Sparks

Father

  By evening the next day, I knew I had to let Obsidian rest; I wouldn't last much longer without sleep myself. It would take at least a month to travel the Greenwood down to the Creekmont south of Hubli and take the trails west to Lagodon on the coast, and I couldn't afford the time to do it on foot. Taking the main road wasn't the smartest thing I ever did, but I didn't have much of a choice. I hoped keeping my head down and moving quickly would get me home without being noticed.

  I kept on the move as much as possible, stopping only to rest or feed Obsidian and clean my kill for the day. It felt wrong every time I stopped to eat, but it wouldn't do to get home and be weak with hunger. I never stayed in any of the inns on the road, too worried about who I would meet or who might be looking for me.

  Each time I drew Father's thread made me more frantic to get home. He constantly thought about nets and patching them before their owners came back for them. He never thought about my mother, which made me worry the most. I couldn't make sense of any of it. Why wasn't he hunting? Where was my mother? What had happened to them since I left?

  The Greenwood Road south of Hubli was busier than I would have expected, and frequently I had to slow down to pass a crowd or a slow-moving cart. There were families traveling to the Andover to see the summer beaches or farmers looking to sell their crops in the Calloway. No one seemed to notice me or seek me out, and I began to wonder if Avis had been justified in keeping me away so long.

  Three weeks after leaving Firethorne, I could sense I was close. The trees of the Creekmont fully bloomed with small white flowers, and crunchy brown pinecones littered the ground. Hunting was easy here where the trees were thicker. I would be home in a few more days and-hopefully-have some answers. Poor Obsidian was worn ragged from the weeks of racing down the Greenwood. She can get plenty of rest in Lagodon.

  Just like every night since I left the Andover, I made a fire far from sight of the road and laid out a place to sleep. That night had the added bonus of a thick, fallen tree that could serve as a seat. I sat at my meager fire waiting for my evening dove to cook when a flash of white flew into the small clearing.

  "What in hell do you think you're doing?" Avis was fuming mad as he slid off Pearl in an instant and tied her up next to Obsidian on the tree branch.

  "You know-"

  "Yeah, I know you're an idiot. Are you trying to get yourself killed? Or just your horse? I can't believe you would try to pull this. You're not a boy anymore."

  "I have to help him." I said it with as much finality as I could manage. I wasn't going to be persuaded. Avis paced around the clearing, wringing his hands together and trying to get control of his breathing. I had never seen him so angry, and I was sure I wouldn't like what happened next.

  "I know." He sat down on the felled tree next to me by the fire, holding his fist in his other hand. "I would have gone with you-if you had told me," he said once he had calmed for a few minutes.

  I couldn't believe it. He was angry I left without him?

  "How did you do it? Get away without me knowing?"

  I brought up the image of Khea in the blue dress. "I should have known. But you think about her all the time as it is. How am I supposed to tell your daydreaming from your intentional escape plan?" He began to chuckle as he thought back to the night I left, surprised I was able to get away.

  I shared my small bird once it had cooked through, still amazed he was there and supportive beyond all expectation. What surprised me most was how good it was to have him with me. We had been together constantly for so long, it just felt natural.

  Just as I thought, it only took three more days to reach my fishing village on the western coast. It looked much like I remembered it, with large ships in the cove and skinny, dirty children underfoot. The villagers kept their distance, and I was reminded of how I felt when I first saw Obsidian. Horses were rare luxuries, and we had just come with two of the finest.

  Reading the thoughts of a large group seemed easier than when I had left. I remembered struggling to concentrate on Rhorken in the square the day I chose to leave. In the past three years, I had learned to draw threads and cut the ones I didn't need. The result was a remarkably quieter and less chaotic walk through the village.

  Beyond their awe of the horses, not a single villager recognized me. I guess I shouldn't have been too surprised. I hadn't spent much time in town as a child, and I had grown considerably since then. I was at least a head and shoulder over every other man in the village, barely resembling the thin, lanky boy that left. I returned as a tall, strong man sitting atop a very valuable horse.

  As we moved towards my parents' home, I noticed it looked even worse than I remembered. The roof had a soft spot that surely leaked in a light rain. The porch sagged straight into the ground, and the rest of the house wouldn't be long after.

  I quickly jumped down from Obsidian and handed Avis the reins. "If you want me-" he began to ask. I shook my head and loped up the weak steps.

  "Father?" I called out into the house.

