stables. Walk alone in the Gravewood. Choose a bridefruit. Ugh.
I cannot pinpoint the moment when I stopped wishing to hunt animals or even eat them. Maybe it was the scream of a khek hare or the terrified bleating of a gut goat. Some creature’s peaceful grazing interrupted by violent death so that we could graze later on its flesh marinated in a slow-cooked sauce and turn its hide into boot leather. I simply do not want to make my life’s work ending the lives of other creatures. He will say it is the way of animals to hunt and eat other animals, and that is true. But I have no taste for hunting anymore.
That is not to say I have no skill at it. Or that I have skill at anything else. I do not know what else I want to do, and if I tell my family I don’t want to be a hunter, I know that’s one of the first questions they will ask me: What else will you do, Abhi? How will you put food on the table if you do not put a spear through its neck first?
And I don’t know for sure. Go to Rael, perhaps, where they have the Third Kenning and their Triple Goddess to match and know who they are as a people. There is no national identity crisis there. The Earth Shapers are so very grounded, ha ha. I have no interest in pursuing their kenning, but perhaps I could apprentice myself to a beekeeper…?
Kalaad in the sky, I need to think of something better than that! Father will stomp me into the grass if I tell him I want to keep bees.
Maybe a farmer. Something he doesn’t fully understand but he respects. I need to be ready with an answer when he hands me a spear tomorrow and I refuse to take it.
Whatever happens, I know my life will be much different when the sun rises than it is today, and I thought I should record a small part of it before it’s gone forever.
—
“That was short, I know,” the bard said, “but diary entries are rarely much longer. Soon enough Abhi will long for the days when all he had to worry about was the annual khern hunt. We will come back to him tomorrow but return now to our greensleeve, Nel Kit ben Sah, who has left her cousin to recuperate and returned to her duty on the western coast.”
Coastal patrol is a mixed blessing. On the one hand, we are always looking out into the sun and never drinking the twilight peace of the canopy, but on the other, there’s a decent chance we’ll see something strange at least once a week.
Yesterday in the night, for example, one of the Hathrim mountains bloomed into the sky. The ash blossom could be seen in the dawn, spreading and flattening in the blue and promising gray rain on our green forest. We think it is Mount Thayil above Harthrad, though we cannot be sure. But I have never seen anything so strange as what I saw early this morning. I don’t think I’ve even heard of such a thing.
In the black hour before sunrise, flickering lights danced on distant waves. Many tens of tiny fires moving north on the surface of the ocean.
I knew it could only be one thing: Who else builds ships that can stand the scorch of fire? Only the giants do this. Lacking trees, they build glass boats and burn putrid blocks of compressed vegetables and dung in large steel bowls and keep the blaze going forever with the talents of their firelords.
Seeing their trade barges pass in the night is common. But those ships keep fairly close to the shore and move in ones and twos, and we can hear the beat of the drum and the grunt of the oarsmen as they pull their way through the water. These were far out—so far that I would not have seen them without the fires—and making no noise that I could hear over the susurrus of the tide. And there were far too many of them to represent a trade convoy. In all my years of patrol I have seen no more than six rowing together. These were many tens.
What could it mean? Follow the branches until you get to the trunk: the ash blossom was indeed Mount Thayil, and it represented the death of Harthrad. The Hathrim had to evacuate their land. But instead