Floodpath Page 16

  I think quietly of her campmates, the ones she’s lost—Pickle, in the wagon chase. Rose buried back in Three Lines. My thoughts travel east, toward Callais. The rest of her campmates must be almost there by now, if everything has gone all right. Rou and Eloise are probably only a few days behind them—if the worst hasn’t happened to them, either.

  “I’d argue that you didn’t know, either,” I say, and if my voice was louder than I meant it to be before, it comes out too quietly now.

  “I knew enough, and I made bad choices anyway.” She stares at the now-empty splitting block, the ax drooping in her hands. “Over and over again. I did my best to get the easy ones back home—Bitty and Arana and all the rest. But I didn’t even make an effort with the rest. Lila, and Rose, and Little Whit . . . Saiph. Pickle. They needed things I couldn’t give them, but I kept choosing Three Lines. I kept telling myself they were better off with me than out in the world.”

  “It wasn’t your fault,” I insist. “The world hasn’t made itself an easy thing for you to trust. You can’t blame yourself.”

  She shakes herself. “Well, I’m gonna, and I’d like to see you try and stop me.”

  I draw myself up, matching her brassy tone. “Challenge accepted.”

  She tilts the ax in her hands, just an inch. The head dips into a patch of the slanting morning sunlight and beams a flash of it into my eyes. Unprepared, I jerk my head and swear. She grins. In retaliation, I toss the last two bites of my sticky bun at her, which she deflects easily with the ax handle. Rat lunges for the fallen pastry and inhales it.

  Lark laughs then—not a snort, an honest-to-goodness laugh. I quit rubbing my eyes to watch, stopping just short of actually gawking. Her laugh sounds like Eloise’s—if you maybe dropped it an octave and roughed it around the edges. It’s warm and bright, like the flashes of sunlight she throws around.

  “Wasting food.” She shakes her head, still grinning—this is a record. “I keep telling you. You’re a terrible outlaw.”

  I return her grin, my brain tripping over itself to think of something funny to say back, something to make her laugh again. But I’m too slow—over my shoulder, I hear the cabin door open.

  “Veran! Are you ready?”

  Suddenly I don’t want to go into town. What worthwhile thing will there be in town, anyway? At the moment, it seems much more pressing to stay right here at Soe’s splitting block and make Lark laugh again.

  Her grin has melted away, though hints of it remain in the rounds of her cheeks. She jerks her chin over my shoulder. “You’d better go on—they could probably use help hitching the cart.”

  Reluctantly, I turn. Fat lot of help I’ll be—I’ve never hitched a cart myself.

  “Veran—hang on.”

  I look back.

  Lark sets the ax head on the block and wipes her forehead. She opens her mouth, and then hesitates. First a laugh, now a hesitation. I raise my eyebrow. She sees the expression and shakes herself.

  “Look, what I’m trying to say . . . because, see, I’m trying to be less mean.”

  “Less mean?” I ask, bewildered.

  “Yeah, you know, just . . .” She gestures vaguely to herself, her skin dewed with sweat and mist over her muscles. “What I meant to say a second ago was, thanks. For getting them out. My camp. I keep thinking about what would have happened if they’d all been there when the soldiers came.”

  “I should have asked you first,” I say.

  “I’d have said no, on principle,” she says. “That was well before I trusted you.”

  “Which suggests that you trust me now,” I say, hoping for a laugh again.

  I don’t get one. She nods. “Well, yeah.”

  The answer hovers between us for a moment. That warmth I was feeling in my stomach blooms into fireworks, snapping and crackling around my rib cage.

  “Veran!” Iano calls again.

  “I’ve never hitched a cart,” I blurt out to her. I point toward Soe’s tiny paddock. “I’ve only ever seen it done.”

  She rolls her eyes and gives one of her usual snorts. She sets down her ax, picks up her shirt, and starts to move past me. When she’s in range, she reaches out, grabs a handful of my hair, and gives my head a little shake.

  “Knucklehead,” she says. She lets go and bumps my arm. “Come on.”

