Chapter 5: Chapter 5 – Where A Friend Might Guide You

As implicitly promised, James Morei was waiting outside for me. With him was a girl who looked like she was in her mid-twenties, which apparently meant absolutely nothing, and a basket whose odor made me realize that I was ravenously hungry.

“Sophie, be known to Kelly Avara. Kelly, be known to Sophie Nadash.” James beamed beatifically at the both of us. “We know full well the costs of magic, and you bore the brunt of a grand working upon your body today.”

“I heard that we had someone new. A Traveler.” Kelly’s eyes sparkled down at me as she smiled, and I momentarily forgot about the food. She had a voice to die for, a clear soprano that rang like a bell and filled me with multiple flavors of yearning. “Soon as James here let me know I had the duty, I grabbed you a walk-basket! It’s Levali’s, so probably Keldren actually cooked it.” I had reflexively held my hand out to shake hers, which was obviously the kind of cultural artifact that wouldn’t carry over to a different world, and I startled as she handed me the basket. “And you have no idea what that means! So eat, eat, we can walk and talk.”

“Sure. I…” I looked down at the basket. There was a layer of dumplings on a cloth, and I popped one of them in my mouth with, if not trepidation, a bit of caution.

My eyes went wide, and I chewed hastily, swallowing a little bit too early and shoving another dumpling into my maw.

“They’re good, aren’t they!” Kelly nodded excitedly at me, head bobbing up and down as she swayed from side to side. “Keldren does the mants! I always make sure that if I’m doing something that calls for a walk-basket, it’s on a Levali day.”

“Kelly, not to interrupt,” James murmured quietly, quietly enough that I almost didn’t hear him, “but I did do a fair bit of magic myself, and I would like to avail myself of Thesha’s hospitality.”

Another dumpling fell to my hunger, and I missed what else he was saying to her. She nodded at him, pushing at him playfully while laughing. “Go, go! Get yourself a bespoke meal. You had to cast, poor man!”

“Sophie.” He ignored the shoves, smiling genially at me. “You are welcome here. This is the Kingdom of Shem; here, we do our best to ensure that all flourish. Be a good First Friend to her, Kelly; call on me for whatever help is needed. And mind that you—”

“James.” Her voice was sweet, but his wince seemed genuine, and her next shove had more force to it and less playfulness.

“My apologies, Kelly. I leave her in your hands.” With that, and a nod at me, he turned right—his right, my left—and started walking down the road.

I looked at them, him moving in the direction she’d been pushing him and her with her hands propped on her hips and staring at him. I swallowed, managing to savor the bright flavors of citrus and the tang of the juices that exploded out of the dumpling in my mouth, and swallowed again, for less flavorful reasons. “First Friend, huh?” I raised an eyebrow at her, voice definitely not quavering. “That sounds like it has capital letters.”

“It does. It’s my job.” Kelly gestured to a bench a few steps away. “And speaking of which! I forgot to get you some water. Sit down! I’ll be right back, okay?”

“Sure, sure.” I bit down on another dumpling, sitting down and watching her take off at a quite respectable run. She looked fantastic doing it, multicolored skirts hiked up around her hips to show off bright teal tights or leggings that tucked into boots very much like mine, and I watched shamelessly, grinning, until she turned and was no longer in sight.

I blinked a few times, popping another dumpling into my mouth. Only one left, I thought to myself, then shrugged. It was the first moment I’ve had since I stepped out of the forest that was genuinely relaxed, and I looked around in curiosity at the… village square, almost certainly.

The sun was low-ish but still brilliant and warm, maybe four-ish if it was—ah, not summer, not in Shem; that was a Qatn word. Growth. The season of renewal was past, and we were in striving, which was split into Planting, Growth, and Harvest. The third season was the season of quiet, split into Frost, Ease, and Anticipation, and then it would be back to renewal; Thaw, Rebirth, and Festival.

I took a deep breath, carefully avoiding panicking. I could work with this; the important part was that I had an intuitive understanding of the timekeeping of wherever I lived, not that I pointlessly remembered the names of the year’s subdivision we used where I’d lived until now. At least they still had hours and days, here!

