rainbowfic | Stories beneath the ground

Name:	jkatkina
Story:	Fensirt
Colors:	Skylight 19. Cultural center Amber 1. Earth Glue (“...you'll be ready to take on a new responsibility in your life. Most importantly, you'll want to be the captain of your fate. This feeling of accountability to yourself is vital.”)
Word Count:	2241 (this got long)
Rating:	G
Summary:	Tuanada comes to an unexpected crossroads.

A dust storm had blown in from the desert to scream across the flats. The worst of the storm broke on the city wall, cut its teeth on the bluffs, reduced to moaning winds over the houses and an accumulation of settling grit.

The Rider compound was outside the city. Sandstorms hit it full-force. A great deal of work had, over the years, gone into sandproofing the clay and stone buildings, but sand, like the dusty, metallic tang of the storm itself, got in everywhere anyhow.

To the Rider students, there was a festive air when the wind started picking up the way it had that afternoon. A few hours rest from drills and endurance training was a cause for celebration, no matter how much the participants wanted to be there. It was a foolhardy sentiment: the worst dust storms could last days, which would stretch the patience of even the laziest of them, even if the compound was all connected up by warrens to keep trapped residents from starving during a long one.

The wide, low room served as a multipurpose classroom and shelter for the Rider training grounds and was, like many of the buildings in and around Fensirt, set half into the ground. The earth cooled the air and muffled the noise of the wind. The hearth was blocked up against the storm, though the wind howled hollowly over the chimney far above. It was an atmospheric background to the cadence that one of the pairs of instructors had taken on.

They spoke with the smoothness of long association.

“The stories say it was the burrs, at first. They’ve been a nuisance since bodies first grew fur,” the Rider chuckled in her deep, sonorous voice. “Burrs on your back, burrs in your mane — you can always ask someone to nip them out, but it’s better with fingers, hmm?” Her human partner raised a hand and wriggled her fingers, good-natured. It earned a murmur of a laugh from the audience. “Perfection is a myth,” the Rider added, raising her big blocky head and preening, “and we come as close as may be, but...”

“To call our history a partnership of necessity would be doing a disservice to both sides.” The human picked up the thread of the lesson again, which was one part story, one part lecture. She spoke more softly, her voice strangely light beside her partner’s. “There’s no arguing: Riders are the better built for the desert. Your kin have been perfecting that art for centuries. Humans, we do alright on our own too,” she demurred, earning another low thread of chuckle. “But the best partnerships in our lives create something greater than two already solid wholes.”

“We might have lost ourselves in breeding into something that could build and lift and caulk — and pull out burrs,” the Rider hummed, warm voice falling into the feeling of the lesson, “and they might have settled this place in twice the time, without our stamina and strength. But we came here together, and we’re the better for it. Just like you and your partner will be the better for each others’ skills, strength, and hearts.” She shook her head, rattling her head full of braided blue hair and brass beads.

“The first settlers, they weren’t pairs, not properly,” the human picked up, falling out of the parable and back into the story. “At that point it *was* an alliance of convenience...”

Tuanada crossed his paws in front of himself carefully, feeling a pressure in his chest. The pair at the front, their obvious ease and affection — surely only the most upstanding Rider pairs got chosen to teach the next hopefuls, their presence one part example and one part propaganda, but it still ached. He couldn’t refute a word of it, and he had heard it all before, and his own failure stung.

Qensuna, who had flopped stretched along his side, had begun giving him anxious little glances as his tension had increased. She was no good at guarding her feelings, that one, and that anxiety did her no favours. He put his ears back and houghed at her when she glanced at him one more time, and then regretted it immediately when she looked so alarmed. Poor thing — she was too much the credulous soul, wanting to believe the best of all things and people. Maybe that’s why he’d let her find him and linger as she did: someone needed to look out for her, to temper her expectations with wisdom. She tried so hard with the human trainees, wanted to believe that every last one of them could be a good partner.

He stood up, calmly turned for the stony ramp of a hallway that led to the rest of the training grounds’ outbuildings, ignoring one last startled stare from Qensuna. He was too old to be projecting. He knew better.

The hallway was cool and dark, quiet after the chamber full of flopped bodies. He walked slowly, listening for voices in the rooms that lined the way.

He didn’t expect a great deal of understanding from the teachers, and it felt odd to demur to their judgement — the youngest of them were his own age, should have been his peers. But maybe one of the older pairs, who had seen cases like his, might be able to offer some wisdom. He did not lightly consider leaving the program, but it was getting harder to imagine trying for a second chance was a good idea.

The cloth hangings in the doorways didn’t muffle enough for privacy, in the quiet hallway, even with the storm howling outside. Tuanada stopped and stood at one, indecisive. Voices came from behind.

“Lodging a formal complaint isn’t the end of the world,” a human voice admitted, sounding reluctant. He belonged to one of the teacher-pairs that had ducked out of the storytelling hall earlier.

A voice that Tuanada read as the daemon member of the senior Rider pair rumbled, sounding satisfied. “It isn’t. Fensirt knows we shouldn’t have to put up with her, and the victim’s family are kicking up a fuss that she’s lingering around. He’s in the class, didn’t you know? Forget his kin, he was upset when he noticed her.”

“I didn’t know that.” The human sounded profoundly uncomfortable.

“I don’t imagine he wants to whispered of amongst his peers.”

It was about the Friave child, then. Tuanada had only a general idea of what had happened to render her such a pariah to the Rider compound, and what he did know was pieced together from more than one conflicting story, but he had seen her lurking around the training fields. There was something a little pathetic about the defensive hunch she held whenever she snuck up on the fence, something familiar.

