It was strange, Tadala thought, to see Astel acting in his official capacity as Recorder. The ritual he followed was little more than walking the streets of Foulkrin in the plainest of all his coats, undyed canvas with short sleeves, and reading periodically from a small book bound in white fishskin. She had seen the village headwoman gravely address the air and water and stone before, and blessings laid on houses. She knew the soft expectancy of waiting for the inanimate to answer and the hesitancy before turning away, unsure if they remained silent or if one had not been listening hard enough.
It was strange because Astel himself seemed transformed into some other man, hesitant and a bit fearful. He did not smile or even quirk his cheeks as he read or walked. When people nodded to him, he nodded nervously back, without any awareness of his own dignity or importance.
Tadala had, a little self-consciously, joined a small group of city dwellers who made a point of following the Recorder's route every Marked Day. These were mostly the very elderly, grandmothers and grandfathers who had retired from their family businesses and now spent their days threatening various descendants who refused to eat their vegetables or who persisted in soaking their good clothes by swimming in canals.
This, at least, was what Tadala gathered from the hand gestures and facial expressions of a tall woman with white hair braided against her skull, who firmly took her elbow and refused to let go. She guessed after the cluster of ancestors had followed Astel away from the palace, over a bridge, through several narrow alleys, and by an enormous and intricate water garden, that this woman was perfectly deaf, which was why she didn't seem to notice that Tadala could neither understand her nor respond in the same language.
Elabel was still in Foulkrin, a week after she had arrived. She had spent most of her days closeted with Estel and—when he returned mid-week in a boat that also carried one of the bronze camels—the oldest of the three siblings, Istel. He did not have whatever gift it was that Astel used to make whoever he spoke understand him and Astel was not quite arrogant enough to do it on his brother's behalf, so his and Tadala's communication was limited to a few grave nods. From Estel, she knew that some of these private discussions had to do with a city named Boujac, whose Swordkeeper and Recorder were publicly protesting how the Empress had treated her siblings and who had started issuing weekly demands for their release. From Elabel, she knew that Boujac was the city of the purple men and their mechanical beasts of burden.
Istel frightened Tadala. He was too familiar—his voice and his bearing too much like the spearmen the high chief over the river valley had once sent to her mother's village; his blue eyes and the severe white pattern on his face too much like a woman the headwoman had banished for witchcraft. She was painfully sure that, however little he could understand of what she said, he could see through her and knew that she had no business claiming to be the friend of an Empress.
The friend of Elabel—well, that was something else again. Elabel had unthinkingly painted a whole dossier of important letters green with pond-weed soup during dinner the night before. She always picked up her bowl to eat, and when Astel had started asking questions about the Recorder's library in Diagasar and if she'd found anything useful yet when searching, she'd lost track of where her hands were and let the bowl tip to one side.
It was hard to believe Astel and Istel were brothers. Istel—well, maybe he had been handsome when he was young, she thought, or maybe if you weren't frightened of him, and of course Astel was—
Her tall, white-haired companion elbowed her in the ribs jocundly, and a round of titters went around the group of elderly miscreants. She realized she had been staring intently at Astel's profile as he chanted, and blood rushed to her face. But then—she looked around their grinning faces and sighed. They were all old. They most likely weren't under any illusions about why she was following after the Recorder on a Marked Day.
Foulkrin was much longer and wider than Diagasar, though it had a fraction of the stairs, and the Recorder's path crossed and re-crossed itself. Several times Astel had to climb down into a boat and briskly paddle himself over one of the wider canals. These boats were invariably small and lacquered in white. All of the other traffic of vessels and swimmers paused when they saw him, waiting with still hands and voices until he had moored the boat on the other side and pulled himself onto the pavement. Tadala even thought she saw a few ducks watching him.
At the first of these crossings, Tadala assumed she and the others were done following. A stooped grandfather laughed and tugged at her other elbow as she turned back toward the palace, pointing a bony finger at the canal. A young man, his head a bristle of short dreadlocks, was busily poling his boat up to their side of the water. From the prow another person, taller and thinner than the first, unfolded, and between the two of them they helped each of the elderly spectators into the boat. Tadala was last, and the man with the dreadlocks smiled hugely as he lifted her down from the quay. He was not nearly so handsome as Astel, but she still felt her face get hot.
