[Closed] Share in Evening’s Cool and Quiet

[Nkemi pezre Nkese]

Evening, 26 Bethas, 2720
The Etoririq’dzwei, the Turga

The smell of fried fish fills the whole of the ship. Nkemi has eaten well and hungrily – eggs and beans in the morning, plenty of bread with all the lentils and vegetables she could stomach at lunch – a glass of juice in the mid afternoon. She is full of sun and as hazy-soft as the sunset with sleep; she is full, too, of pleasant conversations and hours passed with strangers, of things said and unsaid, of silence, of noise, of smiles and frowns.

“I can smell the fish from here,” Fera says with a wide smile, all her teeth gleaming. “I dreamt of this fish our last journey,” she laughs; Poro laughs too, and Nkemi as well.

“We helped in the fishing,” Poro says, cheerfully, rubbing her hands together. “Good entertainment as well.”

“I needed to be sure there be would be enough,” Fera says; her eyes gleam.

“We owe you a debt of gratitude,” Nkemi says, solemn, and they all laugh again.

Alefa is a dark shadow in her hammock, her face turned towards the wall.

Fera and Poro go first; Nkemi lingers at the door. She stops; she turns back.

“Ada’na, do I think correctly that you study at Ire’dzosat?” She asks, thinking of the strength of the girl’s perceptive field.

“Yes,” Alefa sniffles; she sits half up, still tangled in the blanket, looking at Nkemi through bleary-eyes. She straightens up further, finding the straightness in her spine. “Yes,” she says, more firmly. “I am a student there.”

Nkemi smiles. “Then you know well the value of following the motions,” Nkemi says, meeting the younger girl’s eyes. “Will you come and take fish with my friend and I? He visited Ire’dzosat for the first time only a few days ago; we sat together in Iz. I know he would be interested to hear more of the Thul'Amat.”

“My stomach was upset last night,” Alefa says, quietly; her hand tangles in the hammock.

Nkemi inclines her head. “Then come and sit only, and do not eat if you are not hungry. See how the motions feel.”

Alefa comes, down the hallway.

The fish are fresh, and they are many. They are fried whole, dropped large into the boiling oil. In one pan they are coated first in thick red paste, with a smell of peppers and pepper which rises thick into the air and streams out the window. In the other they are plain, but, as Nkemi tells Anetol with a bright-eyed grin, the fish need no ornamentation.

There are many clothes, and syrupy sherbet to drink; there are no knives, no forks or spoons. One reaches through the fried skin to find the tender meat within; some fish are small enough to be eaten by only one, and others large enough for two or even three to share.

“I meditate sometimes In Tseli,” Alefa is saying to Anetol. There is a little crease in her forehead, still, but there is, too, a smile on her lips, and she is digging her hand again into the small fish before her, eating bits of the tender flaky white meat. “You have not gone yet, have you? You must, before you leave Mugroba; there is a grove of petrified trees,” her eyes gleam. “Most are only trunks, of course, but on some there are the shapes of branches – so ancient they have turned to stone.”

Nkemi rises, and makes her way across the room, wiping her hands, to refill her sherbet; her offer to the others is made perhaps too freely, and she balances her glass, Alefa’s, Anetol’s and Keraxa’s in small hands. She fills them up, and picks them up – one, two, three – and frowns down at the forth.

Two small hands take it; a solemn face looks up at her. Jafrela frowns.

“Thank you, ada’na,” Nkemi says with a solemn bow of her head.

Jafrela nods; she follows behind Nkemi, and then cuts in front of her. She sets the glass down before Anetol, and stares up at him; when Nkemi sits again, Jafrela comes to stand beside her, taking her sleeve in one hand.

“Do you like fish?” Jafrela asks Anetol, staring very intently once more. She looks down at his pale hands digging into the skin, and then back up at his face. She pauses; she thinks it over. “I like fish,” Jafrela adds, frowning.

