Valdyis galsin

We’ve already been in Turenay for weeks! And I know all my letters now and can write words with them, and even Rhinla knows all her letters because they’re all birds for her. I like her letter-bird drawings! And I’m learning to do sums and to fight with a stick. But it’s not called a stick, it’s called a staff! I don’t have one of my own yet so I’m using one that the school has for people to practice with. The staff needs to be one hand longer than you are, and they do have one in my size!

School is nearly over because it’s summer and lots of people are going home because they only live at school when there’s school and they live with their family when there isn’t. Master Senthi is still teaching us, but not the people she’s teaching languages from far countries because there’s only one still here, Venla who we met on the first day, and then the others would have to catch up later anyway.

We have a lot of time to do fun things! We took Radan fishing, because Rhinla wanted to teach him to catch crayfish, and we tried to take Halla too but she turned up her nose at it. I think she wants to be a lady, not a girl.

We went upstream of the town because the river is full of dirty stuff downstream, that’s because there are lots of workshops that need water but make it dirty, like tanning and dyeing. We know that it’s clean at the Halfway Inn, we waded in it and caught fish and washed ourselves! I wonder where all the dirty stuff goes. Lady Rava says it’s the same river and it flows from Turenay to Veray so it must lose it somewhere.

Radan was very good at catching crayfish! He filled more than half the bucket by himself once we’d showed him how to stick his hand in the mud under the crayfish so they don’t notice you and scuttle away. And we caught some trout and a big fat fish with a small head and shiny scales, we didn’t know what it was but it looked tasty.

Then we saw someone sitting on the other side of the water! It was a man with very dark brown skin like Master Tao, but a lot younger, and he looked as if he’d been looking at us for a while. “Hey!” Rhinla called to him, and he jumped up and came over. “Is your name Tao?”

He grinned. “No, Mazao,” he said. And he almost said something else, I could see that, but he didn’t.

“Are you of the Nameless?” Rhinla asked, but I could see that he wasn’t there was nothing about him that was scary that way. (Not about Master Tao either, not like his friend who had prayed with us at the fire. She had been of the Nameless all right!)

“No,” he said with a laugh. “Why did you think that?”

“I wanted to know,” Rhinla said. “Because you’re so black.”

“Being of the Nameless or of Anshen has nothing to do with the colour of one’s skin,” he said. “I’m this colour because I was born that way. I’m Ishey.” We didn’t know what that was, but it was the people who lived up the hill on the far side (he pointed) and they weren’t all so black, only some of them.

“Is this your river?” I asked him, but it wasn’t, he just lived near it. And the fish wasn’t anybody’s fish either so whoever wanted to catch it could do that.

We’d got our bucket full now! So we said goodbye to Mazao and washed the worst of the mud off Radan and took the fish to the house. Halla in the kitchen was very pleased with all the fish! “I know what we’ll eat tonight,” she said. And she could tell us that the fat shiny fish was a river bream, and that they are very tasty indeed! She was going to make a stew with all the fish so everybody could have some of each, and that was fair though it was a pity that we couldn’t roast the bream and hold the crayfish over a flame, they taste much better that way.

But the stew was delicious! And Radan got to brag to his parents and brother and sisters about catching all the crayfish.

We got sent to bed early again but that wasn’t bad because we were tired enough after all that traipsing in the river. But I was suddenly awake in the middle of the night, and Rhinla wasn’t in bed next to me! Instead she was drawing on the walls with light, a strange landscape with mountains and storm clouds and little people who looked as if they were frightened by the storm and running away from it. I called her but she didn’t look up, and then I took her wrist and I saw that her eyes were closed and she was still drawing. I thought of calling Lady Rava, but before I could do that she was at the door already.

“Oh, I’m so glad you’re here!” I said. “Rhinla is drawing in her sleep!” But just as I opened the door for her, Rhinla had crawled back into bed. Her drawing was still on the walls, though, fading a little but you could still see what it was.

“Do you know that place?” Lady Rava asked, but I didn’t, it looked a bit like the hills we’d seen near Veray but not enough to say it was there. And there wasn’t a big stone house on one of the hills like in Veray, either.

Lady Rava didn’t seem worried. “Isn’t it dangerous?” I asked.

“Not as dangerous as sleepwalking,” she said, “she doesn’t go outside and fall off things or into the river or anything.”

The next morning it was so much like a strange dream that I completely forgot to tell Rhinla! Only when we were at the hospital to see if we could help, and Doctor Cora asked if we’d done anything interesting, I remembered. And Rhinla was so surprised! I showed her what she’d drawn — another thing Master Senthi taught us how to do properly — and she didn’t recognise it either. Doctor Cora called Lady Rava at the school, because she thought it was dangerous! And they had a bit of an argument about it, without us.

We went to the children’s ward to talk to the sick children, and we saw that a girl was glowing, Doctor Cora later said that was the fever, but she had no holes in her light . And there was a little boy with a broken leg. “How did you break that?” I asked.

“Fell out of the tree,” he said. “Mum said to come down quickly! But I came down too quickly.” We promised him to bring the painting of the doesn’t-exist-bird, and that gave Rhinla such a good idea! When Doctor Cora came back she asked if she couldn’t paint some paintings for the children’s ward, happy ones, with things to see on them! Like doesn’t-exist-animals, and things we’d seen on the water. Doctor Cora thought that was a good idea, and said that the hospital would pay for the paper and paint and they’d give Rhinla some money for the work too.

Then Doctor Cora said she was going to fix the boy’s broken leg, and yes, she’d like our help because she couldn’t get light (I should call it anea, power, that’s what it’s called in the lessons) from the world and most of the people who usually helped her with that had gone home for the summer, or they’d finished school and had gone away forever. And some people couldn’t help Doctor Cora because they were busy showing the teachers that they had learned enough to finish school.

