Northlight by Deborah Wheeler

listening.
    â€œWhat does it take to make you see? ” Aviyya’s back was to him and raindrops quivered from the ends of her tangled black hair. “Maybe you just stepped into your own mother’s place without a fight. Maybe that’s exactly what you wanted all along. But I’m not you! I can’t live with your secrets! I’ve got to have my own life!”
    A heartbeat pause and then, from the shadows of the living room, his mother’s voice: “We none of us have our own lives.”
    â€œI’ve sworn your gods-forsaken oath and I’ll keep it, damn you!” Avi rushed on. “You talk about family pride and honor and the balance of all Harth — don’t you think I care about those things, too? But that’s all — ”
    â€œKeep your voice down!” Esmelda’s voice came like the slither of a hunting snake. “The boy might hear.”
    Ripple — here he’d lain awake in his room, listening to the rain thrashing on the roof. The storm had worsened, thunder crashing in the distance. The air smelled of wet grass and lightning. Minutes passed, hours maybe. His door opened slowly and the bed creaked as Aviyya sat beside him. She was fully dressed, an oiled-wool cloak over one arm.
    â€œThis is good-bye, baby brother. I’m going to miss you, but I can’t let her do this to me.”
    â€œWhat if something happens to you?”
    She’d laughed, then smothered the sound with one hand. “I hope something does happen to me. Otherwise it would be a waste, running away. I intend to have lots and lots of things happen to me. Wild things, wonderful things. Like we used to play, only real.”
    Despite Aviyya being seven years older, she’d been an excellent playfellow. She never fussed about her clothes and she never ran out of pretend adventures. Together they’d turned the living room into a norther tundra swept by bitter winds and blood-thirsty raiders, turned the glass-walled solarium with its masses of potted greenery into a forest south of the great Inland Sea. The staircase had become a terraced eastern steppe, and the polished bannister the perfect stake to which to tie the victim for the nomads’ mystical rites.
    â€œTake me with you!”
    She’d rumpled his hair and sighed. “Oh, baby brother, if only I could.”
    Years later, Terricel discovered that Aviyya had joined the Rangers. Esmelda had always known, as she knew so many other things that happened all over Harth, not just in Laurea, and she’d never told him. Pateros had received Avi’s oath, but Terricel never blamed him for keeping her secret safe, as he had so many others.
    Ripple — and here was that other woman Ranger now, knife strapped to her leg and looking crazy enough to try anything. Terricel wondered — if he met Aviyya today, would she be like that, too? Would he even recognize her?
    He thought of all the stories she’d told him about their father — so many and so vivid that surely she must have made some of them up. But he’d never questioned her. He’d needed to believe in them as much as she did — how their father had taken her to his weaving studio, taught her to tie knots, use a camp knife, catch dragonspiders, how he’d danced with her and sung songs from his own childhood.
    Sometimes Terricel could hear those songs echoing through his own dreams. Once, when he was four or five, he’d heard Esmelda singing a country ballad as she arranged the flowers Annelys had brought in from the garden. As soon as she realized he was crouched behind the bannister, listening, she broke off. Without a word, she’d taken him into her arms and held him, rocking him gently.
    Finally the morning ripples died down, their substance bleached away by the morning light. There was no denying he was awake and it was today instead of yesterday, and he’d seen Pateros, the Guardian of Laurea,