But the longer they took, the more opportunity fear had to take hold in her heart. By the time she and her grandmother finally reached the apex of the promontory and gazed upon the proud splendor of the Great House, the girl’s steps were equally as slow and stumbling as the old woman’s.
“Spirits of our fathers!” the old woman exclaimed as she gazed out from the trees’ long shadows at the high walls and sweeping buttresses, the stone-carved eaves and cornices and the enormous double doors. The girl heard all the weariness lift from the old woman’s voice, and indeed even her hand lightened its hold on the girl’s shoulder as she straightened to stand nearly as tall as she had when she was young. “It is so very grand! I have not made this climb in many years, and it was beautiful then. But this! Ah!”—and here a dart of sorrow pierced her voice—“if only my poor husband had lived to see it so near completion.”
The girl turned wide eyes up to her grandmother’s face. She could not remember ever before hearing her grandmother speak of her husband. He had died many years ago, gathered to winter’s cold embrace long before the girl was born. Iulia spoke of him fondly upon occasion when seated with the family around the evening fire. She called him a proud, brave man, a worthy chief of Kallias. But grandmother never mentioned his name.
Her old eyes were bright with unshed tears, however, as she gazed at the Great House before them. Then she shook her head, and pressure on the girl’s shoulder urged her on into the yard.
Shading her eyes, the girl could see the Strong One about his work high on the topmost roof. He spotted them as well and acknowledged them with a wave of his arm. But he did not come down to receive his water-gift, being caught up in whatever task he currently pursued.
They found the Kind One on the south side of the Great House, the side nearest the promontory’s precipitous cliff face. The girl saw the river far below, and her eyes scanned the swift-flowing water for signs of fishermen in their canoes, but spotted none. She thought of Draven and the prisoner and their mad flight in darkness, and wondered if any man of Kallias could boast as much courage as the coward and his enemy.
Akilun was dismantling a tall, fearfully unstable scaffold, but he stopped the moment he spied his visitors and climbed down to greet them.
“Good mother,” he said, making the appropriate sign of respect as he approached, raising two fingers and tracing a half-circle in the air. One could almost believe he was himself a man of Kallias, so natural were his gestures and words. But no man of Kallias ever shone with such a strange, inexorable beauty that not even an overcast sky heavy with coming rain could suppress. “It is many years since we have seen one another.”
“Mere moments to you,” Grandmother replied, reaching out to place her own hand on his forehead, the familiar blessing the elderly of Kallias bestowed upon young warriors. “You have not aged a day, Akilun.”
“Neither have you in your heart,” Akilun said, his face resplendent with one of his lovely smiles. He turned that smile down upon the girl, who, suddenly shy, tucked herself closer to her grandmother. “Thank you for the water gift,” he said.
Remembering her role, the girl held out the skin and watched as Akilun drank. When he was through, he peered up at the rooftop but could not spot his brother. “Etanun will be some while,” he said, then addressed himself again to the girl and her grandmother. “Will you hear more of the story?”
“I understand,” Grandmother said, “that you have yet to tell of the hunting of Hydrus.”
“Indeed!” Akilun replied even as he handed the waterskin back to the girl’s waiting arms. “Though I would be shy to do so in your company, good mother, for you may spin that tale far better than I!”
“Indeed not,” said she with a shake of her head. “I have not heard it in many a year, and I fear I would forget the details.”
Even as she spoke, thunder growled overhead and the heavy clouds, strained to the bursting point, began to spill over with drizzle.
“Please,” said Akilun, offering a supporting hand. Grandmother lifted her weight from the girl’s shoulder and leaned upon him instead as he escorted her into the shelter of the vast, echoing hall. The girl felt a little resentful as she followed along behind. After all, she had supported her grandmother all the way up the long climb.
At the doorway she paused. Without the comfort of Akilun’s hand, she found she did not like to enter the shadows of the Great House, which seemed so much darker on this overcast day. But Akilun, sensing her hesitancy, paused and looked around. “I think your grandmother needs you,” he said.
