The Anatomy of Curiosity

by Brenna Yovanoff

  Tears shone on her eyelashes, and she shook her head, angrily. “You would not have said that a long time ago. You only say that since last night.”

  “No.” It was a struggle to be calm, polite, distant. As I always should have been with her.

  “We are the best team, and they need us together,” she said.

  “I am not my best when I am with you.”

  “How can you say that, you imbecile?”

  My eyes lowered to her bare toes, showing under layers of dark robe. “I am distracted by you, Dinah. I always have been, and you know why. We are lucky I did not make some grave mistake, and that those mistakes I did make were countered by your great skills.”

  “No,” she whispered.

  “It was a great honor,” I said to her feet and the desert floor.

  • • •

  The commander was not happy with me when I walked into her office to resign as a pacer. “You think because of who your family is you can do whatever you want?”

  I had no energy to answer any other way but truthfully. “Yes,” I said.

  Deleted a whole section here that was slowing things down, about how he spent his afternoon. It added nothing but words.

  • • •

  Rafel.

  My whispered name woke me, and my hands found my sabers.

  “Wait,” she whispered through the dark tent.

  Aniv.

  I rolled to my feet. “What’s wrong?”

  “Be quieter, please,” she murmured, and the tips of her fingers began to glow. Or, rather, the fingers of the gloves she wore. Dinah Aniv was fully dressed, swathed in the traveling robes, veil, and thin boots the star clans traveled through the desert in.

  “Where are you going?” I asked.

  “To New Spring. Come with me.”

  I peered through the dull light. It cast her face silver.

  New Spring was the drowned sacred city. Where the Irisu Dam had burst under the onslaught of a wreath of flower mines, triggering this Restoration Campaign. Said to be impossible to clear of the mines because of all that water.

  Because I didn’t answer, she kept talking. “Do you know why we were a good pair, mage and pacer? It was because we were connected, because you were distracted. You hear the desert, Rafel. We can free New Spring of all flower mines at once, like on the seventh terrace of Shiver.”

  This was “I,” but I needed her to be challenging him about them specifically, not just randomly wanting suddenly to free the city. Make it about their relationship and her sort of Hail Mary pass to get him to understand. I played with it for a while, then ended up only changing that one word, but I think it makes a huge difference here.

  My mouth was dry. My eyes groggy from sleep. I was glad of the zing of desert hum between my sabers, rushing through my arms and down my spine to spin urgently in the small of my back.

  “Rafel, go with me.”

  She lowered her glowing hands. The light slashed shadows up her chin, mouth, nose, and creeping, long eyelashes.

  I felt such sudden, piercing grief that this mage would never be my wife, the heart of my family. I thought I might die of it.

  But I said yes. I would go, pace her, keep her alive if I could, and witness everything if I could not.

  • • •

  The days of traveling were like a dream. Even now, it is hard for me to space them out, order them into this, then. The two of us walking, sharing the burdens of the sun, following the hum and its patterns to water, to shelter. When the sun flashed, the spirit stone that striped the bluffs and chimney rocks would shimmer like living magic. There were well-known paths, of course, that the star clans used, that even the special service knew, but Aniv was worried we would be followed, caught, dragged away from Irisu Valley without the chance to save it, and so we strayed from those known paths.

  “I forgot you knew so well how to slip unseen through the Sweet,” she said to me the first day—it must have been. She had turned to instruct me on folding the veil she’d provided, but I’d already laid it correctly over my face to protect from the late sunlight and dusty wind.

  I wondered if she’d tried to forget I was Rafel the Gardener.

  We went in a jagged line farther and farther north, to meet up with the Irisu River just below the broken dam. It was long hours of walking over rough desert, climbing chimney rocks to look ahead and behind, cracked gulches, wishing for horses—at least on my part—and outwaiting the sun at its peak. Mornings were for boiling water for coffee and for softening the hard meats to eat with stiff, heavy crackers. Evenings we roasted a snake or little wingless dragon if we’d been lucky enough to catch one, rock beetles if we had not.