[Tom Cooke]

The Etoririq’dzwei • The Turga

Morning on the 26th of Bethas, 2720

P
etrified trees,” he repeats, trying to find the meaning in the shape of the word. He’s not sure what a petrified tree is like. He knows what Nkemi told him earlier, but he can’t picture it, Alioe turning a tree to stone. Nkemi is taking their empty glasses, clinking windchime-delicate as she balances them against fingers and wrists; he grins up at her, wondering if he should’ve offered to help, but she’s smiling and weaving away.

When the tide’s low in Plugit, sometimes you get stones that look like tree-stumps. They scatter tangles of stone roots through the mud and slush, interconnected, broken and worn down by the water.

It’s hard to separate them from the driftwood and the broken bottles and all the other spitch that winds up out there; nobody much talks about them except to call them the fossils of trees, like the funny fish stones that wash up on Sherry’s sometimes. Once, he and a couple of lads – who were out there to do nothing in particular, of course – caught a mud-stained golly wading through, taking notes.

A whole grove, though, he can’t picture; but then, he couldn’t’ve pictured Iz before, either.

He tears into the warm crackling skin with his fingers, finding himself another bite. “I should like to visit Tseli,” he says. “Nkemi tells me there are also rooms where you can time yourself to the second by falling sand.”

He watches Alefa take another bit of tender white fish. She looks up at him, her brow faintly furrowed, her eyes intent. “Tseli keeps time in many ways,” she says, “in centuries and seconds,” and smiles that small, serious smile. She looks back down at her fish.

It’s one of the small ones; not much meat clings to the bone and cartilage, and she’s worked at it slowly, picking off morsels here and there. His own is larger – and it’s his second fish that evening – but they’ve both opted for the unadorned fish. The benny-rich, hot smell of peppers drew him to the dining room, but the sight of the fish sizzling and dripping red paste in the pan rolled his stomach over.

He wonders if she’ll go for another herself. She was barely eating at all when she came down with Nkemi, but now, she’s picking at the bones as if she expected there to be more on them than there was. He smiles, easing back and wiping off his hands; there’s a pause, and he drinks in the lull of conversation, the soft glow of the lights and the smells, and the breeze that whispers in through the open window over the stove.

When he sets about his fish again, Nkemi is back with three full glasses in her hands. He doesn’t see the little lass until she’s cut past her and squeezed in beside him, reaching to set the cup beside him on a table that comes up nearly to her chest.

She has the same nanabo stern expression on her face; he looks from her to the fish, then back to her. In the corner of his eye, Alefa is smiling down, a faintly embarrassed expression on her face. For all the strength of her field surprised him when Nkemi introduced them, he knows her age – old enough to know she’s not a boch, but not old enough to know she is one.

“I like fish, too,” he agrees, peering thoughtfully down at his own. “I like them so much,” he starts. He glances up at Nkemi, then over at the lass; he doesn’t see her jara anywhere, but he keeps his eye out. “When I was your age, I didn’t want to eat anything but fish. I was a nuisance to the fishermen.”

She has half-slid onto the stool to one side, a small leg folded underneath her. She rests one elbow on the table and props her head up, staring at his fish. “Have you had the red fish? I have had three fish already,” she says gravely. “My name is Jafrela pezre Farai.”

He introduces himself, suppressing more laughter. “Ada’na Jafrela, Anaxi aren’t so good at eating peppers,” he says, and to his surprise, he hears a stifled laugh from his other side.

“Jara has told me so,” she says. “Jara has told me that Anaxi are very strange. Ada’na Nkemi says that you wear funny clothes because you do not remember you are allowed to take them off.”

He raises both his eyebrows at Nkemi.

“She said that some remember,” Jafrela says gravely.

“There are,” he says, “many things Anaxi don’t remember.”

“Have you been to Anaxas, ada’na Nkemi?”

[Nkemi pezre Nkese]

Evening, 26 Bethas, 2720
The Etoririq’dzwei, the Turga

Jafrela’s hand tightens on Nkemi’s sleeve when Anetol starts. There is a moment when she squeezes – and then she lets go, and she shifts herself onto the stool, staring up at Anetol.

