Run away, sister

Monastis Monestrum: Part Two

Dear Kamila,

I met this strange boy at the market today. I was getting pickles and breads from Miss Yerkra. You know her, right? Well, this boy was at the same stand. Seemed to be giving Miss Yekra quite some trouble. He wouldn’t talk to me, really, or at least he didn’t seem to be listening much to what I or she said. But he kept saying the same thing, over and over again, real quietly:

“Emile… don’t you remember me?”

And then I waved my hand in front of his face and asked what was the matter, and he just looked straight at me.

He said: “Oh, it’s you. You know, you do so remind me of him.”

And then he left, just like that.

Isn’t that weird?

Hope to see you soon.

P.S. I heard through the grapevine that there’s a violin repair shop in Kivv, but I haven’t seen yet. Can you imagine that? An entire shop, just for fixing one instrument? Whoever keeps it must be very good at their craft. And this city is so big, to have separate shops for different instruments…

If you come and get your fiddle fixed we can play for mom and dad when I’m done here!

-From the letters of Hilda Zelenko,

Dated 241 YT, Winter 8-7.

Kivv: 240 YT, Late Autumn. Three years before the death of Marga Zelenko.

Buttons and keys depressed with the muted noise of air rushing through intricate human construction. The sound was drowned out, made almost inaudible, by a tremulous wailing, an almost Ordian quality in the notes, the trills, the little ornamentations with which Hilda Zelenko played. With the brim of her flat cap pulled down to shade her face, her back to the wall of the great Reaper Monastery, Hilda worked the bellows of her accordion haltingly, a mild frustration reflected in the perspiration on her brow. She played enthusiastically, but her movements were unpracticed, and when one measure was through, with all its intricacies, she stopped, pondered, shifted her hands, and struggled her way through the next.

The streets of Kivv were alive with the movements of people today – a festival of some sort, though in the whirl of her arrival Hilda hadn’t bothered to learn much of anything about the city’s customs. Too many people, too much noise, the crowds drove her to this place, the one secure spot in the shadow of the Reapers’ operational center, just across Wanderer’s Way from the Sower Monastery. No doubt Aleks, Hilda’s older brother, was ensorcelled there, caught deep in whatever tricks of the mind the Sowers employed for their tests. As a confirmed aspirant, Aleks would be respected enough by his elders there that they wouldn’t hold back with the more tricky challenges.

Hilda tried not to think about her own results, whether she would be made aspirant or not. It occurred to her that if she were to make aspirant, she would have the opportunity to come back here in a year, and again the next year, and she would have to get used to the crowds. But Hilda was not so sure of her chances. They had asked her so many questions, strange questions, and pointed ones – about what she would do in different situations, many of them life-or-death. So many of these manufactured situations seemed calculated to push Hilda to violence, and even when she tried to avoid it, eventually to fight was the only conclusion she could reach.

The spruce trees along Wanderer’s Way cast dancing shadows over Hilda, over the wall behind her, and the people on the streets. Hilda forced herself to look up from her fingers, to meet the eyes of one or two of those passing on the cobbled stone, plastered over old, thin, and cracked asphalt. Three or four groups passed in sequence, dancing along to the tune another played. Hilda shut out the music to focus upon her own. She cast her eyes back to her fingers, kept her knees bunched up under the middle of the accordion’s bellows, her feet resting in the grass.

With her eyes thus down, away from the press of the crowd, she didn’t see her older sister approach, nor did she notice who Kamila had in tow.

“Heyyyy, Hildaaaaaa!”

Hilda jolted and nearly dropped her accordion – saved only by the straps that looped over back of her hands. She looked up, wide-eyed, and her cap fell off the back of her head and onto the grass. Standing over Hilda, Kamila laughed, picked at the end of her braid, and knelt down next to her younger sister with bent knees.

“Come on, didn’t you hear me coming?”

Hilda averted her eyes, frowning. “There’s just… a lot of noise. I didn’t notice you in all that.”

“Ha!” Kamila’s hand patted Hilda’s shoulder, and Hilda turned back to look up at her sister. “Some Reaper you are, huh? Not being able to tell when someone’s sneaking up on you?”

At the sour look on Hilda’s face, Kamila cringed. “Aww, I’m sorry. Didn’t mean it like that. You know I didn’t mean it like that, right?”

Hilda nodded and scratched at her neck. The rash from her new tattoo burned even when she had something – like her music – to distract her. But there was a warm glow to the golden lines and curves of the salient bear, as well.

