Nico pressed her shroud to her face in frustration. The piercing crack that sounded when they struck that unexpected trench still rung in her ears. The windship wheel had completely shattered around the axle. They hadn’t made it but a day out of the oasis and already something had gone wrong.
Azan crouched down and studied the wheel. The blacksmith’s child hissed between his teeth. “It’s completely shot. The wood is ruined. Several of the spokes still look good, though.”
Nico studied their surroundings for potential building materials, but this area was so unyielding—the ground cracked, parched, and gasping. The air was so dry it hurt the throat to breathe, and no tree or shrubbery was in sight. Just dry dust and heat. Nico was grateful they had refilled their water supply back at the oasis.
“Could we patch it with clay?” Nico asked.
“It’ll get us back up and running until we can find an alternative. We’ll be slower till then,” Azan said.
“That’ll have to be enough. What’s your experience making clay?”
“Not much at making it. The shop usually imports clay from the brickmakers, but I’ve worked with it enough to guess at the sand-soil ratio,” Azan said, a little uncertain. It was still better than the handful of lessons regarding clay-making Nico had in school.
Nico turned to Suri and Kelin, who waited for instructions on how to handle yet another disaster she had steered them all into. Her magic would help them little this time around. They were going to have to tighten their shrouds and get the hard work done.
“We’re going to mix clay for a makeshift wheel, but we’re going to have to sun-bake the mix. We’re losing light, so time isn’t on our side. Azan and Kelin, start digging a hole. Suri and I will sift the soil.”
Nico unloaded her satchel and glaive, and the others followed suit. In one big pile, they discarded all the items they didn’t want to get dirtied or weigh them down. They rolled up their sleeves and put up their hair.
Nico retrieved two large calabash bowls and the sift from the windship hatch. She leaned the sift against the hull and handed Suri the other bowl, but Suri grabbed at it blindly, distracted by Azan and Kelin, who were using the windship oars to break the hard earth and shovel out dirt into a gathered pile. Nico noted the frown that pulled Suri’s bow lips taut.
They traveled off toward a nearby ditch of sand. Nico held her calabash atop her head to create a small measure of shade from the sun. Nico watched their shadows travel the hot ground beside them.
Once they’d left Azan and Kelin in the distance, Nico asked, “What’s wrong?”
“I looked in Kelin’s satchel.”
“What? Why are you going through his things?”
Suri stopped. Her hair was curled and frizzed from the sweat on her forehead. “You can’t trust him, Nico. You want to help them. That’s who you are. But a tent rat will always be a tent rat.”
Nico was jolted by the unexpected slur. That was the type of ignorance Nico expected of Suri’s tah, one of the Council’s most ardent proponents of wiping out the Tents, but Nico never thought Suri shared any of her tah’s views. Where was this suddenly coming from? Or had it always been there and Nico had missed it all this time?
“You sound like your tah,” Nico accused.
“There were herbs in Kelin’s satchel for poisons.”
“Neema brought knives.”
“These are the type of poisons you slip into someone’s drink. I knew you’d be blind to this. He is not to be trusted, Nico. None of them are.”
“You’re wrong. Tent kids are no different than any of us. There are good and bad on both sides, and I don’t appreciate you calling them ‘tent rats.’ I have friends in the Tents.”
“Kelin is trying to kill you, and that mutt bastard is only using you for your influence.”
“Suri!” Nico snapped, aghast at Suri’s audacity to drag Zephyr into the conversation. She’d spoken to Suri of Zephyr before, and Suri had never expressed such sentiments, but now, Nico was beginning to remember that they commonly had been one-sided conversations. Suri never inquired after Zephyr or asked questions, as if Suri didn’t care but was only listening because Nico did.
Nico felt her world drying out. “You’re wrong, Suri. You’re wrong about Kelin, and you’re wrong about Zephyr. You’ll understand when you finally meet him. We won’t talk on this anymore.”
