Duskfall (2 page)

Bahc stood, breathing heavily. What he had just seen was impossible. Or at least it should be. But he had seen it once before. The day his daughter was born.

The night his wife died.

Gord rose to his feet slowly, muttering something about ghosts. Lian moaned softly. The stranger lay crumpled, chin resting on his chest, eyes closed. Peaceful, as if he’d fallen asleep.

“We tell no one,” Bahc whispered, looking around at the mess: utensils everywhere, hooks embedded in walls, containers overturned. “
No one
.”

Gord nodded, slowly. “What about Lian?”

“I’ll talk to him.” They couldn’t let this get out. It was too dangerous. No one—human or tiellan—would understand.

“What’re we going to do?” Gord asked, looking around the room nervously.

“Bind the man,” Bahc said, retrieving a few long scraps of leather that had been scattered on the floor in the chaos, and handing them to Gord. “And then…”

He trailed off as the stranger groaned.

Bahc sighed. He had made up his mind. “Then,” he said, “we take him back to Pranna.”

A
FTER SHE HAD BATHED
and dressed, Winter slipped quietly out of the house into the bleak morning light. She wasn’t sure if her father was up yet, but Cantic tradition dictated that the bride should not have any contact with the men in her family, or the groom, until the ceremony.

“The bride,” Winter whispered to herself. Sometimes she just had to hear herself say a thing to believe it.

She tried again. “I’m getting married.” She had thought the idea might finally sink in on the day it happened, but apparently not. Marriage still seemed as foreign to her as air to a fish.

Winter looked back at her family’s small cottage, wondering if she shouldn’t find her father, anyway. They didn’t put much stock in religion, not anymore. But seeing him would be awkward, and provoke a conversation that she wasn’t sure she could face quite yet. She didn’t know how to tell him what was in her heart. She wasn’t sure she understood it herself.

Deep, slow breaths were the key. They always were.

She shivered in the crisp air and kept walking. It was cold, but not as cold as Pranna could be in the middle of the long winter. The sun hid behind a wall of gray clouds; the threat of snow loomed on the horizon.

Cantic tradition also stated that, the morning of the wedding, the bride was to have a Doting—to be given gifts by those closest to her. Since most tiellans had already left Pranna, that left precious few. One old king’s abdication and act of emancipation one hundred and seventy-one years ago had still not erased a millennium of slavery. Old prejudices ran deep. Tiellans were shorter than humans, with slender, pointed ears, larger eyes, and rarely grew hair on their bodies, except for the tops of their heads. Of course, after centuries of interbreeding there were exceptions, Gord being one of them with his unusually tall build and full beard.

Winter still did not understand how such minor differences caused such great conflict. But the results were clear enough: Gord and his brother Dent, Lian and his family, and Darrin and Eranda and their children were the only tiellans who remained in Pranna besides Winter and her father. The fact that so many had left weighed on Winter’s heart; tiellans were always reluctant to leave their homes.

“Not always,” Winter whispered to herself, glancing at the sea in the distance.

Her Doting was supposed to be at Darrin and Eranda’s home, but Winter stopped at the small intersection in the road ahead. To her right, not far down the dirt road, was Darrin and Eranda’s hut and the few friends she had in the world. To her left, the Big Hill ran down to the Gulf of Nahl. She saw the dock, and her father’s boat, far below. One path offered duty and those who loved her; the other offered freedom and the beautiful terror of uncertainty.

Winter paused, even though she already knew her choice. She allowed herself to imagine, briefly, leaving everything behind. She had never felt at home in Pranna. She didn’t know why. Even with her friends, sometimes even with her father, she never felt whole. A piece of her had always been missing, and she had never known what it was, or how to get it back.

She imagined herself at the helm of her own ship. A small crew to call her own. Perhaps a lover. Perhaps not.

And she imagined that life crashing down all around her. There wasn’t much room in the Sfaera for the tiellan race anymore, and even less room for a tiellan woman.

What makes you think you’d fit in any better on a ship, away from Pranna, than you do here?
Winter shook her head. It was a useless daydream.

With a sigh that she could see in the cold air, Winter pulled her cloak more tightly around her and took the right-hand fork.

* * *

“Ready to give your life away to a human?” Lian asked her, when they finally found a moment alone during the Doting. Lian spoke with a leisurely, lilting drawl, like most tiellans. Winter did not, because of her father. “The language of captivity,” he called it.

Lian’s parents and Darrin and Eranda were momentarily distracted with talk of more tiellan persecution in the nearby city of Cineste when Lian had sat beside her, near the fire. Winter had been listening to the others talk. She loved these people, but did not know how to show it. More often than not, she found herself simply observing, as she did now. Even at her own Doting.

Turning to Lian, Winter couldn’t tell if he was being sarcastic or genuine. Probably both; he was smiling, but the expression didn’t reach his eyes.

“Knot is a good man,” Winter said, though the words felt worn from frequent use. “Humans aren’t all bad, you know.”

“Right. It’s just that you’re marrying one, is all.”

“I don’t trust humans, but that doesn’t mean I hate them. You’re much better at that than I am.”

Lian’s eyebrows rose. “But this one you trust?”

Winter didn’t say anything. Trust had always been a rare commodity for her. She suspected it was the same for every tiellan. Humans cheated you, betrayed you, and would take everything you owned if you let them. Some tiellans would do the same. If she was honest, Winter only trusted a few people: herself, and her father, certainly. Gord, Darrin and Eranda, and Lian, too. Knot… Knot was not yet close enough to count.

They sat in silence for a moment. The others’ chatter seemed distant in the background.