  He sat in the kitchen, his wrinkled hands working a net hung up from the rafters. When he heard my voice, he stood and turned but didn't look anywhere. My heart sank in a moment; he had gone blind, just like Quauhtil. His hair was fully grey and his torn clothes hung loosely around his thin frame, even smaller than I remembered.

  "Who's there?" His mind searched to think of whose voice he heard, but he couldn't place me. He hadn't heard my deeper voice since I'd left several years ago. I struggled with my breath as I realized he didn't know me.

  "It's me. Lark."

  "Lark?" He lifted his arms to try to find me, and I had to step into his path to avoid watching him wander aimlessly. He was in disbelief, but ecstatic; he thought I would never come back.

  "What are you doing here?" In the month it took to get to Lagodon, I hadn't considered what I would tell him. Would he be upset that I had read his thoughts, known of his desperation, from the other side of Madurai?

  "I-I got leave to come home. I wanted to see you and-" I didn't have to finish before his mind was reeling, trying to figure out how to tell me about my mother. She had died despite the tea; she had just been too far gone. He had been alone for nearly four years.

  "Lark. Son, I'm sorry. Your mother-"

  "It's alright. Have you eaten today?" I knew well enough that he hadn't, that he hadn't eaten in many days. He shook his head sadly, humiliated that I would know that he couldn't hunt; I immediately regretted asking.

  "I'll be back in a few hours." Just as I turned to leave, Avis appeared in the door.

  "Stay. I'll hunt today." My eyes clouded as I attempted to convey my gratitude. I turned back to my father who had returned to work on the net.

  "What are you doing with these?" The whole kitchen was stacked full of them in seemingly random piles here and there, and the rest of the house was in complete disarray. No one had cleaned in a great long while.

  "Repairing them. I can feel the tears and patch them so the nets can be saved. Fishermen bring them by and pick them up a week later." It was really an ingenious way for a man to make a living, but it meant he only got a small amount of coin once a week. When he ran out, he was out.

  "Would you teach me?" I had every intention of helping him repair all the nets in the kitchen and then some if it meant he could eat every day. He spent the rest of the afternoon showing me how to find the holes and wind a thread across to pull it shut. The gentle, patient teacher was still there as I learned yet another skill from my father.

  Just as when I as a child, he was quiet and reserved, though his thoughts streamed wildly: How was he going to explain about my mother? How was he going to tell me how badly he had been doing? Did I pity him?

  Of course, all I wanted was to help him, to make sure he was alright. It killed me that he was so worried about how I perceived him.

  "Would you like to see her?" he finally asked. His memories showed me where he buried her beneath a tree just inside the edge of
the Creekmont.

  "Of course." I let him lead me to the tree-line with his hand on my elbow, telling me which way to go with his words. The terrain here was familiar enough I could probably have found it if I hadn't had my own eyes, but I was able to help him get there without incident. He hadn't been out to see her in at least a year.

  The pitiful trees were spread thin, but they still covered the ground in a light layer of needles and leaves. Her resting place was simply marked with a stone at the base of a larger pine. "There was a bird she found here once."

  "I don't remember that." My mother had come home with dozens of birds, but mostly from town or the trees near the river where she could find work sometimes.

  "It was a lark, a beautiful, white lark. We had it for months before it was strong enough." As he told the story, he pictured the frail, white bird that was swallowed in my mother's delicate palm. It had grown to be an impressive bird, and she had cried when it had been time to leave. She had named me for that very bird.

  Once there, I didn't know what to do. Should I say something to her? It wasn't as if she could hear me really. Did I have anything to say? Part of me fumed that all my work since leaving Lagodon had been for nothing. All the unfairnesses, all the beatings, hadn't made a difference for her.

  The other part of me was thankful that she had held on long enough for my father to hope my departure would save her. I couldn't decide if I should be angry or grateful to her. If she had died the day before Rhorken arrived, I would never have gone to Myxini-never would have met Micha, or Khea, or Avis, or learned to control my Spark. I would be yet another desperate man in a sea of desperation.

  By the time the sun began to fall, Avis returned with three geese and set to cleaning them and roasting them over a fire. I helped him pull the old ashes from the fireplace that hadn't been used for some time, but the two of us made quick work of it. Soon the house began to smell like it always had.

  "Father, this is Avis. He's my mentor at school."

  "I hope you are taking good care of my boy. Teaching him." My father told Avis sternly. I had to laugh that he would still be protective of me after all this time. Avis and I were strong and young compared to my father's age and frailty; there wasn't much my father could do to Avis even if he did disapprove of my treatment.