So this time Rhinla went to sit by the fire in the little temple where Anshen would give as much anea as anyone needed, and I found a place halfway where I could pass it on, behind some high plants in the school’s herb garden. There were some people looking out from a window in the school who could perhaps see me but I didn’t even bother going invisible, I didn’t think anybody would bother me.

After a while I could feel that Doctor Cora needed anea, and I asked Rhinla for it and the stream started to stream. It was hard to push it in the right direction at first, but I thought up a bucket like the ones we’d been shown to use when there was a fire and filled it and handed it to my other hand and sent it on to Doctor Cora. There was a new bucket every time, so that worked! Only my arms got sore after a while, even though anea doesn’t weigh anything and thought-up buckets don’t either!

Then it was suddenly done and Rhinla came from the temple and we went back to the hospital and found the little boy asleep with his leg bandaged between two pieces of wood and Doctor Cora cleaning up. We helped, of course, and then we all had herb tea. Doctor Cora was surprised about the buckets, she’d had to get used to getting the anea in gulps instead of as a stream! But that was what I found easiest.

When I said I’d got hungry from the work she laughed and said “Oh! You’re one of those!” and called for a nurse, who brought sweet buns. (It turns out she had an apprentice who left just before we arrived to be a doctor in a distant town, and doing things with anea always made her very hungry too!)

Then Rhinla thought of a way to convince Master Jilan to teach at the school! She went and asked Lord Vurian for a small barrel of wine to give to Master Jilan. He laughed, and asked if a jug wouldn’t be enough? And then he filled a big jug for us from a barrel in the cellar!

We went to Master Jeran’s house with it, pausing at the door to stroke the cat. “How did you manage to convince the cat?” Master Jeran asked, “she’s been bringing me the tails but eating the mice! But I think she’s finished all the mice in the house now, so I’m letting her out so she can hunt in the gardens.” He had some pie left as well, and shared it with us! And he was very pleased with the wine. He had already drunk two cups of it (and remarked that it was very good) when he started to think that we probably wanted something from him. “You want to make me drunk so I’ll say that I’ll come and teach?” but Rhinla said “No, we want you to drink wine because it makes you happy and when you’re happy you tell the truth!”

“Yes, maybe you’re right,” he said, and then he fell silent and drank another cup. “Maybe I should really come and teach. But, mind you, I teach people how to paint like me.”

“Can’t you teach people how to paint like themselves?” Rhinla asked. “I mean, when you painted the stars and explained how you do that with the little white lines, if you explain things like that people can paint like themselves and still learn what you’re teaching them and use that.”

“That’s a very wise thing to say,” Master Jeran said. “I’ll talk to Master Rava.” And then he was so woozy that we had to help him into his bed and he fell asleep at once. We gave the cat clean water in her water-dish, and washed up the cup and the jug and the plate, and put the plate near the door where the baker’s errand boy or girl would find it, and took the jug with us.

When we came back to Lord Vurian and said that Master Jeran was going to do it, he wanted to know what else we’d been learning. And we found, when we were telling him, that it was all letters and numbers and maps and stuff, not much with the mind at all. “Well, what can you do?” he asked, and
Rhinla said she could make things from light and I said I could make myself invisible and sometimes other people too. And we told him about giving anea to Doctor Cora, but he’d heard that already, and I made a bucket to show him how I’d done it.

Then he asked us to get a jug of water from the kitchen and taught us different ways to keep it closed! Well, in fact he showed us one way and made us think of our own different ways. Rhinla wrapped the whole jug in a lot of layers of something that looked like thin cloth made of light. And I smeared the top with a sort of thick paste. And after that I just told it that it was closed. We found that some ways worked much better than others, and we got very wet too and had to go and fill the jug again about five times!

We’d completely forgotten to tell Master Jeran about Rhinla going to paint pictures for the children in the hospital, so we went to his house again the next day. He still knew what he had promised! And he thought it was a very good idea of Rhinla’s so he took us to the market to buy things to make paint from. This was at a little stall where they sold things that looked like different coloured kinds of sand and stone. Some of them really were sand or stone, Master Jeran said. Red sand and blue stone! We got a small bags of different ones and a jug of oil to grind them up with, and a lot of little earthenware pots. He didn’t pay any money but wrote his name on the stallkeeper’s slate, and said that he’d arrange everything about the money with the hospital. I could read and almost understand the numbers on the slate and I thought it was really a lot of money! I didn’t know stuff to make paint from was so expensive.

Then Master Jeran took us back to his house where we learned to put some of the sand in a heavy pot (a mortar, he said, made of bronze) and pound it with a thick stick with a round end (a pestle) until it was as smooth as dust. And then pound it some more with oil until it was as smooth as pancake batter. Some of the sands got a very different colour when you pounded them! Every colour went into its own little earthenware pot.

That evening Lord Vurian called us to his study again. He said that it was almost Midsummer, the Feast of Anshen, and who did we want to celebrate it with? We could stay at the school and celebrate with whoever was still there for the summer, or go with him and his whole family to Lady Rava’s family at Gralen, or even with Doctor Cora and her family who had a vineyard further up the river. We didn’t know what a vineyard was, but that’s a field where grapes grow to make wine from, and the wine we’d given to Master Jeran was some of the wine from Doctor Cora’s grapes!

“If Master Jeran doesn’t have anyone to celebrate the feast with we’ll stay with him,” Rhinla said. “We can ask him.”

“You don’t have to decide right away,” Master Vurian said, “it’s a few days until we leave. But please know that you’re welcome to go to Gralen with us.” And then he asked what everybody else was always asking us, but it didn’t seem so bad from him: what did we want to learn at school?