“Hey, don’t scratch that!” Kamila grabbed Hilda’s wrist, with a surge of unsettling strength. She removed her hand a moment later, reached behind Hilda and picked up her cap, and placed it on Hilda’s head, ruffling her hair in the process. “Sorry. Anyway, enough of that. Check this out!” Kamila stood up and stepped to the side, left leg out, touching the ground, rocking her way out of Hilda’s field of view.

Behind where Kamila had stood, there was a young man, dressed much like Hilda herself with an incongruously fancy red waistcoat over an otherwise plain grey dress. The man shifted his eyes between the sisters, his hands held nervously in front of him and his expression… expectant. Like he was waiting for the answer to a question.

More interesting and out of place than the man himself was the apparatus sitting in front of him. A black box with folded protrusions, little squares and circles and bells. The box rested atop a circular platform connected to the ground by three diverging poles. Hilda closed in the bellows of her accordion and gathered her legs under herself, pushing her back against the wall, starting to stand up slowly.

“It’s a camera!” Kamila said, excitedly. “An analog-digital one. I hired this professional artist” – Kamila drew out that last word in a rough approximation of the central Ordian accent, like ar-teest – “to take a portrait of you. We’ll get a physical image right now, and a digital image on a little chip, so when we get back home we can put it on the machine at dad’s library.”

“Oh. That’s nice.” Hilda smiled, though the prospect of this stranger having a picture of her made her heart lurch a little. Kamila must have sensed her uneasiness, because she stepped forward again and wrapped an arm around Hilda’s shoulder.

“Come on, it’ll be fun! Here, I’ll help get you posed. First of all, you’re going to need to” – Kamila grabbed Hilda’s wrists and led her motion – “hold the accordion like you’re playing it, in the middle of a song.” As Kamila worked, the man with the camera – a photographer, Hilda supposed – picked up his device and moved it so that it faced Hilda (and the wall of the monastery) head-on. Kamila moved her hand on top of Hilda’s head, and twisted it. “Look just off to the left – I’m told portraits don’t look any good when the subject is staring straight into the frame.”

“You’re having a lot of fun, huh.” Hilda’s smile was fainter by far than Kamila’s, though she found she didn’t hate the attention. Kamila just nodded and continued prodding at Hilda, getting her posed ideally for the photograph. The photographer himself, for his part, stood placidly by the camera, occasionally fiddling with something on the little box or messing with its folds, but otherwise letting Kamila do her thing and leaving Hilda her personal space.

“Okay, okay, now hold right there.” Kamila stepped out of the way and gave the thumbs up to the photographer, who returned the gesture and leaned down in front of the box. His face, at once placid and nervous, disappeared behind the box. Hilda turned her head to the side, keeping the rash from her new tattoo out of the photographer’s view.

Hilda held still as long as she could, struggling not to move her hands or flex her fingers, bracing the accordion against her knees so her wrists would not grow tired. She looked off to the side, just as Kamila had instructed her, focusing on the tapping of Kamila’s foot against the grass and the way the blades tamped down and sprung up under her boot’s toe.

When it was finished, Hilda held in her hands a piece of glossy paper with her own image on it – even the sunlight through the leaves looked right. The image may have lacked the flair of a master painter, but it had the accuracy of one. The photographer put the chip in Kamila’s hands and accepted in return a folded piece of paper. He smiled suddenly, gave a quick bow, and walked off with his camera in tow.

Hilda motioned for Kamila to join her, and her older sister fell back against the wall, slid down it with her arms outstretched, grinning. “So… what did you pay him with?” Hilda asked. “We don’t have much extra money.”

“Oh, he wanted a Reaper’s autograph.”

Hilda’s heart dropped into her stomach.

“But… you’re…”

Kamila grabbed her wrist, as tightly as before. “Look, Hilda.” Her sister stared intensely into her eyes. “It’s not about me. That guy really wanted a Reaper’s autograph, so I tried to oblige him. I know a real Reaper wouldn’t go around giving out their autograph, but since I’m not one, why not? He’s happy with what he got, and does it really matter if I… misled him a little bit?”

“It matters!” Hilda tried to stand up, but Kamila wouldn’t let go. “Kamila, come on! We have to go apologize to him!”

Kamila scoffed, rolling her eyes ostentatiously. “Hilda. This is absurd. Let the man have his autograph. He’ll have a new story to tell his friends after today, and isn’t that a good deed?”

Hilda opened her mouth to say something in retort, though she didn’t yet know what she would say – but she was interrupted by a voice from the nearby gate.

“HILDA ZELENKO!”