  "Don't worry, sir. He's in the best care possible." He said it so that I almost believed him. Almost.

  The next day, I went out to hunt while Avis went to the center of town to buy some vegetables and grain for the horses-with what money, I had no idea. By noon, we sat at the table eating the leftover goose from the night before with freshly roasted potatoes and carrots. It was a meal even my mother would have praised.

  My father never mentioned it, but his stomach swelled in gratitude for the meals. He didn't want to seem desperate, but he ate eagerly and continued eating until he could hold no more. In a few weeks, I would have him back to health again.

  After a few days in Lagodon, my father went to bed while Avis and I sat on the porch drinking a bit of grain wine he had purchased from the square. "We can't stay here forever, you know," he told me.

  "I'm not leaving." He needs someone to take care of him.

  "I know. We'll find someone. But we have work to finish, and you need to get back to school."

  "No, I don't. My place is here." Even as I said it, I wanted to go back. I missed my friends, and Khea was ever present in my thoughts, her black necklace gleaming as I slept at night. I didn't want to think about living the rest of my life and never knowing what that was about. And Avis knew it.

  "Lark, your father will be fine. We'll leave him better off than the last time you left. But you have to prepare yourself to leave. We have to go back."

  "What else could I possibly learn? Do you want me to learn to speak Hurgadan? Read people in my sleep?"

  "There's only one thing left." He lifted his left hand and shook his wrist so that the copper bracelet bounced around it.

  "You're giving me your bracelet?"

  "Ha! No. These copper bracelets were charmed so they block out Readers."

  "What? That's why I can't read you? Because you've been wearing a bracelet?"

  "Think about it. Every person who works at Myxini wears one, and you can't read them. Not Lheda, not Sinha-not Rhorken, none of them." He was right, of course. Once I thought back to each person who couldn't be read, they had been wearing a copper bracelet. All but one.

  Avis was smiling as I asked, "Then why can't I read Khea?"

  "Honestly, I don't know," he answered, still smiling.

  "But you have an idea."

  "I do. But I'm not sure yet, so I'll wait until I figure it out. I promise I'll let you know."

  "So what do you want me to do? Read you?"

  "Yeah, that about sums it up."

  I produced a thread to cross the porch to Avis, but a few feet away it stopped, refusing to move forward any more.

  "See?" he sneered, seeming pleased that I couldn't do it.

  "Fine. I'll figure something out. Always do," I told him as I went inside and lay in my old bed. While I hated having that frustrating feeling of non-accomplishment, I was admittedly excited to finally get to read Avis. My mentor had been constantly inside my head for years, and I was eager to return the favor.

  After an eggs and biscuits breakfast the next morning, we left my father to work on a net, and set out to the center of town-though Avis refused to tell me why. He wandered around strangely, as if looking for something, but still he wouldn't tell me, and his bracelet still blocked my thread. On the far north side of town near the little river, Avis stopped walking, though I couldn't see anything.

  "What are we doing here?" I asked him, annoyed at our mysterious trip.

  "Shhh! Listen."

  When I stopped to listen, I heard a small, frightened voice in my head rather than aloud. The young girl's voice was so quiet, I wondered how he had heard her.

  Avis walked up to a tree on the bank of the river and extended his hand into the branches. "Good morning, Estha. Could you come down?" He spoke sweetly, more kindly than I'd ever heard him, and I began to wonder what had gotten into him.

  A tiny hand lowered out of the dense leaves of the tree, and he helped lower her to the ground. She was a tiny thing, yellow hair tangled all about her, with only six or seven summers, skinny and dirty as most children of Lagodon were.

  Kneeling in front of her, Avis spoke to her like he had known her for years. "Estha, this is my friend, Lark. He's made a big breakfast and we don't have anyone to eat it all. Can you help us?" The tiny girl nodded eagerly before Avis picked her up and carried her back towards the house. Maybe he knew she didn't have the strength to make the trip.

  Back at home, the girl ate ravenously, tearing into the biscuits and shoving eggs into her mouth as fast as she could manage. Her memories showed me that she had been on her own for a while, her family leaving Lagodon but not taking her for a reason she didn't know. It made me a little sick to think that someone would intentionally leave her behind.

  What are you doing with her? I asked Avis silently. While I wanted to help the girl, I was more worried about my father. I didn't come to Lagodon to run a charity.

  "You'll see."

  The girl stayed with us for the rest of the day, sleeping in my bed and only getting up to eat at meals. She was a little, frail thing that reminded me of another small blonde girl from Lagodon, one who popped into my mind more often than anyone else.

