by May, K. C.
His kindhearted offer touched her deeply, and she put her arms around him and hugged him tightly. “You’re such a dear.” Now she questioned his agreement with her decision not to submit. Had she disappointed him? Surely not. He’d brought the flute with him, had arranged for it to be made well before knowing whether she was going to submit. If she submitted, there would’ve been no reason to give her a gift aside from the reason he gave—a remembrance. Besides, he hadn’t known what a promissory was any more than she had. It was merely a gift to a dear friend. That was all.
She released him and patted his chest. “You’d better go. You’re to choose a wife soon. What a scandal it would be if you were late to your Antenuptial because you spent too much time in the company of other women.”
He grinned and wagged his eyebrows. “Creating a scandal just before leaving Kaild? That sounds like good sport to me.”
She reached to slap his butt, but he skittered out of reach, laughing as he jogged away. Jora leaned out the door. “Thank you again,” she called. “I’ll treasure it always.”
He turned and bowed to her while he walked backward toward the civic hall.
“It’s a promissory,” Nuri pronounced.
As Jora returned to her seat, she shook her head, refusing to believe it.
When Jora heard someone rattling around in the smithy next door, she set down her work and picked up the flute before wandering over to greet her friend. At one time, she’d considered an apprenticeship in blacksmithing, but only because that was the path Tearna chose. The two girls were born in the same month of the same year and had been close friends all their lives. They’d done everything together. It only made sense to her young mind that they would continue to work side by side in adulthood. Now Jora was glad Nuri had recruited her into leatherworking instead. Leather yielded in her hands, and with Tearna working next door, they often talked through the open windows. In effect, they were working side by side.
Tearna was opening the window shutters when Jora knocked on the door.
“Good morning,” Jora sang.
“Morning, dove. What’re you so cheerful about this early in the morning?” Tearna’s black hair was tied back into a simple bun and secured with a wooden stick. Jora could tell by the haphazard way it was wrapped that it would come loose before the day was done, and Tearna’s hands would be too dirty to fuss with it.
“Let me braid your hair. It’ll come undone by noon.”
Tearna grinned and pulled a stool over. “I was hoping you would offer. Your braids look pretty. Can you do mine like that?”
“Sure.” Jora pulled the flute from behind her back. “Look what Boden gave me.”
“Challenge the god!” Tearna said, her wide brown eyes set on the wooden instrument. “How did he manage to get a flute?”
“The crafter is his aunt. He said he begged her and she made it for me. Isn’t it gorgeous? I cannot wait to try it out.” In fact, she would make sure to find Boden’s aunt and thank her profusely before the Antenuptials began.
“Go on then. Play something.”
“Oh, no,” Jora said, setting the flute on a small table. “This is something I have to do in private. Sit, sit.”
Tearna looked at her flatly before sitting on the stool with her back to Jora. “I don’t expect you to be good. I just want to hear you play one note.”
Jora began to untie her friend’s hair. “I don’t know how to play one note. That’s why I have to do it in private—so I can figure it out before someone hears me be awful.”
Tearna laughed. “I’ll bet you’re naturally good at it.”
Jora wrinkled her nose at the back of Tearna’s head while she separated the hair into strands for braiding. “I’ve never even held a flute until this morning. I don’t know how to blow into it.”
“You’re too modest.”
Jora continued to braid Tearna’s hair while they talked about Boden’s upcoming Antenuptial and the preparations that were underway. When she was finished, she patted Tearna’s shoulders.
“Thank you. Are you doing Hanna’s hair for the ceremony?” Tearna asked, standing.
“She hasn’t asked me. I don’t know if she’s submitting.”
Tearna went out the back door and returned momentarily carrying a bulky burlap bag across her shoulder. “Have you told Boden you’re not?”
“Yah, we talked this morning and agreed that we like our friendship the way it is. Besides, I’m not fertile right now. If I submitted, I’d be disqualified anyway.”
