One Year Later

No Path, partner or progeny. Jian woke each morning to a day the same as the one before it, but the days ran together in memory. Hope faded.

It was unprecedented, Elder Veila said with a sniff, for anyone to reach the age of sixteen without learning something. Most children had seen a vision of their future Path before they reached their teens, some without even undergoing an isolation trial. Those who did complete the Trial always returned promptly to Elsinoor Village.

No one, Elder Veila admonished, had endured a full year and returned home without news of their Path. And of course, the Elder made no effort to prevent her words from reaching Jian's ears.

"Be patient," Mother had told Jian. "Veila is an old windbag. The Trial is something the Elders thought up, not something Maere Herself asked us to do. The Creator will reveal your Path to you only when you are ready to see it, and not before."

That didn’t make sense to Jian, because she had been ready. Why would the Maere keep her on Trial for a year, through the coldest winter North Isla had ever known, if not to shape her for an exciting and taxing challenge? Why let her suffer through intense sickness and fever dreams alone in the wilderness? She ought to have died rather than return empty-handed, Jian resolved, and knew others in the village thought the same.

Instead, she sat in a circle with Mother and some of the elderly women, learning to sew decorative stitches. Mother's own Path, before she reached her thirteenth year, had encouraged her talent with textiles, and a keen hand for colouring them with home-brewed dyes. Mother's fabrics were the pride of Elsinoor Village, but Jian had long known she wasn't cut out to be a craftsperson. Her fingers dug bitter trenches into the fabric as she copied Mother's neat, precise stitches. This was work for grandmothers whose days of adventure were long past, not for fifteen-year-old girls whose confidence had abruptly taken leave of them.

Because they were faithful people, Jian couldn’t say anything to Mother or her friends about the dread feeling inside when she considered Maere might not have anything in store for her at all. Could it be that rather than having too many futures to choose from, Maere simply couldn't find anything worthwhile for Jian to do? There were no boys she liked, no apprenticeless master for her to learn under, and no late-blooming talents had revealed themselves. A full year had passed since her Trial ended, with no vision from Maere, and no Path. No future. It would be unheard-of, for a child of Elsinoor not to be visited by Maere before entering adulthood, but Jian might be the first.

What, she wondered, would happen if she never received a Path vision? Could such a thing be possible?

"In other places, it happens, I heard," said Mother. "West of Kesmet is a village that fell out of favour with Her. But here in Elsinoor we respect Maere properly, so never worry, my sweet. It is late, but I have faith you will receive your Path. As always, you do things at your own pace."

"But Mother, how could it be any later than this?" Jian would only be fifteen a scant few more days. "I might never see anything."

"That won't happen," Mother promised.

Mother believed, but Jian could not, because Jian was terrified of a life unlike any of the futures she'd dreamed of as a child. What role could she play in Elsinoor, after being rejected by the Goddess Herself? It was so scandalous Jian wanted to crawl back into the cave and lay there, waiting for Maere to step into her dreams, no matter how long it took. Until winter. Or longer, if need be. I'll meditate as much as she wants me to. Jian hadn’t been respectful enough the first time, during her Trial; maybe that was it. Perhaps she hadn’t believed enough. The problem was that Jian knew it wasn’t true. She had believed; she had dedicated herself to her Trial, to receive silence in response.

After nearly a year of silence, of course that belief would begin to waver.

Maybe, Jian hoped, Maere wanted her to come up with a good Path rather than waiting around. After all, some girls knew instinctively where their talents were best suited; they knew what they wanted long before they were visited by a vision. When she put thought to the notion, though, Jian couldn’t come up with a single idea of something she could do for the rest of her life.

There wasn’t anything special at all about her.

It is a person, a boy with striking violet eyes. Jian’s only ever seen one human being before with eyes that colour, and she's one of the most respected people in Elsinoor, because of the colour of her irises. She was touched by the Goddess, they say.

Maere's eyes.

Jian can't help staring, mesmerized. She knows this tender gaze, even knows this face. Out of the depths comes a voice, too; so distant she can't discern the words.

The lids of those luminescent eyes flutter closed, but the open mouth continues to speak. It's as if the words are being smothered, all but one. A word she strains to hear: "Homeland."

"Homeland," Jian repeats.

He is saying something else. Jian knows it to be something vital; perhaps the most important thing she might ever hear in her life. But no matter how she strains, she can't understand the words. The sounds splash over her like waves, garbled, distorted but euphonious, resembling music more than words. Utterances she can't decipher stream out of his mouth, urgently; his voice is a stream approaching the crest of a waterfall, unable to be clawed back.

She knows how important it is that she hear what he's saying, but the words keep falling, until they smash and shatter on the rocks below, and scatter like foamy bracken on the surface of the river.

Kesmet. Of course it would be Kesmet.

Madrigal spat on the ground, tasting blood. He should have known better than to expect help from bigots. For all their devotion, and the talk about forgiveness, at the end of the day the Kesmettans were just as narrow-minded as his own people. He mattered less than a blade of grass or a pesky bug, in their eyes.

It burned him to think he'd pinned his hopes on not just their acceptance, but their approval, of all things. These people were supposed to be different, after all. Better.

It was clear now that they thought so. Or at least they considered themselves better than him.

He hated to give up what little he still had, but Madrigal found himself stuffing his bloodstained cloak into the underbrush, and his gloves soon followed. He couldn't hope to walk into any decent place and find shelter looking as ragged as he did just then. Sleeping rough wasn't out of the question, but there was a tiny village half a day away, and dawn was only just breaking. If he could make it there by midday and recover for a night or two, replenish his supplies, he could set out on the northern road to Land's End before word started getting around.

He only hoped this village, the northernmost settlement on South Isla before Land's End, didn't fancy themselves any friendlier with Kesmet than his own people did.