They proceeded around the city like this, in a slow, gracious leap-frog. At noon, a host of waxed boxes wrapped in cotton squares were produced from inside pockets, under kerchiefs, and beneath jackets. Tadala found herself being offered a myriad of different sorts of smoked fish and flatbreads, while the knot of elders continued ambling forward. Depending on the place where Astel stopped to do his reading, they paused anywhere from a few paces behind him to across a canal. When they were able to get very close, somehow the elders contrived for Tadala to be at the front of the little crowd. Astel did not seem to see her.
This annoyed her, but she supposed she had expected to be annoyed. Estel, of all people, had told her about the Marked Day and the fact that citizens were allowed to watch the Recorder do his work. In retrospect, Tadala was not sure if she had told her this to make sure she would go or had meant to warn her off going. In any case, it wasn't like she had anything else to do today. She missed her garden on the other side of the well very badly. She certainly couldn't tell if Astel wanted her here or not, as he hadn't so much as acknowledged her today. But then—
But then, what was that nonsense about the library? He had made arrangements for her to dine privately with the twins and the parents of one of their new sets of friends the night after the horrible formal dinner, in a grand house that neighbored the palace. It was a kind enough gesture, as far as it went: at least it wasn't so horribly hot, and they weren't trying to impress her with a miasma of dishes all smelling stronger than a midden heap. But—even as she had been sternly assuring herself that Astel had written her off as a viper-tongued inconvenience with a weak stomach—even as the jovial parents' clock had started chiming nine hours of the evening—Astel himself had appeared at the door of their dining room, all smiles and gracious-but-not-excessively-gracious bows. He had escorted the three of them back, conversing most charmingly on any number of topics. Stories of Elabel as a small child were a great favorite, followed by tales of bizarre objects that merchants had brought to the Foulkrin markets. The twins went off with a servant, and Tadala had found herself walking back up to the Recorder's library with him—
Her tall companion elbowed her again, and Tadala realized the elderly social club had started to take their leave of each other, hugging and slapping backs. Her eyes searched for Astel. She found him, again in a small white boat, poling himself away from the small crowd of watchers.
They stood on a high quay that faced one of the outermost walls of the city, wider and of coarser stone than the buildings inside. A particularly deep and murky stretch of water separated them and that ancient surface, dripping with algae and water weeds. Astel had aimed his boat for a half-submerged postern gate, which he yanked open with a snarled piece of rope. Its arch was so low to the water that he lay down in the craft to push himself through. He still held the little white book in one hand, and his face (before it vanished between the rocks) was that of a man intent on finishing a task.
Tadala looked at the old woman, who finally released her elbow. Through a series of emphatic gestures, she was made to understand (she thought) that she was free to follow Astel if she liked, but the rest of them were going home to their tea and their misbehaving grandchildren, and if she wanted some cake that would break her jaw, she ought to come along with them.
That last bit wasn't sure, but Tadala dipped her most graceful bow, bestowing a smile all-round before climbing down the slippery steps to where another, much shabbier boat had been moored next to the Recorder's white one. The water was nearly still, and surely it didn't take that much skill to maneuver a small boat over a short crossing, and in any case she couldn't stand the thought of a dozen of the tall woman's equally-emphatic grandchildren climbing on her and trying to feed her jaw-breaking rock cakes.
And maybe, she thought grimly, when Astel had carried out his duties, she could have a private word with him.
The rope that held the boat was soaked and grimy with age, and it took some struggling to loosen it from the gnarled iron hook jabbed into the rocks. There were two paddles in the bottom of the boat, but she wasn't sure she could manage them both. She only picked up one to push hard away from the side of the canal. The boat lurched and she crouched, panicking, until it stopped rocking. It was a little too wide to manage with just the one paddle, and the nose of the boat wobbled back and forth as she paddled furiously on one side and then the other. She closed her eyes to beg whatever gods lived in Elabel's world to keep any larger boats from coming along, and during that moment, the boat scraped stone.
She yelped; the boat had glided into the wall just to the left of the postern, bouncing away with an ugly clatter. A deep breath, and she had the paddle hooked around the edge of the door. Slowly, carefully, she pulled the boat toward it. She barely remembered to lie down before the lintel stone hit the top of her head; and then she was outside Foulkrin.
The marsh stretched to the horizon in front of her, an unrelenting sheet of water and reeds, apparently empty of people and other dwellings. A glance over her right shoulder showed her the line of cliffs they had descended in the locks.
The forward momentum of the boat carried it into a clump of rushes and cat-tails, where it lodged. Tadala groaned and shoved at the plants with her paddle.
