by Jae Waller
An enormous creature surfaced out in the deep water. Its marbled grey body flowed into a split tail like a fish. Another leapt from the water, droplets streaming off its flippers, and crashed back down with a torrential spray. Whales.
Rin who traded on the coast told stories about all sorts of creatures — playful dolphins, turtles the size of humans, squid lurking in the deep. I’d never seen any. My fur-trapper family always traded in the inland mountains. Seventeen years in the coastal rainforest and I’d never touched the ocean until now.
3.
STORM YEAR
I lay awake long after Nili fell asleep. Wind gusted over the promontory where we’d tied our tent to a salt spruce. When I closed my eyes, whales drifted past, etched into my memory. The lap of waves on the beach faded into the splash of flippers. I clung to a whale’s speckled skin, the ocean rolling below us . . .
A twig cracked.
I snapped out of my dream. Nili stirred but didn’t wake. I drew my flail and crept out of the tent. Cold air cut into me, whipping my hair around my shoulders.
The tip of the promontory was bare. I peered into the tangle of spruce and pines around our tent. “Who’s there?” I called, swinging my flail in warning.
A figure stepped into the moonlight. Short dark hair, perfect posture, sword on his belt.
I hurled a chunk of ice at Fendul. It thudded against his chest and bounced away. “What in Aeldu-yan are you doing here?”
Fendul rubbed the spot where I hit him. “Most people say hello.”
“Don’t sneak up at night!”
“I planned to approach you in the morning. I thought you were asleep.”
“I was. Thanks for waking me, mudskull.” I crossed my arms, the flail’s spiked head swinging by my hip. “That was you at the smokehouse, wasn’t it?”
“Yes. My father sent me to bring you home.” Fendul gestured at the inlet. “I knew you wouldn’t turn around until you got stuck.”
“We’re not stuck. I was aiming for the ocean. I just found it a few days early.”
“Kako.” He shifted his feet, opened his mouth, closed it. Wind rustled through the forest, swirling ferns against our legs. “Listen, it’s not fair to drag Nili along.”
“Nili wants to come.”
“She doesn’t have family in the Iyo. Why would she care—”
“Because we both want Dunehein’s help.” The words escaped before I could stop them.
“You—” He pressed his palms to his temples. “Kaid. So that’s what this is about. Aeldu curse it, Kateiko.”
I took a step backward, more stunned by his swearing than his anger.
“You want to marry into the Iyo-jouyen like Dunehein did.” His words were almost lost in his frustration. “How long have you been planning this?”
“Since Nili and Orelein split up this spring.”
He shook his head. “I should’ve figured it out sooner.”
“We’re not going to right away. I can’t until I’m eighteen. We just wanted to make the arrangements—”
“But only okorebai or okoreni can approve marriages between jouyen. Is that why you asked me to come? You were using me?”
“Don’t talk about using people. You ratted me out so you’d look like the perfect okoreni saving Nili—”
“It had nothing to do with that—”
“Then what?” I cried. “You knew I’d never be allowed to go after that!”
“The autumn equinox is in three days. You couldn’t have waited to visit the shrine? And don’t say you went for the star rain,” he cut me off. “I know why you lit the lantern.”
“It’s my family’s shrine as much as anyone’s! I should be able to go when I want!”
“Kako, I’m trying to look out for you, but there’s not much I can do if you’re determined to run headfirst into the ground.”
“Maybe I should ask for your help next time. Oh wait, I tried.” I hugged my arms closer to my body. “I’m freezing. I’m going back to sleep.”
“I’m not leaving,” Fendul called after me.
“Fine. But I hope you brought your own tent.”
•
I stepped into dense fog the next morning and smelled cooking meat. Orange light flickered on the point, but the ocean and sky were lost from sight. I headed in the other direction. Mist choked the forest, drifting along in spectral tendrils. My snares were empty. I thought about the limited preserves in my carryframe and searched the undergrowth instead, finding dewy mushrooms and late-season huckleberries.