  New location (sort of), new world-building details! Keep the world and setting fresh in readers’ minds, but with new details so it’s not redundant or boring.

  Aniv and I did not need to speak very much—even in our division there was an understanding. I knew what she needed, and she predicted for me, too. I knew when she should drink more; she knew when I’d reached the end of my energy. In such a way we took care of each other. I realized I was paying more attention to her needs than my own, but it balanced because she paid more attention to mine. Laughable, really, and dangerous.

  I asked why she was so determined to save the Irisu Valley, and why now. She reminded me it was sacred to her, to her clan. She’d lived most of her life farther north, near the Eruse border, and then later in Eruse itself during the war, but her grandmother and great-grandmother had both been mages, both born in New Spring.

  She wasn’t telling me all of it. I believed her about her family, but this was about us. About proving something to me, to herself, maybe to the Sweet itself.

  Added this paragraph late in the game to make this conflict about them overtly, not just symbolically.

  • • •

  The first full night, we stretched in the lee of a layered rock whose wind scars shaped it into the profile of a goat. We’d been quiet since making camp near the roots of a short inyan tree, whose roots held water for years. Water that tasted like sugar when squeezed from the meat of the root, and when pulped, that meat was chewy and refreshing. A gift of the Sweet.

  The stars pulled out from behind thin clouds, and Aniv lay near enough I could’ve taken her hand if I stretched out my own. Our heads were slightly nearer than our feet, our bodies wrapped up in travel robes that tied tight enough to keep spiders, scorpions, and any other such night-crawlers from us as we slept, but that fell away with one tug of the intricately woven ties. One of my sabers waited flat against my thigh inside the robes, the other outside it, near the palm of my free hand. The great canyon of stars overhead made me feel small, but Aniv and her desert hum made me feel larger.

  “Aniv,” I whispered.

  “I’m awake, Rafel.”

  I liked how she always said my name back to me when I said hers. “Do you remember when I said my family would never welcome a star clan refugee like you?”

  After a pause she said, “Yes.”

  “I lied.” My confession was only a breath of noise, but I knew she could hear. “For weeks I had been imagining exactly that: taking you home to my family. I knew they would not only welcome you, but love you, be proud of you, and of me.”

  This scene was one of the other core moments I wrote down in my notes before ever beginning to write the story itself. Just Rafel confessing this to her, aching and proud and ashamed. It meant a lot to me personally.

  It can be hard to push through a draft because of a muddled middle or a loss of purpose or uncertainty about the ending or fear of your own lack of skills. I try to have core moments like this that I cannot wait to write, and the pressure to get to write them is what draws me through the middle and end of my draft.

  “Rafel—”

  I talked over her. “I should not have lied—it was not worthy of myself or my family, and certainly not when I knew they would admire and love a strong, beautiful woman such as you were.”
<
br />   She rolled toward me, touched my shoulder. I turned my face away, to the dark, to the stars.

  “I’m the same person, Rafel Sal AnLenia,” she murmured.

  “I know.”

  It was true. I did.

  Her soft, bare fingers touched the hollow of my cheek. When I did not flinch or pull away, she turned the touch into a caress.

  “It hurts,” I said.

  Aniv stopped.

  • • •

  Sometimes, when we climbed hard and silently, saving our breath for the task, I saw the man Aniv again. The way Aniv’s gait changed over rough terrain, becoming less elegant and sure, more irregular but still strong. It was my imagination, I knew: I was ascribing a maleness to it just because it was not the grace I was used to. But it was a relief to see.

  Why a relief? Because it kept me from falling backwards into those dreams again, where Aniv could be what I wanted her to be.

  • • •

  What I would not give to be there again. To have those days back, even if nothing changed, if I changed nothing at all.

