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  Editor: David M. Johnson

  HEARTHFIRE

  Copyright © 2018 Emmie Mears

  All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without prior written permission of the publisher.

  This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Published by Indigo

  an imprint of BHC Press

  Library of Congress Control Number:

  2017945133

  Ebook ISBN: 978-1-947727-52-6

  Visit the publisher:

  www.bhcpress.com

  Also available in

  Hardcover (ISBN: 978-1-947727-51-9)

  Softcover (ISBN: 978-1-946848-52-9)

  For those in transition, who know that sometimes

  we need to find rebirth within ourselves to truly live.

  Dear Reader,

  Welcome to the Hearthland! This world is one I have been building for the past four years of my life, and I am so excited to finally open the doors wide to you.

  Being a writer is a chance to play god, in a sense. Whether we are reimagining the world we occupy on Earth or spinning a new one from scratch, what comes out is a manifestation of our subconscious and conscious awareness alike.

  This book came to me very much by accident. A stray line in Patrick Rothfuss’s The Name of the Wind about how the weeks in that world were eleven days long set my mind spinning. We build time based on so many factors—the cycle of the moon, the movement of the earth around the sun, the turning of the planet to see the sun and then look away.

  My brain ran with those thoughts until it came to a what if question: “What if a land were so bountiful that one day in five was a feast day?” I spent the next eight hours thinking out exactly how another world might be different in how they structured time and seasons, how the basis of society (agricultural, hunter-gatherer, industrial) shapes our perception and use of time structures. Running through all of that was the soul of what would become this series: what would someone in such a bountiful land do if they discovered that the abundance they enjoyed came from draining the life from the earth itself? Could a person live with that? And what if there were consequences for deciding one couldn’t live with that knowledge? I wanted to explore an epic fantasy parallel of climate change and its human impact through the lens of magic.

  The characters of Hearthfire met me there. A young man bullied relentlessly, his feelings minimized and undermined. A young person who has built a place for herself but is not certain she has chosen the right path. A young genderfluid person (hyrsin, in the book) who knows who they want to be, but whose desire to affect change will come at a steep cost. And another young woman, whose path is laid out for her in certainty and who will do whatever she must to keep her homeland safe and fruitful—no matter the price in blood.

  You’ll notice that there is a different set of pronouns included in this book (sy/hys/hyr/hyrself). Those pronouns are, in-world, the ones used by people who in our world would be non-binary. They can be genderfluid, bigender, agender—in the Hearthland world, they define hyrsin as people who are “both and neither, all and none.” Children embody that potential, and in this world, children all use those pronouns until they are fifteen, when they declare to their village who they are. Some then declare that they are men or women (cis or trans, to us), and others move from hysmern (children) to hyrsin.

  Hearthfire is a book that surprised me. It’s a book about confronting humanity’s impact on the earth and recognizing that hoarding resources hurts people, about the price of doing right, and it’s a book about consequences. It’s about power—and how the uses of power, whether intended for good or ill or personal profit, can cause unexpected repercussions. About how what we throw into the ocean will return on the next tide—or wash up on someone else’s shore. And most of all, it’s about choice—how we always have a choice, even when it’s not a good one.

  Thank you for exploring this world with me.

  THERE WAS something, Carin always thought, in the way Dyava’s skin caught the sunlight. The whole of him soaked it up as if he could make magic of it. Light revealed, darkness concealed, and with the rays that fell upon his face, Carin saw only love.

  “If you keep staring at me,” he said, “I might turn to dust before sunset.”

  “If I don’t keep staring at you, how do you expect me to still remember your face when I return?” Carin teased. “High Lights is some time away.”

  Her tone was much lighter than her heart felt, but Dyava knew her, and she knew him, and neither of them would give way to the weight of tomorrow when today was here now.

  His eyes, warm and brown, twinkled as he smiled at her. Dyava reached out to take Carin’s hand, kissing it. His long black hair tickled the side of her arm. He even smelled like sunshine.

  For a moment, Carin allowed herself the thrill of it and the wicked moment of remembering the youth Dyava had been only one cycle past. Dav, he had been. Before he set out on the same Journeying she herself was about to, returning to Haveranth new-named. Dyava. Her Dyava.

  Carin caught his hand in hers and turned it over, kissing his even as he’d kissed hers. “I saw Jenin heading toward Lyah’s roundhome,” she said. “They’ll be together these next moons and still they steal moments today.”

  “You’re jealous,” Dyava said. He pulled Carin close to his chest. “I suppose there’s no hope for it. I’ll have to join you lot.”

  Carin let out a laugh that was almost a snort, even though her heart soared suddenly at the idea of Dyava by her side for the Journeying. “Merin would have you trussed to the village hearth-home, possibly on a spit.”

  “Good point.”

