Honesty

 

 

NIDANA WAS FOUR years old when she learned what her second-oldest brother’s name meant.

Jedao was nine at the time, still skinny—certainly skinnier than Rodao, the oldest, who was fourteen and tall, and already broad at the shoulders and chest. Jedao and Ro both had to go to school. Nidana couldn’t wait until she was old enough to go to school with them. Ro said that she should enjoy not having to study while she could, but Nidana didn’t see that what Ro did with the slates was all that different from all the games she played on them. Plus he got to go out and play with his friends at school. Ro said that wasn’t what you did at school, which was very confusing.

“‘Honesty’?” Nidana said, tugging at Jedao’s shirt while he was cleaning Mom’s glassware. Nidana knew she was supposed to be careful, so careful, in this room, even more careful when someone was working with the shiny glassware. But she was also curious, and she couldn’t wait. “Why did Mom name you ‘honesty’?”

Jedao’s eyes softened as he put down the beaker so he could ruffle her hair. “Beats me,” he said. “I have always had the sneaking suspicion that she picked names out of one of those adventure novels she likes to read. I haven’t been able to find evidence, though.”

They were speaking in Shparoi, their birth-tongue. Their mother was Shparoi. So was Rodao’s sire, and Jedao’s, although not Nidana’s. Most people realized that Nidana and Jedao were related, because they had inherited their mother’s tilted smile and her eyes. The three of them had learned the high language second, not first. Rodao spoke the high language flawlessly, although he refused to say why it was so important to him, putting Nidana off with, “You’ll find out someday.” But Jedao never would lose the local Shparoi dialect’s drawl.

“I can help,” Nidana said, brightening at the thought of helping one of her brothers with something. She was starting to be able to read without pictures, although pictures were better.

“If you find it, let me know,” Jedao said. He frowned at the beaker. “There’s still a speck on this. You’d better go, Nidana, before Mom decides that you’re old enough to learn how to do this.”

She went.

The next day, she had not found evidence in any of the books she could reach. (She had also narrowly avoided pulling down a bookcase on herself, although she was oblivious to this fact.) But she decided that she could find something else to be helpful with, and set off after Jedao. Like everyone in the heptarchate, she had developed a keen sense of passing time from an early age. She might be able to meet him on the way home from school.

They lived at the edge of town—not even properly a town, Ro had remarked once—and Ro and Jedao hiked to a stop where a flitter picked them up with some other local kids. Jedao had taught Nidana the route over the course of weekends, almost certainly without Mom knowing. Definitely without Ro knowing. Mom wouldn’t have cared—she let all of them explore the surroundings however they pleased—but Ro disapproved of an awful lot of things.

Nidana had a good sense of direction, something else she shared with Jedao, and she knew to wear a jacket and bring water and something to eat. Jedao always made her lunch in the morning because Mom tended to forget. But that meant that she had a rucksack with snacks and meat pastries. (The rucksack also communicated its location to the household computer system at all times, something she wouldn’t learn until she was six. Mom might be terrible at feeding people on time, but she liked making sure no one got lost.)

The day was overcast, but Nidana liked the way the wind nipped at her cheeks and blew strands of her hair free. The hills were so tall. She liked the way the grasses made them mysterious, the occasional startling break of sunlight flinging shadows across her feet. Birds shouted at each other. She wondered if birds told the truth, like her brother was supposed to.

She had come up the hill, where the grasses had worn thin, and heard shouting, voices raised in taunts. The slight figure in a lavender jacket belonged to her brother. He was half-crouched, backing away from two older boys. She couldn’t remember if she was supposed to know their names.

“Jedao!” she called out.

He whirled, caught sight of her, and said the same words Mom had said that night the goose eggs exploded in the incubator. “Nidana, run!” he shouted, just in time for the taller boy to hit him on the back of the head. He staggered but did not go down.

She ran toward Jedao. He said more words. The taller boy swung at him again, but Jedao was prepared this time and snatched up a rock. He didn’t throw it, which was what Nidana would have done (if she had been allowed to throw rocks). He kept it in his fist. His blows were staggeringly quick, even with the added mass. The taller boy managed to get in another blow, then shouted one more taunt before fleeing. His friend said something that Nidana couldn’t quite understand and scurried after him.

“Why don’t they like you?” Nidana said. She was not afraid. Of course she wasn’t afraid of the boys.

“It wasn’t anything they had against me,” Jedao said.

“Then why did you fight them?”

“They said things about Mom.”

Nidana considered that. “Were they nice things?”

Jedao seemed to consider this in his turn. “They were things you have to hit people for.”

“Oh.” Then she saw it again, in a flash, her brother with his quick fists. For the first time she looked at him, wide-eyed, and thought of all the times he had carried her through the house, or combed her hair, or played house with her; thought of what he could do with those hands. She shrank from him.

Jedao set the rock down. Then he knelt and tipped her chin up with his callused fingers. “Listen,” he said. “Listen. I would never hurt anyone I love.”

She would not wonder for many years why, in a sentence otherwise in the high language, he had used the Shparoi word for hurt, which meant moral damage but excluded the physical—“a hurt of the heart’s marrow, not the flesh,” as one of their famed philosophers had said—a distinction that the high language did not make.

 

 

Author’s Note

 

Jedao never did find out what became of Nidana, and I regret that I ran out of time to tell her story. I will say that his suspicions were right and she hightailed it out of the heptarchate after Hellspin.

Incidentally, the Shparoi drawl is—you guessed it—a Texan drawl. I have the damndest time convincing folks that I’m from Texas because I don’t have it myself, aside from saying “y’all”; my parents moved often enough that it didn’t stick.