Floodpath Read online

Soe obediently skirts the pair of them and heads out the door for the water barrel. Iano bends over and scoots a pot sitting on the hearth just a few inches from Veran’s feet, the fringe on his boots swinging. I stand at the table, watching all three of them—Veran, Lark, and her dog.

  “Hey,” I say, and when Lark looks up, I point to Rat. How did he know?

  “Know what?”

  I gesture to Veran, whose seizing is starting to slow. Lark looks at me, puzzled, and then at Rat. “I have made him lie down behind Veran before—maybe he thinks he is supposed to now?”

  I shake my head and reach for my slate. BUT HOW DID RAT KNOW HE WOULD COLLAPSE?

  Lark studies my words, frowning. “What?”

  HE BARKED AT YOU. HE POKED AT VERAN

  Lark stares at the slate again, and then turns back to Rat.

  “I don’t think the dog knew,” Iano says. “How could he? Veran wasn’t doing anything except resting.”

  I throw my hands up. I don’t know. But the dog was upset—about what?

  Veran’s final tremors slow, and his body loosens. He retches deeply a few times but doesn’t come around. Lark checks him over, from his lap up to his neck and head. She arranges one of his wrists into a less awkward angle.

  I rap on the table and sign with conviction. The dog knew something was wrong.

  “It must have been something else,” Iano says, just as Soe comes back in with a full water pitcher. “Soe, is there anything outside? A creature? Are the horses acting up?”

  “What?” Soe says breathlessly. “No—why? It’s raining now. Has he stopped?”

  Lark looks back to me, consternated. I go for my slate again.

  HAS RAT BEEN UPSET THE LAST FEW TIMES VERAN’S COLLAPSED?

  Lark’s eyes go distant as she searches her memory. Her gaze drifts down to Veran, lying partway in her lap, breathing shallowly through pale lips. After a pause, her head jerks up sharply.

  I raise my eyebrows at her.

  “The first time,” she says slowly, “Rat was whining. He was under me, pressing under my legs. I did not think of it until now.”

  Any other times? I ask.

  “Outside Tellman’s Ditch . . .” She scrunches her eyebrows. “He stayed far away from us, in the sun, outside the shade. And he whined again. I was thinking he is only tired.”

  We all stare at each other around the kitchen.

  “But there was nothing to see,” Iano insists. “Nothing to indicate . . .”

  My hands jump up. To you. Dogs smell things, hear things we don’t.

  “But I’ve never heard of a dog . . .” Iano’s words die on his lips as he stares at me. I can feel my face contorted at him, and I hope he’s realizing that his own limited experience isn’t the truth of the world over. I thought I’d shown him that when I first walked onstage as his parents’ ashoki.

  Lark shifts, adjusting Veran’s head. “I am going to bring him into the workroom. He is going to be confused when he wakes up.” She nods at Soe. “You can get his feet, and bring the water?”

  Soe nods and crouches down, linking her arms under Veran’s knees. Lark lifts his torso, steadies his head, and together they move him toward the workroom. Rat, in the absence of Veran or his oncoming seizure, rolls onto his side and sprawls leisurely on the hearth, at ease.

  The door to the workroom closes, and for a moment the only sound is muffled murmuring and the shifting of presses. We’re still standing on either end of the table. Iano looks at his chair, then at the fire, and then back at me.

  “Tamsin,” he says slowly. “I get the feeling that you’re angry with me, but I don’t know what for. Ever since Pasul, it seems like . . . like I just keep doing and saying the wrong things.”

  I drag my slate toward me. I don’t want to have this conversation like this, but thanks to everything, I don’t have a choice.

  WHY ARE YOU TURNING DOWN ALL MY IDEAS? I write.

  “I’m not,” he insists.

  YES YOU ARE

  “I just haven’t ever heard of a dog . . .”

  I smack the table. NOT THE DOG. THE PRESS. KIMELA. OUR PLAN

  “I just want you to be careful,” he says. “You’re still healing. We don’t have many answers. I don’t want you to get hurt again. I just think it’s better to stay small.”

  My next words are huge and uneven. THERE IS NO SMALL

  “Yes, Tamsin, there is,” he says. “I know you’ve always thought big, aimed big, but look at what’s come of that.”

