Seeklight

Nearly every day Daenek went through the fields to the rim of the quarry. The watcher was not always to be found sitting on the other edge. Sometimes when he was not there, Daenek could pick him out, working with the others down on the floor of the quarry. The large figure moved about, gathering up scraps and chips of the valuable white-veined stone the quarriers cut out of the ground in great slabs. That was the most menial job of all, Daenek knew, requiring no skill but strength, the job the village youths started out at when they first became old enough to come to work in the rocks.

An edge of pity, like an uncomfortable warmth in his throat, would mix with the other feelings Daenek had when he saw the watcher at work, filling up a bag slung over his shoulder with the little bits of rock. Daenek had never felt scared when he saw the brutish-looking figure.

There was something intensely interesting about him, though—Daenek crouched down at the cliff’s edge, supporting the net bag on his knees, and studied the hulking man. There was something missing about the watcher, something cut out that both the villagers, and the Lady Marche and Daenek himself had in common. Something that laughed and spoke, and moved.

But there was also something about the watcher that Daenek wasn’t sure of, that maybe only he and the Lady Marche also had. If there was a word for it, Daenek knew somehow it would be in that other language of which he had heard that little bit.

The watcher cocked his large head to one side, and Daenek leaped to his feet. How long had he been sitting here? He clutched the net bag to his chest and plunged back into the field’s dry stalks. A quick glance over his shoulder showed the figure still watching him.

The Lady Marche was almost to the house when Daenek reached the path. He ran along it, coming up behind her as she stepped up to the single door. The houses in the village were square and made of dark, unpainted boards, with corrugated metal roofs and small windows of wavy glass. This house, that he and the Lady Marche lived in, was round, a tower, and made of a seamless white stuff, smooth to the touch. Only the round-topped door showed from the outside, but once inside there were big sections of wall in every room that were as clear as glass.

Once he overheard some old men in the village marketplace remembering to each other how the house had been lowered out of the sky onto the little cleared space in the field. Daenek couldn’t remember it, though. That was when I was a baby, he thought. Before I was really me.

The door sighed and swung open when the Lady Marche pressed her palm near its edge. Daenek followed her into the cool, familiar interior. In the kitchen he stood on tip-toe and hefted the bag up onto the counter—made of the same shiny white stuff—beside the sink. She loosened its cord and her long fingers began to swiftly sort out the items.

“Lady,” piped Daenek suddenly. He pushed his shoulder against a cupboard door. “What is it that’s the same about me and you, but different from everyone else?” He hadn’t meant for it to sound like an old riddle.

Her hands stopped and she looked down at him, her face strangely altered by some emotion. “There’s nothing different about me,” she said quietly. “But you. Your—” she broke off, then, even softer: “There was someone once who could have told you.”

She meant to say ‘your father,’ thought Daenek. The betrayer.

She knelt down before him and brushed his dark hair over his ears with her long hands. “They see it in your face.” Her own eyes were shining as rain. “Anyone can.”

He twisted away from her hands and ran out of the house. The confusion that yammered inside his skull seemed to be swelling too large to keep inside walls. Breathlessly, he plunged through the thick fields above the house, the ground curving upwards beneath his feet until it ended in the steeply clustered boulders of the hills’ upper reaches. Between the largest rocks there was just room for his small body to squeeze through. He clambered over other boulders, their flanks baking in the sun, until he came to the little open space he had found and told no one about, not even the Lady Marche.

A tiny spring welled up and fed a small pool only a few yards across. A pair of low, gnarled trees had found root in the clefts of rock on either side and arched over the pool with their twisting branches, darkening the still water with their shade. His heart pounding from running up the hill, Daenek lowered himself down from atop one of the sheltering boulders. Squatting on the damp, moss-slick edge of the pool, he leaned over and studied his reflection in the black water.