A miracle at sunset
Ulín sold Laufkariar’s jewel-encrusted pen and hired a deepname-powered carriage and a guide. Her aim was to travel north to Lysinar. Her ancestral lands ended with Priadét, and it was all wilderness from there, forests flanking a thin, sandy strip of a coast and between them an ancient trade road, sometimes narrow, sometimes a little bit wider. The land itself was wild here. Small bears fished the waterfalls, unafraid of the deepname-steered carriage and its riders. Birds flew overheard, startled by the rattling of wheels. Beyond the driver and her guide, she saw people only rarely, here and there in fishing and hunting villages.
Once Ulín passed by a bookhouse that stood in the middle of a small town. The building was made of wood and painted lavender, and had books stacked high in the windows. The bookseller was a stooped and ancient ichidi who once lived on the Coast, but had found its gatherings too loud, or so they said. The bookseller had lived in this town now for sixty years, peddling healing herbs and old books that smelled of bitter tonics and honey. Ulín traded more of Laufkariar’s gifts for two modest pens carved of alder, and a traveling inkwell filled with walnut ink. She got notebooks bound in leather, and books about Lysini culture and about the ancient war which made the Lysini people who they were. There was also a dictionary of the language of the stag people.
Ulín’s journey north from there was a happy one. She read, disdaining the headache for as long as she could; and when the carriage made stops, she jotted notes in her new notebook. The language of the serpent people and the language of the stag people had similar words—words for dreaming and waking, for rain and woman, for hunter and leader and trader. This is what she had wanted all along—this learning, and travel, and wide-open spaces.
She crossed the border of Lysinar, into the land of rivers that gurgled and spoke in the language of water that knows no dictionaries. Birds sang differently here, as if their language, too, was different from what she’d heard at home. Golden mice and voles darted underfoot, their pelts glinting in the rays of sun that stole through the canopy of the great trees. The carriage driver and guide would go no farther, but Ulín did not want to stop. She parted with her companions and walked alone, deeper and deeper into the sun-dappled wood.
It was almost sunset when people stepped out to greet her. Their leader was a woman taller than any nameway Ulín had ever seen. She was proud and regal of bearing, and she was clothed—
I cough, and Ulín frowns at me, but it is indulgent. She says, “Stone Orphan, she was definitely clothed.”
I laugh. “Go on.”
She was clothed in heavy garments embroidered with the shapes of berries and leaves. Her skin was grayish-green, and her head was crowned in beautiful sunset-pink antlers that branched into the air. These tree-like antlers glowed with the light of hundreds of tiny magical candlebulbs, which must have been planted there by her nameway companions. The people surrounding her were hunters, both nameway and dreamway, dressed in leathers and furs and adorned in ornaments made of brass and beryl and twigs. The queen of these people was unsmiling, but Ulín detected a warmth emanating from her.
“Who are you, and why do you come here, and what do you bear?” the stag woman asked in the common tongue of the North.
She said, “I am Ulín Ranravan, daughter of Sibeli and Kannar, and I am a child of the Coast. I am a person who was named for heirship of my people, but I myself want only words. I want to learn languages, and meet the people who speak them, and share friendship under the open arms of the sky.”
The stag woman bowed slightly, and the magical lights in her antler crown jangled and twinkled, but did not blind Ulín.
“This land does not open its arms to the sky,” said the Kran-Valadar, for such was her title, and she was the leader of the hunters and warriors of that land. “Four hundred years ago, my people of the stag were exiled here from Katra. Our star was destroyed, and we ran northwest, where the nameway people of Lysinar welcomed us. These forests grew out of our entwined magics, the powers of the nameway and the dreamway—and all the birds and the voles and the rivers and the lakes. We know what it is to fight and to flee, and we know what it is to lose and to gain. Friendship is ever an empty word if no action accompanies it.”
“The Katrans attacked us too,” Ulín said. “During that war four hundred years ago, after they exiled you, they subjugated our Coast.”
“I know this history. Once it was even true,” said the Kran-Valadar. “But now your people sit in Katran governance. Your own father is a minister of war. If Katra attacks us, your father will lead the troops. Is this your ambition as well?”
“I do not want power,” Ulín said.
The Kran-Valadar heaved a big sigh, and her companions whispered between themselves. “You are still a child,” she said. “You have been through much, but you are still young, and naïve. Nobody can escape wielding power. If you have it, you must learn to use it.”
“I know what I want,” Ulín said, stubborn. “Languages and people and learning. I do not want power. I do not want to choose any sides, to contribute to any wars. I just want to learn.”
The Kran-Valadar said, “Once you learn, you change. Once you change, you choose. Once you choose, you exercise power.”
“I am powerless,” Ulín insisted. “My own brother assailed me and disempowered me.”
“You are far from powerless,” the Kran-Valadar responded. “But you have suffered and you are afraid, and so you lie to yourself that you’re powerless.”
Ulín protested, but the leader of the stag people would not hear it.
“Come, I will show you the price of such fear,” she said.
She took Ulín to a settlement of log houses on a large forest glade. There was a person who looked different from any nameway and dreamway Ulín knew. This new person was older and fishlike, her skin silvery-blue with scales. Her eyes shone soft silver, and she sang in a voice deep and melodious, sang with words Ulín did not understand. It was breathtaking, that melody, and deeply soothing, and it healed and ruined her heart.
“This is my lover, Beautiful Song of the siltway people,” said the Kran-Valadar. “She comes here every few years. She comes here in secret. Her people do not want her to reach out to people not like hers, and she can neither accept her desire nor resist it. We can share the land and the sea, I said to her, but she told me it had been done before, done badly. She told me how it all went wrong. And now she is afraid. Her people, too, are afraid. They hold each other so tightly, so vigilantly, so firmly, so equally, and none of them will ever trust outsiders. They do not trust themselves either, afraid that if they don’t hold each other so tightly, the Shoal itself will dissolve. Each fish will go on its own, tossed with the current, powerless and bereft and easily hunted. So they clutch at each other, thinking that it is the only way. But a people can hold together with power greater than fear.”
Ulín did not understand this story back then. Not until now.
“Any day now, she’ll flicker away from me, my Beautiful Song,” said the Kran-Valadar. “But she will return in a few years’ time.”
“Why do you love her?” Ulín asked, incredulous. “If she cannot overcome her fear and commit to you?”
“She hesitates,” said the Kran-Valadar. “That hesitation is her gift to me. None of her people hesitate, but she does. She flickers away out of fear, and comes back out of love. Fear will make her loveless among her tightly held shoal, and love will make her bereft. One day, she will choose. But even now, she is changing. Already she learned the language of woman and she chose it, even though her language does not have such words.”