It wasn’t true. Her grandmother was perfectly content leaning upon his arm. But the girl was grateful nonetheless, and slipped over to the old woman’s side. So the three of them made their way across the hall toward the pool of light where the Kind One’s lantern shone.
Grandmother gasped. “Oh great spirits! Oh great airy gods!”
The girl saw that her grandmother’s eyes were fixed upon the carving of Draven. Akilun had made little progress on it since yesterday. It didn’t matter. The eyes of that wooden face seemed to gaze out from beyond the confines of carving with an expression more alive, more intense than the girl remembered. Far more living than she comprehended or could ever articulate. She felt a tremor run through her grandmother’s arm, and she knew that the old woman better understood what she saw, though even she could not understand completely.
She said only, “It is very like, I think.”
“Yes,” said Akilun, simply. He could accept the compliment on his skill, perhaps because he did not deem it either more or less than what it was. Overhead, the drum of rain echoed in the rafters, and a surreptitious drip, drip, drip revealed those places where the roof remained incomplete. But here, in the circle of lantern light, the dreariness of the day could not penetrate.
Akilun found something for the old woman to sit upon, and the girl stood at her side, still holding her hand. “Now tell me,” Akilun said, taking up his hammer and chisel to continue his work, “where does the tale of this hunt begin?”
“You must say, Akilun,” said the girl’s grandmother. “I cannot remember.”
“I believe that you do,” the Kind One replied. “How could you forget?”
“The years work a curse of forgetfulness on those of my kind,” Grandmother replied. “You have not the knowing of such loss, for all your experience and wisdom.”
“But some things are never truly lost,” Akilun said.
The girl found herself growing very impatient. “Please!” she said, though it was rude, she knew, to interrupt her elders. “Who was Hydrus? You have mentioned him many times now. Was he a man? An enemy of the tribes? Or a monster?”
“Oh no!” her grandmother replied, patting the girl’s hand gently. “No, Hydrus was no enemy. Neither was he a monster. Hydrus was a gift.” Her eyes rested upon the carving of Draven, and had the girl been asked, she would have said without hesitation that he gazed back at her.
“Let me tell you a story,” her grandmother said.
Every man, woman, and child of Rannul dreamed of Hydrus. Little boys, as soon as they were old enough to sit quietly and listen to a tale, would hear their grandfathers tell long, complex, and fanciful accounts of hunts in years gone by. Little girls, as soon as they were old enough to carve spears out of stout saplings, would practice their aim, turning any ordinary object into a target, dreaming they aimed for Hydrus’s eye.
Hydrus himself lived in the ocean, far away beyond imagining. Rannul boasted only faint memories passed down over many generations of explorers who claimed to have seen the Endless Water beyond the western horizon. It was there, the tale tellers said, that Hyrus lived, a long, sinuous ribbon of darkness, small compared to the vast creatures who swam those salty waters with him.
But when he made his cyclical journey up the River Hanna, penetrating deep into the heart of the great forest country—Ah! Then did Hydrus become a mighty king, monarch of the river.
He migrated with othe
rs of his kind far up the river to the freezing lake country beyond Rannul territory. Many hundreds of miles he traveled, but no perils there could threaten Hydrus. Not the great-clawed beasts that hunted from the shores, picking off his kindred and feasting on fleshy bounty—not the sharp-taloned raptors that swooped from the skies to snatch up his younger brothers and sisters and bear them away to towering nests—nay, not even the two-legged predators with their swift-darting lances and spears or their cunningly crafted nets—none of these could deter Hydrus from his instinctual course.
He traversed the waters of Hanna, as dark and winding as the very spirit of the river himself. And he feared neither man nor beast.
