A Dying Land
Chapter Two
“What do you mean?” The man replied, tilting his head as if her question had confused him. He stepped to her side, running his fingers along the vine. “It’s a shame it’s been dead so long. They are quite beautiful. I hope someday you have the opportunity to see a living one.”
She stared at him for a moment, trying to decide if he were teasing or lying. But there was nothing in his expression suggesting anything but sincerity. “I planted this only yesterday. I came back today and found it like this,” she said.
He turned to look at her, and from so close she could see his eyes were as black as his hair, feathered by long lashes and lined with a blue so deep it was almost black. He pushed his hair away from his face as he studied her.
“I thought maybe the seller had lied or, or I don’t know, that maybe the magic had gone wrong because of this place. But I don’t know. I don’t know much,” she continued. “About magic, I mean.”
“Few of those who grew up here do. Most fear it. Those of us from the outside mock you for that, you know.”
She didn’t know. It was rare for someone from outside of Brielle to make it this far in. Occasionally some high profile visitor would decide to see where the famous Schor was made and would make the journey upriver. Such visits were typically short and filled with anguish on the part of the visitor for such a dreaded lack of magic and the ubiquitous stench of poo. They fled as quickly as they were able. She shrugged her shoulders, unsure what to say.
He ran his fingers gently along the spine of the plant, as if he could see it better through his fingers than with his eyes, and she wondered if such a thing were possible through magic.
“This vine is small, to be expected considering it was planted in such hostile soil. But even so, it must have grown for at least a season to get to this size and color. It could not have grown this large in such a short period of time. Not unless someone used considerable magic to help it grow.”
She could see him looking at her from the corner of his eye as he ran his fingers along the plant once more. She tried to keep her face still, not wanting him to see her confusion. What he said was impossible.
“It’s a shame, something so beautiful forced to die so quickly. Outside of Brielle it would live for many decades, growing thicker than my thigh and climbing high into the trees.” He lifted his gaze to hers. “It matters, you know. Where we are planted. The soil we grow in shapes our lives in ways most of us can barely imagine.”
She turned away from the intensity of his gaze, seeming to ask more than the meaning his words conveyed. She studied the plant, it must have been enchanted in some way he didn’t understand or know about. Or maybe it wasn’t the plant he thought it was, maybe it was some faster growing variety or something.
“There is much here that seems to be failing,” he said, as if this were a continuation of his comments on the plant. “In town and here. The trees…” he let the sentence trail off, watching her.
Her mind jumped to the waiting silence of the Weavery, of the dead Zildeschor further back in the groves, but she couldn’t think of anything else that was failing. Meuse was a vibrant as it ever had been. She shrugged, further confused by his words, and turned her attention back to the plant. “Perhaps I never should have planted it here,” she said, “I was curious to see what the seeds would do.”
“It’s a shame you never made it back out to see it in bloom. I’m surprised you planted it, though. Isn’t magic forbidden here?”
“No. Well, yes, technically. But only because people fear it. But I don’t think there is anything to fear about magic at all, everyone else uses it, and they’re all fine. It’s just silly superstition. Folks fear what they don’t understand.” She turned and began walking back toward the raft feeling unsettled and confused. She wanted to get back to Meuse and tell Petra and Isak what had happened with the plant, about meeting Dreskin out in the marshlands. They would tease her about her obsession with magic and would set her mind at ease.
“Mmmm, yes. They… ” he paused and Evelyn glanced back at him. He had stilled, staring out into the swamplands, lost in thought. “Yes, they are fine,” he finished, his eyes focusing back on hers as he flashed a smile. She smiled back before turning back toward her boat. He followed her out of the copse of trees. “So, you are not afraid of magic, are willing to use it, even though it is technically against the law. Have you spent much time outside of Brielle? Where did such an ease with magic come from?”
She leaned down and pulled a couple apples from her bag, offering one to the stranger. He accepted with a smile. She took a bite, chewing slowly. He was awfully full of questions.
“I’ve been down to Middelhaern a few times, with my father. What I remember the most about it was the smell. The sea smells so different from the the Arnhem and Lisse rivers here. And the Shadow Market of course.” She noted the surprised that flashed in his eyes at that. “But I’ve just always been fascinated by it. I love Meuse, mud and all, but it is rather drab most of the time. Magic is just… I don’t know. It’s exciting. I’m Evelyn, by the way.”
“Dreskin.”
“Well, Dreskin, where are you from? Why are you wandering out here in the muck and the mud?”
