Floodpath

by Emily B. Martin

  “And Lumen Lake?” I ask. “Where do they see the Light?”

  “Water,” he says. “Well—sort of. Reflections. Their pearls are a big part of that—the way each one reflects light and color differently. The way the lake shifts and moves, the way the waterfalls change throughout the day, the way the sun filters on the lake bed. They see the Light as something so big and broad that we can only understand it by way of change—we can’t perceive it as a whole, but we can see when it shifts and guides the things around us. Kind of similar to my folk—makes sense, since we’re neighbors—but for us it’s small and physical, while for the Lakefolk it’s huge and intangible.”

  I purse my lips. He had me at the first mention of water, but then he lost me. “That sounds . . . overwhelming.”

  “Yeah, I think that’s why a lot of Lake folk believe in the tradition of the Light more than the actual nature of it,” he says. “Not everyone, of course—these are big generalizations. There are even differences from island to island.” He scratches his chin, dark with stubble, and then he gives a little laugh. “Actually, it’s kind of funny, if you think about it—you, the Sunshield Bandit, flashing that buckler around. Reflecting all that light. Kind of similar.”

  I can’t tell if he means capital-letter Light or just plain old sunlight, but the thought makes me uneasy. I think of something watching over my shoulder, pushing and pulling me in different directions—why would it push somebody into slavery? Why would it separate a child from a family? For that matter, why would it separate hundreds, thousands of children from their families?

  Suddenly, the Light doesn’t seem like such a peaceful, spiritual force. “I don’t know if I believe all that—about it guiding and stuff.”

  He shrugs. “Not everybody does.” He pokes at the fire again and smothers a yawn. “Are you as beat as I am?”

  “Yeah.”

  He rummages in the small bundle of items from the minister’s coach. “There’s just the one cloak. What do you think—back-to-back?”

  We first slept back-to-back out in the water scrape, both fuzzy and disoriented from dehydration, our shoulders and waists pressed together for warmth. For some reason it feels stranger tonight, when I’m fully lucid. But there’s no other option—we’ll freeze if we lie separately, and any other position . . .

  “Back-to-back, yeah,” I say quickly.

  “You want to face the fire?”

  “No, you face it,” I say. “I’ll curl up with Rat.”

  We tidy up camp, check on the horses once more, and then settle down. I wait until he’s situated himself where he wants by the fire and then lie down on his other side, pressing my back up against his. I pat the ground for Rat to come curl up beside me. He smells a little better after a day of romping in the crystalline water gushing down the Moquoviks. Veran shifts to spread the thick wool cloak over both of us.

  “G’night,” he says.

  “Night,” I reply.

  He wriggles down and goes silent.

  I wrap my arms around Rat and hug him close, burying my fingers in his fur.

  I can tell when Veran falls asleep, the way the rise and fall of his back slows against mine. I listen to the crackle of the fire, the scurrying of a few nighttime animals. Twice Rat raises his head, ears forward and nose twitching, but each time he lowers it back down, assured of our safety.

  I take a long time to fall asleep, which only unnerves me more, because normally I have no problem sleeping on any given patch of earth. But tonight I lie on my side, staring out at the stars slowly turning in the sky beyond the trees, thinking about the Light and culture and lines drawn in the sand. One country believes this, another believes that. What does it mean to be raised nowhere, with no strings tying you to a set of festivals or traditions? What do Veran’s books say about that span of rock and sun, the wild country that belongs to Alcoro only in name, that celebrates the shooting stars mainly for the chance to drink and holler around a campfire?

  Vainly I try to reach inside, to that kind of spark Veran said belongs to one half of me—my father’s half. I don’t know what it feels like, though, or how to find it. In the desert I always felt like I was made of dust; out here it feels like nothing, like I’m just a tent of skin over bone, with nothing but empty space inside.

  The night cools. Rat twitches. Veran presses a little closer in his sleep.

  I finally sleep, but don’t dream.

