Chapter 24 #2
It is not so important, but Fell was from a village in the mountains.
He grew up more on land than sea, which was unusual for many Norsern as there were far more driftwood, sea villages than mountain ones.
He spoke words the “dry way” and had a mild accent to many in the palace.
The derogatory term for those like him was thirsty.
I’m letting you know this to explain away some of my confusion in his presence.
Most of it was my own inability to perform basic human tasks with him anywhere near me, but a small portion can be blamed on his accent and dry choice of words.
“I swear it is warm,” he said, and I took a few steps toward the water’s edge, certain I was about to feel an icy chill and hear the laugh that comes from a Norsern when their prank has been successful. I knelt and hesitantly dipped my pointing finger into the water, pulling it out immediately.
“Ah! It’s as hot as a bath!” The Norsern didn’t bathe in hot water, so I hadn’t felt that pleasure since I’d been ill, and King Arik had ordered everything brought to me to be scalding hot.
Fell laughed. “No understand.”
In my surprise, I’d spoken Islish. “Hot,” I said. “Hot like cooking water.”
He swam on his back away from me with a taunting grin. “I told you.”
“How does it work? What is heating it?”
He laughed again. “The spring heats herself. Her name is Odae. She has… healing properties. She will tend to your scars if you wish. From before we met and… when we met. Your dress and the… capture.”
My hips and shoulders still had patches of fresh skin that were paler than the rest of me, but I considered the scabs healed already.
And I certainly didn’t like him bringing the conversation to my body.
I was pretending I didn’t have a body, that I had no skin or blood or bone, nothing that could feel physical sensation while in his vicinity.
“I will keep space between us, if this is your concern. I know the Mud and Mist laws are… stronger. You can wear your under-dress, and I can keep my eyes closed even.”
“You claim to know a lot about the Land of Mud and Mist,” I said, determined to change the subject. I would not be getting in the water with him, nor would I be taking off any layers of clothing, regardless of how brutally taunted I was by the idea of being truly hot again.
“I do.” He grinned. “Do not forget, I am friends with Arik, and he speaks of it constantly. He is a little obsessed with it, I think. But also, I have known people from your country. And, if you remember, I have been there.”
I frowned, but it wasn’t a true frown. I was playing at being angry which was most unlike me. “I remember.”
He laughed. “The trees are very old there. They have lots of secrets I would wager.”
Am I smiling? Should I stop?
He swam one length of the hot pool and then back.
“I told a friend of mine about you,” he said. “She said you were a bear, and if I dreamed of a bear, it meant I was dreaming of you.”
It was a comment so outside of prescription that I had no guide for my response. My family’s sigil was a bear, which he couldn’t have known, making his words all the more eerie. “You do not know so much about my country as you claim. Where I am from, we do not dream or speak about dreaming.”
“Ah, but I do know that. I also know that the first thing mist-people do when they come north is talk about their dreams. Then they have lots of sex. Then they pray to our gods and mark their skin and wash their hair with lye that whitens it so no one will ever know where they came from. This is commonly known.”
“Well…” I wrapped my cloak tighter around me, holding my arms tight against my chest. “I will be going back home, so I will be doing none of those things.” Only I had. I’d told King Arik that I dreamt, that I remembered those dreams.
“I sense you are a very strong person,” Fell said. “If you say it is so, it will be, I think.”
It is so, I thought.
The wind tugged at the pine and spruce branches around us, pulling them toward the hot pool and swishing the needles above our heads.
“Ah, the trees are conspiring,” Fell said with a devilish look on his face. “We must be on guard.”
I raised my eyebrows. “There is no way—”
“Odae also is… planning… she would have you drink hawthorn tea—”
“That is what Ivar said—”
“Ivar has strong senses.”
The wind surged, and the entire world swayed. My hair rushed forward toward the pool, my dress as well.
“Ha! Hyrold speaks, too! He says, ‘Get in the water already.’”
While I had no belief at all that the wind was a god named Hyrold, I had to admit that—by chance—it had looked like the wind was pulling me to the spring.
I am so unafraid, I thought, bewildered by the idea.
Mira from five months ago would have been trembling wildly if she were so close to water.
Had I grown used to the sea because of King Arik’s palace?
Or was the hot pool so much less threatening than the sea that I had been gentled toward it?
Was it Fell’s presence that made something so terrifying seem so sturdy?
Was I under some spell? Yes to all of these, I think.
And, looking back, I also think I had some of King Arik’s determination left within me after reading for him.
I hadn’t yet learned how to barricade myself during readings.
And because Fell was still smiling at me, and this made me into something I wasn’t, or perhaps removed some of what I was not, so I could be more of what I was? I unlaced my boots, pulling one off and then the other, my toes attacked my the cold.
“Ah!” Fell grinned that terrible grin of his. “The goddess determines to enter the spring!”
I glared at him. “You must not call me that. It is very… illegal in my country.”
Did he like me telling him what to do? It appeared that way.
“And,” I said. “I am not coming in fully. I will just put in my legs.”
My heart pattered nervously as I edged even closer to the water, but the moment my cloak was tucked beneath me so the cold of the stones surrounding the spring wouldn’t freeze me, and my feet and legs felt the spring’s warmth, my nerves settled.
Fell swam away a little and then hovered, watching me, suddenly very serious.
I rolled my eyes, which I don’t think I’d ever done before. “What?”
“Odae asks me about you. I have so little to tell. I say to her that I think your heart is broken.”
“Well, you can also tell her that I said you do not know anything about me, so you cannot be trusted on the matter.” That was good, I told myself. Be a little mean to him always, that way he cannot know…
He laughed, and it stirred my marrow.
