Thesil didn't want to talk with me. She trailed behind, her shoes dragging through the dirt and stomping the occasional anthill. When I fell back to walk beside her, she fell back farther. So I walked near Lira and tried not to stare at her face.
Lira said, "I can hear you clomping along. If you have come to walk beside me, stay to my right. Defan does not like people on his other side."
The ass, who strolled along swishing his scrawny tail, didn't look like he cared that I existed one way or another. But Lira must know her guide better than I did. I took up a position beyond her right shoulder.
She said, "Is your friend well?"
I glanced back at Thesil. "Fine. Just thinking."
Lira nodded and walked along serenely, as though everything that could be said already had been.
The lack of interaction annoyed me. I asked, "Were you with the pilgrims for long?"
Lira turned back towards me. "Ten years."
"You must have been very used to it. Amaz trained the donkey for you?"
"Six years ago. As I said."
She didn't make talking to her very easy. I tried, "It must have been difficult for you before then. Did you have trouble moving around?"
"No trouble. They set up the camp the same way, every time. Enough of us are blind that it matters. Amaz insists."
"Does he?"
Lira nodded. "He is a good man."
"He also insisted on our deaths," I said, suddenly unwilling to speak kindly of a man who had strung me from a tree. "He would take your baby from you."
Her expression didn't change. "He is bound to tradition and the good of the people. It is a charming trait, under other circumstances."
"He cut off his nose."
"Would you not sacrifice that much for your health?" Her tilted head was a challenge.
I glared. "No. I'm not unhealthy."
Her mouth pursed. "I see."
She looked ready to disagree with me. I was ready to go walk somewhere else.
She said, "I will pray for you when we reach the mine."
Where was I even supposed to begin with that statement? I settled for the neutral, "What do they mine?"
"Her ore. It is a holy place. Even Amaz will hesitate to make demands there."
I stopped walking. "Her ore?"
"Holy Efra's. The Unknowns' great gift."
"You're leading us to an oracle ore mine?"
Her head tilted. "Yes."
"Why didn't you tell me? We can't!"
"The leaders of such mines are powerful. The cities respect them and do not lightly anger them. And they always need more hands–"
"Thesil will die!"
Lira froze, one hand still resting on her donkey's neck. "Explain."
"Oracle ore is poison to her."
"She need not handle it."
I folded my arms tight over my chest. "That's not good enough. Just breathing it in could kill her."
Lira's mouth was still for a few long minutes. Finally it moved. "There is a town. Between here and there. We will need to stop there to gain permission to work at the mines, in any case. Will that suffice?"
She had said a town, not a camp, though I'd yet to see any permanent structures beyond the reach of the cities. "Do they bring the ore there?"
"I do not know."
I squeezed my eyes shut. That wasn't good enough. Thesil shouldn't go anywhere near an oracle ore mine, not even a town over.
But we were in the desert, far from home and far from help. If we turned around, we might meet Amaz on the road. And we were running out of food. I didn't see that we had a choice.
#
That night, after we made camp and Lira set to cooking dinner, I crouched at Thesil's side and signed to her, "If I told you we were going somewhere where there might be oracle ore, would you want to turn around?"
Thesil looked at me, her eyes dark and level in the firelight. "Are we?"
"Not if you don't want to."
"Where is she leading us?"
"She wanted to lead us to an oracle ore mine. I told her we wouldn't go with her. She's agreed to stop off at a town nearby."
"So what's the problem?"
I squinted at her. "It's nearby. The air is probably full of ore. I'll spend my days high and you'll–"
"Die?"
I nodded.
"We don't even know the way to the city," Thesil said. "I don't want to die of thirst in the desert. The town sounds like our best chance."
I shook my head. "It's too much of a risk."
Thesil leaned towards me. Her face was side-lit by the fire. "Why do you care so much what happens to me?"
"You're my friend. And I saw you in my visions."
Her hands flicked that away before they moved into words. "So? I was cruel to you when we met. I didn't want anything to do with you. I wasn't even useful. Why did you take me with you? Why did you give me a chance to become your friend?"
It was true. She'd been, well, a brat. A burden. I spread my hands, intending to reassure her she had more than proven herself since then. But the signs my fingers made were unintended. And far too true. "I needed someone to take care of."
I didn't expect to say it. The way Thesil jolted upright told me she hadn't expected to see it either. But now that I was signing, signing truth so painful I didn't even watch my own hands, I couldn't stop.
"If I was taking care of you, I was useful. I wasn't thinking about my parents, or never going home, or having to make my own way in the world."
I could see Thesil staring at me from the corner of my eye, but I didn't look. I didn't want to see her face or hands. What she would say.
I signed, "I had to be strong and coordinated and useful or you would starve. It was stupid. Selfish. I needed you to need me. I made you come with me because of it."
My hands fell to clench in my lap. I bowed my head, and my face sweated in the heat radiating off the fire. I had a stuffy nose and damp eyes and my throat hurt.
I shouldn't have said all that. Even if it were true. Especially if it were true.
I wanted to go home. I missed my parents terribly.
A touch on my arm brought me out of myself. I looked up.
Thesil signed, "You are strong."
I stared at her.
Her hands clenched nervously before she went on. "I've never met anyone stronger. You needed to help someone. Fine. I needed help. Without you..." She shook her head.
My fingers trembled. "I don't want you to owe me."
She leaned close to me, her breath the sweet smell of oats and honey. Her lips moved in speech I knew Lira could never hear. "What do you want?"