  Veran

  When I wake, the fire is cold and the blackened logs are frosted white. My breath curls in front of my face. Frost in August—not even on the highest balds of the Silverwood do we have frost in August. I frown, and wiggle a little—my back is warm, but so are my shoulders, and the backs of my knees. Small puffs of warm air move against my neck. I go still when I realize what it is—Lark turned over in the night. She’s facing me now, curled against my back. I can feel her forehead pressed against the back of my head. On her other side, I hear Rat snore.

  I hold still, unwilling to wake her up, when a curl of cold air against my calves rouses me a little more. I carefully lift my head, and my fears are confirmed—I stole the cloak. The reason Lark is molded against me is because I bunched the fabric around myself, leaving only a small corner flopped over her hip. How long has she slept uncovered in this frosty night?

  Prickled with guilt, I ease to my back, putting my hand on her shoulder to keep her from rolling over. I prop on my side facing her and drag the cloak back across her shoulders. Two of her dreadlocks have fallen over her face in the night, and in front of her lips they’re rimed white where her breath has frozen on them. I lift them out of her face. Her hands are folded up under her chin, fingers tucked in for warmth, but they’re still icy cold. Tentatively, feeling a bit like I’m sticking my fingers within range of a rattlesnake, I close my palms around hers.

  She doesn’t wake. I cup her hands, trying to share warmth. With our noses inches apart, I can count every freckle. Eloise’s are clustered around the corners of her eyes, crinkling when she smiles, but Lark’s are dusted more over her cheeks and nose—places usually hidden by her eyeblack and bandanna. There are sun lines around her eyes and worry lines on her forehead, but no lines around her lips—not from smiling nor frowning.

  A tendril of cold winds between us, and I inch forward a little more, until our knees and chests touch. My stomach does a funny little wiggle, being so close. I lower my mouth to our hands and blow warm air between them, trying not to think about her fingers against my lips. It only just begins to strike me that maybe I should be worried about her being half-dead of hypothermia when her eyes snap open.

  Every line in her face tenses.

  “What are you doing?” she blurts out.

  “I was just—”

  “Don’t touch me!” She snatches her hands out of mine and rolls over, flattening Rat, who yelps. She plants her feet and stands. “Were you watching me sleep?”

  “I dragged the cloak off you during the night—your hands were freezing. I was trying to warm you up.” I sit up. “I’m sorry.”

  “Why were you facing me?”

  “You were facing me first.”

  She stares, flexing her hands at her sides. The breeze ruffles her old shirt.

  “Here.” I get up and hold out the cloak. “Look, I’m sorry I made you uncomfortable. Really. I was only trying to share some warmth.”

  “I don’t need you to do that,” she says, her voice staccato.

  “Okay. I won’t do it again.” I shake the cloak toward her. “Take this, please. I’ve got my tunic over my shirt—you need the extra layer. Things are going to stay cold until the morning gets on.”

  She hesitates, and then reaches forward and flicks the cloak out of my grasp. She swings it around her shoulders.

  We stand for a moment, silent. The fir trees sigh around us. Off to the right, our horses stamp and blow, their breath steaming.

  Lark turns on her heel, the cloak swinging, and begins to stride off into the trees.
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br />   “Where are you—”

  “I’m going to pee,” she says. “Don’t follow me.”

  “I’m not going to follow you,” I say incredulously.

  She disappears. I rub my hands over my face, feeling a little silly and a little irritated and also still a little wobbly, which I tell myself is from the gut memories of getting hit in the face with her buckler or stabbed in the sternum with her sword hilt or twisted by the arm after getting too close. And then another memory hits me, the vivid image of her face an inch from mine, slanted with sunlight, before she pressed a crushing kiss to my lips, her bandanna bunching between us.

  It wasn’t a kiss, she clarified a few days ago.

  No, it had been a distraction to steal my firefly, and anyway, she’d apologized. We’d both apologized, for the cascade of hurts—intended or otherwise—that we’d caused the other.

  So many apologies.

  I remind myself to remember the consequences of getting too close. A rattlesnake was the wrong comparison. A rattlesnake is reluctant to bite. It rattles to warn folk away.

  Lark bites first.