Nkemi’s face is very solemn, but her eyes are dancing. She nods at Anetol when he raises his eyebrows at her, standing comfortably behind what she has said, as funny as it is to hear it in Jafrela’s solemn, piping voice.

Alefa’s hand is pressed to her mouth, still, though it does not quite hide her smile; she rises, and goes, and comes back with another fish, this one not much larger than the one before, still not red-coated. She sips at her sherbet, and peels flaky fried skin off the edge of the pale white flesh, nibbling at it.

“I have, ada’na Jafrela,” Nkemi says.

Jafrela nods, and frowns, as if this requires thought as well. “Did you like it?” She asks.

Nkemi’s eyebrows lift. She blinks, and grins at the young girl. “There are many things to like about Anaxas,” she says. “I met many kind people there.”

Nkemi and Keraxa had shared one of the larger fishes, red-coated. Keraxa is working at the head, now; she peels back the skin, and eases out a soft cheek, settling it onto the plate. She turns the head over, sightless fry-crusted eyes looking at nothing in particular, and starts her search for the second. She finds it, and grins, and sets it down. “Ada’na, take one,” she says, cheerfully. “They are all the more tender for the sharing.”

“Domea domea,” Nkemi says, cheerfully; she eats the small cheek.

“Did you eat fish in Anaxas?” Jafrela asks.

“Yes,” Nkemi wipes her hands and smiles at the little girl. “In a city called Old Rose Harbor.” She says it here with the lilting accent of a Mugrobi, stronger here than in Vienda, lilting the word out.

“Jafrela,” her father comes, his eyes wide; his hands are wiped clean, his white clothes still very neat. He comes to the edge of the table; he stops, and takes a half-step back. He bows. “I apologize; I asked my daughter to remain at our table while I was gone.”

Jafrela looks up at him from the stool, then back at Nkemi, and at Anetol.

Alefa is looking up at the human, wide-eyed; she shifts back, ever so slightly back on her stool. Jafrela’s father swallows; his jaw is tight.

Nkemi bows her head, lightly. “She was of great assistance to me,” she says, solemn. “I apologize for leading her to break her promise.”

Jafrela looks up at Nkemi once more, wide-eyed; she twists to look up at her father, still sitting on the edge of the stool. A little pout comes across her face, darkening it like a thunderstorm. She grabs hold of the edge of the table, small hands both holding tight.

“Will you join us?” Nkemi asks. She smiles. “You are both welcome.”

Jafrela’s father blinks; something softens in the set of his shoulders. After a moment, he nods. “Thank you,” he says, half-uncertain. Jafrela squirms off the stool; he sits, and she climbs back onto his lap, comfortable, and returns once more to her solemn contemplation of Anetol.

“He is an Anaxi,” she tells her father in Mugrobi, small childish voice bright. “He likes fish too.”

His face twitches at a smile. “She is telling me you like fish,” he says, glancing up at Anetol; the smile does not quite stick. “I am Afer pez Lijo. My daughter is Jafrela pezre Farai.” There is a weight in his voice on the name Farai.

"I told them my name!" Jafrela protests, indignant. She pouts, but nestles only further into her father's lap.

“You have a lovely daughter,” Keraxa says with a smile. “My own is not much older.” She wipes her hand on her napkin, smearing red against it, and takes a sip of her sherbet. She makes a little face at Jafrela, who stares, solemn and wide-eyed, at her.

[Tom Cooke]

The Etoririq’dzwei • The Turga

Morning on the 26th of Bethas, 2720

A
da’na Keraxa is prying up the delicate skin of the fish’s head, one crusty, red-speckled eye staring upward. He peers down at his own, smaller fish, meeting its beady eye only briefly; it’s hollowed-out from neck to tail, little bones bared, its head still silvery-whole. Beside him, Alefa’s starting tentatively on hers, looking over at Keraxa and Nkemi, her lips pursed. She touches the cheek, then hesitates, then pulls up a bit of skin, then wipes her fingers off on a cloth and takes a sip of sherbet.

