And the centaurs.
She flopped onto her belly. At first, Haret had refused to take Abisina, saying that she would “draw centaurs like a bear to bait.” Just that fall, a boy from Vranille had been snatched by the centaurs while getting water. A raiding party had gone after him, returning a few days later with the boy’s broken body and another centaur tail for Vranille’s wall. Abisina would never forget the boy’s sightless stare, his footless ankles. She had to stand by while her mother cleaned the body and buried him in the woods. Violated by centaurs, he was outcast in death and could not be buried in the village’s burial ground. She had assumed the dwarves and centaurs were allies, joined together by their beastliness and hatred of humans. But the way Haret had talked, the dwarves hated the centaurs, too. . . .
How could she think of putting herself at the mercy of a dwarf? Stories of Vrandun, the fourth of the six Vranian villages, haunted her. Cunning dwarves had tunneled underneath the village, bringing down the walls and huts, burying most of the inhabitants alive. Now she was heading out into the wilderness with one of the vile half-men who’d brought about their deaths!
And even if they got to Watersmeet, would her father be there? Would he want to see her?
I have no choice.
Abisina tried to bring back the flame of courage that had fueled her.
And if I go with this dwarf, I will stay close to Mama’s necklace.
She closed her eyes, aware of the emptiness around her neck. The necklace was all she had left of her mother.
She did not sleep much that night—or any of the other nights as they prepared for their journey and waited for winter to release her grip. When sleep did come, purple flames, razor claws, death-dark eyes, and shouts of hate filled Abisina’s dreams.
Days were no better. She couldn’t let Haret see her worry, but trying to appear strong exhausted her. And Haret wanted to “toughen her up.” She woke to him standing over her bed yelling, “Get up, human!” As soon as she was on her feet, he led her to the great room where Hoysta was getting breakfast and made her walk in circles until she was drenched in sweat. Stroking his beard, he would mutter things like, “We have a difficult journey, and you are puny and weak like all of your kind.” With a cold look at Haret, Abisina would pick up her pace.
Hoysta clicked her tongue at Haret when she heard him speak like this to Abisina. “Don’t wear her out!” she reprimanded as she fixed another bowl of her foul soup. “You saw how skinny she was when we first found her. And her journey here through the snow!” Hoysta had explained to Abisina that the closest human village was a four-day journey.
“That’s four
human
days,” Haret had interjected. “A dwarf can do it in two days and a night.”
But Abisina had never remembered anything from those four days, though other memories of her last day in Vranille returned. Did she sleep in the snow? Did she find anything to eat? Did she bother to look? The fact that she still had her feet, not to mention her life, told Abisina that she hadn’t encountered any centaurs. But how had she broken her arm or cut her head?
As Abisina grew stronger, she helped Hoysta with her work. In the far reaches of the cave, Hoysta bred moles, mice, badgers, and rabbits for food and fur. Now Abisina and Hoysta culled the flocks—smoking what seemed like hundreds of moles in a hollow log; knitting silky rabbit fur into hats, mittens, leggings, and under-shirts; piecing various skins into snug sleeping rolls. They baked batch after batch of flatbread made of root flour, and they mended cloaks—including the one Abisina was wearing when Haret found her. Hoysta chewed leather to a supple softness to make Abisina a new pair of boots.
Abisina saw plenty of evidence of the “dirty and repugnant” dwarf habits she had heard so much of in Vranille. It was hard for her to watch Hoysta’s warty hands immersed in root flour or her filthy fingers straining pans of badgers’ milk. The voices of the Elders rang through her head: The foul mud-dwellers wallow in their own filth, hiding their ugliness in the ground. It was true that their food tasted of mud, each bite gritty on her teeth; Hoysta’s hands and face were black with dirt; and Abisina had watched both Haret and Hoysta rub their hands in an urn of dirt before eating.
But after a few weeks, Abisina could not deny that she had more flesh on her bones than she ever did in Vranille, and she was getting stronger. The Elders would not have given the widows half this much food, to say nothing of the outcasts. And the Elders had seen Abisina herself as no better than a dwarf—hadn’t the villagers called her “dwarf-dirty” for as long as she could remember? And eventually, Abisina realized that Hoysta and Haret’s skin was not as dirty as she thought; it was darker. Like
hers
. And they weren’t washing in that urn of earth before eating; they were thanking the Earth for the gift of roots and animals that sustained them.
