Valdyis galsin

After a couple of days I felt better. At least I didn’t feel sick all the time any more, only when there was a bit more wind than at other times, and when I ate anything and forgot to look at the sea for a while afterwards. Rhinla was high up in the mast most of the time being lookout, lucky girl! And even Vurian was climbing up now though he wasn’t nearly as good at climbing as us. But there it went up and down, and back and forth, much more than on deck so I didn’t even try. It wouldn’t do to puke from the mast and hit someone below!

But at least I felt a bit like myself again and Cynla saw that and wanted to practice with us. Rhinla still got a headache if she used her mind too much, but Cynla said we’d only practice a little. “I expect there will be fighting,” she said, “so I want to teach you how to defend yourselves!” We’d already made the shield when the man in Veray threw the knife at us, but that was only on one side, now we were going to make something on all sides. “You protect yourselves, and I’m going to hit you, if I get through you’ll feel it. Can you make a cloak of spirit?” We all could. “Now pull it as close to yourself as you can, and make it as hard as possible.”

“Are you going to punch or stab?” Rhinla asked. “Because if you’re punching I need a cloak of leather or cork, but if you’re stabbing it needs to be of stone or iron.”

“I’ll stab,” Cynla said, and Rhinla covered herself with stone, and I made a copper kettle to sit in, and we didn’t know what Vurian did but he did look protected. Then Cynla stabbed with a knife made of ryst! And my kettle went “poinggg” like copper kettles do but she got through Rhinla’s cover a bit and the knife stuck in it so Rhinla could grab it and try to pull it out, but Cynla made it disappear.

“I see,” I said, “you’ve imagined it so you can unimagine it too!”

“Now I’m going to lie in my hammock below,” Cynla said, “and then you touch me with your mind! But if I spot you, I’ll attack.”

“Can we work together?”

“I didn’t say you couldn’t,” Cynla said. And down the ladder she went.

When she was out of sight we put our heads together and decided that two of us would protect all of us while the third went down to get Cynla. Rhinla was first, and she made a lot of spirit gnats, but they couldn’t get through Cynla’s protection until she kicked her in the mind-butt to startle her.

Then it was my turn, and I imagined a fork — first a pitchfork, but that was too big to handle, so it became one of those large forks that cooks prick meat with to see if it’s done — and went down the ladder with it. That frightened Rhinla and Vurian! Because my spirit went down but my body stayed with them, without the spirit in it.

When I got down I couldn’t see Cynla at all, however hard I looked! But she’d said she’d be in the hammock so I stabbed the fork into the hammock from below and she yelped and became visible. Then I went up the ladder again before she could catch me.

“You were gone!” Rhinla said. “You were out of your body!” But I was in my body now, and my hands and feet were very cold and my legs were stiff so I had to stretch before I could help protect Vurian as he went down.

Vurian didn’t send his whole spirit down, only a sword he’d imagined, and after a while we heard Cynla yelp. Well done, all of you, she said in our heads.

Later, I complained that she’d been invisible, and she said “well, I thought I shouldn’t make it too easy for you!”

“Next time you could go somewhere else when you’re being invisible,” I said, “because it was easy, you said you’d be in your hammock so I pricked the hammock!” “Yes,” she said with a grin, “you were cleverer than me.”

Then Rhinla, who was in the top of the mast again, called out “There’s a ship in front of us!” And so there was! “May we look for people?” we asked, but Cynla said no, she’d look herself, and then told us to make ourselves as invisible as possible. The ship was full of people of the Nameless! “What are they doing there?” I asked. “Do you think they want to catch us? Or Vurian?”

“I don’t know,” Cynla said, “but better be careful, we want as little as possible to do with them.”

Rhinla curled up on a rolled-up rope and went to sleep, like a cat, and after a while the real cat joined her, while I went and helped the cook cut up carrots and turnips for the stew. The carrots were much nicer raw, and I nibbled on one while working, the cook didn’t mind.

After we’d eaten the stew we were all so tired that we really wanted to turn in, even Rhinla who’d been asleep for a couple of hours. When we were in our hammocks I noticed that Vurian was dreaming, a little uneasy but not very much, so I brushed him a little from where I lay but soon fell asleep myself.

Then Rhinla shook me awake! She’d got up in the middle of the night and went on deck to help Cynla keep watch, and now someone was trying to set fire to the ship with their mind! I scrambled up the ladder, and Vurian too, and we spent half the night throwing buckets of water at the sail and several other places that someone on the other ship was making hot enough to catch fire.

“Now I can look!” Rhinla said, “they know where we are anyway!” And she did, from behind a shield she made, just peeking past, and she saw three people of the Nameless on the other ship. One of them was the woman I’d hit with the oar when she and her friends were trying to kill us, and Rhinla drowned one after she’d bitten his ear off!

They stopped after a while, but we stayed on deck to keep watch with the sailors, Vurian down in the hold, Cynla on one side, I on the other side and Rhinla in front. None of the sailors could keep watch with their minds, but they could see if the other ship sent a boat with people with grappling hooks and knives and swords. They didn’t, though. Only Vurian came to get us because someone had tried to make a fire where he was. And now the other ship had put its lights out so we couldn’t see it any more except with our minds.

“Can people see it when you look at them?” I asked Cynla.

“Sometimes. We’ll practice that,” she said.

Then Cynla said she’d ask the captain to make our ship go slower so there would be more room between the other ship and us and it would be harder for them to do things. But Rhinla wanted us to overtake them, and fight! Cynla didn’t think that was a good idea, but she’d have to speak with the captain anyway and the captain was asleep so they didn’t argue about it right then.

Rhinla and Vurian went to bed then, because they were both too tired to fight or even stay awake, but I stayed to keep watch with Cynla. We talked, mostly so we wouldn’t fall asleep. “What do you think of the whole thing?” Cynla asked me, and I thought for a bit and I said “they don’t have to be killed, they just have to be somewhere else than we are! It would be bad to fight on a ship with a lot of sailors who don’t have anything to do with what the fight is about. Better wait until you’re on land and fight only the people you have a quarrel with!”

“But the people of the Nameless would think it’s all right if other people die too,” Cynla said. Well, duh! That’s why I’m not with the Nameless.

