With that, he patted my hand and got up and went away upstairs. I sat there a little while longer, trying to understand what that whole conversation had been about, but I didn’t. Then one of the boys came over and said, “May I take your plate, Lady?”
I blinked up at him. He was small, almost as small as me, and his hair was only to his shoulders; he’d braided it back. He didn’t have on a complicated robey thing the way Eino and Arolu did; his was simpler and plainer-colored, with narrow sleeves that had been pushed up to the elbow. He kept his eyes turned down, which I didn’t like, so I said, “Hello! I’m Shill. Who are you?”
He looked surprised. “Oh—um. I’m Juem, Lady. Just a servant.”
I knew the word servant. It was sort of like the way some mortals tried to do things we wanted, except we never asked them to. I wondered why. And I really wished he would look up! “Hey, do you want some juice?” I picked up the pot Arolu had used. There wasn’t much left so I made more until the pot was full, and then I made some cups, and then I stood up to try and pour the juice into them the way Arolu had done. The other boy was over by the fire, looking at me oddly; Juem just stared, gape-mouthed. I don’t know why. It was hard pouring the juice. I spilled some, then gasped and tried to find something to wipe it up with, and Juem reached for a rag on another table, but then I just vanished it away and tried to pretend I hadn’t spilled it. Juem started laughing behind his hand, and I ducked my head. “Um. Sorry.”
The other boy—the one who’d told Arolu about me being outside Eino’s room—came over and took the pot from my hands with a graceful little bow. “It’s all right, Lady. That’s our job, anyway. It takes practice.”
“It’s a hard job!” They both giggled at this, but I felt better, because I didn’t think they were laughing at me. “Um, hello. I’m Shill.”
The other boy looked amused. He was older than Juem, but looked a lot like him, and I could feel the kinship between them. Siblings! “I heard. I’m Erem. Honored to meet you, Lady.”
“OK.” I wasn’t sure what else to say when people said stuff like that. “Do you want some too?” So we all sat down and had juice together.
“This is good,” Juem said as we relaxed. “We should do a fermented version for the wedding feast.”
“What?” Erem looked shocked.
“What?” I asked, confused.
Juem chuckled at Erem. “The old lady announced it yesterday; didn’t you hear? She’s picked Mikna. ’S’why Eino stormed out all afire before mid-meal. She said who she’d picked, he asked her for a private talk in her study, all prim and calm as you please—and then Heshna at the Dallaq clan house said he could hear Eino yelling. That’s two houses away.” He grinned at both of us; I blinked. “They say he didn’t even come home ’til the middle of the night!”
Anything about Eino interested me. I knew that mid-meal was a time when humans liked to feed themselves in the middle of the day. I had appeared in the market around midday! So I had met Eino right after he had yelled at Fahno, then gone looking for a way to sneak his scroll into the Raringa.
Erem inhaled, sitting forward. “Only he could get away with that.”
“Maybe. Rumor has it he was at Yukur with a bunch of other boys breaking curfew, all of ’em cavorting like traitors of old!”
“No!”
I was not supposed to tell, so I bit my bottom lip. But I was so curious! Maybe I could ask about things that weren’t about the anatun? “I don’t understand,” I said, carefully. “Why was Eino upset? What is a Mikna?”
They looked at each other, Erem suddenly squirming. “This is just servant gossip, Lady,” Erem said. “We shouldn’t have brought it up in front of you. It’s nothing of import.”
“I’m forty days old,” I said solemnly, and they blinked. “Oh! Forty-one. Everything is important to me.”
They stared, then giggled behind their hands. I smiled, too, even though I didn’t think it was that funny. Finally Juem sighed. “Mikna’s a who, not a what,” he said. “She’s another enulai practicing in Darr, one of Fahno’s protégés.”
“But not the only other enulai practicing in Darr,” Erem interjected. “Darr is blessed with three, though we’ve only got maybe seven godlings altogether living in the country.”
“Two again,” said Juem. “Fahno’s retired.”
“Oh. Right.”
“Mikna,” I said, hoping they would get to the point.
Juem chuckled at me. “Mikna is by all accounts the better enulai. Older, stronger, with a bigger stable of godlings. And she’s old Darre—from an old clan, that is, with conqueror roots and traditional ways. Always had a bit of magic, but a few years back a godling took up with a boy from the clan, and decided to make a daughter with him. Godlings aren’t much for raising demons, so she gave the child to the clan, and they’ve been enulai ever since.”
I nodded. “Eino.”
“I was getting there!” He huffed at my impatience. “Eino’s old enough to be married off, see. More than, but Fahno-enulai’s better than most clan matriarchs; she didn’t want him going off to be a father when he was barely more than a boy himself. But he’s just gotten prettier with the extra years, and word’s out about how strong his magic is. That usually means his demon blood is strong, too—which makes our Eino the perfect sire for the next generation of enulai, in any clan.”
“But then there’s the other enulai clan in Darr,” said Erem, leaning forward so I would know that what he had to say was important, too. “That’s Lumyn’s people. Lumyn’s not much for the enulai art; the blood runs weak in her, probably because they’ve been breeding with foreigners for years. Amn and such.” They both grimaced; I nodded, though I had only the vaguest idea of what he was talking about. “Lumyn even trained outside Darr, down somewhere in Senm. But she’s of marrying age, too, and she came a-courting Eino as well—and Eino seems to like her better.”
It was a little confusing, but I understood. Sort of. “If they both want babies from Eino, why doesn’t he just give them both babies?” It seemed the simplest solution.
They both stared at me. “They want husbands, not just the children those husbands will make,” said Juem, finally, once he stopped looking appalled. “Who else is going to bathe the children and feed them and teach them the ways of two clans, and protect them if the home’s invaded? Women risk their lives enough to bear children and provide for them by tool or by blade; the least men can do is handle things after that.”
“Oh.” I frowned, wondering if Eino was much interested in feeding babies. He would be really good at protecting them, though!
“So,” Juem continued, reaching for more serry juice, “now there’s two clans fighting hard for our little Eino. And he doesn’t want the one his beba’s picked.”
“It’s done,” said Erem, shaking his head. “If you said she’s picked Mikna—”
“Now, when have you ever known Eino to give in to what somebody else wanted?”
Yeah, that didn’t sound like Eino at all.
But—“I don’t know if Eino wants either of them,” I said, frowning to myself. I thought maybe Eino really just wanted to dance, and maybe be an enulai himself, and do other things that men long ago used to do. Maybe men got married back then, but if so they got married when they wanted, and it sounded like Fahno and these other women wanted Eino to marry now.
Erem belched. “He doesn’t have a choice. Fahno’s got no heirs, see.”
I must have frowned in confusion, because Juem explained: “She had three sons, but they went off to marry into other families, like boys do. She had a daughter, Tehno, but Tehno didn’t get much of the blood—the demon blood, you know? Not enough to become enulai after Fahno. But Tehno married Arolu, and they made Eino, who did have it. It’s a throwback sort of thing like that sometimes.”