N. Jemisin - The Awakened Kingdom

Eino’s jaw tightened. He sat back on his knees abruptly. “You at least joined in and didn’t break the spirit of it. That lot, though”—he nodded after the strange women—“were probably retaliation for that little trick I pulled on the Council this afternoon. We’ve danced out here before, many times, and no one ever troubled us.” He shook his head, sobering. “Gods. An actual raid. I must have really pissed them off.”

“What do you mean?” I hunkered forward; he was speaking softly, like he didn’t want the other boys to know, so I did it, too. “What was in that paper thing you made me take into the Raringa?”

“An idea they clearly didn’t want to consider. I’ll tell you later.” He looked around at the other boys, who had withdrawn into knots and were talking quietly to each other now. “Can you send them home? The hunters will be watching the trails, after that.”

“Huh? Oh! Yeah!”

“A moment, then.” Eino got to his feet, taking a deep breath and turning to the other boys. “You weren’t here, friends. If the ones they caught say that you were, you’ll be home safe in your beds in a moment to belie them. There’s no proof; remember that.”

Some of the boys let out relieved sighs. But another one who was tall and older like Eino frowned. “Eino, I can’t do this anymore. If I’d been caught… my mother’s carting business depends on me marrying into Selu-medre’s clan. The scandal—”

“Scandal!” A younger boy made an angry gesture. “You weren’t out here cavorting with foreign women or siring daughters for free, for gods’ sake—”

“Enough.” Eino looked weary and angry and some other stuff besides. “There’ll be time for recriminations later. If you don’t want to come next time, then don’t come. It’ll be some time before I do this again, anyway, to let things cool down.” His expression turned bitter. “I never dreamt they would find something so simple so threatening.”

The older boy frowned, but before he could ask, Eino glanced at me. I looked at the other boys and felt the places in the world where they were supposed to be, the place each called home, and I made little folds to put each of them in those places. (Some of them were surprised! I giggled at them.) After a moment, only me and Eino remained at the top of the terrace. He stared out over Yukur, the edges of his thoughts tasting thick and bitter. “There,” I said. “You want to go now, too? I have to go back to Fahno-enulai’s anyway; I’m staying with her ’til she finds me an enulai.”

He drew back a little at this, then sighed. “Of course you are. But I don’t want to go back yet.” His jaw tightened. “How did you do that?”

“Do what?”

He made an odd gesture with his hand, and I felt it: a tiny wave of the FORCE he had thrown during the dance. “I’ve never been able to do that before.”

I shrugged. “I dunno why you didn’t , but you could . Isn’t that what the dance was for?”

He turned his head a little, so I saw how he frowned. “It was just a dance. I found descriptions of it in a book, images of it in an old sphere. Nothing I learned said it was supposed to be magical.”

“Well, it was.” I shrugged. “The moves were not magic by themselves, but you made them magic because you told them to be, and the universe listened. Together you and the dance said stuff like sha ejuviat , and wahek akekkipu .”

Eino twitched. “You’re speaking godwords.”

“Um, yeah! ’Cause I’m a god?” I tried not to roll my eyes. Papa Tempa told me that mortals don’t believe things even when they see them, sometimes, so you had to say stuff that was obvious. Silly mortals. “Oh. Do you need me to tell you what I said in mortal?” I tried to think of how to translate, but mortal words are all wrong for stuff like that.

“No,” he said, slowly, frowning to himself. “I… understood what you said.”

Oh, well then. “So, you were speaking godwords yourself in the dance—just, you know, without godwords. Probably because you’re a demon, too, if you’re related to Fahno-enulai? I dunno. But that’s why the dance was full of magic. You were dancing with a god, and everything we do is magic, and you’re more magic than most mortals, so you danced it, too.” It had been so much fun! I did a little hop, remembering the dance, and stomped the ground once—but only a little, because Yukur didn’t need anybody else messing it up.

He turned to face me, looking troubled. “I know some magic,” he said, slowly. “My grandmother taught me enough to control myself, and to protect myself. But that takes concentration, practice. I’ve never done magic by accident .”

I stopped play-dancing, puzzled. “You didn’t do it by accident. You wanted to hit me, even though we were only play-hitting. You wanted the ground to shatter beneath your feet.”

“That’s it? I want something enough, and it happens?”

“Well, that’s how it works when I do it. But I don’t need the dancing. And I never saw anybody run out of magic before! Maybe because you’re mortal?”

He stared at me without answering for so long that I got bored and started spinning around, humming the boys’ chant.

“I need to know if you’re going to tell my family about this,” he said finally. “Since you’re staying with us.”

I stopped humming, although I kept spinning, because it was fun. “Tell them about what?”

Having become more sophisticated, now I could tell better when mortals were wary or surprised or disbelieving, and he was all three. “About this . Some of the boys they caught will talk.” His jaw flexed. “They’ll have to. Some of them will say that this was my gathering. But like I told the others, without corroboration, it will just be rumor. Rumors can’t—” He paused, then laughed in an angry sort of way. “Well, they can hurt me. But not as much as proof, and they won’t have that.”

“Oh.” I shrugged. “I won’t tell if you don’t want me to. But why aren’t you supposed to be here, if that’s the problem? And why were those women so mean?” I stopped spinning and scowled after them, and wished that bad things would happen to Veiba. My first curse! I didn’t know if it would work, but I sure hoped it would.

Eino shook his head. “They were cruel because that’s what people are, sometimes. And we weren’t supposed to be here because good clan-sons don’t do such things. We stay home where it’s safe. We obey without question. We don’t go out late at night unchaperoned to cavort like barbarians. And we don’t demand, via unsigned proposals slipped unseen into the Council’s ‘new business’ docket, that men be granted again the rights that we justifiably lost centuries ago!”

I was really confused. “Huh?”

Eino sighed and looked around, finding his discarded robes and shaking them out. Some of the other boys had trampled them; he grimaced and brushed ineffectually at the footprints until I willed them all away. He let out a little wry chuckle, then nodded thanks and began to put on the robes in layers: first a long narrow sleeveless sheath of the same stuff as his loose pants, then a simple black robe, then the voluminous, brightly dyed outer robe, which had strange seams and extra lengths of cloth and weird unnecessary leather belts. It was very complicated. I grimaced over at my own discarded robes, disliking them just because of watching him.

“We come to Yukur,” he said, as he got dressed, “because once, a long time ago, a rebellion started here.”

I knew what a rebellion was! A long long time ago, like a whole three hundred years, a godling called Kahl Avenger had tried to do bad things. Everybody was still upset about it. “And everybody is still upset about it.” I was trying to sound wise.