“No,” she said, confidently.“It is more than that.”
“It is not.”There was a sinking feeling in my chest as I looked at Fell walking far ahead of us.My next words were almost silent.“It cannot be.”
Dania rolled her eyes.“If you want me to believe that, you must stop staring at him with this forlorn look on your face.”
“I’m not staring?—”
“Yes, you are.”
“I am not?—”
Dania’s eyes met mine, and her expression had me wanting to giggle.“Perhaps I look at him, but not more than I look elsewhere… and this is not something… beauty can be appreciated without… Gah!Dania, he doesn’t look back, so it matters not.Please Dania, say nothing about this.Ever to anyone.I would die of embarrassment.”
“I will tell everyone in Aalt if you do not admit that you are enraptured with him.”
“Dania, stop.I could never?—”
“Inga!I have a story for you!”
My hand shot to Dania’s mouth, and my eyes pleaded with her.Inga was too far ahead and too intoxicated to look back at us.
“I admit it,” I said quickly.“He is someone I notice.But I will go home and I will forget him.It will fade.”
Again my chest sank.How terrible these words were.How sad it would be when I forgot the look of his face.I ached in anticipation of it.
“I will keep your secret,” Dania said.
My melancholy waned as we reached Bringa, which wasn’t a person as I’d been expecting, but a tree growing in a large courtyard of Aalt.It seemed an elm tree like any other, old enough that its trunk was too wide for me to reach my arms all the way around it, old enough that its branches drooped nearly to the ground.
“I have a moon blade,” Egil’s tallest son said, tugging at a leather strap around his neck.He pulled a white crescent-shaped item out of his clothing and cut his palm with it, whispering to the blood before setting his bleeding hand on a twisting root that rose from the ground.Most everyone around me was doing something similar—cutting themselves or else waiting for their turn with a blade.Hald and Layf spat on the tree rather than bleed on it, but even they were calm and still with reverence.
I stood a little back, wincing internally as skin was sliced, but also noticing how many Norsern were coming to the tree for the same purpose.Its roots were marked in most places with dark, wet spots, and the drooping branches seemed to be reaching in the wind, brushing foreheads and cheeks.Caressing.
The longer I watched, the harder it was not to see it.The tree was reaching out for the people.When Fell cut his hand, I felt it on my hand and clenched my fist closed.And somehow… it seemed the tree was reaching for me, too.A budding leaf tickled my forehead, and my sadness was gone.
There was a circus, I thought.And the weather is fine.I have friends here.Let us dance and drink and forget the rest of it.
Egil’s tallest son came and stood next to me as his siblings finished their offerings.“If you forget everything else from this time in your life,” he said.“You must remember one thing—it will all make sense by the end.Nothing happens without a purpose.”
I didn’t say that I had just been thinking about forgetting.His gaze was too potent, almost turquoise.“I… always I have a… how should I say it… when you have many things together, one after another, to be done or wanting to be done?”
Fell was close suddenly.“Collection?”he offered.
The word wasn’t quite right, but it would do.“Collection.I had one of these for my life, but it was a secret… I told no one because I thought it will not happen for me.But this day I have realized it has all come to be.Only not as I was thinking it would.”
Egil’s tallest son smiled a little.“Today I have added something to my own list.There are many great performances in your future.”He laughed.“I am greedy.I would like to see them.I would like to be one of the men in your palm.Bringa has told me it will not be, but still I hope.”
He and his siblings left us at the tree, and the odd day, became a light afternoon.The whole city roared and cheered and sang as the moon covered the sun’s light and the world became dark.And then when the light came back, the thousands upon thousands of people in Aalt grew lively and wild.
By the time the sky was the colour of ink, I was drunk and twirling, the stars above, the earth below.I felt strong and endless and so very alive.And quite frequently, the most beautiful man I’d ever seen danced into my vision, and I could watch him and see his smile.I could notice how cheerful he was to everyone, how quickly he would include new people into our little group.He is friends with everyone, I thought at one point.Everyone liked him and gave him gifts: smoke to breathe, drinks from their own flagons.
A man joined our party during one of the countless songs.He had black hair like me, no tattoos on his face or hands like me.
“You are Islish?”he shouted over the rabble.
I nodded drunkenly.
“I have vowed to buy a drink for every Islish woman I meet this night!”he said in Islish.
