Chapter 25
Twenty-Five
An eclipse was to come in early spring that year, and the amount of visitors seeking Jorn’s advice multiplied.
The city of Aalt swelled with newcomers, fires and large brawls becoming part of the daily news.
Every morning approaching the eclipse, I heard gossip of lovers discovered or scorned, this-such-and-such person arriving, that-such-and-such ware for sale.
King Arik had warned me that I might want to hide in my chamber during the eclipse, that I might breathe in some of the smoke that would be everywhere, causing me to dream while awake.
That wombed beings would be looking for anonymous lovers, hoping to conceive a child on the most special day, unworried entirely about where they had to lay to make it happen.
That travellers would be selling their works aggressively.
“Of course, Gentlewoman, if you want to have fun and explore but would like a guard, I can arrange this.”
I smiled. It was the same warning and offering he’d presented me with for the winter solstice and spring equinox. I gave the same response I had then. “While it does sound… interesting. I expect a quiet evening would suit me more.”
I’d intended to spend the day playing music in my chamber, but then, without any planning from King Arik or myself, a guard of sorts presented himself at my door early morning.
I opened the door to find Fell, smiling that awful smile of his. “There will be many sights today,” he said. “It is a good time to be a guest in Aalt.”
I stood there looking at him, bewildered by him.
“You would come with me and some friends? Dania will meet us, too.”
Of course I would. I’d already forgotten everything I knew, including King Arik’s warning, simply because Fell looked as he looked, felt as he felt.
I followed that beautiful man right out of the southernmost doors of the floating palace, my cheeks warm because the guards saw us leaving together. Because our shoulders were not so far from one another.
All the ice and snow had melted, leaving the world damp.
Birds sang their songs of spring, and the docks were filled despite the early hour.
I’d come to realize that at least a third of any group of Norsern were hungover on a given morning, so the full size of a group could never be ascertained until after midday at least. On the day of the eclipse that was true as well, but it didn’t feel true as so many people were out.
The breeze was fresh and damp, smelling like sea and cedar smoke, carrying four or five different tunes from different directions.
“They will all end up playing the same song later,” Fell promised. “There are eclipse parties in your country?”
I pressed my lips together. There were, but the Norsern idea of a party and the Islish idea of it were very different.
“We do not eat or drink,” I said. “All is silent. Even babies…” My ears caught on a cart full of wind chimes for sale, each singing its own little song of delicate notes.
“But it is all building for when the eclipse passes. There are sweets and drinks and music. There is water-dancing, which I’m realizing now is hard to explain…
” Again, my attention was pulled away. The most colourful bird I had ever seen was sitting on a man’s shoulder. The man winked at me.
“Normally, I charge a copper to hold him,” the man said, nodding to the bird. “But for you, I would charge a kiss.”
I froze, entirely unsure how to respond to such brazenness.
Fell smiled at the man, setting his hand near my back—not on my back—but close enough that I could feel the heat of him, close enough that I seemed spoken for.
I recalled floating in Odae with him. His fingers…
“Here the eclipse party is a message,” Fell said as we kept walking. “The gods must know that we love being alive, that we want our sun back once the moon has had her way with him. We try to be loud enough that they will not forget us.”
I looked up at him even though we were still walking along the packed docks and it was probably best for me to pay attention to where I was going. “What?”
His eyes were shiny with mirth. “The sun and moon will have sex today. No one has told you this?”
I wanted to keep looking at him because he was beautiful and his face was full of teasing, but I had to look away. I couldn’t hold eye contact with him after hearing the word sex.
Speartooth, Loudlaugher, and Catseye (who by then I knew were named Sigyn, Daal, and Inga) were waiting for us at a spring that trickled down the rocks just as the endless docks of Aalt met with the red sand of actual earth.
Norsern passing by would stop to drink straight from the rocks before carrying on, not bothered in the least that so many other people had set their lips against the same place.
“Ah! Thirsty Bastard and Lightning Wielder! Nice of you to join us.”
I’d given up asking them not to call me that, realizing the name had only stuck as long as it had because I’d been resisting it, and Norsern love teasing each other.
