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Colcium. The name of the town came to Revni, the memory drifting up like something half-asleep. Men sitting around the fire in Ulf’s house, discussing the resettlement. She and her mother and Sulvi refilling cups with bitter aul, the scent of pine smoke and rancid oil from where they hadn’t yet cleared the meal.
“We could go to Gülm,” someone had argued.
“They call it Colcium there,” someone else had said, but he was drowned out by the others shouting objections.
“You think the Faenish jurls will care?”
“I’ll not wait a year for justice that might never come.”
“If the laws can’t be upheld on our own soil, what makes you think they’d uphold them there?”
“I trust the Isfolj in Faen more than the corrupt Councils here!”
“It’s too far south. It’s not safe to be that far south on Faen.”
“No Councils. No arguments. We go our own way. To our own lands in the north,” Revni’s father had declared, and that was how the matter was decided, how her clan had decided that escaping to a new world was better than being legally in the right but dead.
She knew as much about the town as she knew about the beasts that lived deep beneath the Speckled Sea, or the name the goddess Yesena had wanted to name her stillborn child. That is to say, nothing at all.
But it had Isfolj jurls. If it had jurls, it might have Councils. And either way, it would have people—people that were hers, people that could get her where she needed to go. And most of all—
It had been south, on this island, of where her family had been headed. Just as she was now.
“Colcium,” Revni said aloud. “Do you know how to find it?”
The woman tidied her space, returning herbs to their small leather sacks. “I am an old woman. I have lived my life within one hundred cart turns of the place I was born, until my daughter convinced me to come east, to follow her and her new husband, to make a new place for our clan at the juncture of the three rivers, where the Caerdeneii could stake no claim. Now my daughter and her new husband are dead, and I am here, in a land with no name. I do not know the places of the Iasacht.” She set each sack in a large basket in careful order, tilting her chin towards Eavus’ sleeping body. “But the soldier probably does.”
She flashed Revni another knowing smile.
Revni sighed. She pointed to the muddy girl huddled in the shadows, the one who had crept in, thinking Revni hadn’t noticed.
“I’m going to want that knife back.”
TWELVE
Eavus woke to the unfamiliar sensation of fingers touching his face.
He reeled backwards, bumping his head hard on something behind him—a tree trunk? No, a wooden pole. He was indoors. His hand flew on instinct to his belt—but there was nothing there.
Eavus scrambled upright, but froze. A sword wavered unsteadily in front of his nose.
“Steh stel.”
It took a moment to register that the voice had spoken what sounded like Dinaeii, a second longer to realize how young it was and then to see the boy behind the weapon point, a fierce look on his round face.
Eavus put up his hands. Little fingers touched his bare chest and he recoiled, the movement causing a sudden seething pain. Several children were all around him, a mix of mischievous smiles and wide-eyed fear. As if working on a dare, a few tentative hands came forward to poke him again.
Why wasn’t he clothed? Where were his things? Where was Revni?
He didn’t speak Dinaeii. Caerdeneii had some similarities, but he barely even spoke that.
“Stop,” he tried, but it was met with giggles and more little hands prodding. “Stop!” He snatched at the closest wrist and twisted. A little girl screamed and the other hands fell away, little bodies scrambling backwards. Her face contorted in pain, her eyes instantly full of tears. Her bones were twigs. What was she, four years old? Five? Eavus’ own gut twisted in shame and he let go. The boy shook closer, and Eavus snatched the sword out of his hands by the blade.
“That’s mine.”
Eavus winced as it nicked a small cut in the fleshy part of his palm, and let go. He hadn’t expected the edge to be sharp. It hadn’t been honed in days. The bravado had worked, though. The children scuttered away, slamming through the low door and leaving it to clack and rattle behind them.
Where in the nine temples of Viduus was he?
