“It was divined for my generation, so I am hopeful.”
“Well, for your sake, I hope it is, and that, as you said, you don’t need it for a long time.”
“Thank you, my lady. And yours?” He seemed hesitant, but I’d encouraged the intimacy, hadn’t I?
“Old, I’m afraid. The family have tried to get a more recent one, but no luck so far.”
“I trust it will serve,” he said.
The ink he was using was a light blue that would match my House colors, and already I could see the intertwining lines with points marked here and there. Someday, those lines, covering my left arm from wrist to elbow, would be all I’d have to guide me. Not soon, I hoped, but someday. And, as my father had said, better to get it down when young than spend one’s life worrying about it.
The pinpricks continued and the design grew.
I came to consciousness with no shirt and an itch in my back.
“My back itches,” I announced to anyone who might be nearby.
Shandy was, it seemed, nearby. “Dolivar’s back itches,” he said. “It probably doesn’t have anything to do with passing out half-naked on shortgrass. I would look for a mystical explanation.”
I gave a few mystical explanations for his life and sat up. We were back in camp. A quick look around showed fires going, the sun just rising over the eastern hills glimpsed through occasional breaks in the trees, and Herthae chipping away at spearheads. Above me, Morning Snake would soon slither off until nightfall, but watched over us for now, if you believe in that sort of thing. Bigmoon was high up, but already becoming pale as the light grew; Littlemoon wouldn’t rise for another nine days. I smelled breakfast. I believed in breakfast.
“What happened?” I said.
Tivisa said, “You don’t remember?”
I shook my head, and it hurt, so I made some deductions. “I got hit in the head during the raid.”
She nodded. “You need someone to just follow you around and yell, ‘Duck!’ from time to time.”
“I’ll get right to work on that. What hit me?”
“Flat of an ax. You did sort of duck.”
“Ax. Where are they getting those?”
“You don’t remember that either?” said Shandy. “They have a forge. We saw it during the raid and you said to destroy it and then you were down.”
“Did we destroy it?”
“No. Sethra was there. We ran.”
“Who dragged me back?”
She gestured toward Rothra. “Her and Shandy.”
“Anyone hurt?”
“You.”
“Anyone else?”
“Some of them.”
“Other than failing to destroy their forge—damn, I don’t remember it at all—did we get anything?”
“Breakfast.”
“Huh. Well, I guess if we didn’t lose anyone—”
“Chief!” came from behind me, shouted. It was Chiqwe, presumably on watch to the south.
I turned my head. “My name is Dolivar,” I called back. Then, “What is it?”
“Someone’s coming,” he called.
“Okay,” I yelled. “Make sure you don’t shout or anything to let him know we’ve spotted him.” Then I tried to stand up but got dizzy. I sat down again and pointed to Shandy and Rothra. “You two. Find out what’s up.”
They each picked up a spear from the pile, then Shandy grabbed a second one because he was Shandy. They needn’t have bothered; before they could move, Chiqwe called, “Coming through,” which meant that whoever it was, was no threat.
What the—?
I tried to stand up again, failed again, sat and stared.
She came walking up to me as if she knew just who I was, and with me sitting we were eye-level. A child, not more than ten years old. “Uh, hello,” I said. “You are—”
“Devera. And you need to come with me now.”
Okay, then. Here was something new. I had no idea what to say.
“Uh, who are you, and why?”
“I told you, and because.”
“Um. Do you have a better reason?”
She just looked at me. I looked at her, and, for the first time, paid attention to what she was wearing. It was a single garment, covering her from shoulder to ground, of a rich blue I’d never seen before, and with gold on it, and, well, I had no idea who could make something like that, or how, or how many hundreds of hours it would have taken, and who has hundreds of hours to put into one garment that, well, how does it even survive ten minutes of walking around?
“Where did you get that?”
“I’ll show you,” she said. Then, “Please?”
I guess it was the please that did it. Well, that, and I’ve never been able to resist the uncanny.
“Sure,” I said. “Lead on.” I started trying to stand up again.
Shandy said, “Chief, you—”
“My name is Dolivar,” I said. “If I don’t come back, it’s all on you.”
I wobbled a little, then said, “All right, Devera. Walk slow.”
“What happened?”
“I got hit in the head.”
“Are you all right?” she seemed genuinely concerned.
“Mostly. I’m seeing imaginary children wearing impossible clothes who are convincing me to follow them I know not where, but other than that, yeah, I’m okay.”
She giggled and ran off for a ways, then stopped and waited for me as I shuffled along. Everyone in camp was looking at me. I caught up with the little girl and didn’t ask myself what I was doing. But, if this was a trap by the Dragon, it was a lot more clever than any of the other traps they’d set for us.
I imagined a bunch of them, probably including my sister, waiting just beyond the clearing, but I kept walking anyway. I shouldn’t have worried; we didn’t make it as far as the clearing.
I stopped and said, “What just happened?”
I was no longer in the clearing. I was no longer in the forest. I was in, well, I don’t know what to call it. There was no sky, there were no trees, no grass. It was a like a hut built out of something impossible and big enough for a thousand million families. Okay, I’m exaggerating, but huge, all right? And all of it white.
I reminded myself that I had been hit in the head.
Also, Devera was gone, and I was alone. Yeah, the “hit in the head” thing—
“Hello, Dolivar.”
The voice echoed weirdly, like I was in a narrow, close canyon. I turned and she was behind me, about ten feet away, unarmed, very tall, and then everything blurred and I was outdoors again, though nowhere I recognized.
“My apologies, Dolivar; I imagine the setting must have been disorienting for you. Here, let me fix your head.” She reached toward me—there was something odd about her hands—and the pain in my head and the dizziness went away. I hadn’t even been aware of the pain until it stopped. And I still didn’t trust what I was seeing.
“I am Verra,” she said.
I almost said, “Who are you?” but shut my mouth instead. People kept telling me their names as if that were useful information.
There was silence for a moment, than a titterbird whistled and I almost started laughing uncontrollably; it made more sense than anything else in the last few minutes.
“You are at a critical moment,” she said.
“You mean, in my brain fever?”
“Be quiet and listen. It is perfectly fine with me if you think you’re mad. It is fine if you think this is a dream. None of that matters. What matters is that you listen, and that you do what I say. It won’t make sense to you, and that doesn’t matter either. Listen.”
Under the circumstances, I thought it best to listen. It wouldn’t have mattered, I think, if I hadn’t wanted to, because she walked right up to me—she really was tall—touched my forehead with one of her weird fingers, and said, “There is a line that began centuries ago, with the creation of the Great Sea that released me and my sisters. It extends into the future, I don’t know how far.”