Nili and I always talked of travelling. Seeing islands, the dry south, the northern tundra where the sun never set in summer. I’d daydreamed of going with Leifar, a nineteen-year-old itheran goatherd and my recurring romantic fling, from Vunfjel to his town on the wide eastern plains, but he said it wouldn’t be appropriate unless we married. I didn’t care that my elders wouldn’t approve the marriage. I just didn’t like Leifar nearly enough for a life of rye sourbread, prairie blizzards, and wet, smelly, bleating goats whose horns could take out my eye. At least when I trapped elk, they stayed in the same place.
Nili had been with Orelein two years when he asked her to marry him. She said no. A yes would’ve tied her to Aeti Ginu forever. After they broke up, I told her, Let’s leave. We’d marry laughing young Iyo who’d teach us to sail the seas. Nili could get silks and a rainbow of thread only sold in coastal ports, the materials her embroidery skill deserved. We’d meet people and eat food from places we never imagined. This summer, I told Leifar I wasn’t coming back.
I was stripping grey bark off a cottonwood to get at the soft, edible inner layer when I heard voices. I returned to the campsite with my scarce pickings. Fendul had built a sputtering fire at the tip of the promontory. A hare carcass lay at his feet. Nili sat bundled in her cloak, bleary-eyed and messy-haired, chewing and looking anywhere but at him.
“I made breakfast.” Fendul offered me a strip of meat.
“Don’t you ever sleep?” I brushed past him and sat next to Nili. “Traitor,” I told her.
“M’ungry. Too foggy t’ hunt,” she said around her mouthful.
I peered at the meat that was still cooking. The fat had barely melted. “Fen, your fire sucks.” I dried a handful of kindling and tossed it on the fire. Sparks leapt into the air, glowing in the fog.
“Why is he here?” Nili asked once she could speak again.
“Apparently he let us wander around the forest for four days so we’d decide the smart option is to go home.”
“Your mistake was thinking Kako is smart,” she told Fendul. I jabbed her with a stick and she yelped.
“Neither of you are, or you’d remember this is a dead end.” He took the stick and drew in a patch of mud. The eastern mountain range was a vertical line, the inlet a horizontal line to its left. The two didn’t quite touch. “See this gap between the inlet and the eastern range? That was the route to the border crossing. It’s all wasteland now.”
“So we’ll go around east,” I said. “We’re already in mountains. They’re just taller out there.”
“Kako, listen.” Fendul leaned forward. “This winter will be bad. I can’t imagine why else a snowcat came so far west. We can’t risk travelling through those mountains this late in the year.”
“Then we’ll carve a canoe and cross the inlet.”
“You hadn’t even seen the ocean until yesterday, let alone rowed on it. Please don’t try.”
I popped a couple of berries in my mouth. They tasted like salt. I spat them out. “Fine. I’ll take my chances with the wasteland.”
Fendul ran a hand down his face and muttered something. “Right. See for yourself. Then we’re turning around and going home.” He stood up and dusted ash off his breeches. “Eat and let’s get moving.”
I made a face at him, but when he left I plucked a str
ip of cooling meat off the rocks.
•
I wanted to hate that Fendul was with us. I tried to sulk, but it didn’t have any impact. He kept a polite distance and gave us time alone at lunch. It felt strange, given that I shared a house with him, so Nili and I resorted to mocking him when he wasn’t listening.
We had a full day of monotony, cutting back northeast along the inlet. Fog turned to rain. Rain turned to dry air. I thought it was good news when the inlet narrowed, but just before sunset, we crested a steep hill and saw it.
Dead earth. Not just dead — mangled. Blasted apart, blackened and scored with rifts across a flat valley until the ground balked at its abuse and rose into abrupt mountains. Boulders had been wrested out of the earth and tossed aside like handfuls of pebbles. Skeletons of trees dotted the landscape. What had been the riverbed of Oberu Iren was a dried, cracked rut.
