Hearthfire Read online

  Now she hefted herself into Carin’s bed with her usual familiarity, and after a bemused moment, Carin followed.

  “Pull the coverlet up,” Lyah said. “It’s always so cold in here.”

  Carin pulled the coverlet up higher and nestled into the mattress. Silence crept through the chamber, long enough that Carin thought Lyah had gone to sleep straightaway.

  The bedding gave and rustled, and Carin felt and heard Lyah’s sigh at the same time, a puff of vanilla-scented sweetness from the resin she chewed at night to clean her teeth.

  “Are you frightened?” Lyah asked.

  Had anyone else asked her that question, Carin would have turned her face to a mask and answered in the negative. “Yes,” she whispered instead. She’d forgotten to clean her own teeth, and she could smell the spiced conu broth souring already on her breath.

  Lyah didn’t seem to notice. “As am I.”

  “You?”

  “Yes, me.” Lyah turned and snuggled into Carin’s shoulder. “Jenin said something today,” she trailed off, shaking her head against the pillow with a rustle of fabric Carin heard rather than saw. Carin felt a pang at the mention of Jenin.

  You’re jealous, Dyava had said. Another three moons without him, watching his sahthren with her friend grow closer in love with every day spent walking.

  Carin tried to shake the feeling off and laid her cheek on Lyah’s hair.

  After a moment, though, Lyah propped herself up on one elbow. “Are you still thinking about the High Harvest?”

  Carin held the breath she had just inhaled. There it was again. High Harvest. It was a day of feasting and ceremonies, for villagers to declare new bonds, new bulging bellies of coming babes, new appellations.

  That last had never seemed like such a momentous thing, though she had seen others do it, their faces relaxing with some profound relief. Carin had hinted to Lyah some turns before, but she had immediately regretted it. It was too much to think of on the eve of the Journeying. With Dyava she could simply be. It used to be so with Lyah, too.

  Carin let out the breath and simply said, “No.” She knew Lyah would know the lie and the reason for it.

  There was no light in the room with the window shuttered, but Carin knew Lyah’s expression would be consternation, her straight eyebrows pulled together as though stitched at the center of her forehead, her mouth tight and a little lopsided. After a moment, Lyah moved back to the subject of the Journeying.

  “Ryd and Jenin said Old Wend told them about the last Nameless in Haveranth, back when our parents were children. They said he’d been a favorite, that he was a charismatic leader and a master woodsmith by the time he chose to abjure the syr form. Overnight they shunned him, forced him out of Haveranth. They loved him one day, disowned him the next. Only the elders remember him. Jenin said sy tried to ask Tamat about it while sy tended the fire and Tamat went silent and said there had been no Nameless that cycle. What if we don’t find our names? What if we return Nameless? What if they forget us?”

  We won’t, is what Carin ought to have said, would have said if anyone else were present. But with Lyah… “I don’t know.”

  The last Nameless to leave Haveranth had gone cycles ago. Carin was familiar enough with how Nameless were treated, but she hadn’t known any details of the last. If one came back from the Journeying having not found her name—or reporting the wrong one; Merin always knew—they were exiled. Some went north, back toward the cave, into the Mad Mountains to wander and die in the hundreds of leagues of peaks. Others would travel south, past the plains and into the other range of mountains beyond.

  None ever returned.

  It was said in the Hearthland that if one traveled far enough to the south, through the wildlands of plains and past the southern unnamed mountains, the sea would greet you as it did at Bemin’s Fan to the west. But those were only stories, and the folk of Haveranth never traveled far enough to the south to discover its truth. The older villagers sometimes spoke of lands across the sea, where the earth went on far enough for the land to grow warmer, then cooler again if one traveled across its length from south to north. All had ventured to the foothills of the Mad Mountains for the Journeying, but there it is colder, not warmer, and thus most believed these tales to be naught but falsehoods and spun sugar stories.

  Carin didn’t know what happened to the Nameless or to where they wandered. All she knew was that they never came back.

