The Silences of Home (36 page)

Lanara had been warm for two days—a deep, encircling warmth that had let her sleep as she never had on the ship. Nellyn had brought her food, and washed her, and stretched out beside her after dawn. She woke against him, watched the blue cloth he had hung sway in the wind that blew through their small window. She had never left, perhaps. She had been here, sleeping and waking, suffused with this warmth that made her heavy.

Except that she
had
been away: she could not deny this as she stood on the cliff path at the place where it turned in its descent to Fane. She looked down at the fires that burned on the wharf and up along the river. She heard snatches of singing and laughter when the wind shifted. She watched and listened and felt the weariness of her body, and its unsteadiness, as if she still walked on a deck, not earth and stone.
I can’t
, she thought.
I’m so tired I can hardly stand
. Exhaustion, that was all, the only reason she turned and walked back up the path, away from the Queen’s celebration.

She did not see Alea, when she climbed through the tower. She had only seen her once since her return, and Aldron not at all. Lanara had not sought them out; they would all be apart for a time, resting, and that was as it should be. And Aldron had the baby now. Lanara vaguely remembered seeing it in Alea’s arms when she had stood on the stairs, looking into the kitchen.

Lanara heard nothing in the tower. Nellyn would be writing in the log or attending to the candles in the lightroom. She would sit and watch him. It was all she wanted to do, which surprised her a bit. She should have yearned for the revelry and companionship of the party, and yet she was here, stepping up through silence so thick it lapped like waves in her ears.

“Oh.” She said the word involuntarily, and it echoed in the writing room. Nellyn and Alea turned to her. He was sitting at the desk and she was on a cushion on the floor near him. They had not been talking, just sitting.

“You said you would go to the celebration,” Nellyn said, rising, crossing to her. He touched her cheek.

Lanara nodded. “Yes, and I started to walk there, but I’m just too tired still.”
That’s all
—again the insistence, the pushing against something else so that it would remain nameless.

“Sit,” he said. “Here—we have fresh sunfruit. . . .”

“Where’s Aldron?” she asked when she was on the stool, a bowl of sliced fruit untouched in her lap.

Alea straightened on her cushion and tucked her hair behind her ears. “Sleeping, finally. He hasn’t slept since he returned.”

Lanara stared down at the fruit, pushed at one red sliver with her right forefinger.

“What happened there?” Alea’s voice was so low that Lanara nearly felt the words rather than heard them. She could not look up—but of course she had to speak.

“Hasn’t he told you?” she said, so that she would have more time to order her words.

“No. He hardly speaks. He’s weak and ill, yet the wound in his chest is almost completely healed, so there doesn’t seem to be a reason for his weakness. Tell me, since you have your voice: what happened in that place?”

It was easy to talk once Lanara had begun. She talked of the voyage across, the landing, the battle, where Aldron had fought bravely and well. She talked of the Queen standing atop the tall stone in the pool, of her raised arms and the sudden blazing of her mindpowers. The fire, the wind, the curse, Aldron gasping behind the stone. Lanara described it all, growing more certain as she did so. She had not told Nellyn this much, only small bits, and he had not pressed her for more. She had been afraid to tell more, as if the words, spoken, would bring the flames and bubbling skin back to her—but they did not. She was stronger, almost herself, as she had been in the winter.

“So,” Alea said, long minutes after Lanara had finished, “where was Aldron when your Queen’s power burst forth?”

Lanara frowned. Alea’s voice was higher than it had been, with an edge that would have been mockery if it had not also sounded like desperation. “At the foot of the stone,” she said. “Behind it while she spoke.”

“Ah, yes,” Alea said. “Your Queen simply opened her mouth and
spoke
the destruction of the sea people.”

“Yes,” said Lanara. The word sounded defiant, and she bit her lip to stop others like it from coming.

“And how did your Queen explain her sudden ability to speak magical words?”

Lanara forced herself to answer slowly. “The First Queen,” she said, and told that story too, so that she would be reminded and Alea would understand—but Alea started to laugh before the tale was done.

“You’re a fool, Lanara,” she said breathlessly. “You and all your people. Your Queen has ruined Aldron, and no one knows the truth of it.”

“How dare—” Lanara began, and Nellyn said both of their names, but Alea spoke the loudest, standing now, very tall.

“Why was Aldron not tended to after he got his wound, though the Queen and her fighters were nearby?”

Lanara ran her tongue over her lips. “She thought he was already dead,” she said, but Alea shook her head.

