by Kevin Hearne
“You will hear no argument from me on that. I agree completely.”
Olet stopped rowing, heaving the oar out of the ocean and setting it in its cradle before turning to face him. Jerin did the same.
“Is it your ambition to be Hearthfire of that city someday?”
“No. I’m not particularly disposed to be a Hearthfire at all.”
Olet’s arched eyebrows leapt up. “Have you shared that disposition with your father?”
“No. He doesn’t make a habit of asking me what I want.”
“All right. So what do you want?”
“Will you answer the same question?”
“Sure. You first.”
Jerin hesitated, then sighed. “The truth is I like the idea of starting a new city outside of Hathrir. But I’d like to be doing it legally, not the way my father’s doing it, and I’d like to do it with people from all six nations participating. And I don’t want to be in charge. I just want to help build it, hammer steel, shape glass. Create something new, but not at the expense of others. The problem, of course, is finding a place to make that happen.”
Olet’s mouth opened and then froze that way, stunned. Jerin saw and misinterpreted. “I know it sounds stupid …”
“Did La Mastik—? No.” Olet looked at me, her eyes narrowing. “Did the bard tell you to say that?”
“No,” Jerin and I said in concert. Olet dismissed me and turned back to Jerin.
“Doesn’t it burn you to be manipulated like this? Your father put us on this boat so we’d talk, and now here we are, doing what he wants.”
“Yes, it burns to be manipulated, but I don’t care what he wants. I got to honestly speak my mind just now, and it was refreshing. He might have wanted us to talk, but I’m sure he didn’t want me to say I disagree with his goals.”
“You say you disagree, yet you participated in that slaughter today.”
“Yes, I did. I did indeed. And when was the last time you openly defied your father?”
Olet flinched and looked down, her voice barely audible. “You think because I’m here on this boat with you I’ve never defied him?”
“No. I’m sure you have. And you probably found out, as I did, that however horrible the thing was that he wanted you to do, defying him was worse.”
Olet looked up. “Yes.”
“What happened?”
Her eyes fell away from him, and her voice went flat. “You heard about what my father did four years ago? It was what forced the Hearthfire of Narvik to face him in single combat, made him ruler of two cities.”
“Yes, I remember.”
The giantess sniffed and passed a hand across her pale cheek. “That was because I defied him. I’d been a firelord for three years and serving on some ships as protection, observing that tensions between us and Narvik had been steadily increasing. One day, he told me to sail south with my crew and burn the cargo of just one ship from Narvik, and I refused, thinking of those sailors and merchants and their families at home and how desperate they’d be without that income. It would be heartless, I told him, which I thought would make him explode. I was a fifteen-year-old brat, and that was my rebellion. But his face softened, and he looked so kind, and he said, ‘Oh, no, my sweet daughter, I’m trying to save lives by doing it this way. Can I show you why this is better?’ and I said okay, thinking he would show me something I hadn’t thought of, something outside my experience. And I guess in a way he did. He sailed south with me and was very serious, working out with me precisely what the impact would be if we burned the cargo of one ship, what the impact would be on that ship’s crew and their families, and what the impact would be on Narvik as a whole. ‘I’m glad you’ve taken the time to think this through,’ he said. ‘Proud, in fact. You should always weigh the consequences of your actions ahead of time.’ And then we came upon ten ships—the Narvik Bloodmoon fleet, bringing up all the chipped volcanic glass knives and crystal, plus enchanted firebowls and lamps—the dragon’s share of their economy. He ordered his fury, Pinter Stuken, to set them all on fire, sailors and cargo, and that sick son of a sand badger smiled. His arms just turned to gouts of flame that spanned the distance between ships, and in moments everything aboard was kindled. Two of the ships had lavaborn on them, and they snuffed out the flames on their ships as best they could, but they couldn’t save everyone. So it was eight ships he destroyed and a good portion of the others. Hundreds of sailors and many of Narvik’s most important merchants, gone. Eight times the economic damage I had calculated and just … incalculable damage to the lives of their loved ones.”
