Silence met Marissa’s words. Isa tried to remember when she’d last heard such bitterness from Marissa. She was always so blithe and breezy. Nothing seemed to touch her. All those days hanging out, shopping, watching movies, with friends at bars, Marissa was always the solid one, the practical one, the one with the plan for what happens next. She never dated anyone very long; she always said it was because she didn’t want commitment. Her parent’s messy divorce, she’d said.

Which was plausible. Everything Marissa said was plausible. Everything she did in Portland, it was within these “normal” parameters.

Mery laughed and broke the silence. “Rough place you girls are from. Came to Varana for the relaxing, friendly atmosphere, did you?”

“Sounds like Thornbury to me,” said Mimay. “The cities are rife with that sort of thing. All machinations, intrigue, plotting, and the like.” The cleric shivered. “Stab me in the front, thank you very much.”

“Cities? You have cities?” Alice asked.

“Oh sure. Some places are wilder than others. Varana contains a multitude. Wouldn’t expect it to be any different on your plane.”

“Yes, but the technology, the magic. It’s all very agrarian.” Alice looked at Isa as if wanting support.

Isa nodded her head. “We just didn’t realize that—”

Marissa cut her off. “Just because they don’t have iPhones doesn’t mean they’re primitives, OK?”

“Primitive?” Isa felt her voice and anger rising. “Who said anything about that? What Alice was saying….” Isa glanced at Alice. “You can step in here any time.”

“Everyone keep your panties on.” Mery stood up. “I’ve traveled all over. This plane and others. People are fuckers no matter where you go. Some are good hearted for the most part. Others need a knife in the gut instead of a handshake. Cities, villages, deserts, they’re just places to go or pass through.

“Bards don’t have a home. There’s a place where they were born, and sometimes it is just a place where the wagon stopped long enough for you to slip out between your mother’s legs into your father’s waiting hands, or your grandmother’s or the fiddle player’s. So let’s not get all prickly about where we came from, yeah? Let’s concern ourselves with where we’re going.” With that Mery pointed at the approaching Onyx Hills.

“Who lives there?” said Alice.

Isa stood up and touched the hilt of the sun blade. “I need to do this thing, this ritual with my weapon. Al, can you come get me in an hour?” With that she moved to the rear of the raft and sat near a bundle of gear. She pulled the sword hilt from her belt. As she gripped it, the blade shimmered into existence, and light played across her face. She glanced back at the group to see if they had noticed the light, but no one was looking in her direction. Possibly no one was purposefully not looking in her direction.

Isa placed the sword on the deck and took her hand away. The blade and its light disappeared. She was ready to bond with it. If only she knew how. “Bond,” Isa muttered. What does that even mean? When you bond with a person, it’s because you shared time, effort, a goal. What goals does this blade have? Should I ask it? Have I truly gone crazy now?

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Isa sighed. So much of life in Varana was unclear. Where did the notebooks come from, anyway? If Ysel is really a god, is there a leader, like a head boss? A Zeus at the head of the whole thing?

She bowed her head and stared at the hilt. It was gold and brown with an inlaid iridescent design – magical runes, perhaps? The base was brown and the gold metal bands ringed the hilt, evenly spaced, from top to bottom. At the bottom, the hilt flared out just a touch, and Isa knew that if she should grasp it, a cross piece would appear as a companion to the actual blade.

Isa picked it up with two fingers so as not to activate the blade and set it with the top facing up. The top was capped with a raised image of the sun, and Isa knew that she could press it into a dollop of hot wax to make a seal if she wanted, if she were inclined to mark a document. As she looked at the image, it seemed to move, the rays of the sun stretching and flexing.

She wanted to pick it up, but then she didn’t want the blade to appear. How could she ever bond with the damned thing if it was always going to be a naked blade? Maybe that was part of the bonding, learning to control it.

Feeling a little foolish Isa said, “Stay” and picked up the hilt. The blade did not appear. Had she broken it or mastered it? She said, “Come” and the blade appeared. The light seemed blinding. She tried to blink away the after-images. “Could you tone it down with the lights? Jeeze.” And the blade dimmed.

Isa dropped the blade to the deck. “Holy shit. Can you understand me?”

The blade didn’t move.

“Right. Um, if you can understand me then bring the blade out.”

Nothing.

“So you’re not a genie trapped in the hilt or anything?”

The hilt lay where Isa had dropped it. With a sigh she picked it up and realized that the blade had not automatically popped into being. “Progress,” she muttered.

“Come,” she said, and the blade appeared. “Stay.” It disappeared. “That works, I guess.” She rubbed her thumb over the sun seal at the top. “We’re bonding.” She placed the hilt so that it rested across both her open palms. What now? Were they bonded or was there more?

Isa glanced at the group at mid-deck. Alice was making no move to come toward Isa, so there was plenty of time left in this little bonding ritual she was doing. But without instructions, how could she know what to do?

Just then a memory popped into her head. Sixth grade, their teacher Mrs. Webber, plopped two bags of oranges on her desk. “We’re learning about sense memory,” she told the class. Each child took an orange and made a small ink mark on it, claiming this orange as their own. And then they had two minutes to study the orange. At first there were giggles and nervous seat-shuffling, but then the class settled into looking at their oranges, really looking, since Mrs. Webber had made it clear that this was a graded exercise.

Isa studied the face of the orange, the one rough spot on the skin, and the way that the navel part was a little lopsided. Surely, she could pick her orange out of the bowl, even without seeing her small “ic” mark near the bottom. But then Mrs. Webber said to the class, “Close your eyes.” And she gave them two minutes to study the orange with only their sense of touch. “Pay close attention,” she told them because in a few minutes they’d be trying to pick their orange from all the oranges using only touch to identify their fruit from the others.

Once the two minutes were up, everyone placed their oranges on the corner of their desk, and Mrs. Webber came up and down the aisles collecting them. Isa watched her orange disappear into Mrs. Webber’s bag, and she wondered if she’d ever be able to find hers among all thirty of the oranges.

The rough spot helped. That little pinhead of a rough spot, low on the side of the orange helped Isa eliminate a good half the oranges that passed under her hands that morning. When she felt any sort of rough spot, she next felt toward the top, looking for that lopsided place at the navel, and finally, after touching at least a dozen oranges, Isa was certain that she had her orange in her hands. She cradled it, much as she now cradled the sun blade hilt, and waited for Mrs. Webber to tell them to open their eyes. While she waited, Isa turned the orange upside down, and the first thing she saw when she opened her eyes was her inked initials.

She closed her eyes and let her fingers travel across the hilt, counting the bands, tracing the sunburst image on the top of hilt. Of course, she would know this hilt anywhere. Even in the dark, she’d be able to grasp it and know it was her own. And as Isa’s hand rested on top of the hilt, she knew that no one would be able to take it from her. The blade was part of her now.