  I follow her. Her shoulder blades bunch together as she works her arms through her sleeves. Before she flips the shirt over her shoulders, I see a tattoo I’ve missed before—a bird on her right shoulder, vaguely larkish with its dark collar and long open beak. I want to ask her who gave it to her, and when. Who gave her the others? When did she decide she needed them inked into her skin? And—are there more I haven’t seen?

  I want to see them.

  I want to know them all.

  Lark

  I head back up the steps of Soe’s cabin with an armful of split wood. The last creakings of the mule harnesses are being swallowed by the giant trees and dense ferns, along with the sight of Veran bobbing in the back, his face turned toward the cabin. Iano looked back several times, too, probably hoping to make his final words to me stick.

  “I appreciate you staying here with Tamsin, Princess,” he’d said. I’d ground my teeth against the honorific but didn’t say anything. “Try to keep her from doing too much. Soe left her with the paper and stamps to make labels, but she doesn’t have to do them if she doesn’t want to. If it seems like she’s tiring, try to get her to rest.”

  I’m not her nanny, I wanted to say. She’s a grown woman—she can make her own decisions. But I just waved him away, perhaps a little more curtly than I should have, and headed back to the woodpile while Veran hurriedly called good-bye.

  Now they’re gone, and they’ll be gone all day. I push open the cabin door with my hip and bring the load of wood inside. Tamsin is sitting at the kitchen table, turning one of the stamps in her fingers. A piece of rag paper sits in front of her, blank.

  She offers me a smile when I come in.

  “Hi,” I return, unloading my wood into the rack.

  She leans forward and taps the table next to a plate of leftover walnut buns. A pitcher of that piney urch tea sits beside it. I can’t get used to this—the idea of just eating whenever one feels like it. This morning, Soe apologized to me for not having butter for the buns. I’d just stared at her blankly. What ordinary person eats butter? In Three Lines, we were lucky to have grease left in the pan to mix into our cornmeal.

  “Thanks.” I brush off my hands and take a seat. I pour myself a cup of tea. Tamsin offers honey, but I wave it away. We sit for a moment in silence. I curl my fingers around the hot mug.

  Tamsin sets her chin gingerly in her hand and regards the sheets of blank paper. She nudges one of the stamps, with tul burned on the back. There’s a set of other words—walnut and oil and huckleberry—plus a tray of individual letters that can each fit into the slot of a wooden handle to form new words.

  Tamsin glumly inks the tul stamp, rocking it into a leather pad coated with sticky ink, and presses it to the paper. It leaves a perfect imprint behind.

  She sets the stamp down. Clearly, stamping labels is not what she’d like to be doing at the moment. Despite my irritated thoughts about Iano, I ask her if she’s tired.

  She shakes her head, her brow furrowing.

  I cast around, trying to think how normal people who do normal things like sip tea whenever they feel like it might act toward a friend.

  “You play the dulcimer. Yes?” I ask.

  She nods, her chin still in her hand.

  “You want to play now?” Soe had pulled the instrument out of the cedar chest this morning, perhaps to entice Tamsin to play.

  But she shakes her head, scrunching her mouth.

  “You want to go for a drop?” I ask.

  She frowns at me, looking puzzled. I run back through the words I just said.

  “Drop,” I try again.

  She shakes her head and tilts her thumb upward.
<
br />   “Drop? Dro—walk.”

  She smiles, and then nods, pushing back from the table. I hadn’t expected her to agree, but I can’t back out now. I get up, too. She limps around the table, clutching the backs of the chairs for support. I offer her my arm to cling to, and we head out the door. Rat jumps up excitedly.

  I plan to keep our route short, just accompanying her around the yard, but when we reach the back of Soe’s house, Tamsin points down a narrow, ferny path. From this morning, I know it leads to Soe’s latrine, so I expect she must need to use it. But when we reach the little shed, Tamsin determinedly tugs my arm, her gaze on the straggly trail beyond it. Wordlessly, I follow, my anxiety building with each step. I hadn’t thought we’d go out of sight of the house. I don’t have anything with me—not the crossbow, not a canteen, not even my bandanna. Tamsin doesn’t have her slate and chalk. But she seems to have a destination in mind, placing her steps purposefully, if not quickly, on the needle-covered ground.

