In the glimmer of their eyes and the troubled fidgeting of their hands he sees the thing he most hopes for: the beginnings of belief.
“Can I get you anything?” The First again, her hands full of food and drink. An old man, disappearing behind his enormous grey beard, stands behind her, waiting.
“Water, thank you,” he says.
“Hard to believe it was ever so hard to get this,” she says, handing him the cup.
“Yes,” the storyteller says. “You get yours from wells, I suppose?”
The First nods.
“It’s one of the few things we don’t have to worry about here,” she says, and the storyteller nods and thinks about the difference between a meager population like Twist’s and the massive throng of people that was Arcadia at its peak.
He is about to ask if they still draw from the old well in the basement of the ruins when the old man steps forward and coughs.
“Oh, right,” the First says, turning aside to let the man forward. “I should not take up all of your time. This is Praise, the oldest member of our community. He’s the closest we get to memory here.”
“It’s a great pleasure to have you here,” Praise says, shaking the storyteller’s hand. “I wish I had been around for your previous visit, though I’m afraid I wasn’t yet born, or not yet old enough to remember it, anyway.”
The storyteller nods, thinking of how he had this exact conversation with Praise the last time he was in Twist. Praise’s beard was shorter and thicker then, and the First had been different—a man with long, strangely blond hair and a bravado that almost certainly had both got and lost him the position.
But the storyteller says nothing, only smiles and thinks about what Praise told him last time about his difficult childhood.
“I had a difficult childhood, of course,” Praise continues, musing. “As did many here, I suppose. I can’t remember my parents well, but I have distinct memories of hard days toiling away at the well, too slight and weak a boy to do anything else. I was quite small.”
People are beginning to return to the fires now, turning their eyes again toward the dais, letting their conversations drift toward silence.
“I don’t suppose you know a place I might rest and sleep while I’m here,” the storyteller says, cutting into Praise’s monologue. “You look like a man who knows this place well.”
Praise exchanges a look with the First, a quick flash of surprise before returning to the storyteller.
“I suppose I am,” Praise says, mollified by the compliment. “And wouldn’t you know—I was just getting around to offering you a place in the old building where I live. You can rest, sleep, and relax there all you like.”
The storyteller does, in fact, know, but he widens his eyes and smiles in happy surprise all the same.
“Many, many thanks,” the storyteller says, as if he needs to or could do any of those things anymore.
“I’ll show you there during the next break.” With that, Praise turns to go back to his seat, though not before giving a clandestine nod to the First.
It’s so human, this need to scheme and plan and profit. He offers them safety with his visit, and so they sniff at the edges of his offer and seek a longer visit, a longer stay, more safety. Who can blame them?
So human, and yet, the storyteller thinks, feeling the steadying weight of the pack on his shoulder, it doesn’t have to be. There have been those to seek and find another way.
The old man wanders back to his seat at the bigger of the two fires, where he sits and begins thinking through what he must do. It will begin with kindness and invitation and end in apologies and chains.
And forgetting. Always forgetting.
“He was most excited about your approach when the scouts first gave word,” the First says by way of apology, and the storyteller cannot bring himself to hate or even dislike this woman. Like all those who have come before her, she is doing all she can—even that which she finds distasteful or wrong—to keep her people safe. She is just another plant breaking itself in the striving for the sun.
He puts a hand to his pack, still slung over his shoulder, before turning back to his waiting audience, the First moving back down to join them.
All of this inevitability, written on each face, in the fold of each hand, saturated in the words he has heard before and the actions he has undergone and will again before his visit is finished.
But maybe in the crush and press of inevitability, hope might finally flower.
For just a moment, the storyteller hears those long-ago words, full of a new-dawn belief that all might be well: “I’ll see you after.”
“Forget this interlude and return,” the storyteller says to his audience. “As she leaves it for the last time, let me say briefly how it was that Kindred came to the island city of Arcadia.
“She was born on the huge continent of the Mainland, home to great powers and warring nations. Kindred grew up in a quiet house, daughter to parents who died young in service to a king hungry for more. An orphan with little left to her name, her closest family was her grandmother, strange and estranged, a ship captain on the Forever Sea to the east, a thing of mystery that she had only ever heard of.
“Kindred’s first time on a ship was the voyage that carried her away from the pieces of her old life and to something new, something different. Something wilder.”
The storyteller pauses and closes his eyes and holds his open hands out, palms up, as if he is holding open a book, one he knows so well, he doesn’t need to even look at the pages.
“At first there is nothing but the Forever Sea and the breath of business on the boat. Kindred spends the voyage on the deck, standing fore, eyes trained on the horizon ahead. She eats and drinks little, communicates with no one. She has brought nothing of her old life with her because there was nothing to bring.
“While the ordering of the ship goes on behind her, Kindred Greyreach lets the wind score her face clean of tears and fill her lungs like sails, as if each breath might be the push she needs to move in this new direction. And always, she looks to the horizon, holding it like an anchor, something stable and unchanging and impossibly far away. She wants something she cannot grasp, something impossible, something infinite.
“When she sleeps, it is there on the deck, and none have the heart—or mind—to move this young orphan who has lost everything. And they know the might and temper of the one who has paid her fare.
“Days of travel pass before Arcadia grows on the horizon like a tumor distending its clean line. Lookouts shout and preparations are made, but Kindred does not move. She watches as her new life rises from a field of green and golds, a field that Kindred will come to learn and love in ways most never do. Did.