WIP Wednesday: New Beginnings

Hello, everyone! How was the first week of May for you? With my self-imposed NaNoWriMo deadlines plus graduate school heating up, mine has been as busy as a one-legged man in a butt-kicking contest.

I don’t have much to say other than that this week, so let’s just cut to the chase: Here’s your weekly Soldier of Dorsa update. It’s short this week, but don’t you worry: there’s more where this came from!

Chapter Something (One… maybe)

In faint grey light tinted pink by the rising sun, two women in two different places worked through a series of movements.  Filled with leaps and crouches, the sweeping of arms and legs in great arcs and tight thrusts, sidesteps, dodges, and spins, an outside observer might have taken each woman to be engaged in a kind of unusual, exotic dance.

“What is she doing?” the observer watching from the shadows may have asked himself.  “Is she imitating the mountain men and dancing to bring the rain?”

But no one watched either woman.  Each had made sure of that, because their dance was a secret one.

One woman danced on floorboards so worn that years of footsteps had worn visible pathways into them.  These floorboards rolled and shifted beneath her feet, for she was belowdecks in a merchant carrack sailing from Reit in the East to Paratheen in Terinto.  Trade goods surrounded her, primarily in the form of sheep and cattle, and, although the men who hired her on as a cook thought she did not know, she also knew that a hidden compartment contained two barrels filled with meravin mushrooms — barrels that were easily worth twice or even three times the cost of all the livestock.

Despite the unstable surface upon which she danced, her movements were fluid and graceful.  The ship bucked and rocked, but she did not.  Any warrior of the Seven Cities, who might have recognized her dance for what it was, would have also called her deadly.

The woman on the ship was known as Joslyn of Terinto.  Only a few weeks earlier, she had been dead.  But she made a bargain to a dark creature in a dark world to gain one more year of life in order to protect the woman she loved.

The second woman danced on an opulent rooftop courtyard.  She had pushed the furniture to the edges of the patio to make room for her dance, and as she moved, she silently recited the names of each part of the dance.  Her lips moved to form each word as she went:

Mountain.  She planted her feet; she changed her breathing.

River.  She dodged left, then right, then forward, then back, never letting her feet leave the ground.

Rising sun.  She crossed imaginary daggers before her — because the movements were meant to be done without one’s weapons — and parried against an invisible foe, moving his weapon above and then behind her.

Any warrior of the Seven Cities, who might have recognized the young woman’s dance for what it was, would have called her an amateur — but a well-trained amateur, if only she would stop mouthing the names of the movements like a child learning to read.

The woman on the rooftop was known as Natasia of House Dorsa — the Traitor Princess to some, the rightful Empress to others.  Only a few weeks earlier, Tasia had watched the woman she loved die before her eyes.  Tasia, by all rights, should be dead, too, but somehow here she was, a royal who had dodged the executioner’s axe now in exile, taking refuge with a strange lord in a strange land.

But this strange land was the land where her love had been born.  Being here in Paratheen, Terinto’s largest city, made her feel closer to Joslyn, even as it underscored her absence.

Wind through wheat, Tasia mouthed, leaning backwards with as much flexibility as she could muster, though she knew her version of the movement hardly even a decent imitation of her dead lover’s version.

Tiger’s fury, Joslyn thought (without thinking) on the ship sailing for Paratheen many hundreds of miles away.  The ship lurched, but Joslyn did not.  She completed her short charge and tigress-like swipe with her dominant hand even as the Adessian Sea boiled like a cauldron.

Diving falcon, Tasia mouthed on her rooftop, remembering the way Joslyn had made her watch hawks and falcons diving for their prey for nearly an hour before she had consented to teach this one.  Once Tasia had finished the sharp duck, she hesitated, one knee on the ground.

“Gods be damned,” she muttered to herself, because she had forgotten the next move of the dance.  The next several moves, actually.

But Joslyn had not forgotten.  Several hundred miles away, in the belly of the ship, diving falcon morphed effortlessly into scorpion sting, scorpion sting became light on water, and light on water transformed into heron’s pause.

On the rooftop in Paratheen, Tasia used a shirtsleeve to mop the sweat from her brow, thinking she might as well stop for the morning and break her fast.  A flicker of movement caught her attention and she spun around.  Defensively, she placed her back against the waist-high wall that marked the edge of the roof, and she placed her hand on one of the knives sheathed at her hip.

One of the hanging plants, its long arms and spiky fat leaves cascading nearly to the ground, swayed gently upon the line.  It swayed, despite the fact that the wind was still this morning — there was no sandy breeze tripping southwards off the dunes, and no cooling salt breeze traveling north from the sea.

Tasia leaned forward, squinting.  Then she smiled, taking her hand from the hilt of the dagger.  

“It’s alright,” she said, aiming her comment in the direction of the swaying plant.  “You can come see if you want.”

But the plant stopped swaying on its own without anyone appearing, and Tasia sighed.  She slipped Halia’s leather sandals onto her feet once more and pushed the furniture back into place.

Maybe tomorrow, Tasia thought.  Maybe tomorrow morning, the girl would come again, and this time she would be brave enough to show herself.  

Tasia hoped she would.  She’d like to have someone to talk to besides Evrart, Halia, and Lord M’Tongliss.

But after nearly being caught in her voyeurism, Tasia doubted the girl would even come to the rooftop tomorrow morning, let alone reveal herself.  The differences between “slave” and “Empress” had doubtless been ingrained into the girl’s head since birth.  Tasia imagined that, for the girl, the two words were each isolated continents, and between them was an abyss that no one could cross.

Tasia headed for the stairs.  She might as well break her fast.  Evrart would probably be waiting for her.