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The raven found Medric lying in Emil’s cottage, peering lazily out at the morning sunshine and twisting a finger through Emil’s hair.
“Raven,” said Medric lazily.
“This early? It must have flown through the night.”
“Or stopped nearby last night,” said Medric. “What news, raven?”
The raven chuckled at him. “Visitors,” it said.
“That will be Karis, then, and Zanja goes where she goes,” Emil said. “I ought to do the dishes.”
“It’s my turn,” Medric protested, not moving, his mind only half on the conversation. He felt he had missed something; the touch at the sides of his head like a dream he ought to remember. And in Medric’s case, dreams were things he usually ought to remember.
“More,” said the raven.
“Norina, too?” Emil asked. “The cottage will be pretty full, then.”
“More,” said the raven.
“Never more!” said Emil. “That would have to be J’han with Norina, then - and they’ll have brought their child with them. Medric, dear, are you asleep?”
“No,” Medric groaned, though at least between the two of them Emil and the raven had answered what he must have dreamed about. “Emil, there’s so many dishes.”
“I said I would do them. You find something for the raven. What do ravens eat?”
“I’m sure we have a book on it around somewhere. I’ll find it,” Medric said, and began fishing next to the bed for a pair of spectacles with which to find the other set. Spectacles in hand, or rather on his face, he sat up and looked around the room, blinking at the shelves and chests of books. “Do we have room for guests?”
“We’ll find room for them,” Emil said, and so Medric stood up and began to pick his way across the room to where he’d left the last book of birds, hoping to find a raven’s breakfast in it. Then he yelped at the cold and jumped to find something he could put on, and there was a small bustle before he was warm enough to return to his search.
They had been slow to put the books away all winter, for it was so much easier to pull one out, exclaim over the title, and retreat to the warmth of bed with it, hunting through pages until the other joined them there with another volume, which had to be exclaimed over in its turn, the first abandoned in favor of delightedly turning pages and indicating passages in the new book - and then it began over again, until their bedroom began to look like the warehouse in Habrin.
Medric tended to find the most exciting books, which Emil deemed cheating; they had been his for longer, and he had a seer’s talent for picking out the most interesting passages. Medric maintained the fire in his blood had nothing to do with it; he just knew what would pique Emil’s interest - and ought to, after all this time, he would have added, if Emil hadn’t roared with laughter half way through the sentence.
“You hardly know me,” Emil had said, and Medric, blinking, had realized it was true, and changed spectacles reflexively. They had been together only a few short months, and yet it seemed a lifetime; and he supposed that was from the weight of time and struggles on their lives.
And now here came Karis, and Norina, bringing a child into their twined lives. When the books still lay scattered across the floor and the trunks sat open all across the cottage, with nowhere else for anyone to lie.
“I’ll shelve the books,” Medric promised the open air, changing spectacles as he paged through the book of birds. On closer inspection it said nothing about what to feed ravens; but he knew from his father’s stories how they haunted battlefields, and so he wandered into the kitchen and found some dried meat, which the raven seemed to appreciate.
“I should have noticed this thaw coming sooner,” Emil grumbled around the dishes, as Medric offered to take the first pan from him and set it on the fire to crack eggs into.
“Why?” Medric asked. “What signs are there?”
Emil paused in his motions, then went back to them, but was silent a long time. Medric thought about reminding him of his question, but Emil got distracted less easily than he did; and so he sat and waited.
“I don’t know,” Emil said. “The air smells different. It’s been a while since it snowed last. We ought to see crocuses some time soon.”
Crocuses, Medric knew. His father had showed him how to plant them, every fall, pushing them into the cold soil up to his wrists. He’d blowed on his fingers to warm them up, and - what? Had his mother been watching, or did she keep the fire warm, or was she dead already? He couldn’t remember, or else the memories had melted together.
“Seeing any visions?” Emil asked. Emil kept asking if he was seeing things; visions didn’t happen as often as he seemed to think. Or else he was teaching himself to read the signs in Medric’s posture the way he read the signs of spring coming, without noticing them, merely working them into the steady gait of his life. Medric loved the planted way he walked, the deliberate shifting of his weight, how he never seemed to lose track of where he was going the way Medric did.
