11 – 2
We find the Royah in a haphazard sprawl of wagons, the smoke of banked hearthfires curling into a starless sky. Their faint light shines on the painted walls and wheels of those half-dozen homes, surrounding the brightly painted designs with shadows that ebb and flow with the wind. A horse whinnies, answered by the lowing grumble of a sleepy ox. Someone's deep-bellied laugh rolls along behind, brought down to an embarrassed muttering by a shout of Ay! from inside a nearby home.
Relief staggers me, so hard that I have to reach out for help to stay standing. Clarke and Juliana take my hands as laughter bubbles up my throat. It comes out a gasp and a sob, a smile through the stinging burn in my eyes. “They're alright,” I manage to say, first to Clarke, who smiles at me and turns to hold my cheek in her free hand.
“They're alright,” she echoes. She's beautiful. I turn into her touch and kiss the softness of her wrist. Her eyes widen, still open-sky blue, even in the dark of night. An unsteady breath leaves her parted lips. I could kiss that, too. All I'd have to do is take a few steps forward.
Except, I don't. Juliana is behind me, still holding my hand, and my people are right there. As much as I want to learn how her kiss tastes, as much as I hope she feels the same; now is now the time. Here is the not the place. With my eyes alone I beg her to understand: Later. I promise. Her fingers curl into my jaw, nails scraping gently over my skin. Shivers, down my spine. A moment passes, and then she nods. Her hand falls away.
Juliana clears her throat. Clarke startles at the sound, flush spreading across her cheeks and the bridge of her nose. “I don't mean to interrupt,” Juliana lies, tease in her voice and the glint of her eye. “but don't you have an appointment to keep?”
I turn a narrow-eyed glare on her. “Yes,” I growl, “and I – am – keeping it. We're waiting.”
“What for?” she asks.
I give her a blank look. “To be invited in,” I answer.
Her thunderhead brow furrows. She looks confused, and I don't understand. Was I unclear? Do all knights have the habit of entering someone's home uninvited? Is it unique to her? Either way, it's dangerously rude. Maybe it's as simple as this: that she hadn't considered a wagon could be a home. Until now, that is, for the furrows lifts and allows understanding to cross her face. “Of course,” she says, with a kind of embarrassed regret.
“It won't be long,” I assure her. Tell it true, I'm half-sure we've been seen already. It'd be foolish to have no one watching the Port, and my people are no fools. We can't be, living as we do.
“Indeed it won't, little sister,” a voice from the shadow says, each word by shaped by the accent I can no longer deny we Royah have. “Indeed it won't.” They step forward, showing themselves to be a man by the dim light of distant hearthfires. He's a lean form dressed warmly against the autumn night, dark in hair and eye, with a knotted club hanging from a leather strip at his belt. He meets my eyes and asks, “So you'd be her, then?”
“I would be,” I answer. This isn't the place for the formal greeting, so all I further say is, “I'm Zira.”
Courtesy would have him introduce himself in turn. With a wave to Juliana and Clarke, he says, “You sure took your time. Stop to pick up every stray you met on the road, or was it just these?”
Clarke's eyes flash as she answers, “Is everyone in your camp this welcoming, or is it just you?”
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He claps a gloved hand to his chest. “A cut,” he drawls, a bitter smile gleaming in the dark, “You've opened me to the bone, outsider. Any other day, I'd like you for it.” He shrugs. “But it's this one.”
Juliana asks, growing concern on her words, “Has something happened?”
“Sure,” he answers, nodding, “Horse threw a shoe two days ago, had a baby born yesterday...oh, an' I jabbed myself with a sewing needle this morning whilst darnin' my socks.”
Clarke begins to say, “She meant–” and is interrupted.
“I know what she meant,” he says. “an' she's asking for business that ain't hers. Hell,” he jerks his chin at me, “She's kin, an' it's – barely – hers.”
There's a long, thick scab tracing the length of my back. Beneath it, a scar smoothing into my skin. It aches in the cold. “What happened?” I ask.