  I stare at him, gripping the chalk in my fingers, repeating his phrase in my head. Look at what’s come of that? Of what?

  I’m struck by a sudden, staggering realization.

  Iano never believed in what we were doing.

  Slowly, I scratch the chalk over my powdery slate again.

  WHY DID YOU AGREE TO END SLAVERY? I write.

  He stares at my slate. Whatever he expected me to write, it wasn’t that. He looks back up at me.

  “You helped me see it was wrong,” he says.

  WHY THOUGH?

  “What does this have to do with the dog?” he asks almost pleadingly, gesturing to Rat lounging by the fire.

  I point at the question on my slate.

  “Do you want reasons?” he asks. His fingers twitch almost imperceptibly toward the pamphlet with my essay, still folded on the table. “Do you want me to recite your words back to you?”

  I shake my head. That’s exactly what I don’t want. Was it just because you loved me?

  Confusion flares on his face as he tries and fails to interpret my signing. “What?”

  The words burst from my mouth, perfect in my head and nearly unintelligible on my tongue. “Was it just because you loved me?”

  He jumps at the startling sound of my voice. “Just because I loved you?”

  WERE YOU SO DESPERATE TO IMPRESS ME THAT YOU JUST AGREED TO WHATEVER I SAID? I palm the slate, smearing the chalk. IF I HAD SUGGESTED WARRING WITH THE EAST, WOULD YOU HAVE GONE ALONG WITH THAT TOO?

  He has to squint to read this last tirade—by the end my words are a tiny scrawl.

  “Tamsin . . . ,” he says.

  Think, I demand, jabbing at my head. Think before you speak.

  He bristles, angry. “Tamsin, none of it was a walk in the park. None of it was without consequence. If I’d just been out to impress you, do you think I’d have stood by our policy once the blackmail started?”

  DID YOU STAND BY IT? I scrawl. WHEN I DISAPPEARED, YOU LET ALL DIPLOMACY FALL. YOU DIDN’T GET A THING DONE WITH THE EASTERN DELEGATION

  He lifts his hands. “Because I was trying to keep you from being murdered!”

  AT THE EXPENSE OF THIS! I slap my pamphlet, which flutters feebly.

  “Yes!” he shouts. “Yes, I admit it. At the time, I cared more about getting you back alive than our policy. Would you rather me have left you to die?”

  I WOULD RATHER YOU HAD SOME BELIEF IN SOMETHING OTHER THAN ME

  I toss the slate down with the words facing him, and he stares at them as if they’re incomprehensible. I take a long breath, clenching and unclenching my hands at my side, and then I lift my fingers.

  I’m not your ashoki anymore, I say, using the sign Lark and I made up for my old title. Kimela is. You can’t make your decisions based on me. You have to make them because you actually believe in them.

  “I do believe in them,” he says. “I just want them done carefully.”

  I push back from the table, the chair screeching on the floor. I stand for a moment, glaring at him, a flood of words piling up behind my lips. In the workroom, things are quiet—I’m not sure if Soe and Lark are still tending to Veran, or if they’re waiting for us to finish.

  I turn on my heel and pick up my cloak from the back of the chair.

  “Tamsin,” Iano says heavily. “We talked about Kimela. I can argue to reinstate you.”

  I swing the cloak around my shoulders angrily, wondering what exactly his vision of my future as ashoki looks like—just
me onstage, silently strumming a dulcimer? I wrench the door open to the falling rain. I want to say something cutting, something poignant over my shoulder, but I can’t, so I merely pass through and slam the door behind me.

  I head down the cabin steps, keeping one hand on the porch rail until I round the corner and have to manage on my own. Slowly, I head toward the path Lark and I walked a few days past, the damp redwood duff swallowing the sound of the rain. The drizzle mists down, diffused by the distant canopy, beading on the fibers of my cloak. I plod through the vibrant shocks of ferns and splashes of moss, breathing in the darkness of the forest.

  After I pass the outhouse, my steps slow, my breath catching in my chest. I have more strength than I did a week ago, but I still feel unsteady, like a bad footing would send me flying. I place my feet more carefully, my head bowed against the damp. As the trees swell and close in, the patter of rain stops, no longer able to reach the ground. I sink into the feeling of being swallowed by the forest.

