Read Online The Silences of Home by Caitlin Sweet - Free Book Online Page B

She lay on her bed as the grey light turned to gold, and longed once more for home.
    Nellyn pushed his flatboat, and it did not move. He pushed again, grunting with the effort, and it edged down the bank.
    “There are reasons why we do not take our flatboats out alone.”
    Nellyn straightened and turned. “Wise one,” he said to the woman behind him. The shonyn words felt strange on his tongue. “Please—do not stand here. Return to your stone and sit with the others.”
    She said, “No, tall one. I talk to you now.”
    Water slapped against flatboat wood. Across the river, a lynanyn fell with a muffled splash. Nellyn heard other flatboats, other shonyn pushing them and talking and picking up their poles.
    “Tell me why,” the wise one said. He looked at the river, dappled with low sun and growing shadows.
    “Why . . . ?”
    “Why we do not take our flatboats out alone. Tell me this.”
    Nellyn shifted on the sand. He should be sitting at the wise one’s feet; he should be listening and nodding, wrapped in words. For a moment he yearned for this so keenly that he sucked in his breath, but then he saw his own hut and remembered Lanara’s laughter, and the yearning became a different ache. “We do not take them out alone because they are heavy. It is easier with two.” He answered as he had when he was a child sitting in the Queensfolk teaching tent.
    “Yes, that is one reason. But there is a larger one beneath it. You know this one, also. Remember, Nellyn. Remember that we cannot be strong or good alone.”
    The flatboats had all been launched. He could see them upstream, glistening with spray and the last of the daylight. The full moon was already high in the sky. Nellyn looked at it and did not speak.
We are all alone
, he thought
. Beneath the stories is our own breathing. One breathing only
. He turned back to her to say this, or something else—but she was gone.
    He was still gazing down at her footprints when Lanara touched him lightly on the shoulder.
    “Thinking, I see,” she said as he blinked at her. “You were still here, so I came back down. Is anything wrong?”
    He shook his head. “No. My flatboat is heavy—that is all. That was all. I go—I will go. Now.”
    “Let me help you,” she said, and they bent together with their hands on the wood. He looked at her when he was crouched on the flatboat. She was standing up to her shins in water, smiling. “Come with me,” he said, and felt suddenly breathless, as if he had fallen.
    She said, “Really? Do you . . . ?”
    “Come,” he said, and held out his hand.
    Lanara had never seen such darkness. Luhr’s streets were lit with lanterns at night, and the palace’s tower windows were always bright. On her journey to the Sarhenna River she had set torches outside her tent to frighten away curious desert creatures. And on the Queensship she had slept through the deepest part of the night. Now, sitting cross-legged on Nellyn’s flatboat, she could almost feel the blackness around her. The stars still flickered in the sky and on the river, but the moon had set. River, flatboat, Nellyn, lynanyn, herself: all edges were water, in this darkness. Her eyelids were heavy, but she did not sleep.
    They had not spoken since he had started gathering lynanyn. She listened to his hand brushing the water and the gentle thud of the fruits as he set them on the wood, then his pole, scattering drops as it rose and fell, pulling them slowly back to the shadows of the village.
    The darkness had thinned to dawn when the flatboat ground to a halt on the bank. Neither of them moved. “Lanara,” he said, and she looked up at him through the mist that was rising from the river. “Let us do what you said before. Let us go down the river.”
    She shook her head. “I was joking. Not being serious. Remember?”
    “We do not have to go to the end. Just a small distance. I get you a pole and you can help me—” and he was gone, slipping away along the bank.