After dinner, she sat upon her bed as the sun slanted westward. It had been a couple years since she had served on such a duty, caring for a single Departing in isolation from her Sisters or the goings on of the Wards or the lesser precincts of the city. The Sisters were often sharing stories about their days in the privacy of the dormitories or the dining room, and even though Jareen was often quiet, she missed the chatter and camaraderie. She’d forgotten how lonely the quarantine suites at the Manse could be.
Yet she had been there less than two days. It was the loneliness or the sudden change of routine that was bothering her most.
Standing abruptly, she walked over, grabbed two of the leather portfolio cases, and brought them back to her bed. She was irritated at herself, but also terribly curious. She poured herself some wine and took a long drink, then shuffled through the papers for a while, trying to put them in some kind of order. Most of them were in the same cramped hand that she had seen earlier. Many had scratched notes in the margins, written in Noshian. One read “Distance between Aelor and High Tir?” Jareen suspected the scribbled notes belonged to her very own Departing.
Something on one page caught her eye.
As for agriculture, I can hardly believe that you are as ill informed as you claim. Drennos is one of the largest importers of Vien wines, fruits, and spices. There is some increased demand to the eastern continent, especially for cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg, and the other aromatics. As you well know by now, my ignorance of these trade concerns is matched only by my apathy. Silver is the primary aim besides steel, for our artisans are much taken with the star-metal, as well as the jeweled rocks that come so readily from the eastern continent and its backward denizens. I have heard stories of their ways that I cannot find to be credible. Perhaps you could write some of them, that I might compare what I have heard with your own nearer knowledge?
My own experience is in the cultivation of the mangoes, kiwis, pomegranates, and other fruits for which the Aelor heartwood is so well known. The cultivation of these groves represent the intersection of art and science, but I have recently become enamored of the harvesting process. We use a particular blade, curved sharply at the end, to harvest different fruits, and our people sing whenever work gives rise to rhythm. However, I was recently working in the harvest of mangoes on the edge of a plantation that bordered a yam garden. The yams were being pounded even as we harvest the mangoes. The workers pounded the yams in a 2/4 beat with the accent on the 1, while we swinging our sickles fell into accenting the off beat and singing a counterpoint.
I can tell you that rarely has my heart soared more than to hear the polyphony of melody and rhythm joined to the movement of the body. Just as we reached that pristine place, the aromas of sweat and harvest all around us, a Noriel burst into song—one of our native songbirds—and all things were sublime. I wept.
Jareen lowered the page, fighting a tightness in her throat that threatened to moisten her own eyes. How silly of her, after everything she’d seen, to be so moved by a description of music and simple labors, but she could still smell the groves, hear the sublime voices of her people in song, and for the first time in decades, she had heard in memory the voice of the Noriel. She flipped the page over, and saw written upon the reverse side some lines of scratchy poetry and a note.
“We are twilight without night.
We see no day nor morning.
We fall through centuries
without hope of ground.
No shady tree,
no sun-sweetened fruit eaten by starlight,
nor melody sublime outlasts us.
We watch them pass us,
Beauty our torment,
Without end—or else Vah’tane.”
Many people begrudge us our perpetual lives. But I think if you dwell upon these lines, you may see that humans are gifted—you do not know the torment.
The lines and note shook her from her moment of homesick self-pity. How unfeeling, her own people, to think that humans would revel in their deaths. Jareen was not so blessed as to pity the Vien. Swallowing the tightness in her throat, she shook her head. She should not care for the easy life of the Vien, who could not understand how horrible such a statement must feel to a human—or to her.
But annoyance, like beauty, was a passing disturbance. The writer’s self-conceit did not hinder her from flipping to the next page. She read until the daylight failed. There were a few candles in the vestibule, but she did not wish to use them or to go back out of the chamber without need. The epistles ranged widely in topic, and at first she thought that the letters might be in random order, until she noticed date ranges written on the underside of the case flaps. The letters she had read were from over ten years ago. They contained extensive discussion of Vien grammar, even more discussion about music, which the letter writer often found ways to tie into everything. There was also much about the natural history of the flora and fauna of Findeluvié, the climate, discussions of Vien wine making, rope making, festivals, and even the best ways to candy nuts from various trees. Coir was referenced by name on more than one occasion, so she was sure that her Departing had maintained the correspondence actively for years.
It was remarkable. Jareen had never heard of such lively and congenial interaction between Vien and human before. Surely, there were trade agreements and ambassadors. Yet this read more like friendship—at least, the kind of friendship one might find between two mutually curious and verbose minds.
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The writer, whoever they were, had a keen eye for description, and appeared to be responding to various specific questions and lines of discussion. The topics, mundane as some of them were, moved Jareen deeply, especially as the writer had a way of seeing and hearing the beauty in even the ordinary. She had felt those things, once, but long ago she learned to avoid thoughts of Findeluvié. After so many years, her far-away homeland felt more dreamlike than real, like the Elfland the Noshians described in their little stories. It remained the most beautiful land in the world, and yet though she was from it, she was not of it, not truly. Not anymore than she was of Drennos. Perhaps less. In Drennos, she was a Sister of the Order, after all.
