#warofshallows
## War of Shallows 006: The Infant
"The ones who had come to end your life," Radiv said.
The river moved between them and the far bank as if it had decided not to hear.
Juva waited. She had learned long ago that Radiv survived difficult things by talking around them first. If she pushed, he would make a joke. If she struck him, he would make a better one. So she did neither.
"I was young," he said. "Old enough to understand fear. Too young to understand why everyone was pretending not to feel it."
"Where were you?"
"Sky Roof. Lower court. The one with the painted animals that look more intelligent than the ministers."
Juva almost smiled.
"Ranga had been gone for forty days. Miners had found trouble near the western cuts. A collapse, I think. Or sickness. Nobody told children useful things. They told us to stand straight."
"You were never good at either."
"I was excellent at looking wrongly grateful."
His voice thinned.
The memory came slowly, not as a tale he had prepared, but as something folded away for too long.
Ranga entered Sky Roof without horns, praise-call or armed announcement. He came through the side arch used by riders, dust on his legs and dried mud to his waist. His travelling cloak was torn. One sleeve hung by threads.
In one hand he carried an infant.
That was what Radiv remembered first: the size of her. Not crying. No blood that he could see. Only impossibly small against Ranga's palm, wrapped in miner cloth darkened by water and dirt.
The court went silent in a way courts were not supposed to go silent. Pilas liked formal silence. It showed discipline. This was everyone reaching the same thought and hating it.
Ranga still had his old face then. A broad mouth. Deep-set eyes. Hair bound back with leather. He wore a grey travelling tunic, cracked at the shoulder. Nothing about him looked like Vantack.
He looked tired.
Then one of the elder Pilas saw what he carried.
"My lord," she said, "that child has no knot."
Radiv remembered not understanding the horror in her voice. Infants came from Indev hands already tied into a parent's life, already belonging somewhere. A Pila infant without a knot was not only orphaned.
It was unfinished.
Ranga looked down.
"Her parent died in the western cut."
"Then she is already dying."
"Not yet."
The elder glanced at the others. They had a rule ready. Perhaps they had always had it ready.
"She will suffer," the elder said.
"She is alive."
"For days. Perhaps less."
The infant shifted inside the cloth. One hand, no larger than two of Radiv's fingers, opened and closed against the air.
Radiv stepped forward without meaning to. He had never seen anything so weak. Among Pilas, even weakness usually announced itself with weight.
Ranga saw him.
For a moment the ruler of Pila Land looked at his son as if asking him to leave.
Radiv did not.
Two attendants entered carrying a shallow stone basin. Another brought the thin white knife used to end the pain of infants who could not survive. No one rushed. No one wept. Mercy, among Pilas, was often performed with excellent posture.
Ranga looked from the basin to the knife.
The infant made no sound.
"No," he said.
The elder bowed her head. "There is no other path."
Ranga closed his fingers more carefully around the child.
"Then make one."
#inkstream
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Reposted
#WarOfShallows
## War of Shallows 001: North Eis
On the evening before the Tail Moon, the sky darkened to an electric blue, translucent as glass.
Stars from other worlds remained visible above Pila Land even in daylight, but at this hour they seemed close enough to break loose and fall. Their light gathered in hard, glittering edges. Radiv lay back on the riverbank and studied them with the concentration of someone hoping to be noticed studying them.
He raised one arm.
"North Eis looks bigger today. Almost as big as one of the Tail Moon's bones."
Juva sat beside him on a slab of river rock, trailing the sole of one wooden shoe through the current. The river divided around it.
"Since when are you interested in the sky?"
"Since always."
"That's a very recent always."
Radiv lowered his arm and looked at her. His hair had taken the muted green of the grass behind him, although one dark streak remained above his forehead where he had been lying against the earth.
"I can name more stars than you can count, you ugly lump of Pila."
"Of course you can. Anybody can name stars. Stars are named by idiots and after idiots. You have natural advantages."
Juva's laugh crossed the river. It struck the opposite bank and came back thinner, as if someone hidden among the reeds had joined her.
Radiv watched her laugh with an expression of patient injury. Juva knew that expression. It usually meant he was planning something childish, violent or both.
She turned back to the sky anyway.
North Eis did look larger that evening.
It occupied a pale space beyond the scattered stars, bright but not sharp, like a light seen through layers of frozen water. To Radiv it was another faraway thing he could tame with a name. Juva could not look at it that way. Even from the riverbank she felt a pressure behind its brightness, an immeasurable gathering she had no words for.
Radiv sat up.
"You don't even know which one I mean."
"I know which one."
"Then say its proper name."
"North Eis."
"That's what I said."
"No. You said it like you discovered it."
He rubbed his chin and considered this accusation with great seriousness.
"Perhaps I did. It may have been waiting all this time for someone qualified to notice it."
Juva looked at her brother. He was older than she was and two feet shorter, a fact she considered useful whenever he became pleased with himself.
"You noticed a bright object in a dark sky. Vantack will be proud. We should carve the achievement into Sky Roof."
Radiv's eyes narrowed.
Juva smiled and faced the stars again.
"What?" he asked.
"Nothing."
"You're looking at it strangely."
"I am looking at it."
"That's what strangely means when you do it."
She let the insult pass. Drawing her foot from the river, she watched the last rings travel across the reflected sky.
"Come here," she said.
Radiv glanced at her hands before moving. "Why?"
Juva pointed at North Eis.
"Because you have named it. Now look again."