Song of the Sea Spirit: An epic fantasy novel (The Mindstream Chronicles) (3 page)

She found herself looking at Gunnar again, as if he were steel and her eyes magnets. “No isn’t really an option. Have you ever looked into his eyes?”

“Whose eyes?”

Startled by her blunder, Jora lifted one shoulder in a nonchalant shrug. “The eyes of the parent or wife or sibling or child asking me.”

“What are you looking at?” Tearna went on tiptoe to look out the south-facing window and smiled. “Ah. Gunnar’s eyes. Ha! I should’ve known.”

Jora’s six-year-old twin nephews went running past Gunnar and Boden, followed by a red-faced girl of about twelve. “Come back here or else,” she hollered.

“Leave them,” Jora called to the girl. “My nephews are old enough to accept the consequences for arriving late to class.”

The two boys stopped short and looked at her with surprise in their matching faces, as if the notion that being late to school having consequences had never occurred to them.

“And if they don’t get to class on time from this day forward,” Gunnar said, his arms crossed and a scowl on his face, “they’ll wish they’d been born girls.”

When the boys broke into a run, headed directly toward the schoolrooms, Jora and Tearna both laughed.

“No wonder he has such a tough reputation among the boys,” Tearna said. “He instills it early.”

Gunnar walked toward the smithy, a pleasant smile replacing the scowl.

“Shh! Here he comes,” Jora said. “I wonder what he wants.”

“You,” Tearna said. “Go talk to him.” Then she busied herself with firing up the forge, leaving Jora to speak with Gunnar alone.

“Good morning,” Jora said in a pleasant tone. Her heartbeat quickened with every step of his approach. She couldn’t help but admire his smooth gait and the way his broad shoulders glided evenly through the air, despite his slight limp.

“And good morning to you, dear Jora.” He stood a half-step closer to her than a man normally did when conversing with an unmarried woman, perhaps a query as to how far into her personal space she would allow him. “Did you not sleep well?”

She shook her head. “I stayed up all night to work on Boden’s departure gift.” Her throat felt unnaturally thick, and she swallowed in an attempt to normalize her voice. “Perhaps I can sneak away for a nap later.”

“Would you sit with me a minute? The boys are beginning their lessons under your brother’s expert guidance.”

She looked around quickly and spotted a bench outside the tailoring workshop. “How about there?”

They took a seat on the bench, their bodies angled toward each other, knees nearly touching. “What’s that you have?” Gunnar asked, his deep voice so gentle, it raised goosebumps on her arms. What would it be like to hear him murmur her name late at night?

She swallowed down her nervousness and stroked the flute’s smooth wood. “A flute. Boden gave it to me earlier this morning. I’ll have to learn to play it in private so I don’t annoy people with my mistakes.”

“I see. You and Boden are...”

“Just friends,” she said quickly. “In fact, he’s more of a brother to me than Loel is.” She remembered a day when Boden boldly stood up to older and bigger children who’d been teasing her about being a freak while Loel and their elder brother Finn looked on.

“You’ll miss him,” Gunnar said quietly.

She nodded, lowering her gaze. “Of course. And worry.” Of course, her own anxiety was nothing compared to the pain and fear that must have gripped Gunnar’s heart and Anika’s. “I can’t imagine the pain and fear parents must endure while their sons are away fighting. Do you think the war might finally end in our lifetime?”

He slumped his shoulders as if in defeat. “I fear we’ve forgotten how to live any other way. I’m about to send my son into a war to defend a damned tree. It seems so senseless to me now, especially considering...” He shook his head. “When I was Boden’s age, I was as excited and proud to do my duty for Serocia as he is, but fifteen years of fighting leads a man to question things.”

“What kinds of things?”

He met her gaze, and the sun peeked above the roof of a building to shine his eyes like they were liquid silver. “How can we possibly serve the greater good by killing?”