When it was day again Cynla talked to the captain and he ordered the sailors to take in some of the sail so the ship went slower. The cook grumbled about that, perhaps he’d run out of food if it took too long to get to Selday! Then Rhinla hung a fishing-line from the railing, with a worm from the hard-tack on the hook. She forgot it for half a day! But when we remembered it was there, it had caught a great big fish and we ate it.

The other ship was now so far ahead that we couldn’t see it with our eyes any more, except the people who climbed into the mast (Rhinla was one). We could still see it with our mind if we wanted but Cynla said to be very careful because if we could see them, they could see us.

The cook still grumbled, fish or no fish, and made porridge from hard-tack with some worms in it for flavour.

We passed Selday (where the other ship had gone), and Rhinla and I asked to put us and Vurian ashore and not take us to Selday, because we needed to go to the west over land anyway! And if the people on the other ship couldn’t find us, they wouldn’t be able to catch us. So we got a little boat with a sailor in it (to take it back to the ship, we could have handled a boat between us, I think even on the sea) to put us on the shore, on a little bit of beach between the sheer white cliffs. You could see how high the water came, even in the dark, because there was a lot of seaweed lying there, so we could sleep between the cliff and the seaweed and not get wet by surprise.

In the morning we caught crabs and mussels and picked up some seaweed and dry driftwood, and found a place where water came down the cliff that was only a little salty, so we could wash the salt off ourselves. And we made a delicious stew with the crabs and mussles and seaweed (Seaweed is like salty cabbage, very nice). Where the water came down there was also a place where we could climb up, not really easily, but Rhinla and I could give Vurian a hand up in the places were it was too hard for him. And I had the cat in the front of my shirt for a while, but she escaped and found her own way up.

Now we were on top of the white cliff! It was almost completely flat there, with a line of trees further inland, round yellow fruit growing on them. We tried one, and the rind was tough and bitter but it was sweet and juicy inside, so we picked some more and sucked the pulp out and threw the rinds into the sea. Perhaps some fish will like it!

We stopped to look around with our minds, we hadn’t done that yet, and we saw a lot of people behind us, the way we weren’t going, and fewer people in front of us, and one person quite close by, also in the right direction.

That person came closer! And it turned out to be a man with very dark skin, and a herd of goats with him. “Hi!” Rhinla said. “Is your name Tao?”

“Why, yes,” the man said, “how do you know?”

“We know someone in Essle who looks like you and his name is Tao. You’re Ishey, right?” And that was also right.

The man called Tao was looking from side to side as if he was searching for something, and when we asked he said he’d lost one of his little goats. So we offered to watch the rest of the goats while he looked in the bushes! Then we learned that none of us were cut out to be goatherds, and that the cat wasn’t cut out to be a dog (but Tao’s dog stayed, and did most of the work). It was fun, though, to run after the goats when they tried to escape! And Tao came back carrying the little goat that he’d found down a crack in the cliff, and pointed the way to the nearest village.

That was tiny! Only five houses, I could count them on one hand! And nobody in the houses was gifted, a good thing, or perhaps they wouldn’t want Vurian with the Nameless still in his head.

The people were surprised that we were there (“where have you come from? From the sea?”) but they gave us soup and bread and let us sleep in the hayloft. We wanted to buy horses from them, but the village had only two and they couldn’t sell them both. Well, one horse would perhaps be enough for a while. But first, sleep!

After all the hard work we put ashore and made a small fire and sat there eating some more of the pancakes. Not all, so we’d have some left for breakfast, but a lot, because we were all very hungry.

Rhinla thought of making fireworks! She took a willow-twig, lit it in the fire and threw it up and towards the water so it made an arc of sparks first and then hit the water with a psssh! and a splash. Vurian and I joined her, until we were so tired that we couldn’t help falling asleep.

In the morning we caught fish first, and then we swam (and taught Vurian to swim a bit) and then ate the fish. And the last pancakes, too. I rinsed the barrel in the water, we’d find a use for it! We took turns poling, that was another thing we taught Vurian. He was strong in the shoulders, so when he got the hang of it he did well enough.

We went on like that for a couple of days, stopping at dusk, fishing in the shallows. catching crayfish and sharing them with the cat. (The cat was catching water-rats too, but we all liked fish much better than rat!) And when it was my or Vurian’s turn to pole Rhinla used the slate to draw pictures of everything, and when it was her turn I used it to practice letters and do sums. Sums with money! I counted everything in the purse and there were ten and ten and ten and another four big silver riders in it, thirty-four! And at least as many of the smaller silver coins that were shillings, and little silver half-shillings, and copper pennies.

Then it became dark before it was evening. A huge storm-cloud! Rain, too, and thunder. We dragged the boat to high ground — we were in the wetlands now, not much ground at all, but some parts were so high that they stood above the water like islands — and turned it so we could sit under it. Rhinla played with light, making garlands, and little pigs that ran around us. “Can you do rats and mice?” I asked, but she didn’t want to do that because she thought the cat would chase them. She made kittens, though, but the cat didn’t even seem to see them!

We taught Vurian a lot of words on the way, and also when we were waiting out the storm. He was sort of all right now he didn’t have the hole in his head any more, except that it’s hard to be friends if you can’t understand each other properly. And of course he still had the Namelesses in his head, and that made it hard to be friends too.

But we could show each other things! We showed him Essle, the places we knew best, and he showed us something like a city only it was inside, with a roof over it, and a large place like a square (only with a roof) where people about our age were fighting with swords and sticks, it looked like practicing. Perhaps they were practicing for fighting the rivals!

Then the rain stopped, and I caught a big fish, and we wanted to roast it because the rain had made us cold as well as wet! But all the wood we could find was too wet to burn. “Wait, I can do that,” Rhinla said, and she got so angry at the wood for being wet that it became hotter and hotter and it dried itself out and caught fire! There was still a lot of smoke because some of the wood had stayed wet and not caught fire and it smouldered, but smoked fish is just as nice! After we’d eaten the fish Rhinla put the rest of the fire in the empty barrel, and we caught a lot of eels and put those on top so they’d get smoked too.

We’d looked around with our minds to see if we could find other people, and we did find some: a woman with two children who had passed us earlier. The children weren’t much younger than us but I didn’t think they got to pole or row or scull, they’d probably get very bored! And when we caught up with them it was clear that they were, because they were fighting and their mother was yelling at them. We joined them on their boat (it was lying near the bank) and I pushed the boy into the water. The girl jumped after him, and when they’d cooled off a bit we all swam and talked. They were going to Essle to bring stuff in their boat — we forgot to ask what kind of stuff, but it was all under oiled cloths. We all left at the same time, but their boat went faster, perhaps because the mother was taller than us and could scull faster!

