by Ray, M. A.
“It’s all right if you’re not.”
“Like you said, we’re almost there.”
“It would’ve been better if we’d been able to hitch a ride,” Vandis grumbled as they came out of the trees and onto the road again. He hadn’t shut up about that for two days solid, but he didn’t understand how things worked. They hadn’t been able to eat at a tavern or sleep at an inn. They hadn’t been able to hitch a ride or even pay for one, and Vandis had been prepared to offer some truly ridiculous sums of money. All they’d been able to do was walk and camp. Dingus could’ve told him it’d be that way. The only tavern he’d ever been allowed in was the White Hart back home, and that was only to bring barrels up from the cellar.
Above the trees, Dingus could see the triple spires of the biggest way station in Wealaia, and he fixed his eyes on them. Almost there. They only had to get across the river and through the town. Elwin’s Ford was the second-biggest town in Wealaia, on account of it was the best place to cross the Semoulian where it snaked through on its way to Brightwater Delta. The only town bigger was King’s Seat, downriver a ways. The road bustled with people, humans and hitul both, and Dingus caught a lot of stares as they walked. He would’ve liked to think it was his disgusting clothes and banged-up face, but most of it was his ears.
“I can smell you,” Vandis said after a little while.
Dingus grinned wryly. “I can smell me. I need a bath bad.” He done his best in the little streams they crossed, but it hadn’t been too good, especially since he had to put dirty clothes back on.
“You need one badly.”
“Yes, Vandis.”
“First thing you’re doing when we get there. Bathing, and taking something for pain. Willow bark isn’t doing it for you.”
“I’m okay.”
“No, you aren’t. You can hardly walk. If you were any shorter, I’d be carrying you.”
When they got to the bridge, Vandis stopped to pay the toll. At least they didn’t try to keep Dingus off of it—except by charging twice as much for him to cross. When Vandis found out about that, he threw the extra coins into the guard’s chest and stormed onto the bridge. Dingus trailed him, hating the scene. He needed more attention like he needed a poke in the eye. The other traffic divided around his slow pace as he struggled along the thick oak planks of the big, arched bridge. After a minute or so Vandis stopped and turned, letting the other people push past him, too.
“I don’t know how you stand this,” he said, and before Dingus could answer him, a squishy something sailed through the air and splatted right on his broken nose.
“Ow!” Dingus said, and got a taste of it. Rotten tomato.
Vandis’s mouth hung open for half a heartbeat. Another tomato smacked the side of Dingus’s head, and Vandis’s hard face turned to granite. He turned on one toe; by the time he faced full the other way, he was in midair, and his finger jabbed out at a passing produce wagon with three hitul on it. “Why, you bleeding cracks!” he bellowed. Dingus sighed and wiped the junk off his burning face. He stuck his hands in his pockets and kept walking. “Fatherless sons of back-alley fucks!” The tulon driving the wagon slapped the reins, trying to hurry his horses along, but there was too much traffic in front of him. Dingus kept walking. He passed under Vandis’s boot soles. It felt weird to walk under somebody hanging in midair. Vandis didn’t stop yelling for a heartbeat. “You people make me sick to my stomach! I’d better never see your faces again, you motherfucking elves!” He said a lot more besides, almost all of it obscenities. Why’d he have to say anything anyways? It was only a couple tomatoes. Dingus slouched toward the road on the other side, glancing around to make sure nothing else flew his way—now that everybody knew dilihi was fouling up the bridge.
By the time he stepped off the planks, Vandis walked up behind him, still muttering dark curses under his breath. Dingus didn’t say a word. All he wanted was to get to the way station and away from all the eyes. When Vandis grabbed his elbow, he pulled back.
“Dingus.”
“What?”
“Are you okay? Were you hurt?”
“It was tomatoes. Squishy ones. It’s no big deal.”
“It is a very big deal,” Vandis said.
“It wasn’t dirty nappies. It wasn’t rocks.”
Vandis stopped. “People throw nappies?”
“It’s happened.”
“Doesn’t it make you angry?”
“What do you think?”
