Éclosion

Shepherd’s End
Spring to Fall, Year 1019

Waiting For the Waves
She runs, for there is no one to tell her to have a care for her arm, with the adults gone and Ava deep in her books. She runs, though her shoulder aches and her wrist sends lances of flame up her arm. She runs, counting each step, the time between the docks and the charred lighthouse. Twenty minutes.

She runs, as the lances of flame shrink to daggers, counting each step, the time between the harbor and the lighthouse. Eighteen minutes.

She runs, as the daggers dwindle to needles. Sixteen minutes.

She runs, the slivers fading to nothing. Thirteen minutes. Twenty-six, counting the return.

She swims out, as close as she dares to the treacherous currents on the knife-edged rocks, and back again. Sometimes she misjudges and returns with lacerations streaking red on her skin, but always she returns.

She sneaks into the obstacle course Kaisi has built himself and adds to it, erecting walls and shaky scaffolds, ropes to climb and boulders to pull, running through it when she thinks Kaisi isn’t around. When she ventures out into the ever-wilder lands around the village, she takes what time she can to roam the forest and cliffs to pit herself against actual wilderness.

When she has a minute, waiting for a meal to cook or the fish to surface within net range, she does push-ups or planks. She jogs everywhere she can, knees high, going from Ava to Esmund to Peach to Aureya to Salinger to Kaisi to Seyfried, harassing them all to put down their books or weapons or tools and get some food in their bellies. (Kibeth she skips for these reminders, seeing no need for them in her case.) She does crunches and stretches as Ava studies late into the night, watching her wordless spiral with worried eyes. More than once she carries Ava to her bed after Shepherd End’s new physicker falls asleep at her desk. On her watch patrol around the village, she never stops moving; even when her shift has her assigned to one place, she squats, or lifts her knees, or finds a rock to lift.

She runs and trains and pushes herself until her muscles burn with exhaustion, collapsing each night into her makeshift pallet at the Wanderlust, waking each morning with the feeling of impending disaster a hanging albatross over her shoulder. The only side benefit is that in the depths of her exhaustion, her sleep is dreamless; if any visit her, they shred upon waking.

Feel It Coming
She chivvies Yevhetsek into waking with her at dawn to run and to swim, moving ahead of him and returning to push him on, merciless until he screams at her and storms off. She gives him a day before she wakes him again.

She leaves Ash to her grief. When Yevhetsek snaps at their stepsister that she isn’t pulling her weight, Xalati tells him flatly not to speak to her that way. When he yells at her that she’s coddling Ash just because she’d also lost her twin, except he wasn’t even a real twin, she cold-cocks him.

He stares at her from the ground, shocked—it’s the first time she’s ever hurt him in anger. She admits to herself that he might have a point; she is being much harder on him. Aloud, she tells him it is necessary.

“Why?!” he yells, climbing to his feet and towering over her. “I barely get any sleep any more! I’m exhausted and starving all the time! We aren’t going anywhere any more, the puddings are gone and we don’t have to kill ourselves before something else does!”

“Do we not?” She finds her gaze being drawn where the sea touches the sky, unerring as a lodestone. “It feels like there is a wave coming. An enormous one. Can you not feel it hanging over us? We are just … waiting for it to fall. And the only thing we can do is get ready, as much as we can, for when it hits us. If we are not as prepared as we can be, it may wash away the rest of us.”

“Then why just me?! Why not Ash! She’s useless right now, maybe some training would actually make her do something! She isn’t the only one who lost a brother here, but she’s the only one who gets treated like it!” His voice wobbles momentarily, but his mouth is hard, his eyes hot.

Xalati hesitates, the answer bubbling to her mind too awful to say without, she senses instinctively, irreparable damage. A cold, mean part of her resents him for sneaking out from the barn on that terrible night. If he hadn’t left, she might have been able to go to the lighthouse with the others. If she’d been there, maybe she could have kept them all together, and not lost Ember or Zakhal. Ember, always witty, able to make them laugh or sometimes groan with his jokes, oddly embarrassed every time he exhibited kindness, which was often. Zakhal, quiet and shy, dreaming on clouds and losing himself in books, not even six feet yet. With Yevhetsek sneaking out, she’d had to go after him to preserve Kibeth’s father from going himself, and ended up losing both Kren and her siblings.

Is that really how it happened? a quiet part of her asks.

“No,” Ash says, watery, and they swing around in surprise, both flushing guiltily at having forgotten her presence. She drags her hand across her nose and says, “Don’t fight. Not because of me. I can’t bear it, after— after everything. And you’re right, Yev, I am useless.”

“Ash—” Xalati starts, and, “I just—” Yev says, and Ash holds up a hand.

“You’re right, and I’m not proud of it, and I don’t think E-Ember—” her voice hitches as she says his name, as it does every time, “would be proud of me either. I’ve got to do something to help out—we still have the little ones to watch out for, and I can’t help them if I’m a u-useless sad sack that dissolves into tears every five minutes. So—” She sniffs, and sighs. “Wake me up tomorrow when you go to run.”

So they start training together, the three eldest, left without even a shared surname among them, and Xalati never says the horrible thoughts that had risen to the surface. They weren’t, she realizes after several days, even correct in the line of causality. It was, as ever, for the best that she had kept her mouth shut.

Natural
She picks up her trusty walking staff-sling and begins to swing it with the intent to hurt an inoffensive tree trunk. She is awkward and clumsy at first, until her arms acclimate to the new movements and her body begins to fold naturally around the arcs of the staff. It takes a day. The glaive, when she frees it from a twisted pile of metal off the train, feels as natural to her hand as the staff. She has to compensate a little for the length and the extra weight at one end, and the blade means she has to be more precise with the angles she swings at, but it only takes a few days for her to work out the differences.

The sword takes longer, a week. When she runs into a wall she can viscerally feel, her body not knowing how to place itself behind her hands, she asks the Verdict for advice, demonstrating the part where her feet get tangled up. She is baffled when he asks who taught her, what training manuals had she read. He blinks when she tells him she’d never even seen a real weapon besides the Sheriff’s until a month ago.

When he mentions that it might be good for more of the villagers to learn something of defense, she goes around and finds those willing and able to start lifting spear or shield or bow, putting together dummy targets and archery rounds and setting times for people to gather and train together under the jaded eye of Vathedrin. She borrows the first few weapons Kibeth makes and puts them to use for dummy practice and sparring, saving the good weapons they found amongst the remains of the train for forms practice.

More people begin to join them in their pre-dawn runs, fewer on their swims. The practical part of her welcomes the company—more people strengthening their bodies against what’s to come can only be good. The quiet part of her misses the solitude of her morning swims, and she begins to wake even earlier, paddling out into the surf before the sun cracks blush across the horizon.

Sometimes, she floats in the deep, calm pocket between the rocks and the cliffs, where the daring jump off to cool down during the summer heat. She stares up at the glimmering stars and listens to her heartbeat and the crashing of the waves farther away, straining to hear her voice, never finding it.

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