When it started to get dark we could see Tilis, so we went on, and we were there when it was completely dark but Rhinla had made a light that she held up like a lamp so we could see where we were. We put the boat under the big house where a lot of other boats were too, and Rhinla gave me the purse to get something to eat. “Soup!” she said, and gave me the bucket. “And bread!” I said.

There was someone on the bridge to the big house, with a poleaxe, so I asked him if he was a bridge guard. “Sort of,” he said, “do you want to go in?”

“No, I only want to ask where to get soup and bread.”

“There’s the White Swan right across that square,” he said, “they’ll still have some.”

The White Swan was a large inn, on stilts like the big house, but there were horses under it, not boats, because the stilts stood on land instead of water. I climbed the stairs to the main room and found it full of people eating soup, that was encouraging! And they filled my bucket in the kitchen for a couple of pennies, and gave me some bread for another couple of pennies. There were little white beans in the soup and pieces of all kinds of vegetables and some kind of meat, and it smelt so yummy that it was hard not to start eating right away! But I got the whole bucket to the boat and we shared it out in the bowls and there was enough to fill the bowls again when they were empty.

In the morning we asked the guard (it was a different guard now) if he could watch the boat, and yes, he would, that was his job! So he was a boat guard, not a bridge guard. We told him we were going to see if the White Swan had any pancakes, and he said “could you bring one for me too?” But in the White Swan everybody else was eating porridge or bread-and-cheese. Rhinla was bold, though, and just asked for them. “How many would you like?” the cook asked, and Rhinla said “Ten! Ten each!”

And we got them! We were so full of pancakes! And we got another one for the boat guard and rolled it up with treacle on it. It didn’t cost much, all those pancakes for one half-shilling, and we got a cup of milk each and the cook said we didn’t have to pay for that. Perhaps the people in Tilis like kids who like their pancakes that much!

Then it was not very far to Essle, but it still took us longer than from Essle to Tilis because then Arin had been pushing us! And now even if he’d been there to push we’d say no to him because now we know he’s some sort of the Nameless.

We were kind of scared to come back to Essle because we didn’t know who had died of the sickness, perhaps everybody! But the priestess was in her temple. And once she’d seen us she asked her neighbour to watch the boat and took us inside and we told her everything.

“Hm,” she said, “there is something wrong with you. You’re sick in your spirit.” Now we did have a hole in our spirit, Rhinla and I both, but that didn’t make me feel sick! But we’d go and find a doctor who knew about spirits. Or Cynla, because she also knew about spirits. Or someone else in the house where Cynla belonged, the house of the Order.

“Stupid gods,” Rhinla said. “You can’t trust them! Well, except Naigha, she is honest at least.” The priestess could only agree with that, of course. She stroked our heads, and that felt good, as if something that had been too hot before was now nice and cool.

Now we asked what he hadn’t dared ask before. “Are Jerna and Faran and Rovan still alive?” They were! And even Arin was still alive. We didn’t ask about the witch, and especially Rhinla didn’t want to go and see her.

Then we went to our own island! Faran was there, mending something. “Hey! It’s you! We thought you were gone but now you’re back!”

“Yes,” we said, “but we’re not staying long, we’ve got a job to do!” And we told Faran everything too, though I don’t think he understood everything. That wasn’t so bad because after all we didn’t understand everything either. “Where’s Rovan? And Jerna?”

“Jerna went fishing, she’ll be back soon. Rovan went into town.”

“By himself? But he’s only six!” (But then we’d been going into town when we were that small, too!)

“He didn’t go far, I think.” And then Faran called him, and soon enough he came swimming through the reed field and hugged us. He wanted to hear everything too, of course. And he said a couple of things that sounded very wise for someone who is only six (but I don’t know what the things were now, only that he sounded wise when he said them).

“Things have changed in town,” Faran said. “You should watch out for the people in the black boats.”

“Do they try to shoot you dead?” Rhinla asked.

“Sometimes,” Faran said. “Mostly they’re nasty to other people in boats.”

Then Jerna came back and we hugged her like anything. “Are you staying?” she asked. “At least tonight?” We weren’t; we had to find the doctor! But I’d picked wild garlic and mint and fennel to eat with the fish, and we did stay to eat it.

We went south then, past Master Jeran’s house (and we didn’t stop to talk to him), past the boat-house, to the under-king’s palace. We did see a couple of black boats! The first had one person sculling and two people sitting in it, the other two no passengers at all but the people sculling it each had a bow at their side. I hid our boat a little and they didn’t seem to notice us. When Vurian noticed what I was doing he helped me, he had a lot of strength to hide things!

Once we were at the palace we asked a palace guard where the house of the Order was, because if Cynla was there at all that was the place to find her! He told us a lot of complicated things but it ended with “and ask again there” so we’d probably find it. Then I hid the boat again, and we went the right way while Rhinla searched for Cynla. And she found her!

The house was on the other end of a wooden bridge that we could tie the boat to. There was a guard on the bridge, a young man, who wasn’t sure that he could let us in but when we asked for Cynla he called her. And then she wasn’t sure that she could let us in, because Vurian had at least three Namelesses in his head, she said! “Is he a friend of yours?” she asked, and we said “yes” and “we’re taking care of him” and “Anshen said that we should”.

Well, we got over the bridge at least. And we told everything to Cynla. Then Cynla said “excuse me” and disappeared into the temple that was in the middle of the house (it wasn’t one house really, but houses all around the edge of the island, with a large space in the middle that had the temple on it and room for people to train with weapons). And when she came back she said that Anshen had told her, without words, that it was none of her business. When she’d just decided she wanted to come with us!

“You can’t anyway,” we said, “Anshen said he wanted us to go because we haven’t learned too much, people who know everything you know can’t do it.” But we still didn’t know exactly why so we couldn’t tell Cynla exactly why either.