Nico whirled and stomped over to one side of the sand ditch to fill her calabash while Suri walked over to the other side. They’d been friends their entire lives, but they’d never had as many conflicts as they’d had during the Forging. Nico had been grateful that they had been placed on the same team, but now, she wondered if it was worth all these cracks rupturing their friendship. She doubted they were the sort of cracks that could be mended with clay.
When Nico and Suri returned with the sand, Azan was laughing at one of Kelin’s remarks. Nico glanced at Suri pointedly, as if Azan’s laughter proved Kelin’s goodness, but it only deepened the mistrust on Suri’s face.
With a sigh, Nico plopped the large calabash of sand on the ground and shook out the strained muscles of her arms. She wiped at the sweat on her face and chest with her shroud and took a deep swallow of water before getting to work.
Nico and Suri worked in tandem, never needing to vocalize their actions or next steps. Nico wished it was always this easy. Suri held the silt, while Nico tossed in dirt from the pile Azan and Kelin had dug up. Suri shook out and flung the stones and pebbles over her shoulder. They repeated these actions over and over to thin the soil until it was fine and smooth.
“Is it true you eat people in the Tents?” Azan asked Kelin, both of them knee-deep in the hole. Nico immediately cringed at the question. “They say bodies disappear in the night because you eat them.”
“Why do you think grub-mash tastes so strong?” Kelin smirked and leaned forward. His lips brushed against Azan’s dusty cheek. “It’s to hide the taste of what else is in it.”
Nico recognized Kelin’s answer as one of those brash tent answers common to such questions. Many tent folks believed the Grankull didn’t have a right to tent business, and many embraced that mentality by perpetuating and exaggerating the very stereotypes they were often accused of. Others got tired of the same old questions and answered with lies and half-truths for the entertainment. A rarer few tried to educate, but they often got exhausted when their words bounced off dense ears. Whatever the case or reasoning, tent answers were never straight.
Kullers didn’t understand that. They only heard the surface, as evident by the dawning horror on Suri’s face. Azan laughed awkwardly. Nico could see his next question forming and subtly shook her head, but Azan couldn’t stop himself.
“What do people taste like?”
Kelin’s face was grave. “They taste like grubworm.”
Azan laughed, though it receded when Kelin’s face didn’t change. “You’re kidding, right?”
“No.”
“Oh.”
Kelin angled away from Azan and a roguish smirk pulled at his face. Nico shook her head. If the Grankull saw people living in the Tents as outsiders and the people in the Tents saw those in the Grankull as outsiders, how were they ever supposed to meet in the middle? Nico feared she was steering out of her lane, but nevertheless she felt compelled to speak the truth.
“They are called the Vulture Han,” Nico said, “and none in the Tents have seen their face. At night, the Vulture Han’s followers collect all the bodies fallen during the day, or those bodies of the dead given over, and their team of trappers use the bodies as bait to catch grubworms. It’s one of the most important sources of food in the Tents. So yes, technically, all the dead taste of grubworm.”
Kelin stopped and stared at Nico, surprised.
“Really? That’s true?” Azan asked.
“I’m the Ohan.”
Azan nodded, appeased by that explanation. Sometimes that line did come in handy.
“But why didn’t Kelin just say that in the first place?” Azan complained, asking Nico the question, even though Kelin was standing right next to him. Kelin turned to Nico, amused, to see if Nico could tell him his own answer.
Nico didn’t rise to Kelin’s bait. She focused on Azan and chided, “Why should he have to?”
Azan looked between Kelin and Nico as if sensing he had done something wrong but unable to vocalize it. Azan said, hurt and defensive, “He’s part of the kull, and he lied to us.”
“He wasn’t born of a kull. Why should he owe us anything? While the Tents have a clear purpose for their dead, cannibalism can still happen, as it also happens in the Grankull. Many in the Grankull do not have food. Those who fail the Forging do not receive rations. Those with no job do not receive rations. Cannibalism happens in the Grankull too, but we point to the Tents and vilify them and call them cannibals to make us feel inherently superior. But it’s just a story, hiding the fact that we’re not any better. The Grankull lies, too.”
