The Last Orellen - Chapter 42: Choir Practice

“You have to wash,” the woman in charge of the choir robes told Kalen while he stood still and let her drag yet another one over his head.

“I wash.”

Regularly. In the sea. When he meditated. Though it was getting too cold for that even by his standards.

“Not just your face and hands. A full bath on the solstice. If you come in dirty you’ll be sent straight off no matter how many practices you’ve attended.”

“I know what a bath is.”

She stepped back and narrowed her brown eyes to examine him. The morning light streaming in through the tall window behind her was so bright it made the pile of white robes on the table seem like they were glowing.

To his exasperation, Kalen had been deemed sufficiently short and cute to stand on the front row of the choir with the much younger children. He was a full head taller than the next tallest, but not tall enough, or unseemly enough, for the second row. As a consequence, he got to borrow one of the newer, cleaner white silk robes on the special day. They had wide gold bands of embroidery around the sleeves and bottom hem.

This one was the right length, so when he took it off, the robe lady folded it neatly and set it aside. “Now, when you’re wearing it, you mustn’t pick at the stray threads on the hems. You little ones are always so fidgety.”

“I am nearly twelve,” he seethed. “I know not to unravel the embroidery.”

Aunt Jayne would have murdered him and his cousins if they’d dared.

She clucked her tongue and sent him to practice while one of his fellow front-row members stepped up for her own fitting.

Despite feeling that he was being treated like too much of a baby, Kalen actually enjoyed his morning choir practices. A married couple—the parents of the girl soloist—were in charge of teaching everyone the songs and how to behave themselves. The children stood on the stairs at the front of the chapel, sang a few songs, had warmed rolls with butter to eat and cups of hot water to drink, and then sang a few more.

There were around sixty choir members. Kalen had never before been around so many other children at once. He wondered if this was what school was like, but the school he’d seen in Baitown had less than twenty students in it.

The other children had all formed groups of friends, based on age and social class. Nerth from Tiriswaith didn’t fit in well. He talked strange. According to one little girl, he used too many big words and he did it in a funny way. Nobody knew his parents. His clothes were too nice for some and too shabby for others.

But despite all of that, nobody seemed to dislike him. They were all willing to talk with him whenever he was in the mood.

Except for the boy soloist. The ten-year-old seemed to have realized that all the grown-ups preferred Kalen’s voice to his, and he sat around red-faced and glaring whenever Kalen went up for his own solo practice as the designated alternate.

It was all so easy. The whole job was just memorizing and standing straight and resisting the urge to tease an envious younger boy. They fed you for free. It was over by noon each day. And on every third, Kalen collected his payment for attending.

If practice would just last a few weeks longer, he thought he could have justified buying another book ahead of schedule.

As it was, he left every day with a spring in his step and went off to study magic. Usually in the graveyard.

Two weeks after he’d joined the choir, Yarda headed back to the Acress Enclave to meet with Sorcerer Nigel. She’d be staying for at least three days, since he was actually going to do something for her this time instead of letting the more junior healers help her with “the peripheral symptoms of her malady.”

I hope it works. I hope he’s as good as Yarda thinks he is, Kalen fretted as he wove between the tombs to one of his favorite practice locations.

He hated that he had no way of helping. Or even knowing.

If I were a decade older as a practitioner…if I just understood more things…

But he didn’t. The best he could do was promise himself that he would learn.

The cold wind ruffled his hair, and Kalen held out a hand to feel it better. It was becoming a habit, though there wasn’t much point to it yet.

It was just that he felt sure a wind practitioner should be able to glean something from the wind itself. He’d felt that first spark of some kind of understanding before. When he’d blown up the forest. And, strangely, when he’d thrust his hands in the current finder’s barrel.

There was some secret. Or mystery. Or underlying truth to be had.

Or he wanted that to be the case, at least.

He let the air flow through his fingers.

“It can never stop moving,” he murmured. “Because if it does, it’s not the wind anymore.”

That was how he’d explained it to Fanna.

What did his little sister look like now? It had only been a few months, but a few months was a lot for a baby.

Did she remember Kalen’s voice? Did she remember how much he’d held her before he left home? Was he stupid for even hoping that she might?

He’d tried not to put her down for a whole day once. Like he could imprint himself on her.

I can’t go home. I can’t ever go back home until I’m sure it’s safe for them all.