  Mist gathers in the crevices and hollows of the roots. A gray fox darts across the path, casting one glance at me with its sharp black eyes before plunging into the bracken. Ahead, Cloudyhead looms among the other trees, its rippled bark stained deep red.

  I settle into the wings of its roots, the same place I wrote the audition song that won me the position of ashoki. I was no one then—no title, no job, no prospects. Bold enough to dream big, and naive enough to think my life could only get better.

  I stare into dark space, my thoughts a jumble, my knees drawn up to my chest. After a few minutes, a figure melts through the gloom, and I turn over what I’m going to do if it’s Iano. I’m surprised by how much I don’t want to see him right now. He doesn’t know about Cloudyhead—not because it’s a secret, but because it never occurred to me to tell him.

  But it’s not Iano. It’s Soe. She shuffles forward with a thick woolen blanket clamped under her arms.

  She doesn’t say anything. Not I knew I’d find you here or You’ll catch your death or You shouldn’t wander off. She silently settles down beside me, unfolds the blanket, and tucks it around our knees. Then we just sit.

  We sit long enough that the forest forgets we’re here. An owl swoops by on pale wings. A pine marten lollops across the duff. Songbirds—ones with names Veran could recite but that I don’t know—call through the growing evening.

  The mature part of me should find a silver lining in having a better appreciation for silence, something I was never adept at before.

  But I don’t want silence.

  I want to talk to my friend.

  I pull my fingers out from beneath the blanket. If I knew more signs, if I thought she could follow them, I would dive into an explanation on how Iano and I fell in love in secret, how it thrived on the stolen moments, the thrill of discovery.

  How I’m not sure that was as strong as I thought it was.

  Soe’s watching my fingers where they’re frozen in the air. I twitch.

  I don’t understand what I feel for him anymore, I finally say.

  She leans against me, her shoulder warm.

  “Feelings change,” she says.

  Veran

  When I crack open my eyes, it’s night. The world makes a bubble around me, distorted even in the darkness. Shapes blur and bend at their edges. One detaches from the others, leaning forward.

  “Ma,” I croak. It only makes sense—unless she’s out in the wood, she’s always the first to me.

  “Veran?”

  The voice isn’t Mama’s, and once I place it, and the dim outline of the face beside me, I can’t think why I’m in Lumen Lake. When did I get to Lumen Lake?

  I crane my head. “Lady Queen?”

  The person stiffens, and the more I blink, the more things fall into place.

  “Oh,” I say. “Eloise. Sorry.” We must be at school, then. Blazes, I hope I didn’t collapse in class.

  There’s a sharp inhale, and Eloise’s face disappears. There’s murmuring outside my line of sight. That’s okay—my body is outrageously heavy. The muscles in my shoulders burn.

  I can hear rain outside. Rain in Alcoro! That’s a welcome change. My eyes flutter closed again, bringing no change in the darkness.

  I think I sleep?

  The next time I lift my head, the sounds of deep breathing combs through the rain. Eloise sits on the floor a pace away, her knees drawn up to her chest. I squint. What did she do to her hair?

  She turns her head. “Feeling okay?”

  “Yeah,” I say automatically, a complete and utter lie, but I don’t like to worry Eloise. “You?”

  She snorts, a sound I can’t recall her making before.

  “You knew all that time,” she says. “From that first time you collapsed on the way to Utzibor. You recognized me then. Those were some of the first words out of your mouth—Lady Queen. I must really look like her when you’re hallucinating, huh?”

  “What?” I ask.

  She’s silent.

  Rain patters. Something warm and oddly furry presses against my hip. I nudge my fingers through a coarse coat.

  I want to rub my face, maybe sit up—I feel like there’s some urgency just out of reach, something I can’t quite pin down. But sleep is clawing at me again, hooking its smoky fingers into my skin.

  “I liked your curls,” I say drowsily, intending to go on that I also like whatever she’s done to them now.

  “I don’t give a damn what you like,” she says, as I’m drawn reluctantly back into sleep, trying to remember when I’ve ever heard Eloise curse.