Olet sniffed again and shook her head, and this time when tears spilled from her eyes, she let them fall. “And of course I screamed at him to stop; he didn’t have to kill our own people. It was too horrible. That’s when all the kindness and pride left his face and there was nothing left but this ugly, molten rage. He said, ‘Their deaths are absolutely necessary, Olet. In the future, you need to also weigh the consequences of defying me. It will always be a price you never want to pay and certainly a price no one else will want to pay either. I trust you’ll never be so heartless again.’ So—” She splayed her hands wide. “—here we are.”
“I’m so sorry. Yes. Here we are, two kids, adrift on the ocean, who don’t want to grow up to be like their murderous parents.”
“And who can’t escape them.”
“No, we can’t. Well, wait. Why can’t we?” Jerin flicked a finger in my direction. “We’ll drop off the Raelech in Hashan Khek and then just keep sailing north into a life of adventure.”
Olet smiled for the first time, and it transformed her whole person. “You mean two itinerant firelords walking among the tiny people of the world, caramelizing their onions and custard for them?”
“And fetching things off the top shelf. We’d be very helpful like that.”
“I like it. Very heroic.” She beamed at him for another few moments, enjoying the fantasy, before her smile crumpled and the joy leached away. “They’d never let us go. They’d send people after us, and someone would get hurt. Someone innocent.”
“Yes,” Jerin admitted. “I would have struck out already on my own if I thought I could. But I would just be trailing chaos behind me if I did.”
Something shifted in the air between them; I could see it, even feel it. Olet cocked her head to one side, and Jerin leaned back, nostrils flared, as it hit them both at the same time: they were each sitting across from someone who didn’t want them to be a Hearthfire. The same someone who could, perhaps uniquely, understand their problems.
“Are you …?” Olet began, and then she frowned, shaking her head minutely. “Oh, no, no. You’re like him, aren’t you, being all charming, and then later you’ll be a badger hole.”
“What? No. Look, Olet: I’m not your father, and I’m not mine either. It’s okay if you don’t like me, but please make sure it’s really me you don’t like and not someone else.”
They had themselves a staring contest, Jerin projecting earnest sincerity and Olet trying to peel back a mask with her eyes, certain that he was wearing one.
“I have trouble trusting people,” she finally said, “and probably always will have.”
“After what your father did, I can certainly understand why. And I’m not asking you to trust me. Just … reserve judgment, perhaps.”
She nodded once, her eyes boring into his. “Were you aware that your father threatened to bury his axe in La Mastik’s head if she said another word about returning to Hathrir?”
Jerin blinked. “No. But it doesn’t surprise me. He can be ruthless and even callous, as we saw today. But he does have his admirable qualities.”
“Such as? You don’t mean battle, I hope.”
“No. I mean he truly loves my mother. And me, too, I guess, though I didn’t appreciate that until recently. When we first arrived after Mount Thayil erupted, he told me something that I think you might appreciate. He said that if you and I didn’t hit it off, he’d let me
out of this arrangement so that I could marry for love.”
Olet’s mouth gaped, and Jerin grinned at her, pointing. “That was my reaction, too! Very surprising. But maybe that will give you some comfort. If you want out, you can rest assured that there won’t be any backdraft from the Mogens.”
She blew out a long breath. “Only an explosion from Winthir Kanek. Thank you, though.”
“Sure. But what do you want, Olet? You promised you’d answer.”
“Oh. Well, it’s an impossible dream. I want to be free of my father, and I don’t want anyone to get hurt because of it.”
“That’s a fine vision for the future. I’d like the same, honestly.”
“And I’ve thought about trying to start a new city elsewhere, too, far away from Hathrir, which is why when you said that, I couldn’t believe it.”
“We have plenty of time to waste talking about it. We can scheme, or we can let the bard do his thing.”
They looked at me for all of one second and chose to scheme. And, unexpectedly, to smoke. Olet had a bag of personal effects and withdrew two glass pipes from it. “Do you partake?” she asked Jerin. I noted that she didn’t ask me.