“Drawing,” Rhinla said, “and things to do with light that I don’t know about yet. And when I can do all those things I want to have a house with an oven and live there.” And I said that I wanted to learn to fight with a staff and to learn things to do with anea and lots of sums. “Sums with money,” I said.

“Those are the best sums,” Lord Vurian said with a smile.

Lesla doesn’t have such an urge to draw but she does want to learn to read All The Books!

Rhinla had made such a nice painting of the white dog! It wasn’t really a painting of the white dog, but of everything around the white dog, and its eyes and tongue because those weren’t white (and the paper was). But you could see it was the dog! She spattered some mud on the painting and then it looked even more like the dog because the dog was spattered with mud too.

Jeran said that we ought to wash before eating, and we wanted to use the goose-pool for that but of course we could wash in the washing-house next to the kitchen. There were much fewer geese in the way there! And we got towels to dry ourselves with, of such nice cloth that Rhinla said we should make a skirt of it. Or if you had two towels a shirt, and with another towel for the sleeves.

Then we got to eat at a long table with a lot of other people. I’d already seen a pot in the kitchen with turnips and beans and bits of bacon, and that was on the table all right. But there was also a large piece of pig on the table! And each person at the table had a knife (I think some of the knives were the people’s own knives but we got one each next to our plates) and one of those sticking-things with prongs that they’d had at the palace. “A fork,” Jeran said. “That’s what civilised people eat with. Just do as I do.” But it was a lot harder than it looked.

“You stick the fork in the meat and then cut off a piece,” Jeran said, and we did that and put it on our plates, and then we had to cut little pieces off the meat on our plate. “Cut off a piece and give it to the cat!” Rhinla said, but that wasn’t the idea, you had to cut off a piece that fit in your mouth and eat it.

After a while nothing was left of our pieces of pig except the bones. “We should put them back in the pot for soup!” I said, but Rhinla took them outside to give to the white dog.

We went outside again and Master Jeran sat in the inn drinking wine. He drank so much wine that Rhinla teased him about it, but he didn’t seem to get weepy drunk like Faran or angry drunk like Arin!

Then we were so tired that we wanted to go to bed, so we asked the woman in the kitchen where we could sleep. We had to take Jeran upstairs too because otherwise when we closed the room he wouldn’t be able to get in! But we went to the little house in the yard first, all of us, and Jeran told us to wash our hands and faces again. But that was a good thing, because we were all greasy with pig fat.

There was a big soft bed in the room that we all fit in, and Rhinla and I snuggled each on a side of Master Jeran, but he wasn’t Jerna. (He snored more than Jerna, too! But he didn’t sound like a pig at all.) When I have a house of my own I want a bed like that, with a bag of feathers to lie on. We opened the bag to see what kind of feathers, and we thought the goose feathers that geese drop anyway in summer. And even if they were from dead geese, we weren’t going to eat them so that was all right.

In the morning we were awake before Master Jeran and we went to the kitchen to get something to eat. “What would you like?” the kitchen woman asked. “Bacon!” Rhinla said. “And bread!” I said, at the same time as Rhinla said “beans”. “Bread is better for breakfast,” the woman said. “Do you have eggs?” I asked, and she fried some eggs for us with bacon and gave us a tray with that and large pieces of bread and a jug with beer in it. “Could we have something to drink that isn’t bitter?” I asked, and we got a bowl of milk as well.

The tray was so big that we had to carry it up the stairs between us, Rhinla at the top and me at the bottom because I’m taller, and it was heavy too, but we managed without dropping or spilling anything. Master Jeran was a bit awake when we got back to the room. He drank some of the beer (but not all, and Rhinla teased him about that as well) and we all ate bread with eggs and bacon, and Rhinla and I shared the cup of milk. Master Jeran said that this beer wasn’t bitter, but we tried it and both of us thought it was!

Then we carried the tray down the stairs the same way, except that I had to go backwards now.

When we were hitching the donkey to the cart the cat came running up. She looked ragged as if she’d been fighting, with scratches in her fur. Rhinla stroked them closed with light, and that made the cat want to wash herself. We lifted her on top of the wagon, where she just went on washing.

It was only half a day to Turenay now, Master Jeran said. There were fewer trees here, not everywhere like where we were earlier, there were green open fields between them, some with animals. Master Jeran pointed out sheep and goats and cows. Goats mostly have horns and sheep mostly don’t, and goats look a bit more sly and sheep a bit more silly. And cows are bigger than a donkey and they have very beautiful eyes. And they all eat grass from the green fields.

Then we could see the town! There was a wooden wall in front of it but we saw the tops of tall houses over the wall. But we first wanted to see something on this side: in a field full of sheep there were two large ones with big curvy horns on their heads, and they wanted to fight! They ran at each other over and over again and knocked their horns together with a lot of noise. Rhinla said to Master Jeran, “I want some paper!” and she got a sheet of paper and a bit of charcoal and she drew the fighting sheep.

Then a tiny sheep that had been looking at the fight ran right between the two big ones! And they stopped just in time that it could get through. When they weren’t fighting any more they weren’t interested any more either and wandered away.

Rhinla’s drawing was splendid! But the charcoal was so soft that it came right off. Master Jeran said he’d got stuff to fix it to the paper with, but that was at home, in the town. So Rhinla tried to fix the drawing to the paper with light, and it worked, when she’d put a lot of layers of light over it like we’d done on the door. That made her so tired that she could hardly walk any more so Master Jeran lifted her on the cart and let me walk beside the donkey by myself, through a gate in the wooden wall.

There was a wall-guard at the gate but he knew Master Jeran and let him through without asking who he was or if he had any papers saying he could get through.