Kalen tried not to dwell on it because it made him feel trapped. He didn’t understand how having the entire rest of the world to live in, apart from one single island, could make you feel trapped, but it did.

As usual, the reminder that he was away from his family for a purpose made him want to rush. Toward Arlade, toward the Archipelago, toward being a practitioner powerful enough to protect himself and the people he loved.

So he rushed in the only way he could, by sitting down in the dead and dying grass and flipping to the hardest spell in the book.

He’d read the instructions for it so many times that he’d nearly memorized it, but the spell pattern was too difficult. It involved eight different pathways, and it had forty points of intersection. By the time Kalen got halfway through building it within himself he’d always accidentally dropped bits or dragged in too many pieces and made a mess. It happened even if he worked along the edges of his mana structure, where he’d trained himself to create internal spell patterns for years, instead of near the wind nucleus where he’d been trying to practice his pattern formation lately.

Casting Pearls.

The spell made balls of silent, invisible, compressed wind. About the size of “large sweet grapes.” They scattered along the ground in the area you targeted, and they would knock things over.

At first, Kalen had liked the idea of it just because it created eight little wind balls, which he thought would make him feel like he was casting eight small spells at once. Now that he’d realized how close to impossible the spell was for him, he only attacked it when he was in this sort of mood.

If he could beat Casting Pearls, then he could beat every spell in this book. It would be proof that he was moving forward quickly enough, even without help.

He spent the whole afternoon toiling away at it without much progress, and he didn’t return to the inn until dark. The room felt lonely without his cousin that night. And for the next two.

Granslip Port’s harbormaster did make one of his rare appearances that evening to check in on Kalen, as Captain Kolto had apparently asked him to do before the Ester Ivory had left port. He was a gruff old man, but as always, he sounded sincere when he said Kalen should come and find him if he ever needed anything.

Finally, Yarda returned on the fourth morning after she’d left. Kalen didn’t realize she was back until he stepped out of the inn at dawn and saw her leaning against the porch rail, eyeing the single step up with an uncharacteristically grim look.

“Yarda!” he cried, unable to hide his alarm.

She looked frail. And pale. And not like herself at all.

Kalen dropped the letters he’d been planning to carry to the Office of the Post on his way to choir practice and raced toward her. “Oh I’m fine, I’m fine,” she said, waving him away with a pained smile. “Don’t you worry about me. The sorcerer did his healing magic on me for most of a day. He said I should feel more like myself come…come next week. I just need rest.”

She pulled herself up the single step onto the porch. Kalen helped her inside as best he could and into a chair.

He knew she must have felt awful because she barely protested when he went to wake up the family currently sleeping in the ground floor bedroom and ask them if they would consider moving themselves upstairs. They were not obliging. The upstairs room he and Yarda were sharing was much smaller.

So he paid them to be obliging, at long last making his first attempt to haggle like an adult…and failing at it, he thought. Probably it would be cheaper just to move to another inn. But he didn’t have space in his mind to worry about that on top of everything else.

He spent the morning moving their things downstairs and the family’s things upstairs and helping the innkeepers clean the room. There was a knot of fear in his chest that wouldn’t come undone no matter how many times Yarda told him this was just part of the healing process.

Always before she had come back from the Enclave looking better. Now she looked worse.

How could that be healing?

Is she dying? he thought.

And then he crushed the thought. And then it came back.

Is she dying?

What do I do? How do I fix it?

He hadn’t felt this helpless since the night his mother had given birth to Fanna, when he’d stayed up flipping through books, chasing answers he was fully aware they did not hold.

They got Yarda settled into bed, and Kalen sat in a chair an inch away from her, staring at her like she was about to disappear.

“You missed your singing practice,” she said tiredly.

“I don’t need my singing practice. I’ll just stay right here until you feel better. I’m not going to leave for a minute.”

“Goodness,” said Yarda gently. “That might be embarrassing. A lady does need some privacy now and then.”

Kalen huffed. “You know what I mean.”

She made a motion with one of her hands, and Kalen reached out at once to hold it. “Shelba is right about you,” she said, squeezing his fingers with her much larger ones. “You’re a good boy.”

She slept.