Sighing, I turned my attention back to my surroundings. There were two buildings on the square, one facing the other, and I was sitting on a bench right in front of one. That one was very obviously the administrative building and military headquarters, given that it contained a bunch of clerical offices and was connected to a series of low buildings surrounded by stables and practice grounds. It also abutted the wall of the village, which was… weird, with the square-wave stone bits on the inside.

I put that aside. I was not, after all, an expert on fortifications, not in the slightest.

There was a ring road to my left and right that went around the village parallel to the wall, and they both terminated into the square. There were houses along it in odd little bunches, five little single-storey houses spread out evenly around what looked like a vegetable garden. Each house was connected at the rooftops with slender, arching walkways to the other houses in their set and to the next set over. Some of those sets were then connected by more of the same, slightly wider, walkways to open areas on the wall, which might have been why it looked so odd.

The ground was… cobbled? I kicked at it idly, humming. If it was cobblestone, it was remarkably smooth and evenly mortared, but that seemed entirely possible, especially with magic. Call it cobbled for now. The ground, then, was cobbled, and the four corners of the square had three trees each which reached at least twenty feet high. They weren’t exactly like the titanic nearly-redwoods that I’d seen in the forest, more mundane and narrower proportionally, but they were clearly kin to them, and it was oddly reassuring to see them.

The building behind me was made of a light gray stone, textured and weathered, with black mortar between the blocks, which was interesting and probably a deliberate contrast, because the building in front of me had the colors reversed. Dark gray stone with white mortar, and it was indisputably a library, because it was quite literally shaped like an open book facing the square; spine rising higher than the pages, each page represented by an outthrust wing of the building with big clear windows that had a big cozy-looking chair and side table.

There was someone at one of those chairs, leaning back with a book in hand, and something unknotted in me to see it. I took a deep breath of air that tasted of crystalline purity, and stretched up, left, right, and down, spreading my knees a little to accommodate my belly as I touched the ground. It was remarkably quiet—not silent, but in that almost suburban way where the main noise was coming from children, whether at play or, at least in one case, wailing nearby that they weren’t thirsty, Kanja was thirsty, whatever that meant.

I ate the last dumpling, and right on cue, Kelly came around the corner with a large bag bouncing at her hip. Its design was odd, with two straps that were both over her opposite shoulder, both crossing across—ah. Those, I thought to myself, are shoulder straps. She’s just wearing it like a cross-body bag.

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I was still grinning as she ran over and stopped in front of me, pulling a waterskin out of her bag. “Here! Did you miss me?”

“Atrociously,” I lied smoothly. “My life wasn’t complete without your water. I mean, you.”

“Flatterer.” She handed me the waterskin, and I twisted the cap on its spigot, pulling it off in a motion that felt practiced but which I’d never done before. “I got you a standard kit. Two three-quart skins, a three-quart insulated canteen, some odds and ends. Bedroll, couple sets of underclothes that looked like they’d fit, soap, a washcloth—”

“How much is this going to cost me?” I was still blinking at her exuberance after the relief of the water, both to quench my thirst and to wash down the remains of the dumplings, but I had to interrupt her. “I didn’t anticipate… all of this.”

“Right, of course, you wouldn’t know. Matti, he was Shemmai—” from the Kingdom of Shem, I knew that to mean— “so… right.” She put her hands together in front of her face, pressing her palms into each other, and took a deep breath.

From the Kingdom of Shem. I mentally flinched at how the fact was just in my head like I’d grown up speaking the language. There was a different inflection that would have meant he was culturally Shemmai, and a third one that would have referred to the ancient, liturgical form of the language named Shemmai and would imply she was calling him old-fashioned; and at that point, I managed to pull my mind out of its spiraling before I crashed. She was waiting for me, and I nodded at her.

“This is free,” she said simply. “It has to be. We count the cost in the time it takes for you to settle in. Even someone like Matti, someone who’s established in a trade and came with a wagon, takes a season; if you’re happy and thriving in a year, I’m doing my job.”

“Your job, which is… First Friend.”

