Chapter 41: Chapter 41 – Afternoon’s Contentment

I pushed a lot of thoughts away until we’d gotten the third mystery disc in place. Jannea took much longer to recover from the aerial shot than I did, and much longer than the first time she’d used her Skill, which I was guessing inscribed the memory onto the disc; while she rested, my mind wandered.

I’d expected to be shaken—or Godtouched, for that matter—and for very little time to have passed. Jannea was non-verbal and barely present, still smelling like an ever-shifting, slowly fading piece of nature, but I… wasn’t.

It had, however, been a couple of hours. It had to have been, since my stomach would still have been full, but it took eating, finishing the task ahead of us, and having a moment to relax to even consider it. Even then, I didn’t entirely believe it until I stepped outside and saw the sun, which had moved about a third of the way down the sky.

Stepped outside, because Jannea had emphatically kicked me out of my own home.

Tayir declined to come with me. Jannea, he told me with a sonorous voice and a fond smile, would forget to go to dinner without a reminder; and he wanted to finish his own work as well. So it was alone, and feeling it, that I let my thoughts spin as I stood on the edge of the ring road.

It felt… weird. I’d had the occasional quiet moment in my first few days in Kibosh, but they’d been just that: moments, interstitials bookended by diving into learning something, meeting someone, acting, or sleeping. I had nothing planned until dinner, no access to my house, and complete confidence that Kelly would find me when she was done no matter where I wandered.

I was, in short, at entirely loose ends, and it was… really quite nice.

Still, delightful as the lack of pressure and expectations might have been, I didn’t particularly want to spend it standing alone on the side of the road. There was a library I could visit if I walked south along the ring road, one with an absolutely implausible number of books given the number of people living in Kibosh; that would do for a destination.

Not long into my walk, though, I was drawn inexorably off the ring road onto the quint paths. Someone had just the most amazing alto laugh, carrying and full of an uninhibited joy, and something was nudging me to go investigate.

I stopped for a moment, looking down at the path I’d stepped onto, and tried to sort of relax into the feeling and interrogate it. It was a System feeling, I decided, coming from either Observe or Comprehend, or maybe some mixture of both.

Fascinating, and reassuring, since if I couldn’t trust the System, I was fucked regardless.

There wasn’t much to distinguish the quint I was walking to from any other, to my eyes. Sure, the ornamentation and art was unique, but they were all unique, and I had no idea what the particulars meant or implied. The color scheme of the houses was primarily reds and purples, with flowers and vegetables painted onto or maybe somehow integrated into the stone itself, but the five houses spread around the central garden plot all interpreted that in their own way.

I had no idea what any of the flowers were. That wasn’t an unfamiliar feeling; I could vaguely identify a rose from a non-rose, but that was about the limit of my understanding. Most of the flowers I saw as I walked down the path towards the garden even looked perfectly mundane, things that I wouldn’t have been surprised to see at the Conservatory of Flowers or the Botanical Gardens.

Most of them. The one that looked like a more elegant pitcher plant with a symmetrical pattern of seven nectar pools that had reinforced ribbing and thorns, pictured in the middle of skewering something that looked like a cross between a flying ant and a wasp? That didn’t look particularly mundane.

The vegetable garden itself was interesting enough to make me stop, no matter how alluring that astonishing alto sounded. Fruit trees bracketed terraces of vegetables—leaves of tubers or other root vegetables poking out the soil, low plants that looked vaguely like some kind of lettuce, and then beans and maybe tomatoes on scaffolding. There was no way that there should have been light getting to all of them, but I supposed that was what the magic was for.

Shadow spilled out in every direction from the vegetable garden, dark and thick. The light was being collected at a thousand little points, redirected to supplement what would otherwise have been inadequate sunlight in the dense vegetable forest. And it was dense; the individual plants were huge, and they were packed in closely enough that I was surprised their root systems weren’t one conjoined system.

Though, after all, that was entirely possible. Who was I to declare otherwise, in a world of magic?

