[Customs House] Behind, a Sealed Route

[Philomena]

WINTER 85, 514

The last winds of winter brought the generously cooling dregs of a Zeltiva bone snapper - or at least Minnie liked to suppose that was the wind’s source. Preparing to leave one beloved place, she found, gave her a yearning for all places previously left, and just as the dusk-scent of Semiyr filled her with preemptive nostalgia, the thought of the gardens of the Wright House just coming into bloom brought her near tears.

The water was rich with currents, for the evening’s cool brought slender barges up and down the lengths of the grand canal. The boatswains, both Zeltivan and Akvatari, recognized her by now, fluttering down the way with her feet bound. Her belly was strong know, the muscles of it toned from the rhythmic waves of the kicks, her shoulders more taut than they had been, really, since her childhood, when she had wormed into nooks and crannies in search of suppers to filch, and they moved the water along with, if not the grace of an expert, at least with familiarity.

“Geldscrier Philomena, a fine evening, yes?”

The voice came from an Akvatari gentleman, quietly knitting as he guided a load of lambswool along the canal.

Minnie smiled, and nodded, “That ’tis.”

It WAS a beautiful night, and not even the hard beauty of the sun-swelters of the desert. The sky held, high up, wisps of clouds like pale shadows on the dusk. The soft click-clack of the needles blended with the murmur of wings above her, where a troupe of Akvatari performed a silent dance, slow and formal, and eery with no music but the whisper of night-wind. Balconies in the towers around the canal held silent spectators.

They say the wild is beautiful, I suppose

She did not really know, she admitted to herself. She had walked the meadows below the mountains, but they were so interlaced with road and rick, vineyard and hedgerow that to call them wild would be a misnomer. And then, she knew the sea, but the sea seemed its own sort of wild. The idea of an empty land (or at least empty of humans) filled her with a an irrational foreboding - the wilds, after all, were where she and Lanie had agreed to die together.

I wonder if there are beasts on Darva?

She sighed softly. The movements of dancers began to strike her as predatory, the beautiful swoop and hover of birds of prey.

———

She arrived, finally at the wharves, and took her ankle ribbon to bind up her damp, dark hair. A ship rested in the harbor, filled with the slow, hard-cornered songs of sailors winching cargo from a hold. It smelled strong, some spice perhaps from Eypharia. She settled her satchel on her hip, and stretched her hands. The joints of her fingers had begun to feel the mild ache of their age, particularly whens he wrote - and how she wrote now! She spent long, late nights with the pen, poring over papers for her biography of Charm Wright, and then timid mornings trying to pen a libretto for an opera about Akvatar, an adaptation of a folk tale that her young apprentice had taught her. She wrote as if the world was ending - perhaps, after all, it was, at least for her.

The customs house sat broad and high-stooped on the dusty pavers. She slid quietly to the back, and to the door of Raisa’s private apartments, and with a slow, sad breath, tugged the bell pull.

x

[Liminal]

Teresa Wright Allwave, Master of the Zeltivan Customs House and Docks, had finished her work for the day. It had been a busy one, preparing for the arrival of the trade vessel, but now the actual labor was in the hands of the stevedores and dockworkers. She had just poured herself a cup of tea -- real tea, the kind that was only available in Akvatar because of the cargo ships coming in from the south -- when the bell rang. She set the cup down, and then walked to the door, pulling it open. She had not changed her clothes, and was still dressed in her Master's uniform, which was white with gold trim. Teresa wasn't always inclined to be that formal, but on days when ships arrived, it behooved her to be so. "Doctor Lefting?" She hadn't been expecting this particular visitor, and it was clearly obvious that, although Minnie was well in body, she was troubled in spirit. "Please, come in." Raisa led Minnie to the sitting room, and then picked her tea back up. "Tea for you?" she asked. "And what can I do for you? You look...ill at ease."

[Philomena]

The uniform with its bright white gold struck Minnie immediately with the knowledge of feeling a wee bit intimidated. She was still used to thinking of Raisa as a sort of young niece, whereas the uniform was a symbol of superiority, especially the braid. It made for a contradictory set of feelings in Minnie.

Smelling once again the scent of southern tea leaves, she smiled politely, "No, no, I dunny need anything."

A strand of wet hair escaped its ribbon and clung to Minnies face in a long, dark spiral. She paid it no heed, and did not think to take a chair. She looked at Raisa in the eyes, less out of any kind of assertion, and more so that she could address something more familiar and comfortable than the white and gold beneath.

"Well, I dunny want to dance on the capstan. The thing is, Raisa, I've come to ask you an inappropriately large favor. I need a ship, for taking me to Darva."