“I’m a Boatsmyn, which means I’m from nowhere. Or, maybe everywhere.” He took a bite of the apple, the two of them chewing in comfortable silence. “How long have you known you have the gift? It’s rare, but I’ve heard it does sometimes happen here.”
“You mean the gift of magic?” Evelyn asked, surprised. Dreskin was not quite as worldly as he seemed if he thought there was room for magic of any sort here in Brielle. “Maybe such a thing could happen in Middelhaern, being at the edge as it is, but not here. Not for centuries.” She considered, for a moment, what her parents would do if she had somehow been able to use magic. Imagining the look on her mother’s face was about enough of that little thought experiment, thank you very much.
“The only magic you’ll find here,” she continued, “are the few little trinkets boatsmyn dare to sneak in with them. Most of which stop working after a day or two. This place… these are dead lands.”
“Not dead,” Dreskin said, an odd urgency in his voice. “There are lands in this world that truly are dead, and I hope deeply you never have cause to visit any of them.”
He took a deep breath, pushing it slowly out as if to calm some inner turmoil. “There is magic here, I can feel it, humming deep beneath the ground, thrumming through your Zildeschor trees. What, do you think, makes Schor what it is?” He took another bite, swallowed. “The magic is here. It’s you, the people who live here, who choose not to use it or so even see it. A choice I’d thought was pretty universal, but perhaps I was wrong about that. Are you quite certain you have none? I’m not sure that vine—”
Evelyn laughed again. “I’m quite certain. Believe me, I would have been chased out of here, or worse, if I’d ever shown even the tiniest aptitude for magic.”
Dreskin studied her for a minute and then dug an apple seed out of the core of his apple. He leaned in close to her, so close she could feel the heat of his body. He smelled like how she remembered the ocean from Middelhaern smelled, like water, salt, and sunshine. “Watch,” he said. His eyes focused on the small brown seed resting in the center of his palm.
For several moments nothing happened at all. But she’d played with enough magical trinkets to know it wasn’t always fast. Magic often required patience. Sure enough, after her fifth exhale, a small crack formed on the seed, and from it, a thread of green emerged. It thickened from an almost transparent thread to a seedling as thick as her thumb and her heart sung at the wonder of it.
“Magic does exist here, Evelyn. It’s what makes a tree spring from a seed, what causes the wind to blow and the rain to fall, it’s in the spaces between the drops of rain when they fall. And it’s in us, right now, moving in and out of us with every breath we take. ”
She stared up at him, eyes wide and mouth open in delight. She’d never seen anything so incredible in her entire life. “How…?”
“Magic is life, Evelyn. Where there is life, there is magic also. And without magic…” his face twisted as if from some pain. “Well, without magic there can be no life. Even here.”
Evelyn reached out and touched the seedling, needing to feel it to believe it was real. “That’s…” She wanted to say it was amazing, the most astonishing thing she’d ever seen, and deeply moving. But it was also just wrong. Everyone knew magic had died here so long ago the reason had passed out of living memory and was now just a fact written in the books everyone read in school. “That may be true, Dreskin, but not here. Not in Brielle. But thank you for showing me that, it’s…” she shrugged, she could think of no word to describe what she had felt watching that thread of life emerge from that seed.
“Outside of Brielle this bit of magic is too small to even be noteworthy. Even now when… Well, it’s hard to explain until you’ve seen it. You could learn to use it, there are places that teach such things.”
She knew all of that was true, of course. But it was different hearing it from someone who’d seen it with their own eyes, who actually lived it. Boatsmyn always claimed they’d been all over the world, but her father had always told her to assume everything a boatsmyn said was at least fifty percent lie, and that at least fifty perfect of whatever was left was flagrant exaggeration. Evelyn was pretty sure that outside of Witch, who refused to speak of her past, Dreskin was the only person she’d ever met who had spent any real time outside of Brielle. She couldn’t even imagine, really, what it must be like to live in a world where such a thing were commonplace.
“I could teach you. If you wanted to learn, I mean.”
She went still, everything went still, as if she’d somehow managed to slip into that gap between the raindrops. If what Dreskin said was true magic existed even here, in the place everyone said had none of it. She couldn’t believe it was true, but the proof was still sitting in Dreskin’s open palm. Could she learn how to sense it? How too feel it, how to actually use it?
She held that thought for a moment. Enjoying it, imagining what it would feel like to be able to do what Dreskin had just done. But then she let it fade away like a dream upon waking. Even if there was magic here it was forbidden. It was so deeply ingrained in her people she couldn’t imagine it ever being any different. Even as Warden she would never be able to change that. She doubted he intended it, but Dreskin was tempting her with something that could never be.
