because we have free will.”
“Ugh. Right. And yours... hm...” He tangled his fingers together, illustrating. “...because all things in the world have conflicting needs, even if they’re all part of the greater whole. Something like that. Right?”
“Yeah. Pretty good.”
They watched the water of the lake as it sparkled copper in the sunset. “I can learn a lot in a year,” Keifon murmured.
Agna remembered that night in the dark, seething with misdirected anger and panic over Laris. They’d started over that night. “I can learn a lot in a year, too.”
“You have. I’m so proud of you.”
“Oh – stop it.” Agna pulled one foot onto the bench and locked her fingers around her knee. She leaned back, the halves of her body counterbalanced against one another. The sky was clear this evening. If she looked up, she didn’t have to look at him. “I’m proud of you, too.”
They listened to the water and the distant call of birds.
Agna rocked idly in her seat. “So how was town?”
“It was interesting. It’s not as... cohesive as the Foreign Quarter in Prisa. There’s no Yanweian town square. But there are a lot of my people, and shops and things like that.”
“Did you get anything good?”
“Mmn. Some tea, and some spices. A Lundrala gift for somebody we know. And some books.”
Agna sat up, her interest piqued. “Yeah?” She covered her mouth when he hesitated. “Oh – oh. If they’re racy books or something, then never mind. I mean. Uh...”
“No. Well… one is just a novel that looked interesting. And I got – not much of a book. A pamphlet, really. About immigration. Not a history.” He swallowed, the movement highlighted by his naked throat. “This one is, um. A guide.”
Agna felt something rising in her chest like a soap bubble. “A guide to immigrating? So you are thinking about moving here after all?”
“Maybe. I’ll see what the trip to Ceien is like. I might... I mean, it’s just an idea.”
“Yeah, of course, but...”
“I’ve been thinking about that plan. Moving to Wildern, and getting some more training. I think… I think I could do it.” His unease was transforming, warming into trust and pride. Agna clenched a fist against her mouth, willing herself not to shout for joy. Keifon was smiling now; it was hard to resist. “And when Nachi gets older, she can visit me.”
She could no longer contain the fizzing excitement. Agna’s squeal drew an alarmed look from Keifon. “I’m so happy for you,” she explained.
Even her embarrassment could not quench the buzzing under her skin. She wanted to walk back to camp right now, or run, or dance; she couldn’t sit still. She slipped her shoes off and picked her way down the shore to the edge of the lake, to let the water lap against her bare feet. The lake bottom was pebbly and slick with algae, but the water was cool.
“How is it?” Keifon called.
“Slimy.”
He waded in, passing her by a pace or two. He’d rolled up his pant legs.
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