None of the letters she had read so far were signed. She wondered at that, but then, she had not heard of letters being sent in Findeluvié, except on business from the Synod where secrecy was desired. Important messages went by rider and were related in memorized speech. Anything else could wait. What was a little time? Perhaps the writer did not know the custom of signing letters, and certainly his calligraphy was easily recognized. The letters were placed together in the dossiers by topic, and there were no tenae or envelopes that might have held a signature or greeting. It was clear the writer was from Aelor, and likely that he was a close relative of the Tree of Aelor, if not a member, judging from hints in the letters. She went to sleep thinking of home.
***
Before dawn the next morning, Jareen awoke to the sound of babbling from the next room. She knew instantly that something was wrong. There was a tenor that accompanied fever, and as she hurriedly dressed she recognized it clearly. Oddly, she felt relief; her suspicions had been unfounded. Stepping into the dark of the next room, she strode to the couch where the man reclined, twitching and turning and muttering. She grasped a wrist and laid the back of her other hand against his face, then his chest. His pulse was rapid, his skin was dry, and his temperature severely elevated.
It took her only a moment to retrieve a candle from the vestibule and light some tinder. Holding the lit candle up and grasping the man’s jaw, she forced his mouth open. His tongue was swollen, but it was not yet obstructing his breathing. Those who died quickly from Seven Isles Fever usually did so from suffocation due to their swollen tongues. His breathing wasn’t yet obstructed, but his rate of respiration was high. His eyes stared toward the ceiling, looking white from how wide open they were. He did not appear to focus on anything.
With some work to do at last, Jareen did not hesitate. She had plenty of pre-mixed antipyretic tincture in her bag. In a little glass dropper, she mixed the antipyretic—made from chokeweed, primarily—with some of the Sister’s tincture drops for pain and breathing. It was only a small dose, to test how the archivist’s body responded, and she took it to him in the dropper and deposited it under his tongue, a few drops at a time. Considering how strong of a turn he had taken for the worse, she expected it would take two doses, separated by an hour, to bring him to comfort. She would not rush it; she needed to see the effect of the first dose, despite her instinct.
She was correct about the need for a second dose. In less than two hours, his ravings had quieted, his breathing slowed, the temperature of his skin had reduced slightly. She sat next to him through the day, sponging his forehead with a damp towel.
During his delirium, Coir had muttered “kill,” again and again, and “they know, they know.” These phrases alternated with the words “sinking,” and “down,” but as the elixir did its work, the speech calmed. Just before mid-day, he slipped into something resembling sleep, and when the meal arrived, Jareen took the opportunity to step away. As she carried her meal and a pitcher of wine back to her chamber, the archivist opened his eyes. Turning his face to her, he spoke:
“Lovniele. Lovniele. Na’li Vah’tane?”
Jareen jerked back so hard that wine sloshed from the pitcher onto the carpet.
“What did you say?”
But Coir stared at her blankly, his eyelids fluttering. Jareen’s heart beat hard and fast. Poor pronunciation aside, there was no mistaking what the man had said. “Lovniele, Lovniele, where are the gates of Vah?”
Jareen fled the room, shutting and latching the door to the Sister’s chamber behind her. Her hands shook, so she set down the pitcher and plate on the little table beside the window.
There was an explanation. She knew there was an explanation to how he knew her Vien name. Everything had a reason and could be explained. She had not heard her name uttered by another in over six decades, and she had not uttered it since the day she first entered the Wards to beseech acceptance to the Voiceless. They had given her a Noshian name: Jareen. Her Vien name was difficult for the Noshians to pronounce, anyway.
Lovniele.
She walked back to the door, reached her hand toward the latch, and hesitated. There must be a simple explanation. The archivist had a strange curiosity with Vien culture and language. But how could he have learned her name? Surely no one in Findeluvié knew what had become of her.
Were records from the Order kept in the Archives? That must be it. She took a deep breath. The archivist must have records. But why learn her real name? Why remember it? The wild fear that he knew who she was gripped her chest. She wiped her moist forehead, forcing herself to take deep breaths.
No. No.
She should never have told anyone her true name, not even when the Arch Sister had asked her. She had been so young and ignorant when she first came to Nosh. Some strange coincidence was at play.
The archivists of Drennos were considered some of the most intelligent men of the entire nation. There was rigorous training, she was told, and this man was the Arch Archivist. Certainly, there was some explanation. Had the fever merely unlocked his memories of an entry in a record?
With such talk, she calmed herself. At length, she managed to eat the pile of raw brassica, carrots, and—oddly enough—stalks of parsley, and drink the sour human wine. The time came for her Departing to have another dose of tincture. She looked at the door, feeling a shiver pass through her stomach. Nevertheless, she would return to her duty. She had witnessed horrors and heard far worse than her own name so far from home.
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