Azan, Suri, and Kelin were all staring at her now as if she had performed the most shocking of magic. The truth shouldn’t be magic. Everyone was always so shocked to learn that all the stories, all the myths, all the legends, were edited.
“I didn’t know,” Azan mumbled.
“Now you do.” Nico cleared her throat of her rant. She swallowed it down hard. “I think that hole is big enough. You both can stop now.”
They were slow to move, but Nico continued and crouched before the hole. She drowned them out to focus on her magic and exhaled a deep breath.
Summoning the water for their dug-out hole was harder than the small lake she had previously made. No immediate water sources were in the vicinity to draw from, just the water that existed in their own bodies, gourds, and the supply in the windship. The Grankull often thought she summoned water from nothing, but that was an illusion. She shifted water. She moved it from one place to another, and it took far more magic to move it over large distances. She borrowed from the oasis a day away, and the water level of their dug-out hole began to rise.
“Okay, that’s good,” Azan said once the water hit his shins.
They added the fine soil and sand, then took off their shoes and blended the mixture with their bare feet. It squelched between Nico’s toes, and her thighs burned at the pull of the thickening mud. They all worked in silence, and Nico admitted she might have soured the water with her rant. Her intentions hadn’t been to splinter the group even further.
If the Tents and the Grankull were as sand and soil, could Nico be the water to mix them together?
After thoughtful deliberation, Nico reached out and slid her muddy hand across Azan’s face. He looked at her, shocked, and Nico raised her brows in a teasing challenge. He grinned wide, then reached down to scoop up a handful of mud.
Nico ducked behind Kelin, and the ball of mud hit Kelin squarely in the chest. He gave an affronted yelp and didn’t hesitate to seek revenge as he scooped mud in both hands.
Azan laughed as he raced toward the other side of the hole, splashing Suri on the way. Mud slid down Suri’s face, and the sight resurfaced memories of Nico and Suri chasing each other through rain puddles. Nico wondered if those same memories had bubbled up in Suri when her face softened into a smile. Suri moved to grab for mud, and Nico grabbed her own. They each got caught in the crossfire between Azan and Kelin. Suri and Nico wordlessly agreed to join forces.
For a brief moment, the tension between the Grankull and the Tents was forgotten. They forgot about the Forging and the deadlines and the responsibilities. Nico forgot her worries of assassins and strained friendships and jih waiting for her rescue.
Nico let it all go.
And took the time to have a little fun.
The sun had set by the time they finished mixing the clay, which meant they’d be stuck out here at least till high noon tomorrow waiting for the sun to finish hardening the clay and set in the mold.
Which, in the end, was probably a good thing, for it took some time to scrub the mud from their clothes. They hung their wet clothes to dry along the sail line. Suri had won the first hand of rattle-bones, so she took her bath first, behind the windship and out of sight of the camp.
The shrouds might have been optional now, but it took longer than a few days for kids participating in the Forging to grow bolder with their bodies. Nico certainly didn’t feel comfortable stripping in front of everyone, so she helped set up camp while itching in all sorts of places and waiting her turn at the water barrels.
Kelin, on the other hand, had no such compunctions. He stripped naked right there at camp and started washing off. At least he had the decency to move far enough away so as not to splash them with dirty water, but he was still close enough so that Nico and Azan couldn’t miss the knowing smirk he tossed in their direction as he judged them both for their innocence. Kelin had a wiry build, with the sort of sleek muscle that was often underestimated and well-hidden under clothes.
Azan cursed when he cut his finger on the flint, a rarity for him. Azan always started the campfire on the first sure strike. He was so dependable that Nico envied his skill. It always took her at least a few tries to get the flame going. But tonight, Azan found himself distracted, constantly glancing over at Kelin. Kelin did nothing to help Azan’s focus as he scrubbed at his skin, slowly and sensually. Flirting.
Nico had noticed it for the past couple of days now and even today while Azan and Kelin were digging the hole. They might become a problem.
“You seem to know a lot about the Tents,” Azan said, curving the statement into a question while turning to her. He unconsciously scratched at dirt on his arm.
