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rainbowfic2019-01-05 05:50 pm
jkatkina) wrote in rainbowfic2019-01-05 05:50 pm
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| Name: | jkatkina |
| Story: | Fensirt |
| Colors: | Skylight 15. Bars on the windows Scarlet 9. Hardships make or break people. |
| Supplies and Styles: | Stain (“Ask your child what he wants for dinner only if he's buying.”) Glue (“You are trying to hold your emotions under control, but a solid case is building for you to express them. You don’t want others to be sticking their noses into your business. You’re quite clear about the boundaries you establish and work hard to keep your personal and business worlds separate and distinct. Nevertheless, you might need to break your own rules today by letting off some pent-up steam.”) |
| Word Count: | 1964 |
| Rating: | G |
| Warnings: | none |
| Notes: | A continuation of an old series of shorts! Find the rest here or in my tags. |
She’d been dreaming of the desert.
Of course, Fensirt was in the desert and of the desert, in its own way, but it was a city first. They didn’t live like they were in a desert: they had fresh, flowing water, they grew gardens, they hid in the bluffs from the endlessness of the sky. She didn’t think of it much anymore, except sometimes to frustrate herself by imagining the whole city full of people who pulled their own cage doors shut. It was all another after in her life. She was one of those people now.
It annoyed her that her dreams hadn’t gotten the message, and even before the last smudge of smoky scrub and sand had faded from her mind’s eye, her brows were furrowed.
“Well, isn’t that a look.”
Her eyes popped open and for a split second she was ready to launch herself out of bed, but it was just Lauren here to wake her. He stood framed in the doorway of her small room, hands on his hips and looking down in amusement. A familiar sight, unthreatening — except that he was teasing her. She wrinkled her nose at him. “I’m up, go away.”
He smiled and backed off. “Breakfast is simmering. Go wash up.”
Lauren, like Iunis, was closer to thirty than twenty. To Kaitan he was properly old, but it was a weird middling old that didn’t quite feel like an older brother or a father. But whether or not he was her official guardian, he came closer to being real family than any other of her so-called family here. It had only been because Lauren was the brother who had enough room for a foundling that she’d had somewhere to stay. From the start, he and his husband Colm had welcomed her with pragmatic good cheer and real warmth. Sometimes she felt so pathetically glad of it her chest would ache with a kind of shame; sometimes it confused her into standoffishness; the worst times, she felt the danger of it, and warned herself that this was just another before. Even so, every morning, they were there.
At breakfast, all three of them seated along the stone edge of the round central hearth eating porridge as the world warmed up, Lauren was peering at her. “Why don’t you come with me today?”
That elicited a more mundane flash of annoyance. Ever since her debacle of a tumble under Pars’s watch, Lauren had seemed to be more interested in keeping her underfoot. She swallowed her mouthful of porridge hurriedly, but Lauren had already gone on.
“There’s a caravan in today, and I’m sure they’d be happy for the extra hands unpacking. I’d be happy for the extra eyes,” he added, and Kaitan felt like that was a low blow, appealing to her ego. “They’re coming back from the big loop. I’m sure they’re not smuggling, but you never know what’s gotten forgotten in a corner, and you know what to watch for.”
Kaitan was a realist; if Lauren really thought there was something going on, he wouldn’t put her on the job, he had real people for that. Maybe her caravan had been on the big loop once upon a time, but she’d just been a kid then. Still, she couldn’t resist the permission to climb around in someone else’s cargo.
“Fine,” she agreed diffidently, and Lauren patted her on the shoulder.
It wasn’t like she didn’t know it was going to be a whole pile of reminders of what it had been like to be part of a caravan, when Lauren had invited her out, but it was getting under her skin all over the place. It was just like red sand that had wedged itself into every nook and cranny of these wagons, grinding in her teeth like it ground their wheels. The sun was hot and clear white in the sky as she hauled boxes with the rest of the hands.
Lauren was in a tent going over rosters with the caravan heads, which meant he’d be gone most of the morning. She’d been right; his usual inspection team had met them at the receiving yards, and she’d been pressed immediately to hauling. The wagons of this train were all full of crates nailed shut, or big round bolts of cloth sewn into protective canvas sheaths to keep the sand and sun out — none of it easy to snoop at, and it left her annoyed.
“Ho, Friave,” one of the other haulers called, peering into the back of a cart. Kaitan trotted over to the husky woman. “Need you for this one,” her summoner said gruffly, and offered a broad pair of hands to help Kaitan up into he back of the cart.
It was one of the family carts with only a long, narrow storage space along one side turned out to be stuffed with tiny, ornate boxes of tea. There was a lip that separated the compartment from the back of the cart, and Kaitan had to practically perch on top of it to paw through the boxes.
“Pass ‘em out, huh?” The hauler told her.
There were a lot of the little boxes, but soon enough she’d cleared out a space for herself to sit in the compartment. The bigger woman came and went, dropping off loads of the little boxes to be checked and counted and returning for more. Between loads Kaitan sat and pawed through the junk of the anonymous cart-owners’ storage space.