Where had Astel gone? she wondered, pushing the vessel into a narrow channel. On either side rose a massive stand of reeds, so high she couldn't see past the prow. Wasn't his business in the city, anyway—?
The boat lurched, the unused paddle in the bottom cracking against the timbers of the seat. She yelled, almost dropping the paddle she was holding. What the reeds had blocked from her view was that a much deeper channel of the river cut through the marsh, creating a boiling, frothing current that bounced off the masses of waterlogged plant matter. The boat dipped again, then righted itself, heading downstream without Tadala's input.
There was Astel in the small white boat up ahead, expertly using his long paddle to navigate the curving river channel. It bent around the corner of the outside walls, carrying him briefly out of her sight before the current threw her boat forward again.
She considered shouting to him, but that seemed too embarrassing to be survived. This section of the river wasn't that fast, she told herself—at least, the sections that Javath the soldier had paddled them through on their way from Diagasar had seemed far more tumultuous. She would be fine. A bank of reeds rushed up on the boat, and she shoved it fiercely away with the paddle, nearly sending the boat careening into another clump of plants. Oh, this was not pleasant.
Even with all the plants, the water was strangely clear, and she could see any number of fish and strange, jointed creatures like crawfish moving through the water below her. Their shadows danced peculiar gavottes over the shifting mud and sand of the riverbed. She risked a glance up and saw that Astel had stopped his boat in the middle of the river and was standing full height, his book held in front of him, reading aloud. He must have an anchor.
Casting her eyes about desperately—the last thing she wanted to do was ram the two boats together—Tadala caught sight of a wide gap in the reeds ahead of her on the left and paddled furiously for it. She had misjudged but not badly: though the river channel through here was as wide as a dozen boats, the current only ran down the middle third or so. The boat dipped again as it left the rush of water and drifted lazily toward the reeds. Tadala exhaled. When her heartbeat had decreased somewhat, she poked the boat forward, the paddle skimming the mat of plants.
As she drew closer to Astel, she saw that a shadowy line connected the stern of his narrow boat to a pronged shape on the riverbed. The boat, suspended in the middle of the fastest part of the current, slung from side to side and dove up and down on its tether, but Astel kept his balance and kept reading.
Tadala stopped pushing forward for a moment, watching his legs tense and shift as the water shifted and thrashed. She wondered what his legs looked like under his trousers, then scrubbed her face with the heel of her her palm and looked back at the line keeping him in place.
It was odd, but there seemed to be a taller shadow floating in the water next to the line. This darker patch of water made a vertical seam of sorts from the riverbed to an arm's length below the surface. It wavered with the movement of the water, almost like a long weed or bit of rope. Tendrils of dark matter slipped out on either edge of the shadow, then disappeared like a handful of sand thrown into a stiff wind. Tadala frowned. She was still a good few boat's lengths behind Astel, and she doubted he could see the shadow from where he stood.
A branch, from who knew how far upstream, swept by her. It was a huge piece of wood, a dozen smaller protuberances stabbing out from it like the hands of a corpse. A mess of tangled water plants weighed down its lower half, so that nearly the whole of it was submerged. The branch struck Astel's line and then the vertical shadow in the water.
Later Tadala would think over the events of those few seconds and realize that the branch had slid away from view like a person passing through a doorway. But then, just then, it vanished with terrifying abruptness, and—horrifyingly—the line was yanked along with it.
Tadala yelled as the stern of Astel's boat was jerked under the water. He grabbed for his book as he tumbled backward, and the fact that he was holding onto it with both hands made his swimming slow and uncontrolled. The craft's white wooden form was thrashing under the water like a caught fish on a line. Astel, not having seen what happened, was arrowing toward the line, trying to untie it without letting go of the sacred white book. She knew what would happen a half-moment before it did: the boat was yanked through the vertical cut in the water, and Astel, clutching its side, was yanked through with it.
Her body unfolded from where she sat, and she dove into the water before she had had even a moment to think the action through. The water was cold but not shockingly so. The water had looked clearer from above than it proved to be when she was actually submerged in it, and it took another precious moment to orient herself and begin kicking toward the shadow in the water. The current tried to whip her past it, but she saw something solid and grabbed for it—
It was a piece of wood, or something very like wood, wedged in the slit in the water, and the pressure of her hand knocked it free, and both it and she were pulled through into a darker world almost immediately.
The water was suddenly icy and so dirty that it was impossible to see her hands clutched on the piece of wood in front of her. Tadala gasped involuntarily, and the liquid that forced its way past her lips was salty.