Indeed, Hydrus knew nothing of fear. In the last hundred years of his life he’d never had cause. Not even when a sharp-eyed young warrior—Gaher by name—had thrown a surer spear than those of his fellows and struck the old fish a mere finger’s breadth from his eye. A flash of pain, perhaps, a brief but soon-forgotten wariness, and nothing more disturbed the murky stability of Hydrus’s consciousness. He was too old and too cold to feel warm-blooded passions. He knew only deep waters and shafts of golden light in the shallower turns of the river. He knew only hunger and the satisfaction of that hunger. He knew only this driving instinct that forced him, every few years, to return to the freshwater lakes. Life and death meant nothing to him. He was above such concerns.
And so he wended his way over the many long miles, his great jutting jaws open to receive whatever offerings the river might send him. He ate anything that fit into those jaws, and most things did. But he was not vicious. He was too cold to be vicious. The wide pale eyes, so enormous that they could penetrate the darkness of plunging ocean depths, were devoid of all expression.
He did not realize it, but his sole desire was a single moment to know that he truly lived. This is all any of his kind desire.
For Hydrus that moment was coming.
Ita found her brother on the outskirts of Rannul. This was unusual, for Draven rarely permitted himself to be seen by any of his people, retreating more and more into solitude as the months went by. He wore a beard now, new and sparse but slowly thickening—a testimony to his manhood, however disgraced that manhood might be.
He was hard at work chipping away at a stone, slowly applying his chisel as he sought to craft the most valuable shape. If the carving came out well, it could be turned into a brutal weapon. If his hand slipped or his eye misjudged by even a fraction, well, the stone could still be made into a farming tool. This, however, was considered an ignominious end to a stone-shaper’s work, so Draven’s whole attention concentrated on each small chip.
Crack went the stone on stone. Then, very gently, a puff of breath to blow away the debris.
Ita waited until after he had blown his breath and before he started his next chip. She balanced on one leg and, when the moment presented itself, gave him a smart tap with her crutch.
“Argh!” Draven gasped, dropping his chisel rather than risk a stray blow. He turned a scowling face up to Ita, his eyes gleaming with the combination of wariness and resentment that had become a permanent fixture since his naming. As he recognized his sister the wariness relaxed though the resentment redoubled. “Ita!” he growled. “Away with you, fool girl. You are standing in my light.”
“I am not,” said Ita, which was true, for she had shifted from it even as he spoke. “Brother,” she said, “put down your stone and come with me.”
“Come with you where?” he demanded, taking up his chisel in direct rebellion against his sister’s order. “Have you no good labor to which you might turn those idle hands of yours?”
“I do!” she exclaimed. “The best labor, indeed. But I need you and your strong arms.”
He pretended to inspect his work in progress, but cast his sister a sideways glance. “Do you mean to say your arms aren’t strong enough?” His eyes held a devilish glint, but he flinched, knowing what her response would be, and narrowly avoided a harsh kick from her.
Ita, nearly overbalancing, sank heavily onto the support of her branch. “My arms are strong enough for what I have in mind,” she said. “Strong and quick too, quicker than yours! But I cannot steer a canoe and aim a spear at the same time.”
This caught Draven’s attention enough that he lowered the stone to his lap and turned his head to fully look into his sister’s eager face. “Aim a—Ita, what deeds are you plotting in that foolish little head of yours?”
Grunting, Ita sank down into a crouch, bringing her face close to Draven’s own. In a voice hushed with mounting excitement she said, “I am going to hunt Hydrus!”
Draven laughed. In retrospect he realized this was taking his life into his hands, for Ita never took kindly to laughter, not if she felt she was being mocked in any way. But he could not help himself. The very idea that his pale, hollow-eyed, club-footed sister would hunt the mighty quarry that had eluded several generations’ worth of Rannul’s stoutest warriors . . . well, it was too much! So he laughed.
But when he saw the smile twisting the corners of Ita’s mouth, the bright light flickering in her eyes, he found his mirth cut short. He cleared his throat, shaking his head at her. “You’re mad. Mad as a spring fly.”
