Another Lux
1011–1015
She thought it would be much easier, away from the village where everything, everything rang hollow with Lati’s absence.
She hadn’t counted on how big the world was, how much there was going on. How much she missed having her sister with her in the face of new things, how even Mama sometimes seemed not big enough to hide behind from the stranger things, how annoying Mama could be about keeping her away from other things. She hadn’t thought how much Lati’s absence would chase her, even in new spaces. She hadn’t realized she would feel so much, all the time, never-ending—
It was enough to make her burst, and she did, often. The screams would well up and demand to be let loose, and she had nothing to hold them back. Why bother?
Her fits got them thrown out of more than one inn. Sometimes it drew hushed whispers and staring eyes in marketplaces, and Mama would bodily pick her up and cart her off, or wrap her up tight, or shake her. Sometimes it worked.
It was easier on the ocean, when they sailed the Wind Jewel from village to town to city. When the tears and screams would well up, she could dive into the water and pretend for a moment like maybe she could find Lati if she just dove deep enough. She could never get deep enough, though, since Mama would tie a rope to her belt and pull her up if she thought she was spending too much time down there. The one time she thought she had gotten away, when she used Papa’s fishing knife to cut the rope, Mama dove in after her. She never let her keep the knife when swimming again.
When Mama sold the Wind Jewel was the worst one, though. She did not even notice the moment it happened. Mama had been talking about something boring with a trio of weathered-looking halflings and an old blue man, so Tala had wandered off to the tip of the pier, watching the trading ships coming in and the fishing boats still out on the water. This was a bigger town, maybe three or four times as big as Shepherd’s End, but by this point all the places had begun to blur into each other.
She did notice when the halflings and Mama shook hands, and the halflings got into Papa’s boat and pushed off, away from the dock.
Gasping in outrage—they were stealing the boat!—she started to run after it, fully intending to dive into the water and swim to catch up with those stupid, stupid halflings, and then Mama caught her by the collar and stopped her and explained in only half-heard words that it was supposed to go with them, they’d bought it. When the words soaked into her brain, the screams of outrage escalated into shrieks, into tears, into wordless howls. Her knees gave out and she fell to the ground, unable to keep herself up.
She did not notice Mama swearing and stomping off, pushing her way through the crowds. She did not notice—couldn’t even properly see—the old blue man seated on a coil of rope watching her, her world a haze of swimming reds and grays as she sobbed and screamed harder and harder until her voice ran out of air and capability, heels and head drumming on the wood. He waited until she lay knotted on the dock, too worked up to even breathe properly, much less scream, before he uncorked a small leather flask and splashed some of its contents into her mouth.
The shock of the absolutely foul taste and the burn made her gasp involuntarily, and then the burn creeping down her throat sent her spluttering and gagging. She rolled over, spitting out what she could on the dock. She inhaled, a blessed draught, and her vocal cords tensed to scream again—
—until a sharp blow between her shoulder blades drove the incipient scream out of her throat. She gulped in again and shot the old man a furious look, heaving breaths and too enraged to speak.
“Good, you’re breathing again,” he said, dry. “I’ve had some big sturms and fits in my life, but never found getting so angry that it stops your own body to be of much help for anything.”
Still too stunned to think of words, she shuddered in some breaths, on the edge of weeping again, and he sighed and clucked his tongue. “There you go again, and me without the patience or ability to follow you around and smack you out of a fit any time you stop breathing. Want to know a neat trick, though?”
That caught her attention. Still trying to form something around the lump in her throat, she nodded.
“Stop focusing on yourself for a moment.” He cast about for a minute, then plucked a small pouch from his belt. It clicked and clattered pleasantly as he opened it and took out a handful of carved wooden dice. “Hold these, and look at them close. See how the light catches in the scratches? See how the pips are slightly paler than the rest, the edges of the dice rounded and dark? Feel how they tumble in your hand and sound when they strike another? No sweeter sound, that.” He chuckled. “Though one that has led to the sour jingling of my gold going into someone else’s pocket, often enough. Never mind. Focus on the dice, and do not think of anything else. Even smell them, if you wish—oh, faugh, missy, don’t lick them what is wrong with you!” He wrinkled his nose as she drew the dice close and opened her mouth to smell it better, her tongue darting out just slightly to tap the pointed tip against one of the dice. “Damn yuan-ti, I should have known. Sailed with a snakeman harpooner once. Good arm.”
He paused for a moment, watching her, then smiled. “And look now, see. Because you turn your focus toward something outside of you, it gives your body a chance to recover and your mind a break from all the sturming.”
