The Fecund's Melancholy Daughter - Brent Hayward [24]
Were they all this damn stoic? There had been one or two in the past—strictly men, as far as she could recall—but subtleties of their demeanour were lost in the haze of spiritus and fervour of the moment—
Those blue eyes never once looked up.
The chatelaine straightened, trying to slough off this mood and appear, belatedly, to be the persona she was meant to be, whoever that was, certainly not this moping, awkward teenager. She cleared her throat again. “We need to descend and ask the crabby old fecund for another miracle.” But could she press her face into that neck, just once, lose herself in it, draw even a small portion of the girl’s youth into her aching lungs? “This is very important for me. You might think I’m a heartless and ugly old hag who wants to replace her pet on the morning it has gone missing, but there’s more to this than I can possibly explain to you right now.”
“I need no reasons. I’ll go see the fecund.”
“Well. Well, all right, then. That’s fine. I won’t hold you back any longer.” But the girl had not said, You aren’t ugly, Terra Bella!
Turning away at last, the chatelaine held her hands together in front of her, to remove them from the situation. Tears were coming now. She did not want to cry in front of this girl. “Of course, we will find who took her. We will have the city turned upside down. Now go. Please, go. I don’t want to lose any more time. We’d best begin.”
Octavia bowed.
The chatelaine watched the girl as she walked the Great Hall in retreat. “Come see me after,” she called, blurting the words out. “So long.” And then she chastised herself for sounding too desperate and adolescent. The chatelaine wondered if, of all things, she might be falling in love.
Up from the shallow valley, as if regurgitated in desiccated forms of sand and the harsh battered shapes of burnished wood and tin and other detritus—perhaps even imagined by the lakebed dry these many seasons—there rose piecemeal into view a series of what could only be the dwellings of people. Dull, scoured from rocks and desolation, all bespattered with dust and shit and pocked by endless storms, these were nonetheless homes. Homes. Perhaps two dozen or so of the structures clustered together, extending into the near distance where mists began to claim their details.
So incongruous and shocking was the sight of this ramshackle village—after travelling two full days now through deserted and unchanging badlands—that path’s father stood silent atop the hillcrest for a full minute, perfectly still, regarding the apparitions while hot winds plucked and pushed at his own tatters, urging him onward, and down.
His son, path, groaned and craned his neck just then, grumpily peering past the fabric ridge of the sling he rested in to see his father’s face; the boy had been dozing and felt shudders pass through the familiar, skeletal body that supported him, a trembling in the sternum always pressed to his own spine. This shudder had been followed by the cessation of movement; he woke from sleep to see tears streaking the grime on his father’s cheeks.
“Now what?” He ground his little teeth together. “Father? Are you listening? Will you please keep moving?” But by then the boy had also seen the structures out the corner of his eye and, as he turned his head, implications of what they might mean settled over him. A few moments passed before he found words again.
“All right,” he said, finally, reverentially, more like a breath than true words. “We can start here. Maybe this is what we’re looking for.” Path’s small heart pounded in his ribcage like that of a bird.
His father wiped at the dampness on his face with a shaky arm and, abruptly, as if suddenly disgusted, removed the sling from around his neck. He held the contraption away