Robin Hobb - The Inheritance and Other Stories

Day the 7th of Light and Air

Year the 1st of the Rain Wilds

It took us a full six days to hike downriver to our original settlement. Time in the light and air have restored most of us to our ordinary senses, though all of the children have a more detached air than they used to have. Nor do I think I am alone in my vivid dreams of life in the city. I welcome them now. The land here has changed vastly since the days of the city; once all was solid ground, and the river a silver shining thread. The land was restless in those days, too, and sometimes the river ran milky and acid. Now the trees have taken back the meadows and croplands, but still, I recognize some features of the land. I recognize, too, which trees are good for timber, which leaves make a pleasantly stimulating tea, which reeds can yield both paper and fabric when beaten to thread and pulp, and oh, so many other things. We will survive here. It will not be lush or easy living, but if we accept what the land offers us, it may be enough.

And that is well. I found my tree city mostly deserted. After the disaster that sealed us in the city, most of the folk here gave up all for lost and fled. Of the treasure they collected and mounded on the platform, they took only a pittance. Only a few people remained. Marthi and her husband and her son are among them. Marthi wept with joy at my return.

When I expressed my anger that the others could go on without her, she told me, quite seriously, that they had promised to send back help, and she was quite sure that they would keep their word, as their treasure is still here.

As for me, I found my own treasure. Petrus had remained here, after all. Jathan, stonyhearted man that he is, went on without the boy when Petrus had a last-moment change of heart and declared that he would wait here for his mother to return. I am glad that he did not wait for me in vain.

I was shocked that Marthi and her husband had remained, until she put in my arms her reason. Her child was born, and for his sake, they will dwell here. He is a lithe and lively little thing, but he is as scaled as a snake. In Jamaillia, he would be a freak. The Rain Wilds are where he belongs.

As we all do, now.

I think I was as shocked at the changes in Marthi as she was in the change in me. Around her neck and wrists where she had worn the jewelry from the city, tiny growths have erupted. When she stared at me, I thought it was because she could see how much the city memories had changed my soul. In reality, it was the beginning of feathery scales on my eyelids and round my lips that caught her eye. I have no looking glass, so I cannot say how pronounced they are. And I have only Retyo’s word that the line of scarlet scaling down my spine is more attractive than repellent.

I see the scaling that has begun to show on the children, and in truth, I do not find it abhorrent. Almost all of us who went down into the city bear some sign of it, either a look behind the eyes, or a delicate tracing of scales, or perhaps a line of pebbled flesh along the jaw. The Rain Wilds have marked us as their own, and welcome us home.

My parents both lived through the Great Depression and World War II. My father met my mother when he was stationed near Norwich with the Eighth Air Force. She married him and followed him to the United States. Both of them had known affluence in their lives, and also knew how quickly wealth and easy lives could disappear.

As I grew up, they let me know that education and experiences were to be valued high above material things. These things were the riches that one could not easily be stripped of. And when they died, first my mother and then my father, there was very little in the way of physical goods for any of us to claim. Some photo albums, some books. A rocking chair, a wooden salad bowl, a chiming clock my uncle had made for them. That was my inheritance.

And on the surface, such an inheritance can seem trivial, even pathetic. Unless one recalls that an inheritance isn’t about material wealth, but about the experiences that came with it.

It was in my grandmother’s jewel box. I found it after she died. Perhaps jewel box is too fine a name to give to the plain wooden cask that held so little. There was a silver ring with the stone long prized from the setting, sold to pay family debts no doubt. I wondered why she had not sold it whole. There were two necklaces, one of garnets and another of polished jasper. In the bottom, wrapped in layer upon layer of linen, was the pendant.

It was a lovely carving of a woman’s face. She looked both aristocratic and yet merry, and I recognized in her features some of my own. I wondered which of my female ancestors she was, and why someone had taken such care to make so delicate a carving from such an ugly piece of wood. It was gray and checked with age and weighed unnaturally heavy in my hand as I examined it. The chain it was fixed to was fine silver, however. I thought it might be worn alone if the pendant could be removed. I heard a footstep in the hall outside her bedroom and hastily slipped the chain about my neck. The cameo hung heavy between my breasts, concealed by my blouse. My cousin Tetlia stood suddenly in the doorway. “What do you have there?” she demanded.

“Nothing,” I told her and hastily set the box back on grandmother’s chest.

She quickly came into the room and snatched it up. She opened it and dumped the necklaces into her hand. “Nice,” she said, holding up the jasper one. My heart sank, for I had liked it best of the three. “I’m eldest of the granddaughters,” she pointed out smugly and slipped it over her head. She weighed the garnets in her hand. “And my sister, Coreth, comes next. This for her.” Her lips twisted in a smile as she tossed me the robbed ring. “For you, Cerise. Not much of an inheritance, but she did feed and clothe you for the last two years and kept you in a house that long ago should have come to my father. That is more than she ever did for my sister and me.”

“I lived here with her. I looked after her. When her hands twisted so that she couldn’t use them anymore, I bathed her and dressed her and fed her . . .” My hidden anger pushed the words stiffly out.

Tetlia waved my words away contemptuously. “And we all warned you that you’d get nothing for it. She burned through her own family fortune when she was a girl, Cerise. Everyone knows that if my grandfather had not married her, she’d have starved in the streets. And my father has been good enough to let her live out her life in a house that should have come to him when his father died. Now she’s gone, and the house and land revert to my father. That’s life.” She tossed the plundered casket onto my grandmother’s stripped bed and left the room.

“I loved her,” I said quietly into the stillness. Rage burned bright in me for an instant. It was an old family dispute. Tetlia’s father was the son of Grandfather’s first wife, and the rightful heir to all, as they so constantly reminded me. It counted for nothing with them that my grandmother had raised their father as if he were her own child. It scalded me that Tetlia would claim my grandmother as kin for the sake of being entitled to her jewelry, but deny that I had any right to share the family wealth. For a second I clutched that anger to me. Then, as if I could feel my grandmother’s gentle hand on my shoulder, I let the strength of my just wrath leak away from me. “Useless to argue,” I told myself. In my grandmother’s looking glass I saw the same defeated resignation I had so often seen in her eyes. “It’s not worth fighting for,” she had told me so often. “Scandal and strife serve no purpose. Let it go, Cerise. Let it go.” I looked at the gaping ring in my hand, and then slipped it onto my finger. It fit as if made for me. Somehow, it seemed an appropriate inheritance.