Now I wanted to be in the temple too! It was just like the one in Turenay only really big. Rhinla and I sat by the fire (I think Rhinla was glaring at Anshen) and then Vurian came in too, very shy. He still had the Namelesses in his head, the ordinary one and Arin, not the really scary one. And Anshen was in his head too, arguing with them. I thought of the squabbling kids at the boat and pushed the Nameless (the ordinary one) into the water — I had to imagine some water for that first, but that was easy. He didn’t go away or anything, but he was startled enough to stop arguing. Now only Anshen was arguing with Arin, and Rhinla tried to cover the ears of Vurian’s spirit so he could think for himself for once. She took him out of the temple, too.

I stayed, and Anshen filled me, all of me, the hole in my spirit too (but it was just filled up, not closed, it was still a hole). Cynla saw that later, but I said to her “I don’t want to join the Order! At least not now!”

We wanted to know if Vurian really wanted the Nameless out of his head, and we thought it would be best to do that in a dream, so we could at least understand each other! Cynla thought that was a good idea and offered us a room as close to the temple as possible. “Would you like me to stay with you?” she asked, and I asked her to stand outside and keep watch.

Then the doctor came back! He had brown skin, and we asked if he was from Iss-Peran, and he was! And he could talk to Vurian in a language that he understood! He told us that Vurian was from Ashas, far in the south of Iss-Peran, and his name was really Vurian, it wasn’t a name he was using because he was in Valdyas, some people from Ashas do have Valdyan names.

The doctor took us into his room and looked at the holes in our spirit. “Can you fix it?” I asked, but he said no, people can’t fix that, only the gods can. But he’d teach us a way to stop spirit leaking out of us. We had to think of our own way to do that, because then it would work best. Rhinla made something like very hard eggshell, and I made something like the poultice that Rovan had put on the dog, and Vurian made something like a very straight and flat bit of wall, and they all worked.

“You do that every day when you get up,” the doctor said, “when you’re saying your morning prayers. And in the evening too, twice a day.”

“For the rest of our lives?” I asked, and the doctor said “yes, unless the gods fix it.” “Perhaps the rest of our lives won’t be long,” Rhinla said, “we might all die in Dol-Rayen!”

Then we asked for headache tea, and got some, and a bunch of mint when I said I liked the tea (the doctor didn’t) but with mint it was even better.

We set out on the reed boat as soon as everything was ready. Rhinla had made a special thick piece of boat to hide the purse full of money in! We put Vurian between us and taught him to paddle, but he was too tired to paddle so we wedged him more securely so he could sleep. And I put my head on his butt and slept too, because I hadn’t had much sleep last night.

When I woke up we were already almost in Veray! It really went a lot faster downstream. We put the boat ashore in a reed-field so it wouldn’t stand out, and hid ourselves as well as we could, and went to Maile’s house where Master Jeran had had a room. We couldn’t have that room but we could have a room, for a day and a night, and we could pay for it, too, we had the money-purse for that kind of thing! Now Rhinla wanted to sleep because she’d been paddling the boat to Veray all night long, and she locked herself in the room with Vurian and I went into town with the purse to buy a boat. Not that I knew where or how to buy a boat! But I decided to go to the harbour because that was full of boats.

When I passed the house where the fighting had been, there was a boy about my age with the people repairing it. “Hey,” I said, “looks good, last time I saw this house it was on fire!” We talked about that for a bit while he worked, but I don’t think he knew anything about the fight. “Would you know where I can buy a boat?” I finally asked him, because he lived in Veray and he just might know people I didn’t know existed.

“I don’t buy a lot of boats!” he said, “How big does it have to be?”

“For three people to go to Tilis in,” I said. And yes, he thought his uncle might want to sell his boat, because the uncle was too old to go fishing! He could take me there but he’d be working all day, of course, so I promised to be back at sunset if I wanted the boat and not come back if I found another one before then.

Then I went to the harbour and saw boats being made, and boats being painted, and boats being repaired, and boats being broken into pieces, and boats being loaded and unloaded. And I looked where boats were going from the harbour and how to get out of the harbour without standing out because of doing something different than everybody else.

I was so full of boats then that I started back, but it was through different streets because I’d walked quite a long way along the harbour. Near a large white building I saw a cat that looked familiar! I thought we’d left that cat with Master Jeran in Turenay! The cat went into the building, and I followed her, it looked like a place where you could just go in like a temple of Naigha, only not of Naigha. I found the cat sitting at the feet of a huge statue of a woman with a child on her arm, looking as if she was at home there (the cat, not the woman, though the woman was at home too, I could see that). I sat there for a long time, stroking the cat. I really was the cat! She smelt a little like oil paint!

A girl with skin about as brown as mine, and hair about as curly as Rhinla’s, asked “Can I help you? You look like you need something from Dayati.”

“I don’t think you can help,” I said, “my sister is angry but not with me.”

“Can you tell me why?”

“No,” I said, “it’s not mine to tell.” But I could say that this place felt very good and safe, and she said that it was the temple of Dayati and that Dayati was Timoine. I didn’t know Timoine was a grown-up lady with a baby! The priestess in Essle had never told us that when she was teaching us about the gods. But it was the Síthi people who had built the temple because there were so many of them living in Veray, the girl told me (and also that her name was Prithi) so perhaps people from different countries see different parts of the gods.

I went to get Rhinla to look at the cat, and I wanted to get Vurian too but Rhinla locked him into the room. That was a pity because I thought it would be good for Vurian to be in the temple! And Rhinla wasn’t convinced it really was the same cat, but she (the cat) wanted to come with us, Prithi said so too.

Then the sun was almost setting so we went back to the boy mending the house. He took us to a bit of harbour where there were little huts and fishing-boats. His uncle was sitting in front of his hut, mending a net. He was called Ervan and his nephew was Erian. The boat was just the right size! And everything that needs to be in a boat was in the boat, except the oars, they were lying in a rack next to it.

Rhinla said that she wasn’t going to pay more than twelve silver riders for it because that was what a boat cost! But I thought boats didn’t usually cost that much, the twelve riders had just been because Master Jeran wanted the bad people to pay us enough money to go to school with.

“You know what,” Uncle Ervan said, “I’ll sell you the boat for twelve new-minted riders or six old tarnished riders.”

I found six old tarnished riders in the purse! Five with the head of the king on it, and one with the head of a queen who Rhinla said wasn’t the real queen because the queen was thin and the head was of a chubby woman. But Uncle Ervan said that this was the old queen, the king’s mother.