Kalen couldn’t bring himself to let go of her hand for a long time. When she woke up again, it was late afternoon. The street sounds through the window were noisy. Yarda glanced over to where Kalen had been kneeling for the past half hour, finishing up a project.

“Are you drawing on the floorboards?”

“It’ll wash off. It’s just chalk. It’s a heating circle. To warm the room. It’s a little cold down here.”

Chalk wouldn’t hold the spell the way magepaint did, but Kalen could just channel power into it constantly. It would make the place more comfortable and give him an outlet for the frantic energy that had been coursing through him all day.

She watched him for a while.

Finally, she said, “Is there a spell for hiding noise?”

Kalen glared at the window. “I’m sure there is, but I don’t know it. Maybe I can find a pillow to put over it. Or—”

“Come sit right here beside me again.” She reached out to pat the chair he’d left there. “I want to talk to you.”

He leaped up, brushing off chalk dust, and hurried over to sit.

Despite asking for a talk, it took her a while to say anything else.

At last, she said,“I think I will get better. The people at the hospital have taken good care of me each time I saw them. And though this time was different, a real sorcerer worked magic on me for hours, and then came by to check on me several times over the next days. Why would he do a thing like that if he didn’t mean to help me?”

“That’s true,” said Kalen. He squirmed in his chair. “But I’m so sorry I didn’t go with you. I should have this time. Even if…I just should have.”

She stared up at the low ceiling. “Spending some days there, with nothing to do but sit abed and talk to people and listen to their own talk in turn, I heard some strange ideas.”

“Well, practitioners probably do talk about a lot of strange things.” Kalen was often quite startled by lines in his books. He imagined spending lots of time surrounded by magic users would make you see the world in an odd new light.

“On Hemarland we hear peculiar stories from the continent all the time, don’t we?” she said. “But it feels very far away. Mayhap because it is very far away. And we are not people who bother about them, as they are not people who bother about us. Especially practitioner folk, because they have no interest or liking for places with no magic in them.”

“It’s really different,” Kalen agreed. “They’re spoiled, having magic all the time. I think if you’d never been without it, then traveling to places where there wasn’t much at all would seem foolish.”

“Sitting at the pub one night,” said Yarda, “…oh, it must have been two years or so ago. I heard tell of some wizarn family or another that had disappeared itself.”

Kalen’s breath caught in his throat.

“And I was barely paying attention. But I think the story that went ‘round was that there was a prophecy about them, and that lots of other important people were upset about it, and so most of them just up and vanished one day a few years ago. Just left their big fancy houses behind and never came back. And mayhap they’d reappear when their prophecy came true.”

“I…I’ve heard about that.” He didn’t think his voice sounded too unnatural.

“I didn’t think much of it. Disappearing all of a sudden just sounds like something wizarns might do because they feel like it, doesn’t it? And it’s no concern of mine so long as they don’t take me along with them.”

“That’s probably how everyone at home feels. About practitioner stories.”

Yarda nodded. “They feel quite different about it here, don’t they?”

Why was she bringing this up? What had she heard at the Enclave? What did she think it meant?

Kalen couldn’t bring himself to ask.

“Those nice young healers,” she said, “some of them not much older than you…they go in and out the doors of that place sometimes with pouches of coins and bracelets. And when I ask them about it, they tell me it is for finding some of those missing people. And I say, ‘What are you finding them for?’”

She frowned.

“It seemed an obvious thing to ask. ‘What are you finding people for if they do not want to be found?’ And they told me that the family that had disappeared had done something wrong. And I said. ‘Well, what was it?’”

She turned her head to look at Kalen. “They said they had stolen bodies. And magicked them back to life.”

His hands clenched into fists against the tops of his thighs. “I heard that story, too. Our first day here. At the office of the post. It sounds crazy.”

“It does. But most of them say that’s the thing the family did wrong. And some of them say it’s not about what they did, but about what they will do to everybody else if their prophecy comes true. And then others seem to think that what is so bad about those wizarns is just that some other wizarns do not like them, and so by disappearing instead of dealing with their enemies, they have made trouble for everyone else.”

That doesn’t even make sense.

“I said to the ones who told me that, ‘That doesn’t make sense.’ And they said, ‘Ms. Yarda, you just don’t understand the continent.’”

“I don’t understand it either,” Kalen muttered.

“I asked them what they would do, if they found the people they were looking for.” She spoke slowly. “And they said obviously they would protect the one that the prophecy was about.”

