On the Wall

It took the better part of two hours to figure out where Sari had gotten to. Somewhere along the way Trick began to wonder if he was on a fool’s errand. Harbek Valley wasn’t a big city but the vertical element to it, the unfamiliar plant life and Sari’s very pronounced home field advantage all worked against him finding her. It was only when he stopped to think about things holistically that things fell into place.

He still didn’t know exactly what it meant that the brightest person in Harbek was charged with keeping dim, although he had his guesses. However he did know simple duality when he saw it. If Sari was the brightest tasked with being dim then where would she go when told she didn’t belong at the bottom of town, at the armillary? Probably somewhere near the top.

So he climbed up the terraced side of the valley until he got to the town walls then walked the perimeter. He found her sitting atop the wall, staring out at the reservoir. She’d unbraided her hair, letting it flow down her back like a golden waterfall and, for the first time, Trick understood why a culture where shedding light attracted evil might want her to dim her brightness. Like that she stood out like a torch.

It took another minute or two for him to find a stairway up then pick his way to her. There was a path on top of the wall but it was narrow enough to make him a little nervous and didn’t include any kind of railing or wall to hold on to. It wasn’t a siege fortification, after all. Just a place to deploy the wards from.

Making his way along the wall to Sari demanded most of his attention and he didn’t take note of the water reservoir until he sat down next to her. It was almost as beautiful as Sari’s hair. With no sun shining on the seventh sphere the stars ruled the night sky and the waves drank down their light thirstily. The waves glimmered and shone like rolling jewels. “It’s quite the sight,” he said, making himself as comfortable as possible on the brick wall. “Do you come here a lot?”

“Now and then. Listening to the waves is soothing.”

“I’m sorry I dragged you into such an uncomfortable position.”

She let out a puff of air with just enough force to set the fringe of her veil fluttering. Not much for the average person but for Sari it was loud enough to border on a yell. “That wasn’t your fault. You don’t know our ways here, Trick, nor have you lived under the threat of the ninth. If I was worried about how they’d react I shouldn’t have taken you to the festival.”

“Your parents seemed to think it was a good idea.”

“My mother has dreams of changing things and my father thinks I can find something meaningful in the stars no matter how the town rejects me.” She took a few strands of her golden hair and started weaving it through her fingers. “They don’t know what it means.”

Trick let himself indulge in watching her fingers work for a bit. He knew there was a conversation he had to keep up, and he was getting to it, but there was a whole other layer to the talk hidden between those fingers and he meant to tease it out. The way they moved spoke of worry. But her grip was loose, her fingers spread wide most of the time, the touch light and gentle as it had been when it rested on his arm earlier. She wasn’t closed off to him, not just yet.

So he gently pushed. “What is it they don’t know the meaning of? With my parents saying that kind of thing could fill volumes.”

“They don’t know what it means…” She paused and started picking out a knot she’d worked into her hair. “What it means to stand out.”

“Your mother I can understand but Cethvik? He’s almost as bright as you, isn’t he?”

Sari clenched her fist around her hair and for a moment Trick worried he’d pushed too hard, somehow. Then she said, “He is, but he was only the brightest for a few months. His great uncle was brightest for ages and he died only a few years before I was born.”

Which meant that not only had Cethvik been brightest for a far shorter time than Sari had he’d also had the luxury of becoming brightest, and as an adult. His daughter had been brightest her entire life. Trick wasn’t a psychologist by any stretch of the imagination but he could guess that being raised as the brightest had to have a much worse effect on a person than inheriting it as an adult. Still, he shelved that line of thought for the moment.

“Why not your hair?”

There was a specific kind of jerky turn that Trick was learning signaled surprise and Sari used it just then. “My hair?”

“Well it’s hands down the brightest part of you, isn’t it?” Trick reached up, grabbed a bit of his own carrot top and stretched it out for her to see. “Everyone mentioned how bright I am when they saw this stuff. So why do you cover your face instead of your hair?”

“Ah… well, I’m the brightest but I don’t need to be that dim. A little is usually enough, unless the brightest is Artabani, and the elders decided in my case that a veil was sufficient.”

Trick frowned, wondering what an Artabani was. Maybe another ethnicity or nationality? Most of the words that didn’t translate were names so he tentatively filed the word under that heading and focused on what bothered him more. There was nothing wrong with the idea of wearing a veil, per se. The problem was, if that was the default way of hiding the brightest from the scrutiny of the sky it had the side effect of removing a person’s face entirely from view. That was a deeply dehumanizing thing to do.

“Is…” She started rolling her hair between her thumbs. “Is there something wrong with my hair?”

“No, no, no, it’s lovely I was just curious. I still don’t really follow the implications, or lack thereof, of all these things.” He sighed, wondering if he was ever going to get a handle on Casparian culture.

Sari released her hair and tucked her hands into her lap in prim fashion. “Lovely?”

He smiled. “Not as lovely as your hands but it’s still pretty.”

“My hands?”

A surge of strange heat rushed up his spine and grabbed ahold of him, driving him to lean in to her, snake one hand down her arm and grab one of those slim, delicate hands. “These hands.” He held one of them up and pressed his palm to hers. He worked her fingers out until their hands were flat against each other, fingers splayed out. “Look at these. Delicate, graceful, saying everything their owner can’t…”

Sari yanked her hand back, flicking her fingertips to ward him away. “That’s enough, Patrick Gallagher. My hands are not some decoration for you to make up strange meanings for!”

“Look! Look!” Trick flicked his fingertips back. “They’re telling me you’re irritated but not angry enough to walk away!”

A frustrated noise emerged from under the veil and Sari got to her feet, stomped down the wall to a tower, grabbed a large vine growing up its side and climbed down to the ground. Trick watched her go with a smile on his face. The heat in his skull told him to chase her down but his better judgement prevailed and he stayed put. There would be time to follow up on that later. He sat and watched the waves in the reservoir for another few minutes while putting a plan together. Then he got up and headed back to the dorms.