“. . . yes?” Nico said, already knowing she might not like where this question led.
“They say tent kids have a lot of sex. Is that true?”
Nico groaned. “It’s true that they tend to have more sexual experience than we do at this age, but not because they’re undisciplined or deviant,” Nico said the latter quickly to dispel those assumptions, “but more so because they aren’t disallowed from having it. They don’t risk banishment and shame like we do. They have no face to lose. That said, every person is different. For all Kelin’s . . . bravado, he’s a flock kid. They’re protective of their investments. I’d guess he hasn’t had any.”
“What?” Azan asked, shocked. “But the Flock . . . they’re whores, right?”
“Calling the Flock a group of whores is the same as calling dragonscale iron,” Nico explained. “From what I understand, the Flock began generations ago when a group of whores decided they could better protect themselves by working together. Today, I’d compare it to the sophistication of any of our merchant guilds. Kullers in need of extra money for whatever reason don shrouds, go into the Tents, and ask the Flock for work. The Flock dresses them as one of their own, with feather masks and all, and sells them to the next shrouded kuller looking to buy sex. Little do people know, the Flock is selling kuller to kuller and taking a percentage of every transaction. Are there people in the Tents who also work for the Flock? Yes. But in the Tents, the ‘Flock’ more accurately refers to the group of people who manage the Tents’ empire of selling bodies.”
“Spill all our secrets, why don’t you?” Kelin said from over Nico’s shoulder, more amused than angry. The Flock liked lying to the Grankull. They liked their reputation. In their opinion, it kept them protected. Kelin threw on his clothes and said more haughtily, correcting her, “I’ve had sex.”
“The tahs don’t know about it, do they?” Nico asked.
Kelin grinned and didn’t answer. He sat next to Nico at the fire and glanced over at her. “I’ve never heard a kuller speak about the Tents the way you do.”
“I support Tents’ rights,” Nico said. It was a controversial thing to say, and the importance of it went right over Azan’s head. Azan was too busy staring at Kelin’s face. “I’m probably the only ohani to do so since Sola-granta. I can only hope to build on her accomplishments.”
Kelin scowled at that. “No Ohan has ever supported the Tents.”
“Solaria Ohan is the reason you’re sitting here right now. She is the one who advocated for tent kids to be able to participate in the Forging, arguing that kids born in the Tents shouldn’t be judged on the mistakes of their parents, that they should have the chance to become a part of the Grankull just like anyone else.”
“I’ve never heard that.”
Nico shrugged. “Not many people have. It’s not the type of history they teach in the Grankull, either.”
Nico only knew of Solaria Ohan because her many writings overflowed the personal library of Nico’s home, but these writings were practically absent from the temple. They were banned reading and inaccessible to anyone who wasn’t a scribe.
“The Grankull have turned the Tents into the villains of a carefully curated story told so many times the lies have become the truth. I don’t blame the Tents’ mistrust and intolerance of kullers. It was the Grankull who twisted Solaria Ohan’s good intentions to justify the first purge. Allowing tents kids into the Forging gave the Grankull the excuse to claim ‘innocents’ are given a chance, that if tent children can’t survive the Forging, it’s further proof they don’t deserve to make it. But it’s never been equal opportunity. The Forging has always been stacked against you.”
“That, I know.” Kelin nodded. “Every tent kid knows the bones are weighted.”
“Yet, you’re still here,” Azan said.
Kelin shrugged. “You do, every now and again, win a rigged game.”
It was easy to take rations for granted, knowing you were secure in your next meal . . . that was, until Kenji-ta dumped you around a fire of tent kids who didn’t know where their next meal was coming from. Tent kids spoke of rations like Grankull kids spoke of hunting stars. Even though Kelin was a part of the Flock, he had still been an orphan first. At night, in the dark, he too had no doubt yearned for the stability on the other side of those bones.