He’s smiled at Nkemi’s careful, graceful reply; he doesn’t know he could bear such a question, asked with the expectation of honesty. Thankfully, Jafrela doesn’t ask him.

The mention of the Rose brings another smile to his face, and he opens his mouth to speak when he hears Jafrela’s jara’s tired voice. He’s picking another tidbit off the bones, closer to the tail than the head, and he doesn’t, at first, turn. Nor does he look round, though he hears Alefa’s chair creak beside him.

He waits, wiping off his own fingers and swallowing his fish whole. He thinks he feels a bone, and he clears his throat, straightening.

But Nkemi is smiling, and she’s his host, so he smiles too; he eases back as the natt sits, crisp white in among the riot of colors and patterns. Alefa is looking down at her fish, but she looks up, too, and something like a smile is on her face, though it doesn’t reach her eyes.

He hears Jafrela’s burble of Mugrobi. He hears Anaxi, first, and blinks down at his fish; then – a faint, uncertain smile flickers at his lips. He knows eqi’quqem, at least, fisherman, as you can scarce live and work in the Fords and in the Rose without hearing it. When Jafrela’s jara speaks again, he looks up, finally, and meets the human’s eye.

“Thank you for joining us, ada’xa Afer, ada’na,” he says, laughing at Jafrela’s protests. Nobody’s gotten up and bowed, but he inclines his head and shoulders when he introduces himself.

Ada’xa Afer doesn’t meet his eye for long. It strikes him familiar. In the midst of the brush of all those fields, he feels the absence at his side sharply; he realizes it makes him uncomfortable. After Keraxa, nobody’s spoken.

The smile has petered out. Glancing down at his fish and thinking quickly, he fixes a serious expression on his face to match Jafrela’s; he looks down at her in her jara’s lap and raises an eyebrow. “I,” he says in slow Mugrobi, “like fish.”

It’s Alefa laughs first. It’s more a snort than a laugh; she’s trying to keep her face straight. Keraxa laughs, grinning a broad white grin, and he laughs, and Nkemi laughs.

Even Afer is smiling – a little – in his beard. “Fish,” Jafrela repeats intently, a small frown puckering her face.

“Jafrela,” Afer says, glancing at him.

“Fish,” he repeats. “Fish.”

“Fish!” Jafrela insists.

“Fish.”

“Fish,” she pronounces, slowly.

“Jafrela!”

“Anaxi do not eat the head?” Jafrela asks, fidgeting in jara’s lap, crossing her arms sullenly.

“Anaxi eat the head,” he protests, though he doesn’t say, but I don’t. Then smiles. “Where I come from, there’s a pie – we call it stargazy pie,” he goes on, meeting Jafrela’s intent eyes, “because it’s baked with whole pilchards, and the heads poke up out of the crust, like they’re stargazing.”

He hears a funny noise from Alefa’s direction, and then a clearing of the throat. Her plate is a little further from her than it was moments ago.

Jafrela, to his surprise, giggles. “Ada’xa Ahtoli, you are from a strange place.”

He turns to Nkemi and smiles. “That I am,” he says. Afer is quiet, looking down; Jafrela is peering over at Nkemi and Keraxa’s fish. He looks down at his own, then shifts, pushing his way out of his chair. He’s not so unsteady anymore. “I think I’ve room for another fish. Can I get any of you anything? Ada’na Alefa –”

“No thank you, Mr. Vauquelin.”

“– ada’xa Afer, ada’na Jafrela?” Jafrela is peering at his almost-eaten fish. Thinking of the way they’ve all been sharing, he pushes the plate delicately toward her.

[Nkemi pezre Nkese]

Evening, 26 Bethas, 2720
The Etoririq’dzwei, the Turga

The conversation peters out, after a moment; Nkemi is busy with a tricky piece of fish clinging to the bones, carefully prying it off.

“I like fish,” Anetol says, very slowly and very carefully.

