The metallic melody from a trumpet player mixed with the lively strumming of a lutist and the jingling of a third man holding a series of bells from the far corner. It was the most festive gathering I had ever seen.
The center of the room had been cleared for a large mass of students, who congregated to talk and laugh; some even danced near the band on the far side. Micha found me first and congratulated me on my fourth stripe as I congratulated him on his fifth.
“You wouldn’t believe the game in the Frost Pass. Giant elk with white antlers, snow leopards, even a white bear. You’ll love it.” I had to take him at his word without his thoughts to read, and it was almost strange not to have him so open to me. I made a note to ask him about it later so I could see into his memories of the journey through the Frost Pass, and I hoped I would get the chance to go next summer.
“Well, you wouldn’t believe the horse I got. A tall black mare with legs for days.”
“
You
got the black mare?” I hadn’t thought of it before, but of course Micha was aware of her. He could sense every animal for miles, far more acutely than even I could, much less a huge horse just on the other side of the grounds.
“There you are!” Iseut yelled excitedly as she threw her arms around Micha’s wide shoulders and began to leave a trail of light kisses down his neck. Micha’s face revealed a level of shock I had never seen from him before, but he certainly didn’t look like he was going to complain.
As the two Trackers skulked off to a corner to do who-knew-what, I spotted Rhada talking to a new student. He was a young boy with the light-tan colors of a Rider and I knew I was off the hook.
Moments later, I bumped into Parvani, my combat teacher who I hadn’t seen in more than a year. The time away had done her well; the tight, sleeveless, red dress, with seven black stripes across the ribs, accentuated her narrow figure, and her long, black hair was still hung in a braid over her shoulder.
“Well, look who it is. The little Tracker boy who couldn’t throw a punch. I bet no one is asking to have a go at you now.” She teased me as she squeezed my muscular arm from where she stood several inches below me. I noticed how she had to look up when she spoke, instead of down to me. It seemed strange that I had grown so much.
“It’s all thanks to you, the best teacher a skinny boy could ask for.”
“How about I show you a few more moves?” she said with a sneaky smile, and for a moment, I thought I would have to turn on my reading to try to grasp some idea of what she meant. Thankfully, she reached up and kissed me and removed all doubt. It was firm and fast and made my heart beat with absurd strength, and I knew Avis had been right, which seemed to be happening more and more often lately.
What could have been an hour or a minute later, Parvani lowered back to the ground and grabbed me by the hand. She pulled me through the crowd, but there was a moment there that changed everything.
I saw Khea for the first time in a long time, and she was nothing like I ever could have expected. She was still small, but lacked the emaciated jutting of her bones, instead appearing the picture of health, with full cheeks and even a muscular tone to her bare arms. Her feminine curves were displayed under the hugging, pale-blue fabric of her sleeveless dress; the roundness of her chest peeked just above the neckline, and a shimmering, black necklace was nestled between. Her fourteen years seemed worldlier in a way that amazed me, and I was sure, for a moment, our gazes locked before she disappeared behind the crowd.
In the hall of doors, Parvani used her strong, fighter’s legs to push me up against a door and pin me with her hips, her mouth moving up to seek out mine. Away from the thundering crowd, her thoughts and desires were immediately clear to me: how she wanted me to pull at her dress to reveal a body she was proud of, and how badly she wanted me to see it. Despite my surety of a moment with Khea, I couldn’t let the opportunity go by; there was no way to know when it might happen again.
“Which room is yours?” I asked in a brief moment where I could pull my mouth free.
“This way.” Parvani led me across the grounds to a door tucked in a corner between Latinia’s and the northern edge of the grounds. It opened into a hallway not unlike the hall of doors–just a bit shorter. It made sense considering there were far fewer female students. During the long walk, I could sense her anticipation grew and it only added to my own. By the time the sun rose, I would be a man.
~~~~~~~~~~
The next morning at breakfast, there was a strange excitement as students recounted their experiences at the Moonwater Festival. Many, like myself, never actually got to see the moon over the lake, but that hardly diminished the value of the evening.