She wrinkled her nose, probably at the dubiousness in my voice. “Sophie.” Her voice was quiet but intense, and her bubbliness was absent from her voice. “Yes, that is my job. To be the friend you need so that you can build a better life. To help you navigate a community you’re a stranger to, with mores you have no way to know and manners you won’t recognize. And this is proof of that.” Her voice got a little bit more energetic as she waved at the basket next to me on the bench and the now-nearly-empty waterskin in my hand. “Would you have known that you could go to the day’s public refectory and get a walk-basket? No. Would you have known that you can get a standard kit for free, as someone new to the Village, no questions asked? No!

“You don’t know the laws, you don’t know the Breach Protocols. You don’t know who to ask questions to, even when you know to ask them. You don’t even know that there’s another layer of mants under the cloth!”

She paused, triumphantly, and I obediently pulled away the cloth that I thought was at the bottom of the basket. There was indeed a second, smaller layer of dumplings—mants, she was calling them—there, and I started laughing quietly. Taking a deep breath, I made myself stop before my quiet laughter became uncontrolled hysterics. “Okay. And how do you feel about that? Because I know how I feel about having a stunningly pretty girl compelled to be friends with me; specifically, I am very not okay with people having to spend time with me who don’t want to.”

“You think I’m pretty?” She batted her eyelashes at me, trying for a simpering air, but it lasted about half a second before she started breaking into giggles. “Sophie, first off, I’m older than you are. Wherever you’re from, they didn’t treat you right.” She reached out, tracing a line across my brow, face suddenly serious; I didn’t feel the slightest urge to flinch, which was nice and new. “And second? I love new people. I love meeting them, I love helping them, I love being friends with them. It’s…”

I waited to see if she was going to resume after trailing off, then tapped her on the shoulder. “It’s what?”

“Nothing.” She smiled sheepishly at me. “Come on, let’s walk.”

“Come on. Are we friends or what?”

She shot me a shocked, almost betrayed look, and then threw her head back, laughing. Dropping unceremoniously onto the bench next to me, she leaned her back against my side, and I waited patiently until her laughter faded into chuckles. “I’m going to like you, Sophie. Listen, I wasn’t lonely as a kid, this isn’t me trying to rectify my trauma or atone for misdeeds.” Her weight and warmth shifted off of me, to my fleeting regret, and I turned in time to catch her smile turn soft. “I think it’s important work, and I like stories. I’m not supposed to have a selfish motive, but even after twenty years of this I still like stories, and being your friend is going to mean hearing them, and maybe telling some of mine.”

“Maybe telling some of yours?” I grin back at her as she giggles. She’s absolutely delightful; they’re not some delicate chiming sound, her giggles have a snicker to them, they have depth and resonance, and it makes the joy she’s showing feel so much more real. “If you think you can be my friend without dishing all your embarrassing details, you’ve got another think coming.”

“Sealed!” She grabbed my hand, putting my palm against hers around shoulder height. “This is how we seal a bargain. Not a business bargain, but a personal one; a promise, if it’s reciprocal. We push like this.”

I pressed back, thinking rapidly. “Is that related to the thing where you put your palms together and took a deep breath?”

She nodded, a sort of quick triple-nod with small head motions. “Yes! We hand the moment to our future self, our self two moments from now. Then we take a moment and we breathe, because we don’t have to deal with it; and we give that breath to our future self too, who pays us back by doing what needs to be done.”

“Where I come from, we pinky swear. We lock our pinkie fingers together like this—” I demonstrated, feeling embarrassed, but she went along with it with such obvious joy that it was infectious— “and we move our hands up and down like we’re shaking hands, which probably doesn’t exist in your culture, and we make the agreement that way. I think it’s supposed to signify vulnerability or something.”

“Pinkie swearing.” She nodded slowly, then nodded again, faster. “That doesn’t make any less sense than how we do it! Now come on, I have to show you around town before it’s dinner time, now that your food’s all gone!”

By the time I’d looked down and realized that, somewhere in the middle of that conversation, I had eaten the second layer of mants, she’d shifted from the pinkie swear to holding my hand and pulling me up to my feet. Laughing, following her as she practically skipped towards the ring road, I allowed myself to be dragged along in her wake.

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