“You tested yourself?” Tearna untied the bag and dumped its contents, charred wood, into the forge.
“No, but a girl gets a sense of her own cycle after so many times being disqualified.”
“So what are you going to do?”
Jora shrugged. What could she do besides become a latterly maid? Tearna and Briana, her two best friends, had both been chosen as First Wives. For years, they tried to reassure her that someone would choose her, too, that she wouldn’t have to suffer the humiliation of spending years as a latterly maid, hoping a returning soldier would propose before she was too old to bear children, but Jora knew better. That boy Oram had been right: no man would want a Mindstreamer for a wife.
She leaned against the doorframe and looked down the road toward the boys’ training center where Gunnar conferred with Boden outside, one hand on his son’s shoulder. He looked directly at her, his gray eyes seemingly darker and filled with something that made her insides flutter. Desire? Jora held Gunnar’s gaze long enough to communicate her interest, then let her eyes drop to the flute in her hands, a dream come true. If Gunnar proposed to her, then her other dream would be fulfilled. First a flute of her own and then the husband she wanted? She would owe Retar something truly special for granting her two dreams in one lifetime.
“You know,” Tearna said, “that’s a pretty extravagant gift for someone who’s not leaving. Are you sure he didn’t give you that flute as a bribe?”
“A bribe for what?” Jora asked with a laugh. She stroked the flute lovingly. Something this beautiful could never be a bribe.
“To convince you to submit for his Antenuptial?”
Jora shot her an annoyed look. “Retar smite you.”
Tearna chuckled. “I was jesting. Don’t be so sensitive.” She went out for another bag of charcoal. “Speaking of gifts, how’s Boden’s bag coming along?”
“Slowly. Maybe if I move my workbench in front of the shop’s door so no one can come in, I’ll be able to finish.” So many people interrupted her during the day to ask about their loved ones away at war that she barely managed to finish her regular work, let alone work on an extra project, and Nuri was adamant that she only work on the bag in the mornings and evenings. She’d stayed awake all night to work on it, and her eyelids were heavy and sticky.
“Maybe if you said ‘no’ now and then.”
She found herself looking at Gunnar again, as if he were steel and her eyes magnets. “No isn’t really an option. Have you ever looked into his eyes?”
“Whose eyes?”
Startled by her blunder, Jora lifted one shoulder in a nonchalant shrug. “The eyes of the parent or wife or sibling or child asking me.”
“What are you looking at?” Tearna went on tiptoe to look out the south-facing window and smiled. “Ah. Gunnar’s eyes. Ha! I should’ve known.”
Jora’s six-year-old twin nephews went running past Gunnar and Boden, followed by a red-faced girl of about twelve. “Come back here or else,” she hollered.
“Leave them,” Jora called to the girl. “My nephews are old enough to accept the consequences for arriving late to class.”
The two boys stopped short and looked at her with surprise in their matching faces, as if the notion that being late to school having consequences had never occurred to them.
“And if they don’t get to class on time from this day forward,” Gunnar said, his arms crossed and a scowl on his face, “they’ll wish they’d been born girl
s.”
When the boys broke into a run, headed directly toward the schoolrooms, Jora and Tearna both laughed.
“No wonder he has such a tough reputation among the boys,” Tearna said. “He instills it early.”
Gunnar walked toward the smithy, a pleasant smile replacing the scowl.
“Shh! Here he comes,” Jora said. “I wonder what he wants.”
“You,” Tearna said. “Go talk to him.” Then she busied herself with firing up the forge, leaving Jora to speak with Gunnar alone.
“Good morning,” Jora said in a pleasant tone. Her heartbeat quickened with every step of his approach. She couldn’t help but admire his smooth gait and the way his broad shoulders glided evenly through the air, despite his slight limp.
“And good morning to you, dear Jora.” He stood a half-step closer to her than a man normally did when conversing with an unmarried woman, perhaps a query as to how far into her personal space she would allow him. “Did you not sleep well?”