  The silence that followed threatened to sink lower. Carin pulled back to look at Dyava. His face was quiet, with the stillness of a forest pool. As if he was suddenly miles away. Carin thought she knew what he was thinking. Jenin and Lyah had been inseparable since they had all been hysmern, children with no appellation of their own. Carin had not understood it, then, though as Dyava’s Journeying had approached the cycle before, she had found herself dreading his absence. When he returned days before High Lights, thinner and quieter and stronger, Carin had known nothing like the relief she felt. She had struggled to catch even a glimpse of him for the days that followed, until the sun claimed its longest day and the village toiled under its heat and that night, oh, that night. Exhausted and aching as always, Carin had taken her cup of ashes and turned at the sound of Dyava’s soft voice addressing her.

  “I failed you, Carin,” he had said. “In all those moons walking, each step reminded me that I had forgotten to make something clear between us. I hope you will forgive me.”

  “Forgive what?” Carin’s hands had nearly dropped her cup.

  “Simply that I care for you,” said Dyava. “More than simply for a friend. I should have told you sooner.”

  Carin had dipped her whole hand into her cup, covering her palm with ashes that stung her skin. Without speaking, she placed her splayed hand over Dyava’s heart and me
t his eyes. The next morning, with the whole of the village nude and covered in the ashes of forgiven wrongs, Dyava and Carin leapt into the Bemin River together, the cold-flowing water reviving them anew. Carin thought that until that moment she had never been alive at all.

  Now, no ashes coated her palm or Dyava’s tunic-clothed chest, but she looked him in the eye and knew he remembered.

  And, true to Dyava, he smiled, kissed her, and changed the subject. “Once you return, we will have to prepare for the High Harvest.”

  Any other person would simply mean preparations for the feasts, the dancing, the festival in which villagers from Cantoranth and Bemin’s Fan would arrive and set up colorful tents surrounding the whole of Haveranth for the whole waxing and waning of Harvest Moon. This time, though, Carin knew what he meant.

  “I’m not sure I can think about that yet,” she said, “or if I will truly do it.”

  Carin had chosen her appellation at her fifteenth cycle, like everyone did. But for some time it had not set well for her. She had gone from being child to woman, just as Lyah had, but now, two cycles past and on the verge of true adulthood, Carin could not be sure that she had been true to herself. High Harvest would be the time to make it right.

  At her trailing silence, Dyava seemed to come back to himself, pulled her closer. “Sometimes people need to leave something behind to do what is right. Be you,” was all he said.

  He did not use her name, and in that moment, Carin loved him for it. Tomorrow she would go search for the name her village would know as her true name forever, but today she was trapped in now. Carin el Rina ve Haveranth. Was that who she was?

  In the warmth of the arms around her, she had no need of a name at all.

  The sun sank toward the horizon, and after a time, Carin bade Dyava a bountiful night, knowing he went to his parents. Jenin’s parents, too. Dyava and Jenin were sahthren, born of the same blood a cycle apart.

  Dyava gave Carin no lingering goodbye, only a flash of a grin as he turned back toward Haveranth, leaving Carin to slowly turn back herself.

  RYD AL Malcam va Haveranth hated being sat on.

  It may have been one of the unfortunate effects of being smaller than everyone else, but the other village children seemed to think it was a fine past time. Never mind that he was due for his Journeying and only two harvests away from being a full adult. Never mind that the rumps pressing into various parts of his body belonged to squeaks ten harvests his junior. Never mind that even the grown folk in town found it amusing.

  Ryd didn’t.

  He struggled against the weight of six bodies—a giggling whump of new pressure made it seven—pinning him to the lush blue grasses.

  “Geroff!” he hollered.

  No one listened. They never did.

  Ryd looked overhead through the wiggly cluster of sweaty children, catching glimpses of the bone-white halm tree’s trunk. Against the blue of the sky, the halm was dotted with deep red buds that would soon open to the sun. A knee punched into Ryd’s side, bony and probably covered in dirt.

  This is it, Ryd thought. This is how I die.

  A startled squawk from one of the children cut through their giggles, and suddenly the weight of seven squirmy bodies vanished. Ryd gulped a breath of the warm spring air, scrambling to a sitting position just in time to see the kids—carpenter Stil’s brat wouldn’t even pay for hys idea of a joke at home later—scamper off into the town square. None of those squeaks had even reached the age to declare their appellation, and no one cared that Ryd was on the cusp of becoming full-fledged adult, with a place and a name and a purpose.

  “You’re welcome.” A whoosh of air brought Carin’s muscular frame down hard in the grass beside him. She plopped an apple into his lap, its skin redder than the halm’s leaves and as shiny as the sun on the Bemin River.

  “You don’t always have to rescue me, you know,” Ryd said. The words came out more cross than he meant them to, and Carin sniffed.

  “You’re right. I don’t. Want me to call them back?”

  He shook his head. In spite of her joking, Carin had the look in her eyes that said she had just come from Dyava. Half dreaming, half present. Even half present for Carin was enough to send the village hysmern scrambling away from their usual hobby of sitting on Ryd, though. Ryd thought he should resent that they fled her presence and laughed at his, but he couldn’t.