When Micha arrived and claimed the seat next to me, the look on his face gave him away, as mine did to him. “So who’s the lucky girl?” he asked as he elbowed my arm.
I shook my head laughing. “Oh, come on! You have to tell me. I’m your best friend. I’ll tell you what happened with Iseut.”
“I don’t need you to tell me.”
“Fine, that’s true, I guess. You don’t have to tell me any details, just who it was.”
Of course, as luck would have it, a ragged, sleep-deprived Parvani appeared in the entry to the corridor and stopped to glance my way with a shy, crooked smile.
“You can’t be serious!” Micha shouted loud enough I was sure she must have heard; heat quickly settled into my cheeks.
At least someone’s enjoying himself.
It would be a lie to say I didn’t enjoy the night with Parvani, but it just hadn’t been quite like I pictured. It felt almost wrong to know her deep, animalistic desire for a man on such an intimate level. At some point, I cut her thread so I didn’t feel like I was committing such an invasion. And most of the night I had spent thinking about Khea.
Micha finished eating and went to the combat training area to begin his knife-fighting lessons with Sinha. The idea of going back into training and challenges was unappetizing alone, not to mention putting knives and swords into the hands of your opponents.
No thanks.
Avis waited for me back in my room, and I was a little surprised he didn’t seem to hold a hint of gloating. He had been right about everything, and had given me the know how to please a woman, yet he didn’t seem satisfied.
Did I do such a bad job?
“I told you, it’s not a job. We’ll talk about it later. Right now, Lheda wants to see you.”
So that’s what he’s grouchy about.
It didn’t take a mind-reader to figure out he didn’t hold her in high regard, and I was confident I would probably never get the whole story. As long as I didn’t get caught in the crossfire, it didn’t much matter to me.
Entering through the large, wooden doors, she instructed me to sit in the same chair as my first day at Myxini. She looked even better than I remembered, with a lovely shine to her blonde hair and not a hint of wrinkles.
“Good morning, Lark.”
“Good morning.”
“I have to say that I’m more than disappointed at your lack of progress. You have been with us for two years now and yet you’ve only completed four rounds.” It was the most infuriating thing anyone had ever said to me.
“You kept me behind for a whole season!”
“Lark, I cannot be blamed for your problems. As I told you before, you have a unique Spark and it will need to be put to good use soon.”
“What do you want me to do?”
“Complete your rounds so that you are ready to demonstrate your skills on Round Ten. Your particular task will take place on the Nakbe Islands, so you will need to be fluent in Nakben before you leave. Please don’t let us down.”
Avis pulled at my arm to get me out of the chair, hurried me out the door, and headed straight for the stables before I could let out a single sound of response.
Silently, he mounted Pearl and flew towards the eastern entrance to the city; I could only throw myself over my horse to follow behind him. He set a steep pace that was hard to follow at times, but the pounding of hooves against the cobblestones helped to soothe my anger somewhat and put my mind to other places. By the time he stopped, we were just along the edge of River Street, where we could watch the water race past.
I slid out of the saddle and let my boots crunch into the soil along the river bank. After the meeting with Lheda, I should have had my thoughts occupied, but somehow all I could think of was a pale-blue dress and a blonde girl with a black necklace. “It’s called obsidian.”
“What?”
“The black stone. It’s a rare gem called obsidian. It comes from Hurgada.” Having been from one of the poorest villages in Madurai, I can’t say I became well-educated on the different varieties of gemstones. It was a strange word that somehow seemed appropriate for the depth of the blackness of the stone.
Obsidian.
“It fits her.”
I reached out to stroke the neck of my horse and whispered in her ear, “Is that what you’d like me to call you? Obsidian?”
Avis was right, of course. Obsidian fit her. Elegant and dark, just the name to suit my gentle, black horse.
“And don’t worry about Lheda. She just doesn’t like when things don’t go her way.”
