Chapter Twenty

“That’s a town, isn’t it?” Tess asked, pointing to the large dark line on the horizon, silhouetted by the breaking dawn.

“It is indeed,” Guido said, stretching his wings. “That will be the town of Rachel. They have a flourishing textile economy, and one of the largest libraries in this country.”

Martha was stuffing a blanket back into her pack and Gus was struggling to retie his own. They had slept the night on the edge of the woods, where the unshielded trees had given them the first cold wind they’d ever felt. The whole company was shaken from having spent the night huddled together in fits of shivers.

“How far do you think it is, Guido?” Gen asked.

“If we start immediately, we should be there before noon, I wouldn’t wonder.”

They each took a breakfast to eat while they walked, and then shouldered their packs and started out. Martha and Gus had gotten beyond complaining and taking rests every half hour, but the group’s traveling days were shortened by at least two hours, as their stamina was still abnormally low.

It had taken them two days of traveling to make it out of the forest. The traveling was quiet, except for Gus choosing random intervals at which to ask Guido for a trivial piece of information about There—”How long are each of the four seasons,” “Is it true there are babies and old people?” “What is ‘school’?” — and Ben questioning the edibility of the new, strange plants they found along the path. Tess had been particularly silent, keeping mostly to herself and avoiding contact with anyone but Ben. Ben supposed her timidity had something to do with the scathing look Gus often had on his face when he looked at her or spoke about her or to her. Ben wanted to chastise him for this, but under the circumstances, he didn’t think picking a fight would help matters any, not to mention he didn’t understand Tess himself anymore. It was if she had grown an extra pair of arms, or worse, like she’d been hiding them throughout all the years he’d known her.

“Guido,” Gus said, breaking the travelers’ tired silence, “could you explain... yesterday you said something briefly about ‘marriage.’ What is it?”

Guido often flew about Ben and Tess’ head, but for this early mornings, when his wings were still wet with dew from the night before, he was perched on top of Ben’s pack, bobbing along in the rhythm of Ben’s walk, clutching the clasp with his feet. “What do you want to know?” he asked.

“You said it’s between two adults who’ve decided to live together and share lives,” Gus said, still looking straight ahead, a look of concentration on his face. “But how is that different from lashing?”

“Lashing doesn’t exist outside of Medias,” Guido said. “You see, lashing is the marriage of Medians. Outside of Medias, when two adults decide to become married, it’s because they’re in love with each other, because they want to start a family together, or because they each have something to personally gain from a union with the other. In a lash, you become like siblings, almost like twins, just born from different families. In a marriage, you become husband and wife, which is a different bond completely. You support one another, are interested in what the other is interested in, and often you buy each other arbitrary gifts to annually celebrate something so asinine as the passing of time.”

Gus and Martha looked at each other. “Wait,” Martha said, “if lashing doesn’t exist outside of Medias, does that mean that Gus and I aren’t technically related anymore? Does that mean we won’t be allowed to live in the same home?”

Ben felt his face grow hot. So, not only had he failed to mention to them that they would most likely never return to the only home they could ever remember having, and not only had he convinced Gus, through Tess, that he could never leave their side for fear for Ben’s life, but he had now surreptitiously torn Gus and Martha asunder. He could see the looks of both terror and longing in their eyes, and immediately wished he could turn all of them back and run back to Medias. He knew what it felt like to be denied a closeness that felt deserved and necessary. He looked over at Tess, and he saw deep worry carved into her features as well.

“You can always just tell people that you’re brother and sister. No one can prove otherwise, can they?” Guido said.

But somehow, all four children knew it wouldn’t be the same. Just the name, the societal recognition of a bond... it meant something and without it, the relationship felt more distant.

Ben felt Tess tug lightly on the sleeve of his shirt. He looked over at her to see, through a mask of indifference in her features, a glint of... happiness? in her eyes. He furrowed his brow, and she blushed and looked back down at her feet.

Then he understood. If lashing didn’t exist, and if time really did move by with a recognizable pace, then it no longer mattered that he and she were separate. No one would tell them that there wasn’t a chance anymore that they could ever be together. No one could say that since it hadn’t already happened, it was bound to never happen. They could pretend to everyone here that they were related, and no one would try to keep them apart, like people had been doing all their lives.

The town of Rachel was getting ever closer, and since the sun had long since pulled its heft over the horizon line, Ben could better make out the details of the town’s appearance. That is, he could have, if there had been any details to make out. All he could see was a massive granite wall, probably tens of feet tall.

“Is Rachel a warring village?” Martha asked. “Why does it need such strong protection?”

“It’s customary to build fortifications around a town,” Guido said dismissively, nibbling on some piece of something stuck to his wing tip. “It’s a precaution, but still, it is likely to prove necessary or at least helpful in the future.”

“Do towns often battle each other, then?” Gus asked.

“I wouldn’t say ‘often,’” Guido said. “But warfare is not an unseen presence in most towns, Rachel least of all.”

“We aren’t,” Ben said with some hesitation, “we aren’t walking into a battlefield, are we?”

“Unless one has cropped up in the past few weeks that I’ve been gone, no, I don’t believe we are.”

No one spoke. Ben thought he heard Gus gulp anxiously. Ben examined the wall as they got closer and closer, just a few hundred yards off now. He searched for archers’ turrets or any guards, or even a gate, things he’d seen in the few books he’d read in Medias, the ones that showed large towns and settlements in There, without much description, only pictures and a few labels. But the walls faces were completely bare except for a large banner hanging over the top with a deep green insignia that, at this distance, looked like a rounded maple leaf or a poorly drawn hand with only three fingers.

“Is there an entrance on this side of the town, or are we going to have to walk around a bit to find one?”

Guido croaked shortly. “Oh, we’ll be able to enter from whatever direction we approach, don’t worry about that.”

________

As I publish more of these excerpts, I'm realizing that there are times when I forgot a few details that I was waiting to divulge, and now I'm screwed because parts of my story aren't going to match other parts.

Forgive me. Bitte.