She shook her head. “I stayed up all night to work on Boden’s departure gift.” Her throat felt unnaturally thick, and she swallowed in an attempt to normalize her voice. “Perhaps I can sneak away for a nap later.”
“Would you sit with me a minute? The boys are beginning their lessons under your brother’s expert guidance.”
She looked around quickly and spotted a bench outside the tailoring workshop. “How about there?”
They took a seat on the bench, their bodies angled toward each other, knees nearly touching. “What’s that you have?” Gunnar asked, his deep voice so gentle, it raised goosebumps on her arms. What would it be like to hear him murmur her name late at night?
She swallowed down her nervousness and stroked the flute’s smooth wood. “A flute. Boden gave it to me earlier this morning. I’ll have to learn to play it in private so I don’t annoy people with my mistakes.”
“I see. You and Boden are...”
“Just friends,” she said quickly. “In fact, he’s more of a brother to me than Loel is.” She remembered a day when Boden boldly stood up to older and bigger children who’d been teasing her about being a freak while Loel and their elder brother Finn looked on.
“You’ll miss him,” Gunnar said quietly.
She nodded, lowering her gaze. “Of course. And worry.” Of course, her own anxiety was nothing compared to the pain and fear that must have gripped Gunnar’s heart and Anika’s. “I can’t imagine the pain and fear parents must endure while their sons are away fighting. Do you think the war might finally end in our lifetime?”
He slumped his shoulders as if in defeat. “I fear we’ve forgotten how to live any other way. I’m about to send my son into a war to defend a damned tree. It seems so senseless to me now, especially considering...” He shook his head. “When I was Boden’s age, I was as excited and proud to do my duty for Serocia as he is, but fifteen years of fighting leads a man to question things.”
“What kinds of things?”
He met her gaze, and the sun peeked above the roof of a building to shine his eyes like they were liquid silver. “How can we possibly serve the greater good by killing?”
Jora had no answer. She was technically still a girl in the eyes of her people, a girl from a medium-sized town in rural Serocia, not worldly like Gunnar was. “I don’t know.”
“I don’t know, either, but as I prepare my son to leave the relative safety of Kaild to kill other men’s sons, I think about it. A lot.”
And of course, those other men’s sons were planning to kill and not be killed, just as Boden was. Jora’s eyes welled with tears. She didn’t want to think about losing her friend the way she’d lost her eldest brother. She didn’t want to consider the possibility of Boden falling in battle with a terrible, painful wound or bleeding to death on the battlefield. “Did your father ask the same question when you were going off to war?”
“I never knew my father,” he said softly. “He died in battle when I was six. I only remember the corpulist delivering his body, wrapped in a shroud, in the back of a wagon along with the bodies of three other men, stinking of death and drawing flies.”
Tosh had been returned home the same way almost ten years earlier. She was only thirteen when she witnessed her brother’s death in the Mindstream, seeing Tosh being struck down from behind, a sword going into his back and through his heart. Jora had watched in mute horror as his body arched, his head snapped back, and his mouth fell open with his last gasping breath. She shook her head to dislodge the image. Such a violent death was something she hoped never to witness again, especially if it was someone she loved. “We’ve all lost family members, but I’m certain we’ll see Boden home safely in a decade.” This she said more out of a desire to convince herself than of belief in what she was saying, but to speak her mind, to say aloud what they both surely feared, would have felt like a condemnation. Hope was all they had.
“Right. Enough of such morose talk,” he said. “Are you excited about this afternoon’s ceremony?”
In the three years since he’d returned from the war, Gunnar had never asked her that, never shown any interest in her participation in the Antenuptials. She supposed that this time, because the boy becoming a man was his son, he would have an interest in who was chosen to be Kaild’s newest First Wife. “I’m happy for him,” she said, “but I won’t be submitting for the Antenuptial.”
He lifted one eyebrow, but he didn’t look offended. “Did my son do something to displease you?”
