The ethaefal had navigated the two following her into the depths of Mourningstar tents, curiously empty to any outsider who didn’t recognize the Drykas culture as uniquely busy. She was confident, though, walking them around an old hound that served his time better with the pavilion children than he did keeping guard of the camp, though he liked to pretend he was still capable. Regardless, the ethaefal murmured a soft word to him, some assurance that the people she was bringing were good, and he seemed to trust her implicitly enough to not raise his hackles… or do even little more than lift his head. He had let them pass, though, into the open area the group shared as something of a communal meeting place.
“Are you comfortable in the Sea of Grass?” The ethaefal asked her companions, finally speaking the questions that seemed most important to her. It was imperative that an interested applicant be comfortable in the open Sea, surrounded only by faces he might soon become tired of, and who wouldn’t ride off into danger. “We spend the hot season out there, weathering the storms and managing the webs. You will learn to navigate, if you don’t already know how, but it’s important for the ankal to know your skills and how you may fit with us.”
She was not trying to be dismissive, but Ciraaci hardly handled the affairs of the pavilion, having been the wife of an ankal long dead and not the ankal herself. She held the tentative position of elder, though she looked as young as the ankal’s middling daughter, and while she was permitted to hold an opinion among her peers, she wasn’t indispensable. These were two Drykas alone in Endrykas, and that stirred her enough to bring them to her ankal – and he would decide where they fit, if they did.
“Stay here,” the ethaefal said, indicating the central fire of the shared meeting space, and left the two of them behind without awaiting their agreement to her request, stepping forward to the largest of the tents there, so easily identified as an ankal tent by the intricacy of the knotwork and the coloured ribbons tied to it. There were children outside to keep an eye on Ramona and Bhug, a quiet woman minding over the scene with a careful patience for what was occurring. She was silent for the moment, her interest more on the children who’d breached personal space to eye the new child and his older sister.
Ciraaci herself had entered the ankal’s tent, little warning to give the man and his youngest wife the time to dress and greet her, but she was detached from experiencing embarrassment over seeing the two of them sweat-slicked and wrapped together in a bed of animal skins. She waited, though, for the ankal to rise and greet her before spilling the information she’d gleaned regarding the two Drykas awaiting his attention, beginning of course with the fact that the two of them were alone, and that they were young.
Caradoc Mourningstar was a hard man to read, even for the woman that had watched him grow from an easily agitated child to an aggressively personable leader. He had undergone some kind of personal crisis in the early days of 512 that had changed him as a man and made him contrary. Ciraaci understood that a lot had changed at the time, but she had no patience to make sense of it. Caradoc was a grown man and she wasn’t his mother. He was quiet, like the woman outside minding the handful of children left behind while their parents did their work around Endrykas, but his silence was less introversion and more severe, like his voice had the force of thunder and he withheld his words so he wouldn’t waste the power on lesser subjects.
His wife, an obnoxiously loud, young creature with pretty eyes and enviable beauty, watched the two of them with wide-eyed curiosity, but Ciraaci gave her little mind unless she spoke up. She’d once read a discomfort in the girl when they’d spoken, as if the ethaefal left her perturbed, and hadn’t made the effort to breach conversation unless absolutely imperative. It wasn’t as if Ciraaci disliked the girl, but she had long ago thought that people had gotten over staring at her. She was on the furthest part of the ethaefal’s mind for that, all eyes on Caradoc as he considered what Ciraaci had brought to him.
“I will see them,” he said then, moving to rejoin his wife and dress appropriately for the Autumn chill of the outdoors. Ciraaci herself nodded, stepped out, and shooed away the handful of children that had amassed to surround Ramona and Bhug, chirping innocent questions about where they’d come from and why they were here as their caretaker maintained her careful eye on them.
“Caradoc is coming,” Ciraaci said to all of them, and like it held a deeper meaning over the young ones than it did over their guests, the children scattered to the four winds with peals of laughter and an patient mother’s pleas for good behaviour.
Caradoc wasn’t far behind her, emerging from the pavilion tent as he tied a purple sash around his waist in proud display of the Amethyst colours. The man was large, greying hair betraying his age where it didn’t bend his back in weight of the years, and wore the evidence of his many seasons in the form of scars across his face and bare arms.
He approached the two straightforward, indicated they remain seated, and left Ciraaci to hover nearby, like some kind of fussy mother overseeing a playdate while trying to remain impartial.
“Tell me about yourselves,” he said to the two of them, measured with his tone, and as if Ciraaci hadn’t already relayed everything she’d learned to him already. “Where you’ve been living, and how you’ve done so alone.”
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