Tarashana by Rachel Neumeier (best novels to read for students .TXT) 📗

Not at all offended, Rakasa shoved me back, grinning. “If your heart stopped for nothing, you would deserve that fall, Ryo. Next time I will remember your fragile heart, but we did not come to see you. My mother and your mother wanted someone to carry a letter to Aras. My father and your father decided Bara and I could bring it. My father said a very long journey might keep us both out of trouble for the rest of the warm season.”

I was so immensely relieved that I could not help grinning back at Rakasa, who was an easy-tempered man and impossible to be angry with. “So, was that your father’s hope? What had you done?” He started to answer me, but I realized I had begun with a question that was not important and waved his answer away before he could make it. “What is this matter that involves both inGara and inGeiro?” I asked instead. Our peoples were close allies, so this was not entirely astonishing, but I still could not imagine what this could be.

Aras handed me the letter. “There’s a problem your people seem to believe a sorcerer might solve. See what you think.”

I took the paper and looked at it. The hand was my mother’s; I saw that at once. Her writing was as meticulous in darau as in taksu. She had headed the letter as though writing to another woman or to a poet: My friend Aras Eren Samaura. Addressing Aras that way rather than by any title meant that she did not consider this a matter for lords, nor a matter for warriors. She might mean she did not consider it a matter for men. I began to read what she had written. We have encountered a problem here that we do not know how to solve, so I ask whether in your wisdom you may see a solution. This is how it happened: the eldest brother of my elder son led some of our warriors into the far north beyond the mountains to see if they could determine by means of a more determined exploration what fate it was that came to the people of the starlit country—

“The starlit lands!” I exclaimed, looking up. “Garoyo went there? Did you go with him?” I was envious at once. I had never been to the starlit country. Stories of that land describe it as marvelous, a place where the music of the uncountable stars can be heard, where forests of trees shimmer with a radiance of their own and the breeze is always soft and warm. The people there, the avila, were small and delicate, a peaceful folk, but they had disappeared some years previously.

Rakasa gestured agreement. “This is one reason Bara and I were asked to carry that letter, so that we could tell you. A lot of us were curious to see that land, Ryo—I certainly was—and your brother thought it would be good to take a party of young warriors through the pass. Some of the young men had become restless and foolish—”

“Yes, some,” Bara said, his tone mocking.

“Yes, I already said you were right!” Rakasa told him. He went on to me, “Immediately after the end of the Convocation, I led some young men of both our tribes on a raid against the inVotaro that did not end in any useful way—”

“The inVotaro?” I was astonished. No one raids the inVotaro. That is not an ordinary tribe, and not likely to be gentle with any young man they caught in such temerity.

“He meant to steal Royova’s favorite pony, as a trinket was not enough for him,” Bara told me. “He had a clever idea for how to do it.”

I had to laugh. “The warleader’s own favorite, Rakasa? Perhaps this proved too ambitious.”

“Yes, Ryo, I thought we could do it, but as you have surmised, this was a mistake,” Rakasa agreed ruefully. “Iro and Bara and I worked out the plan together, but then Iro said there were too many ways it could go wrong. He told me all those ways, but I said we could do it. Of course Iro was right. He is a most provoking brother.”

Iro was six winters younger than Rakasa. I did not know him at all well, though he had begun courting my sister two winters past, while she was still a girl. I was not certain whether that courtship prospered now that Etta had become a woman. I wanted to ask Rakasa about that, but set that thought aside for later.

Rakasa was saying, “Fortunately, Bara and Iro managed to get the other young men away, so that no one was too much embarrassed—”

“—almost no one was too much embarrassed—”

“Be quiet, Bara! So, Ryo, after that, many of us were glad to go through the pass to see the starlit lands, if only to get away from the hard looks our fathers kept giving us. My mother wanted someone to look much more carefully at the starlit country, and your mother also thought that wise. Now that we are not to raid the Lau, everyone thought it wise to look again to the north, as carefully and thoroughly as we could. So Garoyo said he would lead anyone who wanted to go and he would try to stop us from doing anything too stupid.”

“Also, who would not want to see those lands?” Bara added. “But that is just the beginning and not important. Read the rest of the letter, Ryo.”

I bent my attention back to my mother’s letter. She wrote, The homes and fields and all the places where the avila used to live still lie abandoned. Our warriors saw there were no people anywhere, so they came away again. But as they returned to the winter lands, someone followed them across the mountains. This was a woman