“No. You knew he wasn’t. You said you heard him, yet the Queen was paying him no attention. She didn’t
think
he was dead, she
wanted
—”

“Stop!” Lanara cried. “Stop, stop—you can’t know how it was, there. It was all confusion, everyone was still muddled from the visions, the power—you can’t possibly understand—”

“Ah, but she can.” Aldron was on the stairs, looking at Alea. “She can,” he said again, into the stillness, “and she does, and she hates me even more than she did before.”

Alea pressed her lips together, bent her head so that her hair fell across an eye and cheek. “No, I only grieve for you. For all of us—because we’ll have to go, won’t we? We’ll have to flee this place and these people before someone finds out what you’ve done.”

“What he’s done?” Lanara repeated. “I don’t understand. . . .” She tried to swallow over a sour taste that had risen in her throat.

“His Telling power,” Nellyn began, quietly, only to her, but she rounded on him, said, “His power isn’t real—they told us that in the inn, remember? It can’t change things. It’s pleasant enough but only while the images last.” She spun from Nellyn’s silence to theirs. “Show me, then! Change this writing stick from black to red, or tear that parchment without using your hands.
Show me
.”

Aldron was looking at her now, at last—across a space, not pressed so close to her that she could not see his eyes. He shook his head once, almost imperceptibly, and she wanted to launch herself at him and claw away this “no,” whatever it was for. She did not move. She watched him look back at Alea and smile (the smile, like the head-shake, a slight, shadowy thing).

“Will you flee with me, then?” he said.

Alnissa was crying. Nellyn heard her begin, softly, as Aldron asked Alea his question and Alea answered him. The crying grew loud and indignant, and still no one moved. Nellyn walked past Lanara, past Alea and Aldron. He walked down two floors, and over to Alnissa’s basket. Her face was nearly as crimson as the blanket she lay upon. He never murmured or cooed, as Alea did, but the baby always quieted immediately when he picked her up. She did so now, her head heavy between his shoulder and neck.

“I’m sorry,” Alea said from behind him, “I should have been the one to come to her.” She lifted Alnissa away from him and sat down on her pallet to nurse her. Aldron was there as well, thrusting clothing into a brown sack. “You’re still weak,” she said. “Perhaps one more night . . . ?”

Aldron straightened. “No,” he said in the hoarse, thin voice that seemed to be his now. “I can’t. How could I sleep surrounded by . . . this?” He did not look away from Alea or gesture, but Nellyn knew what he meant: surrounded by painted flame and earth and sky.

Nellyn went down to the kitchen. Lanara was already there, standing by the empty fireplace with her arms crossed. She did not glance at him, or at Alea when she came down. Only when Aldron descended with a bag over each shoulder did Lanara’s gaze shift. She watched him as he took his travel cloak down from the peg by the door and rolled it up.
I have never seen her look like this before
, Nellyn thought. He turned quickly away from her and followed Alea, who was going back up the stairs.

She stood touching the painted walls with one hand. The other held Alnissa against her shoulder. “I can’t take anything. Nothing except the clothes I arrived with, and Alnissa’s.”

“The basket?” he said. Alea shook her head. “The blanket, then. You’ll need it, surely, and it comforts her.”

“Yes, of course—here, hold her a moment.” He felt the sleeping, curled weight of her one more time, the last time that was certain in this world that was a line, not a circle. Nellyn breathed her scent and tried to hold it.
Now still always
, he thought, shonyn words that he felt within him yet, even if they were not true.

Alea put her arms around his neck, and Alnissa, between them, stirred and sighed. Alea held him very tightly, her fingers in his hair, her forehead against his. When she kissed him he tasted salt. He tried to take it away with his thumbs and his lips; tried to stop her sadness and greet his own, for it was new, familiar, already lost. He felt her warmth, and soon it was gone, and Alnissa’s too, and he was alone.

Lanara and Aldron were standing where they had been before; Alea noticed this, though she hardly looked at either of them. She adjusted the sling she had made from the red blanket, ensured that Alnissa was secure within. She remembered suddenly how she had felt kicks and prods on the wagon ride into Fane. Perhaps Alnissa’s movements, or her sister’s, or both—not that it mattered now. Only this leaving mattered.

Aldron was slow behind her on the path. Alea turned back once to offer her hand or arm, but he shook his head. She walked on, quickly. When she came to the end of the path, she waited until she heard him gasping and close then she stepped onto the wharf.

