A Turn of Light by Julie E Czerneda Page B

and forth in straight lines from shoreline to midriver, faster than the eye could see, preoccupied by their own affairs. A heron stalked past as Jenn and Wainn came down the bank, its great yellow eyes alert for careless pollywogs. Other than the clang of Davi’s hammer and the river, the loudest sound came from crickets in the grass. The air smelled of water and growth and decay. With a hint of summerberry.
    Wen Treff stood bent in the shallows, skirt hitched to her thighs, her mass of brown curls dusted with cobwebs and pollen. Her gaze was fixed on something in the water.
    “That’s where she is,” Wainn said breathlessly.
    His voice drew Wen’s attention. Her eyes were gray, almost colorless. Her eyebrows met in a distracted frown that cleared when she saw Wainn. “This is where I am,” she agreed.
    Wen spoke?
    Heart thumping in her chest, Jenn glanced over her shoulder at the Treff house, tensed to rush back and tell the family the news.
    Then, she hesitated.
    Wen’s speech or lack of it wasn’t her business. Didn’t she run to her secret friend in the meadow at every chance? Maybe Wen did the same, in her own way.
    Meanwhile, Wainn had waded into the water, stopping when it reached his knees. “Hello, Wen,” he said happily. “We’re not alone. Jenn Nalynn let me come with her to visit.”
    The pale gaze switched to Jenn. A brow lifted. “Why would she do that?”
    “I’ve a question,” Jenn said carefully. She moved forward until her toes sank into dark bubbly mud. “About toads and princes.”
    Wen, it turned out, possessed the same quality of stillness Wainn could display. For an endless moment, she regarded Jenn. The river eddied around her knees and a curl fell loose over one eye. A fish gulped air near Wainn, as if making a comment. A dragonfly landed on Jenn’s wrist, regarding her with emerald eyes. Just as Jenn began to believe she’d imagined Wen could speak, she did. “I know toads. The only prince I’ve heard of is the one who sent us here. Mother calls him the Fat Old Fool. She writes him a long letter once a year and gives it to Davi, who is supposed to ask your aunt to deliver it. He burns it in his forge instead.”
    “My father calls him Prince Ordo Arselical,” Wainn offered. “He rules all of Rhoth.” He lifted his foot from the water and splashed it down again. “Except here.”
    Wen’s smile transformed her face from plain to extraordinary. “Except here,” she agreed.
    From what Jenn had been taught, Marrowdell was indeed part of Rhoth and so subject to its prince, because the prince had decided it should be. Rather than leave the quiet north to the hunters, trappers, and foresters who made it home, he’d declared to his barons that an unsettled northern border was an invitation to invasion, Rhoth being in a constant state of disagreement with its prickly eastern neighbor, Ansnor, and never sure of the intentions of the vast civilization of Eldad to the south. As to the west, well, there lay peaceful Mellynne, who’d put up with the prince’s great-grandfather’s border raids no longer than it took to overrun the Rhothan capital and place its own people in positions of influence, before leaving with a treaty of binding friendship.
    A treaty that hadn’t spared those of Naalish descent when Prince Ordo needed families to settle the north for him and, not coincidentally, wealth to buy the support of both the House of Keys and Lower House in Avyo. He’d declared all the original property leases at an end, offering those left penniless the choice of Mellynne, a domain as foreign to them as to any Rhothan, or to take his gift of land to the north and start anew.
    A handful of settlements were his legacy, Marrowdell among them. No other domain contested the border. No one of Rhoth appeared to care about those sent into the wilds and left to fend for themselves.
    Not that Jenn thought of the world in such terms. Her breath caught imagining what it would be like to