“Lost in the past,” Medric said. The distant past; how long ago had he planted crocuses? If his father was still alive, and that soil was from his mother’s house, then… “Before Lilterwess fell.”
They hadn’t spoken of Lilterwess before. Emil went still, the way Shaftali did. He said, “Where were you when you heard? I was at the University at Kisha - about to enter the library there.” He laughed, at some joke Medric did not know.
“I don’t remember,” Medric said. “I was four.”
Emil dropped the bowl he was holding, and Medric and the raven both leapt into the air. Medric had a hand reaching for a knife - foolish, hadn’t he learned that? - around the time Emil swore, and then both of them remembered it was just an accident, and smoothed their ruffled feathers.
“I forgot how young you are,” Emil said, his voice marveling. Medric was silent, his heart still hammering from the noise.
Is this youth? he thought, remembering a thousand winter mornings training in a courtyard with boys and girls who died as soon as they saw battle. All the friends of his childhood were worms’ food now, except the ones still fighting his mother’s people. He had orchestrated the deaths of a hundred of his mother’s people, or more; and the torture of his new friends, who somehow failed to die; and he had come away from it all to live a traitor’s life alone in the Shaftali winter.
It didn’t feel young. But then, he hadn’t, not since he pushed that crocus bulb as deep as it would go.
Their five guests arrived two days later, knocking on the door and then crowding inside in a swirl of clomping boots and snow knocked off against the wall. Emil hugged Zanja like a lost sister, and walked her to a place by the fire, and Karis followed in her wake, the entire focus of the room pivoting to follow her; at least, until the bundle in Norina’s arms felt that, and began screaming.
“Shush,” Norina ordered, shaking it. “You were supposed to make a good impression on your uncles.”
“Uncles?” Karis asked, but J’han was saying, “Norina, you can’t shake a baby like that. Bounce, yes. Here, pass her this way.”
“Let me try,” Emil offered, and J’han ceded the baby to him, since J’han still had his coat on.
Emil had never been a father himself, but he had dandled half the babies of South Hill, and had learned a thing or two from their parents. From his experience, or perhaps just because four of the people in the room were now focused on it, the baby slowly settled, until J’han could take it and begin stripping the outdoor wrappings from it.
Medric wondered what he would find in them. He had seen babies at a distance, but he’d never taken much interest in them. They were irrelevant to his experience, and they didn’t seem to do much. He was always interested in new experiences, of course, but -
“Do you want to hold her?” Emil asked.
“What? No. No, no, no! I can’t.”
“Can’t?” Emil raised his eyebrows. “That’s a powerful statement to make in a house containing this many elementals.”
“I’ve never held a baby before,” Medric said.
“How?” asked J’han.
“It’s easier sitting down, the first time,” said Karis, which surprised more than J’han.
“People assume that earth witches know things that smoke addicts don’t,” said Zanja.
“Sit down,” said Karis, and so Medric sat, babbling in panicked self-defense, something about obeying the vested G’deon. He managed to knock his spectacles off in the process, and Emil passed them back to him in what was becoming a practiced routine.
“Now. You can’t drop her from this position,” Karis told him. “The only thing you have to worry about is giving her neck enough support.”
“Babies are disproportionate monsters,” Emil offered helpfully. “They can’t support their own heads, but neither could you if your head were twice your weight.”
“That doesn’t make sense,” said Medric, and Emil smiled at him and, with as little fuss as can be made of such things, settled the baby into his lap. Medric felt its slight weight begin to settle, and he reached around to hold its neck the way Emil was doing, and he squealed.
The only reason he didn’t drop the baby was, in fact, because he was sitting down. Six hands went to catch her head, and Medric’s got there first. Sitting stiff as iron, supporting the baby’s head like a steamed pudding, Medric said, “I wish you had given me any other baby.”
J’han plucked the infant out of Medric’s grasp and Norina said, “What’s the matter with my baby?”
“Nothing is the matter with her, the matter is with Medric,” said Emil worriedly. “What did you see?”
“Well,” said Medric, not sure where to start, his heart still thundering from the force of the vision. “She’s certainly our daughter. All of ours.”