This was a strange town! No water in it at all. as if it was all on one huge island. “Oh, there’s a lot of water,” Master Jeran said, “but it’s not around the town, it’s under the town and it comes out of the fountains everywhere.” And yes, we could see fountains where the streets met each other, with water coming out of them, and at one fountain someone was filling a bucket under the spout. So that’s how people get water here!

Master Jerain pointed out a big stone house, “that’s the school! But we’ll go to my house first.”

That was a nice house! It was built of wood with what looked like the kind of straw stuff in between that you could break away and get in, but Master Jeran told us that most of it was stone with just the white layer over it. And once we were inside we could see the stone between the wood. “That’s to prevent fires,” Master Jeran said, and of course stone doesn’t burn as quickly as straw! (But the house in Veray had been mostly of stone and there’d been a fire there too! Perhaps it was the wood between the stone that burned.)

Inside there was one big room with a fireplace and a table and a cupboard, and stairs going up. “You bring the stuff from the cart upstairs,” Master Jeran said, “and I’ll take the donkey to the stable.”

That wasn’t easy! Because the chest was so heavy that we had to haul it up the stairs one step at a time. But we got it there, and the room there was full of chests so that looked like a good place for it. There were more stairs in that room which went to a room full of painting stuff and paintings, so we put the painting stuff and paintings from the cart there.

“Where do you think Master Jeran sleeps?” Rhinla asked, and we found a little room to sleep in in the wall of the chest room. There was a bag of straw in it, and when we lifted that lots of critters ran out. The cat caught a mouse at once, and then another one, but a lot of other mice ran away and all the bugs ran or flew away too. The bag smelt so dirty that we took it outside behind the house and set fire to it with the tinderbox we’d found beside the fireplace.

Then Master Jeran came back with a big bag full of straw, not the right shape to put in a bed, just to carry the straw in. But he said that it was a good thing we’d burnt the old one, “that happens when you’re away for a while.” And he said that it was a good thing that the cat had caught the mice, and he hoped she’d catch the rest of the mice too. So the cat could live at Master Jeran’s house!

“I’ll take you to the school now,” Master Jeran said, “but first we’ll go to the bath-house. And you’ll need some new clothes, you can tell you’ve travelled all the way from Essle in these.”

“We’ve got money to pay for clothes,” we said, but the money from the boat was for the school, I think to pay for the food we’d get there and the paper and ink and other things that we were going to use.

“It’s all right,” Master Jeran said, “I’ll get it back from Rava.” We knew that Rava was the mistress of the school, and also the mother of the queen! She must have enough money to pay for things. So we went to the market and got a skirt and a shirt each, and bits of leather with a thong to bind to our feet, called ‘sandals’, because Rhinla said she wasn’t going to wear wooden shoes. And then we went to a bath-house and a woman washed us in a tub, just like Jerna, our hair as well, with soap that smelt of flowers, delicious! And another woman washed Master Jeran, and a boy washed our old clothes and rolled them up still wet and tied them in a cloth so we could carry them to somewhere we could hang them to dry.

Then we went to the school! We’d seen that it was a big stone house, and now we saw the yard too. There were a lot of people there, some only a little older than us, talking or reading or just sitting around. In one corner, boys and girls were having a fight with long sticks, in pairs, and it made as much noise as the two sheep! And every so often one of them fell to the ground and the other one waited for them to get up, we could see that it was a friendly fight. I stared at it so much that Master Jeran pulled at me to come along.

“Can I learn that too?” I asked. “I hit someone on the head with an oar, that’s even longer!” “Yes, I think you can learn that, and I think you won’t be allowed to do it until you do learn!” That was silly, how can I learn something if I’m not allowed to do it?

Master Jilan took us into the house and up the stairs and went through a door but he left us sitting on a bench in the passage. The wall opposite us was all white and plain and Rhinla painted on it with light, the stick-fighters and Master Jeran’s house and the mice and bugs running and flying away.

Then Master Jeran came out and said we had to go in, but he went away himself. There were two women in the room, one tall and old with pale skin and a sort of greyish-blonde hair, and one young and no taller than us, with brown skin, very beautiful. And the room was full of books! I saw where Rhinla was looking, not at the books but at the ink-pot on the table that the two women were behind.

The old woman said that she was Rava, and the other woman was Cora. I knew she wasn’t the queen, because the queen is called Raisse, but I did ask her if she was a queen because she was so beautiful. “No,” she said, “I’m not a  queen, I’m a doctor.” Rhinla said “then you must be ever so rich!” and she smiled and said “I’ve got enough.”

“Master Jeran told us some of your adventures,” Rava said, “but we’d like to hear it from you. After all, he didn’t know everything!” And we told them everything. Perhaps we told some things more than once because they asked questions and a bit of the story belonged to the answer. Rava smiled when she heard that the baroness of Tilis had said that the queen would send us to Turenay anyway, and if she wasn’t in Valdis she’d be in Turenay, and one should always do what the queen says because she’s so bossy! Then we realised that the queen was Rava’s daughter, and I said sorry, but she said “who do you think she gets it from?” But the queen wasn’t in Turenay at the moment, though she’d probably come soon.

Rava and Cora looked at each other as if they were talking but we couldn’t hear it. Then Cora nodded, but she looked a bit sad, and Rava said “You’d better live in my house for a while, and go to school to learn.”

“Can I learn to fight with sticks?” I asked. “And to read and write and count?”

“You must learn to read and write and count,” she said. “We’ve got a teacher who is very good at teaching people to read and write who never got the chance when they were little. And yes, you may learn to fight too.”

“And to draw?” Rhinla asked. But there wasn’t any teacher who could teach that, Master Jeran had been that teacher but he’d gone away to paint pictures of the fields near Veray and he’d said he wasn’t going to come back to the school. “Then I don’t know if I want to go to school here!” Rhinla said. Cora had her hands on Rhinla’s shoulders now and Rhinla was cuddling against her, but she still didn’t look happy.

