‘I’ve been pretty sometimes.’ Jaer shrugged.
‘Oh. Then the change is not just from Jaer, boy, to Jaer, girl. You change more than that?’
‘Sometimes.’
‘Are you a virgin?’
Jaer flushed, aware of the meaning of the word but unsure of its application. ‘I – don’t know.’
Medlo grimaced. ‘I’m only curious. The boy Jaer from the inn in Candor was appealing. He looked rather like someone I once knew well. Now you look like no one who interests me. Still, I remain curious.’
Jasmine leaned forward with questions of her own. ‘When you change, do you…’ She asked an astonishingly intimate thing.
Jaer flushed deeply. ‘I – don’t know. I suppose I do. Please, I’d rather not talk about it.’
Jasmine cocked her head. ‘Only curious. Don’t worry about it, girl. For the love of the Goddess, it’s nothing to blush about.’
Medlo, as embarrassed as Jaer, changed the subject by asking Jasmine about herself, and this led to a long monologue which both Medlo and Jaer followed with interest, though it was an ordinary enough tale. A girl, born third daughter to a poor family in Lakland, where marriage without a dowry is impossible. A dowry scraped together for one daughter. The farm left to the second. The parents dead before Jasmine could be provided for. Then work as this and that, a little dancing, a little singing, a little acting, a tall young soldier who stayed for almost a winter before he left with the troops. And then a child, Hu’ao, stolen by the Eldest Sister of a Temple of the Goddess.
‘And now you are here,’ said Jaer, ‘and your child is far away.’
‘Yes.’ Tears gathered in her eyes and dropped into the mug of tea which she held. ‘When I return from my quest, if I return, she will have forgotten me.’
‘Please don’t cry.’
‘Oh, I cry or don’t cry. It is better to walk with you than to be sold as a whore-slave in an evil town. The farmwife in Lakland would say it thus: “I come long here, mister, missus, ’thout ary tear, lone as high hawk. Now I sit cosy as mouse in winter nest. Twas cold there, warm here, so natural I thaws a little and t’runs out t’eyes.” ’
Both Jaer and Medlo laughed, and she went on in still broader accents letting them be cheered by the nonsense. At length, Medlo asked Jaer,
‘You are still determined to go east?’
‘I told you on the ship. I showed you the map.’
‘And you took oath.’
‘I did.’
Medlo shook his head, scratched at the dune soil with a grass stalk. ‘I was sent on a quest, too, birdling. It was supposed to be my death, though I was not expected to learn of that. Since this quest is not even yours, we may assume it is not designed for your death, but it might turn out so. Why run after danger when we might as well travel to Orena, where your old friends came from?’
Jaer was stubbornly silent, and Jasmine took up the argument. ‘It is not as though they asked you to go.’ She stared at the quest book and its maps with troubled eyes. It had taken her a year to come from Lak Island to Hynath Town. Now the map showed the River Del winding back eastward toward Lakland, and she thought of the weary miles with loathing.
Medlo went on. ‘Ten years I’ve walked the narrow ways, making music or being silent, speaking this tongue or that. Hiding sometimes. Running often. There were fountains in Methyl-Drossy in the town of Rhees. There were gardens and green lawns and the smell of hay. Though the gardens may have been only a face painted over shame and greed, still I long for the lawns of Rhees. Do you know what I am saying?’
Jaer nodded, spoke past a painful lump in her throat. ‘I long for the steps of the tower, warm in the sun, where we sat early in the morning.’
‘But you will not seek a place of safety where there may be sun-warmed stones and the feel of peace?’
‘No,’ said Jaer. ‘I will not.’
Jasmine murmured, ‘Let come as comes. Nor morn nor dark but comes as comes. ’Twilln’t hasten f’thee.’
‘Oh, Powers.’ Medlo heaved himself to his feel. ‘If we may not have reason, we may as well walk as talk.’ And he led them away down the coast toward the mouth of the River Del.
Two days later they passed the Separated village of Delmoth at a safe distance, stopping only to purchase water from a guarded well where it cost them too much to fill their flasks. Jasmine carried two, a battered old one of metal and a larger skin bag, but she filled only the skin bag at the well, cursing the robed water seller as she did so.
‘Did you make the water? Did you put it in the earth? To charge such prices for the bounty of the Goddess is sinful. I don’t think you even dug the well.’ The water seller did not answer, merely leered at them through his eye holes and bit the coins they gave him. Jasmine tried to shake off her ill humour but could not. They were actually turning east, and the miles stretched endlessly before her. She wept beneath the orbansa.
A night or two later, Jaer changed sex in the midst of a strange dream in which a distance voice demanded, ‘Tell me where you are.’ Jasmine shook him awake under the cold moon of autumn, and he clung to her, trembling, then aware of a strangeness between his body and hers. Jasmine grew aware of it, too, and held him not so closely. They slept the rest of the night so, and in the morning Jaer was troubled by the way they looked at him, both with a new kind of tension and forced cheer. Medlo was calling him ‘youngun’ again, instead of ‘birdling.’
Perhaps it had been simply that Nathan and Ephraim had been quite old at the time Jaer was