And she was lightning, burning hot and fast across the sky, leaving a pattern of char behind her, but one so beautiful it took Medric’s breath away. She was so beautiful, so perfect, and they all had so little time to give her everything she needed. And Medric’s heart still ached with the force of all that had just gone through him.
He took a moment to breathe, to feel Emil’s hand planted gently on his back. Why had no one in the garrison ever thought to touch him like that, as he was recovering from a vision? or from a hangover? or from both? Oh, it was because he was mad.
“And what else, master seer?” asked Karis.
Medric gave a weak smile. “I am going to love her so much,” he said.
Norina and J’han stayed with them several more days. Medric thought perhaps they were giving him a chance to adjust to Leeba. She was a very confusing infant; he could not figure out how much he loved her, and how much of what he felt was just that he was going to love her. J’han taught him how to change her diapers, which Medric took to with as much gravitas as he took to reading, though a sloppier result. Karis taught him to quiet her when she was crying, though he despaired of being as good at it as… any of the others.
“Do you always expect to excel at something the moment you start?” Zanja asked him seriously, and Medric stopped complaining. And changed Leeba’s diaper again. And watched her sleep, and wondered how much of what he felt was love.
Emil seemed to flower in their presence, and Medric tried not to be jealous - not of Zanja, as the two sat together at the hearth and traded conversation incomprehensible to the rest, or of Norina, or J’han, but of the way Emil seemed to comfortably expand into more of himself as he had not done when Medric was the only one there. Medric did not expand in their company, so he stuck to Leeba.
A week into their stay, Emil pulled him aside. “You need to go out,” he said. “You’re coming apart at the seams.”
“It’s just people,” Medric apologized. Too many people, too little space, and nowhere to escape to; every winter was like this.
“So go out and get away from them,” Emil said. “No one will mind. Anyone would go a little crazy, packed into a tiny cottage like this.”
“I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but there are two feet of snow out there,” said Medric.
“Don’t you have snow shoes?” Emil asked, and Medric said no, Emil knew exactly what he had, they had bought it together, and no, he didn’t know how to use snowshoes, and snapped no, he wasn’t a Shaftali peasant, and slapped a hand to his mouth. But Emil didn’t seem to mind the insult, and Medric remembered that he wasn’t a soldier, and had a moment of dizzying disorientation wondering what he was.
Karis made him snow shoes. It took her a day, and Medric had a sneaking suspicion it would have taken longer if she were not the G’deon of Shaftal. But the next day he had snow shoes, and Emil took him out to learn how to use them, and Medric, who had been as charitable as he could be, could feel himself untensing as he came away from the house full of people. And as Emil paid more attention to him alone, which was jealousy and as useless in a garrison as it was in Shaftal, but there it was.
“I should pay you more attention,” Emil said, picking him up after Medric had gotten his feet tangled once again.
“I should not be jealous of my… husband and wives,” said Medric, testing out the words.
“We’re not married,” said Emil with surprise.
“But we have a child,” said Medric.
“Only because a master seer told us so,” said Emil. Medric grimaced, and watched Emil register that that was not something he appreciated being teased about. If Emil was proud, he could be proud on his own time, or when Medric was not around, or when no one, ever, was around.
“How long are they staying?” asked Medric, breaking both of their ruminations. Emil looked surprised.
“Until spring, at least. Likely longer. They are introducing you to your daughter.”
“I can’t keep a daughter. I don’t know how to make a family,” said Medric miserably. “I don’t know how to cook a dinner, or buy groceries, or keep a budget, or pay taxes -“
“Medric,” said Emil, “Neither do I.”
They stood a while on top of the snow, pondering the ridiculous nature of trying to form a family, much less the government that would inevitably coalesce around Karis, and wondering whether to laugh or to cry. Medric lifted one show shoe and set it back down.
“I don’t think anyone in Shaftal knows how to pay Shaftali taxes, much less calculate them,” said Emil thoughtfully. “We have a lot of work ahead of us.”
“One step at a time,” said Medric, repeating what Emil had been telling him all afternoon. “First we form a family.”
“First, we teach you how to wear snowshoes so you don’t go mad from being indoors all winter and near people the whole time,” Emil said. “All right, I understand. Try that walk again.”