“I do!” I said, “I want to learn to read all these books!”

But then Rava asked “Would you like to see the school?” and I would! And Rhinla said yes, she’d come along. There were two girls at the door who were going to show us around, Halla and Venla. They were older than us but not much. And Venla had almost the same colour of skin and hair as me!

We saw some more of the room with the books — there was a book full of maps and I could have looked at them forever but we were going on — and the room at the top of the house where the girls who lived in the school slept, with the room for the boys on the other side but we didn’t go in there, just like our men’s and women’s houses on the island, you only go to the other side when you’re invited. And we saw some rooms where people were learning but we didn’t go in either, only looked through the doorway of one. And the big room for eating with a fireplace at one end where a fire was burning.

“Is that a fire of the gods?” I asked.

“It’s for Anshen,” Venla said, and we stood at the fire and prayed, Venla and Halla knew all the words of course, but we knew most of the words too.

Then I asked “do you have a little house to piss in?” and Venla laughed and took me there, several little houses in fact, between some sheds at the end of the yard. When we came back Halla was talking to Rhinla in a voice that sounded as if she were threatening her, and Rhinla was getting more and more unhappy. Then Venla said something to Halla and Halla turned and walked away, with a glance over her shoulder at Rhinla that said “I’ll get you yet!” (Later we told Rava, and she said that it wasn’t good and she’d speak to Halla about it. I hope that doesn’t get us into more trouble.)

“What did she say?” I asked.

“She said that I was different, and that she’d keep an eye on me!”

“But everybody is different, right?” I said.

“I don’t know!” It was clear that Rhinla needed a place to think, to be alone, and Venla knew one: the temple! I was confused, wasn’t the temple the part of the eating-room with the fire? But there was a small building with eight sides near the school, not quite in the yard but on a square behind it, and there was a fire in the middle and the fire was full of Anshen. “Do you mind if I stay?” Venla asked, and Rhinla said she didn’t, and I didn’t mind either.

Then Rhinla drew on all the walls of the temple with light. Everything she was thinking of, all the parts of our story, and when she ran out of walls she started again on the first wall and the drawing that was already there disappeared. It didn’t seem to make her tired at all, as if she got all the light from the fire. I was happy to just sit there and watch her do it.

Venla and I talked about Anshen and the Nameless but I don’t remember much of what we said, because we went back to the school then and from there to Rava’s house. We got a room with one of those very soft beds full of feathers, and the woman who took us there asked if we wanted to eat first or to sleep first, and we said ‘eat’, but Rhinla tried the bed and fell asleep at once and I was so tired that I crawled in next to her and fell asleep too.

The boss woman gave us a piece of paper each and said that we’d be able to swap those for food in the palace yard, so we went where a lot of other people were going and coming back with food. And yes, we got a bowl of beans and green stuff and a bit of meat each, and a mug of something to drink, but when we made faces at that because it was bitter the person handing out food and drink took it away and gave us water with herbs steeped in it instead.

Someone asked us what cargo we had, and when we didn’t understand what that meant, what we were carrying in our boat. “Ourselves!” we said. “Then you could perhaps carry letters,” he said. “Ask at the temple.”

“What does the temple look like?” I asked.

“It’s built of wood, over there. With a blue stripe over the door.”

It was already late, getting dark, but there was a light in the temple and a woman was sitting at a table writing something. She had only one letter: for Veray, but we would pass that on our way to Turenay anyway. She gave it to me, and I peered at it and could read “Mizran”. “It’s for Mizran in Veray?” I asked.

“Sort of. Just give it to the temple there.”

“Does the temple in Veray have a blue stripe over the door as well?”

“I don’t know, probably not, but you can ask around, they’ll know where it is. You get one shilling from me now, and two when you deliver the letter.” And she gave me a silver shilling!

Then we went to sleep in the boat. We’d already asked where Turenay was: go past the bridge and take the right river-arm, not the left, and go against the stream. That sounded easy enough!

In the morning we caught a fish for breakfast and set out. There was a lot of water here, and it was hard to see exactly where the river-arm was, but we saw some other boats going that way, faster than us but we could follow them until it was clear where to go. Each of us rowed until she was tired, then the other one, and then we paused to catch fish, and eat, and feed the cat. Because the cat was still with us too, mostly sitting on a bench in the boat and looking out.

In the middle of the day a boat overtook us. We were careful in case they had someone with a bow and arrow on board, but they didn’t, not that we could see anyway. It was full of barrels. “Hey!” I called. “What’s in those barrels?”

“Air,” the people in the other boat said. “Going to Veray to have them filled with wine. Wine doesn’t grow in Essle.”

They were going faster than us so we went out of their way. A bit further on another boat started to overtake us, and they did have someone with a bow and arrow! So we hid in the reed field and ducked below the edge of the boat and I made us invisible. The cat didn’t like being invisible! She kept shaking and washing herself as if I’d doused her with water.

We travelled like that for some days, and then the river was more like water between pieces of land and less like a lot of water with some random reeds and bushes at the edges, and we could actually sit on a little island to eat. The cat liked it a lot: she wanted to catch tiny mice that were climbing the reeds, but the reeds weren’t strong enough to bear her weight and anyway the mice were too quick for her. She did catch a rat once, and ate it, and later she came back from hunting with a dead duck! “You eat it, cat,” we said, “we can’t!” But I saved some of the big wing feathers because they were like the feathers that the thankful man at the palace had been writing with. I think you need to cut a piece off the end because I saw him do that, but I haven’t tried it yet even though Rhinla has a sharp knife now.

