Given to the Earth

by Mindy McGinnis

  I bite my tongue hard enough to draw blood at the thought. I’ve never known a woman, and never shall. The Lithos cannot be distracted. I have not strayed from this path, something again that Pravin excelled at: maintaining my focus. But with Hadduk by my side, all jests soon turn to bedding women—usually Nilana—and my mind has wandered of late.

  I swallow the mouthful of blood I drew, and it joins the salt in my throat, a slick mixture that coats the words I speak to the face that comes to answer my knock. I continue to the next home, and another light goes out behind me.

  * * *

  I would let the darkness follow me to my chambers where I can be what I am, a crying child. But the Keeper waits for me there, a warm fire in the hearth and a drink at the bedside table.

  “You’ll make me soft,” I warn her, but sink, exhausted, into a chair nonetheless.

  “This man, I think not.” She clucks her tongue as she removes my boots, something she’s never done before. I see the streak of gray in her hair has widened since I left and wonder if worry for me was the cause.

  We have become close, this woman who raised the Stillean Given and I. I killed her husband, but spared her so that she may teach me how she closed her heart so tightly that she can raise babes into women, knowing they go to drown. And yet this person who should be as hard as any Pietran stone shield is made of kindness and cares for me now as she did the little Givens. As if I myself were to go to the sea.

  I shiver at the thought that I nearly did.

  “You are cold, my Lithos?”

  “No,” I tell her. “Only remembering.”

  She takes the seat opposite me on the other side of the fire, rekindling the habit we had taken up before I marched for Stille.

  “I think it did not go so well,” she says drily, eyeing me over her own cup.

  I do the one thing I haven’t done since I left this room. I laugh. “No,” I agree, taking a drink of the wine she had warmed for me. “Not so well.”

  “I hear Pravin was lost?”

  I nod, the laughter dead.

  “And many?”

  “Many and more,” I say. “I would guess Feneen feet outnumber Pietran in our army now.”

  “Is that because the Feneen outnumber us or because so many of them are three-legged?”

  She’s aiming for another laugh, but gets a smile only, and that not for the jest. “Us?” I repeat.

  The Keeper shrugs and looks to the fire. “I was made to care for things; it is my nature. If you were a Stillean, you’d go by King, but because your blood is Pietran, the people call you Lithos. You are a leader; I am a caregiver. My allegiance is to that which I care for.”

  “You are a comfort to me,” I say, and those very words should make me drag her by the hair and throw her from the room. The Lithos of Pietra knows no comfort, that he may be unflinching. If Pravin were alive to see this fire and warm wine, he would toss the Keeper into the stables. Hadduk will only assume the bedsheets were turned down as well, her welcoming body under them.

  “I should send you away,” I say. “You make the room warm and say kind things to me. You are a mother to a boy who should have no family.”

  “Nay,” the Keeper says, poking an ember that slides from the fire with the toe of her shoe. “I’m the punishment you weren’t expecting. For every kindness I give, you heap coals upon your own head. I know well that you killed my man and razed my village. So I’ll make your food and unlace your boots, and the hate will rise up inside of you, higher every time, like the tide that eats the beach. But it’s not the hate they taught to make a Lithos, not the rage of sword and slice of blade. It’s the slow, rotting death of self-hate I’m treating you to, boy.”

  She reaches for me, covering the distance between us so that her hand rests on my arm, the weight of it more than my salt-crusted armor.

  “It’ll make you harder than any lesson they taught you on the clifftops,” she says. “I’ll do it with love and mean every kind word.”

  “You’d see me dead,” I say, the only thing I can understand.

  “No.” She shakes her head. “I’d see you live a long life and fully know what you’ve done.”

  We stare at the fire in silence until a knot pops, a spark flying to catch among her skirts. She reaches down and pinches it out, smoke trailing from her singed fingertips as she rises from her chair as she leaves the room.

  “Tomorrow is a Culling Day, my Lithos,” she reminds me, and my head sinks farther at the thought of all the darkened houses, the wives and children who may bring boats to the shore in their grief and ask to be given to the Lusca so that it may end.

  “Depths,” I say, alone in my warm chambers with good wine in my belly. “Depths.”

  CHAPTER 10

  Dara

  To travel with an Indiri not my brother, Donil, is an odd feeling indeed. And though Vincent was a decent woodsman and we knew each other’s movements from childhood, his blood remained Stillean; his toes would catch in roots, his hair snag in branches. Faja is like me; her feet make no noise, and the trees part for her as we pass, something I’ve never seen.

  “They know me,” Faja says in Indiri, when she catches me glancing behind us to see the canopy closing again. “You, they fear. There’s a bit of stolen lifesap in you.”

  “I pulled down a tree,” I admit, something I am not proud of, though it gave me the strength to kill many Feneen on the battlefield. And Tangata, too, I recall, eyeing the cat who walks beside us, tail haughtily curled in the air. Faja calls her companion Kakis, though I would sooner call her gone.

  “A tree,” Faja says, slightly out of breath as she tries to keep pace with my mount, Famoor. Her hand brushes my ankle purposefully. “More than one, I think. That was badly done. None wanted to go.”