We paid him the six riders and now we had a boat! And on the way back to our room we passed a butcher and bought a little barrel of salt pork and a hard sausage. Rhinla wanted to take a barrel of pancakes too! “I don’t think pancakes come in barrels,” I said, but we bought an empty barrel for a couple of pennies.

And Maile promised to bake pancakes if we gave her two shillings extra for the flour and milk and eggs! She started at once because, she said, filling the barrel would take a lot of pancakes! But first she took a pie out of the oven and cut it into eight pieces. “Is there anyone else living in the house?” we asked, but the people who were didn’t eat in the kitchen, we could have two pieces each, and that felt like twice as much pie. There was chicken and turnip and carrot and eggs in the pie!

But Rhinla was still angry and I didn’t know what to do about that. And we were up half the night again because Vurian was dreaming bad dreams about sitting on a cart in a cage that he only just fitted in.

In the morning we had a barrel full of pancakes! With honey and butter between the layers. I carried it, and we made Vurian carry the barrel of pork, and Rhinla carried the sausage and the bucket with cups and bowls and spoons.

When we got to Uncle Ervan’s house he’d put the boat ready for us, so we were away at once, and that was a good thing because there was a scary person looking at us! With their mind, we couldn’t see who it was, but it felt like a man. Vurian was very scared, and I knew it had something to do with his dream, perhaps he’d dreamed of the scary man, but he still didn’t speak anything we could understand and I hadn’t been in his dream this time.

Getting away from the scary man didn’t make Vurian less scared, he looked as if he got more scared! So I brushed him some more with the imaginary brush, but this time it snagged on something when I did that, and I found a kind of thread that was fixed to his head and it went somewhere, it looked like all the way to Veray! Now that was really scary! We wondered whether to cut it because it looked as if someone was sucking something out of him through it. I tried to reel it in like fishing-line, and got a bit of it bunched up in my hand, but when I let it go it was back where it had been.

And I think my pulling alerted someone because there was something rushing at us! Rhinla and I made a shield at the same time, like we’d learned from Lord Vurian! And the something hit it with a loud crash (at least in my head it was loud), and stuck in it trembling, and it was a black knife made of power, of mind-stuff. Rhinla pulled it out and looked at it with a disgusted look on her face. “Perhaps I can cut the line with this,” she said, but she threw it back where it had come from instead. She couldn’t throw it all the way to Veray but it gave her an idea. “Hey, cat,” she said, “make yourself useful, will you, and catch me a live rat!”

Catching live rats isn’t hard for a cat but bringing them back still alive is, and the rat wasn’t very alive when the cat brought it back but alive enough. So Rhinla smeared a lot of power on the rat and put the rat on the line and gave it a push. It ran along the line for a bit and then fell off, but the power went on and on and we knew it was hitting the scary man!

All that time we were going farther and farther away from Veray, and the thread pulled thinner and thinner, and I saw us arriving in Tilis or even in Dol-Rayen with Vurian on a thread that was too thin to even see! There must be a way to get it off him. “Let’s take him to the doctor in Essle,” I said, “or to the witch, or the woman from the Order!” But Rhinla wanted us to try before then, and she saw that there was something missing in Vurian’s head, a bit of his spirit, and she tried to give him a bit of her own spirit to fill the hole. And that worked! The hole was still there but it was a lot smaller. I could see that Rhinla now had a hole in her spirit too, and I couldn’t fix it like we’d fixed the holes in people’s light, so it took me some time to decide to give Vurian a bit of me as well. But I did. And when the hole in his spirit was patched we could cut the line with an ordinary knife. Though i think there was a bit of anea on the knife, too.

The first thing Rhinla did then was check if she could still paint, if she hadn’t given that piece of herself away! But she could. We couldn’t see which pieces we’d given away at all, but it really was what Vurian needed.

And then we were all so hungry that we ate a lot of pancakes from the barrel, nice sticky ones!

I slept through most of the feast! But Rhinla (and everybody else) told me I’d been almost dead after I fell off the horse. Or perhaps I fell off the horse because I was almost dead. Someone had hit me inside of my head!

I think I woke up a little because Anshen was poking me but I told him I was too tired to listen, so I only got to the bonfire when it was almost out. And Lady Rava told me not to do anything with my mind for a week, but I could swim and practice stick-fighting and climb trees, no problem! So I swam and practiced stick-fighting (there’s a farm boy about my size only fatter, and he’s really good at it, so I practiced a lot with him) and climbed the trees. Apple trees are easy! And willow trees are fun, they’re in the water and they’re very bendy so you can pick a branch that can just carry you and swing and then drop, or pick a branch that bends over so far that you can swing in and out of the water. Rhinla made drawings of everything!

But after a few days Lord Vurian said we were going back to Turenay. That was a bummer! Because we’d wanted to stay all summer. But we convinced them that everybody would at least stay another couple of days so we could teach Halla and Radan to swim properly, instead of Halla like a scared kitten and Radan like a baby otter, on his back and very splashy.

And Master Rovan promised to teach me some horse-doctoring. (People keep asking me if I don’t want to be a people-doctor instead, but I like animals! And I want to help them when they’re hurt or sick or sad or scared.) There wasn’t any horse-doctoring to be done, though, all the horses were healthy. But I talked to the horses a lot and got to know them. Those are huge horses! They have to be so they can pull the really big wagon with really big barrels of beer on it. There are only four horses that belong to the brewery, two for each wagon, but all the village people who have horses bring them to Master Rovan too so he can make the horseshoes. They need to wear shoes because otherwise their feet get hurt from the stones in the road. Master Rovan let me hold the horses he was putting shoes on and keep them calm, and that was a nice easy job that I didn’t need to use my mind for, only my hands and voice. And my shoulder, to lean against the big mare when she was frightened of the stink when the hot horseshoe hit her hoof. Rhinla thought nailing iron shoes to the horses’ feet would hurt them, but the feet are made of something that looks a bit like wood but Master Rovan says it’s more like your nail, only thicker, and they don’t feel a thing.

Before we’d finished with the horseshoes a man from the village came running, without a horse! “Rovan,” he said, “can you come over, my dog’s not well.” And I asked if I could come along, and Rhinla trailed along because nobody said she shouldn’t. The dog was lying on its side in a field full of goats, it was probably the goat-herding dog. It looked very unhappy. It hadn’t eaten or drunk water since last night, the man said. Rovan (he didn’t want me to call him ‘master’ any more) let me look at the dog first. I wasn’t supposed to look with my mind yet, but I tried anyway, and all I got was a headache. I’d wanted to see if the dog had eaten something wrong that was now in his stomach bothering him! But Rovan pushed the dog’s stomach and said it felt normal, only empty.