Then there was more land, and some of it was higher than the rest, like an island on the land, though the water stayed flat. We saw a big island (in the water, not on the land) with something that looked like a house on it and a tree next to the house. We dragged the boat all the way to the tree to tie it up, because we didn’t know if the water would rise like at home. (It didn’t!) The house was all broken and the only useful thing in it was a broken jug, not right through but the rim had broken off so it was a bowl. We could light a fire in the fireplace and make fish stew in the broken jug! Then Rhinla thought of taking the fire with us in the bowl (after we’d eaten the stew, of course) so we wouldn’t have to light a fire every time. After that we ate our crayfish roasted every time! But the fishes were too large for the small fire so we ate them raw, not bad for fish that’s so fresh that it was swimming a moment before.

By now there was a path next to the water and we saw a couple of boats being pulled by animals, so Rhinla got an idea, she tied the boat-rope around herself and pulled the boat while I steered! That went faster than rowing against the stream, but the steering was difficult and she became just as tired as from rowing so we swapped after a while like we’d done with the rowing.

We hadn’t counted the days we’d been travelling! But it was perhaps more than one handful. And our small fire in the bowl was still going! We got dry sticks for it from any trees we passed, standing on the land or half in the water. And we took care to keep the reeds under it wet so it wouldn’t burn through the boat. That’s easy, to keep something wet, when you’re on the water!

There was still more and more land on our left and right, and higher and higher islands on the land, and sometimes everything was flowers! We got out of the boat and picked flowers and made garlands from them that we put on ourselves and the boat and the cat, but the cat shook them off and went away to catch things until the smell of fish called her back.

When we passed a couple of houses we thought that it might be Veray, but if it was, Veray was very small! There wasn’t room for a temple with a blue stripe over the door! And the people living there said it wasn’t Veray, it wasn’t even Nesh yet, it was one day to Nesh and four days from Nesh to Veray, if you were going upstream, if you were going downstream it was two days from Veray to Nesh. That figures, you don’t have to row or pull so hard if you’re going downstream because the water is already going that way.

Then we saw someone standing in a field, and it looked as if they were holding something large and white! “It’s a person,” I said, “but they’re standing still, they can’t be lost, can they?” I went to see what the person was doing, and it turned out to be a man, with a kind of rack in front of him with a piece of paper that he was making a picture of the landscape on! “Oh!” I said. “I’ll get my sister, she’ll be interested!” Not that I wasn’t interested but I thought Rhinla would be even more interested, and someone had to stay with the boat.

Rhinla was away a long time! And the boat was swaying so gently and the flowers smelt so nice that I fell asleep until she shook me awake. “Lesla! This is Jeran, he paints pictures, and I painted some pictures too!” And she showed me a picture of flowers that had the river on the other side, all in blue, and a picture of flowers with a bug crawling on them, as big as a mouse!

“I promised that we’ll take him to Nesh in the boat, that’s where he lives, and then he’ll give us things to eat. He doesn’t have any beans but he does have bread.” It was the rest of the day to Nesh where Jeran lived, but he was strong enough to take his turn pulling the boat too. And he knew a way to put fish on a stick to cook it over the fire!

It started to rain then, but Jeran had a piece of leather to keep his pictures from getting wet. And then I remembered the letter! Of course the letter was wet already, but Jeran put it between pieces of paper and the paper under his piece of leather. “That’ll dry it out,” he said. We talked a lot in the boat and after we got to his house. We said that we’d come from Essle and wanted to go to Valdis to ask the queen what to do but the boss woman in Tilis had said that the queen wasn’t in Valdis and would send us to Turenay anyway, she might even be in Turenay, so that was where we were going now.

“It’s time I went back,” Jeran said.

“To Essle?” I asked.

“No, to Turenay, that’s where I come from, too. Would you like to travel together?”

Yes, we would! Jeran was a nice man and it was great to have someone to talk to who wasn’t each other. “Let’s go tomorrow, then. From what I can see it would indeed be a good idea for you two to go to the school.”

“Is it for learning to count and figure, too? And read and write?” I asked.

“It’s for learning everything you need to learn,” he said. Rhinla still looked a bit dubious but I really wanted to go to that school now! Counting and figuring are so nice to learn. And it became even better when Jeran started to pack his paintings in a chest: he had six with paint on, and six without any paint on, and I was trying to count them all all, and it was too much to count them all on my fingers, for each hand I needed a finger of the other hand to make up the count. “Why not make an extra finger from light?” he asked, and I did, so I could count to two-more-than-ten easily! And he told me that two-more-than-ten is called “twelve”.

We slept on a rug on the floor, and Jeran slept in a tiny room in the wall with the doors closed, but he put something over the whole house that looked like paint to keep everything out that he didn’t want in. Only he’d forgotten the chimney! Rhinla tried to close the chimney with light but that didn’t stay in, not even when I helped, so we knocked on the doors of his tiny room to tell him the chimney wasn’t closed, and he laughed and closed the chimney. In the morning we had to piss! There was a little house behind the big house with a hole to piss in, but we couldn’t open the doors because the paint was still over the whole house. I tried to make a knife of light, but that didn’t do much, and then Rhinla tried with the real knife with light on it. That woke Jeran up but still didn’t open the door, but when he was awake anyway he opened the door for us.

In the days that we needed to go to Veray, Jeran told us that we’d all have to hide ourselves because Veray was full of people of the Nameless! That reminded us of Arin, and when we told Jeran about Arin he wanted to meet him. “It can’t be the Nameless’ son,” he said, “he doesn’t have any children! That made us talk a lot about the gods and whether they can have children and make love and get married, but that didn’t distract Jeran, he still wanted to meet Arin. “I don’t want to meet him ever again!” I said, but Jeran insisted, and we called Arin but he didn’t come.

