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yubishines) wrote2015-06-24 10:49 pm
yubishines) wrote2015-06-24 10:49 pm
Entry tags:
sehnsucht: the storm
Rana writing -- rolled a disaster for a Recent Event, which was very bad news for an NPC I was supposed to be close to.
-
Be kind.
...is what Rana's parents told her, whenever the subject of Helena Waters came up. Helena was an old family friend of the Curlews, always in and out of the forge, for all that she was nearly twice the age of Rana's parents. "She's had a hard life," her mother would say to her. "Helena's the only one of her family left -- she had to claim the farm back from the lord when she came home from the army, did you know? And she never married. Be kind to her, Rana."
When Rana was apprenticed to the hagwitch, she mentioned this lecture one day. The hag looked out the window for a beat, then said gruffly, "That's mostly right. You ought to be kind to anyone, mind, whether you know they've had a rotten deal or not. Odds are, they have." The hag shook her head. "But your mother wasn't wrong. I'd figure that old soldier's seen more in this world than most people should."
It all felt moot, anyway. Helena would have laughed if Rana had told her about this. Nothing seemed to faze her, not bad weather or bad news or rude merchants who thought some old cow farmer from a backwater village was too stupid to know a fair price from an insulting one. It wasn't that she was too stoic to have feelings, just that she had better things on her mind. Or so she said.
"You can fix stupid," she said to Rana once, "whatever your old hag says. But not every halfwit in the world is worth coming to blows over. Save your energy and pick your battles."
-
Rana supposed that she would know about battles, at that. The woman didn't advertise it -- not like the priest with his notched spears, or the hunter with his mysterious workshop that Rana itched to see with her own eyes someday -- but it was generally known that Helena Waters had signed up for a hitch at sixteen and came home decades later, scarred and limping and apparently with no greater desire than to retire in her quiet hometown for the rest of her days.
Helena lived alone, though she did hire a number of farmhands about the place to repair the fences and feed the cattle and turn the milk into cheese, not to mention the seasonal workers during calving time. Still, she must have been terribly busy, yet she still found the time to talk to Rana whenever the girl came around, and listen to her problems and give her advice and teach her various card- and board-games.
Sometimes she would tell stories about the people who'd been in her command and who seemed to come from all the corners of the earth -- the barbarian chief, the nameless legionnaire, the masked nomad, the half-cursed knight-errant. Once she let Rana see her old medals and decorations; there seemed to be an awful lot of them. Helena kept them in an old shoebox shoved under the bed, out of sight.
One day, Rana screwed up the courage to ask, "Why did you come back? If all your friends are out there?"
Helena had looked over Rana's head, seeing something that wasn't there. "If things had been different --" She broke off, and a ghost of a wry smile came on her face. Instead she said, "Sometimes you want to go where nobody knows your name."
-
Rana couldn't really understand. She'd grown up in a little riverside community where everyone could be expected to know your name or your parents' names, and anyone whose grandparents hadn't been born in the village was viewed with some suspicion. The Waterses had been among the first settlers back when Amfluss was founded. But she did understand that Helena wanted, in some way, to keep herself a secret, and Rana understood secrets.
She didn't even tell her friends that the scarred farmer had, once upon a time, been a decorated knight-commander. Helena Waters would probably have handled Khalil and Jamilan pestering her to show them sword techniques and battle formations with the same easy aplomb as she did anything else, but there was something about Helena that made you not want to disappoint her.
And anyway, Helena knew her second-worst secret, which was that Rana didn't cry after her mother died. (Her worst secret was that she was starting to forget her mother's face. Rana took after her father, who was slim and dark and quiet; she didn't think she looked much like her mother, aside from her eyes, but it was getting hard to recall what she looked like. This felt like a betrayal in an obscure way, and she never told anyone.)
Rana could cry when she scraped her knee and when she fell out of the treehouse, but watching them put her mother into the ground made her feel strange and hollow, not weepy at all. After the funeral, when her father went from quietness to complete opaque silence (and would not speak more than two or three words at a time for the next year), Rana made a beeline for the farm.