  Have to remember that.

  Rubbing my hands together, I head into the trees to begin preparing the horses.

  Tamsin

  Soe’s oil presses are like any other—a large screw holds a broad wooden plate suspended over a basin. A long wooden arm is fed into slots in the screw and cranked to pull it downward. The arm is drawn out, set into the next slot, and cranked again, until the plate applies the desired pressure to the goods in the basin. A spout opens out into a bucket, catching the runoff—in this case, salal berry juice.

  “Your job is to have a bucket ready to swap out when one fills,” Soe tells Iano, hefting the first basket of berries. She glances at me standing close by, as if I can be useful by proxy. “Tamsin, if you like, you could fit the strainer over that big pot there.”

  This task takes all of three seconds. I look around for another job, but I’m not familiar with the intricacies of pressing, and I’m not sure what would be helpful. I stand, frustrated, at the edge of the room while Soe pours the berries into the basin of the largest press and picks up the wooden arm. She fits it into the first divot in the screw and hauls it toward her, like a rowboat oar. The screw cranks down. She removes the arm, fits it into the next slot, and hauls again.

  After a few more pulls, we’re all rewarded with the first stream of burgundy berry juice trickling from the spout. The trickle turns into a stream, filling the bucket with dark, frothy liquid. Iano crouches with an empty bucket at the ready. He swaps it out, but not fast enough—a jet of juice spatters the floor, already stained a rich purple from previous splashes.

  He hoists the bucket to the pot and pours the juice through the linen strainer. I hold the pot steady, though it’s not needed. Soe keeps tightening the screw every minute or so. Iano swaps out three more buckets. I busy myself with mopping up errant splashes of juice—at one point, some spatters across the parchment Soe uses for labels. I trace it with my pinkie nail, drawing a shapeless design, as if pulling a quill through ink.

  “Hey,” I call to Soe as she starts to wind the screw back up. She looks up to see me holding the square of parchment—not parchment, I realize. I test the word.

  “Paper?” I ask gingerly.

  “Yeah, paper,” she confirms, fitting the arm in the screw again. “I get it from the ragpickers at the mill in town. Linen scraps, you know. Cheap. It’s good for the labels because it doesn’t buckle like parchment. And it takes the stamps well.” With the screw lifted, she works the cake of crushed berries out of the basin, emptying them into the slop bucket for her turkeys.

  I rub the paper with my thumb. It’s less smooth than parchment and vellum, but I can see what Soe means—rather than puckering up like parchment sometimes does under ink, the grain of the paper almost sucks up the berry juice. Growing up running around the scribe’s office my parents worked in, I’ve seen paper before, prized for its low cost, but usually passed over by rich patrons, who prefer the look and durability of vellum. Paper is used for woodcuts, the only way to make a proclamation or advertisement that needs to be stamped over and over again. Cheap. Quick. Easy.

  I look at the shelf where Soe keeps her label stamps, flat wooden blocks carved with mirror images of words like walnut and pine and huckleberry. I pick up the one for ground, perhaps because it appeared in that line that came to me in the middle of the night. Rain cannot soak dry ground. I dip the stamp into the puddle of juice drying on the wood.

  I press it to the linen-rag paper—ground, ground, ground, ground—until the ink runs out.

  Lark

  I never thought anything could be as big as the canyon walls of Three Lines, until we rode into the shadow of the redwoods.

  “By the Light,” Veran breathes. He’s been repeating the phrase for the past half hour, craning his head this way and that, not even bothering to hold the reins, twisting to stare up the soaring trunks. I did, too, at first, squinting up at the treetops swallowed by mist, but now I keep my head down. A feeling of being closed in—netted, caged—has been growing in my stomach, and I can’t shake it.

  “And these are—alive?” I ask dumbly.

  “So alive,” he says. And then—“Blessed Light!”

  He pulls his horse up short and slides off, making for a massive, sweeping trunk, the biggest one we’ve seen yet. I grab his horse’s dangling reins before it can amble off. Veran approaches the tree with both hands cupped toward it, as if receiving a gift. His head is thrown back, searching for the crown hundreds of feet above us. He reaches out and touches the trunk with one set of fingers, and then begins to circle it—he disappears around one side, and it takes a full twenty seconds for him to materialize around the other.