The path took me under an arcing planter, no less dense with vegetation, and into a thicket, a maze of greenery and life. The smell was astonishing, too dense with odors of food and herbs for me to make out any individual thing other than the overall earthiness of it all. I shivered in memory as I came to a tiny gurgling brook, hearing in my head the whispers of the waterfall that I’d followed not much more than two days ago, and then smiled.

I needed to find cypress and laurelwood, and make arrows from them, which would take a teacher and a fair bit of study and practice. I’d need to learn to shoot a bow more seriously than as a way to flirt with other women at a Renaissance Fair, and find people to take me on hunts. But I’d just seen a woman take three memories of mine and inscribe perfected versions, and I had my own 3,000 square foot house whose rooms would bear that art.

A damn good deal, I thought to myself with a grin as I continued down the path that bridged the water, following the laughter.

The path took one more turn before opening up into the central part of the garden, and suddenly the conversation that I was dimly hearing snapped into focus. A moment later, in the middle of saying something about iron in thickly accented Qatn, I came into view and the speaker cut off.

“Um. Hi!”

I might have flushed under the sudden gaze of seven people, but I was too busy marveling at the chairs and benches. They were all obviously carnivorous plants—a set of chairs styled after that sevenfold pitcher plant, a couple other chairs that were some variant of plant-with-teeth, and a couple of benches that were made to mimic long, barbed-and-glistening fronds of some sort.

“Be welcome in this place! Please, come join us as a guest.”

My eyes snapped over to the speaker, the owner of that glorious voice that’d drawn me here. Once I’d looked at her, I couldn’t understand how I could have been looking at the chairs and benches in the first place, or at least not for more than a heartbeat.

Holy shit, I thought to myself dimly. Down, girl. She’s probably not even into women.

“Thank you,” I managed to say without stammering. Someone else had said something about bread and salt, and my hands came up to catch the piece of flatbread before my eyes caught up to the throw.

I’d caught thrown pieces of challah at the Shabbat table for almost twenty years. They were complicated memories, invoked by the act of making the catch, and I had to very deliberately not burst into tears.

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I ate the salted bread, instead, and smiled politely at the titanic powerhouse taking up an entire bench on her own, and at all the others.

Well, the kid determinedly trying to climb a trellis, I grinned at. But the others—two men in very different kinds of robes, two women in very different kinds of armor, an ancient-looking lady, and a scowling clerky type—all got a smile.

There was a shifting around of body language, looks traded around. Six of the people were sitting in some manner, and five of them were glancing towards the sixth seated person. She was old, old in a way that eclipsed Kibosh’s Matrons or Thesha, and she turned rheumy eyes towards me and beckoned me closer with shaking hands.

“Elder,” I said as I approached, “I am—”

“Sophie.” Her voice was soft, but it was clear and carrying enough that I didn’t have to strain to hear her. “I know you. Traveler, and your Gods; not for hundreds of years have their names been spoken on this side of the Wardline, may it stand.”

My heart was beating loud in my chest, and there was an utter silence from the others. I knew that silence; it was the same silence I’d heard with Thesha, the silence of someone suppressing sound and being obvious about it.

It was the silence of privacy.

“What is—”

“Three thousand and more in full array, behind those who touch still this soil. Tell me, will you bring them all?” Her hands grabbed mine, firming up around her gentle grip. “Will you overtake the world as a channel for their divinity? Will the Five shatter the lands and the Forest spread primeval over Kingdom, Principate, and Sarkārat alike, and then onwards?”

“No?” I tried to pull my hands away, but her grip was like steel; I tried to look around for help, but my eyes wouldn’t leave her suddenly-clear ones. Channel, the world whispered to me, and my brain stuttered as something slid between me and the world, leaving it somehow dimmer. “I have no idea what you’re talking about, but that sounds bad, and I’d rather not?”

“Ah. Well.” She let go of my hands and leaned back in her chair, eyes clouding over and hands shaking until they landed in her lap as sound caught up with us again. “That’s good.”

I blinked at her, mind still not remotely caught up with whatever was going on, though whatever she’d been doing to my perception faded away. “I’m… glad, Elder…?”

