Troubled Waters

by Sharon Shinn

  Weather was good for the entire length of their trip, though it was the opening nineday of Quinnatorz and the air simmered with the promise of heat. For the first three days, they passed through land that was broad and level, prairie and woodland taking over any stretch of soil that hadn’t been cleared and cultivated by human hands. Water was abundant, though this apparently came as a welcome surprise to many of the travelers they met on the way.

  “Drought been along here for the past two years,” an old man observed to Zoe as they waited to fill containers at the water pump of a campsite. “The first year, they rationed how much water you could take at any campground. Last year, none of the camps had water at all. It makes me crazy to see water spilled on the ground—look at that, those boys don’t even stop pumping while they put down one bucket and pick up another one!”

  She smiled at him. “I don’t think we’re going to run out. Not today.”

  “You wouldn’t say that if you’d ever lived through a drought,” he grumbled.

  “I suppose not,” she said. “But I never have.”

  Coru girl. Lalindar prime. Of course she’d never seen a time without water, but until now she had never realized why.

  As they pushed farther north, the land began to change, growing hillier and rockier, sustaining hardier crops and more stubborn trees. Not long after that, mountains began taking a dusky shape on the northern horizon, curving up from the southeast to create a serrated spine from the city to the northwestern coast. The river, Zoe knew, ran alongside the mountains all the way to the southern sea.

  “The air smells different here,” she said on that seventh morning. She was carefully piloting the wagons along the empty road that rose at a shallow but insistent angle all along the visible horizon. “It smells like snow. I’d forgotten that.”

  “Forgotten?” Jaker said. “You’ve been to the northwest provinces before?”

  “Not for years. We used to visit my grandmother there when she was alive.”

  “It’s the prettiest land in the whole kingdom, I’ve always thought.”

  “I loved it when I was a little girl.”

  “Is any of your family still alive up here in the northern parts?” Jaker asked.

  Zoe thought about it a moment. “Maybe.”

  He gave her a shrewd look from his blue eyes. “Is that why you’re along on this trip? To find out?”

  She smiled at him. “Maybe,” she said again.

  He nodded and asked no more questions.

  The day was blissfully sunny when they finally reached their destination, a small, picturesque town nestled against the mountain foothills like a kitten curled up against a rumpled pile of blankets. Smaller and more playful here at its headwaters, the Marisi chortled in its banks between the steep slope of the mountainside and the flat acres of the town. The place was barely a crossroads for travelers planning to journey on to the coast and for tradesmen swapping goods with local merchants who served the great manor houses nearby. The town boasted little more than one inn, a modest campground, and a couple dozen houses and storefronts.

  “You might as well take a room for the night,” Barlow told Zoe. “We’ve got to haul the wagons to the three estates where I’ve promised deliveries—can’t transport the glass any other way. We’ll probably end up pitching a tent on one of the properties, depending on where we are by nightfall. We’ll be back sometime tomorrow to pick you up and start on home.”

  Smiling, she shook her head. “I won’t be going back to Chialto with you.”

  Barlow was surprised, but Jaker wasn’t. He said, “I thought you didn’t know yet if any of your folks were still here.”

  “They’re here,” she said. “I just don’t know what they think of me.”

  A little bewildered, Barlow looked between Zoe and Jaker. “If you’re not sure of a welcome,” he said slowly, “we could wait a day or two. You can still come back with us if things don’t go the way you hope.”

  Impulsively, she kissed him on the cheek—and then, because it felt right, she kissed Jaker, too. “It’ll take me more than a day or two to sort it out,” she said. “I’ll find another way back to the city if I have to.”

  “What do I tell my mother and father?” Barlow asked.

  She laughed. “Well, first you have to tell your mother that you are not interested in marrying me.” He groaned and she went on. “And then you can tell them that I thank them very much for the trust they put in me and the opportunities they gave me. And that when I have a chance, I will pay them back eightfold.”