Jora had no answer. She was technically still a girl in the eyes of her people, a girl from a medium-sized town in rural Serocia, not worldly like Gunnar was. “I don’t know.”

“I don’t know, either, but as I prepare my son to leave the relative safety of Kaild to kill other men’s sons, I think about it. A lot.”

And of course, those other men’s sons were planning to kill and not be killed, just as Boden was. Jora’s eyes welled with tears. She didn’t want to think about losing her friend the way she’d lost her eldest brother. She didn’t want to consider the possibility of Boden falling in battle with a terrible, painful wound or bleeding to death on the battlefield. “Did your father ask the same question when you were going off to war?”

“I never knew my father,” he said softly. “He died in battle when I was six. I only remember the corpulist delivering his body, wrapped in a shroud, in the back of a wagon along with the bodies of three other men, stinking of death and drawing flies.”

Tosh had been returned home the same way almost ten years earlier. She was only thirteen when she witnessed her brother’s death in the Mindstream, seeing Tosh being struck down from behind, a sword going into his back and through his heart. Jora had watched in mute horror as his body arched, his head snapped back, and his mouth fell open with his last gasping breath. She shook her head to dislodge the image. Such a violent death was something she hoped never to witness again, especially if it was someone she loved. “We’ve all lost family members, but I’m certain we’ll see Boden home safely in a decade.” This she said more out of a desire to convince herself than of belief in what she was saying, but to speak her mind, to say aloud what they both surely feared, would have felt like a condemnation. Hope was all they had.

“Right. Enough of such morose talk,” he said. “Are you excited about this afternoon’s ceremony?”

In the three years since he’d returned from the war, Gunnar had never asked her that, never shown any interest in her participation in the Antenuptials. She supposed that this time, because the boy becoming a man was his son, he would have an interest in who was chosen to be Kaild’s newest First Wife. “I’m happy for him,” she said, “but I won’t be submitting for the Antenuptial.”

He lifted one eyebrow, but he didn’t look offended. “Did my son do something to displease you?”

“No,” Jora said. “Not at all. I won’t qualify, and so I don’t care to go through the humiliation of being tested and denied in front of the whole town. Again.”

He looked at the flute in her hands. “Is that a promissory, then? You’ve agreed to wait for his return?”

She felt warmth flood her face. “No, it was just a gift, not a promissory. We have no such agreement.” Why did people assume the flute was a promissory? True, giving a gift to someone who wasn’t leaving Kaild was highly unusual, especially when the one giving was a man about to choose a wife, fill her with seed, and then leave for war. That didn’t make the gift a promissory.

“So you’ll be seeking a husband from among the returned soldiers.” His was a kinder way of putting it than pointing out that she would join the ranks of the latterly maids, the unmarried women of age. The ones desperate to avoid ending up like old lady Xerba, childless and alone. Although half the married women in Kaild had at one point been latterly maids, it was an embarrassment every woman wanted behind her.

She nodded. “Two men are due home within the next few months. Perhaps one of them would overlook my... talent and offer his hand.”

“I submit myself for consideration.”

She blinked twice, unsure what to make of his words. Was that a proposal? Surely not. A man as respected as Gunnar Sayeg, or as handsome, or as virile, didn’t take homely women as their wives. And no sane man wanted a Mindstreamer.

“I’ll keep you warm and safe at night and try my best to give you at least one daughter to carry on your family name.”

Her arms ached with the need to hug him. “My sister has a daughter,” she heard herself say. “As do my cousins.”

His eyebrows lowered, and his eyes darkened. “Is that a no, then?”

“No! It-it’s not a no. I-I meant that I don’t need a daughter. I would be happy enough to bear you five sons.” Oh, God’s Challenger! She was gushing at him like a love-struck girl. Warmth spread through her face and down her neck.

And just as quickly, his eyes brightened, though he didn’t smile. “Then it’s a yes?”

Her heart was pounding, and her hands were so wet with sweat she feared they would start dripping. “It isn’t proper to propose to a woman before her twenty-third birthday.”