Nkemi knows him well enough to laugh, easily; he is laughing too, when the mood breaks over the table. She does not laugh at Jafrela attempting to teach him the word, saying it quickly first, and then more slowly, sounding out the e, and the q, and the i, as if it will teach Anetol which vowel is which, and how to pronounce the q more smoothly.

Black, says Anetol, or very nearly, and then toward, and then perhaps quarter, although she understands him well all the time.

She does not laugh because of the serious look on Jafrela’s face, at first, although the laughter is there in her chest, warm and easy. Then she does not last because of the sharp pinch on Afer’s face, the tightness around his eyes and the press of his lips as he speaks his daughter’s name.

Nkemi giggles as well, at the description of stargazy pie, making a little face. She likes fish well – very well, although she did not grow up eating them, and the first fish she saw were on a boat like this one, and very much a surprise. But to eat them baked into a pie seems to her peculiarly Anaxi – she is very glad not to have been surprised by a pie with heads sticking out of it in the Seventen barracks. The thought alone makes her giggle more.

“No, thank you, sir,” Afer says before Jafrela can answer.

Jafrela looks up at Anetol. “I eat the heads,” she says, very solemnly.

Anetol eases his plate delicately towards her.

Jafrela’s small hands are digging, expertly into the fish head; she is indiscriminate in her tastes, cheerfully wriggling out the bit of cheek before pulling something crunchy and well-fried from deeper within.

Alefa coughs into her hand, and takes another sip of sherbet.

Keraxa, busy with the head of the fish she is sharing with Nkemi, grins. She has not gone as deep as Jafrela, but their fish is well picked over; neither she or Nkemi has let the fins and other harder parts go to waste.

“Where are you headed, ada’xa?” Nkemi asks with a smile. She nibbles at another piece of fish.

“Holaga, ada’na,” Afer says, looking over and down at her.

Nkemi nods. “For us, Tsaha’ota. The beginning of our journey will too soon end.”

“We’ll pause at Tsaha’ota for a few hours, I think,” Keraxa says with a smile. “I thought of getting up and going to see the town, but it will be very early indeed.”

“Will you ride a camel?” Jafrela asks.

“Yes,” Nkemi says, cheerfully. “Have you ridden a camel, ada’na?”

“Of course,” Jafrela says, scornfully. She nibbles at something else from the rapidly-dwindling head of Anetol’s fish.

Alefa almost giggles again; she contemplates her fish once more, slowly; she takes a bit of bread from the basket in the center of the table instead, tearing at it lightly with her hands and nibbling at it.

“Ada’xa Ahtoli will ride a camel?” Jafrela asks.

“Yes,” Nkemi says, hiding her smile.

Jafrela turns her head to look at Anetol as he returns, solemn. She nods. “Jara and I will ride a camel also,” she informs him. “But not yet.”

“How many more days on the river, ada’xa?” Nkemi asks him with a smile. “I remember well my own journeys, when I was Jafrela’s age.”

“Two on this one,” Afer says, “half a day on the next, ada’na.”

“Three for me,” Alefa says, suddenly. She grimaces; there is a pile of ripped of pieces of bread on her plate, now.

“The same for me,” Keraxa says with a smile. “Do you go to Asha Morais as well, ada’na Alefa?”

“Yes, ada’na” Alefa says, after a moment. She glances up at them all, her gaze half-skipping over Afer, and then back down at the bread and the fish; she wipes her hands clean, and they nestle in her lap.

Keraxa wipes her hands once more, and takes another sip of her sherbet. “I hope we may pass a few more meals together,” she says, lightly. There is the gentle press of a caprise from her soft clairvoyant field to Alefa’s slippery perceptive one, friendly and even.

Alefa looks up at her; she nods, and looks back down at her plate.

[Tom Cooke]

The Etoririq’dzwei • The Turga

Morning on the 26th of Bethas, 2720

T
urning and coming back, he sees the table. Nkemi’s bright, soft voice reaches him through the tangle of conversation; Alefa’s head is still down. Afer is a large shape in white, head and shoulders – slightly bowed – still a good half-foot above the rest of them, Jafrela tiny and pouting in his lap. Though not all of the chairs are matched, the stool’s slightly lower, catti-corner beside Nkemi and his empty seat.