The door at the bottom of the well; Elabel's hand pulling her through. The image flashed in her mind before she was kicking upward, desperate to breathe, desperate to see where Astel had gone. Her head broke the surface, the air somehow yet colder than the deathly dark water, and when the water drops had cleared from her ears, the sounds of shouting and creaking and wind blowing and feet stamping and metal clanking came from everywhere. Waves lapped at her face and shoulders, every third or fifth one covering her skull. She squinted—the sky was a solid mass of hard white, and it hurt to look at. There were ships everywhere. She had thought that the ships in Foulkrin were huge, certainly bigger than any she had ever seen, but these were floating palaces, floating cities, with rows on rows of tiny windows lining their sides, hundreds of pieces of white cloth flapping around dozens of masts—
There was no sign of the low walls of the Foulkrin. Dozens or hundreds of wooden docks jutted out into the salty water where she was desperately treading, trying to stretch her neck as long as she could, trying to find the white boat or the huge branch or—please—Astel. Somewhere above her, on the deck of the nearest ship, men were shouting. Its sides rose steeply in front of her, slick and studded with barnacles. Did they see her? Did they see—?
A knot of rope hit the side of her head, and she yelped in pain and went beneath the water for a minute. When she resurfaced, she saw that the rope traced its way up to the railing of that nearest ship. There were three men with pale faces and dark beards leaning over, looking at her, two with their hands on the rope, ready to pull it back in. The third was holding a musket, something she barely recognized having seen in the hands of a few of the furthest-traveled desert men.
Astel, she thought desperately. Well, there was nothing for it, was there? She filled her lungs and screamed. “Astel! ASTEL! I'm here! Where are you?”
A form pushed away the shadow of the boat, and Tadala spared half a thought to be annoyed or—relieved—or—she didn't know what—and then Astel had his arm looped around her and was trying to pull her toward the ship—
“No,” she said. “You don't understand.”
He said something incomprehensible, and she tried again. “Astel, we have to go down—we have to go back through—it's like a door, we have to go through—”
His arm was still tight around her waist, and his face was close to hers, saying something in the language of Foulkrin, his eyes big and his lips tight, and she realized in frustration that he wasn't listening, or couldn't listen—
Tadala pushed away from him, sorting through her brain for words in Elabel's language. “Follow,” she said finally. She took a deep breath and dived—please let the slit not have closed—or her to have moved too far away from it to find it again—what if they were trapped here—she didn't like the look of the men on the ship—
She kicked back, and her foot connected with something solid and soft. Astel was right behind her, then. His hand closed around her calf, then scrabbled to catch hold of the edge of her skirt, as she pushed deeper into the water—
From here, in this dark, dirty harbor, the vertical slit in the water glowed with blue light, the clear water of the marsh-river rushing by on the other side. Tadala bent double, searching for Astel's hand; when she found it, she pulled him through the water to float next to her, until he could see the opening that went back (she hoped) to Foulkrin. He understood almost immediately and took a tighter grip on her hand, his whole body undulating as he swam powerfully back into the river.
They broke the surface of the river almost at the same time, the warmth of the sun painfully welcome. Tadala shook her head, gasping, and began to paddle out of the current. Astel grabbed her ankle again.
“My boat,” she said. “The boat I took to follow you. It was just here.” He stared at her, seeming too shocked still to understand, and she searched her brain again. “Go on wood,” she said finally in Elabel's language. Oh, misery. How was he supposed to understand that? “I come here,” she added helplessly.
But the boat had gone downstream while they had been on the other side, and suddenly she saw that it had run partway aground on another mat of reeds at the edge of the river. “There,” she said, flinging out her hand. Astel turned his head and saw it.
Getting into the boat from the water was a mess; Tadala tried to climb onto the reeds and only succeeded in slipping off and getting a large clot of algae stuck in her hair. Finally, Astel gestured impatiently for her to take hold of the side of the boat while he swam beneath it and pulled himself up on the other side, using Tadala as a counterweight. She wasn't quite heavy enough, and the boat dipped and rocked wildly. Then he took her by the arms and lifted her up as well.
For a long minute, they just sat in the boat, panting. Astel shook his head and tried to speak, but he seemed to have forgotten or have been too exhausted to do the magic that made Tadala understand him, because all that came to her ears were the unadulterated and inscrutable syllables of Foulkrin. She took the paddles from the bottom of the boat, gave him one, and started to push against the reeds with her own. After she had successfully dislodged the boat from the mat, she felt a hand touch her hip; when she turned, Astel was politely holding out his open palm, waiting for the other paddle.