  The trees loom over us. The brilliant green bracken crowds the path. Birds call and swoop through the understory. I’ve never gone for so long seeing so little sky.

  After another five minutes, there’s a noticeable change in the forest. The trees, which were already big, swell. Their bark becomes rippled and cracked, some scarred black from past fires. The bracken becomes less thick, unable to find sun in the impenetrable shade. One blow-down lies half-buried in the earth, its exposed girth still twice my height.

  The meandering path narrows and disappears just as we enter what must be the heart of the grove, where an incomprehensibly massive redwood stands. It’s easily thirty feet around, perhaps more, and its crown disappears into a wreath of mist hundreds of feet above our heads. I tilt my head backward, flabbergasted.

  “Cow,” Tamsin says, gazing upward, and she grimaces. “Cowy.”

  “What?”

  She rubs her face in frustration, and then gestures to the tree. “Cowy . . . Heg. Hee . . . eh . . . oh . . . you . . .”

  She gives a little shake of disgust at her inability to even pronounce the letters, and takes my hand. She turns over my palm and traces the letters there instead. I concentrate as hard as I can, first on interpreting the letters she’s drawing, then on ordering them in my head, and then on turning them into words.

  “Cloudyhead?” I say.

  She sighs in relief and nods. She gestures to the tree again.

  “That is its name?”

  She nods and limps toward the tree. She places her hand on the bark and, one careful step at a time, begins to make her way around its base. I follow her—the bark and roots are buckled and uneven, providing no easy path. But Tamsin persists, slowly circling the tree. I trail my fingers on the rough bark, trying to convince my brain that this thing is growing, alive.

  Veran, I think. Veran needs to see this.

  I remember his astonished rush to show his gratitude in the first few groves we passed through, turning his palms over and offering them out to the trunks, as if giving them a gift. The corner of my lips flicker. I still can’t get over the lack of sky, but I’m starting to understand a little better now. It doesn’t seem so weird to simply be grateful for such a thing, centuries upon centuries old, burned and broken, but still standing upright.

  It takes a few minutes to loop around the tree. When we reach our starting point, we simply stand and stare. Tamsin’s hands flutter. I glance at her. She twists her lips.

  “I,” she begins. She takes a few steps back from the base of the tree. She points to a crook in its roots, carpeted with years of fallen needles.

  “I wro’,” she says again. She mimes writing in an invisible journal. “A . . . de . . .”

  She gestures again, this time to her lips, letting her fingers burst from them. Frustration creases her face. She can’t pronounce the s.

  “Song?” I say.

  She nods, and points back to the roots. “Here. The one I play’ . . . be . . .” She mimics the strumming of a dulcimer, and then waves hopelessly at herself.

  “The one you sang to become ashoki?” I ask.

  “Uah.”

  I look at the little crook in the roots, and then back up at the soaring trunk. “It is a nice tree.” It’s a stupid thing to say, especially to a poet in the shadow of the biggest living thing I’ve ever seen, but other words, particularly in Moquoian, fail me.

  She sighs. “Uah.” She gives the bark another pat, and then turns away. She takes a few steps back up the trail on her own. I hurry to give her my elbow again, and she takes it.

  We’ve gone a few paces when I decide to voice the thought nudging my mind.

  “You know,” I say. “My friend Arana—she was a slave also, but now she is in Callais—she cannot hear in her ears.” I gesture to the sides of my head. “When she is a little girl, she is working in the sand blaster, and the big noise makes her ears go quiet.” I hope I’m explaining this well enough, or at least not being offensive. “She talks with her hands.”

  Tamsin eyes me sideways.

  “We have to learn how to see it,” I acknowledge. “Rose and me. We have to learn what she is saying. It takes a little time. But it is not so hard, after some practice. It is just normal.”

