Chapter Six – Korr
Chapter Six
Korr
Sorina has been in Steinheim for four days.
I’ve seen her maybe five times, and none of those lasted longer than a few minutes.
She stays in her room with the door closed, or goes down to the Narrowhalls, and I don’t know what she does in either place.
When we cross paths, we talk about nothing.
Food, the weather outside, whether she needs anything from the market.
She always says she’s fine and then finds a reason to leave.
I can’t ask anything from her. She doesn’t owe me her company.
I bought her at a bride market, which is problematic in itself, and the least I can do is give her room to figure out her new situation before I start wanting things she isn’t ready to give.
But it bothers me… this distance between us.
I want to reach out to her, but stop myself every time, because her body language and the fear flickering in her blue eyes tell me I need to wait. And wait I will.
She’s gone to the Narrowhalls again. I heard her door open and close, and her light footsteps as she crossed the living room.
She’s probably made friends. The Narrowhalls are built to human scale, the Pickaxe is full of laughter, and everyone there is her own size.
I can’t blame her for choosing that over the Highhalls, where the ceilings are too tall, and the golems look at her with curious eyes, knowing she’s my new bride and wondering how long she’ll last. They all know about my predicament, so they don’t comment.
They would never say anything to her, and when I meet my friends and acquaintances in the Corehalls, we stick to general topics of conversation.
Calcification is not something golems like to talk about.
The quiet in my quarters is too much tonight, so I go to Irrva and Jarrvik’s.
Their place is a short walk from mine. Irrva opens the door before I knock, which means she heard me coming down the corridor.
“I was about to send Jarrvik to drag you over,” she says, stepping aside to let me through. “You haven’t visited in over a week.”
“I’ve been busy.”
“Busy doing what? Sitting in your workshop staring at your tools?”
She gives me a look, the same one she used to give me when we were children, and I lied to her that I hadn’t eaten the last of the smoked meat.
“Come on. We’re on the balcony.”
The balcony is carved into the mountainside, open to the night.
From up here I can see the treetops below us and the sky above, wide and clear, the moon a sickle surrounded by bright stars.
Jarrvik is lounging with his feet up on the ledge and a crate of bottles beside his chair.
He hands me one of the dark beers from the Narrowhalls without looking up.
“Sit,” he says.
I pull a chair closer to his, sit down, and we drink. The air is cool and the valley is quiet. For a few minutes nobody talks.
Irrva is the one who decides to break the silence.
“So,” she says. “When do I get to meet her?”
“Whenever you have the time,” I say. “Come by tomorrow, or the day after. She’s usually in during the mornings.”
“Usually in.” She turns her bottle in her hands. “How are the two of you getting along?”
“Fine.” I shrug. “She spends most of her days down in the Narrowhalls. It’s easier for her there, I guess. She seems comfortable.”
“Everything up here is built for us,” Irrva says. “The furniture, the doorways, the stairs. If I were her size and the chair in my room came up to my chest, I’d probably find somewhere else to spend my time too.”
“That’s what I figured.”
“But she can’t live in the Narrowhalls forever.
Not if this is going to work.” Irrva says it gently, without pushing.
“Maybe I can help. I could come by, bring some food, show her around the Highhalls a bit. Let her see there’s more to this place.
If she had someone besides you to talk to, someone who isn’t her strange, clumsy husband who bought her and now doesn’t even know what to say to her, she might start to feel more at home. ”
“I know what to say to her,” I mumble.
“No, you don’t. Your whole life, you never knew what to say to the people closest to you.
” She takes a sip and smiles over the rim of the bottle.
“I’ll bring honeyed bread from the market.
Humans like sweet things. And I’ll introduce her to Gella and Maren down the hall.
They’re pleasant enough, they won’t overwhelm her. ”
“She’d like that,” I say. “I think she would.”
“Good. Then it’s settled.” Irrva stands and sets her bottle on the ledge.
“I’m going to go check on my flowers. The frost got into the snapdragons last week, and the new ones I planted might not have taken.
” She touches my shoulder as she passes, a quick squeeze, and then she’s gone down the garden steps.
She does it on purpose, always finding a reason to step away so Jarrvik and I can talk without her in the middle.
She’s been doing it for years, and I’ve never once called her on it because she’d tell me I’m imagining things.
I’m also grateful, because she’s my sister, and there are some things I just can’t share with her.
Jarrvik and I are childhood friends. We grew up together, and then Irrva was born and when she was old enough, we included her in our games. I’m glad they are soulmates and they found each other early. It’s a blessing to not see either of them have to deal with the threat of calcification.
Jarrvik waits until her footsteps fade, then looks over at me.