They walked on in silence for a while, past the noisy market and through the traders’ quarter with its tall, thin houses crammed right next to each other. He tried not to look it, but Dingus couldn’t help gawping at everything. He’d only been here once before, for the fair when he was eight, and that ended when—well, it was a short trip. Vandis didn’t pay much mind to any of it. He walked along next to Dingus, quiet, looking thoughtful.
When they turned up the temple street, out of nowhere Vandis said, “I’m sorry, all right? Before this week, I didn’t know what it was like for you, people like you. I knew about the laws, but this? Nobody should ever have to live like this.”
“Course they shouldn’t—that’s got nothing to do with it. It just is.”
“Well, that’s what the Knights of the Air are for. To try to make sure what shouldn’t…isn’t.”
Dingus blinked. Here he’d been thinking of it as a ticket out of Wealaia. “Really?”
“Really.”
He thought about it until they reached the cobbled path that led off the street to the way station. It was the biggest building on the temple street, set back from the road on a grassy hill, and all the outbuildings and grounds rolled out behind it on a plush green lawn, and behind that, the forest. It looked like Paradise. “So all that crazy shit you keep talking at me—all that freedom of thought and expression and basic rights stuff—is that a Knights of the Air thing?”
“It’s the Knights of the Air thing,” Vandis said, laughing. “Why? Is that a problem?”
“Hell no. Sign me up.”
Vandis’s smile practically wrapped around his head. “I’m about to.”
“I never heard all that before. I thought it was just you. That don’t mean I didn’t like it.”
“Well, that was one lecture that fell on the right ears, then.”
They turned up the path. Two big white oaks framed the double doors, which stood open for the breeze. The floor inside was laid with hundreds of tiny, colorful tiles, and shadows and gray daylight through the overcast played across it, and the long desk farther back in the room. “What’s a white oak mean?” Dingus asked.
“Why do you ask?” Vandis had that look he wore sometimes, almost like he was eager to see what Dingus had thought up: his listening look.
“It has to mean something.” Dingus gestured to Vandis’s right hand, where a faded little tattoo rested under the glove: the white oak leaf.
“Good eye. The white oak is sacred to Akeere Wayfarer.”
“Is there a story?” He’d bet there was. Vandis must’ve had thousands of stories, ’cause he told Dingus at least four or five every day, and not a single one Dingus had heard. He had hundreds himself, mostly from Grandpa, but Vandis hadn’t asked him for any of them.
“You’d better believe there’s a story. Remind me to tell it to you later. Right now, we have some pressing business.”
He followed Vandis inside and saw right away that all the colorful tiles made a picture under his bare toes, a picture of a beautiful woman with red, red hair and tiny white wings on her ankles flying gracefully over a town. She wore a smile, a short dress, and nothing else. “Is that Akeere?”
“It is. This is Elwin’s Ford, see? Here’s the river, and the bridge.”
Didn’t seem right to walk on a goddess, but Vandis strode right over Her with his dirty boots, and Dingus followed him across the giant hall, looking from pale rafters holding the ceiling to huge windows with the shutters thrown wide to the day. White plaster covered the
walls, stained dark at intervals where candelabra burned. There was a massive hearth behind the long desk, and ashes banked at the back, glowing faintly from the heat of the coals underneath. A corridor led off to the right of the hearth.
It was bright, and under the smoke, it smelled cleaner than any house Dingus had been in. He liked it right away. The man behind the desk had a face covered in shiny, wrinkled burn scars, but he smiled at Dingus. Vandis wrote with a quill in a big book lying open on the desk; when Dingus looked over his shoulder, he saw that it said, “Vandis Barton Vail, Head,” on one of the lines.
“Now you sign in.” Vandis handed him the quill. “Your name and rank—that’s Squire.” Dingus wrote it: “Dingus Parsifal Xavier, Skweyer.”
“Well.” Vandis looked it over. “We’ll work on it.”
“’Allo, Vandis,” said the burned man in a throaty accent Dingus had never before heard. “Who is your young friend?”
“Dingus,” Vandis said. “My Squire. I need three things, right from the jump. One. Where are the archives? Two. Is the bathhouse fit to use? Three. Clothes and boots for a man—how tall would you say he is?”