I couldn't answer. Not with words.
Our lips touched, and they said everything words and signs hadn't.
#
Thesil did not fall down dead the minute we approached the mining town. I found it promising.
The townsfolks' reaction to us was less so.
"Go away," signed the old woman who blocked the gate. A wall of dead and live bushes woven together, their thorns facing outwards, surrounded the town. It stretched some ten feet high. Just the sight of it made my hands feel like bleeding.
A young man with one arm stood next to her. He bobbed his head and said, "She said you ought to go away."
Lira stepped forward. I ignored her and the young man, focusing on the old woman who stood like a stump in the middle of the gap between the thorns. Her skin was dark, darker than the soil the town was built on. Her mouth twisted into a scowl that tugged at her wrinkles like the strings on a puppet. But her eyes were tired and resolute and familiar.
She caught me looking and straightened her neck, standing tall as her bent back allowed. It was still taller than me. "What?" she signed. Nothing in her expression expected an answer.
I led Thesil and Sefi up to her and bowed, my hands over my heart. When I rose, I signed, "Elder. May we please come in and have a drink of water and something to eat? We can do whatever work you need in return. If you don't want us to stay, we'll move on once we replenish our supplies."
Her grayed eyebrows flew upward, but her scowl deepened. "We aren't letting people in," the old woman signed. The set of her jaw told me I would not easily move her.
Thesil stepped up beside me, and her jaw was set, too, jutting out like a stubborn cliff. She signed, with a fluency she hadn't had a month ago, "Who are you to keep us out?"
The old woman glared. Her hands snapped, "I'm Hashida, the leader of the mines. Turn around. Go back to your camps and pray."
My heart jumped into my throat. Hashida. This woman was my grandmother.
It shouldn't have seemed like she'd fallen out of the sky. It shouldn't have felt like being punched in the stomach. Mother had told me Grandmother lived near one of the mines. Working with automas, she'd said. Here she was, exactly where she should be. Yet I could not imagine a more impossible and astonishing meeting.
I'd never thought what I'd do when I came face to face with her. I'd never dreamed we'd stumble over her as easily as tripping over a log. If I'd thought about it at all, I'd expected to work for it, to search and plead and beg until someone finally recognized her name. But looking at this woman, at this proud unwelcoming grandparent, I had the sense people would've known her name wherever I asked.
I knew one thing: she wouldn't recognize the name of any long-lost grandchild. The question was, if I told her who I was, would she care?
"Pray for what?" Thesil signed.
Hashida – Grandmother – scowled. "Haven't you heard?"
"Heard what?"
She stared at us. "You poor blessed souls. Go back into the desert and hope the news never comes to you."
"We'd starve in the desert," Thesil said.
Grandmother's glance was dismissive. "There are worse fates. I promise you."
I stepped forward, interrupting a rude gesture from Thesil. My feet dragged like someone had tied lead weights to them. "Did you send a letter, two years ago, to the perfecta Ferime? At the August City?"
Both she and Thesil stared at me. Hashida's hands moved. "And how would you know that?"
I signed, "I'm your granddaughter."
"Well," she signed, and she stared at me as though I were a unicorn.
We didn't look much like each other. I had her broad nose and thin mouth, but her skin was a few shades lighter than mine and wrinkled with age. Her face was rectangular and strong, nothing like my baby-curved cheeks. I couldn't guess whether our hair would have been the same – she had shaved it all away, leaving gray stubble against her dark skin.
"Mother told me to find you," I signed, when she didn't immediately repudiate me.
"You're Ferime's daughter."
I nodded.
"Who's your father?"
"Perfecta Rarstin Yvostai. His parents were deaf, too." I responded more easily this time. Something in her ash-gray eyes told me the danger of her throwing us into the desert was past.
She looked me up and down, her eyes hungry, then glanced behind me. She signed. "And who is this?"
I felt Thesil's warm pressure against my shoulder.
"She's my girlfriend," I signed. It was the first time I'd ever made the sign in reference to myself. I felt proud and embarrassed and happy at the same time.
"Well," Grandmother signed again. "And her?"
I glanced towards Lira. "She's... a friend. She's pregnant."
Grandmother's chest heaved in an unmistakable sigh. "Come inside, then. I can't turn away my granddaughter and her friends, much less a pregnant woman. My conscience would never forgive me."
I bowed to her, relief swelling my heart. "Thank you, Grandmother."
Another sigh, and we stepped through thorns and into a town readied for war. Naked automas lined the interior of the walls, their articulated wooden hands curled around the hafts of ten-foot-long feather-staves. The feather-staves were entirely wooden, but the feathers that tipped their ends looked no less sharp for it.
The young man was talking in Lira's ear, his mouth bent close enough I couldn't read it. She and the ass paced at his side into the center of the town.
I stopped, staring round at the small army of wooden women.
Grandmother stopped beside me, her curved shoulder at the top of my head. She glanced at the automas and signed, "I keep them guarding the mine, most of the time. But this isn't the time for mining."
I took a deep breath, comforted by the presence of Thesil at my back. "You look ready for an invasion, Grandmother."
"I am. I don't intend to let unrest in the cities take this place from me or mine."
"I don't understand," I signed. "What unrest are you talking about?"
For a second I thought she smiled. But her face was so grim I must have imagined it. "Why, Granddaughter, nothing could panic the perfectas but the return of death-palsy. They say Efra has turned her back on the world."
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