Chapter 44

The desert and the forest both have lessons to teach us. Still, it is interesting how so few of us really want to learn the lessons of both. Do you cling to one or the other? Are you willing to learn the lessons of both the winds of Harani and the waters of the White Isle?

Class Lecture by Linna Applebloom, Chapter Head of the Greenfellows

It was after the noon hour at the Goblin Market Dragon Web Station.

This was a quiet time of the day for the workers there – it would be another hour before the next freight shipment would be in, and two before the next passenger carriage. In the DIC office, the main sounds were the rustling of paper and the scratching of pen on paper, and the beads of the calculating table clicking back and forth.

“What were you thinking of, Waubrin of Meridae, to make such a mess of your invoice paperwork?” Umber Madrona said. “Pages out of order, stamps on the wrong sheet?”

It had taken Umber longer than he expected to finish the paper work before his lunch break. He put the last page, properly tabulated and endorsed and sealed, and gave a sigh of relief.

“I hope Lana can still get away,” he said, grabbing the lunch bag he had managed to put together before work. “So much paperwork from this morning! How does such a little place create so many documents?”

He headed out towards the break room. Lana, standing behind a counter with no customers, was drawing with her fingers on the countertop, making invisible patterns. The woman at the station next to her noticed Umber walking in their general direction, and gave Lana a nudge.

As she looked up, a bright smile touched her face, and her ruff flushed a pretty, happy blue. She waved to her supervisor, who nodded, and she left the counter, grabbing a bundle on her way out. Umber stopped, and watched, his own smile matching Lana’s as she moved.

Lana hurried up towards the young Dragonkin. “Oh Umber! I was worried that you forgot about lunch!”

“Me forget lunch? Never,” Umber said. “It just took me longer than I suspected. “I was afraid you had gone on without me.”

“When I told you I had made something special? No way.” She took him by the elbow and pulled him towards the lunch room. “Come on! I want to see what you think about it.”

A bit dazed by her insistence, he let himself be dragged on, much to the amusement of the people at Lana’s work station. The woman who had seen him first waved at the two of them and had a fit of the giggles.

Inside the room, there were a couple of young Bauchan boys, runners for the people at the message counter, eating their lunch and playing some sort of game.

“Your move, Trabin,” one of them said with a mouth full of whatever he had crammed between two slices of bread. He looked up and gave the couple a glance, then gave his game partner a wicked glance. Neither said anything to either Dragonkin as Umber and Lana walked to the back of their room and took their usual place.

The table was big enough to hold four, but only had chairs for three. He took the seat on the left, the seat he had used even before Lana had started joining him for lunch. He looked at the table as he dropped his lunch bag on it. Surprisingly it had recently been wiped clean. Umber idly wondered if Lana had come in earlier to prepare it. Wiping the table off was usually the first thing he did, but chose not to mention it.

“So what did you bring?” he asked, as Lana put down her lunch bag. It was certainly larger than any lunch she had brought in the past, three times the size of his little parcel.

Giving him a shrug and a tease of a grin, she pushed his lunch to the chairless side, where it bumped up against the wall, like it was some undesirable junk left by earlier eaters. Her eyes twinkled with excitement, but her ruff and manners showed just a little anxiety along with her happiness.

She leaned forward, covering her hand with his. In a soft voice, she said, “Close your eyes.”

“My eyes?” he asked. He didn’t know what surprised him more, her touching his hand or her request, but he knew something was making him tingle inside.

Lena nodded, and pulled her hand back. “Just do this for me. I worked hard on what I brought. I want you to be really surprised.”

He took a deep breath, calming himself, and smiled back, nodding. “I guess I’ll play along, if it makes you happy. I am closing my eyes,” he said. “But my curiosity is overwhelming. What could you have brought for lunch that needs this much flair?”

“Humor me,” she said. “I’ve never done this before. And no peeking.”

Umber couldn’t remember anyone giving him the look she was giving him, at least since he was a child, pleading and playful at the same time. He decided then he liked it, even if it made him feel strange inside. He nodded solemnly and even covered his eyes with his hands to block his vision.

“This reminds me of what my mom did on my holidays from the creche. I was so glad to be home, wanted to see everybody and run around the house and neighborhood, but she always had a special treat waiting, and made me just sit there, eyes closed, until she put it in front of me.”

“Then you already know it can be worth it to wait,” Lana said.

He could hear her opening her bag, and taking something out, slightly banging it on the table. It sounded like she was fiddling with something, and she made a little growl of frustration. “Now how does this work?”

“Do you need some help?” he asked.