“’Allo, Dingus, be most welcome. Archives, down the hall, fourth door on the left. Bathhouse, perfectly in order. Six feet, two and one-half inches precisely, I would say, but ask at the laundry, which you will find in the same building as the baths. And of course, the ’ospital is the large door on the right.”
“Thank you,” Vandis said, and marched off down the corridor, beckoning Dingus. “Hospital first.” They went to the right, where the single door opened on a long, narrow room with a row of beds, and another door at the rear. Most of them were occupied, and it smelled like sick. Dingus’s pulse jumped higher and higher as he followed Vandis down the room to the back. A woman with dark brown hair sat at a table next to the rear door, writing something. She was very pretty, with eyes the color of the bluest night. “Kirsten. Good to see you down here. Did you just come in from the Moot?”
The woman didn’t even say hello to Vandis. She stood up from her table and came at Dingus with her hands out. Dingus walked backward away from her. “Look at this kid,” she said as she came on, in a flat voice like Vandis’s. “Winds! Hold still. I’m not out to hurt you.”
“Come and sit down, Dingus,” Vandis said. “Trust me.”
He sat, feeling his stink ooze from every pore. The pretty woman put her fists on her hips and looked at him out of her midnight eyes, and then she threw back her head and bawled, “Lukas!” Dingus turned when a metallic clang and an obscenity came through the wood of the door. A moment later it opened to show a human guy about Dingus’s age, with the woman’s coloring and an even better-looking face. He wore a leather apron over his tunic, breeches, and jerkin.
“Yes, Aunt Kirsten?”
The woman jerked her head Dingus’s way. “Exam.”
“Right. Hi, I’m Lukas.” He gave Dingus a big, friendly, handsome smile, which Dingus immediately distrusted.
“Dingus,” he said.
Lukas walked over to the table, taking off a pair of elbow-length gauntlets as he did. “It sure looks like you got the business. Who set your nose?”
He shrugged.
“I did,” Vandis said.
“Well, you didn’t do a very good job, Vandis,” Lukas said cheerfully. “It’s a little bit crooked, and a little healed. Do you want me to fix it for you? Only I might have to break it again.”
Dingus held up his hands. “Uh, no, that’s okay.”
“All right.” Lukas smiled again. “Let’s check your eyes. I’m going to—oh wow, are you an elf?”
Before Dingus could say a word, the woman reached out and slapped Lukas upside the head. “That’s a nasty word.”
“That’s okay. I’m not,” Dingus said. He didn’t much care what humans called the People, given their name for him. “I’m dilihi.” Behind him, Vandis made an angry noise, almost a snarl, and in front of him were two blank stares.
“Dingus is a half-blood,” Vandis explained, when Dingus didn’t.
“Oh,” said the woman and Lukas together, and shrugged like it was no big thing. Dingus got a plaster to hold his nose in place, and new bandages to put on his ribs after he’d had a bath. Lukas pressed all over his gut and gave him a pot of salve to put on his scrapes, and the mark on his neck. The woman also palmed something over to Vandis, a little bottle, maybe, on the way out.
Vandis took him across the hall to the archives. It was a dim, dusty, disorganized place with one tiny window. Dingus rapped on it while Vandis rummaged around for a book; it was hard, and made a brittle tapping sound. “What’s this?”
“Glass,” Vandis said, dropping a heavy book on a cluttered desk. A cloud of dust billowed around his head. He sneezed, and then paged through it almost to the end.
“Neat.” The window sheened like a bottle he’d seen once, on Grandma’s counter, but it was sort of clear, instead of green. He walked over by the book while Vandis hunted some more, coming up with a small wooden box, a quill, and an inkwell. Written on the two pages Vandis had opened to, Dingus saw names upon names, a long list of names and dates in cramped script. The right-hand page had hardly any space left. “Is this the rolls?”
“It is.” Vandis shook the inkwell, unscrewed the top, and laid it aside. He consulted a chart on the wall, dipped the quill, and wrote, squeezing the words into the space: “Dingus Parsifal Xavier has been taken for a Squire by Vandis Barton Vail, and given the badge this 24th day of Fress, in the 489th year of the reign of Velrach Fedracholle.” He shook sand over the words. The lid of the box creaked when he opened it. It was full of rattling, blue-and-green enamel badges in the shape of acorns, and he gave one to Dingus, saying, “Now you’re official. Pin it right side of the jerkin, two inches above the nipple. When we get you a jerkin.”