“They will?”

“So they say. Because of course it is not a child’s fault that they are born to a bad family.”

Kalen didn’t know what to say to that.

“And I said, well…what do you do if you find one of the others? Because there were many children in that family of wizarns. And…mayhap…if those stories are true, there are more besides. And they don’t all have prophecies about them, do they?”

“No. That prophecy woman they all like so much around here only makes one prophecy every time she wakes up,” Kalen answered. Then he added, “The gods told her to stop doing that.”

Yarda didn’t smile.

Normally, Kalen thought, she would have.

“Those healers who have helped me so much said of course they would take care of those normal Orellen children, too.”

Kalen didn’t flinch at the name. He was getting better at not doing it.

“But…” she said “…a couple of them….well, mayhap it is best not to speak such ugly words. I will just say I believe there is something wrong with their thinking in this place. I think there is something very wrong with it indeed.”

“What did they say?” Kalen said quietly.

She reached over and placed a hand on his knee. “Nothing that bears repeating. Now, have you had a letter from your friend or your Sorcerer Arlade?”

That was a quick change of subject.

“I haven’t been to the Office of the Post in a couple of days. I was going this morning, but—”

“Mayhap if we don’t hear back from them by the day of your choir performance, we will leave this country after all. And we will make our way back home. I think that would be the best thing for us to do.”

Oh, thought Kalen. Oh.

“You’re not well to travel,” he said in a thin voice.

“The sorcerer said I would be better soon.”

“Yarda, it’s winter. It…it would take a miracle to find a ship heading all the way to Hemarland this late in the year.”

She knew that.

“If we have to stay through the whole winter,” she said slowly, “then you should spend more time at that church of yours. And we will go home with the first ship out come spring.”

“Yarda…”

“And if,” she said, looking at him with eyes so creased by laugh lines that it was a shock to see them serious, “I do not get well, and your new Master doesn’t come here for you, I want you to promise me you will get on a ship and go home yourself. Just as soon as you can find one.”

“Yarda, no.”

She caught his hand and squeezed it in her larger one. “This is not a good place for you to be, Kalen.”

Her voice was very quiet.

He stared down at their clasped hands. The white Clywing bracelet was visible below the cuff of his sleeve. “Yarda…do you know?”

She didn’t answer for a long time.

“The people at the Enclave are very interested in children of a certain age,” she said finally. “A child of a certain age who was very interested in the Enclave is suddenly not. I have lived with him for a while now. I think I know him well enough to recognize when he is behaving unlike himself.”

“What did they say?” Kalen asked in a whisper. “What did they say that was so horrible?”

“Hurtful, wrong words don’t need to be shared.”

Kalen had spent weeks now, listening in on conversations through Ears of the East. Most people obviously did not feel the same way as Yarda Strongback.

“Did they say I was a monster?”

Her hand tightened on his.

“Did they say I was a dirty thing made with blood magic?”

“Shhh,” she said.

His voice was very small. “Did they say I was stolen from death, so it wouldn’t even be a sin to give me back to it?”

She pulled him toward her with surprising strength, considering how weak she looked, and he ended up half-sprawled across her on the bed while she clutched him to her. “You listen to me now, little cousin,” she murmured in his ear.

He was shaking. He couldn’t stop. “I didn’t want you to find out,” he choked. “I didn’t want anyone else from home to ever think of me that way.”

Telling Lander had been horrible enough. And he’d done that in a panic.

“What the sea gives a man is his to keep,” Yarda said softly. “What a man gives his wife is hers to keep. That is how we do things on our island. You know that, don’t you?”

Kalen was crying. He barely managed a nod.

“Then who could you ever be but Kalen, Jorn’s boy? What could you be but Kalen, Shelba’s son?”

“I kn-know,” Kalen sobbed, face pressed to her shoulder. “I do know. That’s why I won’t go back.”

Yarda held an arm around him until he’d cried himself out. He was too relieved that she would hold him, even now that she knew, to feel embarrassed about it.

“I’ll get stronger,” Kalen whispered. “I’ll get strong enough to keep myself safe. And I’ll keep them safe, too.”

“That sounds like rough seas,” she said eventually. “And no shore in sight for a long time.”

“I can do it.”

“All right then. That’s what we’ll do.”