“They say only the maddest will hunt Hydrus to his end,” Ita said. She put out her hand and clutched Draven by the shoulder. “Come with me now!” she urged. “This is his season. He will pass our banks any moment. I have listened carefully to the old men and I have asked them questions. They say when the first red aster blooms and the morning bird sings at dusk, that is the time. Hydrus will come. Brother!” Her grip on his arm tightened, and she would have pulled him to his feet had she possessed the strength. “I saw the first aster this morning, bright as blood in the grass just outside my door! It is a sign. I will hunt Hydrus. I will claim him!”
How many other hopeful hunters had seen the asters and read them as signs? Too many to number, Draven was sure. He himself, only a few years ago, had taken up his spear and, an aster tucked into his hair for luck, gone hunting, desire to bring home the great prize hot in his breast. But it had all been for nothing. Sometimes years would pass with no sign of Hydrus, for he was wily and could pass at night unseen in the darkest deeps of Hanna’s flow. Sometimes hunters would claim to have glimpsed him on his journey north and would set traps for his return. But these were never strong enough. No, only a spear could end this hunt, but what good was a spear against quarry one could not see?
“Ita . . .” Draven began, more gently than he’d spoken before. But gentleness was the worst possible approach when it came to his fierce sister.
Ita pushed violently against him and, grimacing with pain, hauled herself upright. Her eyes flashed with anger, and her fist clenched white-knuckled at her side. “I cannot do this on my own,” she said. “But if you will not help me, I will still try.”
Hearing these familiar words, Draven felt his gut roil. He wondered if she even remembered speaking them in that overgrown field all those months ago. From the look in her eye, she did not. The whole of her being was set upon here and now, the urgency of her own strong will.
“You will fail,” Draven said even as he set aside his work and stood, towering over his sister.
She stared up at him, her jaw tight. How like Gaher she looked in that moment, despite the frailty of her features. “I will still try,” she repeated.
And so Draven knew that, even as before, his sister would have her way. He would not see her fail. He would not allow it.
Not as he had already failed himself.
Ita insisted that they use Draven’s canoe hidden in the culvert, thereby keeping anyone in Rannul from knowing their intent. Draven did not argue, though he knew most of the men were far upriver, gone to inspect a disputed copper mine on the edge of Rannul territory. Rumor spread that the chieftain of Kahorn was sending raiding parties to capture the precious ore. Tensions with Kahorn had redoubled since the prisoner’s escape, and it would take less than a ru
mor to set the war drums sounding. It was only a matter of time.
Draven kept pace with Ita, pretending he didn’t have to significantly slow his stride to match hers as they made their way through the rough woodlands along the river’s edge toward his secret place. He carried Ita’s spear for her, for she found it difficult to navigate the overgrown trails with both crutch and spear. How she expected to balance herself on that clubfoot and hurl her weapon, all without overturning the canoe, Draven could not imagine. But again, he did not ask and he did not argue.
At times his gaze wandered to the forests across the river. They were even more thickly grown than the forests on this side, an effective shield hiding all the Kahorn doings. He wondered again at Callix’s enigmatic warning spoken in the dark. And he wondered if the Kahorn prince had survived the trek back to his home village.
They reached the hidden culvert, and Draven went first down the narrow path so that Ita could use his shoulder for support at need. She took hold of him once. He could hear her heavy breathing and knew the trek from the village had sapped her feeble strength. But he did not suggest that they give up the hunt. One glance at her determined face and he knew he did not dare.
His canoe had been much battered during the nighttime ride down the rapids, and he had been obliged to carry it by land back into hiding, for there was no paddling against the river’s currents in this place. But it was still solid, and Draven assisted Ita into the front, tucking her spear and a few of his own down the middle, along with a waterskin.
“Be prepared to lean when I tell you,” he said.
“Shall I have a paddle?” she asked, and if he didn’t know better, he might have suspected he heard a tremor in her voice.
“No,” Draven replied. “Hanna provides more than enough power, and I will provide the direction. You must simply keep balance.”