He fit both of them into the oarlocks and rowed them back into the current. She found herself also noticing that his jacket and shirt were so wet that she could watch his chest expand and flex as he pulled the oars and felt profoundly irritated with herself and the whole world.
The river continued over the plain, away from the city to who knew where, but he turned them into a canal that had been dug up against the wall.
The sun had gotten very low in the sky by the time they came upon another postern, this one tall and wide enough to merit its own guard, who was sitting in a small turret by the iron gate. This particular young woman had been whittling some sort of bird out of a bit of wood when Astel banged the gate against the wall. She blinked once at him, once at Tadala, once out at the marsh where they had come from, and then opened the postern for them without asking any questions. Astel continued to row, opening doors and gates for them, until Tadala realized that he'd brought them through a back way into the palace.
He moored the boat near an overhanging tree she thought she recognized; if she was right, the gardens where she had spent the larger part of the first week in Foulkrin were close by.
But now he was looking at her as if he didn't know quite what to say. He folded his hands, opened his mouth, closed it again, and put his hands on his knees.
Maybe the magic would be back in place now. “Has that ever happened to you before?” she asked slowly.
The side of his mouth quirked, and Tadala felt an unexpected and enormous rush of relief. He didn't look normal if he wasn't half-smiling. “No.”
“Has it ever happened to anyone else, that you know?” she went on.
He closed his eyes and shook his head.
“Not here, or anywhere else,” she said, then added tentatively, “in the whole—the whole world?”
“No.”
“We need to tell Elabel,” she said. “She—if anyone will understand this, she will understand it.”
“You've seen something like that—like that rip in the water, before today,” Astel said. It was not a question.
“I have,” Tadala said slowly. “Once. But I can't explain it to you.”
“But you knew what had happened when my boat was pulled down.”
“No,” she said, suddenly feeling tearful. “I guessed—and I was afraid that if I didn't—and anyway I'm sure I was stupid for following you to watch—but I wasn't—but I thought it might—”
She was not exactly sure what happened after that, but suddenly she was very close to Astel, and his face was pressed into her neck, and his hands, which had just gotten done moving her across the boat, were pressed into other soft portions of her person. They were both completely soaked, and her clothes made odd squishing and sucking noises when they stuck alternately to her skin and to his clothes and to his skin. This, she thought dimly, was not objectionable at all. She pushed her nose into the hollow of Astel's collarbone and tentatively let her hands migrate to his back. In spite of the thirty minutes they'd spent in the frigid water, he was very warm from rowing the boat back to the palace. And now he was nibbling on her jaw. That, she thought, he could keep doing approximately forever.
Then he moved his hand again, to a soft portion of her person that was somewhat lower down than previous areas of exploration. This was startling but also very pleasant.
Astel's voice, very close to her ear, asked her if she had something. It was a word she didn't recognize, and in fact she was so focused on what his hand was doing that he had to repeat it before it quite registered in her brain.
“No,” she said. “What's that?”
“Er,” he said. “You know? For, er, planning? So one doesn't, er, find oneself in an interesting position?”
Tadala blinked at him, and a memory of her mother talking to a newly-pregnant auntie and laughing detached itself from somewhere deep in her brain and floated to the surface. Her face warmed.
“I didn't,” she started, then shut her mouth, embarrassed. The truth—that she had been far too distracted to think about how one got an interesting condition underway—suddenly seemed horribly naive. “I didn't,” she began again with dignity, “realize that one could plan for that sort of thing.”
“Oh, surely,” Astel said, rearranging his hands so they were in more neutral locations. She dipped her head away from him, feeling yet more abashed by this sudden shift in intent, but he tilted his head until he could meet her eyes. “It's, ah, generally a good idea,” he went on, more hesitantly, “if one is interested in certain sorts of companionship.”
“I don't have any idea where to get one of those,” Tadala said crossly, wishing he would put his hands back where they had been and feeling even more cross that she couldn't bring herself to ask him to do so.
“I do,” Astel said. “If you would like to know.”
There was a curious mix of hope and wariness in his voice that made Tadala open her eyes all the way. Their faces were so close they could have rubbed noses—though perhaps she shouldn't when he was trying to have a serious conversation. This close, she could see russet and gold lights in his dark irises. Somehow the thing he was asking, without ever really asking it, was both terrifying and wonderful.
She could not quite make her mouth work, but she touched her fingertips to his wrist and nodded.