“So, how is it really going?”
“I told you. She’s spending her days in the Narrowhalls.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
I take a long drink and set the bottle on the stone between my feet. The valley below us is dark, the trees a black edge against the stars.
“I don’t know if she’s the one,” I say. “The pull is there, and it hasn’t gone away. But a pull isn’t a bond, and four days of closed doors and a few stolen words here and there haven’t brought me any closer to knowing for sure.”
“You told me the pull was stronger than anything you’ve felt before. When you came back from the market, you said it hit you like nothing else had.”
“I know what I said. That doesn’t mean I’m right.”
“And if you are right? If she’s your mate and you’re just sitting here, giving her space until your body gives out?”
“Then it gives out.”
Jarrvik exhales. “Have you told her about the calcification? About what happens to you if you don’t bond?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because it’s not her problem. She came here with bruises on her face and arms, Jarrvik. She escaped a bad place, and I’m not going to pile my problems on top of hers and watch her buckle under the weight of it all.”
“You could tell her without making it her burden. Just let her know what’s happening. She deserves to understand what she’s part of.”
“If I tell her I’m dying, she’ll touch me because she feels guilty. She’ll climb into my bed and spend the rest of her life resenting me for it. I don’t want that. I want her to choose me because she wants to, not because she can’t live with letting me die.”
“You’re being stubborn.”
“I’m being fair to her.”
“You’re being stubborn and calling it fairness because that’s easier to live with.” He finishes his beer and reaches for another from the crate. “But it’s your call. I’ve said my piece.”
“You have.”
He pops the cap and doesn’t push further. We’ve known each other long enough that he can hear when I’m done with a subject, and I’m done with this one.
I shift my arm on the armrest, and the sleeve of my shirt pulls back.
The crack on my forearm catches the light from inside the room behind us.
It’s a deep fissure, one that’s been widening for weeks.
I’ve watched it spread every morning, a little wider each day.
However, it looks the same as it did four days ago.
The edges haven’t moved. I look at it for a few seconds, then pull my sleeve back down.
Calcification doesn’t pause, I tell myself.
That’s not how it works. The stone degrades until the organs start failing one by one.
It’s only a coincidence that the crack hasn’t worsened, or maybe I’ve been too distracted to monitor it properly as of late.
“We hit something good this week,” Jarrvik says, and I notice the excitement in his voice.
He loves the mine. When we were young, we used to sneak down to the upper shafts to watch the crews work before someone chased us out.
“A vein about a hundred and thirty feet past the last junction. The stone around it is clean, barely any fracture lines, and the deposit is thick. We think we can pull some big pieces of diamond, bigger than anything we’ve extracted before.”
“How deep are you?”
“Deep enough. We extended shaft nine by another forty feet to reach it.”
“That’s a lot of new ground.”
“It’s worth it. You should see the samples we brought up. The crystals are clear all the way through, not a single inclusion. If the rest of the vein is the same, this is the biggest find the mine has had in years.”
“The deeper you dig, the more dangerous it gets,” I say. “You know that.”
“The supports are solid. The crew is experienced, half of them have been working shaft nine since before I took over. We brace every foot before we move forward.”
“Experience doesn’t stop a ceiling from coming down.”
Jarrvik sets his bottle on the ledge and looks at me.
“What happened to your father won’t happen again, I promise. I have this under control.”
I hold his gaze. He means it. He believes it, fully and honestly, but the problem is that I know believing it doesn’t make it true.
“If something happens to you down there, Irrva won’t survive it,” I say. “You know that. And you tend to be reckless, Jarrvik. You always have been, even when we were kids. You go in first and think about it after. So yes, I worry.”
He picks up his bottle and takes a drink. He’s quiet for a moment, then he shakes his head.
“You worry about me,” he says. “Irrva and I worry about you.” He gestures with the bottle, a loose wave that takes in the balcony, the valley, the whole mountain. “Where does it stop? It’s all about worrying.”
I laugh. He laughs too, and the sound carries off into the night. It’s true. The three of us spend our lives worrying about each other, passing it around and around, and the only sensible thing to do with a truth that heavy is to laugh at it.
I finish my beer and stay a while longer.
I’m grateful for these two people even if I don’t say it often enough.
Irrva, who returns from the garden with dirt under her fingernails and tells me everything is going to be fine because that’s what she needs to believe.
Jarrvik, who puts a drink in my hand and tells me the truth even when I don’t want to hear it.
They’ve been carrying me through the worst years of my life, and they’ve never once made me feel like a burden for it.
I stay until the bottles are empty and the air turns cold, and when I finally walk back to my quarters, I’m slower than I was two hours ago, my joints stiff from sitting too long.