But Abisina still avoided Hoysta’s comforting pats and pulled away from her frequent hugs. She told herself it was because of the dwarf’s musty odor, but she knew she was lying, and her conscience pricked her.
Hoysta healed and cared for me, while the people of Vranille refused even to touch me,
she berated herself.
Only my mother would have cared more for me
.
There were other things Hoysta did for Abisina that reminded her of her mother—and each memory brought a grief that blotted out other thoughts. Several times the old dwarf tried to get Abisina to drink a cup of cool feverfew tea. “Been through a lot, dearie. Drink this and you’ll feel better,” she said, patting Abisina’s hand. But Abisina couldn’t swallow the bitter infusion. As a small child, before she learned to hide her feelings, Abisina had returned to her hut to weep out the pain of the other children’s taunts and tricks. Sina, too, had comforted her with a cool cup of feverfew tea.
Hoysta’s feverfew did make Abisina feel better, but not in the way Hoysta expected. One day, the old dwarf returned from tending her flocks with a nasty badger bite on one of her fingers. Abisina sat by the fire sewing pelts into a sleeping roll and watched as Hoysta put some cobwebs on the wound to staunch the bleeding before she returned to sewing.
“I’d put some feverfew on that,” Abisina suggested as Hoysta picked up her needle with her injured hand and winced.
“On a badger bite?”
“It’ll bring down the swelling and ease the pain.”
“A tea will do that?” Hoysta said doubtfully.
“Not a tea. A tincture.” Abisina sewed a few stitches and added, “I’ll make one for you, if you like.”
“Where would you learn something like that?”
“I’m the daughter of a healer,” Abisina answered, her chest aching. But later, as she collected the dried feverfew from Hoysta’s herbs, she recalled the bunches hung from the eaves in the hut in Vranille—and she felt the tiniest easing of her pain. Through her, someone would benefit from her mother’s gift.
Abisina enjoyed the work she did with Hoysta. The dwarf’s constant stream of conversation kept her thoughts busy, and through Hoysta’s stories, Abisina began to understand Haret’s intense interest in Watersmeet. Hoysta spoke of the dwarves’ ancestors living in a vast city built into the roots of the Obrun Mountains—the same mountains Sina had mentioned that last night in Vranille. The Obrun City was rich and cultured, complete with palaces and plazas, underground rivers, broad avenues, spacious halls, canals, tier upon tier of dwellings, and libraries.
“Libraries?” Abisina asked incredulously. “Dwarves can
read
?”
“Of course, dearie! Can’t you?”
“Well, yes, but we had to hide that my mother was teaching me. Women aren’t allowed to read in Vranille, and most men can’t either.”
“Women can’t—? Humans!” Hoysta shook her head and gave Abisina a pitying look before resuming her story.
The wealth of the Obrun City came from the Obrium Lode—a vein of the wondrous metal that Sina’s necklace was made of. The Lode ran through the earth right underneath the city, giving it and the mountains their name. “Dwarves never name mountains! We’ve no use for them—poking into the sky.” Hoysta chuckled. “But other creatures do.”
The stories of Obrium astounded Abisina almost as much as the libraries—a metal as flexible as gold but stronger than diamond. According to Hoysta, even a thin sheet could protect the wearer from an axe blow or an arrow shot by a centaur’s longbow. The only known source was the Obrium Lode, and dwarves alone knew how to mine the metal and work it.
Abisina presumed that most of what Hoysta told her about the Obrun City was legend. Dwarves, who now lived in holes in the earth, covered in dirt, used to live in luxury beyond what the Elders enjoyed? But Hoysta spoke with such detail, such reverence, that Abisina got caught up in the stories, just as she got caught up in the fanciful stories of long ago that her mother used to tell.
“You haven’t told me what happened to the city,” she said one day, as they sat by the fire sewing skins into a cloak for Haret.