She let out a long exhale, keeping her eyes on Raisa's, her hands fiddling with her gloves, her toes (still bare) worming into the pile of a throw carpet.

x

[Liminal]

Raisa was putting her cup -- now empty -- back on the table when Minnie dropped her bombshell. The cup fell from the Master's hand, clanking off the tabletop and rolling to the floor. "Darva?" Raisa's shock was plain on her face. For several long minutes -- an eternity! -- she said nothing at all, didn't even move. The air was thick with nervousness. Faintly, the noises of shouts and shuffles from the unloading of the ship outside could be heard. "Please, Doctor Lefting, sit down. You'll make me even more unsettled." Raisa managed half a smile, but that was all, even though she was clearly trying to lighten the mood. "I'd give you anything I could, Doctor Lefting -- anything for such a friend of my family as you! -- but I don't know that your request can be fulfilled. I don't have to tell you that my grandmother never came back from the last expedition there, or about the Lost Colonies from the 430s and 440s. I don't know what lives on Darva, or what it wants, or what its concerns are, but I know that people who go there don't come back." A long, shuddering sigh, and some of the magic of the Master's uniform she wore seemed to wear off. Teresa was a musician at heart, not an administrator, and certainly not a sailor. She'd done good enough work in Abura for her position to be secure, but she was still only 24, and the rare Full Member of the Guild who had never so much as served as a deckhand on a trade route. If her mother were here, rather than retired in the Zatoskas; if her grandmother hadn't sailed off into emptiness forever; if her great-aunt hadn't become her city's tragic heroine and vanished into its mythology -- they would know what to do. They were the leaders, the doers, the clear-eyed and surefooted judges of people and courses. But Jocylinda, Charm, and Kenabelle weren't here. There was no one except Teresa Allwave, suddenly uncomfortable in both her clothes and skin, trying to decide how to answer an impossible question. "I have a boat, and the voyage is easy," she said finally. "But there are so few of us here. Who would sail it? Who would go with you to the place from which no one goes back? And why would you go, Doctor Lefting? What do you want in a place that takes everything and gives nothing? Why leave your geldscrying, your writing, your walks along the dock in the cool of the evening?" She shook her head, but nothing seemed clearer. "Why?"

[Philomena]

Minnie blushes, a dark rose underneath her sun-freckled cheekbones, and pulls herself into one of the chairs, sitting on the edge of it, her hands fidgeting in her lap.

"I know it sounds mad..." she laughed, surprising herself with the sound of it, tight and frightened, "I told your Grandmother the same thing, and cunny convince her, and did nae understand it. I may not still, perhaps."

She sighed softly, a the memory of Charm, feeling her eyes grow hot and misty, but swallowed hard, trying to maintain her composure. She looked again at Raisa, and now, with the disquiet on her face, she looked young again, looked like someone Minnie could talk to.

"Raisa... there's a very dark work in all this. I dunny know how a little nothing like me might've gotten mixed in things, but I have a thing, now, a key, and I dunny know just what its for, but I know its..." she stops, and looks very intently at Raisa, "Its great enough that Qalaya herself is frightened of it. And I know she asked me to take it t' Darva. And that's all I know, really, more or less. 'haps its to do with your great-aunt's queer books, or with the colonies, or with your Grandmum's disappearing, I canny say, I canny say. IT all feels so wrapped up and tangled! But I do know, it is something that must be done, and I canny say why, but its something must be done by me."

She sighed and shook her head, "It will nae stop there, When I get to the shores, there'll be summit more I've to do. Its just faith, you understand that, non?" she half-laughs again, "I know you know it, you've SUNG it, I've heard you sing it, from Gavritte in The Dame of the Zatoskas:

I will go underneath the stone,
And pass through the graves of a thousand better men.
For the sake of a thing that has never been,
I'll enter the dark alone.

For reasons that I do not know
On feet I do not trust
With course I cannot chart
But with love that presses me, insistent, hungry..."

She blinked, once very slow, and murmured, "You could come, too, Raisa."