“... Ada’xa Ahtoli,” he hears, muffled, as he works his way round another table.

A light caprise of static mona brushes his field. “Sir,” comes a light voice, a chair politely scooted.

One of Afer’s large hands is in Jafrela’s hair, and then rubbing her shoulder gently.

By the time he’s returned, ada’na Jafrela’s demolished the fish head; he watches her delicately crack a long jaw-bone, fish out more from the dwindling tidbits inside. He settles in with another plate of fish, this time painted deep, rich red, spilling out pepper smells. He catches Alefa’s sideways glance, which lingers on his fish – if it’s a wanting, it’s a queasy sort of wanting, and she returns to shuffling about the pieces of flatbread.

“Oh?” He pauses, a hand hovering over his fish; he smiles at Jafrela, then looks up at her father.

There are windows over the stove and the countertop, giving out on the wide Turga, now glittering with the dying light. He wove past a handful of fields, a precious few glamours; he smiled and inclined his head at a couple of dagkas without fields, one taller than him and one of a height, who bowed back. He caught a lungful of a cool breeze, and looked out to remind himself of the stillness of the horizon.

He’d been on the edge of getting another of the plain fish when a lass sidled up, reaching to plate a red one, and politely sang the red sauce her praises. The breeze picked up, and he caught another lungful of sweet, spicy pepper and onion and decided to take his chances; his stomach didn’t churn.

It doesn’t now, though he pauses. Ada’xa Afer is looking down at Jafrela, still with a tightness in the lines round his eyes. A smile just brushes its way onto his face when he looks up; it doesn’t reach his eyes, and he looks at Nkemi soon enough.

Two and a half days, and more camelback across land. He wonders, thinking of Fen Kierden. He almost asks, but – Afer’s hand is still on Jafrela’s shoulder, and he watches Alefa and Keraxa, listening intently.

He knows enough of maps now to know that Asha Morais is a ways, and all by river. Keraxa’s field is warm against hers. You get used to it, he wants to offer, but it’d be half-hearted; he doesn’t think it’s only the queasy, though the queasy is tangible, at the very least. He tears into his fish, through the crunchy skin and the warm sauce, and busies himself with his first few bites.

“Why are you going to Asha Morais, ada’na?” asks Jafrela, fidgeting. She has exhausted the rest of his fish.

Afer tuts, this time, hand firm on her shoulder. “I am sorry, ada’na,” he says.

He looks curiously at Alefa, who blinks at Afer. There’s a pause. “No,” she says simply, then adds, “ada’xa.” Her eyes wander to Keraxa, who is smiling still. “Family,” she says, shrugging her shoulders slightly, and then reaches for her sherbet.

Jafrela is pouting. She looks up at Afer, fidgets, then looks back at Alefa.

The inside of his mouth stings; he takes a sip of sherbet himself, and then turns. “Would you help me with this fish, ada’na?” he asks, turning his plate so the head’s in Jafrela’s direction.

Jafrela looks at him, then nods firmly. “We are going to Holaga,” she says as she reaches in. “But I liked Pa Olakano very well. Jara says there will be no fish in Holaga.” Afer makes a little tut, glancing at him and then at the fish, then strokes Jafrela’s hair.

“I also have family in Asha Morais,” says Keraxa, smiling, “though my husband and daughter have stayed in Thul Ka this time.” He thinks he can feel a gentle curiosity in her caprise of Alefa, at the edges of his. “I too remember well my journeys, though it has been some time since I have made this one,” she adds, looking at Nkemi with a smile.

[Nkemi pezre Nkese]

Evening, 26 Bethas, 2720
The Etoririq’dzwei, the Turga

Outside the window, fluttering birds swoop through the air, diving down to skim the water and climbing back up to hover in circles once more. Dark shapes glide from a distant tree, snatching invisibly at the air, rising up and down.