Never mind, Jeran said, and we practiced hiding ourselves. The way Jeran did it was to pull his light into himself so that it was smaller than he was, but when Rhinla did that she disappeared completely, she’d disappeared inside Jeran’s head somehow! When they’d sorted that out, I thought I knew what to do so I sat in the hut in my head with the rain curtains down. “Not so far!” Jeran said, “just inside, you need to see what’s going on when you walk in the streets.” That made sense, we didn’t want to bump into people while looking for Mizran to give the letter to!

The next evening we called Arin again and he was there. I really didn’t want to see him, if Jeran wanted to see him he could talk to him! Rhinla thought the same so we went to catch crayfish, but when we got back Arin and Jeran were still talking so we shared the crayfish with the cat — Jeran would have to get his own supper! — and went to sleep. And in the morning Arin was gone.

“I still don’t know who he really is,” Jeran said, “I think he’s the Nameless a bit, and a bit not the Nameless. Perhaps he’s confused himself. I’ll have to tell this to the people in Turenay, there are some who might know more, and they’ll certainly want to know more!”

Then we saw a place that was big enough to be a town, though not by far as big as Essle, and that was Veray. But there was something like a cloud hanging over it, like light only dark! “Now we hide,” Jeran said, “they’re fighting!”

“Who?” we asked.

“People of the Nameless.”

“Who with?”

“Other people of the Nameless, they’re fighting among themselves, that’s all I can make of it.”

We got bored when we weren’t allowed to do anything! So we went to the thankful man and Rhinla asked him for paper and ink to draw and I asked him for a slate and a stick to write on so I could practice letters and numbers. We got a whole stack of paper, and black, blue and red ink! There wasn’t any green ink and that was a pity, but Rhinla made a blue river with black and red fishes swimming in it, and a red sunset with black clouds.

Then it became dark and we had an oil lamp but it wasn’t on, so I went to the kitchen to ask if they had some fire to light it. And they filled the lamp full of oil for me! And gave me a jug of water and a lot of food that was left over from the posh people’s dinner. But Rhinla still wouldn’t eat anything, however yummy the food smelled, she only drank some water. I was worried about her! But I couldn’t do anything about it.

Then we went to sleep, I on the sack of reeds and Rhinla in a nest of drawings.

In the morning someone knocked on our door! We knew from Master Jeran’s house that we ought to open the door if they did that, and it was a woman in grey clothes but we could see that under the clothes she had a bandage around her ribs and a bandage on her arm. And there was blood seeping through the bandages, it was red, like she’d only been wounded a short while ago! She had a sword on her belt, but there wasn’t any blood on the sword.

She said her name was Cynla, and we said our names too, and then she wanted to know everything that had happened when we fought the people on the boat. And when we didn’t want to tell that to just any strange woman she told us a lot about her own life, that she knew what it was like to kill someone because she’d done that too, but mostly because her boss had told her to do it. I don’t think it’s any better when your boss tells you to do it! But I do think it’s less bad when you kill bad people because they’re doing things like trying to kill you or someone else.

When Cynla was a little girl she fought some people who belonged to a different god than she and her mother did, and then they went to her house and beat up her mother and she was so angry that she stuck a knife in one of those people’s belly and killed him, and then went home and cried a lot. When she was done crying her mother told her about some people belonging to Anshen, the god of fighting, so she joined them and learned to fight properly with a sword. Those people were in order, or an order, or something like that. She mostly fights people who belong to Archan, I don’t know who that is the god of but he’s got a lot of bad people belonging to him. Perhaps he’s the god of bad people, but then why would people want to belong to him?

I was thinking whether I’d like to join those fighting people too, but I don’t like to fight, not even against bad people! I like to find out things, and to count, and to write letters and numbers! I want to learn a lot more of that.

Cynla sent me to get her something to eat and drink then, but I thought that was because she wanted to talk to Rhinla alone. She could have said that, I’m not stupid! But something to eat and drink was a good idea, and I also found the tiny room over the water again where you could piss into the water instead of in a bucket so I did that too.

In the kitchen I got a jug of water and a plate full of pancakes with cheese inside! And apples and berries, too. And when I came back to our room Cynla was still listening to Rhinla talk about the fight, so I hadn’t missed anything. Now she asked us to look at her to see if she had holes in her light, and she didn’t, but she looked as if her body-of-light had bruises on the head. “Did they hit you on the head too?” I asked.

“Yes, sort of,” she said. Rhinla was already stroking it better, and when I saw how she did it I could do it too. It was like polishing! And it made it shine more, like polishing a shiny thing does.

“Can’t everybody who can see people’s light see if there are holes in it?” I asked, because I couldn’t imagine that we were the only two people in the palace who could see that! And if there were a lot of people why did we need to see everybody? We’d been doing it all day and there were still people we hadn’t seen. But Cynla didn’t give an answer that we had any use for, or that we even understood. (That’s probably why I don’t remember what she said exactly, but it was about different people seeing different things.)

I don’t know how we got to it –perhaps because Rhinla asked “can’t all the bad people see you too if you give that much light?”– but Cynla said that you could shut it off, like closing your eyes. I closed my eyes but I could still see people’s light! “Close the eyes of your closed eyes!” Cynla said, “and it doesn’t stop you from seeing, but it stops people from seeing you. Would you like to learn that?”

Yes, we would! If the bad people who could look through houses couldn’t see us, it would be a lot less scary.

“Lesla can make herself invisible!” Rhinla said, and then I had to do it, of course, go into the corridor and be invisible and someone in blue clothes with ribbons (a servant, I knew now) almost bumped into me. But when I went back into the room Cynla and Rhinla saw me anyway because I hadn’t learned yet how to make the light invisible too, and it didn’t help that I’d closed the door when I went out so they saw it open.

