“Of course! It’s not the most comfortable chair, I’m afraid.”
She shrugged her cloak off and spread it on the rusted seat and settled herself among her layers of embroidered clothing, elegant and poised. “It is quiet here. That is prudent.”
“Will you sit, An-Hadrea, Il-Davior?” Tain joined Salvea on the bench and turned his warmest smile on her children. The boy sprang up beside his mother with his feet tucked up on the seat. An-Hadrea glanced at her mother and then nodded stiffly. She sat as far from us as possible, back pressed against the twisted old iron, her eyes constantly searching around the garden, suspicious and alert.
“I was born in Losi,” Salvea told me. “On the Ash estates. We served there for most of my life. My family tend the kori crops, and distill the spirits.”
“Mother,” An-Hadrea said, “we do not have time for a family history.”
Salvea sighed. “There is always time for manners, Daughter,” she said. “And our history is not irrelevant to this discussion.”
“We’re so grateful you’ve come,” Tain said. “Terrible mistakes have been made, and I want to put them right.”
“Mistakes?”
“Daughter,” Salvea said, her tone a bit harder. “Please.”
“Please, let her speak,” Tain said. “We’ve wanted to hear this. But no one will talk to us, and there are people trying to stop us learning the truth.”
“You are the Chancellor,” An-Hadrea said. I could almost hear the omitted supposed to be. “How is it that you say you do not know what has happened?”
“Please,” Tain said again. He sounded old and tired. “Please, can you start from the beginning. Assume I know nothing. Assume I have been a thoughtless boy, concentrating on my own affairs without looking outward. You wouldn’t be wrong. Please tell me what’s happened.”
And so they did. Salvea with sadness, An-Hadrea with tightly contained fury. And the tale they told …
Part we now knew. The beginning, decades ago. Deaths at the mines, and help and attention from the city slowing and fading. On the estates, life growing worse. Salvea told us how conditions on Credola Nara’s Losi valley holdings, where her family had lived and worked for generations, had become harder. “Once, before my time, they say others envied the esLosi,” she said, shaking her head. “The estates were prosperous. We worked hard for decent wages, and we had great tah with the land.”
“Tah?”
Salvea looked flustered, fluttering her hands, searching for words, and looked to her daughter. An-Hadrea rolled her eyes dramatically.
“Tah. Connection to the secondworld, to the spirits of the land. We no longer have your letters, out where we live, but you have forgotten more important things.” She pulled the middle charm from the necklace I’d returned, and held it aloft, as if the symbols should have been clear as text. She indicated the two interlocking circles, one at a time. “Tah and honor. Respect for the land and the spirits, respect for humankind. If you have good tah, you are in harmony with the spirits of the land. If you have good honor, you are in harmony with the people around you.” Scorn tinged her words. “This is your history, not just mine. Your vain and greedy cities have forgotten half the code they once lived by, and twisted the other half to something your ancestors would not recognize.”
“Daughter,” Salvea admonished, and An-Hadrea frowned and fell silent. Her fingers still twisted the necklace aggressively in her lap.
“Over time, things changed,” Salvea continued. “Families spent less time on their properties, no longer sent their heirs there to learn the estates. Stewards became distant relatives or simply employees, sometimes kind, sometimes not. But the orders kept coming from the cities. We must work longer on the land each day. We are told we must produce more in less time. Lay crops in fields that need fallow time. Things the estates once did for us, they no longer do. And so we are pushed from one side, and pulled from the other, and there is always more work.
“My grandmother told me stories of when she was a girl. Then, there was a little school in the village, which she attended. Her mother was very clever, and was even sent off to a city for school. But I have never known this. There is no longer any time to send children to school, to memorize all those little symbols. What use do the greedy stewards and Families have now for their workers’ learning? We cannot read, so we do not need books, or art, or science. Instead of sending our children to learn from a Guilded carpenter or shipwright or mathematician, the Families send cityfolk in to perform high skilled jobs, then send them away again. Our livelihoods are diminished. The Families dispense what orders they wish, and we have no recourse to complain.”
Salvea paused, jaw quivering, then gave us a sad smile. “All this is the way of the world, is it not? The powerful Families divided up the lands all those years ago, and they have grown wealthy off them ever since. We are not starved, on the estates, nor physically endangered. Perhaps if we did not remember what we had lost … but our grandmothers and our aunties and our Tashien whisper the stories of the past to us as we sleep, and we know that this was not how it was meant to be.”
“No,” Tain said. “This is not how it was meant to be.” He sounded queasy and looked ashen.
“And what about your religion?” What Salvea said confirmed the worst of our fears about the growing chasm between the city and country, but there was still more. The fury in those men’s faces, the strange magnetism of the Speaker woman, the cruel murder of our messengers. Spirit killers, they’d called us, and they had meant something by it, something more than schools and language and lost chances.
“You have forgotten,” An-Hadrea said again, with even more venom. “Your religion, you say? This is not religion. This is the essence of the very land we stand on. Your ancestors on the first Council signed a compact, a promise of a country built on both tah and honor. And then they built your cities and they forgot that what they take from the land is a bargain, not a right.”
“We warned them,” Salvea said softly. “Just as the Speakers all over the country warned us.”
“Speakers?” I had not told Tain—or anyone else—about my experience, and I tried to keep my tone interested but not over-intense.
Salvea answered quickly this time, before her daughter could interject. “A Speaker is one with a very strong connection to the secondworld. They are a conduit for the spirits, to communicate or act in our world.”
“We do not have many left,” Hadrea put in bitterly. “None at all in Losi anymore. When I was young a traveling Speaker told me I had great potential for fresken. But there are no teachers, anymore, and what use is ancient power and heritage when I could be making drinks for spoiled—” She cut herself off this time without comment from her mother, as if her brittle fury had simply snapped.
I wanted to ask more, but Tain was already prompting Salvea. “What did the Speakers warn you about?”
“That the spirits were growing angry at the lack of heed and respect the people are paying. We took too much from the mountains, and the earth, and the rivers, with no offerings in return to strengthen them. We drew on the special places at the core of them, the sacred places that should not be depleted.” She shook her head. “In truth, though, we did not need the Speakers to tell us that. The land told us itself.”