(no subject)
I am working on changing Amari from a 17 year old sailor girl into...something else. This is a bit of writing, unpolished, exploring an alternate version of the character. This is not about her on the ship or after the wreck it is a tenative bit of exposition.... Let me know what you think?
Minori laid asleep in the crook of my arm. I reached down and stroked a pale brown curl, the sheer beauty of her seeming to crush my chest.
“We will find you, Amari.” I heard my husband repeat. “I promise you.”
I shushed him with a hiss of breath through my teeth without looking up. I loved Jinto. I had loved him since we were
young and hopeful and sure his words and the images I put to them would change the world, but he talked too much. He always had. That was the problem with writers, too many words.
He sighed and slid onto the arm of the chair, wrapping his arms around me, but careful not to disturb my position so much as to disturb Minori. “We will find you.”
I glanced up at him now and I could see in his face that he believed, as I did, that it wasn't true.
“I will stay here.” I said.
His arms around me tightened. “No.”
“She needs her mother.” I said, nodding to Minori in my lap. “You need her mother.”
“We both will miss you less knowing that you are alive somewhere.” He replied.
Jinto's worlds had never moved the mountains he had hoped to. I was the only one who, in the end, had read them most of the time. Instead he had gotten a good, honest job with a merchant firm recording their inventories in neat, evenly spaced books. He had gotten the job five years ago, before the war, when I had become pregnant. It had broken my heart to see him give up his dream, but Minori, I think, had been worth it to him. Besides that it had been a blessing in disguise. If Jinto had filled the world with his beautiful words he would have been arrested years before. No one dragged merchant's bookkeepers off in the night.
Unfortunately for me, I had done better in my chosen career. I had gotten a job doing etchings for a print shop. It was innocent enough, mostly. We had done very little work that could have been considered political by any stretch of the imagination, but since the war it had been hard to leave politics out of things at times.
I'd felt safe enough, I wasn't of noble blood, and I was hardly threatening in my personal appearance or habits. I was not a swordswoman and, though I could do some magic, I knew very little with much offensive capability. But Marko hadn't been any more political, any more noble, or any more threatening and he had disappeared last week.
I did not want to leave this place. Emming was my home. But Jinto said it was better to lose my home than my life.
I leaned my head against his chest and sighed.
“I love you.” I said.
“I know.” he said.
“We should tell Minori.” I said, looking down at her again.
“To what purpose?”
I sighed. He was right. It was not right to burden children so young as to be on the edge of understanding with that manner of adult concerns. Too much explanation would only upset and scare her. I hoped Jinto would be gentle with her, that he would help her to understand that I had not abandoned her. I hoped that his own grief did not encumber him when he tried to comfort her.
“Jinto.” I said. “If you can't get away... if you fall in love again, I want you to know...”
“We will find you.” he said, for a third time. I felt this to be a mistake. With each repetition it sounded less believable. He kissed my temple. He snaked his hand down and turned my face towards his and kissed my lips.
“I will save the passage.” he said. “We will come. We will be in the Northlands before you. We'll meet up and go and live in the country and heard cattle or whatever it is that Northlanders do in that great big frozen country of theirs and in ten years Minori will marry a hulking brute of a blond fellow.”
I laughed. “When she's fourteen!?”
“Maybe twenty years, then.” he said, waving off my objection with a flip of his left hand. The right was still on my face. “And we will have strapping grandchildren, who we will tell stories about our youth and someday they will return to Emming and...”
I kissed him again to stop him. He really did talk too much. When I pulled away there were tears in my eyes.
“Jinto, love. Please don't send me away.”
“It's for your own good, Mari.” He said, then, heading off my objection to this line of reasoning he added. “But it's also for Minori's. And for mine. You will be safe. And they will have no reason to come after us when you are gone.” He wrapped his arms around me and stroked my hair. “ And we will find you. “
Somehow, this time, I believed him.