The Embers of Heaven

The Embers of Heaven by Alma Alexander Page A

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Authors: Alma Alexander
Tags: Historical, Fantasy
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thing. That entitled him.
     
    He didn’t understand the honor, naturally, and merely smiled as he tipped his cap at her. “I’ll find you,” he said.
     
    And he did. He came up with two partly filled and discarded notebooks and—greatest treasure of all—a completely blank notebook of substantial proportions, bound in thin leather.
     
    “The captain’s log is far more boring than what you might want to use it for,” he said.
     
    “This is the captain’s book?” Amais demanded, too impressed to be polite.
     
    “Yours now,” the officer said. “He’ll only think they forgot to load his usual quota. You’d better keep it out of sight, though. You know.” And he had winked at her in a conspiratorial manner.
     
    She didn’t know whether to believe him—taking one of the notebooks destined for the official log of the ship’s journey sounded entirely too outrageous, and might well have been a story invented to create a connection between the giver of the gift and its recipient. But she did it anyway, keeping the book hidden even from her mother, no small achievement given their cramped and untidy cabin.
     
    Vien and the girls changed ships after they crossed the big inland sea on the far shores of which Elaas lay, and loaded themselves into another, even bigger vessel sailing east, all the way to the Syai port of Chirinaa, familiar to both Vien and Amais only as a lost city of legend. On the first night of this, the last leg of their journey, Vien felt well enough to leave Aylun sleeping in the even more cramped cabin, if that were possible, than the one in which they had traveled on the first ship, and join her older daughter on deck.
     
    It was evening, and the sea breezes were cool. Vien wrapped her shawl tighter around her and leaned her elbows on the railing, leaning out to look down into the water below.
     
    “Soon,” she said to Amais. “Soon we will be there.”
     
    “What will we do there, Mother?”
     
    “I will make proper arrangements for your grandmother,” Vien said. “That is the first thing that I will do.”
     
    “But where will we live?”
     
    Vien hesitated. Just a little. “I don’t know yet, Amais- ban . But we will see how it is when we get there. All will be well.”
     
    Amais tilted her head to the side, and regarded her mother with a sudden chill, a touch of fear. There had been a light in Vien’s face just then, something that spoke of an exile’s homecoming, of a glow of joyous expectation which might not have been wholly unexpected in one of what baya- Dan had called li-san , the lost generations, the ones who went away, who left Syai behind. But that joy was drifting, ephemeral, rootless. Amais could quite clearly see her mother on this journey, see her wrapped completely in its expectations, its visions, its dreams. She could not, hard as she tried, imagine Vien at the journey’s end, could not see what Vien planned to do with Syai when its soil was firm under her feet. Their lives seemed confined to the limbo of the ship, with quiet waters all around them, an eternal voyage fated never to end.
     
    She did not know what scared her worse—the knowledge that her mother had no idea what to do next, or the nebulous thoughts that were forming in her own mind, a still shapeless and formless thing, something that had been born of her nebulous dreams and of the promise she had made baya- Dan on her deathbed. Something that was waiting in Syai for her hand to be laid upon it. Something that was for her alone, that nobody else in this world would be able to do.
     

Five
     
    Amais had thought the port in Elaas where they had boarded their first ship had been huge and full of people. The port across the Inner Sea where they had boarded their second ship was even larger—a busy, exotic place that smelled strange across the waters a full day before they had caught sight of land—but Amais did not have the chance or the inclination to explore it in the rush of

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