“Not usually.”
“Neither do I. Only on special occasions. Can’t stand the taste of it. Kind of lingers in the mouth.”
“Indeed it does. But is this a special occasion?”
“Yes. Come on. Spark up with me and I’ll explain. I don’t like to smoke alone.”
“All right.”
Olet pinched some dried, shredded leaves out of a pouch and tamped them into the pipes. Being firelords, they sparked them with a thought, drew in the smoke, and exhaled. They both coughed a bit afterward and grinned at each other.
“Okay. Why are we doing this to ourselves?” Jerin asked.
“It’s not for the fire or the taste or the smell. It’s for the smoke itself.”
“The smoke?”
She took a deep drag and exhaled slowly, withdrawing the pipe and pointing at the cloud birthed from her mouth. “Yes. Look at it curl into the sky, Jerin, each puff of it different and beautiful for a brief ephemeral time, like us, and then it dissipates, out of sight, gone forever and forgotten. Unless we pay attention and remember. That’s what we’re doing. Observing and celebrating this moment before it’s gone. And using fire not to consume but to preserve.” She tapped the side of her head with a free finger. “Preserving this fleeting, smoky moment in our memories.”
“What are we preserving?”
“The revelation that we don’t have to be what our parents want us to be. That someone else agrees with us. A small sliver of perfect accord between the Mogen and Kanek families.”
Jerin stared at her for a moment, then nodded. “Okay,” he said, but must have thought that wasn’t strong enough, because then he added, “Yes. That’s a good reason to smoke. Even if your mouth tastes horrible for days, you know why. You remember.”
“That’s right.”
The two of them were so absorbed in each other that they never saw my jaw drop. Following a morning of screaming death with a quiet smoke on a boat was the last thing I expected that day. Not that I had expected the screaming death either.
I never got to sing or tell them a single story. Instead I had to listen to them daydream about freedom and flirt the whole distance to Hashan Khek.
I offered a prayer of thanks to the Triple Goddess when we finally sailed into port under a flag of parley. The giants delivered me into the hands of a group of soldiers at the docks and pushed off immediately. I was ushered into the viceroy’s presence, where I delivered the bad news and Gorin Mogen’s ultimatum and said nothing about what I had heard at sea. Thinking of what Jerin and Olet might be plotting now that they didn’t have a bard along to listen in, I gave Viceroy Melishev Lohmet at least one advantage over the Hearthfire: he knew he had a problem and where it was coming from.
“The reason that the juggernaut was called back to Rael, of course, was the invasion of the Bone Giants and the loss of the Raelech city Bennelin,” Fintan said upon dismissing the seeming of his armored self. “The Triune Council saw the Bone Giants as a much greater threat than Gorin Mogen and required Tarrech’s presence, for there were still plenty of Bone Giants left in the south of Brynlön, able to strike at us if they wished by skirting the southern edge of the Poet’s Range.”
He pulled out a sphere to imprint and grinned. “As you might expect, the viceroy of Hashan Khek was displeased to receive my report. But let’s save his reaction for later. Shall we catch up with Abhinava Khose and the newly blessed Beast Callers?” Fintan asked.
All during Fintan’s tale the crowd below the wall had continued to grow; the children had been dismissed from school as soon as he began and ran to join their parents and listen to the bard. They roared approval at the suggestion of more Abhi: I saw some little kids in particular jump up and down, clapping their hands.
Hanima was true to her word and took few opportunities to be quiet. Her enthusiasm was infectious, though. She told me what it was like living under the docks by the river. “Nobody wanted me around. I was the stupid dirty girl because my mouth wouldn’t work, so I had nowhere else to go.” For a brief moment, her expression clouded with rage at the memory. She would not forget the treatment she’d suffered, and perhaps there would be occasion to right a wrong done to many people. The cloud cleared away, however, as she thought of her change in fortune. “But now I can talk, and I bet I’ll clean up really nice. Plus there will be a respect bonus now. You know, for being blessed.”