Helena hadn't tried to coddle the girl or tell her what to feel or relate some gory war story to illustrate that hey, things could be worse after all. She just let the girl follow her around as she went about her work day, only talking about the day's chores and how this cow was off its feed and that rats had gotten into the dairy again. Helena knew about grief.
Rana figured that if Helena didn't tell anyone about that, she could keep the old soldier's secrets as well.
-
The longest Rana stayed away was early in her apprenticeship, when she'd found an abandoned raven's nest. That had been a nightmarish two months, first feeding the orphaned nestlings every hour on the hour, then teaching them to fly and somehow preventing them from imprinting too much on their human guardian. ("Why couldn't you have started with something easy like a dog?" the hag said wearily. "Or a pig. Good animals, pigs. Hard to screw up when it comes to pigs.")
Against all expectation, the nestlings lived, from their hideous pinfeathered-gargoyle phase to fledging and almost looking like real birds. Most of them could be persuaded to leave the nest (though as time went on, Rana found that the flock came back twice or thrice a year, to hang around the swamp and cackle hoarsely at each other and beg for table scraps, as though they were still squalling infants) -- most of them, that is, except for one.
Rana and the hagwitch kept a watchful eye on the hanger-on for a while, but as it never seemed to get too friendly with other humans, and as it seemed perfectly capable of fending for itself (the two big concerns with released wildlife), the hag allowed that it was probably okay. Ravens, the hag said, made up their own minds, and this one had a mind to stay.
"So is this a witch familiar thing?" Helena asked, when Rana finally made it back to the farm and told her about her stint as a corvid foster mother.
"No," Rana said. "Yes. Maybe. I don't know. Ravens are smart -- smart like people are. It's hard to say. He's still a juvenile, anyway. He might still leave when he's bigger."
"Mm," Helena said, watching the young raven preening itself on the girl's shoulder. "I wouldn't count on it. He has that look about him like he'll follow you to the ends of the earth, whether you like it or not. Reminds me of Garrett," she added, as part of some private joke.
"Which one was he?" Rana asked, and Helena laughed and told her about the time she and Garrett and a dozen people had tried to stop an out-of-control magician's mount, and they'd all gotten thrown in a lake for their troubles.
-
Rana blinked awake. The hag shook her roughly. "Wake up, girl."
"What time is it?" she said stupidly, because she'd gone to bed long after sundown and it felt like she'd only just closed her eyes, but there was a red cast to the sky --
"No questions," the hag said. The old witch's face was set in hard lines. "The river's overflowed. Lost some livestock already. They're gonna need all the manpower they can get. Move."
She propelled herself upright and out the door somehow, with the hag close behind and rain pelting down on their heads. There was a strangely familiar smell in the air as well, one she thought she recognized from the forge. The smell of copper.
Her stomach turned when she caught sight of the river.
Rana had never seen the sea. She thought she had a pretty good idea of it now. The waters had risen, flooding the pastures and the tanner's house. She couldn't see the docks at all, and the mill was too far to get a good look at. The shore -- what had become the shore -- was a mass of panicking people and animals. As she and the witch came closer, another cow lost its footing and was swept under the waves, lowing mournfully the entire time. The waves were a dark, cloying red.
The hag caught her arm again. "I'll deal with the cattle," the hag ordered. "You get them off from the goddamn shore before they do themselves an injury, then join me."
Rana opened her mouth to argue -- Why should they listen to me? -- but the hag gave her an impatient shove. She took off towards the crowd, her shoes slipping and skidding in the red mud (oh god, oh gods) and screamed at them to fall back.
Maybe it was being the hagwitch's student, maybe it was that of the village children she had somehow been labelled the responsible one, maybe it was just that they needed the order (a scrap of advice Helena gave her floated through her mind: Say it in the right voice and sound like you know what you're doing, and most anyone will follow you) -- whatever it was, they faltered, quieted, and began to struggle through the mud up to drier land.