  Ryd took a bite of the apple, licking the juice from the skin where it seeped out around his lip. It danced on his tongue with a slight tartness that quickly vanished into the silken sweetness of candy or syrup. They were called Early Birds because the trees that bore them flowered with the first frost and offered their slow-growing fruits just as the spring’s daffodils opened their golden trumpets. This was the first Ryd had eaten this season, and perhaps the last before the Journeying. The thought soured his next bite.

  “You’re thinking about it, aren’t you?” Carin’s voice was quiet, punctuated only by the ringing of the blacksmith’s hammer on an anvil across the square. The rest of the village had gone silent in meditation for what would come on the morrow, but apparently the children had decided sitting on Ryd escaped the cause for solemnity.

  “How can I think of anything else?”

  Carin didn’t answer, but she took a crunching bite of her own apple. A trill rose from the halm tree. A whitfinch with its trr-dee-trr-dee-dee-dee.

  Carin pointed past the town square where the road rose toward the foothills. The hills themselves wore the deep blue of spring, blazing bright in the yellow sun. The road curved around Kinnock’s Rise and vanished, but Ryd could have drawn the map of the route under the darkness of the Veiled Moon with the stars hiding their faces from the night.

  “Speak for yourself,” Carin said softly, letting her hand drop. They sat with their bodies touching in easy friendship, but somehow Carin was leagues away.

  Ryd still looked where she had gestured.

  Past Kinnock’s Rise to Haver’s Glen. Up the cleft of the glen along the banks of the Bemin to its source, a high and shining lake known simply as the Jewel. Skirt the shores of the Jewel to the west and climb, climb, climb the Mistaken Pass to the Hidden Vale where the Hanging Falls floated, dripping crystalline drops hundreds of feet to water the grasses beneath. Beyond the falls, on the westernmost slopes of the vale, was a cave.

  It was to that cave he was supposed to journey tomorrow. Not just a journey. The Journeying. To seal his passage into adulthood. To mark his growth. To find his name.

  By harvest time, he and Carin and the others would be starting their trades, new-named and ready to prove themselves to the village. Not quite full villagers, not until their twentieth harvests, but closer. Named. Respected.

  Ryd linked his elbow with Carin’s, and together they looked into the west.

  When he found his name, he wouldn’t let anyone sit on him again.

  ON THE banks of the Bemin, far from the sun-warmed grasses overlooking Haveranth’s surrounding hillocks, Lyah el Jemil ve Haveranth wove her fingers through her lover’s hair. Jenin’s dark locks flowed over Lyah’s lap, lustrous and shining in the light of the setting sun.

  “Suo vo dyu, dyu vo suo,” Lyah murmured. Light from darkness, darkness from light.

  “Spoken like a true soothsayer.” Jenin teased, but hys eyes lit with pride. Lyah had been apprenticed to Merin, Haveranth’s soothsayer, at the last Night of Reflection—a celebration of her reaching her seventeenth harvest and the coming of her Journeying with the following spring. She’d known for some time that Merin would take her as an apprentice, but it was finally official. Lyah would one day be soothsayer. As such, she’d taken to learning the lore of the village and found herself uttering proverbs even when she didn’t mean to. As the first apprentice Merin had chosen in her three hundred cycles of long life, Jenin couldn’t often disguise the pride sy felt at Lyah being the one chosen.

  And Jenin’s pride in her made Lyah glow like the backlit maha trees that dotted the horizon
, their leaves glowing deep blue with the gold of the sun behind them. Jenin went still beneath Lyah’s gentle touch on hys hair.

  “Tomorrow,” sy said after a long pause.

  Tomorrow was the Journeying. Lyah tried to disguise the skip in her heart that came with the thought of being off with Jenin for turns on end as they traveled. Of course, Carin and Ryd would also be there, but that wouldn’t stop Lyah’s excitement. Carin and Lyah were fyahiul, pillow-friends, practically family without sharing blood. Ryd would tag along, as he always did. Like a bug clinging to a falling leaf. Both Carin and Ryd seemed apprehensive about the Journeying, their thoughts rotting with the fear that they wouldn’t find their names and would be cast out of Haveranth as Nameless, but Lyah had no fear on that score. Nor had Jenin, but the tension in hys shoulders, even as Lyah ran her fingers through hys hair, told Lyah that perhaps something had shifted.

  Jenin’s chin was stubbled with whiskers, and sy turned to lay hys head on Lyah’s knee, the roughness of hys chin through the thin fabric of her leggings sending a tingle of excitement through her. Jenin fell silent, hys posture tensing as sy lay across Lyah’s lap. A question hovered in hys eyes, but sy didn’t speak. Instead, Jenin’s dark eyes searched hers. For the space of a breath, it looked to Lyah as if Jenin’s eyes bore the weight of a thousand mountains, quashing their dark warmth with nothingness. After a moment, sy blinked and smiled and reached out hys hand to touch Lyah’s face.

  “Why do we have to go on the Journeying?” sy asked.

  “To find our names and join the village as adults,” Lyah responded automatically.