Everyone remembered the Storm Year. It was the first summer I was away from home without my parents. I remembered standing on a mountain peak, the wind whipping through my hair as lightning split the sky. The thunder sounded like a distant cry for help as the far reaches of our homeland burned. The earth shook until fire burst forth from the ground, colliding with snow in plumes of steam. The sun turned red and then rain poured down as the sky drowned in smoke. Trees were buried under avalanches of ash.
The worst didn’t reach us in the north, but itherans muttered oaths and herded their goats down the slopes, retreating to their town on the plains. I remembered Isu’s arm around my shoulders as we watched the earth turn inside out. Her body trembled. I thought the world was ending.
Anwen Bel healed. It always did. The scorched rioden on the shore of Kotula Huin was one of the few remnants of the Storm Year. But on the crest of this hill, we were faced with a part that couldn’t heal. The forest’s guts had been ripped out and laid bare.
“My father and I came to check on it last year,” Fendul said. “The elders think it’s cursed.”
“I don’t believe in curses.”
He gave me his favourite exasperated look. “It doesn’t matter what we believe. We could be out there for days without food or water. We don’t even know what’s on the other side.”
I shrugged. “Isu and Hiyua would’ve told us if it’s impassable.”
“Hiyua doesn’t know how bad it is. Isu . . .” Fendul glanced down. “She knew I wouldn’t agree to take you.”
“Wait. Wait. She never wanted me to get to Toel Ginu to see Dunehein at all?”
Nili waved her hands to get his attention. “So what are we supposed to do? Stay cut off from the entire southern half of the Aikoto Confederacy?”
“We’ll probably have to marry into the Tamu-jouyen,” I muttered. I kicked a rock and it bounced away down the hill.
Nili’s mouth twisted into a knot. “You told him?”
“I figured it out,” Fendul said. “Look, give me some time. I’ll talk to Behadul, and maybe we can go after the snowmelt—”
“Nei,” I said. “I’m not going home to spend all winter seeing the land of the dead. Nobody will marry me if I go insane.”
Fendul gave a small shake of his head. “Don’t be dramatic.”
“Don’t be an ass.” I shrugged my carryframe off my shoulders. “I’m going to gather food.”
•
It was well after dark when I returned to our campsite with a satchel of mushrooms. Blue light glowed through Fendul’s tent. Nili had set up our tent under a cottonwood stand. I looked forward to crawling under the blankets and falling asleep, but when I pulled back a panel I found Nili awake.
“It’s strange,” she said as I ducked inside. “Sitting on the edge of this. It feels like . . . nothing. Like the air is dead.”
I knew what she meant. I could feel it in the water. I’d tried to call some in the woods, but it was sluggish, like calling sap.
“Nili? Is Kako back?” Fendul asked. “Can I talk to the two of you?”
“Nei,” she said. “I’m busy talking to the trees.”
I pulled back the panel again. “Hurry up. You’re letting the cold in.”
Fendul squeezed inside. I draped the blankets over our laps. He’d brought his irumoi, a wooden rod covered with glowing blue mushrooms. It felt like when the three of us shared a tent on hunting trips as children, except now our knees bumped every time we moved.
“There’s something I should tell you.” Fendul flipped the irumoi between his fingers. The light swung over the tent walls. “My father and I came south when the storms began to calm. He wanted to know what caused them.”
“Earthquakes,” I said. “We’ve been over this. Quakes triggered volcanoes and avalanches, ash in the sky messed with the weather, and it all combined in a giant fucking mess. Even itherans say it’s happened in their mother country.”
“This is different. When I saw this wound in our homeland, I knew we had to change something. Stop the spiral that got us to that point. Itherans don’t . . . react quite the same way.”
I leaned forward, my hair spilling into my lap. “Wait, was that . . .”
“That’s when I first attuned. The day I saw the wasteland.”
“You never told me that,” I said softly. I knew it happened that summer, but almost every Rin adolescent attuned in the Storm Year. I was eleven, Nili thirteen, Fendul fourteen.
“I knew it was an animal following us,” Nili said suddenly.