“We were just placing wagers.”
“Inga is going to invite a new child to life this day.”
“I think she will choose a life-thrower with dark hair. Sigyn thinks blond.”
“I think I will choose no one,” Inga said.
The men were drunk already, and Inga was some type of intoxicated that didn’t seem to come from drink, her lids painted a deep charcoal colour that made her eyes glow all the more. “They have been teasing me endlessly,” she said, her eyes on Fell.
I hated her, hated the conversation the pair of them were having with their gazes alone.
“For you, Lightning Wielder,” Daal offered up his own mead, and I took it. I’ll need six of these if Catseye and Fell are going to be looking at each other like this all day, I thought, taking a big, long drink.
“Ah!” Fell raised his brows, revealing his surprise at how much mead I’d taken.
“It is a Norsern party, no?” I said, relishing in his attention.
“It is,” he said.
For good measure, I drank a little more.
Dania arrived with her boys. Hald was crying.
“What has happened?” Inga said to him in a tone that implied she was taking his misery just as seriously as she would take adult misery, and not as if he was a small child who cried about fifteen foolish things each day.
I’d seen him cry because he pushed grass between the floorboards in the palace and it was lost forever to the sea.
I’d seen him cry because he wanted a broken eggshell put back together, good as new.
I’d seen him cry because he wanted Dania to stop singing.
“I want to see a bear,” Hald said.
“We can surely find a bear,” Inga said.
Layf picked his nose and then offered what he acquired on the tip of his finger to Dania. She pulled a cloth from her pocket and took the booger from him no questions asked.
I felt like I might throw up, and my face must have shown that because she scowled at me. “Mira, I am having one of those days where I hate Eggun for leaving me with all of this, and I cannot deal with one more sour thing, so you must fix your face.”
“More mead for Owl Face and a bear hunt for the rest of us!” said Sigyn.
I felt certain the day was going to drag with the crying children, and glaring Dania, and Catseye and Fell looking at each other, but I was entirely wrong.
Hald cried only a little longer as everyone pointed out cloth bears and carved bears and bear teeth for sale.
He explained he wanted to see a real bear, and Dania reminded him that bears lived in the forest, not in the city, but the child insisted he’d heard one earlier.
It was Fell who stopped us all with a loud, “Ah! This will be worth our attention!”
We all shuffled through the crowd to see what he was pointing at. Two men and a woman were hanging rich, colourful silks from posts freshly planted in the ground. Their clothing was odd and bright, made of mismatched fabrics.
They’d brought two carts with them. One seemed normal enough, but the other was covered with purple silk, and from inside, there was a frightening noise. A low rumbling sound I’d never heard before. I didn’t need anyone to tell me it was an animal beneath the silk—my stomach told me.
Fell said, “I will fetch more drinks. What do we think? Three skins? Four?”
“Five, in case they run out later.”
“Ah! Very well. I shall return.” And he was gone through the crowd. Sigyn, Daal, and Inga huddled in a little circle, smoking from what looked like a flute, offering some to Dania and myself.
“I think you may not like it?” Dania said. “It is stronger than mead.”
So I stood, holding each of the children with one hand, worried to lose them in the crowd that flowed around us as Dania joined their little flute circle.
“You are breathing without me?” Fell said as he returned with his arms full of leather skins.
Before our companions could do anything more than giggle, one of the men setting up silks shouted, “We are Egil’s children!”
Quickly, those who’d gathered to watch formed a circle around the three performers and the little platform they had built.
The Norsern were much taller than the Islish on average, and I struggled to see beyond the shoulders that pressed into us from all sides.
Fell and Sigyn pushed our group a little forward, so the boys and myself could see.
Egil’s sons were placing their sister into a tiny crate by the time I could see them again; the crate was much too small for a person to fit inside, but somehow she did.
They closed the top, and one brother sat upon the crate as it shifted around, the woman inside trying to get free.
The other brother asked a young girl from the crowd to come forward and blow wind onto the box, and when they opened it, their sister was gone.