She looked up at him again. His hair had fallen back over his eyes, his lips curled in that same smile - not sardonic, but sincere. Everything about him suggested he meant what he said. But she knew all too well just how impossible such a thing was. She would have to leave her family, her friends, everything she loved most in the world, and as exciting as his offer sounded, she could never leave Meuse. She had mud in her veins after all.
“Even if everything you said were true, and even if I was able to learn to use it, it would do me no good here. I’d be disowned by my parents, forced out of Meuse, banished. I’d never be able to see my friends or family again. I’d lose everything I’ve ever known and everything I love most in the world.”
His smile stiffened and his eyes slipped away. “I guess I’d not fully considered my offer. I hope I did not offend.” He dropped his hand, the small seedling fell from his palm and landed in a patch of wet mud.
“No offense taken. I understand our ways must seem backward to anyone not from here. It’s getting late, I should really be heading back.”
“Would you mind giving me a ride back into Meuse?” He asked, rubbing his hands together as if wiping off something dirty. “It is getting late, and it’s a bit of a slog back into town. Quite literally, in fact. They warned me, back at the Inn, but I never imagined it would be quite like this!”
Evelyn laughed and agreed. “The rest of the world may have magic, but here, here we have mud!”
Dreskin smiled and turned to step up onto her small raft. She bent and swiftly scooped the small apple seedling up from where it had fallen. She slipped it into her bag as she stepped up beside him and began pushing the small raft into the somewhat deeper water beyond the copse. It was the dry season, and deep water was hard to find. But even with the weight of two people her raft was able to float in remarkably shallow water.
“Mud.” Dreskin laughed as he said it. “You do indeed! It must be quite spectacular during the rain season.”
“Spectacular. I’m not sure that’s the world I would use to describe it. But the river is quite impressive when the rains fall. Everything you see here, as far as you can see, it all turns into a vast, deep flow of water. Out here it stays fairly calm. It’s spread too wide to carry much current. But closer to town you can hardly believe how fast the water runs.”
She told him about how the river could gain enough strength to tear down even deeply set pilings, how the air can become so thick with water nothing dries and everything molds, and of how peaceful the township can be in the early morning after a big storm. He sat and listened as if fascinated, and she found she was quite enjoying telling him about living here. Shit smell and all, Meuse was her home.
Time passed quickly and she was soon tying off at a piling near the docklands. “Do you know your way?” she asked. “I’ve got things to do, but I could show you if need be.”
“Evelyn!”
She turned to see Petra sprinting across the dock toward her. “Evelyn, where have you been? I need to talk to you.”
“Petra, slow down! Is everything ok?”
Petra looked at Dreskin and seemed to gather herself together. “Yes, of course, everything is fine. I just need to talk to you about something, it is urgent, we should go.”
Evelyn was surprised at her friends rudeness. Petra was always the polite one. “This is Dreskin,” she said, “I found him wandering around out in the swamp, can you believe it? Oh, and the seeds were a bust. It was all dead when I got there.”
“What seeds… wait, Dreskin? Your name is Dreskin?”
“Indeed, it’s nice to meet you, Petra. Evelyn was nice enough to give me a ride back, something my boots and I very much appreciate.”
Petra was staring at him with an odd expression on her face, something between recognition and fear. “Is everything alright, Petra?” Evelyn asked her friend. Petra was the most placid person Evelyn had ever met, it was exceedingly odd seeing her so flustered.
Petra grabbed her arm and began pulling her away. “Nice meeting you,” Petra said to Dreskin. “Evelyn, let’s go, we need to talk about, um, some dye pots, I think. Yes. I need some help. Also Witch is looking for you.”
Dreskin seemed to sense Petra’s discomfort. “I’m fine, I am familiar with the docks, I can find my way. The boat I shipped up on isn’t journeying back downriver for a week or so. I’m at the Swift Run, I’d be glad for some company, should you find some free time on your hands.”
Petra was pulling harder and Evelyn gave her an exasperated look.
“I know it,” Evelyn said. “It was nice meeting you, I’ll send word.”
“I look forward to it.”
They looked at each other for another moment, Petra now hauling on her arm, pulling toward Witch’s cottage. Evelyn wanted to say more but she didn’t know what to say. “Ok, well, goodbye then.” She turned, stumbling as she caught up to her friend, wondering what on earth was so important.