“No, no, no. It’s working now. Just a moment or two more. Patience is one of the best virtues, they used to teach me at the creche school I went. Mistress Landar almost beat that into us every day. I think we tried her patience nearly every day as well.” She giggled a little at that.

“Don’t tell me you were a little terror at school,” Umber said. “I would have guessed you were the teacher’s favorite.”

“Some years,” she admitted. “Other years, well...”

After a moment, he heard a dish being put in front of him, and another, and another. The smell from it tickled his nose and made his mouth water.

“Hungry yet?” she asked, her voice filled with a laughter she didn’t quite give way to, like she was teasing him.

“Famished. Can I look yet?”

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“Yes.” Suddenly she sounded anxious. “I hope you like it.”

Umber dropped his hands and opened his eyes. In front of him, he saw food of a type he hadn’t seen since the last time he left Harani. There was a hot stew of meat and grain he grew up eating. Masha, they called it back home, rich with spices. Small bits of meat and vegetables floated on its surface Next to that was a dish of fruit and nuts that was traditional to eat with it, and on the third plate, a small stack of flatbreads. In front of them was a touchstone food heater – the device she had been struggling with. A similar selection of food rested in front of her place.

Lana began to babble. “I hope you like it. I hope I didn’t make it too spicy. I haven’t made it for a while, so if it’s awful -”

“It looks wonderful,” Umber said, interrupting her. “I haven’t gotten to eat Masha in so long. It’s one of those things I’ve really missed. I’m not much of a cook and haven’t dared make it myself. Sit down and eat yours, too.”

He grabbed one of the breads and tore it in half, and dipped it into the stew and popped some of it into his mouth. Memories of eating just this dish flooded him, sometimes at home, sometimes in restaurants, even at school. “So good. It’s almost the way my mother makes it. How did you know?”

“Well, you did mention growing up in Harani. I know everybody eats it there. They also eat it in Sunderland and Meridae, although they don’t usually make it as spicy in Meridae. My mother loved it, and made it often. I just figured you’d like some.”

He picked up his spoon. “And you were right. You don’t know how much I’ve missed everything from home.”

“Oh, you might be surprised,” she said. “Goblin Market is just so…”

“Different? Green? Not home?”

She looked thoughtfully into her bowl as she stirred her stew with her spoon. “I think different is the right word. This is the first place I’ve lived where there were so few Dragonkin. And there are so many Aos Si! It took me some time to get used to it. It’s not that they’re bad people. It’s just…”

“Not Dragonkin. They see the world differently. Or anyway, that’s how it feels to me.” Umber took another bite of his stew, and let the spicy heat of it soothe him.

“That. And I miss the dry country. Rock and bare ground that isn’t damp.”

Umber nodded. “I’ve never lived before where there were so many trees.”

“It drove me crazy my first year here. That’s when I started exploring on my days off. I’d just take to the air and fly and fly. And that’s when I found it. My sanctuary.”

“Sanctuary?” Umber asked, tearing one of the flatbreads in half.

“A place where the rocks rise above the forest. It’s not exactly like home, but it’s not like the land here. I’ve never shared it with anybody before, but this is what I want to show you on your day off.”

“You’ve never?”

She shook her head. “I was saving it for the right person. I think the right person is you.”

Umber looked at her eyes with amazement. “I...I hope so.”

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In the Gray Lands, in the secret retreat of Almyra, fifth ray of the sacred star of the Mother of Smoke and Fire, the afternoon was just beginning to wane, although there would be many hours of light left. Violetta looked around the room she had used for the last weeks, at once her sickbed where she fought for life under a deep magical sleep, and where she had slowly recovered, regaining both the strength in her leg and her magic, and learned more secrets of a people she knew nothing about before this journey.

On the bed lay a pack that contained the one reason why her journey was important and a desert robe of the type that Jinn women were known to wear. The pack was warded with strange Jinn wards that she really didn’t understand, based on their own magic given to them by the Mother, not the methods of the Aos Si or the Dragonkin.

She put the robe on over her clothes, the clothing type she was wearing when she arrived here – riding boots, trousers, a vest over a long-sleeved shirt. Grabbing the pack, she slung it over her shoulder and looked around the room one more time, seeing if she had left something. Seeing nothing, Violetta stepped out into the garden.

She stood there for a moment, blinking against the sunlight. “What a small world I’ve been living in since I was bit. Am I really ready to go out into the outer, much bigger world? Back to the root of my childhood, as the Mother said?” The thought both excited her, and made her nervous, remembering what she had been told. “A safer harbor to take this burden – what could that be?”