Hoysta’s face changed; her voice became raspier and lower. “The city was destroyed by the Great Earthquake. Till that time, the Obrun Mountains were nothing but hills. Dwarves and other creatures moved easily over them to the north and the south. Even the Mountains Eternal were smaller. My grandfather spoke of seeing the summit of one of the lower ones!” Hoysta shivered at the thought. “But after the Earthquake, all that changed. The Mountains Eternal shot up into the clouds. And the Obrun Mountains doubled in size. The Obrun City was destroyed. Only a handful made it out. Tried to tunnel back to see if anyone or any part of the city survived, but met a wall of rock that they couldn’t break without their Obrium tools buried behind it. Couldn’t find a way to cross the mountains either. Wanted to see if there were any other Obrun dwarves who had made it out on the northern side. Heard they did. Somehow the word ‘Watersmeet’ reached them. They began to believe that this was where the survivors had fled to. But they gave up trying to cross. Had to. Set up their own communities. Mixed with the woodsy dwarves living south of the mountains.
“So much lost!” Hoysta lamented. “Riches, know-how, city-building. Most of the dwarves think it’s a legend, a tale to tell the young by the fire of an evening. But my son and his bride, Haret’s parents, believed the stories. And my father, and his mother.” Hoysta sighed. “Went off to find the Mines, all of them. Obriumlust, it’s called, this maddening desire to dig for the metal. Done all I can to hammer it out of Haret. Won’t lose another! Then you came—with Obrium and the word ‘Watersmeet’ on your lips—and the madness is building in him.”
Abisina thought of Haret pacing the great room after supper—and the sound of his feet tramping, tramping as she lay awake on her cot.
Hoysta plucked her needle out of a pelt in agitation. “I was beginning to think Watersmeet was a legend myself, till we met you. But now the Mines pull Haret like a lodestone—like they pulled his parents.” She looked up at Abisina. “All these years, we’ve searched. Can anything be worth the suffering?”
As time passed, the cave became more and more suffocating to Abisina—the air stale, hot, and heavy with the smell of smoked mole. With no sunrise or sunset, she lost track of day and night. She longed for one breath of fresh air. And finally, she got her wish.
Hoysta had just finished untying her arm, carefully flexing the elbow to work out the stiffness. Then she led Abisina to the tunnel at the far end of the main room—the way out! A heavy curtain of animal pelts covered the tunnel to keep the warm air of the room from escaping. Abisina had longed to lift it and breathe the fresher air of the tunnel, but the first time she put out a hand to the curtain, Haret’s bellow told her that he was sure she would run away if given the chance.
Now Hoysta, torch in one hand, basket in the other, told Abisina to pull it back. “We’re off to collect some roots!” she said with a grin.
Abisina stepped into the tunnel and drew in her first breath of fresh air in months. She followed Hoysta up the steep incline, brushing her head on the low ceiling. Within twenty paces, they came to a fork, and Hoysta went right, onto the steeper of the two pathways. They continued to climb another two hundred paces before the tunnel leveled off and opened into a long, low room. Abisina entered, stooping, and walked into Hoysta, who had stopped and set down the basket.
“Now let’s see.” Hoysta leaned back to survey the roof of the cave.
Abisina twisted her neck to look along the ceiling. In the torchlight, veins of white fretted the dark earth, some more slender than strands of hair. Hoysta reached up and probed the ceiling with her sharp fingernails until she found what she was looking for. She dug farther in, clumps of dirt falling onto her head, and then she pulled something out and held it up to Abisina.
“Supper!” Hoysta held a gnarled white root, caked in soil, between her thumb and forefinger.
“Aren’t we—aren’t we going—out?” Abisina stammered, dread tickling her scalp.
Hoysta shivered. “Out? My, no! This is close enough for me! Give me walls of Earth above, below, and around. Don’t see how Haret stands it, crawling on the surface of things. You don’t mind it, of course, being a creature of the surface. But not me. I was made to be underground.”
“But I must go out! I must see the sun, even for a moment! Please, Hoysta!” Abisina grabbed the dwarf by the shoulders.
“Don’t hurt me!” Hoysta cried.
Startled, Abisina let go. Hoysta’s frightened face reminded Abisina of her own reaction when she realized Haret and Hoysta were dwarves: What are you going to do to me? she had cried. Did she look as terrifying to Hoysta now as Hoysta had looked to her then? What kinds of stories had the dwarves heard about humans?