#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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Comments
"The elder bowed her head. "There is no other path."
Ranga closed his fingers more carefully around the child"
"Then make one."#warofshallows
“They told me that the road I took would lead me to the Sea of Death; and from halfway along I turned back. And ever since, all the paths I have roamed were entangled, and crooked, and forsaken.” #wherefrom