  By the third day, Estha seemed to be getting back some of her strength. She was awake for most of the day and even helped Avis carry a loaf of bread he bought from the square. He showed her how to crack open an egg and cut a potato without cutting her fingers, and I began to see what he had in mind.

  You think she can take care of my father? I asked one day when we went hunting together.

  "Why not? She has no one else, and this is the best home she's ever known." I knew he was right; I coul
d read her as well as he could. But I was nervous leaving my blind father in the care of such a small child.

  "She won't always be small. Look what happened to you when you had a few years of regular meals." By way of making his point, he slammed his palm into the muscle of my shoulder as hard as he could and smiled at the loud slapping sound it made.

  A moment later, the orange-breasted hawk flew overhead. I nocked my arrow and took aim. Before I could release, Avis placed his hand on the arrow and shook his head. "Not that one." By the time he let go, the hawk was gone. He knew how much I wanted to shoot it and surely loved every minute of my failure. Some things will never change.

  In the warmth of late summer, Avis and I worked to teach Estha some skills she would need to take care of my father. She learned to hunt with a small bow she made herself, clean her kill and cook it through until it was safe to eat. She could brush the dust out of the house and wash clothes in the river. We repaired the roof so it was good and strong and would keep them dry even in a downpour. Removing the decayed wood from the floor, we placed stones under the house and replaced some boards so it wouldn't rot even when the ground was moist. Avis bought my father and Estha new clothes from the square, even a pretty, yellow dress for the girl.

  Sure enough, when Estha had been there a month, her thoughts left no doubt that she wanted to stay with my father. He was sweet to her, telling her stories as she sat on his lap, and tucking her into bed at night while Avis and I talked on the porch. She hunted with the small bow she made fairly quickly and had caught the evening meals for the last week. Father hadn't had anyone to care for in a long time, and he liked it as well. The two of them would be undeniably good for each other. I couldn't postpone our departure anymore.

  "Tomorrow, then," Avis told me as we sat on the porch drinking grain wine. It had become a sort of tradition since arriving in Lagodon, but it would be our last night. I began to worry about Estha catching enough meat in the edge of the Creekmont, or being too small to carry a kill back to the house. There were a million things that could go wrong.

  "Don't worry. They'll be fine. I promise." Avis seemed confident, and it did calm me a little, but there would probably always be a part of me that worried.

  The next morning, with our horses fat and packed, Avis and I said out goodbyes.

  "You take good care of him. I'm counting on you." I told Estha, who smiled at being trusted with such a task.

  "I am so proud of you, son. As proud as a father could be," my father said with his arms locked around my neck. I broke quickly from his embrace, worried that I would let a tear fall against his cheek, and walked down the steps to stand next to Obsidian.

  Avis stepped forward when I headed to the horses. He knelt in front of Estha and handed her a small, leather bag that chinked with copper coins. It was hard to tell if Estha or I was more shocked; it was more coin than either of us had ever seen.

  "This is enough to get you and Mr. Davies through several years if you're careful. Do what you can with your bow and only use these when you have to. It'll be enough to get you through." He kissed her on the head and shook my father's hand before turning to leave.

  Avis led Pearl through the city streets while I followed behind distractedly. By the time we reached the edge of the Creekmont, I was having trouble controlling my emotions. Leaving my father in the care of a little girl? Avis giving them more money than they would know what to do with? Estha taking care of a blind old man? I didn't need to go back to Myxini. How could I really leave them just for my own pride? I felt like such a fool to make the same mistakes all over again.

  In a moment, Avis was there with a strong hand on my shoulder. "Lark, calm down. You've done everything you could have." I shook my head as I looked to the ground, hoping to avoid his gaze a little longer. For the thousandth time I wished for a moment of privacy; he could feel every ounce of my shame.

  "You have nothing to be ashamed of. You're a good man, Lark." He clapped his hand against my cheek and continued walking between the trees.

  When I felt more in control, I lifted myself into the saddle and caught up to him. It would be at least two weeks to get back to Hubli, and I would do it with Avis. He had won me as his friend and ally for the rest of his life.

  Riding side by side on the worn trail to the Greenwood, I finally worked up the courage to say it aloud. "Thank you." I would never be able to repay him for helping me, for helping my father, for all of it. If he wanted me to play a part in Nakbe, then I would do it. I would do whatever he asked, and it still wouldn't ever be enough. He just nodded back and kept riding.