In fact, I wasn’t worrying about Lheda at all. Instead, I was wondered how Khea had come to have a rare Hurgadan gem around her neck. I knew she didn’t bring it from Lagodon, but then where else? Did another student give it to her? The thought of her with another boy the way I was with Parvani made my chest pound and my breath quicken.
“Don’t worry. She didn’t.” I let out a huge sigh that confused me–even as I released it.
Why am I acting this way?
I hadn’t spoken to her since that night I returned with Rhada, and of course I had told her to leave me alone. That had been almost a year ago.
I didn’t have a claim to her and, at that point, barely knew her. What was wrong with me?
Avis and I walked along the riverside for nearly the entire length of its stretch through Hubli before he spoke again. “To complete Round Five, you must be able to isolate a single thought from a crowd. You know how to turn them all off, but you have to be able to listen to some as you remove others. Today you can practice in the city.”
Avis turned Pearl around and broke into a smooth trot, I assumed back towards Myxini. It was just as well;
I could go for a day of being alone.
By the time I returned at nightfall, I was no closer than I had been that morning, although I was considerably hungrier. The chill of winter had begun to creep in and the torches swirled in the wind. I hurried along to the dining hall.
Rationally I should have just taken the rest of the day off and quit subjecting myself to the frustration of failure. But the morning’s conversation with Lheda wouldn’t let me give up just yet.
As I hungrily guzzled two bowls of rabbit stew, I tried to start with all the threads connected, then cut them one by one. Before I knew it, I had cut them all and had to start over. Twenty minutes later, I still hadn’t managed to get it down to less than five at a time, and the process took several minutes.
When I decided I wasn’t getting anywhere, I tried it with an empty mind at the start. I chose a random student and carefully traced a thread between us. Sure enough, I heard their thoughts about how the training for Shakers was much more challenging than the other rates. I cut the thread and repeated the process with the cook, who thought how wonderfully she had made the rabbit stew that night.
Modest are we?
In less than five minutes, I had drawn a connecting thread, observed the thoughts, then cut the line over and over to at least a dozen students. To finish a round in less than a day was quite impressive–even for me.
Several days later, I began to get worried. Avis hadn’t appeared out of his hole to provide a black stripe, so I was just stuck.
Has he gone away? Did he think I wouldn’t be able to accomplish it so soon?
With nothing left to do, I took Obsidian on runs through the bit of woods that separated Myxini from the rest of Hubli. Each time, I eventually found my way back to the city to practice drawing and cutting threads.
For over a week, I listened in to the people of Hubli, and I began to notice a troubling trend. More and more, their thoughts came to rest on being able to provide their dues to Takla Maya. I remembered my father paying dues, usually a few geese a year, in exchange for their protection in the absence of the Madurian army.
It seemed the dues had been on the rise, and lately they had reached a point where the gentle lives of the villagers were being disrupted. Part of me felt only condescension towards them, people who had so much and still complained that they didn’t have enough. The other part of me wondered what had caused Takla Maya to change the dues. What were they up to?
That night, I lay in bed and thought about why Avis hadn’t come, how I was supposed to learn Nakben, or what Khea was doing. More and more my thoughts returned to her.
Where did she get that necklace? How was she doing under Mathias’s guidance? Did she remember we had been friends once; that I almost killed for her once?
She looked so stunning in that blue dress that I couldn’t get it out of my head, but there was nothing to be done for it. I had no idea where to find her; for all I knew, it would be another year before I saw her again.
But there was another girl I did know how to find. I pulled on my green shirt and made my way to the corner near Latinia’s; even before opening it, I heard Parvani’s thoughts behind her door. It was getting easier to separate them from each other, and I did so more out of habit than any conscious effort.
“Who’s th–” I could hear her worry I was an attacker or the girl she had challenged that day come to seek midnight revenge.
“Don’t worry. It’s just me.”
“Lark?”
In answer, I slid myself down between her and the sheets until my hips rested on hers and I could barely make out the shine of her eyes from the moonlight through the window.
Once I sensed her acceptance of my presence in her bed, I cut her thread and let my hands and mouth lead the way.