She reached the first of the fires in six paces. The heat of flames and air beat against her skin, and she turned toward the popping of wood and sparks even though she did not want to. Not her fires: and the air was moist and salt-rimed, not red as desert sand. But there were people, sitting or standing, lifting flasks to their mouths and laughing, some of them dancing. She watched from between two fires. She wanted to run until she reached the other fires, the other dancers, the wagons that were still her only home.
But no
, she thought, bitterness like fingers at her throat, and she looked behind her for Aldron.

He was well back from the first fire, though its glow reached him, lit his staring eyes and twitching lips and the hands he held trembling before him. He could not be seeing these fires, or even those of the Alilan.
He sees horror
, Alea thought, and she ran to him and took his hands, tried to smooth the shaking from them. “Come,” she said, “we’ll get through, we’ll get out.” She led him around the fires. His hand was limp in hers until they reached the brightest houses. Here he stopped, and she stopped with him and saw which house they stood before.

The Queenshouse shone. Every window was open, blazing with candles set in holders of gem-studded gold and silver. Banners of green and blue silk had been hung from the upper windows and fluttered gently against the stone. Queensguards lounged in the doorway, and many stood above as well, on the central balcony. Aldron lifted his head to look at them—but not at them, Alea realized as she too looked up.

Queen Galha was sitting at the balcony’s railing. Her chair was high-backed and wooden. Its sides, where her hands rested, were carved and painted, though Alea could not see their shapes or colours. The Queen glittered as her candles did, as the fires below her did, built high to honour her.

“Let’s go,” Alea said quietly, even though the noise around them would have masked a shout. “Quickly, Aldron.” He did not move his eyes from Galha. He followed her hands, raised to sketch an accompaniment to her words; he followed her angling head and her smile. Alea sought out hatred in his face, or even fear—but instead she saw something far and cold. “Love,” she said, touching his cheek despite her own fear, “what did she say to you? What did she promise you, if you did her bidding?”

He wrenched his gaze back from where it had been. He turned to Alea, recognized her. “Nothing,” he whispered.

She wanted to laugh, or snap, “Why should you lie to me?”—something easy and angry that would remind them both of the way they had been. She did not. She cupped one hand beneath the curve of Alnissa’s body and drew Aldron away with the other. Away from the Queen and her docks and her ships; away from the fires, though these extended upriver for a time, until the houses crowded in against the banks; up beneath the lit windows of these houses to where there was darkness at last, and the river widening free under stars and wind-bent trees. Away from the river then too—the three of them, alone.

Nellyn remembered waking with joy, hearing it in Lanara’s humming or the strokes of her writing stick. He remembered it in voices in the kitchen and in the scent of rising bread and burned-down candles. It had been in silence as well. But now he woke in silence that was heavy, and he heard no joy, and felt none. It was late summer, and he lay bathed in sweat beneath his light sheet—yet he was chilled, had been since Alea and Aldron had left. Lanara had disappeared then. It was as if she had gone somewhere without her body, which stayed near Nellyn, breathing and sometimes eating, but empty. He did not disturb the quiet of this body; he waited, as he always did when he was unsure or unready—but this time the waiting was difficult to bear. He was hollow with loneliness. When she had left the shonyn village, he had felt this loneliness. Now, though, he could see her, and feel her stillness as she pretended to be asleep.

One day he woke to a sound. He lay and listened. When the sound did not come again he rose and dressed and went downstairs, his bare feet light on the wood. He intended to go to the kitchen to make Lanara a meal (she would not have eaten yet, although it was well past noon), but he stopped at Aldron and Alea’s sleeping floor. Lanara was there, sitting cross-legged on the pallet. Her mouth was clamped over the knuckles of one hand. Her sobs were muffled, but he saw her shake with them, and he heard one, broken and dry.

There were two knives in front of her on the pallet. He saw when he drew closer that one was plain and the other inlaid with strands of gold and green stones. He knelt before her and said her name.

“They’re Aldron’s,” she said, from behind her hand. “Galha gave him this simple one at the Queenshouse before we left for the Raiders’ Land. Aldron killed a fishperson with it.”

“Why?” Nellyn asked. It was not a word he often used—but he needed her to talk, to be Lanara.

“I. . . .” she shook her head, “I don’t remember. I think it was trying to escape. Aldron seemed upset, afterward, that he had killed it.”

“And the other dagger?” Nellyn felt slow and clumsy, trying to lead her speaking—but she did not seem to notice.

“She gave it to him in her cabin, after he killed the fishperson. As a reward, I think. She valued him, you see—his skill, his willingness to follow her, even though he was not a Queensman.” She raised her eyes to Nellyn’s. He returned her gaze, though he wanted to look away—at the window, perhaps, or at one of Alea’s glass vases: somewhere clear and calm.
I have never wanted to avoid her eyes before
, he thought. Slow, clumsy, and now afraid as well.