  I stoop my head. It’s raining, something I would normally welcome, but it’s been raining since we crossed the ridgeline of the mountains yesterday, and I can’t remember the last time I’ve been so wet for so long. I pull the hood of the minister’s soggy cloak farther over my head. I miss the protective brim of my hat.

  “Veran,” I say. “Come on. They said the house is supposed to be this way. Are you talking to that tree?”

  He turns reluctantly back for the horse. “Thanking it.”

  “Thanking it for what?”

  “For just—” He mounts and gesticulates emphatically, waving his arms first between him and the trunk, and then all around, like that’s an answer. “The very air breathes—can you feel it?”

  “You’re weird, you know that?”

  He grins and nudges his horse. “Ah, Lark—ethnocentric bias. Don’t let your uncle hear you.”

  The knot of anxiety in the pit of my stomach grows a little sharper, a little colder. “What?”

  “Ethnocentric bias—thinking your worldview is the only, or best, worldview. It’s something your uncle Colm hammers in to all his students on the first day of class. Skies forbid you ever use a word like weird in his discussions.” He barrels his chest and exaggerates what I can only guess is a Lumeni accent, bearing down hard on his r’s. “Never allow yourself to devolve into a dichotomy of right and wrong, of normal and not normal.”

  There are two words I don’t know in that sentence—the two that started with d’s—but that’s not what makes me uneasy. Normal and not normal? A worldview? I picture that man I attacked in the stagecoach, weeks and weeks ago, back when things were all in their right places. I remember his well-made clothes, his crisp tattoo, the casual way he encouraged me to take his money, his matches.

  I must have looked so pathetic to him, a feral, cultureless outlaw. Someone to be pitied. And now my campmates—except for Rose—are heading to his house. They might already be there. And when the ambassador and the princess get there a few days later, the news will be out—that the professor is related by blood to the dirty, ignorant bandit who wrecked his stage and stole his shoes.

  And if that’s his outlook, what will his sister—

&nb
sp; The queen.

  My mother.

  What will she think?

  Veran must mistake my daunted silence for remorse. “It’s okay,” he says. “Think me weird all you want—my folk consider it good policy to offer thanks to your environment.” He’s in a jolly mood—the giant trees have brought out a kind of bouncy excitement. He gives his horse a little kick. “Come on—I think I see a light up ahead.”

  We plod down the track, the horses’ hooves muffled on the wet redwood needles. Shockingly green ferns press thick around us, growing as tall as I am and drooping with rain. Rat keeps plunging into the brush, despite me calling him back—I can’t help but feel that if he were to get too far away, I’d never find him again in this dense, skyless maze.

  I catch a tendril of smoke, and I lift my gaze from the horse’s mane. Through the trees peeks a squat cabin made of unfinished logs, its mossy roof a slice of green against the red-brown trunks rising around it. The windows gleam yellow through the rain, and smoke curls from the clay chimney. A few outbuildings are scattered here and there—a coop of turkeys, a woodshed, and a one-walled stable surrounded by a small paddock, where two horses and two mules cluster around a trough of hay.

  We don’t get much more than a glimpse, however, before a figure leaps up on the porch. There’s a flash of metal, and I tighten my hold on the reins, causing my horse to throw its head up. My gaze darts around for cover, a place to fire from—and then an escape. My hands have closed on both the stock of the crossbow and a handful of quarrels before Veran urges his horse ahead, his arm raised in the air.

  “Iano!” he calls, relief flooding his voice. “Iano—it’s us!”

  I stop plotting escape routes and look back to the figure, who’s standing sideways in the rain. As we get a little closer, I realize it’s because he has a long, bone-white bow drawn back to his ear. I stare at the old-fashioned weapon—the only ones I’ve ever seen are a splintered old thing collecting dust on a shelf in Patzo’s general store and depictions in petroglyphs.