Then she blushed, and looked immediately down, "No, no, I dunny mean that, I don't, mean... I only... n-n-need a ship, I dunny even need her to wait for me. Leave me on the shore, I canny think I'll need a way back, I'm sorry, I..."

x

[Liminal]

For another long, long while, Teresa said nothing. Muffled cries and snatches of song filtered in through the windows, sometimes heard over, other times drowned under the rhythmic noise of the waves. When the woman did speak, it was in an archaic dialect -- Common of the first century BV, the Alahean variety. It was difficult language for a non-specialist, but anyone who had studied classic poetry would recognize the lines. "The stars' breath steals my sight and I walk in the realms of Nysel, the mountains of illusion, and a voice calls to me, the consonants torn, the vowels ragged, the words vanishing like burning paper, like the wrecked ship's hull against the reef, the message lost, the orders drowned in water or in fire." Teresa was looking at her bookshelf now, though she might well have been looking through it, searching for something only she could see. "Marie Sendlant, 'Breath of the Stars'," she said quietly. "There's more, of course, but that's the opening, and it's always stuck with me." What was it that took anyone connected with her away? Her grandmother, lost in Laviku's embrace; her great-aunt, swallowed by the island of disappearance; her mother, retreated to her estate in the mountains. Her father and grandfather, gone to Dira far before their expected times, leaving an expectant emptiness in their places. And now Doctor Lefting, the chronicler of her dying house, talking of keys and the fears of gods, begging for her own negation. The force of the mental question took Teresa by surprise. She knew that Doctor Lefting was a family friend -- trusted by her great-aunt, tolerated to a remarkable degree by her mother, even when the Doctor's quirks threatened to become overwhelming. But it had not occurred to her before this moment how much Doctor Lefting was a window to a past that Teresa had never seen, or a rope that tied her to the great-aunt who had given Teresa great kindnesses and then winked out of existence, and to the grandmother she had never met, whose presence -- and absence -- still loomed so large over her life. Losing Doctor Lefting somehow felt like an actual loss, an erasure of Teresa's own history. Especially now -- now that Teresa herself was so far away from her home, surrounded by strangers and subordinates, taking her evening teas alone under an alien sky, flanked by a landscape not her own. Who knew if she would ever see Mathews Bay or the Zatoskas again? Zeltiva had been through so many tragedies, and Teresa could easily be here for the next twenty, thirty, forty years -- the gods knew she wasn't capable of doing much else for the Guild. If her time to go home ever came, it might be that there would be nothing to go home to. Certainly there would be no one there to remember her. Half her friends had died in the Blight anyway, and who even knew where the others were? She turned fully to face Minnie, and there was an uncharacteristic burning in her green eyes, a force that was normally limited to her music and her writing. "Doctor Lefting, the vessel in the dock is on its way back to Zeltiva. The fastest route up goes within a mile of Darva; I can have them bring an extra longboat and let you off in it on their way. It is what can be done. But first...first, before I do any of that, I need you to tell me something." She fixed her gaze on Minnie's face. "Who are you, Doctor Lefting? You say you're nothing, but you speak of keys, of Qalaya-given charges, of seeing Bethany Edgetower's face. What do you know? Who are you? You're somehow at the center of everything that's happened to my family, and when you're gone, I'll never have another chance to understand who my family is and what happened to them." A deep breath. "Who are you?"

[Philomena]

Minnie looks surprised, and a bit uncomfortable at the question. Nothing was, after all, her practiced answer to the question, or something less dramatic than that. Just a scholar. A Zeltivan orphan girl. Or, in her mind, gutterslut. It struck her now that, rather frighteningly, she WAS something, maybe always HAD been something. The thought, intellectually, she could see should be comforting, but it wasn't. Self-deprecation was awful, but it was safe - if one is nothing, one expects nothing of one’s self.

Well, I’m the girl Lanie loved. No, loves. I have to be sure of that. That’s something.

And that extrapolated outward to so many things. She was the girl Hannah had loved like a daughter. She was the girl Charm Wright had, after all, loved as a friend. She was the girl that Gypa had loved as a mother, even when he was fallen so far. She was the girl that…

She frowned a little, and did not look in Raisa’s eyes.

“Your family… Qalaya’s dirty fingers! It’s… think of it everyone is so… big! I canny even… You’re mother, she’s the greatest… I dunno, diplomat, the city ha’ e’er had, and then your gram lead the Guild into it’s greatest strength, and your great-aunt, well… what can you say? And then Bethany, she is practically your family, the greatest scholar we’ve e’er had, and you! You sing… you sing, like…”

She shivered, and looked Raisa in the eyes now, "You are a flame, Raisa Wright-Allwave, like the mothers behind you.” She shrugged, and half-smiled, “Flames need moths, lovely.”

x

[Liminal]

Teresa met Minnie's gaze. Her brow furrowed, and the young woman frowned. "I know that my mother is a political genius, that my grandmother was an amazing leader, and that my great-aunt is a legend. I know that Bethany was a noted scholar. And I appreciate your kind words about my music, though I'm not sure I take your meaning fully." She shook her head firmly. "But that's not what I meant, and I think you know it, Doctor Lefting. I know what's common public knowledge about my family, and about Bethany, and about myself. I'm not a politician by any stretch of the imagination, but I know more or less how my family is perceived. But whatever is going on with us that's tied into you is different, something not very many people -- maybe nobody but you! -- know about. And you still haven't told me who you are." Raisa's found herself a bit surprised by her own firmness -- and noted to her dismay that she sounded a bit like her mother in this moment -- but she also felt that she was justified. Big favors certainly deserved answers, and Raisa would need answers. "I want to help you, Doctor Lefting, really I do. But I can't just give you what you ask for blind. I need to know the answers."

