Blue Gentian: A 'Spies of Kwedregiol' novel

The Marketplace

The boys built the bonfire where they always built it: west of camp, nearer to the creek that flowed thin in the summer heat, but still with room for the Travelers to dance around. Salya watched them prop the wood together from her stool in the booth of the marketplace. They stacked it in a triangle that reached higher than a human, and it stood on the blackened earth of a thousand fires that had come before. It shouldn't have been any different than the other bonfires they always built, but it was. This one was for Salya. This one was for the first ceremony of her Handcalling.

Stretching away from her in a line were two rows of wooden booths with white canvas tops. Colored bits of cloth on string tied each booth to the other and the bits fluttered in the breeze. Inside each stall was a collection of rainbow goods. Punched tin creations in one, fur coats and gloves in another, glossy furniture, bolts of bright cloth, vibrant weavings, the herbs and bottles of medicine that stretched on the shelves behind Salya and her sister Vadie.

She offered a thin smile to the few trickles of shoppers who weren't driven away by the heat, and kept pounding the pestle into the collection of herbs in the mortar. Vadie shifted beside her and sighed. It was hours since Mother had come and filled their water bucket a second time.

The day was old now, and the sun created mottled shadows from the broad, low trees that fell across the ring of wagons in the distance. Salya couldn't see it from here, but she knew the wagons were dust covered and pitted from their many trips over the mountains between Dregiol and Nelinah. Still, there was something beautiful about even the marks as their shingled sides caught the afternoon light. Each wagon was a family, and each family was full of faces she had known her whole life. A crowd of dust swirled, and the tepid breeze flowed over her sweaty shoulders.

"What would you do if you could do anything in the whole wide world?" said Vadie, breaking the long silence between them.

It was an unfair question, and Salya could feel it hanging in the air between them as she pondered options that would never matter. The boys stacking wood in the distance wavered in the heat that rose from the ground as they moved to and fro. Someone fingered a bright blue cloth in the booth across from them.

Vadie sat on the small folding chair, her feet tucked beneath her, lazing backward. A tight bud of annoyance settled in Salya's chest. She pounded the pestle harder into the herbs.

"So...?" said Vadie.

"It doesn't matter," said Salya. "You know it doesn't, thinking like that. I'm being Handcalled as a healer. Tonight. And that is the end of the tale, three apples fall from the sky. Wants don't feed in famine. I've made my choice."

"Well, I'm going to marry a trader boy just as soon as someone asks me. And he'll build me a new wagon all golden wood," said Vadie.

"You know they hardly ever build new wagons," said Salya.

"They'll build a wagon for me."

"Sure they will," said Salya.

"You don't have to be mean about it."

"I wasn't... Nevermind."

Salya could just pick out tiny, white-haired Amma amongst the handful of people around the wagons. They all looked like flowers, blowing in the breeze, from this far away. But Amma's tight silver bun marked her where she stood by the communal cook fire talking to Torreb. His giant, bearlike qualities made him a formidable caravan leader until you got to know him and realized he was more growl than swipe. Amma was the one with the iron will.

Salya wondered again if she wasn't making a mistake, apprenticing herself to her grandmother.

In the silence that followed, Salya watched the gadgets the Nelinites pulled from their pockets; watches that chimed a song, or a geared purse that must spin open. One woman had a mouse with a key. When she placed it on the ground, it spun in circles in the dust in front of her little son. He clapped his hands and laughed, and tried to pick it up as it spiraled again, just out of his grasp.