A chronicle of Breegarra's court
You ask me for the beginning, and the beginning is water. Understand first that I did not choose it, and neither did she. Our own sorcerers did that. They were losing — you will know better than I whether they went on losing — and men who are losing will open anything that has a hinge. Breegarra was a captain of the line, and she stood in the tent and told them plainly what she thought of it, and she was overruled by men with cleaner hands, and then she was sent back out to hold the very ground they meant to use. That is how armies reward an honest mouth. Liana stood at her shoulder, as she always did. And I was there behind them both, because Breegarra would not leave me back among the sorcerers, where a woman like me was only one more thing on a table. So: not chosen. Collateral. Remember that word when I tell you the rest of it. Of the working itself I keep nothing I can put into sentences. A pressure. A wrongness, like a note held too long. Then the river. It ran brown-green under a sky too bright, and the far bank was all jungle, and we came up out of the shallows of the southern shore coughing, with our own mud still on our boots. Noob River, they call it now. I have never liked the name, but names here are given by whoever survives to speak them twice. She stood up first. I want you to see her as she was on that bank: not a girl newly spilled into a strange place but a woman finished, thirty years of the line in her shoulders, soaked to the collarbone, already assessing our state. Water, height, cover, sightlines. She turned to find Liana — found her, upright, dripping, unflinching as her nickname has it — and then she turned to find me, and only when she had both of us in her eye did she let herself breathe out. Where Bjorn should have been, there was nothing. She walked hundreds of yards upstream. Then back, and hundreds down. Nothing. Her look told us. We never spoke more of that pain — a warrior's loss. But four became three. And we have always been three; it is our crest, our inner truth. Yet provenance sits here too. In the weeds we found him, sick and yellow and dying, a mountain in the form of nearly a boy. You must picture her carrying him, that hulk across her shoulders, sinking to the knee in the muck of the river edge. No uncertainty in her. Each step set down as sure as the sky is blue. And we cared for him. He healed, and spoke unknown words mixed in among the ones we owned. We fed him, and he taught us — his name, Tycho; his language; the names of the things with teeth. And then three were four again. An eeriness, welcome but like an echo: he stood with the packs on his back and the patience of a mule. I never learned why he was there, dying in the reeds, and in time I stopped asking, because the answers frightened me less than the asking did. What she became as three returned to four is a different accounting. The tome, the fifteen turnings of Kurak's road, the stone that eats distance — she had none of that on the riverbank when we arrived. She learned it here, in this world, because the thing that had been done to us was sorcery, and she would not be ignorant of what had unmade her life. She went and got it the way you go and get a blade you hate the weight of. Every time I saw her use it afterward, her jaw set as if she were losing the argument again, the same argument, in the same tent, to the same men. And me? I danced for them. You may laugh. Wounds close faster near me; they always have. On that bank, in that first hovel we built, it was all I had to give, and it was enough to start with.
It was Tycho who told us, in his mended-together words, sitting with his back against a rock because sitting was still work for him. Strangers come up from the south, he said. Not the way we came. They come out of the desert with nothing — no water, no blade, some of them with the marks of the cross still on their wrists — and they walk north until they find the river, because water is the only promise a man will believe when he has nothing else. And here, he said, at the shallow bend where we had been filling our skins, at that same shore, they are met. By the ones who eat other humans, and by the things with endless teeth, whose names he had already taught me. He did not say it as a warning. He said it as weather. Breegarra listened with her arms folded and her eyes on the middle distance, which is where she always put them when she was deciding something and did not wish to be asked about it yet. Then she walked some two hundred and fifty paces up the shore from the mud we had washed in on, and stood on the rise beneath the broken bridge. I understood the choosing of the ground before she explained it, because she had trained me to understand ground. The rise saw the crossing. And the bridge — that ruined span, going nowhere, black against the sky — could be seen from very far off. A man with nothing will walk toward any shape that is not sand. Give him a shape, and he arrives somewhere, instead of dying on the way to nowhere. "Here," she said. We built it as a shack of stone and green timber, the three of us and then the four, because Tycho would not be left sitting. At first he only set blocks where I laid them out for him, one and then another, his great hands shaking, resting between each. Liana split and hauled and said nothing, which is her way of consenting. I fetched and mixed, and danced a little at the edge of the work when it went badly, and the work went better. It was small. I want you to know that it was small, so that you understand it properly. One room. A roof that kept out the sun and most of the rain. I asked her why — not resentfully; I was tired — why we were spending our days in this world on a house we would not sleep in. "It's for those who didn't choose this," she said. "And those who chose poorly." She set a stone straight with the heel of her hand. "They should not have to wake up unaided in this place." She meant to stock it, in time. Water, a blade, a bandage, something to eat would begin it. She said so often, in the way she said all the things she intended. The Inn is still there. And it is well stocked.
A tower in the ruins becomes a house, and then a home.
The first four come to work for her, and the household begins.
A woman is given a name out of her own people's tongue.
Someone keeps walking out through the cellar door.
Two foals are raised, and named.
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