“Odae asks how you are finding her work.”
I didn’t say, I’ve noticed nothing, though I did feel marvellously relaxed as I had missed bathing in hot water terribly. I said, “It is too soon to know.”
“I feel her quickly, but some medicine works slow. Look—” he stood on the far side of the pool, more of his torso rising above the steaming water than I felt capable of dealing with.
He rotated his arm in a wide circle, bringing it high above his head.
“See? I could not do that without pain even an hour ago. My shoulder-turn, see?” He stopped.
“Has Arik been teaching you medicine words?”
“Uhh…”
“The words for hidden parts of the body. He does this with his favourites.”
The king had taught me the word for the socket where the leg bone connects with the hip.
The word for the trap door in the back of the throat that moves depending on whether you’re eating or breathing.
The word for the passage between the nose and the mouth, where he said sickness often comes first and leaves last.
I nodded. “Some.”
“Ah, he does adore you then.” Fell lowered his body back into the water and pushed off the side of the pool, giving my mind some respite, but not much.
“Arik made me learn them all before I raided with him. So if I got hurt, I could tell him exactly which part needed medicine. He would not even let me be fearless until I had.”
He was swimming closer to me, so I was only half listening. How close would he come? I was an absolute shipwreck. I need to go, I thought. But what I said was, “Fearless?”
“Yes… what I am doing now.”
“You are being unafraid right now?”
“No… or… this is an Egil-question.” He stopped swimming, grabbing a tree root to the eastern side of the pool. He grinned, and the smile quickly transformed into laughter when his eyes met mine. “I see the…yes, this is—ha! This is confusing. No need to glare at me. I did not decide how words work.”
The muscle between his neck and his shoulder held my focus, especially with his arm raised above his head, holding the tree root… I looked down at my legs.
“Fearless means being unafraid, like you have said it, but it also means what I am doing now—” he pushed off and swam to the west side of the pool. “Moving through the water, not touching the earth beneath. Understand?”
I nodded. Norsern had a handful of these double words.
They would say wind, when they meant wind but also when they meant breath or air and a listener would just have to know which meaning they intended.
“I cannot… be fearless,” I said, feeling like I wasn’t speaking about swimming at all. “I will drown.”
He shook his head. “No, there is no undercurrent. You would have to try very hard to drown in Odae.”
“I am not speaking it rightly… I do not know how to be fearless. I have never done it.”
He stopped swimming and stared at me. “Truly?”
I nodded.
“You are very brave to be living in the palace then. With the sea below you at all times? You know pieces of Aalt fall into the sea once or twice each year, yes?”
I hadn’t known that.
“I can teach you. It is very easy.”
Absolutely not, I thought. But then, he was coming closer and holding his hands out for me to take. I stared at him, thinking Catseye wouldn’t like it. Neither would Loric.
“I am sworn to defend you. This would be easier if you could keep afloat in water,” he said.
I was wearing three dresses and quickly removed the outer two.
I reached for his hands because I am a wretched, vile temptress just as they say.
My fingers met his, and he led me into the water, so gently and so slowly, my dress floating and swirling around my legs.
I was flooded with a feeling of rightness so strong it felt like I was made of earth or water or something else that could make no error ever.
I kept thinking Who is this brazen fool?
And why, for all that is sacred and prescribed, am I listening to him? Why am I so unafraid?
The lack of fear wasn’t to last. The fearlessness I’d borrowed from King Arik by reading for him wasn’t enough to combat my true feelings as I went deeper into the water. My heart raced as the pool’s surface came up past my chest, to my throat, my chin… I gripped Fell’s hands so tightly it hurt.
He kept his eyes on mine, just as he’d done when we were at sea together, promising no harm.
“I will not let you sink. I did not let you sink when you were the weight of ten Norser, did I?” He offered the softest, half-smile.
“I will put my hand here on you,” he said, releasing one of my hands and touching his own ribs. “You are unbothered by this?”
I wanted to say I was terribly bothered by it, but also, I didn’t want to say that at all. I said, “Proceed.”
He set his hand on my ribs on the left side and then on the right side.
“Water is very wise,” he said. “If it knows you are scared, it will let you sink. If it knows you are unafraid, it will hold you up. Understand?”
I understood nothing but the feeling of his hands on me.
“I will hold you along with Odae, but I will hold gently, so you can feel her holding you too, so you can see she is trustworthy.”
We were so close my dress brushed against his legs.
“It is easiest to start on your back, so your face is always where the wind is.”
I nodded, completely enchanted by the closeness. How was he able to carry on speaking when we were touching so?
I leaned back as he seemed to be directing me, and he shifted his hands to beneath my back, holding me atop the water’s surface until I was entirely calm.
He took one hand away and I stayed—feeling the strength of the water beneath me, just as he said I would—and then he took the other, and I panicked and scrambled to right myself and grab onto him before the water filled my lungs and ended my pathetic life.
His hands were back on me before I sank.
“She will hold you,” he whispered.
Again and again we did this until I lost my fear, certain Fell would catch me should I start drowning. I floated. As someone who has felt heavy their entire life, I can’t explain the ease that seeped into me from that. It was magic—healing just as Fell had promised Odae would be.
The moon had moved half across the sky by the time we climbed out of the pool and hurried back to the palace.
We’d spoken to each other all evening, about what, I can’t even recall.
Words came easily, and everything he said I enjoyed, and everything I said he listened to as if it were interesting.
I think it was the most I had ever said in one evening.