Winter knew what was coming. “Please don’t ask me again,” she pleaded. She wasn’t sure she could take it. Not today.

“Still haven’t given me a straight answer,” Lian said. “I’ll keep askin’ ’til you do.”

“The advantages are clear. Any tiellan who marries a human is better off, no matter who that human is.”

“Even if that particular human has no idea who he is or where he came from?”

Winter frowned. She hated this conversation for a reason. Part of her agreed with Lian; what she was doing was difficult to justify. And yet, if Knot could take her away from Pranna, Winter might have a chance to really
live
—not just waste away in a dying town. Even if Knot wasn’t the man she imagined, she could cope if it meant getting away. She was a tiellan, after all. She could endure, if she had to.

And, perhaps, if she left, she might find somewhere she belonged.

“D’you remember that time you nearly drowned?” Lian must have grown weary of her silence. “That summer, when we were young.”

Winter blinked at the question, but couldn’t stop her lips twitching into a grin, however slight. “Which one?” she asked.

Lian smirked. “I suppose nearly drowning was pretty common for us back then.” He looked into her eyes. “You know the time I mean.”

Winter did know. She had only been eight or nine, playing on the dock with an earring of her mother’s, taken from her father’s room without his knowledge. The earring had slipped through Winter’s fingers, between the boards of the dock, and into the water below.

Winter remembered not thinking about what she did next. She just did it. She jumped into the water and started searching for the earring. She remembered diving in, coming up for air, diving down again. There hadn’t been much daylight left, the water was murky, and Winter had hardly been able to see anything. Each time she went down her hands dug into the mud at the bottom, but came up with nothing. She didn’t know how long she surfaced and dived again, but she remembered the panicked constriction in her chest, and the tears mixing with seawater on her face.

The sun set, the water grew colder, but still she continued, even when her muscles began to cramp. Looking back, Winter couldn’t say what had come over her. In that moment, all she knew was the
need
to find the earring. There had been nothing else.

Lian finally found her, shivering and spluttering, about to dive once more. To this day, Lian swore it would have been her last dive. He jumped in just as she went down. He took hold of her, and pulled her to the surface.

Clutched in her hand had been her mother’s earring.

She looked at Lian. “Are you angling for another thank you?”

He laughed. “No. Just wanted you to remember. Sometimes you think you need a thing, you fixate on it, and you don’t know when to give up. But that’s the best thing you can do, sometimes—let a thing go. Just wish you knew when to do it.”

“Me too,” Winter whispered.

Then suddenly Lian reached out, brushing a strand of hair from her face.

Her hand snapped up, gripping his.

“Don’t.” Winter lowered their hands, his in hers, gently. Friendly affection was one thing, but this was her Doting, for Canta’s sake. And the touch reminded her of a time she wasn’t interested in revisiting.

“Sorry,” he mumbled, and seemed to mean it.

“So am I,” she said, but knew she didn’t.

* * *

The Doting went as well as Winter could have expected. The small cottage smelled of fresh bread and cinnamon, smells that reminded her of her mother. Silly, that anything should remind her of a woman she had never known, but it was true all the same.

The gifts Winter received were plain, but meaningful. A traditional tiellan
siara
of beautiful white wool, a small woodcarving of a man and woman standing close together, a black-stone necklace to bring out her dark eyes, and a swaddling cloth that made her cringe at the thought of having a child.

Then, too soon, a knock came at the door. Three Cantic disciples in red and white robes stood outside. The women—humans, all three—made Winter nervous. Humans always did, though she tried to hide it. Winter looked down at her dress, coarse brown wool that covered her from to wrists to ankles, and the grey
siara
she wore, a long loop of fabric wrapped in folds around her neck and shoulders. A stark contrast to the sleeker, form-fitting dresses and exposed necklines of the human women before her.

Winter felt a stab of disappointment that there were only three. Cantic tradition called for nine disciples of the Denomination to escort new brides to their Washing; nine to represent the original disciples of Canta. Winter wasn’t sure if there were only three because the town population had decreased so dramatically, or because she was tiellan and the disciples didn’t think she merited a full escort. Her disappointment surprised Winter. It was a detail she had never thought would mean much to her.

She felt a sudden surge of panic, a great weight locked away within her chest threatening to break free. This wasn’t what she wanted.

Then the feeling passed. She would do what was required.

Winter said her goodbyes to her friends, the last time she would see them as Danica Winter Cordier, daughter of Bahc the fisherman. Whether she wanted it or not, change was coming.

* * *

“Can it be? My little girl is really getting married?”

Winter smiled as her father walked into the Maiden’s Room. Fathers were the only males allowed in the area, and only right before the ceremony. Winter was alone; the three disciples had left to prepare the chapel.

Despite her misgivings, Winter adored how handsome her father looked. He wore his only formal suit: loose, faded gray trousers and dark-blue overcoat in the old fashion. So different than his normal furs and wool—his fisherman’s clothing.

“Hi, Papa.”

She felt his arms around her, his tanned, smooth cheek against hers.

They separated, and she let him look at her. Her raven-dark hair was tied with a bow behind her head, and the disciples had seen fit to place the black-stone necklace she had received around her neck, matching the deep blackness of her eyes.

Winter had changed into a red dress, the only article of clothing her father had kept of her mother’s. It was simple dyed wool, but the fabric was fine and cascaded over Winter’s thin frame elegantly. The sleeves reached her wrists and the fabric covered her neck, but this dress actually fit her, hugging her hips and chest tightly. It was technically within tiellan standards, but at the same time whispered subversion. Winter imagined her mother wearing it years ago, and the outrage it must have caused the tiellan elders and matriarchs. The thought made her smile.