Medric fell over several more times, and came back snowy and tired, and was scolded for trying to hold his child while dripping with sweat and snow, and Zanja pressed some tea into his hands instead. Medric looked down into the tea still swirling from her patient ministrations and thought: So this is a family. A house packed with people, a baby screaming erratically, learning to snowshoe so one might escape from them for a few hours a day, and coming back to tea already made.
And a woman who could make snowshoes in a day.
He could get used to this. He was a soldier; he could get used to whatever was necessary. And he had deserted, so it was necessary. And he was not a soldier.
“I am still confused by how much extra space there is in Shaftali houses,” said Zanja, and Medric was no longer confident of any ability to grow accustomed to this strange family.
Zanja and Emil seemed to shrug off the mantle of soldiery effortlessly. Even Norina accomplished it. Zanja, when he asked her about it, did not seem to think there was a difference between her life now and her life in South Hill, not in herself, and she tried to explain to him what a katrim was, and Medric found his head aching with how much fire logic did not overlap sometimes. He would never have Zanja’s gift for languages or boundaries. But he knew that Emil felt something similar to whatever Zanja was describing, and he did not know how to talk about it with Emil. Which left Norina.
Norina was never easy to talk to and Medric had been avoiding it, but Zanja said that sometimes a small death was necessary, so Medric sidled up to her one day while she was cutting apples and took a deep breath.
“The knife is in the drawer. Don’t cut yourself,” Norina said.
“I’ve been using knives since -“ Medric began, stung.
“Karis sharpened these,” said Norina, so Medric sat himself down without protesting further and touched the edge of the knife to one of the apples. It gave so little resistance he might have been cutting applesauce, and his eyes widened.
“This knife is worth respecting,” he said, and changed spectacles so he could watch his work more closely.
“She only sharpened it; the blade will dull. The ones she made stay like that,” said Norina, and Medric thought she might have been proud.
He was glad, for Leeba, that she had more parents, ones that would tell her more directly when they were proud of her.
“What are we cutting apples for?”
Norina gestured with the knife, and Medric flinched backward. He caught her raised eyebrows and blushed, but she was kind enough to say nothing about the blush or the flinch.
“Those are for a snack this afternoon, with the last of the cheese,” she said. “These, for a pie. And the rest we will stew up into applesauce.”
“That’s a lot of apples,” said Medric.
“You have a lot on your mind,” said Norina. “Or was I not supposed to know that? Can fire logic not guess that when someone chooses to sit next to a Truthken, they have a pressing need to know the truth?”
“I do want to know something,” Medric said, “but you are also my husband’s sister’s… wife’s… sister?”
“The mother of your child, I am told,” said Norina.
“Thank you,” said Medric. “Yes.” He looked at his hands, curving around an apple, and carefully, carefully skinning the peel off. Because that was how their cook wanted it, and there were several hundred soldiers to feed, and that meant several hundred apples, so even the clumsiest, blindest soldier - or the most valuable seer - took his turn peeling them. Enough apples had passed through his hands that even with a knife as sharp as Karis kept them, the skin curled quickly away, and Medric was hard pressed to remember to go slowly, to remember how frightened he was of this blade.
“I want to know,” he began, and stopped again. “It seems like everyone here goes home in the winter and takes off soldiery like they take off their coats when they come inside,” he said. “Or maybe that’s backwards, and the coat is - whatever not being a soldier is, only I don’t have one. This is just my skin.”
He looked expectantly at Norina, who was looking expectantly at him. The silence grew, Medric satisfied with what he had said, until Norina said, “I cannot judge the truth of a seer’s fancy.”
“I cannot say it plainer than that!” said Medric.
“You will have to try,” said Norina mercilessly. So they sat and peeled apples, or rather, shortly, without speaking about it, Medric was peeling the apples and Norina vivisected them.
“I say it is like a coat,” said Medric, “and Emil would tell me it is the coat of arms, and to replace it with a book jacket. And Zanja would tell me that the soldier in me has to die so that whatever is left over can be born. But there is nothing left, a soldier is what I am, for all that I have decided to write a different story going forward!”