One of them didn't budge. He pointed at the bloody river urgently: "Look!"
Someone was struggling to keep afloat. A head bobbed up and down in the waves; the tanner's apprentice, barely older than Rana herself, was fighting the current and failing.
Helena shouldered past them, tying a rope around her waist. The other end of it, Rana realized, was lashed to a tree; an anchor. "Good work," Helena said to her, then threw herself into the river.
They should have made it. The old farmer swam through the floodwaters as easily as she might have done at sixteen, as a fresh young recruit heading into the world for the first time; she caught the apprentice around the waist, treaded water for a moment to let them catch their breath, and turned back.
Lightning forked across the sky. For a moment -- it must have been the thunder, so loud that it rattled through your bones -- Rana's vision blurred and she felt a peculiar lurch under her feet.
The rope snapped.
For a moment, Rana thought that it wouldn't matter. But the current must have grown stronger somehow, because no matter how hard they tried, the swimmers were being pulled away from the shore, away and under.
Rana caught the end of the rope, still knotted securely to the tree. There wasn't enough give to tie around herself, so she wrapped it around her wrist and dove into the churning water.
If she was thinking of anything, she might have been thinking that that was her friend out there, that Helena had been brave enough to try to rescue someone and Rana could be as good as her, that Rana hadn't been able to do anything about her mother but here was someone she could save -- but the only thing going through her mind, irrationally, was a snippet of one of Helena's stories: ...thought we were going to drown, but my feet touched the bottom and what do you know, it was only waist-deep... Garrett never did take to swimming, though...
It was harder going than she ever imagined. The copper smell overwhelmed her senses, enough to make her gag. She surfaced, spat out a mouthful of bloody water, and found herself face-to-face with Helena.
The woman looked at the girl and mouthed the word no. Rana shook her head and reached out with her free hand.
Rana felt her fingers touch her palm, when the current heaved and pulled them all under.
-
When Rana opened her eyes, it was sunrise. They'd pulled her out of the river. Only her, and nobody else.
-
Be kind.
...is what Rana's parents told her, whenever the subject of Helena Waters came up. Helena was an old family friend of the Curlews, always in and out of the forge, for all that she was nearly twice the age of Rana's parents. "She's had a hard life," her mother would say to her. "Helena's the only one of her family left -- she had to claim the farm back from the lord when she came home from the army, did you know? And she never married. Be kind to her, Rana."
When Rana was apprenticed to the hagwitch, she mentioned this lecture one day. The hag looked out the window for a beat, then said gruffly, "That's mostly right. You ought to be kind to anyone, mind, whether you know they've had a rotten deal or not. Odds are, they have." The hag shook her head. "But your mother wasn't wrong. I'd figure that old soldier's seen more in this world than most people should."
It all felt moot, anyway. Helena would have laughed if Rana had told her about this. Nothing seemed to faze her, not bad weather or bad news or rude merchants who thought some old cow farmer from a backwater village was too stupid to know a fair price from an insulting one. It wasn't that she was too stoic to have feelings, just that she had better things on her mind. Or so she said.
"You can fix stupid," she said to Rana once, "whatever your old hag says. But not every halfwit in the world is worth coming to blows over. Save your energy and pick your battles."
-
Rana supposed that she would know about battles, at that. The woman didn't advertise it -- not like the priest with his notched spears, or the hunter with his mysterious workshop that Rana itched to see with her own eyes someday -- but it was generally known that Helena Waters had signed up for a hitch at sixteen and came home decades later, scarred and limping and apparently with no greater desire than to retire in her quiet hometown for the rest of her days.
Helena lived alone, though she did hire a number of farmhands about the place to repair the fences and feed the cattle and turn the milk into cheese, not to mention the seasonal workers during calving time. Still, she must have been terribly busy, yet she still found the time to talk to Rana whenever the girl came around, and listen to her problems and give her advice and teach her various card- and board-games.