  “It won’t happen to us,” she said finally, her voice cracking in the stillness of the night. She thought she heard a hitch in Lyah’s breathing, but it may have been the shifting of the sheets on the mattress.

  “It won’t,” Lyah echoed. She lowered herself back down to the bedding, pulled her pillow close to Carin’s. “Will you braid my hair tomorrow? I want to look presentable when we leave.”

  “Of course.” Carin knew exactly why Lyah wanted her hair to look nice, and it wasn’t for the benefit of the villagers. She thought of the way Jenin had looked at Lyah over the winter fires and how sy’d shared the first of the Early Bird apples from hys tree with her. For a brief moment, Carin wondered what that would be like. Then she sloughed off the thought and turned over. She had far more pressing things to fret about.

  Their breathing became slow and deep, but an hour passed before either could drift into the realm of sleep.

  THE FIRE of Jenin’s family hearth lay banked and ashy, giving off little warmth. Hys parents, Silan and Tarwyn, each clasped one of Jenin’s hands in their own. Something wild and raw and full of storms gathered in Jenin’s breast. Hys time of tending the village hearth-home’s fire had ended, turned over to his cousin Clar, who would spend the next cycle tending the village hearth in ignorance, as she should. Dyava had gone home, as was expected, for he no longer shared their home.

  Hands held tight to hys parents, Jenin felt as if sy were alone on all the earth. Sy wished Lyah could be there.

  Jenin felt a pang when sy thought of Lyah’s own ignorance, but sy could not allow hyrself to pursue the emotion. Time for that had long passed. What would happen would happen.

  The windows sat shuttered, so there was little need to fully bank the fire, but Silan had said that they could not allow the chimney’s smoke to show their continuing wakefulness. Not now, not this night.

  It whispered through the air in the roundhome, the prickles of magic that Jenin now recognized. It had been the same for turn upon turn now, but tonight was different.

  Silan’s usually gentle face grew determined and set like the slow hardening of clay in a kiln. He grasped Jenin’s hand tighter, as did Tarwyn, her angular features every inch as sure of what she did. Merin’s visit that night had hardened them, fired their certainty, burned away any remaining doubt they might have had about what they meant to do. Jenin had hardly been able to bear it.

  The prickles crept through Jenin’s hands like the needling sensation that followed a sleeping foot’s numbness. At hys shoulders, Jenin took one last clear intake of breath as the prickles wove like vines through hys chest and stifled his exhale, turning it shaky.

  Jenin had chosen this. This was hys to bear.

  Jenin concentrated hys thoughts on the hearth, on the stones that sy had pulled off one by one to inscribe their insides with runes, replacing them with new power of cloaking, for no one outside this roundhome could know what the family did, or what awaited the village on the morrow. They had to be surprised. They had to believe.

  Even when the sun rose and the Journeyers departed, they would not know.

  But by then, Jenin knew that the first unfurling tendril would greet the dawn—for sy would be the one to make it.

  With the Journeyers’ first unknowing steps toward the mountains and their names, Planting Harmonix would bring true seeds of change to sprout in Haveranth.

  Jenin had seen to it, and tomorrow it would be hys choice that changed the world.

  ONLY FOUR times in a cycle did the great bell toll out the morning, and on the morn of Pla
nting Harmonix came the first for that cycle. The bell struck three times, and its resonant hum hung in the crisp morning air. Carin sat straight up in bed, brushing a lock of Lyah’s hair from her face.

  “Lyah!” She poked the still-sleeping young woman with her forefinger. “You have to go. We’re not supposed to see each other until the Journeying!”

  “Tosh,” Lyah muttered. “They’ll never know.”

  “That was the third bell!”

  Lyah bolted out of the bed so fast that she tripped over her clogs where she’d left them. “Third already?”

  The fourth bells began to ring through the village.

  “Rot.” Lyah threw her feet into her clogs and scooped up Carin’s hands in hers. “I will see you in the hearth-home.”

