When the sun rose on Gabrielle’s last day in town, she did not cry. She packed her bag with her extra dress, as many candles as she could fit, and three chittering mice. The Kaerents, in off-beat Erillen, had told them not to bring much, as proper clothing and approved possessions would be provided for them at their school, but Gabrielle knew each girl had their secret treasures stashed away on them: promise ribbons, carved walnut shells, metal thimbles and sheep bone needles. For Gabrielle, it was the carving knife given to her by Mother Hall that she kept close, tucked into an inner pocket by her thigh.
Gabrielle would have thought it cruel, the way the Kaerents herded the girls quickly into wagons and away from their parents, but she was grateful for the clean break. If she had been left to linger by Mother Hall, she would have brought back up her accusations and been unable to keep down her hard-swallowed resolve. Given room to spread, the pain and sense of betrayal seeded in her would have bloomed like an infection. Then perhaps their curt parting was suitably surgical.
Gabrielle wondered how many of the boys would try to run away before wagons came for them in a few weeks. Somehow their fate, not yet realized, seemed worse; she grieved more for Roland and his dwindling freedom than she did for the girl sobbing next to her.
What, then, is there to say? For the next few weeks, Gabrielle was in the strange space between purposes and defining environs. No longer her town’s Candlemaiden, not yet a student in a Kaerent school, she ate when she was given food and slept when it was time to sleep. The rest of the girls talked to each other and devised games with acorns and sticks, but Gabrielle kept herself at a distance, as she always had. It helped that her new mice friends were always willing to play with her, and that she was able to send an impression of herself after them as they ran through the fields. Gabrielle always referred to this skill of hers as “stepping out,” but Mother Hall had called it projection and cautioned her to be careful with it. Well, Gabrielle was careful. She never stayed out of her body so long that her limbs were afterwards too stiff to flex about.
It never occurred to her that her periods of rigid posture and glazed eyes unnerved the other girls. And so each day unfurled, much like the day before, and Gabrielle watched it all with a measure of objectivity. Little of note happened as they crossed the countryside, except for one incident, four days before they reached the capital city of Ramos, involving Sellie and a river spirit.
Gabrielle knew most of the girls in the wagon passing well. They had, after all, grown up in the same town. Names for the most part escaped her, but she had a general impression of each one’s character. Which is why the Kaerents’ treatment towards Sellie confused her. Sellie was a sweet girl, a bit quiet, who had always offered Gabrielle and Hall reeds and seaweed and other water plants that she liked to gather. Many candles and wards called for such things, and when Sellie’s younger brother had died of an autumn fever two years past, Gabrielle had been grateful to be able to repay Sellie’s fine offerings by letting the two talk to each other one last time.
Sellie was sweet, but the Kaerents treated her with distrust and hints of revulsion. When they handed out evening rations, they were brusque with her, taking extra care not to accidentally touch her. They tended not to look at her face when they addressed her but were fine staring when her back was turned. Truthfully, Gabrielle wouldn’t have noticed any of this had one of her mice not mentioned it in passing, bumping his nose against hers and sending her the message in tumbling images.
But once pointed out, it was hard to ignore, and Gabrielle couldn’t help but wonder what the poor girl had done to provoke the Kaerents’ ire. It was also a bit strange to Gabrielle to see someone else treated as other, as an outsider, when she herself had grown so accustomed to the role.
The answer came to Gabrielle accidentally, after a disastrous stop at a river.
The river was a bit rough and not a stop Gabrielle would normally choose, but at the time a wash for the girls had been overdue and even the Kaerents had that reedy-thin feel of exhaustion to them. Nobody protested when they stopped the wagons for the day and gestured for the girls to go bathe downstream. Gabrielle had learned from her mice that the Kaerents would be eating the good cheese and cured meat while the girls were gone, and she had asked her three spirit friends to snag a bite for her if they could manage it without being seen.
Now, river spirits aren’t as wild as they used to be, but still, no one with good sense approaches a foreign river without caution. It pleased Gabrielle that most of the girls looked to her before approaching the river, and only entered when she gave them a nod. The river’s spirit wasn’t nearby, and from the traces of itself left in the water, it didn’t seem to be one of particular malice. Still, as Mother Hall had succinctly phrased it, better over-cautious than dead, so Gabrielle did little more than scrub her skin clean at shore and then stand, or rather sit, guard at the edge of the river, a spherical candle mottled blue and brown- called an anchor candle and both time-consuming and tricky to craft- heavy in her hand.
When Sellie came to sit by Gabrielle in her vigil, the Candlemaiden was a bit confused, until Sellie explained, in a soft voice, that she had a fair sense of and a good hand with water spirits, and that she would keep guard with Gabrielle. Gabrielle tilted her head at this and acquiesced; Sellie was, after all, one of Erinlin’s Drowned, with lighter skin that had permanent blue-green splotches like bruises blooming beneath it. The Drowned, though they had no skill at seeing the dead or setting candles, were often able to see and treat with river spirits even when they were incorporeal. It was probably, Gabrielle mused, what made Sellie so good at gathering water plants.
So there the two girls sat as the others splashed in the shallows and took a chance at levity by jumping from stone to stone. They didn’t talk as the others laughed and played, but it was a peaceful quiet that they shared.
Gabrielle wasn’t sure which of them noticed the tendril of awareness first, but both sat up straighter as the sleepy river spirit quested towards the unfamiliar girls.
Friends, Sellie assured the spirit, and Gabrielle added, just passing through.
Offering? The spirit’s voice, if so it could be called, was sleepy and ponderous.
Company, Sellie said, with a soft smile, and music, if you bring me a reed.
The spirit turned its awareness towards Gabrielle, who had been conversing with her distant mice. Gabrielle let her consciousness slip towards the river spirit. Would you like to try some cheese?
By the time the mice had brought Gabrielle their purloined cheese and skittered away to steal more, Sellie had added a small length of river-spirit-cut reed to a set of staggered shepherd’s pipes and begun to play, her whistling music sounding like water over pebbles and summer rain. The other girls, not fully aware of the spirit but somewhat wary, had mostly moved all towards the river banks, loitering on the wide flat rocks while pulling on their pants and frocks or taking a comb to their tangled hair.
Gabrielle fed the river spirit the cheese in crumbles, and the aqueous form it manifested for the offering was a creature somewhere between a flat-headed salamander and a sea lion, with a wide mouth and deep whirling eyes. Gabrielle still wasn’t sure how river spirits ate their offerings; sometimes the food seemed to sit in their translucent bellies, and sometimes it disappeared after their mouth. Mother Hall had spoken of secret coves in a realm apart where river spirits kept all their treasures, and Gabrielle supposed it was possible that’s where some of the offerings went, to be feasted on later in private.
Lost in thought, Gabrielle didn’t hear the Kaerents approaching, though by a stroke of luck the stolen cheese was gone by then. They came with their usual general shouting to hurry up and stop lollygagging, accompanied by the refrain of didn’t they know how fortunate they were to be chosen for a proper Kaerent schooling and couldn’t they show their appreciation by promptly following orders? All this was more or less harmless, until one said you too, freak and grabbed Sellie by the back of her tunic, yanking her away from the water’s edge and jarring her reed music to an abrupt halt.