I gaped at Fendul. “Seriously? What about ‘attuning only for war and spiritual purposes’?”
“Looking after the jouyen is a spiritual purpose.” He drew himself up taller, but his cheeks looked dark in the faint light.
Nili rolled back laughing and jabbed her finger into his chest. “You’re never — allowed to tell me off — for attuning again.”
He waved her off. “Let’s get back to the issue at hand. Please.”
“Yeah, what do you mean we have to change?” I asked. “The storms were just a fluke.”
“Maybe not. My father thinks it was . . . well . . . vengeance.”
“Who’d want vengeance on us? All our enemies are dead.”
Fendul rubbed his arm through his woolen shirt, at the exact spot of his okoreni tattoo. “Some people are bitter about the Dona war.”
“I’m bitter. Rin only split off to form the Dona-jouyen because they didn’t want to fight some stupid trade war. So what did we do when they wanted to come home ninety years later? We massacred them.”
“It’s not that simple, Kako.”
“Hang on,” Nili said. “Fendul, don’t say you think the aeldu were punishing us. Only, like, four Rin believe that, and they haven’t been right in the head since the Dona war. Even Behadul doesn’t listen to them.”
“It wasn’t the aeldu punishing us.” Fendul dropped the irumoi on the blankets and leaned back on his palms. “Half the people who formed the Dona-jouyen were Iyo, remember. That means we killed people with Iyo relatives. Relatives still alive today.”
“You think Iyo caused the storms?” I scoffed. “How? They only have water-callers, just like us.”
He shrugged. “That’s just what my father said.”
I threw my hands into the air, hitting Nili’s arm. “Okay, suppose they did — now what? They’ll attack Rin on sight? My cousin lives with them.”
“Dunehein joined two years before the war. They accept him as Iyo. We don’t have that protection.”
Nili tossed her long tail of hair. “You’re just trying to scare us into not going.”
Fendul pressed his hands to his head. “I want what’s best for both of you, but I don’t know what that is.” In that moment it seemed like the thread holding him together unravelled, letting all the pieces of him loose to float into the air.
My stomach twisted. “You could try trusting us.”
“If that’s what you want.�
�� Fendul looked like he was about to say more, but he picked up the irumoi and rose to leave. “Please think about what I said.”
Nili and I sat in the dark until we heard him settle into his tent. Then we curled up under the blankets, leeching each other’s body warmth. Dead air stirred the leaves outside. Dead water stagnated in the dirt below us.
“Isu wants me to marry Fendul,” I said.
“Nei!” Nili burst into giggles. “You couldn’t possibly!”
I stuffed a blanket into my mouth to muffle my laughter. “She told me this summer. Pretty sure she was afraid I’d run away with ‘that skinny itheran goatherd.’”
“But Behadul can’t stand you! Fendul would never marry without the okorebai’s approval.”
“Not to mention, ew.”
“Well . . . he’s kinda lush, if you’re into uptight, hare-nerved—”
“Shut up shut up!” I kicked her leg. “If you tell Fen, I’ll tell him you snuck off from the autumn equinox ceremony last year to tap Orelein in the woodcarving workshop.”
“You wouldn’t.” Nili sounded horrified.
“I swear on the aeldu I would. Then neither of us could look Fendul in the eye.”
“You’ll have to tap him with your eyes closed.” She erupted with laughter as I jammed my elbow into her ribs. “Just imagine it. Your husband would be Okorebai-Rin one day. What would you do?”
“I wouldn’t be an aeldu-cursed coward like Fendul. I’d make sure the elders listened to me. Why, what would you do?”
“I’d let myself visit the Iyo so I could marry someone else.”
I snorted. “Yeah, good luck with that.”
•
The year Dunehein married into the Iyo, he promised he’d come back to visit, but the next summer he fell ill and couldn’t travel. The summer after that was the Storm Year. No Iyo came north and we didn’t dare travel south. We couldn’t even tell Dunehein his older brother had died in battle. I waited, year after year. The Iyo never came. An alliance that had lasted thousands of years fell silent.