“J’han would tell you that you are mixing your metaphors,” said Norina calmly, the piece of apple flying off her knife to land thip thip thip in the bowl. “Take those other apples next. The older ones make the pie juicy.”
Medric obligingly took an old apple, and nearly sliced his thumb cutting over the first soft spot. Norina said nothing about this, but he could feel her noticing. He physically shook it off, careful of the knife’s edge as he did so.
“I am a soldier, and everyone else knows how not to be, and I do not so much not know it as cannot know it,” he said, and at last Norina nodded.
“I suppose that is as clear as you can make the problem,” she said. “So, what is your question? Do you want whatever solution you think I have, or do you want me to give you orders until you stop being a soldier, or do you want me to tell you some truth that will make the whole thing go away? Truth doesn’t do that, seer. Half the job of being a Truthken is seeing what needs to be done and not flinching from it.”
“I want the orders because I am a soldier, and soldiers follow orders,” said Medric, “and I know you are trying to trick me with that option.”
“And I cannot give you a solution, because a Truthken is not and never has been a warrior of any kind. So there are two answers you cannot have.”
A Truthken had never been a warrior of any kind, Medric thought, and look what she had done to Zanja, when she found her with the otter people. What sort of people were the Shaftali, that every profession had some martial side?
My people, on my mother’s side, he thought. And that half is the problem; the grand contradiction that not even fire logic can encompass.
“You are telling me that I am looking at it sideways, and if I can but turn I will see how these things that I think are utterly separate are in fact the same,” he said, trying not to make comments about the way shadows fell from a pendant hung at various angles to the sun.
“I am telling you that you do not speak clearly enough for me to say if you are lying, much less think clearly enough,” said Norina. She had half filled her bowl, and cut patiently into it, staring straight through Medric for a while before she spoke again. “When I forced you into it, you told me that you do not know and cannot know this thing. These are separate statements, and the first is false, and the second is true.”
“That cannot be,” said Medric, “because I know that I don’t know, and if I did know, it couldn’t be true that I cannot know.”
“I do not know how these things are true, I know only that that is the sense of your words,” said Norina. “If you had asked in my capacity as Truthken, I would not have told you that much, for it is muddy and full of guessing; but you asked as my… sister’s wife’s brother’s husband.”
“Paradox,” said Medric happily. He knew where he was at, with paradox. “And the way out of a paradox is to discover what assumption led to the paradox, and reexamine it. So: I do know, and I cannot know. And I am Leeba’s father, and I love her,” he added, because it seemed important. “Which, I suppose, is not a very soldierly thing, so perhaps that is what is meant by that I do know.
“And yet it must in some way be true that I cannot know, and that can’t be physically possible because I do know, so it must be possible in some other sense. Logically? Emotionally? Culturally? If I cannot know - or perhaps turn it inside out, if Medric cannot know, if he cannot know - why, that is a completely different phrase! Emil would love this.
“‘He cannot know’ is closer to may not or must not - and it can’t be that I must not know, because I must, and therefore it must be that I may not know because, in fact, it is paramount that a soldier not know how to stop being a soldier or there would be very many more desertions than there are already. And there are already quite too many.”
“You fire bloods do talk a lot,” said Norina.
“Emil would like this puzzle very much,” said Medric. “I think I would not have gotten it half so fast if I did not know him.”
“Did you figure it out, then?”
“Yes,” said Medric, and immediately, “No. I know that as a soldier, I cannot know how not to be a soldier; but all I know about knowing how not to be a soldier is that I love Leeba. And Emil, but a soldier could love Emil. Anyone could love Emil.”
“A statement entirely colored by prejudice,” said Norina. “But surely you weren’t always a soldier?”
“No,” said Medric. “My mother was Shaftali; it wasn’t until after Lilterwess fell, and it seemed a brighter future to be Sainnite, that I was given over to the chi - to the raising of the Sainnites.”
“You must have been very young,” said Norina. “Do you remember your mother at all?”
She sounded, very briefly, not at all like a Truthken; and Medric was reminded that she was a member of a banned order, part of the resistance in an occupied land where such people died daily, and her daughter was an infant. He thought it took great courage to raise a child in such a world; and then he abruptly remembered that he had decided to do this also. And he remembered holding Leeba the first time, and the sense that there was no other possible way forward than love. That love was the only possible response.