She began walking. This time, instead of looking pale and frail, needing a walking stick, or walking unassisted with a limp, she strode purposefully across the garden paths. Ever since her visit with the Mother of Smoke and Fire, her vitality had been restored to what it was the day she first met Xhindi, or even earlier, and she felt her magic energies even stronger than before. Her particular gift was to sense magic fields, and as she walked, she could feel the presence of the Called even before she rounded the path to where the woman who had overseen her healing was sitting. Today, she seemed a small figure sitting on the bench under the trees, the leaves casting dappled light over her white veil and robes, but Violetta could feel what a empowered giant of a magic user she was as she neared.

The Called was not alone this time. Standing nearby was her brother Xhindi, watching Violetta move with a pleased grin. At peace with his new orders from the Mother of Smoke and Fire, he too was dressed for travel, cloaked and hooded, and held the leads to two gyphons, already loaded with their personal travel goods. One of the gryphons, her bird’s beak bright orange and head a mottled yellow and gray, tossed that head, calling out a greeting, a high pitched call, more like a the sound of a large hawk than the roar you would expect from some animal as big as a riding gryphon.

“Oh, Brishi, I’m glad to see you, too,” Violetta said, hurrying up to bury her face in its feathered neck. She gave the animal soft, smooth strokes as they reunited. Oddly, the gryphon made something in its throat, a rumble that in a house cat would have been called a purr. With a final stroke, Violetta turned to look at Xhindi, who seemed quite pleased at how the gryphon had reacted. “I’m surprised she remembered me.”

“Ah, Syenah gryphons never forget their riders,” Xhindi replied. “You can tell at their reunions what they think of those who rode them before.” He moved closer himself, to give Brishi a pat of his own, then when his own mount protested a little, turned back to sooth the big beast. While he soothed the animal, he continued. “Sometimes the reunion is not so peaceable. I saw one man who was hard on his mount almost get torn to pieces when they were reunited after a week apart. It was only through the care of his friends that he wasn’t killed.”

Violetta’s eyes widened, rather shocked. “His mount turned on him? Why?”

“I never did learn all the details, but I heard someone talking about him beating the animal to go beyond its limits. Whatever it was, the gryphon wanted absolutely nothing to do with that rider again. And he never had to. After the two were separated, the gryphon was taken to pasture, to relearn that not all riders were evil. And that man – I don’t know if he ever rode again. He was pretty badly injured. I bet he will walk with a limp the rest of his days.”

“But why? Why did he treat the animal that way?”

Xhindi shrugged. “No telling. Some people forget that animals aren’t machines. But you...Brishi seems very happy to be reunited. You two have formed a real bond. Gryphons don’t purr for just anyone.” He gave her a big smile. “That says something, too.”

She nuzzled the animal one more time. “Soon, friend. We’ll be riding again.”

The gryphon crooned softly.

Violetta walked toward the bench where the Called was sitting. The Called stood up, and smiled.

“I owe you so much,” Violetta said. “I would be dead if not for you. What can I say to someone who saved my life?”

“I helped, but it wasn’t just me,” the woman said, inclining her head towards Violetta. “My brother had the wisdom to bring you here, even though it was against some of our strongest traditions. But it was the Mother who saw to it that you became whole again. It is good to see you strong and well, ready to return to your fate, Violetta, blessed of the Lady of Smoke and Fire. I can only see so far ahead, but she tells me what you are charged to do will be of the most importance, and she has given you her blessing to aid you.” She took off a crystal which she wore around her neck. “Take this, friend. It is a sending stone. If there is anything we can do, or aid you and your endeavor with, use this to call me. Xhindi will be the Mother’s eyes, but he has lived most of his life in the desert – I suspect you will see things that are outside of his knowledge. And be alert. There are people who don’t know that they are tracking you yet, but they seek what you are carrying.” She handed Violetta a small bag. “This might help confuse them a little longer.”

“Illusion dust, Sister?” Xhindi asked.

“Smoke, fire and dust – the gifts of the Mother to all of her children,” the Called said, turning to Xhindi. “As for you, brother. You know your task. You are her guardian until her task is finished. The Mother chose you.” She closed her eyes a moment. “Your path will take you far from the places you know, but don’t forget us here in the Gray Lands. The Mother is counting on you.”

“I understand, sister. As always, I bow to her wishes.” He gave his sister a hug. “We must ride now, or else we won’t make the first campsite before dark.”

She nodded, and made a sign of blessing over the two. “May your way be blessed.”

She turned and headed back to the building.

“Shall we ride?” Xhindi asked.

Violetta nodded, and mounting, she took a deep breath. “Let’s go!”

And the two headed out of the sacred precinct, where Ashira and the rest of Xhindi’s team awaited them.