He shakes his head. “Not my story to tell,” he says, “I'll take you to whose it is, an' she can tell you or not as she pleases.” He stops in his turn to look at me over his shoulder, “Just you, mind. No room for outsiders in our camp. Not after today.”
- - -
Caught out in the space between my people and my companions, I hesitate. She fought and fled and bled right alongside me. She saved me. I'm alive because of her. The only reason I'm here at all is because of her. It's not right to keep her out. He had joked, my embittered kinsman, that her words had cut him to the bone, but it was his that put that low, distant sadness back in her eyes. How do I convince him that she is worthy of being welcome and won't violate the trust of hospitality? How do I change his mind?
Can I, even? I can't think, the wheel of my thinking mind stuck in a grasping rut of worry and growing dread. There are only so many reasons why a Royah camp would close itself off, none of them good. I have to try. She's earned that, and so much more. “Please,” I beg, “Won't you–”
“Can't, little sister,” he interrupts again, not even looking at me now, “even if I wanted to,” Is that regret I hear? “which I don't.” It is not.
“It's fine,” Juliana says, voice rich and strong and telling a lie. My eyes snap to her, to the hand she rests between Clarke's shoulders, and how his bitter needling has failed to find purchase. “We'll wait here, hm? Go meet your people.” Clarke nods, saying nothing. The warm weight of Juliana's great hand seemed to have lessened the sadness at being kept away from somewhere yet again.
“You see?” he says, impatience shortening his tone even further, “It's fine. They're fine. We're – all – fine, now are you comin' or not?”
“Yes,” I answer, “I am.”
“Wonderful,” he sighs the word out, then waves me onward, “Come. Follow me.”
Guilt in my belly, I do. We go back into the same shadowed alley he came from, passing between the pair of wagons that shape it, and emerge into a hearthfire clearing. Another three encircle the dying embers, lifted yokes painted dull orange by the fading light. There's quiet here, the kind that comes with deep slumber, and a stillness that comes from something else. How could anyone laugh like that, all deep-bellied and rolling, with this in the air?
Whatever wrong was done here left an echo.
We pass the paddock, the pressing silence broken by the stomp of hooves and snuffle of questing snouts. The unresolved shapes of horse, mule, and ox loom in the dark. The earth-sweat smell of them fills my nose, loosens the grinding clench of my jaw. Soon, they're left behind, and the stillness returns. It crawls up my back, burrowing under the cracking scab into the tender skin beneath. Throbbing ache pulses into the base of my skull.
“Here,” he says, voice muted, stopping outside a lone-standing wagon. No hearthfire near it, nor the ashen remnant of one. The paint adorning it is old, made faint and peeling by years of sun, wind, and rain. The walls are covered in gentle hills of darkened amber, the door a rise of pale, weathered stone. He steps up to rap it twice with his knuckles.
From inside, a woman's voice, made muffled by the wood and roughened by something else. “What?”
“It's me, Lenn,” says he, and gently. The wagon rocks as the woman, as Lenn, moves within it. She soon stops, though her door stays closed. “It's late, I know, and today's been...” he glances at me, “well, you know, but it's important. Our wayward sister's finally found us.”
Now the door does open. Lenn is a woman of iron-gray hair and wrinkled, leathered skin covering a thin, bony frame. She wears a thick, woolen robe over a pale nightgown. Her dark eyes are sharp, reddened, and swollen as they look me over. She has a thin mouth that thins further before she says, “What time of night do you call this, hm?”
“I – I'm sorry,” I stumble over saying, “I came as soon as I could.” Lenn hums and says nothing. She's waiting.“I...I am Zira, daughter of Alia, daughter of Mira,” I say, and bow as deeply as my cracking scab would allow, “and I – I have come to see and be seen as I begin my walking road.”
For a moment, it seems that Lenn won't finish the greeting. She'll leave me and return to her private mourning of whatever it is that grieves her. Blessedly, and almost begrudgingly, she says, “You see and are seen by Lenn, daughter of Ruon...m – mother of Leda.” My heart cracks with her voice. The greeting done, she laments, “If only you had been a day sooner, daughter.”
“Why?” I ask, “What's happened?”