  That raised Jaker’s eyebrows, but Barlow was still focused on more immediate explanations. “They’ll want to know why you didn’t come back.”

  “Tell them the truth,” she said softly. “I have family here. And I’m going to see how much we like each other.”

  “Coru family?” Jaker said.

  “Yes,” she said. “Lalindar.”

  She spent the night at the inn, taking a small, cramped room that seemed infinitely luxurious after the sleeping mat laid between crates and boxes in Barlow’s wagon. As much as anything, she wanted to wash away the grime of travel, to beautify herself for Christara’s house, much as she had beautified herself for Barlow that last evening in Chialto. She paid extra money to have hot bathwater brought to her room, and she took extra time to wash her hair and rub oil into her hands and feet. As Sima had showed her, she tied her damp hair in scraps of rags so it would froth with curls in the morning. She lay down on the narrow bed and slept fitfully, and the seductive murmur of running water ran all night through her dreams.

  In the morning she dressed in her most formal black trousers and her favorite purple top. It was too warm to need an overrobe, but she carried her festive jangling shawl with her anyway. She did not want to approach her inheritance destitute and pitiful. She would bring with her whatever wealth she already owned, and a lifetime’s worth of pride.

  The innkeeper arranged for her to hire a driver and a small cart to take her to Christara’s house, perched halfway up the mountain on the other side of the Marisi. She sat motionless in the back of the cart and watched the house as the driver negotiated the short, narrow streets of the town—as they took the bobbing ferry across the gurgling waters—and as he began the winding ascent up the pine-scented road. Now and then the house disappeared from view, only to reappear larger and closer. It was a long, three-story structure built of yellow stone that so closely matched the color of the mountain that sometimes only the blue shutters, the blue flags, and the great double-hung blue entrance door distinguished it from its surroundings. The entire bottom story featured what seemed to be an unbroken line of windows, higher than the height of a tall man. From any room with a southern view, Zoe knew, you could look out and see the river.

  She could feel the pressure of elevation singing in her ears by the time the road leveled off and took a straight line toward the house. Almost immediately, the sound was accompanied by the cheerful patter of falling water. The entire estate was ringed by a fountain—a narrow band of ornamental stone set into the ground and concealing jets of water that leapt and danced in a choreographed display. Only one twenty-foot section of the fountain was habitually turned off to allow carriages to pass through without getting soaked, but at night even that section was usually spouting water.

  As they trotted through the break in the fountain, catching stray droplets on their faces, the driver was moved to speak. “They say old Christara Lalindar could turn that water against someone if she didn’t like whoever was arriving at her door,” he said. “She could call up streams of water so hard they could wash a man right off of his horse or out of his coach.”

  “Did you ever see her do it?” Zoe asked.

  “No, but I believe it.”

  “I believe it, too.”

  He pulled up at the doorstep and helped her out. She gave him a quint-gold, far more than the transportation service was worth. He widened his eyes, and then narrowed them to give her a more t
horough appraisal. She merely smiled and turned toward the door. Carefully climbed the five steps. Pulled three times on the rope that sent chimes chasing each other through the house.

  When the door opened, she saw eight servants lined up just inside. Seven were bowing; the eighth held his hand out in a gesture of welcome.

  “Zoe Ardelay Lalindar,” he said. “It is good to have you home.”

  For the first nineday back in her grandmother’s house, Zoe spent most of her time in the kierten. It was an enormous, high-ceilinged space with ten-foot windows on three sides and wood floors so brightly polished she could see her blurred reflection.

  Now she stood in the center of the bank of windows that overlooked the river and did not think she could ever look away. From here, by turning her head a little to the right, she could see the headwaters of the Marisi, jetting up with a joyous rush. The river still churned with delight, but was already much tamer, by the time it passed directly before the Lalindar house. If she turned her head to the left, she could watch it for another mile as it curled and lapped along the base of the mountain range, as if eager to explore but unwilling to travel too far from familiar paths.