Sometimes she would tell stories about the people who'd been in her command and who seemed to come from all the corners of the earth -- the barbarian chief, the nameless legionnaire, the masked nomad, the half-cursed knight-errant. Once she let Rana see her old medals and decorations; there seemed to be an awful lot of them. Helena kept them in an old shoebox shoved under the bed, out of sight.
One day, Rana screwed up the courage to ask, "Why did you come back? If all your friends are out there?"
Helena had looked over Rana's head, seeing something that wasn't there. "If things had been different --" She broke off, and a ghost of a wry smile came on her face. Instead she said, "Sometimes you want to go where nobody knows your name."
-
Rana couldn't really understand. She'd grown up in a little riverside community where everyone could be expected to know your name or your parents' names, and anyone whose grandparents hadn't been born in the village was viewed with some suspicion. The Waterses had been among the first settlers back when Amfluss was founded. But she did understand that Helena wanted, in some way, to keep herself a secret, and Rana understood secrets.
She didn't even tell her friends that the scarred farmer had, once upon a time, been a decorated knight-commander. Helena Waters would probably have handled Khalil and Jamilan pestering her to show them sword techniques and battle formations with the same easy aplomb as she did anything else, but there was something about Helena that made you not want to disappoint her.
And anyway, Helena knew her second-worst secret, which was that Rana didn't cry after her mother died. (Her worst secret was that she was starting to forget her mother's face. Rana took after her father, who was slim and dark and quiet; she didn't think she looked much like her mother, aside from her eyes, but it was getting hard to recall what she looked like. This felt like a betrayal in an obscure way, and she never told anyone.)
Rana could cry when she scraped her knee and when she fell out of the treehouse, but watching them put her mother into the ground made her feel strange and hollow, not weepy at all. After the funeral, when her father went from quietness to complete opaque silence (and would not speak more than two or three words at a time for the next year), Rana made a beeline for the farm.
Helena hadn't tried to coddle the girl or tell her what to feel or relate some gory war story to illustrate that hey, things could be worse after all. She just let the girl follow her around as she went about her work day, only talking about the day's chores and how this cow was off its feed and that rats had gotten into the dairy again. Helena knew about grief.
Rana figured that if Helena didn't tell anyone about that, she could keep the old soldier's secrets as well.
-
The longest Rana stayed away was early in her apprenticeship, when she'd found an abandoned raven's nest. That had been a nightmarish two months, first feeding the orphaned nestlings every hour on the hour, then teaching them to fly and somehow preventing them from imprinting too much on their human guardian. ("Why couldn't you have started with something easy like a dog?" the hag said wearily. "Or a pig. Good animals, pigs. Hard to screw up when it comes to pigs.")
Against all expectation, the nestlings lived, from their hideous pinfeathered-gargoyle phase to fledging and almost looking like real birds. Most of them could be persuaded to leave the nest (though as time went on, Rana found that the flock came back twice or thrice a year, to hang around the swamp and cackle hoarsely at each other and beg for table scraps, as though they were still squalling infants) -- most of them, that is, except for one.
Rana and the hagwitch kept a watchful eye on the hanger-on for a while, but as it never seemed to get too friendly with other humans, and as it seemed perfectly capable of fending for itself (the two big concerns with released wildlife), the hag allowed that it was probably okay. Ravens, the hag said, made up their own minds, and this one had a mind to stay.
"So is this a witch familiar thing?" Helena asked, when Rana finally made it back to the farm and told her about her stint as a corvid foster mother.
"No," Rana said. "Yes. Maybe. I don't know. Ravens are smart -- smart like people are. It's hard to say. He's still a juvenile, anyway. He might still leave when he's bigger."
"Mm," Helena said, watching the young raven preening itself on the girl's shoulder. "I wouldn't count on it. He has that look about him like he'll follow you to the ends of the earth, whether you like it or not. Reminds me of Garrett," she added, as part of some private joke.