[Philomena]

Minnie looked confused by the question, and more than a bit distressed, "You see, the problem is, I dunny really know!"

She stood and started pacing slowly across the room, her bare feet tense and stiff.

"It's not... I dunny know. She came to me, the Lady of Memory, she came to me, when I was dying. It were the plague, you'll remember, nae s'long after we met. I was done, I'd written everything I could, I'd tried to take care of the Murder Man, I'd written everything down, and then the Evalin came, but I did not go with her, and I was going to die, I know it. Then Mother came, the Lady, and she..."

She turned to Raisa, and her eyes looked confused, hazy, childish, and her accent started to thicken, losing the traces of practice she'd put around it, shaking with some deep agitation, "She fixed me, Raisa, she fixed me, and I dunny understand why. Then they threw me in the bandy house, and they said as I were bandy m'self, and I dunny know what I thought I'd do, but then Mother sent Bethany to me, and she gave me the book, that I could make disappear, so it wunny be took o' me, and now I'm only trying to do what they ask."

Her eyes fell, and her voice shook, her hands shook, her eyes blinked rapidly, "I've seen the dead, I've seen the sea, I've seen books of auld tongues none e'en know. And now I've this key what... I don't understand it most of all. Your great-aunt had it and could nae take it where it went, I s'pose, and then the old stone carver, and then the ghost-lady of the spires, and SO MANY grand folk, and here I am, now, not-a-but-an outgrown gutterslut what's read too many books, and it's I who's to be doing it."

She breathed - probably her first full breath since the scattered storytelling started. She closed her eyes, and moved her conscious thought into itself, thought of Semiyr, tried to settle things in her head.

"You will think it's all b' madness. That's to be expected. I can write it down for you. I can show you my books - I wouldnae show others my books, but I would show you, Raisa Wright, because I come to you now, at the last, and must simply hope for your trust. If I sat beside you instead o' before you, and saw this whole ruckus, I'd tell you t'take the poor loon whose asking you for a boat to her death, and put her in a room and lock it, treat her kind and call a healer. But I'm not beside you, I'm before you, and asking."

She sighed, and murmured, "Oh, dharopan! If only you could come now."

x

[Liminal]

Teresa stood, and walked over to the window. She could see the docks, the ship waiting there in the harbor, the distant shape of Hospitality House on the other side. She put both hands on the sill, stabilizing her body while she tried to do the same with her thoughts. "I am not marked," she said eventually. "Rhaus has never seen fit to claim me as his, though I suppose I've not directly asked him to either. And yet, if he asked me to do something, I'd be willing to sacrifice a lot to make it happen." One hand absently caressed the curtains. "My mother was marked once by Gnora, and once by Laviku. I suppose my grandmother was probably marked by Laviku also, though I never did ask her. But I know that Bethany followed Qalaya, like you -- and there's a family legend that great-aunt Kena did too, although I don't know if there's actually proof of that or not. But I do know that my mother would make the world turn backwards if her deities asked it of her." The sun was setting now, turning the few high clouds pink and orange. The tide was beginning to retreat. "When Syna departs for the Goldenlands, and Leth sheathes the world in silver, my thoughts are wrapped in raindrops, dissolving the faces I shall not see again." Teresa turned again from the window. "Sendlant again, always Sendlant. It's always made sense to me that the saddest of all the poets was also the greatest. I wish I could have met her. Who knows, maybe I did, when I wore a different skin and another life that I'll never remember, before this incarnation." Now, she looked at Minnie. Raisa's eyes were sad -- a sadness that might have reminded Minnie of other eyes, eyes she had seen in the shadows of a place that looked like the Zatoskas, though it might have been nowhere at all. "Go, Doctor Lefting. Take the boat I'll give you and find whatever is waiting for you on Darva. I don't expect to see you again after that, but I appreciate your friendship and your kindness to my family. If Qalaya asks it of you, it's not for me to say no. We're waiting for a shipment of goods to come in from Ahnatep -- when it does, the ship is scheduled to leave on the 20th of spring. I'll plan for you to be on board, and if there's anyone else you must take with you, they can go too. There is little else I can do for you, but I wish you the best, always the best."