Then I saw that there was a bloody spot behind one of the dog’s ears, as if someone had hit him with something hard! It could be a goat’s horn, or a person with a shovel or even a knife. It was all red and angry-hot. It must hurt him so much that he couldn’t even drink! I pointed it out to Rovan and he poured something from a flask on the skin, probably brandy-and-water, then dried it and poured on brandy without water (while I kept the dog quiet by stroking his muzzle and paws) and put some ointment on it and a bandage.

“Won’t he scratch it off?” I asked, and then Rhinla tried to stick it on with light and she couldn’t, so she called to Lord Vurian to come and help her. And he came! And helped her stick the bandage on firmly. Rhinla didn’t want to come close to the dog when he growled, but I held his jaws so he couldn’t bite even if they hurt him by mistake.

When everything was in place the dog seemed to feel a bit better and I could make him drink some water. Rovan went back to the horses, but now Rhinla was teasing Vurian and play-fighting with him and I wanted to see that! Such a pity that I couldn’t join in yet. She stuck herself to him with light and drew a smiling sunflower on the bald spot on his head. Then they tripped each other a few times, until Rhinla got really tired, and we all went back to the brewery. The horses were all done but I found the farm boy and we practiced some stick-fighting. That at least didn’t give me a headache. We weren’t hitting each other on the head! if it had been a real fight it would be allowed, but not when you’re just playing.

“Do you think someone cut the dog with a knife?” Rhinla asked me later when we were eating.

“Yes, or hit him with a shovel or something,” I said. “Oh! I know! Perhaps it was someone who wanted to steal the goats.”

“Let’s go and keep watch.” And we did, as soon as it was dark enough that goat thieves wouldn’t see us. We found a place between some bushes and made ourselves comfortable there. I really had to lie down and sleep, I must have been working with my mind even if I’d tried not to, but Rhinla stayed awake and made finger-traps along the fence.

And she caught someone in one! She woke me up and we went to look who it was. A boy! No bigger than us, and probably not much older, darker brown than Rhinla, with hair like dirty pondweed. All he had on was a sort of leather skirt and that was dirty too. He couldn’t understand us at all! Rhinla put her forehead against his forehead and tried to think right into his head but that didn’t work either because his thoughts were as scrambled as his hair. So I stroked his hair just like I’d calmed the dog and it worked a little, then I thought up a brush like the one I’d been brushing horses with and used that, and it worked even better. We could see in his thoughts that he was running away from something, and also trying to go somewhere, and something else that we couldn’t understand. I brushed all the ruffles one way, in the direction of ‘trying to go somewhere’.

When the boy was almost untangled he fell asleep. He had a knife and I took it away, I didn’t want him to cut up any more dogs, or us! Because there was a lot of the Nameless inside his head. And outside his head too, the ordinary Nameless and the other one who he’d been fighting with in Veray and also that pesky Arin. And Anshen was there too! I made my safe place to be inside of to keep the Nameless out, but of course the boy was inside it with us full of the Nameless. But at least I could keep the three Namelesses out who were standing around. I said to Anshen, “you can come in if you like!” and he did, and it was very crowded with three children and one god in my safe place because it was really only big enough for me and Rhinla to sit very close together.

Anshen wanted to talk to us! I thought he was a god who never talked. But he did, lots! He said that he needed our help to decide something, and for that we had to go somewhere and take the boy with us because he knew exactly where to go. He wouldn’t tell us anything precise, bummer! Not what he needed to decide and why he was asking us, anyway. Only that the boy was called Vurian (“he can’t help it”) and that the place was called Dol-Rayen. And that it was the place that Rhinla had been drawing on the walls in her sleep.

I’d heard about Dol-Rayen! “Isn’t that the place where the king threw the whole town on the town?” I asked, but Anshen said he’d kept the town from falling until everybody could get out, but it was that place all right.

“Shouldn’t we take someone who knows more than we do?” Rhinla asked. “Like the king?”

“No, the king absolutely mustn’t go to Dol-Rayen,” Anshen said. “This isn’t work for people who have learned a lot of things already so they can’t invent new things any more, like you can.”

“Isn’t it good to learn things?” I asked.

“Learning in itself is good,” Anshen said, “and you’ll learn a lot on the way. But the grown people have learned too much in set ways, and they’ll only see what they already know.”

“Well, I do want to learn everything!” I said. Rhinla wanted to learn things too, but not what other people told her to learn, “I’ll decide for myself!” she said. Well, I don’t mind people telling me what to learn if that’s meant to teach me something! Except when it’s something I think is stupid.

I don’t remember all the other things that Anshen said, but when we asked if the boy was dangerous he said yes, but we were dangerous too. And he wouldn’t chase the Nameless away that was inside the boy because that was part of why he could take us to the place where we wanted to go, or something like that. I saw myself brushing him with the imaginary brush all the time, every day and night, while we travelled, and that wasn’t how I’d imagined my life! I’d imagined going to school and learning sums with money and reading and writing and different languages and maps and stars and stick-fighting and doing things with light power! (Well, I think brushing with the imaginary brush is doing things with power. But you know what I mean.)

Then Anshen went away, and all the Namelesses outside my safe place went away too, and only the bit of the Nameless inside the boy Vurian was still there (but I’d expected that). And he woke up and he was tangled again but not so much, so we could take him back to the brewery with us. Rhinla tried to talk to him but she knew only words to say to sailors, and it was clear that the boy wasn’t a sailor because he didn’t understand anything.

It was almost morning now, getting light already though we were back before anyone else got up.

We filled a tub with water and Rhinla made it warm with her mind! I didn’t know she could do that! (She didn’t know she could do it either, and I certainly can’t do it.) When we washed Vurian his hair became a sort of watery light brown but his skin stayed darker than ours. I found a linen cloth to put on his hips instead of the dirty leather, and we could get a shirt for him later.