“In this time—no, in this place, I am called Iōanna, and I am a Delver registered in the Kingdom of Shem. Be known to Alchemist Nadash, children.”

A spate of introductions followed, and I managed to actually pay attention despite now having multiple additional major categories of inquiry and some absolutely blissful preserves spread on a thin slice of hard cheese. I nibbled at it, tasting something very similar to cloudberry, and attended as best I could, trying to project the feeling of being present.

Deoro was the man in the sand-colored robes that covered everything but his face and hands, and Ketka the woman in the leather-and-steel armor covering only her vitals which sang somehow of magic. Between the two of them and Iōanna, they were three out of a five-person delving team, taking a day’s rest between outings before they struck out for the Forest to hunt… something, I wasn’t entirely clear on what.

Deoro didn’t speak much in the way of Shemmai, but he was fluent enough in Qatn for all that he had a fascinating accent full of gutturals and rounded vowels. Iōanna didn’t volunteer anything about herself, but she’d been speaking Shemmai earlier, and Ketka spoke eleven languages and visibly preened at my impressed and somewhat stunned look.

The others seemed almost faded by comparison. Aliza, whom I’d recognized as soon as she turned around, was one of the kids I’d used as a shield in the party the night before, dark-skinned and with light, wild hair escaping its braids. She applied herself diligently to ignoring me in favor of continuing to try to climb the trellis, which I approved of, laughing off the occasional fall and marking with chalk every time she got even a little higher.

There was, I noticed, quite a lot of chalk, and it started very low.

Shafta, the young woman in robes whom I’d initially thought was a man, was reserved—not shy, but distant and controlled, quiet while still being firm when she did speak. She was the Clerk-Adjutant to James and Meredith, and she’d dragged along the scowling, clerky-looking girl who turned out to be Shuli, Kartom’s apprentice. Tseizal, the Guard in some kind of armor—kinda like a breastplate over a leather jacket, with gauntlets and a helmet at his side—with a spear resting next to him, joked that it was so that they could both be notionally social while still having someone silent around; he, on the other hand, was just happy to be on downshift, which meant he was equipped and alert but not engaged in any particular duty.

Oddly, as things shifted back towards conversation instead of introductions, I found myself talking mostly with Deoro. Iōanna was quiet, possibly asleep, and Ketka was attentive, but Deoro obviously loved to talk and needed practice with Qatn. Shafta spoke Yaroba, and contributed by translating whenever Deoro’s Qatn wasn’t good enough, but mostly Deoro was able to make himself understood.

He was a good storyteller, even in pidgin, but while I was polite and nodded along, I wasn’t actually that interested in the story I’d interrupted by my arrival. Some birds had done a favor to a king, and made a bad choice as to their reward; they wound up being so insufferable they didn’t have friends, left to make their own community, and got caught in a sandstorm and died.

He kicked it over to Ketka, who stretched, muscles flexing, and shook her head. “If two have heard my story,” she’d said, “then there are three more who have not heard Sophie’s.”

So I settled down and, a little bit haltingly, started to talk. About hiking and the dullness and colorless life that drove me to seek solitude in nature; about the decision to follow the creek, and the encounter with Artemis. About my having asked her to make sure my mother knew, and the realization that, dressed in hiking gear, she’d mistaken me for a man; about her domains as a Goddess and theoxenia, the hospitality laws that her father enforced. About the way her social mask had come off as she offered me a new chance as a gesture of evening the scales, and about the way her half-brother Hephaestus had stepped in to reforge my body in the process.

And then I told them about how I’d seen the beauty of the forest and the majesty of its trees, and then after some time left it to make my painful way to Kibosh; and at that, Iōanna stirred.

“Ah. Either way you went,” she said softly, “it would bring glory to them.”

“I… don’t understand.” Again, I didn’t say, but I certainly thought it.

“Sent here,” she said, switching to Ancient Shemmai, “bear you ancient foes of ours, and a conduit to them all you are, even within the Warded Kingdom. If took you the path to the cities of the Forest, you would have been oracle and Priest unto them—and for a hundred years not an inch of land may we have dreamt of taking.”

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