  Just Arana. That was when we had Bitty, too, and a slew of little ones—Meissa, Lefty, Clariet, Voss and all his little sisters. It became our typical routine to get all the young kids to sleep and then sit up around the campfire, signing in Arana’s language so we didn’t wake them. Those were some of the best times—everybody was healthy and reasonably well-fed, thanks to my forays into Snaketown. And we had a destination for the little ones. Voss and his sisters had family in Teso’s Ford, and Clariet in Port Juaro. Meissa and Lefty had been stolen from Bitter Springs. Of them all, only Little Whit had nowhere to go, and so with me she stayed. My stomach twists as I remember her slow slide into silence. Now that I think about it, she used to sign with Arana, too, to avoid talking through her cleft lip. I wonder if some of her illness didn’t come about because Arana and Bitty left to rejoin their families in Callais once we’d brought the others back home.

  I should have made more of an effort to sign with Whit. I hope she’s getting the care she needs in Callais, along with the others. Maybe she’ll find Arana again, and they can sign together.

  “That word, song,” I say, bringing my thoughts back to Tamsin. I wave my hand back and forth in the motion that always looked like water to me, but that Rose insisted looked like someone conducting music, a phenomenon I’ve never seen. “This is the sign Arana is using for song. And for write . . .”

  “Uah,” Tamsin suddenly says firmly, cutting me off. She looks pointedly away from me.

  I fall silent. My hand stills in the air, and then I drop it.

  I’ve made her mad. My face heats, and I curse myself for prattling about something she doesn’t want to hear. We walk, our footsteps muffled on the needles. The trees shrink from monstrous to simply massive as we leave the grove of giants behind.

  As we near the latrine, Tamsin halts. I stop with her. Her breath hitches, and she covers her face with her hands. Through her fingers come a few muffled sobs.

  I blanch—I’ve never known what to do with someone crying. I could handle the little ones in camp all right, but facing someone my own age or older leaves me perplexed. But Tamsin doesn’t give me the chance to wonder what to do—she simply turns into my shoulder, her palms over her face, her shoulders shaking. I give her a few awkward pats.

  It passes. Her crying slows. She leans back, red-faced, and waves a hand.

  “You are okay?” I ask.

  She nods and wipes her eyes with the corner of her sleeve. Gathering her skirt, she crouches down and brushes the ground to clear the redwood needles, then traces her finger through the dirt. She writes some letters and looks up at me.

  I get the feeling she’s trying to tell me something important, but I can’t make sense of the lines in the dirt.

  “Sorry, I cannot understand?”<
br />
  She nods at me, gestures inexplicably. We both pause. I give her a look of trepidation. She clears the ground again and tries to write more clearly. But I’m terrible enough at reading Eastern, let alone Moquoian—even last night, reading the letters on her slate made my head ache. It takes several more tries of writing, rewriting, and gesturing for me to understand what she’s asking me.

  WHAT IS THE SIGN FOR SORRY?

  “Oh.” I rack my brain, trying to remember those times around the campfire. We didn’t apologize to each other a lot. I pore back over the language Arana used, dredging up half-forgotten signs. Finally I recall the time she dropped a full bucket of water onto the campfire, engulfing us in clouds of smoke and steam. When our coughing finally let up, it turned into laughter.

  Sorry, she’d signed, her laugh overly loud and lovely. Sorry.

  I form a fist and rub my chest in a circle.

  “Sorry,” I say.

  She repeats the gesture, once to mimic the motion, and a second time while looking me in the eyes.

  “It’s okay,” I say.

  Her hand drops from her chest, unfurling in a manner I recognize. It’s not exactly the same as Arana’s gesture for thanks, but it’s a perfect copy of Veran’s.

  “You’re welcome,” I say.

  She nods and clears away the last traces of tears from her cheeks. She points up toward the cabin, just peeking through the boughs. Without waiting for me to offer my arm, she starts back up the path.

  Tamsin

  The walk to and from Cloudyhead has left me shaky and exhausted, but the inspiration that came from Lark’s attempts buoys me up the steps. Once inside, I wolf down a walnut bun and half a cup of urch tea, and then I drop back down with the stamps and papers. Lark follows after telling Rat to stay on the porch. She takes a walnut bun with the same kind of sneak-thievery as last night and sits down opposite me.

  Soe’s blank stamp block is small, but big enough for me to cram on the letters I want. I fix them the way I want them, then rock them over the sticky ink pad. Lark watches as I press the block to the paper.