Then people started to come down and we each got a bowl of porridge with pieces of dried apple in, Vurian too, and he ate it without saying anything. Then we went to tell Lord Vurian what had happened in the night because we’d seen him looking at us and not knowing who that strange boy was. And he talked to the boy and he could speak his language a little. He said the boy was from Iss-Peran, as we’d thought, but he spoke a different Iss-Peran language than the sailors so that’s why he hadn’t understood Rhinla.

We were so tired from being up all night that we went to our room to sleep, with the boy between us. And I had such a strange dream! I was somewhere in a field where I could see dark buildings, and everybody was wearing dark clothes, me too, and the boy Vurian, and Rhinla, and a lot of other people. We were all going to the dark buildings. We and Vurian could understand each other now! We talked a bit and then Rhinla said “this is a stupid dream, I want to wake up!” and she was gone, but I wanted to talk to him more now I could understand him and I asked where we were going. “There,” he said, and pointed to the buildings, “but we’ll have to fight, it’s full of rivals.” And yes, other people came and I suddenly had my stick and I fought two people at once who wanted to catch Vurian and knocked one out and chased the other away. I heard someone calling whose voice I knew but I was too busy fighting. Then Vurian came and cut their throats, and I was so angry about that that I didn’t know what to do, but I heard the calling again, and it was Lady Rava who called me out of the dream.

Vurian was still dreaming but it was very hard to wake him up. I told Lady Rava and Lord Vurian about the dream, and about the rivals (“aren’t those people who want the same as you want and you fight over it?” I asked, and that was a good way to say it, Lord Vurian said). And then we got to sleep in another room so we wouldn’t be next to Vurian and catch his dream.

But the next morning we knew that we’d really have to go or we’d be worrying about it forever. When we said to Lord Vurian that we wouldn’t be going to school any time soon he didn’t try to tell us what to do! He didn’t even ask what we wanted to do like everybody else, he only asked us what we needed, and we said we needed a boat to go to Tilis so we could find a way to go to Dol-Rayen, and money to pay for food and things with, and a bucket made of wood so it would float, and three bowls and three spoons.

Rhinla started to make a reed boat at once, and I got things together for the journey, the bucket and bowls and spoons and a change of clothes for all three of us. And I showed Lord Vurian how I’d made an imaginary brush to brush the boy Vurian’s thoughts with, and he said “not everybody can do that.” Perhaps that’s because nobody ever taught me to do it, like Anshen said!

We went to Master Jeran’s house to ask him if he’d be lonely on the feast. He was painting something with the blue paint we’d helped him make from the blue stone! “That’s pretty,” I said, and we said some more things like that (“you have to do a lot of talk first,” Rhinla said) before we asked him what we’d come to ask.

“No,” he said, “I won’t be lonely, I’m celebrating the feast with a lot of people.”

“But are they nice people?” I asked.

“Of course they are! Or I wouldn’t want to celebrate with them.”

Rhinla went to get the painting of the fish with all the teeth that she thought would be too scary for the little kids in hospital, and Master Jeran agreed. Not only the fish, but also the person looking at it, which was me from the back, but you couldn’t see that, you could only see a dark scary figure like a thing from a nightmare. “I’d better paint a big pie then,” she said.

“Yes!” I said, “then all the kids will get hungry, and they have to eat a lot to get better!”

We went to tell Lord Vurian that we were coming. “I’ll organise some horses,” he said.

“Do we have to go on top of a horse?” I asked.

“Yes, we’re not taking a wagon, only horses.”

Horses! They’re so big! Well, we could make friends with the horses first. Rhinla got some apples from the kitchen, in her shirt, but there weren’t any horses yet, they’d come tomorrow. So she hung up the shirt with the apples in it from a hook in the stable.

Everybody was preparing things! But there was nothing we could do. Rhinla went to paint the pie, and I first got water from the fountain on the corner of the street and then I sat on the fence of the herb garden with Radan, who couldn’t do anything either. He told me a lot about Gralen! That there were a lot of his cousins and other kids to play with (I wondered whether they’d be nice or throw stones at us, but if they were Radan’s cousins they’d probably be nice) and that you could swim and fish, and that there were otters. I’d seen otters before in the river, they’re so cute!

Later, Lord Vurian asked us what we used to fish. “Our hands!” we said. “And a reed spear. And a bucket.”

“Not a net?”

“It’s much easier to make a spear than a net!” we said.

We’d leave the day after tomorrow, so we had a day to make friends with the horses, and I promised Venla to help her clean the little temple because it was full of mud from people who had walked there with their muddy feet, and I knew I was one of those people! And it was nice to be in the temple, with Anshen in the fire.

There still weren’t any horses the next morning so I went to the temple, and Rhinla started to paint the pig and her piglets. (Later I heard that when she’d finished she was hungry and she washed herself because you wash before eating, so after washing you eat! But it wasn’t time to eat yet, so she washed herself some more, and got very very clean.)

Venla was already at the temple with buckets and brooms and brushes. We swept and scrubbed, and then we saw there was a crack in the wall! There had been so much dirt on it that we couldn’t see it before. I got some soft clay from the river to fix it, so Venla could paint it white again when it was dry. I would probably still be in Gralen then so she’d have to do it.

Then we saw that the wall was full of anea and it went through the stone but not through the clay! I took the clay out again to see if it made a difference but it didn’t go through the gap either. “Perhaps there should be anea in the clay,” Venla said, and we tried to knead some in but it didn’t stick.

“I can do water, I think,” I said, “can you do sand? Clay is just sand with water in.” And we tried to do it together and that worked, sort of, when we filled the gap with the clay full of anea the power in the wall did go through but very slowly.

“Perhaps it’ll be better when it’s dry,” I said, and Venla promised to check every day while it was drying. Or else we’d have to get the people who built it, the Ishey, neither of us are builders.

Then I noticed that I was tired. And hungry! But at the school fresh bread was just coming out of the oven and I ate a lot of it.

When I came back to Lord Vurian’s house Rhinla told me about the ceiling in Lord Vurian and Lady Rava’s bedroom. It was all painted with lots of naked people who liked each other a lot! Lord Vurian and Lady Rava had found her there when she was lying on her back on the floor so she could see it better. But they weren’t angry, they’d only sent her away because they wanted to be in the bedroom on their own. And they weren’t at dinner either, perhaps they were in the bedroom liking each other a lot.