  “Go out the kitchen door—Mamo might not be awake yet.”

  “I will.”

  Lyah flung open the door to Carin’s room and slid across the floor in her clogs. Carin closed her eyes and tried to steady herself. She felt as though the down from her coverlet had crept into her skull over the few short hours she’d slept.

  “Morrow, Rina.” Lyah’s voice came out like a squeak, and Carin heard the slide of Lyah’s leather clogs on the floor as she skidded to a stop.

  “You’re not supposed to be here, child. Get to your home. This isn’t a day for bending rules.”

  “Yes, Rina.”

  To Carin’s surprise, Lyah actually sounded contrite.

  Poking her head out her door, Carin met Rina’s glance. The older woman’s face was sober, unamused.

  “Joyous Journeying, fruit of my womb,” she said, sounding as though she believed nothing of the sort. Rising from her chair by the fire, she set down a cup of steaming red bush tea that smelled of honey and spice. “You had best get ready.”

  The new woolen cloak was folded neatly on the edge of the table, the new bow strung and sitting next to the cloak. As Carin filled her ceramic mug with tea from the kettle, her new possessions tickled at the corner of her eyes.

  There was not much she could do to prepare. Journeyers were allowed only weapons, a waterskin, and a bundle of clothing and provisions. No pack animals, no coin. She gathered up the gifts from her mother and returned to her chamber, mug clasped in her free hand.

  Three cycles before, Tilm al Hadeer, who had been injured in a hunting accident at nine harvests, had been carried in a litter by the other two Journeyers who left with him. That cycle had been a somber one, a fearful one beneath the smooth surface of the villagers of Haverath. Everyone had tried not to show their apprehension—would Tilm return Named or Nameless? Would they return by High Lights? Would he return at all?

  The days of spring had marched forward. Seeds sown burst through the loam and snaked upward, budding then blooming then bearing fruit as always. As the days continued toward the longest light, the High Lights ritual of atonement and amends, the tension had grown like a new bowstring pulled to its notches. Tilm’s parents, Hadeer and Almin, stared down anyone who looked their way as if daring their neighbors to suggest their son would be branded Nameless.

  But then, on the third day of the Stem turn under the Toil Moon, one day before High Lights, one day before Merin would have to declare Tilm and his fellow Journeyers lost and Nameless, a young shepherd spotted them in Haver’s Glen as they descended the Mistaken Pass.

  Three Journeyers, all on foot. The litter was nowhere to be seen.

  Tilm al Hadeer va Haveranth strode into the village on two healed legs. While whispers made waves through the people gathered around the central village hearth, Merin closeted herself in her roundhome with the three Journeyers for three hours. When they emerged, no one had said a thing until the Naming at High Lights, when Tilm had become Tillim va Haveranth, Named and welcomed home.

  No one spoke of what had happened on his Journeying, or how the legs that had kept him from walking for eight cycles sparked once more to life, but strange things happened on a Journeying.

  Carin shuddered at the chill that snaked up her spine, and she drained the remainder of her tea. In her reverie she had piled half her clothing on her unmade bed. With anxiety-numbed fingers, she sorted her belongings. Three sets of hose, two of brown bavel and one of soft leather. One pair of wide-legged trousers of a thick weave. She pulled on one pair of bavel hose and a light linen tunic with sleeves that fell to her wrists. Carin belted the tunic with a wide leather strap, adding her sheath to one side and a pouch of fishing line and hooks to the other.

  She bundled the remaining clothing into her leather rucksack. After a moment of chagrin looking at the quiver, Carin discovered that her mother had gotten Jemil—Lyah’s mother must have done it, for Rina herself couldn’t stitch a single swatch without sewing her own finger into it—to sew a pocket onto the side of the rucksack. The quiver fit into it perfectly, and two leather buckles held the quiver firmly in place.

  With her rucksack on her back and her bow slung across one shoulder, Carin quietly made her bed and returned to the kitchen, knowing she would find it empty.

