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rebuild one of the skimmers so it d come when I whistled. Like Maissa s ship,
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the one Stavver turned up with a while back. Wonder what he did with her and
how he got round the ship s safeguards. Probably never know, he can t be
liking me much now, not that he ever did even when we were lovers. Maybe when
I come up with my dear mother I can get a few modifications out of her. I d
prefer a full re-doing of my ship. Trouble is no one knows anything about what
Vrithian s really like. I can t get an idea of what to expect, so how can I
plan anything? I met one Vryhh who said he was kin to me, but what s that?
Kell. If they re all like him ... but how can I tell? How many Vrya are there?
Who makes beds for them, cooks, all that? Robots? Slaves? Wouldn t put it past
Kell to keep slaves, the others, I don t know. Could be there s no more than a
dozen, could be there s not even standing room left. There s the Vryhh who
fixed Maissa s ship for her. Mischief, a debt, a whim, what? Turning that
madwoman loose on the universe, that d appeal to Kell. I keep talking about
him, Phahh! wash my mouth out. You don t understand a word of this, do you.
Where was I? Ah. I did have something to say before I started maundering. If
you ll just stop fighting it, time will begin healing your grief. You ll get
used to being alone; it s not easy, I wouldn t lie to you and say it is, you
wouldn t believe me anyway. You should have let us go, Juli. You should have
grieved with your sisters and let us go. Think about it. I ll see you home
again if you wish it. Somehow. My word on it, child. Though, dammit, it may
take another year s trek to get back where I started. Madar grant there s some
way out of that. Bad enough to have to spend all this time reaching the place,
retracing the same miserable steps is too much, not even the little bit of
excitement about what comes next to lighten the boredom.
She went on talking, rambling on and on about nothing much, hoping that time
and habit would soften the young zel s resolute hostility. As she kept her
soft unassuming voice flowing, she probed very lightly at the zel s mind, drew
back almost as soon as she touched it, disturbed by a darkness and pain beyond
anything she d ever felt even at the several nadirs in her life. I can cure
the body, she thought, but not the soul. Wakille most likely could operate on
her; no, he wouldn t touch this, nothing in it for him. In a way she regretted
her lack of skill for the girl s sake, that is, not for her own, she had
enough moral dilemmas to resolve without adding another. Brittle, she thought,
she won t bend, just break. That zel culture, rigid, fossilized. She s young,
though. Maybe she s still flexible enough to survive this. Damn. Too bad she
had to see Shadith in her lover s body. Ground s shaking under her. Funny,
it s almost the opposite of what happened when Swartheld came out. My friend,
my lover, in another body. Hard to see him behind that strange face. What are
we going to do with her? I don t want the responsibility for her on the other
side. I wish she d go home. That s the best place for her. Madar, I m starting
to feel like the boy with the magic goose who collected himself a parade of
followers, each one stuck to the one ahead and bound to follow wherever he
went. That old tale had a happy ending, for the boy, at least, I don t
remember what happened to the others. She s uneasy, unhappy with me here. And
stubborn. Determined to keep on suffering.
Aleytys sighed and got to her feet. For a moment she stood gazing out over the
sparkling blue swells, then swung around and went to take her turn digging the
ponds.
day 4
The zel wandered about on the periphery of their activities watching as they
hauled in long fronds of seaweed and gathered the crustaceans growing on the
stems, watching when they cast the net out beyond the nose of the island to
haul in a catch of the little silver fish. She made Shadith nervous. She hung
around like a bad conscience, grating on the girl s nerves, a constant
reminder that she had in a sense stolen the body she wore. Shadith grew
irritable and avoided the sad girl as much as she could. Linfyar worked hard
to break down Juli s resistance and make her feel welcome in the group. In
optimistic moments Aleytys let herself hope the boy would finally succeed. He
did get her to come to meals, he surprised a smile out of her now and then,
though these were always brief and reluctant. As Aleytys watched, keeping her
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distance to make the boy s task easier, she began to feel a lightening of the
gloom in the young zel and thought she saw her starting to accept Shadith as
Shadith and not the person she kept trying to make her be.
But with this lightening and this acceptance came rage, a rage the zel turned
on Aleytys and Shadith, but most of all on herself. She was refusing to let
herself heal.
day 5
Black storm clouds hung in the northeast, creeping gradually closer as the day
passed by, but there was no smell of rain in the air despite the pummeling of
the wind. They spent most of the day building a smoking rack for fish and a
drying rack for weed, then a wattle screen to keep the wind from attacking the
fire. In the evening when they sat around that fire, the wind noisy about
them, Wakille looked up from the net he was mending. He kept his hands busy as
he talked, the firelight shifting in and out of the crevices of his face. A
long way from here and a long time ago in a place where trees are as big
around as this island and the rivers are sometimes wide as seas, there lived
an old man (Yes Linfy, older than me, older by a lot) who had several fine
sons. He was a thief, his sons were thieves, his father and his father s
brothers were thieves and his grandfather and so on back longer than anyone
could remember. Now, when the old man got too old to climb in and out of
windows or leap on travelers going from town to town, he and his sons followed
the family tradition and turned to swindling. (Another kind of thief, Linfy,
someone who uses words to steal. Take that grin off your face, Hunter; me, I m
just an honest trader trying to make a living.) He and his little band came
into a rivertown one day and settled there for a while, looking about for a
mark.
In that rivertown there lived a merchant who bought and sold anything he
could find a profit in. That was his legal trade. Under the counter. (That
means, Linfy, that no one in power was supposed to know about it, yes, like
the men who brew beer in Courou.) Under the counter he was a moneylender; that
was against the laws of that place; no one was supposed to charge interest on
money lent. (Interest has another meaning, Linfy, when it s used like that.
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