A light seemed to glow inside the bowl, illuminating Talis’ face a sickly yellow-green. Talis stared into the glowing bowl, his mouth open, his head leaning closer and closer as if he were falling asleep, though his eyes were wide. Nico didn’t know how long Talis stared into the bowl-far longer than the breath Nico tried to hold. As he watched, Nico thought he could feel a chill, as if the bowl were sending a winter’s breath out from it, frigid enough that Nico shivered. The feeling became stronger, and the breath Nico drew in seemed to pull that cold inside with it, though somehow it felt almost hot inside him. It made him want to breathe it back out, like he could spit frozen fire.
In the other room, Talis’ head nodded ever closer. When his face appeared to be about to touch the rim of the bowl, the glow vanished as suddenly as it had come, and Talis gasped as though drawing breath for the first time.
Nico gasped, too, involuntarily, as the cold and fire inside him vanished at the same moment. He started to pull his head back from the door, but Talis’ voice stopped him. “Nico. Son.”
He peered back in. Talis was staring at him, a smile creasing the lines of his olive face. There were more wrinkles there, lately, and Talis’ hair was beginning to be salted with gray. He groaned when he stood up too fast and his joints sometimes creaked, even though Matarh said that Talis was the same age as her. “It’s fine, Son. I’m not angry with you.” Talis’ accent seemed stronger than usual. He gestured to Nico, and Nico could see a smear of the red dust still on his palm. He sighed as if he were tired and needed to sleep. “Come here.” Nico hesitated. “Don’t worry; come here.”
Nico pushed open the door-the hinge, as he knew it would, protesting loudly-and went to Talis. The man picked him up (yes, he grunted with the effort) and put him on a chair next to the table so he could see the bowl. “Nico, this is a special bowl I brought with me from the country where I used to live,” he said. “See… there’s water in it.” He stirred the water with a fingertip. The water seemed entirely ordinary now.
“Is the bowl special because it can make water glow?” Nico asked.
Talis continued to smile, but the way his eyebrows lowered over his eyes made the smile look somehow wrong in his face. Nico could see his own face staring back from the brown-black pupils of Talis’ eyes. There were deep folds at the corner of those eyes. “Ah, so you saw that, did you?”
Nico nodded. “Was that magic?” he asked. “I know you’re not a teni because you never go to temple with Matarh and me. Are you a Numetodo?”
“No,” he said. “I’m not a Numetodo, nor a teni of the Faith. What you saw wasn’t magic, Nico. It was just the sunlight coming in the window and reflecting from the water in the bowl, that’s all. I saw it, too-so bright it seemed like there was a tiny sun under the water. I liked the way it looked, and so I watched it for a while.”
Nico nodded, but he remembered the red dust and the strange, grassy color of the light and the way it had bathed Talis’ face, as if a hand of light were stroking him. He remember the cold fire. He didn’t mention any of that, though. It seemed best not to, though he wasn’t certain why.
“I love you, Nico,” Talis continued. He knelt on the floor next to Nico’s chair, so that their faces were the same height. His hands were on Nico’s shoulders. “I love Serafina… your matarh… too. And the best thing she’s ever given me, the thing that has made me the most happy, is you. Did you know that?”
Nico nodded again. Talis’ fingers were tight around his arms, so tight he couldn’t move. Talis’ face was very near his, and he could smell the bacon and honeyed tea on the man’s breath, and also a faint spiciness that he couldn’t identify at all. “Good,” Talis said. “Now listen, there’s no need to mention the bowl or the sunlight to your matarh. I thought that one day I might give your matarh the bowl as a gift, and I want it to be a surprise, and you don’t want to spoil that, do you?”
Nico shook his head at that, and Talis grinned widely, as if he’d told himself a joke inside that Nico hadn’t heard. “Excellent,” he said. “Now, let me finish washing the bowl-that’s what I was starting to do when you saw me. That’s why I put the water in it.” Talis released Nico; Nico rubbed at his shoulders with his hands as Talis picked up the bowl, swirled the water inside it ostentatiously, then opened the window shutters to dump it into the flowered windowbox. Talis wiped the bowl with his linen bashta, and Nico heard the ring of metal. He watched as Talis put the bowl into the pack that he kept under the bed that he and Nico’s matarh shared, then put the pack back underneath the straw-filled mattress.
“There,” Talis said as he straightened again. “It’ll be our little secret, eh, Nico?” He winked at Nico.
It would be their secret. Yes.
Nico liked secrets.
The White Stone
They came to her at night, those who the White Stone had killed. In the night, they stirred and woke. They gathered around her in her dreams and they talked to her. Often, the loudest of them was Old Pieter, the first person she’d killed.
She’d been twelve.
“ Remember me… ” he whispered to her in her sleep. “ Remember me… ”
Old Pieter was their neighbor in the sleepy village back on the Isle of Paeti, and she’d known him since birth, especially after her vatarh died when she was six. He was always friendly with her, joking and gifting her with animals he’d carved from oak branches, whittling them with the short knife he always carried on his belt. She painted the animals he gave her, placing them on a window shelf in her little bedroom where she could see them every morning.
Old Pieter kept goats, and when her matarh would let her, she sometimes helped him tend the small herd. The day her life changed, the day she started on the path that had led her here, she’d been out with Pieter and his goats near the Loudwater, the creek falling fast and noisy from the slopes of Sheep Fell, one of the tall hills to the south of the village. The goats were grazing placidly near the creek, and she was walking near them when she saw a body in the grass: a doe freshly killed, its body torn by scavengers and flies beginning to buzz excitedly around the carcass. The doe’s head, on the long tawny neck, gazed forlornly at her with large, beautiful eyes.
“If ye look into that right eye, ye’ll see what killed her.”
A hand stroked her shoulder and continued down her back before leaving. She started, not realizing that Old Pieter had come up behind her. “The right eye, it connects to a person’s or an animal’s soul,” he continued. “When a living thing dies, well, the right eye remembers the last thing they saw-the last face, or the thing that killed it. Look close into that doe’s eye, and ye’ll see it in there, too: a wolf, p’raps. It happens to people, too. Murderers, they been caught that way-by someone looking into the dead right eye of the one they killed and seeing the killer’s face there.”
She shuddered at that and turned away, and Old Pieter laughed. His hand brushed wisps of hair that had escaped her braids back from her face, and he smiled fondly at her. “Now don’t be upset, girl,” he said. “G’wan and see to the goats, and I’ll carve ye something new.. ..”