  I think of the tree I took down the night I drew Khosa to the water. Too much wine had found my tongue that night, and the life I pulled was not taken on purpose. Still I must have been forgiven, for it was the same tree’s branches that saved me from being pulled under with the wave, tangling me in an embrace even as it died, salt-crusted and weary.

  “Nothing ever wants to go,” I say to Faja, who laughs.

  “Live to my age and see if you say the same.”

  Beside us, Kakis sneezes, a sound suspiciously laced with amusement. I give her a dark glance, but the cat only stares at me, wide-eyed and innocent.

  “I don’t think I will live to your age.”

  “You march for death,” Faja says. “Maybe not your own, but some will die at your hand. I see it in your walk, the firmness of your mouth. Tell me, Indiri girl, who is it you would kill?”

  “The Lithos of Pietra,” I say. “I saw him on the beach before the wave came, and though he had become a man, I know well the face of the boy my mother looked on before she died. He leads the people who killed my own, and neither of us children now.”

  Faja is quiet, all teasing gone from the air between us. Even the curl is out of Kakis’s tail; it hangs low behind her, gray and black rings nearly dirtied as we go.

  “The Pietra.” Faja spits after speaking, the words foul in her mouth. “I was not there on the plains of Dunkai, but I have been, after, and seen the earth where nothing grows.”

  “You were not there because you chose the Tangata over your people,” I remind her, and see Kakis’s ear turn to me as if she were listening.

  “Good that I wasn’t, or who would you speak with now?” Faja shoots back.

  “No one and nothing,” I tell her. “And maybe the better for it.”

  Kakis stalks past us and crouches in front of Famoor to relieve herself. He halts and snorts, appalled. Faja hides a smile in her hand, but I catch it.

  “Does the cat understand me?” I ask Faja.

  “You’re not terribly complicated.”

  “You know what I say.” I drop my voice, the ton
e used for an Indiri challenge, no matter what words are spoken.

  “Peace, young one.” Faja raises her hands in the air. “I’ve spent my life in the woods, and none who pass know my tongue. I only like to make words with another who can answer—forgive me if I treat you lightly.”

  “Forgiven.” I say, my voice lightening. “Now, explain that.” I nod toward the pile Kakis has made directly in Famoor’s path.

  “A lifetime among the cats found them as my speaking companions, and Kakis is one of the kits who nursed beside me. Indiri I may be, but the Tangata lead a harsher life yet, and without her as my companion, I would have gone to the earth long before now. Kakis taught me to live as a cat, and I taught her to think as an Indiri, learning our words.”

  “They can live so long?” I ask, urging Famoor forward and favoring Kakis with a swing of my boot, meant to warn but not connect. She raises her lip, showing teeth that I’d do better to avoid.

  “The cats can live long, though Kakis and I perhaps have outstripped our usefulness with our years. We’re wild things, the both of us, and not meant to age.”

  “Nor am I.”

  We walk in silence a bit longer, Kakis brushing beside me close enough that her tail touches my hand.

  “What is this wish to die that you carry?” Faja finally asks. “I have seen the young Lithos a time or two, in my wanderings. Even in my youth, I would not have faced him assured of my victory.”

  My hands find Famoor’s mane, and he soon sports a row of braids as my tongue searches for words.

  “You see that I walk a path of death,” I tell Faja. “And being Indiri, you know that we are all fierce in both loving and fighting, but each has their own inclination.”

  She nods. “Yours is clear.”

  “Knowing that I cannot find a mate, I will make bodies instead of babies. There will be no Indiri from me; the least I can do for my people is avenge them.”

  “I would not turn you from it, even if I thought I could,” Faja says. “I would ask, though, that you let the beast go.”

  “Famoor?”

  “Unbroken,” Faja repeats, smiling. “He is well named, but the fact that you name him at all undermines the meaning, yes?”

  “And what does Kakis mean?”

  “Ask your ancestors,” Faja says. “Yet my Tangata wears no bridle, and I do not sit upon her back. That Famoor carries an Indiri is a compliment to him, that he is asked to bear a rider, an insult.”

  “My horse is my concern,” I say, not sharing that I agree.

  “To the edge of the forest, young one,” Faja says. “And then I leave you.”

  “Then I shall spur my horse,” I say.

  But I don’t.

  CHAPTER 11

  Donil

  I go to meet her, though I know I should not.

  I love my friend’s wife, and she me. Yet because we both love Vincent in our own ways, we must remain chaste. We speak without touching, both of us vividly remembering the one time we gave ourselves freedom with our bodies, nearly fulfilling the act. I would have damned her with my touch, had we made a child together. Her destiny of providing a new Given would have been fulfilled, and Stille would have pointed her to her final destination—the sea, a place no Indiri can follow.

  That danger is gone, replaced by another. If a speckled child were born to her, we would both be killed as traitors and the babe drowned as a bastard. And though I fear no executioner’s blade, I would go to my death knowing it was well deserved, for betraying my friend.

  Yet when I am with Khosa, everything fades, even Vincent. It would be easy to forget him and dare all of Stille to deny me what I want. It seems almost understandable, easily explained if we were seen together, our happiness so evident none would deprive us of it.