Now there were horses! We made friends with the one that looked nicest, brown with white feet, not too large. We climbed on the horse with the climbing things that hang from the leather chair-thing on a horse’s back, just as the stableman came back from what he’d been doing, and he told us that the climbing things were called stirrups and the chair-thing a saddle, and that we could ride this horse if we liked, it was the quietest one. We were small enough to fit in the saddle together! The stableman showed us how to pull very softly on the reins, those are the leather straps that go to the horse’s head, to make it go to one side, but we wouldn’t need that, he said, this horse would just go with the other horses when we were all riding.

The next morning we put all of our things in the saddle-bag and climbed on the horse. Rhinla was in front. Two of the horses had only packs, and all the others had people on them, one person on most but Halla was sharing with Radan because they were even smaller than us. (Well, Halla is taller though she’s younger, but Radan is smaller.) Then the front horses started to go and it was true, our horse went with them without us having to do anything.

It didn’t look as if we were going very fast, but it was faster than walking, because we arrived at the Halfway Inn with the white dog in the middle of the day. We were so stiff from sitting on the horse! But we petted the dog and splashed in the creek. No fishing, because we had food with us that we ate, we only got drinks from the inn, beer for the people who liked that and water with fruit juice for us. And then we were in the saddle again, because Lord Vurian wanted to reach Veray on the same day.

It was almost dark when we reached Veray, and there was nobody fighting, at least not that we could see. I’d thought we might sleep in the big stone house, because that’s for lords and ladies, but we went to an inn. All of us children got a place to sleep in the hayloft: us two, and Radan, and Halla, and Radan and Halla’s sister Riei who is a bit older than me, and Seran, the cook’s son, who is a bit younger than Rhinla.

Rhinla made clouds of light! And I made a couple of stars but they didn’t make it more light than the clouds already did, they were just pretty. Then I closed the window and the hatch in the floor. The bats could still get through, but people and the Nameless couldn’t!

We talked a bit, and promised to tell each other scary stories, but not in Veray, we’re saving them for the feast. I’m going to tell all about the time we went into the house to count people and saw the man with one hand and the other man who looked like a rat, that was really scary!

In the night I woke up and saw Rhinla drawing in her sleep again! And Radan woke up too and he could see it. She was drawing the same thing that she’d done before, but it looked as if we were closer to it. Radan asked if that was a real mountain, but I didn’t know.

The next morning someone knocked at my seal, it was still there! We had to eat fast because we were leaving: porridge and bread and, when Rhinla insisted, fried eggs with salt pork.

Then we were on the horse again. I was almost too stiff to sit! We wanted to tell Lady Rava about the sleep-drawing, but she was in front of us and we didn’t know how to make the horse go faster. Then we called her, and she made her horse go slower to get next to us. “You push with your heels, like this,” she said, and showed us (and then of course her horse went faster and she had to make it go slower again). And to make it walk normally with all the other horses, you let the reins drop so it doesn’t feel them any more. That’s easy! If I ever learn how to sit on a horse without getting as stiff as wood I want to ride horses a lot more.

I don’t think Lady Rava was very worried about the sleep-drawing, but she said it was a good thing that I’d closed the loft so nobody could get in. Or out!

In the middle of the day we found a place at the riverside to eat. And swim! Rhinla went into deep water at once, but she’d forgotten how to swim under water! She came up snorting and spitting. But she learned to do it again quickly. I swam with her for a bit and then I went back to where the others were in the shallows, throwing water at each other.

Later, we saw Riei and Halla and their sister Alyse brushing the horses, and we wanted to do that too. They showed us how, and we brushed our own horse, each on a side. It’s easy once you get the hang of it, and horses like it a lot.

When we were on the way again we suddenly came to a place where the road was full of rocks. A whole pile of rocks, most of them too big to lift, as if a whole chunk of the mountain had fallen down. People could climb over, but horses can’t climb, they’re not goats! And it was hard to go around because on one side was the river and on the other side it was much too steep.

We tried to think of different ways to move the stones, but they were too heavy for horses to pull away, and the ground was too hard to dig a hole in, and we didn’t have pickaxes to break them with, and fire or water would take too long to work, the feast was in a couple of days already. “Can’t we go through the water?” I asked, because there was reed growing in it so it couldn’t be too deep to wade.

“Let’s camp here and decide what we’ll do tomorrow,” Lady Rava said. We left the horses on the road and climbed up the mountain to a large flat space where someone made a kind of shelter of a big cloth. Rhinla and I and Radan and Seran went down to the river again to catch fish for dinner and came back with two big fishes each, enough that everybody could have a piece with their bread.

In the morning we put the saddles on the horses again and decided to go through the water after all. Some horses were okay with it, others didn’t like it one bit, like ours, and I tried to calm it down, I sort of brushed its thoughts so it wouldn’t panic. That went well, we reached the other side of the pile of rocks and it only had to shake itself a bit when it was back on dry land. But Halla and Radan’s horse, right behind us, stumbled. Rhinla and I went to rescue Halla and Radan –Halla could swim a bit but she was wearing a long skirt, and Radan couldn’t swim at all, we’d promised to teach him in Gralen– while the stableman got the horse out of the water. I tried to calm down this horse as well, but that wasn’t as easy because it had broken or torn something in its leg which hurt a lot.

Someone rode ahead on the fastest horse to fetch the horse-doctor from Gralen. That was someone from Lady Rava’s family’s house. That meant Riei and Alyse had to share a horse, and Halla and Radan got our horse, and Rhinla and I walked with the stableman and the hurt horse while the rest rode on. “If you’re not in Gralen tomorrow night you’ll miss the feast!” Lady Rava said, but we both thought the horse was more important, especiallly because I was still trying to help it.

We had to stop after a while because the horse’s leg really hurt it too much to walk. We gave it water in a bucket, and it lay down after it had drunk it, panting like a dog (except that its tongue didn’t stick out).

Then I thought: isn’t pain a kind of anea? I’d seen Doctor Cora take pain away, and perhaps I could do that, too, like I’d put anea from the temple in a bucket to move it. I put my hand on the horse’s leg and tried to draw the pain out, and something that I could almost see did come out, but I couldn’t let it flow into the ground, I had to put it in the empty water bucket. When the bucket felt full I went to rinse it in the river, and when I came back I was so tired that I fell asleep in the middle of the day. (No problem, we had to wait for the horse-doctor anyway!)

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.