“Solaria Ohan died young. She had many dreams and many ambitions, but she died from poison in her water.” Nico leaned toward Kelin, away from Azan, and emphasized her point low under the crackling fire. Suri had grown up around healers all her life; she knew what poison looked like. Nico didn’t doubt her. “Currently, the Council is at an impasse. They are planning another purge, and when I succeed in my Forging, I’ll have the deciding vote. But the Grankull has turned you into the villains yet again. They think so little of the Tents that they’ll hire a tent assassin to take out the one person fighting for them, because they don’t think an assassin will ever have anything in common with an ohani, that they’ll never talk, and they’ll never be able to think for themselves and their best interests. That is how little they think of the Tents, and it disgusts me. You aren’t bones to be thrown in someone else’s game. The bones are in your hand, and you decide how you play.”
Kelin’s eyes scrutinized her, calculating. “Everyone lies.”
“I hope I have all the Forging to gain your trust.”
They stared at each other, never breaking eye contact, weighing the other. Suri considered Nico naive, but Nico tried her hardest to keep her face clean. Perhaps if Nico were Ava-ta, she would kill Kelin right then and there to avoid his imminent betrayal, but Nico had faith he’d make the right choice.
That was the thing about kindness and trust and compassion. If kindness were easy, more people would do it. Anger was easy. Revenge and jealousy were easy. Ignorance was easy. But kindness and trust and compassion were hard. They required you to open yourself up, to stride into a fight without armor and stand there and be vulnerable, not knowing whether the other person would wound you with disappointment or worse.
Kindness was not for the weak.
After everyone finished washing, they ate dinner around the campfire. When the lively chatter of dinner faded, Nico spread the standard map issued to all the Forging kulls across her lap. They were somewhere dawnward of the skinko mating grounds. Nico admitted that she was a little frustrated by their glacial pace, and the air was so dry in this area that she was having a difficult time sensing Kai’s whereabouts.
She spat on the map and willed her magic to find him. She watched the spit coalesce on a pair of squiggly lines on the parchment—the kull’s gorge hideout.
Great acoustics, her tah’s voice chimed in her head.
Nico returned the map safely to the cylindrical case where it had been stored. Suri sighed, disgusted. Nico looked up, and beyond the bright burn of the fire, found Azan and Kelin all over each other’s faces.
“Azan! Kelin!” Nico said, alarmed. “We’re underage!”
Kelin rolled his eyes as he pulled off. Azan pouted, but those round eyes weren’t going to work this time.
“Come on, Nico,” Azan dramatically complained. “Everyone kindles a little fire during the Forging. My eldest jih fucked his whole Forging kull during his.”
“He’s lucky he didn’t seed anyone.”
“Calm your nips. He fucked them all in the ass. It was fine.”
“That’s still not safe!”
One of the biggest unsaid facts of the Forging was that kids were dumb, and when there were no adults around, sex happened. Tent kids might have had more sexual experience, but kull kids were downright horny by the time of their Forging. The Council knew sex occurred during the Forging, but they couldn’t punish anyone without evidence. For those who were caught, however, the punishment was severe.
Underage touching meant a season of lost rations.
Underage sex meant banishment.
Unapproved pregnancy meant a death sentence.
For a society with finite resources, every birth had to be planned. Every child born of the Grankull must be approved. Unbridled pregnancies put the Grankull at risk, and the Council did not hesitate to march any offenders through the streets and burn off their faces at the temple steps. The price of an unapproved pregnancy was the death of one female and one male, and if the female refused to give up their accomplice, the Council would take the nearest male relative as payment. It tore families apart. The consequences had been branded on Zara’s face before she fled to the Tents with Zephyr in her womb. They burned Zara’s siblings, a male and female, in her stead.
It was a topic Nico didn’t treat lightly.
“I am to be the Ohan. When the Council interviews my story of the Forging, they are going to scrutinize every little detail. It would be safer for you both to wait. You can legally fool around all you want after the Naming.”
Azan huffed while Kelin rolled his eyes again. They looked at each other and Nico knew they weren’t going to listen.