“I’m not proposing. I’m planning ahead.” He winked at her, and a tiny smile played at one corner of his mouth.

“When you propose, I’ll say yes. Until then, I can’t give you an answer.” As nervous and excited as she was, her biggest concern was how she would break the news to Boden. Ten years was a long time. Maybe by the time he returned, he would forgive her.

Gunnar laughed, a sound that never failed to make Jora tingle inside. “I look forward to it.” He rose and offered to help her stand. She wiped her hand on her trousers before putting it into his. “I’d better report to my students. I’ll be impressed if Loel has managed to run them through their starting exercises.”

“Thank you for speaking with me, Gunnar.”

He leaned down and kissed her cheek. “The pleasure was mine, dear Jora.”

As Jora watched him walk away, she fought the urge to touch her cheek to see if it felt hot to her fingers. She caught sight of his Fourth Wife, Marja, standing by the door to the dining hall. The woman glared at them with her arms crossed and mouth pinched tightly shut.

The first opportunity Jora had to take her new flute to the beach was late morning, before the Antenuptials were due to begin. She hurried across the sand to the rocky shoal she had played on since she was a child. At low tide, the rocks were dry and easy to cross by hopping along a familiar path, though she wasn’t as lithe as she’d once been. The smell of saltwater, the sound of the rushing waves, and the feel of the sun’s warmth on her face sharpened her mind and calmed her soul. She couldn’t imagine living anywhere but by the sea.

She settled on a rock with her legs dangling over the edge, a good two feet above the splash of the waves hitting the rocks. Out here, with only the birds and fish to hear her, she lifted the flute to her lips, covered all but the first hole, and tried a tentative blow. It came out sounding more breathy than musical, but the shy note encouraged her to try again to coax out a clearer sound.

She experimented with rotating the flute by degrees and found the perfect angle that allowed her to blow clear, crisp notes instead of note-flavored breaths. Excited, she tested various positions of her fingers, covering and uncovering holes to get a feel for how to create the notes she wanted.

“Jora!”

From the beach, Tearna beckoned her with waving arms. Had time passed so quickly? It seemed she’d arrived only a moment ago. She waved back.
A few more minutes.

She played a few notes of her favorite song, adjusting her fingering when she got them wrong. She played them again and again, getting them right after the third attempt.

A joyful twitter broke her concentration. She looked down to find a bottlenose dolphin eyeing her from the water near her feet, its mouth open as if in a smile.

“Hail,” she said, charmed by the creature’s friendly greeting. “Did my flute playing disturb you?”

The dolphin rose out of the water a few inches and twittered some more.

Jora laughed. “I’ll get better, I promise. In the meantime, you might want to find another place to nap or hunt or whatever you were doing. I plan to come here to practice every spare moment I can.”

To her surprise, the dolphin whistled the same notes she’d played—the correct notes, as if it knew which of her attempts was the right one.

“How did... You just...”

The creature twittered again and rolled in the water. It acted like it was flirting with her.

“Do it again.” She waited, but the dolphin merely watched her with one dark eye. She lifted the flute and played the notes.

And the dolphin repeated them.

“Goodness!” This was astounding. Jora wondered whether she had unwittingly found a way to say hail or something else in Dolphinese. Then it struck her that the name of the piece was Song of the Sea Spirit. Perhaps the enchanting melody hadn’t been composed by a human at all but a dolphin. A sea spirit.

“Jora!” Tearna was waving more frantically now.

Boden’s Antenuptial.
“Oh, Challenger’s bollocks!” She scuttled to her feet. This was the one event she couldn’t be late for. She started to run back to shore, but stopped and returned to the edge of the rocks. “It was a pleasure meeting you,” she said to the dolphin. “I hope to see you again.”

With that, the dolphin rose up onto its powerful tail, twittered happily, and dove back into the water.

Jora laughed and waved before running back to the beach.