“A respect bonus,” Sudhi said, a grin spreading across his face. “I like the sound of that. I’d like to just get some baseline respect, never mind the bonus.”
“You’re going to get it,” Hanima replied, and stabbed a finger in his direction. “You watch and see. And we deserve it for getting chewed on. We’re, uh … I don’t know. Abhi, what are we again?”
“Beast Callers.”
“That’s right. Beast Callers. Except I don’t know what I’m supposed to call or how to call them yet. Are we going to get our own bloodcats and stalk hawks now?”
I shrugged. “It’s going to be a discovery for me as much as it is for you. I don’t know what to expect.”
We emerged from the nughobe grove where the horses waited undisturbed. They turned their heads as one to look at Adithi, who had been silent as she limped.
“Whoa,” she said. “Why are they staring at me?”
“Ask them.”
“Are you … no. Seriously?”
“Absolutely. I spoke to Murr and Eep, and they followed me.” The horses nickered and approached Adithi. A bemused half smile on her face, she reached out and petted their heads. “They seem to be much more interested in you, though, than my animals were in me.”
“I think I know what they’re feeling or wanting,” Adithi said. “Can you guys feel it?”
“No,” I said, and the others chimed in with the same.
“What do they want?” Sudhi asked.
“Apples. They’re bored with this grass.”
“Don’t horses always want apples?” Hanima said.
“This one says I can ride him!” Adithi said, her hands on the head of a spotted stallion.
“That’s definitely different from me,” I said. “I don’t get any mental communication from Murr or Eep. They understand me but not the other way around.”
“Looks like you figured out the nature of your blessing already,” Sudhi said. “Congratulations.”
“This is the best,” Hanima asserted. “You need a tough title now, like plaguebringer but horsey.”
“Well, what if she can hear more than horses?” Sudhi asked.
Adithi’s smile was wide now, and she had tears leaking down her cheeks. “I’d be happy if this is all I can do.”
“You could be a horsemaster!” Hanima said.
Adithi scoffed. “You mean a horsemistress?”
“Yeah, that’s what I me
ant.”
We fed the horses apples from my cart, made a camp, and spent the day there, trying to figure out the boundaries of our kenning. Adithi could make herself understood by horses just as I could, but they could “talk” back to her in a sort of fuzzy emotional language of desires. Her broader communication with horses did not extend to other animals, however. When Murr rejoined us from the grove and Eep returned from hunting in the plains, they couldn’t understand her at all like they could me. They didn’t understand Sudhi or Hanima either, and night fell before we could discover what new talents those two might have.
The writhing mass of snakes and eels collected around Sudhi in the morning, however, gave us a fairly decent clue about his affinity.
“Gah! Flesh eels!” Adithi cried. Not the gentlest of good mornings, but that’s how I woke up. And we all scrambled to our feet, including Sudhi, who was staring at a whole lot of reptiles. Instincts and a lifetime of horror stories about flesh eels will get any Nentian off the ground in a hurry when confronted with one.
Except that none of us had to worry about flesh eels anymore, and we realized that after a few seconds of cursing. Our kenning protected us, and I had specifically protected Tamhan as well. Had I not taken care to do so, the eels would have injected their paralyzing poison, gnawed through the skin, and burrowed to the lungs while he still lived until they tore open the lungs to lay their eggs inside. In a couple of days tiny eels would slither up the windpipe and out his mouth and enjoy his face for breakfast. That is, if the lungs weren’t eaten first by blackwings or other scavengers. The eels’ quick gestation period and the ravenous hunger of the plains scavengers always made it a race.
“Go away!” Sudhi said to the mass of reptiles. He flipped his hands at the wrist to banish them, as if such a human gesture would be recognizable to snakes, but they began to disperse and slither off into the grass. The flesh eels obeyed as well. The significance sank in, and Sudhi turned to me, his jaw slack. “Snakes do what I say now?”
I shrugged. “Looks like maybe they do. Call one back to wrap around your arm; see what happens.”
“But I don’t even like snakes.”