“Don’t you have any other questions for me, Nellyn?” she said, her eyes so bright, so expectant.

“No. What questions should I have?”

She laughed. It started as a tremor that could have been sobbing but was not; when it rose from her belly to her throat, he knew this. “What should . . . why not try ‘why do you weep so for this other man?’ or ‘what have you done?’”

He took a very long, slow breath. “Do you want me to ask these questions?”

Her laughter was changing. It was sobbing, as he had thought it had been before—or perhaps it was all the same. “I didn’t think so—but all these weeks have passed, and I can’t bear it, I can’t have this secret, it’s hurting me. . . .”

“Tell me, then.” His voice sounded very steady. It was strange, that his voice and thoughts could feel different from one another. “Tell me,” he said again, and waited.

Lanara watched Nellyn. She had been watching him for two days as he walked, pacing around the back of the signal tower even during the hottest part of the day. He had only come inside to perform his duties in the lightroom and on the writing floor, and when she had climbed up to relieve him, he was already gone. Outside again, probably, sitting on the back balcony, staring at the cliff. When he wasn’t pacing he was doing this. He was doing it now, his hands placed lightly on his knees, his head held straight and motionless. His entire body was motionless. She watched him and felt her own limbs twitching. Even her skin was restless, it seemed, prickling and itchy.

She had nearly gone out to him several times. “Please,” she had imagined saying, “speak to me. Stay with me.” Her fear kept her away.
What did I say?
she thought, reaching back two short days and finding nothing but blur, and more fear.
What did he say?

She had told him that she and Aldron had been lovers. She had told him that she loved Aldron—but that could not be; it was not true. Or maybe it was. Even if it was, it did not matter: she loved Nellyn. She had told him that too—she must have. She would. As soon as he came inside she would go to him and tell him and he would hold her, calm her as he always did.

She walked down to the kitchen, sat before a platter of cheese and bread. Her stomach and head felt thick with sickness, as if she had been drunk for two days instead of sleepless and afraid.

“Lanara.”

She looked up so quickly that he swam in her eyes for a moment. Her throat was dry—no voice, now that he was here with her. But she did not need it: he was talking, talking, too many words for a shonyn.

“The shonyn say the river is within each of us and must be sought out when body or mind are not calm. I have not been able to find it—not really since the day I left my people. I thought this was a loss, like the others, that I could bear and even understand. But now I feel it is not. I cannot find the river in me—only confusion and noise.”

“This is just change.” She did not know how these words had come so swiftly out of her silence. “Remember when you first understood time? You felt mad. You told me, when you found me in Luhr: you felt overwhelmed with change. This is the same. It’s overwhelming, but it will pass.”

“No.” He swallowed, opened and closed his hands. “Or yes. Perhaps I fear either way. I do not know my mind—that is why I must return to my people. Perhaps I will find my river there, and know again how to be.”

“No.” Her turn to say it, and she repeated it, repeated it, even when he went back up the stairs. She forced herself to stand when he came back down again. “If you discover, once you’ve been there for a time, that you can’t live with your people after all, will you come back?”

He was gathering fruit, nuts, bread, placing them all carefully in the centre of a cloth he had brought with him. He tied the four corners together and held the makeshift bag at his side. The bag trembled, even with so much within; she felt a surge of hope, seeing this.

“I do not know,” he said—and she was crying again, though she had thought herself too far away for tears. “Lanara,” he said, and took a step toward her, “do not—please . . . I understand time now, as you say. I understand ‘future.’ So how could I give you any other answer that would be true?”

He was in front of her; she could have touched him. He lingered for a moment—but no hope now, she had been a fool to think there was—and then he was past her, and she heard the door open and close.

She ran up to the writing floor. It was dusk. Sea and sky were dark, and so was the path, but she saw him anyway, a small, slow shape moving away. When she could no longer see him, she looked down at the parchment on the desk. His writing was slanted and uneven, as it had been ever since she had met him.
Sundown
, she read.
Very hot and still. Wind gentle from
—and that was all, a sentence unfinished and the writing stick lying across the page, where he had dropped it. She stared at the words, and where they ended. She closed her eyes and imagined him coming up behind her, winding his arms around her waist, murmuring, “I’ll finish that later. . . .”—imagined it in every detail, for she deserved this pain.