He was right. Her lungs were still hitching every so often, her belly sore, but her entire torso was no longer one tight, lead-dense knot that wouldn’t untangle. Her face was still hot and felt two sizes bigger than it ought to be, her head swimming from the venom she’d accidentally injected into herself, knees and arms scraped up from the flailing—but she could think again, sort of. At least, the rage no longer felt like a monster that had her body in its clutches, while she watched from a point far inside, a distant observer.
With hot rage gone, exhaustion swept in, filling the crevices as anger seeped away. Her hands closed around the dice and fell listlessly into her lap, and she sat there, staring dully at the tarred-black wood of the dock, worn smooth by thousands of feet over thousands of days.
“And that, that will be the calm after the sturm,” the old man said, nodding knowingly. He looked up as heavy footfalls approached. Mama had come back, and said something, sounding surprised—Tala did not care what. She did not want to see Mama right then, not when she had sold the last little piece that Lati had touched. When Mama sighed, a familiar sound by now, and walked away, she had only a flicker of incipient panic before she squashed it under the gray of exhaustion and stubborn disregard again.
She looked over her shoulder to confirm Mama had gone, a little tremula of disbelief quivering through her that she actually left. The old man was still there, though, still seated on that coil of rope, leaning against a crate. He smiled at her. “She’ll be back. She only went to find some supplies with the money from the sale. I told her I could calm you down, and see.”
That was how she met Nuno.
He was an old friend of Mama’s, retired from the Diamond when the Beast had bitten off his leg below the knee and now retired near his children in the town of Deepshore. Whaling was too hard a life for an older man with an imbalance and a wrecked hip, and few ships would take him on, but she would stop by every time the ship came through port to trade tales. Now without a craft of their own, Mama hired on with ships to cross the seas and track down the beast that had taken Lati. She left Tala behind with Nuno when the ships she was on did not want a child around (most of them, as it turned out). While her mother was away, Tala ran errands for him and took care of chores around the house.
Like most genasi, Nuno deviated from the rest of his family, a hearty lot of half-orcs, halflings and the odd tabaxi that largely did not understand his affinity with water. While the rest of them lived in the stone and earth homes typical of Lux, he lived in a modest wooden hut closer to the harbor, far enough on the outskirts of town to have some peace while still being close enough to the taverns to gamble easily of a night. Nuno’s family were welcoming enough, but wondered audibly at the semi-foundling Nuno had taken on, while Nuno remained unflappable no matter the screaming fits she threw or the sobbing nightmares she woke with. He would wait for a gap in her tantrums, give her a sip of the absolutely foul liquor he always kept with him, and make her go through the focusing exercise, sometimes with whatever was around, sometimes with just her breath. He told her innumerable stories—probably fewer true than not—about his journeys during his whaling and trading days. He had even met Papa, once, when Mama had persuaded Papa to sign on for a run. Papa had not stayed, finding that he missed Shepherd’s End too much (a prospect that made Tala snort and roll her eyes), but Nuno remembered the accuracy of his aim and said that it was something Ixtalan shared with both of her parents—a compliment, or maybe just an observation, that Tala did not know how to receive. He made her go to the Teaching classes in his district of Deepshore by dangling more interesting lessons before her in her off time, like the language of the sea, how to will the water to move at her command, tricks of reading the weather, of lashing lines and steering craft. The lessons stood her well when some ships decided that a thirteen-year-old might be old enough to be a cabin girl, and Mama started taking her along on some of her trips.
She never got to say a proper farewell to him, though. She had assumed, when they found the Beast and killed it, they would return to Deepshore before moving on. It was not so.
For one, the trail of the Beast resurfaced suddenly in the midst of a whaling trip to the north of Lux. Michka and the rest of the crew abandoned their previous prey to pursue it, lured by the tales Michka told of riches swallowed by the Beast. During the days of their pursuit, Ixtalan quivered in the crow’s nest, eyes straining on the horizon to catch sight of the turbulent mass sliding through the waves, the glint of unnatural colors in the water.
The day they drew close enough to see it with bare eyes, Mama locked her into the brig.
Ixtalan spent the next hours screaming and beating on the bars of the cell, hearing cries and the shudders of the ship as it was rocked by blows, sometimes catching a tantalizing glimpse of pink and teal gleamings through the portholes, or sounds that almost felt like words on the edge of comprehension.
When Michka returned to free her, weary, wounded, and triumphant, she faced an adolescent simmering with fury at being denied the vengeance she’d sought for four years. After Nuno’s lessons, she did not lash out at her mother nor erupt in screams, but the journey home to Shepherd’s End was tense and silent—a marked difference from what awaited them when they arrived.
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