  She washed her mug. She took a long look around the home of her mother.

  And Carin el Rina ve Haveranth left home behind.

  IT WAS an eerie thing, watching the village ignore her, Lyah thought. There was Malcam, her sacks of seeds belted to her expanding middle as she trotted off to the south to sow her fields. No one looking would think her own son Ryd was about to embark on a Journeying that would span the next three moons or more. And there, Rina. Rina who had bid her good morrow without scolding her for breaking the village rule and visiting a fellow Journeyer on the eve of their departure. Rina had a hammer in one hand and hefted a bundle of ingots in the other, and she too did not look Lyah’s way.

  No sign yet of Jenin or hys family, but they lived on the far side of town and were known for their lack of punctuality as much as for the conu orchard they tended to perfection. Lyah’s hair fell into her face, unbraided. Had she woken at first bell, Carin could have fixed it. Lyah supposed she might as well leave Haveranth with it in a state of disorder; it looked like this every other day anyway. Perhaps leaving on her Journeying with it properly tidy would have been a sort of lie.

  A clatter of a latch reached her ears, and Lyah turned to see Carin walking toward her, her face set in that square expression Lyah had learned cycles ago meant she had a storm raging in her gullet but would die before she let anyone see it. Over one shoulder, Carin wore a shining white bow. Halm, it was. It had to be. Lyah tried to stop herself from gaping. Great Toil, where had she gotten that? Carin stared straight ahead, and Lyah wondered what it would be like to leave knowing any sight of one’s beloved would be soured by the beloved ignoring one’s very existence. Lyah did not think she could deal with such a thing. She pitied Carin and Dyava both for this parting.

  The hearth-home was full of a quiet bustle. Market stalls open, the whistle of an ihstal here and there, the soft clicks of their padded hooves on cobblestones. And yet Lyah and Carin—and Ryd, who came round the corner just then—were excluded. Quiet solemnity eddied around the three of them.

  This, too, was part of the ritual. Until they returned with their names, they had ceased to exist.

  Ryd and Carin reached Lyah at the same time, Ryd looking as unnerved as Lyah felt. His eyes, pale green in the morning light, darted back and forth as if tracking a pendulum that hovered right in front of his face. His normally rich brown skin looked pale and sallow. Carin never looked sallow, even now when Lyah knew her friend had barely slept. No, her face had a healthy golden glow, and her eyes, which were the color of the Bemin’s deeper pools, a dizzying sapphire blue—those eyes showed no redness or bags.

  There they stood.

  The hearth-home was Haveranth’s direct center. Haver’s Road ran north and south through the middle, with Cantor’s Road spreading east and west. It was to the north they were to go.

  The scent of fresh smoked goat and baked eggs wafted past, but Lyah made herself ignore it. She saw Ryd take a deep
breath and then exhale.

  The spears strapped across her back chafed already under the weight of her rucksack. Looking over at Ryd next to her, she wondered what weapon he’d brought. No swords hung from his belt, and no spears or bows to be seen either. A cook pot and a shallow pan clanked against each other when he moved. Ryd was small, almost a head shorter than she, and she hoped he’d brought something other than a frying pan that could do some violence.

  None of them spoke, only stood in wait for Jenin to come scampering down the street. Any moment now sy’d appear. Lyah tried to suppress her excitement of spending whole moons with Jenin at her side. She’d hoped for some time that when they returned properly Named, sy would give her some clue of whether they would join in the bonding ritual or not. They wouldn’t be allowed until their twentieth harvest anyway, but she wanted to know.

  No one came. Minutes stretched by, and the sky colored itself lighter and lighter with each passing moment. Soon the sun would peek above the horizon, and then they would be off. Shadows formed on the westward side of buildings and stalls, still as bleary with sleep as Lyah felt, still no sharpness to be had of them until the sun crested Cantor’s Road and cut a golden line down the center of Haveranth.