Some of the bigger caravans, the ones that did the best trade, encouraged the individual families in their train to do their own business in addition to supporting whatever major goods the caravan as a whole hauled. It was a way to draw families in when a caravan needed new hands, and a way to show status. Who needed to be close-fisted about the bookkeeping when they were doing so well? Kaitan’s caravan, when she had been part of one, had done that.
She’d hated it. It’d meant no one had had the room in their wagon for her when her mother had died. She would have meant less cargo, less to sell. A six-year-old had less value than stupid little boxes of tea. But that was another before, and she firmly told herself, what did it matter? They’d all gotten their comeuppance.
But that didn’t feel good, either. She pulled her knees up to her chest, wriggled further back into the compartment, trying to compress the ache in her chest and pull out more boxes.
Back here, the compartment had been used for personal storage, too, bits and pieces that weren’t important enough to be out all the time. There was a kid in this cart, probably more than one: there was a stash of small clothes, a few carved toys. One of the toys was a little carved hunter daemon, painted in wide blue stripes on top, with bright little pebbles for eyes. It had broken: the long tail had snapped off, leaving a stump and making the toy look like a skinny rider daemon.
The narrow little compartment was dangerously private, and in the dark and the dust, she felt her eyes prickle. She sniffled, tried not to. This could have been hers, a long time ago. The hunters in her caravan had been good to her. She’d spent a lot of nights piled in with their kids, warm and looked-after, just another youngster who needed a place to sleep. She wondered if the hunters with these people looked after their orphans.
“Friave?” Her hauler was back.
Without thinking, Kaitan shoved herself further back into the narrow space, hiding behind the remaining pile of tea. She heard a grunt as the hauler hoisted up to peer into the dim space, and she hoped hard the big woman had been sun-blinded.
“Where’d she...” The missive faded into a grumble, and footsteps tromped away.
Kaitan wanted to melt into the wood of the cart, pull her poncho all the way up to hide in. This was stupid. Why had she even come today? Lauren had just been trying to keep her caged up with meaningless work, and now she was stuck in the back of a cart she didn’t want to be in, weepy over a stupid broken toy. She realized with alarm that she’d been clutching it to her chest, and nearly flung it across the compartment.
Instead she shoved it under the pile of clothes, screwed her face up, scrubbed her eyes, and shoved her way out of the compartment. By the time the porter, at a loss, circled back, Kaitan was stacking the last few boxes of tea on the back lip of the cart. It left them in easy reach.
“You can get them yourself,” she snapped at the mystified woman, and then leapt off the back of the cart. Lauren’s haulers could do the rest of the work. She wasn’t going to put up with this.
When she came home, much later in the day, Lauren was already home. She crept in only reluctantly, coming in down the ladder from the roof and heading to her little room right away. She was dusty and grubby, and could have used a wash, but that would have meant going downstairs and walking past Lauren and Colm. It wasn’t that she was afraid, or even exactly worried they’d be mad. Mad didn’t scare her. But maybe Lauren would be disappointed, or maybe he’d be like Iunis, all exasperation and lack of surprise. She’d spent part of the day regretting running off, justifying it to herself, and then regretting it again; now, she just wanted the day to be forgotten, to pass unnoticed into yesterday.
Her heart sank when Lauren came to knock on her doorway, peek in through the curtain.
“Did you find anything interesting today?” He asked, cheerful enough. Had he not even noticed she’d run off? When she shook her head, tight-lipped, he added, “I brought home the rosters to finish checking tonight, if you’re curious. I know you got a look at the tea at least, I’d love to know if the numbers seem right to you.”
No, he knew. He was studying her, even if his voice was light. Why was he being so nice? It burned shame in her, made her want to wilt into the floor all over again. “I didn’t count them,” she challenged, belligerent. “I left. I ran off.”
Lauren shrugged, and smiled, and rubbed his bald head. “Will you at least come down to eat?”
Kaitan grunted, looking down, feeling herself slowly reddening. He was giving her a chance to paper over today, and she didn’t have an answer. He’d leave in a moment, she was sure, and then she could have the space to decide.
But instead, he spoke again, a little quiet in an apologetic way that amplified her shame. “Not that common to have a caravan from that far south, huh? Thank you for helping as much as you did.”
She felt very small. Kaitan growled and swiped her eyes, hunching up. Lauren patted the doorway, added, “there’s a pot of tea.”
When she crept down the steep stairs, there was, with a cup already set out for her. She took it, curled up to sit against the hearth, and listened to the chatter of the pair of them, and if she wanted to cry again just a little bit, she breathed in the tea steam instead.
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And, oh, I feel for her. I might just be a sucker for stories about kids struggling to get their feet under them, but this was a really nice reintroduction to her struggle and your exploration of Fensirt as a whole.
Thank you for sharing this!
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I'm glad you're still reading and enjoying. You've been such an integral part of getting this world on its feet.
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