“I do,” he said. “She was as warm as a hearth fire, and she laughed often, and she taught me new words like they were precious secrets.” His father had said she laughed especially when she was sad.
Norina was silent a moment, even her knife stilling; and then she remembered herself, and returned to her steady rhythm. “That ought to be the last of the apples for the pie. You aren’t sad to have lost her?”
“It was a long time ago,” Medric said. And soldiers died all the time, and so did people who were not soldiers. “I was very sad when I first left, and I was devastated when she died. But I have more of her than many soldiers.”
“Then that is where you start from,” said Norina. “You want to be something other than a soldier, you start with the part of you that was never a soldier. Scrape away whatever you don’t want, and start fresh with whatever you have left. Decide who you want to be, and don’t rely on the parts of the past that you don’t need.”
“But I have always been a soldier,” said Medric. “I don’t think I can change now.”
“Medric,” said Norina. “You’re nineteen.”
“So Norina didn’t solve your problem, then?” Emil asked during their next snow shoeing lesson. Medric no longer needed lessons so much as practice, and they were moving further and further from the house into forests silent with snow.
“She told me I was nineteen, like the problem was my age,” Medric said.
“Well, you are nineteen.”
“Nearly twenty! And I don’t think you can measure it in years - what other nineteen-year-old is personally responsible for the destruction of an entire paladin company?”
“And the survival of several families of Shaftali farmers,” Emil reminded him. “And an entire wagon-load of books.”
“Exactly!” Medric said, throwing his hands in the air. “I’ve been to war, and I’ve been retired from it, and I’ve planned battles and spared prisoners and changed sides and the blood I’ve seen, Emil, even just the blood I’ve seen awake and in person - you can’t call me a child after that. I haven’t been a child in years.”
“Did she say you were?” Emil asked.
“No,” Medric admitted. “She said that I should decide who I want to be, and I told her I didn’t think I could change, and she said I was a teenager.”
“Well,” said Emil, “when I was a teenager, I was worried about who I was and who I was going to be, what I wanted to do with my life and who I would do it with. And the answer was not ‘stay on a farm with everything I have ever known.’ It sounds like a very developmentally appropriate problem to me.”
He paused, shaking snow off a low-hanging tree branch until it lifted out of his path. “It sounds much like the problem I have now, except that now I have a husband and a family, and Shaftal knows Karis gives us all a purpose. Perhaps I never stopped asking teenager questions.”
“But I’ve already been shaped into the person I’m going to be,” said Medric. “I made the crossing over into - being Shaftali, and I’m still a soldier, and I can’t change that. I can’t change what I am.”
“That’s what they said of Shaftal,” said Emil. “That’s what they said of Karis, and of Zanja.”
“Hmph,” said Medric. Emil put a hand on his shoulder.
“It wouldn’t be easy. It would be the hardest thing you ever do.”
“I destroyed an entire paladin company, and saved several families of South Hill farmers,” said Medric.
“Even so,” said Emil, and shrugged off the near-empty pack he was wearing. “Take this. Go down to the next farm and ask them for supplies to get us through winter - our household just tripled in size and I don’t think even you were expecting that. Give yourself some time to think. There’s money in the right side pocket, and a list in the left.”
Medric stood with the pack in his hands, and more questions than he was ready to pose. How long had Emil been planning this? It was getting dark; he would have to stay over with a Shaftali family, and he didn’t know if he could do that. If they would find out he was Sainnite. What they would do if they did, and what he would do in response.
“It’s a good test of your skill,” Emil said, and it took Medric a moment to realize he was talking about the snow shoes.
“Did you make Norina use up the apples just so I would have to go?” Medric blurted.
“No,” said Emil. “Zanja did. You’ve been needing some time away from people. Go and enjoy it; I’ll be waiting for you when you get back.”
He left Medric standing in the snow with the pack still in his hands, Emil trudging back across the snowcrust toward the light of the cottage. It was too small for seven people, Medric thought, but Karis would add to it, so seamlessly that no one would know it had been built smaller. Perhaps as early as spring. And they would be a bustling, tiny Shaftali family, who sent their quiet people into the snow to protect them, and sent their half-Sainnite loved ones into the world with the blithe assumption that all would be well.
