lantairvlea | Over halfway through

“My friend, Silfiya, she’s great at languages. She studies them. We’re going to need more than just me on the Kamenan side,” Kayrin said. She held her breath briefly. “And she followed me last time and knows I’m crossing the Milash. She didn’t follow me across, but she knows.”

“You trust her?”

“With my life.”

“Do you want to help?”

“What am I helping with, Kayrin?”

“With what I’ve been doing on Remstans. We could use someone who knows languages better. I mean, they know theirs, of course and I have Kamenan, but you go so easily between everything you speak.”

“They?” Silfiya raised her brows.

“His sister has joined in. Really, we couldn’t expect to have just the two of us and make this work. It would be too much for two people. Will you help, Silfiya?”

Silfiya blinked and inhaled. If there was something klamon hated more than humans on their territory, it was Meim. Why the klamon fixated on the Meim during the Separation Wars never made as much sense as her history professors seemed to believe it did, but putting herself deliberately in the klamons’ path felt unwise. But they, two of them now, the one had helped Kayrin. Saved her life by the sound of it, even if Kayrin downplayed the incident in her retelling. Her bruises and scrapes after the event had told a different story. “You’ve told them about me?”

“It’d be stupid to show up with someone unannounced, wouldn't it?” Kayrin said.

“Yes. I mean, I can try. You all have weeks, if not months ahead of me in study now. I don’t know if I’ll be able to catch up.”

“O, you will! I know how you are.”

They set out to cross the Milash and Kayrin started explaining Getie’an as best as she could.

“I can loan you my notebook to copy from, but I’ll need it back so I can practice.”

Kayrin led the way, her mare picking up the now-familiar track across the river. They stopped on an open area dominated by a large rock. Kayrin dismounted and hobbled her mare. The mare eagerly hunted out the sparse grass growing in little hollows where water had collected during the last, pitiful storm. Kayrin’s mare was relaxed and settled readily. Silfiya’s horse became increasingly on-edge, ears swiveling and head looking about. Its nostrils flared as it tried to pick up a scent it found concerning.

“Keep hand on your horse,” a voice said in strangely accented Kamenan. “It will not like us.”

“Five years and six miscarriages, we were about ready to give up on having children. I finally held a pregnancy for more than two months. I must have prayed every hour of every day once I hit eight weeks that I could hold on long enough to see our baby born alive. You know the klamon barely hold their young for a month, anywhere from 32 to 40 days, but humans go so much longer, nearly nine times longer. The doctor couldn’t believe that we held them so long. That we allowed our young to get so big before being born and then had nowhere to put them.

The girls were talking together, comparing the boys whose names they knew. Sray was doing her best to ignore them, reading a book that Tos had insisted she take with her. It was a slender volume with pulpy paper from his current favorite author. The story followed a pair of shipwrecked siblings trying to make their way back home.

“That Jorgin Pfyllat is pretty handsome.”

Sray didn’t know which one said it, but it caused her to look up and study the girls more critically.

“What do you think, Sray?” Kem asked.

“I think Jorgin Pfyllat is too old for any of you to be thinking about and, if he is a decent person, he would refuse to entertain those thoughts.”

“Too old? How old do you think he is?” Elima asked.

“He is at least twenty.”

Anyone that old shouldn’t be looking at teenagers. You’re not mature enough before then to make good decisions about love and family.