Leaves skittered over the cobbles. Crimson leaves, golden ones, others brown and brittle; the courtyard was full of them. A red one blew up against the sackcloth target, and Lanara nocked an arrow, loosed it so quickly that the leaf was pierced and pinned before the wind could find it again. There were low whistles from the Queensfighters who stood behind her, and some scattered clapping. She smiled and shrugged, and stepped aside so that the next person could take his turn.

The Queensfighters had been friendly to her since her arrival at the Queenshouse two months ago. Friendly at the meals they took together in the long thin dining hall, and here in the courtyard, practicing archery and swordplay—but she saw that they always held themselves a little back from her. They had all seen her with the Queen, in this building, on the great ship that had led the fleet—perhaps even in the Raiders’ Land. There were two Luhrans among them who had seen her with Ladhra. One of them had told her this, haltingly, her eyes cast down, on the day Lanara had come to live with them. Part of her felt strengthened by this distance and the reason for it; another part of her longed to be truly, effortlessly one of them. She was, however, entirely relieved to be in this house, among her own people, surrounded by their voices and their blue-and-green-clad bodies. Only at night was she alone, in her tiny room overlooking the courtyard. They had given her this room as a sign of respect, assuming she would not want to share one as all the other Queensfighters did. She had accepted it, flattered, muddled by her sleepless nights in the signal tower. But soon she feared nights here as well—for despite the distraction of her days, the waking dreams still found her when she was alone. In the silence she still heard hissing rock and smelled blood and burning and fresh earth beneath her fingernails. When she closed her eyes, she saw snatches of colour that were not so fleeting that she did not recognize them: a Raider boy lying on flower-speckled moss, trails of dirt on her skin and Aldron’s. She would sit up in her bed, reeling as if she had been in a cabin that tipped and tossed upon waves. In the signal tower she had been too afraid to walk the empty floors and stairs; here, at least she could go out into corridors and rooms and find people who were awake, whom she would watch and listen to even if she did not join them.

“Doesn’t surprise me,” Drelha had declared, when Lanara had sought her out at her house in Fane. “Tower life’s hard and lonely, not for everyone.” Lanara had nodded, too tired to explain anything. Three days later, Drelha had returned to the tower with a train of donkeys bearing chests, and her burly, silent husband. “Father died in the winter,” she said as she stomped up the stairs, peering at each floor. “Right after the icemounts burned—what a sight. He wished he’d still been up here, the foolish old thing. Now what,” she’d continued, picking something up from Alea’s low table, “am I to do with the likes of this?”

Lanara had looked from the copper armring in Drelha’s hand to the rows of glazed pots with their jewels to the glass vases that stood where Aldron had placed them. “I don’t know,” she replied.

“Well,” Drelha had sighed, “I suppose I’ll sell some things back to the markets—these stones maybe, and this rug—it’s far too bright. As for the walls. . . .”

When she had set her feet upon the path, Lanara had intended to journey back to Luhr. But by the time she had reached the Queenshouse, she knew that she could not go further—not yet, not as tired as she was. And after she had been in the house for one week, then two and three, she had decided that the rest was doing her good. She reminded herself of this during the day. At night she had different reasons for not wanting to continue on to Luhr: the Queen’s strangeness on the ship, the palace corridors that would still echo with Ladhra’s voice and footsteps, the river journey that would take Lanara past the shonyn village. But
I’m resting
, she insisted to herself as the days grew shorter and the leaves began to fall.

“Queenswoman Lanara.”

She turned to the Queensguard who had come up beside her. It was almost her turn to shoot again; she paused with her bow slid halfway down her arm. “Yes?” she said. Her fellow archers had fallen back from her. She stood alone with the guard as silence rang in her ears.

“There is a letter for you,” he said, looking steadily at a spot on her forehead. “From our Queen.”

But it was not from Galha—Lanara saw this as soon as she read the first line, in the same room in which she had read another letter from Luhr, so many months ago.

My dear Lanara, our Queen is unwell. She has been weak since her victory in the Raiders’ Land, and her weakness is increasing, though I had hoped that being home would soothe and strengthen her. She spends much of the day in bed, though she still insists on receiving the families of those lost in the battle, or the Queensfighters themselves, who desire to meet with her. She does this every two days, by Sarhenna’s pool—but this saps her energy, and I am trying to convince her to cease the practice until she is well again.

She is asking for you. Although she has not contacted you since her return to Luhr, she has been speaking of you every day, with growing urgency. I am certain your presence would comfort her as nothing else has yet been able to. I fear for her and for this realm. We miss you, Lanara, and we need you. Come back to Luhr.