Valdyis galsin

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.

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.”