Who wielded that assumption like the words of the G’deon in Medric’s mother’s fey-tales: The G’deon said, “This house will walk,” and it grew chicken-feet and walked - spreading flowers in its wake, because Medric was a soldier’s child, and had asked for them.
He turned back to the forest and the family he was supposed to buy from, and wondered if they would accept him, and if they would let him buy flowers.
It was a long hike in winter, and Medric showed up at their neighbors’ door sweating and irritable and with only his distance spectacles; he had always been annoyed at sweating in winter, and his mother had laughed at him for it, and even after he had been sent to the garrison his father taught him to laugh at his own irritation. The neighbor family welcomed him in and took his coat and told him it was freezing out before they even asked his name; and when he said, “Medric,” they said, “Oh, you’re Emil’s husband! Have you eaten?”
And that was the end of any worrying about being a Sainnite.
They fed him oatmeal with honey and apple and walnuts, and apologized that they had already eaten their dinner and had nothing left but porridge to offer him, and that he would have to share a bed with their eldest, who scowled about it. And they let him play with their youngest daughter, who would be Leeba’s playmate when they were both older, and asked him about their visitors.
Medric, who was rolling on the floor with the two-year-old, stopped to look up.
“It’s…” he said, and did not know how to go on, and blushed as he found the right words. “It’s my daughter and her other parents. She’s four months old. I’m going to be the best father.”
The oath surprised him, but the Shaftali adults laughed, and said he was on his way, and that they were glad to hear Emil had found a family, that it wasn’t right, him alone up on that mountain, and better when there were two of them, but best that they were starting a proper family. And when Medric asked about flower bulbs, the oldest child found some in the corner of a store yard that they had forgotten to plant, and tucked them into his pack while Medric was trying to imagine Sainnites forgetting to plant their flowers.
He helped put the toddler to bed, and asked about the oldest man’s knitting, and helped the second-oldest child wind a ball of yarn, and gradually realized that she was flirting with him. It was an uncomfortable realization. He had thought of her as a child, old enough to look after herself, and thought no more of the matter; and he found himself handing her ball to her hastily and moving across the room, a rejection she took stoically. Would Emil have thought of him so, if he had not brought the books? he wondered. And then he tallied up their ages, and found she was at most three years younger than he was.
He went to bed confused and angry and not able to show any of that, and woke the same way, and left earlier than he had meant to. He was in a foul mood anyway, walking uphill and with a full pack and nearly all his money left because the family would not hear of taking money when their neighbor Emil Paladin was setting up a family; so he took advantage of the walk and his anger to work out how irritated he was that Norina was right. He was nineteen. He was three years older than a child who flirted with whoever came to visit because she was just learning how and didn’t get many opportunities to practice.
Here he had been thinking he was old, and broken, and that Emil fit into his cracks and pieces and bound him back up together again. That they held each other together, all their frayed edges and broken bits, and that being with Emil felt like being whole again, though they might never get their youth back. And here was an importunate child who thought Medric was just an attractive farmer around her age. And, gallingly, she was right.
His father had told him, once, that emotion was stored in the body, carried in stiff muscles and tight body language; and that it had to be worked out, in drill or on the battlefield. Medric worked his out in the snowshoes, spectacles tucked in his pocket where they wouldn’t get sweaty or steamed, snow cooling his muscles as the anger steamed out of them. He missed the garrison for that; life as not-a-soldier contained too little training for the hot confusion and the tides of anger and grief that being a soldier still left him with.
The confusion and anger lasted three quarters of the trip, and then it worked itself out through his pores. When he felt the last of it seeping away, he stopped, panting, at a relatively level point, and took his spectacles out, and looked back downhill at where his tracks meandered through the woods.
There had been new snow in the night, and his tracks, staggering as they were with the difficulty of a slope in snowshoes, were nearly all the tracks there were; certainly the only human ones. The woods were muffled in stillness, all their sharp edges and jagged echoes coated in a smooth muffler of white. The trees themselves had every branch outlined in ice, the branches bending downward in benediction. As he watched, a load of snow sloughed off one, and it rose again, bouncing gently against the still backdrop.
