The day was overcast, but Nidana liked the way the wind nipped at her cheeks and blew strands of her hair free. The hills were so tall. She liked the way the grasses made them mysterious, the occasional startling break of sunlight flinging shadows across her feet. Birds shouted at each other. She wondered if birds told the truth, like her brother was supposed to.
She had come up the hill, where the grasses had worn thin, and heard shouting, voices raised in taunts. The slight figure in a lavender jacket belonged to her brother. He was half-crouched, backing away from two older boys. She couldn’t remember if she was supposed to know their names.
“Jedao!” she called out.
He whirled, caught sight of her, and said the same words Mom had said that night the goose eggs exploded in the incubator. “Nidana, run!” he shouted, just in time for the taller boy to hit him on the back of the head. He staggered but did not go down.
She ran toward Jedao. He said more words. The taller boy swung at him again, but Jedao was prepared this time and snatched up a rock. He didn’t throw it, which was what Nidana would have done (if she had been allowed to throw rocks). He kept it in his fist. His blows were staggeringly quick, even with the added mass. The taller boy managed to get in another blow, then shouted one more taunt before fleeing. His friend said something that Nidana couldn’t quite understand and scurried after him.
“Why don’t they like you?” Nidana said. She was not afraid. Of course she wasn’t afraid of the boys.
“It wasn’t anything they had against me,” Jedao said.
“Then why did you fight them?”
“They said things about Mom.”
Nidana considered that. “Were they nice things?”
Jedao seemed to consider this in his turn. “They were things you have to hit people for.”
“Oh.” Then she saw it again, in a flash, her brother with his quick fists. For the first time she looked at him, wide-eyed, and thought of all the times he had carried her through the house, or combed her hair, or played house with her; thought of what he could do with those hands. She shrank from him.
Jedao set the rock down. Then he knelt and tipped her chin up with his callused fingers. “Listen,” he said. “Listen. I would never hurt anyone I love.”
She would not wonder for many years why, in a sentence otherwise in the high language, he had used the Shparoi word for hurt, which meant moral damage but excluded the physical—“a hurt of the heart’s marrow, not the flesh,” as one of their famed philosophers had said—a distinction that the high language did not make.
Author’s Note
Jedao never did find out what became of Nidana, and I regret that I ran out of time to tell her story. I will say that his suspicions were right and she hightailed it out of the heptarchate after Hellspin.
Incidentally, the Shparoi drawl is—you guessed it—a Texan drawl. I have the damndest time convincing folks that I’m from Texas because I don’t have it myself, aside from saying “y’all”; my parents moved often enough that it didn’t stick.
Bunny
JEDAO WOULD RATHER have been doing anything but cleaning the bathroom, but his older brother Rodao had skipped out on the chore in favor of a night out with his boyfriend. Their mother was working late tonight, as usual, so she wouldn’t know or care who did the job as long as it got done. Besides, Jedao considered it useful to have additional blackmail material on Ro. He couldn’t decide whether it was hilarious or annoying that Ro had suddenly become interested in dating. At eleven, Jedao couldn’t see what the fuss was about.
In the meantime, he still couldn’t figure out how those weird purple stains had gotten onto the bathtub. Had his mother been pouring her experiments into the tub instead of disposing of them properly? Except she was always so conscientious about that. Or did it have something to do with her attempts to brew up new and exciting shampoos?
“Jay,” said a soft, snuffling voice from the doorway.
Jedao set down the sponge and sat back on his haunches. His six-year-old sister Nidana was scrubbing her eyes. “What’s the matter?” he asked.
Nidana burst into tears.
Jedao stripped off his rubber gloves, quickly washed his hands, and put his arms around her. “Hey, there,” he said. “I didn’t think the book I gave you to read was that scary.” The book in question featured a bold girl space adventurer who punctured space monsters with her space rapier. Ordinarily Nidana loved that sort of thing.
After the snuffling and wailing had dwindled, Nidana said, “I went outside to look at the tree with the really big icicles.”
“All right,” he said, “did you hurt yourself?” He’d had icicles fall on him before. The big ones were no joke. She didn’t look injured, despite the hair straggling out of her braid, but maybe she’d had a scare.
“Jay,” she said, “I can’t find the cat. I think she got out.”
“I see,” Jedao said, suppressing his alarm. The cat, which Nidana had named Bunny when she was five, had a talent for getting herself stuck up trees. (At five, Nidana’s vocabulary for animals had left something to be desired. The family also had a dog named Bunny, two finches named Bunny, and a snake named Bunny.) Bunny-the-cat tried to escape the house at every opportunity, and while Jedao wouldn’t have worried about her during warmer weather, he didn’t like the thought of her trapped outside in the cold. “Bundle up. Let’s go look for her.”
Jedao helped Nidana with her sweater, coat, mittens, hat, scarf, and boots, then pulled on his own winter clothes. He left a note tacked to the small corkboard next to the door, just in case. “Come on,” he said. “We’ll find Bunny.”
Nidana snuffled some more. “I didn’t mean to, Jay.”
“I know.” It was too bad that Bunny-the-cat hated Bunny-the-dog. The latter was reasonably good at tracking, but his habit of trying to nip at Bunny-the-cat’s tail whenever he could catch her wouldn’t do them any favors here.
The cold air stung Jedao’s eyes and nostrils as they traipsed out onto the path that Jedao and his brother had shoveled that morning. The wind had blown more snow onto the path in feathered drifts, but it was still walkable. Unfortunately, it also meant that any tracks the cat might have left were obscured.
“Show me where you went,” Jedao said.
Nidana led him to the sycamore with its mantle of glistening icicles. He broke one off from a lower branch so that she could suck on it. If nothing else, it would distract her.
“Bunny!” Nidana called in between licking her icicle. But there was no sign of the cat.
Jedao and Nidana checked all the buildings they were allowed into, and some that they weren’t. The cat remained elusive. The sun sank lower and lower in the sky, and Nidana was starting to shiver. Jedao made sure not to walk too quickly for her to keep up, despite his increasing concern for Bunny.
At last, discouraged, they returned to the front door of their home. Bunny-the-dog bounded up and almost bowled Nidana over when they came in, tail wagging frenetically. “Stop that,” Jedao said, and made the dog sit. He and Nidana shed their winter clothes, and Jedao hung them up in the hallway closet. “Nidana,” he said, “entertain the dog. I’ll check around the house.”