“No,” Jora said. “Not at all. I won’t qualify, and so I don’t care to go through the humiliation of being tested and denied in front of the whole town. Again.”
He looked at the flute in her hands. “Is that a promissory, then? You’ve agreed to wait for his return?”
She felt warmth flood her face. “No, it was just a gift, not a promissory. We have no such agreement.” Why did people assume the flute was a promissory? True, giving a gift to someone who wasn’t leaving Kaild was highly unusual, especially when the one giving was a man about to choose a wife, fill her with seed, and then leave for war. That didn’t make the gift a promissory.
“So you’ll be seeking a husband from among the returned soldiers.” His was a kinder way of putting it than pointing out that she would join the ranks of the latterly maids, the unmarried women of age. The ones desperate to avoid ending up like old lady Xerba, childless and alone. Although half the married women in Kaild had at one point been latterly maids, it was an embarrassment every woman wanted behind her.
She nodded. “Two men are due home within the next few months. Perhaps one of them would overlook my... talent and offer his hand.”
“I submit myself for consideration.”
She blinked twice, unsure what to make of his words. Was that a proposal? Surely not. A man as respected as Gunnar Sayeg, or as handsome, or as virile, didn’t take homely women as their wives. And no sane man wanted a Mindstreamer.
“I’ll keep you warm and safe at night and try my best to give you at least one daughter to carry on your family name.”
Her arms ached with the need to hug him. “My sister has a daughter,” she heard herself say. “As do my cousins.”
His eyebrows lowered, and his eyes darkened. “Is that a no, then?”
“No! It-it’s not a no. I-I meant that I don’t need a daughter. I would be happy enough to bear you five sons.” Oh, God’s Challenger! She was gushing at him like a love-struck girl. Warmth spread through her face and down her neck.
And just as quickly, his eyes brightened, though he didn’t smile. “Then it’s a yes?”
Her heart was pounding, and her hands were so wet with sweat she feared they would start dripping. “It isn’t proper to propose to a woman before her twenty-third birthday.”
“I’m not proposing. I’m planning ahead.” He winked at her, and a tiny smile played at one corner of his mouth.
“When you propose, I’ll say yes. Until then, I can’t give you an answer.” As ne
rvous and excited as she was, her biggest concern was how she would break the news to Boden. Ten years was a long time. Maybe by the time he returned, he would forgive her.
Gunnar laughed, a sound that never failed to make Jora tingle inside. “I look forward to it.” He rose and offered to help her stand. She wiped her hand on her trousers before putting it into his. “I’d better report to my students. I’ll be impressed if Loel has managed to run them through their starting exercises.”
“Thank you for speaking with me, Gunnar.”
He leaned down and kissed her cheek. “The pleasure was mine, dear Jora.”
As Jora watched him walk away, she fought the urge to touch her cheek to see if it felt hot to her fingers. She caught sight of his Fourth Wife, Marja, standing by the door to the dining hall. The woman glared at them with her arms crossed and mouth pinched tightly shut.
The first opportunity Jora had to take her new flute to the beach was late morning, before the Antenuptials were due to begin. She hurried across the sand to the rocky shoal she had played on since she was a child. At low tide, the rocks were dry and easy to cross by hopping along a familiar path, though she wasn’t as lithe as she’d once been. The smell of saltwater, the sound of the rushing waves, and the feel of the sun’s warmth on her face sharpened her mind and calmed her soul. She couldn’t imagine living anywhere but by the sea.
She settled on a rock with her legs dangling over the edge, a good two feet above the splash of the waves hitting the rocks. Out here, with only the birds and fish to hear her, she lifted the flute to her lips, covered all but the first hole, and tried a tentative blow. It came out sounding more breathy than musical, but the shy note encouraged her to try again to coax out a clearer sound.
She experimented with rotating the flute by degrees and found the perfect angle that allowed her to blow clear, crisp notes instead of note-flavored breaths. Excited, she tested various positions of her fingers, covering and uncovering holes to get a feel for how to create the notes she wanted.
