Soulwoven: Exile

Chapter Thirteen

~13~

Eighty-eight days before the destruction of Emeth’il

In the morning, she was watching him.

Tsu’min woke to the feeling of the barge slipping through the waters of the Deru. The sun prickled his eyes, and the wind nudged his cheeks. The blanket he’d wrapped himself in partway through the night sported droplets of dew in spidery patterns, and his arms and legs were cold.

As the sun rose higher, he lay on the deck and watched Maegan in return. Her eyes were rimmed with red, her dreadlocks frayed and unkempt in a few places.

“I am sorry,” he said in Aleani.

The words felt awkward and sticky in his throat. It had been a long time since he’d used them.

Maegan shook her head.

“I shouldn’t have pushed you,” she said. “Thank you for the lesson.”

On the other side of the barge’s deck, near the staircase that led to its hold, a few Aleani were cooking strips of lamb over a brass brazier. The smell, savory and spiced with hints of sage and thyme, was mouthwatering.

“We should eat,” Tsu’min said. “And then I wish to ask you some questions.”

Maegan nodded.

A few minutes later, they were standing on the barge’s portside rail, licking the grease from their fingers and watching the countryside go by. In the distance, blue-white glaciers glittered among the western peaks, dusted white with new-fallen snow. The Aleani hadn’t settled many of the northern valleys. In the summer, herders drove flocks into makeshift camps within them, but by autumn the cold pushed them either all the way north to the coast or south to the warmer lands around Du Fenlan.

If whoever had taken Litnig was looking for solitude, it was into those valleys they had likely gone.

Tsu’min fished a strip of lamb up and swallowed it. “Why did you insist upon accompanying me?” he asked.

The girl, standing next to him with her dreadlocks trailing over her shoulders, sighed. She looked briefly toward the bundle of her belongings where she’d slept.

“I don’t think I want to tell you that,” she said.

Her arms bunched. She wrung her hands.

Tsu’min drew himself up and stared at her, but she wouldn’t meet his eyes. She looked instead at the mountains, or the few white clouds that hung in the vast sky above.

“As you wish,” Tsu’min said. “Then I do not think I wish to speak to you at all.”

#

A few hours later, Maegan Heramsun sat in the center of the barge and pulled a wooden case out of her belongings. From it, she withdrew a thick, leather-bound volume, a jar of ink, and an iron-tipped quill pen. The wind had risen during the morning. It whipped over her head, tugging at her hair and chilling the tips of her ears. She wrapped a wool-lined cloak closer around her, pulled the hood up, and began to write.

Journeys with Eraic a’Soulth: A Chronicle

by Maegan of Clan Heramsun

We set sail on 7 Harvestmonth, with the stars over our heads and the Deru calm as a sleeping infant. I learned many things, very quickly…

 

She wrote for hours, but when she reached the place where she ought to explain why she’d decided to travel with Tsu’min, she faltered. She’d told no one—not even her mother or her brother—everything that underpinned the exile on which she was embarking. The truth was complex.