  • • •

  One morning I jogged around the striped rock marking our camp, having scouted ahead and used the time to stretch, let loose my hair, relieve myself. I skidded to a halt because Aniv was bare to the waist. Her back was to me, her golden, curving back. Her shoulders and the long, smooth muscles of her arms. All that black hair piled haphazardly atop her head in a messy stack. She sopped at her neck with a cloth, rubbing dirt and sweat away under the pink light of the morning sun. Her robe gathered around her waist, falling like a smooth gown to her ankles.

  Paralyzed, I watched, half wanting to run away again, half wanting to go up to her and kiss her shoulders, her spine.

  • • •

  Mere hours later, we stopped to collect thick juice from a hava plant, which when added to boiling water thickens it to a soup that is almost tasty to eat. I crouched beside her, lifting the heavy fronds up so she could harvest juice without irreparably harming the plant. My face was inches from hers, and I could smell her sweat and the rose oil she still rubbed every day into her hands.

  See what I mean about food being a great way to establish world stuff? Many of these scattered traveling scenes are grounded in what they eat, because all they’re doing is eating, sleeping, and walking.

  There’s an old joke about stew in high fantasy novels because it’s really common as lazy world building that your heroes eat stew around the campfire at the end of a questing day. DON’T BE LAZY WITH YOUR FOOD.

  A shadow was on her cheek, at her jaw.

  It took me a long moment to realize she was finally showing the promise of a beard. I wondered if it would be fine and soft, or coarse and spotty like mine when I let it come in.

  I said, “You should shave, Dinah.”

  She replied, “Why? I thought you did not want me to hide?”

  A personal favorite moment of mine. It is really okay to have them, love them, keep them. You do not have to kill all your darlings. If you did, why would you bother sharing your story?

  I glanced back to our task and said no more.

  • • •

  The night before we would reach New Spring, we camped on a high promontory of orange stone. The wind was sparing, the air cool, and we could see down into the great Irisu River Valley where the city waited—dark, invisible in the moonlight because no people resided there to light lanterns or fires.

  Moonlight glinted off great swathes of water, though, for the valley itself was flooded.

  An image of a flooded desert city—all terra-cotta and pale tiles, flooded about three or four feet deep with brilliant teal-green water—is what located this story in the desert for me. I know it seems like it must have been the Iraq/ IED connection, but I played with setting it in a more tropical location for a long time. When I saw that image I knew FLOODED DESERT CITY. The desert I used for research and imagery was part of the Australian Outback.

  I stood with one boot up on a rock, leaning over the edge of the cliff, staring down into the valley at the black shadows of the city walls, the towers and homes, the courtyards and avenues and palace.

  Aniv joined me, the light breeze toying with her hair and the ends of her robe as it could not play with my heavier, fitted uniform.

  I was thinking about such a glut of floodwater, surrounded by the desert.

  #theme! Surrounded by so much of what you need that it’s killing you.

  She took my hand. Her touch startled me, for we’d been careful with each other all these six days of travel. She pulled me down to her.

  She kissed me.

  Surprise pulled the air from my lungs. I leaned away. Looked at the dark red desert under my feet.

  “Rafel,” she whispered. “This is the last night. Tomorrow we go to work, and it will be work and work and work—hard work—until we are finished.”

  “The last night for what?”

  Aniv tilted her head and leaned in to kiss me again.

  “Aniv, I can’t.” I pulled far away, heartsick.

  Anger bent her mouth. “You want me, though, don’t you? Tell me the truth, Rafel—you want my touch, you want my friendship and love.”

  I nodded.

  “Then what is the problem? Your people do not care if men share any of those things with other men—that is what the Eruse say. They mean it as a curse, as a condemnation, but it isn’t. Why do you think it is? Rielan men dally with other men.”

  “I have not!” I cried. I bit my lip. I added, “I have not … dallied … with anyone.”