  If Dara were here, these meetings would never happen. She’d shade my steps, give me the sharp edge of her tongue, and her blade after that if I persisted in this madness. But my sister left me, what little of her that was made for love shattered. I have never seen Dara shrink from pain, but to see Vincent beside Khosa she could not bear. My rage with her for harming Khosa would have faded with time, but not so her feelings for Vincent. So she left, as I would if I were half sensible. Instead, I persist in a folly that will lead to nowhere good. I go eagerly.

  Khosa has arrived in the clearing beforehand, and I take a moment to watch as she waits for me upon a rock. She is wise, wearing the crown of Stille at all times, not as a gesture of power but to remind herself—and me—of who she is now. No longer does she choose her own mate, and I do not ask how she spends her nights with Vincent.

  The crown sits heavily. As a child, I placed the one Vincent now wears on my head in jest, and all of us laughed at the idea of an Indiri ruling Stille—although Dara laughed last, and somewhat bitterly. I remember how it pinched, and how my neck ached for days afterward, as if I’d slept with a tree root in the wrong place.

  No, Khosa wears the crown not in victory, but as punishment.

  I go toward her, breaking a branch beneath my foot to warn her of my approach, an old Indiri courtesy. But she is lost to me, staring beachward with the blank look of a baby oderbird. Alarmed, I break into a run.

  “Khosa,” I call, and am on my knees in front of her in a moment, ready to pull the very feet out from under her if she heads for the sea.

  “No fears,” she says to me, her voice calm, the brush of her hand through my hair. “I am myself.”

  I rise and walk to the edge of the clearing to put a safe distance between us, urging the swell of panic in my throat to cease.

  “How fares Vincent?”

  I always ask these words first when we meet, acknowledging the third who stands between us.

  “Unwell, I fear,” she says, her voice carrying to me. “He drinks wine too easily these days.”

  “I am partially to blame,” I admit. “We should seek a better way to pass our time.”

  “He needs the release of being with you,” she says, waving away my apology. I can’t help but wonder if he finds any release in her bed, then shake my head clear of the thought.

  “He has much to think about of late,” I say. “I fear he has taken Sallin’s proposal of building ships into consideration.”

  “Is it so mad?” Khosa asks, and my heart dips into the dirt.

  She would go and Vincent with her. Dara has left me, and now the two others in this world I care for would sail into nothingness. I cannot bring myself to the thought of standing on the bones of trees killed so that people may go upon the water, an unnatural action, even if there were a destination.

  “Filthy fathoms, yes, it is mad,” I say. “What is the Pietran saying? Boats are for the dead. The Lusca may haunt their shores and eat their flesh, but the creatures are not the only thing to fear. Would you risk going to the depths based on a misbegotten whim?”

  I have said too much and spoken too harshly. Khosa gathers her skirts to rise, her face betraying nothing, as usual.

  “I suppose I am a madwoman, then,” she says. “For I would go, and take any who wish to leave with me. The tides rise, land slips beneath the sea—”

  “You need not tell me that,” I snap, the Indiri temper Dara wears so close to her skin flaring in me as well. “I am of the earth. Do you think I do not feel keenly how much more powerful the sea is than—”

  “Then why will you not listen?” Khosa yells, crossing the distance between us, anger finally forcing her stone face into an emotion. “There is something else out there, Donil, I feel it. I am drawn to it even as I am drawn to you.”

  “There is nothing else.” I repeat the words I said to Vincent the other night, though my voice is weak after her frank admission.

  “There is,” she insists, and pokes a finger into my chest. “And I go to it still. Whether I go with a boat beneath my feet or not, it will have me eventually.” />
  “We can fight it,” I say, breaking our vow not to touch as I take her hand in mine. “I’ll lash you to a tree—”

  “And watch me go mad?” All anger is gone from her voice, her eyes trained on our intertwined fingers. “I would tear my own limbs off to reach it.”

  I sigh, bringing our clasped hands to my face, where they rest against my lips, for a moment only. I have never touched her without desire. I keep it at bay, and see the same feeling pulsing within her. Yet today there is something stronger running through my love. There is a vibration that runs throughout her body, like a note already played yet still hanging in the air. It pushes against her very skin to be near mine, and I know it pulls with equal strength in the opposite direction—toward the sea. She would indeed be driven insane denying this call, and anything Vincent or I would do to keep her from it will only end in harm.

  I release her hand.

  “What would you have me do?”

  CHAPTER 12

  Khosa

  What do you know of building ships?” Khosa asks.

  “Less and little,” Donil tells her, his eyes unnaturally bright in the wake of his outburst. “The Indiri have nothing to do with the sea.”

  “Has it always been so?” she presses, but lightly, aware that his patience has already been tested this day.

  Donil runs a hand over his face and squeezes his temples. “You’d have me ask my ancestors?”

  “I mean no harm, or offense.” Khosa’s hand flutters toward him, but she resists the impulse, and it falls, twitching by her side, a butterfly with a broken wing.

  “There is no offense in asking,” Donil says gently. “I am not my sister, enjoying anger so much that I seek out chances to feel it.”