It fit easily in the hollow of Dingus’s palm. It’s so little, he thought, with his heart doing that startled-bird flutter and his mind telling him it was too small to be real. “Are you sure?”
“A fine time to ask. I’ve already written you into the book.”
“You could scratch me out,” Dingus said softly, rubbing the badge with his forefinger. The metal warmed to his touch. “If you wanted.”
Vandis huffed. “Why would I want to do a thing like that? Let’s go.”
He followed Vandis down the long corridor and out the back door. There were half a dozen outbuildings attached to the way station, clustered around a big square. White cobble paths through the green lawn connected the buildings one to each other, and in the middle of the square there were two columns of backless benches sitting under a stretched canvas roof. There was a short statue at the back of it that looked like a white oak with the top scooped out. “That’s the chapel,” Vandis explained. “We’ll go there in the morning with everyone else, to give respect to the Lady. Every morning,” he added, with steel in his voice.
“Yes, Vandis,” Dingus said, and trailed him around the square to the left.
“This one’s the tavern,” Vandis said, pointing at the little building with a foaming barrel above the double doors. “The barrel is Vard’s sign. They always come together: Akeere and Vard. In Vard’s temples and taverns, you’ll always find the sign of our Lady. Knights are welcome in Vard’s places, and Vard’s priests are welcome in the Lady’s places.”
Dingus paused to look up at the foaming barrel. A muffled trickle of music came through the doors, and he smelled yeast. “Like that one story you told me, with the World Tree. Where Vard came down into the world and walked with Akeere. That’s how come there’s a tavern here.”
“Exactly.” Vandis walked on. “This next one—I don’t know what this is.”
“Kitchen,” Dingus said, and when Vandis looked at him, he went on, pointing out the smoking chimneys: four of them. “I smell food. Besides, there’s more than one hearth inside. Good thing these roofs ain’t, I mean, aren’t thatched. What’re they made of anyhow?”
; “Those are slates.” Vandis never seemed to get tired of answering questions. What’s this, what’s that, how come, where, and when? Now that he had someone who didn’t mind answering, Dingus asked every last one that bubbled into his brain. All their slow way around the cobbled paths, until they got to a big building with one gigantic chimney, he asked, Vandis answered.
“Okay, okay,” Vandis said finally, holding up his hands and laughing. “Enough for now. I think this is the laundry.”
It was the biggest laundry Dingus had ever seen, and it only took up half the building. Lines and lines full of hanging, wet clothes laced from wall to wall. Huge tubs of water and smelly soap, full of soaking clothes, stood on one side, and on the other was a massive hearth surrounded by big copper kettles. A couple of human women were up to their elbows scrubbing, while another one went from tub to tub, stirring the clean clothes around in clean water, and a couple more followed behind, wringing them out and hanging them on lines. The woman with the oar sailed over to them when they walked in.
She clucked her tongue over Dingus’s clothes and fussed about his injuries, swirling around him and calling him a “poor young creature” while he clutched his fresh bandages and pot of salve. He sneaked his hand into his pocket and felt for his pocketknife, and his new badge. The oar woman yelled at the other laundry women and they scattered, out the door or toward the back. She fussed at Vandis, too, telling him he needed a new jerkin, that one was so shabby, and asking when was the last time he’d changed his socks?
Dingus got a tunic the color of a white egg and the same kind of plain, brown breeches and jerkin that Vandis had on. The bathhouse was in the same building, and as impressive as the laundry, filled with metal bathtubs, each with a low stool next to it, and the same copper pots on the hearth. Instead of wet clothes, bright curtains hung from the lines, sort of like the curtain he’d nailed across his corner at home. “Look,” Vandis said. “They filled up a tub for you.”
His knees went weak, it looked that wonderful. No old laundry water, tepid with sitting and full of dirt from everyone else. No, it was a tub of clean water, with steam curling up from the surface. Someone had put a towel, a pot of soap, and a comb neatly on the chair. He gazed at it.