  “Veran. Veran—can you wake up? It’s time.”

  Who the balls is speaking Moquoian to me? With a huge effort, I slit open my eyes. Bending over me is Iano, looking pale and haggard.

  “We tried to let you sleep as long as you needed, but we have to get to the road now—everything’s all packed up.”

  I groan and drag my hand over my face. A familiar ache squeezes all my muscles, along with an unfamiliar race of pain down my back from working the crosscut saw.

  “I seized?” I ask, pressing my palm over my eyes.

  “Last night. You didn’t hit anything. How are you feeling now?”

  “Murder.” I roll onto my side, pressing my forehead to the quilt. “Is there water? Or something hot?”

  “I’ve got both. You might have to drink them fast.”

  I push myself up on hollow arms. I roll my neck a few times.

  Iano holds out a mug of urch tea. I sip it, letting it scald my throat.

  “Lark rode out before dawn to check the road. The tree is still up. Do you think you’ll be able to finish felling it yourself, or do we need to change our plan?”

  “No, we can’t change it now. All the rest of you need to be down by the road.” I don’t add that I can’t stomach the idea of any of them being the one up top, coordinating the activity below. I’ve played it all out in my head so many times it feels like I’ve done it already. I’m not going to hand it off to someone else.

  I rub my face again. “Let me eat something, and then walk around a bit—I’ll be okay.”

  “All right, if you’re sure. The others are almost ready, though.” He hesitates and then says, “Have a care—I think Lark might be mad at you. I know Tamsin’s mad at me.”

  “Why?” I ask, at the same moment I recall the curt things I said to Lark across the saw as we prepared to fell the redwood. We’d worked for hours in determined silence, relying on the demands of the work to absorb any need to talk. Her silence persisted throughout the ride back to Soe’s.

  “I don’t know about Lark.” Iano looks away. “Tamsin . . . she’s saying I don’t trust her decisions anymore.”

  “You need to let her make her own choices,” I say, feeling wise and worldly. “Let her be the person she believes she can be, not the one you want her to be.”

  He eyes me sideways, almost shrewdly. He looks like he’s about to say something when there’s a rap on the doorframe. Soe sticks her
head in the room.

  “Feeling okay?” she asks.

  “I’ll get there,” I say. I down the rest of the tea and push myself to my feet. “Sorry about last night—I didn’t break anything, did I?”

  “No. It’s fine. We’re all glad you’re okay. There are huckleberry cakes here on the table.”

  I make my way into the kitchen with my hand on the wall and wolf a few down without taking a seat. From outside comes the continuing patter of rain. We’d factored the possibility of rain into our plans, but I can’t help but worry that I’ve glossed over something. The fuzzy cobwebs in my head don’t help. I shake my head a few times to clear it. Surely the rain won’t change things. It may even help, masking our noise and making the work of clearing the fallen tree take that much longer.

  As I throw back another mug of urch tea, the door opens, and on the threshold stands Lark. If I’d been writing a script, this is where I’d throw in a flash of lightning and a roll of thunder, but the skies don’t comply—the rain continues to drizzle behind her.

  Still, I have to bite back a triumphant grin. She’s wearing the blue vest and the cowhide hat. Her red bandanna is pulled up around her chin, and she’s even smudged soot from the fire over both cheeks. The broadsword hangs in a loop at her belt. I wish I’d been able to find her a buckler to complete the picture.

  Her gaze lands on me for only the barest second and then skirts away.

  “Ready?” she asks the room.

  Soe and Iano nod and swing their cloaks around their shoulders. Lark steps aside to let them pass through the door. Out on the porch is Tamsin, wearing one of the new dresses, carefully closing the top of an oilcloth pouch under her cloak, where her essay must be tucked inside.

  I pick up my own cloak and Iano’s bow and quiver.

  “Lark,” I say as she heads for the porch. She turns halfway back, offering me her ear, but not her eyes, which remain fixed on the doorjamb. If Tamsin is mad at Iano, at least I can remedy things on my end.

  “Listen, I’m sorry about yesterday,” I say. “I shouldn’t have snapped at you about cutting the tree. I appreciate your help.”

  She frowns at the door, and then shakes her head, still not looking at me.