  She looked at me suddenly as if I was sweet. Adorable. As if she loved that about me. “Let me show you,” she said.

  I really did not want this emotional conflict to be about Rafel being homophobic (inasmuch as that was possible, because to a certain extent he is), and I worked hard to make the world building support that it is NOT what is primarily holding Rafel back. This is really about gender, not sexuality—his or hers. It’s about the very rigid gender roles in An Riel specifically—I built them to be different from ours (American), and hopefully they subvert ours well enough to make this point.

  I put my hands to her jaw. She had shaved the tiny dark hairs that same night I’d mentioned them, and her skin was as smooth as ever, as soft. “I can’t,” I said.

  There was a great, heavy pause. My hands slid off her as she studied me. She was nearly my same height, especially now that she wore star clan boots. Her black eyes were open wide, her long nose lifted toward me. And she asked the one single question I’d asked of her.

  “Why?”

  “Because,” I said from a dry throat, “I can’t bring you home. I expected everything from you—unfairly, I know, without your input or consent, I know. But I wanted everything from you, everything there is in life, and I can’t have it now, knowing the truth.”

  She made an expression like a spitting cat: teeth bright.

  Aniv was as ferocious and beautiful as the ocean. She said, “Damn you, Rafel Sal AnLenia! I want you too. I want anything, everything you’ll give me, Rafel, right now before I go into that drowned city and break everything, risk everything. If we both want the same, why are you being so stubborn?”

  “It would hurt too much,” I whispered, hoarse and ashamed. “To let myself think—to pretend—and then go home without you. Take myself away. Lose you. It will be hard enough without adding these memories.”

  Her face crumpled, and she truly looked like a man then, on the verge of crying, full of passion and sorrow. “I have fallen in love with a coward,” she moaned.

  Choosing to Other yourself when you don’t have to is very, very hard. That’s what Rafel would have to do to be with Aniv openly because of how I’ve made An Riel culture and Rafel’s family. SEE? SEEEEE? World (building) creates character conflict which creates story.

  *drops mic*

  • • •

  I can still hear her saying it, if I close my eyes and let the sea spit at me. It’s what
I deserve. Rafel the Gardener, a frightened boy. Tucked again in his bedroom in his mother’s house on the cliff.

  • • •

  The city of New Spring glowed under the morning sky: polished cream sandstone and long strips of marble cut through with bloodred blocks and columns. It was a true desert city, built of rock and mud, beautifully gleaming tiles, and narrow towers connected by swaying bridges woven of mage-silk.

  But abandoned.

  Drowned in still, emerald water.

  • • •

  We approached by the main road, raised above the desert floor just enough so the floodwaters left it like a narrow bridge for us, from the edge of the valley directly to the main gates.

  The hum vibrated through my entire body the moment I stepped into the valley, and I glanced, startled, at Aniv. She said quietly, without anger but with no encouragement, “The water reflects the song again and again. Amplifies it, you would say in An Riel. Hold on to your sabers if you must.”

  I did.

  We walked carefully, but fast.

  A large white banner hung from the carved wooden gates, blocking the crack between them. I’d seen such things before: a mage’s flag, to mark that a place burns with magic. I supposed it worked to remind anyone who came here that the city was full of flower bombs.

  Aniv strode to the flag. She stripped off her silk glove and put her hand upon the cloth. It was just high enough that she could reach the top corner and run her fingers down from top to bottom, then again farther to the right. She moved her hand up and down in columns, the way I might move my eyes to read.

  I stepped to her shoulder and examined the flag; it was dusty, stained, but there was no writing, nothing I could see. I reached around her to touch the edge. I felt tiny, barely discernable texture—not a weave pattern, but marks made into the stiff cloth. Aniv was reading. But with her hands.

  One of the first details I created about star clan magic was their refusal to rely upon sight when casting or performing magic. I expanded that philosophically in a few directions, including that they should or would have non-sight-based ways of communicating.