“I see what you’re doing though,” Cynla said. “I’d like to see you looking at people to see if they’re ill!” But we noticed that she was bleeding worse again, and got another servant in the corridor to fetch someone to bring clean bandages. And when that someone came, with a basket full of linen and wound-cleaning stuff, we looked at him and let Cynla watch and we saw that there was nothing wrong with him. Perhaps she’d have learned more if there had been something wrong, but we couldn’t help that.

Then Cynla really needed to sleep and we went to a place where we’d been before, an outside place but sort of inside because it had walls all around it (but no roof) with trees and bushes and a pool of water, to wash ourselves. There was a cat there, white with red and black patches, who didn’t mind that we carried her inside, she just kept purring and went to sleep on Cynla’s feet.

We were worried that nobody had asked us to do more work! Because Master Jeran would need a lot of money to pay the man who was making Jerna better. Just as we wanted to go and ask the thankful man he came, to see if Cynla was all right, we said, and we asked him right then and he looked a little strange as if he hadn’t expected it but let us sit in the same rooms again and look at more people. And then it ended! There were no more people to look at, we’d seen them all.

“Why couldn’t we be in the same room?” Rhinla asked. But that was because they wanted to make sure that if someone was ill we both saw it without telling each other, so they could be double-sure. And still nobody told us if anyone who could see light could have done that. Every time we asked they said things that weren’t the answer.

So we went back to Cynla but she was still asleep, and we went to sleep too, on the floor in Rhinla’s nest of drawings with the cat between us. And later, when we were all awake, we talked some more about the gods, that Anshen mostly doesn’t say anything but when you pray to him (that was a word we didn’t know but it means talk to the gods, ask them things, that kind of thing) it could happen that you know what he would have said if he’d said it, and that Archan talks a lot but that’s mostly lies. And she took us each by a hand in front of the fire (I had to get an armful of firewood first and make a fire in the hole in the wall that is for making fires in) and said things that we had to repeat, like a song, but the sound didn’t move around much like songs, it stayed in the same place in her voice. “I don’t think I can remember that!” I said, but we didn’t need to remember it right away.

The next day we went to the thankful man and asked if there was any more work to do because we needed to pay a lot of money for making Jerna better, but he said we’d earned more than enough money for that! When we came back and said that to Cynla, she said that she would be in the palace for a couple of weeks to let her wounds heal and she could teach us as much as we could learn if we stayed with her. (And the thankful man had said that we could stay, so that was no problem.) But we did want to go and see Jerna, and then home to Faran because he was sure to be worried and perhaps he was angry! And tell the priestess why we hadn’t come to school. (Cynla said she could teach me more letters! I want to learn all the letters! The letters I know already are about half the letters there are, if you don’t want to write foreign languages because those have their own different letters, she says.)

We had a boat of our own now! No oars, because they’d both escaped in the fight, but we could use a pair from the palace. Cynla came with us because she wanted to talk to Faran too and perhaps to the priestess. And she had a sword, and nobody needed to know that she was too wounded to use it, she could just hold it up and chase people away. We had to help her into the boat but once we’d put the long pillow from the bed at her back she was all right. Rhinla rowed and I steered the first part of the way, to Master Jeran’s house.

Master Jeran was surprised! Not that we were there, but that we had Cynla with us. “This is Cynla, she’s in order,” I said, and that surprised Master Jeran some more. Then we went up to where Jerna was lying in bed, and she was a lot better! “I think I can go home in a couple of days,” she said, and she was well enough now to come downstairs and meet Cynla. It was strange to see them together, I don’t know how to say it, as if they didn’t both fit in the same world though they both belonged with us. Because after even one day I had a feeling that Cynla was the sort of person who belonged with us, or we belonged with her. Perhaps because she was teaching us things.

Then I rowed the next part and Rhinla steered. We didn’t see any people with bows and arrows, and nobody who watched us through houses either, but we passed a boat full of bridge-guards and more than one boat with dead people. We couldn’t see if the dead people had died of illness or of getting a sword or a knife in their body, they were wrapped in cloths.

“It’s secret where we live,” Rhinla said to Cynla, “we have to blindfold you!” But she didn’t mind, she even had a cloth herself to use as a blindfold. That was a good thing, because otherwise one of us would have had to tear a strip off our new shirts!

Faran wasn’t angry, but he had sure been worried! He kept asking after Jerna even when we’d told him a couple of times. Then Cynla took him aside and talked to him very softly, so we couldn’t hear, and we saw him nod and bite his lip like he does when someone tells him something he knows already but he doesn’t know that he knows. And while they were talking, Rhinla and I took Rovan into the swamp to catch crayfish becaue Rhinla said she might be able to eat that. A lot of beautiful crayfish! They’d come back to the places where we’d caught them earlier because we hadn’t been there to catch them. When we got them back home and cooked them Faran ate a whole pile, and Cynla too, and Rovan and I, but Rhinla ate one and that was enough, she said. But at least she’d eaten something!

Cynla wanted to teach us something right here! We needed a place that we could close, so we took her to the women’s hut and let the rain-flaps down, and she closed it even more with light! And she tried to teach it to me too when I asked, but it was very difficult and I couldn’t do it yet. Then she asked us where we felt the most safe, and I said “Here!” so she made me have the place in my head so I could come back to it when I didn’t feel safe somewhere else. Strange to go to a place in my own head! But I think I got it right, I even hung my hair-ribbon on the hammock to show it was my place. And when Rhinla had to have a place, she chose the temple of Naigha, with the priestess in the doorway to keep the other-side children away. “If Lesla can have a ribbon can I have stuff too?” she asked, and Cynla said yes, “anything you can think of”. So there she was in the temple in her head, with a lot of bottles of ink around her, in all colours, more than I could count!