Tuanada became aware that the conversation had paused. Taking his opportunity, he houghed politely, nudged the draperies to announce his presence.

“Come in.”

The two rider pairs were seated around a low table, the humans on cushions and the daemons in lightly padded sitting-boxes, bowls and cups of tea laid out. Nidrili and Tassa, the senior pair, shared a look of sharpness at the intrusion — privacy wasn’t harped on in daemon halls the same way that the humans might be used to, but some of those mores tended to transfer between human and daemon partners. The younger pair, Tontona and Abban, were not quite so in accord. Abban, a young human man with short-cropped dark hair and mahogany skin, had his shoulders up and his face composed, but Tuanada could practically smell the uncertainty wafting from him. Tontona sat like a rock in his sitting-box, mottled blue pelt practically shivering. The tension in the room tingled.

Tuanada padded over, carefully casual, and loafed himself in a spare sitting-box.

“So, what do you think we should do about the Friave child?” Nidrili asked in her sonorous voice, re-settling her forepaws to more perfectly align in front of her. She didn’t expect an actual answer, he was sure: what he wasn’t sure of was if he was being used as a bludgeon against Abban, or if she was obliquely calling him out for having intruded at an awkward moment.

“I think it depends on what you want to get out of the Steward,” Tuanada enunciated carefully, keeping his voice in his throat out of respect. Even so, Tontona looked at him in surprise, and the angle of Nidrili’s ears sharpened. “From what I understand, the foundling is a point of contention within the Friave family as well as without. The fact of her relation to the current Steward is a point of courtesy to his departed father more than a certain thing, and her place in their inheritance line is unclear.” Just then, he was fiercely glad for the gossip Qensuna brought in from the city. He wouldn’t have known half of that without his friend having talked his ear off. He added, slowly, “I expect she’s already a point of stress for the current Steward. Imagine his gratitude if someone else were the one to take on a family problem.”

Nidrili’s ears went back. “That’s not our responsibility. If they can’t keep order in their house, no one should be expected to.”

Tassa put her hand on Nidrili’s blue pelt, a gesture Tuanada wasn’t sure how to interpret. “The Steward knows that the Compound can’t be expected to suffer her presence. If it were any other troublesome child, there might be a question of it, but our responsibility is to our own. Let her family look out for her; she’s not the victim here.”

“Besides,” Nidrili added, “if she is so much of a problem that the Steward can’t handle her, he has recourse.”

“You’d have a child banished?” Abban exclaimed.

Nidrili houghed. “We wouldn’t, but if she keeps making trouble here, the question will be put in front of the council by the aggrieved’s family. It’s only a matter of time.”

Abban still shook his head. “I can’t believe they wouldn’t be able to imagine giving her a second chance. It’s insane.”

Tontona was looking more and more uncomfortable, and suddenly Tuanada felt a fierce gratification for that. He hoped his conscience was biting him; he hoped Nidrili’s was too.

“She’s not our responsibility,” Nidrili was arguing again, the firmness of seniority in her voice. She was putting her foot down, decreeing an end to the conversation. “If it comes down to a choice between protecting our own and humouring a child who has plenty of other prospects, we protect our own. If she is still a child, then so is her victim, and you are saying that just because her relatives are important, no one should be looking out for the child she hurt. There’s no question of it. She is neither helpless, nor innocent, nor ignorant of her crimes. She will stop coming around, or she will face official censure.”

“We’ll handle it,” Tassa added.

Tuanada rolled a murmur in his throat, and pushed himself slowly into an erect sit. “If I may,” he offered.

All eyes in the room turned upon him, then, and he’d only once felt more unwelcome. No matter; he’d come in here to discuss resigning from the class in any case. He nodded low to Nidrili, feeling his heart pound as if he was charging into a run. There was no time to think this through, and besides, he didn’t want to. There was something about the idea, which had sprung fully-formed into his mind, that felt right. “Of course the Council can’t offer official approval of the Friave youngster, not without removing support from the family of her victim. But it may be that there’s a way to resolve this without offering explicit offense to the Steward or tacit approval of her bid to join the Rider ranks. What you need is for her to stop trying to find ways to become a Rider, yes?”

Nidrili was sitting very still and boring into him with her golden eyes, but she offered the barest hough to confirm.

“Then allow me to talk to her. I expect,” he said, realizing as he spoke that it was true, “that what she is looking for is exactly the second chance that she can’t have. If she believes she’s been offered it, I don’t think her desire to join the Rider ranks will persist.”

He could feel the skepticism leveled his direction... but, too, tension had drained somewhat from the air. “And what exactly will you tell her?”

Tuanada shrugged. “I’m not sure yet,” he admitted. “But let me try before you lodge any formal complaint. If I don’t succeed, well.” Letting him take the job on would absolve official channels of responsibility; likewise, personal prerogative on his part would leave no official trail with the Rider leadership. No harm, no foul.

Nidrili and Tassa looked at each other, and then at Tontona and Abban. Then, Nidrili nodded one sharp, decisive nod, sending the beads in her braids to clicking against one another. “Very well. We shall give the issue some time to resolve itself.”

Abban looked vindicated; Tassa’s lined, sun-darkened face had settled into determined lines. Nidrili was staring down Tontona, who looked away. Tuanada wondered what he had gotten himself into.

Well, there was nothing for it, now. He nodded low again, almost a bow, and considered his new responsibility as he stood to leave.

Stories beneath the ground

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