  At every time of day, it was a different color—frosty silver in the morning, luscious blue at midday, glancing gold at dusk as the sun laid down horizontal bars of fire. On nights when the moon had much shape or substance, the river sparkled with random lights that seemed to skate along its moving surface.

  Zoe felt as if the blood in her own body mimicked the river’s surging currents. As never before, she sensed the headlong flow down through artery, back through vein, bubbling up through her heart like the waters themselves. She could picture every inch of land that the Marisi traveled through, knew every juncture where it skipped under a bridge or coiled around an outthrust foothill. She was almost dizzy as she felt herself plummeting down that long fall of stone behind the royal palace to collect and swirl and calm herself in the deep pool nearby. She wanted to wave and call out greetings as she flowed past her friends on the river flats, but she was in too much of a hurry; she had to pick up speed and race down those final miles to the sea. Then came the plunge into icy water, the shock of brine, the disintegration of self.

  And suddenly she was back at the headwaters again.

  Had anyone tried to describe this sensation to her, she would have believed he was mad.

  But it was this remarkable connection with the Marisi that finally began to convince her that she was indeed prime. She was certain Christara must have had the same visceral bond. She wondered if it was something that came awake in the dormant blood only when the new prime stepped for the first time into the ancestral home. She wondered if she would lose that awareness of water, of blood, when she left this house and traveled down the mountain.

  She could not decide if it was something she would welcome or fear.

  Quiet footsteps behind her signaled that Hoden had entered the room and wanted to speak to her. In truth, she had caught the pattern of his pulse before she heard the slight sound of his shoes. She supposed it should be more eerie, this sudden ability to know where all the servants in the house were located merely by the sound of their heartbeats.

  All this time, she had remembered she was coru, but she had forgotten that her gift was blood as well as water.

  Indeed, in ancient days, when people first identified themselves by their five intrinsic traits, it was believed that men and women were blessed with distinct and complementary strengths. Men were known by the elementals—air, water, wood, earth, fire. Women claimed the corporeal—soul, blood, bone, flesh, mind. A coru woman might be a midwife or a healer; she would work in blood. A coru man would be a fisherman or a sailor who loved the sea. Zoe had forgotten all that—and, indeed, these days the traits seemed so blended together that no one separated them out by gender anymore.

  But she was reminded now of where her separate strengths lay. And—at least while she resided in this house—she was unlikely to forget.

  “You have company,” Hoden said.

  She remembered Hoden from her grandmother’s day, or perhaps she remembered his father, for his family had served her family for as long as the river ran through Welce. He was neat, small, unobtrusive, efficient, and utterly indispensable. It was Hoden who had escorted her through every room of the house, explaining what work had been done since she had been there last, more than ten years ago; it was Hoden who had sat down with her in her grandmother’s study to show her how her accounts stood, which investments had prospered. She was, it turned out, a very wealthy woman.

  “Why didn’t you send for me after my grandmother died?” she asked him that first afternoon.

  “I didn’t know where you were.”

  “But you knew I was alive. And that I was prime.”

  He paused a moment, as if at a loss for how to explain. “The house knew,” he said at last. “Both of those things.”

  And though he served a coru family, Hoden was a hunti man. Wood spoke to him as water called to Zoe. Naturally, he would believe whatever story it had to tell.

  “You have been so faithful. I am not sure how I will repay you for your years of exceptional service to the house while I was away.”

  His face had flickered with surprise. “There was nothing else I could have done.”

  She believed that, too.

  Now she turned slightly to see him standing motionless by the doorway. “Yes, I heard someone approaching,” she said. Heard the heartbeats of the horses and the humans. Four horses, two humans, one no doubt a coachman. “Who is it?”

  “Keeli Lalindar.”

  Zoe’s eyebrows rose. Aunt Sarone’s daughter. “My cousin. I thought she was living in the city.”