Later that night, Nico wasn’t shocked to wake up to the undeniable sounds of Kelin and Azan going at it. She slapped her hands to her face and tried to fall back asleep, but how did one sleep to the enthusiastic exclamations of Azan’s big dick? She envied Suri’s ability to sleep through anything. Nico pushed up from her bedroll and went for a walk.
A blanket of stars spread endlessly overhead, and it reminded Nico of a song, specifically, one of the many tah had composed. She closed her eyes and imagined the deep tenor of tah’s voice. She hummed the tune on her lips and danced atop the melody. She spiraled, round and round, and collapsed with a lament. He wrote songs under these stars, found inspiration in their tapestry of light.
Nico shook her head and the sand from her clothes. The same voice that had once sang her to sleep haunted her now. She’d tried to bury tah’s voice beneath his starry muses, but she knew it wouldn’t stay there. It was woven too deeply, buried in dreams and skirted the fading light of a once good person. The songs were too much a part of her now. She’d have to break her own bones to escape them.
Nico returned to camp and found it quiet once again.
Kelin stoked the fire, and he looked at her through the flames with a clever smirk. Nico crossed her arms, and he immediately raised his hands. “You didn’t see anything. Plausible deniability, right?”
Nico sighed. At least Azan and Kelin were a seedless joining and didn’t have to worry about the worst consequences. “Just be discreet about it.”
Nico slipped back into her bedroll and listened to Kelin shuffle the embers of the fire with a piece from the broken wheel; he had rolled first turn at watch. He was an odd one when he was bored, Nico thought. Or perhaps he didn’t know to expect long stretches of idleness. Azan sharpened and cleaned his axe when he was on watch or entertained himself with the single-player version of rattle-bones. Suri oiled her bow and explored the landscape, looking for any materials to add to her concoction of medicines. Suri didn’t actually like the healing part of medicine. She liked the mixing and inventing and finding something new. During watch, Suri sometimes read through her favorite tales she’d checked out from the temple library, the ones of healers and their recipes. Kelin, on the other hand, sat and listened.
“Why do you care so much?” Kelin asked suddenly, surprising her.
Nico stared up at the stars. She’d wondered that question her entire life, be it because of Kai and seeing all the different ways he had been treated, or because of Kenji-ta and his insistence on bringing her into the Tents to experience for herself the similarities and differences. Or perhaps because of Ava-ta and being burdened with all the people she’d hurt. Or because of her friendship with Zephyr and the insight he brought from lands beyond and how often the things you knew to be absolute were conditional elsewhere.
Nico had the great fortune of having access to worlds she wasn’t born into and had always taken great care to walk these spaces as their guest. She wanted so desperately to show people the world she saw, but it was so hard to open doors that weren’t hers to open.
Nico didn’t know the answer to Kelin’s question. No answer was easy.
This is what Nico did during watch when she was staring into the fire—she thought, she debated, she questioned, and still she never found the answers she was searching for.
Nico settled on, “I care because I know. I understand how unbalanced the scales are.”
Kelin scoffed. “All the Tents know the scales are unbalanced. Doesn’t mean we’re naive enough to think anything will ever make a difference.”
Nico combed her hands through her hair, looking for a way to explain, to help him understand. It felt like grasping water. Maybe Nico cared not because of any of those outside influences, but because of something inside herself. Something as much a part of her as rainchimes and bittersweet songs.
“You don’t ever see a pair of off-balanced scales and need to correct them?” Nico asked. “I need to fix them. I need the scales to balance. It makes me feel balanced in turn. What kind of person would I be if I don’t use all this power I’m born with to try and right the world? Even if it’s pointless, or naive, or people don’t understand, that compulsion to balance is a part of who I am.”
Her ponytail needed to be exactly at the center of the top of her head. The campfire needed to be made out of a perfect ring of rocks. Nico needed a certain harmony in the group. She needed the world to balance, and she’d spend her entire life making it equal. It was the only way she’d ever know peace, she thinks.
In the end, like everyone else, she was selfish too. If there are no villains in the Tents, there are certainly no heroes in the Grankull.