"Which one was he?" Rana asked, and Helena laughed and told her about the time she and Garrett and a dozen people had tried to stop an out-of-control magician's mount, and they'd all gotten thrown in a lake for their troubles.
-
Rana blinked awake. The hag shook her roughly. "Wake up, girl."
"What time is it?" she said stupidly, because she'd gone to bed long after sundown and it felt like she'd only just closed her eyes, but there was a red cast to the sky --
"No questions," the hag said. The old witch's face was set in hard lines. "The river's overflowed. Lost some livestock already. They're gonna need all the manpower they can get. Move."
She propelled herself upright and out the door somehow, with the hag close behind and rain pelting down on their heads. There was a strangely familiar smell in the air as well, one she thought she recognized from the forge. The smell of copper.
Her stomach turned when she caught sight of the river.
Rana had never seen the sea. She thought she had a pretty good idea of it now. The waters had risen, flooding the pastures and the tanner's house. She couldn't see the docks at all, and the mill was too far to get a good look at. The shore -- what had become the shore -- was a mass of panicking people and animals. As she and the witch came closer, another cow lost its footing and was swept under the waves, lowing mournfully the entire time. The waves were a dark, cloying red.
The hag caught her arm again. "I'll deal with the cattle," the hag ordered. "You get them off from the goddamn shore before they do themselves an injury, then join me."
Rana opened her mouth to argue -- Why should they listen to me? -- but the hag gave her an impatient shove. She took off towards the crowd, her shoes slipping and skidding in the red mud (oh god, oh gods) and screamed at them to fall back.
Maybe it was being the hagwitch's student, maybe it was that of the village children she had somehow been labelled the responsible one, maybe it was just that they needed the order (a scrap of advice Helena gave her floated through her mind: Say it in the right voice and sound like you know what you're doing, and most anyone will follow you) -- whatever it was, they faltered, quieted, and began to struggle through the mud up to drier land.
One of them didn't budge. He pointed at the bloody river urgently: "Look!"
Someone was struggling to keep afloat. A head bobbed up and down in the waves; the tanner's apprentice, barely older than Rana herself, was fighting the current and failing.
Helena shouldered past them, tying a rope around her waist. The other end of it, Rana realized, was lashed to a tree; an anchor. "Good work," Helena said to her, then threw herself into the river.
They should have made it. The old farmer swam through the floodwaters as easily as she might have done at sixteen, as a fresh young recruit heading into the world for the first time; she caught the apprentice around the waist, treaded water for a moment to let them catch their breath, and turned back.
Lightning forked across the sky. For a moment -- it must have been the thunder, so loud that it rattled through your bones -- Rana's vision blurred and she felt a peculiar lurch under her feet.
The rope snapped.
For a moment, Rana thought that it wouldn't matter. But the current must have grown stronger somehow, because no matter how hard they tried, the swimmers were being pulled away from the shore, away and under.
Rana caught the end of the rope, still knotted securely to the tree. There wasn't enough give to tie around herself, so she wrapped it around her wrist and dove into the churning water.
If she was thinking of anything, she might have been thinking that that was her friend out there, that Helena had been brave enough to try to rescue someone and Rana could be as good as her, that Rana hadn't been able to do anything about her mother but here was someone she could save -- but the only thing going through her mind, irrationally, was a snippet of one of Helena's stories: ...thought we were going to drown, but my feet touched the bottom and what do you know, it was only waist-deep... Garrett never did take to swimming, though...
It was harder going than she ever imagined. The copper smell overwhelmed her senses, enough to make her gag. She surfaced, spat out a mouthful of bloody water, and found herself face-to-face with Helena.
The woman looked at the girl and mouthed the word no. Rana shook her head and reached out with her free hand.
Rana felt her fingers touch her palm, when the current heaved and pulled them all under.
-
When Rana opened her eyes, it was sunrise. They'd pulled her out of the river. Only her, and nobody else.