“I don’t think so. The league is going to cause you grief. That I believe.” Yoen touched him on the shoulder. With a gentle pressure, he turned him toward the path to the river. “We will be fine, Dariel. Nobody will attack us here. We have nothing to fear but the cathounds and freketes and… dou worms.” He clicked his tongue. “Truly, Dariel, do not think us weak. Just do what you have to for the People. That’s what matters. Go now. You have many miles to travel, and you must be quick if you’re going to be there for the gathering the clans have called. It is your only chance to address them all at once. Don’t be late!”
“Are you coming down to see us off?”
“Of course. Now go.” He caught sight of something that drew his gaze. “Anira is there, waiting for you. Go to her.”
She was. She appeared from around a wall, her sack slung over her shoulder. Dariel acknowledged her with a wave and started toward her. A few steps on, he turned to say something to Yoen, a non-parting that promised a proper one down by the water.
The old man had turned away already. He did not hurry. His back was not unkind. Yet Dariel felt emotion pour into him, a sadness like he had not felt since he was a boy.
The crafts they were to travel in were oval boats about twenty feet long, deep in the hull, with good storage space within. A frame of the white-bark trees crosshatched their centers, strapped in place by cords that wrapped down around the hull. The lines of the hulls had an ornate elegance. The keel was a gentle ridge from which smooth, organic contours flowed upward. Something about them reminded him of something, though Dariel had never seen a craft even remotely like them. It was only when he saw one overturned on the rocky beach that it occurred to him what they reminded him of.
“They look like turtle shells.”
“Very observant,” Anira quipped. She hefted a bundle and moved to load it into one of the boats.
Dariel did the same, double-time to keep up with her. “You don’t mean… that they are turtle shells, do you?”
Anira tossed the bundle in and turned to face him, showing him the full measure of her amusement. “What did Birke tell you about the Sheeven Lek?”
“Not to swim in it.”
“Why did he do that?”
“Because other things swim in it. Bigger things.”
“Exactly. Things like turtles.”
“There are turtles this size in the river?”
“No.” She tossed a leg over the gunwale and began to shove and wiggle the new bundle into place. “They’re no more. Died out a long time ago.” Before Dariel could expel the relieved breath he had at the ready, she added, “The scale leeches killed them off.”
Scale leeches? Dariel thought it sounded like something she had made up on the spot. He said so, much to her amusement.
T hey floated free of the riverbank by midmorning. Yoen did not come down to see them off, but it seemed as if the rest of the village did. They crowded on the beach, down onto rock outcroppings. Some of the children tossed flowers to them from a tree house high on a branch overhanging the water. He barely knew these people, but watching and waving to them, touching the rune on his forehead, he felt a weight of responsibility to them. He had agreed to help them, to try to secure this land for them to prosper peacefully in. He had agreed to try to become the hero they all hoped for. It felt right that he did so, but as he floated toward it, he feared he faced an enormous task that he still did not understand the shape of.
The seven shells were to carry the party of five back toward the coast from which they had so recently come and to take with them the young and hardy from the nearby villages, any who could help in the fight they all knew awaited them. Each boat went captained by a rower skilled at handling it. Perched on the thwart, the rowers moved the crafts with a quiet efficiency of effort. In the quiet pools of still water-of which there were many the first day-they drove the vessels forward by leaning their backs into timed pulls on the oars. When the current picked up, when pressed through rocks or down steeper sections, they turned the boats with a touch of an oar on the green water or spun them like tops with a cross-cross pull. There was an elegance to it that Dariel admired from where he lay among the bundles of supplies.
In the afternoon he took a turn at the oars. He had rowed skiffs on enough occasions to be confident, and he figured the study he had made of it from a few hours’ watching had taught him what he needed to know. Wrong. He spent all his efforts on just moving the absurdly long oars. Just landing the blades in the water the right way proved difficult, and the right way never stayed right for long because the vessel was always in motion. When he lifted one oar to reposition it, he invariably pulled against the other, swinging the boat one direction or another. When he tried to correct on the other side, he found the water as immovable as setting concrete. If he managed to press down on an oar-thereby lifting its other end out of the water-the freed end flailed in the air with a life of its own.
“Anticipate, Dariel,” Birke called. “Anticipate. Feel the momentum starting to-”
“Would you shut up?” Dariel shouted, jerking his oars in frustration.
Listening to the jibes the others tossed around him, Dariel wondered if he needed to harden his demeanor. He imagined returning the taunts with fierce expressions of disapproval. Or sharp reprimands. Invocations of his name. No, not his name. Of his status as the Rhuin Fa! That’s what mattered here. Just look at his forehead! Of course, he got that status because of who he was in the Known World, not in this one. He had not done much worthy of a title yet. He still had no idea just how he would lead the People.
Other than that he could speak languages he had never learned, he could not say he felt any different having part of Na Gamen’s true soul in him. He knew that he was heading toward a clan gathering in which he would be presented to all the people of Avina, but nobody asked him what he would say or told him what he should say. Perhaps because of that, he had dreams each night in which he held long conversations with different people. In them, he listened to them, learned about their fears and worries. In them, he argued against the league’s vision for Ushen Brae. He encouraged the People to unite, to find strength together, and to reject the league’s enticements. Maybe, if he dreamed about it long enough, he would find the right words.
By the time he gave up on rowing, his face was wet with sweat and his shirt plastered to his chest. The other shells were far ahead, a few out of sight around a distant river bend. He nearly voiced a suspicion that the basic dynamics covering rowing were somehow reversed in Ushen Brae, but he knew a lame excuse when he heard one. He kept it to himself. He handed the oars back to Harlen, the captain of his shell, who had watched the entire show while chewing on a twig of sweet branch. He took the oars without comment and made up the time Dariel had lost in a few minutes, humming as he rowed.
When this brought new bursts of taunts from the distant shells, Dariel flipped his frustration over and gave in to it himself. Why not? He could not change who he was to them, even if he was mostly a walking invitation for mirth. He did not even want to, when it came down to it. If he was to be the hero these people needed, it could not be shaped by pretense. It had to flow from who he was, who they were, and what they could do together. As odd as it was to feel himself a constant source of humor, there was something he actually liked about it. A playfulness. A camaraderie that felt close to what he had experienced as an Outer Isle brigand.
“That can’t be a bad thing,” he said. He decided to build on it, to let it grow.