ON THE banks of the Bemin, far from the sun-warmed grasses overlooking Haveranth’s surrounding hillocks, Lyah el Jemil ve Haveranth wove her fingers through her lover’s hair. Jenin’s dark locks flowed over Lyah’s lap, lustrous and shining in the light of the setting sun.
“Suo vo dyu, dyu vo suo,” Lyah murmured. Light from darkness, darkness from light.
“Spoken like a true soothsayer.” Jenin teased, but hys eyes lit with pride. Lyah had been apprenticed to Merin, Haveranth’s soothsayer, at the last Night of Reflection—a celebration of her reaching her seventeenth harvest and the coming of her Journeying with the following spring. She’d known for some time that Merin would take her as an apprentice, but it was finally official. Lyah would one day be soothsayer. As such, she’d taken to learning the lore of the village and found herself uttering proverbs even when she didn’t mean to. As the first apprentice Merin had chosen in her three hundred cycles of long life, Jenin couldn’t often disguise the pride sy felt at Lyah being the one chosen.
And Jenin’s pride in her made Lyah glow like the backlit maha trees that dotted the horizon, their leaves glowing deep blue with the gold of the sun behind them. Jenin went still beneath Lyah’s gentle touch on hys hair.
“Tomorrow,” sy said after a long pause.
Tomorrow was the Journeying. Lyah tried to disguise the skip in her heart that came with the thought of being off with Jenin for turns on end as they traveled. Of course, Carin and Ryd would also be there, but that wouldn’t stop Lyah’s excitement. Carin and Lyah were fyahiul, pillow-friends, practically family without sharing blood. Ryd would tag along, as he always did. Like a bug clinging to a falling leaf. Both Carin and Ryd seemed apprehensive about the Journeying, their thoughts rotting with the fear that they wouldn’t find their names and would be cast out of Haveranth as Nameless, but Lyah had no fear on that score. Nor had Jenin, but the tension in hys shoulders, even as Lyah ran her fingers through hys hair, told Lyah that perhaps something had shifted.
Jenin’s chin was stubbled with whiskers, and sy turned to lay hys head on Lyah’s knee, the roughness of hys chin through the thin fabric of her leggings sending a tingle of excitement through her. Jenin fell silent, hys posture tensing as sy lay across Lyah’s lap. A question hovered in hys eyes, but sy didn’t speak. Instead, Jenin’s dark eyes searched hers. For the space of a breath, it looked to Lyah as if Jenin’s eyes bore the weight of a thousand mountains, quashing their dark warmth with nothingness. After a moment, sy blinked and smiled and reached out hys hand to touch Lyah’s face.
“Why do we have to go on the Journeying?” sy asked.
“To find our names and join the village as adults,” Lyah responded automatically.
“That’s all?”
“The Journeying proves us worthy to join the village. It’s arduous but necessary.”
Jenin broke eye contact, hys gaze focused on Lyah’s midsection. Not in the way Lyah hoped; there was no lasciviousness in Jenin’s face, only a quiet vulnerability that made the tingles of excitement in Lyah’s stomach turn sour.
“Jenin?” Lyah placed her hand on Jenin’s chest, her fingers seeking out the solidity of Jenin’s flat planes and strong muscles that came from hys toil in the fields. For all sy came from the same womb as Dyava, Jenin could turn serious with the changing of the wind.
“I have to tell you something,” sy said. Hys eyes darted to the skyline of the village, the low curved roofs of the roundhomes clustered at its center. A breeze ruffled Lyah’s hair, pulling long strands from her hasty plait that stuck to her lips.
The sour nervousness in her stomach grew, like fermented plum juice gone past enjoyment. This was not what was supposed to happen on the eve of the Journeying. “Jenin,” she began, putting all the love she could into the speaking of hys name, only to have it die on her lips as she remembered that sy would only shortly bear it, that the name she’d come so accustomed to speaking in love would be eschewed for a new one. Now Jenin yl Tarwyn vy Haveranth—then who? Who would Jenin be in three moons’ time?
Jenin scrambled to hys knees and took hold of Lyah’s shoulders, sensing her discomfort. “It’s not about us, fruit of my heart. It’s more than us. More than the Journeying.”
Alarmed, Lyah felt her breath come faster into her chest, even as the breeze rose to become well and truly wind around them. “What is it?”
“I can’t say yet.” That weight returned to hys gaze.
“Then why say something now?” Lyah’s tongue felt dry like the clay that caked her mother’s worktable.
Jenin’s hands tightened on her shoulders. “I ought to have kept quiet. I’ve not spoken of this to anyone, but I’ve learned things and—”
The bell tolled in the village, one loud, reverberating note that spread out through the fields and hills around Haveranth. Sure enough, the sun had dipped below the horizon to the west, its rays following the Bemin to the sea where it bid farewell to the folk of Bemin’s Fan before sleeping in darkness for the night. To the east was Cantoranth, where only the slightest haze of smoke betrayed the presence of their neighbor-village. Strange that this cycle no one would join them from Bemin’s Fan or Cantoranth for the Journeying; no others came of age. There were whispers in town that fewer folk had been born in recent cycles, that two thousand cycles back the Journeying had brought as many as a score of young folk searching for their names. Now there were only four, all from Haveranth.
For the first time a true vine of fear spread through Lyah’s core, writhing like a worm at the center of an apple. Someone called out from the village, and Jenin, whatever sy’d been about to say lost, rose to stand, pulling Lyah to her feet.
“One day,” sy said. “One day, I’ll be able to explain to you. Don’t worry on it.”
Lyah felt that spoiled pit in her stomach grow heavier and sourer. “Jenin,” she said.
“Ahsh,” sy said, hushing her. “Remember one thing for me.”
“Always.”
“There is always the choice. As children, we choose the things we love and the village nurtures them. As youths we find ourselves and declare our appellation to our families, man or woman or hyrsin, declaring not just who we are but who we will become. As adults there will be the choice as well. I’ve made mine. Lu dyu, pah, artus lu suo dyosu suon.”
Sy smiled as if to say sy could quote proverbs too, but it didn’t reach hys eyes.
“I choose you,” Lyah said, her voice full of a vehemence she didn’t know she possessed.
“And I will never be far from you,” said Jenin, kissing Lyah’s lips with softness like down. Sy left Lyah on the banks of the Bemin, the rushing of the water over its time-smoothed stones not full enough to make the proverb Jenin’d spoken less hollow.
In darkness, birth. Light reveals all for good or ill.