“How old were you?”
“I picked everything up in bits and pieces. When I was fourteen, two years after my deepsearch, I left home on my own for the first time. I was only gone ten days.
After that, I went more often, and stayed away longer, until when I was seventeen, my mother moved back from North Haven to Pebble Fleet. I’d been born in North Haven, didn’t think of Pebble Fleet as my home. So after that, I wandered.”
“And you just go anywhere, whenever you want.”
“No, not really. I’ve been a lot of places, but for now I seem to have settled on an area I travel regularly: North Haven, Sliprock, Three Trees, Cruath. Ollfoss, of course, though I don’t get to stay here as often as I’d like. And sometimes I get as far south as Holme Valley, to see T’orre Na and the herders on the grasslands around there. I traveled with T’orre Na for a while, a few years ago.”
“I’ve heard of T’orre Na.” Marghe counted the tubers. “I think we’ve got enough here for today. Put the rest in the cellar.” They started cutting the clean tubers into thick slices. “So tell me how you came to be part of Wenn’s family.”
“Ollfoss was the first place I came to on my own. Wenn was younger then. When I walked out of the forest, she was struggling with an old tree stump on her land. I helped her drag it out. She invited me to share supper with the family. I did. Told them stories and what news there was. I came back many times, often just for the good food. They began to feel like family. Sometimes I brought Hilt. And then when our mother left for Pebble Fleet, it just seemed natural to choose this place as home.” She sighed, and pushed a strand of hair out of her eyes with her forearm. “I should spend more time here. But Wenn understands. I get… restless.”
“Tell me about the others. Tell me about Leifin.”
“You don’t like her, do you?”
“It’s more that I don’t quite trust her. Maybe I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for her, but there’s something about her that’s just too calculated for me. And I don’t understand her. I mean, how could someone who can see a beautiful shape in a piece of wood and spend hours lovingly carving it, polishing it, how can that same person then go off and slaughter animals just for their furs? Why can’t she see the beauty in the living animal?”
“I think it’s that she sees the world differently. For Leifin, a thing is beautiful if she can reach out and put her hand on it any time.”
“If she owns it.”
“Yes.”
By manipulating the family into accepting Marghe, Leifin expected to gain materially from trata: more wealth buys more things. Marghe did not want to think about Leifin any more.
“So tell me about Gerrel. She used to have a soestre.”
“She had two, twins, who died along with their mother, Gerrel’s blood mother’s lover, when they came too early. We took Gerrel because Kristen couldn’t bear to look at her daughter.”
Sometimes it would be Thenike who asked the questions, and they would talk until the moons were up. More than once, they wrapped up in furs and cloaks and walked through the garden in the moonlight, still talking. Sometimes they just walked in silence, and Marghe thought she could hear Thenike’s heart.
The first time she saw Thenike with the drums was one night in the family great room, after eating. It had been a good meal, and most of the family were still picking their teeth when Leifin announced she was going on a hunt in a few days.
Marghe went very still. “What will you hunt?”
“Oh, queen daggerhorn, wild taars. Whatever’s there.”
“Not goth?”
Leifin laughed. “Goth? They only walk through old stories. Not in Moanwood.”
She turned to the rest of the family. “Have any of you ever seen a goth?”
“I have,” Marghe said steadily. “And you were hunting it.”
“And when was that?”
“When you found me. At the edge of the forest.”
Leifin smiled. “Marghe, you were more than half delirious. You were crawling, crawling mind, in circles. Your eyes were sunken, more than half gummed together with the same blood and mucus that slimed your furs.” She laughed, looked at the rest of the family, drawing them in. Gerrel, Marghe was pleased to note, scowled.
Thenike was expressionless. The others smiled. “You drew a knife on me, do you remember, Marghe? Thought I was an Echraidhe. Now, if you could think that one Ollfoss woman on foot was a mounted savage, you could have mistaken a tree for a goth, or a chia bird for a… dragon.”
“It was a goth.”
“If you say so. Though, even supposing for just a moment that you’re right, what’s wrong with that?”
Leifin must know as well as she did what was wrong with hunting goth, Marghe thought, but Gerrel spoke before she could frame an answer.
“You hunt too much!” she burst out. “And we don’t need any more meat. We’ve plenty of furs. I think you just—”
“There’re never enough furs for trade up in North Haven,” Leifin contradicted gently.
“But…” Gerrel trailed off in frustration. Marghe sympathized. Leifin made it all sound so reasonable.
Thenike stretched and looked up and down the table. “I think tonight would be a good time for a song.”
“Sing the one about how the rivers first decided to run to the sea,” Gerrel said instantly.
“I’ve a mind to sing something special,” Thenike said, and looked at Marghe with an indecipherable expression. “I’ll need my drums.” Her skirts swirled as she stood, and Marghe caught the warm, musky smell of her skin mixed with the sharper, sweeter scent of the herb sachets Kenisi made for the family to lay in with their clothes. The door closed quietly behind her.
The family waited, listening to the crackle of the fire, sipping their wine.
Thenike returned, sending flames leaping in the door’s draft. She squatted near the fire and set her drums to warm, turning them occasionally. The rasp of wood on stone as she moved them was the only sound in the room.
When the drums were sufficiently warmed and the skins stretched tight, Thenike drew her knees up and settled the drums between her skirts. She looked at Marghe with that same indecipherable expression.
“Once upon a time, if there ever was such a time, the world was different. It was round, as it now is round, and the sun rose in the east and set in the west, as now it does, but it was younger, much younger. Where now there is plain, there was forest; where now there is a valley, there once stood a sea. Mountains reared their shoulders high, and were worn away. Rivers formed, grew, and cut through rock as they ran to the ocean. The world turned.
“In these times, upon that raised plain we now know as Tehuantepec there stood a forest. This was the mother of all forests, and her trees stretched east and west from Pebble Fleet to the Oboshi Desert, and south and north from the Trern Swamplands to the northern coast, though there was no woman here to speak those names. This mother of a forest stretched even beyond the north coast, for in those days there was no sea lying between here and what we now call the icy wastes, and those far northern lands were fair and fruitful. On and on the forest stretched, and down and down upon it shone the sun, more strongly than it does today.”
While she spoke, Thenike’s hands moved gently over the drums, stroking and tapping, cupping the sounds, bringing them to life beneath her long brown fingers.
Then she stopped talking, and set the scene to her tale with drums alone. The drums spoke of warm rain and a forest floor steaming with mist, of strange flying creatures whose shrieks rang through the trees and whose feathers flashed purple and gold.
Something about Thenike’s utter concentration warned Marghe that she was about to witness something she had never seen before, something that was at the heart of being viajera. Tonight she would hear more than a pretty tale set to a nice tune.