Under a Starless Sky novel Chapter 4

“May I speak my world?” Lanore asked.

Tell bowed. Lanore took a sheet of silk paper and placed it on the table, and set Tell’s book on this, a sign of respect for her world. She took her book and skipped the words on the first page, opening it to the map behind it, which stretched from the 2nd and 3rd pages.

“Tamor,” Lanore said.

Tell laughed. “You have the entire world in your book?”

Lanore didn’t know how to respond. The study of Tell’s face revealed emotions. There was more than humor. There was embarrassment for having laughed, a hardness that came after: serious control. She wondered if the other side of the Sleeping Forest was a harsh world. She pointed to a place on the map. “Easterly. Here.” Symbol for forests on either side of Easterly, extending from shore back to mountains, and extended along the entire mountain as far north and south as the map could contain. She turned the map to page four. Easterly was better defined. There was evident path extending through the forest up to the mountain where another village was marked, which loosely followed a meandering river. When Easterly’s first dome was solid, the river had been nearer. Since it had shifted a bit north, and no longer broke over the cliffs into the bay. “Midelay.” On the other side of the mountain was more forest, and another path. The Sleeping Forest owned both sides of the mountains, and only one peak was known to be free of growth.

“You have made it over the mountains here?” Tell asked.

“I have not,” Lanore said. “The higher one goes, the thicker the forest. No one passes through the Sleeping Forest.”

“But this is a path…”

“You must go through the mountain at Midelay in order to travel to Sinter,” Lanore said.

“You walk through mountains?” Tell asked.

“I have been on both sides,” Lanore said. “I have even been to Sinter.”

“You have not,” Sheen said.

Tell pointed a finger at the apprentice, snapping: “Speak out of turn again, there will be penalty.”

Lanore didn’t interfere with this.

“You come from Sinter?” Tell asked.

“I was schooled in Sinter. I was born in East Midelay. I was a child when the East was opened up to us. I was not the first venture from Midelay, but I am the first to take roots and report back,” Lanore said. “My village is small, but it thrives. I have made contact with water people.”

“So have I,” Tell said. “They are stranger looking than even you. We call them walking fishes. They can stay submerged for nearly an entire hour glass of time.”

“Had I not experienced this myself, I would have thought this exaggeration,” Lanore agreed. “If I were not seeing you with my own eyes and heart, I would say you were a myth.”

“You have never met someone my color?” Tell asked.

“I have met your dead opposite,” Lanore said.

Tell laughed. “A ghost?”

Lanore nodded.

“You’re serious?” Tell asked.

“She is whiter than rice,” Lanore said.

“Rice?” Tell asked.

“Tesh, bring rice. Cooked and uncooked,” Lanore said.

Lanore took a sheet of paper and drew an image of the water people. Tell agreed; these resembled the Walking Fish she had met. She drew an image of Eirwen.

“How horrendous,” Tell said. “How could any people suffer her to live?”

“Her story is legend in Sinter. The legend of her doesn’t fit the reality of her. I suspect she was so hideous her family tossed her out,” Lanore said.

“Not another child on a river story,” Tell complained.

“Child on a river?”

“You never heard how the first walker was found floating on a lotus down the river?”

“You mean like the first Queen of Sinter?” Lanore asked. “A baby put in a reed basket?”

“I do not know this story,” Tell said. “This ghost? Does she have powers?”

“No more than any of us,” Lanore said. “The story I heard from her own lips was that she was taken by the Walking Bears when she was a child. She was recovered by people at about six, and raised in Sinter. I brought her back to Midelay when I returned from school.”

“Walking Bears are myths,” Tell said.

Lanore pointed to a black and white tail that framed a dream catcher, hanging above the hearth.

“That is the tail of a Walking Bear,” Lanore said. “They are known to kidnap children and carry them in their pouches.”

“Pouches?” Tell asked. “Like a purse?”

“I have not seen it,” Lanore said.