The sun sunk not so long ago over the edges of the horizon, scattering pink-gold-red-orange over the clouds and the water both; now all that is left is a deep red glow, and a bright river of stars overhead.

Jafrela has picked clean the head of Anetol’s third fish. Alefa’s plate is a scattering of bread crumbs; she tears the bread into smaller and smaller pieces. Keraxa’s hands are pristine once more, her napkin a smear of bright pepper-red; a little pale sherbet glints in the bottom of her glass. The plates are littered with fish bones and fried bits of skin, and the air smells, still, of frying oil.

Jafrela’s small legs dangle, bare, over the edges of Afer’s lap. She is fighting the fluttering shut of her eyelashes, her small cheek laid against her father’s shoulder. Afer’s arm is wrapped firmly around her, his clean white sleeve holding her close.

“Why?” Jafrela’s bright voice pipes up; her eyes flicker open, and squint at Nkemi.

Nkemi smiles at the little girl; her sandals sit on the floor, and she is cross-legged on her stool. “Serkaih is a special place,” she says, “not only beautiful, but where even the worst of the sandstorms do not reach. This is why it was special to the ancient Mugrobi.”

Jafrela’s eyelids sink closed once more.

”The lantern’s light,” Keraxa smiles. “Isn’t that about Serkaih?” she taps her fingers lightly on the table, and glances at Nkemi, and then at Afela. “I wish I could remember the verse.”

Afela shakes her head. “I am not sure, ada’na.”

Nkemi turns to Anetol, wondering; she smiles at him.

“A wanderer in the dark,” Afer says; his low voice is a rumble in his chest. Jafrela shifts, but her eyes do not open, “counting the grains of sand with blind eyes. Not dawn which breaks in the distance but a lantern’s light; color gleams off endless walls. Beware the fall, the shepherd sighs. An endless journey through endless time.”

Afer goes quiet; he does not look at them, but down at the small head resting against his shoulder.

“Watching waiting winding still,” Keraxa says with a smile. “A lantern’s light a life which to fill. Yes - that’s the one. Thank you, ada’xa.”

“It is recent?” Nkemi asks. She cannot place the words; she feels them like a tickle somewhere she cannot scratch, like a taste she does not recognize.

“The last century or so, I think,” Keraxa says, turning to her. “I’m surprised you don’t know it.”

“Yes,” Nkemi agrees; she sets it aside, in favor of the echo of laughter from the table nearby, the smile on Keraxa’s face, the faint frown in Anetol’s eyebrows, Afela looking squarely at her plate and nowhere else. “It is lovely - it is haunting.”

“It’s a haunting place,” Afela says. “If we are meant to honor the return to the cycle, why surround ourselves with reminders?” She looks at each of them, sharp-eyed; there is the faintest gleam at the edges of them.

“Honor has place for joy and sorrow both,” Nkemi says, softly. She does not look at Anetol. “Grief, too, may be honor.”

Afela looks down once more, thin shoulder as tight as Afer’s. Jafrela shifts; Afer strokes her head, and she settles once more.

“I will take her to rest,” Afer says quietly into the silence. “Thank you, ada’na, ada’na, ada’na, sir.” He rises from the stool, careful; his daughter’s cheek rests on his shoulder.

The room is quieter now, half-empty; Afer is not the only one making his way to the door. He does so with slow, even steps, smooth and careful; Jafrela does not stir, cradled so.

“I should sleep too,” Alefa stands, jarring the table; the plates clatter.

“As should I,” Keraxa stands; she bows to Nkemi and Anetol. “I have enjoyed the running together of our currents; I wish you well.”

Nkemi rises, barefoot; she bows also. “May your waters flow smoothly. And yours,” she smiles at Alefa.

Alefa bows as well. “May Roa bless you both.”

Keraxa walks out with her; they talk, but the sound is swallowed by the quiet room.

Nkemi smiles across the table at Anetol, sitting cross-legged once more. “Tomorrow, Tsaha’ota.” She says, simply.