  “Yes. She is here visiting her uncle Broy. His estate, of course, is an hour south of the village,” he added. It was something she ought to know, but probably didn’t; that was what Hoden meant every time he dropped a smooth of course into their conversation. She appreciated his tact.

  “By all means I will see her.” She glanced around. “Here? Or is another room more appropriate?”

  He never seemed discomposed to be consulted even on such tricky matters, and during the past nineday he had answered dozens of odd questions. “To receive visitors in the kierten is to indicate that you wish them to acknowledge your status and your power,” he said. “It might not be a hostile reception, but it is not a warm one. It signals that you might not trust them. That you judge their worth to be less than yours.”

  “Ah,” she said. “Not the message I want to send to Keeli.”

  “Perhaps the green sitting room that overlooks the garden,” he suggested. “I will bring refreshments.”

  She smiled at him. “That sounds perfect.”

  A few minutes later she was standing in the green room, a place that seemed to exist for no other purpose than to provide people with somewhere to sit. There were two chairs drawn up before the tall windows—which did indeed provide a view of the garden, which no one looked at because the windows also provided a view of the river—and a narrow table between them. The rest of the room offered more chairs in small groupings, some accompanied by footstools and occasional tables. That was it. No bookshelves, no statuary, no musical instruments. Zoe thought it might be almost as much of a statement as the kierten, with its vast expanse of wasted space. Only this room said, I am so wealthy, I am so pampered, that I need do nothing all day but sit and stare. It was not a philosophy that generally appealed to Zoe.

  She heard Keeli’s heartbeat coming closer—and then suddenly it was overlaid by the sounds of rustling clothing and hasty footsteps. “Keeli Lalindar,” Hoden announced at the doorway, but the visitor brushed past him to step impatiently into the room.

  Then she came to a dead halt and simply stared. “They were right,” she said. “It is you.”

  Zoe signaled to Hoden to withdraw, and for a moment the cousins gazed at each other in silence. Keeli didn’t look much like the playmate
Zoe remembered from childhood. She was taller than Zoe, heavier, with a voluptuousness not at all concealed by the ornate gold jacket and wide-legged gold pants that Zoe guessed were the epitome of fashion. Her heavy hair was also golden and pulled back from her face in a thick, braided knot adorned with jeweled flowers. Her eyes were river blue, her skin sunrise pink. By now Zoe knew enough about footwear to realize that the beaded leather flats she wore had probably cost an entire gold coin.

  Thanks to Hoden, Zoe’s appearance was not quite that of a river squatter attempting a masquerade. The day after she arrived, he’d brought in the house seamstress to take her measurements and alter a few of the more classic pieces from Christara’s wardrobe. So now she wore an embroidered red tunic over matching trousers with a narrower silhouette than the ones Keeli wore. She’d put a few clips in her black hair and brushed rouge onto her cheeks, but she knew her appearance could not compare with Keeli’s. Anyone would know, just by looking at them, which was the cousin who had grown up with all luxuries at her command and which one had grown up in exile.

  “Hello, Keeli,” Zoe said. “Yes. It’s me.”

  Keeli came forward into the room, still staring. “Christara always said you weren’t dead, but nobody knew where you were,” she said. “Where have you been all this time?”

  “With my father,” Zoe replied.

  Keeli shook her head wonderingly. “Banished. Away from all your family and all your things. And the house. Didn’t you miss it? Didn’t you want to come back?”

  Zoe wasn’t sure how to answer. No one invited me back. “I thought it was important to stay with my father. I thought he needed me.”

  Keeli’s pretty face drew into a frown. “Is he dead now? That’s what Uncle Broy said.”

  Unexpectedly, Zoe’s throat closed, choking down the words that would confirm the news. She merely nodded.

  “Well, I’m sorry to hear it,” Keeli said. “My mother said he was the most interesting man any Lalindar had ever married, even though Christara hated him.”