Read The Silences of Home for Free Online Page A

called at his retreating back. “It’s ridiculous—it’s
rude
!”
    He disappeared down the hill. She saw him a few minutes later, by a flatboat. She watched him push it into the river, a woman beside him.
    “Shonyn life,” Lanara mimicked in wavering falsetto. “River and flatboats and lynanyn.” She made an inarticulate sound and went back inside.
    My Queen, I was encouraged today by an interaction with the young shonyn man I wrote about on my first day here. He came to the teaching tent and helped to translate something one of the children had said. After they had left, he remained behind and we spoke, mostly about his own Queensfolk teacher, Soral. It was a brief conversation, but I am certain that we will speak at more length soon. He is aloof and inscrutable, as all shonyn are, but I feel I will be able to change this. His name is Nellyn.
    Nellyn’s footsteps sound too loud on the ridge. He tries to be quiet, to be calm. He does not run as he did from Soral, on the day the sun drew jewels from the sand.
    Fear
, Nellyn thinks, the Queenstongue and shonyn words both, as he walks away from her.

FIVE
    Lanara sat on her bed with a thin stack of parchment in front of her. “Trees,” she read, squinting at Cannin’s spidery scrawl. “Food . . . Pottery . . . Climate.” She rested her fingertip beside the last word.

    Climate:
    Hot and dry. Rains once a year, lasting about seven days. Winds high during rains, moderate at other times. No lynanyn gathering during rains.
    Lanara glared down at the page. “That is
all
?” she said, then glanced up to see if anyone had heard her.
As if shonyn would be up here now
, she thought.
Still, I am talking to myself. I must alert Ladhra that I am already going mad
.
    She set the parchment down on the carpet beside her bed and went to open the door flap. There were long shadows on the sand: dark, distorted tents and listless banners. The shonyn would soon crawl out of their mud houses to sit by the river. Nellyn would be among the first, Lanara knew; she had watched the village every day, though she had not gone down to it.
Patience
, she had told herself, attempting Creont’s sternness.
Be as slow as they are. Watch and learn.
But she could not, today—not with Cannin’s infuriatingly brief document behind her, and the shadows lengthening into yet another gentle twilight. Lanara offered silent apologies to her father as she descended the ridge and sat down to wait in the shade of Nellyn’s house.
    He ducked out minutes later—the first to do so, as she had anticipated. He had stood and was starting to stretch when he saw her. She quelled a triumphant smile at his surprise. His arms and fingers froze and his eyes widened until she could see white around their darkness.
    “Walk with me, Nellyn,” she said as she rose. “To the riverbank, past the sitting stones. And do not try to leap in and swim away from me.”
    “I do not swim,” he said, and she sighed.
    “Ah. Of course you don’t.”
    They walked slowly among houses that were still quiet and sat where the bank was thick with plants. “They do grow crops,” Cannin had told her, “after a fashion. A little plot of herbs and vegetables that has apparently been there since the village began, whenever that was.” Lanara saw that some of these plants were brittle, their fronds brown-tipped and shrivelled. She looked from them to the shallow river and said, “Tell me why the shonyn are afraid of the rains.”
    After a predictable pause Nellyn said, “The Queensman Cannin does not record this with his writing stick?”
    She peered at him, wondering whether shonyn were capable of sarcasm and finding no answer in his face. “No,” she replied. “And anyway, I want to find these things out from a shonyn. You. So—the rains.”
    He turned to look upstream. The stones where the old ones sat were hidden behind the plants. “The rains bring change. We fear this.”
    She frowned. “Only that? And do these