It reminded him of Emil, yesterday, shaking the snow out of another branch, using it as an excuse to think, the corner of his mouth tucked in the way it did when he was thinking, when Medric was torn between kissing that fold and waiting to hear what he would say. Emil, who stood in this forest as if he had grown there. And hadn’t he? And hadn’t Medric also?
He felt in the side of his bag, where he had tucked the bulbs the Shaftali farmers had given him, the ones he had forgotten in his anger, the ones they no longer could identify. They were still snugly netted, covered over by Emil’s shopping list, protected from any still-falling snow.
The older soldiers had taught him to curse the weather, but he had never been quite comfortable doing so, stirring anger against weather he could not change and could not imagine an alternative to. Yes, Shaftal was cold, and it was windy, but here he was wrapped up in a heavy coat, alone to witness the emptiness of the world, the land gone silent in appreciation of the way the snow transformed it.
It was beautiful. Not a soldier’s beauty, but there was no one here to tell him to curse the weather. No one asked him when the first bulbs would bloom; they gave him time to see the light reflected off each shade of white for himself, and to love that, and to not be anxious for its passing.
And perhaps that was what not being a soldier was about.
He stood up again, staggering under the weight of the pack and tripping over his snowshoes; but he came home lighthearted, with the peace of a winter forest in him, ready to treasure Shaftali snow.
Zanja opened the door for him before he had quite touched the handle, and she stood there in his path for a moment.
“What were you singing, just now?” she asked.
“Just a marching song,” said Medric, because all the songs he knew were marching songs; and he did not want to say that the Sainnese felt like home in his mouth, here when he had not meant to be caught singing at all.
“Are you going to teach it to Leeba?” asked Zanja.
“Why not?” asked Medric.
“You are half way across a border, and you are still deciding what to carry with you,” said Zanja.
“And the language of my childhood is not something I can give my child?” Medric challenged.
“I did not say that,” said Zanja. “I would give her the songs of the Ashawala’i, if there were any left to sing them.”
Medric could say nothing, for a moment, in the shadow of her grief.
“I was given the songs and stories and the gods of my ancestors,” said Zanja, standing in the doorway like she had forgotten it was there. “Every generation is a border, and we cross it as we age, deciding each time what to cross with. And this is what my people thought was worth carrying: the stories of Raven, the guidance of Salos’a. And when I try to carry it, it runs through my fingers like blood.”
She held her hands out, and Medric saw the pattern on them where dark faded to light in her palms, the small, thin fingers that had been broken and molded and regrown; and she lifted her joined palms up to him, as if to give him a drink of water, and they were empty.
“The only things we can keep are what we give to our children,” she said.
Medric saw it then: Their one child, the three peoples her parents came from, the weights she could not possibly carry and would shake off, irritably, as they were draped over her. All of the things she would choose to carry, and what was left behind would make an ache in Medric’s heart.
“Dying is always painful,” said Zanja, and he looked in her eyes this time, and saw the warmth of compassion in them this time, and understanding. They two would lose with Leeba, no matter how much they loved her and rejoiced in her. “Winter is always long.”
“But it is beautiful,” Medric protested, reaching for his pack. “And when the spring comes, there are flowers.” And he took a handful of flower bulbs, and laid them gently in her outstretched hands.
“Just so,” said Zanja, smiling, and she stepped aside to welcome him in. “And that is why we continue to bear it, is it not? Come, I have made you tea.”
Medric remembered thinking that this was a family, a house filled with people, tea already made to welcome one home. Today, the house smelled of bread baking - J’han’s bread, simple, loosely leavened bread that traveled well, flavored with herbs. He had said he would teach Medric to make it, and when Medric asked when, he had said, “There is always time in winter.”
There was time. Ages of it, stretching ahead; seasons and seasons to bake bread, and snow shoe, to plant bulbs and to teach Leeba to look for where they began to peek from the good dark earth. Time enough to learn how to make a family, to become good enough for Leeba, to become husband or brother to all his husband’s family.
It was starting to seem like a good thing.